47 cm. He wasn't used to thinking in metric. That would be somewhere close to half a yard. He picked up a ruler and measured his forearm. About right.
Jane's dictionary lacked front and back covers and an unknown number of pages at each end. But it was thick and wide and heavy, unabridged until the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune had abridged it right into someone's trash. Luckily, "obeah" would be found closer to the middle. He riffled through dog-eared pages.
"Obeah. Noun or verb, the noun means a form of West African magic or the practitioner or an object or fetish used in that magic. I've never heard that third use. And cataloging a dress and ornaments sounds like it's some kind of figurine."
"Hah!"
He shook his head. "Log it as a possibility. 'Texas' and 'Negro' are both a long ways from what my sister's after." He stopped and stretched. "That's what, twenty-five possibles? Thirty? Maybe Caroline can narrow it down. She knows more of these terms than I do."
Muffled shouts interrupted him, a slurred male voice from overhead. He cocked his eyes toward the ceiling, tracing heavy feet stomping on the upper side of the floorboards.
"Danny. Drunk again." Jane grimaced and reached into one of the milk crates. When she pulled her hand back out, it held a .45 Auto. She laid the pistol on the desktop by her right hand, casually enough that Gary shivered. Then she picked up another sheet of printout.
Gary stared at the pistol. First thing, Ben's training, he checked the safety. No safety, none at all — the lever had been broken off flush against the frame. The gun was so old most of the bluing had worn away to leave dull steel. Its handgrip showed cracks and a missing corner, and brown rust spread like patchy fungus along the slide and frame. No sights. But it was cocked, with a magazine shoved home. Gary stared at it some more.
She glanced up from the paper and then followed his gaze. "Looks like dog shit, but it works. Ask Danny." She nodded sideways toward the door. "Drilled the peephole with it, last time he came calling."
He'd noted the peephole, standard security fisheye lens centered about chest high on his body, a little low for her to stare through without bending over. Outside, the door was splintered around it, damn sloppy job with a brace and bit or electric drill, but he figured it fit the general ambience of slum. And the brass tube through the door would be about half an inch diameter.
A hole left by a .45 caliber slug. Instant drill.
He stared at the door. Wooden door, cheap flat unpainted luan veneer slab, with deadbolt lock and chain. Chest high, centered, a .45 caliber hole.
"Bastard was drunk, yelling, pounding on the door. Said he'd break it down. Three in the morning. Don't have to put up with that kind of shit. Fuck 'im."
So she put a slug through the door. Shooting blind, inside a rooming house. Another shiver ran down Gary's back. Maybe Dad and Ben were right about her.
"What if you'd hit him?"
"I'd be out of here before anyone had time to call the cops. Computer and wallet and the clothes I was wearing. Two minutes, max. Half that if I didn't sleep naked."
He looked around the room. No books, no pictures, no stereo, no TV, no nothing. Her printer was a cheap inkjet, one of those freebie rebate "specials" where the replacement ink cartridges cost an arm and a leg. Homemade desk, three mismatched chairs, mattress on the floor, dresser and mirror picked up off the curb with one drawer missing and a corner held up by a pile of scrap bricks.
This was a hideout, not a home. His own looked a lot like it, but he needed places to keep stuff he didn't dare leave in a dorm room where the Admin had passkeys. Morgan stuff, like her .45.
He wondered where she studied for her classes. Besides his dorm room, that is. He wondered where she kept her textbooks. He wondered where she lived. Or maybe this was it — and nearly a palace, compared to the streets of Naskeag Falls or an upstairs room in the Paramount Hotel.
"Fingerprints?"
"If the cops match my fingertips to their fucking records, one dead Danny'd be the least of my problems."
His brain fiddled with that statement for a moment. One dead Danny would probably have rated as manslaughter at worst. No premeditation, and it might pass as self-defense under the circumstances. So she must think the cops had evidence for a murder charge or two, looking for a print match.
Well, he already knew that she avoided cops.
He started to reach for the pistol, just curious. She snatched it away, didn't quite point it in his direction, and put it down on the far side of her computer.
"Not on your life, lover boy. You're cute, but not that cute."
That phrasing seemed a touch . . . indelicate. Under the circumstances, with her sitting there naked from the waist down and the sweat of sex still drying on their bodies. He settled back in his chair, and then straightened up as it creaked alarmingly behind him. A door slammed upstairs. Silence fell.
He sat, and thought, and stared at that peephole in the door. And at the gun. And at her. And then he understood.
Barn cat.
A high-school friend's family had kept horses, raised a heifer or steer for meat each year, still used their barn. They'd had cats, house pets and a couple of others that hung out around the feed-bins in the barn and kept the mice and rats and sparrows twitchy.
The barn cats acted almost like house cats. Almost. They came to the food dish, the water dish, they meowed at you if the dish was empty. Sometimes you could scratch their ears and rub their chins, if they wanted your help in shedding excess
