She steps back from the bar, her gaze hard, and slips the strap of her dress off one shoulder, letting it slip down almost to the nipple of her right breast. If she’d done this earlier, I might have been grateful for the glimpse, and eager to see more, but there are two reasons why there isn’t anything even remotely sexual about this moment. First, there’s the obvious fact that she’s dead, and as much as I was attracted to her in life, that’s a line even I won’t cross. Secondly, there’s some kind of symbol branded into the flesh of that breast, a large ugly pink thing that looks like a couple of wigwams behind a crooked fence trapped inside a square. Hovering above the whole mess is a couple of rough Japanese or Chinese symbols.
“What’s it mean?”
She shakes her head, tugs the strap back onto her slim shoulder, and I’m somewhat disturbed to note how hard her nipples are beneath the material, and how harder still it is for me to ignore the fact. “I don’t know, but it’s how he kept me here,” she says. “S’why I’m still here. Night before he took off, he tied me down, took off my shirt and had the bitch spout gibberish over me before she drew that symbol on my tit with the business end of a red hot Bowie knife.”
“Jesus. You ever try to leave?”
“First time I tried stepping over the threshold of this place, it made me sterile and ejected the baby that was busy growin’ in my belly at the time.”
“You were—”
“No great loss. It was my daddy’s child anyway, so he did me a favor.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I put it down to coincidence and tried again. That one gave me such a pain it dropped me to the floor and left me there for two days, paralyzed and bleedin’ from every hole in my body. So I gave up, figurin’ if I tried a third time, it might be the last.”
“Might’ve been a mercy too.”
“This look like mercy to you?”
“Guess not.”
“So my daddy comes back. Lian Su isn’t with him, and he’s loonier than a goddamn fox-gnawed hen.”
“What happened?”
“Beats me, but it don’t take a genius to figure out what might have happened to a Western man in an Eastern house of witches, does it?”
I shudder at the thought, or maybe it’s the cold, but despite how unnatural my circumstances might have become, the whiskey is once again doing its job and blunting the edges.
“He locks himself in his room for a week, and I leave him there, happy to have him starve to death, till I remember he’s the only hope I have of ever steppin’ foot outside this place. So I go up there and I find him curled up on the bed like a child, naked and whimperin’, and I grab him by the throat.” She extends her hand and throttles the air between us. “And I tell him I’m glad he’s gonna die, that it should have happened years ago. And I tell him I’ll help put him out of his misery if he just tells me how to get out from under the bitch’s hex. And you know what he does?”
I wait for her to continue.
“He laughs. That cocksucker laughs in this hysterical girly laugh and tells me this is my place, nowhere else right for me, and then gets right back to laughin’.”
“So he could have done something about it if he’d wanted to?”
“Don’t know. Maybe he knew how to lift the curse, maybe not, but I didn’t give him a second chance to tell me.”
I drain my glass, and damn that whiskey’s hitting the spot now. I’m even wondering if Gracie will object to letting me take another bottle off her hands for old time’s sake. But her eyes are all glassy. She’s back in that room with her daddy for the moment so I guess it’s best to hear out the end of her account.
“You kill him?”
“You bet I did,” she says, the fire in her eyes hotter than the one at my back. “Fucker had it comin’. Should’ve done it years ago, first time he came into my room reekin’ of bourbon with his pants around his ankles. Should have stashed a knife and cut off his prick, but I never dreamed he’d do it. Could’ve done it any night after that but I guess I was too afraid, too stuck on the Bible and what it tells you about vengeance and righteousness and all that bullshit. He unlearned me of those lessons, I can tell you. My only regret now is that I left him off easy. Smotherin’ him with a pillow was a hell of a lot better than he deserved. I should have tied him down and…” She waves away the thought. “S’all the same now.”
“And here you are. Still.”
“Here I am.”
“The hell happened in here tonight, Gracie?” I want more than anything for her to be able to give me a straight answer, tie up the whole goddamn mess in one quick sentence, because she died, and surely that gave her the opportunity to see who pulls the strings in this little nightmare.
But all she does is shrug. “Don’t know.
“So what now?”
She looks around at the fire outside our little magic tunnel. “Guess I’m gonna have to start putting this place back together. Not gonna stand around in a pile of ashes for the rest of forever, and a girl’s gotta make a livin’.” This time she does smile, just a little.
“I’d be glad to help.”
“Appreciate the offer, Tom, but it’s not like I don’t have the time.”
“Not a matter of time, Gracie.”
“I’ll figure out what needs doin’, and the way I see it, if I can blow cold bubbles that keep the fire from eatin’ me up again, I can sure as shit make myself some walls and a roof.”
“I guess that’s true.”
“Besides,” she says, shoving aside her empty glass and taking a long swallow from the bottle. “You’ve got problems of your own.”
I sigh. “Don’t I know it.”
“Not yet you don’t.”
Setting down my glass, I feel the return of the cold. You can dispute bad news from just about any source, but when it comes from the dead, who I figure are more likely to know the score than anyone living, then you best listen. So I do.
Gracie’s dark eyes hold me in place. “Tonight,” she says. “This tavern, this whole town, has been rotten for a long time, Tom, and so are most of the people in it. Some more than others.”
None of this is news to me, but she’s building up to something, and I find myself getting edgier with every word. She’s trying to be gentle with me, and that’s not in her nature, so it doesn’t work, and that’s the worst thing of all, because if she’s trying to soften a blow that’s coming, it’s going to be a bad one.
“Tell me.”
She puts the bottle in front of me, nods for me to take it. I do, and with it comes the feeling that it’s a parting gift, that she suspects one of us isn’t going to be here when the sun comes up. That lock of hair falls over her eye. I wait for her to tuck it back. She doesn’t.
“It’s your boy,” she says. “You have yourself a Judas.”
Part Two: Sunday Morn’ in Milestone
Chapter Nine
Wintry’s in agony and it’s not the kind of pain he’s accustomed to carrying with him. This isn’t the same as walking around with guilt pinned to your chest like Sheriff Tom’s badge, or keeping it in your eyes like Gracie, or in your heart like Flo, or like Cobb trying to shed it with his clothes as if sins are snake skins. It’s not the same as waking up every morning to find the faces of a few murdered men glaring at you in the mirror. This is a different kind of pain altogether. Oh yes. This is like being dragged for ten miles naked across a gravel highway until you tumble into a mound of salt and fire ants after being skinned alive and havin’ boilin’ water poured over you.