CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

The drowsiness was gone like a fog whipped apart by a sudden high wind.

Jeanette dashed to her room, threw off the robe, and put on the same track suit she'd been wearing when she'd paid her earlier visit to Bigfoot's place.

She was out the door into the early light of what would shape up to be another summery day according to the weatherman, into her car and on the road less than fifteen minutes after the brain-dead slut hung up.

Ten minutes after that, she was cruising Prewett again.

Gone was the hectic, dirty, festering activity of the previous night. The street was all but empty, the buildings along it looking like piles of roadkill so unappetizing that even the flies turned up their noses. Smiley's in particular was a gangrenous open sore.

Thankfully, there was no sign of Batman. Or of Weasel or the black kid who'd been camped in front of Bigfoot's door last night.

She drove past, then parked a block over, in front of a food bank on the corner of Dunley and 2nd. The posted hours showed that the food bank didn't open until ten on Sundays, but a few other cars occupied the slots that angled up to the curb. She got a small café mocha at a coffee kiosk to blend in with the few others out and about, and walked into the manager's office of Smiley's like she owned the place.

A tinny bell, mounted above the door, jingled. But the sound was lost in the way-too-enthusiastic patter of some morning-show hostess desperate to prove she was pretty enough and vivacious enough to be put on weekdays instead of weekend mornings.

The office had cheap tubular-chrome furniture and a scarred wooden counter that served as the front desk and divided the small room into two smaller halves. The desk was unmanned at the moment, and she could hear water running somewhere nearby.

Jeanette flipped up the hinged section of the counter, stepped into the rear half, and surveyed the keys hanging on grimy metal rings from a pegboard. She chose the one that read 'Main' and was at the door before the water gurgled to a stop.

The bell jingled again. From the back, a man called, "Be right with you!"

Without answering, Jeanette let the door swing shut and strolled around to the rear of the building.

Bigfoot's room was 119, and the key didn't give her any trouble at all.

That, though, was the last part of her plan to go right.

The room was empty. Not empty of crap, no … in that regard it was exactly as she'd seen it before. Piled high and strewn from hell to breakfast with trash, porn and junk. But empty of people.

No brain-dead slut. No sign of a brain-dead slut. No sign that a girl of any sort had spent much time in here at all. There were no panties on the floor, no used condoms stuck to the wall. Besides Jeanette, the only women present were bare-assed and beaver-shot on the walls and the covers of magazines and DVD cases.

She had come in pumped up and gun in hand, not entirely sure whether she intended to take the slut hostage or leave a vivid reminder waiting for Bigfoot. To abruptly have neither option threw her badly off her stride. She looked around the room in disbelief.

"Hey!" she barked. "Where are you?"

Rustle-rustle! Then a stack of moldy pizza boxes fell over as a body darted out from under a pile of garbage.

A rat. She saw at once that it was a rat, nasty and brown and beady-eyed, and almost blew it to bits anyway. It scurried for the open door, slid around the jamb like a brown wad of snot, and was gone in a flick of diseased-looking pink tail.

"Son of a bitch," Jeanette said.

Rather than put the gun away – that being the sort of thing people did in movies after being startled by a cat, bird, or whatever, only to relax and then be jumped – she made a circuit of the room, kicking stuff out of her way.

It was empty. She even held her breath and checked the bathroom. Which was every inch as purely vile as she had previously suspected, and harbored millions of living things far down the evolutionary scale, but no people.

She didn't see the pre-paid cell phone anywhere.

"The bitch wasn't here," she said to the pouty-lipped silicone bimbos on the wall. "She was never here. Where was she?"

A shadow partially blocked the open doorway.

Jeanette still had her gun in hand, and it was pointed at Weasel's face before she knew she meant to do it.

He goggled at her, absolutely stunned. "The fuck?" he slurred.

Weasel, still in the same torn, rumpled, dandruff-speckled and food-stained clothes as she'd seen him in last night, stood there with a key in one hand and an empty cardboard box that had once held Soft Roll toilet paper in the other. He was, like Smiley's and most of Prewett Avenue, even uglier by day's harsh and unforgiving light.

"Where is he? Where is the stinking shithead?" she demanded.

His bloodshot eyes nearly crossed as he tried to focus on the gun. "The fuck?!" he repeated, astounded.

She was to him in four strides. At the last minute, Weasel's street-savvy survival instincts took over and he tried to run for it, but he was too late. She caught him by the collar. And although Jeanette was only five-two and a hundred and ten pounds, she matched Weasel for size and more than matched his slack, wasted frame when it came to strength and fitness. The box went flying. She hauled him backward and flung him on the floor, then slammed the door and stood over him with the gun aimed at the center of his scabby, receding hairline.

"The fuck?" Weasel groaned, there on the floor.

"Tell me where Jon is."

"The fuck I will."

Aha, she'd gotten two whole more words out of him.

"The fuck you won't," she said.

"Won't fuckin' shoot me. You're a fuckin' parole officer!"

"No, I'm not."

"The fuck?"

God! She thought she might have to shoot him after all if he said that one more time. "Last chance, Weasel."

"The fuck you know my name?"

Her finger tightened on the trigger.

"Okay, okay, hold your fuckin' water!" Weasel cried, raising his hands. He had dropped the key. "Jon called me this mornin', okay? 'Bout an hour ago."

"And?"

"Wanted me to come here and get some stuff."

"What stuff?"

Weasel got a sulky look. "Nothin'."

"Nothing?"

"His mom might come over. He din' wan' her see him livin' like this." Weasel nodded around at the centerfolds and stacks of magazines.

"Oh, really?"

The gun hadn't wavered but Weasel's eyes did. "And, okay, he's got some fuckin' recreational, okay? He don' sell it, but he don' wan' his mom findin' it. Said I'd get rid of it for him."

"Wait," Jeanette said. "His mom?"

"What? So he's got a mom, so fuckin' what? I got a mom."

She found that she did not even want to imagine what kind of women could have birthed and raised sons like this. "And she's coming here why? Where's Jon? Why doesn't he come and clean out his own porn?"

"He's in the fuckin' hospital, okay?"

This threw her for a loop. "The hospital? What happened? Did he crash that damned bike of his? Was he hit by a car?"

"Shot," Weasel said, and looked from the gun to Jeanette accusingly.

"The fuck?!" she said. "Where?"

"In the fuckin' chest."

"No, not where on his body did he get shot, you moron, where –"

"Century Medical," Weasel said.

"No, again. Where was he when he got shot?"

"Fuck'f I know. Dunley Street someplace, I think. He din' tell me the whole fuckin' story, okay? Said he'd been shot, some guy shot him, he hadda have surgery. An' his mom was comin' to get his shit, okay?"

"Shot," marveled Jeanette.

Then the bottom dropped out of her stomach. Shot. By some guy. Shot. And she had a very bad feeling she knew which gun had done the shooting.

She looked down at Weasel, who hadn't budged from where he'd landed when she had thrown him to the floor. He lay there in a litter of trash and pornography, watching her. Not afraid. He had never been properly afraid, not even with the gun leveled at him, and now a cocksure insolence was growing in his eyes.

He didn't think she would shoot him, especially now that she'd gotten what she wanted to know. He didn't think she had the guts.

She shot him.

**