Corridor Man by Mick James Read Free Book Online Page A

she was right, she was a mess.
    “I don’t know who those guys were. They were at Foxies, did you know them?”
    “What guys?”
    “The ones shooting at us.”
    “Huh.”
    “The guys in the Escalade, they were shooting at us. Didn’t you see?”
    “What the hell are you talking about? God, I could sure use a drink.”
    “Look at my damn windshield. They tried to kill me.”
    “What the hell are you talking about?”
    “Just,” he let the rest of it go. “Do you have a phone, a cell?” he asked.
    “Why?”
    “I was thinking of calling the police. You know since there was a maniac on the road shooting at people. I thought it might be…do you have a cell?”
    “Quit yelling, for Christ sake. Oh, God, look at this, you made me puke all over my cigarettes,” she said, then held up the dripping package of cigarettes to prove her point.
    He felt his stomach begin to lurch, but swallowed it back down. He wasn’t going downtown and as he thought about it, maybe a little more than a week out of the halfway house wasn’t the best time to call the police about a shooting. He sure as hell wasn’t going back anywhere near Foxies.
    “I’ll take you to my place. You can get cleaned up there.”

Chapter Seventeen
     
     
    “Hey, you got a towel?” Kate called through the bathroom door.
    Bobby had been dividing his time between standing guard at the bathroom door and running to the window to see if there was a burgundy Escalade parked out by the dumpster.
    “I just moved in and they’re all still packed away. Hang on, just a minute,” he said, then ran and grabbed two T-shirts from one of his paper bags. He knocked on the bathroom door, then pushed it partially open and stuck his hand in with the T-shirts. “Here, I’m afraid you’ll have to use these. You can dry off with one and slip the other on until your clothes come out of the laundry downstairs.”
    He caught her reflection in the bathroom mirror as she took the T-shirts from his hand. She was shaking her head like she couldn’t believe what he’d just told her. Her hair was wet and hung down over her shoulders. A series of black and blue bruises ran up and down her side, more from falls than any beating he guessed.
    Even just out of the shower and still looking like a mess there was a sense that she might have been attractive at one time in the distant past, but it would have been a very long time ago. He guessed she was somewhere in her fifties. Her figure had fallen prey to the lifestyle. It had been over four years since he had seen a woman naked, let alone been this close to one. It would be a while longer before he touched one and it certainly wasn’t going to be this woman. He pulled the door closed until it wedged against the door frame and wouldn’t close any further.
    “I’ll go check on your clothes,” he said.
    He had the dryer cranked on high and he put another buck-and-a-half worth of quarters in the slot, he pushed the coins in and hoped the dryer wouldn’t stop. He wanted her dressed as soon as possible.
    He heard her rummaging in the kitchen area when he stepped back into the apartment. She was standing on her tip-toes peering into the small cabinet above the stove. The rest of the cabinet doors were half open. The T-shirt had risen over her rear and exposed a new set of black-and-blue bruises. Red blotches appeared on the back of her thighs.
    “This place is empty and you don’t have shit to drink around here. I really need a drink.”
    “My name’s Bobby. I guess we weren’t exactly introduced.”
    She ignored the hand he extended and bent down in a very unladylike pose to look under the kitchen sink. “Where the hell do you keep it? I told you, I need a goddamn drink.”
    “Hey look, Kate, like I said I just moved in. Everything is still packed away, in the delivery van. I don’t have any alcohol here.”
    She looked up at him from the empty cabinet. “Any blow? Crank? Come on, you gotta have something?”
    “No,