The Axeman's Jazz by Julie Smith Read Free Book Online Page A

less. “Put it in her IV,” said the resident.
    “It’s fallen out.”
    “What?”
    “This lady weighs about half a ton, and you’re doing chest compressions—what do you expect?”
    There wasn’t time to start sticking her arm experimentally. Three minutes must have passed already.
    “Goddamn! Jesus shit!” The resident was falling apart.
    Sonny said, “Under her tongue.”
    The resident gave him a look of pure hate, as if he’d killed the patient. But he opened her mouth and lifted her tongue, where he knew he’d find a vein. It was too late; her body shuddered and gave up.
    He refused to accept it, injected the stuff anyway. Sonny knew he would have done the same thing. “Sonny. Chest compressions.” He and the resident did them together. And that was how they found them when they answered the code, still pumping rhythmically, the resident pale but resigned, Sonny’s face fierce in its desperation.
    Later on the roof, gulping air he could practically drink, it was so humid, that fairly burned as it entered his lungs, Sonny thought of gentle hands smoothing out the furrow between his eyes, massaging the muscles of his face, making it all go away. Not Missy’s. Missy’s ministrations would come with a thousand kisses, a thousand words of praise and admonitions that it wasn’t his fault, a thousand suggestions on how to handle it in life, in his profession, in his heart of hearts. Missy would not rest until she had split every atom of his psyche, pieced each one back together, and re-arranged them to make a rosy new picture.
    All he wanted was the fingers.

FIVE
    SKIP HADN’T CLOSED the Goodwill sofa she slept on, instead had made it up as if it were a real bed in an actual bedroom instead of nearly the only thing in her studio apartment. She needed the surface for packing, and for Jimmy Dee Scoggin, her neighbor and landlord, who reclined as she worked.
    The air was scented with pot smoke, Skip abstaining but getting an atmospheric high. “Officer Darlin’, it doesn’t have to be like this, you know. Some squalid apartment out of
The Day of the Locust,
that bear of a human crawling all over your petite little person…”
    “Dee-Dee, what is it with you and Steve?” Frustrated, she threw her hair-dryer so hard it thumped against the suitcase. “You’ve never asked me to travel with you before.”
    He bestirred himself to grab her wrist, bring it to his lips, and nibble. “I’m in love with your itsy-bitsy bone structure.”
    She jerked away. “Oh, cut it out.”
    “Do I detect a note of genuine irritation? Darling, is it our first fight?”
    “Dammit, yes. I could have taken two vacations. I’d love to have gone diving with you, no matter if I didn’t have your full and complete attention. I’d especially love it at your expense. You invited me just to tease me.”
    “True. True, I did.”
    She faced him. “And to keep me from seeing Steve.”
    “Don’t be ridiculous.” But he rolled off the bed and went to the kitchen, anything so he didn’t have to look her in the eye. She couldn’t understand why Jimmy Dee hated Steve so much. For months he’d been telling her she had to get out, trying to get her to buy clothes she could wear on dates, even introducing her once to one of his straight friends, and the minute she took his advice he got huffy about it.
    “Dixie?”
    “No, thanks.”
    She heard the top pop open. “I just think you could have found somebody more…”
    “More what? Go ahead and say it.”
    “Okay. More your own size.”
    “Oh, can it, Dee-Dee—if you and I made love, I’d crush you.”
    “Yeah, but I’d love it so
much
.”
    “More what else, landlord?”
    “More local.”
    “Oh, pish-tush—you’d
really
hate that.”
    Not only was the conversation inane, they’d had it about fifty times lately. She needed it and she knew Dee-Dee did too. She’d realized, once she caught on to how jealous he was of Steve, that Jimmy Dee really loved her. She was half