The Rabbit Factory: A Novel by Larry Brown Read Free Book Online Page B

nightmare about him, one where he was eating her feet, actually some of her toes on a three-cheese pizza, and she’d thrown him to the floor so hard it had injured one of his legs, and he’d limped for four days, and she had worried, and on the fifth day he had stopped limping and Mr. Hamburger had come home and caught him up in the hall and hugged him and kissed him, acted a fool over him like he always did.
    She bumped over the floor and looked behind a couch. He wasn’t there. She looked for the little dog for about twenty minutes, opening doors quietly, taking careful steps, peering around corners one eye at a time. But he was nowhere to be found. She even went looking upstairs. Then she felt something watching her in Mr. Hamburger’s study and turned around slowly. He was lying on a shelf about two feet above a desk full of shipping bills and ledgers. He looked like nothing more than an old dust rag, so still he was. She couldn’t imagine how he’d gotten up there.
    She raised her hand to try and pet him but he raised his lips and showed her his teeth. Okay. Well. She turned and bumped out and closed the door and shut him in there so he wouldn’t go outside and dig in the yard and get all messy while she was gone. Her boss wasn’t coming back for about another week and she thought she might slip out for a while tonight. But she wouldn’t be gone for long. He’d be okay by himself for a while. She’d be back later.

13
     
     
    A njalee parked her junky Camry just around the corner from her apartment building and left it and walked up the street and peeked around the corner before she stepped out. More snow was coming down and the few people on the sidewalks were bundled up and hurrying against it. There were two police cars parked in front of her building. The lights weren’t flashing. They were just sitting there. Oh fuck. She’d have to go back to Gigi’s Angels and keep staying there until Frankie called for her. The couch cops might not know she was working there yet. And the regular cops would put her under the penitentiary if they nabbed her for Miss Barbee. She didn’t know if Miss Barbee was dead or alive. She’d looked in the paper a few times but she hadn’t seen anything about it. But if she didn’t go back to the old folks’ home for community service, she violated her probation. She’d get raped with a billy club in jail. Maybe have to muffdive somebody’s old stinky box.
    She got back in her car and turned it around in a parking lot overgrown with dead weeds. In ten minutes she was back at the strip joint. She put her car behind the building. A few customers were sitting on stools in the dead midafternoon. A rock tune was blaring. One girl was dancing but not very enthusiastically. She didn’t see the neatly dressed old guy who wore a gray raincoat and who had come in there for the last few afternoons. He was not a regular and nobody knew who he was. He just sat there on the corner stool and drank gin and tonics. She’d talked to him once.
    Since nobody was behind the bar, Anjalee went around to the end and raised the part that was mounted on hinges and let herself back there and got a cold mug from the little icebox and drew herself a Sam Adams and poured a shot of mezcal and picked up a salt shaker and grabbed a wedge of lime from a tray full of them and set everything across the bar and then ducked back under the thing instead of raising it again and took her stool out front.
    Maybe Frankie would call soon. Maybe even today. She didn’t want to tell him she’d been turning tricks again. But she hadn’t heard from him in a few days and she couldn’t do without money, smokes, drinks, food. And where was she going to go now? Where could she go where they wouldn’t find her? They might even come looking here. The detectives might be out on the street with her mug shot, since she had one, showing it to people and asking them if they knew her. And somebody they might ask might know