Hell's Half Acre Read Online Free Page B

table. I could smell myself and it wasn’t a good smell. I was wearing white pants for some reason, and nothing else. I was hungry and I felt like I was coming back to the world.
    Hey, I said.
    I just came from the clinic, she said.
    Are you okay?
    No. I’m pregnant.
    Oh. Shit.
    Shit, she said.
    How pregnant?
    Eight weeks. She lit a cigarette and immediately put it out.
    Bad for the baby, she muttered. Her hand was trembling and she made a fist. I wanted to say that everything was okay, that we were together and everything was okay but it was almost impossible to conceive of Jude pregnant, Jude a mother, and finally my brain kicked in like a radio that only works on rainy days because rats have been chewing the wires. That blood on the bed was something to worry about yes but there was something else, wasn’t there. But I couldn’t bring myself to say anything.
    The attack was exactly eight weeks ago, she said.
    And we, I said. We had sex that morning, and the night before. I remember because the phone kept ringing and you threw the portable out the window.
    Jude half smiled. That’s right.
    We didn’t use a condom, I said.
    No, she said. But you withdrew.
    And they didn’t, I said. Did they?
    Jude sighed. She said that she was tired.
    Look, I said. It’s okay. We’re gonna be okay.
    Jude shook her head. No, we’re not.
    She went to take a nap and when I went to check on her, she said she wanted to be alone. I tried to pull myself together. I got myself cleanedup and went to the grocery store, numbly thinking that she would need things like chicken soup and milk and ice cream and bottled water because even if she was going to get an abortion she would need to eat. I wasn’t too rational. I hadn’t been out of the apartment in almost a month and my vision was still blurry and when I came back to the apartment Jude was gone. She was just gone. I went out and bought a shotgun, and waited as long as I could stand it, maybe a month. I was hoping the men would come back to finish the job. But they never did and I realized Jude was probably hunting them, and maybe she’d already found them, and after a while the silence of the apartment and the springtime stink of the Quarter had driven me half crazy, and I decided Jude wasn’t coming back. I got on a bus and headed back to Denver, where I plunged myself into an altogether different nightmare. But that’s another story.
    I’m still sitting in a yellow cab outside the King James Hotel. The driver is waiting for his money. I reach into my pocket and find the wallet I took off the dead man in the alley. I flip it open to find a wad of small bills, maybe ninety bucks. No credit cards. Driver’s licenses from five states. The same blond hair and silvery eyes with five different names, and if the IDs are fakes, they are well crafted. I study his face for half a tick. Thin, intelligent, fierce, hard as the underside of your boot. The Nevada license, expired, is the only one that bears his Christian name, Sugar Jefferson Finch. This was one of the dogs Jude was hunting. This was one of the men who attacked us in New Orleans, one of the savage fucks who raped her, and I saved his life today. I wonder if he was the one who took me down with that hammer, and I feel sick.
    Furious and sick.
    The dead man in the alley was presumably his kid brother, alsoknown as Shane. Tucked into Sugar’s wallet is a book of matches from the Alamo Hotel, with a phone number scribbled on the inside. Might be a long shot, might be an easy ground ball, hit right at me. The cab’s radio crackles with the dispatcher’s voice, and now my driver turns around to favor me with his gray fleshy face, mottled with a pink rash.
    What’s it gonna be, pal? In or out.
    You know a place called the Alamo?
    The driver grunts. Big drop-off from the James to the Alamo.
    That’s cool. Is it far?
    The Alamo is strictly Section Eight. Peeling paint and the stink of mildew and a humming death vibe. The lobby is a