The Return Read Online Free Page B

simply shoot us? They might torture us first. You heard about what happened to that teenage bookie that the police found on Main? During the autopsy they found a pillowcase in his stomach. Do you know how scared someone has to be to swallow a pillowcase? Oh, and did I forget to mention that his throat had been cut from ear to ear? That was down on Main, Darlene Red Blade territory, Juan's playing ground."
    "Was it a whole pillow case?" Carol asked.
    "Oh, would you shut up," Jean said this time.
    Darlene glared at Jean. "I thought you were more than a chicken bitch. I guess I was wrong."
    Jean turned to Lenny, her boyfriend, the father of her unborn child. He still hadn't answered her original question. Earlier she had been right to think of him as a stranger. Looking at his dark, cold masklike face, she hardly recognized him. And to think, she had made love to him only two days before on this very couch. No, she had had sex with him—there was a difference.
    "How can you let her talk to me that way?" she asked. "This is your house. Kick her out. You know she's talking crap. You know this whole meeting is insane."
    Lenny took his time answering. Something on the floor between his legs had him fascinated. It must have been the dirt because that was all that was there.
    The heavy burdens on his attention—the filth and her request. Finally he spoke, his head still down. "You just didn't care about him the way we did. You can't understand." He shrugged, adding, "We can't let Juan get away with it."
    Jean jumped up from the sofa, feeling the blood suffuse her face. "I cared about him more than any of you know! I knew him before any of you knew him! But he's dead, and it's really sad, but why do we have to die with him? Why do we even have to talk about killing people?" Her throat choked with emotion; her voice came out cracked. "Why do we even have to live like this?"
    Jean didn't wait for an answer to her painful questions. She ran from the living room, into the bedroom, and out onto Lenny's balcony.
    The platform was a haphazard affair, a collection of splintered planks thrown on top of a randomly spaced group of termite-zapped wooden stilts. Yet the drop to the ground was substantial: thirty feet straight down. Jean heard the boards of the railing creak as she leaned against them. The view was pretty at least, if you liked smelly oil wells and rundown houses that doubled as fear-infested fortresses. The downtown skyscrapers were visible, far in the distance; dark towers with dots of light in a bleary haze of pollutants. Really, Jean thought, it was all the same no matter which direction she turned. It wasn't a city, it was a dying monster. She wanted it to die. She wanted the big bombs to fall, the red mushroom clouds to form. She didn't know why she had argued so passionately for life when she felt so little life in her heart.
    It was ironic that ever since the seed of a new human being had started growing in her body she had felt more and more like ending it all. Not suicide, no, but something close to it. Something like a contract that could be entered into without serious penalties. Not a devil's contract certainly, more like a person-to-person handshake and a pat on the back and an understanding that it was OK. That it would be all right. I did the best I could, God, but it wasn't good enough. But I don't hate you and I don't hate myself. I just don't know what the hell I'm doing. Help, please, help me.
    Standing on the creaky balcony, time passed for Jean Rodrigues. How much time, she didn't know. But somewhere in the sand at the bottom of Jean Rodrigues's fallen hourglass, the colors of the nighttime city altered. The dull yellows turned to blues and the sober reds to fresh greens. The intensity of the light grew as well, as one after another tiny candles were lit in dark corners above homes that had never been built and atop skyscrapers that would never fall.
    The shift was subtle at first, and she didn't know it was