The Dead Women of Juarez Read Online Free

way.
    He put the outside light on, just a bare yellow bulb without a fancy cover, and went inside to wait. He had beer in the little fridge and drank until his legs felt heavy and relaxed.
    Paloma knocked after midnight. Kelly let her in.
    Maybe she wasn’t beautiful, but she was everything Kelly liked. She had wide hips and a full body that stupid men up north would call chunky. Kelly liked her short hair and her tan skin. He liked the way she smelled.
    “Hi,” Kelly said.
    “
Dinero
,” Paloma replied.
    Kelly gave her the money. “You owe me extra for cab ride.”
    “Pay your own cab fare,” Paloma said. She counted out the cash. She wore snug jeans and kept a wallet in her back pocket like a man. The two thousand went up front. She paid Kelly from the wallet.
    Kelly found extra for the cab, after all. “Thanks,” he said. “I don’t like the buses at night.”
    “Cabs are a rip-off,” Paloma said. “You got any more of that beer?”
    “Help yourself.”
    Kelly sat on one end of a ratty convertible couch. Paloma sat onthe other. They drank and looked at each other for a while. Kelly felt her eyes on his bruises.
    “You look like shit, Kelly.”
    “I got to make a living. You and Estéban were out of town.”
    Paloma nodded. She drank beer like her brother: hard from the bottle and no flinching. Kelly hadn’t ever seen her smoke a joint or touch a needle. These were also things he liked about her. “Our cousin Ines got married.”
    “That’s what Estéban said. How was it?”
    “Better than
your
weekend.”
    Kelly laughed. Paloma smiled. She had dimples and white, white teeth.
    They sat a while and Paloma told him about the wedding. Mazatlán was on the Pacific coast and was beautiful all year round. Kelly saw cliff-divers there once and ate so much fresh fruit over a weeklong visit that he felt like a health nut gone wild. Compared to Ciudad Juárez it was tiny, but the air was cleaner and the streets less crowded. Kelly might have lived there, but Mazatlán was a retreat, not a place to make a home. He didn’t really understand why Juárez was one and Mazatlán the other, and not the other way around.
    Paloma talked about vows taken in the shade of a white tent on the beach with a view of the old lighthouse. Dancing and drinking and eating followed. And family arguments and embarrassing drunkenness. “I would have invited you,” Paloma told Kelly. “But Estéban said you wouldn’t come.”
    “Not my thing,” Kelly lied.
    “Next time,” Paloma said.
    “Sure.”
    The beer didn’t last and neither did the wedding stories. Paloma got up to turn off the light and came to Kelly on the couch. He lifted her blouse in the dark. Paloma had small breasts and when Kelly put his mouth on them he felt the little steel barbells in her nipples on his tongue. She had other piercings elsewhere — in her tongueand at her navel. The stitched wool of a green scapular around her neck fell against him when they kissed.
    Kelly was sore, but Paloma was careful. She did the work, put him inside her and set the pace. Kelly loved the sound of her breath in his ear when it quickened, and her hair in his face. He put his hands on her hips; let his fingers sink into her flesh. The smell of her was stronger than the fresh scent of beer.
    “I’m close,” Kelly said.
    Paloma lifted herself off Kelly and knelt between his legs. Her grip on his was tight, insistent and her mouth was searing. He felt her tongue stud on him. When he came, she swallowed. Afterward they lay together on the couch. Drying perspiration kept them cool.
    For the first time that night, Paloma touched Kelly’s face, but delicately. “When are you going to stop fighting?” she asked him.
    “Whenever they stop paying me.”
    “I don’t like it when you get your nose broken. How are you supposed to eat my pussy?”
    Kelly smiled in the dark. “Who says I was going to?”
    Paloma hit him on the shoulder, but not hard. “You