Read Online Queenpin by Megan Abbott - Free Book Online

on me with the old lady. Running to put out one fire would start another. Sure, there was one fix. Stop seeing the sharpie. But who was I kidding? He had a hold of me. He had a hold of me and as much as I wanted to stop, I didn’t want to stop. I couldn’t go back. He had something on me. He knew my number and there was no turning back.
    She picked me up at nine to head over to Googie’s Chop House. I was so distracted about Vic and what I’d heard, I wasn’t careful. Sliding across the bench seat of her El Dorado, my skirt rode up and she got an eyeful. Five bruises, glaring through my stocking, dotting my thigh, an oval for each finger, in a perfect radial pattern.
    Green, violet, raw, hot to the touch.Yeah, I’d seen it in the bath that morning. And when I got dressed. My palms itched every time I looked at them. I could feel them throbbing.
    At first, she was silent. Then she switched gears and began pulling away. “Who did it,” she said. “Who did it to you?”
    “I got caught in a turnstile at Casa Mar,” I said, pulling my skirt down.
    She looked at me for a second, flinty, severe. I found myself counting the faint lines crimping her crimson mouth. A line for every lie told to her by a two-faced shill like me. Then she turned her eyes back to the road, gloves wrapped lightly on the steering wheel.
    I knew she didn’t believe me. She could read everybody, most of all me, who she’d made from scratch. She’d given me my poker face, molded it herself, so she knew it when’ she saw it.
    It wasn’t until two hours later that she brought it up. We were in one of the round booths in the back and she’d had three vodkas, two more than I’d ever seen her drink since I’d met her. She didn’t seem tight. Instead, the booze seemed to make her sharper than usual, more focused, her words barreling across the table at me. We were talking about other things, business things, when suddenly she set her glass down and looked straight into my eyes in that way she had, her neck curved toward me, jaw forward, like a cobra hood. It always got my pulse going.
    “Listen, baby doll, somebody hurts you,” she said, “they don’t get a second chance.” Then she slid closer, so close I could smell the ambergris in her perfume, the expensive vodka on her tongue. “You’re mine,” she said, putting one gloved finger on my thigh until I winced. “Roughing you up is roughing me up. And I don’t let anyone rough me up. You’re mine and someone puts his dirty paws on you they might as well be on me. You’re my girl. I won’t think twice.”
    And I knew she meant it.
    ∞◊ ∞
    It was scarcely two days later when it happened. Guess I knew it was coming, could feel it in my gut even if I didn’t let myself think it out loud. I’d been talking myself out of worrying. She’d backed off. Hadn’t asked me who the guy was. Part of me was worried maybe she didn’t need to ask, already knew, had known all these weeks. But she wasn’t pressing me, so I could make myself believe. I hadn’t explained the bruises. I let her think whatever she thought.
    But as for him. As for the powder keg he was sitting on, he was betting, dodging, and losing his way straight to the basement of the Grotto. And when I came by his place Sunday night, late, there was no answer at his door. For the first time in thirty nights or more. So then I thought about Amos Mackey’s boys and got spooked. I took a bobby pin from my hair and popped the lock, a trick one of the loading dock fellas had taught me once in exchange for a gratis box of Old Golds.
    The furniture was still gone except for the box spring he sugar-tongued the landlady into advancing him, but his clothes and toiletries were there. And there were no broken windows or signs of trouble. But I didn’t feel much better. I couldn’t exactly call around the casinos asking for him. So I decided to stay put.
    In the end, I fell asleep waiting, nearly set myself on fire with the cigarette