Down These Strange Streets (George R.R. Martin) (Kitty Norville 6.50)

“I don’t know . . . You’ve always been good to me, and once we had a thing goin’.”

“We did,” I said.

“What happened to it?”

I shrugged. “It quit goin’.”

“It did, didn’t it? Sometimes I wish it hadn’t.”

“Sometimes I wish a lot of things,” I said.

She leaned back in the seat and opened her purse and got out a cigarette and lit it, then rolled down the window. She remembered I didn’t like cigarette smoke. I never had got on the tobacco. It took your wind and it stunk and it made your breath bad too. I hated when it got in my clothes.

“You’re the only one I could tell this to,” she said. “The only one that would listen to me and not think I been with the needle in my arm. You know what I’m sayin’?”

“Sure, baby, I know.”

“I sound to you like I been bad?”

“Naw. You sound all right. I mean, you’re talkin’ a little odd, but not like you’re out of your head.”

“Drunk?”

“Nope. Just like you had a bad dream and want to tell someone.”

“That’s closer,” she said. “That ain’t it, but that’s much closer than any needle or whiskey or wine.”

Alma May’s place is on the outskirts of town. It’s the one thing she got out of life that ain’t bad. It’s not a mansion. It’s small, but its tight and bright in the daylight, all painted up a canary yellow color with deep blue trim. It didn’t look bad in the moonlight.

Alma May didn’t work with a pimp. She didn’t need one. She was well-known around town. She had her clientele. They were all safe, she told me once. About a third of them were white folks from on the other side of the tracks, up there in the proper part of Tyler Town. What she had besides them was a dead mother and a runaway father, and a brother, Tootie, who liked to travel around, play blues, and suck that bottle. He was always needing something, and Alma May, in spite of her own demons, had always managed to make sure he got it.

That was another reason me a

nd her had to split the sheets. That brother of hers was a grown-ass man, and he lived with his mother and let her tote his water. When the mama died, he sort of went to pieces. Alma May took the mama’s part over, keeping Tootie in whiskey and biscuits, even bought him a guitar. He lived off her whoring money, and it didn’t bother him none. I didn’t like him. But I will say this. That boy could play the blues.

When we were inside her house, she unpinned her hat from her hair and sailed it across the room and into a chair.

She said, “You want a drink?”

“I ain’t gonna say no, long as it ain’t too weak, and be sure to put it in a dirty glass.”

She smiled. I watched from the living room doorway as she went and got a bottle out from under the kitchen sink, showing me how tight that dress fit across her bottom when she bent over. She pulled some glasses off a shelf, poured and brought me a stiff one. We drank a little of it, still standing, leaning against the door frame between living room and kitchen. We finally sat on the couch. She sat on the far end, just to make sure I remembered why we were there. She said, “It’s Tootie.”

I swigged down the drink real quick, said, “I’m gone.”

As I went by the couch, she grabbed my hand. “Don’t be that way, baby.”

“Now I’m baby,” I said.

“Hear me out, honey. Please. You don’t owe me, but can you pretend you do?”

“Hell,” I said, and went and sat down on the couch.

She moved, said, “I want you to listen.”

“All right,” I said.

“First off, I can’t pay you. Except maybe in trade.”