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.And now she’s vanished.Is there anything you can think of that might help explain her disappearing?”“Disappearing from where?” Dice asked, skeptical again.“No one gave a shit about her to begin with.Same as me, same as you without that uniform.How does someone who’s already invisible vanish?”“My heart bleeds for you and yours, it does,” Maureen said.“You’re getting defensive.You’re hiding something.What are you not telling me?” She waited.“I’m looking for her now.She matters to me.Now.I can help her.Tell me about her.”“She had these orange medicine bottles,” Dice said, “a bunch of them, a pill stash.” She corrected herself, “No, it was not a stash.What I carried was a stash.She was on medication.I went through them when she wasn’t around.” Dice, for a fleeting instant, was embarrassed at her behavior.“Like I said, I was getting back into the shit around that time.”“What were the pills?”“Not what I’d hoped for,” Dice said.“That was for fucking sure.Clozaril was one.There were a couple of other kinds.I forget the other names.I asked around.Turns out it was scary shit.Antipsychotics.No use to a junkie.Not to take, not to sell.I left it alone.I wasn’t that cruel or desperate.Not yet.She was rationing, anyway, by the time we moved into the Bend in the River.She was cutting the pills in half.I don’t know if she ever tried for a new ’scrip.” Dice shrugged.“Like there’s anywhere for someone like us to go for that shit.”“And how did you feel about that?” Maureen asked.“When you learned your new friend from LaPlace with the pretty voice had a mysterious wad of cash and a collection of antipsychotics under the bed?”“It’s a strange world we live in.” Dice rolled her shoulders, dismissive.“I mean, she stole the money, that was obvious, right? Drug money, probably.Nobody panhandles their way into a shoe box of cash money like that.Cash is like water through your fingers out here.We’re not savers.I know plenty of people who’ve been on and off meds.And I know plenty more who should be on them.It ain’t no thang.The money made me more nervous than the pills.Nobody chases after a few lost bottles of pills; they go out and get more.I never counted it, but I saw stacks of cash.Enough for whoever she took it from to come hunting for her.When I saw the money, it made more sense to me why she wanted to be off the streets and living indoors.”“Clozaril’s no joke,” Maureen said.“It’s for severe cases of paranoid schizophrenia.Severe cases.Violent cases.”“Well, had I known that,” Dice said, playing it casual while Maureen watched the fear in her rippling below the surface, “the fact that she slept with a straight razor under her pillow would’ve bothered me a whole lot more.”Maureen felt her stomach drop, as if she’d been standing atop a trapdoor.The LaPlace connection and now this.Add in the brown hair and strange old outcast Madison Leary became a murder suspect.At least she was to Maureen, the only one who knew enough of the details to assemble the theory.A razor would match the murder weapon at the Magnolia Street killing, too.“A straight razor.Under her pillow.While rationing her crazy pills.That didn’t frighten you?”“You’re funny,” Dice said.“You talk like Madison’s so different from everyone else I live with.Like she’s a, whadda you call it, an anomaly.Everybody I know, the women especially, carries something as a weapon.Who else is gonna protect us? Y’all?”Maureen nodded.Women didn’t accessorize their egos with weapons like men did.They carried them for practical purposes, for use.She felt her gun pressing against her tailbone.Before she’d become a cop, since she was a teenager, she’d carried a switchblade.She had used it for more than ornamentation, as a girl and as a woman.It had saved her life.She had killed a man with it.And until she had become one, she had never counted on the cops, either.“The under-the-pillow thing was slightly weird,” Dice continued.“I’ll give you that, but it’s not like she sat up nights sharpening and admiring it in the moonlight, doing tricks with it, or talking to it.She wasn’t Gollum.She cut her pills with it.Seemed like a nice razor, too.Shiny blade.Clean.I could see my reflection in it when she showed it to me.She told me the blade was new, but the handle was real old.Said her grandmother gave it to her.That her father had carried it in the First World War.She said the handle was real African ivory.”“You believed her?”“About the handle?”“About any of it.”Dice thought for a moment.“It was important to her.But where it came from, her story changed about that.Same as the stories about where she came from.She told me when we were drunk one night that the razor had belonged to her daddy, and that she’d killed him with it, and took it with her when she ran off.She told me another time she’d killed a bootlegger that had come after her back in the woods, when she was living in a cabin in North Carolina [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]