No Time to Die Read Free

I’m sorry.”
    “No!” I backed away. “No cab! No nothing!” I screamed, watching the surprise and confusion as Elizabeth moved toward me. “No!”
    I turned and ran toward the building, tearing through the crowd and muscling my way around the patrolman near the stairs. I heard a voice, Tad saying, “Let her go! She can see it.”
    I ran up four flights, with my hand against my mouth, which did not help at all. The odor was at once powerful, numbing. If it was Claudine, I wanted to see her, connect her to it; otherwise I’d wonder the rest of my life how it happened. As I’d been left to wonder about Benin. Tad was behind me but did not try to restrain me.
    I made my way to the kitchen, almost dizzy from lack of air, then leaned against the table and stared. A chair had been overturned, the canisters on the counter near the fridge were covered with dried black stains. The body on the floor was Claudine but I only recognized the bathrobe I had given her as a birthday present last year, pale pink silk with a corded belt with tassles on the end.
    The robe had been spread open, her stomach amountain of gas, and her face flattened as if a steamroller had gone over it. Her features had disintegrated in the humidity. On her face where her mouth once was were flakes of some kind. Cereal. It had been scattered in her eyes, ears, nose, and mouth. It was on her chest and between her sprawled legs.
    I fell back against Tad and a minute later found myself back out in the street, sitting on the curb, staring, Elizabeth shouting, and Tad pressing a handkerchief against my mouth as I retched until my stomach was on fire.

“Turn that fuckin’ radio off! How long we got to listen to the news? You hoppin’ and jumpin’ from ’INS to CBS every time they mention that girl gettin’ strangled. Got it blastin’ so loud, who the hell was she, anyway? Your dumb-ass girlfriend?”
    Hazel’s laughter stopped long enough for her to raise the forty-ounce bottle of Colt 45 to her swollen face. She stood in the doorway of her son’s room and he could hear the loud swallowing from where he lay on his bed, hoping, praying, that maybe this time she’d misswallow and the liquid would rush down the wrong pipe. He glared at her upturned arm, and in the dim light, imagined a ham with the fat clinging to it, sliding along the meat rack at a slaughterhouse.
    “And another thing, when you gonna git to this room? Smell like a shithouse in here. Now you got you a little jay-oh-bee again, it done gone to your head and you takin’ showers two times a day, but don’t tell me you can’t smell this dirt.”
    He sat up on the edge of his bed, stiff as a soldier at reveille, still gazing at his mother. Her 350-pound bulkcrowded the door, blocking out what light there was. And he could feel rage and terror competing for space within him.
    Shithouse. Like she one to talk. I know she here before I even put my key in the door. When the fuck was the last time she seen water? Maybe two, no, three months ago? And that punk-ass boyfriend had to call the fire department to jack her out the tub. From then on, it was “bird baths” as she like to call it
.
    He wanted to squeal with laughter, but fright held the sound to the back of his throat. Bird baths. There was no bird on earth, in fact or fiction, that resembled this woman. Except maybe something roaming Jurassic Park. And then you’d need a double-size wraparound drive-in movie screen to get the full picture. No wonder the fuckin’ dumb boyfriend split. Probably figured what little he was snatchin’ from her check wasn’t worth it.
    He bit his tongue and kept his shaking hands balled at his sides as he watched her drain the bottle and luxuriate in a long-drawn-out belch. Her stubby fingers pushed the Dutch-bob wig from her sweating face and then jabbed at him.
    “Now, you throw your ass down from your shoulder and git this room in some kinda shape. ’Cause you got a piece a job again don’t cut no