House of the Rising Sun Read Online Free PDF Page A

drove a dagger into my heart?
Well, fuck her, fuck everybody. He didn’t need her sympathy. He didn’t need her at all. He didn’t need anybody.
    Ray took a deep drag on his cigarette as he looked down at the two winos sleeping on their cardboard beds. He flicked his butt over the edge of the roof at them, watching it spin in a lazy arc toward the alley, trailing hot ashes in the air.
    He missed, but not by much. The cigarette hit the side of the Dumpster, glanced off, and settled on the ground about four feet from one of the sleeping bums. Looking up at the sky, at the clouds that were forming, Ray thought about the soaking the two derelicts would get when the rain came.

C HAPTER T HREE
    Jenny dragged into her apartment and closed the door. The clock on the stove read 7:25 AM . Stripping off her waitress uniform, looking at it, thinking of it again, like she did every day, as her slut suit, Jenny left a trail of clothes from the door to the bathroom. She wondered if Ray was angry because she was still in the apartment,
his apartment
, the one they had lived in together.
    It had been his place first, before she moved in with him. Then after he went to prison, she had thought about giving it up but decided to keep it. Why not? French Quarter apartments weren’t easy to find, and it was within walking distance of the bar where she had worked at the time. It was even closer to the Rising Sun, so when she had gone to work at the House it made even more sense to keep the apartment.
    She spun the taps on in the tub, making the water as hot as she could stand it before flipping the lever that turned on the showerhead. She eased one foot at a time over the side of the tub and slipped under the blast of water, pulling the shower curtain closed behind her. Inside it was safe and warm, and she felt like she was shutting out the whole damn world.
    Every morning after she left the House, the first thing Jenny did when she got home was take a shower, always staying under the hot water for as long as it lasted.
    For a full ten minutes Jenny leaned forward, palms pressed against the wall below the showerhead, her head hanging under the water as it cascaded through her hair, leaving it draped in thick strands along both sides of her face. Then she tiltedforward a bit more and let the stream blast the back of her neck, rolling it first in large clockwise circles, then circling it to the left as she tried to work out the knots.
    Only after the water had washed away some of the tension did Jenny start scrubbing. Using a long-handled wooden brush with stiff bristles, she raked her back, her shoulders, and her arms. Then she sat down under the steady stream and did the same with her legs and feet. She scrubbed until her skin felt raw, but even then she still didn’t feel clean. As Jenny stood up, she let the last of the warm liquid wash over her like rain and imagined it rinsing away all the filth.
    When the water turned cool, she shut it off. Sliding the shower curtain aside, she stepped out of the tub and pulled a thick towel down from a wide shelf. As she dried herself, she thought about Ray.
    After their encounter this morning, she had seen him again, just past six o’clock, right after the cops finally cleared out. She had been up on the second floor, trying to get away from everyone downstairs, when she saw Ray slipping out the emergency exit. She had seen him leaving through that door before and knew he was going to climb the outside fire escape to the roof. This time she thought about going after him, about trying to talk to him again, but she didn’t. There was no use in it. Too much had passed between them to ever go back to the way it was.
    A few minutes after Jenny spotted Ray climbing to the roof, on his way to do whatever the hell he did up there every morning, she saw Tony Zello practically skipping down the stairwell. She figured he was coming from Vinnie Messina’s apartment on the fourth floor.