Needles & Sins Read Online Free PDF Page B

meanness. As she pulled away, in a high, breathy voice she gasped three words. Maybe they were just nonsense. Syllables of the damned. I don’t know. But I could have swore she said, “Free, at last.”
    Then she stepped back and walked, nakedly— and almost human— to the broken window out in the hallway that I had entered with Janis less than an hour before. With a single, strangely liquid wave, she slipped over the sill and into the alley to disappear into the night.
    “What did I do?” I whispered, as I looked back at the mutilated body of Janis Phoenix. “What DO I do now?”
    The room was filled with the shifting light of red and blue as the sirens I’d been hearing grew closer. You can’t strap down and flay a woman alive and not expect someone to hear the screams if you lived within 50 miles of… anything . And this was the city. A backwater slum, but still the city.
    The wrecked, split face of Janis looked back at me and smiled. Smiled in the wrong direction. A vertical smile of murder.
    I was fucked, whether she had left hundreds or thousands of dollars in my pocket. Whether they found my fingerprints or my rubber gloves. I knelt to pick up her pants and her shirt, running my hands through the pockets to look for whatever money might be hidden there. Maybe I could still follow the strange creature who had slipped free of Janis like a wraith. Like a prisoner set free from a lifetime in a cage. I found a pocketful of green, but the spotlights already splitting the black shadows of the ceiling said they wouldn’t help.
    “I did what you wanted and set you free,” I whispered to the dead remains of a not-so-crazy woman in what had formerly been my operating suite. “I let something inside of you out.”
    From the hallway of my office, a smash, and then a voice.
    “Put your hands in the air.”
    Somehow I knew that it wasn’t in the cards for me to have the same kind of transcendent, phoenix-like rebirth as the corpse on my table.
    Bills fell from my hands like confetti, and I stood to meet the start of my own new life. I suspected that it would be far more confining.
     
    — | — | —
 

The Strong Will Survive
     
    The petals slip lazily down like bloody autumn leaves, spattering the glass above his face. I put the unbreakable window there to protect him. Not from decay, he’d done that already himself, but from the children, the pilgrims. They come from near and far. Hundreds of them. Thousands. They continue to pass through this corridor and still, they do not cease to come.
    They do not bring friends. Certainly not lovers. Their pilgrimage here stems from the hidden depths of love.
    And hate.
    Some wait in salvaged pews that I dragged here weeks ago from an abandoned church on 11th Street. Often the pilgrims wait in this damp, concrete warren for hours or days before leaving. Some arrive wearing three-piece blue pinstripe suits, and some appear in sweat pants and Reeboks. Still others are dressed for the season, in layers—flannel draped over cotton shirts and T-shirts and Marine-green Eskimo coats on top of it all. I thought they should have some place to sit and sleep besides the blackened floor.
    Time seems to stand still here, deep below the steady pound of the city. Trains are the only clock, breaking the chill silence periodically with their rhythmic clicking and clacking and braking screeches. The room rumbles and shakes with their passage, but leaves us otherwise unchanged. Untouched. Our attention rarely strays from the dead man beneath the glass. He also, untouched. And we…untouchable.
    A middle-aged man kneels before him now, the gift of crimson roses shivering slightly between his clenched fingers. His almond hair is already silvering, his wide, faintly Irish face furrowed with the early cat scratches of time and heartache and worry. His ears look chafed and protrude somewhat from the cut of his close-cropped hair. A dark mole guards the entrance to his right ear, the one facing