Tango Key Read Online Free PDF Page B

now the hanky crosses the bridge of her nose and she can see. See.
    Tears gather in the corners of her eyes; she blinks them back. For several long moments, she simply absorbs: the peeling baseboard, the way the motes of dust lift like tiny balloons when she exhales, the edge of the platform on which the mattress rests, a fat roach skirting past her fret.
    She tilts her head back as far as she can and sees the window, the filthy slats of the cheap venetian blinds, and the light, oh Christ, the light is beautiful. If she gazes into it long enough, it will take her into itself. She and the light will make love.
    Push toward me, whispers the light.
    So she does, painfully, slowly, pressing her bare toes against the floor until the light is a hot strap across her forehead. Her right arm is now dead to her. Her right thigh tingles from loss of circulation. Her bladder aches with fullness.
    Press your feet against the edge of the platform, instructs the light.
    She does.
    Roll onto your back and try to hook your toes under the platform. You can do it.
    Now the light's voice is the voice of her old man. You can do it do it do it.
    She pushes with her right foot, twists, starts to flip onto her back and knows she will crush her hands if she does. She works her wrists for a while. Doug used to kiss the insides of her wrists. If it was her left wrist, it meant he was appreciating her or thanking her for something. If it was her right wrist, it meant he wanted her, and if he'd been drinking it meant it didn't matter to him where they did it: the bathroom
floor at someone else's house, on the deck of the sloop at high noon at the marina. But that was only in the beginning when he was courting her, when he was trying to snare her like one of those animals he'd hunted on his African safaris. She was his greatest trophy, he used to tell her. What he never realized, not until later, was that she had also hunted him.
    The ropes around her wrists are so tight, they've burned the skin raw. She is too weak from hunger, thirst, from her earlier exertion, to loosen them. She screams in frustration, the gag muffling the sound and slicing painfully into the corners of her mouth.
    And then she hears it.
    A car.
    His car.
    She hears the familiar chug of his engine, the shriek of his brakes, the car door slamming. She squeezes her eyes shut, tries not to cry. She tries not to think about what he will do to her when he finds her like this on the floor, her eyes free.

Chapter 3

    T he night, Aline thought, was conspiring to keep her awake. The heat, the resolute cry of the crickets, the slow, monotonous turning of the ceiling fan in her loft, the distant pound of the surf: the treachery of an insomniac's world.
    Then, of course, when she closed her eyes, she would see Doug Cooper's decapitated body or Murphy's face when he had first come into the room and seen Eve. She tried counting backward from a hundred, and found herself wondering why Murphy had never seen Eve around. She finally attributed it to Tango's caste system, subtle but insidious: the folks from the cove—and everyone else.
    She took a hot bath and even put a couple of clear crystals into the water to clear her head. She'd gotten that idea from one of the New Age books Whitman's stocked, but it hadn't worked, and now she wondered if maybe the crystals should've been larger or smaller or maybe a different color.
    She shifted positions in the hammock; it swung a little. Moonlight struck her face. She finally sat up, and Wolfe, who'd been curled in the windowsill, lifted his head, sniffed, and leaped out the window onto the porch, pursuing some vagrant scent.
    Tea. She needed a cup of hot tea. What would work fastest for insomnia? Was it lobelia? Chamomile? Comfrey? Angelica? —Or maybe her chamomile and honey with a touch of mint and eucalyptus.
    She threw off the sheet, turned on the lamp, pulled a T-shirt over her head. It was one of Murphy's T-shirts and reached almost to her