All she needed was to place the call to Holger. Get her to show up with some cops and shut this place down. And lock up all the monsters big and small.
Now? That won’t happen. Can’t happen.
Worst of all, these people are going to hurt her.
She has to get away. The only weapon she has is the baton. Waiting in her baggy pocket. If Skank looks away…
“You and me, we’re not so different,” Skank says. Burning stare. Faint smile.
“If you say so,” Atlanta says.
“You really did it, huh.” A statement, not a question. “Blew your step-daddy’s yam-bag off, huh?”
A weak nod. Atlanta clarifies in a throaty mumble: “Wasn’t my step-daddy, though. Everybody thinks that, but he wasn’t.”
“Just a boyfriend, then. Whatever. Bet he got to you a bunch of times before it pushed you that far, huh? Yeah. Me too. I had an uncle. Married in, not blood. Lincoln was his name.” She laughs and snarls at the same time. “Lincoln, Lincoln, I-been-thinkin’, what the hell have you been drinking? Whiskey, that’s what. Cheap-ass hot-piss whiskey. He raped me three times and like they say, three times is the charm because the next time he came at me I stabbed him in the thigh—three times, actually, go fuckin’ figure—with a steak knife. Hit an artery. He bled out, almost died. The stains never really washed off the porch—that’s where he liked to do it, outside on the porch before my parents got home from work.” She shrugs. “I should’ve taken a lesson from you and cut his nuts. Like an apple from a tree. Monkey steals the plums.”
“Sorry to hear all that.”
“No, you’re not. You’re thinking just what everybody else does—this crazy bitch probably deserved it. I didn’t, but whatever. I don’t blame you for hating me. You should hate me. I hate you. I got enough hate to go around. And see, that’s where our paths go two different ways. I see you making friends with the faggots and the wetbacks and picking up every other downtrodden piece of garbage that goes floating by, cradling it to your breast like a teddy bear. You still feel like bad about what happened to you—you see yourself as a loser and so you hang out with losers. Bunch of turds bobbing in the same toilet bowl.” But here Skank stops. Eyes shimmering. She gestures with the gun, punctuating each word with a thrust of the barrel. “But I found power in what happened to me. Found out that I was strong and I don’t have to swim with garbage. I see trash I call it what it is and then I throw it away. Homos and niggers and spics.”
Atlanta narrows her eyes. “Let me guess. Your not-blood uncle wasn’t white.”
Skank clucks her tongue. “Cute. Fine. Yeah. He was a fuckin’ Jew. Rich-ass, big-nosed kike. Just like all of them.”
“Man who touched me was white. That mean all white people are that way?”
Skank’s jaw drops. “Whoa. Wait. You know, I… damn, I didn’t even think about that. I didn’t even imagine that white people could do bad things and that maybe I’ve been prejudging people based on…” But she can’t contain it anymore and she starts cracking up. “Whatever, like I’ve never heard that one before. White people can be shit, too. But they learned how to be an animal from the animals, you dummy.”
She looks away for a half-second, shaking her head and laughing.
That’s when Atlanta moves.
Baton out with a button press—snick. She leaps up, baton raised.
Skank’s elbow catches her across the bridge of her nose. Everything is white flashes and dark shadows swirling together, an orgy of ghosts haunting her vision. Skank grabs the baton, cracks it hard against the Morton building wall, breaking it into three pieces. Atlanta tries to run but her eyes are watering and her vision is smeared and by the time she starts to move, Skank’s got her by the hair again.
Wham. Back against the wall. Atlanta crumbles. Wipes her eyes and holds her nose—her palms come away red.
“You won’t surprise me,” Skank hisses. “I own you.”
“Girls,” comes an admonishing voice. Atlanta looks—even through her bleary smeary vision she knows who it is.
The Devil has arrived. The cop. The dark little man with the furrowed black brow. Again in his civvies: red polo, jeans. She doesn’t see a gun but she figures he has one on him somewhere. Ankle, maybe.
“Petry,” Skank says with some deference, then steps back.
Petry. That’s his name. Officer Petry.
He sniffs. Looks