Free Suitcase City by Sterling Watson Page A

butts, fast-food wrappers, and crack vials until somebody came along and they started hollering, “Booty for sale! I got the softest mouth in Tampa.” Shit like that. They were crack-addicted whores. The walking dead. Blood Naylor had invented a word for them: zombitches .
    Blood ran whores, but he did it the smart way. His scam was neat, efficient, and safe. He ran the rent-to-own as a legitimate business, and it did all right, nothing spectacular. But the bulk of his income came from the whores whose apartments he furnished. He shipped cheap furniture out to them, kept them on the books as rent-to-own clients, and recorded his share of their take as monthly payments on the furniture. The cocaine business provided a small part of his revenue. He only dealt with upscale clients: connections in the universities and some people in the medical and legal communities who liked their recreational drugs to come from a discreet and reliable source. It never hurt to have friends in Armani suits.
    The sun had gone down over the jacaranda tree, and the two whores were doing business. A white man in a van had pulled up next to them and was negotiating. The two girls strutting their pathetic, skinny butts and talking that whore trash to a redneck from across the bay in Kenneth City. Blood heard Tyrone muttering to himself inside on the Barcalounger. That Special Reserve gave a man power dreams. Blood figured he’d better get back inside before the boy wandered off to stick up a convenience store with his dick. He’d give the boy some cocaine to take with him, put the photos of the boy’s face in an envelope, and stick them in his pocket, maybe tuck a couple of hundred-dollar bills into the boy’s wallet for good measure. Customer relations.
    Bloodworth Naylor dreamt his power dream at night, and it was always the same story, and James Teach was always in the starring role. And James Teach was always surprised, beautifully surprised, when his sweet white world turned to blood and shit all around him, and in the dream Bloodworth Naylor was always laughing. And there was someone else in the dream. She was the reason for all of this. A beautiful woman. And, oh yes, wasn’t that always the story?

NINE
    Teach awoke to the ache in his elbow. He rolled onto his back, wondering why it hurt. Then it all came back. The bar. The men’s room, that angry ebony face, the shirttail flagging to the side for a second, showing Teach what was almost certainly the handle of a razor.
    He lay staring at the ceiling, feeling the sweat of fear break on his face. How had he gotten himself into this mess? Why hadn’t he waited a moment to see what the boy would do, ask him again what he meant? Then he thought: No, damnit .
    As a kid, Teach had read about the murders of Sharon Tate and her friends in a wealthy house in the Hollywood Hills. How a band of lunatics had just walked in smiling and laughing and killed everybody. No one had sounded an alarm; no one had resisted because everyone had assumed the freaks had come for the party. The story had changed Teach. Taught him that it would always be better to trust instinct and strike when the alarms went off in your head than to wait the extra second to be sure. You could die in that second. Abigail Folger had waited. Wojciech Frykowski had waited, smiling, asking if he could help Tex Watson, who drew a pistol and shot him, then jumped on his back, stabbing him as Frykowski staggered across the lawn. Teach wasn’t sure he’d done the right thing in Malone’s Bar, but he was sure he’d do the same thing again.
    He worked the elbow that ached because it had split a boy’s cheek and wondered if Dean was awake.
    She had come out to the auditorium dressed in jeans and a thigh-length T-shirt, still glowing with stage makeup and the excitement of her triumph. She’d brought two friends with her—Missy Pace, a cheerleader, and the black girl, new to ballet. Teach had nodded and smiled at the two girls and