Free The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror by Paula Guran Page B

some eats and make some coffee in the morning. She deserved something good. Should have found and married a man with a steady job that could have done all right by her.
    But that hadn’t happened. Me and her had a bit of something once, and it wasn’t just business, money changing hands after she got me feeling good. No, it was more than that, but we couldn’t work it out. She was in the life and didn’t know how to get out. And as for deserving something better, that wasn’t me. What I had were a couple of nice suits, some two-tone shoes, a hat, and a gun—.45-caliber automatic, like they’d used in the war a few years back.
    Alma May got a little on the dope, too, and though she shook it, it had dropped her down deep. Way I figured, she wasn’t never climbing out of that hole, and it didn’t have nothing to do with dope now. What it had to do with was time. You get a window open now and again, and if you don’t crawl through it, it closes. I know. My window had closed some time back. It made me mad all the time.
    We were in my Chevy, a six-year-old car, a forty-eight model. I’d had it reworked a bit at a time: new tires, fresh windshield, nice seat covers and so on. It was shiny and special.
    We were driving along, making good time on the highway, the lights racing over the cement, making the recent rain in the ruts shine like the knees of old dress pants.
    “What you need me for?” I asked.
    “It’s a little complicated,” she said.
    “Why me?”
    “I don’t know . . . You’ve always been good to me, and once we had a thing goin’.”
    “We did,” I said.
    “What happened to it?”
    I shrugged. “It quit goin’.”
    “It did, didn’t it? Sometimes I wish it hadn’t.”
    “Sometimes I wish a lot of things,” I said.
    She leaned back in the seat and opened her purse and got out a cigarette and lit it, then rolled down the window. She remembered I didn’t like cigarette smoke. I never had got on the tobacco. It took your wind and it stunk and it made your breath bad too. I hated when it got in my clothes.
    “You’re the only one I could tell this to,” she said. “The only one that would listen to me and not think I been with the needle in my arm. You know what I’m sayin’?”
    “Sure, baby, I know.”
    “I sound to you like I been bad?”
    “Naw. You sound all right. I mean, you’re talkin’ a little odd, but not like you’re out of your head.”
    “Drunk?”
    “Nope. Just like you had a bad dream and want to tell someone.”
    “That’s closer,” she said. “That ain’t it, but that’s much closer than any needle or whisky or wine.”
    Alma May’s place is on the outskirts of town. It’s the one thing she got out of life that ain’t bad. It’s not a mansion. It’s small, but it’s tight and bright in the daylight, all painted up canary yellow color with deep blue trim. It didn’t look bad in the moonlight.
    Alma May didn’t work with a pimp. She didn’t need one. She was well known around town. She had her clientele. They were all safe, she told me once. About a third of them were white folks from on the other side of the tracks, up there in the proper part of Tyler Town. What she had besides them was a dead mother and a runaway father, and a brother, Tootie, who liked to travel around, play blues, and suck that bottle. He was always needing something, and Alma May, in spite of her own demons, had always managed to make sure he got it.
    That was another reason me and her had to split the sheets. That brother of hers was a grown-ass man, and he lived with his mother and let her tote his water. When the mama died, he sort of went to pieces. Alma May took mama’s part over, keeping Tootie in whisky and biscuits, even bought him a guitar. He lived off her whoring money, and it didn’t bother him none. I didn’t like him. But I will say this. That boy could play the blues.
    When we were inside her house, she unpinned her hat from her hair and sailed it across