CHAPTER 1
The wealthy made and lost all their money on Main Street.
I always watched them from the gutter. Men had sideburns with bald heads or baby faces and slicked back hair, black and greasy like pitch. Women had candy hair and tight butts and wore tight dresses and fur collars.
The wealthy came down from the Hills to escape their picket-fence-lives. They frequented casinos and blew their winnings on one of the hundred fancy restaurants and a few more escorts. I saw one come out of a casino one time, drunk out of his skull—his entourage cheering his big win—and march up to Avaris Airstrip. He came back, chest stuck out past his flopping belly, waving a fistful of paper and a few keys; the bastard had bought a jet in cash.
You’d think all that money would make me crave wealth. But I’d seen what money does to men. It turns them bad so they’re not men anymore. They become devils. Laughing devils won craps and bought jets and carried escorts on their arms like accessories. Angry, dead-eyed devils lost their fortune at roulette. They lost their cars and throttled their friends in alleyways, stripped the valuables and left the bodies naked in the sleet.
In the jungle of casinos and fancy hotels and plump-bowtie wearing devils, there’s no room for people like me—no room for starved, smelly twelve year old brats.
I’d seen how Wealthy Devils dealt with beggar kids. For starts, we were called Cochon. If a Cochon crossed the street, chances were, a car would speed up and mow it down. If a Cochon was spotted on a sidewalk, it’d be beaten for fun by wealthy men, and even the escorts jabbed the heels of their stilettos into eye or ear to see which bled better.
My earliest memory is learning to avoid the wealthy. Some years back I ran into a Wealthy Devil after stealing takeout. The guy who caught me sent his buddy to get some pliers. I don’t like to think about it, so I’ll say this: thank God baby teeth are supposed to go.
Don’t think Wealthy Devils are above torturing little girls either. Last week they bludgeoned one for walking on the sidewalk. No matter how often I see that type of sick shit, my stomach turns.
“Got it started!” a Wealthy Devil cried, smacking the brat’s knees with a cane until she fell, sobbing.
“Me next!” a man grabbed the kid by the neck and bashed her head against a wall.
“Here!” shrieked a harpy escort, and rammed a heel the kid’s eye. Squelch.
Whoever evoked the most screams and blood from the kid won ‘the game’ and they all went on drinking and walked over the body and joined their friends for good times at a Big Win Casino.
A car crunched around the corner. I blinked. My feet were numb; I’d been daydreaming again.
I shivered and swept my tangled hair out of my eyes. My curses frosted in the air. Cars continued to crunch by and, occasionally, a pair of well booted feet and stilettos clapped past on the frozen asphalt.
Main Street was a perpetual ice storm. It was hard for a pile of bones in a wife beater and shredded boots to maintain its heat. But I steeled myself. My belly was empty. It was time to eat.
Just above the gutter, on the sidewalk, there were hoots of delight.
“What do we have here, eh?”
“Cochon, seems like. A Cochon, mucking the sidewalk.”
“Let’s kill it!”
“It’d get our blood pumping in this cold.”
“Yes… would do just that. But Julia’s waiting for me back at La Rouge… I’m her carnal fascination.”
There was a murmur of praise and scattered sniggering.
Now. It was now or not at all for the rest of that day. I gritted my teeth and gripped the already-loose grate. The freezing iron caught me through the threadbare mitts. I bit my lip and pushed. The grate clanged onto the street. I kicked off, out of the waste deep gutter water, tumbled onto the street, and hopped back on the sidewalk, barely dodging unforgiving black wheels.
Even in the day, Main Street was a hub. Across the street Big Win Casino loomed like a gold monolith, and cars lined up out front, waiting for the valet to scramble to their aid. Flyers depicting a shadowy woman plastered the gutter grates and filled waste bins and were stuck up on restaurant windows. JULIA’S SWORD. 11 FRIDAY ONE NIGHT ONLY.
Next door was a sprawling hotel with a sign studded in flashing lights: La Rouge. There was the same amount of congestion and people guffawing and wolf whistling and dashing into the warm, lavish interior for a long awaited mug of coffee or glass of pinot from the wine fountain. Next to La Rouge was another hotel, Le Vert, with more people, and next to Le Vert, a packed steakhouse and another casino and, further up the road, Avaris Airstrip. Nearly every establishment played “Luck be a Lady”.
“Hey! What’s he doing there?
I spun round to see a red-faced man wearing red-tint shades in a tux accompanied by a burly fellow with splotchy skin and three slim women in violent-red dresses and long hoop earrings, pointing a gloved finger at me. Beneath the man’s boot was a kid who looked my age. He had a black eye and a busted lip. Snot and blood congealed and froze down his nose. His eyes were brown and frozen like his tangled blonde roots. He didn’t look up.
In an instant the devil crew lusted for me—another body, ripe for ravaging.
“Two in one day!” screeched one woman.
“Oh… this is too good.” Sighed the pointing man. “Julia will have to wait!”
The burly man cupped his hands and shouted down the street to another group that was approaching the scene.
“Cochon! Hurry u—!”
I backed up, rounded the corner and pelted down the street, trying to ignore the crowing and heavy footfalls as the group tailed me.
I squinted through falling snow, and after few minutes of slide-running, found my hideout, a space beneath a short flight of wood stairs, and my food source—a packed steakhouse to which the stairs led. The sign out front read Bones.
I ducked behind a waste bin near the side of a hotel and waited for the flow of stuffed rich people to ebb before crawling in the thick snow, and, when all was clear and the street was void of cars and the sidewalk of people, dove under the staircase.
The door banged open at that instant and warmth and the smell of steak and the sound of a murmuring violin and chatter wafted out.
“Come again!”
“We sure will!” came a cartoonish voice. I couldn’t tell if the voice belonged to a man or a woman but it tickled my ears in an annoying way.
The patio creaked, then the stairs. I peered through the space between the stairs. A man. And he wasn’t alone. Only…on each arm, instead of women in lurid dresses, he held giggling men with hoop earrings and black suits and black shoes.
“—Cranston’s mistress, they say.”
“I’d swallow a sword for a piece of that chiseled beauty.”
I blinked, shook my head and scanned their hands; no bags. A car pulled up to the curb. Doors shut and the men were gone.
The next party to descend the stairs was rowdier—if less colorful—than the last, though all they had to offer were a few dirty toothpicks, which they dropped through the space between the stairs.
My stomach grumbled and I shivered violently and wrapped my arms around my prominent rib cage. I never got used to the cold—not even after freezing for as long as I can remember. The gutter was freezing and you got wet but at least the wind couldn’t rattle your bones and blow away dreams of warmer days.
I brushed ice crystals from my lashes and looked up at the sound of the door moaning wide. Chatter. V
iolins. “Take care now! Come again!”
Someone creaked out onto the patio. A pair of feet and a dull clunk; a man, alone. A man with a cane, alone. And better still, the silver bottom of a paper bag glinted as he made his steady way down the stairs.
I tensed, ready to spring out but froze at the crunch of road-ice. I squinted through the stairs. A small limousine had pulled up alongside the curb. The driver’s door opened and a tall man with a buzz cut and a black suit and a solid black tie and sunglasses stepped out.
Now or not at all. I popped out around the staircase. Hesitated. The man before me was not elderly—somewhere in his late thirties maybe. He had broad shoulders, good color in his lips and his blonde hair had a healthy sheen and hung unruly over his eyes. His eyes were blue like mine but vibrant—electric even. They were shocked at the sight of me. When he saw me, the man’s mouth neither wrinkled in disgust nor smiled with intent of sadism. Instead he frowned, and a curious look flashed across his face and his eyes blaze with recognition.
I gaped, rooted to the spot. There was something about him. I’d seen him before, somewhere, many times before, but I couldn’t place his face.
The man scratched his stubble-dotted jaw. “Say…” he began.
“Hey! Cochon!”
I whirled around to see the driver charging across the street. I swallowed and blinked rapid fire and turned back to the man. I reached out, tore the bag from his loose grip and dashed back up toward Main Street.
My breath was ragged and spit flew from my mouth. I glanced back, sure I would find the driver on my heel. Down the street, the man with the cane was waving at the driver, calling him off.
My heart steadied for a moment but kicked back up instantly when I saw that the same group from before—the one whose leader was in a relationship with someone called Julia—was standing on the sidewalk near my gutter. What was more, they were accompanied another other group—two men and a young, richly dressed woman.