The Escape Diaries (33 page)

           
I
could see his face, illuminated by the glow of a stop and go light. He was
smiling.

“More or less.”

           
More
or less.
Well, wasn’t he the man of mystery?

Escape tip #28:

Boys will be boys—

except when they’re girls.

           
We
cruised slowly past the Oriental Theater, where patrons were lining up for the
midnight showing of the
Rocky Horror Picture Show.
Almost everyone was
in costume, mostly in Frank-N-Furter getups, with a few Riff Raffs and Little
Nells in the mix. Labeck suddenly cut over to the curb. He stuck his fingers in
his mouth and whistled. A towering figure in the movie line looked over toward
the car. Then the person—male, female?—clopped over on six-inch
platforms.

           
“Boney!”
the creature warbled in a bass voice that at least answered the gender
question. He was wearing a frizzy auburn wig so wide it wouldn’t have fit
through most doorways. Eyeliner had been applied by the quart, lipstick
scrolled on far beyond lines where lips ever existed. In heels and wig, he was
in LeBron James territory.

           
“Looking
sharp tonight,” Labeck said.

           
“I
try.” He batted his long fake lashes. Stooping, he peered in through the broken
passenger window, eyeing me curiously.

           
“Doing
‘The Time Warp’
tonight?” Labeck inquired.

           
Coquettishly,
the guy fluffed out his French maid’s skirt. It was black satin over a net
crinoline that stuck out at right angles and barely covered his crotch. Frilly
garter belts held up fishnet stockings. His torso was crammed into a low-cut
maid’s uniform top that exposed a werewolflike mat of chest hair. He did a
curbside bump and grind and sang in a robust falsetto.

           
“With
a bit of a mind flip, you’re into a time slip . . .”

           
Labeck
clapped.

           
The
guy curtsied. “You ought to come down and catch the show tonight, Boney—you
and cutie pie here.” He stuck a large hand clad in a lacework glove through the
window. We shook, his grip surprisingly gentle. “I’m Magenta.”

“Oh, right. The
Patty Quinn character. From
Rocky Horror
.”

The
mascara-studded eyes widened. “You know
Rocky
?”

I nodded. During
our single-girl days, Gloria and I had spent a lot of Friday midnights at the
Oriental, singing along to “Sweet Transvestite” and “Eddie’s Teddy.”
Wa-a-y
before the
Glee
Johnny-come-latelies had co-opted
Rocky.

“What happened to
your hair, sweetie?” Magenta asked. “It looks like someone styled it with a
blowtorch.”

Close.

“Anything weird
going on in the ’hood?” Labeck asked.

“Narcs, thugs,
suburbanites? No, baby, everything’s cool.” Magenta’s eyes cut to me again, and
I had a sinking feeling that lights were going on behind the inch-long feathery
fringes. “I got your back, Boney babes.”

“Come up after
the show, okay?”

Magenta pursed
his lips and blew a kiss. “Love to, darling.”

“I think he
recognized me,” I said when we’d pulled away.

“He won’t tell.”
Labeck turned into the narrow alleyway behind his building, which was built up
against the Oriental’s back wall. “I keep his secrets, he keeps mine.”

           
Boney
babes
?
 

           
Labeck
parked the Volks between two dumpsters. Unless you were looking very hard,
you’d never see it there. Expecting Jong and Custer to burst out with
switchblades and flaming Zippos any second, I grabbed Muffin, dashed from the
car to Labeck’s building, and rocketed up the stairs. Labeck clumped up behind
me, holding the locker loot. He retrieved a key from the top of the doorframe.

           
“Handy
for burglars,” I commented.

           
He
raised an eyebrow, managing to wordlessly convey the fact that he’d trusted me
with his apartment key, a key now in the possession of two very nasty professional
killers or possibly incinerated along with the brewery.

           
I
set Muffin down once we were inside. He’d gotten over his Labeck issues and was
warming up to him. Labeck’s approval rating rose further when he opened his
refrigerator and scrounged Muffin a leftover hamburger patty. I hoped there was
something in there for me, too. The ballpark brat felt like years ago.

           
Labeck
took my arm and dragged me toward his bathroom. “First we play doctor.”

           
I
sat on the toilet while he sat on the bathtub rim. Knee to knee, all cozy-wozy.
I tried to ignore the sexual
frisson
set up by the body contact. Labeck
had large, competent hands and didn’t seem at all bothered by blood. He gently
washed the wound, took a tube of antiseptic salve out of his medicine cabinet,
uncapped it, and looked at me.

“You’re not going
to be a baby about the antiseptic this time, are you?” he asked, a grin lurking
close to the surface. He began spreading the strong-smelling salve gingerly
over my palm. I didn’t want to look at the cut, so I gazed at Labeck instead.
His head was bent, exposing the back of his neck. There was something
endearingly little boy about his nape, with its small stray curls; it made him
seem vulnerable. I could understand the appeal of vampirism. How would it feel
to gently press my lips against his nape, just
there . . .

He looked up at
that moment. Our eyes caught and locked, his holding a question. There was
definitely chemistry here; I could feel our ions bonding.

No!
Nein, non, nyet,
ixnay,
not
bonding!
No hanky-panky!

“This cut is
really deep,” he said, turning his attention back to my hand. “It ought to be
stitched.”

“Forget it.
That’s my Girdle of Venus.”

“I would have put
your Girdle of Venus a bit lower, but then, I didn’t go to med school.”

“I learned the
parts of the hand in a book on palmistry I read when I was a kid. I was planning
to make money telling fortunes.”

“Just a wild
guess, but I’d bet you didn’t make a lot of money.”

“As it so
happens, I was a very good palm reader.” Taking his left hand in mine, I peered
at it. “Hmm.”

“Hmm what?”

“You had
something with mustard for lunch.” I turned his hand over. Wide calloused palm,
long fingers, non-hairy knuckles. No ring. Heart line that swooped upward
toward the Jupiter finger, indicating a passionate nature. Stay the heck away
from
that
one.

“What else?” he
prompted.

“You will live a
long life and have fifteen children.”

“Not what I
wanted to hear. Is there anything in there about who’s going to win the Stanley
Cup this year?”

“Yes, but the
palmist doesn’t work for free.” I shoved his hand back.

He pressed a wad
of gauze over the gash in my palm, then used almost a whole box of Band-Aids to
tape the gauze down. “That’s the best I can do for now,” he said. “Take two
aspirin and stay away from bad guys.”

“Thanks, Doc.”

“No problem.” He
lightly touched the singed ends of my hair and ran his hand down my neck to my
collarbone, caressing it with his thumb. I forgot to breathe. If this was what
his hands could do with my collarbone, what could they do to my—

           
Stop
it!
I was not going to make a fool out of myself over the first male who
wasn’t slicing, dicing, or fricasseeing me. I stood up quickly, which was a
mistake, because I suddenly felt dizzy.

Labeck steadied
me. “Are you all right?”

“Yeah. Sorry to
go all girly-girl.”

“Nothing wrong
with girly-girl. I
like
girly-girl.” He kept his hands on me. In the
bathroom’s narrow space, I was pressed against him, and couldn’t help noticing
that the front of his jeans, the part that contained his
Tower of Eros,
seemed
to be undergoing some seismic activity. I looked up, because I didn’t want to
be caught looking down, and found myself staring at Labeck’s mouth. Why hadn’t
I noticed before what full lips he had? They were a little chapped, the lips of
a guy who was outdoors a lot, but they looked as though they would be very . .
. nice . . . to . . .

He smoothed my
hair off my forehead and gazed into my eyes. This was it! Ben Labeck was going
to kiss me and I was going to kiss him back, because I had been through an awful
lot in the past twenty-four hours and I deserved a reward, damn it! One little
closed-mouth kiss—was that too much to ask?

Bending his head,
Labeck lowered his mouth toward mine. Then he stopped, six inches short of my
lips, frowning.

“What’s this?” He
touched the angry red blotch on the side of my face, where I’d used my
cheekbone as a fire extinguisher for my flaming hair. “This looks serious,
Mazie. I think it’s a second-degree burn—”

“It’s nothing! It
doesn’t hurt, it’s no worse than a bad sunburn. A little aloe vera and it’ll be
as good as new,” I babbled. “And another short of that Bushmills stuff wouldn’t
hurt.”

Labeck shook his
head. “You’re a walking disaster, Mazie. Maybe I ought to kidnap a doctor and
force him to treat you at gunpoint.”

“Don’t be
ridiculous!”

“Then I guess
it’s going to have to be my grand-mere’s famous burn remedy,” he said. “We’ll
need the kitchen.”

The kissable
moment had passed, and I wasn’t sure whether I felt disappointed or relieved.
Labeck pried ice out of his freezer trays, tossed the cubes into a large bowl,
added water, and stirred the stuff until it was the consistency of a soda
fountain drink. He dipped a towel into the icy water and ordered me to hold it
against my face.

“Better?” he
asked after a minute.

“Much. Your
grand-mere is a genius.”

Then we both
turned our attention to Luis Ruiz’s backpack. Labeck set it on the table, took
out the 7-Eleven bag, unsnapped the rubber band that held it closed, and
reached into the bag. My heart was beating ridiculously fast. A blackened
banana peel would be inside the bag, I told myself. Five hundred generations of
fruit flies were about to burst out.

No fruit flies.
Photos. Instamatic photos. Dozens of photos. Handling them gingerly, as though
we were crime scene technicians, we studied them. They were amateurish,
off-center, and slightly blurred, as though they’d been snapped in a tearing
hurry by someone lurking in the shadows with a cheap camera. By Luis?

           
A
familiar face appeared in a photo.

           
“Is
that who I think it is?” Labeck’s eyebrows skidded toward his hairline.

           
Oh,
yes, indeed!
It was Bear Brenner as he might appear if time-lapse
photography worked in reverse. Say, eleven or twelve years in reverse, around
the time he’d been interning at the family plant in Mexico.

“Got a Hulk Hogan
thing going there,” Labeck commented.

Blond,
mustachioed, and wearing a muscle shirt, this Brenner was a far cry from the
exquisitely barbered, star-spangled-tie-wearing politician who advocated
stricter penalties for drug offenders. He wasn’t introducing a bill to have
June declared
National Cheese
Awareness Month
here. And he wasn’t checking up on container
production either, because beer cans were aluminum cylinders, whereas the
products in these photos came in heat-sealed blister packs.

“He’s running a
meth lab!” Labeck said, incredulous.

“Not meth,” I
said. “I think it’s Mexican valium.” The stuff he’d used to drug me.
Flunitrazepam,
as Nurse Nasty called it, legal in Mexico, but a banned drug in the United
States. During my years in an inner-city high school, I’d learned a lot about
the vile stuff.

We carefully
examined the rest of the photos. Some were taken in the manufacturing lab, some
showed the pills being concealed in empty beer containers, and some showed the
beer containers being loaded into semitrailers. Other snapshots showed Bear in
Uncle
Teddy
mode, hosting parties where the liquor flowed in a never-ending
river, the doobies were set out on plates like appetizers, and the partygoers
were teenaged boys. One snapshot, nearly identical to the one I’d found in
Kip’s stash, showed Bear with his arm around Luis.

Except the boy
couldn’t be Luis. Luis was the photographer, wasn’t he?

I flipped the
photo over and read the words gouged deep into the paper with ballpoint.

Éste
es mi hermano Miguel Javier Ruiz,

narcotizado
y matado por Tío Teddy el 14 de julio de 1999
.

“Can you read
Spanish?” I asked Labeck.

“I can pick out a
few words.
Mi hermano
is my brother. I think
narcotizado
is
drugs, or drugged.
Tio Teddy,
of course, is Uncle Teddy.”

“
Matado
?”

“It think it
means murdered.”

“So . . .” I
puzzled it out, wishing I’d taken Spanish instead of French. “Miguel was
drugged to death. Maybe Brenner did him the way he did me, crushed a pill into
the boy’s drink.”