Gin Palace 01 - The Poisoned Rose

Its teeth break my skin and lodge deep into my muscle of my leg, into my thigh bone. It has a solid, crushing hold on me. Within a second it begins to shake its head from side to side.
    Blood comes out of me fast. I feel myself lifted off the pavement, and then all I see is sky where there should be ground and ground where there should be sky. The dog shakes me like a rag doll now, does so more times than I can count. I cannot imagine that this will end. Then out of all this insanity I hear the sound of the siren grow nearer. My ear tunes in on it. It fills my head, then finally stops and all I’m left with is the growling and the tearing of flesh and the crashing waves.
    I hear the crack of gunfire. I hear it again. Suddenly I am dropped, slick with blood and spit, to the pavement.
    The instant I hit the ground I feel two hands grab me by my arm. It is the girl. She is pulling me across the pavement, pulling me toward her, away from the beast dropped by a cop’s .38.
    I look for her eyes but get only the morning sun, the color of pain and heat, in my own…

Chapter One

    It was in the pale light of what seemed enough to me like morning that I awoke to the sound of someone pounding on my door. Outside my three front windows a steady rain was falling through the few yellow and red leaves that were left hanging on the trees that lined Elm Street, drilling hard into the already saturated lawn two floors below. It had been raining for days and I almost couldn’t remember a time when there had been anything else but this. I preferred the sound outside my windows over the pounding on my door, so I let myself hear only that for a time. I was facedown on a bare wood floor, breathing in dust and damp, and thinking how the drops hitting the leaves sounded like rain falling on a hundred tiny umbrellas.
    My muscles ached and the left side of my face stung. I didn’t think too much of any of it. Last night’s drinking was still in my veins. I could feel waves of intoxicants moving like thickly clustered schools of tiny fish in my blood. A part of me was still asleep, and the part of me that wasn’t wanted to join up with it again as soon as possible.
    Finally I got up off the floor. It took some doing but I made it to my feet. I wanted more to stop the pounding than to see who was there. When I opened the door I saw George standing in the dark hall outside, his arm poised for another bang. He looked pretty much half in the bag himself. He lived in the apartment below mine and served drinks seven nights a week in the bar one flight below that. The town we lived in was a small resort town that all but shut down between September and May, and the bar we lived above, the Hansom House, catered to the working-class locals who lived there year round, artists and laborers alike. There wasn’t much to do at night during the off months out here but drink and gossip, and George was the man to whom most people came when they wanted healthy servings of both.
    When he saw me George lowered his arm. He looked a little dumbfounded, and then I realized that his eyes had shifted and were focused on the left side of my face. I felt the stinging again and remembered then the scratches and how they had come to be there.
    “Jesus, Mac,” George said, “they look worse than they did yesterday.” He whispered when he spoke; the dark hallway outside my door seemed to require that somehow.
    I ignored George’s comment. I felt an urge to touch the scratches but didn’t.
    “What do you want?” I muttered.
    “There’s someone here to see you.”
    “You could have just called me to tell me that.”
    “I tried, Mac. Your phone’s out of order.”
    “Oh, yeah.” Service had been shut off last week because I hadn’t paid my bill. Yesterday I received notice that the electricity was next. “What do they want?”
    “She didn’t say.”
    “She who?”
    “Didn’t say.”
    “Have you ever seen her here before?”
    “No. And I would have remembered her.”
    “So what did she say?”
    “That she needed to talk to you. That it was important.”
    I had gotten up too quickly and was a little dizzy. It felt as though gravity were working particularly hard on me this morning. It took pretty much all I had not to give into it and just lie back down on the floor for as long as it would take for things to lighten up again.
    “Tell her I’m not here. Tell her I left town and you don’t know when I’m coming back. Tell her whatever you want,