Blood and Oranges by James Goldsborough (latest books to read txt) 📗

to kick him, he dragged her screaming into the living room. He had to silence her quick and smashed her mouth. With a heel she got him in the shin. “Whore,” he shouted, smashing her again, throwing her to the floor, standing over his prey, kicking her in the ribs and stomach, hurting her really bad, turning screams into soft sick moans.

Willie ran at him, knocking him from the back, putting him to his knees. Willie was a big man, but not a strong one and his only chance was to delay him long enough to get to the window and signal the cop. He dashed back to the windows, tangling in falling curtains when he couldn’t find the draw cord. The venetian blinds were drawn. Angie tried to get up and Gil kicked her in the face, the side of his big hard roughneck’s boot catching her in the mouth, teeth against soft lips, explosion of blood.

Wrapped in curtains like a statue before unveiling, Willie tried to scream, but had no voice. An arm pulled tight around his throat, closing it so he couldn’t breathe. He heard banging from the next apartment or maybe the floor below. Why didn’t they come? He kicked out, trying to loosen the arm that grew tighter until he blacked out. His trachea was crushed, his blood was stopped, his voyage was over.

Sobbing, delirious, her dress up around her waist, Angie lay still on the carpet.

“And now you,” he said, picking her up, wiping blood from her bleeding face with his sleeve and carrying her into the bedroom. “You be good to me now, just like in the old days.”

Hours later, with Gil drunk and spent on stained, bloody foul-smelling sheets, she finally reached the window and screamed to the cop outside, who had awakened. She could hardly open her mouth and when she tried, the wounds that had sought to close while she was being raped reopened and blood gushed again. The cop came quickly but not quickly enough to catch Gil, who gave her a final belt and was out the door and down the back stairway.

A large man, unkept, unshaven, physically depleted, hungover, covered in blood and well known to the police, he was caught the next day at a trolley stop.

Chapter 19

They gave her blood, stitched her shattered face, which had turned black; set her broken jaw and right arm, bandaged her broken nose, covered her eyes swollen shut from the stitching, taped her fractured ribs, swabbed and bandaged cuts and contusions everywhere on her body, tended scratches on her thighs and around the vagina. They treated for concussion and probed for organ damage and internal bleeding. They stitched and bandaged the gashes on her legs. Capping her broken front teeth would have to wait until they unwired her jaw. She lay semiconscious for days, unable to see, held immobile by cords, drugged on antibiotics and analgesics, fed intravenously and denied all visitors. A police guard stood round-the-clock outside her room, and reporters from newspapers across the nation were kept away, though an enterprising one made it as far as the guard outside her room.

Her mind awakened at some point, telling her she was dead. She could not see or feel, had no sense of time, space or body. What is that, if not death? Her mind alone told her she was not dead, or that if she was dead that her soul had survived in some strange invisible dead place. “If a man keep my saying he shall never see death,” and she had kept His saying. She had the feeling of being lost in deep, black space, some kind of heaven without light. At some point—hours, days, weeks, she didn’t know—dim light seeped in, she was aware of it though she could not see. She heard distant voices. Her mind told her she was alive. The Lord’s design, His trial by fire, a voice said, and she had answered. Jesus was not done with her.

Gradually she became aware of the coming and going of doctors and nurses, of people talking, changing her bandages, manipulating her body, which she had begun to feel again, at least parts of it. At some point one eye partially opened and she saw shadows in the light that with time turned into people. The people were all in white, but one day she saw dark suits, and they tried to talk to her. She began to think more lucidly and to move. Her eyes opened, both of them, and she could hear, but her lips were sewn shut.

The dark suits came again and again. She understood them, but had no desire to answer because she could not speak and could not write because she could not move. She was plastered and wired and tubed, immobilized like a ship in dry dock. Cal came to tell her about Willie’s quiet burial at Forest Lawn Cemetery, but she could not cry. He told her of plans for a memorial service, plans that the Soldiers, led by Henry Callender, insisted must await her recovery. He was sitting in a chair by the window and then came over to the side of the bed and told her not to worry, that they would wait. The Soldiers wanted her, no one else. She wondered how she looked. Others had flinched at the sight. Cal did not.

She had not seen her face, had no desire to see it until the final surgery was done and time had passed and the scars healed. How many months or years would it take? Martyrdom is never pretty. Cal told her that DA Barton Pitts had abandoned his plan to prosecute her and Willie for “outrage to public morals and illegal flight.” Only Gil was to be prosecuted. Cal was not sure she understood anything. There had always been two Angies for him, and he wondered if both would survive this ordeal.

Had she lain there for a week, a month,