Saint Oswald by Jay Bonansinga (always you kirsty moseley .txt) 📗

something’s come up,” Harkness mutters as he blows past his secretary’s desk. His sun-kissed blonde hair dangles in his eye. “I’ll need you to go ahead and take messages the rest of the day.”

“What about the 3 o’clock?”

Harkness is already in his inner office, rushing around behind his desk, rifling through drawers, grabbing his iPad, his cell, and his attaché, calling over his shoulder: “Tell Mr. Cohen—what—tell him I’m dealing with a—what—a family emergency! Yes, yes, that’s exactly what I’m dealing with here, I’m dealing with a family emergency. I’ll be out of a box until tomorrow. I’ll check in later, though!”

Harkness grabs his thousand-dollar Burberry raincoat without even breaking stride.

The secretary stands at her filing cabinet as Harkness clamors past her toward the elevator. “Mr. Harkness, what about the—?”

“I’ll touch base later, check in from the road,” Harkness assures her as he presses the DOWN button and fidgets in front of the elevator doors with the twitchy restless energy of a bug on a griddle. “Or not,” he murmurs as the doors rattle open.

He lurches on board, the doors rattling shut, and then he’s gone.

The downstairs buzzer barely registers to Laura “Gerbil” Goldstein’s traumatized ears. She is curled on the end of her Salvation Army futon, chain-smoking Camels in front of a rebroadcast of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, the TV’s sound dialed down in deference to her raging boom box. Right now, a frenzied meat-grinder of a song by the Minutemen blasts out of its frayed speakers, filling the little low-rent studio with glorious 1980s post-punk.

The buzzer keeps groaning. Somebody’s down there leaning on it. At last Gerbil acknowledges the sound with a grunt. She lifts one emaciated leg and angrily prods the volume knob down with her black-painted toenail. “Jesus Christ! I’m coming already.”

She makes her way over to the door with a tattered Army Surplus blanket wrapped around her skinny, malnourished form. “Jesus! I’m coming! Hold your fucking horses already!”

When she opens the door to the landing she sees a massive Pachyderm of a man in faded denim and chambray, standing on her threshold, looking pale and sick and nervous.

“Thank God you’re home,” he says, brushing past her and entering the apartment. He wears a threadbare jeans jacket, and his thick black hair looks more unkempt than usual. The metal screw-top of a cheap bottle of booze sticking out of his pocket, he walks with the lame gait of a wounded bull. “C’mon, we got work to do.”

“Fuck are you doing, Ozzy?” Gerbil demands, lingering by the door, her hands on her bony hips. A skeletal young lady with jailhouse tats on her scrawny neck and chainsaw-ragged hair dyed India-ink black, Gerbil Goldstein is not the type to follow people—or follow any other norm of civilized social discourse. She hates doorbells. She also hates landlords, salespeople, Republicans, clergy, the IRS, policemen, psychotherapists, and the Department of Motor Vehicles.

Hate, in fact, is Gerbil Goldstein’s best friend. It’s her form of personal empowerment. She even has the word HATE tattooed on her cadaverous left knuckles in some sort of ironic homage to the old Charles Laughton film Night of the Hunter. The only difference is, in the movie, Robert Mitchum’s sociopathic preacher also has the word LOVE tattooed on his opposing hand. LOVE is missing from Gerbil’s extremities.

* * *

Laura Goldstein—aka “Gerbil,” aka “Punk-Ass,” aka “Who-zit,” aka “Naz” (short for Nasty)—grew up in a hellish pile of reeking stone and brick officially known as the Illinois State Children’s Orphanage. Situated in an antebellum village downstate, the place opened for business in 1865 under the auspices of post-war legislation known as the Latham Act. From that day forward, “all qualified parentless children” would hereby be warehoused in this shithole for an indefinite period of time (or until they turned eighteen and could be dumped into the back streets, hobo camps, and stew-bum squats of the rapidly industrializing towns up north). Gerbil was deposited in the orphanage as a baby—following the death of her prostitute mother—and grew up as mean and ornery as the Catholic nuns charged with her care. For most of her teenage years, she considered the festering, ancient redbrick dormitories a penal colony and treated them accordingly, making numerous escape attempts. On countless occasions she was subjected to whippings with a rubber hose in the bowels of the school building.

Oswald found her about ten years ago, late one night on Chicago’s Rush Street. He caught her unscrewing the faceplate of an ATM and taking the ready cash back to her apartment in Uptown. At first, she figured he was an undercover cop. Or maybe a pervert who had followed her home. He seemed just a little too interested in her situation, a bit too quick to ask if she wanted a job. “In my line of work,” he had explained to her that night, “I could use a budding criminal to provide assistance, somebody with a strong stomach.” But what Gerbil Goldstein didn’t know at the time—and to which she remains oblivious to this day—is that Oswald had been searching for her for years. Oswald had a very specific reason to find her, and try and help her (or at least keep an eye on her). All of which is why he enters her apartment tonight as though he is her Dutch uncle.

“Slow down, for shit’s sake,” Gerbil grumbles, scurrying after the big Indian, who, as fate would have it, is the only individual on earth whom Gerbil doesn’t outright despise. In fact, if she were tied up, laid out on a rack, had her nipples hooked to a car battery, and maybe was threatened with an acid bath, she might—just might—admit that she almost sort of likes the big hooligan. “How’s Tilda doing?”

Oswald is already halfway across the room. “Fine... actually not so hot.” He says this over his shoulder as he stomps into her studio. “Hence, I got a job needs immediate attention.”

Gerbil makes her way back into her hovel and finds him pacing