Boon by Ed Kurtz (smallest ebook reader txt) 📗

us was mostly darkness until a door squealed open and a shape filled the brightness of the sun outside. I paid this no mind, but Boon reached past me to the closest doorknob, opened the door, and pushed me into the room without a word. She shut the door gently once were both inside and clamped a hand over my mouth.

“Policeman,” she said.

“Fong,” I said.

“Will be fine. Be quiet.”

I stayed quiet. Boon pressed close to the door and listened. The floorboard creaked some more on the other side of it. My blood pounded in my ears.

The room was almost pitch black, the only light in it leaking in from the doorframe. So, when I heard a small whimper somewhere behind us, I came close to crying out myself. Boon touched my arm, as if to settle my nerves, and she plunged into the darkness where I heard a voice whisper but could not make out what it said. A moment after, a match struck, filling my nostrils with a devilish, sulfurous smell, and Boon lighted a lantern atop a three-legged stool. Beneath the stool was a pallet much like those in Fong’s room, except upon this one was a filthy, slumbering white man beside a young Chinese girl. The girl’s eyes were wide and shimmering in the lantern light. Boon pressed her finger to her lips and pointed at me. The girl hesitated, but she rose from the pallet, careful not to upset the ugly man beside her, and she padded softly across the room to me.

She couldn’t have been more than twelve, maybe thirteen years old. Right about the age I reckoned Boon had been when she first reached the Bay from old Connecticut—and it looked to me that this one had been shanghaied into the same, awful circumstances. I watched her closely, as sure that she was going to act as I was unsure of what exactly she was going to do.

Boon cleared up my confusion by pointing to my boot. I nodded, pulled my knife. She took two long, silent strides to retrieve it and returned the same way. I put my hands on the girl’s slight, slender shoulders and turned her away from the pallet, toward me and the door.

“Don’t look,” I whispered.

Boon shushed me. I covered the girl’s ears and she pressed herself against my leg. It was all over in an instant, the blade sinking point first into the hollow of the man’s throat and Boon using the heel of her left hand to push it all the way down to the hilt. He never had a chance to make any sound other than the awful wet gurgling of so much blood filling up his airway. Was she thinking of the dirty men who crowded her memories and nightmares? I have always assumed so. And I knew even then that the girl would not be free of such horrors in her future, either, no matter what Boon did for the child that no one ever did for herself.

She had to stand on the dead man’s chest to wrench the knife free. She wiped the blade clean on his shirt. Her hands and sleeves were still coated with the blood, and when she handed the knife back to me, she smeared it on the back of my hand. I imagined that it was hot, so hot it burned, and fought to stop thinking about it. My stomach roiled.

It was catching up to me. Three years, so much God damned ugliness.

It was catching up to me.

Chapter Thirty-Four

I was against it from the start, but the girl came with us when we went out from that slum and snuck away back to the docks. There was a word somewhere in my brain for it, for the danger of bringing a child along on our flight, but I stammered and spat trying to search it out.

Boon said, “Liability.”

“Mayhap,” I said. It wasn’t the word, and I did not know its meaning, but I wasn’t in the mood to nitpick. “I can for sure understand what you are doing with her, what with her being in the same sort of trouble you was in before.”

“Trouble,” she said flatly.

“Probably there’s a hundred girls like that,” I went on. “A thousand. I don’t know. What’s saving one? ’Specially if we get our own God damn selves killed for trying?”

Boon’s eyes flashed on me. She looked every bit the same as she had that day in Revelation, the day she knocked me down and I ended up in the hoosegow. I clenched my jaw and braced for the hit. It did not come.

“I do not expect nature ever came up with a dumber creature than a man,” she said, those eyes still huge and bright. “But the worst part of it is how willfully stupid you sons of bitches are, Splettstoesser. You choose stupidity because you can and because it is easy.”

She spit off the edge of the embankment, into the oily water sloshing up against the posts dubiously holding up the docks, crawling with algae and barnacles.

I said, “Boon.”

“I have killed a mess of men,” she said. “Only the boys hurt me, because maybe there was still time for them to choose better. Grown men are what they are. Most of them deserve worse than I can ever mete out to them, and that’s a fucking fact.”

For the briefest instant I thought she might cry, but she steeled herself and turned her face down to the small, withdrawn kid standing just apart from us. Neither of us knew her name. She had not spoken a single word. It was my assumption that she understood no English, and since neither Boon nor I could speak Chinese, we were at a deadlock. If nothing else, I worried she had no idea what we were about. For all she might have known, we were only more slavers come to steal her away to the same circumstances or worse.

“All men are stupid, little one,” she