Angel shrugged Jeanette’s hand off and tried to roll the cell door, but this one was locked. Angel grabbed the lid of the coffee urn and began to whang it against the bars, creating an ungodly racket that made Jeanette slap her hands over her ears.
“Wake up, bee-yatch! Wake up and smell the motherfucking coffee!”
The woman on the bunk opened her eyes, which were almond-shaped and as dark as her hair. She swung her legs down to the floor—long and lovely they were, even in her baggy intake coverall—and yawned. She stretched her arms, thrusting forward a pair of breasts that put Claudia’s to shame.
“Company!” she cried.
Her bare feet hardly seemed to touch the floor as she ran across to the bars and reached through them, grasping one of Angel’s hands and one of Jeanette’s. Angel instinctively pulled away. Jeanette was too stunned. It felt like some mild electricity was passing from the new woman’s hand and into her own.
“Angel! I’m so glad you’re here! I can talk to the rats, but they’re limited conversationalists. Not a criticism, just a reality. Each individual creature on its merits. My understanding is that Henry Kissinger is a fascinating discussion partner, yet consider all the blood that man has on his hands! Force me to choose, I’ll take a rat, thank you, and you can print that in the newspaper, just be sure you spell my name right.”
“What in the hail are you talking about?” Angel asked.
“Oh, nothing really. Sorry to blabber. I was just visiting the world on the other side of the world. Scrambles my brains a little to go back and forth. And here’s Jeanette Sorley! How’s Bobby, Jeanette?”
“How do you know our names?” Angel asked. “And how come you can sleep without growin that shit all over you?”
“I’m Evie. I came from the Tree. This is an interesting place, isn’t it? So lively! So much to do and see!”
“Bobby’s doing fine,” Jeanette said. Feeling as if she were in a dream . . . and perhaps she was. “I’d like to see him again before I fall aslee—”
Angel yanked Jeanette back so hard she almost fell. “Shut up, Jeanie. This ain’t about your boy.” She reached into the soft cell and grabbed Evie by the admirably filled front of her coverall. “How’re you stayin awake? Tell me or I’ll put a hurtin on you like you never had. I’ll make your cunt and your asshole swap places.”
Evie gave a jolly laugh. “That would be a medical marvel, wouldn’t it? Why, I’d have to learn how to go to the bathroom all over again.”
Angel flushed. “You want to play with me? You want to? You think just because you’re in that cell, I cain’t get at you?”
Evie looked down at the hands on her. Just looked. But Angel screamed and staggered back. Her fingers were turning red.
“Burned me! Bitch burned me somehow!”
Evie turned to Jeanette. She was smiling, but Jeanette thought there was sadness as well as good humor in those dark eyes. “The problem is more complex than it first might appear—I see that. I do. There are feminists who like to believe that all the world’s problems go back to men. To the innate aggressiveness of men. They have a point, a woman never started a war—although, trust me, some were definitely about them—but there are some bad, bad chickadees out there. I can’t deny it.”
“What is this shit you’re spouting?”
She looked back to Angel.
“Dr. Norcross has his suspicions about you, Angel. About the landlord you killed in Charleston, for one thing.”
“I didn’t kill nobody!” But the color had drained from Angel’s face, and she took a step backward, bumping the coffee wagon. Her reddened hands were pressed to her chest.
Evie redirected to Jeanette, speaking in low tones of confidence. “She’s killed five men. Five.” And now she turned again to Angel. “It was a kind of hobby for awhile there, wasn’t it, Angel? You out hitchhiking to nowhere in particular, with a knife in your purse and a little .32 in the side pocket of that rawhide jacket you always used to wear. But that’s not all, is it?”
“Shut up! Shut up!”
Back to Jeanette those amazing eyes went. Her voice was quiet but warm. It was the voice of a woman in a television ad, the one that told her friend that she also used to have problems with grass stains on her children’s pants, only this new detergent had changed everything.
“She got pregnant when she was seventeen. Covered it up with big loose layers of clothes. Hitchhiked to Wheeling—didn’t kill anyone that time, good for her—and took a room. Had the baby—”
“SHUT UP, I SAID!”
Someone with a video monitor had taken note of the confrontation: Rand Quigley and Millie Olson were pounding down the corridor, Quigley with Mace in hand, Olson with a Taser set on medium power.
“Drowned it in the sink, dropped the body down the incinerator chute.” Evie grimaced, blinked a couple of times, and added, softly, “Pop goes the weasel.”
Quigley tried to grab Angel. She whirled instantly at his touch, threw a punch, and overturned the cart, coffee, juice, and all. A brown wash—no longer scalding, but still hot—poured over Millie Olson’s legs. She screamed in pain, and fell on her behind.
Jeanette watched in amazement as Angel went full Hulk Hogan on Quigley, grasping his neck with one hand and clawing away the Mace with the other. The can hit the floor and rolled through the bars of the soft cell. Evie bent, picked it up, offered it to Jeanette.
“Want this?”
Jeanette accepted it unthinkingly.
Officer Olson was paddling around in a brown puddle, trying to get out from under the overturned coffee wagon. Officer Quigley was trying to keep from being choked out. Although Angel was skinny and Quigley outweighed her by at least fifty pounds, Angel shook him like a dog with a snake in its jaws, and tossed him into the coffee wagon just as Millie Olson was getting up, and they went down together with a thump and a splash. Angel whirled back to the soft cell, her eyes huge and glittering in her narrow little face.
Evie spread her arms as wide as the bars would allow and held them out to Angel, like a lover beckoning her beloved. Angel held her own arms out, her fingers bent into claws, and rushed at her, screaming.
Only Jeanette saw what happened next. The two officers were still trying to untangle themselves from the overturned coffee wagon, and Angel was lost in a world of fury. Jeanette had time to think, I’m not just seeing bad temper; this is a full-blown psychotic episode. Then Evie’s mouth yawned open so widely that the entire bottom half of her face seemed to disappear. From her mouth came a flock—no, a flood—of moths. They swirled around Angel’s head, and some caught in the peroxided up-spout of her hair. She screamed and began to beat at them.
Jeanette rapped Angel on the back of the head with the can of Mace. I am going to make an enemy here, she thought, but hey, maybe she’ll go to sleep before she can come back on me.