Salvage by Stephen Maher Page B

was as if she was trying to hide, Scarnum thought. She wanted an orgasm, but she was so full of vodka and cocaine that it was hard for her to get there. He moved urgently, and roughly rubbed at her, while she encouraged him with grunts. When she finished with a spasm, it came as a relief to him, and he let himself go and collapsed on top of her.
    When he regained his breath, he asked her, “What Mexicans?”
    She grunted.
    â€œYou asked me if I was mixed up with the Mexicans,” he said. “What Mexicans? Was Jimmy involved with some Mexicans?”
    But she ignored his question and started crying again, and again covered her face with her arm.
    â€œOh, Phillip,” she said. “I’m a bad person. Oh, oh, oh. A very bad person.”
    She made it into a little song. “ I’m a very bad person .” And she started to cry again.
    He pulled her head onto his chest and cradled her again, comforting her. “You’re not a bad person, Angela,” he said. “You just needed to get fucked up, then you needed to get fucked, that’s all. It’s understandable. You just found out your man was murdered.”
    She laughed bitterly. “Phillip, I’m pregnant. I’m three months pregnant and I’m drunk and coked up, and I don’t even know if the baby is Jimmy’s or yours, and Jimmy’s fucking dead and I just came over here to fuck you.”
    Scarnum absorbed that for a minute. “Yuh,” he finally said. “I guess you are a bad person.”
    She laughed then, and looked at him through all her tears. She had cried so much and so hard that the heavy mascara around her beautiful green eyes was smeared like a raccoon’s mask, and mucous dripped from the end of her perfect ski-slope nose. He wiped her face and she hugged him and he told her it would be all right, and this time she seemed to believe him.
    He lit smokes for them and asked her again about the Mexicans.
    â€œI don’t really know,” she said. “Just after Christmas Jimmy started to have a lot more money. I mean, he always made pretty good money from the fishing, but he spent it as fast as he earned it. You know what he was like. Always had to have a new truck, new TV, new clothes, coke, liquor. He’d go in to town and blow a few grand on the strippers. Then he suddenly had a lot more money, and a lot more coke. He wouldn’t tell me where he got it.
    â€œOne night when he come home drunk, I went at him, asking him over and over again. Drunk as he was, he wouldn’t say nothing. Finally, I asked him why he wouldn’t tell me. He said, ‘I tell anyone and the Mexicans find out, I’ll be fucking dead as a doughnut.’ When he realized what he’d said, he got right scared-looking and made me promise I’d keep my mouth shut. I never told nobody until tonight.”
    Scarnum asked her how come he was fishing alone on the night he was killed.
    â€œI’ve been wondering that,” she said. “It’s weird, isn’t it? He never fished alone. It’s not safe.”
    She told Scarnum that Jimmy usually fished with a guy named Doug Amos, who lived in a trailer in the woods behind Western Shore.
    Scarnum cut up two thin lines of Angela’s coke, and they each snorted one, and they each took a drink of vodka.
    â€œAngela,” said Scarnum. “If you want, I’ll try to find out who killed Jimmy. I’ll do that for you, but I want you to do something for me. I want you to stop drinking and snorting coke until you have the baby.”
    She started crying then and called him a fucking jerk, and said of course she wasn’t going to drink or get coked up while she was pregnant, but not because he said so.
    â€œAnd you can’t come around here anymore,” he said. “So far as I know, nobody knows that you and I have been fucking. The cops already think I might have had something to do with Jimmy getting killed.