The girl—15? 30?—jumps, catching Mike’s sleeve with her cigarette. A tiny circle of pain stamps itself inside his wrist.
“Oh, man. Man, I’m sorry. I—you okay?”
“Fine,” he lies. She beats ineffectually at the damage, making it worse. Through gritted teeth: “Please. No problem.”
A shrug. “If you say so.” Sherri drops the cigarette, face falling into more familiar lines. “Looking for me, huh?” she says. “What for?”
Instinctively Mike reaches inside his coat—whether for his gun or his wallet, he couldn’t say. “I—I’m a friend of a friend.”
Sherri smirks. “Got a lot of friends, baby. Refresh my memory.”
Mike swallows, hard. Something seems to be caught in his throat. It knocks against his tongue when he tries to speak, deforming the words. “A—dagebeck.”
“Come again?”
Much slower, this time: “Adage Beck.”
Sherri recoils, slipping on some stray garbage. When he tries to help her, she avoids his touch. “Get off me,” she snarls.
“You knew her, right?”
“Damn straight I knew her. That chick was stone crazy. Nuts. And you’re her friend?”
“Look, it’s important. You know where she is?”
Sherri wrenches away, flattening herself against the inside of the door.
“One time,” she says, suddenly clear and calm. “Only one time, and then I don’t ever wanna see your face again. Me and Susan, we had a room down in Chinatown. And one night she brings back another chick she found on the street. Your friend.”
Adage, Mike breathes.
“So we’re doing pretty well here, right? Except our johns start disappearing. And they turn up dead, all over the Strip. It’s in the papers. Cops’re finding them in pieces. And none of them got any skin, right? Like somebody tore it off.”
And Mike sees early morning. 1980, peering through the windshield of his Dad’s truck at something. Something small, and nude, and black with flies. Something without a face.
As the smell rises and settles, rises and settles, like a tide.
“So I start noticing stuff. Like how she smells weird, like meat that’s gone off. And she sleeps all day, and she’s always wearing the same clothes. Whatever. And then Susan’s gone. And they find another body, out back of Ryerson. And that night I come home early, and your girlfriend’s standing there—”
Sherri chokes.
And: I don’t want to hear this, Mike thinks. I really don’t.
“She was wearing Susan’s—Susan’s—”
A nearby street lamp goes out.
“Sherri?”
Sherri looks up, mascara dripping.
“I’m going now,” she says, and does.
* * *
“I was three months in the hospital, but I don’t remember any of it. Just a long, red blank.
“And the silence.