Bad Blood

“Oh, no. Go away.”
    Olms pulled at the storm door handle, got it open, and said, “We need to talk to you, Birdy.”
    “I said everything I was going to say. What if the police are watching? Go away, go away,” Gordon said.
    Olms was just under six feet tall, and thick through the chest. He stepped directly at her and said, at the same time, “We can’t do that. We need to talk,” and his momentum pushed her back without touching her. She backed into the living room, and Junior Einstadt followed, with Rooney right behind. He pushed the inner door shut with a solid thunk , and they were all standing in a circle.
    Roland Olms asked, “You been here the whole time?” and, “You spend all my money?”
    “If this Flowers gets on to you, you won’t need any money,” Gordon said. “He says you all killed some girl and left her body in a cemetery. Some underage girl, and he’s like death on that. He says somebody beat her with a whip, and more than once, more than the time she was killed. He says she was gang-raped—”
    “Wasn’t no rape,” Einstadt said. “She was glad to get it any way she could.”
    “You were there?” Gordon asked, and her hand went to her mouth.
    “Didn’t say that,” Einstadt said. “But it wasn’t no rape. She was friendly, and she liked it. She’d get in a pool, and she could get seven or eight of us in one night. More the merrier.”
    Rooney said, uneasily, “That’s not something we ought to talk about.”
    “Why not?” Einstadt said. “Old Birdy here was the same way, hot to get it on.”
    “Was not,” Gordon said. “That’s why I ran away, you sonofabitch.”
    They were still standing and she began backing away from them.
    Olms said, “I oughta take my money’s worth right now.”
    Rooney said, “Shut up, Roll. We’re not here to fuck around.” He looked at Gordon. “What all did Flowers ask you? We want to know all of it.”
    “He said that this dead girl got raped by a bunch of you,” Gordon said. “He said that you were all church members, and he wanted to know if the church, you know, made little girls do it.”
    “He mention anybody?” Rooney asked. Gordon’s mouth flapped for a moment, as she tried to decide whether to mention Rouse, and it looked to the three men as though she was trying to avoid saying something, and Rooney pressed: “Did he mention me?”
    “Well . . . he sorta wanted to know about you and the Flood girls. The girls were just little bitty kids before, I couldn’t even remember them, hardly.”
    “Sonofabuck,” Rooney said to Einstadt. “He knows.”
    Gordon said, “He was asking about some other people . . . the Bakers, a boy named Loewe, I think he was that little queer back then—”
    “Didn’t know you knew him,” Olms said.
    “I knew who he was; some of the women thought he was queer . . . and Flowers is telling me all these things. Rouse? Rouse’s daughter, riding around with people? Does that mean anything?”
    “Ah, shit,” Einstadt said. “Who’s talking to him?”
    “I think he’s talked to a lot of neighbors.”
    “If he’s asking about the Rouses, we got a problem,” Olms said. “Greta Rouse has been serviced by everybody in the Spirit. If they get hold of them—”
    “We gotta get back,” Rooney said. “We need a meeting tonight. With everybody. We gotta call Emmett, right now.”
    Einstadt looked at Gordon for a moment, then said, “We got a friend who’s going to stay with you overnight. Just to make sure you don’t go talking to cops until we can have our meeting.”
    “You’re not staying here,” Gordon said. She had pulled enough out of the three men that she expected Virgil to burst into the living room. She wanted to look back toward the open bedroom door, but didn’t.
    “We’re not. But you remember Kathleen Spooner?” Einstadt asked. “She’ll be here in a few minutes. She’s gonna stay with you. We don’t have time to fuck around, Birdy. So we’ll bring Kathleen in, and tomorrow morning, we’ll have figured out what we’re gonna do, and she’ll be gone.”
    “I’m not—”
    “We’re not asking,” Olms snapped. “We’re telling you.” And he reached out and slapped her hard, and she staggered and almost fell: still did not look at the bedroom door, although she was now murderously angry, and it showed. Olms smiled at her: “You remember that, don’t you?”
    “Fuck you,” she hissed, but she moved away from him, her shoulders hunched, one