Light of the World by James Lee Burke

adjusted the lenses on his face. There was a coarseness in his skin that reminded her of the skin around a turtle’s eyes. His hands were big and knuckled, his shoulders as thick as a piano mover’s. He was the kind of man who drank whiskey as casually as someone flinging an accelerant on a fire. He had probably been a brig chaser in the Corps or with CID in the army or an administrative sergeant in the air force or a land-based pencil pusher in the navy; but he was someone who knew how to make use of the system and milk it for all it was worth while staying off the firing line.
    She had sworn she was through with her former life. She had seen a counselor in West Hollywood, attended Adult Children of Alcoholics meetings in the Palisades, and worked as a volunteer at a shelter in East Los Angeles to get her mind off her own problems. Unfortunately, the latter was not as therapeutic as the former. She saw women who had been raped, sodomized, burned, and beaten until they were unrecognizable. She was daily witness to the terror that never left their eyes, because each of them knew she would have to return to a home where any night a man whose children she had borne, whose problems she had shared, whose body had settled between her thighs, would rip the door out of the jamb and perhapstear her apart. Nor could Gretchen forget their haunted look when they asked how they could change their lives, where they could work, where they could hide. She never answered their questions. If she told them what she would do, they would probably flee her presence.
    She remembered the early lessons in the trade that she had learned from a retired button man in Hialeah whom everyone referred to as Louie, no last name. Louie had grown up in Brooklyn with Joey Gallo and claimed to be the character in The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight who walked Joey’s pet lion down to the neighborhood car wash and clipped his leash to the chain that moved all the vehicles through the water jets and revolving brushes. “Don’t let your feelings get mixed up in it,” Louie said. “The target broke the rules or he wouldn’t be the target. He made the choice, you didn’t. Don’t use anything bigger than a .25. You want the round to bounce around inside. One in the ear, one between the lamps. If he’s a rat, the third round goes in the mouth.”
    Louie did not go out in a blaze of glory. He died in a lawn chair while watching a shuffleboard game at the retirement center where he lived. At his funeral, a woman in the viewing line leaned over the coffin and spat in his face. Many thought she was the widow of a victim. As it turned out, she was his landlady, and Louie had stiffed her on a winning lottery ticket they had purchased together. In death, Louie was no more dignified or intriguing than he had been in life, and all his lessons were no more than the self-serving rationale of a psychopath. The problem was that Gretchen hadn’t gotten into the life for money. What she learned from Louie was a means to another end—namely, to get even for the burns that had been inflicted on an infant and for the day a man named Golightly had forever robbed her of her innocence.
    Don’t let your feelings get involved in it? What a laugh, she thought.
    She put her dark glasses back on and dipped her hand in her tote bag and felt the can of Mace and the foamed butt of the telescopic baton she carried. She waited until a car passed, then crossed the street and stepped up on Bill Pepper’s darkened porch. The bulbabove the door made a loud squeak when she unscrewed it. Beyond the house, she could see the moon shining on a church steeple and hear the river humming through the willows and rocks along the riverbank.
    Go home. There’s still time. He’s a cop. Don’t throw everything away over an insult, a voice said.
    Another voice replied, Don’t let anyone get over on you ever again.
    She tapped on the door with her left hand, her breath coming hard in her chest as