Fuzzy Navel Read Online Free Page A

anymore.
    Not ever again.

6:21 P.M.
     
MARY
    “W HERE’S THAT PSYCHOTIC CAT you have?”
    Mary Streng stares hard at Alex Kork. The woman who broke into their house is taller than Jacqueline, with broader shoulders. Her body is angular rather than curvy, and Mary can see the muscle striations in her bare forearms. Alex has straight black hair, shoulder length. This woman might have been pretty once, but the left side of her face, from her chin to her missing eyebrow, is a knot of pink scar tissue, puckered with patchwork skin graft zigzags and pockmarks from countless stitches.
    “At the vet,” Mary answers. “Bitten by a dog.”
    Alex winces. No – it only looks like a wince because the ruined half of her face stays immobile. It’s actually a smile.
    “That’s a shame. Such a cute kitty, being mauled by a big, bad canine.”
    “He’ll be fine,” Mary says. “The dog isn’t expected to recover.”
    Alex sits on the sofa next to Mary. She’s tucked her gun – a small-caliber revolver – into the back of her jeans, which rankles Mary.
    I’m an old lady, and she doesn’t consider me a threat,
Mary realizes.
    It’s true, and it hurts. Sharp as her mind still is, her body has grown old and weak. Osteoporosis is shrinking her. Rheumatoid arthritis has turned her hands into agonizing claws. Her figure, once a perfect hourglass, is now shaped more like the box the hourglass came in. What she would give to be young again, just for a minute, to show this young punk-
    “Are you sizing me up?” Alex asks.
    Mary lowers her eyes.
    “Look at me when I’m talking to you, Mom. Or I’ll start knocking you around.”
    Mary stares at her, projecting defiance instead of fear. Alex’s face twitches into a half smile. Up close, the scars are white and look like rubber.
    “I know you used to be a cop,” Alex says. “I bet this really makes you feel helpless.”
    Mary doesn’t answer. Jacqueline has told her all about Alex and her nightmarish family. Like most cops, her daughter kept her fears hidden away. But Mary knew that Jack feared Alex. And now she can see why. This scarred woman sitting next to her doesn’t have a soul. Something, some vital part, is missing from Alex. The part that makes her a human being.
    Mary had only seen it once before, more than forty years ago, on the Job. A homeless man had killed his friend over half a bottle of wine. Mary had hit the offender with her billy, over and over, but he wouldn’t go down. He just continued to stare at her with those black, bottomless eyes. Eyes without a trace of humanity. Eyes that dared her to kill him.
    The same eyes Alex has.
    “I bet it hurt,” Mary says, “when my daughter tore your face off.”
    Mary doesn’t see the blow coming – it’s too fast. But she feels it, the fist connecting with her mouth, the explosion of pain in her lips, her head snapping back. She had been punched before, in the line of duty, but never so hard or so viciously.
    Then Alex is standing over her, running a hand through Mary’s gray hair in a warped parody of kindness.
    “Maybe later I’ll show you how much it hurts,” Alex says.
    And Mary Streng realizes she’s going to die.
    It isn’t as scary as she thought it might be. She’s lived a long, full life. She’s done everything she ever set out to do. She’s made some mistakes, of course. Some big ones. A failed marriage. A child out of wedlock, put up for adoption when she was still a teenager. A feud with her mother that never got resolved before she died. But Mary managed to forgive herself, to learn from her errors, to keep on going. She knew she could meet death – even an unpleasant death – with grace and dignity and no regrets.
    But this isn’t just about her. Alex also wants to kill Jacqueline.
    That scares Mary to the core. Mary would die for her daughter. She’d also want to die if her daughter were killed. Parents aren’t supposed to outlive their children, and Jacqueline is too good a person