Chapter 16 Chapter fifteen

In East Memphis, Tennessee, Katherine Baker-Martin and her best boyfriend are watching a new movie on TV in his apartment while smoking a pipe full of marijuana.The commercial breaks are getting longer and longer, but the intervals are getting shorter and shorter. "I'm so hungry, would you like some popcorn?" she said. "I'll get it, give me your key." "Sit still. I'm going to see if Momma's called anyway." She got up from the couch, a tall young woman, big-boned, fleshy, almost clumsy, with a dignified and handsome face and clean hair.She found her shoes from under the coffee table and walked out.

The evening in February is not so much cold as it is gloomy.A thin mist from the Mississippi hangs at chest height over the large parking area.She saw the waning moon, gray; dark, like a bone-white fishhook. Looking up, she felt a little dizzy.She started across the parking lot, walking steadily toward the front door of her own house, two hundred yards away. The brown van was parked near her apartment, surrounded by motorhomes and trailers with motorboats on them.She noticed the van because it resembled the delivery truck that used to bring her presents from her mother. As she passed the car, a light came on through the fog.It was a floor lamp with a shade, standing on the tarmac behind the car.Under the lamp was a heavily stuffed armchair covered in chintz with a pattern of red flowers, bright in the mist.The two items looked rather like a pair of furniture sets displayed in an exhibition room.

Catherine, Baker-Martin blinked several times, but kept walking.When she thought of the word unreal, she blamed the bong.She's fine.People are moving in and out.Enter.out.In Stone Hench Gardens, people are always moving around.The curtains in her apartment moved, and she saw her cat on the window sill, now arching its body, now pushing its side against the windowpane. She had the key ready and looked back before opening the door.A man climbed out from the back of the car.Through the light, she could see that the man had one hand in a cast and his arm was in a sling.She went inside and locked the door behind her.

Catherine Baker-Martin looked up and down the curtain, and she saw the man trying to get the chair into the back of the car.He gripped the chair with his good hand and tried to push it up with his knee.The chair tipped over.He straightened it up, and with his fingers, wiped a spot where dirt from the parking lot had caught on the chintz. She came out. "Give me a hand." Her tone was on point—help and nothing else. "Are you willing to help? Thank you." The voice was strange, nervous and unnatural.Not a local accent. The floor lamp shone on his face from below, distorting his facial features, but she could still see his body clearly.He wore neatly pressed khaki trousers and a sort of chamois shirt that was unbuttoned and showed a freckled chest.His chin and cheeks are hairless, smooth like a woman's, and the two eyes above the cheekbones are just like two beans in the shadow of the lamp, emitting thin light.

He looked at her too, and she was sensitive about it.As long as she is close to men, men are often surprised by her huge figure, some just don't show it very much. "Good!" he said. The man smelled bad, and she noticed, to her disgust, that his chamois shirt still had curly hair on the shoulders and under the sleeves. Lifting the chair to the low floor of the car is not difficult. "Let's push it forward, shall we?" He climbed into the car and moved some debris, a large flat basin that can be pushed under the car to drain oil, and a small crank handle called a coffin utensil.

They pushed the chair straight forward to just behind the seat. "You must be fourteen?" he said. "what?" "Would you please pass me the rope? It's right at your feet." As she leaned over to look, he smashed the back of her head with a plaster cast.Thinking that her head had hit something, she raised a hand to block it, but the plaster clamp came down again, smashing her finger on the skull; again, this time behind the ear; One hit kept hitting, each hit was not too heavy, until she fell on the chair.She rolled onto the floor of the car and lay on her side.

The man studied her for a moment, then tore off the cast and sling.He quickly took the light into the car and closed the rear door. He tugged at her collar, reluctantly looking at the size tag on her blouse. "Good!" he said. He used a pair of bandage scissors to cut the shirt from the bottom up from the back, tore it off, and handcuffed her hands behind her back.He spread a mover's mat on the floor of the car and rolled her so that she lay on her back. She wasn't wearing a veil.He poked her big nipples with his fingers, and they felt heavy and elastic. "Good!" he said.

There is a pink sucking mark on her left breast.He rubbed the mark with his finger Tian Tian, ​​just like he wiped the stain on the calico; when the reddishness gradually faded under light pressure, he nodded, and he rolled her body again so that she lay on her stomach, I used my fingers to part her thick hair to check her scalp. The plaster clamp was filled with something and did not break her scalp. He felt for the pulse with two fingers on the side of her neck and found it strong. "Okay—!" he said.He still had a long drive to get back to his two-story house, and he'd rather not field her here.

Catherine, Baker.Martin's cat watched the car go away through the window, the tail lights getting closer and closer. Behind the cat, the phone is ringing.The machine in the bedroom answered the phone, and the red light on the machine flickered in the dark. The caller was Catherine's mother, a newly elected U.S. senator from Tennessee.