Subject Seven

Chapter Eight
Tina Carlotti

It was late September and Tina Carlotti was shivering as she woke up. She knew something was wrong immediately because there was something drying on her skin that left her feeling like she’d been rolled in glue.

She opened her eyes and frowned, trying to identify anything around her. There were sheets of plywood, old and warped, where her bedroom walls should have been.

Of course, she hadn’t been in her bedroom in a couple of days. Mr. Sizemore, the landlord, had locked the doors and changed the locks after her mom went off on another bender. She tried not to think about that. Her mom was a good woman, but now and then she was weak. When she gave in to temptation, everything else stopped mattering.

Temptation these days was heroin. Great stuff to make the world look prettier, no matter how shitty your life was, at least according to Mom.

There’d been a time when the family was in good shape. Her dad was a made man, in the mob and doing well. They should have been good; even after he disappeared, they were taken care of, but it didn’t last. She remembered her mom crying after a couple of old Italian men came to visit them in their house. A much nicer house in a different place, thank you. And Mom told her Daddy wasn’t coming back. She remembered it, but just barely.

She didn’t know the details. When she tried asking, Mom used her fists. So she learned not to ask. Really a no-brainer, that one.

Mom did something wrong. Something stupid. Another place where she didn’t know all the details, she just knew that it was the sort of screwup the big boys didn’t approve of.

Now? Now the future wasn’t looking all that sunny and Mom did anything and everything for another fix.

Tina didn’t like to think about that. She liked to think about her mother at home and being, well, her mom.

Still, none of that changed the fact that she was sitting in a place that was completely unfamiliar to her, in near darkness. She could see some light coming from beyond the boards that covered the windows. Enough to let her know it was the daytime, at least. That was something.

Tina stood up and immediately let out a squeal. It wasn’t until she really moved that she realized she was naked. The sound of her outcry echoed off distant walls. It was the only sound she heard, except for the angry squeak of a rodent she’d startled. The rat didn’t bother her. Vermin had been a part of her world for years.

She looked around more carefully, awake now and frightened. She’d never been fast at waking up and never really thought about it as a disadvantage, but now she was feeling differently.

No one was around to look at her in the nude, so she decided to keep it that way. She scanned the oversized bags of trash around her and started sorting through them for something to wear.

Nothing! The first three bags were absolutely useless, revealing nothing but torn papers and leftover wreckage. Whatever they were doing to the building around her, it looked like most of it was destruction, not construction.

She found a duffel bag a little deeper in the debris and figured out that was where she’d apparently been sleeping. A look at the pattern on her leg told her it matched the texture of the military green material. Inside she found clothes. They were too big, but with a little work she managed to make them fit. There was a men’s shirt that looked like it was made for a giant and a pair of baggy painter’s-style jeans that worked if she held them in place.

The sticky stuff on her skin was irritating, but she could wait until later to get to that. Right now she had to figure out where she was and try to get home. Her mom would be worried- Yeah, if she’s even woken up yet -if she didn’t get back soon.

When she was done dressing, she pulled the duffel bag with her. It was heavier than she expected, but she hoped maybe she could find some shoes to go with the clothing.

She pushed and pulled at the duffel bag until she got outside and then, winded, she sat on the package for a few minutes to catch her breath.

The day was bright but hazy, with a lot of glare from up above but no sign of the actual sun. Her stomach rumbled at her and she did her best to ignore it. She’d lived her entire life in Camden, New Jersey, which was not a place known for having a lot of extra food lying around.

Camden was a slum, pure and simple. She knew people who went out of their way to avoid Camden, like it was a bathroom with a broken toilet or something. She couldn’t really blame them. Most of the people she knew who lived there wanted to get out as fast as they could, before the drug dealers or someone even worse got to them. She tried not to dwell on that part of her world, but it was there just the same. It was always there, like an anchor trying to drag her down. She hated the city almost as much as she hated having to live there.

No. Food wasn’t really that big a deal. She’d gone hungry before.

Tina looked down at her hands. Underneath the rusty gunk that covered them, they were thin and delicate. Most of her was that way. Not eating much had given her a body that looked like it belonged to a twelve-year-old, which wasn’t so bad, back when she was twelve. At fifteen, she figured she should have been developing bigger boobs by now.

She tried not to let it get to her. One more thing on a long list of complaints that she couldn’t do a thing about, not really.

She looked at the stuff on her hands and frowned. Whatever it was, it coated her like a thin layer of paint, but it was flaking away now. She tried wiping it off on the jeans, but the stuff liked to stick a bit.

She brought her fingers up and sniffed at them and immediately pulled them back. The odor wasn’t that bad, not really, but it was strong, and she recognized it.

“Blood. I’m covered in blood.” Her skin slipped into a thick wave of gooseflesh.

She was pretty sure it wasn’t hers, but that didn’t do too much to make her feel better. It wasn’t a little blood, not like from a busted nose-Mommy hits when she’s in a mood-or even from a big scrape like she got along her leg once when she was a kid and a car hit her.

No, this was a lot of blood, like enough to fill a person.

Tina’s skin crawled again at the thought. She bit her lip to stop herself from panicking. Panic too much and people think you’re easy prey. People think that way about you in Camden, and you don’t live long. That was a lesson she learned a long time ago and one she never intended to forget. You couldn’t be a coward if you wanted to survive in her hometown.

So, she was covered in blood. But at least it wasn’t hers. That was a bonus.

On the other hand, she could be in serious trouble if she didn’t figure out who the blood belonged to, and the last thing she could remember was partying with Tony Parmiatto after he offered to give her a lift.

Tony was the real deal, one of the guys who actually made money in Camden, dealing the sort of stuff no one ever wants to think about and smart enough not to get hooked on it. He was handsome, rich and fun to be around. He had a great smile, and his jokes always made her laugh, and okay, so he was a few years older than she was, but that wasn’t so bad.

He was also her ticket out of Camden. Maybe she could never be a Mafioso, not in the truest sense because, hello, female, but if she got in good with Tony, she could be connected to the Family in the right way. She could learn from her mom’s mistakes and do things differently. She could get work, could make enough scratch to get the hell out of Camden and never once look back.

That was the plan, right up until he tried to slip his hand up her shirt.

It wasn’t that she didn’t like him, because she did. It was that she wanted him to like her, and not in the way that meant he called her when he was horny. She wanted him to like her enough to introduce her to his friends, to his bosses. He’d have to work for it before he got anywhere beyond a little snuggling.

Tina shivered again. They’d been arguing about something, she remembered that much. She closed her eyes to try to focus on the last discussion they had and she could remember Tony laughing, a nasty, mean sound, and smiling, but it wasn’t a nasty smile, it was just, it was just Tony being Tony. She was angry about something, but she couldn’t make her mind get past the noise that came out of nowhere deep inside her head, a sound loud enough to make her want to scream WAKE UP!

– like an explosion going off, and that was all she could remember. After that there was waking up a few minutes ago.

“What if I did something to Tony?” She spoke the words softly, afraid that saying them out loud would make them a reality.

She had to bite her lip again to stop the panic. Tony was made. He was connected. Throw a hundred other Mafia cliches out there and he was those too. He was second or third in line for the local mob guys and that meant if she’d done something to Tony, his friends would be after her to do something back.

Now and then a body showed up in the Delaware River. At least twice she watched them get fished out by the cops.

She stood up from her makeshift seat and looked around. There was a big space of parking lot in front of her, but the entire shopping center she was in looked like it hadn’t seen a person in months. A weathered sign faced the highway a few yards off. It read PENNSAUKEN MART and over that, someone had placed several yellow signs that stated it was marked for demolition.

Pennsauken? That was miles from Camden! How had she gotten here?

She shook her head and dug into the duffel bag, hoping for shoes a second time. It was going to be very, very hard to walk back home without a good pair of shoes.

There was a pair of sandals that looked almost new. They were three sizes too big, but she didn’t much care. Tina fished them out of the bag and dropped them on the ground ready to slide her feet into them. Then she froze and stared back into the bag.

She stared hard, barely even breathing, and then hastily closed the zipper. Then she opened it again. Closed it, looked around and finally inspected the contents a little better.

Money. A lot of money. Most of the bundles of bills she could see looked like hundreds and twenties. Her ears were ringing and her heart felt like it was about to break a few ribs.

She sat down hard on the warm concrete walkway to the interior of the abandoned shopping center.

“Oh, damn. What did I do?”

It was hard to swallow.

“What the hell did I do?”

No one answered her. No one. She was all alone.