Genuine Gold by Ann Aptaker

Author:Ann Aptaker [Aptaker, Ann]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781626397316
Publisher: Bold Strokes Books
Published: 2016-12-20T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eleven

The door to the Shore Baths is locked, the big, arched windows with their pink and blue painted mermaid moldings boarded up for the winter. I’ve got my lock picks and could pick the lock, but there’s just enough passersby on the boardwalk to make that risky.

Around back, facing an alley that serves as a cemetery for dead tires, broken thrill-ride hardware, and faded old signs with peeling paint, the back door’s boarded up, too, the lock blocked, so I can’t get at it. But the workers weren’t so thorough in their hammering and nailing along back windows. A board across one window is just loose enough at a corner for me to pry off using a piece of the castoff hardware as a tool.

But the window’s locked from inside.

The quiet of the alley is shattered when I break the glass, the shards crashing onto the bathhouse floor with a brittle clatter. But Coney’s off-season is my salvation: there’s no one else in the alley to hear the noise, or see me reach inside, unlock the window, open it, and climb through.

Inside, I land in a back hallway that gets just enough light from the edge of the skylight for me to see my way to a door.

The door leads into a blue tiled room, bigger than your average bus station washroom, smaller than a high school gym. With its drains on the floor, and spigots and rubber hoses protruding from the walls, you might confuse it with a torture chamber, but it’s not. It’s a hosing room, where attendants hose you down with needle-sharp sprays of warm water, a therapy believed to invigorate the circulation. My pop was an enthusiast of these hose downs. I always knew when he’d had a shpritz. He was extra frisky with my mother when he came home.

I don’t bother looking into the drains; they’re small, too small to hide the pyxis, so I move on into other rooms. The drains are just as small in the hot bath pool and cold bath pool—the former tiled in fleshy pink, the latter tiled in aquamarine—so I don’t bother with them, either, though the swimming pool drains look promising. I hear my own breathing, deep and anxious, echoing around the cavernous blue and white tiled room and the empty pool as I unscrew the drain covers with my penknife, but the effort yields nothing.

A place I’d never find it, Mickey bragged. So far, he’s right. But these were only just-in-case searches before heading for the place his loose lips let slip. So I forget about searching the men’s and women’s steam rooms and what the country club crowd would call a sauna, but the Coney denizens just call dry heat. And I breeze past the kitchen, where beer and sandwiches are served up in summer to a bathing-suited clientele on a boardwalk patio. I’m headed to the last private place Sig allowed the joint’s previous owner: the men’s locker room.

Rows and rows of lockers face

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