Little Miss Mute
Page 3
impossibly wide and bright with green, her running mascara and smeared powder lending an almost ghoulish quality to her otherwise gorgeous features. She was gasping for air and bug-eyed with alarm, but the way she kept her hands up at the ready and her eyes upon me with near-mistrust, I knew at a glance that she was one hell of a fighter. Delicate little dark flower that she appeared to be, I had to wonder just who’d really been winning the struggle before I’d interrupted them. She wasn’t crying. She wasn’t cowering in fear. She didn’t even really look scared or hurt, in spite of the blood coming from her lips. She was tough as nails, this broad, and suddenly I found myself wanting her in ways that went beyond a few minutes of horizontal dancing on my bed at home.
“You okay?” I asked her, giving her attacker a brief glance. If he was still alive, he must’ve grown gills, because he clearly didn’t have a problem with having his face buried in a deep puddle of muddy water.
Little Miss Mute hesitated for a moment, also looking over to her former assailant, and then nodded. I held a hand out to her with a smile.
“C’mon,” I said, “let’s go someplace a little less rough.”
I looked over to see Big Vin standing not far away from us. He had a rather surprised look upon his pudgy mug when he looked down and saw the crumpled leftovers of the second would-be hit man. I felt a twitch in my right hand and had to consciously stop myself from unconsciously reaching for Bertha under my coat. He didn’t seem to notice.
“You knew it was coming, Vin, didn’t you,” I said more than asked. He stared at me blankly, dumbly. “That’s sad. I never thought you were the type to sell a guy out.”
He shook his head too quickly, saying, “Honest, Paulie! I didn’t have no idea they was after you!” His voice never had quite matched his looks, sounding about two sizes too small for his ape-like frame.
I jerked a thumb towards Miss Mute. “You saying they were after her, then?”
“I didn’t say nothin’!” he insisted, holding up his beefy hands and shaking his head again. “I just knew these guys was out here. I didn’t know who they was looking for, honest!”
“They don’t pay you to keep an eye on the lot?”
“Nuh-uh. Just to make sure the wrong people don’t come in, that’s all,” Vin replied with a shrug.
He was a dumb old lug, that guy, but I couldn’t fault him. He followed orders better than most guys would have. If someone told him to do something, he did it; he wasn’t bright enough to think for himself, but he had enough marbles to know how to stick to the rules of the game we all played, so he made a perfect bit of muscle for the house. Sadly, if the guy had enough wit to think on the fly, he’d be the kind of chump that could actually put a fellow like me out of business, or at least make me work that much harder not to lose my place in the whole scheme of things.
I glanced around. “So, just these two, then?”
“Yeah. Just two.”
“If there were more, you’d tell me,” I said, looking him straight in the eye, “wouldn’t you, Vinnie?”
He gave that a firm nod. “Sure would, Mister Verconi.”
Guys like Big Vin only called me by my last name – my assumed last name, that is – when they felt like they might be in trouble. It was a way of acknowledging that one dog was bigger than the other. Sometimes, it wasn’t how big that one dog was, or how loud he could bark, but how mean of a bite he could give if you rubbed his fur the wrong way. I wasn’t a mad dog, just a scrappy one that did what he needed to get by. Part of that included masquerading around as an Italian from Chicago when the truth of it was that I’d been born to German parents in Kansas – not exactly something you’d want to shout from the rooftops in those days.
I took my coat off and laid it over the seat to help save the interior of the car from getting too nasty when Miss Mute sat in it. That coat was going to need a serious cleaning, though, because her whole backside was smeared all to hell with grass, bits of leaves, and that nasty clay Missouri mud. I’d use the money that I’d saved from the drinks that I never bought that night for the cleaner’s bill the next day. I gave her a clean handkerchief to clean herself up with a bit while I drove us away from there, trying to resist the urge to speed away in too much of an obvious rush on that messy back road.
“You hurt bad?” I asked her as she wiped at her pale, damp face.
She only glanced at me for a second before looking to the road again, shaking her head. Only paying as much attention to the road as I needed, I watched her carefully dab away the moisture from her pretty face for a few moments before laying the hanky in her lap. She peeled off her gloves, wiped a smear of blood from beside her lovely mouth, and then stared at her crimson-stained finger for just a moment. The crazy dame dipped that same slim finger in her mouth and closed her eyes, licking it clean like she’d just dipped it in ice cream.
I wasn’t sure if I was seeing things right in the darkness of that sedan, but watching her for a few seconds longer, I saw her do the same thing again and again. At first, I only raised an eyebrow when I saw her do that; when I saw her start wiping away the rest of the blood from her face and being a little bit less discreet about lapping it up, practically slurping blood from the palm of her own hand, the other eyebrow was up. She seemed completely oblivious to everything else as she did that, her eyes closed the same way I imagined she might have looked in the middle of a really good bedroom romp.
With her index finger stuck between her lips, sucking away that last bit of red like it was honey, she finally seemed to come to her senses. She opened her eyes, saw how I was staring at her, and suddenly tried to look more civilized by fussing with her hair. I’d seen more than enough, and she knew it. I had one seriously disturbed skirt on my hands here.
“Well, I guess I oughtta be taking you back to your place,” I said as we turned onto the main highway leading south to Kansas City. “You live downtown, right?”
She was shaking her head worriedly at that. Instead of trying to put her hair back up, she was taking it down all the way. Without her hat, which had apparently gotten lost during all of the night’s excitement, and without those little pins and such holding it all in place just so, she looked wild, strange … and somehow even more beautiful than before. That pitch-black hair of hers rolled all the way past her shoulders so far that I wondered just where it ended. The nails on the tips of her slender, delicate fingers were longer than any I’d seen before in quite awhile – not the hands of a working girl in any sense of the word, for sure.
“Not downtown? Okay, then,” I shrugged, “what side of the river you live on?”
She shook her head again, sending wet strands of inky, curly blackness in front of her eyes that she combed back with her fingers. She pointed one of those almost dangerously long fingernails at me.
“Me? What about me?” I thought about it for a second, and then I was the one shaking my head. “I don’t think so, missy. We just met awhile ago, and I almost got you killed. I’m taking you home.”
She was furrowing her brow into such a crease of worry and disagreement as she shook her head, she almost looked angry. She pointed to me, mimicked my driving with her hands, pointed to me again, and then made a steeple sort of gesture with her fingertips pressed together. I’m sure she meant to say, Take me to your place, but another part of me thought for some reason that she was saying, You should drive yourself to a church. Did the sins of my past really show that plainly on my face? Never mind, dumb question.
I let out a heavy sigh, examining my left hand in the backlit glow of my car’s headlamps as I told her, “Listen, lady. I dunno what kind of a fella’ you take me for, but I’m really not your kind of guy for that. I mean, don’t get me wrong, you’re one hell of a fine dish. But given the circumstances tonight, I don’t think we should be getting too tangled up with each other.”
That didn’t seem to sit well with her. She scooted right on over next to me on that bench seat, putting a hand on my shoulder and another on my elbow, squeezing bo
th. Again, she had one hell of a strong grip, especially for being such a frail-looking but dark little angel. Hell, even if she’d been a man, I would’ve been surprised at that kind of hand strength. She knew how to use it, enough to make damned sure that she had my full attention but not enough to really hurt … although I honestly wondered how much more it would have taken for her to leave bruises, especially since I wasn’t one to get marked up very easily.
“Take me home with you, or we will both die,” she practically whispered into my ear, barely audible over the droning of the car’s engine.
I was too surprised by her speaking for the first time to really grasp what she’d even said. Right away, my suspicions about her homeland were pretty much confirmed. She had a thick but velvety accent that gave her words almost a sort of purring sound, very Slavic, very Old World … more like Ancient World. Her voice was woman through and through, nothing girly or weak about her. She had as much strength in her voice, I knew just from those few words, as she did in her grip.
Face-to-face with her again, I could feel the warmth of her closeness to me, almost feverish in spite of the dampness that should have been chilling us both. I tried not to let the feel, the soft scent, or the spellbinding sight of her manage to overtake my