The DeLacey Doily is owned by my husband’s stone-faced father, along with most of the rest of the town. Hollis, my quarterback gone-to-flab husband should be in charge of running some of those businesses by now. Heaven knows he’s old enough and his father says as much pretty often. But Hollis is not a man you would trust with a business.
Truth is, you wouldn’t be wise to trust him with much of anything. Not your sister, certainly not your daughter. If you left him around any kids at all the best you could hope for would be that he’d only sell them soft drugs.
He treats all property as though it were his own and he’d already grown tired of it. Hollis Cullen was the cause of pain, destruction and damage all over town. Time after time I’ve seen his father’s sad eyes narrow as his head shakes and he says, “How can he have turned out this way?”
“Well, shucks, Mr Cullen, I wonder.” I actually said that to him one time, but he either thought I was being serious or more likely he just wasn’t listening. They have a few things in common, the father and son. Never listening to a word anyone tells them is one.
There could be some things I don’t know about, too. Hoagie Cullen’s wife died in childbirth. When you see the size of Hollis it’s maybe not too surprising. Hoagie thinks it’s a blessing, “At least she never saw the waste of milk and water her wretch of a son turned out to be.”
That man did not know the half of it. At least so I strongly suspected. So when the ladies of the town lean their heads to one side, flash their eyelids and say, “Courtenay, I so envy you your picture-perfect life,” I just think, If you spent one night in my shoes, you’d have a sight more appreciation for your own life. Maybe you’d find some compassion for mine, too.
People assume that we roll in the Cullen billions. Of course they do. We live in The Manse, a five-story Georgian house that Hoagie built for his son’s wedding gift.
They hadn’t heard Hoagie tell his son on his wedding night, “The deed stays in my name. You show some responsibility and I’ll let you have money and all the things that you can take care of. Until then, you get your allowance, same as always.”
The ladies whose eyes gleam with a greenish fire as they watch me, I can see them thinking about how they would love to have my life. There’s no easy way I could tell them how they would hate it, how the first hour after dark they’d be out and running.
The funny part about it is, some of the most degrading, humiliating awful things I’ve had to endure, I would have been fantasizing about those very things before my father gave me to Hollis. They were things that I wanted back then, or thought I did. But not the way Hollis wanted them.
If Hollis was at a picnic, he would turn the butter rancid. It makes me weep to think how I had looked forward to my wedding night. All the dreams and plans that I had. He spent most of that night with the bridesmaids he’d invited. Three girls who worked in the brothel on the edge of town.
When he finally came up, he wanted the worst things I’d ever heard of and when he didn’t have the stamina to finish what he started he slapped me and told me I was useless and how much better the ‘girls downstairs’ were.
In those early days I was confused and, I guess, a little naive. Once I told him, “What is wrong with you? You’re only the second wealthiest man in town.”
“Wealthy? I have nothing. Noth-ing,” he yelled, “My father is wealthy, oh yeah. Everybody knows what a great man my father is. He keeps me on a tight chain. I have nothing.”
“You have me.”
“What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”
I won’t say what he did next. It hurts to think about it, so I don’t if I can help it.
Chapter Eight
I DON'T DRINK during the day. Come to that, I hardly drink at all, but now I had a powerful need for a shot of whiskey. My mouth craved the smoky taste and the smoldering fire, and my throat longed for the rasp. Shows how little I do drink, I looked in the cabinet in the lounge and a cupboard in the kitchen and didn't find anything.
After I searched the kitchen, the bedroom and the office, in the end I had to brave the stinking pit that Hollis called his ‘den’ before I found a bottle of Jack Daniels. It was on a shelf, half obscured by a smelly vest of Hollis's and the top was half off. No surprise that it was more than three quarters empty.
It was probably only because what was left in the bottle had been hidden behind the grayed and overripe shirt that there was anything in there at all. My instinct, the urge, was to take a swig right from the neck of the bottle.
Turned out, though, Hollis hadn't completely driven out my ingrained need for some basic hygiene so I held the neck of the bottle to take it up to the kitchen. I wasn't wondering what was happening with Hollis, although when I noticed that I wasn't wondering, my head shook and I quickened the next couple of steps to the kitchen.
I washed and rubbed the neck and the lip of the bottle hard with a wet microfiber cloth, then dried it quite vigorously, then I washed it again. I got a tumbler from the glass cabinet. I washed that, too, although it seemed perfectly clean.
The amber liquor glowed like liquid fire in the glass and it felt like fire in my throat. As it burned and lit its way down, my mouth craved more so I poured another shot. The second gulp was better. The third was the charm.
At the back of my mind was the idea that my whole life had changed and would never be the same again. That was how I felt when my mom told me what a good match I would make for Hollis and how happy we were all going to be.
Back then I even thought it might be true. That Hollis and I were going to have some fairy tale life. Even though I had seen what a selfish, brutal louse he was in high school, I somehow still had the idea that marriage would be a magical spell and he would settle down and we'd have lots of lovely children. I couldn't bear the memory.
There was only a splash left in the bottle. It went down my throat like a stolen kiss, all too quick and fading fast.
Liam knocked at the door then.
Chapter Nine
LIAM AND DECLAN had left less than five minutes before. Declan drove and Liam sat in the back of the car with the bag and the counting machine. They hadn’t got as far as Main Street when Liam said, “It’s short. There’s a hundred and fifty instead of two fifty.”
Declan’s voice was raw. “On the first half?” He banged the steering wheel as he stopped the car, “Did someone spray him with stupid gas?”
Liam opened the door and said, “I’ll walk back.”
There was a procedure for these things. A protocol, an established practice. A big pickup rushed by as Declan set off to meet with the target.
When he crunched back up the drive, it was a surprise to Liam to see Courtenay open the door flushed and loose. More than anything she looked like a woman who was exhausted, worn down and in urgent need of some flowers, some new clothes and a night’s dancing.
“He’s gone out.” Was all she said. They she opened the door and stood aside. For a fleeting moment, Liam wondered if this was the housewife’s moment of surrender. The sweetly guilty guiltless invitation.
But, no. Courtenay Cullen may have wanted, wished that she could take a casual lover, but she was not at all that kind of a woman. He’d seen enough of them to know. Mrs Cullen was different.
“Would you know where he’s gone?” Liam asked her as he stepped inside.
Her pretty hair bobbed as her head shook. “He doesn’t tell me anything.”
“Would it trouble you if I waited a while? Just in case he comes back?”
“You need to see him again.” It wasn’t a question but Liam nodded.
She asked Liam if he’d tried Hollis’s cell. “Straight to voicemail.” Her arm moved, like she was ready to reach for her own cellphone. Then she stopped, thinking about when Declan had told her to use the house phone. Matter of factly she said, “He doesn’t want to see you, does he.”
Liam’s head shook once. “That’s why he left in such a hurry.” She said, “Because he knew you�
�d be coming back.”
She could see a dark cloud on the horizon. A shadow on the landscape, moving near. But surely they were both thinking the same thing. This is where he lives. Where’s he going to go?
She said, “He must have gone out to get something.” Liam nodded slowly. “That’ll be it.”
Then they must both have thought some about what Hollis might have gone to get. Mainly, though, Liam was thinking, What ridiculous distortion of fate can have given this beautiful woman who’s delicious as well as smart and loyal, to that slug of a man?
Her voice was steady as she told him, “Once I found a stray kitten at the back of the house.” She took Liam back into the lounge and motioned for him to sit on the couch. Smoothing her skirt beneath her she sat on the chair facing him. “Naturally enough I gave the kitten some milk, took her in and fed her. Set a blankie by the fireside. She prefered to sit in my lap and nuzzle me while I read. For the first and only day after my marriage, I felt I had a friend.”
She looked into her lap, “As soon as he got home, Hollis pulled her off me, carried her by her neck to the kitchen, filled the sink and drowned her. Laughed while he did it. That night he was even more brutal and disgusting with me than usual. And he kept on laughing. I almost wished that he’d drowned me instead.”
Chapter Ten
SITTING IN THE lounge with Liam, I felt like I was in a strange place, somewhere I’d never been before. Still the house and my situation weighed me down, though. I wished I could have shrugged off the conventions, stepped out of the rules, but I couldn’t, it wasn’t me. And there it was.
What I remember most vividly was the absolute certainty that Liam felt it and understood. I could see that his mind had ventured up the same alley that mine had considered, but that he saw my need for convention and, even though I hated it, he respected it. He respected me for it, too, I thought.
The most vivid sensation was the certainty that my life was on a tipping point. Invisible wheels turned like the tumblers in a complicated lock. When they stopped, everything would shift.
Chapter Eleven
DECLAN ARRIVED BACK. With him, he brought Hollis, who looked very sorry for himself.
“You see, Hollis,” he was saying as he led him back into the lounge. “We’ve a rule for this particular situation.”
Liam stood, growling. “You’d be fucking surprised at how often it comes up.”
“One way or another.” Declan took the other chair.
Hollis slouched, pouting like a sullen teenager. He breathed slowly.
Declan’s voice was thin. “A client thinks to himself, ‘These men are outside the law. What recourse have they got if I just edge the deal back my way a little bit?’ I suppose it could be an easy mistake for someone to make.”
“So, er…” sounding theatrically bored, Hollis said, “What’s this rule?”
Liam turned his face to Hollis’s, “Oh, you mean the rule for when the client tries to stiff us, Hollis?”
“We go to the target.” Declan told him. That got Hollis’s attention. He sat right up. “We tell him the situation, ask if he’d like us to do the client.”
“For the same price.”
Hollis sat back “Oh. Well, that’s a relief.”
Declan asked him, “Why do you say that, Hollis?”
“Gareth couldn’t afford you. If he could pay your bill then he would have paid mine.”
Quietly, Declan said, “You could be mistaken about that, Hollis.”
“Why the fuck didn’t he pay me then?”
“I did ask him that. I asked him particularly.” Declan looked in Hollis’s eye, “He said it was because you’re a cunt, Hollis. It came as a bit of a shock to him that you’d taken out a contract on him, seeing as how you’d cheated him anyway. As he would have it.”
Hollis was quiet. Declan said, “What he told me was, ‘I knew he was a cunt, but I never really thought that he was that much of a cunt.’ Those were his words, Hollis.”
“Well, he’s going to regret that.”
Declan’s eyebrow raised. “You really think so?”
Liam said, “On balance, Hollis, I think that I could be inclined to agree with Gareth.”
Confidently, Hollis asked Declan, “Well, he didn’t offer you the price of a hit, right?”
“Ah, no,” Declan made a soft smile, “But there’s something we probably ought to confess to you there, Hollis.”
Liam said, “Yes, the old, ‘We’ll do the client for the same price that he paid for us to do you,’ thing? It’s a con, really.”
“Yeah, it’s just a jape.”
Hollis leaned forwards, “You wouldn’t really do it?”
Liam and Declan both laughed. I almost laughed with them. My lips pressed between my teeth and I kept my face still, but I saw what was coming and I couldn’t believe that Hollis didn’t.
I watched him, like I was truly seeing him for the first time as Liam said, “Oh, we’d have no trouble about doing it.”
“There’s no doubt about it.” Declan nodded.
“No, the little dishonesty is about the price.”
Hollis frowned, “Why?”
Declan leaned forward and dropped his voice to a soft, confidential tone, told him with a twinkle, “Because we’ll do it anyway, whether the target pays us or not.”
Liam stood and looked down at Hollis. “Yeah. The main reason we ask the target for money is that then, when the client disappears, the target usually acts all furtive and then he quite often makes people suspicious.”
“Runs away or something.” Said Declan.
Liam paced around the room. “Gets the idea that the cops will pin it on him.”
“And so,” Declan held Hollis’s eye, “Unwittingly he’ll often as not pin it on himself.”
“And, keep in mind,” Liam moved to stand behind Hollis’s chair. “Since we already know that the client is the kind of an idiot that will try and stiff a contract killer, invariably he’s also just the type of a fool to have gone blabbing to all his drinking buddies that he’s taken out a contract on old so-and-so.” Hollis’s face reddened, “And that puts old so-and-so, Gareth in this case, right in the frame.”
Declan laughed gently, “You’d be surprised how well it often works.”
“We’re always very keen to see that crimes get solved.”
“Ours in particular. We like it when they’re tied up all neat. Put away, filed and forgotten.”
“Do you think that we’re bad people for that, Hollis?”
“Oh, No.” Hollis said quickly, “No, not at all.”
“Do you not?” Declan leaned towards him, “Well, we fucking are, Hollis.”
Liam held the back of Hollis’s chair. “Yup. That’s the thing about us that I think you’ve completely failed to take account of all along, Hollis. We really are bad motherfuckers.”
“And he doesn’t mean that in a nice way, Hollis.”
Hollis’s face was flushed. “Okay, look, I’ll pay you double.”
“Oh, you will? That’s nice. Isn’t that nice, Declan?”
“Would you have the money on you, Hollis?”
“It’s no problem at all, I just have to go and get it.”
“Ah.” Said Declan.
“Shame.” Said Liam.
“I can get it from the bank this afternoon.”
“Yes.” Liam shook his head.
“No.” Declan stood. “No. You see, Hollis, there are some people, if they feel like they’re in a bit of a tight spot, they’ll be thinking of ways to slip off.”
“Really.” Hollis tried to laugh. “Come with me to the bank. I’ll get you the money right now.”
Liam leaned on the back of the chair so that it tipped back. The front feet came about a half inch off the floor. “If only.”
“See, that would be fine,” Declan told him, “Except that we know that you’re a lying, cheating scumbag.”
“A cunt, as your man says.”
“But look at
it this way, it wouldn’t make any difference.”
Hollis’s voice was strained, “What do you mean?”
“Right enough,” Declan said, “We’d love to take your money.”
“But,” Liam said sadly, “It wouldn’t change the outcome.”
Chapter Twelve
DECLAN AND LIAM stood on either side of Hollis and got him to his feet. They practically had to lift him. Declan said to me, “Anything you want to say to him?”
Two Hitmen: A Double Bad Boy Mafia Romance (Lawless Book 1) Page 4