“Now why would you do something like that?”
He laughed. “She wants to meet you, Rock, because you’re my good friend, isn’t that how these things work?”
I didn’t think it actually was how these things usually worked, and to support my side of a dispute on that point I could turn to any other guy there and ask them if they ever thought about bringing their wives or girlfriends around. The answer would have been no, because this was the kind of place men came to behave like men, which was to say they behaved here in ways that made you wonder how the species ever managed to reproduce.
“Sure, sure,” I said, “of course, bring her by. I’d be happy to meet her.”
“Good, cuz it’s already set. She’s gonna be here Saturday. It’ll be a blast. Don’t worry, Rock, I know what you’re thinking, but she can handle herself. Oh, and before I forget: all that stuff about… you know?” He leaned over the bar to whisper: “The atomic stuff.”
“Yeah, I was about to ask you about that. How’s things?”
“You had best not ask me any more.”
“So it’s not going well?”
He got a little red in the face, which was a peculiar reaction. “No, it’s going… We can’t talk about it, you and me. Not any more. Look, Rock, I know I can trust you, okay? But some guys got in a little trouble for saying too much to the wrong people about… all of that. And now, I mean right now, it’s becoming kind of a big deal. A couple of fellas came by the other day, made me sign a bunch of papers.”
“Are you in some kind of trouble?”
“Me? No, no, no trouble.” The way he said it made me think the exact opposite was true. “I just have to… I mean, now that we… Aw hell.” He grabbed my hands and squeezed them tightly, like we were about to get engaged or something. “I can’t talk about it Rocky, but things have changed, you get me? You can’t tell anybody about this stuff.”
I nodded. “I’ll keep a lid on it, Al, don’t worry.”
“I know you will,” he said, releasing my hands and clapping me on the shoulder. “You’re a straight-up guy.”
“I try to be. So who were the guys?”
“The guys?”
“The ones with the papers you had to sign.”
“Oh them. Don’t worry about it. They won’t bother you. Don’t even know about you.”
I did worry. Worry seemed like an extremely healthy reaction.
Maybe it was more than worry. That’s the kind of word you hear when a concern is unfounded, and this felt like the kind of concern based on reliable historical precedent. Specifically, when I felt like this I was usually right, and that thing—call it an instinct, I guess—has kept me alive for a really long time.
I knew something was wrong, is my point. I wanted to know what those papers were for and who made Al sign them and what would have happened to him if he hadn’t signed them. Then I wondered when men with papers were going to show up for me, and exactly how much trouble that was going to be for me when it happened, and if I should leave town before it came to that. But Al wasn’t talking about anything other than his Lu-Lu after that, so I couldn’t press him. Instead, I drank a lot of alcohol, which was another thing that’s kept me alive this long.
Then came Saturday.
Al showed up at the bar at his usual time, took his usual seat and had his usual beer, and acted like nothing special, so I was thinking the whole thing was off. I was a little relieved about that, but I couldn’t have told you why.
It wasn’t until he was in his third beer, sometime past eleven o’clock, that Lucy breezed in and instantly confounded my expectations regarding what a woman who would date Al would look like.
She was a knockout all right.
Lucy had long, straight red hair under a sporty fedora, a sharp skirt suit with a hemline that didn’t make it past her knee and a slit that, if you were looking for it, you’d be alarmed to discover went more than halfway up the thigh. She had on three-inch heels that managed to look practical and a little whorish at the same time. Her round face seemed to have been constructed specifically to draw attention to a cat-like pair of emerald green eyes and an adorable button nose.
It was like seeing a unicorn in a dog kennel, because this was more than just a pretty girl. People who had no business doing so would write poetry for this kind of woman. Men would leave their wives for her, and if she asked nicely, wives might leave their men for her too. She could start wars and wreck ships and end careers just by smiling at the right people. She was trouble. I knew right away what kind of trouble.
* * *
Succubi get a bad rap.
We live in a world where people who don’t know better call things “demon”. It’s annoying because there really are demons, but they don’t look like succubi or incubi or vampires or anything else. They look like demons, which is to say they’re big and ugly and violent, and also not actually associated with any hypothetical hell you might ascribe to.
These are all just different species, and it’s really simple, and if mankind would just get past the idea of magic (and maybe of heaven and hell but to each his own) they would get along better with the other things they happen to share the world with.
So here’s the truth. Your average succubus loves sex, but not as much as they love being adored. In that sense they’re like any of us, except that succubi are really good at both—the sex and the being adored—to a degree that might seem supernatural.
If you spend enough time with a succubus who finds you interesting, you’re going to be ready to give up everything else you’ve got going on in order to spend as much time as you possibly can with her, and that might seem like a spell or something, but there’s nothing demonic or magical about it. It’s an obsession, and it can get unhealthy, but that’s all.
I should know. I’ve probably spent more time with this species than any man who ever lived, and while I have certainly been tempted to give up everything for one or two of them, I never did, and I was always ready to walk away if I had to.
Sure, it helps to be immortal; I can outlive a succubus if one turns out to be too tough to walk away from. Succubi have a longer lifespan than humans, and they tend to look about twenty-five for somewhere in the neighborhood of seventy-five years, so outliving them does involve a commitment, but it can be done.
* * *
“Evening, boys!” Lucy announced from the threshold. “How ‘bout letting a girl through?”
Being a Saturday night, the place was pretty packed. Not jammed by the standards of any of the big bars and clubs downtown, but well occupied for the dive it was. I counted three other women in the place when she walked in—one of them was a hefty dame who worked the docks, had a girlfriend of her own, and nobody actually thought of as a woman—but when Lucy showed up it felt we were looking at a girl for the first time in our lives.
“Hey sweetheart, you sure you’re in the right place?” asked the guy nearest the door. I didn’t know him by name, but he looked like the kind of customer you didn’t want to meet in a dark place.
“Ain’t you sweet for askin’?” she said with a glorious smile, touching his cheek. “I’m lookin’ for a little guy, kinda bookish, glasses, goes by Al. You seen ‘im?”
“Over here, Lu-Lu,” Al said. He leaned up on the edge of the bar and waved her over, while the patrons between him and the door tried to come to grips with the unlikeliness of this couple.
“Yeah, there he is,” the man at the door said, pointing. “Hey! Make way for the lady!”
“Thanks, sweetie,” she said. I’m pretty sure he blushed, but it was tough to tell with the lighting.
Al grabbed my arm. “Hey, Rock, didn’t I say? She’s something, huh?”
“That’s how I’d put it, buddy. Something else, all right.”
A space was made for her at the bar next to Al once Vinnie stepped aside, with something approaching reverence in his eyes. Lucy waltzed down the middle of the parted room looking like royalty walking through the co
urtyard in Versailles, and somehow everyone in this crappy little hole felt like they were in that French court with her. You’d think a girl who looked like that would feel threatened in a place like this, but nobody dared touch nobility without asking.
When she reached Al she kissed him on the check, and held her hand out to me.
“You must be Rocky,” she said. I shook her hand.
“That’s what they call me.”
“Pleasure. Heard a lot.”
“Me too. Looks like Al might’ve done you a disservice.”
Al said, “Hey!”
“You need a bigger vocabulary to go with that big brain,” I said. “Lots of girls are beautiful. You’re gonna have to find a better word than that.”
“Awww, you’re a charmer. You didn’t tell me he was a charmer, Al.”
“I didn’t know he was!”
“I’d kill for a beer, Rocky baby,” she said. “And hey, can anybody offer the lady a smoke?”
* * *
Lucy picked up three marriage proposals—one from someone I was pretty sure was already married—and started two fights I had to break up personally, since I was the only guy there who was technically an on-duty employee. (There were other bartenders. Most nights the only way to tell which of us was working was to see who was standing behind the bar.) She also never went more than two seconds without a beer in front of her, a cigarette, or a light for that cigarette. When she had to excuse herself to freshen up in the ladies room I think a couple of fellas ran in ahead of her and cleaned the place.
The attention his girl was getting didn’t bother Al in the least. He seemed flattered by the idea that of all the mooks there, this hot little number was on his arm. He also didn’t mind that for all the attention she was getting and giving out, the thing she was most interested in doing was talking to me.
“So no last name?” she asked at one point. “Just Rocky.”
“Never had much care for last names,” I said, although the truth was I never gave “Rocky” one. It took a while before I got around to picking full names for myself.
“Everyone’s got one,” she insisted.
“Yeah? What’s yours?”
“Mine’s Smith. Lucy Smith.”
“Smith. Popular name.”
“Oh yeah. I come from a long line of Smiths.”
“I’m sure you do.” I didn’t think she came from a long line of anything with a family connection.
“Big burly craftsmen, like these fellas here. Liked to get their hands dirty. Do you like to get your hands dirty, Rocky?”
“Depends on the work,” I said. “And who I’m doing it for.”
She winked at me, as if we’d shared a secret. We hadn’t, so far as I knew, but maybe she was coming to an understanding about me that wasn’t entirely warranted, all by herself. People make assumptions about me all the time that are only wrong because they don’t have been alive forever as one of their options.
Or maybe we had shared something and I missed it. I’d been sipping the cheap vodka straight from the bottle all night, which nobody much minded since nobody else was going to touch the vodka anyway. (We mostly used it to stretch the bourbon.) This made it a little hard to keep my head around Lucy, since every wink and smile and gentle touch of her hand on my wrist made me want to giggle stupidly. Knowing what she was helped me keep my head a little, but only a little, because as long as I knew that I also knew she was only as monogamous as the situation warranted.
When she wasn’t talking to me she was chatting up all the other regulars, which was a distraction all its own since when she and I weren’t talking I felt something like jealousy. I tried to get close enough to figure out what she was saying to the other guys, but it was too tough because after all I was working. I only picked up a word or two. She seemed really interested in what everyone did for a living and what their full names were, two details that only seemed weird to ask for after the fact.
Closing down the bar that night was tough. I wasn’t allowed to keep the place open all night, but if I had been we probably could have gone on until sunrise so long as Lucy and Al stuck around for it. They might have been up for that too, as they were the last ones to leave.
“Gotta take my sweetie home, Rock,” Al said as I walked them to the door.
“It was a pleasure, Rocky,” Lucy said, extending her hand. That my first instinct was to bow and kiss her wrist was something I kept to myself. “I hope we meet again soon.”
“Bring her back, Al,” I said. “I’m sure the gang would love it.”
Al laughed. “Oh, I’m sure. But I think maybe you were right. She belongs in a higher class place, huh? I’ve got to treat her right.”
He led her out. As she walked past me I could have sworn I caught another wink.
* * *
Cleaning the bar was a couple of hours’ worth of work, and I spent all of it thinking about Lucy, and those men that turned up with papers for Al to sign.
It seemed to me if he was in some kind of trouble for saying too much to someone, the first person I’d check on would be the much-too-attractive girlfriend who could convince men to walk into traffic for her. That should have been good news for the bartender he’d sworn to secrecy, because I’m not nearly as persuasive.
Somehow, thinking about it like that didn’t make me feel any better. If anything, meeting Lucy had me even more worried. I just couldn’t figure out why.
Cleaning the bar mainly involved rinsing the glassware and getting the trash out to the dumpster in back. I could have swept and wiped down all the tables but nobody much cared if I bothered. The place was covered in a thick layer of nicotine from the constant cloud of cigarette smoke lingering in the air just below the ceiling, and had reached some sort of irreversible unsanitary threshold long before I’d started working there. Nothing I did was going to change that. So when I was finished with the basic picking-up and scrubbing, and after coming to no firm conclusions regarding my friend’s girl, I put out the lights and headed in back to clean myself up and call it a night.
A couple of minutes later, just as I was about ready to retire to the cot in the corner of the storage room, I got the sense I was not entirely alone.
I popped my head out into the bar again, and looked around. It was darker than during business hours, but one light near the door was always left on.
“Hello?” I asked. “Anybody there?”
“Hiya, Rocky.”
Lucy had taken up the darkest corner of the barroom, but I didn’t need to see her to know who I was talking to. I’d say it was the perfume, or the tenor of her voice, and that could’ve been true, but I think I was sort of expecting her.
“Evening, Lucy. Little late for you, isn’t it?” I walked out and stepped behind the bar. A match lit up her corner of the place, shining a little light on a beautiful pair of legs and a taller set of heels than she’d been wearing earlier. She sucked her cigarette to life.
“By now I’d say it’s a little early.”
“True enough. How’d you get in, if you don’t mind my asking? Seeing as how you’re trespassing right now.”
“Would you believe the door was unlocked?”
“I’m the fella that locked it, so no.”
“Then you did a lousy job. Buy a girl a drink?”
I pulled out a bottle I’d been hiding under the counter. It was a top shelf whiskey that was so top shelf the shelf it belonged on was in a different bar. I put out two shot glasses.
Lucy unraveled her legs and walked over, from no lighting to poor lighting.
The heels were four inches. The legs were without stockings. She had on a trench coat that stopped somewhere north of mid-calf, belted at the waist. And it was really tough to tell for sure because the light only touched her in quick flashes, but I was pretty positive she didn’t have on anything under the coat.
She was all kinds of dangerous. I should have turned around and run out the back door. Instead, I poured two shots.
; “You don’t seem surprised to see me,” she said.
“I’m good at spotting trouble, sweetheart,” I said with all the bravado I could muster. By the way, we really did talk like this back then.
She held the shot glass up in the light to examine the amber contents. “Is that what I am, Rocky?”
I took the second glass, and together we downed our shots.
“All sorts of trouble,” I said, as the whiskey burned its way down my throat.
She put down her glass. “Ooh, tickles. You saved me the good stuff. Hope I didn’t keep you waiting too long.”
“I’ve been waiting for someone like you for years,” I said. It was a good line, I thought. I refilled the glasses. “Now you’re here and I’m not sure if I should be sticking around or running away as fast as I can.”
She pouted. “Please don’t run, it is so hard to keep up in these shoes.”
I stepped around the bar, which wasn’t much work since we were at the corner of it anyway. Standing next to her, we were almost eye-to-eye, thanks to those heels she had on. Her green eyes sucked me right in.
“What do you want, Lucy?” I asked.
She smiled, took her second shot, and slapped the glass on the table. “It’s not obvious?”
She stepped closer, her hip touching mine, the smell of the top shelf whiskey mixing with cigarette smoke on her breath.
There was nowhere to look that didn’t involve a piece of her. I could fall apart when looking into her eyes, but when I looked down it was straight into a bosom that shouldn’t have been that perfect without something propping it up. My left hand was on her thigh and working up and under the coat, and it didn’t appear I had any control over that.
The touch of my hand made her tremble, and somehow find a way to get even closer. We were practically in each other’s clothes. I reached for the belt of her coat, and hesitated there.
“Go on.”
I was about to. It would have been the easiest thing, and there was a large—and growing larger—part of me that was ready to lose everything for this girl. But I knew something wasn’t right. “No,” I said, sounding a lot less sure of myself than I wanted to. “How about first you tell me what you really want?”
Hard-Boiled Immortal (The Immortal Chronicles) Page 2