“I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about,” he whines, curled in a ball on the floor.
“Didn’t think so,” I say. Then I tuck the gun into the back of my waistband and put the magazine in my pocket and walk out, closing the door quietly behind me.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
The adrenaline hits me after I get back to the Mirabelle and take a long shower and I notice my hand shaking while I shave. I rinse the remnants of shaving cream from my face and look in the mirror and see a drop of blood ooze out from under the bandages on my brow, loosened by the hot water.
I find a packet of Polysporin from the Burlington ER in my shaving kit and take a Q-tip from the chrome dispenser on the vanity and I’m about to treat the cut when there is a quick, sharp knock at my door.
I move to the bathroom doorway and wait for a beat. I glance at the clock on the nightstand. 2:50 a.m. Another, louder knock, and the adrenaline peaks.
I open the drawer of the nightstand and slip Sallie Fun’s Ruger into the pocket of my hotel bathrobe. I keep my finger on the trigger and lean beside the door jamb.
“Who is it?”
I hear a small, exasperated sigh and Nicki muttering “Thank God.”
“Nicki,” she says, louder.
I open the door and here she is—sneakers, jeans, and a white sweatshirt with a hood that falls over the back of her blonde glove-leather jacket. She is furious.
“You went there, didn’t you,” she says flatly. A statement, not a question. I’m still rushing with adrenaline, so I say something stupid.
“Usually, when a woman knocks on my door in the middle of the night she greets me with a little more decorum.”
Her blue eyes shoot through me. This is the first time I’ve seen her in casual attire and she seems smaller; more like the petite, tomboyish girl she must have been. A different look, but no less captivating. 5’3” in sneakers and lovely. But boy, is she pissed.
“What happened?” she demands.
I open the door and step back and she comes in. I close the door and sit on the edge of the bed and take a couple of deep breaths to let my heartbeat downshift toward a more normal pace.
“I went home,” she says, standing over me like a scolding schoolmarm—except schoolmarms don’t wear tight jeans and fitted leather jackets. None that I know of, anyway.
“I went to bed but I couldn’t sleep,” she says. “I just knew you went to Jersey City. I called your room half a dozen times and then I decided to—”
She stops short when she sees the butt of the gun sticking up out of my bathrobe pocket.
“Jesus, Jack—tell me what happened,” she says.
I put the gun back in the nightstand drawer and return to sit on the bed and Nicki sits beside me and glares as I tell her about my adventure with Sallie Fun. She listens, shaking her head with disapproval, then disbelief, and her eyes grow sharper still with anger.
“What were you thinking?” she says, after I finish. “What the hell is wrong with you? You promised me…”
I nod. “I’m sorry,” I say.
“Don’t ever lie to me again. Don’t ever break a promise to me. Don’t ever do anything like that again, do you understand me?”
I nod again. I find it hard to look her in the eye.
“So reckless. You could’ve been…” she says, and then she stops herself. She gets up and goes to the mini bar and takes out a tiny bottle of Skye vodka and twists the top off and dumps all of it into a cut crystal whiskey glass and drinks half of it in one gulp. She turns and looks at me.
“It’s my job to defend you and to protect you. And I can’t do my job if you go off and do idiotic things like this. Now I want you to promise me—and mean it this time—that you won’t ever do anything like this again, and you will do as I say, as long as I’m your attorney.”
“I promise,” I say, looking steadily into her eyes now, to show her how sincere I am. Her eyes dart back and forth as she looks into mine, reading me for any sign of guile. After a long moment she sighs and takes another drink—a small sip this time.
“What is it?” I say.
“What’s what?”
“This isn’t just about you protecting me as my attorney,” I say. The tunnel-vision from the adrenaline is gone, and I’m more interested in her reaction to my errant behavior than I am in playing the tough guy.
“What is it?” I say again.
She looks down. Takes another delicate sip of her drink.
“Look, I’m sorry,” I say. “But I’m here and Sallie was a dead end and it’s over. It’s okay.”
“It’s not okay,” she says, looking down into her glass. She starts to say more, then changes her mind, and cuts the conversation short.
“I just feel like now I can’t trust you. And I need to know that I can,” she says into her glass. “I need to know that you won’t do something stupid like this again.”
“I told you, I won’t,” I say.
She glances up from her drink at me. She notices the loose bandages on my brow, then puts down her glass and heads into the bathroom and comes back with a couple of Q-tips and leans close to me and dabs the blood away, her face close to mine. I can smell the faint, sweet scent of her—a delicate blend of skin cream, soap, shampoo, the fresh spice of vodka under her breath. I feel a stirring deep inside me that I haven’t felt for a long, long time.
Then she stands up, heads to the bathroom, and tosses the Q-Tips into the wastebasket, then dumps the rest of the vodka down the sink. She puts the glass back on the sideboard and looks at me.
“Get some sleep,” she says, and turns to go. I get up and walk her to the door and reach over her shoulder to release the safety clasp on the jamb. A brief breath of her scent again, and without looking at me she says, “I’ll see you in the morning.” And then she leaves.
I take off the hotel robe and hang it on the hook on the back of the bathroom door. I slide between the crisp sheets of my king-sized bed and turn off the lamp on the nightstand and lie back on the pillow and close my eyes.
There was something more to her reaction than just professional concern. Some raw nerve had been scraped. She was angry, yes, but there seemed to be something more—something behind the anger that she wouldn’t talk about.
I try to imagine what nerve I had touched in her, but the adrenaline has drained me and I suddenly feel very tired. My muscles loosen and my breathing deepens and then I drift off in the darkness, along with the last traces I can sense of her.
THINGS PAST
He was fifteen but he had grown tall and strong for his age, so when he told people he was eighteen no one batted an eye. It had been two years since he had left the Witch buried in the vacant lot—and in memory—and caught a ride with a trucker, just as he had planned.
The trucker took him all the way to West Virginia, where he got a job in a small town, washing dishes at a truck stop whose owners weren’t choosy about things like child labor laws or immigration status—or health codes or minimum wage, for that matter. The owners, a mean, petty old couple, let him stay in a shed at the edge of the parking lot in exchange for a cut of his meager pay. The shed was no longer used, and barely bigger than a closet, but that suited him fine. He liked the tiny, windowless space. He plugged the holes in the rotted wood walls to keep out the light, and he was free to love his Angel or read his Bible in the twelve hours a day he wasn’t washing the greasy dishes in the truck stop kitchen.
But by age fifteen he had become increasingly restless and discontent. Over two years’ time, the Angel was deteriorating badly. No matter how dark he made the shed, it took more and more effort to keep the Angel looking right.
The skin was the problem. His first efforts at taxidermy had been clumsy and rushed, his thirteen year-old hands stitching ragged seams behind the hairline and the jaw. And since the book he had read was about animals it didn’t take human skin into account. He stole an embalming textbook from a library while on an errand to Charleston but it
was too late. No matter what he tried—makeup, putty, clay, wax—it was impossible to replicate the fine porcelain skin of the Angel. Even on the darkest moonless nights he couldn’t help but be distracted by the sagging, shapeless, mottled features that had once been so clear and perfect. He had carefully pulled up the planks of the wooden floor of the shed and dug a small hole where he kept the Angel while he was at work. The damp earth only accelerated her decay, and soon he could no longer summon the Angel’s voice at all.
Thus deprived, he became angry at the smallest things, although he kept his anger—and all feelings—bottled up inside. The other workers in the kitchen had long since given up trying to make conversation with him, which was fine, but it only increased his isolation, his desperate need to be paid attention. He didn’t care to listen to the mindless kitchen blather about sports or women or their fucking cheap-ass bosses, anyway. He didn’t want to listen, he wanted to be heard. But not by the crude, ignorant kitchen staff—by his Angel, who was crumbling before his eyes.
So he lost himself in his Bible, and began to branch out in his reading—to the worlds of Poe, Doyle, and a dozen or more mystery writers. They engrossed him and took his mind off his discontent in the hours when he was able. But eventually the books weren’t enough, either. His life was a story in itself, greater than all the books in the world, greater, even, than his Bible.
And then, as he had found before in his young life, just when he was at his most desperate, a miracle arrived.
Caitlin, her name was, a pretty high school senior who took a waitress job at the truck stop after he’d been there two years. And the moment he saw her, his breath caught in his fifteen year-old throat.
She was his Angel—her skin perfect pale porcelain, her face the same Mona Lisa oval. Her hair and eyes were the wrong color but those could be changed. Even if he didn’t transform her as he had the Witch, hair could be dyed, and he had read that some people wore colored contact lenses. Maybe, at the age of fifteen, he had found someone who could be with him. Really with him. The idea of sharing his stories and going to special places with a living, breathing Angel was a thrilling prospect—thrilling to the point of terror. He had never been with a girl; never really even considered it a possibility. Until now.
Caitlin was popular at the truck stop right from the start—full of laughter and vulgar talk with the kitchen crew and the truckers who flirted with her. She was stupid and common but he didn’t care. Once she came to know how special and powerful he was, she would be his.
So one night, when the kitchen staff took a cigarette break in the parking lot, he made his first, fumbling effort to talk to the girl Caitlin.
And she looked right through him like he didn’t exist, then flicked her cigarette away, turned her back on him, and walked away without a word.
He watched her go and the rage came boiling up from the pit of his stomach with such ferocity that he nearly vomited.
To her, he was nothing. He could see it in her face the moment he spoke. It was clear from her blank stare that she had never noticed him, never thought of him. She probably didn’t even know his name. To her, he was just the weird, quiet kid who lived in the rat-hole out back and sweated over the steaming dishes in the grimiest, noisiest part of the kitchen; his sparse adolescent beard patched with acne from the greasy steam bath of the dishwashing tub. He was less than an appliance to her. Less than an insect.
After that night, her daily laughter and flirting sent him into a dizzy, spiraling rage that became harder and harder to hold back.
So he began to plan. He figured it would take about three months to prepare and to do it right. He started by reading more books. True crime stories, more mystery novels, books about police investigation—and he studied the techniques described in them. Then he waited. Watched. Learned her habits, her routine. Since no one paid him any attention, no one noticed him watching.
When he was ready, he broke into the local mortuary and stole some embalming supplies, taking only what he absolutely needed, leaving no trace of his burglary. He found a place to dig, an empty field not far from an antebellum graveyard—now a tourist site, of all things—on the outskirts of town, near the interstate. He dug carefully, first cutting and carefully lifting away the layer of topsoil, keeping the wild growth of weeds intact so he could seamlessly conceal the grave afterward.
He followed the waxing and waning of the moon in the local paper and then, when she finished her late shift on a new-moon Thursday night, he came up behind her as she passed his shed on the way to her car, and he hit her once behind her right ear with a heavy, padded steel pipe, rendering her unconscious but also un-bloodied and unmarked. He carried her five yards to his shed, where he had split open and spread plastic trash bags around carefully. He covered her mouth with several bands of duct tape to mute the screams, and removed the head and hands with a large serrated butcher’s knife he borrowed from the kitchen. He did his embalming work on the head and hands, dyed the hair, and placed the china blue ovals under the eyelids. He applied makeup—very little, since it was young and already resembled the Angel. Then he wrapped the body in the trash bags and drove it in the truck stop’s battered delivery van to the gravesite and buried it, topping the grave with the top layer of soil and thick weeds with meticulous care. Then he returned to his shed, and his new Angel.
She was perfect.
The rage and the restless discontent were gone, and soon also was the decayed former Angel—the transformed Witch—which he cut into small pieces and destroyed, night by night, piece by piece, in the heavy industrial garbage disposer in the kitchen.
The new Angel’s voice was clear and sweet once more. Once more he was listened to, once more he was loved, and once more he was at peace. Peace that passes understanding. She brought his ecstatic feeling to new heights.
Even though physically she was new, she was still the same Angel—the one who had soothed him since he was five years old. The only one who knew everything about him. The only one who loved him and praised him and recognized his extraordinary power.
He would have to leave West Virginia soon, but not too soon. He waited until the searches and the public prayer vigils ended (if only they knew!). And when the locals started speculating that the pretty, flirtatious Caitlin Stubbs had simply run off with a trucker, he knew it was time to leave.
But while he waited, there came another, surprisingly powerful source of immense pleasure as a result of his transformation of the girl. It happened four days after he changed her. He was heading into the convenience store across the highway from the truck stop when he saw it: his Angel’s picture on the front page of the local newspaper, inside a vending machine. Trembling with excitement, he dropped a quarter into the machine’s slot and took two copies of the paper and returned to his shed and read and re-read the article about the missing girl Caitlin.
His pride and power swelled up in him as never before. His story was being told—being read by hundreds, maybe thousands of people. Of course, no one knew it was his story, but it was enough just to see the barest facts about the story in print. And the picture of her…of his Angel. It was HE who put that picture there. His work was immortalized, and it filled him with a delighted grandeur almost as enthralling as the Angel herself.
Day after day, he bought the papers and followed the stories and read every word dozens of times. He saw the reporter’s byline on each article and thought about calling him, but of course he knew that was idiotic. Nevertheless, he indulged in the thrilling fantasy of talking to him over and over. He hated that some of the facts were omitted from the articles—some were even outright wrong. There was, of course, no mention of the grave, since no one had found it. And there were vague, titillating allusions to a possible sexual assault, which offended him. He wanted his story told right. He could set the record straight, he could tell his whole story…he had to. But he had no one but the Angel to tell it to. And, of course, she already knew.
Over time, the news article
s went from the front page to the second, and then reduced to a sprinkling of occasional small items in the back of the paper. Finally, when the articles ceased altogether and things went back to normal in the small town, he bought a fake driver’s license from a Mexican trucker who trafficked in such things. He quit his job at the truck stop, caught a ride with an old rigger from the Midwest—his heavy, soft suitcase in hand—and rode all the way to Kansas City with his new Angel and his first published stories.
According to the license in his pocket he was now twenty. And when the Mexican asked what name he wanted on the license he didn’t hesitate. He chose the name of the hero of his favorite Bible story: the brave young leader of the Israelites—the righteous ruler, the warrior-poet, the bold lover—the boy who killed the giant, then cut off the giant’s head to prove his victory, and was made king.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
I wake the morning after beating Sallie Fun and find a note under my hotel door from the front desk. There is a package waiting for me. I call to have it sent up, along with breakfast. I wash up and when I come out of the bathroom someone knocks on my door. I put on the hotel robe and a waiter pushes a breakfast cart in and hands me a box. I open it and find slacks and a shirt, still with the tags on, and a note from Nicki: “Guessed at your size, hope it’s ok. Here’s Dr. Abrams’ address. He’ll meet us at ten-thirty a.m.”
I eat my breakfast and cut the plastic tags off the clothes with the bread knife from the room service cart. Nicki’s good taste extends to men’s clothes as well as women’s: gray Zegna slacks and a sky blue Paul Smith shirt with a combined price tag that’s half my mortgage. I put the clothes on and look in the mirror. I look a lot better.
I leave the hotel and walk three blocks to the address Nicki gave me and ride up to the fifth floor and find a door marked Dr. B. Abrams, M.D.” I enter and find Nicki in the waiting room.
“Much better,” she smiles when she sees me in my new clothes.
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