Lily shook her head.
“You sounded like Mofet just then,” she said. “I’m sorry, Rorke, but this is what’s best for everyone. I don’t know how else to make you see when you won’t look. Your way won’t work. And I would die if Ash ended up hating me.”
I put my hand on her arm. “That’s where you’re headed.”
“You won’t tell her I said yes to him, Rorke.”
“I can’t make you that promise. And I won’t lie for you, either, Lily. I don’t want to lose her, too.”
“I know. I understand. Just please, I need more time.”
She gave me an awkward hug with the bar between us and took off up the stairs to her room.
I looked over at Chance in the booth.
He had his headphones around his neck, and he was leaning against the deck, watching me.
I gave him a shrug that said, I don’t know what the hell just happened.
He held up a finger. This meant, hang on, I’ll fix you.
He flipped through his music. When he found what he was looking for, he kicked up a beat mix and slid right into “Lesbian Vampires from Outer Space.”
The crowd went nuts.
He got on the mic and dedicated it to me, and they went even more nuts. Next thing I knew I had several shots lined up, a full tip jar, and some titties in my face.
I love that boy.
Lily was gone for so long I actually started having fun. But then she reappeared, bouncing and trailing after Wolf like a deranged pixie, demanding that he tell her where Ash was. She begged. She said his name like it had three syllables.
“Woooooolf, please. I know you know where she hides.”
Wolf grunted, shook his head and worked around her. “She comes back when she comes back. I’m not her keeper.”
She watched him walk off, and then she went up in the DJ booth. I imagined she was doing the same song and dance for Chance, especially when I heard him pop on “God is a Bullet.” He shot me a look to go with it. When she left the booth, I had a feeling she was coming for me again. Sure enough, the minute she hit the bottom of the stairs she started pacing the length of my bar.
“I can’t remember exactly what I said, Rorke. Tell me what she might have overheard.”
“I can’t babysit you right now, sweetheart. I have to run a bar.”
“Well, make Wolf tell me where she is.”
“I’m not sure I could make Wolf do anything. And I don’t think he knows where she is. Hell, she’s probably still in the bar somewhere. We all have jobs to do, Lily. You aren’t gonna find her until she wants to be found, and you know it. Now go play.”
She continued her rounds, wandering from my bar to the booth and back, all the while eyeing the front door. Then she went outside and wandered up and down the sidewalk. She looked so strung out I’m surprised the cops didn’t haul her off to the pokey for public intox. Wolf kept an eye on her, and I just kept my mouth shut.
The sky over downtown turned this crazy orange color, and a summer storm kicked in around midnight, hail included. The Luxe had an old metal roof back then, so it sounded like bones were rattling down from the sky. Nobody could leave because the streets were a parking lot.
Party time in the Goth bar, kids!
I ordered my crew some barbeque from the bar up the road and popped in an old vampire flick with the volume turned down. Chance was on fire up in the booth, and I was flying high until Wolf made Lily come back inside. He said she was looking to get struck by lightning. So she sat down at my bar to sulk.
“You’re soaked,” I said. I leaned forward so my crew wouldn’t hear. “Go take a bath and get some rest. You don’t want her to see you like this, hon. I promise I’ll send her upstairs as soon as she comes back.”
Lily didn’t answer me. She got up and went to sit by the window. She sat there until closing, and then she disappeared again.
I never did see Ash.
Chapter 18
I assumed Lily went up to bed. But the next morning I found her on the couch, this sad little rumpled mess. She fell asleep waiting for Ash to come home. I was covering her with a blanket when Zayzl busted through the front door. He was suspiciously chipper and still wearing last night’s shine. He took one look at Lily and started cackling.
“Tie one on, did we, Lilybelle?”
“Fuck off,” she mumbled. “And don’t call me that. Only Mofet calls me that.” She hid her face in the cushions.
We call it the Lap of a Thousand Nights. You have no idea how many people have ridden out the spins on that couch. It looks so pretty in the dark, but the family knows better than to touch it. Unless you’re just so low you don’t care anymore.
So there she was.
“Jesus, what did she take?” he asked me. “And when’s the last time we had that couch cleaned?”
“Give it a sniff, dude. I don’t know. She spent the night there,” I said.
“You missed the show, Lily?” Zayzl’s eyes bulged. “She missed the show? What’s wrong, are you sick? Is she sick?” He kept looking from me to her, her to me. Neither one of us was answering. “I don’t get it, Lily,” he said. “The only acceptable excuse for missing Honky is good drugs or good sex. And I can tell by looking at you that you had neither.”
“Rorke, can I have some water, please,” Lily said, sitting up, completely ignoring him. Her throat was coated with gravel.
“You are sick,” he decided. “Damn it, Lily. You better not get me sick.”
I heard leather creak and I looked up.
I can’t tell you how badly I wanted to see Ash standing there. I needed somebody to set the whole screwy mess right so I could catch a damn nap. But it wasn’t Ash. It was Wolf. He had his arms crossed over his chest, and he was grinning.
“She was up all night,” he said. “Waiting for… Which one were you waiting for this time, sugar?”
Lily spun right up off that couch like Linda Blair and took a swing at him. She landed a pretty good punch to the shoulder. Well, it would’ve been a good punch if he weren’t made of concrete and beef ribs. All he did was smile down at her.
And Zayzl went from petty to pissed. “You were with Ash last night?”
“No,” I said. “She wasn’t. I think that’s the point of all this.”
Lily shook her head. She was staring at her chewed up nails and trying not to cry. “I wasn’t with her.”
“I was about to say—”
“You were about to say what, Zayzl?” I dared him.
He didn’t answer me. He just kept watching Lily.
I helped her up off the couch and made eyes at him to leave her alone. She felt old in my arms, stiff and breakable. It took us forever to get up the stairs. More than once, she looked at me like she forgot who I was.
“I can’t be in my room alone,” she said. “I don’t want to hear any music, either. Please, can you watch me? At least until I sleep. The Dragon’s at the door.”
“Of course,” I said. “I’ll stay with you.”
I actually had a couple of reasons for not wanting to leave her alone. At the top of the list: I didn’t want to be the one to find the body later on, second only to: I didn’t want to be the one to tell Ash about the body I found.
Lily turned the knob and opened the door.
I swallowed a gasp.
Her room was trashed, Sicilian style. Crazy clutter everywhere, and it smelled weird, too. Like sickness. I’d never seen her room dirty before. Cluttered, maybe, but not dirty.
Dragons, indeed.
I kept hoping she’d start yelling and demand to know who tore the place apart, but she never did. She just walked right on in, kicked some crap aside, and collapsed on the bed. So I ran her a bath while she watched herself in the mirror.
The cloud cover was dense. Pink Panther style.
“I don’t know how you let things get so out of hand,” she said.
She wasn’t looking at me, so I didn’t answer.
I was pretty sure she
was talking to the mirror.
She lifted her dress over her head and let it drop on the floor. That’s when I saw that her perfect skin was covered with cuts and scars. All over. It wasn’t just what she kept up her sleeve. “Those were broken days. I told you I would never leave you. I said I’m yours, no matter what. I don’t know why you keep asking why why why. She’s the reason why.”
“Lily, who are you talking to?”
“I wasn’t singing,” she said quickly. “That was Ash.”
I walked over to her slowly and ran a finger along one of the marks that had healed. “Honey, did you to this to yourself?”
“He didn’t clip his nails,” she said. “He breathes fire, and he didn’t clip his nails like he said he would.”
I got her away from her reflection and led her into the bathroom. She didn’t fight. She didn’t talk. She sank down into the tub and sighed. Under the water, her scars rippled like scales, and she smiled up at me. “It’s been a while.” And then she asked me for an éclair and a pink spider.
I tried to smile back. I didn’t want her to see how freaked out I was. I washed her hair and left her there to soak while I cleaned up the room and figured out what the hell to do. I cleared the mess off her bed and stripped the dirty sheets. My hands were shaking so badly. I didn’t know who to call for help. When I found Lily’s cell phone kicked under the curtains, I picked it up and just hit the green button.
It dialed Ash.
A phone rang on the other side of the room.
“Time for church!” Lily sang from the tub.
I sighed and ended the call. Then I started scrolling through her address book. The further I got, the more I realized my options sucked. Her phone was full of party people. Nothing but party people. So in the end, it had to be Wolf. I dialed.
“Yeah,” he said.
“I need a doctor, a maid, and maybe a priest.”
“What’s she on?”
“Honestly, I don’t know. I haven’t found anything lying around. I checked her pockets. I checked her room. But, uh…it’s a pretty disaster up here.”
“What?”
He didn’t believe it either.
“Yeah. And it smells like a meth lab, too.”
“Jesus.” He sighed. “Okay, I know someone. Keep her awake.”
Twenty minutes later there was a knock at the door.
I got up to answer myself, just in case it was trouble.
Trouble, indeed.
Two chicks were on the other side of that door, and one of them was dressed as a pinup nurse. At three in the afternoon. She smiled at me, held out her whore manicure and said her name was…wait for it…Florence. Right? I started cackling. Then I asked who the hell was having the bachelor party. She looked like she should’ve been climbing out of a cake. Then Wolf walked up behind her with his arm around a hot blonde in glitter eye shadow and a broomstick skirt.
That’s the day I met Paige.
The girl Wolf phoned was his cousin, a nursing student, paying her way through school by stripping weekends at a joint called the Thorny Rose. She said she made enough cash in two shifts that she didn’t have to work the rest of the week. Turns out the doctor kit was real, but the tatas were toys. I asked her if she could wear the same uniform to both gigs, and she didn’t take offense. I dug her. She also didn’t seem bothered by the fact that Lily was singing “Look What the Cat Dragged In” in French and refusing to put on any clothes. We totally could’ve shot some low budget porn, bad soundtrack and all.
After Flo did her thing, she told Wolf and me what we already knew. Lily was losing it. And if she didn’t get some food, and some rest, and some water, things were only going to get more interesting. Flo said she couldn’t be sure what Lily had taken without a blood test. And Lily kept insisting she hadn’t taken anything. Nobody said a word about the scars. And Paige slipped me her digits on her way out the door.
I see that look on your face, Nick.
Is this the part you were hoping we wouldn’t get to?
Chapter 19
Well, that would depend on what kind of guy I am, now wouldn’t it?
No. It wouldn’t.
Straight guys are reduced to just the one kind when there’s talk of two pretty women getting it on, and that kind is the kind that wants to hear about it. We wouldn’t turn it off if it came on the TV, either. Besides, I was trying not to look surprised. I wasn’t about to admit I didn’t know Paige ditched me for a woman.
Paige ditched me for a woman.
I thought the damn nurse was a dude. In my head he was a stereotype, too. With feathered hair and a big toothy smile. Made it a whole lot easier to hate his sorry ass instead of hers so she and I could pretend to be friends. But now that I knew the truth… My god, what else didn’t I know?
“What are you grinning at, Nick?”
“Look, um, whatever Paige told you—”
“She didn’t.” Rorke stood up and started stuffing things in her pockets. “Let’s get the check and get out of here before my baby gets a bath.” She nodded through the railing toward her black ’59 Chevy convertible that was sitting open in the parking lot, and then she looked up at the sky.
We didn’t say much in the car on the way home. We smoked. We listened to Nick Cave. We watched the highway, cruised along with a handful of graveyard shifters floating home through the fog. I tried not to look at her. I tried not to think.
Once we were inside the bar, where there was no threat of natural light, I felt better. Sunrises don’t turn me on. It’s got nothing to do with becoming a big pile of dust. It’s about depression. Or the avoidance of it.
Dawn is last call. For a Goth, it’s the gods’ way of turning on the lights so everyone will leave. Sometimes it involves coming down from whatever (or whomever) you did during the night. Other times it’s about finding your keys, your car, your way home, or someone to take there with you. More often than not, it’s about looking down at your Nightmare Before Christmas watch and realizing you blew the whole party in some random bathroom, thumbing a back issue of Meltdown and listening to Skinny Puppy with a chick you didn’t even like because she had drugs you didn’t even want.
But once in a while, it’s all about a story.
And the girl telling it.
Rorke said to kick back and pointed at a circular red velvet couch with a low black table in the center. She went behind the darkened bar and grabbed another bottle of liquor and a pack of smokes. There was a faint blue light hovering over the empty DJ booth, but I couldn’t make sense of the music I was hearing. I sat down and became aware of every muscle I had. She put a smoky glass in my hand and filled it from her thermos.
“Drink up,” she said. “It’ll help.”
I couldn’t even tell what color the stuff was. It was mirrored like an oil slick, and it didn’t smell at all like booze.
“This is the same stuff you keep giving me.”
She nodded.
“Is it legal?”
“It’s a full night’s sleep, Salem. On the house. The law’s got nothing to do with it.”
“You make it here?”
She nodded.
“It tastes like sex,” I said.
“Thank you.”
She set a small black box between us on the table. It was the kind of box fingers show up in when you piss off a Wiseguy. Then she lit a cigarette, settled back into the couch, and pushed the box toward me with the toe of her boot. She was clearly up to something.
“Take a whack at it, Salem.”
She grinned, and suddenly I had a knife in my hand. It should’ve freaked me out, but I was the one holding the weapon, so I grinned back and pulled the black ribbon.
There was a knocker in the box.
“It’s a white chocolate covered cherry truffle,” she said. “The nipple is a surprise, though. Hazelnut, espresso bean, rubber eyeball from the Halloween store. Could be anything. I’m holding my breath for the Pink Panther.”
“The diamond or
the cat?”
“It’s a tossup.”
We both looked back down at the breast.
“Sorry, babe, but I can’t cut that.”
“Sure you can.”
“I can’t. It’s too perfect.”
“Thank you,” she said.
“You made it?”
“No, I posed for the mold.”
The knife veritably flipped out of my hand and clattered across the table. My eyes wanted to drop so badly they started to twitch. But there was no way in hell I’d get busted checking the goods so blatantly, so I picked the knife back up and cut into the chocolate. I don’t know why it felt so scandalous. My face was on fire.
“You’re losing your grip, Salem. Take your half of the tit.”
“I know, I’m sorry. I just…” I started laughing. “Does this mean you get to have your cake and eat it too?”
She nodded. “In this bar? Always.” She picked up a piece of truffle between two fingers and pushed it into my mouth.
“Holy shit, this is incredible.”
“I know. Evilyn makes them. Why do you think I carry a knife in my hair?”
“I think I’m in love,” I said.
“With me or the truffle?”
“It’s a tossup.”
She grinned at me, but then her eyes shifted to the knife sitting next to the box. She fingered the handle. “I don’t wanna talk about Paige yet. Okay, Nick?”
“Fine by me.”
Chapter 20
So Ash was gone.
It shocked the hell out of all of us. Even Zayzl seemed lost without somebody to toy with. We thought, you know, she’d take a few days off. Go wherever it is she went when she needed to cool down and then get right back up there in that booth.
But it didn’t happen.
And she didn’t call.
Her phone service was shut off, and no one downtown had seen her. As far as I knew, she had no family. I wanted to go to the cops and file a Missing Person’s, but Wolf reminded me that we didn’t know what she was into. He said it might piss her off if we got her arrested instead of bringing her home, so all we could do was wait.
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