Reilly 13 - Dreams of the Dead (7 page)

“I can show you how much I love you if you let me, but I need to know first. What are you willing to do to be with me?”

After a long silence, she sat on the side of the bed, hair hanging over her eyes so I couldn’t see them. “We had this discussion. You promised me you wouldn’t bring it up again.”

“Yes, but I don’t think you thought it through. We could live together in a beautiful, warm country in a beach house with a pool, a staff, a view of the world, a soft bed, privacy at last.”

“I told you, no.”

I came up behind her, pressed against her back, wound my legs around her body. “Listen one more time.” I held her close and told her about it again, laid it out a different way, sure I could convince her this was the only way, and it was the right way.

When I finished, she turned sideways, her body against me, almost melting in the heat between us. “Forget it. I won’t commit a crime. I won’t go to prison. You should never have told me any of this.”

“There’s no risk.”

“Right. Sure.” Her body tensed. “My friend who went to the Nevada State Penitentiary for selling drugs? He died there.”

I suppose my nerves and the time pressure got the better of me. “We’ll be rich and free. We can live our lives like we deserve to, not in a hellhole limbo like this. I need more time to explain all this, that damn second hand moving around is all you see—”

“Because I have to go!” Cyndi struggled to stand up and leave.

I tightened my hold.

“Let me go. It’s twelve forty-five, and the maid could come in anytime after one. I have another life and it’s time to get back to it.”

“Fuck your other life! You love me, I love you, I’m trying to talk about our future together and you’re—”

“Let me go!”

I felt my heart beat against her back. I felt her sweat on me, smelled perfume mixed with her body.

After another minute, she quit fighting me. She turned her head away and closed her eyes, speaking so softly I had to work to hear her.

“Should have known. Get close to somebody. Fall in love. It’s never enough. I should know by now, crazy shit every time.” Her eyes opened and she stared at me coldly. Her voice rose but held steady. “You need to let me get up now and put on my clothes. Then I’ll go back to work and you forget about me. We’re done. I mean that. Okay? I won’t tell anyone about your plans. I won’t do anything to stop you. But leave me out of it.”

She meant it. I could hear it. She had detached herself right then with no return possible. I knew because I’d done it myself. She might as well have taken an ax and chopped right through my brain. I felt pops, storms. All thinking ceased. Memories attacked. I thought of the day I met her. I thought about how I have failed so many people and how life has failed me.

“I told you from the start,” Cyndi said, shaking, pushing. “I won’t leave my kids. I won’t run with you. I won’t go to prison because you’ve got another set of cheap dreams. Fucking fool. Jesus.” She managed to pull away from me, but I jumped up and pushed her back down against the bed. I could see her sneaking furtive looks at the clock, the clock that read five minutes to one.

“You’re gonna listen, and you’re gonna say yes.”

“You’re hurting me, asshole!”

She’s small but strong. She made a fist and right-hooked me in the side of the jaw. The pain made me lose it for a second. I hit her with the palm of my hand hard on the side of the head—a reflex, that’s all it was—and she went limp for a second, so I laid her on her back on the bed. Her mouth opened and kept getting wider and wider and she took in a breath as she got herself ready to let out a shriek that was going to bring witnesses and ruin. Her face went red, snotty, and nasty, transforming her into a new person who didn’t love me after all, who’d played me for gifts and thrills.

I put my left hand over her mouth and held her down with my other hand, trying to keep her quiet, saying, “Cyndi, Cyndi,” in a soft
chant, but she squirmed like a python, a big snake who had turned against me forever, vicious and out of control. Some small part of my rational mind arrowed its way through the chaos of my emotions to one clear thought: She would tell. If I let her go, she would call the police about my plans.

As if reading my thoughts, she bit me suddenly on the arm, a deep bite, as if she were trying to eat me. The clock, the one she had watched so avidly, flashed one o’clock.

This time reflex played no part. I hauled off and hit her hard again, connecting with her chin, knocking her head back to the pillow. She didn’t move. I rubbed my forearm, groaning. White teeth marks, no blood yet, purpling under the skin. I looked at her. Silence, for now.

In emergencies I go cold. Time slows down. In the middle of one now, hardly any blood around, I noted that I hadn’t even sat in a chair. Other people slept here every night. The room was full of prints. I had touched almost nothing. Cyndi had even handled the key.

She stirred.

Her black nylons lay on the rug beside the bed in easy reach. I picked them up and wrapped them around her neck. I don’t believe at that moment I really meant to kill her, but when she started fighting me, everything snapped into place. The thought had entered my brain, the possibility. I fought back. I held my position even though she struggled through every dying second.

Finally, she stopped. I held tight long enough to look at her pretty hair, her body, anywhere but her face. I wrapped and stretched the black material tighter, muscles straining, encountering no more resistance.

The clock’s second hand moved. Round and around it ticked forward as I waited, holding the cloth against her neck. Three times around. Three minutes of hell past one. I had to be sure.

I let go.

Eyes open, she looked dreamily at the ceiling as if she had spotted something interesting there, face now a mottled, swollen gray, fog-colored. I felt a mental storm coming on, not a storm of rage and self-preservation this time, but a storm that would soon lead to decompensation.

I had never killed anyone before. She had forced the situation, put me in serious danger.

I checked the room, ears wide-open for the clank of a cart. I dressed quickly, looking around for signs of my presence. Ten past one. I maneuvered her into bra and panties, unwound the black material from around her throat, and settled her on the bed, wondering at the changes. She looked removed. Distant. Spent. This was the sum total of her life, one stupid mistake.

I had no time, but still I arranged her tangled hair.

Did she think of her children and her husband, in those last moments, when she gasped and I became a maniac?

Her hair felt silky, alive, twisting between my fingers.

Was she sorry? Had there still been a chance?

Her mouth dropped open. I closed it. It dropped open again. I closed her eyes. They opened. She was still fighting me. Her skin moved between life and death in front of me, changing from an interim dusky color to something like salt, inert.

Time to go.

I had the door open and was ready to leave when I realized I didn’t have my wallet.

Leaving the door ajar, I crept back inside to look for it. I was so screwed up from the liquor and pain and the rest of it that my eyes couldn’t focus anymore. Nothing on the rug, nothing on the bedside table. Seventeen past one in the afternoon. Brilliant sunshine. Fucking Tahoe clarity.

I found my wallet under the bed nestling near a used condom, not mine. I grabbed it, stuffed it into my pocket, and left, pulling my cap down low. I hit my hand on a cart full of towels on the way out. No blood, just another scream in my head. What I had done to Cyndi barreled around my mind like a bad dream. I felt like someone slugged by a piece of king-hell bad luck.

As I hustled out, a maid leaned against the building. She looked my way from about a hundred feet, long-haired, gray-rooted, a good ol’ girl. I ran out to the lot; at least the car keys had stayed in my pocket as they
should. I took off, but I wasn’t relieved to turn onto the highway. My skin had gone cold and my hands on the wheel shook.

What had the maid seen?

See you shortly, honey, I thought, and strength came back, resolve came back, fury came back. Women trying to ruin my life, what I had left of it, trying to destroy the one chance I had left. I wouldn’t allow that.

B
renda Bee had been yawning all day because her new husband, Ronnie, husband number three, took Cialis and wouldn’t give her any peace all night. She was fifty-five and sex was pleasurable, but have a heart, baby. Don’t make it so hard to sit down the next day.

Right now, she was eating lunch at the restaurant on the gaming floor. Employees of Prize’s got food at a discount, and since casino buffets cost practically nothing, she could have loaded up on starch, beef, and rich desserts, but she chose wisely, going for lettuce, soggy fruit, and two cups of hot black coffee. At her age, you had to make a choice, sex or food, and she chose sex.

She watched the gamblers’ numbing routine. Not long ago you put in quarters and pulled a lever, watched the rows roll for a while, watched them clack clack clack one by one. These days, you inserted a money card and punched a button. The machine gave a digital approximation of sevens rolling along for about two seconds, then lights insisted on another punch, preferably of three quarters, not one. Bells used to blare when even a small pot hit. These days the casinos played it cool and quiet.

Of course, back then you could hardly see the machines for the ciggie smoke, and nowadays the gaming floors were well ventilated. Win some, lose some.

She watched a girl with bleached-blond hair almost faint as
three sevens lined up on her machine. A newbie, now hooked on winning, destined to lose her fun money, and it wouldn’t take long. Three sevens weren’t worth what they had once been. Inflation had hit the world of slot machines in this way, too. Good. More money for Prize’s, and that meant better job security for her. How much had the girl won? She couldn’t see the jackpot amount on the machine, though it was only a few feet away. The girl wasn’t squealing anymore, so it wasn’t worth getting up.

Ronnie had been nagging her for ages to get glasses. She couldn’t imagine wearing them, the weight on her nose, the ugliness. He said, “Brenda, are you saying female pride won’t let you get glasses, even though you’re blind without them?”

Pride? No. This was a survival technique, the way she saw it. As soon as she could, she would get LASIK surgery. She hated being nearsighted, had spent her whole life fighting it. If only she had the money. Of course, then she wouldn’t be able to see as well up close, but that would be fine, she would welcome drugstore magnifiers for reading. They cost like what, ten bucks? Plus, she didn’t read all that much, and Ronnie could read her the menus.

Up here in the mountains, working at a place where showgirls reigned, a girl needed to look her best. That required intervention and vigilance. She had beauty tricks Ronnie would never know about. She had recently had her lips permanently tattooed with color. Lips got pale in middle age. She remembered how perplexed Ronnie had been when she wouldn’t let him kiss her for a week after because her lips, swollen and a little crusty, hurt so much. Then, her breasts had shrunk when she lost weight. They hung like her grandma’s until she got the lift and implants. She made him wait again until everything healed and she could appreciate his appreciation.

Then came her hair extensions. Yes, hard to believe how cute they made her feel. She had never expected to watch her hair thin, but that it had done. One morning, she had followed her brow to her hairline and discovered—a bald spot! Up the street, right
off Highway 50, was a hair/nails place where a Vietnamese lady, singing to herself in her own language the whole time, carefully wove strands of someone else’s lovely thick hair into Brenda’s own, until you couldn’t see where the other person’s hair ended and hers began.

Worth every penny, especially the previous week when Ronnie took her out to Harrah’s to a live show, and she curled her new hair and looked fantastic and sexy.

How else could a girl compete in this culture of ski bunnies and entertainers who looked twenty when they were thirty, and twenty when they were forty, the dyed-blond boob-babies?

Wiping the dressing from her lips, she rose, then climbed downstairs and down a long hallway, where she picked up her cleaning cart. An extension of Prize’s Casino-Hotel, the two-story motel part of the complex had some cheap rooms that opened directly on the parking lot.

Pushing the loaded cart seemed hard today, even though a thin springtime sun warmed her. Her partner, Rosalinda, was home sick, so, doing double duty, she was running late. A few of the rooms she should have finished in the morning she hadn’t yet done. Oh, well. She’d skimp on the bathrooms. You could run a dry cloth quickly over water drips and toothpaste blow, fold down the ends of the toilet paper rolls, and keep the customers happy.

She rolled up to Room 102, where the guests had checked out according to her schedule, and saw that the door was ajar. A
DO NOT DISTURB
sign dangled from the knob.

Ah, jeez, they hadn’t left yet after all.

Once, a bad thing had happened—she had busted in on a couple making love on the bed. Brenda had backed out again, and nobody had ever said anything about it to her.

She put her hand on the door, ready to give a swift knock and push it open.

Then hesitated. Something was making her nervous. It was—boy, was she ridiculous—it was as if she could feel that someone
was in there, and listening for her. She looked down. Someone had blocked the door with a pillow. Odd, a pillow of all things. It would be hard to step over that with a suitcase.