She flew from Denver to Phoenix, checked into a Courtyard by Marriott, and was walking down a street near the hotel when a sign in a diner window caught her eye. WAITRESS WANTED. The place was unprepossessing, and none of the handful of customers struck her as a potential big tipper. Could she even take home enough to cover her hotel room?
Still, it might be interesting, slinging hash at the Last Chance Café, or whatever it called itself. And what did it call itself? She looked up above the window, where a sign read STAVRO’S DINER.
She went in, unfastened the Scotch tape that held the WAITRESS WANTED sign in place, took it down and carried it to the counter, where a stocky man with a moustache raised his abundant eyebrows and watched her from beneath them. “You must be Stavro,” she said. “You can put this away. I’m your new waitress.”
“Just like that? How you know I wanna hire you?”
“What do you want, references from Delmonico’s? A letter of recommendation from Wolfgang Puck? You need a waitress and I need a job. So?”
He gave her a look, and then a look-over. His eyes were a sort of muddy brown, and she could feel them on her breasts. Their expression said it was his place and his eyes could go where they wanted. And so could his hands.
“Steve,” he said.
“Steve?”
“My name was Stavros,” he said. “Not Stavro. Idiot who made the sign, thinks if you put an S you gotta put an apostrophe in front of it.”
“Couldn’t you make him do it over?”
“ ‘I ain’t payin’ you,’ I told him. He said he’d do it over. ‘I still ain’t payin’ you,’ I said, and that’s where we left it. Stavros, Stavro, what’s the difference? Everybody calls me Steve anyway. You can call me Steve.”
“Okay.”
“What do I call you?”
What indeed? She hadn’t bothered to figure out that part, and didn’t want to use the same name she’d written on the registration card at the hotel.
“Carol,” she said.
“Like a Christmas Carol? You probably hear that all the time.”
“You’re the first.”
“Yeah, I bet. You wanna start now? There’s an apron on the peg. It’ll fit you. Last girl worked here, she was about your size, but I gotta say she didn’t have your shape. You got a real nice shape to you.”
She’d drawn a few cups of coffee, served a couple of Blue Plate Specials, and had Steve brush up against her a few times, with an apology each time, always with an inflection to belie the words. And the next time she passed through the kitchen he dropped the accidentally-on-purpose pretense and ran a hand appraisingly over her bottom.
“Very nice,” he said.
Well, she’d thought she might stay a while in Phoenix, and that didn’t seem likely now, did it? Oh, she could deflect his pass and make it clear she wasn’t willing to play, but she didn’t get the impression Steve would take no for an answer. She sensed that making herself available to him was part of the job description, which might explain why the vacancy had existed.
She could quit, of course. Take off the apron, throw it in his face, and tell him to save it for the next girl with a nice shape to come along.
But the son of a bitch got her motor running. He was crude and crass, and you couldn’t call him good-looking, but there was a sexual magnetism about him that she couldn’t deny. Even the rank smell of him, all musk and sweat and a shirt that had gone too long between washings, was part of the package; she might wrinkle her nose when she breathed in his scent, but that didn’t keep her from getting wet.
Now? Or later?
Either course held its attractions. She could hurry the two customers at the counter, then turn the sign on the door from OPEN to CLOSED and return to the kitchen. Look at him through half-lidded eyes, part her lips a little and run her tongue around them. It wouldn’t be all that difficult to give him the idea, given that he already had the idea, had had it the moment he laid those muddy brown eyes on her and let them linger.
She’d take off her panties before she went in there. Then just pull up her skirt and bend over the counter, and he’d be on her like a mongoose on a cobra. She imagined his hands on her, his cock deep inside her, her nostrils filled with the raw smell of him.
And in the afterglow, while he was catching his breath and thinking of all the things he’d soon get to do with his hot new waitress, she’d be well placed to finish what she’d started. It was a kitchen, there were knives and cleavers all over the place, and she’d grab one and put it where it would do the most good, and he’d be dead and she’d be gone. Back to her room and under the shower — God, she’d need a shower — and then goodbye Phoenix.
But what was her hurry? He’d want her even more if she gave him a taste and made him wait for the rest of it. Why strike while the iron was hot when all it could do was get hotter?
In the end, it was he who turned the sign from OPEN to CLOSED. “Okay, time to go,” he said to one old lag sitting with an empty cup of coffee and a newspaper another customer had left behind. And, as the old fellow got to his feet, “Hey, Joe, don’t be a cheap bastard. This is Carol’s first day, ain’t you gonna leave her a tip?”
Shamed into it, the man put a pair of quarters on the table. “Last of the big spenders,” Steve said, and scooped up the coins, presenting them to her like a cat depositing a dead mouse at its owner’s feet. And, with the window sign turned and the door bolted, he gave her a grin and motioned her into the kitchen.
She didn’t have to pretend to be excited when he handled her breasts and buttocks and ran a hand up between her legs. There was nothing artful about his technique, but the crudeness itself was exciting. Oh, one would tire of it soon enough, but for now—
“Not tonight,” she said.
He was a man who would indeed take no for an answer, but not until the fourth or fifth time he heard it. She’d fend him off and he’d go at her again, until at last he realized that no meant no. He let out a sigh and leaned back against the counter.
“Tomorrow,” she said. “Tonight, it, uh, it wouldn’t be good. God, you’re exciting. I can’t wait until tomorrow, Steve.”
“So why wait?” He looked at her, then shrugged. “Never mind. I guess you got your reasons.”
He’d need her working noon to eight, he told her. He opened at 6:30 for breakfast, but his sister helped him out mornings. Maybe she might like to get there a little earlier tomorrow, he suggested. So they could go over some things together before the lunch crowd showed up. Say eleven?
Back at the hotel, she didn’t shower right away. Her room had two beds, and she stripped and got in one of them and pulled the covers all the way up, trapping his smell. She breathed it in while she touched herself, giving her fantasies free rein, holding herself back from the edge, then finally allowing herself the release of orgasm.
She’d have showered afterward, but sleep took her by surprise, and she slept deeply until dawn and woke up ravenous. She’d made herself a sandwich midway through her shift, but had gone to bed without supper. First, though, she needed that shower.
But was there any point? In a matter of hours she’d be smelling of him all over again.
She took the shower anyway. Nothing lasted, so why expect a shower to endure?
In a sense, the effects of the shower were gone by the time she got dressed. She put on the same skirt and blouse she’d worn the day before, not wanting to get his scent on a second outfit. She’d wear the same clothes, even if it meant walking around all morning with that musky odor on her, and after it was over she’d throw everything out.
Should she check out now? Take her bag to the bus station, stash it in a locker? That would get her out of town faster, but you couldn’t always find those coin-operated lockers. They’d been disappearing for a while now, to thwart dope dealers. And, she supposed, terrorists.
So should she take the suitcase to the diner? Or would that be suspicious? He might see it and think she was leaving town.
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p; And if he did? Like, so what? It’s not as though the prospect of her imminent departure would make him any less eager to fuck her.
So that would work. She’d bring the bag along, stash it in the kitchen. And during the slow time before the lunch crowd showed up, she’d go in back and let him do what he wanted. And then she’d do what she wanted, and she’d retrieve her bag and be out the door with the CLOSED sign hanging in the window.
With his smell all over her.
She’d need the room so she could shower and change. And she could afford to pay for a second night, but it went against the grain. She picked up the phone, rang the front desk, asked about a late checkout.
No problem, Ms. Perkins. Two o’clock all right?
Perfect, she said, and went out for breakfast.
She knew she didn’t want to eat at the diner, but she had to walk past it to get to the other nearby restaurants, and that gave her a chance for a look at Steve’s putative sister. The woman she saw through the window, carrying plates of eggs and bacon as if she’d been doing this since childhood, was short and stocky and dark-complected, with black hair and thick eyebrows. So she certainly might have been a sister, but she hadn’t believed it when he said it and was no more inclined to believe it now. She’d bet anything this beauty queen was Steve’s wife.
She walked on, found a place to eat with better lighting and a reassuring commitment to hygiene. She settled into a booth with a copy of the morning paper, ate a big breakfast, and drank two cups of coffee.
And smelled him on her clothes.
“Right on time,” he said.
There were two customers in the place, and one of them was the same man he’d run off the night before. Did the old fart live here? He looked to be wearing the same clothes, too — a forest-green work shirt worn through at one elbow, with a pair of baggy trousers that must have started life as the bottom half of a business suit.
Well, what else did she expect? She hadn’t changed her outfit, and neither, she was unsurprised to see, had Steve. Classy joint, the Stavro’s Diner. Everybody wears the same clothes forever, and nobody bathes, and they all smell about the same. Be a shame to say goodbye to a place like this.
And damned if Steve didn’t run the old boy off again, and the shrunken blue-haired woman at the corner table along with him. “Gotta close for a few minutes,” he told them. “Gotta go over a thing or two with Carol here.”
He ushered them out. And bolted the door, and fixed the sign. And, with a wolfish grin, beckoned her to the kitchen.
It smelled of eggs and grease and bacon, and of course of Steve himself. His hand cupped her shoulder and turned her toward him, and she hoped he wouldn’t kiss her. Some hookers, she knew, drew the line at kissing, objecting to it because it was somehow too intimate to be available for a price. She had never minded kissing men regardless of what she might have planned for them, and her objection now was purely aesthetic; she didn’t want to kiss him because she found him revolting.
But she definitely wanted to fuck him. He might disgust her, but he also turned her on something fierce.
His hands, clumsy but confident, touched and patted and stroked and squeezed. She realized with some relief that he was no more interested in kissing than she was. Maybe it was an intimacy he reserved for his wife, maybe he didn’t like to kiss a woman without a moustache.
And then, as she had fantasized earlier, he turned her around and pushed her face down toward the counter. It was topped with a butcherblock cutting board, and she smelled blood and meat, along with the musky sweat smell, the Steve smell.
He pulled up her skirt, bunched it around her hips, then reached to lower her panties. They fell to her ankles, and she would have stepped out of them but she couldn’t because he was holding her by the hips.
She thought, Greek foreplay. Brace yourself, Athena! And then he was inside her.
She had to wait at the bus station for an hour and ten minutes, and tried to will the time to pass and the bus to come. She wasn’t anxious about the time it was taking, because it would be hours before the authorities found out about Steve. She’d found a set of keys on a peg by the entrance to the kitchen, and one of them fit the outer door. With the lights out and the door locked, and the CLOSED sign already in place, there was every chance that nobody would find him before morning.
As it was, she’d missed the bus to Tucson by less than ten minutes. She could have been on it with time to spare if she hadn’t insisted on spending a full half hour in the shower, soaping and rinsing and soaping and rinsing. I’m gonna wash that man right out of my hair—the song ran through her mind as she used up Marriott’s entire mini-bottle of shampoo. It left her hair smelling of orange and ginger, and wasn’t that an improvement on eau de Stavros?
And now she was dressed in clean clothes from head to toe, and a plastic bag on the bench beside her held everything she’d been wearing: skirt, blouse, panties, socks, even her shoes. And it was the bag and its contents that made her wish the bus would come, because the plastic was no barrier to that godawful smell.
There was a trash receptacle in her line of sight, and the impulse to drop the clothes into it was almost irresistible. Bad idea, she told herself, over and over. There were bloodstains on her skirt and blouse, and she could imagine what trace evidence her shoes and panties would yield. Not that an investigating officer would need a microscope, or any of the battery of tools they used on CSI. The sniff test would be plenty for anyone who’d ever been within ten yards of Steve, living or dead.
The bus would take her north, to Flagstaff. She’d stay there long enough to get rid of the bag of dirty clothes, then take another bus and get across a state line or two. She could take buses all the way to her ultimate destination, but Chicago was a long ways off, and by the time she got there she’d need a long shower just to get rid of her own smell.
Crazy the way she couldn’t stop thinking about smells. Gross, really.
She thought about Chicago, and Graham Weider. Of the four living members of her personal alumni association, he had to be the softest target. Alvin Kirkaby, if he was still alive, could still be in Iraq, on another tour of duty. Or maybe his unit had been dispatched to Afghanistan. Or maybe he’d lived and returned home, wherever home might be. She didn’t know where he hailed from, and couldn’t guess where he might be now.
She’d met Graham Weider in New York, where he bought her a good lunch before taking her back to his hotel room for their quickie, the details of which had long since faded from her mind. They arranged to meet later for a good dinner, to be followed by a not-so-quickie. When he didn’t show up, she went back to his hotel, where he’d left a note at the desk. Sorry, business meeting necessitated immediate departure. Rushing to airport and flight to L.A. Call me, love to see you again.
And there’d been a phone number, but she had neither called it nor kept it. At the time she felt a little regret at having failed to close the books on Graham Weider, but not so much that she was going to hop on a plane and hunt him down. It hadn’t seemed all that important.
It did now.
Once again she managed to get a seat all to herself, toward the front but not too close to the driver. There was room in the overhead for her suitcase, and for the bag of clothes as well. She could still smell the clothes, even in their new location, but she had the feeling that she’d still be smelling them if she’d chanced leaving them in the trash can. Her nose was full of his scent, and it would take more than distance to clear them. It would take time as well.
She’d bought a novel at the newsstand in the station, but never looked at it again until she was on the bus. Even then she waited until they’d cleared the Phoenix city limits before she switched on the overhead light.
The book was a paperback thriller. Some wild-eyed eco-terrorist, crazy as a bedbug and twice as charming, had raided a secret government laboratory, killed half a dozen scientists, and made off with enough anthrax, plague bacteria, and smallpox virus to depopulate an al
ready troubled planet. And, astonishingly enough, the only person in the world with even a slim chance of stopping this lunatic was a beautiful young FBI agent, the identical twin sister of one of the murdered scientists.
Well, sure, she thought. These things happen.
She read for a while, dozed for a while, opened her eyes when the bus pulled to a stop in Sedona. Three people got off, two got on. Next stop, Flagstaff.
She’d had one genuine oh-shit moment in the Phoenix bus station. She’d been sitting there, the suitcase at her feet, the bag of clothes beside her, the paperback unopened on her lap, when the room went dead silent, jarring her out of her reverie.
When she turned her head to find out what everyone was looking at, what she saw was a pair of uniformed police officers striding through the entrance. One had a hand on the butt of his holstered pistol.
Time, which had been crawling to begin with, came to a dead stop. She tried to think of something to do, some action to take, and came up empty.
And then the cops walked straight over to a gaunt and hollow-eyed young man, his jeans out at the knee, his arms and neck and who knew what else heavily tattooed. He evidently couldn’t think of anything to do either. She’d thought earlier that he looked like a fugitive, and evidently he was, and his days on the run were over, because he didn’t even protest, just stood up and turned around to be handcuffed.
After they’d led him out, the silence held for an instant. Then almost everybody started talking at once, and the ones who weren’t talking were hauling out their cell phones. This would make a good story for all of them, she thought. It would make an even better story for her, but one she wasn’t likely to tell.
On the last leg of the trip, she remembered what had taken place in the kitchen, with her cheek against the cutting board and her panties around her ankles. As she’d anticipated, Steve was one of those piledriver types, hammering away at her, thrusting hard and fast, like John Henry determined to beat the steam drill or die trying. When John Henry was a little babyJust a settin’ on his mammy’s kneeHe picked up a hammer an’ a little piece of steelSaid, Gonna be the death of meLord, Lord,Gonna be the death of me…
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