Explicit Detail

by Scarlett Finn

  ‘You brought me a newspaper?’ Flick asked, closing the door while wondering at the unusual gift.

  ‘No, I assumed you ordered it. It was at your door. They’re delivered by the staff with breakfast each morning.’

  ‘Oh yes, of course,’ Flick said, as though she was merely forgetful.

  Tossing the newspaper to the TV unit, Flick gestured to the fabric-upholstered chair in the corner.

  ‘No, please, you sit,’ Whyte said.

  Flick did so, on the corner of her unmade bed. ‘Is this important, you seem... alert.’

  Whyte stood so still and looked at her so intensely that Flick wondered at his state of mind. His suit was as immaculate as ever, but something about him wasn’t as composed as he usually was, and his hair was mussed when usually every lock was in place.

  ‘It won’t do.’

  ‘What?’ Flick asked. ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘I want to apologise to you,’ Whyte said.

  ‘Apologise for what?’

  ‘Things haven’t run smoothly, but I find myself preoccupied with you.’

  ‘Preoccupied?’

  ‘I would have come to you yesterday. I wanted to come. I was fearful of alarming you.’

  Maybe it was sleep deprivation, or the melee of thoughts distracting her, but Flick only now noted that they were alone, something she had told Rushe wouldn’t happen. It might be the middle of the day, and they might be in a busy hotel, but alone was alone, that’s what Rushe would tell her.

  He’d remind her to have her guard up too, which she hadn’t when she answered that door. A whisper inside her thought it might be, or maybe hoped it would be, Rushe. But Whyte shouldn’t have been a complete surprise.

  ‘Alarming me?’ Flick’s throat parched. ‘Why would you—‘

  ‘You told me something personal,’ he said, and coming to seat himself at her side, he snatched her hand. ‘It can’t have been easy to admit your sexual naïveté. I have to know why?’

  ‘Why what?’

  ‘Why did you tell me?’

  ‘I wanted to be honest.’

  ‘Is it possible... you told me because you sensed that I was... there was something significant between us?’

  Flick hadn’t had much time to sense anything by that point in their relationship. But when Whyte’s hand loosened from hers and spread against the fabric of her robe, Flick tensed.

  ‘I won’t hurt you,’ he said.

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘You have to be curious, are you curious?’

  ‘About what?’ Flick asked, uncomfortable with the way he leaned closer.

  ‘Or is it true?’ Whyte probed. ‘Are you pure as you claim?’

  ‘You question my honesty?’ Flick asked, and alarm bells rang louder. Rushe’s name thumped through her head and into her heart.

  ‘I don’t think Rosa believes it,’ he said, casting his eyes downward as his hand slipped under her robe.

  ‘No!’ Flick said, trying to force his hand away and leave the bed, but he held her in place.

  ‘I won’t hurt you,’ he huffed, and he launched himself toward Flick, flattening her out on the bed and fumbling to loosen the robe.

  Flick didn’t hesitate to fight; she kicked out and grabbed at his hands to prevent him gaining access to her body. A searing pain in her jaw made her yelp, but she kept kicking when his mouth slobbered on her neck.

  ‘No!’ she yelled out.

  Bringing up her knee, Flick made solid contact with his groin, giving her leave to roll his body one way as she went in the other.

  Whyte grabbed out for her hair and caught the ends dragging a clump of strands loose. It felt like needles were piercing her skull, but on reaching the floor Flick pounced back to her feet and went straight for the door.

  ‘I’m sorry!’

  Flick spun around, her hand finding the door handle at her back. Whyte was coming toward her and she got the door open an inch.

  ‘I’ll scream,’ she said. ‘I’ll run. If you think for one second that I won’t fight you...’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said again, and when his hand moved toward her face, Flick recoiled.

  ‘No,’ she said, looking him square in the eye. ‘I am not afraid of you.’

  ‘I would never have you so. I apologise, I shouldn’t have... that was inappropriate.’

  As apologies went, Whyte sounded sincere enough, but Flick didn’t believe a second of it. He was sorry because she fought, because she got away, and because he didn’t get what he wanted from her.

  ‘You’re going to walk out of here now, and I don’t want to see you again.’

  The apologetic sincerity vanished. ‘This is about Rushe?’

  ‘Rushe,’ she said, thrown for a loop. ‘What does he have to do with you attacking me?’

  ‘I saw the way he looked at you; I saw arousal in you too. There was energy between you.’

  ‘You’re jealous of him for catching me when I fell? Nothing happened between Rushe and me that night. He was a perfect gentleman.’

  Whyte studied her. ‘He entices you.’

  ‘You should go,’ Flick said, not interested in having any such discussion with this man.

  She opened the door fully and stood against it, signalling that she was finished with the exchange. ‘I should like the chance to make amends for—‘

  ‘No,’ she said, and looked him in the eye again. ‘I no longer wish to see you socially.’

  The line was amiable; in fact, she had used it in the past with men from her first life. Despite what had happened, she was polite but she didn’t dither on her resolute tone.

  ‘I should point out that you live and work—‘

  ‘I would go homeless and penniless before I would give in to a man like you. Believe that you are the centre of your universe if you must, but you are not now, nor will you ever be, the centre of mine.’

  Whyte heard her words, but he didn’t react. He walked straight past her out of the room, and Flick closed the door, locking it in place. Moving back into the body of the room, Flick leaned over the television to see in the mirror, and tipping her head to the side she saw blood under her jaw; he’d bitten her.

  His actions were frantic, and Flick wondered at that, and at what Rushe had revealed to her. Was it possible that Whyte had been stimulated while watching her interact with Rushe? Had he let that build up over the last day and a half until that arousal burst out of him?

  She flopped away from the mirror to sit on the stool beside the unit, and her attention landed on the newspaper. Flick didn’t read newspapers, she got news on the internet like most people these days. Her certainty that she hadn’t ordered it was absolute, because she hadn’t ordered anything.

  On the chance that it had been delivered to her room by mistake, Flick opened it out and flickered through the pages to try and find a name or room number. A smudge of blue ink caught her eye, and she fumbled through to find it again. When she did, she realised that the newspaper hadn’t been left here in error, it was meant for her.

  Scrawled down the outer margin was a note, “Rich Room @ seven thirty”, and it was signed, “Jimmy J.”. Either Flick was about to meet Rushe’s alter ego, or someone knew more than she did. The handwriting wasn’t Rushe’s, she knew that for sure, but Flick was far too curious not to show up and find out what the author of the note had to say.

  Chapter Seventeen

  The Rich Room was on the opposite side of town from the Lounge. At this time of the evening, the nightclub section of the establishment wasn’t open yet, it was just a bar.

  Flick arrived and looked around the shadowy, windowless space. Only two booths were occupied; one by a party of four, clearly students, all laughing at one member of the group trying to chug a beer.

  The other booth had only one man in it, and because of how he sat, angled away from her, she couldn’t see his face. The knowledge that the students were so close by gave Flick the gumption to close the gap between them. />
  When she got closer, the man turned and Flick knew immediately that she was in the right place. ‘I know you,’ she said, sliding into the booth opposite him.

  ‘You got my message.’

  ‘Obviously,’ Flick said. ‘What do you want? Why didn’t you just knock on my door? Are you Eric or Scott?’

  ‘Eric,’ he said. He might have been sitting down, but the man with the sandy brown hair was built broad and thick, with a physique that would dwarf many men.

  ‘You’ve been watching me.’

  ‘Rushe told me to,’ he said. ‘We’ve cleared out your apartment, stripped it bare.’

  ‘I don’t care about the apartment. Why did you want to meet like this?’ Flick spread her hands on the table, and observed his hunched shoulders and the bottle of beer on the cardboard coaster in front of him.

  ‘What happened to your face?’ On her descent to the seat, he must have noticed the Whyte-inflicted wound under her jaw that she had tried to conceal with make-up. Her hair was tied back so now that she was sitting at his level, it would have been easy for Eric to inspect it more closely.

  ‘None of your business. Why am I here?’

  ‘Rushe wants you out,’ Eric said.

  ‘Does he? Out of where?’

  ‘The country I’d guess, but he’ll probably settle for off the job.’

  ‘I’m not walking away,’ Flick said, and began to slide out of the booth.

  ‘You been here before?’ he asked, with a blaze of awareness in his gaze. ‘To the Rich Room?’

  ‘No,’ Flick sighed.

  ‘Me either, you know any of the staff?’

  ‘One of the girls who used to work at the Lounge works here, Rosa told me.’

  ‘Yeah, she told me that too,’ Eric said. ‘I showed a bit of interest in Nancy on her first night, so when she stopped showing up, I went in and asked.’

  ‘So? You came here and found her, happily ever after.’

  ‘No one here’s ever heard of her.’

  Flick took her time to try to establish his meaning, and then she began to wonder why he would tell her that, what significance it had, and what had actually happened to Nancy.

  ‘Did you read the newspaper?’ Eric asked.

  Flick shook her head. ‘No, I didn’t, it’s out of date. I thought its purpose was the message.’

  ‘Have you got it?’

  She had stuffed the newspaper in the front of her library bag, which currently hung across her body so Eric would have seen it sticking out. Flick obliged without protest and handed it to him. He opened it to the page of his note, then folded the paper front to back and then in half.

  ‘Do you know her?’

  Flick lowered her face toward the small picture he pointed at in the article, which took up a section on the bottom of the page.

  ‘No, why would I...’ Flick’s denial lodged in her throat. ‘Yes.’ Eric nodded and Flick sat back. It hadn’t been instantly apparent, but the picture was familiar. It was of the refined blonde woman who had come to talk to Davis, that night in the Lounge when Flick first met Whyte.

  ‘They pulled her body out of a dumpster... we don’t know where Nancy is.’

  ‘You’re saying that these women are missing?’

  ‘I’m saying that she,’ Eric said, stabbing his finger on the picture in the paper, ‘is dead. Nancy is missing.’

  ‘You think that those crimes have something to do with Whyte? With Galante or Davis? The casino?’

  ‘That’s what we’ve been trying to figure out.’

  ‘But we were looking for Lisa, someone has to tell her about this, and—‘

  ‘No one has seen her since Monday, far as we can tell Rushe is the last to have seen her... alive at least.’

  ‘Do you think that Rushe has something to do with this?’

  ‘No,’ Eric said. ‘We’ve been trying to get something on these guys for months.’

  ‘Nancy is missing and Lisa is missing, this other woman is dead, and you’ve suspected something grievous for months...? You weren’t going after Lisa, were you? She wasn’t the job you wanted Rushe for.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘That night you came to the apartment,’ Flick said. ‘You were trying to get Rushe to do something, but he wouldn’t do it.’

  ‘No, he wouldn’t.’

  ‘Michael Lewis, he was genuine, looking for his sister?’

  ‘Yeah,’ Eric said. ‘He had a relationship with Rosa, an obsession. He started stalking her, but security kept kicking his ass every time he showed up. So he paid his little sister to lie about her age and get a job, so he could get information on Rosa.’

  ‘Then she started her relationship with Whyte, then Joey. But Michael...’

  ‘Lisa likes the life,’ Eric said. ‘It was easy for them to convince her that Michael is crazy, ‘cause he is.’

  ‘When you found out Michael was looking for his sister, you what? Convinced him that you would get Lisa back? That Rushe would get Lisa back?’

  ‘Yeah. He didn’t tell us about Rosa straight off,’ Eric said. ‘We thought he really lost his sister, thought he was in the same position as us. Rushe got to the bottom of that one quick.’

  ‘Position? You think there’s something else going on.’

  ‘We know there’s something else going on,’ Eric said. ‘We’ve known it since Scott’s girl was hanged in that hotel.’

  ‘She was... she left him.’

  ‘No, she didn’t,’ Eric said with a shake of his head. He clasped his hands on the table and leaned forward. ‘Rushe works alone and we’ve always respected that. Sometimes he’s helped us out. Susan went in the same way that Lisa did.’

  ‘Susan is Scott’s girl?’

  ‘Was, yeah. She started working in the Lounge, Whyte sucked her in and she went for it... She left Scott, she gave up everything, but Scott fought for her, he wanted her back. We tried to get in touch with Rushe but he was working another job, trying to find some woman who had a dumb cop boyfriend.’ Jansen, Flick thought, Eric was talking about the job that Rushe was on when Flick met him. ‘Rushe was gonna help, but... things got complicated, they got messy fast, and Susan died.’

  ‘You think that if Rushe had been here that might not have happened? Does Scott blame him?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Eric said, sitting back again. ‘I think Scott blames everyone, and he wants blood.’

  ‘You’re not a cop?’

  ‘No,’ Eric said with half a laugh. ‘Rushe is the good guy here, believe it or not. Scott can’t go near the place. They know his face, Whyte and the others. We needed someone to get close, to find out what was going on, and decide the best way to hit back.’

  ‘Retaliation,’ Flick said. ‘You’re out for vengeance.’

  ‘Yeah, but Galante, Davis, and Whyte are mixed up with the King Club. If those guys know what’s going on then they’ll protect their members.’

  ‘And if they don’t?’

  ‘Then those three men could have signed their own death warrants. Way we hear it the Club like to know about everything that their members are into. Something is going on there; we have to find out what.’

  ‘So you can get your revenge?’

  ‘Yeah, but now that you’ve walked into it, Rushe is all over the place. He tried to back out... he’s never backed out of a job, never since I’ve known him... You fuck with this, and I don’t know what Scott will do.’

  ‘Are you threatening me?’

  ‘I’m telling you that there are two guys here both fighting for the women they love. Rushe’s woman is still alive, and he wants her to stay that way. Scott... he’s a man with nothing left to lose.’

  ‘Rushe doesn’t know you’re here, does he?’

  Eric shook his head. ‘I’d like it to stay that way. I don’t have a steady girl, but I like my body intact.’ Eric managed half a smile, so Flick reciprocated. ‘If you don’t bow out and walk away now... Rushe can’t do what he does without a clear head.’

&
nbsp; Flick felt the quiver in her breath when she inhaled, and letting her focus fall to the table, she readied herself to make a confession. ‘If I can’t be a part of what Rushe does, a part of his work, then I can’t be a part of his life. He is what he does, it’s all he has.’

  ‘He has you,’ Eric said. ‘He told me to set up that apartment, no questions asked. He never told me about you. If he’s willing to walk away from the job to protect you, then he’s proved you’re more important to him than the job.’

  ‘What he does is important,’ Flick said, raising her head. ‘These women have gone through terrible things at the hands of these men. They’ve lost their lives. They deserve justice.’

  ‘I don’t know if we have the same idea of justice.’

  ‘You want to cause them pain, Whyte and Galante, but revealing the truth of who they are and what they do will make their carefully constructed worlds crumble.’

  ‘Do you think that’s what Scott wants? A press release?’

  Flick leaned as far across the table as she could. ‘I’m the closest to this, and the most vulnerable,’ she said. ‘If you want to know what these men do to women, if you want to catch them in the act, I’m the best bet you’ve got.’

  ‘What are you gonna do?’ Eric retorted. ‘Get naked with Whyte? Wait for him to bring in Galante or Joey? Then what?’

  Flick knew that wasn’t an option from any perspective, but she quickly formed a plan of action on her own. ‘No.’ She shuffled out of the booth.

  ‘Where are you going?’ Eric asked with a note of panic.

  ‘No more messing around.’

  Flick didn’t wait and she didn’t explain, she went straight for the door, out of the club and onto the street. Getting back to the hotel might take an hour in this traffic but she didn’t doubt herself for a second of it.

  ‘Take me to dinner.’

  As much as Flick had wanted to sprint straight to Rushe on returning to the hotel she went to her room first, prettied herself up, and then knocked on Rushe’s suite door, all civilised like. Getting hold of his room number had been easy enough when she phoned down to the front desk and spouted her employee credentials.