“I’m not some helpless princess, you know,” I said. “I can take care of myself.”
He looked up at me and the ghost of a smirk haunted one corner of his thin lips.
“I can see that,” he replied.
“Fuck you!” I spat, but my mad face wouldn’t stay on. I snorted through my swollen nose. “You should see the other guy.”
His tiny smirk swelled into an expression that could almost be mistaken for a smile.
“All right, boss,” he said. “I guess we better get you something to wear.”
The room Malloy ushered me into had a gold sign on the door.
“Sissy Boudoir,” I read out loud. “I think I did a girl/girl scene with her back in ’94.”
Again, that little twitch of a smile, quick as an insect wing at the corner of Malloy’s mouth, as he chivalrously held the door open for me.
The “Sissy Boudoir” was dimly lit and tricked out with pink satin and red velvet. No angles. Everything was soft and rounded in a way that made it feel sort of like being inside a huge plush vagina. To the left was a walk-in closet filled with extra-large feminine attire. Boat-sized pumps with ten-inch heels. Trampy stripper dresses and frilly French maid costumes that would have fit Malloy. Full-figured bras, enormous lace panties and boxes of queen-sized pantyhose. I was about to make some kind of snide comment when I caught a glimpse of my own reflection in the full-length mirror.
I wasn’t ready for that, but I don’t know how you could be. When my eyes first snagged on the pale figure in the hospital gown, I was startled because I thought it was someone else. When I realized it was me, I felt dizzy, stricken with a kind of horrified disbelief.
“Jesus,” I whispered, pressing a palm to the cool surface of the mirror.
My face was a lurid Halloween mask, haphazardly painted in every shade of bruise. My proud Italian nose was massively swollen and lumpy under a stripe of clean white tape. Both my eyes were black, the right more than the left, making me look like an asymmetrical purple panda. My lower lip was twice the size of the upper and had a thick, crusty split down the middle. My forehead was studded with contusions, giving me a heavy, Neanderthal brow. There was blood crusted in my hair.
My arms and legs were also covered with bruises and scrapes and I could see the bristly blue stitches protruding like bug legs from my right side just under the armpit. But my gaze kept returning to that face that couldn’t possibly be my face. I suddenly understood why Savannah had shot herself after she’d bashed up her face in that car accident. Not sixteen hours ago, I had been staring into a mirror and fretting about crow’s feet and less than perfectly perky breasts. I had to laugh or I’d start screaming.
“Sure, it’s ugly today,” Malloy said, pulling a dress off its hanger and handing it to me. “But it’ll be better in a week and back to normal in two. You might want to get some work on that nose when this is all over.”
I couldn’t even imagine what “all over” really meant. What my life would be like when and if this was all over. Or what it was going to take to make it that way.
Instead of dwelling on the uncertain future, I forced myself to concentrate on the little tasks in front of me right now. Tasks like shedding the hospital gown and slipping into the dress while Malloy graciously looked away, as if the whole world hadn’t already seen me naked a million times. The dress was the smallest of the lot but still fit me like a laundry bag. It was black and probably would have looked much sluttier if it actually fit. There were no bras in anything close to my size and the dress’ deep sweetheart neckline hung droopy and unflattering on my bruised chest. Malloy had to help me zip the thing and when I looked back in the mirror I suddenly felt like crying. I wanted desperately to go home, take a shower in my safe green bathroom, and change into my own comfortable clothes. I wanted a bra that looked nice. My favorite boots. I wanted to open my neatly organized, sweet-smelling underwear drawer and pick out a nice clean cotton thong. The thought of my little house and all my books and clothes and personal things barricaded behind yellow tape and rifled by smirking cops fed my helpless anger and heated my tears to near boiling as I fought to hold them back. I turned away from the mirror and that horrible ugly face and started randomly flinging shoes around, searching for anything that was less than three sizes too big.
“I can’t,” I said. “These are all fucking huge.” I picked up a pair of cherry-red patent leather pumps. “Eleven!” I shouted, tossing them aside. “Thirteen!” I read off the print on a pair of clear plastic platforms. “Fuck!”
I flailed out with my left arm and knocked over a wire shoe rack. Huddled and shaking in a pile of trashy drag shoes, I couldn’t fight the tears anymore.
Who did I think I was kidding? I wasn’t some kind of badass action movie heroine. I was just a beat-up barefoot dead girl with no house and no business and no chance in hell of doing anything but getting my dumb ass killed for real. I might as well just turn myself in. At least in jail, I’d get shoes that fit.
Malloy turned politely away from my tears just like he had looked away while I was changing. He stood like that for a minute, giving me space to have my girly breakdown, then spoke.
“Tell you what,” he said softly. “I’ll carry you barefoot to my car and then we can swing by Payless or something. You’re a seven, right?”
“Right,” I said, snuffling back tearsnot and pushing my hair back from my face. “Seven.”
It’s funny, but that was exactly what I needed to break me out of my little pity-party. I normally hated that Men-Are-From-Mars, testosterone-driven impulse boys get where they want to solve all my problems by troubleshooting me like buggy software and offering up a simple concrete solution to stop my tears. But if Malloy had done something more intuitive and nurturing like hugging me or telling me everything was going to be all right, I would have disintegrated into a useless puddle. His simple answer to the problem of the big shoes gave me something to hold on to. Payless. Right. Good idea. It allowed me to pretend that the lack of shoes that fit really was the reason I was crying.
9.
We wound up at Target instead of Payless. I waited in the car with my knees tucked up under my chin while Malloy went in. I watched normal people going in and out with kids and bags, all living normal lives in which nobody had ever really hurt them. I hated them for being so clueless, like I used to be.
When Malloy came out he had twice as many shopping bags as I’d expected. When I looked at what he’d bought, I felt the same sort of baffled wonder I had experienced over the morning coffee.
The first shopping bag he handed me contained items that were plainer and cheaper, but otherwise identical to the outfit I had been wearing the last time I saw him, a pair of low-rise jeans and a black tank top. But instead of the high-heeled boots I had been wearing that day, he’d bought me a pair of sleek black athletic shoes. He’d also included a utilitarian black fleece hoodie, since it was October and the weather was drifting toward cool at night. Another smaller bag contained two black thongs, a black bra and a package of black cotton socks. The bra was the correct size, but Malloy had chosen a more modest, unpadded style, rather than my usual cleavage enhancing push-up in-your-face variety. It didn’t matter. I was amazed by his flawless memory for detail. The sizes were all perfect. I didn’t think the last six men who’d actually touched my breasts could have guessed my bra size at gunpoint, but this man I barely knew remembered how I took my coffee and the exact style of jeans I like. I snuck a glance over at Malloy as he handed me a bag of travel-sized toiletries. He looked the same, deadpan and squinting against the morning sun as he lit another cigarette. I wondered if maybe I was starting to develop a bit of a crush on him. Or maybe it was just some dumb girly thing about being rescued. Either way, I found myself suddenly speculating about what it might be like with him. I wondered if he would crack open and get wild in the sack, or if he would do the deed with the same quiet determination as everything else he did.
I think he might have
sensed my impure thoughts, but if he did, he chose not to comment. He just fished a pair of black sunglasses out of one of the bags, tore off the tag and told me to put them on. I felt suddenly embarrassed, hyperaware of my ugly, beat-up face and dumpy dress.
“Thanks,” I said quietly, slipping on the sunglasses.
“You’re welcome,” he replied and pulled out of the lot.
Malloy wanted to rent a car, something generic and forgettable, just to be on the safe side. He transferred all the shopping bags and a roomy green gym bag from his own SUV into the little rented Kia Rio. Then as soon as we were out of the rental place, Malloy pulled into a big supermarket parking lot and swiftly snagged the license plates off a crappy little Honda not unlike my hated Civic, stashing the Kia’s legit plates in the gym bag. I thought he was being kind of paranoid, but of course it turned out he was right.
On our way out of town, we stopped at a 7-Eleven. I changed in the bathroom and stuffed the hateful tranny dress into the trash bin. I brushed the sticky tangles from my hair and the funk from my teeth and then splashed some cold water on my swollen face. That hurt like hell but I felt better once it had been done.
A chubby blonde teenage girl with giant hoop earrings and too much lip gloss pushed open the bathroom door and then froze when she saw me at the sinks.
“Oh,” she said, tucking her pink face down like she’d been smacked. “Sorry.”
She turned and left without meeting my eyes. Like she had caught me fingering myself or shooting up. The bathroom had several stalls and was meant to accommodate more than one person, yet she fled the moment she saw me. I looked up into the spotted mirror at my face. I couldn’t really blame her. I put my sunglasses back on.
When I left the bathroom, I deliberately dawdled in the store, watching the reactions of the people around me. It was amazing. Once they noticed the bruises, they looked away like I was a leper. Men would scope my ass in the new jeans, but when their gaze hit my face their smirks would evaporate and they would suddenly notice some really fascinating nutritional information on the label of their Red Bull can. Women would cringe from my bruises like they were contagious, like looking at me would remind them that they weren’t really safe after all. No one wanted to see me, to think about what might have happened to me, and so they did everything in their power to unsee me. I had a sudden perverse urge to shake people and force them to look but it occurred to me that my new Teflon face was probably a good thing. After all, a murder suspect on the lam doesn’t want to be looked at.
I imagined a tan, handsome cop with a thick mustache questioning the girl with the big earrings.
“Can you describe the individual you encountered in the restroom?” he would ask.
“She was all beat up,” the girl would answer.
“What color was her hair?” he would ask.
The girl would chew her gooey lower lip and shrug.
“How about her eyes?”
“Black,” the girl would say.
As I hustled back to the rented car, I wondered briefly if people thought that Malloy was the one who did this to me.
The Silver Spur Motel in Vegas was just what you’d expect. Squeezed in between a gas station and a modest storefront that housed a different fly-by-night business every week, it was a blocky stucco U curled around a narrow parking lot. Cheap and tawdry but still clean and relatively safe, not too scary for a beautiful young woman traveling alone with a large roll of small bills. It was far from the flashy neon circus of the Strip but conveniently located within spitting distance of several of the biggest titty bars in Vegas. All the girls stayed there when they were dancing at Eye Candy or Cheetah’s or Sin. I must have stayed there myself a hundred times. It was almost like a dorm for road girls and feature dancers, except there was no watchful dorm mother to keep out gentleman callers. Just a silent, thousand-year-old Indian desk clerk who made an art out of looking the other way. As a result, there was tons of action at the Spur, both professional and recreational. The girls called it the Silver Sperm.
When I spotted the familiar cowboy boot-shaped sign, I told Malloy to make a left into the lot. It was early still, just before 1PM. We saw a pair of hung-over afternoon-shift girls, bottle blondes in velour track suits lugging knock-off Louis Vuitton gig bags, but the place was otherwise pretty dead. Most of the night-shift girls would not even be awake for another hour or two. Malloy clocked the busty blondes as dispassionately as he took note of the other cars in the lot. I spotted Zandora’s Lexus parked right by the office and directed Malloy to park beside it. He shook his head and parked further back instead, as far away from the street and the girls as he could get.
“Put your sweatshirt on,” he said as we waited for the two girls to load their things into their rental car and pull out of the lot. “And put the hood up. Here.”
He handed me a pair of latex gloves. I watched him as he stretched a second pair over his own broad hands.
“Are you serious?” I asked, frowning down at the gloves.
He didn’t answer. He didn’t have to. Clearly he was. I put the gloves on.
Zandora was in room 202, upstairs on the second level. As I stood before the plain white door with its shiny silver number, I had a sick, visceral flashback of screaming that number at the top of my lungs. I shuddered and Malloy put a heavy, gloved paw on my shoulder.
There was a sudden frantic scuffle and thump behind the door, followed by a high-pitched man’s voice cursing loudly in what had to be Romanian. Then, a louder thump and Zandora’s voice shouting something that sounded sort of like “pizza man.” Apparently the guy didn’t like being called a pizza man, because what I heard next could only be fists on soft flesh.
“Jesus,” I said, belly twisted tight as my heart fluttered high in my throat.
“You up for this?” Malloy asked, reaching beneath his jacket to unsnap a shoulder holster I hadn’t even noticed until just then.
Was I?
Before I could answer, he kicked open the cheap lock and moved into the shadowy room, gun out and covering the space inside with smooth, professional ease. Cattle-prodded by adrenaline, I followed Malloy, feeling like an understudy with no time to rehearse.
My old pal was inside, that sawed-off, weasely Eastern Bloc guy that had been looking for Lia. He was crouching over a crumpled, fetal Zandora and shaking out his right hand like it hurt. His surprised face was turned up toward Malloy, eyes wide.
“Who the hell are you?” he asked.
“Get up,” Malloy replied, making a terse upward gesture with the barrel of his gun.
My eyes were scanning the shadows for the weasel’s buddy, that big blond redneck that had backed him up that day in my office. Before I could remember how to make my voice work and warn Malloy, the door slammed back into Malloy’s shoulder and the redneck was on him, gripping Malloy’s gun hand by the wrist. Together, they stumble-waltzed in a tight circle, slamming the door closed, knocking over a chair and bumping a tiny table to the right of the door. A flimsy pink and silver gown that Zandora had been ironing on a hotel towel fluttered to the floor at their feet. The iron followed, hissing and dribbling hot water on the carpet.
After a fierce struggle, the pistol flew from Malloy’s hand. The redneck broke loose and made an awkward sideways lunge for the gun. With a frightening economy of movement, Malloy smashed the little table with his right foot, ripped loose one of its metal legs, and spun around to crack the redneck in the temple. Malloy followed up with a swift kick and the redneck went down on his side in a crumpled, bleeding heap.
Before I could blink, Malloy had the gun again and was pointing it at the weasely guy straddling Zandora.
“Get off her and get your fucking hands up,” Malloy said. “Angel, get his gun.”
Recognition blossomed in the guy’s narrow eyes as he raised himself slowly to his feet, bloody palms framing his disbelieving face.
It seemed to take centuries for me to figure out how to peel myself off the wall and make my ar
ms and legs obey my brain. I put on the toughest face I could muster, walked over to the weasel and forced myself to start feeling around under his obnoxious silk shirt. It was bright canary yellow with a jaunty, Vegas-themed pattern of playing cards and dice, made even more lurid by the recent addition of wet crimson splatters. I could smell his armpits and his hot, minty breath and his eyes kept darting between me and Malloy as I patted his wiry body down. My hands felt clumsy under the latex gloves. Someone with a clue probably would have found the compact .38 in the small of his back right away. I found it eventually and gingerly tweezed it between my thumb and forefinger like something nasty.
“Got it,” I said.
The weasel muttered while I backed away and tried to make my numb fingers hold the unfamiliar gun the way my firearms safety instructor had taught me.
“Over there,” Malloy told the weasel, gesturing with his gun toward the bathroom door.
“You’re dead,” the weasel spat, showing me his long yellow teeth like a dog. “Dead.”
“Shut up,” Malloy said.
“You too, big man,” he told Malloy. “You and this whore.”
I somehow managed to thumb off the safety, aiming low.
“Fuck you,” I said.
The weasel’s eyes cut over to his fallen comrade and widened slightly. Malloy frowned and turned back to the redneck just in time to dodge the airborne iron as it flew into the mirrored closet door, shattering the glass. The redneck barreled into Malloy, wrapping thick sunburned arms around Malloy’s chest. As they grappled and grunted, the weasel started inching closer to me.
“Stay back, fuckhead!” I said, hating the pinched, girly squeak in my voice.
“You gonna shoot me?” he asked, arching an eyebrow and sliding closer.
“I said stay back!”
“What if I don’t?” he asked.
There was a furious howl and my gaze flicked over toward Malloy. He had two fingers of his right hand digging into the corner of the redneck’s mouth, stretching the guy’s cheek out from his teeth in a painful imitation of a kid pulling a funny face.
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