by Tonia Brown
Jonah, who was pretty sure he was already pale, lost what little color he had left. “What?”
But the man didn’t explain. He just smiled a broad, evil grin and left the pair alone again.
“Don’t listen to Chuck,” Candy said. “He’s full of shit. They aren’t gonna cut off your toes.”
Jonah breathed a sigh of relief.
“They’ll probably just shoot you,” she added.
“Shoot me?”
“If you’re lucky.”
“Lucky?”
“Shut up in there!” a man yelled.
“Fuck you, Murray!” Candy yelled.
“No, thanks,” the man said. “I’m not into necrophilia.”
The men’s laughter rumbled down the hallway.
“What does that mean?” Jonah asked.
“It’s his oh-so-funny way of calling me a dead woman,” Candy said. “Which is the truth, I’m afraid. I’ve been dead for a while now.”
Jonah stared hard at Candy. “You… you’re… are you dead?” She didn’t look dead. If she was, then she handled it a heck of a lot better than Dale.
“Yup. Dead woman walking.”
It didn’t make sense. He rested a trembling his hand on hers, pleased to find it warm and supple. She didn’t feel dead. She certainly didn’t smell dead, unless the dead smelled of summer rain and sunshine and soft sighs. He never got close enough to Dale to find out.
“Are you dead dead?” he asked. “Or undead dead?”
Candy narrowed her eyes at him. “What are you talking about?”
Now he was really confused. “Why? What are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about fucking up bad enough to have the mafia track my fat ass across three state lines. Now what in the hell are you talking about?”
Clarity came with her words, striking Jonah almost hard enough to produce another burst of stars. “Ah! I see. Dead as in your life is forfeit. I see. Yes. That makes much more sense than… phew… wow,” he paused to let out a nervous little giggle, “I mean yeah… wow… that is so much better than what I was thinking.”
“Really?” Candy pursed her lips at him as she sat back. “I’m glad you’re enjoying it, because from where I’m sitting, the situation is pretty shitty.”
Jonah finally thought past the fact that she wasn’t dead dead, and didn’t like where he arrived. “Wait up, you know these guys?”
“Yeah. You could say that.”
“What’s going on here?”
“Will you two shut up?” a man yelled.
“Get bent!” Candy screamed.
Another chair scraped across tiles, and more footsteps approached, but a different man appeared in the doorway this time. His hair was darker than his compatriot’s, but the suit was similar, and his build was almost exactly the same. Tall and broad shouldered and powerful. Not the kind of man with whom you would want to tangle in a dark alley. Or a bright alley. Or any alley, for that matter.
“If you don’t mind holding it down to a slight roar,” the man said, “we’re trying to play cards.”
“Bite my taco,” Candy said. She then snorted and sputtered and pulled air through every sinus, every pore, and every available bit of her being, hocking up a tremendous loogie, which she proceeded to spit on the floor between the bed and the door.
“Manners, manners.” The man clucked his tongue as he reached for the doorknob. “You know, I don’t know what Jack ever saw in you. Common little whore with no class? He should’ve known better.” With that, the man closed the door behind him.
“Thank God,” she said. “I’ve been trying to get them to close that damned door for two hours.”
“Congratulations,” Jonah said for lack of a better thing to say.
Candy gave him a wounded look. “Are you mad at me?”
“Mad? Why should I be? I don’t even know what the heck is going on!”
“Well, now that the door is closed, we can talk. Properly.” She scooted to the foot of the bed and made herself comfortable across from him. “I just didn’t want those assholes to hear us. Lord knows they gossip enough as it is. No need to stoke that fire.”
Jonah fell silent and raised his eyebrows at her. “Well?”
She bit her lip. “You are mad at me. Aren’t you?”
“I don’t know yet. Why don’t you tell me what I’m mad about? Besides being shot at and punched in the nose by the freaking Mob?”
Candy grimaced. “Yeah, sorry about that. And for the record, they aren’t real mafia. Just mafia wannabes. I really didn’t think they would follow me so far. I thought… I thought I got away with it.”
“For Christ’s sake! Got away with what?” Jonah was bordering on hysteria. And for once, he thought he had every damned right.
Instead of confessing, she returned to biting her lip.
“Candy,” he said in a calmer tone. “Please. I’m your friend. Just tell me what’s happening.”
Her lip split as she chewed; small drops of blood rolled down her chin. She didn’t seem to notice. Instead, she shook her head and said, “You’re not my friend.”
Jonah wasn’t prepared for that. “Yes, I am.”
“You’re just a couple of guys I suckered into giving me a lift.”
The pain in his knee was nothing compared to the pain he felt at her words. “I don’t believe you.”
Candy looked to her lap. “You can’t be my friend. I don’t have any friends.”
In truth, Jonah had much more to worry about than whether or not some strange woman considered him a friend. To start with, there was the fact that his forty-eight-hour time limit was slipping away, second by second, while he was held up in some bedroom in God only knew where by the mini-mafia. Then there was the fact that, by some miracle, Dale seemed to have gotten away. While on the surface his escape seemed to be a good thing, Jonah’s relief was tempered by the fact that the zombie was out there, in the general public, all on his own, and probably getting hungry again. To top it all off, Jonah was about to lose his and his friend’s immortal souls to the Devil. But for the moment, he caved to his worry for Candy, because he was pretty sure—when it was all said and done and counted and recounted—that she was more than just his friend.
He was pretty sure he loved her.
“You aren’t going home to a dying father,” he said. “Are you?”
She turned her damp eyes to him and shook her head again. “If I had known you were such a nice guy, I would have left you back in Ely. I didn’t mean to get you into this mess.”
Jonah appreciated the sentiment, but it did little to sate his curiosity. “What mess?”
“I guess I owe you a story, considering you shared yours.”
He wanted to agree, but there was so much he hadn’t shared. So much she didn’t know. Couldn’t know. “Go on. I’m listening.”
Candy sighed. “I came to Reno a few years ago to start a dance career. I mean real dancing, like stage shows and proper burlesque. Not stripping in dives.” She laughed a bit as the memories flowed through her. “I must have looked as green as I felt when I stepped off that bus. Jesus, I was such an easy target. It wasn’t long before the sharks picked up the scent of fresh meat. That’s how I ended up with Jack. He promised me a chance to be on stage, but all he really wanted was my money.”
“He robbed you.”
“Blind. All five thousand dollars.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“Not as sorry as I am. It took me years to save that money, and he had his hands on it in days.” She hung her head again as she added, “After he got his hands on me first.”
“You fell in love with him?”
“No, it was all just physical. I thought I was using him, but all the while he was using me.”
“Ah.” Jonah’s heart ached for her.
“Yeah. Afterwards, he kicked me to the curb and called in the next slut with five thousand dollars to lose. It all happened so fast, I didn’t even realize what went wrong
until I was sitting in a homeless shelter waiting on a bowl of soup.”
“You started stripping to make ends meet.”
“I had to. I had nowhere else to go, no money, no home. I couldn’t go back East. My parents were pretty mad about me taking off in the first place. There was no way I was gonna tell ‘em I lost my shirt overnight.” She raised her head again and looked Jonah dead in the eyes. Her gaze was cold, hard, unforgiving. “But I swore that I’d get back at him. I promised myself that I wouldn’t rest until I got my money back. With interest.”
“How much did you steal?” he asked, putting the obvious clues together.
Candy smirked.
“How much?” he asked again.
“Twenty grand,” Candy said.
“Twenty grand!”
“Yeah.”
“How?”
“That’s the best part. I gave him a little while to forget me while I worked on toning down my accent.” Candy took a deep breath, and with a little concentration, she shifted out of her Southern twang into a reasonable imitation of a Midwest gal. “I bought a wig and put on tons of makeup and padded my clothes to look heavier. Then I went to work for his casino as a blackjack dealer.” With a smile, she reverted to her usual drawl. “I got really good at palming chips, which I turned in at the till at the end of every week for almost a whole year. A little here, a little there, it all added up. When I got what I came after, I fled, cash in hand.”
Jonah’s mind went to her single bag and the way she always seemed to guard it, protect it. “You’ve been carting around twenty thousand dollars for the last two days?”
“Minus what I spent on that lemon.”
“Wow.”
“Yeah. I know.”
“You’re one brave woman.”
“You mean I’m one stupid woman. I should’ve known better than this. There was no way Jack would just let me waltz out of his place with that much cash. He must have been keeping an eye on me the whole time. It was a stupid idea with a predictable result.”
Jonah smiled. “I think it was a fine idea.”
“You don’t mean that.”
“Sure. You deserve every penny of it after what he did to you.”
“But you don’t deserve this.” Candy ran her fingertips along the bridge of his swollen nose, so gently that Jonah almost couldn’t feel it. “You are just such a nice guy. I wish I’d met you before all of this.”
“Me too.”
Her touch lingered, tracing his lips, his quivering jaw and sliding down his neck. Before she reached his chest, she backed off. Which was probably for the best. Why start something they couldn’t finish?
“I hate waiting,” she said. “I wish they’d just get it over with.”
“What are they waiting for?”
“Jack.”
“Ah.” Jonah saw the situation as a whole now. The henchmen had tracked them all the way here and captured them, and now the boss man had to play catch-up. Depending on where they were in Colorado—the last thing he remembered was falling asleep outside of Grand Junction—it could be anywhere from sixteen to twenty hours before this Jack arrived. Jonah wondered if they couldn’t put that time to good use. Aside from starting things they couldn’t finish. Something like, oh, trying to escape. Maybe, with a little luck, they could get out of here and still make the deadline.
“How long do you think he’ll be?” Jonah asked.
“Not much longer.” She returned to chewing her lip, then said, “I’m so sorry, hun. I didn’t mean to drag you and poor Dale into this.”
Poor Dale? What about poor Jonah? Why wasn’t she whining about poor shot-in-the-knee, broken-nosed Jonah? “Aw, Dale’s a big boy. He can take care of himself.”
Candy covered her face and wailed in response. Where she was merely teary eyed before, she now bawled.
“Oh, no,” he said. “Don’t cry. It’s okay. We’ll be okay. Maybe we can reach some kind of agreement with this Jack person—”
“No!” she shouted. “Don’t you get it? They killed him. Dale’s dead.”
Jonah blinked once. Then twice. “What?”
“They shot him right after they shot you. Shot him dead. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.” She collapsed onto the bed, a wailing fountain of snot and tears.
Jonah pulled himself across the mattress until he was close enough to put his arms around her. Candy didn’t resist as he enveloped her. She clung to his neck and buried her head in his shoulder, soaking his shirt with her endless tears. Gathering her to him, he rocked and cradled her, cooing and calming her as best he could. In that brief instant, as he hugged her close for the first time—her breath hot on his neck, her firm breasts crushed against his chest, her heart racing wildly with his—he felt both grateful and guilty for her sorrow.
“Its okay, Candy. Don’t be upset. It’ll be okay.”
“But I got him killed. It’s my fault.”
Johan smirked in silence. “Dale has a way of surprising folks. He might be more alive than you think.”
Candy leaned away, eyeing him with a look that demanded ‘are you shitting me?’ “I would love to believe that, hun, but trust me. He was dead. They rolled his corpse into a ditch.”
“They left him behind?”
“Yeah.”
In her desperation, Jonah found a glimmer of hope. He held her by the shoulders and asked, “You’re sure he wasn’t moving?”
She nodded.
“They just left him there?” he asked. “I mean, he didn’t put up a fight?”
“He couldn’t,” she said. “He was as dead as a can of ham.”
Jonah couldn’t help his grin. If they weren’t too far from the scene of the abduction, then there was a good chance that Dale—if he wasn’t really gone this time, and Jonah prayed that the zombie was still a zombie—would find his way back to them. If they could get to a phone and let him know where they were. That is, if they could find out where they were. That was a lot of ‘ifs’, but a few ‘ifs’ was better than nothing. That glimmer of hope sparkled and shone.
“There has to be a way out,” Jonah said. He glanced around, seeking easy exits, but finding none. A pack of rabid henchman lay beyond the door, while the single window was shadowed by bars on the outside. Who puts bars on the outside of their windows? “We have to get out of here.”
“I’d like nothing better,” Candy said. “But the only way out is through that door, and even if we could sneak past the guys, Jack’s bound to be here any minute. He only lives a mile from here.”
The glimmer of hope faltered, sputtered. “Where exactly are we?”
“Jack’s place. You know, Jack of Diamonds? It’s a casino on the strip.”
The glimmer winked out. Jonah trembled. He recognized the name of the casino, but couldn’t remember why. The name echoed in his tired mind. He drew a deep breath and asked again in slow, singular questions, “Where? Are? We?”
Candy said, very softly, “Reno.”
Jonah’s eyes widened, a million cries leaping to his tongue, yet he was unable to speak. If he opened his mouth, he was going to call her a liar. He didn’t want to call her a liar. Even though she clearly was a liar. She had lied to him this whole time, about her sick father, about her lack of funds. He bet that Candy wasn’t even her real name. And now here she was, lying about being all the way back in Reno. Wasn’t she? After all, you couldn’t get all the way from the middle of Colorado to the western border of Nevada in seven hours. And the time said he had only been out seven hours. Right?
Glancing at the clock, Jonah realized his simple mistake.
“You were out for most of the trip because you lost so much blood,” Candy said, pressing on with her lie, making it sound most convincing. “I’m surprised you didn’t bleed to death, but Murray is pretty good with gunshots. God knows he’s seen enough of them.”
Her voice faded to a thin tunnel behind his heartbeat thumping in his temples as he stared at the clock. Or rather, the space where there lay a cert
ain dot. The dot that indicated the difference between a.m. and p.m. When lit, the time was p.m.
It wasn’t lit.
Candy, oblivious to his distress, kept right on answering his question. “We aren’t in the casino, of course. This is the manager’s apartment behind the hotel. Well, Jack keeps it on the books as a manager’s apartment, but nobody lives here. He really uses it for business. And by ‘business’, I mean this kind of thing. Jonah? Are you okay? You look kinda sick. Hun? Can you hear me?”
Jonah heard her, all right, but nothing beyond those glowing green numbers registered with him. He woke from his nap just after one in the afternoon on the forest-bordered Colorado highway, and now here he was at eight in the morning in a stuffy hotel room in a mediocre casino in Nevada. He had been down and out for nineteen hours, which was plenty of time to drag two unconscious folks all the way back to Reno.
Reno.
After coming so far, they had been dragged back to the start. After the bickering and the struggling and the countless hours of endless highway boredom, he was back where he had began. And time was slipping away. By his calculation, he had less than thirty hours left.
It took at least forty to make the whole trip in one go.
