Need Me (Truthful Lies Trilogy Book Three)

by Dunning, Rachel

  And hell, if there is one, well, Frankie Lerrington, I hope you got your hotpants packed. Because if there is one, I heard it’s warm down there, brother!

  I’m smiling, elated, pin-prickles are forming on my head at the thought that it really is going to be over. Sure, Frank Lerrington might have Tatiana go down on him once or twice more, but something tells me Melissa Lerrington is gonna have her beady eyes all over the firm’s books and this lawsuit.

  There will be no lawsuit.

  The situation for me and Declan—the Tatiana Situation—is over.

  I’m smiling widely. “More tea, Blaze?”

  “Uhm, yes, ma’am. Sure.”

  We talk more. I ease back, feel the tension in my shoulders relax. I decide my Nassau trips to see Mr. Bernstein whenever I’m here are now going to include Mrs. Lerrington. When I ask her if this is OK, I see that sparkle in her eyes, but she tries not to let her emotions show too strongly. Her strong upbringing shines out and, ever so calmly, ever so relaxedly, she says, “That would be lovely, dear.” And then she looks away, and the smile finally reaches her eyes.

  Minutes later, maybe even an hour, I ask, “So, that showjumping competition you were doing, when Mr. Lerrington introduced himself to you...”

  “Yes?”

  “What happened?”

  She puts her tea-cup down, blushes, says, “After he spoke to me, I was so nervous I fell off my horse! I should’ve taken it as a sign of things to come!”

  We both can’t stop laughing.

  -4-

  You can take the bullets out the gun, but it’s the gun that’s the thing.

  Tatiana is the gun.

  After my meeting with Mrs. Lerrington, and after passing by Mr. Bernstein’s place to say hi again, I go into my second meeting of the day (which is now the night.)

  I go to dismantle the gun.

  I’m really not sure what to expect, whether I’ll be safe, whether she’ll go psycho on my ass. All I know is she didn’t answer my calls when she sent me those apocalyptic photos all those years ago, despite her pitch of “us girls need to stick together.” And when I try again now she doesn’t answer either. It would have been good to meet at a public place, sure.

  But it would also be good to end this thing, to end it completely.

  Deck can’t see her personally. The risk to him is astronomical. That’s the only flaw with Trev’s idea. And it’s me she wants, so it’s me she’ll get.

  I park my car outside Vikki’s place and take the train into the city to avoid the traffic. Forty minutes later I’m just outside the Upper Sleaze Side. In my torn jeans. And my denim vest. Looking up at a building so tall I’m expecting to see King Kong at the top of it.

  The gates are huge, the walls outside are huger. The sign outside says, Oak Summers Furnished & Serviced Apartments.

  Furnished and serviced. M-hmmm.

  The dresses being worn by the women entering and exiting the building probably cost more than the train I just caught to get here—as in, the train itself. Men in suits and thick scarves walk in and out. Out at Nassau, the snow that fell this morning made it look innocent and pure. In the city, it’s all mush, dirty and black, filled with the skids of expensive tire marks and even more expensive shoes.

  I go into the lobby and ask for Watkins. The man says there’s no one here by that name. I give him the room number (also given to me by Vikki.) He says, “Oh, Mizz Evans.”

  Evans. Right, because Watkins is her married name. And she ain’t married. Thanks to Deck...

  Maybe this is gonna be a little harder than I thought.

  The dude rings her up. “No answer,” he says.

  “And, do I need your permission to go up and knock?”

  He looks at me surprised. “Why would you need my permission?”

  I stare at him in silence for a second, realizing I was acting out some or other Hollywood flick that made me think every building near or in the Upper East Side is a hotel...

  But it’s not. They just have a dude at the front desk. Of course they do. Because it’s “High Class.”

  “Uhm, well, thank you,” I say.

  They guy keeps looking at me while I’m walking away. I sneak into the elevator as quickly as I can.

  The elevator looks a lot like the one at Deck’s place. Just no Vivaldi. It seems Brooklyn has more style.

  The ride up seems to take forever. I look at the numbers and start tapping my feet. 17, 18, 19, 20...23...27. The elevator stops. It’s so smooth that I barely feel it.

  When I walk out I’m in a hallway that smells strongly of cleaning detergent. There’s a large bouquet of flowers about halfway down the right wall. On the left wall is a “Suggestions and Complaints” box.

  I wonder how many complaints get filled in a day.

  I walk down to her apartment door and hear...the one thing I hadn’t planned for...but which I should have expected:

  I hear Tatiana’s sexual groans and moans...and other sounds. A man’s. And some seriously...dirty talk. Sounds that seem very much like you’d expect from a low-grade porno flick. She has a really piercing voice, so the words pour comfortably through the door.

  “Oh yeah...fuck me. Fuck me, Frankie baby. Fuck me hard. Fuck me like you want me! Punish me! Stick that cock in me. Ram it up—”

  Yuck.

  I turn away, my stomach feeling slightly uneasy.

  “Oh...my...GAWHDDD!”

  I’m ten steps away and I can still hear her. She must be highly entertaining for the neighbors. Maybe they fill in the complaints box about her: Catcalls from room 2703. Or That incessant noise again.

  Then her calls come without pause, ever getting faster:

  “Oh-give-it-to-me-give-it-to-me-giveittome-gimme-gimme-gimmegimmegimmegimme!”

  And then...

  She screams. If I hadn’t heard the earlier cries I’d think she’d just been stabbed. I start thinking of Alfred Hitchcock movies (and more cheap pornos.)

  I decide to go downstairs and wait at the lobby. I’ll ask the dude at the desk to point out Mr. Lerrington for me. I’m sure he knows him. And what would I give him for that, a five-buck tip? Fifty?

  Hmmmmm.

  I go downstairs and wait.

  It’s a half hour before Lerrington comes out, smiling and sweating. Almost panting. Looking around himself like he’s being watched. Or like your wife knows what you’re up to...

  The concierge points him out to me. I give him ten bucks.

  I go back upstairs, wait in the elevator forever again, tap my foot, see the flowers when I get to the hallway, snicker at the Suggestion-Complaints box and then I stop at her door.

  I raise my fist, prepare to knock. And then stop an inch before the wood. Here’s goes nothing.

  I pull the fist back, take a deep breath.

  Knock knock.

  TWENTY

  RUN

  -1-

  Declan Cox

  Coach wasn’t kidding about secret location. We’re in the middle of nowhere, and it’s cold as the devil’s heart here. Minnesota. Minnesohhda. It snows all the time here, all the freaking time. We’re doing indoor training at least, at a training facility that might be mistaken for a barn to the untrained eye. But they do have heaters.

  “We had a tough run this season,” coach said to us on our first day here. We were sitting on the green turf, warming up from the almost-frostbite that nipped at our fingers after the two-mile run we had to make from our motel to the training facility. In the snow. Boot Camp.

  We were sitting cross-legged, appreciating the warmth. For all I knew the place was only thirty degrees. But after the jog, it felt like a hundred in here. My fingertips were aching. Everyone else’s eyes were almost tight shut from frozen tears. In the back, in a warm little corner, the team medics and assistant coaches sipped on steaming coffee, wearing large jackets.

  Coach was making a point.

  He stood in the center of our shivering circle, and he spoke as much to the heavens as he
did to each person. He bellowed his words out. “Perkins and Cox’s Hail Mary just ain’t gonna be enough in the playoffs! You guys gotta toughen up! You gotta shape up! You gotta learn that bein’ in the NFL ain’t about chasing pussy...” He turned to me. “...Cox!” He turned back to the others, pointing a moving finger at the large men. “And that goes for all of you! Don’t think I don’t got eyes in the back o’ my head! Don’t think I don’t know the When, How and Why of every goddamn bar and dive you boys been sneakin into on nights before training. I know. Trust me, I know! I know about you, Smith, the night that whore you paid for a good fuck in the middle of Nevada started puking and the brothel owner threatened to sue and you called Walters here”—he points at Walters—“to pull you outta the shit! Turns out they scammed yous, didn’t they? Didn’t they?” Walters looks down at his feet. “YOU LOOK UP AT ME WHEN I’M TALKING TO YOU, BOY, OR BY GOD I’LL HAVE YOU DOIN A HUNNERT-AN-FIFTY LAPS AROUND THIS FACILITY. OUTSIDE! In the snow!”

  Walters looked up. Said timidly, “Y—yes, coach.”

  “Yes, what!”

  “Th—they scammed us!”

  “Damn fuckin right they scammed yo asses.” Coach hardly ever curses. He was pissed. Absolutely...pissed. “They took you for three grand for ‘medical bills’ and you fools paid it.

  “Jackson, how’s Lucinda?”

  Jackson looked up. Swallowed. Deathly silence rocked the circle; silence, that is, except for the eerie howl of blizzard winds outside, sounding like nothing short of a scene from The Exorcist.

  Then Jackson, realizing Coach had fixed an eye on him and was waiting for him to answer, opened his mouth to speak—

  “Ah, fuhget it!” Coach swatted at the air like he was hitting a fly. Then he turned his back to Jackson, faced me and Trev. “I don’t expect you ta answer, Jackson. But know this, young man. You don’t gimme your hunnert percent, and your wife’s gonna know allllllll about little Lucinda and what she been doin wit her mouth durin your trysts.”

  Then coach stopped, straightened up, rolled his shoulders and popped his neck left and right. There was a line around his gray hair from the NY Giants baseball cap he always wears. He’d driven behind us while we’d jogged, but he still had some snow on his jacket from when he’d gotten out the car and walked to the entrance of the indoor training facility. The “barn.”

  He started shaking his head, but his eyes never moved from me. The ghastly howls continued outside. The rafters creaked. Someone coughed.

  “Tsk, tsk, tsk.” He still shook his head. “And then, team... And then...we have Declan I’m-The-Man, Mr. Loner, Mr. Fuck The Team Cox. Declan, Declan, Declan, who talks back to me in my own goddamn locker room after we made it into the playoffs because he thinks he’s the goddamn MAN! Declan Cox, America’s FUCKIN Baby Boy.”

  Yeah, he’s pissed...

  “Dreamboy, Sex Symbol, TMZ Headliner, The Man All the Girls Want.” He waits. “Mr. Fuckin. All. That!”

  He started smiling gently.

  “Lemme tell you sumthin about Declan Cox, team. Declan Cox is a one-man show. Declan Cox thinks he can talk to your coach like Declan is this team’s final hope, the shangri-fuckin-la of All Thatness in a world that should bow down an’ kiss his rosy-smellin feet.

  “Declan Cox, the man who...for reasons I won’t mention here only because if word gets out then this team is at risk!... Declan Cox, the man who might cost this team four million dollars to have one of his hussies—”

  I couldn’t keep my mouth shut at that. “I told Justin—”

  The Coach...detonated.

  He swooped down on me so fast that all I remember is his pointed eyes and his blood-red face as he yanked my solid mass from the ground by my jersey.

  And then he spoke in a deadly tone to me, but this time whispering, and speaking very slowly. And very New Yorkan. “Deck-Man, I taken your shit fuh God Knows too long. This is your last chance. This camp. This training season. You’re the best damn player I ever seen second to Perkins over there. But you’re a loose cannon. You endanger the team with your shit—”

  “That crap was all before I joined—”

  He yanked me once at my sweater, still an inch from my mouth as he spoke up to me. “Don’t interrupt! You endanger the team with your shit. You...” He let me go, started raising his voice, talking half to me and half to everyone else again. “You endanger the team, Declan. You embarrass me in my own locker room. You disgrace yourself and give The Giants a bad name with your boozing, breaking curfew, picking the godawful ugliest skanks to screw instead of someone with a little more class! I think I speak for the team when I say that this...Blaze...was a breath of fresh air from the absolute dogs you been gettin photos taken of with you at those Down South dives!” A few snickers broke out here. Coach also seemed a little more like he was now...joking?

  But the snickers were stifled, the rest of the team still not certain where this was going, or what he was aiming at. Or if he was still being serious....

  He lowered his voice slightly. “So why did I take Cox’s shit? Why did I sit back and shrug when he proverbially spat in my face after that game? And most importantly...” And here he raised his voice, raised it to Pep-Talk level. Raised it to that Braveheart Before the Battle level, The Last Samurai Before the Bloodbath.

  Coach raised his voice here to a goosebumping, exhilarating, blood-pumping...war cry!

  “...most importantly...why is it that I would pay that four million bucks for Declan Bad Mouth Muthafuckin Cox without even a damn wink of my geriatric eyelid? WHY!” Coach was smiling, the rest of the team knew now what this was about, where this was going, why we were here. Some of them raised their heads, looked up at Coach expectantly, wanting to know the answer, wanting to know what the Secret Ingredient was to getting away with anything...

  He spoke softly: “I’ll tell you why. I’ll tell you.” And then he slashed a finger through the air and leveled it accusatorily in my direction, bent his knees slightly and growled like a man taken up by the Holy Spirit and speaking in revelatory tongues: “BECAUSE. HE. MADE. US. WIIIIIIIIIIIIN!”

  The team broke out with baboon cheers, started thumping their fists on the ground and on their chests like true jocks. They cried: “OH YEAH!”

  “Hoot! Hoot! Hoot!”

  “DAMN STRAIGHT, DAMN STRAIGHT, COACH!”

  Coach, sounding more like a televangelist now than a coach, continued his sermon. But now, he was on fire. His face was blood red with enthusiasm, with power, and with a love for the game like no other. Now he was that drill sergeant you never forget, that first High School Football coach who kicked your ass, a preacher, a politician.

  The man was on a roll.

  “Declan Cox, that sumbitch, that Drag-Our-Name-Through-The-Mud, Oh-I’m-The-Man, Look-At-Me-I’m-So-Great, good for nuthin satyr—WON—that mothafuckin game...”—and then all the words came at once—“...For-Us-And-Now-We’re-In-The-Playoffs-Baby-Can-I-Get-An-Amen-Brother-Halleluia-Hooha!”

  Male roars. Cheers. Echoes of bass and baritone growls and “WHOOT! WHOOT! WHOOT!”

  The coach twirled, hand around his head like a dervish in a trance!

  He was on fire, his hair dangling awkwardly, sweat breaking on his brow. My flesh prickled and stood on end.

  “He won the game. And, you no good sons-a-bitches, if you win games for me, if you score touchdowns, I don’t give a damn if you fuckin yo mama, I will turn a blind eye and pay four million, eight million, TEN million freakin dollars to back your ass up, I will stand up for you at press conferences, take blows for you, get smacked for you, I will kiss your goddamned smelly feet—IF you win games for me, can I get HOOHA!?”

  We burst onto our feet. “HOOHA! HOOHA!”

  We jogged, stood, jumped. “HOOHA! HOOHA! HOOHA!”

  “I will be your ugly sister’s prom date, I will tell your grandmother she’s the sexiest woman on earth, hell I will even do your grandmother if she’s worth doin (I’ll take numbers later)—IF YOU WIN GAMES FOR ME CAN I GET
A HOOHA HOOHA HOOHA—”

  “HOOHA! HOOHA! HOOHA! HOOHA!”

  Blood pumped in our brains at a mad rate. Adrenaline fired into our legs as we jogged on the spot.

  “—AND I WANNA WIN THESE DAMN PLAYOFFS, I WANNA TAKE HOME THE BOWL—”

  “HOOHA! HOOHA! HOOOOOOOHAHHH!!”

  “—I wanna see Declan’s ugly dive bitches for the rest of my goddamn life—IF”—he stuck a finger up, then cupped an ear—“YOU DO WHAT?”

  Chorus of male voices: “WIN THE GAME.”

  “WHAT?”

  “WIN THE GAME!”

  “WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU SAYIN, I CAN’T HEAR YOU!”

  The house rocked, the floor shook, steam billowed from everyone’s mouths but I was pumped, hot, ready to kill the opponent and, damnit, most of all I felt in charge.

  The team: “WIN. THE. GAME!”

  “WHAAAAAAAAT!”

  “WIIIN. THE. GAAAAAAME!”

  “Gimme thirty laps around this field, I’m counting, what the hell are you still doing here! Run, run, run run run RUN!”

  We ran. We tackled. We ran. We threw. We ran. We fell. We tackled. We ran. We rushed. We fell. We tackled. We took a thirty minute lunch break. We ran.

  And we ran.

  And, hell, we fuckin ran.

  It’s like being out in a war—no contact to the outside world, no Tatiana, no fear, no problems, no internet, no phone, no worries—and the constant dream of “going home to the one you love.” Just like being at a battlefield in another country.

  War.

  It’s exhilarating.

  Every morning we jog two miles in the snow. Every morning coach pumps us up better than a shot of mega-dose B12 right in your ass. And every day we train, and train, and train, and train, until the body is nothing more than a mere thought, something to be pushed to the limit, something that cannot be stopped.

  We can’t be stopped.

  This has been a religious experience for me. It’s my Mecca, my Jerusalem. It’s the closest thing to something holy I’ve ever come to in my life. I belong, is my thought now about the team. My extended family.

  We’re unstoppable, is my other thought.