THE LAST DEEP BREATH
By Tom Piccirilli
First Digital Edition published by Crossroad Press & Macabre Ink Digital
Copyright 2010 by Tom Piccirilli
Copy-Edited by Neal Hock – Cover Design by Neil Jackson
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OTHER CROSSROAD TITLES BY TOM PICCIRILLI:
NOVELS:
Short Ride to Nowhere
Nightjack
NOVELLAS:
All You Despise
Fuckin' Lie Down Already
Loss
The Fever Kill
The Nobody
UNABRIDGED AUDIOBOOKS:
Nightjack – Narrated by Chet Williamson
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The Last Deep Breath
Tom Piccirilli
for Norm Partridge
1
She turned over in bed, ran her fingers through the wet thatch of his chest hair, and said, “I want you to kill my husband.”
Grey wasn’t surprised. It seemed like every third woman he ran into wanted her husband dead.
No divorce. No let’s get him into AA or rehab. No he’s the father of my children, sweet baby Jesus he deserves a second chance. No smack him in the teeth and leave him bleeding in the gutter.
No mercy at all. These ladies played a serious game. He’d thought things in New York were pretty bad, but out here in the desert all remnants of grace and pity evaporated like a mid-morning shower. They wanted their old men dead. The ring apparently made them homicidal.
He knew he’d never get out the door without listening to the rest of it so he lit a cigarette, lay back against the pillows, and said, “Tell me your plan.”
She did. It was stupid. They were all stupid.
Sweet smell of desert sage drifted in on the hot breeze. Grey looked into her face and saw what he always saw. The seething desperation cresting in heavily shadowed eyes. A hint of dust trapped in the crows’ feet and deep frown lines. Thirty years of unanswered pleas and unresolved daddy issues. A gutted rag doll forgotten in the corner. Another delicate moaner in the sisterhood of pain.
He said, “Let me think about it.”
She got up, drew a slash of lipstick across her mouth, and started to get dressed for her shift at the Main Street diner. No shower. Christ, and he’d eaten there. He tried not to pull a face.
“Bo gets out next Wednesday,” she told him. “Can we get everything ready by then?”
“I think so.”
She smiled in a way he hadn’t seen before. It was girlish and almost cruel, but at least it was authentic.
“Bo is mean. Crazy mean. He’ll kill us if we mess this up.”
“We won’t mess up.”
“If you get hungry there’s some leftover chicken in the fridge.”
“Thanks.”
“I’ll be home by ten, honey.”
“I’ll be here.”
She leaned over and kissed him, tried to put some real affection into it this time, but she just didn’t know how to do it anymore. The attempt seemed to embarrass her and she practically cantered out the door.
Grey took a shower, shaved, and got his clothes out of the drier. He did about an hour’s worth of work on the Chevelle, tuning it with Bo’s tools, then topped off the fluids. Bo hadn’t been much of a stickup man but he had a well-stocked garage. Grey stole a few tools he might need on his ride and packed them in the trunk.
A coyote barked in the distance. He still hadn’t got used to the sound, it always made him jerk his head up. Made him think of the wild dog packs that roamed Coney Island in the winter, eating what was left of the frozen homeless.
A storm rumbled across the encroaching dusk.
He got in the car and headed west.
The world grew wide and burned with possibility and misgiving. He looked in the rearview and watched as the east was swallowed by the thickening darkness of night rising up behind him. He stood on the pedal and aimed for the plunging sun.
2
The next one was different. She found him in a bar outside of Reno.
She was a little older but a lot prettier and much sharper. She hadn’t yet had all the edges sanded off her yet. Her eyes were clear and alive with intelligence and wit. They still held out a touch of hope and they glittered with a kind of bemusement, like she knew this was only a pit stop on her way to the Gold Mile.
Every guy in the place sat up a little straighter. They got change and played tunes on the jukebox that they thought a woman would want to dance to. She moved around the bar and settled in beside anyone who might buy her a drink. She did it without the bullshit flirting that usually led to brawls or back alley rapes and cherry-topped prowl cars. The men joked with her. Nobody laid a hand on her. She’d throw down her Dewar’s and Coke and then move on to the next one, her conversation lively, killing the afternoon slug by slug.
At least that’s what Grey thought was happening at first. About an hour later he reassessed. She was trying to make him jealous, weaving among the old drunks and the truckers hopped on speed. Grey watched her in the mirror behind the bar and, though their gazes never met, he knew she was enjoying being on stage for him. He was a properly attentive audience.
He eavesdropped, his concentration fine-tuned and perfectly focused. Her name was Kendra. If someone tried to call her anything else, the diminutive Ken or Kennie, she corrected them.
She had an easy way about her, an effortless laugh that sounded just a little too natural. It was the soft melody of every woman you wanted to lie beside, your head resting in her lap while she stroked your forehead. You look up into her eyes and she leans down, gives you the killer grin, her bee-stung lips parting to meet your own.
She was blonde, her hair feathered to frame a heart-shaped face, styled in a way that was popular when he was kid and seemed to be making a comeback. It looked good on her. She had high cheekbones that drew you to her hazel eyes flecked with gold. There was some nice meat and jiggle to her hips. Breasts that had just enough bounce to them beneath her blouse to be real. The teeth weren’t. They were so straight, even, and white that they must’ve run into the mid-five figures.
She knew how to throw her head back far enough so that the light caught her perfectly and lit her like the star of a Broadway show. She had the looks but wasn’t vapid enough to be a model, not even an older one who couldn’t do top magazine cover work anymore. That meant actress.
He thought he might’ve seen her before. He guessed she’d had moderate success but had gone into a bad skid. It had lasted a while but she’d pulled herself out and was going to start phoning her producer and director friends and calling in any favors that might still be owed. Not a lot of them would be but there were probably at least a couple. Enough pull to get her back in the door for a few auditions.
Grey used to be a movie buff. Pax had gotten him a first-rate entertainment system for his shitty little apartment down in the Village. Grey walked in one day and the front door wouldn’t open all the way. It was striking against one of the surround sound speakers, the sucker was two-an
d-a-half-feet tall. He couldn’t get to his hall closet. Couldn’t get to the fire escape because the sill was stacked with the DVR, the DVD burner, the TIVO, the equalizer, other equipment he didn’t even recognize. You couldn’t watch a movie with the volume cranked over 3 or the windows would rattle so badly you were afraid they’d blow out onto 8th Street.
The manager stopped by once to bitch at Grey about the noise. Pax walked the guy out into the hall and spoke quietly to him for a minute, and that was the last time the manager ever bothered Grey.
He watched the side of Kendra’s face, listened, and kept a steady buzz going on the weak beer while he tried to place her. Thought maybe she’d been in some lowbrow comedy he’d seen a few years back. Guy’s best friend turns out to be gay and a famous drag queen. Guy has issues with it but decides what the hell. Live and let live, Kumbaya. Then the drag queen best friend turns out to actually be an undercover CIA operative who’s been taken captive by the terrorists. Guy teams up with eight other drag queens–Lola May, Verinia La Fleur, Mistress Lucretia–to go bust him out of Libya. Hilarity ensues–look at the queens doing Judo chops in their high heels, using their feather boas to strangle the terrorist leader before he can turn the key on the nuke.
He thought maybe Kendra played the CIA Chief’s secretary that the guy falls in love with. Bossy at first, good with guns—running joke was that every time he put his hands on her he’d come back with a grenade, an assault weapon, a six-inch throwing knife.
She turned again, hit the pose, caught the light.
Grey thought, Yeah, that’s her.
They closed out the bar together and hung back while the last of the locals staggered away. The bartender moved off and started wiping down the tables and turning over chairs.
Perfume the scent of jasmine. He also smelled aloe and a veggie body wash. Kendra slid to Grey’s side, eased in nice and tight, breathed in his ear, and said, “So?”
3
They crossed the parking lot together, shoulder to shoulder, and when they got to his car she spoke with just the right amount of reverence.
“A ’69 Chevelle.”
“Yeah,” Grey said.
“I used to date a stunt driver who owned one. He usually managed to talk the directors into using it on set. He’d drive it onto the lot, just purring along in a couple of background shots. That car saw more screen time than I ever did.”
That’s how she broached the subject, as if it were an accepted fact that he already knew who she was. Could she tell when someone had seen one of her flicks? Did he look at her differently than everybody else did? Could she tell he was a buff? He didn’t think he was starry-eyed, but you could never tell about yourself.
“Pop the hood,” Kendra said.
“What?”
“I want to take a look at the engine.”
“It’s three A.M.,” he said.
“You’re in a rush all of a sudden?”
“I meant it’s dark out here.”
She had a penlight on her key-chain. He popped the hood and she inspected the engine, whistling, asking questions about original parts, when was the last time he’d flushed the transmission. The stunt man had taught her a lot. She knew more than Grey did about cars, that was for sure.
They got in and she said, “Drive.”
It was a loser question to ask where, so he just drove. She fiddled with the radio for a while until she came to an oldies station. He had bad associations with it for reasons he couldn’t name, but that was true about everything from his childhood.
She asked, “What makes a man drive a classic muscle ride like that and not take it to a car wash? It’s a damn shame seeing it with covered in so much grit. When was the last time you waxed it?”
He pressed down on the pedal, let the night flash by, and tried to hold on to his fading buzz. He didn’t like talking about himself but there was something about her that was dredging up the past. He could feel it moving sluggishly inside him again, seeking the surface. He fought to keep it down, or at least shove it aside. He hadn’t had any of the intense dreams for a few months now, but he could tell that they were going to start up again.
“That was too tough a question?” she said. She took off her shoes and curled in the seat, put her bare feet out the open window. “I can see you’re not going to tax my conversational skills.”
“Don’t be too sure,” Grey said.
“You going to tell me you hate talking about yourself?”
“No.”
She held her hand to his upper thigh, squeezed just enough to get the pulse in his neck snapping. “Ah ha, meaning you don’t have to because it’s already implicit in your attitude. Right.”
They kept to it like that for mile after mile. He’d been hanging around Reno for three weeks and knew the lay of the land. He thought she was starting to doze when she cleared her throat and asked, “Okay, so what’s chasing you?”
It wasn’t a perceptive question. She was appealing to his vanity. Every guy liked to think that his demons were meaner and crazier than anybody else’s. He could see her asking the same question of the stuntman as the guy nudged his Chevelle along the back lot, brooding and self-involved as hell.
Grey smiled, turned on the charm by dashboard light. “I’m just drifting.”
“Adrift, huh?” It wasn’t what he meant, but then again, maybe it was. “Me too. When about a million bucks worth of your shit is sold at auction, it gives you a certain Zen clarity about ownership and property. About home and security.”
“Yeah? So what did you learn?”
Her features hardened, the parentheses around her mouth looked like they’d been carved in with jagged glass. “That I’m never going to let it happen again.”
The resolution in her voice was as firm and inflexible as an oath made at the side of a grave. He’d spit out a few of them himself.
They kept heading into the rocky hills. Moonlight jockeyed between the crags. Grey kept his hand on the gearshift and she toyed with his fingers, brushed his knuckles. He cracked the window and let the warm air blow against his sweaty neck. One song ran into the next and bad mood started to take hold of him. The hinges of his jaw tightened, the muscles in his back froze. She noticed the change.
“What is it?” she asked.
“Turn off the music, okay?”
“Sure.”
Now she had her way in. He’d opened the door. Couldn’t even drive for a half hour without the past rising up and hooking his ankle, tugging him back down into its deep motionless waters. He wondered if he’d ever be free of it, or if he should even try. In a minute she would ask a throwaway question, the way they always asked, which would be full of intent and meaning, the answer to which he would never be able to fully give.
She brushed his wrist and plucked at the thick scars there. Some people thought he’d gone wild with a straight razor trying to snuff himself. But the truth was it had happened when he’d gone through the rear window in the car accident that had killed his parents. If he’d been wearing his seatbelt the way his mother always told him to, he would’ve died with them.
“What cut you loose?” she asked. “What did you do?”
“You don’t go in much for chit-chat. Am I reading that right?”
“I’ve done enough party prattle and hot spot club chatter to last a lifetime.”
“And yet you found me in a bar.”
“I told you my story even though it’s boring. Is yours?”
What cut him loose? What did he do?
He wasn’t sure how to answer. The words weren’t there.
She touched his scars again. He heard his mother tell his father, Slow down, Eddie, the roads are icy.
“I made a promise to do something I don’t really want to do,” Grey said.
Kendra didn’t ask what it was that he didn’t want to do, which surprised him. Instead she made a flat statement. “You’ve been in prison.”
“Narrowly avoided.”
“For doing wh
at? Or nearly doing what?”
“Nearly punching an asshole commanding officer in the mouth.” He pressed the lighter in. It still worked after all these years. You get a classic car, renovate and recondition everything about it, and most of the time you still can’t get the damn lighter to heat up. He shook a cigarette from the pack, champed it between his teeth, listened to the pop of the lighter, and lit up. “What movies have you been in?”
She mentioned a few titles. Grey had seen most of them but only remembered her in them after she got really specific about the characters she’d played and what they’d done in the films. “In Flowers of Evil I was the gardener’s wife who finds the bodies under the rose bushes, who’s having the affair with the pool boy, and he turns out to be the killer. I get it with the shears in the neck at about the hour and fifteen mark. They CGIed my head rolling out of the top of the closet.”
A little surprising that she’d been so high profile, that he’d watched her so many times before.
She fondled his scars some more and asked, “So who’d you kill?”
The question made him raise his eyebrows. He hadn’t been expecting it. “What the hell made you ask that?”
“You’ve got the look about you.”
“I do?”
Was that why they were always chasing him? These women who needed their husbands aced? Because he looked like someone who’d already put two in the back of somebody’s head? And if he’d done it before then it wouldn’t be a stretch to do it again?
“It’s not just your eyes, but in the way you stand, how you present yourself.”
“I present myself like someone who’s snuffed somebody?”
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