DIRTY DADDY

by Evelyn Glass

  “Talk? What do we need to talk about?”

  He smiles easily. “It will make sense if you let me in. And look.” He holds up the wine and pizza. “I bring gifts.”

  He smiles into my eyes, and despite myself I feel a small smile lift my lips, too. There’s something penetrating about his smile, and especially the way it touches his eyes. Glimmering. I know eyes don’t really glimmer, but when I look at him, they seem to—seem to so strongly that I can’t help but believe they really are. But I can’t just go and let some strange man into my apartment because his eyes glimmer, can I?

  “You were talking with Eric,” I say. “Laughing with him. And you’re here. So I’ll assume you know who I am. His ex-wife. What would you want with Eric’s ex-wife?”

  “Like I said. To talk.”

  His smile falters for a second, and I see something beneath it, a flicker. Not of fear, but of uncertainty. Uncertainty about what, though? What exactly does this man want with me? I ask him, and he forces the smile back onto his face. I see that clearly. It isn’t an easy smile. He pushes it onto his face.

  “Who are you and why the hell do we need to talk?” I demand.

  He drops the smile and looks at me with his real expression: icy eyes, straight lips, clenched jaw. Not angry, no; I sense that this man, for whatever reason, is beyond anger. He seems more dormant, like something which could explode any moment but will not, because he has control. “I don’t want to scare you,” he says. “That’s the last thing I want, Anna.”

  “You know my name, so Eric talked about me. Did he tell you what sort of husband he was?”

  “Yes,” the man says. “He told me a lot of things.”

  “And you were still friends with him.”

  “I was not his friend.”

  “You were laughing with him.”

  The man sighs, tilts his head back, and lets out a laugh. A convincing laugh. I know it’s fake because there’s nothing to be laughing about, but when he laughs, I almost believe it despite that. It’s the laugh of a man having the most carefree and fun time of his life. Then it abruptly cuts short and he meets my gaze with a shrug. “See? I wasn’t really laughing with him.”

  I look the man up and down. Tall, much taller than me, at least a foot taller, and ripped with muscle. It’s not often you can tell that when a man is wearing a suit, but this man’s suit is close-fitting and it outlines his muscles clearly. His arms bulge at the seams of his suit jacket. The jacket is open and his chest muscles are outlined by his shirt. His hands are large, strong. I notice that some of the knuckles are grazed. A fighter, then.

  “Why do you want to come inside?” I ask again.

  “I won’t discuss it out here,” he says. “I had a plan, you know, Anna. To charm you.”

  “You probably could, under different circumstances.”

  “Let me in,” he says simply. He takes a step forward so that I have to crane my head to look up at him. He seems huge, towering over me like that, huge and strong. A thousand voices scream at me to shut the door in his face, and only one screams at me to throw it open. But that one voice is hungry, starving; the one voice is captivated with his muscles and his bright blue eyes and the aura of danger that surrounds him. The one voice overpowers the others, and without deciding I close the door, unlatch the chain, and open it once again.

  His eyes rove down my body, linger on my breasts, outlined by my shirt, and then to my pale milky legs.

  Then his gaze snaps back up to my face. “So, where’s the kitchen?”

  I gesture into the apartment, and the grazed-knuckled man steps forward.

  Chapter Four

  Samson

  Her apartment is much smaller than mine, but it seems bigger because it’s less cluttered. I walk into the hallway-cum-living room and then around a bend to the adjoined kitchen. The living room is a simple television, a couch, and a coffee table. A bookshelf sits off to the left, the books neatly aligned. Everything is clean and orderly, tidy, if not quite sparkling. The bookshelf holds some novels, but mostly books about animals. The kitchen is the same: every knife in place; the surface wiped clean.

  I place the pizza and the wine on the counter and wonder if perhaps I’ve made a bit of a prick of myself. My plan was to charm her, to transfix her with my smile and then jaunt in here as though we were best friends. I underestimated her, I realize. She’s not the usual girl, the surface-level girl. No, Anna sees. Being who I am, that thought doesn’t exactly fill me with butterflies. My job relies on not being seen, after all.

  “Where’s the wine opener?” I ask, as she walks into the kitchen.

  She hasn’t changed; she hasn’t even put on a bra. I can see the outline of her small nipples clearly. I suppress a throaty growl. She’s too damn sexy. Her face is soft and her eyes are dark brown, almost black, giving her a slightly odd look, but good-odd, freaky, alluring, dangerous, weird, attractive, and a hundred other words which all come down to the same thing. Different, Anna is different, and I’m shocked by the response that grips me.

  I close my eyes for a half-second, tell myself to get a hold, and then open them.

  She smiles at me, a small, confused smile. “In that drawer,” she says, gesturing.

  I take the corkscrew and begin opening the bottle. The light for the kitchen area is not turned on, only the living room light is. We stand in half-darkness, and for a moment I imagine stepping forward and grabbing one of her breasts. I thrust the thought away. Focus, I tell myself.

  “Glasses?” I say, once the cork is pinned by the screw.

  She leans up and opens one of the cupboards. Her t-shirt rides up and I catch a sliver of her belly, muscular, honed by hours and hours of training, just as my body is honed by hours and hours of killing.

  I take the glasses from her, our hands touch briefly, and I’m sure something passes across her face. She walks away from me too quickly, almost like she’s fleeing to the other end of the kitchen. I pour the drinks and hand her one, and she’s forced to walk back down the length of the kitchen and take it from me. Our hands touch again, though there’s no reason for them to. I hold the glass at the bottom. She could easily grip it at the top. But instead she purposefully glides her hand over mine, and then takes the glass. I look into her face, questioning, and the corners of her lips tug, an almost-smile, and then she retreats.

  “This is not a normal situation,” she says, sipping the blood-red wine. Wine which reminds me of the dozens of men I’ve killed over the years, wine which spikes into my mind and fragments, each fragment triggering a new memory, but all of them the same, really. Blood, flowing blood, cascading blood, and then the money, huge stacks of money. All of it bringing me into this kitchen, at this moment, with this woman.

  “Are you okay?” she asks. “You look a bit . . . shaken.”

  “I’m fine.”

  ‘Are you?’ Uncle Richard asks in my mind. He was a more brutal killer than I ever was.

  “You’re an amazing dancer.” I say to change the subject.

  The compliment catches her off-guard. “Thank you,” she says. “But dancing isn’t my passion, not really. I want to be a vet. I’m in college. I was reading a book on it before you interrupted me.”

  There’s no malice in her voice. She peers over the rim of her wine glass at me, but not just at me, at all of me. Her eyes roam over me just as mine do over her. She traces the curvature of my shoulders and my arms and I do the same with her: her breasts and her legs. We stand there for an absurd amount of time, silent, staring. I’m horny, make no mistake, but there’s something else there. I’m horny for all of this woman, not just her body. It’s not like the others.

  Get a grip! Get a goddamn grip! I yell at myself.

  I place the glass on the counter.

  “Uh-oh, time for business,” she grins. Her cheeks are flushed from the wine.

  “Afraid so,” I say.

  “I don’t even know your name,” she comments.

  “It’s Samson. Sams
on Black.”

  “And you already know mine.”

  “I do.”

  “Okay, Samson Black, what exactly do you want from me?”

  That’s a complicated question, isn’t it, Samson? You had one reason for coming over here, didn’t you? Get information and see if Anna is in danger. She doesn’t seem to be in danger, so all you need to do is get the information. Scout the area. And leave if everything is clear. But when she asks me what I want from her, I can’t help but imagine her on her back, that t-shirt torn away, her breasts bare and bouncing. And maybe I’m mad but it looks to me like she has the same feeling in her eyes. She knows I’m staring at her breasts, but she doesn’t excuse herself, change her clothes.

  I shake my head.

  “Are you sure you’re okay?” she asks.

  “Fine,” I grunt. “Okay, Anna, what I’m about to ask is going to seem damn strange coming from a man you never met before. But it’s important that you tell me the truth. I know this sounds dramatic, but it’s the truth. It could mean the difference between life or death.”

  “Whose?” she says, her voice sharp. “Yours?”

  I gulp. This is the part I’ve dreaded ever since I left my apartment. “Both of ours,” I say.

  She takes a step back, dropping her glass of wine. It shatters in a shower of crimson and sparkling glass on the floor, the shards spreading all over the kitchen.

  “What? What do you mean?” The words are drawn-out. I imagine that it’s a big effort just for her to speak them. “Why would I be in danger?”

  “Don’t step in the glass,” I warn.

  “I won’t,” she says. “Just . . . tell me.”

  “First, you need to tell me. Did you see who put Eric’s body in your car?”

  “You can’t come in here and ask me questions and not expect me to ask what the hell is going on!” She looks down at the shattered glass and then up at me. “What the hell am I doing, letting you in like this?” she mutters, more to herself than to me. “You could be anyone, you could be a . . .”

  Her face twists and behind her eyes I see the pieces slotting together: this strange man at the game, her ex’s sudden appearance, his death. Her mouth falls open slowly. “You’re Eric’s killer,” she says.

  “I’m Eric’s killer,” I agree.

  Her expression, so easy for me to read moments before, clouds over. She turns inward and I can’t see what she’s feeling. Her face is passive, almost empty. Is she judging me? Is she calculating the distance between where she stands and her cellphone? Is she going to turn me in? These are considerations I would normally make coldly. If they run, end them. If they scream, end them. If they fight, end them. But I know before searching myself that I could not harm this woman. I don’t know why that is, it just is.

  “I know all about your marriage,” I say, trying to get through to her. “He beat you, didn’t he, Anna? Over and over. And he stopped you from following your dreams. How many times did he beat you? Can you remember?”

  “Too many,” she whispers. “Way too many.”

  “But that’s not all.”

  “What do you mean?” She speaks mechanically, not even the barest hint of emotion behind her words.

  “The reason I was hired is because Eric planned to kill you tonight, Anna. My client—” your father, Anna, your messed-up man of a father “—has contacts in prison. All Eric has talked about since he was locked up is killing you. All day, all night, to whoever will listen. He talked about it in detail. I won’t tell you what he said—”

  “No,” she says. “No, I want to know.”

  “There’s no need,” I mutter. “It’s just talk.”

  “I want to know.” She stares at me defiantly.

  “Fine,” I sigh. “He said that he would lock you in a dungeon and train you to be the good whore you should’ve been before he slits your throat. That was a lie, though. At least, it wasn’t his final plan. He was going to kill you when you left the arena, on the way to your car. I got to him first.”

  “How did you do it?” she asks.

  “Poison,” I say. “Why do you want to know?”

  “And did it hurt?” Her voice trembles. “Tell me it hurt.”

  The poison isn’t painful. At least, not for long. It induces a heart attack and kills in under a minute most times.

  “Yes,” I say, and she nods with grim satisfaction. “I won’t apologize for killing him, Anna. Truth is, I’m a killer.”

  Her forehead creases. “A serial killer?”

  “No, I kill for money.”

  “A hitman?”

  “I guess that’s the term for it, yeah. But I just use killer.”

  She should run now, or at least take a step back, or scream at me. But she does none of these things. She just stands there, forehead creasing more and more, thinking. I wait, and after around a minute she offers me a shaky smile. “I’m glad he’s dead,” she says. “I know I shouldn’t say that, but I am. Is that wrong?”

  “No,” I tell her. “It’s not wrong. Men like Eric don’t deserve to breathe. Woman-beaters . . . I hate them. Hate them with a passion. I remember when one of my friends—” I remember when one of my friends hit his wife in front of me and he wasn’t my friend anymore and I killed the bastard right there with a wine opener not much different to the one you offered me tonight.

  I cut short, stopping before telling her the story. What is the matter with me? Business, business.

  I rush on before she can ask me what I meant. “Whoever put Eric in the car put him there as a message to me, an open declaration. There was perhaps thirty seconds between when Eric died and when people appeared in the parking lot. Which means I was being watched, probably for days, maybe even for weeks. And to watch me for weeks you have to be slick. I’m not easily tailed. Whoever did this is well-trained, or at the least determined beyond any normal person’s capabilities. Just imagine the steel nerve it must’ve taken to move that body, all the while you can hear footsteps approaching.”

  “Yeah,” Anna says, with the air of someone who’s not really there. “Sorry, I just . . . this is a lot to take in, Samson. I’m trying to work out why I haven’t asked you to leave. My life hasn’t been calm, by any means, but this—talking to a hitman in my kitchen—this is strange.”

  I walk toward her, glass crunching under my boots. Standing close to her, I can feel the heat emanating from her body, a welcoming heat, a heat like home.

  “Let’s sit down, eh?” I say. “We can talk this thing through.”

  She nods shortly. “Okay.”

  Chapter Five

  Anna

  He’s looking at me and I’m looking at him, but not just looking. Looking into each other, looking at each other in that way that leads to other things. I’m aware of how my t-shirt barely covers my breasts, drawing attention to them, and yet I do not even think of going into the bedroom and throwing on a hoodie. No, the truth is, I like the way he is looking at me. It’s odd, and it shouldn’t be the case. He’s a hitman. A killer. I should scream, run, fight, cry. Not sit here oddly calm and excited.

  After he cleaned up the broken glass and spilled wine, we moved to the living room, sitting on the couch. The man who killed my tormentor is sitting across from me. A fact, but it seems strange. Eric was a hurricane, a nightmare, a husband from the dark burning depths of hell, and this man stopped him from hurting me again. Perhaps that’s why I don’t even try and stamp on my lust. I let it spread through my chest and down into my crotch and down my legs right to the tips of my toes until my entire body is humming with it.

  “So?” he asks.

  I shake my head. “I didn’t see anybody, Samson,” I say. “I was in the locker room the entire time. I only found out about Eric when I left after the game, and then the parking lot was filled with people. I didn’t see a thing.”

  Samson nods shortly. “Ah,” he says.

  He sits in a relaxed posture, one hand holding his glass of wine, the other draped over the si
de of the couch, his legs stretched out under the coffee table. But beneath that relaxation is something. It takes me a second to realize what it is, and then I see. It’s waiting power. He reminds me of an alligator I once saw at the zoo. Amazing creatures, alligators, old as dinosaurs and just as fascinatingly inhuman. Alligators sit there, waiting, waiting, and then, sometimes too quick to watch, those waiting muscles snap into action. It’s the same with Samson, I sense. He’s relaxed now, but at any moment he could rise for a fight. Or for something else, I think, and a tingle moves up my spine.