Frank stood at the base of the stairs, watching her approach. “I sent out the dogs,” he said. “How far did you stroll?” He didn’t look any more homicidal than usual. He must have no idea she got his little brother stoned.
Casey came up behind her laughing. “I lost my watch,” he said, having finally got the joke.
“Give him his watch,” Frank said.
She growled and pushed past him, taking her chicken to Casey’s bedroom. Then she checked in her handbag. There was the watch, along with his boxer shorts, covered in six different flavors of cream.
“It probably fell in there,” Casey said from the doorway.
“When you were reaching for a cream puff.”
“Yeah.”
“Your mother hates me,” she said, finishing off Maggie’s fabulous fried chicken. She seemed to have that effect on mothers. On women in general.
“I think she’s scared of you,” Casey said, once again displaying his frighteningly bad skills of observation.
“Was she ever scared of Frankie?”
Casey glanced over his shoulder and closed the door, coming to sit beside her before speaking another word. He furrowed his brow, concentrating on his story. “The way Frank came into our lives was kinda unusual, and because I trusted him, because we really needed the money, she threw caution to the wind.” He quickly demonstrated what throwing caution to the wind looked like with a flick of his hand.
“Go on.” This could've been a good story to keep as ammunition the next time Frankie pissed her off.
He paused for a moment, then nodded and continued. “But accepting his hospitality ruined her in Frank’s eyes. He thinks, he thought, he was so terrible that anyone who’d put their lives at risk, her son’s life at risk, by being close to him made her a bad mother.” He comically frowned. “What’s funny is that his losing respect for her was what earned her trust in him. She realized he had my best interests in mind, no matter what. That he’d go over her head if she messed up.” Casey laughed. “I used to think that if I wasn’t around they’d get along just fine.”
“Don’t say that. They’re protective is all. You’re very…loved.”
He smiled, taking it all the wrong way. Why the fuck did she say loved? She should’ve said stupid, fucking naïve and helpless, that they couldn’t take him anywhere without worrying about something terrible happening. Like when she was too dumb to know better and left her Chanel compact out in the open at home, not expecting it to get broken. Precious, she should’ve said. Or dear. Like her compact had been. Precious. And broken. “That’s why he had me watch over you.”
“Nothing happened to me.”
“Nothing would’ve happened if you’d been alone,” she said. Not that Casey had ever been alone. What occurred that day with hitchhiking was the same sort of thing that always seemed to happen with Casey. The world, or at least the good parts of it, revolved around him. Who else could get picked up hitchhiking by a drug dealer with outstanding pot, and then a pastry chef with even more outstanding cream puffs? His life was fantastical, meeting colorful characters, being invited to the types of parties Bella hadn’t realized existed outside of acid trips. Keeping up with him had kept her on her toes. She’d never even charged Frankie for the duty, which reminded her that he owed her money.
Vincent barged in, startling her enough that she pulled a gun on him. For just a second he had a look like he was ready to run and tell Daddy, but then he smiled, pointed to Casey, and knowingly said, “You’re not wearing any underwear.”
“Good call, Vin,” Casey said, and saluted him.
Vincent pouted, having obviously not got the reaction he was aiming for. Bella held out a cream puff that had somehow escaped, hidden under the underwear Casey wasn’t wearing. “I’ll feed you if you go away.” It was a good thing she had food to bribe him with. She sure as fuck didn’t have any more cash.
“If you keep the door shut, people will talk,” he said, taking the bait and leaving the door wide open on his way out. Vincent had a point, but Bella had an idea.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Casey held the bottom of her shoe, trying to avoid having her heel spear the palm of his hand. It wasn’t the greatest idea, and if it actually worked, it would only work once. But as he stared up her skirt, sidewalk chalk blue to match his sweater, he found that it didn’t matter very much whether they got away with it. Bella must’ve known it, too, though he’d come to realize that she was the type of girl who’d just as likely thought up the idea as an excuse to flash him as a scheme to buy time.
She kicked him in the head before he was able to bring her down onto his shoulders. No apology was needed nor stated. They’d gain two extra hours this morning by starting out so early, possibly more if Frank believed she was asleep behind the locked bedroom door. He’d written a note about heading out to see Alan, and even if someone attempted to corroborate his story, it wouldn’t make a difference. He frequently ended up miles away from his destinations. When he first learned to drive, his mother gave him a cooler for his trunk so the groceries he was supposed to purchase down the road, and ended up purchasing as far away as the neighboring state, would stay fresh until he remembered to come home.
They moved quickly this time, keeping each other in check with reminders of what was to come, so there was no pausing to enjoy gnarled brown and gray tree branches with golden sap like sparkling topaz, and no complaining about dirty shoes.
The cars on the road were sparse compared to the jam of traffic that would follow in a few short hours, but Bella, with her skirt lifted to just under her round, lilywhite butt cheeks, nevertheless stopped what traffic was to be found. It was a female driver this time, in a sleek black Porsche, wearing a sleek pinstriped suit. Casey didn’t like the looks of her. Actually, he liked the looks of her very much, but she made him nervous. The situation made him nervous. The shopping bags in her backseat that Bella was eyeing ravenously made him very, very nervous.
“You’re a fucking shamrock, Casey,” Bella said, and climbed in back. He got in beside the driver, smiling with a quick “Bonjour” that the woman ignored, suspiciously watching Bella in her rearview mirror. He clicked on his seatbelt just as Bella commanded, “Tell her I like her car.”
Bella’s purse was bigger than the one from yesterday, but not big enough to fit everything. And she hadn’t yet told him to reassure the woman that her car wasn’t being stolen.
The driver spoke, provincial French, saying that she liked Bella’s skirt. Lesbian fantasies aside, there was something wrong here. Were they going to get into a catfight over clothes? Could he watch? “She likes your skirt.”
“I like her suit,” Bella said, and he spent the next five minutes conveying compliments between two women who seemed to despise each other more and more with each kind word. It was possibly the strangest situation he’d ever been in, and finally, about half a mile from their exit, he took the liberty of asking the woman to drop them off there. He hadn’t even told her their destination, which was looking like a wise decision, as Bella was starting to salivate over the woman’s purchases.
She asked where they were headed, too late by all accounts, and he again asked her to pull over there s’il vous plaît. The woman pulled over, then pulled out a knife. Casey tried hopping out of the car with his hands over his head, only to fall backward onto the gravel shoulder, tangled in his still-buckled seatbelt. The next thing he knew, the woman was kneeling beside him on the gravel wearing only lingerie and high heels. Bella was holding the knife, which surprisingly matched both their outfits, and in her other hand had a gun. “Get back in the car, Casey.”
“Please don’t kill her.” He didn’t know what he’d do if he watched her kill someone. Or even thought about her killing someone.
“I’m not going to fucking kill her,” Bella said, as if it were obvious. “She has great taste.”
“Oh, well, okay,” he said, and did as he was told. For curiosity’s sake, he checked his cell phone for c
alls he might’ve missed while falling out of the car. His mother had that spidey-sense intuition that alerted her when her baby was in danger. Frank had it too, as a matter of fact. But no one had called. It made the danger seem far away, as if it had happened to someone else.
Bella hopped back in the car, handing him the woman’s pinstripe suit, which he dutifully folded and set on his lap. “I thought you didn’t steal clothes.”
“I’m not stealing them!” she said with a maniacal laugh. “I’m helping her break in her shoes.” She reversed away from the shoulder like an escaping convict, her tires shrieking as other cars honked and veered out of her way. Just as he opened his mouth to scream his jaw clamped shut with the force of her slamming on the brakes. Bella grabbed the suit, jumped out of the car, and set all of the woman’s bags on the side of the road as gently as lowering a sleeping baby into its crib. She yelled, “Come fucking get ‘em, bitch!” and got back in the car, glancing at him as if surprised that he wasn’t having as great of a time as she obviously was. “What?”
He swallowed hard. Her driving was far more frightening than having a knife pulled on him by a psychotic French fashionista. “Did somebody actually issue you a driver’s license?”
“Aye.” She peeled away from the curb, nearly colliding with a big rig and sending it swerving into the next lane.
Casey disregarded the fact that Bella was going at least eighty miles an hour, aiming the car straight at the woman she stole it from. There wasn’t any danger. She had great taste after all. “Why did you make her get undressed?”
“To see her lingerie of course.” Bella swerved only after the woman leapt out of the way in terror, then laid on the horn until they took their exit at well over the posted speed limit. He stared at her wide-eyed as she parallel parked down the block from the bed and breakfast, bumping the cars behind and in front of her to shove her way into a space too small. Bella yanked up the emergency brake and turned off the engine. “We’re here.”
He sighed and got out of the car. She’d parked about two feet from the curb. It would be towed. The sooner the better.
They could see out their hotel room window when the owners of the cars Bella rammed came to investigate, and although he wasn’t the type to laugh at another’s misfortune, he couldn’t help but smile at Bella’s cackling while he translated the profanities. Then they got down to business, and it really was a hell of a lot better when she wasn’t holding a knife to his neck. She stayed on top of him after they’d both come, writing her name across his chest in lipstick the color of windblown embers.
“Who shall drive us home?” she asked as she sparked the first joint of the morning.
“Anyone but you,” he teased. She smacked him. “American tourists who got lost looking for the Louvre.”
“No.”
“Traveling circus?”
“No.”
“Mad scientists?”
“What were you like as a little boy?”
He brushed away the ashes she’d flicked on him, smearing the lipstick. Bella had a shorter attention span than he did, even when she was having fun. He wondered what it would be like inside her head. Clothes guns the word fuck clothes clothes clothes guns Silva and Frankie and the bad things she never talked about. And where did thoughts of him fit in? “Like now but smaller, I guess.”
“With green hair.”
“Sometimes,” he laughed. “I used to dye it with Kool-Aid.”
“Eh?” she asked. She did not sound impressed.
He smiled. “Any time my dad would give me money I’d want to help mom out, so I’d give it to her instead of spending it. But if I found coins in the street that was okay, and I’d buy Kool-Aid packets. It’s funny because I still look at the ground all the time when I’m walking, out of habit, and that’s how I met Gideon. I bent down to pick up a quarter and nearly got hit by a car, and he threatened to sue the driver for me.”
“You should watch where you’re fucking going,” she said, irritated even while she smoked a joint. “Why didn’t you buy fucking paint?”
“I dunno. I guess because it seemed frivolous. I always wanted to be an artist but didn’t think it was really possible. You know how parents and teachers are supposed to say your art is good?”
“I wouldn’t know anything about that.”
“Well it wasn’t until Frank came along that I thought I was actually talented. By then we didn’t have to worry about money anymore.” He ran his hands along her thigh-high stockings. He was glad she’d left those on. “What did you want to do when you grew up?”
“I wanted to fly.”
“Like a pilot?”
“No, just fly.”
“You can go skydiving.”
“Skydiving isn’t flying, it’s falling.”
“What about hang-gliding? That’s fun.”
“Will you take me hang-gliding?”
“It’s the wrong time of year,” he said. “Unless…we go to Australia.” They both smiled, then laughed. “Maybe this summer we’ll go.”
“Where do you live, Casey?”
“Portland, Oregon. Usually.”
“With your mum?”
“Kind of. She’s with Gideon a lot now. He has his own place. But the apartment is Frank’s. I guess technically I’m the only one who still lives there.”
She lay across his chest, her legs spread around his. “By yourself,” she said, setting the lit joint against his armpit hair until it started to smoke. “I bet you always have company.”
“Most of the time.”
“Girls?”
“Sometimes.”
“Are you screwing anybody else?” she asked, the threat of hostility in her tone. She sat back up. Now she had lipstick across her breasts, and she rubbed it around her nipple like a bored child picking at a scab.
“No. It’d been awhile actually.”
“I live near Prague. That’s pretty far away from Portland fucking Oregon.”
She was angry with him again, and once again he wasn’t quite sure why. Although he liked her, more than he’d liked anyone in a long time, possibly more than he’d liked anyone ever, the long distance relationship discussion seemed premature when there was hardly a relationship to speak of. After all, they were there now, together, sneaking around like horny teenagers with overprotective parents. And Vincent had said she’d be there until Christmas, which was over a month away.
Casey had always been in the moment, enjoying every second as much as possible without a worry about when it would end. It was part of why he’d never really gotten addicted to cigarettes. He’d smoke one, savor it like it was his last, and not think of it again for days, weeks, sometimes even months.
But it was also extremely rare for him to make short-term friends. He still kept in touch with people he’d met in elementary school, and his affection for Bella, even after so brief a time, was as strong as his feelings for some of his closest friends. He felt like he could tell her anything, and worship her with his paintbrush if he could ever figure out how to get it right. Maybe if he could make sense of why she kept getting mad at him he could make sense of her spirit enough to capture it on canvas.
“Prague’s nice. I could live in Prague,” he said. Only that was wrong, he knew it immediately, when she stubbed the joint out by his head like punching a pillow.
“You’re not going anywhere near fucking Prague. I’d kill you first and put you out of your fucking misery.” She got off his lap and started to pull on her clothes.
“Bella,” he said patiently, watching her dress without moving from the bed. “Bell.”
“Frankie would fucking die if he knew you’d gone to Prague.”
He was fairly certain that Frank knew everywhere he’d traveled. Wasn’t that the purpose of appointing Bella as chaperone?
She came to him suddenly, back onto his lap, and kissed him like they hadn’t seen each other in a week. “Were you scared of that woman?”
“Yeah,” he said, not m
entioning that Bella’s driving had felt more like a threat to his safety, and given the choice, he would much rather have the French woman behind the wheel.
She roughly stroked his hair and kissed him again. “I like how you are, Casey.”
“I like how you are, too,” he said, though he wasn’t sure what she meant by it. This was too much to deal with when all he wanted was to have sex again and possibly get something to eat.
“What about a band of bagpipers?”
“To give us a ride?”
“Aye.”
“That’d be good. You could translate when we stole their car.”
“That’s what I was thinking,” she said, and it felt like a great victory to know anything going on inside her head.
Chapter Twenty-Three
It was only a matter of time before someone got hurt. Killed. I should’ve seen it coming, but then, who in their right mind takes up smoking again as a precursor to getting back into shape?
Frank had been tremendously fit when he killed for a living: running for hours every day, rain or shine, tackling staircases in skyscrapers without breaking a sweat, and once I came along, fucking me with an appetite even I, at seventeen, could barely keep up with. It wasn’t as if he was out of shape now; even with the decrease in violence from our bedroom activities we still went at each other hard enough to leave marks, and he’d take the dogs out every morning, sometimes as far as town.
But he’d definitely taken it easier since we got married. Now the assassin had returned. I’d spied on him with our rifle’s telescopic lens from the roof, racing through the woods like he was being chased. Or chasing someone. Hugo and Charlie were exhausted most of the day after their morning constitutional. Kiki was lucky. She got to stay home.
Les Recidivists (Chance Assassin Book 2) Page 15
