by Zoe Sharp
“Sir? Ma’am? Would you care for a canapé? Those darlin‘ little round ones are smoked salmon and caviar, and the square ones are Kobe beef and ginger.”
She smiled, but their eyes were on the food, or they didn’t think it was worth it to smile back. Just stuffed their mouths and continued braying to each other like the stuck-up donkeys they were.
Layla had done this kind of gig many times before. She knew the right pace and frequency to circulate, how often to approach the same guests before attentive turned to irritating, how to slip through the crowd without getting jostled. How to keep her mouth shut and her ears open. Steve might hint that she had to put out to get signed on again, but Layla knew she was good and he was lucky to have her.
Well, after tonight, Stevie-boy, you might just change your mind about that.
She smiled and offered the caviar and the beef, reciting the same words over and over like someone kept pulling a string at the back of her neck. She didn’t need to think about it, so she thought about Bobby instead.
Bobby had been the bouncer in a roadhouse near Tallahassee. A huge guy with a lot of old scar tissue across his knuckles and around his eyes. Tale was he’d been a boxer, had a shot until he’d taken one punch too many in the ring. Then everything had gone into slow motion for Bobby and never speeded up again.
He wore a permanent scowl like he’d rip your head off and spit down your neck, as soon as look at you, but Layla quickly realised that was merely puzzlement. Bobby was slightly overmatched by the pace of life and couldn’t quite work out why. Still plenty fast enough to throw out drunks in a cheap joint, though. And once Bobby had laid his fists on you, you didn’t rush to get up again.
One night in the parking lot, Layla was jumped by a couple of guys who’d fallen foul of the ‘no touching’ rule earlier in the evening and caught the rough side of Bobby’s iron-hard hands. They waited, tanking up on cheap whiskey, until closing time. Waited for the lights to go out and the girls to straggle, yawning, from the back door. They grabbed Layla before she had a chance to scream, and were touching all they wanted when Bobby waded in out of nowhere. Layla had never been happier to hear the crack of skulls.
She’d been angry more than shocked and frightened – angry enough to stamp them a few times with those lethal heels once they were on the ground. Angry enough to take their overflowing billfolds, too. But it didn’t last. When Bobby got her back to her rented double-wide, she shook and cried as she clung to him and begged him to help her forget. That night she discovered that Bobby was big and slow in other ways, too. And sometimes that was a real good thing.
For a while, at least.
“Ma’am? Would you care for a canapé? Smoked salmon and caviar on that side, and this right here’s Kobe beef. No, thank you, ma’am.”
Layla worked the room in a pattern she’d laid out inside her head, weaving through the crowd with the nearest thing a person could get to invisibility. It was a big fancy do, that was for sure. Some charity she’d never heard of and would never benefit from. The crowd was circulating like hot dense air through a fan, edging their way up towards the host and hostess at the far end.
The Dyers were old money and gracious with it, but firmly distant towards the staff. They knew their place made sure the little people, like Layla, were aware of theirs. Layla didn’t mind. She was used to being a nobody.
Mr Dyer was indeed, a big man, as Steve had said. A mover and shaker. He didn’t need to mingle, he could just stand there, like royalty, with a glass in one hand and the other around the waist of his tall, elegant wife, looking relaxed and casual.
Well, maybe not so relaxed. Every now and again Layla noticed Dyer throw a little sideways look at their guest of honour and frown, as though he still wasn’t quite sure what the guy was doing there.
Guy called Venable. Another big guy. Another mover and shaker. The difference was that Venable had clawed his way up out of the gutter and had never forgotten it. He stood close to the Dyers in his perfectly tailored tux with a kind of secret smile on his face, like he knew they didn’t want him there but also knew they couldn’t afford to get rid of him. But, just in case anyone thought about trying, he’d surrounded himself with four bodyguards.
Layla eyed them surreptitiously, with some concern. They were huge – bigger than Bobby, even when he’d been still standing – each wearing a bulky suit and one of those little curly wires leading up from their collar to their ear, like they was guarding the president himself. But Venable was no statesman, Layla knew for a fact.
She hadn’t expected him to be invited to the Dyers’ annual charity ball, and had worked hard to get herself on the staff list when she’d found out he was. A lot of planning had gone into this, one way or another.
By contrast, the Dyers had no protection. Well, unless you counted that bossy secretary of Mrs Dyer’s. Mrs Dyer was society through and through. The type who wouldn’t remember to get out of bed in the morning without a social secretary to remind her. The type whose only job is looking good and saying the right thing and being seen in the right places. There must be some kind of a college for women like that.
Mrs Dyer had made a big show of inspecting the arrangements, though. She’d walked through the kitchen earlier that day, nodding serenely, just so her husband could toast her publicly tonight for her part in overseeing the organisation of the event, and she could look all modest about it and it not quite be a lie.
She’d had the secretary with her then, a slim woman with cool eyes who’d frozen Steve off the first time he’d tried laying a proprietary hand on her shoulder. Layla and the rest of the girls hid their smiles behind bland faces when she’d done that. Even so, Steve took it out on Tammy – had her on her back in the storeroom almost before they were out the door.
The secretary was here tonight, Layla saw. Fussing around her employer, but it was Mr Dyer whose shoulder she stayed close to. Too close, Layla decided, for their relationship to be merely professional. An affair perhaps? She wouldn’t put it past any man to lose his sense and his pants when it came to an attractive woman. Still, she didn’t think the secretary looked the type. Maybe he liked ’em cool. Maybe she was hoping he’d leave his wife.
At the moment, the secretary’s eyes were on their guest. Venable had been free with his hosts’ champagne all evening and his appetites were not concerned only with the food. Layla watched the way his body language grew predatory when he was introduced to the gauche teenage daughter of one of the guests, and she stepped in with her tray, ignoring the ominous looming of the bodyguards.
“Sir, can I interest you in a canapé? Smoked salmon and caviar or Kobe beef and ginger?”
Venable’s greed got the better of him and he let go of the girl’s hand, which he’d been grasping far too long. She snatched it back, red-faced, and fled. The secretary gave Layla a knowing, grateful smile.
Layla moved away quickly afterwards, a frown on her face, cursing inwardly and knowing he was watching her. She was here for a purpose. One that was too important to allow stupid mistakes like that to risk bringing her unwanted attention. And after she’d tried so hard to blend in.
To calm herself, to negate those shivers of doubt, she thought of Bobby again. They’d moved in together, found a little apartment. Not much, but the first place Layla had lived in years that didn’t need the wheels taken off before you could call it home.
He’d been always gentle with Layla, but then one night he’d hit a guy who was hassling the girls too hard, hurt him real bad, and the management had to let Bobby go. Word got out and he couldn’t get another job. Layla had walked out, too, but she went through a dry spell as far as work was concerned, and now there were two of them to feed and care for.
Eventually, she was forced to go lower than she’d had to go before, taking her clothes off to bad music in a cheap dive that didn’t even bother to have a guy like Bobby to protect the girls. As long as the customers put their money down before they left, the management didn’t care.
Layla soon discovered that some of the girls took to supplementing their income by inviting the occasional guy out into the alley at the back of the club. When the landlord came by twice in the same week threatening to evict her and Bobby, she’d swallowed her pride. By the end of that first night, that wasn’t all she’d had to swallow.
Even Bobby, slow though he might be, soon realised what she was doing. How could he not question where the extra money was coming from when he’d been in the business long enough to know how much the girls made in tips – and what they had to do to earn them? At first, when she’d explained it to him, Layla thought he was cool with it. Until the next night when she was out in the alley between sets, her back hard up against the rough stucco wall with some guy from out of town huffing sweat and beer into her unremarkable face.
One minute she was standing with her eyes tight shut, wondering how much longer the guy was going to last, and the next he was yanked away and she heard that dreadful crack of skulls.
Bobby hadn’t meant to kill him, she was sure of that. He just didn’t know his own strength, was all. Then it was his turn to panic and tremble, but Layla stayed ice cool. They wrapped the body in plastic and put it into the trunk of a borrowed car before driving it down to the Everglades. Bobby carried it out to a pool where the ’gators gathered, and left it there for them to hide. Layla even went back a week later, just to check, but there was nothing left to find.
They stripped the guy before they dumped him, and struck lucky. He had a decent watch and a bulging wallet. It was a month before Layla had to put out against the stucco in the alley again.
How were they supposed to know he was connected to Venable? That the watch Bobby had pawned would lead Venable’s bone-breakers straight to them?
A month after the killing, Venable’s boys picked Bobby and Layla up from the bar and drove them out to some place by the docks. Bobby swore that Layla wasn’t in on it, that they should leave her alone, let her go. Swore blind that it was so. And eventually, they blinded him, just to make sure.
Layla thought she’d never get the sound of Bobby’s screaming out of her head as they’d tortured him into a confession of sorts. But even when they’d snapped his spine, left him broken and bleeding on that filthy concrete floor, Bobby had not said a word against Layla. And she, to her eternal shame, had been too terrified to confess her part in it all, as though that would make mockery of everything he’d gone through.
So, they’d left her. She was a waitress, a dancer, a hooker. A no-account nobody. Not worth the effort of a beating. Not worth the cost of a bullet.
Helpless as a baby, damaged beyond repair, Bobby went into some institution just north of Tampa and Layla took the bus up to see him every week for the first couple of months. But, gradually, getting on that bus got harder to do. It broke her heart to do see him like that, to force the cheerful note into her voice.
Eventually, the bus left the terminal one morning and Layla wasn’t on it.
She’d cried for days. When she’d gotten word that Bobby had snuck a knife out of the dining hall, waited until it was quiet then slit his wrists under the blankets and bled out softly into his mattress during the night, there had been no more tears left to fall.
Layla’s heart hardened to a shell. She’d let Bobby down while he was alive, but she could seek justice for him after he was dead. She heard things. That was one of the beauties of being invisible. People talked while she served them drinks, like she wasn’t there. Once Layla had longed to be noticeable, to be accepted. Now she made it her business simply to listen.
Of course, she knew she couldn’t go after Venable alone, so Layla had found another bruiser with no qualms about burying the bodies. And, once he’d had a taste of that spectacular body, he was hers.
Thad was younger than Bobby, sharper, neater, and when it came to killing he had the strike and the morals of a rattlesnake. Layla knew he’d do anything for her, right up until the time she tried to move on, and then he was likely to do anything to her instead.
Well, after tonight, she wouldn’t care.
She slipped out of the ballroom but instead of turning into the kitchen, this time she took the extra few strides to the French windows at the end of the corridor, furtively opened them a crack, then closed them again carefully so they didn’t latch.
By the time Layla returned to the ballroom, the canapés were not all she was holding. She’d detoured via the little cloakroom the girls had been given to change and store their bags. What she’d collected from hers she was holding flat in her right hand, hidden by the tray. A Beretta 9mm, hot most likely. As long as it worked, Layla didn’t care.
A few moments later someone stopped by her elbow and leaned close to examine the contents of the tray.
“Well hello, Cindy.” A man’s voice, a smile curving the sound of it. “And just what you got there, little lady?”
Thad, looking pretty nifty in the tux she’d made him rent. He bent over her tray while she explained the contents, making a big play over choosing between the caviar or the beef. And underneath, his other hand touched hers, and she slipped the Beretta into it.
“Well, thank you, sugar,” he said, taking a canapé with a flourish and slipping the gun inside his jacket with his other hand, like a magician. When the hand came out again, it was holding a snowy handkerchief, which he used to wipe his fingers and dab his mouth.
Layla had made him practice the move until it seemed so natural. Shame this was a one-time show. He would have made such a partner, someone she might just have been able to live her dreams with. If only he hadn’t had that cruel streak. If only he’d touched her heart the way Bobby had.
Poor crippled, blinded Bobby. Poor dead Bobby . . .
Ah well. Too late for regrets. Too late for much of anything, now.
Layla caught Thad’s eye as she made another round and he nodded, almost imperceptibly. She nodded back, the slightest inclination of her head, and turned away. As she did so she bumped deliberately into the arm of a man who’d been recounting some fishing tale and spread his hands broadly to lie about the size of his catch. He caught Layla’s tray and send it flipping upwards. Layla caught it with the fast reflexes that came from years of waiting crowded tables amid careless diners. She managed to stop the contents crashing to the floor, but most of it ended up down the front of her blouse instead.
“Oh, I am so sorry, sir,” she said immediately, clutching the tray to her chest to prevent further spillage.
“No problem,” the man said, annoyed at having his story interrupted and oblivious to the fact it had been entirely his fault. He checked his own clothing. “No harm done.”
Layla managed to raise a smile and hurried out. Steve caught her halfway.
“What happened, honey?” he demanded. “Not like you to be so clumsy.”
Layla shrugged as best she could, still trying not to shed debris.
“Sorry, boss,” she said. “I’ve got a spare blouse in my bag. I’ll go change.”
“OK, sweetheart, but make it snappy.” He let her move away a few strides, then called after her, “And if that’s caviar you’re wearing, it’ll come out of your pay, y’hear?”
Layla threw him a chastised glance over her shoulder that didn’t go deep enough to change her eyes, and hurried back to the little cloakroom.
She scraped the gunge off the front of her chest into the nearest trash, took off the blouse and threw that away, too, then rummaged through her bag for a clean one. This one was calculatedly lower cut and more revealing, but she didn’t think Steve would object too hard, even if he caught her wearing it.
She pulled out another skirt, too, even though there was nothing wrong with her old one. This was shorter than the last, showing several inches of long smooth thigh below the hem and, without undue vanity, she knew it would drag male eyes downwards, even as her newly exposed cleavage would drag them up again. With any luck, they’d go cross-eyed trying to look both places at once.
> She swapped her false name badge over and took the cheap Makarov 9mm and a roll of duct tape out of her bag. She lifted one remarkable leg up onto the wooden bench and ran the duct tape around the top of her thigh, twice, to hold the nine in position, just out of sight. The pistol grip pointed downwards and she knew from hours in front of the mirror that she could yank the gun loose in a second.
She’d bought both pistols from a crooked military surplus dealer down near Miramar. Thad insisted on coming with her for the Beretta, had made a big thing about checking the gun over like he knew what he was doing, sighting along the barrel with one eye closed.
Layla had gone back later for the Makarov. She didn’t have enough money for the two, but she’d been dressed to thrill and she and the dealer had come to an arrangement that hadn’t cost Layla anything at all. Only pride, and she’d been way overdrawn on that account for years.
Now, Layla checked in the cracked mirror that the gun didn’t show beneath her skirt. Her face was even more bland in its pallor and, just for once, she wished she’d been born pretty. Not beautiful, just pretty enough to have been cherished.
