I nodded my assent, and he turned back to the window. His shoulder blades rose to points, making me long to dart across the room and kiss them. He held the deep breath for several long seconds and charged into his story.
“About six months before the Nimrod, I hit money troubles,” he said. “Business was slow. I needed to make the rent on the office, pay my bills, all that jazz.” Without looking around, he held up a hand to forestall the comment swelling in my throat. Even after all this time, he knew me too well. “No, I couldn’t have asked you for money. One, you weren’t exactly rolling in it, and two, I couldn’t be your kept man. You wouldn’t have respected me, and I wouldn’t have respected myself.
“So I hid it from you. I was fine when you were around. I could hide it from myself then too. There was a week, though, when you were working almost every night. I hardly saw you, and that meant I had to face my failure. I got maudlin and one night got stupid drunk. Stupid enough to go to Bruno’s casino, hoping to win enough money to tide me over for a month. Stupid enough to keep going past my limit and take out an IOU, which Bruno was happy to extend.”
I clenched my fists. Bruno was always happy to extend IOUs, at least to those people he knew could repay him one way or another.
“When I sobered up the next day,” he continued, “I found the slip in my bag. I was over ten grand in hock to him. So I went to see him, to explain I didn’t have the money and ask if I could work it off—meaning doing some free investigating, rousing bad debts, and sniffing out any enemies that might be plotting to encase him in the foundations of a new skyscraper. He wasn’t interested, said private investigators were ten-a-penny in LA. He gave me three options. The first involved you working off my debt on your back, with him humping sweaty on top.”
“Why? I mean, it’s not like he was short of better options.”
“Because he was a bastard and didn’t want me to take that option. I declined vociferously, of course. The second was for Bruno to shoot me, and you, as an example to other welchers. I didn’t take much of a shine to that one. So I took the third option.”
He stopped for so long that I thought he wasn’t going to continue. Finally, after bending double and heaving his shoulders as if he was trying to hack up a nugget of vomit, he forced out the words. “I agreed to do two hits for him.”
As hard as he had to fight to get the words out, I had to fight to keep mine in. They weren’t words of censure for him. They were for me. I couldn’t believe I’d been so dumb, so self-absorbed, to have missed all this.
“The first was some rival of his, a real lowlife,” he said. “He was trying to muscle in on the casino operations, so Bruno wanted him in the ground. The thing was, I knew the guy. He’d raped an old friend of mine back in New York, but he’d bought off the cops. He needed to pay for his crime, and I needed to pay for my stupidity. So I killed him. Shot him when he went trawling for hookers and turned up a blind alley. I didn’t feel bad. He got what was coming to him, and I spared other women more of what my friend got.
“Bruno waited a while before asking for the second payment. He was smart. He knew about the rape. He knew how angry it made me. He told me the second hit was another pervert, some businessman who’d lured his cousin back to his condo and forced her to go down on him. He told me he’d arranged a meeting with the guy. All I had to do was lie in wait and shoot him when he came in the door.” He paused, and when the final words came, they rode out on a single tortured breath. “Bruno sent me to the Nimrod Motel. I was sent to kill you, Kat. And even though I missed, I succeeded. I put you here. And I’m sorry.”
The moon hung bloated outside the window. He stood silhouetted against it, hands clutching his elbows. He was so thin now, so fragile. He looked like he would shatter if I touched him. I searched for some anger, some sense of betrayal; instead, I found pity for him and blame for myself. Yes, he’d hidden his troubles instead of coming to me, but I’d still noticed he wasn’t himself and had done nothing. And I’d made the sorry mess worse by not telling him I was on Bruno’s shit list. If he’d known, maybe he would have put two and two together and worked out the real target that night. Even with the realization that I’d failed him at this crucial juncture, I felt lighter than I had in years. This could be fixed. I’d spent my whole time in Lost Angeles castigating myself for killing him, believing I deserved everything Hell threw at me. But it was they, not he, who’d judged me. Only his opinion mattered.
He’d said I saw the best in him, and that was true. Lovers were the ultimate cherry pickers, grabbing the succulent fruit and letting the rest wither unseen on the vine. I didn’t see any reason to change now. Circumstance had made him a killer, as it had me. I didn’t care what he’d done under duress. He was still my Danny. Now we could be together again. We’d lost so much time already, and I didn’t know how long remained before we faced the Ammit. Even if it was one day, it could still be the best day of my life. I didn’t intend to waste a second of it.
I walked across the room and slid my hands around his waist. His entire body was trembling from the effort of holding his muscles locked. “You did what you had to do,” I said. “If it hadn’t been you, it would have been somebody else. Bruno was the real killer, not you. And technically, you killed one person. You missed me, remember? I shot you and then myself. That’s two to one. Makes me way worse than you.”
“You’ll forgive me, just like that?” he said, his voice hoarse.
“Just like that,” I said. “Nothing you could do would make me stop loving you.”
For a moment, I thought he was going to relax and turn into my arms, but he pulled away. “There’s one more thing I need to show you.”
He crossed to the bedside table, pulled a key from the drawer, and left the room without a word. I followed him into the hallway at the end of which the two guards were poking around the remnants of the door. They looked at me with frank curiosity. I guessed Danny didn’t have many lady callers, particularly ones who made such a dramatic entrance. He unlocked the door I’d been unable to open and flicked on the light switch. I stepped into one man’s private Hell.
22
The room was bare except for a folding chair set up in front of a cylindrical glass tank full of dark-green water. Inside, a naked man drifted, his toes dragging the bottom. Gray hair streamed out like seaweed from his bowed head, and the tip of his stubby penis poked out from under a fat gut like a limpet on a rock. I hadn’t believed the legend of the previous gambling kingpin kept at Flo’s pleasure. But here he was all the same, dead in the water.
I blinked as the wave of reset hit me; when I looked again, the captive’s head lifted, his features hard to discern in the murky liquid. He began thudding his fists and feet against the walls of his watery grave. Not a sound escaped the thick glass. I wondered what he’d done to make Danny vengeful enough to subject him to this punishment. When his jerking limbs propelled him forward and his face mashed against the side of the tank, I got my answer. The legend was only partly true. I knew that face, and it wasn’t the former head of this gambling business. It was the former head of another. He looked decades older than when I’d known him, and madness had added further eons, but there was no mistaking his ugly mug.
“Holy shit,” I said. “Bruno.”
Danny took up a position over my shoulder. He spoke in a matter-of-fact manner, as if discussing a fascinating piece of interior decor or a pet, which in a way Bruno was. “He marched into the casino one day, asking who ran the place, telling everyone who would listen that he was a gambling guru and wanted a meeting. My people were going to throw him out, until I spotted him. I gave him his private appointment. He came at me with a sharpened piece of plastic he’d smuggled in. He hadn’t gotten the message that assassination didn’t work and thought if he killed Flo, he could be the new boss. I broke both his arms. Then I let him have a good look at my face. He was a touch surprised.”
“I know that feeling,” I said.
I approached until
my nose was almost brushing the tank. Finally, I was face-to-face with the man who’d taken away everything that mattered to me, the man I’d so often fantasized about wreaking just such a brutal revenge upon. He was now too busy straining against the tightly sealed lid to apprehend the significance of the moment, so I tapped the glass. His gaze snapped to mine, and recognition flared in his bulging eyes. Astonishingly, he leered and gave me the double finger. He mouthed, “Fuck you.” Then he died again.
“How long has he been in the tank?” I said as his lifeless body turned.
“Long enough to get wet,” Danny said. “As you can see, not long enough to be sorry.”
“Did he tell you why he did it before you dunked him?”
“I kept him dry for a while so we could have a chat. He wanted you dead because you pointed a gun at him and stopped his fun, which was a dumb move, by the way. He thought it would be sweeter to get me to do it.”
“He always was a petty asshole.”
I watched Bruno in silence until the next blink started the cycle again. I wondered how many times he’d died and been reborn—if each time he woke up, he enjoyed a few seconds of peace before he remembered what was about to happen. I turned my back on the thrashing form and looked at Danny. How many hours had he spent in that chair, letting Bruno see his face as he died in silent agony? This was my revenge, our revenge. But now that I had it, I didn’t want it. This was too grotesque, too cruel. Don’t get me wrong: I didn’t give a shit about Bruno. Sure, his Hell was more extreme than most people’s—he probably looked forward to the visit of his Torment for some respite from the tank—but his behavior had been more extreme. He’d no doubt tortured and killed dozens of people in his lifetime in ways similar to this or worse and made many more miserable in countless other ways. He’d gotten what was coming to him. No, I felt nauseated because of what the torture told me about Danny, what death and decades in Lost Angeles had done to him. The Danny I’d known would never have been so callous. I barely recognized him, his face congealed into a mask of loathing as he stared at our nemesis.
It was easy for me, standing there with Danny back and looking at Bruno through fresh eyes. If I’d been there when he’d arrived, aflame with righteous anger, maybe I’d have left him to soak. Or maybe not. Even by Yama’s standards, this was a cruel and unusual punishment. What I really needed to know was how far down the rabbit hole Danny had tunneled and if he could be brought back to the light. I hoped the real Danny was still in there. I had to remind him who he was, not who Bruno had made him. I stepped in front of him, blocking the view of the tank.
“You don’t need to do this,” I said. “It’s over. We can be together.”
“It’s not over, Kat. We’re still going to have to relive each other’s deaths every night, thanks to that soggy fuck. How do you think that’s going to feel when we wake up next to each other?”
I didn’t feel like making any jokes, but I had to try. It was the one chance I saw of reminding him of the way we’d been—when every night was a verbal duel, winner goes on top—and so showing him this life could be possible again. “Kinky? Death and sex go together—that’s what they say. We’ll screw our way out of it.”
He didn’t come back with a witty rejoinder. “Fine, say we can screw our way out of it. But we’re still here in this godforsaken city. I want out, Kat. I want us both out.”
“Then why didn’t you come to me sooner? We could have tried to find a way together. We could have been with each other, made this existence more bearable.”
“I couldn’t. I saw you the first day, you know, tripping through the alleys of Desert Heights. You looked broken. I’d never seen you so weak and fragile. I knew what you’d done straightaway, and I knew it was my fault. So I hid from you.”
I forgot Bruno as his words sank in. Hours after our deaths, he’d been within touching distance. He’d laid eyes on me in my anguish and done nothing. All those years of agony could have been avoided, or at least tempered, if he’d had the balls to face me. His mistakes upstairs, I could understand. But not this. My temples began to throb.
“What was it, your fucking pride?” I said. “All you had to do was show your face. I’d have fallen down and kissed your feet.”
“I thought you’d have figured out how it happened and would blame me. How was I to know you’d be such a dumbass?”
Our voices were growing in volume, each feeding off the anger at the injustices we’d suffered. “Because you lived with me for years. You saw me light cigarettes at the wrong end, put my socks in the fridge and the milk in the laundry basket.”
“That’s not stupid. That’s preoccupied. You could have worked it out if you’d been objective.”
“How could I be objective about murdering the only man I ever loved, the only man I’d have taken a bullet for?” I shouted. “I blamed myself, like you, but if I’d caught even a glimpse of you down here, I’d have chased you around the city until my feet were bloody! You let me go.”
“I didn’t let you go!” he screamed back, stepping in so our faces were inches apart. “Everything I’ve done in Lost Angeles has been about you. Every last fucking thing. Every waking minute, I’ve thought about you, how to make you forgive me, how to get you back.” He leaned closer and spoke in a fierce whisper. “Every waking minute, I’ve thought about what I was going to do to you when I got you back.”
As his breath hissed in my ear, the fire in my belly dropped a foot and turned into an inferno. I hooked my leg around the back of his and shoved. He toppled backward, and I followed. His mouth closed over mine, and for a few moments, I was aware of nothing but his probing tongue and fingers working at my belt. He broke off to nibble my neck. I arched my back to press my groin against his even harder and threw my head back to allow better access to my throat. I let out a yelp when my gaze fell upon the tank. Danny took my vocalization as encouragement to bite harder.
I forced his chin up. “Bruno,” I said.
In our burst of pent-up passion, I’d forgotten about him. He’d momentarily stopped drowning to bob in the tank, staring at us with a hungry look. I didn’t look down to see if he was showing his interest in other ways. I couldn’t get it on with an audience, particularly one so macabre; more important, I realized this was a chance to press my point.
“Let him out,” I said.
“Now? You want a threesome?”
I knew then that Danny was coming back, emerging tentatively from the years of hurt. I could have expended a million words trying to convince him, trying to heal the wounds, and gotten nowhere. There was no need for declarations of forgiveness. This, the language of our bodies, couldn’t be mistranslated or misinterpreted. It wasn’t about sex. Well, it was about sex—glorious, messy, sloppy, passionate sex—but it was so much more. There was fucking, and there was making love, that connection created in the mind and spirit and forged by the roaring heat of blood. Our bodies hadn’t forgotten we belonged together, that there was no barrier the simple act of letting go couldn’t overcome.
“Not unless you’ve got a better-looking specimen in another jar. I meant release him. Throw him onto the street and let him rot. He can’t hurt us—he’s mad, weak, and alone. If you keep him in there, he can hurt us. He’s a link to the past, a reminder of how plain fucking dumb we both were. Revenge does as much damage to the one who carries it out. We have to let go. We have to let him go.”
He gave Bruno a lingering look, doubt clouding his eyes. I put my hand on his cheek and turned his face back to mine. “I know it’s hard. He’s a real hunk of man love and a joy to look at. But you don’t need him anymore. You’ve got me.”
For the first time, he smiled. It was like an old lightbulb turned on in an abandoned cabin, weak and faltering but enough to dispel the worst of the darkness.
“Let’s talk about it later,” he said. “We have more important things to take care of first.”
I didn’t push it, mainly because my thoughts were turning fuzzy as the less-se
ntient parts of my body took over. My torso followed his as he sat up; I held on as he rose to his feet. He staggered out into the hallway, my legs wrapped around his back, and took me into the bedroom.
23
I’d never had sex as a dead person, despite the many temptations on offer. I was delighted to discover that kicking the bucket didn’t seem to have made any difference to the sensitivity of my nerve endings or the euphoric postcoital mental drift. We lay on Danny’s bed in a daze, a happy one this time, entwined in a knot I never wanted to break again. If his leg hadn’t been hooked over my body, I might have floated up to the ceiling.
“Just like riding a bike,” he said sleepily.
I slapped his chest. “Excuse me?”
“I meant you never forget. It’s been a long time.”
“That would explain why it was over so quickly.”
Now it was his turn to slap me, choosing my ass as his target.
“I’ve been such an idiot,” he said.
“I agree completely.” He shot me a dirty look as I grinned dopily. “Ah, was I supposed to disagree?”
“Yes, you were.”
“Fine. You couldn’t have known I’d be such a pushover. Look on the bright side: we’ve got a lifetime of hanky-panky to catch up on.”
“Give me ten minutes to get my breath back, and we can get going again.”
“I think you’re overestimating your recovery capabilities. Make it twenty. And since we have time to kill, why don’t you tell me about Flo?”
He said nothing for a while, and I cursed my rampant curiosity, which even now couldn’t take a few minutes off. I worried I’d ruined the moment by asking him to recount the years of heartache. When he spoke, though, his voice was relaxed. “I said I had to make it right before I saw you again. To do that, I needed knowledge, power, and influence. So I started looking for opportunities. I found a way in at the casino.”
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