A Last Act of Charity (Killing Sisters Book 1) (23 page)

She smirked at her own humour.

‘Is it dark enough? Oh fuck it, I don’t care. I’ll just wash my hands. That mess would rot the strings in seconds. I’ll come back later and clear the room up. Shame you arrived when you did, Bili. I reckon she’d have got better with a little more practice.’ An attempt at levity.

‘You old men couldn’t perform like that twice in a single week, so don’t come it with me, soldier.’ Bili was smiling, shaking her head at the nonsense of it. ‘Come on . . .’

‘Do not laugh, Bili. Laugh not.’ Stoner was attempting, and failing, to sound stern. ‘It’s just . . . just the way it is. The way it’s always been. You know that. You get fans all the time. Far more than I do. You drink a river of their whisky.’

‘But I don’t fuck them, JJ. Hardly any of them. Hardly any at all. Here I am, trying to remember that last one I fucked. Hmmm . . . Nope. Can’t.’

They were sitting side by side in the silent, dark club, at the side of the empty, quiet stage, all alone in the night.

‘But never mind that. She surely does have an unusually inventive . . . creative technique. Was it as good as it looked?’ Bili appeared to be genuinely interested. Stoner looked at her suspiciously.

‘Yes. Excellent. She needs to practise her last verse closures, work out how to stand an encore or two, but apart from that the performance was outstanding. Not that a gentleman awards marks to a lady. If a gentlemen did that, he would expect that ladies would do likewise, and no gentleman would wish to be compared to another. These things . . . performances . . . are all relative, in any case. I hope.’

He smiled.

‘And I stink, Bili, I truly do stink. Like a drunken tramp in a whorehouse.’

‘Do you care about that? Care enough to clean up before tackling dawn’s early light, so forth?’

The hour was a late hour. Stoner dragged his cell phones from his pocket, glanced at their displays. Messages from here and there; nothing compelling. Nothing from the dirty blonde. Nothing from Shard. Nothing from the Hard Man. Bili looked at him again.

‘You going home to anyone tonight? Is she, your lanky friend, is she around tonight? Or is she as professionally engaged as you? No offence intended of course.’

‘Of course. None taken. Too tired to take offence. Offence could bite me on the arse and I’d take it without complaint and turn the other cheek.’

‘Not seeing your little friend Amanda again tonight? Hasn’t she called you, suggesting another rehearsal?’

‘Don’t be a pig, Bili. Unless you gave it to her, she’s not got my number.’

‘Oh . . . I’d say she’s got it, got your number absolutely spot-on. In a sense.’

Stoner sighed. ‘OK, OK. I’m all in. Can’t do the fighty banter thing much more. Need some sleep. Gonna take a bath, too tired for a shower. There’s a washing machine upstairs too, might even be a change of pants somewhere around. I’d better lock things up first, let you out, so forth.’

‘Just lock up, JJ. I’ll crash here. I’ll even scrub your back in the bath for you. You look too tired to be a threat, and I doubt your elderly shagging tackle’s up to another go-around for a while.’ She smiled, quietly and without sarcasm, with no angle at all.

‘You sure?’ Stoner stood, walked behind the bar, punched the combination into the safe and pulled out the club’s keys. ‘That . . . would be . . . nice. Really nice.’

He locked everything; doors, windows, cellar door and fire
exits. Walked upstairs to the apartment, greeted by the welcome sounds and smells of a filling bath. Sounds of running water from the kitchen, too, followed by the question about it being too late or too early for a pot of morning tea. He shouted a grateful affirmative, locked the doors between apartment and club, stripped off messed clothing and piled himself into the bath, sinking under a layer of fragrant foam. Heaven.

‘Heaven,’ he sighed as Bili padded into the bathroom, a business-like mug of weak tea in each hand. She smiled down at him. Parked their drinks, picked up his clothes.

‘You got a change here?’

He nodded.

‘Upstairs. The other flat. Unless someone’s walked off with it, flogged it all off down the market.’

Bili loaded up a washing machine. ‘Look at me,’ she smiled. ‘Quite the domestic goddess, huh? Make someone a great housewife one day.’

‘You surely will. Surely. Be a lucky guy, that one, huh? That’s what the blonde’s doing at the moment. You know that?’

Bili’s arched eyebrows confirmed her ignorance.

‘You and . . . her,’ she said, carefully. ‘Confuses the fuck out of me. Don’t take the hump, JJ, I’m not being mean, but I really just don’t see it. I mean, she’s a fit critter, no mistaking that, and I’m not qualified to make moral judgements any more than you are, shagger, but . . . I honestly don’t understand why you carry the torch like you do. Makes no sense to me. Hey!’ She laughed. ‘Lean forward and I really honestly will scrub your back for you. Years since I did that.’

She stripped off her shirt, leaned over Stoner to collect soap and cloth. Stoner watched as her breasts sailed in and out of his hazy, tired vision.

‘Oh, the Sloggi sports bra; my favourite. Go to it, wonder woman. You do look sweet enough to eat, Bili. No word of a lie.’

‘And you look like you’ve already been eaten, cowboy, so lean forward . . . but before that, your tackle appears to be bleeding. You OK?’

Stoner lifted himself out of the water on one hand, and with the other swept the suds from his cock.

‘Does feel a little tender. She’s bitten me. Just a flesh wound, right down by my balls. That was one pretty far-out blow job; you’ve got to hand it to her; A for effort.’

‘That’s just a scrape. You’re bleeding from the end.’

Stoner peeled back his foreskin, revealing a pair of symmetrical scrapes at the rim of his glans.

‘You didn’t notice that?’ Bili was incredulous as she laughed at him.

‘My mind was . . . occupied. Really, Bili, at that moment she could have bitten the fucking thing clean through and I’d have asked for more. But it’s clean enough. Unless you reckon I should bathe it in disinfectant? Scour it down with a little wire wool? Drain cleaner? Flame thrower? You really pissed with me? Sorry if so, Bili. Love you, you know that. Don’t hurt. Not for me. I truly am unworthy of that.’

Bili peeled his foreskin back as far as it would peel, washed the limp pink dick gently and let the skin roll back.

‘I was a tiny bit bothered about the vomit; piss and puke are probably not recommended for open wounds. That said, I expect that thing has been in worse places, old man.’

‘You know that to be true, Bili, so I’ll not embarrass you with a reply. Far worse places. God I’m knackered; the old chap hasn’t even twitched. Lovely lady handling him and all. Amazing.’

‘Rub him yourself; you can pretend that it’s all in the interests of personal hygiene. She’ll be back for more tomorrow. You do know that? Know her type? Obsessive? But . . . what she said about your playing; she’s dead right. Last few sessions you’ve been seriously smoking that old Strat. Seriously. Real squeal blues
from the heart. Your tart, JJ; she breaking your heart? Tell me to fuck off if you want.’

‘Nah. She’s . . . she’s the one. The real one. Makes my heart sing, just like the song says. Really. I know it makes no sense at all. None, but that’s just how it is. You’re going to laugh – feel free – but I have an ambition. It’s my only ambition. I want to make it . . . right for her. I want her to do well. I want to make her happy, and I want to make her mine. And now she’s shacked up in the shires playing housewife for some fucking lord of the land, or some such.’

Bili grinned, opened her eyes as wide as wide could be. ‘Really?’

‘Really. She reckons . . . oh for fuck’s sake, you don’t care about this, Bili, and it makes no sense to me. I don’t understand what she wants. She wants us to be an item, the item, the only item, but . . .’

‘She’s on the game, JJ. She’s a whore, a working girl. So she must be an awesome lay? Presumably the best fuck on the planet, right? So why are you sticking it into the faces of chubby wannabe saxophonists? Why do that when you can enjoy sweet expert lurve with your very own not-blonde?’

She reached into the bathwater, squeezed Stoner’s cock with a proprietorial air.

‘Oh look. It’s not broken. That’s a relief.’

She let him go again, leaned back against the wall.

‘Surely she can fuck you so far and so fast that you just wouldn’t want girls like whoever she was tonight?’

‘I can’t remember the last time Lissa and me actually fucked together, Bili.’ Stoner was suddenly serious. Looked angry. ‘Sex is . . . different for her, sometimes. Somehow. She . . . sees my need. Fixes it. Gives monster head; you’ve seen her do it. Anywhere, any time. I last less than one minute. Or a hand job. Efficient. Fast. Can get tissues out of nowhere faster than it takes me to come so there’s never any mess. Any time, any place, just
like they say in all the songs. But we don’t . . . fuck. Hardly at all. Started off like she didn’t want to just do it. I could see that. She does it for a living. It can’t be an exciting thing for her. Never new. I understand that. Same for stagehounds like me . . . and maybe you too, hey? Then later she wanted to make love. Take real time over it. All night. All morning. She’s brilliant. The only time I’m so relaxed that the voices in my head just shut up and fade away and leave me in peace. But that was then. Now she wants to save us time for when it’s love time, not shag time, but she knows I’m a horny old goat so provides instant expert relief any time she thinks I need it. And I can’t fault that. Seems like she’s more interested in my job than she is in my cock. Can’t fault that, either.

‘But it works both ways. If all I wanted was a quick jump, a BJ at the club, whatever, well . . . it’s always there, isn’t it? The poor fan is always with us. You’ve got yours, I’ve got mine. Like troubles. I want more than that from Lissa, I’ve told her but she believes me not. She knows what I really want behind the kind words, which she thinks are just flattery. I’m a bloke; she knows that all blokes want the same. And it’s true. But only to a point. It’s a huge suffering subject. So, let’s be honest, it’s all over. It should be all over between us. That’s what it sounds like. But it’s not true. If anything, I feel more for her than I’ve ever done. You’re not asleep yet, then?’

Bili had moved behind him and was soaping, scrubbing gently at his back. Massaging his shoulders and the sides of his neck.

‘Not yet.’ She picked up a vast soft towel, offered it to him. ‘Dry yourself and come to bed. Pull on some pants too; I don’t want himself poking me in the arse every time you roll over.’

She stood, stripped off the brassiere and pulled a clean T-shirt from a drawer, heaved it over her head.

‘You really are fucked up, y’know? It’ll look brighter in the morning. Honest. Whoever wakes up first gets the milk in.’

‘There’s milk in the club. Coffee’s better here. Thanks for listening, Bili. How long is it since we slept together, huh?’ Stoner towelled; Bili threw him a clean set of tracksuit pants; he staggered into them and fell beneath the sheets.

‘Just under three weeks. Your memory really is fucked. But so is mine. Remember your other fan? The blonde well-dressed one? The one Chimp thinks is a narc? She was in again tonight. That was actually what I came up here to tell you when I found little miss tingle-tongue trying to explode your dick all over the walls. I quite forgot in all that excitement. She’d gone by the time we came down again. Sorry about that. You need another fan.’

She smiled, but Stoner was sound asleep.

23

ANOTHER LONELY DAY

The morning after found Stoner awake early, mind racing with a sense of urgency which years of experience would not let him ignore. He rolled silently from the shared bed, admiring the rise and fall of Bili beneath the flat linen sheets, and skimmed silently across the rugs to collect his cell phones. They held the morning’s news, as he had known they would. A voicemail heads-up from Shard confirming his continued existence, a series of missed calls, a couple with their identities withheld, and a text from Mallis, suggesting blandly that both email and a meeting should be a priority for them both.

Confirmations first. Texts to those who needed reassurance, email to others. Text reply within instants from Shard; someone was awake and living their life, then. A coded message from Mallis containing a place and a time, along with an instruction that he bring a netbook or something similar with net access and a screen bigger than that on a cell phone.

Distant atonal music and the rhythm of a vacuum cleaner revealed the activities downstairs in the club. A glance to the bedroom revealed no signs of activity beyond a steady silent breathing. Stoner showered, dressed, slipped downstairs, leaving
a note: ‘Hope it was as good for you as it was for me.’ Irony is an unappreciated form of wit, and would certainly not be lost on his last night’s bedfellow.

Stoner eased the apartment door closed, let the lock click a note of security, and drifted behind the bar, coffee in mind, along with a need for glasses of water and a laptop or similar. His own was nowhere near. The vacuum cleaner droned on, sometimes closer sometimes not, accompanied by a trail of music he could not recognise.

His phone shook.

Shard.

‘Where have you been? Never mind. You were right. You had a watcher. Watched you all the time you were nowhere to be seen. You were in the hotel. He and me were outside. I couldn’t see you; he couldn’t see you. What was he watching? Why also? You leave as plod arrives. Less than a quarter hour. Your miserable mate has less pull with the plods than you think he does. They charge into the lobby, then stop. He does have pull. Maybe the blue boys are afeared of a dead man. Who can tell? You wave at the top plod, a sergeant. How’m I doing so far?’

Stoner smiled, despite himself. ‘Doing good, Shard, doing good. And then?’

‘Then you’re off. On foot. Why on the foot, JJ? Your truck’ll be towed by now. Your problem. There’s movement. He’s in sight. Not a big guy; easy to take down. Big coat, watch cap, gloves, silent shoes. A pro tracker and a good one, I’d guess. Maybe military, but didn’t smell like it to me. I kept well back. You took a call, made a call, whatever; waved the bright light of your phone for all to see. Maybe you were surfing the porn, who can tell? You stopped. Your trail stopped. You looked around and, fuck me, he vanished, right in front of me, right before my eyes. Panic rises. Mistake time; I was watching you and not the guy with the soft shoes.

‘You move on; he reappears. It’s like a switch. If he’s that good then he’ll know I’m there, so I allow some distance, follow you for a little. But no; he’s still there. You change direction, head off somewhere east. He follows for maybe 400 metres and then stops. Looks like he’s talking; a headset, earpiece, something. Turns around, scans, scans again. Shows no sign of having spotted me, but I don’t know. Walks back to the hotel. I’m in doorways, in bloody front, no shoelaces to tie, no excuses for being there. I ring a doorbell. Avon calling. He passes me on the far side of the street. No glance my way; I can’t see a face, not a hair, no clues. Big hat, high collar, cold night.

‘Walks straight past the hotel. Not a pause. Meat wagon’s present and correct, boys in blue and men in white idling the way they do. He stops and he stares. No hurry, just another rubber-necker. Turns the corner we came in by, lights up a car, climbs in and gone. Number’s on the text to yours. I lean on the pedals but there’s no traffic and a bicycle is not too clever when the enemy’s driving. End of. Went home and shouted at myself a little.

‘Good idea about the bike, JJ. Shame it’s not got an engine, huh? Bloody shame. What now? Where are you? You were silent all night. Strange time to go to a party.’