Chance Assassin: A Story of Love, Luck, and Murder (38 page)

“Through sickness and health, right?”

“We’re not married yet.”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“It doesn’t mean anything, Frank.  You’re irritable because you’re tired.  Can’t you talk to Charlie?  Have him prescribe you sleeping pills or something.”

“He’s not a doctor.”

“He used to be.  Surely he has friends who can give you a prescription.”

“Charlie was never a doctor,” he said, his eyes lifeless behind the dark circles.  “He won his degree in a poker game from an English pediatrician with the same name.  That’s why he went to London.  His father was a doctor, so he knew enough to fake it once he had the paperwork.”

“For fuck’s sakes,” I said, slumping down on the lumpy, stained mattress and running my hands through my hair.  “Then get drunk.”

“Vincent, it’s ten o’clock in the morning.”

“You’re exhausted, Frank.  You can’t even drive.”

He rubbed his face.  He hadn’t actually caused an accident, but he came pretty close to driving over the center line on our way out of town, and since then I’d forbidden him from getting behind the wheel.  “It doesn’t help.”

I shook my head.  He was making me crazy.  “Maybe you should call Casey, huh?  That would cheer you up.”

“I don’t need to be cheered up, V.”

“You need something, Frank.  Obviously I’m not enough,” I said.  I couldn’t help but feel inadequate, now that my blowjobs weren’t sufficient to send him off for hours of pleasant dreams.  I’d never taken it personally when men couldn’t get it up.  Then again, the men I was living with before were much, much older, and having erectile dysfunction meant I got the night off.

“Don’t say that.”

“Go call Casey.  There’s a payphone by the lobby,” I said.  I knew he wouldn’t use his cell phone for some paranoid reason or another.  “Did you run me a bath?”

He put his head down.  “I forgot.”

“Of course you did,” I sighed.  “I’ll shut the door so you don’t hear the water.”

“It
isn’t
the water—”

“Then what is it, Frank?” I asked.  I was this close to digging out the chloroform and keeping him unconscious until the dark circles went away.

“I don’t know,” he said, shaking his head and looking more tired than ever.  “I don’t know.”

I went to him, wrapping my arms around his hunched shoulders.  We hadn’t had sex in over a week.  That was a lifetime compared to doing it five or six times a day.  To think that our biggest quarrel to date had come from something neither of us could even control.  But I couldn’t help but be angry with him, as if all it would take was him trying harder to sleep.  And then I’d feel guilty about being mad, and start thinking that if I couldn’t handle this, maybe I wasn’t ready to get married after all.

“Here,” I said, “I bought you a phone card.  You just dial the eight hundred number and type in the PIN.  That way you won’t have to use all our laundry money.  Who knows, maybe Maggie has some top secret mom trick that would help you sleep.”

He smiled.  “Maybe.”

I kissed his head, roughing up his already disheveled hair.  I used to like when he looked unkempt.  Now he looked like the walking dead, and it scared me.

“I’ll be awhile if I tell him about you.”

“That’s okay, Frank.  There’s plenty of time on the card.”

He got up, delicately grazing his fingers over my scar as he stood.  I turned away from him so he wouldn’t see me get upset.  It was a wonder I was sleeping either.  I’d started dreaming about Frank, his eyes open and dead, not responding when I shook him,
or when I started screaming his name.  And still Charlie’s sister was there, watching with her crooked neck.

I sat in the tub as it filled, the hot water turning my skin as pink as my faded sunburn over the increasing depth, inch after inch of heated flesh until I could lie back against the cold fiberglass and pretend it was the luxurious marble tub I’d soaked in on my birthday.  But I couldn’t enjoy it.  I couldn’t even pretend to.

I dunked my head and then got out, carelessly toweling off my hair and pulling on Frank’s clothes from yesterday, his scent enveloping me.  I shouldn’t have thrown his coffee. It was just plain mean.

Frank was standing at the payphone, talking animatedly in French.  He was all smiles, looking like a happy zombie with the dark circles under his eyes.

I traced my hand over the small of his back, whispering my destination as I walked past him.  I hoped he wouldn’t tell Casey that I’d deprived him of caffeine.  He’d think I was a bad boyfriend.

My wet hair was dripping down my neck, soaking my collar.  It felt good.  The heat was stifling, and the humidity made everything as sticky as the melted gelato dotting the sidewalk in front of the coffee shop.  I was tempted to buy Frank something iced, but the last time I’d tried introducing a coffee variation to him he’d given me a look like he’d caught me tearing pages from one of his treasured books.  He didn’t
do
iced coffee.  And he certainly didn’t do anything blended with whipped cream.

I was probably the only person all morning to buy plain, hot coffee.  The girl at the counter gave me such a funny look that I had to add a couple of overpriced pastries to my order to avoid offending her.  Then I stepped outside, eating straight out of the paper bag and holding Frank’s coffee in my other hand.  I felt eyes on me as I turned the corner, making me aware of how young I must’ve looked; shoving food in my mouth like that, the way I used to do when each meal was a small victory.

I glanced up, stopping mid-chew.  Charlie.  Fuck.

He smiled the widest smile I’d ever seen on his face.  Then he chuckled.  “Well, well, well.  Hello, princess.”

I was suddenly freezing, my wet shirt raising goosebumps all down the back of me.  Then my cell phone started ringing, making me jump.

Charlie smiled again.  “You gonna get that?”

I stared at him, each ring getting louder as my pulse quickened.  I didn’t know what to do.  I couldn’t very well attack him.  Even if it wasn’t in broad daylight, how could I kill Frank’s father figure?  But Frank would understand if I was feeling threatened.  And I was definitely feeling threatened.  Something was irrevocably wrong.  This was the bad feeling he talked about.  And I had my hands full.

I took a step back, not wanting to appear afraid but not wanting to stay close to him either.  My phone stopped ringing, a brief silence before starting again with a vengeance.  I wanted to answer it.  I wanted the reassurance of Frank’s voice.  But I knew what he’d say.  And it was too late for a warning.  I’d seriously fucked up.  I was far enough from the café to disappear unnoticed, like the little girl in the church parking lot.

Charlie didn’t carry a gun.  Frank had told me that.  His hands were too arthritic.  It would hurt him to fire even the lightest pistol.  He was intimidating, his ice blue eyes as vicious as a shark’s, but he wasn’t dangerous.  Not by himself.

I dropped my food to leave a trail like Hansel and Gretel.  This café was one of three places to buy coffee within walking distance of our hotel.  One in three chances Frank was coming to me right now.
 
I kept my eyes on Charlie, the coffee cup shaking in my hand.  I squeezed it slightly, popping off the lid.  A little scalding never killed anyone, and it would buy me some time.  Frank would just have to fess up to fucking me, and we’d deal with whatever consequences arose.

He glanced down as the lid fell haphazardly to the sidewalk, the grin never leaving his face.

My phone began another set of desperate rings.  Then I felt it.  Someone was behind me.  Someone who quite possibly did carry a gun.  Someone whose shadow concealed the daylight as he approached, eclipsing me in darkness.

I splashed my cup into Charlie’s face and ran toward him, grabbing my gun from the back of my pants and spinning around only to have it effortlessly slapped from my hand by a man built like a brick wall.  I scoffed as my gun clattered to the ground. 
That
wasn’t supposed to happen.

“Cute,” he said.  “Got anything else?”  He had a heavy cockney accent, and sounded the way Frank made all the villains in Dickens’ novels sound when he read aloud to me.

This would be the perfect moment to hit rewind, to save some of the boiling coffee to melt
his
face off, but then I’d have to rewind further and not order coffee in the first place so I could say, “Yeah, how ‘bout a cuppa tea?”  Instead I shook my head.  “No, that was it.”

He laughed and looked towards Charlie, as if to remark on his pathetic excuse for an opponent.  I aimed for his diaphragm, not particularly caring whether I sliced my hand off with my knife in the process.  The blade came in contact with something soft, just as something hard came in contact with my face.

I heard him above me before I realized I was down, whining to Charlie that “the little fucker stabbed me.”  The best kept secret between me and Frank was that his refusal to go easy on me had nevertheless always contained a strictly no-closed fist policy.  If the embodiment of evil Bill Sikes from Oliver Twist hadn’t used his fist, he’d found something bigger.  And metal plated.  I was already having trouble opening my eye when I saw the sole of his boot coming at me a million miles an hour.

The darkness tasted like a blueberry Danish.  I was all for a change of scenery, especially considering present company, but having my head kicked clear back to the café wasn’t what I’d had in mind.  My ears were ringing so loud it momentarily drowned out the desperate shrieking of my cell phone, and for just a moment I thought the danger was over.  I blinked a few times, my eyes surprisingly already open, and found myself face down in a pile of pastry crumbs.  My gun was right beside my breakfast, inches from my fingers and dappled with blood.  It could’ve been twenty feet away.  I couldn’t figure out how to move.

“That wasn’t very nice,” he said, and then his boot made a return appearance, doing something even less nice and kicking my gun toward Charlie.

“Sorry, luv,” I said.  Like many of the badly timed sarcastic remarks of my past, this one lost its weight as blood bubbled over my lips.  “Fuck,” I added for good measure.

“Listen to that language,” he laughed.  “You kiss my brother with that mouth?”

Fuck was right.  I closed my eyes.  I knew it!  Soap operas were never wrong!

“Frankie isn’t queer,” Charlie said.  “He’s just…
spiteful
.  I told him to—”

“Frenchies are all fucking queer.  Isn’t that right,
luv
?”

There must’ve been a proper way for outing your fiancé to his long lost psycho brother and his not-long-enough-lost psycho father figure, but short of drooling on my chin I was lost myself as to what it might’ve been.  “Why don’t we go ask him?”

“Now
there’s
an idea.  Let’s go ask him.  What do you say, Charlie?”

“I’ve got a better idea, Henry.  You want a family reunion, you kill this fucking kid like your brother should’ve done two years ago.  And bury him on hallowed ground so he doesn’t come back.”

Just as I was starting to get back in touch with my motor functions, ready and willing to reach my gun that was no longer there,
Henry
grabbed my hair and pulled me upright, clamping his forearm over my throat like a vice and dragging me across the pavement.

My lungs burned as I expended all my remaining oxygen on struggling, trying to pry his huge arm away, elbow him, grab his eyes, kick his knees out and get my skull to connect with his face to break his nose.  I could see Charlie in duplicate just as my vision was starting to go black, holding his blistering face, smiling like he’d just gotten a steal of a deal on something he’d wanted for a very, very long time.  My phone kept ringing.

It was a step up from dead, but not by much.

My wrists were bound behind me with rough cord, my ankles tied to the legs of a tall metal chair.  I was in the center of a large room.  Empty walls painted slate gray.  The floor was cement.  My cheek ached.  It had swollen enough to hinder my vision, but I could see Charlie standing against the wall, smiling with peeling lips.  “Vincent, this is Henry.  Henry, Vincent.”

The cockney crusader came out of nowhere, breaking my nose with the first hit, a wet crunch that brought a bright white flash of pain exploding through my entire face.  The second split my eyebrow wide open, my head whipping to the side with nearly as much agony as the blow.  I was trying to blink away blood when he punched me in the mouth, sending my head thrashing the other direction with more fluorescent excruciation.  When the room stopped spinning I spat in one of his faces.  A tooth went with it.  Through all the pain, I couldn’t help but think of the damage to my poor face.  Vain to the very end.

He laughed and swung again, his fist making contact with the side of my head, sending me flying sideways to the floor.  My face continued the journey while the rest of me remained strapped to the chair, landing with a
thwack
on the cement, a starry night sky quickly consumed by blackness.

I couldn’t have been out for more than a few seconds, my body was still sliding toward my face as the rope dug deeper into my wrists, but it was enough to leave me too foggy to know which way was up.  I didn’t try to pull free.  It was all I could do to focus on where I was as blood pooled around my head, soaking into my hair.

I tried to think what Frank would do in this situation.  But he wouldn’t
be
in this situation.  He wouldn’t have let some maniac sneak up behind him.

Henry kicked me hard in the ribs, the impact sending the chair scraping several inches across the floor with a sound like opening a rusty metal gate.  I closed my eyes, feeling acidic stomach bile try to force its way into my mouth as I coughed a spray of blood onto his shoes.  I hoped it was from my face, and not somewhere inside of me.

“Fuck!” he roared, and he grasped his bleeding side, which I assumed, and really fucking hoped, hurt like hell when he’d kicked me.  It was hard to tell with all the extra padding he was carrying, but the wound looked serious.  Vincent Moreaux strikes again.