Richmond Noir (14 page)

They drank red wine (Louis poured) and smoked half a joint (Louis rolled, Louis lighted, Louis declined to partake, same as he’d passed on drinking wine). DaBlonde pulled up her sweater and exposed her breasts, then slotted her tongue at Tacko while Louis talked geekishly about a new camcorder he’d bought that took higher quality videos. They required more time to load, he said, but it was worth it.

Once they’d moved into the bedroom, the sex was better than last time. Not so bing-bang-bing or as impersonal. They were learning each other’s moves, adding finesse. Tacko forgot about Louis and his camera, except for whenever the husband asked DaBlonde how she liked it so far and urged Tacko to come wherever he wanted, externally, internally, whatever struck his fancy. Unlike last week, Tacko wasn’t impelled by a flight reflex immediately afterwards.

“Tell me something,” DaBlonde was saying now. “You a cheater? You can tell me, I don’t care.”

“Cheater?”

“Married.”

“Jeez, no. I’ve been divorced since ninety…seven.”

Louis stuck his head into the bedroom. “There wasn’t enough to heat so I put on a fresh pot.” Then he was gone again.

DaBlonde flung herself upright as if suddenly and willfully were the only ways she could ever force herself to move again. She laughed when she almost bounced Tacko off the mattress, then swung her legs around, grabbed her Chinese robe (black and red with a firecracker dragon on the back) from a chair, put it on, and cinched it. “Do you want to take a shower first?”

“If you wouldn’t mind.”

“No, you go ahead.”

But Tacko felt like dawdling. “Do … do a lot of guys you meet say they’re not married?”

“You’re kidding, right? Because I’m not even sure I believe
you’re
not.” She laughed and came back and sat down on the bed. “You’re all a bunch of genetic liars.”

“Harsh.”

“Except Louis. Otherwise you’re all cheaters, if you ask me. Not that I give a damn.”

“I’m really divorced.”

“I believe you. No, seriously. I was kidding.” DaBlonde’s expression changed again, her long face looking placid, her gray eyes vacant. “But most men are cheaters. You know they are. And worse. Like my ex? Was just convinced that I screwed around, and I never did, not once in seven years. But meanwhile Scott’s out knocking off new stuff every other weekend.
And
—and carrying on with my best girlfriend, maid of honor at our wedding.” The corners of her eyes crinkled and her smile returned. “Louis is probably hovering out there right now, hoping we’re having sex again, and here we are having a regular conversation.”

Tacko thought, A
regular conversation?
That’s maybe not how he would’ve described it, but they were having … something. Something Tacko was okay with. That he was here for,
present
for. He was good with all of it. It was just—he still had a hard time convincing himself he could
do
something like this, weird shit like this, and get away with it. He’d probably get AIDS. Or maybe Louis was right that second dropping a diamond-shaped purple roofie into his cup of coffee, he’d end up with a ball-gag in his mouth and dangling from a ceiling beam. Jesus. Had he lost his mind? Had he lost his mind since he’d lost his job? He wondered.

For almost nineteen years he’d worked at Greene and Scivally Advertising, the last eleven as a group creative director. Then: new management, and out he went. Week before Thanksgiving. One day he’s brainstorming a new campaign for a national brand, the next he’s emptying his desk with a security cop standing by in case he goes berserk. But Tacko wasn’t the excitable type.

It was scary carrying away his carton of personal items, but also a secret relief. He’d been in career burnout a long time, he just hadn’t let on. In recent years, movies and novels and TV series about characters who found the courage and/or the foolhardiness to abandon stifling lives had held great appeal for Tacko.

The first two months he didn’t do much. Got out to the gym more regularly, subscribed to Netflix and caught up on the third season of Lost, scheduled and kept doctor and dentist appointments before his company health insurance lapsed, and worked on his screenplay, the one based on a botched kidnapping that happened in the early 1990s. But the story got trite as he was writing it, not basing it closely on the real case at all, and he gave it up again. He knew he wouldn’t go back to it.

During this period Tacko wasn’t dating, by choice. He’d had an on again/off again friends-with-benefits thing with a married secretary who used to work with him and now worked for the Virginia Bar Association. But when they didn’t get in touch over the Christmas holidays, Tacko wondered if maybe this time the off-again was permanent. Upon consideration he discovered that possibility not even slightly painful. Thinking about Connie Agnew and how insignificant she had become in his life was the first inkling Tacko had that he might have left more behind recently than his job.

People he knew well, whom Tacko considered friends, called and left messages.
Tack, a bunch of guys are getting together for poker tonight, we’d love to see you. Vincent, my man, you at all interested in seeing a movie? Tack?
I
sent you an e-mail about Robin’s birthday party. Call me. Vin? Nikki and
I
were saying how we haven’t heard from you. Vincent? Tack? Tacko?
He didn’t get back to most people. It just wasn’t anything he cared to do. After a while there weren’t many calls. Tacko had no problem with that.

At the end of December his brother died suddenly, but he didn’t fly out to Salt Lake City for the funeral. They’d been estranged. Their personalities, their politics, their dad’s will. His brother, though. Jesus Christ. Heart attack. And he was younger than Tacko by four years! His brother Kenny’s death shut Tacko down for weeks, well into the new year. Except for paying bills online, he mostly slept and moped around the house. He watched four seasons in a row of
The Wire
. Grew a beard and shaved it off.

He’d received a good severance package, and had significant savings, even some excellent technology stocks, so money wasn’t an issue. The rest of his fucking life was. But even deep into January his future remained a subject Tacko felt he couldn’t deal with yet. If something great, some fabulous new direction, didn’t happen or present itself by the first of February, he’d look for another job in advertising. First of February. February the first. He marked it on his calendar.

Often Tacko woke in the night and lay awake for hours. He couldn’t turn his brain off. One night, but just the one, he pondered ways a reasonable man might realistically kill himself, but otherwise he just thought about how much he didn’t want to resume his former life. Is that what it was already? His
former
life? What he wanted, what Tacko most needed, was something different, a fresh possibility, even the merest glimpse of one.

For a about a week he considered writing a novel, one set in the cutthroat world of advertising. He actually outlined one on the computer. But when he read over what he’d done, it sounded like every other story ever written about an ad agency, so he deleted it and looked at Internet porn instead.

Honestly, Tacko could not recall how the habit started—from boredom and curiosity, probably. But he’d also recognized just how infrequently (hardly ever) he thought about women these endless unemployed days and nights at home, and so it was possible he was using the stuff as proof he hadn’t lost interest in sex. Porn gradually became a daily routine, and one of his favorite pay sites (by the middle of February, he’d subscribed to six) was DaBlonde’s. Not
only
because she was located in his hometown, although it surely played a major part. (Finding her site had been a sheer accident, serendipity, link to link to link to link …) No, what he liked best about her? The woman seemed utterly reckless. Fucking men in stairwells, hallways, at highway rest stops. Behind the Museum of the Confederacy. That took guts. Her site biography (which Tacko figured was probably all bullshit, but he chose to disregard his cynicism) stated that she’d been raised in a strict household and had never even kissed a boy before she was twenty-one. And look at her now!

“You seemed like you were going to say something.”

“No,” said Tacko. “Just thinking.”

“What?”

“I don’t know.”

“Sure you do,” said DaBlonde.

“Who came up with your name?”

“It’s what my ex used to call me, but that’s not what you were thinking. He’d call me that when he called me a slut. So what were you really thinking?”

“All right. I was just wondering—you and Louis met online? At a chat room?”

“Yeah…? I was in North Carolina and Louis was living here. Well, out in the county. So?”

“I was just wondering. Was there, like, one day, one particular day, when the two of you just said that’s it,
enough
, and then packed your stuff and walked away and—got together?”

“I guess. But it’s not exactly an
original story
. It happens all the time.”

“Well, maybe.”

“It does. People walk away, Tacko. And the world doesn’t end. You can do whatever you always wanted and nobody can stop you. Is that what you’re asking me?”

“Yeah. No. I’m not sure.” He was babbling now because he realized this was the first time she’d called him by any name, and she’d chosen his last name, the least familiar, even the coldest, of the possibilities. His heart sank a little.

DaBlonde got up. “Go take your shower.”

“Yeah, sure.” Tacko rolled out of bed and started collecting his clothes from the floor (shirt, briefs, jeans, one sock, Clarks boots, second sock) while DaBlonde fingered apart two thin blinds and looked out the window. That side of the condo faced a gutted brass foundry covered by construction company signage.

“It’s still raining,” she commented. “Listen to that.”

“It’s supposed to stay like this till midnight,” said Tacko, just to say something.

He picked up the Amboys’ framed wedding picture. They were both laughing with their toothy mouths open. He set it down and thought he might not shower after all, just get dressed and go home. But since he was already standing naked at the bathroom doorway, he went in and turned on the faucet in the tub. This was so weird. The whole thing. Being here. Taking a shower now. Using their shampoo, their liquid soap, their scrubby.

As soon as he turns off the water, Tacko hears voices raised in an argument. The Amboys quarreling? But no, the man’s voice isn’t Louis’s. Tacko can’t make out what he and DaBlonde—it’s definitely DaBlonde’s voice—are hollering about. Then he hears the guy shout either “disgusting” or “disgust me” and feels a spurt of jangling dread. He starts to put his clothes back on without drying himself.

That’s a shot. Fuck
.

Somebody just fired a gun, out there. Beyond the bathroom door, beyond the bedroom, out there in the loft.

And that’s a second shot.

He’s fully dressed now, but paralyzed, unable to decide whether to move—to investigate, to implicate himself—or to stay put.

He opens the door a crack and Louis Amboy’s hysterical voice carries in.

“Scott, please. Scott, please. Please, Scott.”

He
makes cheap furniture. And empty threats
.

“Scott, please, for God’s
sake!”

Why isn’t DaBlonde saying anything?

It’s still raining hard and downstairs the band is still playing. Tacko quietly closes the door and locks it.

Three more shots in a burst. Silence, and then another shot. Then silence.

The first slap against the bathroom door is percussive enough to shake it; the second is the merest scratching tap.

Now a spot of dark red glistens in the narrow gap between the bottom of the door and the saddle. The spot widens, liquefies—blood. In its flow, carried along, comes an inch-and-a-half-wide sodden strip of black silk.

A tie end from DaBlonde’s Chinese robe.

Straddling the pool of blood, one foot planted on either side, Tacko unlocks the door, eases it toward him, and her huddled body insistently pushes it open the rest of the way. He glances down for only a moment, but long enough to register DaBlonde’s fixed eyes. His head goes groggy, and he wills it clear, staring through the bedroom and out into the living area, seeing part of the black-and-white sectional and a row of blue screen monitors on a molded glass table.

The only sound now is the rain lashing at the building, the windows, the roof. The band has finally taken a break.

Now Tacko is standing at the bedroom door, now he’s creeping out into the loft, and now crouching beside Louis Amboy sprawled on the floor, a bullet hole at the base of his skull. Blood runs down the back of his neck into his collar. Tacko’s mind fills with strobing light and he bolts for the front door.

“Hey!”

It’s a young guy, thirtyish, full head of brown hair, filthy tan barn jacket, short barrel revolver clutched in a fist streaked with mahogany wood stain. He steps out of the kitchen, or glides from behind a bank of computer monitors (sound on, DaBlonde groaning), or just leans forward in a flexible mesh chair, and says, “You’re disgusting.” Or maybe, “You disgust me.” And squeezes the trigger. A hundred times, like it’s a fucking machine gun.

“Hey! Tacko!” DaBlonde: tapping on the shower glass. “You want to leave me some hot water?” She pulled open the door, shed her robe, and stepped into the spray, smiling as she nudged Tacko from under it. “Can I have the shampoo?” He plucked it from the caddy, Elizabeth Arden, and handed it to her. “You can stay. We can share.”

But he was already out. “No,” he said, “I’m done.”

Louis Amboy was conveying a French press and three ceramic mugs on a service tray from the kitchen to the coffee table when Tacko came out of the bedroom fully dressed and grabbed his leather coat from the sectional.

“You’re not leaving, I hope.”

“I should.”

Louis carefully set down the tray. He cocked his head. “Well, if you have to.”

“This was fantastic.”

“Tell me something, Mr. Tacko. Would you be interested in making it a regular thing?”