The Last Kind Words (27 page)

We got to Head of the Harbor and she directed me along a series of back roads to her isolated neighborhood. She looked at me like she knew I had boosted a lot of TV sets out of houses like these, but it wasn’t true. There were too many private security forces and it wasn’t worth the risk.

She lived in a beautiful home that wasn’t more than five years old but had been built in the Victorian style. Three floors with arched windows set in squared-off bays. The front door was centered in an elaborate porch, and the roof featured gabled ends edged in a decorative carved timber.

“Come inside for a drink,” she said.

“I’m not going to tell you anything you can use, Eve. I’m sorry I wasted your evening.”

She kissed the edge of my mouth. “You haven’t. Not at all.” It was prim by any standard of kissing, but there was a controlled heat to it. I turned to her and she thumbed her lipstick off my cheek. She placed a hand on my forehead like she was checking for fever and then leaned in and kissed me again, much more passionately. I didn’t entirely return it but I could feel something loosening within me. Our tongues rested against each other for a time. I liked not having to talk. She drew away.

Not everything had to lead back to Collie and death. I could have something of mine. I wanted her. I could have her. There was nothing wrong with it, and I tried to believe it.

“Is there a Mr. Drayton?” I asked.

“Mr. Drayton is shacked up with a twenty-year-old theater-arts major in Miami. He won’t be bothering us. Come inside for a nightcap.”

I shut off the engine. The pulse in my throat snapped. Kimmy had been on my mind so much that the very idea of sleeping with another woman somehow felt like a betrayal. Eve noted my resistance. She also saw my desire. She brought my lips to hers again. I fell into it and started reaching for her hungrily.

My conflict heated her even more. She liked a little obstinacy. She lifted a knee and swung closer to the driver’s seat and ground herself against me. I started to groan. The pictures in my head continued shuffling. I hugged Eve tightly and licked beneath her ear. It made her laugh. I liked the sound of it. Her laughter got louder and poured itself down my throat.

In
the dark, when we were about three quarters of the way through the funky stuff, I heard the front door open. I thought maybe Mr. Drayton had returned from Miami a sadder and wiser man. My thief’s instincts took over. I extracted myself from Eve and hopped off the bed. I looked at the door. I looked at the window. We were on the first floor and I wondered if I should climb out. I looked for my pants. She caught her breath and turned on the nightstand light.

I thought of Mr. Drayton wearing a bright-yellow shirt and holding a 10-gauge. I pictured Collie slipping through the tight rooms. Someone moved up the hall toward us. I scanned for my pants but couldn’t find them.

“Relax, Terry,” Eve said. “It’s my daughter, Roxie. She works late for an emergency animal clinic.”

“Oh yeah.” I remembered the photos of the newborn Rottweilers.

“I think I mentioned that she’s training as a vet technician.”

“That’s very … professional,” I said.

“Yes, she is. Come back to bed.”

Roxie’s footsteps continued to the door. She knocked quietly and asked, “Mom, you still up?”

“Not now, Rox,” Eve said. “We’ll talk in the morning, all right?”

“Sure thing. Good night.”

“Good night, honey.”

Roxie headed up the stairs, and a door on the second floor opened and shut. A stereo turned on in a distant corner of the house, and quiet music made the ceiling thrum.

“Come back to bed,” Eve said.

I slid in under the covers and she rolled into my arms. She inspected
the black and yellow bruises over my kidneys. “My God, I didn’t notice these before. Who’ve you been tussling with?”

“The cops,” I said.

I shouldn’t have, but I was still a little miffed at Gilmore and the truth slipped out. She was right. I guess I did want to talk.

“I can do an exposé,” she told me, her voice tight and serious. “I started my career investigating a sergeant in Bedford-Stuyvesant who had raided his own evidence locker. Give me the officer’s name. I’ll visit him with a news crew every day. I can have him walking a beat in Cudahy, Wisconsin, this winter.”

“No,” I said. “He’s a good cop. He’s not hurting anyone else.”

“How do you know?”

“He and I just had some personal issues. And I might still need him.”

“What for?” she asked. “A burglar needing a cop is an odd state of affairs.”

“I need him to keep looking into the Rebecca Clarke murder.”

“Then you do believe your brother is innocent.”

Her body was taut and well muscled, but soft in the appropriate places. She put in a lot of time at the gym. I spotted some oddly pigmented areas at her neck, breasts, and hips that might have been very faint surgery scars. Her breasts were large and didn’t sag much. Her belly was trim and tight and slightly freckled. She wore a thin golden chain across her midriff that chimed so faintly while we’d been making love that I thought there might be a cat walking around the place with his tags tinkling. Legs lean, calves well defined as she arched her toes out and her whole body tightened with a yawn.

“Whatever I believe, I don’t want to talk about it now,” I said.

She ran her hands over my stomach, my chest. “How could you stand it?”

“It was only two sucker-punches.”

“No, not that.” She kissed my chest. “This.”

I thought she meant my scars, but then I realized she was talking about my tattoo. “Yeah, it hurt like a bitch.”

“It’s so intricate.”

There had been a lot to cover. I nodded. She ran a hand through my chest hair like she was petting the head of the hound. She pressed her lips to the dog’s eyes, his nose, then licked across the teeth of its open, barking mouth. She laid me back against the set of thick pillows and ran her tongue down from my navel. I started to pant. I took hold of her head and gently guided her lower. She went with it for a moment, then resisted.

“Why are you all named after breeds of dogs?” she asked.

“Why in the hell are you asking that now?”

“I’m curious.”

Upstairs, Roxie closed a bathroom door. A fan went on, water ran, and the pipes groaned in the walls. Her phone rang and she answered and immediately began arguing with someone. The rain kept spraying against the windows, like it was being cast off by a woman whirling her wet hair against the glass.

“No one seems to know,” I said. “It’s just been the way of our family for at least the last four generations.”

I brushed her hair back with my fingers. She kissed my inner thigh. She flicked her tongue against my flesh and murmured and giggled. She nipped at me. She turned her face upward at me. I thought, Jesus, she’s going to keep me vibrating like a cello string all night long.

“Isn’t it degrading?” she asked.

“I thought you liked it,” I said.

“Not this. Being named after a dog.”

“No. It’s my name.”

She tried to be ingratiating, whispering cutely the way real lovers do. Upstairs, her daughter was on the verge of yelling and then must’ve hung up. The pipes kept groaning. Eve made me groan too. “Still, if you’re named after an animal, doesn’t it make you feel like you should act like an animal?”

I didn’t know what she was asking, if it was a risque way of saying I should be more aggressive or if she was going deeper than that, asking if I ever felt the temptation to go mad dog. Let the beast loose.

“Playing timid isn’t your strong suit,” I said.

“You might be surprised, Terry.”

She began to stroke my thighs again. She used her skilled hands to make me sip air. She continued trying to distract me in an effort to make me more pliable. Her eyes were amused and bright.

This time we kept the light on. Afterward, she walked naked to the kitchen, got me a beer, poured it for me in a tall glass, and snuggled beside me while she sipped two fingers of Glenlivet. I noticed now that she was shaved, oiled, well powdered despite the sweat streaks, and I wondered if it was really for me. Grey had admitted to sleeping with her. I wondered how often and how recently.

I finished the beer. We fell back into bed and went another round, this time much smoother and suppler and maybe even a touch sweeter. I hated drinking scotch, but for some reason I liked the taste of it on her lips.

After, she said, “You’re a good man, Terry.”

“How would you know?”

“Because I’ve met a lot of bad ones. I’ve interviewed them and covered their court cases and done follow-ups through the years. I once visited Manson for an hour-long prime-time special. Five minutes in his presence and I knew we’d never air it. I knew you could see the fear in my face. You’re a good man at your heart.”

I let out a chuckle. “Because I’m not as nuts as Manson?”

“You don’t have to worry about being like your brother.”

“Eve—”

“One doesn’t have to be very astute to know what’s so heavy on your mind. It would happen to any of us. It does happen. It’s why people like Dahmer’s father write books. They feel a need to understand where that kind of evil comes from.”

Evil. It was a word I hadn’t used in connection with Collie yet. He was a mass-murdering prick, but I hadn’t thought beyond the act itself to imagine him as truly evil.

“This is some kind of fucked-up pillow talk,” I said.

“I was just trying to put you at ease.”

“I think falling asleep in each other’s arms would be more helpful.”

Eve held me tightly and said, “Say no more.”

She dropped off to sleep first. I thought about Chub unwinding himself from Kimmy and sneaking back to his garage to pore over his getaway maps. Checking up on the roadwork conditions, which lanes would be shut down tomorrow, where the detours were. I had to talk to him. I felt myself drifting, Eve’s breath glancing off my chin. I started to dream before I was fully asleep.

My sister had been right. I had a head as full of snakes as when I’d left. Now I clung to memories that weren’t mine. I couldn’t be sure if I was awake or out cold. My stomach burned. The smell of whiskey seemed overwhelming and made me gag. Eve’s soft snores pounded at me. I saw hands pulling a sash around a young woman’s throat. In her dead eyes I saw my face.

I snapped fully awake with the sense of someone watching me.

I knew the feeling well, probably because my mother liked to watch me sleep. I opened my eyes into slits. It was still dark. I checked Eve and she was sleeping soundly. The door remained shut.

I waited.

Moonlight splayed against the walls, the silver hue blurred by the intermittent rain. I considered that Torchy’s was undoubtedly mobbed up. Danny might’ve gotten word that Grey and I had been out on the town. It could’ve miffed him. He might want to brace Mal again. He might want to push me for showing up with attitude at the Fifth. I couldn’t imagine Danny sending Wes around in the middle of the night, but Wes had admitted there were nastier goings-on that he wasn’t a part of. Danny had a lot of worse boys around still trying to make their bones. I hung my hand over the edge of the mattress and felt for my pants. A shadow broke against the moonlight.

Someone was standing at the window, peering in.

I slipped out of bed on a roll and slid my trousers on in a fluid move. The forward momentum carried me across the bedroom. I rushed to the window. There was a patch of glass that the water diverted around, like someone had wiped it down to see inside better and the oil from his fingertips had caused the rain to deflect.

I turned the latch and hefted the window up. The screen stopped me. If I was outside trying to get in, I could pop it loose in half a second. But right now I was so keyed up that I couldn’t get it to unlock from the track.

Eve woke and said, “What is it? What are you doing?”

The sound of someone running across the wet lawn made my heart hammer, and I finally just put my shoulder to the jamb and bulled my way through the screen. The metal track squealed and the molding cracked like a gun going off. I took a header into the bushes and lurched across a lawn gnome that practically impaled me. I tasted dirt. I came up in a crouch and wasn’t sure which way to go. I didn’t have my bearings yet.

Eve hadn’t put on the outside light, and the streetlamp didn’t provide much illumination. I spit out blades of grass.

An engine started up the block. Trying not to slip in the mud, I loped in that direction, but it was already too late. A car pulled away from the curb a couple of houses away. No headlights, no shouting, and no mad screeching as he turned the corner. I couldn’t tell the make or model. Whoever it was accelerated smoothly and popped on the lights just as he faded from my sight.

I ran to my car but it was a lost cause. Eve’s porch light came on.

She stepped out onto the veranda, dressed in a robe, and hugged herself as I walked back to her. She gave me a perplexed grin. “I’ve had guys try to skip out before breakfast, but you even left your shoes—” Then she caught my expression. “What is it? What was it?”

“Someone was staring through the bedroom window at us.”