The Last Whisper in the Dark: A Novel (3 page)

But I still thought there had to be a reason for Collie to have lost it. When I’d visited him on death row he kept telling me there wasn’t. He explained that I’d have to learn to live with that fact, but I wasn’t doing a very good job of it so far.

The Elbow Room was where I went to ask the questions that had no answer. It’s where I went to think of my brother and to forget about my brother. It’s where I went when I needed to take a breath and line up the next move.

I pulled into the lot, parked, and waited five minutes. The crew didn’t drive past. I felt more secure that the driver had shaken me without even realizing I was there. It made me wonder what he could do when he really put his mind to it.

I got out and stepped in">“No,” I saidplasto the bar. It was the lowest dive around. It had gotten even worse since the last time I’d had a drink here months ago.

Desperate men sat in the back corners muttering about their worst mistakes. A few halfhearted games of pool were being shot. The whores worked the losers a little more brazenly than was usual. They didn’t bother with subtlety. It was all out front.

The jukebox pounded out a heavy bass riff. It was something designed
to kick college girl strippers into high gear, except this wasn’t a strip club. I didn’t know what the music was supposed to do for the rest of us. The drunk mooks eyed the hookers, the burnt lady barflies, and each other. Everybody seemed to want to throw themselves on the floor. Men wanted to beat their wives, children, and bosses. They wanted to sink their teeth into one another’s throats. They wanted to blow up their mortgage service centers. They wanted to shit on the White House lawn. Getting laid by roadhouse chicks couldn’t ease that kind of pain. Everyone knew it. Nobody was plying much trade. The whores needed affection nearly as much as cash. The whole placed vibed tension and brittleness.

The speakers beat at my back. I glanced at the register. I always checked the register, wherever I went. It was instinct.

The room was forties film-noir dim and smoky. I didn’t want to walk around looking for a booth so I split for the corner of the bar, the darkest spot in the entire room.

I didn’t see her sitting beside me until my eyes adjusted to the darkness. Then it seemed bright as noon and I realized most of the mooks were looking this way. I’d sat in a holy place of honor.

She waited there on her stool just out of arm’s reach, drawing as much attention as if she posed in a spotlight. Every other man in the room looked on mournfully. They stared, none of them canny enough to use the bar mirror to watch her. Their murmurs underscored the music like backup singers coming in on the chorus. Compared to the waxy-lipped women cadging drinks and sneaking bills off the bar top she looked like paradise in three-inch pumps.

She was next-door cute, sultry with smoky amused eyes. Her black hair was out of style, cut into a modified shoulder-length shag. I liked it. So did the rest of them. We were sentimental for days gone by. It told us that she went her own way. When you got down to it, that’s what we all wanted to get our hands on. A woman who stood apart, especially since we couldn’t stand apart from each other.

She was a little younger than the rest of the ladies, maybe ten years older than me. All the curves were still in the right places, her chin just starting to soften a bit. Full heart-shaped lips, a bobbed nose, dimples that only appeared when she gave a slight smirk, which she did from time to time at nobody and nothing in particular. Like the rest of us, she had her own inner monologue going. Hers made her happy. Maybe she was laughing at us.

She signaled the bartender and bought her own drink. A gin and tonic. This wasn’t the kind of place for a gin and tonic but somehow she made it so. She wore a nicely fitted black dress, bare-armed despite the chill weather. Was she showing off or had she been dumped here like some of the other ladies? A trucker boyfriend passing through, a husband who’d walked out in the middle of an argument, a pissed-off boyfriend making a point?

I fought to keep from gawking. When the bartender got to me I ordered a Jack and Coke and tried to keep my eyes aimed at the front of the bar. No one had followed me in. I had parked directly outside the front windowf="kindle:flow

It’s what we all want to hear. It’s what we all
want to believe despite the truth. I took a breath. Then I took a sip, determined not to be lured into this kind of a trap. I gave it a good five count of resistance, then buckled. I was lonely. My heart contained hairline fractures.

“What makes you think so?” I asked.

“You walk with a light step. You square your shoulders when you sit. The rest … well, just take a look.” She told me to look so I looked. “Every one of them is slumped over. Glowering at nothing, chewing their lips.”

“These are rough times.”

“Even in good times they do it,” she said. “That’s who they are. They plod. They’re going to plod out to their cars to get their knobs polished. They’re going to plod home, throw up in their toilets, and make their wives clean up the bathroom floor.”

It was true but it wasn’t the greater truth. “Is this the part where you say, ‘Just like my father’?”

“No, it’s not that part.” She grinned again. It seemed an odd time to smile. “I never knew the man. But, sure, most likely he’s a plodder too, why not?”

“You intimidate them,” I told her. “They’re not this forlorn and full of self-loathing when someone as beautiful as you isn’t in the room.”

“I bring it out in them?”

“It seeps out on its own because of you. Plus, they think you’re a prostitute.”

“How do you know I’m not?”

“Your eyes.”

“Did you just say my eyes?”

“I just said your eyes,” I admitted.

“I’m not sure if that’s sweet or ludicrous.”

“Let’s keep things friendly and call it sweet.”

She finished her gin and tonic. She didn’t smile. I’d stuck an ice pick through the spleen of the conversation. You have to be careful when you call a woman beautiful and your motives aren’t clear.

“You’re here for a reason,” she said, “but it’s not to get drunk or

laid.”

“What makes you so sure?”

“You’re too … ">“No,” I saidplas
alert
for that.”

I smiled at her. It wasn’t a charming smile. It was a convict’s smile. I’d never been in prison but I lived the same life, on the same edge. It was my brother’s smile.

“Christ,” she said. “What is it? Your eyes practically went black. You tightened up like you stuck your tongue in an outlet.”

“Now you’re flirting with me.”

She held her right arm out for me to see. “It was electrical. Look, the hair on my arm is standing up.”

She was telling the truth. I finished my drink and ordered another. She swiveled the stool toward me and I turned to meet her. She openly appraised me, her gaze roving my face, down the length of my body and back up again. She tilted her head when she checked out my white patch. She pursed her lips, dipped her chin. “I like it. The premature gray adds something to you.”

“Yeah. Age.”

“More than that. And not ‘character,’ exactly, that’s just a tired term they use to express something, they’re not even sure what. Not character, no.
Resolve
.”

“Who are you, lady?” I asked.

“My name’s Darla,” she said.

I smiled again, this time with less sharpness. “Come on. Nobody’s name is Darla. And nobody uses it as a, ah, stage name either.”

“How would you know?”

“I know something about using a fake name.”

The corners of her mouth hitched. “And why’s that?”

“I spent five years using one.”

“And what was it?” she asked. “Your assumed name. Nick Steel? Mickey ‘the Torpedo’ Morelli? Johann Kremholtz?”

I told her the truth. “I have trouble remembering.”

“Well, if you had been named Darla, you wouldn’t. And if you knew anything about stage names you’d know it was a damn good one.” She leaned in again as if to kiss me, and then drew away as if fearing I might take her up on it. “How about your real name?”

“Terrier Rand.”

“Terrier? Because of your tenacity?”

“Because everyone in my family is named after dogs.”

She raised her eyebrows. “You people sound like a fun group.”

“Not so much anymore.”

I reached for my drink and stared at her over the rim of the glass. She stared back at me. She was right about one thing, there was something electrical happening.

“You want to split?” she asked.

Darla hadn’t mentioned cash yet. Even in the Elbow Room a working girl would try to get paid up front first. Darla just kept watching me with her amused gaze. It fired me up and gave me the chills at the same time. I wondered if I’d been wrong about her. I was cynical as hell and had maybe jumped to the wrong conclusion. A provocative woman could make you a moron.

She read me easily and let out a smooth, honest laugh. “I don’t charge everyone, you know. I am allowed to give a in a bikini and high heels. at the Qway some free samples in order to build up clientele.”

“The Elbow Room isn’t your kind of corner.”

“I don’t have a corner yet. I’m not sure I want one. I’m still sorting out my potential opportunities. The current economy cost me a home and a marriage, which was falling apart anyway because my husband was an alcoholic and a meth addict. I’m thirty-five years old with an above-average sex drive and a retail job that pays a buck over minimum wage. I’m being murdered by credit debt and bank loans. So I thought I’d look into making a bit of filthy lucre on the side.”

I checked the window again and spotted nothing. “So you’re just liberated and progressive?”

“My mother would have called it something else, but sure, why not?”

“I’d say with your sex appeal you’ll be rolling in dough in no time.”

“That’s generous.”

Maybe it was, under the circumstances. Everything was relative. Darla glanced toward the front window. She was polite enough not to ask what I was looking for.

She leaned in again and I caught a deep breath of her heady, feminine aroma. She wore no perfume.

She said, “I thought I’d start here. My husband used to stop by this place a lot, usually on weekends, where he’d drink himself sick, and spend his paycheck on crank and other women.”

“Why?” I asked. “Considering he had you waiting at home.”

Her smile saddened. “Because I intimidated him in bed. I’m not certain why. He was handsome and rugged and very, very good. And I loved him and wanted to make him happy. I would have done anything for him. He knew that. We were terrific together in the beginning. But he felt some kind of pressure, and he became resentful, and eventually he drifted. Got into meth for a while. He’d rather pay a stranger for what I was giving him for free. He couldn’t handle the intimacy, I suppose. We were a week shy of our second anniversary when he got into rehab. While he was getting clean we lost the house,
so when he was released there was nothing waiting for him except me. That’s when we called it quits.”

Once you had no home, giving up everything else had to be easy.

“Of course he always denied that he was indulging himself,” Darla continued. “Even when I followed him here and caught him in the parking lot with a woman in his lap, the two of them hitting the pipe, he told me it wasn’t what it looked like.”

“Men caught with their pants down and illicit drugs in their system make rotten liars.”

“This I’ve learned, Terrier.” Talking about her husband had put a glimmer of pain in her dark eyes. “Do they call you Terry?”

“Yes.”

“Do you mind if I do?”

“No, it’s what they call me.”

She finished her drink and I ordered her another. “In any case,” she said, “I’m not sure this new endeavor is going to work out. Nobody’s approached me all night. Not even you.”

“You’re too attractive for this place. You unnerve the average mook. You’d fit better">“No,” I saidplas at the bar in an upscale hotel, if you’re really going to pursue that line. Traveling businessmen have an expense account. Their wives aren’t around the corner, they’re all back in Wisconsin.”

“Thanks for the advice. You know your lowlifes. Are you a pimp?”

“No, I’m a thief.”

It didn’t surprise her. Maybe she understood what having a light step really meant. “Are you a good thief?”

“Just having you ask has wounded my pride.”

The giggle floated from her. “I retract the question. Your secret is safe with me.”

“It’s no secret. Everyone knows we Rands are thieves.”

“The whole family?”

“Yes.”

“Doesn’t being a famous thief interfere with the need to be a slyboots?”

Some words were naturally funny.
Slyboots
was one of them. I chuckled. “It has on occasion.”

I was hungry for her. Her warm sexuality stirred me. I shifted in my seat.

“Now you have time to pursue all your other dreams,” I said.

“All I ever dreamed about was having a happy home.” She let out a breath that she’d held inside for months, years. “I suppose that sounds silly.”

“Not to me it doesn’t. Didn’t you have any aspirations before him?”

“My aspiration was him. Or someone like him.”

“Come on. Modeling and acting?”

She smiled a genuine smile. “Am I so predictable?”

“You’re a beautiful lady. Beautiful people get paid a lot of money to show off their beauty on stages all over the world.”

We sat quietly for a while. The mooks muttered and sighed and drank and walked in and walked out. Every time the door opened I glanced up.

“You look like you want to make a break for it,” she said. “I just can’t tell if you want to rush off with me or run away from me.”

I could see my expression reflected in her eyes. A little angry, spooked, a touch worried and a lot horny, hopeful but in need of action.

Darla pressed three fingers to my wrist. “Hey, it’s all right. I’m in no rush. I’m enjoying just sitting here with you.”

She opened her purse and handed me a business card.

“You’ve had cards made up?” I asked. “This might be a little aggressive. If you advertise, it’s tough to argue in court you weren’t soliciting.”