A Better Goodbye (32 page)

“Hell, yes. I'm in, bro. You know I am.” Scott took a breath, summoning all his courage. “But I've got to ask you one more thing.”

DuPree's smile vanished. “What?”

“We're not going to jump him at the apartment, are we?”

DuPree started smiling again. “Relax, dawg. This isn't about getting your ass thrown in jail. It's about our financial betterment. We're going to grab the motherfucker outside. Out in the street.”

“I should have known you'd plan it like that,” Scott said. “Sorry.”

“No big thing,” DuPree said.

But it was to Scott. He felt like eating again. Cold meatloaf wasn't so bad. Cold mac and cheese wasn't, either. And now he was damn sure he'd have some peach cobbler. He was looking to flag down the waitress when he heard DuPree say, “Tell me something.” Scott put down his hand and turned back to DuPree.

“That bitch Sierra smart enough to do us a favor?”

“Sleep with both of them,” Maria said on the phone. “What's the big deal?”

“I can't do that,” Jenny said.

“Sure you can. All you have to do is lie back and spread your legs. Unless you prefer cowgirl or—”

Jenny erupted in laughter. “Maybe you could.”

“Oh, so I'm a slut, is that it?” Maria was laughing too. “Just because I like ten inches of hard cock daily? Hourly if I can get it? Listen, sweetie, sometimes it takes two guys to give me that much.”

“You're crazy.”

“No, I'm horny.”

“I'm hanging up now.”

“Don't you dare,” Maria said, laughing so hard she could hardly get the words out. “Do you hear me, Jenny? Do not—”

Jenny put down her cell feeling better than she had all weekend. Unfortunately that would only last until she went back to work on Tuesday, and then the tug of war in her head between Nick and Barry would resume.

She'd made a point of not telling Maria that Nick had killed somebody when he was a boxer. It seemed pretty strange when she thought about it afterward, protecting the guy who was supposed to protect her, but that was how she felt about him now.

On the other hand, it was strictly out of self-protection that she'd neglected to mention that Barry hadn't called her in two days. Here she was a half-step from sleeping with—oh, please, enough euphemisms—from fucking him, and all she knew was that he was in Santa Barbara. At least he'd been open enough to tell her he'd kept his place there. But couldn't he have taken her with him if he liked her as much as he said he did? Couldn't he have found time to slip away for a romantic dinner? On a Saturday? Come on, whatever it was he did to afford his Rolls—he was still pretty vague on the subject—it had to shut down sometime.

The weight of her skepticism made Jenny feel worse than ever no matter how good she was getting at
Tiger Woods
, an absolute killer with the joystick. Clients were supposed to get hung up on masseuses, not the other way around. On top of that, she'd told Barry her real name.

Nick still knew her only as Coco. She wasn't supposed to get hung up on him either. A security guy? Especially one with the past that Nick had? That was beyond ridiculous, no matter how sweet and sad he seemed to be. And seriously tough, too. She could never forget that, especially after hearing Maria talk about what had gone down in Los Feliz. It was those same guys again. This time they'd done a number on a couple of Thai girls working nights out of the back of a beauty shop. If push came to shove, maybe she'd have to place practical considerations ahead of romantic impulses.

Jenny was wondering what it would be like to have Nick save her when she met Sara and Rachel at 14 Below in Santa Monica that night, the first time she'd seen them since their poetry final. When they'd called, they sounded like they never expected her to say yes, probably because they assumed that her life was filled with men. She guessed it was, but not the way they imagined. Still, she made a point of leaving her cell at home in case Barry did call. Let him wonder where she was.

The beer was cold and Sara and Rachel supplied the diversion Jenny needed. She knew they were using her as bait for cute guys, but so what? She was out from behind her computer and away from her nagging thoughts of Barry. She drank, and Sara and Rachel got asked to dance, and when the live music started a little before eleven, Jenny actually found herself liking it. No punk, no metal, no emo. Just a guitar player from Texas and a couple of his steady rocking friends, real loose, lots of laughing and promises that they'd learn all the songs by next week. Sara said the guitarist used to play in Bonnie Raitt's band, not that Jenny knew who Bonnie Raitt was. But she liked the guitar player as soon as she heard him sing, “She ain't a dish, she's a whole set of china.” The lyrics made her smile for the next two days, until it was time for her to work the evening shift on Tuesday.

She still hadn't heard from Barry and the first person she saw was Nick. Just like that, the cosmic joke was on her again. Barry's silence was a humiliation even if nobody else knew about it, but Nick was as reliably strong and silent as ever. All she said was, “Been busy?” And all he said was, “No, kind of slow.”

It was one of those rare shifts when Sierra saw more clients than Jenny, and Jenny found herself feeling jealous, wishing she had worked Monday. Mondays were almost always off-the-tracks busy, the kind of day she needed if she was going to finish paying her lawyer, but Scott had given the shift to Pamela, his newest blonde. Jenny assumed it was her punishment for making that smart-assed remark about being a cat person.

The thought of it brought her back to Nick and what she now knew about him. It was hardly the kind of thing you bring up casually, like asking if he'd seen one of those TV shows everybody but Jenny watched. Anyway, they were following their usual post-vacuuming routine, him with his sports page and constant picking up, her with the two novels she had brought. She tossed aside
The Catcher in the Rye
after twenty pages, puzzled at why so many guys had recommended it to her when they discovered she had a brain. Holden Caulfield was the kind of whiny, self-absorbed jerk she had always hated. The polar opposite of Nick.

“Thanks for the other day,” she told him.

“I didn't do anything,” he said. “I didn't think he was going to, either.”

“Really? Because I was like this is crazy, he's totally going to turn his dog loose.”

“No, he looks to me like the kind of guy that takes things right up to the edge, then pulls back after he sees how you react. If you're scared or weak, something like that, then he's dangerous.”

Jenny hoped she didn't look as surprised as she felt. She'd never heard Nick string that many words together. More than that, he was practically analytical.

“Wow, you've really thought about him, haven't you?”

“You fight for a living, that's what you learn to do. You don't want to get your clock cleaned because you didn't study the other guy. If he's better than you, hey, more power to him. But if you were lazy, you deserve a beating.”

“I hope you never have to fight him,” Jenny said.

“Guess we'll just have to see,” Nick said.

He stared off into the distance. Jenny waited for him to come back and tell her what he saw, but he just said he was going downstairs to check the laundry. The only sound in the living room after that came from the pages Jenny turned in
The Way We Live Now
. Its author, Anthony Trollope, was a genius and everything—he'd finish writing a novel in the morning and start a new one in the afternoon—but he couldn't keep Jenny from thinking about Nick.

The silence wasn't broken until Sierra came out of her only session of the day, a doctor from Cedars. “What a douche,” she told Jenny. “Never smiled, hardly said anything besides ‘Take off your clothes,' and then he expects full service. Practically orders it. I told him maybe that works with his nurses, but not me. And I've got a fucking car payment coming up.”

Sierra picked up her cell phone and started texting, then stopped.

“Oh, yeah. Barry called.”

Jenny tried not to look too happy about it. “I didn't see anything written down,” she said.

“It's around here someplace,” Sierra said. “Anyway, he wants to see you tomorrow, at seven. You're working then, right?”

“Yeah,” Jenny said. “Did he leave a number?”

Sierra smiled. “You mean you don't have it by now?”

“Somewhere in my backpack, I guess.”

“Don't worry, I got it.”

“Thanks.”

Sierra busied herself loading her outsized purse for the trip home, striding confidently on the high heels she wore off-duty and on. She shouldered her purse and opened the door to leave, then stopped and walked back toward Jenny.

“Did he say anything about Friday?” Sierra asked.

“Who?” Jenny said.

“Nick. You're the only one he talks to.”

Right,
Jenny thought,
because I'm the only one who doesn't turn around and blab it to all the other girls.
But she said, “He hasn't brought it up, actually.”

“I thought you guys were, like, closer than that,” Sierra said, smiling as if she imagined their soiled sheets.

“Well, we're not,” Jenny said.

“Uh-huh.”

“Look, just because I treat him like a human being doesn't—”

“He's an animal,” Sierra said.

“He is not.”

“Yeah? Well, what would you call someone who kills a guy in a fight?”

Sierra looked smug and mean. No way Jenny could let the bitch one-up her. “I'd call him unlucky,” Jenny said. “He could just as easily be the one that died, you know. It wasn't like Nick had this dirty trick that made the other guy fall and break his neck. It was a freak accident. Nick knocked the guy down and the guy hit his head on the rope and—”

Sierra couldn't hide her surprise.

“You don't know what happened, do you?” Jenny said. “You just thought—no, you didn't think anything. You never do. You heard Nick killed some guy when they were fighting, and instead of checking it out, you decided he was, I don't know, an animal, like you just said. Or a monster. And that really sucks, you know that, Sierra? And it's really stupid. And . . . and . . . ”

“No wonder you're sleeping with him,” Sierra said. “He's got control of your mind.”

“I am
not
sleeping with him.”

“Right.”

Sierra turned and marched out the door.

“But I'd rather sleep with him than Scott,” Jenny shouted after her. “Do you have to watch Scott's old TV shows too? Do you, Sierra? Do you?”

Jenny was angry. Jenny was laughing. Jenny was being pulled in so many directions by her emotions that she had to sit down before she fell down. The front door Sierra had left open would have to stay that way for a moment. Jenny had other things to think about, like what she was going to say to Nick, or if she was going to say anything at all.

“I should have told you,” Nick said.

Jenny looked up, as if she'd forgotten he'd be back so soon. When she started to say something, he cut her off.

“I was out in the hall when you two were yelling at each other.”

“I think I was the one doing all the yelling.”

Nick grinned. “I didn't know you had a temper. From the looks of Sierra, I don't think she did either.”

“Did she see you?”

“No, she was too busy escaping.”

Nick and Jenny looked at each other, uncertain of where to take the conversation next.

“I'm sorry,” Jenny said at last.

“For what?”

“For . . . I don't know . . . ”

Nick watched Jenny shrug uncomfortably.

“I don't want your pity if that's what it is,” he said. “I don't feel sorry for myself, so there's no way in hell you should feel sorry for me. What happened in that fight is for me to deal with. I know it's gonna stay with me until the day I die—I can't change that. I used to think I could at least make up for it. The guy had a family and I took him away from them, and how do I make that right? I've lost a lot of sleep trying to figure that one out. I can't do it, can't even come close.”

“Is that why you work here?” Jenny asked. “Like protecting us is some kind of penance?”

“No, I need to make my rent,” he said with a small, sad smile.

She smiled back at him. “Tell me about it. I've got a lawyer to pay.”

“So you know how it is. You put one foot in front of the other and do the best you can—although I've got to admit I never thought I'd end up in a place like this.”

“We need you,” Jenny said. “The girls, I mean. I don't know if any of them have ever told you, but you're the one reason we feel safe.”

“Hearing it from you is enough,” he said.

“But you made it sound like you hate it here.”