Generation of Liars (33 page)

“Did you distract her with your big
dork lips?”

He had a look of sudden
self-consciousness, and then, feeling my stare on the red spot on his lips, he
swatted away the rouge lipstick tracks. “Listen, Alice, I had to think of
something quick. The sexual tension between she and I had been building since
the moment I stepped on that motorboat and saw her the first time.”

“Where is Cleopatra now?”

“I restrained her hands behind her
back with her silk bath robe and left her on the floor of the master bedroom.”

“But you made out with her first?”

“Yes.”

“If it keeps her out of our hair
while we do this, I guess it was smart.”

“Silk ties won’t last forever,” he
said. Another of his hurried attempts at the lock failed. “Damn it.”

“Let’s just take the whole
briefcase,” I said. But just when I finished saying it, Rabbit finished
twisting out one more combination and the briefcase popped open.

“Bingo!” He carefully slid the
dynamite stick from the interior pocket. He tossed it on the desk, letting it
spin like the spindle on a game show wheel until it sputtered stiff. We crossed
glances across the desk.

“Which one of us should take it?” I
asked.

As soon as the words left my lips,
the door to the office flew open with a force strong enough to create a wind
gust that scuttled loose papers off the desk.

My eyes flashed to the door.

Motley was standing there and I
could see the laceration on his forehead, a trench above his brow that foamed
with red-jelly blood. Water and blood were dripping from his body onto the
carpet. His eyes contained a piercing mania that paralyzed me in their
crosshairs. 

“That was very stupid, Alice,”
Motley growled. His eyes zeroed in on the dynamite stick. “Don’t make it worse
by doing something funny with the dynamite stick.”  

“Piss off, old man,” I growled,
tracking backwards on my heels.

From the corner of my eye I saw
Rabbit pull open the desk’s top drawer and retrieve something. I couldn’t make
out what it was, but it was small enough to hide inside his palm, and it was
black.

“Back off, Motley,” Rabbit said. It
was clearly meant to sound confident, but it came out wobbly. I realized now
that he was holding a gun, pointed straight out from the end of his quivering
wrist. “Let Alice get by.”

Motley shook his head. “You’re making
a mistake, Rabbit. Don’t help her. She’s worthless. She will only get you
killed.”

“Take the dynamite stick, Alice,”
Rabbit instructed me. His Adam’s apple throbbed like a hardboiled egg stuck in
his throat.  

I grabbed the dynamite stick off
the desk and shoved it into the waistband of my bikini. I crossed the length of
the room towards the door, the burgundy Persian carpet against my bare feet
felt like hot, crushed rubies. I gave Motley a lingering look of satisfaction
as I sauntered past him while Rabbit held the gun steadily trained on him.

I stopped when I got to the other
side of the door. I didn’t know where I was supposed to run with the dynamite
stick, or if I should wait for Rabbit. I took a minute to catch my breath. I
leaned back against the ornately-crested wall, bent at the ribs, and panting
for air. The drops of blood mixed with chlorinated water scattered across the
marble hallway looked like Impressionist water color artwork.

I heard a thunderclap blast from
inside the office that reverberated through the walls of the house. The gun had
gone off.

“Rabbit?” I called out. “Is Motley
dead?”

But there was no reply.

I called out again, “Rabbit?”

I twisted my neck into the doorway,
my eyes flashed to the floor beside the desk, where I saw Motley standing with
the gun Rabbit had been holding, now dangling from his fingers. He was standing
over Rabbit. Rabbit was lying on the floor next to a branch of blood spreading
out over the carpet.

I turned to run and skidded over
the blood-water concoction slicking the floor. I grappled at the walls to keep
my footing. I started running down the long hallway, desperate to reach the
front foyer so that I could escape out the main door. My moist feet shrieked
against the glassy marble floors.

“Oh, Alice?” Motley was taunting me
from somewhere behind me.  The inflection in his voice was so eerily
sinister that it triggered a boost within every cell of my DNA to run faster.
“Alice, darling, you can’t hide from me.”

I skidded through another corroder
as the once familiar layout of the house became a jumbled labyrinth. Somehow, I
arrived at the front door, and my numb fingers managed to twist the handle
open. I ran outside. The soft pads of my bare feet slid onto the grass and I
buckled my knees to avoid crashing down on my ass.

I heard the sound of the overhead
garage door grinding open and when I turned back to see what was happening, a
pair of headlights popped on and I witnessed Motley’s Bentley speed down the
driveway towards me. It was Cleopatra’s face behind the windshield; her eyes
were hard and callous. Her hands were firmly planted at ten and two on the
wheel and I was certain she had a stiletto heel pressed violently on the gas.
She rolled the car up onto the lawn and barreled straight towards me.

I crossed into the yard of the
house adjacent to Motley’s so that it would be difficult for her to maneuver
the car after me through the tree line. I didn’t know where Motley was.
Cleopatra thumped the car over the curb and clumsily navigated towards the entrance
to the neighbor’s driveway, using the wrong-side lane to get there.

Another car popped onto the
horizon, speeding down the street in the same lane. The car’s headlights
intersected with Cleopatra’s headlights so that a blinding spray of luminance covered
the black asphalt road in blue radiance. I had to shield my eyes against the
blinding lights. My ears were suddenly inundated by a hard screech of tires
screaming over pavement as the second driver slammed their breaks to avoid
hitting the Bentley. The car twisted, spinning into a circle and violently
crashing into the twin gates in front of the neighbor’s driveway. Then came an
eerie silence.

The driver’s side door of the
Bentley flew open and Cleopatra emerged. She had on red stilettos and a slinky
silk robe that had come undone in the front.

Her face got very ugly. She was
screaming. “No! No!” Smoke from the car’s engine billowed all around her like
ghastly fog. I strained my eyes to see what she was looking at, what was
causing her to scream so hauntingly.

Then I saw it.

Veiled by a plume of engine smoke,
was Motley, pinned to the driveway gates by the hood of the second car. The
dusty headlights of the car were pointed on him like a hot spotlight.

The distraught driver of the second
car got out of his vehicle and began screaming something, curses or apologies,
in French. I couldn’t understand him.

Cleopatra’s eyes slid from side to
side. She wanted to find me. “Alice!” she screamed into the night. “You did
this! You bitch, you’re going to pay for this!”

I looked back at Motley, at his
ghastly and contorted body. His neck, which had been pressed flat to one side
against the gate, made a sudden jerk and I saw the gate’s crisscross pattern
smeared in blood along the side of his cheek. His head twisted towards me with
a mechanical motion. His glossy eyes fixed on me and I saw his lips mouth the
name,
Margaux Fix
.

A spark of electric nerves, as hot
as a cattle prod, erupted on my spine and surged through my entire body. I
turned on my heels, running so that the soles of my feet throbbed over the
heavy pavement.

He knew my real name.

Chapter Thirty-one: The Address

T
HE
FLORESCENT RAYS coming off the streetlights seemed to stretch into thin swords,
raining down onto the sidewalk as I passed under them. They could stab me with
the pressure point of a thousand needles, it didn’t matter. I felt nothing. I
was as stiff and cold as ice.

I ducked into the
Abbesses
metro station, which serviced Montmartre. I stood awkwardly on the
platform with my arms folded over myself in an attempt to obscure my midriff
and reduce the embarrassment of wearing a bikini in the middle of a Parisian
metro stop on a frigid October night.

I sat down inside the train car,
resting my feet to roast over the radiant heat coming up from the vent in the
floor. My high heels were resting on the empty seat next to me; my confession
note was tucked into one of the soles. I attempted to figure out my next move.
Going back to my flat was out of the question since
Motley, if he was still breathing, probably already had Moonboots McCafferty
and Xerxes O’Brien on their way there to retrieve me and drag me back to his
house.

I closed my eyes and tried to
conjure from memory the address Ben had scribbled on the prescription pad
earlier that day at the hospital.

Chapter Thirty-two: Comfort

A
KNOCKING
SOUND, obtrusive and loud, like a log falling in a pristine forest, was echoing
throughout the corridor. The sound of a door creaking startled me. Just a nosy
neighbor taking a peek into the hallway. I take a relieved breath.

At this moment, I am standing with
my back up against Ben’s door and my goose-pimpled chest is heaving up and down
to catch my breath. I give the door another knock. This time I hear the rattle
of Ben undoing the locks. When he opens the door, he is looking at me sideways,
and his eyes are small like he had been asleep.

“Alice. You changed your hair
again.”

I smiled.  

Ben didn’t return the smile.
Instead, he leaned his elbow on the doorknob and inspected me from head to toe.
“Just so we’re both on the same page, you realize it’s, oh, a hair shy of three
in the morning, and you just knocked on my door in nothing but a soaking wet black
bikini.”
Not true
, I thought to myself. It was actually a black bikini
accessorized with the dynamite stick. But I had tucked the disk into my bikini
bottoms so that it was hidden. I wasn’t going to burden Ben with the trouble I
was in.

“Can I sleep here tonight?” I
asked.  

“Alice.” His eyes went up the
ceiling and he blew out a trail of air, as though trying to avoid combusting.
“Of course you can. But first, can you explain why you’re traipsing around
Paris in a bikini?”

“Midnight swim. I’m impulsive, what
can I say?” I stretched the balls of my feet to reach up and plant a kiss on
his nose.

“Alice, it’s freezing outside. Your
lips are blue, and if you don’t want to experience hypothermia, I suggest you
go dry off in the bathroom. There are fresh towels inside the linen closet.
Then go in my bedroom and grab one of my clean shirts to throw on.”

I padded to the bathroom, peeled
off my bikini, and patted myself down with a towel.
I
buried the dynamite stick in the back of the linen closet, making sure to tuck
it inside a half-empty box of bandages.
I
grabbed a big fluffy white towel while I was in there.
I sunk my face
into the towel, and from the smell I could tell that Ben used the fabric
softener with the little bear on the bottle. I went into his bedroom and pulled
an oversized University of Illinois sweatshirt over my head. It had the cozy
fabric softener bear smell on it, too. I tossed my high heels into the closet.

Ben had a hot mug of chocolate
waiting for me in his hand when I got back to the kitchen. “Alice?”

I grabbed my mug and spread out the
front page of the Parisian newspaper called
Le Monde
that was on the
counter. “Yes, darling?”

“This is weird. You know that,
right? I know you like doing the whole spontaneous free spirit thing. But this
is beyond that.”

“Just go with it, Ben. It’s easier
that way.” I sipped the chocolate and feigned engrossment in the newspaper.

He walked over and sweetly kissed
my forehead. He felt my hands. “You’re positively freezing.” I hadn’t even felt
the chill. Must have been all the adrenaline. I had nearly been murdered. The
thought of me almost dying made me think of Rabbit. I thought of him lying
injured, possibly dead, in Motley’s office. I knew that I should anonymously
call an ambulance for him. I instinctively reached for my phone, but then I
remembered that I had left it with my clothes in Motley’s bedroom after I
slipped into his robe.

“Can I use your phone?” I asked
Ben.

“Sure, Alice, it’s on the wall over
there.” He pointed to a cordless phone mounted to the kitchen wall. I walked
over and unhooked it from the receiver and gave him the look a dog gives its
owner when they don’t want to be watched while pooping on the curb.

“Oh, for heaven’s sake, Alice, are
you going back to being secretive again?”

“I am not being secretive. I just
want a millisecond of privacy. Is that forbidden?”

I rounded into the bathroom and
locked the door. I ran the faucet and stepped into the shower to block the
sound of my voice from seeping out of the room. I entered the digits to block
Ben’s number and dialed the French emergency number.

 “
Bonjour
?’”

“Yes, I would like to report a
gunshot.” I gave the dispatcher Motley’s address and promptly hung up. I sipped
my cocoa when I got back to the kitchen.   

Ben massaged the spot above his
brow. “Am I ever going to get to bed tonight?”  

“Please don’t be mad at me,” I
begged. “I need you tonight, I really do. So please don’t look at me like I
just showed up and ruined your night or like I’m some kind of nuisance.”

A smile I wasn’t expecting formed
on Ben’s lips. “Alice, I want nothing more than to scoop you up in my arms
right now.” His eyes fell and his voice soured. “It’s just so hard when you act
mysterious like this.”