Love Lies Dying (3 page)

Three

“I’m in trouble, Johnny. Big trouble,” Zoe whispered.

Her hands squeezed his again, as if for reassurance, and her eyes seemed to suddenly stare straight through him.

“Go on,” he whispered.

“I didn’t want to tell you any of this. I don’t want to burden you with it. But when it all happened I had nowhere to go. I just had to get out and run and I had no idea where I was headed. Next thing I knew I was here with Helen and I had to tell her all. I need your help, Johnny. I really do. I didn’t want you to know, or to get involved, but I think I owe you some sort of explanation for my actions.”

“Okay, okay,” he replied. “But start at the beginning.”

“I’ve killed a man,” she said.

“What?” John drew back slightly, alarm bells ringing in his mind.

“Well, at least, I think so. Pretty sure, I guess. But I didn’t mean to.”

“From the start, Zoe,” he prompted.

Her eyes focussed back on him then and she smiled.

“I like that,” she said.

“Like what?”

“That’s the first time you’ve called me by my name.” She reached over and kissed him lightly on the cheek, “I like it.”

“The story…” John prompted.

She sat back and composed herself, “Everything?”

“Everything.”

“Okay. Here we go.”

She paused, as if to get her thoughts in order, and began.

“I think I may have killed my boyfriend.”

Worry crossed her face as she paused for his response.

Stay calm,
he thought.

“Go on.”

“Have you heard of Ricky Fox?”

“No.”

“Really?” she seemed surprised.

“Can’t say I have.”

“Well, he’s a businessman on the west coast. I’ve known him for a long time, quite a few years in fact. We were just sort-of friends and then eventually, you know, we decided to get together.”

“Uh-uh.”

“Well, you see, I thought he was this big successful businessman and everything. He had lots of money and fancy cars and people who would do whatever he told them to do. But it wasn’t until I got in too deep that I realised what he really was.”

Zoe looked down at her hands again as they squeezed his even tighter.

“Ricky did things for people and, well…you know,
to
people,” she met his eyes once more. “Do you understand?”

John stared back. He thought he understood, but wanted to be sure.

“Tell me,” he said.

“He would do things for money. Real
bad
things. Didn’t matter who for, as long as the money was right. He could rough up some guy or he could put him into hospital depending on what he was paid for doing the job. And then…sometimes, he’d go even further.”

“You mean he’d kill people?”

“Yeah, I think so. I never knew any of this stuff when I first met him. And then, after I got to know him, I started to see and hear weird things and it didn’t take me long to put it all together and work out exactly what was happening. But by that time, it was all too late and he wouldn’t let me go.

“I tried to get out, I tried to tell him I didn’t want to see him any more, but he wouldn’t let me go. He’d hit me and lock me in his house and tell his guards not to let me out.”

“His
guards
?”

She nodded, “It was horrible. And when I did get out of the house or go to parties with him, he’d take me home and yell at me and beat me because he thought that I was flirting with any guy who happened to pass by or talk to me. He thought I was cheating on him all the time, but I wasn’t, I swear. I could never get any time alone with anyone to even have more than a small conversation! How could I find the time to cheat on him? He was mad, Johnny, mad. He just wouldn’t let me live. He didn’t understand me, and he didn’t want to understand. He wanted what he could get and on his own terms. He was a bastard.”

John nodded his head.
It sure sounds like he was,
he thought.

She stared directly into his eyes with pure hate, “Men can be bastards sometimes, and he was the worst bastard there is.”

She took a deep breath, “Or was.”

“So you
killed
him?”

Zoe glanced over at the gun on the hallway floor.

“Yes,” she said. “With that gun.”

John turned and followed her glance, “But couldn’t you have gone to the police or put a restraining order on him, or something?”

She shook her head, “You don’t understand, Johnny. I couldn’t go
anywhere
without one of his thugs following me. It got so bad that I even think I was being spied on inside his own house when he wasn’t there! Like there were cameras or microphones in the walls or something. There was no way I could make a call without it being logged and there was absolutely no chance that I’d be allowed to just walk into a police station to make a complaint.”

“Yeah, I guess so. But what about your work as a researcher?”

“As I said, I was freelance. Freelance usually means ‘rarely employed’ in my line of work. A bit like ‘between jobs’.”

“I see,” he nodded.

“I mean, I was working in a coffee shop trying to make ends meet when one day this suave guy walks in and orders coffee. Then he starts to come in every day of the week and won’t take his eyes off me. For fun, I flirt with him and then, one day, he asks me out. What am I, crazy? He was so good looking and fun to talk to. So I say yes! We have a great dinner at a five-star restaurant and we go back to his place for coffee. Once I see the house I know I’m never going to have to serve coffee or research anything ever again if I play my cards right. But at that stage I didn’t know what kind of business Ricky was in. And when I did find out, there was no way I could leave.”

“So he had you trapped?”

“Sort of. But last month was the final straw. I couldn’t take it any more. We went out to some party somewhere. See? I don’t even know where we went! He wouldn’t even tell me that much. I was just the girl who had to hang from his arm and smile and be nice and speak when I was spoken to. And that was it. It was a big party. Ricky was getting some citizen’s award for outstanding development or civic duties or something, he has so many anyway, and while he was on the stage giving his speech I was talking to a guy who was sitting at our table. He was fun and nice and good looking and so I thought I was doing the right thing by sitting there and talking and laughing and trying to have a good time. But I paid for it when I got home. Paid for it badly.”

John shook his head, “He beat you for
that?
”

She nodded, “As soon as we were in the door. It turns out the guy was some kind of competitor or enemy or something. But how was I to know? I thought I was doing the right thing! I tried to tell him but he wouldn’t listen.”

Zoe stopped talking.

John thought she was going to start crying again.

“Don’t go on…unless you want to.”

Zoe smiled, “No, it feels good to get this all off my chest.” She reached over and patted John on the arm. “It feels good to confide in you, Johnny.”

“I’m a good listener,” he replied.

She giggled, “Yeah, I can tell. And I’m a good talker, as you’re finding out.”

“Go on when you’re ready.”

“I hope you’ll confide in me one day,” she said.

“Go on.”

Zoe sighed once more.

“Okay. So, let’s just say that he beat me unconscious that night.”

“What?”

Zoe nodded, “He did a lot of things to me that night, if you know what I mean... But the end result was that I was knocked out. It was the first time he had gone that far and it scared the hell out of me. He knew his stuff; he didn’t hit anywhere where the bruises would show. He never broke any bones because he didn’t want doctors to be involved. That’s why he was paid so much by these people he worked for. He knew how to cause the right pain in the right places.

“I woke up bruised and sore – both inside as well as outside. You should have seen me! Luckily, I heal pretty quickly and the bruises have all gone now, but I couldn’t walk for a day or two. I just sat in bed and tried not to move.”

“Sounds like a real asshole.”

“You said it. And I was mad at him, but even madder at myself. Does that make sense?” She stared deeply into his eyes, searching his soul for the truth.

“I guess so.”

“Because I’d placed myself in this situation and I hadn’t really tried to get out of it.”

“So you decided to do something about it?”

“Well, what made me really mad was that the couple of days I spent in bed and in pain stopped me from continuing with a plan I had already started. And, after that beating, I wished I had completed my plan earlier.”

“So you had decided to break it off with this guy?”

“Yeah, but I knew it wasn’t going to be easy.”

She smiled at him, let go of his hands, leaned back and lifted her black top up off her stomach.

John’s eyes were drawn to the diamond sitting in her belly button and the tanned and muscled skin surrounding it.

Zoe slapped her stomach with the palm of one hand.

The noise of skin on skin sounded loud in the room.

“See this stomach?”

“Ahh, well, yeah.”

“It wasn’t always like this, you know. I was a bit more, shall we say, plump when I first met Ricky.”

“Really?”

“Not obese or anything, don’t get the wrong idea. Just a bit more, well, let’s say undefined.”

John smiled back, “Okay.”

Zoe pushed her top back into place and John found himself trying to burn the memory of her stomach into his mind.

“And, after all, he wouldn’t let me out of his house unless someone was with me, so I ended up using his gym equipment. And believe me, he could afford almost a fully functional gym! So, more out of boredom than anything else, I thought to myself, girl, it’s time to get in shape.

“When I began, I was still in love with Ricky and thought he was my knight in shining armour. The least I could do was get in shape for him, right?”

“Yeah, I suppose so.”

“Well, that’s what I thought too. So, with all this time on my hands, I started to get fit.”

“It was certainly worth the trouble,” he smiled at her.

Zoe giggled once more. “Thanks, that’s really nice of you to say that. I can tell you really mean it.”

“I do.”

“Ricky always lied about things. All the time. He was going to give me this and that and we were going to live happily forever. But then he turned into a bastard and got all jealous even if I just
looked
at someone. Shit, one night he got me home and punched me hard in the stomach because I talked to a girl for too long! He thought I was turning into a lesbian!”

John shook his head, “He sounds crazy.”

“He was. Believe me. And then, no matter where we went or who we saw, when we’d get home he would always check me out.”

She paused.

“Huh?” John said, unsure of what she meant.

“You know,” she whispered, her eyes dropping to the floor. “Internally.”

There was silence between them.

She sighed and continued, “He would check me out internally to see if I’d been with anyone.”

“No!” John was disgusted. “He treated you like
that
?”

She nodded, “Yep. Even if I’d been with him all night, as soon as we got home, he would make me strip naked and bend over. Then he’d use his fingers to check if I was wet or…you know…different inside.”

“That’s disgraceful,” John muttered.

“I know.”

She stopped talking and John held her hands, giving her time to compose herself.

She sighed deeply and continued, “So, in the end, I decided I was getting fit and using his gym not just to pass the time of day, but to help me get out of there. There was only one way I could escape his house, his compound, and that was if I could fight my way out. I was going to confront him last month, but he wasn’t around too much because of business and then there was this party and I decided to stick by him until after he received his award.”

“And then he beats you unconscious.”

“Exactly. But not before he checked me out again because he thought I was getting it on with the guy at the table. And then he did more…”

“More?”

“Yeah. He sort of fooled around with me while I was unconscious.”

“You mean…?”

She nodded. “Sexually, yes. But worse than the other times. And he used things on me. I’m trying to forget it all, but it’s hard.”

“Fucking sick bastard.”