Nightlife (28 page)

Wining and dining. It was time to invest in herself. April gave a small party and reception for the store’s bigwigs, relying on her source that matters might be swayed if she were to ensure their good time by powdering things along for the evening. Just between friends, of course.

Murphy’s Law prevailed, however. The account went to the other studio, and April suddenly found herself cast adrift and in debt to the tune of nearly ten grand for party favors. To a young enterprising entrepreneur named Tony Mendoza.

Seems that he’d had his eye on her for some time, and she had continually spurned his advances. The man was, of course, scum. But he’d seemed happy enough to front her the coke when she didn’t have the money to pay for it, and she’d been quite proud of manipulating him with feminine wiles.

Only now the bottom had dropped out of everything, and Tony had become a very impatient debt-holder. Business was business, nothing personal. He laughed at her offer to set up some sort of time payment schedule. How terrible it would be, he intimated, if something were to tragically befall her new business. Its location, perhaps.

April spent a week in hell.

Then Tony showed up, knight in shining armor that he was, and offered her a way out of this mess. She pounced on it —anything.

So he told her how he was investing in movie production. The direct-to-video route. Mail-order sales, rental outlets. She could take on a costarring role in his next one and wipe the slate clean. He would even costar with her in one of the scenes. Just so she would feel more comfortable working with someone she knew.

Justin listened. Listened. And as soon as Tony entered the picture—figuratively and literally—it took on entire new dimensions of turmoil. His hold on their lives just did not quit. And it seemed to have come so easily, so seductively. Almost as if by invitation.

He’d met the man but once, and now hated him more than he had hated anyone on the face of the earth. He would hate this man until the day he died.

“So I did it,” April said, voice cracking some more. “And he —he didn’t care about the money anymore. This was so personal to him. A conquest. Probably the longest he’d ever had to wait for anything.”

Justin didn’t want to know this, was sorry he’d asked, sorry he’d ever walked into Mind’s Eye Video to begin with. He hadn’t known how truly blissful ignorance could really be.

April was trembling, locked into the auto-da-fé of memory, of reliving self-betrayal. He could see every tortured fiber within her.

“And damn him to hell, he made sure he enjoyed it. He must have had some deal going with the director. Because
that
son of a bitch made us do our scene
—made us do it five days in a row.
” Only now did her voice rise to a wail. “I was lying on this desk after the last time, under those lights. With his—his
—stuff
splattered all over my face. And I swear, it felt worse than acid. I wanted to die. I came home and I sat in that bathtub for an hour, like some pathetic ritual that might help me feel clean again. But it didn’t. The last half of it, I had a razor blade at my wrist. Just trying to work up nerve to do it.” She swallowed hard. “And then Erik called. Out of the blue, no reason. I had my machine on and heard his message come in. He just said he missed seeing me at work.

“He probably saved my life. And he never even knew it.”

“You never told him?”

April shook her head, pushed hair back from her mouth. “I wanted to. But I couldn’t. I would’ve had to tell him why.” She looked up, the first eye contact since beginning the story. “Oh, Jus, I wish I could’ve told him. I started
so
many times.” He nodded. Erik, saving another life just by being himself. The irony was painfully poetic.

“Do you know what it’s like,” she said slowly, “living with that in the past? Not that I can’t deal with
that,
the actual doing it. But never knowing if I’m going to run into someone who might have seen it? Who might recognize me?” Her voice strained, tightened. “That when a stranger looks at me twice, I never know if it’s just because of me—or if he thinks maybe I look familiar. And then maybe he remembers, and that’s what he thinks about me. Do you know what that’s
like?”

He gently shook his head. “No. I don’t.”

“It means I’m never—
never
— far from the worst week of my life. That I probably never will be. Because even if every copy of that tape burned up tonight, someone might still remember.”

“Do very many people know already?”

She laughed bitterly, wetly. “How many people does it take before it starts to matter?” She blew her nose again. “Enough do. I told you Brad found out two nights before the wedding. You know
how
he found out?”

Justin shook his head.

“At the stag party. One of the guys rented
Corporate Head
and didn’t recognize me from the cover shot. They were having a great time until my part started. Doesn’t that sound like something out of a trashy comedy?”

Justin didn’t reply. There was no earthly way he could begin to measure the shame and embarrassment she must have felt.

“So they know, all of his friends. I don’t see any of them anymore, so that’s good. And do you believe it, after Brad broke off the wedding, three of his friends called to ask me out. What did they think I was?”

Justin reached down to hold her moistened hands.

Then pulled her up and held her to him.

“I don’t know who else knows,” she murmured into his ear. “I don’t even want to. Except there’s always,
always,
this fear I have inside that something’s going to go wrong—and my parents are going to find out. That is my absolute worst fear. Every night when I go to bed I pray to God to keep that from happening the next day. I pray for that like I’ve never prayed for anything.”

He held her, rocked her. Every ache and pain his heart had felt in the store and while driving around had melted, drained, paled into inconsequentiality. He felt like the most selfish person on earth.

“I love you,” she whispered, and her mouth sought him, found him. Hungry for something more than contact. Acceptance, maybe.

He had no choice but to give it.

Justin knew that soon, very soon, he would lead her to bed. Maybe even carry her, with April clinging to his body like a koala to a tree. He would lay her down, undress her slowly. Kiss her all over, not missing a single square inch. He would try his very best to give and give and give and this time expect nothing in return. He would become a sponge, trying to soak up the hurt, at least for a while. He would try to make her feel better than she had ever felt before. He would probably fail, but the trying was all. He couldn’t heal the scars, but he could love her in spite of them.

April began to laugh into the side of his throat. A strange sound, a mix. Perhaps eighty percent sorrow and twenty percent hope.

“I liked you that first night we met,” she said. “But I really started falling for you the next night. When we sat at the edge of Davis Island and you told me what happened in St. Louis. I think I would’ve done anything for you that night. You know why?”

He shook his head. “Why?”

“Because I was sitting there thinking, here he is, the one I’ve been waiting for—the one who’s just as screwed up as I am.”

Justin chuckled softly. Understanding, then, that eighty-twenty mix. He took her comment as no insult.

It was, after all, the truth.

At least half the time when the Weatherman saw a movie featuring a contract killer, he laughed out loud. Seldom did they get it right. Especially when they presented some screwtop who approached death with the mysticism of a Zen master. Thought they were absorbing life essences and whatnot. What a load of bullshit.

Guy like that in the real world wouldn’t last any time. Go into it with such personal feelings—especially the deeply weird—and your potential for screw-ups would rocket past the ozone layer.

Fact was, the best in the field were generally the most boring. Total lack of feelings may not translate into high drama, but it definitely makes for cautious business practices.

He allowed himself one luxury of sentimentality: the turquoise ring. Souvenir from the first whackout he’d ever done on a purely professional level, no personal stake other than the half-up-front, half-upon-completion financial terms. Big Mexican gal in Albuquerque, trying to blackmail the wrong guy. Hefty pair of mitts on that mama; the ring fit his own finger just fine.

Dusk had fallen a half hour ago. Time to get a bit more active instead of sitting and watching the world go by. Saturday night’s all right for fighting, Elton John used to sing. It was peachy-keen for dying, as well.

The Weatherman was in his rental, parked in a small business lot across the alley from April Kingston’s place. Different vantage point from where he and Lupo had watched yesterday, but equally functional.

He wore a variation on yesterday’s attire: tropical geek. Wherever he went to work, if there was a stereotypical tourist look, that’s what he adopted. And nobody took a second glance. They had seen it all before. In the West, he wore tight jeans and rhinestone shirts and gaudy boots. In the upper South, he looked like some sort of gentleman fop out of “My Old Kentucky Home.” In California, he looked like a novice surfer. Never failed. On the rare occasions he was witnessed, an accurate facial description was nonexistent. They remembered the silly clothes. Which, by the time the witness was dredging his memory for details, had long been doffed. And if need arose, he simply pocketed the ring until on safe ground.

Weapons check: fine and dandy, perfect working order. For this evening’s job he was using a Beretta nine-millimeter semiautomatic pistol, silencer equipped. Hollow-point slugs that flattened on impact and tore virtual tunnels of damage within the body and craters upon exit. Tough to salvage the slug for rifling marks, too, an added bonus. In actuality he preferred a revolver with the same sort of bullets. Semiautomatics could jam on occasion, and in a business where second chances were tough at best and more often impossible, a jam was catastrophic. Didn’t matter if you had a fifteen-shot clip if that first one jammed; if you couldn’t get past it, the rest might as well be suppositories. But hit a misfire with a revolver—just rotate to the next cylinder, and rock and roll.

However. Silence was golden, literally, and silencers did not work on revolvers. No enclosure around the cylinder. Another famous movie fuckup. He always guffawed when he saw that. So he adapted. The Weatherman came fully equipped with his silenced Beretta and a small five-round .32 revolver backup, just in case. Happily, he’d never jammed. But readiness was everything.

Time to do it.

The Weatherman stowed his pistols. Beretta in his waistband beneath an untucked shirt, the .32 in a small holster riding the small of his back. Then he grabbed his ticket to her door.

Last night, he had staked out this place to make sure these two didn’t leave long-term. Once the girl had returned from wherever and the loft’s lights had gone out an hour later, he returned to his motel and ordered a pizza. He still had the empty box, the strip of adhesive scrawled with his temporary address now removed and burned.

Pizza box in hand, he left the car. A gusty night. His hair swirled in the wind. Damn. He was losing it, that hairline receding higher by the year, and he did his best to comb it to hide the fact.

They were both home. The Fiero was parked by the building, and since nightfall, he had seen a pair of shadows briefly cross the drawn blinds.

He much preferred a double-header like this outside. Both together, side by side, where surprise was optimal and cover minimal. Didn’t look to be the case today. These two were the nest-holingest people he’d taken down in a long time. He’d only seen one today, and briefly. The girl, coming down for her morning paper and mail, wearing white shorts and an orange halter top. Not a glimpse the rest of the day.

The Weatherman took stock of logistics halfway to the stairwell. Nearby enough to make a difference, not a creature was stirring. Just the little ole pizza man.