The Comfort of Black (22 page)

“I'm fine,” she said, wanting to believe it. “You're the one with a concussion.”

“The Vicodin will help. And some rest. And not thinking too much, which will be the hard part.”

She took a step towards him. “When I say I'm not ready to hear about Dallin,” she said, “it doesn't mean I can't handle whatever the truth is. I just don't want to know right now. Maybe I will in a few hours, maybe over drinks in some dumpy bar tonight. Maybe not until tomorrow, or the next day. But you're going to tell me everything, and I'm guessing it's not going to be good. But I'll be able to handle it, because I pretty much feel like I can handle everything now.”

“Yes. You can.”

Another step forward. Hannah stood in front of him, and she could smell him. The smell of Black, the smell of his body from last night. The smell of dirt from the road. The smell of sweat, of skin recently spiked with adrenaline. She traced a fingertip very lightly over the contusion on his forehead.

“I've made a decision in the last hour,” she said. “Since we got back in your car. Since…since you killed him.” She reached up to his shirt with one hand and flicked open the top button. “I've decided to trust you. For better or for worse, I know I can't do this alone, so I'm going to trust you. Don't make me regret that, okay?”

He looked from her fingers back to her face. “I won't.”

Hannah reached down and unbuttoned the rest of his shirt, then slid it off his body.

Cigarette smoke ghosted the stale air of the bar, creating a thin, ethereal mist that hung below the can lights spotting the ceiling. Half the bulbs had burned out and the darkness suited Hannah. The bar was named Yorick's. In case there was any confusion as to the reference, a bleached skull rested on the top of the bar, a half-consumed cigarette clamped between its yellowed front teeth.

“Thought you couldn't smoke in bars anymore,” Hannah said. Black led her to a booth in the back, one beneath a broken light, and Hannah couldn't tell if the seat's cracked vinyl was red or brown.

“No one in Silverson cares about laws like that,” Black said. “And anyone who does care doesn't come to Silverson.”

He slid into one side of the booth and she sat opposite him. Her hand touched something sticky on the laminate tabletop, and she wiped her palm on her pants.

Hannah looked around, and it took her only a moment to count the five other patrons, all of whom sat at the bar, perched like seals at a zoo, leaning from the edge of the water toward the trainer dangling fish before their snouts. They were all men, and they were all silent. The skinny bartender rested his tattooed forearms on the bar top, his thumbs playing a silent symphony on his iPhone.

A Neil Diamond song floated from tinny speakers in the corners of the room.

Hitchin' on a twilight train

Ain't nothing here that I care to take along

“Well, hey there, Black.”

Hannah looked up at the waitress who seemed to appear from nowhere. What she actually saw was mostly her silhouette, since she was backlit by one of the few bright bulbs in the whole place. Her hair spilled over broad shoulders, which in turn narrowed to the kind of waist wasted on twenty-year-olds. Tight jeans hugged bowling-pin thighs. Her arm held up a tray, and from it the waitress took two waters and set them in front of Hannah and Black. The woman's perfume wafted into Hannah's nostrils, the scent attacking like some kind of warning shot, a cannonball lobbed across the bow.

“Been a while,” the waitress said.

The woman took a half-step closer and that was enough for the light to fall on her face. The face was familiar in a vague way for a few seconds, and then complete recognition slammed into Hannah.

“Holy shit,” Hannah said.

The woman turned her attention directly to Hannah, and Hannah felt she was looking at the screen of Dallin's laptop again. That was where she had last seen this woman.

“Oh, hell,” Black said. “I…I didn't even think about it. Look, Hannah, I'm sorry. But I guess it was something I was going to tell you anyway.”

Rebecca, the web slut who had promised Dallin both discretion and a good time.

“What is it, sweetie?” the woman asked.

“You're the whore from the computer,” Hannah said.

“
Excuse
me?”

Black held up a hand and tried to say something, but the waitress cut him off.

“Wait,” she said. “Is
she
the reason I made that video?”

Black opened his mouth, seemed to think better of it, then simply nodded.

The waitress turned back to Hannah. “Look, honey, I'm
sorry. But they paid me a lot of money for ten minutes in front of the camera, and you can guess the tips in this dump don't quite pay my rent.”

Black looked resigned. “This is Jill,” he said to Hannah. He didn't introduce Hannah, nor did Jill seem to expect an introduction.

Jill offered Hannah a pointed smack of her gum in lieu of a handshake. “Pleasure,” she said.

“Not so much,” Hannah said.

Jill shrugged and offered the slightest smile, as if she was beginning to like the idea she'd been part of Dallin's master plan.

Hannah turned to Black. “Does she know Dallin?”

“Look, I'm the one who hired her, okay? She's never met Dallin. The whole video was my idea.”

“
Your
idea?”

He leaned across the table and whispered to her. “You made a decision to trust me. I'll tell you everything in time. Let's just get a drink first, okay?”

He leaned back.

Jill's gaze pivoted from Hannah to Black. “What happened to you two? Lover's spat?”

“Car accident,” Black said.

Jill put a hand on her hip and scanned the two of them like a general surveying a battlefield before an attack. “Never see you with the same person, Black. You come here, few days at a time, always with a different person, then you disappear again. Why you even come to this place I'll never understand.”

“I come here because this is a place where people don't ask questions.”

“I know,” she said. “It's what makes it so goddamn boring. Okay, I get it. What are you drinking?”

“Bourbon,” he said. “Neat.”

Hannah said, “Jack and Coke.”

Jill turned and walked away, the sway in her hips set to full volume.

“Some fling of yours?” Hannah asked. “And part-time actress for hire?”

“Like I said, I like it here because no one asks questions.”

“How much did you pay her to rip my heart out?”

“Three hundred bucks.”

“
Three hundred bucks?
”

Black changed the subject. “You still woozy from the Vicodin?”

Hannah stared at him for a while, wanting to let her anger take over. Black had hired that bitch to pretend to be fucking her husband. The moment
Rebecca's
face appeared on that computer screen had been a cold knife in Hannah's stomach, and it was all just part of some plan where actors were paid to spiral Hannah's existence out of control.

But now wasn't the time to hate. She would listen to what Black had to say, and she would focus her anger on the one person responsible for everything: Dallin.

“A little,” she finally answered. “The nap helped.”

“How's your face?”

“Hurts. But I'll live. How's your head?”

“More of a dull ache. No more nausea, though, so that's progress.”

Hannah put her elbows on the table and clasped her hands, squeezing them together then letting go. Squeezing, then letting go. An image of Black flashed in her mind as she stared at him, an image of him on top of her, the sweat on his forehead, the definition of his shoulders, the veins in his neck. Their time together in the motel room was an escape, just like the nap that had followed. But that was only a temporary reprieve from the reality she now had to confront again.

“So are you going to tell me the story? The real story?”

“Earlier you said you weren't ready,” Black said. “Are you now?”

“It would be easier if my drink were here.”

Black scanned the bar, and moments later Jill swept around it and walked toward them with their drinks. She set them down and asked them if they wanted food, which Hannah did, but not as much as she wanted Jill to walk away, so she shook her head.

Jill left, and Hannah lifted her drink to her lips and sipped. The pour was generous.

“Is she really dead?” Hannah asked. “My psychologist. Madeline.”

“I'm sorry, Hannah.”

Hannah looked over and stared at the dirty wall next to the booth. “I saw her for over five years. Jesus.” It was strange, she thought. Madeline was a friend. She knew every last detail of Hannah's life. Yet Hannah didn't feel like crying over her death. Would that come later, or not at all? Right now it just seemed like another fact to absorb. A piece of information to file away in someplace she could access later.

“Why?” she asked.

“I can think of a few reasons,” Black responded. “Mainly that she was a liability. But I think also as a warning to me. To let me know the plan had definitely changed, and I'd better be on board.”

“Tell me everything,” she said.

Black swirled the bourbon in his glass. “I have a feeling I don't know
everything
. But I know what I know. Where do you want me to start?”

“From the moment Dallin first contacted you. I want to know what he said to you, how much he's paying you…and how the hell he even found you.”

Black made half his drink disappear in one swallow. “Dallin wasn't the one who contacted me initially.”

Hannah remembered Black talking about his
clients
. Plural. That Dallin wasn't alone in the plan.

“Who contacted you?”

“Someone I knew in prison. We called him Smooth.”

“Smooth? I don't know anyone called that. Why would he hire you to do this to me?”

Black set his glass down. “You do know him. You just know him by another name.”

And then Hannah knew. How had she not seen it before? Even the prison nickname made sense. Smooth. Just like his face. A smooth surface concealing the storm just beneath.

“Billy.”

“We didn't share a cell, but we both worked in the laundry together. For two years, day in, day out.” Black kept his gaze on the table. “Nothing to do but talk while you were working. I was happy remaining quiet, because in prison staying quiet was usually the smartest thing to do. Most guys get into trouble first with their mouths, and I learned quickly to shut up and fly under the radar. But Smooth liked to talk. Loved to talk about things he was going to do when he got out.”

“You were in prison with Billy?”

“Like I said, two years. He'd already been there for a while, and kept causing problems, so they kept increasing his sentence.”

“But you escaped,” Hannah said.

“Actually, we both did. He got caught. I didn't.”

“How did you break out?”

Black shook his head. “It wasn't as hard as you'd think,” he said after a long silence. “Hard part is staying out.” He circled the rim of his drink with his forefinger, as if he could coax the glass to sing. “We were out about a month,” he said. “To be honest, I never thought we would make it that long. But we were careful, and after a month I started to believe we could really do it. Live off the grid. Be invisible. But when you don't have someone like me to help you, you have to rely on friends or scrupulous strangers. That's when you become vulnerable. We were sharing a dingy apartment when the cops found us. I narrowly escaped. Your dad didn't.”

“Billy,” she said.

“That's right.”

“I mean I never refer to him as my dad. Just Billy. Or Smooth. That name fits him, in a way.”

“Well, after he was caught, Smooth became my greatest vulnerability. He knew everything about the persona I took on after getting out. And, while I changed it again, there was just too much he could tell the police about me.” Black shrugged. “He knew all the details. Bank accounts we'd set up. E-mail addresses and online identities we were using. Names of people who we'd paid to help us. That kind of thing.”

“Couldn't you just change all that?”

“I did, but there was still a hell of a trace. I knew they would be leaning on him hard about me. Adding extra time to his sentence for escaping, then offering to reduce it for some nuggets of information about me. Hard not to be tempted by that. So I figured he was talking his head off, and I was in a panic trying to scrub my trail and build a new identity.” Black looked up at her and Hannah saw the welt on his forehead outlined in the dim light of the bar. “But the thing of it is,” he continued, “Smooth never talked. Never said a word about me. We weren't even great friends, and though we escaped together, I never felt comfortable trusting him. In fact, I was weak and probably trusted him too much. But he never said a word.”

That almost sounded noble. But Hannah knew Billy was anything but that.

“How did you know?”

“Peter,” he said. “The guy who works for me.”

“Yeah, you mentioned him,” she said. “The asshole who drugged me and stuffed me into a trunk.”

Black sighed. “He's the one. Well, Peter was with us in prison. We were close, probably the only real friend I had in there. He was doing a stint for securities fraud. Guy is smart as hell, by the way. Anyway, I told him about our plan to escape, but he didn't want any part of it. Didn't have much time left on his sentence, so it wasn't worth the risk to him. When he finally got out, I tracked him down to see if he wanted some contract work.
My client list was growing, and I needed someone who was good with overseas bank accounts, electronic transfers, that kind of thing. It was Peter who told me Smooth had been quiet the whole time. Hadn't said a word about me.”