THREE TIMES A LADY (23 page)

Still, there was nothing at all wrong with the way Dinah Leach
smelled
.  Not even close.  Her light and fruity perfume floated up into Nicholas’s nostrils and made him dizzy, sending a delicious wave of olfactory delight flooding through his system. 

Nicholas breathed in deeply and savoured her sweet smell, mentally handing it to her.  Even after all that frantic dancing, Dinah Leach still smelled like a brisk walk through a garden on a fresh spring day.

He leaned over and whispered into her ear.  ‘You smell absolutely
wonderful
, princess.’

Dinah Leach snapped her face over to him and pulled back her head on her shoulders.  Her bright green eyes locked onto his like heat-seeking missiles.  ‘Don’t waste your time, OK.  It’s not going to work.  I’m already spoken for.’

And with
that
decidedly rude comment, she simply turned on her heel and marched briskly out of the crowded bar, not even bothering to turn around to look back at him.  Smug, self-satisfied, completely sure of herself – that was Dinah Leach, all right.

Poor thing.  Who did she think she was
kidding
?

A hot jolt of anticipation rocketed through Nicholas’s veins as he watched the cocky slut saunter away, the urge to kill her even stronger now than it had been before.  More
insistent
.  Still, Nicholas was happy she wasn’t a
complete
wallflower.  Her bitchy attitude would only make it that much more enjoyable when the time finally came to kill her.  No guilt.  No worries.  Just good old-fashioned murder.

Just the way Annabeth Preston liked it.

‘Nice try, white boy.’

Nicholas turned in the direction of the deep voice coming from his left side.  The ‘O.G.’ from the dance floor, grinning like a fool, his mouth hanging wide open to display the ridiculous hardware flashing inside.

Nicholas lifted up his eyebrows on his forehead.  ‘Excuse me?’

The wannabe gangster shook his head and barked out a laugh.  ‘I seen you talkin’ to that bitch, dude.  You can just forget about it.  She belongs to
me
.’

‘Does she know that?’

The black guy widened his grin.  Not yet, but she’s about to find out.  Ya heard me?’

Nicholas frowned.  Looked like this guy had been watching Dinah Leach the entire time she’d been ordering her drink at the bar, too.  Had he been watching
Nicholas
, as well?  Probably not something he should leave up to chance at this point in the game.

Nicholas lifted the corners of his mouth into a smirk.  ‘Go get her, tiger,’ he said, knowing that you needed to show guys like this one that you weren’t afraid of them, much like you needed to do when confronting an aggressive dog.  Or was that
dawg
?  ‘She’s more your speed, anyway.  To me, she’s just a worthless whore.  Nice tits, though.’

The black guy widened his eyes.  For several long moments, it looked as though he might attack.  But when he saw the cold, dead look in Nicholas’s freezing green eyes, he immediately thought better of it.  Good thing for him, too. 

Instead of attacking him physically, the black guy simply flipped Nicholas the bird with both his middle fingers and followed Dinah Leach out of the crowded bar.  Fake bravado, of course, but at least he’d had sense enough to leave it at that.

Nicholas shook his head and cursed the inconvenience as he watched the black guy stalk his mark out of the crowded nightclub.  No matter how much time and effort you put into these sorts of things, murder was never an
easy
feat to accomplish.  Logistically, at least. 

Nicholas breathed in deeply.  No doubt the black guy with the ridiculous teeth in his mouth had a bit of nonconsensual sex with Dinah Leach out in the parking lot on his mind right about now.  It was the only way bullies like him ever got laid.  But that wasn’t happening.  Not tonight.  Not on Nicholas’s watch.  His mother wouldn’t have liked that one little bit.

Finally leaving the bar and trailing the black man toward the exit, Nicholas kept no more than fifteen feet behind him the entire way.  He rolled his neck on his shoulders to loosen up his muscles as he went, knowing he’d need to act fast.  This was it.  Show time.  Time to clear out this obstacle from his path so that the main festivities could finally get under way.  Grunt work, really.  Nonetheless, work that needed to be done.

Stepping outside the noisy bar a moment later, Nicholas saw that the wind had already started to pick up, blowing various bits of garbage and other debris around the surprisingly empty parking lot.  Little bits of dust kicked up into his face and stung his eyes, making them water profusely.  Still, Nicholas was
happy
to welcome the first signs of his accomplice.  From the look of things, Hurricane Allison was
definitely
on her way.

Reaching a blind spot around the corner of the building twenty seconds later, Nicholas picked up his pace and removed the .45 from the inside pocket of his Armani blazer.  Stopping less than a foot behind the black guy, he flicked off the safety and glanced around quickly to make sure no one was watching him.  Didn’t want an audience for this, after all.  Not yet, anyway.

Seeing that the coast was clear, Nicholas lifted the gun to the base of the black man’s skull and pulled the trigger once, somehow timing the action to perfectly coincide with a loud crash of thunder.

The ‘O.G.’ crumpled to the ground like a bag of dropped bricks, his backward-facing Atlanta Falcons baseball cap flying off his head as he tumbled to the ground.  Blood rushed out of his shattered skull and onto the blacktopped pavement, pooling at Nicholas’s feet.  Bits of white bone and gray brain matter sprayed onto the sidewalk in front of them.

Stepping over the shimmering pool, Nicholas leaned down to examine the lifeless body.  No need for a second shot, that much seemed clear.  The man was already deader than a doornail.

Putting away his gun, Nicholas checked his pulse by placing two fingers against his throat.  His heart rate hadn’t risen above a hundred the entire time he’d been killing the other man.  His hands were still steady; his palms still dry.  The evenness of his breath made even
him
wonder what had just happened.

Turning away and walking quickly back around the corner of the building, Nicholas caught one last glimpse of his quarry before she left the parking lot.  Fifty yards away, Dinah Leach was getting inside her silver BMW for her fifteen-minute drive home; blissfully unaware of the fact that Nicholas had just saved her from what most likely would have been a
very
brutal rape.  The self-absorbed moron was much too closed off in her own little world to notice anything going on around her.  Much too consumed with her own insignificant life, completely confident in the knowledge that nothing could ever hurt her.  After all, she was
famous
, right?

Nicholas pursed his lips as he watched Dinah Leach drive away into the darkness; happy she’d decided to leave the nightclub earlier than usual.  Normally, she’d have stayed out dancing until the early-morning hours, but tonight she was obviously in a big hurry to beat the storm home.

Nicholas closed his eyes and luxuriated in the feeling of the wind whipping through his hair.  For a moment, he almost felt
sorry
for Dinah Leach as the wind picked up even more and fluttered his perfectly tailoured Armani blazer around his trim waist.  No matter how hard you tried, though, you could never
really
beat the storm, could you?  Of course you couldn’t.  And Hurricane Allison was almost here now.  Nicholas could
sense
her; feel her soft breath on his cheek; the moistness of her saliva in the spitting rain.

And that was
very
bad news for Dinah Leach. 

Very bad news, indeed.

Tick, tick, tick…

Wheeling her silver BMW out of the parking lot of Johnny’s Hideaway, Dinah Leach leaned forward in her seat and squinted ahead into the darkness. 

The night was as pitch-black as a funeral veil, matching her foul mood perfectly.  According to the weather reports, Hurricane Allison was headed directly toward them now, and Dinah knew that she never should have been out in this kind of weather in the first place.  Not only was it unsafe, it was absolutely
pointless
.

Dinah flipped open her cellphone and hit the voice-activation feature.  If she needed to be miserable out here, she’d have some company for the ride.  And she knew
exactly
who to call.  ‘Call Derrick Coleman,’ she said.

The Motorola Droid went to work dialing the number of her agent, a smooth-talking, almost
heartbreakingly
handsome man she’d first met while they’d both been studying drama at Spellman College back in the late-1980s. 

Derrick answered his phone after five rings.  His deep voice boomed over the car speakers via Dinah’s BlueTooth setup.  ‘Dinah, baby!  What’s the good word, sweetheart?  What’s new and exciting in the life of my favourite reality-television star?  Tell me something good, girl.’

Dinah rolled her eyes but couldn’t fight back a smile despite her dark mood.  Derrick Chad been her agent for the past five years now and her friend for even longer – going on almost twenty years now, hard as
that
was to believe.  When they’d first met, both she and Derrick had been fresh-faced teenagers hell-bent on taking the world by storm – or at least taking it and fashioning it to suit their needs as well as they possibly could.  Sometimes it seemed to Dinah as though she’d
blinked
and half her life had passed her by.  ‘Can it, Derrick,’ Dinah said, still smiling.  ‘I don’t have time for any of your silver-tongued charm right now, playboy.  I’ve got a bone to pick with you.’

‘How big of a bone?’

‘Ever heard of a Tyrannosaurus Rex?’

Derrick laughed.  ‘Sounds like a pretty big bone.  What’s the problem, babe?’

Dinah let out a frustrated breath.  ‘The problem is that I don’t like going out every night like this, Derrick.  I don’t care if it’s good for my career or not.  It’s not natural.  I’m a
housewife
, for God’s sake.  It even says so right there in the name of my show: “The Real Housewives of Atlanta”.  But I’m never home long enough any more to actually
be
a housewife.  You’ve always got me running around like a chicken with its damn neck cut off.  I need a
break
.’

Dinah heard Derrick scribbling notes on his end of the line, no doubt finalising the details on yet
another
public appearance for her to make.  ‘I hear ya, babe,’ he said after a moment.  ‘But you know we’ve got to keep you in the public eye, don’t you?  It’s just the way these things work.  Out of sight, out of mind and all that.’

Dinah smirked.  She and Derrick had played this game ever since college and she
always
won.  Ever since they’d first met at Spellman, they’d tired to one-up each other with competing clichés that possessed exactly opposite meanings.  ‘How about absence makes the heart grow fonder?’ she asked.

‘She who hesitates is lost.’

‘Look before you leap.’

‘Strike while the iron is hot.’

‘A stitch in time saves nine.’

Derrick paused.  ‘Dead men don’t wear plaid?’

Dinah burst out laughing.  ‘I win,’ she said.  ‘
Again.
  I’d say that puts the all-time record at somewhere around a billion to one, wouldn’t you?  Anyway, what’s my schedule look like this week?  I haven’t seen Tyler in for ever now and I need some time with my man.’

‘Let me take a look here.’

While Derrick shuffled through some more papers, Dinah stretched her neck and thought of her husband.  Between Tyler’s job as the starting power forward for the Atlanta Hawks basketball team and Dinah’s
own
job on the reality television show, spending any quality time together these days sometimes seemed a virtual impossibility.  Dinah knew other couples had it worse than them and that she and Tyler needed to count their blessings, but she still couldn’t help resenting their busy schedules.  After all, what was the point of working so hard all the time if they couldn’t enjoy the fruits of their labour together every once in a while?

Derrick finally stopped shuffling papers on his end of the connection.  ‘You’ve got a book signing at Borders Tuesday, a speech to the rotary club in Roswell on Thursday and that cancer benefit thing at the children’s hospital on Friday.’ 

Derrick paused and cleared his throat.  ‘Speaking of that,’ he said, ‘are you
sure
you won’t let me alert the press to the fact that you’ll be appearing at the hospital, Dinah?  It would look really great to the public and up your rep with the bleeding-heart liberals.  Probably score you a few more fans for your Facebook page, too.’

Dinah shook her head and pulled the BMW onto the freeway just north of Buckhead as the skies opened up and rain began to pound against her windshield.  Flicking on the wipers to the most powerful setting made hardly any difference at all.  ‘No, Derrick,’ Dinah said, raising her voice now to be heard above the incessant whine of the wipers.  ‘I’m not trying to benefit from my charity work; you know that.  This is
personal
to me.’