Waitress Wanted (Kit Tolliver #5) (The Kit Tolliver Stories) (2 page)

He’d need her working noon to eight, he told her. He opened at 6:30 for breakfast, but his sister helped him out mornings. Maybe she might like to get there a little earlier tomorrow, he suggested. So they could go over some things together before the lunch crowd showed up. Say eleven?

Back at the hotel, she didn’t shower right away. Her room had two beds, and she stripped and got in one of them and pulled the covers all the way up, trapping his smell. She breathed it in while she touched herself, giving her fantasies free rein, holding herself back from the edge, then finally allowing herself the release of orgasm.

She’d have showered afterward, but sleep took her by surprise, and she slept deeply until dawn and woke up ravenous. She’d made herself a sandwich midway through her shift, but had gone to bed without supper. First, though, she needed that shower.

But was there any point? In a matter of hours she’d be smelling of him all over again.

She took the shower anyway. Nothing lasted, so why expect a shower to endure?

In a sense, the effects of the shower were gone by the time she got dressed. She put on the same skirt and blouse she’d worn the day before, not wanting to get his scent on a second outfit. She’d wear the same clothes, even if it meant walking around all morning with that musky odor on her, and after it was over she’d throw everything out.

Should she check out now? Take her bag to the bus station, stash it in a locker? That would get her out of town faster, but you couldn’t always find those coin-operated lockers. They’d been disappearing for awhile now, to thwart dope dealers. And, she supposed, terrorists.

So should she take the suitcase to the diner? Or would that be suspicious? He might see it and think she was leaving town.

And if he did? Like, so what? It’s not as though the prospect of her imminent departure would make him any less eager to fuck her.

So that would work. She’d bring the bag along, stash it in the kitchen. And during the slow time before the lunch crowd showed up, she’d go in back and let him do what he wanted. And then she’d do what
she
wanted, and she’d retrieve her bag and be out the door with the
CLOSED
sign hanging in the window.

With his smell all over her.

She’d need the room so she could shower and change. And she could afford to pay for a second night, but it went against the grain. She picked up the phone, rang the front desk, asked about a late checkout.

No problem, Ms. Perkins. Two o’clock all right?

Perfect, she said, and went out for breakfast.

She knew she didn’t want to eat at the diner, but she had to walk past it to get to the other nearby restaurants, and that gave her a chance for a look at Steve’s putative sister. The woman she saw through the window, carrying plates of eggs and bacon as if she’d been doing this since childhood, was short and stocky and dark-complected, with black hair and thick eyebrows. So she certainly might have been a sister, but she hadn’t believed it when he said it and was no more inclined to believe it now. She’d bet anything this beauty queen was Steve’s wife.

She walked on, found a place to eat with better lighting and a reassuring commitment to hygiene. She settled into a booth with a copy of the morning paper, ate a big breakfast, and drank two cups of coffee.

And smelled him on her clothes.

“Right on time,” he said.

There were two customers in the place, and one of them was the same man he’d run off the night before. Did the old fart live here? He looked to be wearing the same clothes, too—a forest-green work shirt worn through at one elbow, with a pair of baggy trousers that must have started life as the bottom half of a business suit.

Well, what else did she expect? She hadn’t changed her outfit, and neither, she was unsurprised to see, had Steve. Classy joint, the Stavro’s Diner. Everybody wears the same clothes forever, and nobody bathes, and they all smell about the same. Be a shame to say goodbye to a place like this.

And damned if Steve didn’t run the old boy off again, and the shrunken blue-haired woman at the corner table along with him. “Gotta close for a few minutes,” he told them. “Gotta go over a thing or two with Carol here.”

He ushered them out. And bolted the door, and fixed the sign. And, with a wolfish grin, beckoned her to the kitchen.

It smelled of eggs and grease and bacon, and of course of Steve himself. His hand cupped her shoulder and turned her toward him, and she hoped he wouldn’t kiss her. Some hookers, she knew, drew the line at kissing, objecting to it because it was somehow too intimate to be available for a price. She had never minded kissing men regardless of what she might have planned for them, and her objection now was purely aesthetic; she didn’t want to kiss him because she found him revolting.

But she definitely wanted to fuck him. He might disgust her, but he also turned her on something fierce.

His hands, clumsy but confident, touched and patted and stroked and squeezed. She realized with some relief that he was no more interested in kissing than she was. Maybe it was an intimacy he reserved for his wife, maybe he didn’t like to kiss a woman without a moustache.

And then, as she had fantasized earlier, he turned her around and pushed her face down toward the counter. It was topped with a butcher-block cutting board, and she smelled blood and meat, along with the musky sweat smell, the Steve smell.

He pulled up her skirt, bunched it around her hips, then reached to lower her panties. They fell to her ankles, and she would have stepped out of them but she couldn’t because he was holding her by the hips.

She thought,
Greek foreplay. Brace yourself, Athena!
And then he was inside her.

She had to wait at the bus station for an hour and ten minutes, and tried to will the time to pass and the bus to come. She wasn’t anxious about the time it was taking, because it would be hours before the authorities found out about Steve. She’d found a set of keys on a peg by the entrance to the kitchen, and one of them fit the outer door. With the lights out and the door locked, and the
CLOSED
sign already in place, there was every chance that nobody would find him before morning.

As it was, she’d missed the bus to Tucson by less than ten minutes. She could have been on it with time to spare if she hadn’t insisted on spending a full half hour in the shower, soaping and rinsing and soaping and rinsing.
I’m gonna wash that man right out of my hair—
the song ran through her mind as she used up Marriott’s entire mini-bottle of shampoo. It left her hair smelling of orange and ginger, and wasn’t that an improvement on
eau de Stavros
?

And now she was dressed in clean clothes from head to toe, and a plastic bag on the bench beside her held everything she’d been wearing: skirt, blouse, panties, socks, even her shoes. And it was the bag and its contents that made her wish the bus would come, because the plastic was no barrier to that godawful smell.

There was a trash receptacle in her line of sight, and the impulse to drop the clothes into it was almost irresistible.
Bad idea
, she told herself, over and over. There were bloodstains on her skirt and blouse, and she could imagine what trace evidence her shoes and panties would yield. Not that an investigating officer would need a microscope, or any of the battery of tools they used on
C.S.I.
The sniff test would be plenty for anyone who’d ever been within ten yards of Steve, living or dead.

The bus would take her north, to Flagstaff. She’d stay there long enough to get rid of the bag of dirty clothes, then take another bus and get across a state line or two. She could take buses all the way to her ultimate destination, but Chicago was a long ways off, and by the time she got there she’d need a long shower just to get rid of her own smell.

Crazy the way she couldn’t stop thinking about smells. Gross, really.

She thought about Chicago, and Graham Weider. Of the four living members of her personal alumni association, he had to be the softest target. He was one of two whose full name she knew, and the other, Alvin Kirkaby, was a infantryman on his way to Iraq when their paths crossed. Maybe he’d been killed over there. Maybe he was still there, on another tour of duty, or maybe his unit had been dispatched to Afghanistan. Or maybe he’d lived and returned home, wherever home might be. She didn’t know where he hailed from, and couldn’t guess where he might be now.

She’d met Graham Weider in New York, where he bought her a good lunch before taking her back to his hotel room. They had a quickie, the details of which had long since faded from her mind, and arranged to meet later for a good dinner, to be followed by a not-so-quickie. When he didn’t show up, she went back to his hotel, where he’d left a note at the desk.
Sorry, business meeting necessitated immediate departure. Rushing to airport and flight to L.A. Call me, love to see you again.

And there’d been a phone number, but she had neither called it nor kept it. At the time she felt a little regret at having failed to close the books on Graham Weider, but not so much that she was going to hop on a plane and hunt him down. It hadn’t seemed all that important.

It did now.