Hard-Boiled Immortal (The Immortal Chronicles) (3 page)

“Hey sweetheart, you sure you’re in the right place?” asked the guy nearest t
he door.  I didn’t know him by name, but he looked like the kind of customer you didn’t want to meet in a dark place.

“
Ain’t you sweet for askin’?” she said with a glorious smile, touching his cheek.  “I’m lookin’ for a little guy, kinda bookish, glasses, goes by Al.  You seen ‘im?”

“Over here, Lu-Lu,” Al said.  He
leaned up on the edge of the bar and waved her over, while the patrons between him and the door tried to come to grips with the unlikeliness of this couple.

“Yeah, there he is,” the man at
the door said, pointing.  “Hey!  Make way for the lady!”

“Thanks, sweetie,” she said.  I’m pretty s
ure he blushed, but it was tough to tell with the lighting.

Al
grabbed my arm.  “Hey, Rock, didn’t I say?  She’s something, huh?”

“That’s how I’d put it,
buddy.  Something else, all right.”

A space was mad
e for her at the bar next to Al once Vinnie stepped aside, with something approaching reverence in his eyes.  Lucy waltzed down the middle of the parted room looking like royalty walking through the courtyard in Versailles, and somehow everyone in this crappy little hole felt like they were in that French court with her.  You’d think a girl who looked like that would feel threatened in a place like this, but nobody dared touch nobility without asking. 

When she reached Al she kissed him on the check, and held her hand out to me.

“You must be Rocky,” she said.  I shook her hand.

“
That’s what they call me.”

“Pleasure.  Heard a lot.”

“Me too.  Looks like Al might’ve done you a disservice.”

Al said, “Hey!”

“You need a bigger vocabulary to go with that big brain,” I said.  “
Lots
of girls are beautiful.  You’re gonna have to find a better word than that.”

“
Awww, you’re a charmer.  You didn’t tell me he was a charmer, Al.”

“I didn’t know he was!”

“I’d kill for a beer, Rocky baby,” she said.  “And hey, can anybody offer the lady a smoke?”

*   *   *

Lucy picked up three marriage proposals—one from someone I was pretty sure was already married—and started two fights I had to break up personally, since I was the only guy there who was technically an on-duty employee.  (There were other bartenders. Most nights the only way to tell which of us was working was to see who was standing behind the bar.)  She also never went more than two seconds without a beer in front of her, a cigarette, or a light for that cigarette.  When she had to excuse herself to freshen up in the ladies room I think a couple of fellas ran in ahead of her and cleaned the place.

The attention
his girl was getting didn’t bother Al in the least.  He seemed flattered by the idea that of all the mooks there, this hot little number was on his arm.  He also didn’t mind that for all the attention she was getting and giving out, the thing she was most interested in doing was talking to me.

“So no last name?” she asked at one point.  “Just Rocky.”

“Never had much care for last names,” I said, although the truth was I never gave “Rocky” one.  It took a while before I got around to picking full names for myself.

“Everyone’s got one,
” she insisted.

“Yeah?  What’s yours?”

“Mine’s Smith.  Lucy Smith.”

“Smith.  Popular name.”

“Oh yeah.  I come from a long line of Smiths.”

“I’m sure you do.”  I didn’t think she came from a long line of anything
with a family connection.

“B
ig burly craftsmen, like these fellas here.  Liked to get their hands dirty.  Do you like to get your hands dirty, Rocky?”

“
Depends on the work,” I said.  “And who I’m doing it for.”

She winked at me, as if we’d shared a secret.  We hadn’t, so far as I knew, but maybe she was coming to an un
derstanding about me that wasn’t entirely warranted, all by herself.  People make assumptions about me all the time that are only wrong because they don’t have
been alive forever
as one of their options.

Or m
aybe we
had
shared something and I missed it.  I’d been sipping the cheap vodka straight from the bottle all night, which nobody much minded since nobody else was going to touch the vodka anyway.  (We mostly used it to stretch the bourbon.)  This made it a little hard to keep my head around Lucy, since every wink and smile and gentle touch of her hand on my wrist made me want to giggle stupidly.  Knowing what she was helped me keep my head a little, but only a little, because as long as I knew that I also knew she was only as monogamous as the situation warranted.

When she wasn’t talking to me she was chatting up all the other regulars, whic
h was a distraction all its own since when she and I weren’t talking I felt something like jealousy.  I tried to get close enough to figure out what she was saying to the other guys, but it was too tough because after all I was working.  I only picked up a word or two.  She seemed really interested in what everyone did for a living and what their full names were, two details that only seemed weird to ask for after the fact.

Closing
down the bar that night was tough.  I wasn’t allowed to keep the place open all night, but if I had been we probably could have gone on until sunrise so long as Lucy and Al stuck around for it.  They might have been up for that too, as they were the last ones to leave.

“
Gotta take my sweetie home, Rock,” Al said as I walked them to the door. 

“It was a pleasure, Rocky,” Lucy said, extending her hand.  That my first instinct was to bow and kiss her
wrist was something I kept to myself.  “I hope we meet again soon.”

“Bring her back, Al,” I said.  “I’m sure the gang would love it.”

Al laughed.  “Oh, I’m sure.  But I think maybe you were right.  She belongs in a higher class place, huh?  I’ve got to treat her right.”

He led her out.  As she walked past me I could have sworn I caught another wink.

*   *   *

Cleaning the bar was a couple of hours’ worth of work, and I spent all of it thinking about Lucy, and those men that turned up with papers for Al to sign.

It seemed to me if he was in some kind of trouble for saying too much to someone, the first person I’d check on would be the much-too-attractive girlfriend who could convince men to walk into traffic for her.  That should have been good news for the bartender he’d sworn to secrecy, because I’m not nearly as persuasive.

Somehow, thinking about it like that didn’t make me feel any better.  If anything, meeting Lucy had me even more worried.  I just couldn’t figure out why.

Cleaning the bar mainly involved rinsing the glassware and getting the trash out to the dumpster in back.  I could have swept and wiped down all the tables but nobody much cared if I bothered.  The place was covered in a thick layer of nicotine from the constant cloud of cigarette smoke lingering in the air just below the ceiling, and had reached some sort of irreversible unsanitary threshold long before I’d started working there.  Nothing I did was going to change that.  So when I was finished with the basic picking-up and scrubbing, and after coming to no firm conclusions regarding my friend’s girl, I put out the lights and headed in back to clean myself up and call it a night.

A
couple of minutes later, just as I was about ready to retire to the cot in the corner of the storage room, I got the sense I was not entirely alone.

I popped my head out into t
he bar again, and looked around.  It was darker than during business hours, but one light near the door was always left on.

“Hello?” I asked.
  “Anybody there?”

“
Hiya, Rocky.”

Lucy had
taken up the darkest corner of the barroom, but I didn’t need to see her to know who I was talking to.  I’d say it was the perfume, or the tenor of her voice, and that could’ve been true, but I think I was sort of expecting her.

“Evening, Lucy.  Little late for you, isn’t it?”  I
walked out and stepped behind the bar.  A match lit up her corner of the place, shining a little light on a beautiful pair of legs and a taller set of heels than she’d been wearing earlier.  She sucked her cigarette to life.

“By now I’d say it’s a little early.”

“True enough.  How’d you get in, if you don’t mind my asking?  Seeing as how you’re trespassing right now.”

“Would you believe the door was unlocked?”

“I’m the fella that locked it, so no.”

“Then you did a lousy job.  Buy a girl a drink?”

I pulled out a bottle I’d been hiding under the counter.  It was a top shelf whiskey that was so top shelf the shelf it belonged on was in a different bar.  I put out two shot glasses.

Lucy unraveled her legs and walked over, from
no lighting to poor lighting.

The heels were four inches.  The legs were without stockings.  She had on a trench coat that stopped somewhere north of mid-calf, belted at the waist.  And it was really tough to te
ll for sure because the light only touched her in quick flashes, but I was pretty positive she didn’t have on anything under the coat. 

She
was all kinds of dangerous.  I should have turned around and run out the back door.  Instead, I poured two shots.

“You don’t seem surprised to see me,” she said.

“I’m good at spotting trouble, sweetheart,” I said with all the bravado I could muster. By the way, we really did talk like this back then.

She held the shot glass up in the light to examine the amber contents.  “Is that what I am, Rocky?”

I took the second glass, and together we downed our shots. 

“
All sorts of trouble,” I said, as the whiskey burned its way down my throat.

She put down her glass.  “Ooh, tickles.  You saved me the good stuff.
Hope I didn’t keep you waiting too long.”

“I’ve been waiting for someone like you for years,” I said.  It was a good line
, I thought.  I refilled the glasses.  “Now you’re here and I’m not sure if I should be sticking around or running away as fast as I can.”

She pouted.  “Please don’t run
, it is so hard to keep up in these shoes.”

I stepped around the bar, which wasn’t much work since we were at the corner of it anyway.  Standing next to her, we were almost eye-to-eye, thanks to those heels she had on. 
Her green eyes sucked me right in. 

“What do you want, Lucy?” I asked.

She smiled, took her second shot, and slapped the glass on the table.  “It’s not obvious?”

She stepped
closer, her hip touching mine, the smell of the top shelf whiskey mixing with cigarette smoke on her breath. 

There was nowhere to look that didn’
t involve a piece of her.  I could fall apart when looking into her eyes, but when I looked down it was straight into a bosom that shouldn’t have been that perfect without something propping it up.  My left hand was on her thigh and working up and under the coat, and it didn’t appear I had any control over that.

The touch of my hand made her
tremble, and somehow find a way to get even closer.  We were practically in each other’s clothes.  I reached for the belt of her coat, and hesitated there.

“Go on.
”

I was about to.  It would have been the easiest thing, and there was a large—and growing larger—part of me that was ready to lose everything for this girl.  But I knew something wasn’t right. 
“No,” I said, sounding a lot less sure of myself than I wanted to.  “How about first you tell me what you
really
want?”

 
My hand came off the belt and found the shot glass, alcohol being just about the only thing on Earth than can trump a beautiful woman for me.  I removed my other hand from her thigh, stepped back and downed my shot.

Lucy spun
away from me, and it
did
feel like a spell being broken.  Like I said, I could understand the idea of magic when it came to a succubus. 

She took a drag of her cigarette.
 

“You
ain’t like most guys, are you Rocky?”

She
grabbed the whiskey bottle by the neck and took a pull, which was maybe the sexiest thing she’d done all night.  When she lifted her arm to drink the coat rose up nearly enough to show me everything she wasn’t wearing under there.

“I’m not like most guys, no. 
You sure aren’t like most girls.”

“Well thank you.”

She slid onto one of the stools, her legs parting on the way up into the seat, and I caught a glimpse of everything, because I was looking.  She didn’t bother to cross those legs, because she knew I was looking.