Heartsick (45 page)

He had already betrayed Debbie utterly. Why not this, too? “Yes.”

She pulled her hands from his and sat back. “Let me see it.”

He knew what she meant, and hesitated only briefly before reaching up and slowly unbuttoning his shirt. Then, when it was open, he pulled the shirt apart so she could see his ravaged torso.

She leaned forward over the table, her knees on her chair, perched on her elbows on the table, so she could see. He didn’t move, didn’t flinch, as she reached forward and ran her fingertip over the heart she had carved on him. But he wondered if she could see the pulse in his neck quicken. He could smell her hair. Not like lilacs anymore, some industrial prison shampoo, harsh and fruity. She moved her fingers to the vertical scar that divided his chest, and Archie felt the muscles in his stomach, and lower, tense.

“Is this from the esophageal surgery?” she asked.

He nodded.

Then the fingers danced to the midline scar that divided his lower torso.

“This isn’t my incision.”

He cleared his throat. “They had to open me up again. There was a little bleeding.”

She nodded and moved her fingers over the smaller scars now, from the X-Acto knife she had used to doodle on him. Her fingers traced the half-moon scars along his scapula, then across his nipples, then down to the hash-mark scars in the tender skin of his flank. It had been more than two years since he’d been touched. He was afraid to move. Afraid of what? That she’d stop? He closed his eyes. He would give himself this one brief moment of pleasure. What could it hurt? It felt good. And he hadn’t felt good in longer than he could remember. Her fingers skated lower. Blood rushed to his groin. She was unfastening his belt now.
Fuck.
He opened his eyes and grabbed one of her hands by the wrist and held it there.

She looked up, eyes shining, cheeks pink. “You don’t have to pretend to be good with me, Archie.”

He held her hand there, centimeters from his hard-on.

“I can make you feel better,” she said. “Just let my wrist go. No one has to know.”

But he held on to her. Every cell in his body begged him to let her touch him. But what was left of his mind knew that if he did, it would be the last thing, that she would have some last part of him. It would be over. She would own him entirely. She was amazingly good. She could torture him without even touching him. He laughed at that, and pushed her hands away.

“What’s funny?” she asked.

He shook his head. “You’ve done one hell of a job fucking me up,” he said. He got the pillbox from his pants pocket, opened it, and dumped a handful of pills into his hand. Then he popped them into his mouth one at a time and swallowed them.

“You’re already high,” Gretchen noted.

“Careful,” Archie said. “You sound like Debbie.”

“You have to watch the pills. The acetaminophen will kill you. Do your kidneys hurt yet?”

“Sometimes.”

“If you experience fever, jaundice, or vomiting, you need to get to an emergency room before your liver gives out. Are you drinking?”

“I’m fine, sweetheart,” Archie said.

“There are easier ways to kill yourself. I’ll do it for you.” She caught his eye. “If you bring me a razor.”

“Yeah,” he said with a sigh. “You’d kill me, and the first three guards who came in after me. Don’t let my erection confuse you. I still know what you are.”

She reached out and touched his face. Her hand was warm and gentle, and he turned into it almost by instinct. “Poor Archie,” she said. “I’m just getting started with you.”

She really was beautiful, Archie thought through his pill haze. There was something delicate about her. The luminous skin. The perfect features. Sometimes he could fool himself into thinking that she was almost human. He turned his cheek, and her hand fell away. “How many men like Reston do you have out there?” he asked. “How many time bombs?”

Gretchen leaned back in her chair and smiled. “Including you?”

Archie felt the room slip around him. “You had it planned all along. To call nine one one. To save me. To turn yourself in.”

“If you lived,” Gretchen said matter-of-factly. “If you had died, I would have dismembered and buried you.”

It was hot in the room. Archie felt the moist burn of sweat under his clothes. Gretchen looked cool and calm. Maybe it was just the pills. He cracked his neck and wiped the sweat off his upper lip. He could feel the heart scar throb under his shirt, his real heart beating underneath it. “It was a good plan,” he managed. He planted his hands on the table and stood. “Except that I’m not like Reston and the jackasses you got to murder for you. I know what you’re capable of.” He looked around the room, the cinder-block tomb they met in every week. She had manipulated him again and again. They had manipulated each other. But he had one power. The card she thought he wouldn’t play. “You made one other miscalculation,” he said. “You got yourself locked up.” He raised an eyebrow and lifted his hands off the table. “And you can’t fuck with me if I’m not here.”

Gretchen was unimpressed. “You’ll stay away a few weeks. But you’ll need the bodies.” She tilted her head at him and smiled, radiant. “You’ll need me.”

Probably
, Archie thought. “Maybe,” he said.

She shook her head sympathetically. “It’s too late. You won’t feel better.”

Archie laughed. “I don’t need to feel better,” he said. His tone turned cold. “I just need you to feel worse.”

She leaned forward, her blond hair brushing her shoulders. “You’ll still dream about me. You won’t be able to touch another woman without thinking of me.”

He put a hand back on the table and lifted the other to his throbbing temple. “Please, Gretchen.”

She smiled wickedly. “You’ll think about me tonight, won’t you?” she said. “When you’re all alone in the dark. Your cock in your hand.”

Archie hung his head for a moment. And then he laughed to himself, looked up, and walked around the table to her. She glanced up, surprised, as he stood over her and reached out and touched her hair, the blond slick beneath his fingers. She started to speak and he put a finger on her mouth and he said quietly, “You don’t get to talk yet.” And he cupped her face in his hands and leaned down and he kissed her. He moved one hand behind her neck in her hair as their tongues met, the heat of the kiss momentarily overwhelming him. In that kiss he could taste the bitter pills, the salt of his own sweat, and in her mouth a sweetness almost like lilacs. He had to force himself to disentangle his fingers from her hair, wrench himself away, his lips moving from her mouth, across her smooth cheek, finding her ear. “I think about you every night,” he whispered.

Then he straightened up and he said, “It’s over.”

He hit the buzzer by the door with the heel of his fist. The door opened and he walked through it.

“Wait,” she said, her voice faltering.

His heart was pounding in his chest, the taste of the kiss still in his mouth. It took everything he had not to look back.

CHAPTER

51

A
rchie was sitting
at the coffee table, studying his cab receipts wondering how he was going to explain them, when the doorbell rang. He hadn’t slept. His blood felt thick and warm, his brain muddy. He looked, he thought, even worse than normal. He half-expected to find a reporter at his door, a TV camera, microphones. But in his heart, he knew that it would be Debbie. He hoped it would be her.

“You caught him,” she said when he opened the door. She was dressed for work: a gray skirt and a fitted black turtleneck under her long double-breasted coat. They were almost the same clothes she’d been wearing that last morning he’d seen her, two years ago, that day he’d gone to Gretchen’s house alone.

“Come in,” he said.

She moved past him, pausing a few feet inside to look around the living room. She had only been at his apartment a few times. She tried to act as if his sad little residence didn’t depress her, but he could see it in her eyes. She turned back to face him. “The news said that there was a hostage situation. With that reporter. That you went in.”

Archie closed the door. “It wasn’t that dangerous. He would have killed her before he killed me.”

She stepped forward, cupping his face with her hands. “Are you okay?”

He didn’t know how to answer the question. So he avoided it. “Do you want some coffee?”

She let her hands drop. “Archie.”

“I’m sorry,” he said, rubbing his eyes. “I haven’t slept.”

She took off her coat and laid it on the back of the beige recliner. Then she walked to the sofa and sat down. “Sit with me,” she said.

He sank down beside her and rested his head in his hands. He wanted to tell her, but he was afraid to say it out loud. “I’m going to try to stop seeing her,” he said.

Debbie closed her eyes for a moment. When she opened them, they were shining with tears. “Thank God,” she said. She kicked off her shoes and curled her legs up on the sofa.

Rain slapped against the living room window.
So much for the forecast
, Archie thought. The pillbox was on the coffee table. It had been a gift from Debbie. The day they’d let him out of the hospital.

“I think you should come home,” Debbie said. “Just for a few days,” she added quickly. “You can sleep in the guest room. It would be good for the kids.” And then, looking around, she added, “I don’t like to think of you in this terrible apartment.”

Archie leaned forward, picked up the pillbox, and placed it on his palm. It was a pretty little thing. The kid upstairs was awake. Archie could hear her scamper from her bedroom into the living room, squealing. Then a TV came on. The kid did a little jig above their heads as the bright, loud voices of cartoon characters filled the room.

Debbie sighed and the air seemed to catch in her throat. “What is it about us that makes it so hard for you?”

Archie felt all the pain and guilt he kept so carefully tranquilized begin to burn in his stomach. How could he even begin to explain? “It’s complicated.”

She laid a hand on his, covering the pillbox. “Come home.”

He let their faces into his mind then. Debbie, Ben, Sara. His beautiful family. What had he done? “Okay.”

Debbie’s eyebrows shot up, disbelieving. “Really?”

He nodded a few times, trying to convince himself that this was the right thing, that it wouldn’t just make things worse for everyone. “I need to sleep. Then go into work. I can get Henry to drive me out tonight. He’d love it. He thinks I’m going to kill myself.”

Debbie touched the back of his neck. “Are you?”

Archie considered this. “I don’t think so.”

The kid began to dance again, stamping her feet, jumping. The pounding of her feet echoed through Archie’s apartment.

Debbie glanced up at the white popcorn ceiling. “What’s that sound?” she asked.

Archie was tired. His eyes burned and his head felt heavy. He leaned back on the sofa and closed his eyes. “The kid upstairs,” he said.

He felt Debbie rest her head on his shoulder. “It sounds like home.”

He smiled. “I know.”

Yes. He could give up Gretchen. He could do that. He could move home and rebuild his family. Maybe keep the task force together, as a special-crimes unit. He could even cut back on the pills. He could try. One last go at salvation. Not for himself. Not for his family. But because if he could do it, he’d win. And Gretchen would lose.