The Last Whisper in the Dark: A Novel (7 page)

“What happened?” I asked. “What have I been doing? What have I been saying?”

“You called me, remember?”

I shook my head and it hurt like hell.

“You got beaten up pretty bad. You passed out in your car. You’ve got a couple of bruised ribs, I think. They might be fractured but you said no hospital. You were in agony and starting to go out of your head so I gave you a couple of Percocet for the pain.”

“Why’d you use that shampoo?”

The question made her tilt her chin. The dripping shag fell across her face in a way that made me want her more and also made me want to run. “You seemed obsessed with it. You were holding on to that bag with a death grip. I thought it might relax you.”

She angled the shower head and rinsed us off. I said, “You might want to get out. I need it cold. If my eyes close up I’ll be useless.”

“It’s okay, I won’t throw myself at you again. If you don’t want it, that’s fine, just say so.”

She stepped out and I shut off the hot water, then stood there beneath the freezing needles trying to center myself again.

Number five. The expression on the face of the beautiful lady who saved you as you spurned her adoring advances.

I climbed out. She was still drying off. She held the towel open for me the way a mother waits to dry her kid off at the beach. She patted me down carefully, avoiding the worst bruises. She opened the medicine cabinet and got out a roll of tape. The pain meds kept me from bellowing while she tightly bound the ribs on the right side.

I checked the damage in the mirror. “Holy Christ.”

“It’s not that bad. Here.” She taped up my nose, my ear, and my right eyebrow. My eyes were already going black. The cold water had helped a little but not enough. I looked monstrous and couldn’t believe she’d touched me in any kind of an erotic manner. She appraised
her work. “I don’t think you need stitches but you should keep the tape on for a couple of days at least.”

“You’ve been to nursing school too?”

“Close enough. The husband I told you about, who liked to drink? He had small, fast hands.”

Perhaps as much as a quarter millionre couple of I knew I should apologize for calling her. I’d taken advantage of her. I’d possibly gotten her involved in some real trouble. The crew might still be on my ass and parked right outside. There was no point in checking, I still wouldn’t be able to spot them.

I tied a towel around my waist. She wrapped one around her hair and slid into a robe. I tried to read her eyes but my vision was hazy from the beating and the pills made me loose without relaxing me.

She led me to the bedroom, which was stacked with books in every free inch except where there were overstuffed bags and bins of yarn. My clothes were in a pile on the floor.

“Which sells better?” I asked. “The yarn or the books?”

She let out a short sigh that smelled faintly of mint. “Why are you asking me that question now?”

“I have no idea.”

“You’re stoned on the Percs, aren’t you.”

“I think I’m a little stoned on the Percs, yes.”

Getting stoned only seemed to drive up my curiosity. I still didn’t understand the store, or why she was interested in playing the role of a semiprostitute, and whether she was looking to become a real working girl or if it was all a sex game, and whether I was going to have to pay before the day was out or not. I stared at her and her beauty worked its magic on me, and I was full of need and want again, and the loneliness burned through me like diesel. I had a head full of bad wiring. She sat on the bed and looked up at me expectantly. I had sixty bucks in my wallet. The crew hadn’t mugged me. I hoped she wouldn’t cost more than that, but then again, if I was going to spend time with a call girl, I’d want her to be a high-priced call girl. It
was only reasonable. You had to have standards. I could always rob her next-door neighbors. The Percs and the pain were making me goofy.

She said, “Are you sure you didn’t mean to ask if I wanted to go to bed with you?”

“Maybe that was it. I think that was it, Darla.”

She stretched out across the mattress and her robe slid open at the knee exposing her leg and thigh. I’d just been in the shower with her naked but somehow the curve of her knee did something to me now and my pulse started going haywire. My side throbbed like hell but only distantly, like a drum beating on some faraway ridge.

With one quick motion she drew the towel off her head and tossed it away. She shook out her hair and stared provocatively at me through the disheveled clumps.

It reminded me of that night at the Elbow Room. She sat there just out of arm’s reach, the same way as she had at the bar, drawing all attention. The smoky amused eyes were full of expectation. She’d saved me. I knew I’d have to pay her back. She wasn’t a woman who did things for free or for righteous reasons. She was as bad as me in her own way, and I wondered how much she was going to hurt me in the end.

Darla held her hand out to me. I took it and she drew me forward. I dropped on the mattress beside her and caught a glimpse of the clock on the nightstand. It was noon. I was still very aware that Gramp needed his meds by dinnertime. My father too, probably. My heart sank thinking of my old man losing himself in our house, unable to remember my voice or my mother’s face. I imagined JFK lurching out from beneath the kitchen table, and my old man talking gibberish to him.
Hi doggie
.Perhaps as much as a quarter millionre couple of

Darla said, “Stay with me. Concentrate.”

“I’m trying.”

“Try harder.”

We kissed and my torn lips hurt but not much, and the kiss turned into something more, and she moaned beneath me. I nuzzled the area beneath her ear because it’s the spot that Kimmy liked me to nestle in. Darla shirked out of her robe and said, “Terrier.” Her heavy breasts swayed as she turned over, urging me, and I moved to her and Kimmy’s name was loud in my head, thinking of her.

Terrier, I’m pregnant
.

Darla and I made a fast, angry love, full of loss and necessity, and with a cruel understanding that we weren’t helping each other much, but just enough for now. It was the sort of brutal sex that hurt, and not necessarily in a good way. We were both driven to prove something to ourselves and each other, and in the end all we demonstrated was how selfish and forsaken we were. I wondered if she could actually be a new love. I wondered if she would, somehow, manage to slip the blade between my ribs and at last destroy me.

I lay there panting with her arm thrown over my belly, her face against my throat. She was smiling. I wasn’t. The pain was pushing through. She said, “That was nice.” It wasn’t. I told her, “Thank you, I needed that.” I did. I knew that when my Alzheimer’s hit this interlude would be one of the first memories to go.

Darla put her robe back on, left for a few minutes, and returned with tea, some finger foods, and another Percocet. I ate and slurped down the tea without tasting any of it. I popped the pill. She sat beside me, leaving a few inches between us that felt as deep and wide as the valleys of the moon.

“I don’t want you to think I was taking advantage of you,” she said.

Strange, but there it was. “You didn’t. You were very giving. Thank you for helping me.”

She nodded at that. “So you want to be with me. You’re not just here because you misdialed.”

“No.”

“Was it because you simply needed somebody? Anybody?”

It was an honest question, and I didn’t have an honest answer. Apologizing wouldn’t help. Fucking her again wouldn’t help. I didn’t know why I’d phoned her. Calling my father would have made more sense. Or Wes.

“I was battered,” I said.

“Yes, you were.”

The pill started to take effect. My head got lighter. I started to drift. I held my hand out to her and she took it. “I’m sorry if you feel like I used you.”

“I don’t feel that way at all. I was glad I could help you, and let me say that you helped me just as much. We made love and you were sweet and shy and careful. It’s been a long time since a man, any man, made me feel so warm and right. I’m just wondering why.”

“Why?”

“Why you went to such lengths to show such intimacy. I knew you were different. But you said you were worse. You didn’t act worse.”

“Did you really want me to be?”

“I’m not certain. I think I might have initially. MPerhaps as much as a quarter millionre couple of y feelings about such things are … complicated. Even more so after my divorce.”

I wasn’t sure what she was saying. I was pretty certain she didn’t know herself. I wanted to be a proper sounding board and come up with insightful discourse. I wanted to assure her I would never hurt her, except I couldn’t, and she wouldn’t want to hear it anyway.

“That’s what I’m investigating,” she said, “those impulses, by doing this.”

“Oh.”

“Don’t look so shocked.”

“I’m not.”

“Then don’t look it.”

I tried not to look it. I didn’t know how not to look it, so I made an effort to wipe all expression from my face. It hurt. The tape tugged.

“There’s a lot of bad people out there,” I said. “I think you shouldn’t go looking for them.”

I thought she was too good for the life, if that’s what she was in, but I didn’t know why. I didn’t know anything about her. I thought maybe I wanted to. A hundred questions were backed up inside me, but the Percocet wouldn’t let me get to them.

I found myself on my feet and Darla whispered, “Come back to bed.”

I did as I was told.

“I’m not sure I like it,” she said, glancing down at my chest. She traced the borders of my dog tattoo, which took up the entire left side of my chest. It covered three bad scars including the one from where my father had yanked out my busted rib. “It’s garish, but beautiful, in its own way. Speaking from a purely aesthetic viewpoint.” She let the pause hang there for a full three count before adding, “Of course.”

I wasn’t sure what other point of view you could have besides an aesthetic one when discussing a tattoo, but I was sort of out of it.

She let her fingers roam along the bandages, snarling in the runway of hair leading down to my belly button. She pressed her knuckles into the scar tissue, hissing a little as if the wounds were fresh and she was the one feeling the pain. Everywhere else hurt, but not the scars. They were barely visible beneath the deep black ink of a howling dog. Darla stroked me, stroking the dog’s head.

Her robe fell open. She rolled closer. I slid against her and tightened my jaws. She said, “You’re one of those guys who likes to be in love when you do it.”

“I suppose I am.”

“Don’t fall in love with me.”

“I probably won’t, but it’s a weird thing to tell somebody.”

“I know, but you’re the type to fall hard and get hurt.”

“If you haven’t noticed, I get hurt just fine all by myself.”

I expected a titter at least, but she didn’t even crack a smile. “Aren’t you going to tell me not to fall in love with you?”

“I might if there was any chance of that.”

“There’s always a chance.”

The pain had grown muted. The Percs did their job. Darla’s touch became more insi Intimate Clinical Strength Antiperspirant and Deodorant Advanced Lady Solid Speed Stick, Light and Fresh pH-Balanced. h Mstent. She moaned and said my name again. For the first time I liked the way she said it. We clasped and grappled. I squawked when I twisted the wrong way. Or maybe it was the right way.

She kept murmuring beneath her breath, “It’s all right,” trying to comfort me or simply commenting on my performance. I wondered if she’d picked up any of the beaten-down bastards at the Elbow Room after I’d skipped. As I nipped her shoulder I couldn’t help looking past her, searching out signs of male spoor. I was somehow remorseful and jealous at the same time.

Darla whimpered, “Yes.”

Our second tussle was brief and full of a sort of blunt affection that wore away into sharpness.

Afterward, her breathing steadied and deepened and soon she was asleep. I checked the clock and the numbers melted together. When they came back into focus two hours had passed. Darla was still sleeping.

A small alcove turned out to be a stand-up kitchen. I found ice in the fridge and dumped it in the bathroom sink and soaked my face. The bruises were turning funky colors already. My nose wasn’t broken. The tape job to my side was holding my ribs in nicely.

I called Chub. He answered with a formal
“Wright’s Garage,” a lilt of laughter hanging there like somebody in the room had just finished a joke.

“It’s me.”

The second he heard my voice he disconnected. The Percs kept me steady. I tried again and it went straight through to voice mail.

I said, “This is serious. Call me back.”

I waited two minutes, then drove over to the garage. I pulled up and parked next to his ’64 Shelby Cobra 289 Roadster, another classic muscle car he’d restored himself. I stepped into the first bay">“No,” I saidplas and watched the three mechanics he had working for him under the hoods of three different cars. They didn’t know anything about Chub’s other career. He’d always managed to keep his lives separate. I’d tried that for five years and had still fouled it up.

Chub stood in his office, staring through the front window with a faraway look in his eye. I opened the door and stepped inside.

I could clearly see the outline of a blade in his back pocket. It wasn’t much considering how much firepower the crew carried, but it must’ve given him some sense of safety. It was stupid of him to carry anything except an automatic with a hair trigger on his hip.

If the knife was for me, that was another matter.

He sat down, his feet up on his desk. I said his name and sat across the desk from him. He nodded but didn’t divert his gaze. The last time we’d met like this we’d at least shaken hands. I could feel the heavy tidal drag of resentment straining around us.

“Keep it short. What do you want, Terry?”

“To warn you off of the latest crew you’ve been dealing with.”

He shifted in his seat a little but that was it. The vehicle in the nearest bay started up, sputtering and popping badly until the mechanic fixed the timing chain. The car quieted and finally hummed.