THREE TIMES A LADY (29 page)

Nicholas turned his head to one side and spat out the sinful piece of flesh onto the floorboards of the back seat.  Then he wiped away blood from his mouth with the back of his left hand and smiled mischievously.  ‘Well, whaddya know?’ he said.  ‘I guess now you’re just like me.’

The limo driver’s face went ghost-white.  His hands trembled.  Cupping his shaking hands over his destroyed crotch, he tried desperately to staunch the sickening flow of blood.  His bloodshot eyes bulged wildly from their sockets, watering profusely from the agonising pain. 

Nicholas widened his smile and slid out the preloaded hypodermic needle from the waistband of his nylons.  He clucked his tongue.  ‘Oh, come on.  Quit being such a big baby.  Look at it this way: now we can share clothes.  If nothing else, it’ll save us both a whole hell of a lot of money.’

The man didn’t even
try
answering.  He was much too preoccupied with attending to his mutilated crotch.  Slipping the syringe deep into his throbbing jugular vein, Nicholas depressed the plunger.  ‘Just go to sleep now,’ he whispered, brushing the back of his hand against the man’s stubbled cheek.  ‘It’ll be so much easier for you this way.’

Ten seconds later, the man’s eyelids drooped and he slumped over. 

Feeling for the keys in the driver’s pocket, Nicholas extracted them and climbed up into the front seat before cranking the engine into life and wheeling the limo into a nearby alleyway before popping the trunk and moving the driver’s motionless body there.  If anybody happened to be watching them, they’d most likely think that Nicholas was taking care of a drunken pal.  A real angel of mercy – that was Nicholas, all right.

Just like his mother.

***

At precisely one a.m., Nicholas pulled the limousine up to the nightclub’s main entrance.  Thankfully, he’d managed to find the pickup time in the travel log tucked away inside the limousine’s glove compartment.  Thank God for the little things.

Ten long minutes passed before a path in the crowd finally cleared and Penelope Hargrave sashayed her way through the mass of humanity on both sides of the velvet ropes, still looking like the fifty million bucks she was worth despite the inclement weather.  Clearly accustomed to the popping flashbulbs of the paparazzi, the dumb whore smiled the same stupid smile she always smiled, luxuriating in the thoroughly undeserved adoration showered upon her by her adoring public.

A large Puerto Rican man dressed in a black tuxedo opened up the back door of the limousine for her and held it for the socialite as she stepped inside.  Looking up into the rearview mirror, Nicholas watched Penelope Hargrave immediately pour herself a drink from the fresh bottle of Black Label sitting in an ice bucket in the climate-controlled centre console. 

He stared up into the mirror at the socialite’s reflection, studying it closely.  Penelope Hargrave’s platinum blonde hair had obviously been dyed recently, probably at one of the finest salons in the entire city.  The heavy scent of her perfume permeated the entirety of the vehicle – perfume that had no doubt cost at least five hundred dollars an ounce.  The glittering diamond jewellery sparkling at her wrists and throat looked to be equal to the gross domestic product of most third-world countries. 

All in all, an
embarrassment
of riches.  

‘All alone tonight, miss?’ Nicholas asked.

Penelope Hargrave looked up into the mirror and locked stares with him.  She wrinkled up her face in disgust.  ‘Ugh,’ she said, leaning forward to activate the tinted window between them.  ‘Don’t talk to me, OK?  Just drive me home.  Isn’t that what you get paid to do?

Nicholas nodded as the window slid up with a faint electric whine.  ‘Yes, ma’am,’ he said.  ‘As a matter of fact, that’s
exactly
what I get paid to do.’

***

Forty minutes later, Penelope Hargrave’s naked body had been tied securely to the back seat of the limousine – spread-eagle, of course.  Each one of her bloodcurdling screams pierced Nicholas’s eardrums, threatening to make his brain explode inside his skull. 

Nicholas shook his head in disgust.  Only one way to shut the screeching bitch up.  Only one language she understood.

    Removing a huge wad of one-dollar bills from the pocket of his coat, Nicholas began stuffing them one-by-one down the socialite’s throat with the long, thin piece of metal he’d brought along for the ride. 

Penelope Hargrave’s beautiful face turned purple after just ten greenbacks.  Five more George Washingtons stopped her breathing altogether.

Pursing his painted lips in irritation, Nicholas cursed his rotten luck.  He’d brought along
a hundred
dollar bills with him tonight, had wanted to
enjoy
this a bit more.  And he had zero idea how he’d spend all the leftover loot.  A new purse, maybe.  Perhaps a manicure with Annabeth Preston.  Maybe they could make a mother-daughter day out of it. 

Half an hour later, Nicholas dumped Penelope Hargrave’s dead body into the alleyway two hundred yards away from her multi-million-dollar brownstone in the heart of Manhattan.  Just to make an artistic statement, he positioned her corpse next to the long row of dented silver trashcans.  After all, unlike Nicholas Preston, that’s
exactly
what Penelope Hargrave represented in this world, wasn’t it?  Trash?

Goddamn right, it was.  She’d been trash the day she’d been born – given nearly every imaginable advantage in life – and she remained trash to the day that she’d died in the back seat of a beautiful stretch limousine during one of the worst blizzards in the history of New York City. 

Trash.
  Nothing more and nothing less.

Just like the next name on Nicholas’s very special little list. 

Nicholas’s heart thumped wildly in his chest as he slid back behind the limousine’s steering wheel and cranked the engine into life before putting the long, sleek vehicle into gear and driving away into the storm-ravaged night.  Time for him to get back to work.

And once Nicholas had dumped the limo into the icy waters of the Hudson River in order to properly dispose of the driver’s unconscious body in the trunk, he’d attend to the pop singer out in Arkansas, Amber Knightly.

That was when things
really
ought to start getting interesting for him.

PERMANENT VACATION

‘Fort Myers Beach forms the tourist heart of Lee County, Florida.  Studies have shown that virtually every tourist who visits Lee County crosses the Matanzas Pass Bridge at least once during their stay on their way to a fun-filled day on the sun-soaked shore of Estero Island.’

 
waterfrontfortmyers.com.

Five months after her brutal rape in the parking lot of the Cuyahoga County Coroner’s Office in Cleveland, Ohio, Dana swiveled back and forth on her stool at the Smokin’ Oyster Bar on Fort Myers Beach in Southwest Florida and ordered up her fourth beer of the morning. 

The bartender twisted off the cap from an ice-cold Bud Light and slid it over with a smile.  He needed to shout to be heard clearly above the group of drunken tourists who were noisily punctuating the sounds of Neil Diamond’s
Sweet Caroline
on the jukebox over in the corner with the requisite ‘
bah-bah-bum!
’ 

Wiping up a puddle of spilled beer on the section of bar directly in front of Dana, the bartender yelled, ‘How’s your vacation going?’

Dana looked up at the man and gave him the once-over.  Different guy than the one who’d served her the first three longnecks of the morning.  About forty-five years old.  Longish salt-and-pepper hair.  Solid build.  A throwback hippie quality about him.

‘How’d you know I was on vacation?’ she shouted back.

The bartender waited for a pause in the music and winked.  ‘Tan lines,’ he said, then immediately moved farther down the crowded bar to attend to the group of rowdy bikers hollering for more shots.  Having picked their poison for the day, this particularly motley crew had settled in to do mortal combat with Jack Daniel’s – no beer chasers required.

Dana leaned back her head and took a long swallow of her beer as the bartender moved away, savouring the way the icy alcohol cut into the back of her throat.  A warm breeze blew gently through the tiki bar that featured no walls and a thatched roof, fluttering her short blonde hair around her head and keeping her from sweating like a pig. 

Even in March, the mercury had already reached eighty-five degrees in Southwest Florida, and thank God for that.  If nothing else, it was certainly a far cry from Cleveland, where the wintry weather hadn’t loosened its icy grip on the city one little bit since Dana had left.  Then again, Cleveland had always been a place where summertime never started until somewhere around mid-June.  A gloomy place where the skies that hung over Lake Erie remained gray and cloudy and pregnant with either rain or snow long after spring had officially sprung.

A place where Dana had lost her will to fight the good fight and had instead simply given up.

With her checkered past with the bottle, Dana knew there was no way in hell that she should have been drinking anything stronger than ice-water with a lemon twist, but they didn’t call alcoholism a disease for the simple fun of it.  The siren song of the booze had finally won her over again after all that useless fighting, dragging her down to the same sorry place she knew all too well.  The same sorry place she’d found herself following the deaths of Crawford Bell and Eric Carlton.  The same sorry place she’d promised herself she’d never visit again.

Dana closed her eyes and sighed.  Then she opened them up again and shrugged her shoulders.  Fuck it.  Lifting her beer bottle, she took another long drink and swished around the beer in her mouth. 

With everything Dana had gone through in her life she
deserved
a drink whenever she felt like it.  There was nothing for her to feel guilty about here.  Nothing over which she should feel remorse.  Those kinds of bullshit feelings were better left to the circle-jerk AA meetings she had zero intention of ever attending again.

Dana swiveled her barstool in a complete circle and idly peeled the label from her sweating beer bottle as the jukebox kicked over to Jimmy Buffet’s
Margaritaville
.  Another orgasmic cheer rose up from the tables full of tourists.

Tapping her foot in perfect time to the infectious island music, Dana swayed her butt in her seat, feeling at home here.  Fort Myers Beach was famous for having one of the safest beaches in the world, and if there was one thing she needed to feel right now, it was safe.  Down here in sunny Florida, the sugary-soft white sand reflected the sun’s heat so that you didn’t burn your feet on the way down to the warm water.  The bathwater surf had absolutely no riptide to speak of.  And the depth only dropped off a foot or two for every twenty yards you waded out. 

Down here, she didn’t need to worry about insane women wearing black dresses calling her out by name on autopsy videos before facilitating her horrific rape. 

The locals on Fort Myers Beach referred to their hometown as ‘paradise’, and Dana could understand why.  No hyperbole required.  As long as you could put up with the hurricanes that routinely ripped through the place like a bull in a china shop (and could ignore the flock of elderly snowbirds that flew down here each and winter before completely taking things over) it
was
paradise.  A place where you could get lost in the crowd and maybe – just maybe – find yourself again in the process.

Dana lifted her stare to the ceiling and studied the fairly new construction.  Though she’d missed the devastating effects of Hurricane Allison by half a year, you couldn’t tell by simply looking around the place.  Winds of up to ninety-five miles per hour and a storm-surge five feet above normal had done no real damage to the charming pink and blue cottages dotting the sandy shore.  The cleanup afterward had been little more than an afterthought, much like plowing snow off Interstate 90 back home in Cleveland following yet
another
lake-effect blizzard was an afterthought to the residents there.  And why not?  There were some things in this life that you simply needed to do.  You didn’t bitch about them.  You didn’t whine about them.  You didn’t complain about them.  You just
did
them.  And if you didn’t, you’d find yourself snowed in until April or enjoying warm sea breezes through several windows in your home that the architect had never intended to exist.

Dana took another long swallow of her beer and swiveled in her bar stool a little more, wishing like hell that the alcohol would hurry the fuck up already and drown her painful memories like the crying infants in a bathtub she knew them to be. 

Shortly after her brutal rape in the parking lot of the coroner’s office back home in Cleveland, Dana had received the devastating news that little Bradley had been adopted out to another family.  The domestic court judge and the June Cleaver clone who’d taken the little boy in
seemed
like nice enough people to her.  Real stand-up folks, as a matter of fact.  Honest-to-God pillars of the community.  In addition to his duties overseeing a section of the legal system dealing with traffic offences in Westlake, Bradley’s new father served as a lector at the Assemblies of God Baptist church in Rocky River.  The little boy’s new mother ran the PTA.  Their four-bedroom house overlooked a tranquil lake stocked with steelhead trout, looking positively
idyllic
to Dana every time she’d driven past.