Violets & Violence (7 page)

Lunch with heavy-weighters like Bill Thomason normally involved a lot of nodding and chuckling at bad jokes, followed by the occasional inquiry for more information. That happened in roughly ninety percent of lunches like these, but this afternoon had been different right from the start.

Biting down into my eleven dollar club sandwich while Bill cut into his thirty-four dollar fillet, he said something that piqued my interest. “Glad you enjoyed that stray ticket.”

I gave a curious frown, even though I was aware that he meant Violet’s show. “Stray ticket?”

“I think Violet has exceptional talent,” he went on. And then he popped a chunk of medium rare meat into his mouth. Even with his jaw chomping down, his choice of lunch topic sparked my imagination. “It’s really not magic, Carter. It’s all an illusion.” More cutting.
Nice choice of words, Bill.

“Yes, I really enjoyed the show,” I admitted, smiling the way any polite person would. “Even all alone, it was a blast.” I frowned, inches from biting down into my club sandwich. “Say, do you happen to know Violet personally?”
You know I was called up on that stage, don’t you?

He shook his head. “Not so much Violet, but her manager, Luke. I spent a bit of time with him a few months before the act moved out of Buffalo. Golf, boating, a bunch of fun stuff.” He chuckled at some of the memories, then shook his head. “At the end of it, he hit me up for a hundred for the act.”

“A hundred
thousand
?” I asked, surprised by this.

He shrugged. “Not uncommon, Carter. He dragged her out here to one of my fundraisers, and her little act helped me raise way more than I expected. We were all impressed. The way Luke propositioned it, I couldn’t exactly say no to him.”

I kept eating, pretending like this information had no personal relevance to me. In many ways, it didn’t – no, it
shouldn’t.
But after what happened with my ex, I tended to overthink things like this. That rug under my feet could get pulled out any second now.

“That’s how I got the tickets,” Bill went on. “I invested in Violet to bring her to Detroit, and now I have six other sets of tickets, all of them except yours was paired up.” He studied me with his poker eyes for a minute before going back to his fillet. “So if you want any, you know, for your other clients, or yourself and a lady, just let me know and they’re yours.”

I grinned because the only
lady
I would take on a date happened to be the lady in the show. I deliberated sharing that news with Bill –
that’s what you’re wondering, isn’t it, Bill, whether I’m still sad and alone? –
but decided against it. “Actually, Bill, I could really use some Tigers tickets.”

He laughed. “Good one, Carter, they don’t start ball again until next year.”

I tore a bite out of my sandwich, embarrassed about asking such a stupid question. The World Series finals were starting later this week, it had been all over the papers and news. I kept eating because I didn’t think Bill would appreciate a facepalm.

“Tell you what,” Bill offered, keeping his voice low and giving me an insider’s wink. “I’ve got some good ice-level seats for the Red Wings on Friday night if you want those.”

Of course, Violet had to work Friday night. Not that she would’ve enjoyed the Red Wings game to begin with. It was
her
show, and if she didn’t show up, then there would be no show. She would have nothing. So I had given the Red Wings tickets to another client as a show of appreciation and decided I would hang out at the Fisher and watch Violet work her magic. Literally.

I paid for a single ticket at the box office and waited in the reception area, nursing a sparkling water and deliberating on sending Violet a text to let her know I had come to watch her perform tonight.

The place was getting packed, and I sensed the anticipation. People had heard about this sexy young woman and the tricks she could pull. I wanted to correct each one of them that referred to her magic as “tricks.”

She wasn’t a whore.

At last, I sent my text:

Good luck tonight. I’ll be watching.

I didn’t have to wait long for a response.

Thank you. I’ll look for you.

Grinning, I tapped out a quick reply.

Want to grab a drink after the show?

The lights began to dim, indicating that it was time to head to our seats. I pocketed the phone and followed the rest of the crowd. I was just part of the herd heading toward the back of the theater, one of the worst seats. Not only were the good seats priced in the hundreds of dollars, but none had been available.

I checked my phone one last time before the house lights darkened and found a quick, curt response.

Can’t see you again until next week. Sorry.

Heat rose in my cheeks, the kind that normally accompanied humiliation and heartbreak.

Is that the rug being pulled out? Violet disappearing through that trapdoor?

It wasn’t so much the words themselves as the emotion that accompanied them. I read her text a couple more times before the theater faded completely to black, then locked the screen and pocketed the phone.

At first, I blamed my reaction on paranoia, on some kind of silly fear that I was about to lose something important to me again, a relationship that existed only in my head. After failing at my marriage and losing someone I loved to a guy that I could never compete with, I worried that Violet could become arbitrarily bored with me as well. She
had
mentioned that magical women could make men drop out of the sky, and I had been too stubborn to call or text. This whole time, I had been right to have these fears, because it wasn’t paranoia, it was foresight.

She had no reason to keep trying with me.

Disappointed, I settled back into my seat and watched the stage, the lights flooding into the theater with the snap of a gun. There was nothing to see until she appeared under the blinking of strobe lights, on the coattails of dramatic music, and in Cat Woman tights, the sexiest riding boots ever sold, and a mask that stirred arousal.

Violet. Oh, my sweet and sexy Violet.

I sat straighter and focused on her greyish-green eyes. Notwithstanding the distance, it was physically impossible for her to find me among all these people here in the dark Fisher, just as I could not have seen that mark at the top of her nose or known whether those eyes were more grey or more green right now.

But then I noticed it.

No, not the freckle, not the eye color. Something different, something severe that didn’t appear so much in her behavior or mannerisms, but in
who
she was. Even from this distance, I noticed this sharp edge to her.

This woman was not the Violet I found myself falling for.

It’s been an act, this entire time.

A little discouraged by this new side to her, this almost abrasive version of Violet that shared no similarities with the one who had cooked for me earlier in the week, I sat back and tried to enjoy the show. It wasn’t until the end when she disappeared on the stage—this time, she stepped into a human-sized potato bag before the violets dropped her into a tall, upright glass tank of water. After a couple of minutes of stillness within the tank, one of the four volunteers from the audience used a ladder that the violets had provided to open the lid at the top of the tank and pull out what was essentially an empty potato sack.

Whoa.

But then Violet reappeared four rows ahead of me.

I thought I caught a glimpse of the woman who had kissed me the way nobody else ever had.
It’s because she’s closer to you now, you can see those soft edges, the lips you kissed, the body you held against yours.

At this distance, I convinced myself that I could
feel
her energy.

Everyone rose to their feet, applauding and offering a well-deserved standing ovation to the soaking wet woman that had disappeared from the water tank and reappeared in thin air, four rows up. In response, Violet climbed onto her chair and turned around to wave at the people who were stuck right at the very back of the theater, the people like me.

And her eyes
did
find mine, even behind that sexy mask. The hazel locked onto my face, and it seemed that her perfect smile brightened a notch before she tore her attention away and waved at the others in the back of the theater.

The audience loved her – younger women screamed and squealed; men waved their arms in an attempt to grab her attention – and then she jumped down from the theater seat and ran to the stage, taking her bow like she always did and then disappearing in a puff of smoke, likely via a trap door on the stage.

The lights came up after an extended, heartfelt ovation, and the crowd started to leave.

But not me. I stuck around, walking to the front of the theater and sitting down in one of those front rows, trying to find the seat I had occupied the first time I had been at the Fisher to see Violet’s show.

Outside of big investors like Bill Thomason, I didn’t know who else had access to these front rows. Were there others that Violet’s manager had convinced to donate money to the show? How many? And why? I had seen her house. Was it through those kinds of solicitous donations that she could afford such luxuries? It seemed wrong to me, some kind of fraud.

When the cleaning crew arrived with their brooms and mops and cleaning equipment, they told me it was time to leave. I checked my phone, no message from Violet, so I typed a quick one.

I’m in the theater…quick kiss before you go?

I wanted that kiss, and I thought she would’ve known that when our eyes had locked during her finale.

Sorry, I’m already on my way to the airport. Going to NYC overnight. Chat tomorrow?

“Sir?” one of the cleaners said.

I pocketed the phone without responding and started walking up the aisle toward the exit.

“Thank you,” a different worker said as I left.

I couldn’t help but wonder what she would be doing in New York overnight. She had a show tomorrow, an early morning rehearsal.

Maybe, I considered, it wasn’t a matter of
what
she was doing at all…

Early Saturday morning, somewhere between one and one-thirty a.m., I opened my eyes and saw violet. It started as the color – everything in my vision blurred with a tint of violet – but then morphed into Violet, the woman, the magician in the sick, tight outfit she would’ve worn for the show last night.

Seeing her lifted my spirits, but then I noticed that she wasn’t moving. She was standing still, death-still, in front of the folding table, a red ribbon stretching across her knees with the words
Live Tonight at the Imperial!
in exciting, bold print.

It was then that I realized she wasn’t real. Not my favorite girl.

Rinker laughed as he leaned out from behind the cardboard cut-out. His laughter had a chilling quality to it, but I remained emotionless, unmoving so as to not reveal just how desperate I had become. I knew him, I
saw
him, and I found satisfaction in his face as he watched the hope wash out of my body.

Then I closed my eyes and fell asleep, finding a quick and violent dream on the backside of my eyelids. In that dream, I had pinned Lindsey down on the cold floor, my hands holding her wrists above her head. Her face twisted and it wasn’t until I realized we were naked that I understood I wasn’t hurting her. That look on her face didn’t belong to agony; I was feeding her the kind of pleasure, or sweet agony, she had not yet known. Her head was thrashing from side to side as I pounded into her, each thrust making her wetter.

“Harder!” she demanded, and I obeyed.

I fucked her harder until her muscles contracted around my rigid shaft, and she screamed.

Suddenly, my eyes shot open and, again, I saw violet.

As the color bled from my vision, I spotted the sadistic grin on Rinker’s face behind the table. He rose and approached me on this annoying cross, this stage prop that had become my home for the past nine days. That look on his face told me things were not ending today. He wanted to know what I had done with the money that he had paid Edie all those years ago. And I wanted to tell him. I was ready to tell him.

Once he was close enough, Rinker whiffed at the air. He allowed a disgusted grin to twist his wrinkled old face.

“The money, Luke,” he said. “That’s all it will take.”

“You won’t believe me,” I told him, and I realized I hadn’t fucked Lindsey in my dream because I liked her; I fucked her because I hated
him
.

“Maybe. Maybe not. But like I’ve always told you, you never know until you try.” He patted my ribs in gentle, open-handed swats that were meant to highlight just how thin I had become during my stay underneath the Imperial’s stage. He frowned as his hands found the waist of my pants, a pair of 501’s that Violet had given me for raising the money to get her into the Fisher. It had been a step up from Buffalo, which had been a step up from Cleveland, which had been a step up from the shows at Penn State, each step taking us a little farther from New York City and closer to Las Vegas.

“You’re not turning homo on me, are you, Rinker?” I asked. My words came out slurred, even to my own ears, an indication of just how weak I had become in his care. My body, yes – swollen feet, shoulders that had little feeling left in them from being suspended like this, a headache that had become a sad fact of daily life, the grime on my teeth, the filth inside my pants – but not my mind.

He shook his head, still fascinated with the waist of my pants. “The money, Luke. Tell me about the money so we can all go home, hmm?”

I blinked, opened my eyes and stared again at the cardboard cut-out of Violet. She looked straight back at me, the cold version, the one that stayed out late and crept back into bed in the morning before my alarm woke me because she didn’t think I would notice. And I would not have noticed, I never would have because I never had a reason to wake up earlier than normal.

Propped up on the cross, I allowed my eyes to close, the world fading around me.

Tired. So fucking tired.

“What do you think I did?” I said, more slurred words as I flexed my leg muscles to try to stay awake.

The
click-clack
of his hard-soled shoes as he walked to the table rushed back to me in the shape of an airplane as I allowed my eyes to close again, allowed my mind to escort me into a dream. We were banking hard to the right, the ground speeding toward us as the pilot lost control and the aircraft flipped us upside down. I reached for my seatbelt, hoping to free myself, as if doing so could save my life, but my arms were locked to the sides, I was unable to move as the flash of white light burned across my body on impact.

My body jolted awake, and the entire cross on which I hung wobbled, or seemed to. I saw that Violet’s cutout had moved a little closer to me, maybe three or four feet away from me now. And instead of Rinker sitting at the table, Lindsey was standing at the door leading to the dark stairwell. She had stopped because I had apparently made a noise when I snapped awake from my nightmare.

“Where is he?” I mumbled.

She swiveled away from the door and walked closer to me, her face turned upward in a grin. “Pardon me, Luke?”

“Rinker,” I mumbled. “Where is he?”

She stopped a safe distance away; apparently, she found my thinning corpse, dangling from this stage prop, threatening for some stupid reason.

“I’m sorry,” I told her, then choked out a dry sob. “I did this to you.”

Dehydrated and starving like this, I didn’t have much else to offer except the apology. Nor did she have much to offer me, except for that studious stare.

“I told him your address,” I said, I blurted. “I followed you and that moment when we shared that exchange, I made a choice. To give you up or warn you away. I chose wrong. I saw how you looked at me.”

Nothing.

“I… I gave it up, all of your information. It’s how he found you. That day at the park. And you’re still here, still with him. I’m sorry.”

Still nothing.

I dug deeper. “Gourmet macaroni with cheese,” I blurted, dropping my head and closing my eyes. I knew it sounded arbitrary, insane, something inspired by delusion. It wasn’t. There was a mop in the corner, parked next to a faucet with both hot and cold water. There was a bucket, a table and chair that folded, a fork and a knife in the lunch box, a rope and this wooden cross with belts holding me up off the ground by my shoulders. Industrial cleaner that could melt the skin off your face.

Weapons, depending on just how you desperate you were.

And then, of course, there were words. They were my greatest weapons.

“The mole,” I whispered. “In the crevice between your leg and pubic bone.”

I not only heard her step closer, but I heard her heart skip a beat. Such little things provided me with a much-needed boost of energy. She slapped the side of my face to wake me. She had stepped closer, close enough that I could bite her nose off if I wanted.

“Luke,” she begged. “Luke!”

I raised my attention and stared past her. I saw the cutout again, Violet’s eyes peering into me. She didn’t look happy about my conversation with this young woman. I refocused on Lindsey, who looked even less happy. But unlike the cutout, Lindsey smelled clean, good. Really good.

“How do you know all of this?” she asked, her face twisting.

I shook my head. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, Lindsey.”

She frowned, slapped the sides of my face again as if to knock a bit of logic back into me. “You mentioned it, my mole. Focus, Luke. Focus.”

“Don’t trust him,” I said. “You can’t trust him.”

At last, she stepped back into her safety zone. I couldn’t bite her now, no matter how hard I might try.

“Don’t trust him,” I repeated, then dropped my attention again, closing my eyes and seeking the sleep that would not come.

I heard Lindsey moving about the small room a little frantically, settling behind that folding table, getting up and pacing again, then moving the cardboard cutout a little closer. They were messing with my head, I realized. It was working, yet it was also failing because they weren’t professionals at this kind of thing.

Lindsey stepped up to me and said something that turned my blood to ice. She had come so close that I could smell her again, that pretty scent that reminded me of a life I had left behind, a life of one woman and the sex and the happiness and her love.

“She’s coming to New York,” Lindsey whispered, her lips less than an inch from my ear. “And he’s going to kill her for what you did.”

Later that day, when I opened my eyes, the cardboard cutout had been placed so close to my face that I nearly jumped out of my skin. If I leaned forward and stretched my tongue, I could taste her face.  No, not
her
face, but the cardboard replica’s face. In a few more days, it would be two weeks ago that I had disappeared. Of course Violet would come to New York, of course she would look for me. She knew about the Imperial.

Fuck, fuck, fuck. Would Rinker really kill her?

              I shifted gears, changed plans.

“Good morning,” Rinker said from his perch at the table. I couldn’t see him because of how close he had placed the Violet cutout, but I knew he was lying. If it were morning, he’d have said
good afternoon
; if it were afternoon, he’d have said
good evening
, and so on. He’d been fucking with me like that this entire time. “Ready to tell me about the money?”

“You won’t believe me,” I said, my voice loud and mumbling-ish, enough that he would question my sanity.

“Try me, Mr. Kemble.” Back to calling me Mr. Kemble, so I naturally wondered if he had already captured my Violet, everything pure and beautiful and worth living for. I heard his chair push out from the table, its legs scratching the concrete floor with an annoyance that reminded me of fingernails on a chalkboard. A nice distraction tactic, I realized. And then his hard-soled shoes
click-clacked
until they stopped, at which point he moved the cutout of Violet off to the side.

“I can’t,” I whispered, hanging my head.

His fingers and thumb clamped down hard on my nose and pulled my face up so that I could look at him, right in the eyes. This man worked at a bank—or he
had
worked at a bank; who knew what he did now—with a calculator and computer with spreadsheets and numbers. He wasn’t Al Qaida, he wasn’t even Mark Wahlberg in
Pain and Gain
. He was Rinker.

“Start talking,” he hissed. This man with soft hands and manicured fingernails didn’t have the stomach for the kind of operation he proposed here. Not even two weeks in and he seemed ready for a steak dinner and gourmet mac and cheese already. “Hmm?”

“Invested,” I admitted, then dropped my head and started shaking it again.

“In
what
?” he demanded, then took a good, solid swing at my head with a closed fist. I remembered the early days when his fists carried something of a tickling effect. Not so today. I blamed that on my weakened body.

“The technology,” I slurred.

He sighed, his face stoic. Like maybe he had always suspected as much, but he just needed to hear it. It didn’t happen that everyday people would risk their lives for a few strings of powerful computer code. But I had taken that risk, so had Violet. Violet and me, we had risked it all.

“Now what?” I asked. I tried to sound as normal as possible, and my voice had the desired effect. “Happy?”

Rinker shook his head, faked a smile, and walked back to the table where he’d spent so much time sitting and waiting. “Now we wait.”

“Wait for what?”

“For Violet.”

I started laughing. So hard that I could barely breathe. I watched Rinker’s aging face turn red, but he didn’t leave the table or return to me. He didn’t act out. He did nothing at all. Maybe I had underestimated him.

He remained quiet and simply watched me, unflinching and unimpressed. Those rosy cheeks looked peaceful, like the old days.

Utterly unimpressed
, Violet would’ve said.

And just as I began to calm down and accept that he was not going to “bite,” he did exactly what I hadn’t expected. He asked, “What the hell do you find so amusing here, hmm?”