Hard Candy

'Just before…'

'That's not too late.'

I lit another cigarette, biting deep into the filter, cupping the match to give my eyes a rest from Lily. 'She didn't have to die,' I said.

'You think it was your fault?'

'It was my fault.'

'She was with you? In your life?'

I nodded.

'Then she knew…'

I nodded again.

'Burke, listen to me, okay? Some pain's not supposed to go away. That's the price. That's what it costs to remember her.'

'Aren't you going to tell me to remember the good times?'

Lily's voice was sweet and quiet, but it made you listen. Honey-in-the-rock. 'We all know you're a hard man, Burke. If it works so well for you, why did you come here?'

'Nothing works all the time.'

'What does that mean?'

'I played all my cards, Lily.'

'Then do what you do best.'

My eyes flicked up to her face, watching.

'Steal some more,' she said, a Madonna's smile so faint I couldn't be sure it was ever there.

69

A PLANE CAN run on automatic pilot, but it hits the ground when it runs out of fuel. Nothing was pushing me. I needed to get back to where I was before. Before Belle. The sands shifted- I couldn't find my own footprints. Throwing antacid tablets into a cauldron of boiling lye. Stealing and scamming didn't bring me any closer. Everything worked. The money kept coming in but there was no payoff.

Even Wesley's fear-jolts wouldn't jump-start my battery.

Dead and gone. Dead and gone.

I called Candy.

70

SHE ANSWERED the door, left me there while she walked away. I knew her this time, even with the blond wig and the violet contact lenses. Much taller in four-inch spikes, ankle straps lancing across the seams that ran down the back of her dark silk stockings. She was wearing a wool minidress in some metallic green color, a heavy black chain around her waist as a belt. Swinging the long end of the chain in one hand, a leopard twitching her tail. Waiting.

I walked as far as the couch, flicking the ashes off my cigarette in the general direction of the ashtray on the end table. She twirled, hands on her hips. 'Sit down.'

I didn't like the sound. 'Don't make a mistake,' I told her. 'I'm not the trick who just left.'

A smile blazed across her face. Perfect teeth, as real as the violet eyes. A sociopath's smile. A woman smiles at you…for you…it's like a rheostat…comes on slow until it hits full boost. Little tiny increments. Different every time. Hers was an on-off switch. She came to me, tilted her seamless face up to mine, tried to bring some feeling into those cash-register eyes, wet her lips. 'I'm sorry, baby. I was teasing. Some men like to be teased. I just want to talk your language. Whatever that is.'

'Donde esta el dinero?' I said. Thinking of Wolfe. The beautiful prosecutor sitting in her office, a killer Rottweiler at her feet, my rap sheet spread out in front of her. 'John Burke, Maxwell Burke, Robert Burke, Juan Burke…Juan? Say something in Spanish, Mr. Burke.' I sang my theme song for her.

Wolfe got it when I said it. Candy lived it. 'I promised you a couple of things. You sure you only want the cash?'

'Yeah.'

She curled up on the couch, her legs beneath her. I sat next to her, not too close. Her lacquered fingernails played with the buttons on the front of her dress. Opened one. Then another. The black lace bra stopped just above her nipples. 'A lot sweeter than when you last saw them, huh? When we were kids. Remember?'

What's real? Candy wasn't a woman before the surgeons did their work. And Michelle, the most woman I'd ever met, even with the spare parts they threw in as a dirty joke.

'I never saw them when we were kids,' I told her.

It was the truth. Foreplay was for people with money. People who had doors you could close. Elephants don't fuck the way rabbits do. Predator pressure sets the rhythm.

'You want to see them now?'

'No.'

She shifted her hips, moved against me, face in my chest. 'Pretend you just got out of prison,' she whispered. 'You could do all the things you dreamed about every night.'

Her perfume was thick, with a sharp underbase, like it came from inside her body. The last couple of times I got out of prison, I knew where to go. What to do. But the first time out… it was like she said.

I tossed my duffel bag on the bed in the cheap hotel and hit the street. I needed a gun. And a cabdriver who wouldn't get a tip. But first things first. The skinny whore in the screaming-red dress was waiting in a doorway a block from the hotel. Dishwater blond, hard-boned face, yellowish teeth, blue-veined hands, two bracelets on her narrow wrist, junkie's eyes. She was probably young and plump and dumb and sassy when she got off the bus from West Virginia.

'You wanna have a party, honey?'

I looked at her face.

'Ten and two, baby. I french, I do it all…come on.'

I felt the street. Every doorway had one like her.

She knew it too. 'It might as well be me, mister.'

Another hotel. Two dollars to the clerk. No register to sign. I followed her up the stairs to the second floor. She put the key in her purse, left it open, waiting. I handed her the ten bucks. Peeling wall-paper, swaybacked single bed against one wall, bare mattress. She took a yellowed sheet from the top of a pile on a straight-backed chair, flicked it open, covered the bed. She never turned on the light. Street-neon washed against the streaked window. She pulled the paper shade down. Reached down to the hemline, pulled the cheap dress over her head. Dark elastic garters at the top of her stockings, joyless little breasts in the dim light.

'You want something special, honey? A little half 'n' half?'

No need.

'Let me look at you, baby. Milk it down for you one time, okay? Can't be gettin' burned; I got me a big habit to support.' Reaching over to me, her thumb hard against the underside of my cock. 'You all ready to go, huh, baby? I like a man all ready to go. You ain't no kid all charged up on beer, huh?'

Yes and No.

She fell back on the bed, still holding me in one hand, tied us together, rocked back to the base of her spine, grabbed her knees. 'Come here, baby. It's riding time.'

It didn't take long.

This. Fucking. Nothing.

'I DIDN'T just get out of prison,' I told her.