We wound up at Target instead of Payless. I waited in the car with my knees tucked up under my chin while Malloy went in. I watched normal people going in and out with kids and bags, all living normal lives in which nobody had ever really hurt them. I hated them for being so clueless, like I used to be.
When Malloy came out he had twice as many shopping bags as I’d expected. When I looked at what he’d bought, I felt the same sort of baffled wonder I had experienced over the morning coffee.
The first shopping bag he handed me contained items that were plainer and cheaper, but otherwise identical to the outfit I had been wearing the last time I saw him, a pair of low-rise jeans and a black tank top. But instead of the high-heeled boots I had been wearing that day, he’d bought me a pair of sleek black athletic shoes. He’d also included a utilitarian black fleece hoodie, since it was October and the weather was drifting toward cool at night. Another smaller bag contained two black thongs, a black bra and a package of black cotton socks. The bra was the correct size, but Malloy had chosen a more modest, unpadded style, rather than my usual cleavage enhancing push-up in-your-face variety. It didn’t matter. I was amazed by his flawless memory for detail. The sizes were all perfect. I didn’t think the last six men who’d actually touched my breasts could have guessed my bra size at gunpoint, but this man I barely knew remembered how I took my coffee and the exact style of jeans I like. I snuck a glance over at Malloy as he handed me a bag of travel-sized toiletries. He looked the same, deadpan and squinting against the morning sun as he lit another cigarette. I wondered if maybe I was starting to develop a bit of a crush on him. Or maybe it was just some dumb girly thing about being rescued. Either way, I found myself suddenly speculating about what it might be like with him. I wondered if he would crack open and get wild in the sack, or if he would do the deed with the same quiet determination as everything else he did.
I think he might have sensed my impure thoughts, but if he did, he chose not to comment. He just fished a pair of black sunglasses out of one of the bags, tore off the tag and told me to put them on. I felt suddenly embarrassed, hyperaware of my ugly, beat-up face and dumpy dress.
“Thanks,” I said quietly, slipping on the sunglasses.
“You’re welcome,” he replied and pulled out of the lot.
Malloy wanted to rent a car, something generic and forgettable, just to be on the safe side. He transferred all the shopping bags and a roomy green gym bag from his own SUV into the little rented Kia Rio. Then as soon as we were out of the rental place, Malloy pulled into a big supermarket parking lot and swiftly snagged the license plates off a crappy little Honda not unlike my hated Civic, stashing the Kia’s legit plates in the gym bag. I thought he was being kind of paranoid, but of course it turned out he was right.
On our way out of town, we stopped at a 7-Eleven. I changed in the bathroom and stuffed the hateful tranny dress into the trash bin. I brushed the sticky tangles from my hair and the funk from my teeth and then splashed some cold water on my swollen face. That hurt like hell but I felt better once it had been done.
A chubby blonde teenage girl with giant hoop earrings and too much lip gloss pushed open the bathroom door and then froze when she saw me at the sinks.
“Oh,” she said, tucking her pink face down like she’d been smacked. “Sorry.”
She turned and left without meeting my eyes. Like she had caught me fingering myself or shooting up. The bathroom had several stalls and was meant to accommodate more than one person, yet she fled the moment she saw me. I looked up into the spotted mirror at my face. I couldn’t really blame her. I put my sunglasses back on.
When I left the bathroom, I deliberately dawdled in the store, watching the reactions of the people around me. It was amazing. Once they noticed the bruises, they looked away like I was a leper. Men would scope my ass in the new jeans, but when their gaze hit my face their smirks would evaporate and they would suddenly notice some really fascinating nutritional information on the label of their Red Bull can. Women would cringe from my bruises like they were contagious, like looking at me would remind them that they weren’t really safe after all. No one wanted to see me, to think about what might have happened to me, and so they did everything in their power to unsee me. I had a sudden perverse urge to shake people and force them to look but it occurred to me that my new Teflon face was probably a good thing. After all, a murder suspect on the lam doesn’t want to be looked at.
I imagined a tan, handsome cop with a thick mustache questioning the girl with the big earrings.
“Can you describe the individual you encountered in the restroom?” he would ask.
“She was all beat up,” the girl would answer.
“What color was her hair?” he would ask.
The girl would chew her gooey lower lip and shrug.
“How about her eyes?”
“Black,” the girl would say.
As I hustled back to the rented car, I wondered briefly if people thought that Malloy was the one who did this to me.
The Silver Spur Motel in Vegas was just what you’d expect. Squeezed in between a gas station and a modest storefront that housed a different fly-by-night business every week, it was a blocky stucco U curled around a narrow parking lot. Cheap and tawdry but still clean and relatively safe, not too scary for a beautiful young woman traveling alone with a large roll of small bills. It was far from the flashy neon circus of the Strip but conveniently located within spitting distance of several of the biggest titty bars in Vegas. All the girls stayed there when they were dancing at Eye Candy or Cheetah’s or Sin. I must have stayed there myself a hundred times. It was almost like a dorm for road girls and feature dancers, except there was no watchful dorm mother to keep out gentleman callers. Just a silent, thousand-year-old Indian desk clerk who made an art out of looking the other way. As a result, there was tons of action at the Spur, both professional and recreational. The girls called it the Silver Sperm.
When I spotted the familiar cowboy boot-shaped sign, I told Malloy to make a left into the lot. It was early still, just before 1PM. We saw a pair of hung-over afternoon-shift girls, bottle blondes in velour track suits lugging knock-off Louis Vuitton gig bags, but the place was otherwise pretty dead. Most of the night-shift girls would not even be awake for another hour or two. Malloy clocked the busty blondes as dispassionately as he took note of the other cars in the lot. I spotted Zandora’s Lexus parked right by the office and directed Malloy to park beside it. He shook his head and parked further back instead, as far away from the street and the girls as he could get.
“Put your sweatshirt on,” he said as we waited for the two girls to load their things into their rental car and pull out of the lot. “And put the hood up. Here.”
He handed me a pair of latex gloves. I watched him as he stretched a second pair over his own broad hands.
“Are you serious?” I asked, frowning down at the gloves.
He didn’t answer. He didn’t have to. Clearly he was. I put the gloves on.
Zandora was in room 202, upstairs on the second level. As I stood before the plain white door with its shiny silver number, I had a sick, visceral flashback of screaming that number at the top of my lungs. I shuddered and Malloy put a heavy, gloved paw on my shoulder.
There was a sudden frantic scuffle and thump behind the door, followed by a high-pitched man’s voice cursing loudly in what had to be Romanian. Then, a louder thump and Zandora’s voice shouting something that sounded sort of like “pizza man.” Apparently the guy didn’t like being called a pizza man, because what I heard next could only be fists on soft flesh.
“Jesus,” I said, belly twisted tight as my heart fluttered high in my throat.
“You up for this?” Malloy asked, reaching beneath his jacket to unsnap a shoulder holster I hadn’t even noticed until just then.
Was I?
Before I could answer, he kicked open the cheap lock and moved into the shadowy room, gun out and covering the space inside with smooth, professional ease. Cattle-prodded by adrenaline, I followed Malloy, feeling like an understudy with no time to rehearse.
My old pal was inside, that sawed-off, weasely Eastern Bloc guy that had been looking for Lia. He was crouching over a crumpled, fetal Zandora and shaking out his right hand like it hurt. His surprised face was turned up toward Malloy, eyes wide.
“Who the hell are you?” he asked.
“Get up,” Malloy replied, making a terse upward gesture with the barrel of his gun.
My eyes were scanning the shadows for the weasel’s buddy, that big blond redneck that had backed him up that day in my office. Before I could remember how to make my voice work and warn Malloy, the door slammed back into Malloy’s shoulder and the redneck was on him, gripping Malloy’s gun hand by the wrist. Together, they
