5.
How was it that the minutes leading up to five o’clock could feel so impossibly long?
They were piling up, the minutes, but not accumulating nearly fast enough. I was sprawled out on the couch still, engaging in a kind of torpor to preserve my energy and ignore the hunger pangs that rattled through my body. I kept eyeing my bottle of scotch, just sitting there on the counter, calling to me with its beautiful siren song. It was right there, for the taking, minutes and miles away.
With a sigh, I turned back to the TV screen, where a clock presented itself.
4:47 Eastern Time, it read in the bottom corner of the news icon. Thirteen minutes to glory.
“I wish someone looked at me the way you look at a bottle of scotch,” Eilish said, ever helpful.
“Sometimes I wish you stayed as quiet as a bottle of scotch,” I said. I actually didn’t. I’d had way worse voices than her in my ear for the last few years, and now that they were gone …
Well, Eilish wasn’t a replacement for them, as such, but man … it was nice not to be totally surrounded by silence here.
“Why don’t we go out tonight?” she asked, a hint of wheedling in her tone. “You’re sporting the bottle-blond look, no one’s going to recognize you. There’s that nice Italian restaurant down at the terminus of this road—what do they call it again?”
“It’s called 30A,” I said, watching the clock. Twelve minutes.
“Right. They make it sound so damned iconic,” she said, annoyingly chipper. I’d be a lot happier myself in twelve minutes. “30A. It just sounds cool. Anyhoo … we could go to the Italian place, or that breakfast-y all-day spot down by Publix—”
“Waffle House?” I turned my head to look at her. “They have burgers and such, you know.”
“I’m not really interested in the ‘and such,’” she said. “Ye ask me, you order something non-waffle from a place called Waffle House, you’re just asking for trouble. Besides, those waffles—they’re amazing. I don’t think we have anything like them in Ireland—”
“Your whiskey’s not bad,” I said. But it wasn’t scotch.
“Uhm … I was talking breakfast-food wise,” she said, a little nonplussed by my reversion to alcohol every other thought. “So … what do you say? Or we could get some of those marvelous sub sandwiches at Publix—I know you have a hankering for that Cuban from time to time—”
I rolled at my eyes at her transparent attempt to get me to engage with the world. “You can take the car and pick something up if you want. I’m just going to chill here tonight.”
“Uhm, ye’ve chilled here every night for the last umpteen many, to borrow one of your favorite words.”
I shrugged. It appeared I was running out of enablers. “I’m a fugitive, trying to lay low. Going out to Publix or Waffle House or local Italian places on the regular seems like laying high.” I frowned, trying to make sense of what I’d just said. “Or … something.” Laying high sounded dirty, and there’d been no laying, high or low, for me in entirely too long.
Which was fine. Because scotch was strong, and ever ready, and he would see me through.
“But—but–” Now she was into the spluttering. “But you like Publix, don’t you?”
Here I didn’t shrug, but only because, yes, I did like Publix. It was my favorite supermarket ever. “It is ‘Where Shopping is a Pleasure,’” I conceded. “But I don’t want to go out tonight, Eilish.” I looked at the clock on screen. Ten minutes.
“I don’t know if I can stay in again tonight,” she said, making eyes toward the door and the balcony.
“So hang out outside,” I said. “Chill by the pool deck. Literally, since it’s like fifty degrees. That’s gotta be like a balmy summer day for a fine Irish gal like you.” Nine minutes. “You could probably even work on your complete lack of tan.”
She made a hard scoffing noise. “You should talk.”
“No, I should shut up, watch the news, and count the minutes until five o’clock.” Because damn, this watched pot was steadfastly refusing to get to boiling.
The bridge mess was … well, a mess. Whoever Fire-guy meta was, he’d prompted the wrecking of a huge span of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge. The news was all in a tizzy about it, probably because catastrophes meant ratings—I tried to imagine a scenario where I somehow got bonus pay for things going to shit and realized, with the agency still under my ownership, I kinda did.
Eilish fell into a silence that was beautiful and lasted until 4:56. Four more minutes.
“It’s my first time in America,” she said, now crossing straight into whine-baby territory, “and I just don’t want to sit around the bloody condo all the time.” She hit me with pleading eyes. “We could go walk on the beach. You could even bring your drink.”
I just stared at her, my patience hanging by a strand. “You want me to walk on the beach with an aged Lagavulin in my hand?”
She nodded. “I won’t mind.”
“If you’re feeling like you need to go out,” I said, letting the words filter out ever so slowly, “why don’t you just go and enjoy a fine evening alone?”
“That’s no fun,” she said. We’d passed whining into whatever lay beyond. Whimpering, sniveling, I dunno. It wasn’t just tap-dancing on my nerves; it was a herd of elephants in tap shoes Riverdancing on them. “Come with me. Show me your beloved America.”
“I’m really more interested in my beloved scotch at the moment,” I said, holding my shit together by a thin thread so as not to lose it all over her. I glanced at the clock. Two minutes. Thank heavens.
Like thunder from above, a knocking came at the door in an almighty fury. I froze in my chair and Eilish’s eyes widened next to me. She looked like she was about to shit kittens, maybe squeeze out a brick.
I regained my calm and meta-whispered to her. “Just don’t answer it. It’s probably no one.”
She looked at me like I was stupid. “Someone’s knocking, it can’t be no one. Empty air doesn’t bloody knock.”
I controlled the eye roll, but only barely. “I mean it’s probably no one important, just a solicitor or something.”
She made a confused face. “Why would a lawyer be knocking?”
“A salesperson, you UK baby,” I said. “Not a lawyer.”
“You Americans. Your word choices are just strange.”
The knocking came again, even harder, and I looked at the clock on the TV screen.
One minute to go.
I took a steadying breath, in through the nose, out through the mouth. I got up, started to make my way over to the beverages in the corner. The knocking sounded again, loud and horrendous.
“What if it’s Reed? Or one of the others?” Eilish asked.
“They have keys,” I said, brushing off her tiny, irrelevant, annoying concerns.
“What if it’s the police?”
“They wouldn’t knock, they’d bust the door down and shoot us, holding any questions until after they’d processed us at the morgue.”
“Sienna!” someone shouted through the door, and I froze about two feet shy of my scotch.
A cold, clammy, crawling sensation worked its way up my arms, turning the skin all bumpy with gooseflesh. It made its way up the back of my neck and across the top of my head, down my forearms and wrists to stop at my hands, and, for good measure, went ahead and made it feel like someone had slid an ice cube or twelve down the back of my pants at the base of my spine. An icicle-based tramp stamp.
“Sienna, open up!” the voice came again. It was female, kinda small, but clearly pissed off. The knocking came again, a rattling, and then I heard a wheezing cough from the person standing at my door.
“Oh, f—” I started to say, but it was interrupted by another round of knocking.
“I’m going to stand out here and make a scene until you open the door,” she said. “Because I know you’re in there, and—”
Closing my eyes for just a second, I whirled, crossed the distance to the door in a hot second, ripped it open, and dragged the person standing out there inside before she could so much as wheeze in surprise. That done, I closed it back up, locked it, and took a deep breath.
The skinny, dark-haired waif standing before me looked at me with heat-vision eyes, even though I’d grasped onto her person for about a second, tops, but she let go the succubus-to-skin contact and, instead, gave me a piece of her mind. “You owe me,” she said, cutting right to it, “and I’ve come to collect.”
I took a moment to sigh, then turned my back on her, and with a glance at the clock—it read 4:59—I broke my resolve and shuffled over to the bar, pouring myself a drink without ceremony. I filled it to nearing the top of the little glass, brought it up to my nose, let that peaty scent fill my nasal passages, and with an eye on the TV screen clock—it still read 4:59—I gave up on giving a shit and went ahead and sloshed it back, taking the whole glass down in one gulp.
“Holy hell,” Eilish said. “It’s not five o’clock yet.”
“Go for a jump with a pogo stick up your ass, Irish, I’m an alcoholic,” I said, feeling the scotch burn its way down my throat. That done, I poured another one as my invading “guest” stood in silence, just watching, her skin mottled as she clearly built on whatever internal ragey emotions had brought her to my door. I took another breath, and this time, I would savor my drink while I waited for the first to work. I waited for her to say something, but she didn’t, preferring the cold stare-me-down, as though waiting for my leave to speak, when I knew in reality it was no such damned thing.
Because I knew why she was here without her even having to say anything.
She said something anyway. “You owe me.”
That one caused some heat in my cheeks. I kept the glass clutched between my fingers as I stared at the little figure darkening my door—well, my entry rug, now. I took a breath, and it seared like the scotch. “I don’t owe you a damned thing,” I said, staring right back at her, “Cassidy Ellis.”