Roman
I don’t like the idea of attracting any further police attention—not that those bastards were true police—so instead of stealing a car, I collect the cash which is stowed under the floorboards in the basement and head to the nearest car dealership. As we leave, the two cops mumble and wriggle. I gagged them for good measure. “All this time, you’ve had that money under there,” Lily says, as we drive toward the dealership. “That’s crazy.” She wipes her face with the back of her hands. Her eyes are puffy, red, but she seems to be getting a little better. “And why don’t we just drive this car?”
“They know this car,” I say, making the turn out of the suburbs. I drive calmly. I don’t want to attract the attention of the bystanders who crowd at the end of the street, staring down at the bullet-ridden house. I even wave to one old lady, who smiles and waves back.
“They’ll know the new car, too, when you’ve registered all your details—”
“I won’t be registering any details,” I mutter.
Lily’s forehead furrows. After everything, her big hazel-brown eyes are still capable of naïve innocence. “But you have to register, don’t you? I didn’t think you could just go in and buy a car without giving some of your details.”
“Everybody can be bribed,” I tell her. “Everybody. That’s lesson number one, in this life. Sometimes paper is much more efficient than lead.”
That quiets the conversation for a time. I was right. Bribing the eager-faced man behind the desk is no difficult feat. As soon as I ask him if we can talk privately, his eyes light up like a kid on Christmas morning. He clasps his hands together, worrying them at each other, and almost pounces on me when I reveal the bag full of cash. I tell him I need a new car, a set of plates registered to a different state, and I need him to personally see to the demolition of my old vehicle. For that I will personally pay him a one-hundred percent commission on top of the fee. I barely finish my offer before he pounces on me with an enthusiastic, “Yes!”
I register the car to Betty Baker, just in case.
About twenty minutes later, Lily and I are driving north-west in a grey Toyota Prius, starting the four-hundred-some-mile drive up toward Carson, where I have a safe house. Where, perhaps, Lily will be safe. I want Lily to speak to me as we drive, as cars drift by us and Vegas becomes smaller and smaller in the background. But most of the time she just sits there, pale, silent, staring out of the window as though seeing something else before her, some fantastical land completely disconnected with our journey. Yin-and-yang, I remind myself. You can’t kidnap a woman, cause her best friend to be brutally murdered, and then have her almost killed by police and expect her to be her same happy, optimistic, sarcastic self.
We stop that evening at some dog shit motel with more blinking lights on its sign than steady ones. I insist that we share a room—I don’t want anything happening to her—and Lily says fine, but it has to be a twin, not a double. So that night Lily and I lie on our backs on opposite sides of the room, on a single bed each. Even when she takes a shower, she gets changed inside the bathroom. It’s as though we didn’t have sex yesterday at all.
“What do you do, Lily?” I ask. The night is late, past midnight, and outside the motel is quiet as death but for the occasional stumbling drunk. Moonlight slants in through the too-thin curtains and rests on Lily’s shoulders, a subtle curve I’d love to trail my finger along.
“What do I do?” she replies, confused. “I’m a nurse.”
“But for fun, I mean.”
“Fun.” She speaks as though she doesn’t remember the word.
“Humor me,” I say.
She doesn’t speak for a while, but then she mutters: “I read, if I’m not too tired after work. I sometimes go to the movies. I like checkers. Mom and I used to play when she had a day off and it was raining outside. Checkers and milkshake.” She pauses and on the night-black ceiling I see a younger Lily and the cop who Mom saved playing checkers together over chocolate and banana shakes. “What about you?” she asks.
“I read, too,” I reply. “And I fish.”
“You read?” She sounds surprised. She even leans up, but she doesn’t turn around and face me.
I chuckle. “Yeah. Is that so shocking?”
“I guess not.” She slumps back down. “I’m tired, Roman. We’re tired.”
“Alright,” I say. “Sleep well enough for the both of you, then.”
The next few days are the same, long stretches of open road, diners, motels, grimy toilets with more graffiti than actual wall. A long series of rest stops and silences. Lily spends most of her time in the passenger seat with one hand on the curve of her belly gazing out of the window. I get the sense that she is unhappy, but I don’t know what to do about it. What the hell can I do? Her friend was killed, she was almost killed, she’s being kidnapped by a hitman. I keep telling myself that I’m not kidnapping her. This is for her safety. But then we reach the diner and there’s no doubt about how she sees our relationship.
We’ve been driving for around five days, most of it with Lily in introspective silence, when we reach the diner just outside Carson City. I drove us straight through the night, Lily asleep in the passenger seat. It’s a deep sleep, the one she’s fallen into, the sort of sleep somebody throws themselves into when they don’t want to face the world. I feel bad when I shake her awake. She doesn’t wake up straightaway. As I shake her shoulder, she mumbles, smiles. I know that look and I recognize that sound. She moans, then, and sleepily lifts her hand to lay it upon mine before her eyes snap open. She leans toward the glass, no longer enjoying my touch so much.
“Breakfast?” I say.
She rubs sleep from her eyes, and then nods. “Okay.”
The diner’s walls are glassed so that as the sun rises, it glistens, a beacon for travelers just like in the old days, only instead of mead they’ve got Coke. Lily and I take a corner booth. Lily is still half-asleep by the looks of it. Her snow-white skin is flushed red, her hair mussy and curly around her round face, making her look cherub-like, and her eyes are constantly drawn to the table, her body hunching over, as though she could curl up and fall asleep at any moment.
When the waitress arrives, a redheaded woman with purple heart-shaped glasses propped on a pointy nose who looks almost as tired as Lily, I order us two coffees and a round of pancakes. Lily asks for chocolate sauce on hers. The waitress gone, I stare at her across the table. Dammit, but I wish I knew women better. I know women. I know how to get ’em into bed and what to do when I get them there. But this stuff, the awkward silences, the long-drawn-out looks. That’s something I’m not equipped to deal with.
“Lily,” I mutter, thinking I have to try even if it’ll make me look a fool.
“Yes?” she says, one hand laid protectively over her belly as usual.
“I just want you to know. I never meant for anything to happen to your friend. I never meant for you to be in danger like you were back at the house. I never meant for any of that.”
She nods shortly. “I know,” she says. “I understand that.”
“Then . . .”
She shrugs in answer to my unasked question.
“I’ll protect both of you until the day I die,” I say, but even to myself I’m beginning to sound like a broken record. “Once this business is dealt with, you’ll never have to worry again.”
“Going well, is it?”
I turn away from her. She knows it isn’t going well. She must’ve heard me, perhaps not the words but the tone, talking on the cell to my various sources. All of them have shit, or aren’t giving me shit. Boss is getting impatient. Soon he’ll take the contract to somebody else, robbing me of the biggest payday of my life. But it’s not even the cash that bothers me. It’s fuckin’ Darius. Slipping through my grip just like last time.
The waitress brings the food and drinks over before I have a chance to reply, and both of us, road-starved, fall upon it silently.
When we’ve finished the food, Lily says, “I’m going to the bathroom.”
She walks down the aisle toward the restroom, at the end of the diner. I sit back. I have a full view of the exit and the restroom doors, so there’s no way she’s getting out. I’m angry with myself for thinking like this, thinking about whether or not my captive is going to be able to escape. But I have to. Lily doesn’t understand the scope of what she’s caught up in. She thinks she can flee to the goddamned police and everything will be alright. She doesn’t realize that in this life, you only trust who you have to.
And when you’ve been in this life for a long time, you get a sense for when something else is happening, the picture behind the picture. Take Lily and her trip to the bathroom. The picture is that she’s just finishing up, splashing some water in her face. But the picture behind the picture is that something’s wrong.
So I stand up, toss a few bills down on the table, and make my way to the bathroom.
We’re the only people in the diner except for a couple of truckers, both of whom are men, so Lily is the only person in the ladies’. I open the door quietly, creep in, and lean out around the corner to the bathroom proper. Lily is standing at the mirror, a stick of lipstick in her hand—dirty, obviously picked up off the floor—writing our license number and our names on the mirror.
I clench my teeth, step out. “Lily,” I say, voice tight.
She pauses, just as she’s about to finish my last name. She’s already written out hers and the license number.
“What the fuck are you doing?”
I walk across the room, right up to her, and then smear the lipstick with my shirt sleeve. The shirt is checkered blue. Now the sleeve is blood-red.
I expect her to look embarrassed, caught out, but she just shakes her head slowly. “I can’t live a killer’s life, Roman. I can’t live with a man who tortures and kills people. I mean . . . Roman, are you really better than the men you hunt? Are you really—”
I walk away from her, to the bathroom door, lock it, and then return. She watches me, head tilted, lips pursed, either about to shout or cry. In the end, she does neither, just folds her arms and watches me.
“Listen to me,” I say, leaning over her. “Listen to me closely, Lily. I’m going to do somethin’ I’ve never done before. I’m going to tell you the specifics of the man I’m hunting, alright? If, after you’ve listened to me, you still want to get the hell out of here—you still want to skip right back into Vegas, the heart of the storm—then fine, I won’t stop you.” I swallow. Giving the details is something I’ve never done. When I first try to speak, it’s like when you’re a little kid trying to say a curse word for the first time; there’s a mental block. But slowly, the words come, and then I can’t stop them. “His name is Darius Taggart and he’s a war criminal. And when I say a war criminal, I mean a real fuckin’ war criminal. He was involved in North Korea in the ’nineties, selling Kim Jong-Il chemical torture devices to use in his prison camps. He sold mustard gas and all kinds of nasty shit to Saddam Hussein. He has himself personally administered dozens of doses of lethal poison to women and children during his tests, as he fuckin’ calls them. There are widely reported accounts of him leading war-bands through Uganda and raping and killing anyone in his path, all armed with advanced weapons he personally acquired for them. In some places, he’s known as the Acid Man, because he gets some sort of sick fuckin’ thrill from throwing acid in people’s faces. In others, he’s known as the Red Demon, because wherever he goes, there is blood. In others—”
“Okay,” Lily whispers, voice torn. “Okay, okay.”
I pause, and then go on in a quieter tone. “My client is an American politician who wants this man killed. He never wants him to stand trial. I reckoned I knew why. I reckoned this American politician had maybe made a deal or two with Darius. Yeah, I thought of that. But I always vet my Bosses, and this politician made no deal. No, Darius used one of his paid whores to seduce the man. He’s married, by the way. So he’s a scumbag, yeah, but not a killer, not Darius. Darius.” I growl his name the second time. “He’s wanted by the United Nations, Lily. You can look him up. He’s an evil piece of filth. I tried hunting him once before, and failed. I can’t fail again.”
I stop, chest rising and falling, the anger inflating and deflating it. I unclench my fists and stare into Lily’s eyes. “There it is,” I tell her. “The truth. Look at me and tell me I’m lying.”
She takes a step forward, pressing her body against mine, and stares up into my face. I feel her breasts flatten against my body, the heat of her, rising, getting hotter. Then she steps away.
“I don’t think you’re lying,” she says quietly. “But it’s hard for me, Roman, it’s just . . .”