TWO
HOW PEDESTRIAN
FIX
A person’s hands tell most of their stories. You can learn a lot about someone by simply studying the wear and tear to their hands. As Sera Lafferty lugged her bag down the flooded walkway toward room number twenty-seven, her knuckles were blanched. I noticed the two deep, perpendicular scars that ran across the back of her right hand, silvery and smooth under the bright, white security lights. The scars were defensive wounds. Would have bled a lot. There was every chance her tendons had been severed given the placement of the scars, which would have meant months of excruciating, time consuming physical therapy. She’d been lucky she hadn’t completely lost the use of her hand altogether.
What did Sera’s scars tell me about her, other than the fact that she’d been assaulted at some point? They told me she was a fighter. They told me she was fierce. I made a number of deductions as I followed close behind her toward the room, my shoulders hunched up around my ears against the rain.
One: Sera Lafferty’s attacker was someone very close to her. Someone she knew very, very well.
Two: Ever since she’d been attacked, she’d spiraled out of control, allowing herself to stumble blindly from one dangerous situation to another.
Three: If I wanted to, I could fuck her and slit her throat tonight, and she probably wouldn’t even care.
Not that I’d do that, though. I didn’t rape women.
When we reached the green-painted door with the gold two and seven etched onto it, Sera slid the key into the lock and tossed an irritated look at me over her shoulder. “Guess you’re not as good at planning as you thought you were,” she snapped. “You’d have booked a room ahead of time if you were.”
“I’m right where I’m meant to be,” I said, echoing my words from before, back in the lobby. If only she knew…
Sera didn’t notice my repetition. Or, if she did, she didn’t say anything about it. Most women in her position would have screamed and pleaded with Harold at the front desk, begging to be allocated the room on their own. If that hadn’t worked, other women would have cursed me out, thrown up their hands and gone and slept in their car for the night. A car was a safe, metal box, studded with locks. A car was easily defensible. It had a loud alarm and flashing lights. But Sera simply scowled at me, shrugged, handed over three hundred dollars to Harold, then hurried out to her car to collect her bags.
The inside of room twenty-seven was pretty goddamn miserable. There were two beds, just as Harold had claimed, but they were clearly about thirty years old and heavily sunken in the middle. Both of them were as bad as each other. The walls used to be white at some point. Or maybe…peach? Now they were a scuzzy nicotine-stained yellow, and the air buzzed with the stench of old cigarettes. In the corner, an old television with a dial to change the channels sat on top of an old, scratched dresser, the top drawer of which was missing.
Sera didn’t seem to notice any of it. “I’m taking the bed closer to the door,” she announced. “If you don’t like it, you can go ask for your money back and sleep on that couch in the lobby.”
“The other bed’s fine.” I hefted my suitcase up and slung it onto the mattress, surprised when the whole bed didn’t collapse under the weight of the bag.
“Jesus, what have you got in there?” Sera mumbled. “Bricks?”
“Guns,” I corrected. “Lots and lots of guns.” Being honest was one of my favorite games. It was far more entertaining to tell someone the truth and let them make of it whatever they chose than to fabricate some boring, fake life. Sera, like most people I told the truth, thought I was being ridiculous and decided to mock me for it.
“Oh, right. Because you’re a hitman, and you have to kill someone in town tomorrow. Silly me. How could I forget?”
She was beautiful. Beautiful in an unconventional way that didn’t meet any of my usual requirements. For me to find a woman attractive, she usually had to be short and petite. She had to have to have long hair, either red or blonde, and blue eyes. She had to be submissive and pretty damn quiet, too, unless we were in bed. In that case, she could be as loud as she damn well pleased.
Sera was a brunette, her hair cropped into an edgy, shoulder-length style that was longer at the front than it was at the back. Her eyes were dark, dark brown, filled with intelligence and suspicion. She was close to five-nine, though in her heeled leather boots, she nearly stood as tall as me at six-one, and as far as the submissive thing went…I could already tell there was no hope of that ever happening. She was forged in the fire, this one. There wouldn’t be any cooling her or calming her down. If she were one of my grandfather’s horses back on his farm, he would have eyed her for a second or two, paced around her, looking her up and down, and then declared she needed cutting loose. He wouldn’t have even bothered wasting his time trying to tame her.
“I’d appreciate it if you didn’t turn the television on,” she said, unzipping her own bag. “I’m a light sleeper.”
“Naturally. And I’d appreciate it if you didn’t get your makeup all over every single towel in the bathroom. I’m allergic to all the weird crap they put in that stuff.”
Sera huffed as she pulled a blow dryer out of her bag, winding the cable around its handle. “Fair enough. But there’s no weird crap in makeup. You don’t need to be an ass just because I asked you not to do something.”
“Bird shit.”
“What did you just say?”
I pulled back the sheets on my bed, inspecting them for any suspect stains. So far, all was clear. “Bird shit. They put that in some makeups and moisturizers. As well as snail secretions. And baby foreskins.”
Sera dropped her blow dryer onto her pillow, rounding on me, hands on her hips. “What the fuck are you talking about?”
“Look it up. All those magical creams, powders and potions you smear onto you skin every day? They’re fucking gross. But who cares, so long as they hide the cracks, right?”
Her face darkened to the point where I could almost see the thundercloud hovering over her head. “I don’t have any ‘cracks.’ And also, they do not put baby foreskins in makeup.”
“All right. If you say so.” I took a shirt out of my bag, then removed my shoes and began picking at the mud that was crusted around the sole. How long was it going to take her to react? Three minutes? Five? ‘All right. If you say so,’ was probably the most incendiary thing a man could say to a woman. They couldn’t fucking stand it. With her fiery temper, it wouldn’t be long now before Sera was ripping her own shoes from her feet and throwing them at me.
Instead, as if she knew what I expected her to do and was determined to prove me wrong, she sat slowly in a chair and began humming softly.
I grabbed my wash bag, a set of clean, dry clothes, and headed into the bathroom.
“What are you doing?”
I glanced back at her over my shoulder. “Showering.” I smiled my most inviting smile. The one I used to coerce women into my bed. The one that never failed to work. “Care to join me?”
Sera pulled a disgusted face, apparently immune to the smile, right along with the disreputable glint in my eyes. “I’m not in the business of showering with perfect strangers.”
“This place is probably running on a generator. Who knows when the hot water’s going to run out,” I countered.
“I’ll take my chances.”
“Suit yourself.” I closed the bathroom door and locked it behind me. Of course she wasn’t going to shower with me. It was fun fucking with such an uptight person, though. Sera carried herself with confidence. She knew she was attractive, and there was nothing wrong with that. First meetings with women like her, sexual or otherwise, were always a power struggle, however. She wanted to assert her dominance over me, and I was damned if I was going to let her. The moment I gave in and bowed down to her, worshipping her for the goddess she was, she’d no longer respect me. Or the idea of me. Whenever a man and a woman met for the first time, it was human nature for both of them to imagine some reality in which they were fucking, regardless of their marital status, desires or inclinations. If you showed me a person who claimed otherwise, I’d show you a liar. I wasn’t having her imagining she could dominate me in the bedroom. So baiting her, refusing to be the simpering, weak gentleman she’s probably used to, was just par for the course.
I turned on the shower, wrestling out of my wet clothes, and then, naked, I studied my face in the mirror, rubbing my hand across my jaw to see if I needed a shave yet. I usually avoided mirrors at all costs; I had my father’s eyes—hard to fucking miss—and my mother’s nose. My mouth was my father’s, too. What would they both think of me now? The life I’d chosen for myself. The steeply inclined, slippery as fuck path I’d begun descending straight down into hell.
Thankfully, I’d never know their shallow opinion of me. The priest and his obedient homemaker wife were both long gone. St. Peter must have alerted the media the moment my parents arrived at the pearly gates, shortly after plowing into the back of an articulated truck one frosty, dark October night in Upstate New York. If anyone had been guaranteed VIP entry into Heaven, it was those two. They’d been poster children for the Catholic Faith their entire lives. And I was their biggest disappointment.
I scowled at the pieces of Eric and Louisa Marcosa staring back at me in the mirror, defying them in the only way I still had left available to me. My image slowly disappeared, eaten up by the steam from the hot shower that gradually fogged the glass, and the ghosts fled the bathroom, leaving me standing stripped bare and very much alone.
I showered, thinking hard. I had two jobs on my books, and neither one of them was going to be pretty. Tomorrow’s job was gonna be really shitty. I’d already accepted the payment, so I couldn’t back out of the job, but the more and more I thought about it, the less and less I wanted to dirty my hands with the work.
The guy, Franz Halford, owned an auto mechanics’ shop on the other side of Liberty Fields—had inherited it from his grandfather about twenty years ago. No wife. No children. Just a pile of bad debt and a racist streak a mile wide. I always made a point of investigating why my clients wanted their targets dead—due diligence was important. Crucial in my line of work—and this instance had been no exception. When I’d reviewed Franz Halford’s file, going over the paperwork that had been supplied to me, explaining why the world would be a better place without Franz Halford in it, it had been a pretty clear cut case, as far as I could see. Franz had raped a young woman. A twenty-year-old college student by the name of Holly Shoji. And he hadn’t raped her because he thought she was attractive (though she was), or because she blew him off in a bar one night when he was drunk and making a fool of himself. He’d done it because she was Japanese, and Franz Halford didn’t like Japanese people. He didn’t like anyone unless they were white.
My own skin was pretty damn Caucasian, but I had Spanish heritage. My great-grandparents on my father’s side were both from Altea, a tiny coastal town in the south of Spain, but they’d come over to America just before the start of the Second World War in search of a new life. Ridiculously, I’d had issues with people in the past. When they heard my family name—usually the only clue that I wasn’t pure as the driven snow—they’d cast a derisive glance over me, looking for the tell: the set of my features, or my height, or an accent that would set me apart from them, marking me as different. I despised the motherfuckers who looked at me like that. I usually wanted to cleave their head from the base of their neck, which was why accepting a racist as a mark was a horrific idea. I’d been heavily involved in this line of work for the past five years. The only time I’d ever come close to being caught by the authorities was in a situation very similar to this one; a young girl had been kidnapped by a group of Clan members in the middle of bum fuck nowhere, Tennessee. I’d laid the place to waste, taking my time torturing each and every one of those sick pieces of shit for the brutal acts they’d committed to that fifteen-year-old girl’s body. I’d broken my own rules and stayed in that dingy, dirty rat-infested warehouse too long, and when I burned out of there in one of their stolen cars, I’d barely missed the fleet of cop cars that rolled up on the place only moments later.
God only knows what they had made of the chaos and destruction they found when they threw up those roller shutters and saw what was inside. They probably still had nightmares about it.
The shower water was scalding, but that didn't seem to have helped the temperature inside the bathroom when I stepped out of the tiled cubicle. The air was frigid, biting at my skin, and I hurried to get dry as quickly as possible. While the rest of my body was suffering from borderline hypothermia, my dick didn't seem to have noticed the cold. I had a raging hard-on that was becoming difficult to ignore. I glanced down at it, contemplating stroking it for just a second, but then I decided against it. There was no such thing as just a second when it came to jerking off—I either completed the task at hand, or I didn't start it in the first place—and I didn’t have time to be touching my cock. Not with Sera sitting on the other side of the bathroom door. She was the reason I had a fucking erection in the first place. She seemed smart as well as beautiful, and it wouldn't take much for her to figure out what the hell I was doing in here if I didn't come out fairly soon.
Once dressed, I left the bathroom, rubbing at my damp hair with a towel. Sera pursed her lips as she looked up at me over the top of a book. She’d moved from the chair and was now lying on her bed, propped up against a stack of lumpy looking pillows. “Your cell phone’s been blowing up,” she said, curving a dark eyebrow at me. “Who, or what, is a ‘Fix’?”
Well, well, well. She’d looked at my phone? I curved an eyebrow right back at her. “Naughty girl. You make a habit of invading the privacy of total strangers?”
“I didn’t no such thing. Harold from front desk called the room while you were primping and preening in there. He asked me to give you a message. He said, a woman called Monica called, and said…” Sera cleared her throat, closing her book and laying it on top of her chest. “‘Fuck you, Fix. You’re already late. If you don’t come home soon, I’m coming to find you.”
Urgh. Monica. What the hell was she doing, calling the motel? I’d only told her where I was so she’d quit hassling calling me every five seconds. Now she had the name of the place I was staying, I’d simply given her another avenue through which to harass me, apparently. And Harold shouldn’t have given a message meant for me to another guest, but then again Harold was fucking useless and didn’t know his ass from his elbow, so…
I collected my cell from the night stand beside my bed, and sure enough I had six missed calls from Monica, alongside an collection of colorfully worded text messages that would have made a sailor blush.
“You still haven’t answered my question,” Sera said loftily.
“Hmm?”
“Fix?”
I laughed, sliding my phone into my back pocket. “Felix. Fix. I’m Fix. That’s what some people call me.” If they knew I murdered people for a living, that’s what they called me, anyway. Five years ago, I’d made a decision. I’d stood in a hospital, covered in blood, hands sticky with it, and I’d decided that there was no justice in the world. I’d decided to rectify the situation. I’d set Felix aside, and I’d become Fix.
Since that night, I’d spend every waking moment searching for the bastard who’d hurt the woman under my care. I hadn’t found him yet, but I had a long fucking memory. I wasn’t about to give up any time soon.
“A verb as a nickname. How pedestrian,” Sera mused, lifting a glass to her lips. Her tone was a little mocking, but I could see she was intrigued. She probably wanted to know who Monica was. She probably wanted to know what I was eight days late for. Shame I wasn't going to tell her. The amber liquid in her glass caught the light as Sera tipped it back, taking a healthy swig.
“That’s a healthy pour. You plan on driving with a hangover tomorrow?” I said.
She laughed softly, shaking her head. The glass was now empty. “I learned how to throw back tequila when I was fourteen-years-old. I can drink most people under the table. Haven't had a hangover in years.”
God. If I were any kind of asshole, which I was, this was the moment I’d offer to test out that theory. I wasn’t about to fulfill whatever expectations she’d clearly formed of me, though. Sera and I were still playing our little game of who’s in control here? And I didn’t lose that motherfucking game. Ever.
“I can leave the room if you need to return all those phone calls,” Sera said. Her voice was interesting—a little huskier than most women, which was a nice change. I’d had enough of nasal, high pitched, whiny girls to last me a lifetime. The tequila had probably set a rough edge to her tone, but I wasn’t complaining; it was sexy as fuck.
“Thanks. I’m good.”
“Ah. So you’re a player. You’re going to keep little Miss Monica waiting.”
Ha! Keeping Monica waiting? That was a fucking riot. I smirked, laying down on my bed. “You want to know if I’m fucking her.”
A scandalized look flashed across Sera’s face. She had a faint scar running along her jawline that I hadn't noticed before. The silvery line of healed tissue was narrow, no wider than the blade of a knife, and must have been expertly stitched, because it was barely visible. I probably wouldn't have noticed it had she not dramatically reacted to my statement.
“I don't want to know that. I don’t want to know anything. I’m merely making an observation.”
I assessed her scar surreptitiously, only allowing my eyes to skate over it one more time before I raised my gaze to hers. You didn't get a scar like that accidentally. It was too long and straight and perfect to have been caused by anything other than a weapon. So Sera was interesting, after all. She wasn’t just a prissy princess with a bad attitude. She had stories of her own to tell. Not that I was going to ask her to spill. That would make things complicated. That would be a point to Sera, and I was still keeping a weather eye on the leader board. “You’re judging me,” I said. “You’re trying to figure out who I am.”
A long pause followed, a small, shallow line forming between Sera’s perfectly manicured brows. “And?” She sounded frustrated. “That’s what people do when they meet other people. They form opinions of them. They try and decide if they like the other person or not.”
“What does it matter if you like me or not? Why would it matter if I was the biggest asshole on the face of the planet? We’re here for one night. Once tomorrow morning arrives, you’re going your way and I’m going mine. You’ll never see me again, and you’ll have wasted all that precious time making decisions about me.”
I could play this game forever. Sera stared at me for a drawn out second. All my life, I’d been told over and over again how confronting my eyes were. Too blue. Too cold. Too paralyzing. Too piercing. When Sera turned her warm, chocolate eyes on me, I finally began to understand what people were talking about. It wasn't that they were out of the ordinary, or even that remarkable for that matter, but the intelligence that existed in her eyes, shining out from her intricately painted irises, was enough to pin me to the mattress. Looking directly at her was like looking directly into the eyes of a tiger. There was so much happening behind the look, so much going on inside her head, and yet she managed to conceal it all so well. Still, I knew she was sizing me up. Trying to decide if she could take me on, one way or another.
Inhaling sharply, she sat up, breaking off our weird little staring contest. “You’re right,” she said, reaching for her purse. “I won’t waste my time making any more decisions.” Out of her bag came a bottle of Clase Azul Reposado tequila, which she set down on top of her comforter, leaning it against her leg so she could unscrew the top. Another considerable amount of the golden liquid went into her glass. She didn’t ask if I wanted a drink. She just grabbed the other glass sitting on her nightstand and poured. “Here. Take it. It really is unimportant if I like you, but we do have to spend the next few hours holed up in this room together. We might as well attempt to make them as bearable as possible.”
A series of potential outcomes flashed before my eyes as I reached over and accepted the glass of tequila: I drank with her, got wasted, and I woke up to an empty motel room, with all my hardware stolen; I drank with her, got wasted, woke up feeling shitty, and I allowed Franz Halford to get the jump on me when I paid him a visit at his auto-mechanics’ tomorrow; and, my personal favorite, I drank with her, got wasted, and ended up fucking Sera’s brains out.
This trip was a job, I reminded myself. I was here to take care of business. But how long had it been since I’d fucked anyone? At least three months. I was an attractive guy. No, fuck that, I was hot. Girls stopped their conversations when I passed them in the street. I was followed by double takes and open stares everywhere I went. I was a bad call. I was dangerous. I was a risk that should never be taken. I was the devil, and I wasn’t even in disguise, but it didn't stop women from wanting to take the chance. I was selective, though. I didn't just sink my dick into the first available and willing, wet pussy, just because I could.
I took a sip of the tequila, relishing the burn that spread down my throat and into my chest, warming me from the inside. “This is nice. Expensive.” Sera might have learned how to drink at a young age, but I’d had my fair share of tequila, too. This wasn’t cheap and nasty; it was top shelf liquor.
“It was a gift for my sister,” Sera said, considering the contents of her own glass. “We were supposed to drink it tomorrow night when I arrived, to celebrate her wedding. But since it looks like I’m going to be missing the ceremony altogether, I thought fuck it. Be a shame not to enjoy it.”
“Sounds like you two are close.”
She shrugged. She was tall, her frame strong, but the act of shrugging made her look small and fragile. “Sometimes you end up close to someone because you have no other choice. I used to take care of her, once upon a time.”
Did she mean let these small snippets of information slip? I was learning a lot about her just by sitting here, watching her, but her words told me even more about her past. The scar on her jaw was an act of violence. Her defensive attitude said she was used to protecting herself. And now she was telling me, perhaps inadvertently, that the childhood she’d shared with her sister was fraught with discord. I tossed back another mouthful of the tequila, and my phone buzzed in my pocket again. Damn it, Monica was on a mission tonight. I’d have to call her tomorrow or she really would set out to track me down. That would not end well, for me or for her.
Sera’s mouth turned up at the corners, forming a half amused smile. “You think an awful lot for a pretty boy.”
“Pretty boy?” I’d just met her. Most girls weren't comfortable teasing me about my looks until at least the fourth or fifth drink. Then again, I didn’t usually find myself locked inside a seedy motel room with many women until long after that, and look at where we found ourselves now. “Am I not allowed to think?”
“It’s been my experience that good looks aren’t often married to intellect,” she said.
“Great. We’re making sweeping generalizations. I fucking love those. I guess you have an IQ of fifty-three, then. And you’re a woman, so you’re probably horrible at putting flat-pack furniture together. And you’re a bad driver. And you love to shop and waste all your money on manicures and frivolous, sparkly shit. You probably have a wardrobe full of purses and shoes, and you take four hours in the morning to apply your makeup and straighten your hair.”
She scowled. Drank. Scowled some more. “You know none of that is true. You wouldn’t have said it otherwise.”
“Maybe.”
“You’re the one with the designer suitcase, not me.”
“I stole that off a dead man.”
Her scathing expression said she didn’t believe me for a second. “Come on. You’re probably some sort of investment banker or something. Or a military brat. Although your haircut’s too fancy for that.”
“Thanks. Your hair looks like you’ve had rats nesting in it.” I’d never been told I looked like an investment banker before. Someone claimed I looked like a mortician once, and even that was less offensive than investment banker. I came to Liberty Fields straight from another job, one where I had to look the part, so I could understand Sera making a few assumptions. The old adage, ‘never judge a book by its cover’, was so pointless. People always judged a book by its cover, and the cover Sera saw when I walked into that lobby earlier tonight was a polished, well turned out, very stylish cover. If she’d met me last week, when I was sporting a full beard and covered in dirt, head to toe in camo gear, she would have formed a very different opinion of me. She probably would have thought I was a survivalist nut with a nuclear bunker full of supplies underneath my house. She would never have agreed to share this room with me, that was for fucking sure.
Sera cocked her head to one side, her eyes narrowing into slits. She probably wanted to come across as assessing and severe, but that wasn’t the outcome she achieved. Instead, she looked like a little girl who couldn’t make up her mind. “I’m gonna go to sleep soon. Don’t even think about trying to climb into bed with me. It’s a sure fire way of getting yourself castrated.”
“Please. You know you want to sleep with me, Sera Lafferty. You wanted to sleep with me the moment you set eyes on me.”
A slow, frankly unnerving smile spread across her face. She was beginning to look like a woman who really would tear a guy’s dick off for climbing into bed with her. “You have a very high opinion of yourself, Fix.”
I grinned back at her, flashing her my teeth. “Of course I do. I’m really fucking awesome.”