Kiss Of Evil

69

The gun is in his coat pocket. For the moment. He had stepped inside her apartment and shut off most of the lights. She looks at the bloody silver earring on the coffee table. Celeste’s earring. She chances another look out the window. Jesse Ray is still waiting in his car.

Her one thought is: Can I throw something that far?

“I don’t care anymore,” she says, trying to stall. On the mantel is a heavy bronze bust of Beethoven, about the size of her fist. If she could just get the window open, or broken, she would have one shot at pitching as far as she could, hopefully hitting somewhere, anywhere, on Jesse Ray’s car. “I’m done. I’m not going to hurt anybody. My daughter will be cared for. Do what you have to do.”

“Do you know how much could happen to you by the time your friend makes it up here? A lot. All of it bad.”

“Take your best shot.”

“I want you to pick up the phone, call him, tell him everything is all right.”

“No.”

Jean Luc steps over to the window. Mary takes a step back, away from him. They look at the parking lot together, where the dark sedan idles next to the pay phone, at the cigarette smoke curling up into the night sky.

Jean Luc laughs. “That’s your savior?”

Mary is just about to pick up the bronze bust when a white van pulls into the Dairy Barn lot across the street, screeching to a halt. On its side is the NBC peacock logo. On the roof, a satellite rack.

What the hell’s going on here? she thinks. Why is a news crew setting up across the street from my apartment building?

When Jean Luc removes his coat and begins to roll up his shirtsleeves, she knows. But it is a wisdom she does not want, a keen palisade of memory that tells her that the horror of this night had been ordained a very long time ago.

Because, there, on Jean Luc’s forearm, is the tattoo of a bright orange rattlesnake.

This is the man who was fighting with Celeste in the hotel lobby two years ago, she thinks. My life has been on a collision course with this moment for two years.

Her knees trick painfully, her mind reels out of control, her stomach revolts. She grabs onto the windowsill to steady herself and looks down to see the driver of the NBC van angling his vehicle toward Jesse Ray’s sedan.

The man puts the van in park, exits, crosses over to Jesse Ray’s car, stops. He turns to glance at his partner, a quizzical look on his face, then reaches for Jesse Ray’s arm and removes it from the car window. It is a mannequin arm clad in a black coat sleeve and a bright white cuff, the hand holding an all-but-burned-down cigarette.

The man from NBC scratches his head and smiles. The cigarette falls to the ground.

Four floors above, Christian del Blanco-known over the years as a hundred different men, including a bon vivant named Jean Luc Christiane and a shadowy grifter named Jesse Ray Carpenter-laughs as he closes the shutters and draws the blinds, sparing the night this tableau for the moment, denying those madmen, who can surely hear such things, the song of Mary’s scream.