Page 18 of Dirty
I still couldn’t move. My nerve endings weren’t responding, even though I was hollering at them to obey. I could have snuck away and hid before being discovered, but the shock of what I’d just seen had me rooted permanently to the spot. As Fix slowly turned around, I knew with every fiber of my being that I was about to die. I’d seen what he’d done. I’d witnessed the whole thing. There was no way I’d be allowed to live to tell the tale. The coppery taste of metal and fear flooded my mouth, so thick and overwhelming that I almost gagged on it.
Fix saw me immediately. He was a vision of terror—face and hands covered with blood, jacket doused and drenched in red. He was the stuff of nightmares, and I was locked in his gaze, unable to run. He didn’t look shocked to see me standing there in the doorway. He didn’t look surprised at all. There was a darkness shrouding him as he took a step toward me, wiping his face with the back of his hand, smearing the blood like it was war paint.
“I didn’t think you’d stay to watch, Sera. I didn’t think you’d have the stomach for it.”
SEVEN
JUSTICE
FIX
I’d known the moment she’d entered the auto shop. Her perfume had given her away—sweet, soft, floral and delicious, the same smell that had been haunting my senses ever since I’d fucked her last night—and I’d waited, figuring out how I was going to handle the situation. She’d stop me. She’d come running in and save Franz. She’d call the police. She’d have me arrested if I laid one finger on the guy. Those were the things I’d been expecting her to say and do, only she didn’t.
She’d remained hidden in the shadows, observing silently, and I’d realized exactly how fucked I was. If I let Franz go, he’d try and come after me. That wouldn’t go well for him, naturally, but it was inconvenient. And then what? If he took his anger at being confronted out on another unsuspecting girl? If he raped someone else? There was just no way…
I stepped carefully, making sure Sera could see me clearly as I approached her. No sudden movements. No surprises that might have her screaming. She looked like a frightened deer, trapped in the headlights of an oncoming vehicle that she could plainly see but do absolutely nothing to avoid.
“You killed him,” she breathed, her eyes skating to the dead body on the ground behind me. “You…you took that knife and you killed him.”
“I did.”
She looked at me like I’d just denied my actions instead of admitting to them. “Youkilledhim.”
“I know.”
“Wh—” She shook her head, grasping for the wall, trying to steady herself as she swayed. “Why? What the…”
“He hurt a girl. I was hired to make the situation right,” I said, keeping my voice even. In the years I’d been doing this kind of work, no one had ever stumbled upon me in the act. I’d never been so obviously caught red handed. My mind was reeling. I wanted to pick Sera up, sling her over my shoulder and get the fuck out of there, but that would be risky. If I didn’t handlethissituation right, and she was bawling and crying as I dragged her through the parking lot, someone was bound to see us. The moment Franz was found dead, it would be easy enough for someone to report what they’d seen and the cops would be on my tail in no time. It was bad enough that the waiter in the diner had seen me with Franz as it was, but the kid had barely looked twice in my direction. There had been no cameras in the diner, the place was far too low rent for any kind of security measures, so the police were going to have to go off a very vague description as it was. But if Sera lost her shit and was hysterical as I bundled her into the back of the truck, that would complicate things immensely.
“He—how is this making the situationright?” Sera had lost all color to her face, and she kept swallowing. Her gag reflex was probably working overtime. I remembered the first time I’d seen someone murdered, and while I hadn’t flipped out the way I suspected she was about to, I’d definitely parted company with my lunch once I found myself alone in a bathroom.
“The cops around here would never have pressed charges against him,” I said, cautiously wiping my palms against my pants. “And even if they did, the girl’s too scared to press charges. So I took the job. If I thought the justice system would have taken care of this, I would have left the whole thing well alone.”
Sera sniffed, then covered her mouth with her hand, cringing. “God, the smell…”
The thing about dead people was that, when they were on their way to dying, they often lost control over their bowels. It was more common than not. Combined with the thick scent of blood in the air, the odor of death was already developing from faint to pungent.
“Fuck. I think I’m going to throw up.” Sera staggered back, bending over at the waist, but I rushed forward and took hold of her, pinning her in my arms.
“Donotthrow up in here. If you’re gonna puke, do it outside. Preferably seven or eight miles away from here.”
She groaned, a look of panic forming as she took in the way I was holding her. She was going to lose it. Any second now, she was going to have a meltdown, and I was going to have to take measures to calm her. I didn’t want to have to knock her out, but I would if I had to. Her body shook, one violent shudder, and she tried to lift her hand to her face again, but she noticed the blood on her jacket and her skin—the bloodshe had just put her hand in when she tried to steady herself against the wall—and that was it.
Her eyes rolled back into her head, and she fainted.
******
Step one: Get Sera into the truck.
Step two: Calmly drive back to the motel.
Step three: Strip out of my blood soaked clothes and change in the truck.
Step four: Collect Sera’s bags from the lobby.
Step five: Get the hell out of dodge.
I completed steps one through five mechanically, not really thinking about anything. There would be time for thinking later. Now was a time for action, and I’d been over scenarios like this enough times in my head that I knew exactly what I had to do. Okay, so maybe not scenarios exactly like this, but similar enough. For some reason, I’d never considered there might be a time that I’d have to lay an unconscious woman down on the backseat of my vehicle and hightail it away from a murder scene. The faintest possibility that something like this could happen just never fucking occurred to me.
