Page 4 of Dirty
“Hey! I was here first. If anyone’s gonna bribe him for the room, it’s going to beme.” I was far more successful in wrenching the key from Mr. Black’s hand. The handsome stranger standing next to me didn’t see me coming, or maybe he didn’t expect me to hurl myself at him. Either way, I yanked the key from his grip and shoved it into my pocket, hurling a vicious look at him, just in case he was thinking about trying to get it back.
With the strangest expression on his face, he whispered a word that made my blood run hot and cold at the same time. “Hellcat.” His entire body pivoted to one side, away from me, as he curled a finger, motioning for Harold to lean in and speak with him. “I probably have way more money than her. What’s it gonna be, cowboy?”
Harold, clearly a little discombobulated, just frowned. “The room’s forty-nine ninety-nine for the night.”
Mr. Black smirked. “Yeah. But if you give it to me, I’ll pay you two hundred.”
God, what a bastard. “I’ll give you three hundred, Harold.”
Mr. Black huffed down his nose, his smirk now a full-blown smile. “Five hundred, Harold. And a box of Cuban cigars. The good kind, not the cheap shit you can buy at customs.”
Harold’s eyes had glazed over a while back. He didn’t seem to be taking any of this in. I grabbed hold of Mr. Black by the arm and tugged him forcefully away from the check in desk. “Look. You heard me on the phone just now. I have to get to my sister’s wedding in Fairhope by Saturday. If I let her down, I’ll break her damned heart. I’m the only member of family she’ll have at this stupid fucking ceremony. Now, please… I need to drive out of this dump first thing in the morning, and to do that I need to fucking sleep. Please! Just let me have the fucking room!”
“You know you say fuck a lot?” he whispered, leaning into me, as if imparting a piece of information I might not yet be aware of. His snowstorm eyes flashed at me, filled with amusement.
“Lady, what’s your name?” To my left, Harold scratched at his temple with the chewed end of a ballpoint pen. Oh, thank god. The guy had seen reason. I’d been the first person waiting for a room, so therefore I got it. Fair was fair. I breathed a sigh of relief, releasing my grip on Mr. Black’s arm.
“It’s Sera. Sera Lafferty.
Harold stuck out his tongue, his brow furrowing as his hand weaved toward what looked like a guest ledger. I risked a victorious sidelong smirk at Mr. Black, but I wasn’t rewarded by a look of dismay plastered across his face. The bastard was still smirking, himself.
“And you. What…?” Harold hiccupped. “What’syourname?”
“Felix Marcosa.”
Of course his name was fucking Felix Marcosa. It suited him down to the ground. What an asshole. Harold obviously agreed with me. He groaned, shook his head, and then scribbled something sideways in the ledger. “I entered you into our state-of-the-art database as Mr. and Mrs.…” Hiccup, “…Jones. Twenty-seven’s got two beds. Figure it out. Now…” He squinted at me and then at Felix, narrowing his eyes. “What did we agree? Three hundred fromyou,” he said, pointed at me. “And five hundred fromyou. Plus…a box of Cuban cigars.”
Felix Marcosa wasn’t smiling anymore.
But then again, neither was I.
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.”
