Page 5 of Dirty
“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 thefuckare 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 donotput 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.
