Page 20 of Dirty
I breathed a sigh of relief. I’d just bought usbothsome time.
EIGHT
LOLLIPOP
SERA
Amy: Who is he? And why are you just telling me about him now? I asked you months ago if you were seeing anybody, and you said no.
Me: I’m sorry. I’m telling you about him right now, though. It’s nothing serious. I didn’t think he was going to be able to make the date, so I didn’t mention anything. He called this morning and told me he was going to come and pick me up, so there we have it. Look, if it’s a problem and you’d prefer him not to be there, then I understand. Just let me know.
It was probably a bad idea to tell Amy she could veto Fix’s impromptu attendance at her wedding. She was far more polite than I was, however, and barely argued with me over the matter.
Amy: If you’re here on time and everything goes according to plan, then I don’t care who you bring. So long as he doesn’t fuck up my big day.”
So long as he didn’t fuck up her big day? God, that was a riot. There were a thousand and one ways Fix could fuck up Amy’s big day, which included, but were not limited to, murdering one of the guests. My sister’s friends were all assholes as far as I was concerned, but Amy was fond of them for some reason, so she probably wouldn’t take too kindly to having any of them killed. My ex-boyfriend, Gareth, was going to be there. Things between us had hardly been serious, but when he’d cheated on me and totaled my car, I’d sworn I’d remove his balls if I ever saw his miserable face again. Amy had warned me he was going to be in attendance—as Ben’s oldest friend, he’d been assigned best man duties—and she’d begged me not to cause a scene. I’d been dreading setting eyes on Gareth again, but now he was the least of my worries. Fix was going to turn heads. There would be questions. Lots of them. And when someone asked my plus one what he did for a living, what the fuck was he going to say? “Oh, I kill people for money?” He hadn’t even blinked when he’d told me that in the motel lobby last night. His comment had washed over me, but if he said that to Amy? God, there would be fireworks. Fourth of July fireworks. The kind of fireworks that could be seen three counties over and would permanently burn the retinas of anyone unfortunate enough to catch sight of them.
“You’re grinding your teeth.” Fix hadn’t said much in the past few hours, and neither had I. I’d been staring at the back of his neck from the back seat, wondering how easy it would be to choke him out and escape without him crashing the car during my attack. I’d decided the chances of him driving head-on into a barrier, or veering off the road altogether, were far too high, and I’d shelved the idea, but that didn’t stop me from imagining how satisfying it would be to wrap my hands around his neck and to squeeze as hard as I could.
“I tend to do that when I’m stressed,” I answered him. “And, as you can probably tell, I’m really stressed right now.”
“This isn’t exactly how I’d planned on spending my week either, Angel.”
“Oh? And how exactlydidyou plan on spending your week?” This was going to be good. He probably had another four or five hits lined up or something. I had no idea what his quota was, but he seemed like an industrious guy. Didn’t seem like the type to be taking time off to sip whiskey in front of a roaring fire while reading a good book.
His eyes darted to the rear view mirror. I pretended not to see him look back at me. “I had responsibilities back in New York that are going to have to wait now. Believe me, this is highly inconvenient.”
“Responsibilities?” A number of possibilities occurred to me: what if he had a wife and a family back home that were waiting for his return? He fucked me last night, but so what? A guy who ended people’s lives on a regular basis was hardly going to flinch at cheating. What if he had an ailing grandmother in a care home that he usually had coffee with every Wednesday? Would she know all about his extra-curricular activities? It was then that I remembered the woman who’d been trying to get hold of him so desperately. “Do your responsibilities involve Monica? Does she know who you are, Fix? Does she know what you do whenever you leave the state?”
A ghost of a smile twitched at the corners of his mouth, before it vanished. “Monica isn’t my responsibility. But yes, she does know who I am. She’s probably the only person in the world whodoesknow me. And yes, she knows exactly what I do whenever I leave the state.” The tone in his voice hid a shadow of amusement. There was a story behind his relationship with this woman, Monica, but he didn’t seem like he was going to share it. I sure as hell wasn’t going to ask him about it.
I turned to stare out of the window, leaning my forehead against the cold glass. Wyoming whipped by in flashes of green, blue, grey, brown and white. Columns of smoke poured from the chimneys of homes set back from the road. There were people inside those houses, preparing lunch for their families. Planning the rest of their day. Cleaning and cooking. Paying their bills. Watching television. How could life carry on so normally, so blindly, for some people, when my whole world had been turned upside in the space of a couple of hours? Iclosedmy eyes, and all I saw was blood pooling on the floor of that auto shop. The body of that rapist lying there on the frozen concrete, rapidly cooling, his eyes open, staring at me, frightened, as if he were pleading with me to help him, even in death. “How many people have you killed, Fix?” I asked quietly.
Silence filled the truck, and I began to think he wasn’t going to answer. Then he cleared his throat, and spoke. “Does it matter? Doesn’t the death of one person at my hands damn me to hell either way?”
“I don’t believe in hell.”
Again, another cursory, if a little intrigued backward glance from Fix in the mirror. “So you’re an atheist, then.”
“I’m someone who believes you shouldn’t kill people, even if there is no higher power monitoring our behavior up in the clouds, chalking up points for or against us.”
He smirked. The truck was filled with the scent of fresh, cold air and pine needles. It would forever be a smell that reminded me of this moment. If I were destined to have any more moments, that was. Fix’s ice blue eyes returned to the road, scanning the horizon, and I caught myself staring at the line of his jaw; his facial hair had grown noticeably overnight, and now he was sporting a healthy five o’clock shadow. I hated myself for it, but once again I found myself stunned by how absolutely, ridiculously attractive he was. He was beyond dangerous, and I was beyond stupid to be thinking such things about him at a time like this, but I’d known it for a long time now: there was something fundamentally fucked up inside me. I’d been in too many messed situations already to react the way any sane person might when locked in the back of a moving truck with a potential mass murder. And he really was pretty.
“Are you hungry?” he asked. His voice was deep and penetrating—the sound of rumbling thunder. I tightened my grasp around my cell phone, holding onto it for dear life; it was a miracle he’d let me keep it, really. Fix was a smart man, that much was desperately obvious. So there had to be a reason he hadn’t confiscated my only current means of contact with the outside world. From the backseat, I could easily send a text, pleading for help, and Fix knew that.
“No. I’m fine,” I answered him.
“Okay,” he responded flatly. But another five miles down the road saw him pulling off our course and onto the forecourt of a gas station.
“I told you I wasn’t hungry.”
“And I said okay. But, with all the grumbling and rumbling coming from your stomach for the last hour, I knew you were lying. Also, this truck doesn’t run on thin air. If we’re going to make it to Alabama, then we’re actually going to have to stop for gas every once in a while.” He paused while he killed the engine, then turned in his seat and pulled a face that must have matched my own pretty closely. “I know. The laws of potential energy and physics in general are fucking stupid, right?”
The ease of his smile struck me as odd. But then, Fix had had a long time to come to terms with the fact that he was a killer. It was old news to him. I’d had less than a few hours to wrap my head around his entire existence, and it was taking me a hot minute to figure out what the fuck was going on. “I’ll have a bottle of water and a bag of chips,” I said. “Plain. No cheesy shit.”
According to Amy, I had a look that withered men’s balls and had them retracting inside their bodies, never to be seen again. I was giving Felix that look now, but he seemed utterly impervious to it. Didn’t even bat an eyelash. In fact, he laughed under his breath as he opened up the driver’s door and hopped out of the cab, moving with the ease of someone very comfortable inside their own skin. I hissed under my breath when, instead of filling up the car and heading inside the gas station, Fix tugged open the back passenger door—mydoor—and gestured rather bluntly for me to get out.
“I head inside that building, I’ll come out to find my truck gone,” he said, smiling from ear to ear. “You think I’m that dumb?”
