Page 26 of Nasty
If you were rich enough to live on one of the top floors of The Oakwood, you were given a special key that had to be inserted in order to reach your floor—a nice little extra to ensure the riff raff wouldn’t be wondering your halls. If you’d bought out the entire top floor of the building, however, you were given an embossed, chipped security key, and you had your own private entryway to a dedicated elevator that other residents would likely be shot if they were caught even looking at.
I prowled through the lobby, scanning the area as I always did. The plush carpets; the thick, luxurious curtains; countless vases dripping with flowers, cluttering up every available surface; the heavily flocked, gold foiled wallpaper: there were other residences in Brooklyn far more expensive and exclusive than The Oakwood, but this place had somehow maintained a glimmer of old New York. There was a faded, decayed, rat pack extravagance to the place, and Monica liked it. She’d chosen The Oakwood when it had come to finding her a place of her own to live, and I’d signed off on the location because it was defensible. Unlike in my building, there were no easily accessible stairways. The exits on each floor only unlocked and opened in the event of a fire, so there was no real way for someone to sneak in unless they came in through the front door, past Gil, and they somehow managed to bust their way into the correct elevator and rig it so that it would go up to the penthouse. And it was highly unlikely that that was ever going to happen.
My ears popped like a bitch as the elevator hurtled up to the twenty-seventh floor. Manhattan buildings went way higher, but here in Brooklyn, twenty-seven floors was nothing to be sniffed at. When the elevator doors rolled back, I was greeted by a wall of ear-splitting noise.
Huh. Uncanny. Sounded just like Pantera.
Monica’s apartment was turned upside down. Empty Chinese takeout boxes were discarded all over the floor, chopsticks abandoned and kicked underneath the stools at the island counter. Monica always said the huge expanse of glass at my place made her feel dizzy. She’d opted for somewhere with normal windows—windows that were now shuttered, blinds drawn everywhere, blocking out most of the daylight and the impressive vista of Governor’s Island in the distance. Clothes were draped over the backs of chairs and piled in heaps on the floor. A candle had toppled over on the small table in front of the white leather couch, and a puddle of bright red wax had oozed all over the glass top. From the finger marks, streaks and smears that ran through the wax, it looked as if Monica had tried to clean up the mess, but she’d obviously given up halfway and abandoned the task.
I stalked my way through the apartment, fuming as I went from room to room, searching for the woman. I found her in the bedroom, sprawled out on top of the bed, her stockinged feet dangling over the end. The wimple she’d been wearing earlier was laying on the floor, next to a pile of magazines and a bong shaped like a chimpanzee.
She didn’t rouse when I entered the room. It took me clearing my throat to bring her to life, at which point she sat bolt upright, her eyes flashing, chest rising and falling rapidly as she blinked blearily at me with bloodshot eyes.
“I thought we agreed you weren’t going to get high anymore,” I said.
She glared at me—the kind of glare that would send most men running in fear for their lives. “Urgh!” Flopping back down on the bed, Monica closed her eyes, turned on to her side, away from me, and curled herself into a ball.
“You could have knocked,” she said flatly. “You could have called and told me you were coming over. Oh, wait. You don’t believe in phone calls anymore, right?”
“You have a really short memory. You let yourself into my place less than three hours ago,” I shot back. “And I told you I was coming over. Get up, Monica.”
She groaned. Curled herself up tighter.
“Get the fuck up now, or I’m going to drag your ass into the bathroom and I’m gonna toss you into a cold shower.”
She flipped over, anger radiating off her in waves. “I’m notthathigh,” she snarled. “And you have no right to come in here, making me feel like shit, when you’re the one pulling all the crazy, stupid, reckless stunts.”
“My actions have no bearing on how you choose to conduct yourself. Why the fuck are you wearing that again, Monica? Go and get changed, for fuck’s sake.”
With the wimple gone, her long, blonde hair was unbound and hanging almost down to her waist, but she was still wearing the rest of her habit. “I can wear whatever I want,” she hissed. “I don’t see why you can dress however the hell you please, but I’m expected to cater to your tastes.”
“Youcanwear whatever you want. You always do. But this is crossing a line, don’t you think?”
She turned back over, looking down at herself. “I wore this thing for years, Felix. What’s your problem? They’re just clothes.”
“My problem is that you wearing a fucking habit out on the streets of New York, when you haven’t been a member of the church now for years, is asking for trouble. It draws too much attention, and for what? You’re not a novice anymore, Mon. You gave all that up a long time ago. Just like I did.”
“You’re wrong. Thisdoesn’tattract attention. Men don’t look at me when I wear this,” she replied. “Their eyes skate over me like I don’t even exist. When I wear this, I’m a ghost. A nobody. Some days, that’s better than being picked apart by every hungry, sex-mad moron wandering around this city with their dicks raging in their pants.”
Monica had tried to stick with her calling after the accident. For a full year after she was discharged from hospital, she’d remained a servant of the Catholic church, eating and sleeping at the convent three blocks over from St. Luke’s, praying, repenting, and searching for meaning. She’d insisted there was some kind of meaning to be found, some sort of lesson that she was meant to learn in the wake of what had happened to her. I’d admired her courage and determination at first, but in the end, I wasn’t surprised when she’d turned up on my doorstep one evening, wearing a pair of jeans and a yellow and red branded Denny’s shirt, saying that she’d had enough and that God was dead.
Ever since that day, she’d dressed herself in the weirdest combination of clothes—a Fedex delivery uniform; NYFD overalls; nursing scrubs. I’d never asked her why she dressed that way. It was obvious. Monica had lost her sense of identity when she gave up the church. She’d lost a huge chunk of her heart and her soul, and afterward she hadn’t known who she was anymore. She’d needed something to define herself by. Something to make her feel like she still belonged to something. Normal, everyday clothes were too ambiguous, and so the uniforms made her feel safe.
“I need your laptop,” I clipped out, storming into the room, and up to the bed. Thrusting out the pizza slice toward her, I also dumped the Snapple onto the bed beside her, and Monica flushed. She took the slice from my hands, her expression turning to one of uncertainty. It had been a long-running ritual now—me bringing her pizza and something sweet to drink whenever I came here.Monica didn’t look up at me when she took the food and the drink from me.Biting the piece of pizza, she wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, then she scooted herself to the edge of the bed and got up.
Her mouth was full of dough and cheese when she said, “Why? What do you need it for?”
“Because I need to track down this Carver guy once and for all. The IP address from the message he sent was a dud, but your laptop’s encrypted. There might be a way for Rabbit to backtrack the data and sever the dummy IP if he has access. He might be able to figure out the location and true identity of this Carver guy before he can cause any more problems for us.”
Monica snorted. “You mean, cause any more problems for you,” she corrected. “Or any more problems for that woman.”
“Her name is Sera. Use it.”
Monica leaned forward, aggressively tearing off another bite of her pizza. “She should be dead by now Fix. Dead. You do understand that, right?”
“We only accept jobs that deal with murderers, dictators, cartel bosses and rapists. Sera doesn’t fit into any of these categories, so why the fuck would we take her on as a mark? It makes no sense. The money wasn’t even good, Mon. What happened to your due diligence? What happened to making sure the people I bumped off really fucking deserved it?”
Monica stopped chewing. She lay the pizza down on her bed, wiping her hands off on the hem of her skirt. “I read the email. Saw the sister’s medical reports—”
