Page 9 of Nasty
In the field, back at the hotel, Fix had held onto me so tight. His hands had explored every inch of my body. His mouth had possessed me in the most intimate of ways. It had been dizzying and heady, every last second of it, but the short second that our fingers grazed now was filled with so much electricity that the oxygen rushed out of my lungs and left me spinning. How could I still feel this way about him? How could I still keep losing myself every time I found myself watching him out of the corner of my eye? There was no reason I should still be so winded by his very presence, his very touch, but there was no escaping it.
Fix was bad news, the kind that would be plastered across the front pages of newspapers all over the world if people knew a man like him existed, but I couldn’t rid myself of the thoughts of him that constantly plagued my mind, or the raw, wild, living energy that burst into flame whenever he captured me in his silver-blue eyes.
Light bloomed down in the hole. Fix had activated the flashlight feature on my phone, and he was casting it around, shifting about. His investigation stopped just as quickly as it had started.
“Fuck.” His one-word statement mirrored my own thoughts when I saw what he’d found down there. The space was cramped and small, the walls barely more than ten feet apart. A small desk sat against one of the walls, completely bare of any papers, trash or computer equipment. Against the opposite wall was a small cot, and on the cot lay a body. A man. His plaid shirt strained against his bloated belly, and the fingers on his meaty hands were twisted and contorted, as if they were reaching out and trying to grapple hold of something that wasn’t there. Cloudy brown eyes stared straight up at me out of what, indeed,appeared to be a bunker. His mouth was stretched open, and something fat and purple protruded out between his teeth. It took me half a heartbeat to realize that the mangled piece of flesh was his tongue.
Shit!Shit, shit, shit!
I toppled back, kicking and groping in the grass, scrambling to get away from the hatch. God…he was dead. He was fucking dead, and he was staring right at me. Holy fucking shit. My stomach clenched, and then unclenched. A loud, high-pitched sound pierced my mind, deafening me, making it impossible to hear anything over it. What thefuck?
I couldn’t get up. My arms and legs failed to respond as I begged them to move me further away from the fucked up scene I’d just witnessed. A million thoughts raced through my head, whirling, spinning, spiraling, tumbling.
I was back in that auto body shop, watching Franz bleed out on the ground. I was looking at the blood on my hands, and my stomach was lurching. Except this time there was no blood. From the brief snapshot I’d witnessed of the dead man lying on his back on that cot, I hadn’t seen any visible sign of injury or trauma. The veil of death that hung over him had been obvious, though, like a direct hit to the face.
Fix was next to me, then, his hands grasping at my arms, trying to pull me to him. I fought against him, trying to get away, but he was too strong. His arms closed around me like a vise, and the smell of him flooded my senses. “Sera. Sera! Fuck! It’s okay. It’s okay. I’ve got you.” His mouth was pressed up against my ear. I could hear what he was saying, but his words only seemed to make my panic worse.
“How? How is itokay? That guy! That guy was fuckingdead.”
“I know. I know. I’ve got you. Shhhh. Breathe. Take a deep breath for me, Angel. Come on.”
I inhaled, not because he’d told me to, but because it felt like I was going to pass out. “What the fuck, Fix? Why…why are there dead people everywhere you go?”
He made a tight, low, growling sound that vibrated in my ear,and he pressed my head against his chest. I was still thrashing and flailing, but he didn’t release me. He didn’t let me go.
“I’m sorry,” he breathed. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” Over and over again, he chanted his apology, the beat of the words like a metronome. I railed against him, clawed at his leather jacket and his shirt, trying to free myself of him, but it was useless. Eventually, the adrenalin that had flooded me dissipated, and a tidal wave of exhaustion hit me like a wall. I fell slack in his arms, muscle by muscle relaxing until I felt myself go limp against him.
Fix pressed his lips against my temple, holding them there in a drawn-out kiss that was designed to comfort. His breath, pulling in and out down his nose, rushed over my forehead and my cheeks. “You’re right,” he murmured. “There are always dead bodies wherever I go. This is what happens, though. This is what happens when you go looking for death instead of running in the opposite direction. You find it. Or, inevitably, it finds you.”
FOUR
911
FIX
I left Sera huddled up, perched on the curb, her arms wrapped around her legs, her knees drawn up under her chin. She was shaking like crazy. I didn’t want to leave her on her own, but I needed to get a look at the guy in the bunker. I’d used the ladder I’d found propped up against the wall, almost directly underneath the hatch, to climb my way out and I’d gone to her the second I’d heard her flip out, so I hadn’t had chance to investigate. Now, I needed to know who the guy was that was lying down there, and how the fuck he’d died.
I couldn’t count how many dead bodies I’d seen in my lifetime. There were always vigils being held for the deceased at the St. Luke’s when I was a kid. And I was a nosy, inquisitive kid, so I’d snooped nearly every single time I’d learned there was going to be a funeral. Then, giving people their last rites in hospice or at home, in their beds, I’d been present countless times as men, woman and, unfortunately, children had passed on from this life. Ironically, I saw less dead people now that I was an assassin than I had in my previous life. I knew death. I knew what it looked like. Felt like. Smelled like. And the guy in the bunker… he wasn’t behaving like your typical dead person.
There’d been absolutely no smell when I’d opened up the hatch. It was really uncommon for tongue protrusion to occur, but when it did it usually happened because the body had been exposed to fire either before or after death. The body hadn’t looked burned. But…
But.
Could the underground heat have caused the guy’s tongue to do that? The bunker was hotter than hades. It was possible. I wasn’t a doctor. I wasn’t even fucking close to being a doctor. I wasn’t going to have answers on that front until I managed to sit down in front of a computer and did some research. As I dropped back down into the bunker, Sera called out. “Be careful. Just…Fix. Please. Be careful.”
Care wasn’t something I often afforded myself. Care was a precaution undertaken by a person who loved their life, treasured and valued it, and it had been a long time since I’d given two shits about myself. But now that Sera was here…things were different. I could see myself caring, and that scared the living shit out of me. I didn’t have time to think about that now, though. There were more pressing matters to attend to.
From the bloating, it looked as if the body had been down here for at least two days. Rigor Mortis hadn’t passed yet, which meant it certainly hadn’t been more than three or four days. I closed the guy’s eyes; that had always been the first thing I’d done when I’d been called out to a body when I worked for the church, and old habits died hard. Then, it was about preserving the deceased’s dignity. This time, it was because the dead guy’s stunned, accusatory gaze was creeping me the fuck out. The guy’s skin felt waxy and weird as I touched his face. I cringed, resisting the urge to scrub my hands on my jeans—there was no point trying to clean myself yet. I still had to go through the guy’s pockets.
I found nothing in the breast pocket of his shirt. A branded book of matches—Crazy Girls’ exotic dance club and men’s revue!—and a pouch of rolling tobacco were in the left-hand side pocket of his stained cargo pants. A set of keys in the right-hand side pocket. Who the fuck wore cargo pants anymore? I held my breath as I rifled through the numerous pockets down each of his legs, but I didn’t find anything else.
No wallet. That was weird, but perhaps it explained a few things. Maybe this guy ended up dead because he’d been mugged, in which case it made sense that he had no wallet. Something told me he hadn’t been robbed, however. In a bunker, in a deserted town? Highly unlikely, unless his attacker had known about this place and had come here with him. More likely, if someonehadcome here with him, that they’d taken his wallet so he couldn’t be identified, not because they wanted to steal his money.
There was a pair of shoes tucked neatly underneath the cot. Black. Simple. Leather. They were polished to a high shine, not a scratch or scuff mark on them. I cocked my head, studying them for a moment, before I came to a number of conclusions. These shoes did not belong to the dead man. They were at least two sizes too big, for starters. And they hardly went with plaid and cargo pants. They were dress shoes, the kind worn with a high-end suit or a tuxedo. From the dirt underneath Dead Guy’s fingernails, he wasn’t the kind of person to be wearing a suit or a tuxedo.
There were no other shoes inside the bunker, which begged the question: where had Dead Guy’s shoes disappeared to? He hadn’t arrived here barefoot. The holey socks on his feet were dirty, but not dirty enough to suggest he’d been padding around in them up there on the graffiti highway.
It was growing hotter and hotter. Stifling, even though the hatch was still wide open. Time to go. I placed my foot on the bottom rung of the ladder and stepped—
