Fiona had been taught early on in her life that if you really want to disable someone, you need not run the risk of killing them as well. Breaking someone’s tailbone isn’t a pleasant experience for anyone, especially since if you do it the right way, it will temporarily make the person feel paralyzed, and if you do it the wrong way, it will make the person think they’re paralyzed and knock them out.
So Fiona made sure she did it the wrong way, and then, when it was clear that Clete would not be getting up in the near future, she reached into his pants and removed his gun. It was by far the most disgusting thing she’d done all day. Fiona didn’t understand how someone could have that much hair coming up out of their pants. Quite vile.
But the gun was nice. A Star Model D. 380. Beautiful finger grooves. Platinum plated. A perfect all-purpose killing machine. She slipped it into her purse and then took another look at Clete. She almost felt bad for him, splayed out there on the sidewalk as he was, until she realized she needed to move him, lest someone notice the enormous biker beached in front of Purgatory. Or at least she needed to hide him. She tried to pull him by his leg, but he was just too damn heavy and the dragging would simply take too long. She opted instead to tip him over against the low retaining wall in front of the bar and then drag a few of the handsome planters around him so that he was effectively boxed in from view.
Then she checked her appearance in the window of one of the vacant shops and fairly skipped into Purgatory.
One thing Fiona could never abide in men was their tendency to turn into pack animals when left to their own devices. The result of this tendency was that everywhere they huddled looked the same: brown. Brown furniture. Brown carpet. Brown walls. Brown television. Brown food. Brown drinks. Brown dirt under their nails. Brown jeans that were once blue. Women were far more interesting, at least in terms of their palettes.
The really weird thing, though, was that places even smelled brown when there was an excess of unfettered men about. Scientists would probably call this pheromones or something, but Fiona thought it all boiled down to the fact that men have never learned how to bathe correctly because none of them are willing to change a lightbulb.
This was abundantly clear when she walked into Purgatory and was met with a wall of blackness. It took her eyes several seconds to adjust before she could make out the dark brown bar, the five dark brown stools that sat empty in front of the bar and the skinny man wearing a brown shirt and pointing a brown sawed-off shotgun at her.
“Whoa,” Fiona said. Not because she was frightened, but because she figured that someone encountering a shotgun for the first time would be frightened.
“How’d you get in here?” Skinny said.
“Clete said I could use the bathroom,” Fiona said.
Skinny relaxed a bit, but not to the point that he lowered his gun. “You his?” he asked.
“I’m nobody’s,” Fiona said. “But I could be.” She kept her eyes on Skinny, but she was also making note of the items in her periphery. There was a door to the right of the bar that looked to head to a small kitchen area. On her left was an EXIT sign above a hallway. She could hear voices coming from that direction.
Smart. They probably had a boardroom where they conducted business, though Fiona mostly imagined a dozen grimy men sitting around a brown table, each of them emitting brown dirt from their pores.
“You shouldn’t be in here,” Skinny said. “It’ll be his ass and mine.”
“I just gotta go real quick. No one will even know I was here. And then maybe you and me and Clete can party. He said he was cool if you were cool.”
This got Skinny’s attention.
Men.
They’d risk getting killed if they thought it might end up that they got themselves a wild time in the process.
“Okay,” Skinny said. “Okay.” He still had the gun on her, but it felt less like he was doing it because he thought he’d need to shoot her and more like he was doing it because he wasn’t much of a multitasker. He needed to think and that couldn’t be done while simultaneously moving his arms. “Okay,” he said again. He blinked, then set the shotgun down on the bar. It must be nice to be so simple, Fiona thought. How little time would be wasted on things like making choices. “Go on ahead down the hall. Second door on your right. Just don’t make no noise. It’ll be my ass.”
“Oh, it’ll be your ass,” Fiona said, because she thought even the broadest innuendo would send poor Skinny into a frenzy of mental activity and that would keep him from walking outside to check on Clete. But just to be sure, she added, “We could party first, without Clete. What’s there in the back?”
“The kitchen,” he said.
“Is there a flat surface?”
“There’s two,” he said. “The floor and the counter. Both are pretty dirty.” He wasn’t acting much like a biker. No bravado. No hubris. No secondary male characteristics, really, apart from that shotgun. Ah, Fiona thought, the front. The reason the bar isn’t bugged.
“Why don’t you clean up one of them,” Fiona said, “and I’ll be out in two shakes of a lamb’s tail?”
Skinny considered this offer for a moment before coming to a decision. “All right,” he said, “but I only got five minutes, so get back out fast.”
A true romantic.
Fiona didn’t bother to respond; she just batted her eyelashes a bit, mostly in astonishment, and then headed toward the bathroom. Skinny bounded out from behind the bar and into the kitchen and immediately started whistling a tune Fiona recognized as a child’s nursery rhyme, though she wasn’t sure which one. Maybe “The Farmer in the Dell.”
Once she was in the dark hallway, she could clearly make out the loud conversation going on behind the first door on the right. She could stand right outside the door, but that might be a bit too risky. But since the entire bar was made of fiberboard-brown fiberboard, specifically-she had a pretty good idea that being inside the bathroom would be the equivalent of sitting at the same table as the assembled brain trust of the Ghouls Motorcycle Club.
She opened the second door, turned on the light and realized that, in fact, Clete wasn’t lying: They didn’t have a proper ladies’ room. Instead, what she found was a single toilet, a spartan sink and a mirror that was covered in handprints. On the floor were strewn condom wrappers, broken compacts, crushed beer cans and ants. Above the toilet, in a handsome scrawl, were the words PROPERTY OF THE GHOULS. Fiona ached for irony, but was sure there was none to be found.
She decided she just wouldn’t touch anything.
Hearing wasn’t going to be a problem, but staying invisible might. There were literally a dozen peepholes drilled into the walls of the bathroom so that the idiots in the next room could watch the girls squatting. There were so many that calling them “peepholes” seemed superfluous. There’d be more privacy if the toilet were out in the hall.
Fiona quickly turned the dim overhead light off again and the darkened bathroom filled with crisscrossing pinholes of light from the room next door. She stood in the middle of the room and listened to the conversation. They were going over the details of the break- in and what they’d learned thus far-all things that Fiona already knew, namely that the stolen drugs had been given to Nick Balsalmo and that they’d “taken care of that.”
“Do you have a fucking name yet on the crook?” a man said. His voice sounded like sandpaper. Fiona tried to imagine him driving a gold Lincoln.
“All I got is a last name from Nicky,” another man said. There was a pause in the room and it sounded like someone was shuffling papers. “Grossman,” he said.