She turned again, hit the pose, caught the light.
Grey thought, Yeah, that’s her.
They closed out the bar together and hung back while the last of the locals staggered away. The bartender moved off and started wiping down the tables and turning over chairs.
Perfume the scent of jasmine. He also smelled aloe and a veggie body wash. Kendra slid to Grey’s side, eased in nice and tight, breathed in his ear, and said, “So?”
3
They crossed the parking lot together, shoulder to shoulder, and when they got to his car she spoke with just the right amount of reverence.
“A ’69 Chevelle.”
“Yeah,” Grey said.
“I used to date a stunt driver who owned one. He usually managed to talk the directors into using it on set. He’d drive it onto the lot, just purring along in a couple of background shots. That car saw more screen time than I ever did.”
That’s how she broached the subject, as if it were an accepted fact that he already knew who she was. Could she tell when someone had seen one of her flicks? Did he look at her differently than everybody else did? Could she tell he was a buff? He didn’t think he was starry-eyed, but you could never tell about yourself.
“Pop the hood,” Kendra said.
“What?”
“I want to take a look at the engine.”
“It’s three A.M.,” he said.
“You’re in a rush all of a sudden?”
“I meant it’s dark out here.”
She had a penlight on her key-chain. He popped the hood and she inspected the engine, whistling, asking questions about original parts, when was the last time he’d flushed the transmission. The stunt man had taught her a lot. She knew more than Grey did about cars, that was for sure.
They got in and she said, “Drive.”
It was a loser question to ask where, so he just drove. She fiddled with the radio for a while until she came to an oldies station. He had bad associations with it for reasons he couldn’t name, but that was true about everything from his childhood.
She asked, “What makes a man drive a classic muscle ride like that and not take it to a car wash? It’s a damn shame seeing it with covered in so much grit. When was the last time you waxed it?”
He pressed down on the pedal, let the night flash by, and tried to hold on to his fading buzz. He didn’t like talking about himself but there was something about her that was dredging up the past. He could feel it moving sluggishly inside him again, seeking the surface. He fought to keep it down, or at least shove it aside. He hadn’t had any of the intense dreams for a few months now, but he could tell that they were going to start up again.
“That was too tough a question?” she said. She took off her shoes and curled in the seat, put her bare feet out the open window. “I can see you’re not going to tax my conversational skills.”
“Don’t be too sure,” Grey said.
“You going to tell me you hate talking about yourself?”
“No.”
She held her hand to his upper thigh, squeezed just enough to get the pulse in his neck snapping. “Ah ha, meaning you don’t have to because it’s already implicit in your attitude. Right.”
They kept to it like that for mile after mile. He’d been hanging around Reno for three weeks and knew the lay of the land. He thought she was starting to doze when she cleared her throat and asked, “Okay, so what’s chasing you?”
It wasn’t a perceptive question. She was appealing to his vanity. Every guy liked to think that his demons were meaner and crazier than anybody else’s. He could see her asking the same question of the stuntman as the guy nudged his Chevelle along the back lot, brooding and self-involved as hell.
Grey smiled, turned on the charm by dashboard light. “I’m just drifting.”
“Adrift, huh?” It wasn’t what he meant, but then again, maybe it was. “Me too. When about a million bucks worth of your shit is sold at auction, it gives you a certain Zen clarity about ownership and property. About home and security.”
“Yeah? So what did you learn?”
Her features hardened, the parentheses around her mouth looked like they’d been carved in with jagged glass. “That I’m never going to let it happen again.”
The resolution in her voice was as firm and inflexible as an oath made at the side of a grave. He’d spit out a few of them himself.
They kept heading into the rocky hills. Moonlight jockeyed between the crags. Grey kept his hand on the gearshift and she toyed with his fingers, brushed his knuckles. He cracked the window and let the warm air blow against his sweaty neck. One song ran into the next and bad mood started to take hold of him. The hinges of his jaw tightened, the muscles in his back froze. She noticed the change.
“What is it?” she asked.
“Turn off the music, okay?”
“Sure.”
Now she had her way in. He’d opened the door. Couldn’t even drive for a half hour without the past rising up and hooking his ankle, tugging him back down into its deep motionless waters. He wondered if he’d ever be free of it, or if he should even try. In a minute she would ask a throwaway question, the way they always asked, which would be full of intent and meaning, the answer to which he would never be able to fully give.
She brushed his wrist and plucked at the thick scars there. Some people thought he’d gone wild with a straight razor trying to snuff himself. But the truth was it had happened when he’d gone through the rear window in the car accident that had killed his parents. If he’d been wearing his seatbelt the way his mother always told him to, he would’ve died with them.
“What cut you loose?” she asked. “What did you do?”
“You don’t go in much for chit-chat. Am I reading that right?”
“I’ve done enough party prattle and hot spot club chatter to last a lifetime.”
“And yet you found me in a bar.”
“I told you my story even though it’s boring. Is yours?”
What cut him loose? What did he do?
He wasn’t sure how to answer. The words weren’t there.
She touched his scars again. He heard his mother tell his father, Slow down, Eddie, the roads are icy.
“I made a promise to do something I don’t really want to do,” Grey said.
Kendra didn’t ask what it was that he didn’t want to do, which surprised him. Instead she made a flat statement. “You’ve been in prison.”
“Narrowly avoided.”
“For doing what? Or nearly doing what?”
“Nearly punching an asshole commanding officer in the mouth.” He pressed the lighter in. It still worked after all these years. You get a classic car, renovate and recondition everything about it, and most of the time you still can’t get the damn lighter to heat up. He shook a cigarette from the pack, champed it between his teeth, listened to the pop of the lighter, and lit up. “What movies have you been in?”
She mentioned a few titles. Grey had seen most of them but only remembered her in them after she got really specific about the characters she’d played and what they’d done in the films. “In Flowers of Evil I was the gardener’s wife who finds the bodies under the rose bushes, who’s having the affair with the pool boy, and he turns out to be the killer. I get it with the shears in the neck at about the hour and fifteen mark. They CGIed my head rolling out of the top of the closet.”
A little surprising that she’d been so high profile, that he’d watched her so many times before.
She fondled his scars some more and asked, “So who’d you kill?”
The question made him raise his eyebrows. He hadn’t been expecting it. “What the hell made you ask that?”
“You’ve got the look about you.”
“I do?”
Was that why they were always chasing him? These women who needed their husbands aced? Because he looked like someone who’d already put two in the back of somebody’s head? And if he’d done it before then it wouldn’t be a stretch to do it again?
“It’s not just your eyes, but in the way you stand, how you present yourself.”