Hard Case Crime: Money Shot by Christa Faust Read Free Book Online Page B

me like a laundry bag. It was black and probably would have looked much sluttier if it actually fit. There were no bras in anything close to my size and the dress’ deep sweetheart neckline hung droopy and unflattering on my bruised chest. Malloy had to help me zip the thing and when I looked back in the mirror I suddenly felt like crying. I wanted desperately to go home, take a shower in my safe green bathroom, and change into my own comfortable clothes. I wanted a bra that looked nice. My favorite boots. I wanted to open my neatly organized, sweet-smelling underwear drawer and pick out a nice clean cotton thong. The thought of my little house and all my books and clothes and personal things barricaded behind yellow tape and rifled by smirking cops fed my helpless anger and heated my tears to near boiling as I fought to hold them back. I turned away from the mirror and that horrible ugly face and started randomly flinging shoes around, searching for anything that was less than three sizes too big.
    “I can’t,” I said. “These are all fucking huge.” I picked up a pair of cherry-red patent leather pumps. “Eleven!” I shouted, tossing them aside. “Thirteen!” I read off the print on a pair of clear plastic platforms. “Fuck!”
    I flailed out with my left arm and knocked over a wire shoe rack. Huddled and shaking in a pile of trashy drag shoes, I couldn’t fight the tears anymore.
    Who did I think I was kidding? I wasn’t some kind of badass action movie heroine. I was just a beat-up barefoot dead girl with no house and no business and no chance in hell of doing anything but getting my dumb ass killed for real. I might as well just turn myself in. At least in jail, I’d get shoes that fit.
    Malloy turned politely away from my tears just like he had looked away while I was changing. He stood like that for a minute, giving me space to have my girly breakdown, then spoke.
    “Tell you what,” he said softly. “I’ll carry you barefoot to my car and then we can swing by Payless or something. You’re a seven, right?”
    “Right,” I said, snuffling back tearsnot and pushing my hair back from my face. “Seven.”
    It’s funny, but that was exactly what I needed to break me out of my little pity-party. I normally hated that Men-Are-From-Mars, testosterone-driven impulse boys get where they want to solve all my problems by troubleshooting me like buggy software and offering up a simple concrete solution to stop my tears. But if Malloy had done something more intuitive and nurturing like hugging me or telling me everything was going to be all right, I would have disintegrated into a useless puddle. His simple answer to the problem of the big shoes gave me something to hold on to. Payless. Right. Good idea. It allowed me to pretend that the lack of shoes that fit really was the reason I was crying.

9.
    We wound up at Target instead of Payless. I waited in the car with my knees tucked up under my chin while Malloy went in. I watched normal people going in and out with kids and bags, all living normal lives in which nobody had ever really hurt them. I hated them for being so clueless, like I used to be.
    When Malloy came out he had twice as many shopping bags as I’d expected. When I looked at what he’d bought, I felt the same sort of baffled wonder I had experienced over the morning coffee.
    The first shopping bag he handed me contained items that were plainer and cheaper, but otherwise identical to the outfit I had been wearing the last time I saw him, a pair of low-rise jeans and a black tank top. But instead of the high-heeled boots I had been wearing that day, he’d bought me a pair of sleek black athletic shoes. He’d also included a utilitarian black fleece hoodie, since it was October and the weather was drifting toward cool at night. Another smaller bag contained two black thongs, a black bra and a package of black cotton socks. The bra was the correct size, but Malloy had chosen a more modest,