Kiss of Evil by Richard Montanari Read Free Book Online Page B

over the big red Start video . He clicks. After a few turns of the hard drive, the image appears.
    “What is what?” Beth asks, sitting up.
    “This.” Paris turns and points to the velvet wing chair on the screen. Except the chair is gone. It has been replaced by a picture of the space shuttle making a perfect three-point landing at Andrews Air Force Base.
    “ Uh  . . .” Paris says. He looks at the top of the screen.
    CNN.com
    “That’s called the news, Jack,” Beth says, unzipping the back of her dress, as if they were still married and about to hit the sack. “The national news. Stuff that doesn’t happen in Cleveland. You may have heard of it.”
    “But there was just some kind of, I don’t know, performance-art thing on for a minute or so. Nothing but a chair. The all-chair channel or something.”
    “Right,” Beth says, rising from the bed, a little unsteadily, then kicking off her shoes. “Master Bedroom Theater.” She laughs at her joke, leans in front of Paris, grabs the mouse, and clicks on an icon. The iChat icon. “No peeking.”
    It is a familiar, sexy taunt. An early marriage-game for the two of them that began on their wedding night. Paris, tipsy outside the window. Beth, a terry-cloth blur inside their motel room.
    In a few seconds, the room behind Paris appears on the screen, courtesy of the small digital camera suction-cupped to the top of the monitor. The woman on the screen lets her velvet cocktail dress slip to the floor as she moves, in a series of still shots, to the closet.
    At that moment, to Jack Paris, the woman on the screen is somebody else’s wife, somebody else’s girlfriend, somebody else’s mistress. A movie-sexy total stranger within his reach.
    But . . . should he reach? Was Beth actually trying to seduce him? Was the moment he had longed for and dreamed about for years finally happening?
    He is as unsure of the answers to those questions as he is unable to tear his eyes from the computer monitor. The stranger on the screen slips her bra over her shoulders, her back prudently to the camera.
    And, in spite of his explicit instructions, Jack Paris peeks.

7
    She is Ginger tonight; blond and demure. Grace Kelly with a leopard clutch purse.
    The mark is black, in his late forties.
    She has never gone out twice in one week. Far too risky, far too much wear and tear on her nerves. She usually prefers at least a one-month span between hits, preferably two, but something terrible happened when she watched Isabella from the phone booth that morning. For a few minutes, she had thought another child was her daughter, a little girl about the size Isabella had been six months earlier. When she realized her mistake she searched the playground, frantic for a few moments, then finally burst into tears when she saw Isabella, sitting on a bench, her shoes untied as always, waiting for someone to help. Isabella had been the girl in the navy blue coat and matching tam-o’-shanter. The first girl out of the building when the bell rang.
    She had seen her daughter and not recognized her.
    There was no longer any time to waste. Every day she doesn’t hold her daughter is a day she will never get back She is not going to live up to her father’s low expectations.
    She closes her eyes, finds her center, finds Ginger , takes a deep breath, exhales.
    When she opens her eyes, she glances over at the table in the corner and draws Willis Walker to the bar with a smile that yields the rumblings of his very first erection of the night.
    “I’ve never seen you here before,” Willis says.
    “Oh, but I’ve seen you ,” Ginger answers.
    “Is that right?”
    “It is.”
    Willis Walker leans against the bar, a huge slab of black man in a mauve three-piece suit, matching tie and socks. The president of Black Alley Records, a small hip-hop label run out of a warehouse on Kinsman Road, Willis smells of Lagerfeld cologne, dance-floor sweat, and Vidalia onions tonight, the lattermost courtesy of