Signature Kill by David Levien Read Free Book Online Page B

He moves through it, the camouflage it provides him complete. The lights of the city bounce off his windshield like star points. He cruises the strip off Pendleton Pike between Shadeland and N. County Line Road over and over, his car engine a rhythmic hum, watching as the filthy working girls show up to find their spots, then catch their customers, and then, finally, disappear one after another into strange cars to do what they did for money. There are black girls and Latinas mostly, but whites too, and after about an hour he sees her. The one he wants.
His
. She is almost six feet tall, though a lot of it is the shoes. Spiked towers of black patent leather that reflect the night. She can barely walk on them, so she totters and twirls more than strolls. She wears a faded black denim skirt punched with rhinestones and no stockings, her bare legs as thin, white, and shapeless as PVC pipe. A short, tight leather jacket is her only concession to the cold. She has on hardly any makeup, he sees during his first pass, just red lips. But her hair is blond, piled on top of her head, held up by a large plastic clip.
    After a second pass he feels a gnawing sensation inside that someone else will stop and get her, so he pulls over quickly and lowers his window. She points her way over to him, like a newborn horse.
    “Hi there,” she says, leaning down.
    “Hello,” he answers.
    He smells the mint of her gum over crushed cigarettes when she speaks, and the manufactured fruit essence of her hairspray.
    “You looking to party?” she asks.
    “Yes,” he answers. Stupid words he’s heard many times, though he supposes it
is
a party, of sorts.
    “A shorty or all night long?”
    “I don’t know yet,” he says.
    “A hundred for the hour, or three hundred for the whole shebang.”
    “I want to go to the Always Inn.”
    “Oh baby!” she says, moving around and getting in the passenger side. “That’s good news. It’s way too cold for this car bullshit. Besides, I can’t do my
thang
good in a car. It’s a little far, will you drive me back afterward? You’re gonna be
so
happy you stopped …”
    He isn’t really listening to her, because the humming in his head is rising louder and louder. He drives to the motel and parks away from the office. She has the heat cranked and is playing with the radio when he leaves her. He buys the room with cash. The clerk makes him leave a credit card imprint for security. He has one specifically for this purpose, and it doesn’t bear his real name. It wasn’t difficult at all to get. He’s had it for years and never actually charges anything on it. He takes the key card, goes back to the car, and pulls around to the room.
    They get out near the door.
    “You got any stuff?” she asks.
    He shakes his head. It does feel odd walking into the room without his kit, but he is empty-handed tonight.
    “Okay, so no toys,” she goes on. “Lots of guys like toys, you know?”
    He doesn’t answer. Just flicks on the light.
    “You want to get drinks, or …?” she asks.
    He sits down on the foot of the bed, his hands in his lap. The sense of calm he feels is overwhelming. He has an image behind his eyes of a glacial mountain lake, with no current, no wind, no people, no boats, no fish, no birds upon it, nothing at all to ripple the surface. He is the lake.
    “You’re a quiet one, aren’t you?” she says. She drops her purse on the small round table by the window and takes off her jacket. She has large breasts, pressed together and upward by a tight tube top.
    “So, player, what’ll it be?” she goes on. The cold has made the top of her chest pink, the color of processed ham in a supermarket case. “Something specific, or should we just, you know, take ’em off and try it?” She sits down next to him on the bed.
    “How much,” he asks, “to punch you in the face?” His voice sounds level and distant to him.
    “What?” she says, a laugh in her throat.
    “How much,” he asks