A Killing in the Hills

16


Chill opened the door of his motel room. He wasn’t tentative about it. He did it with authority – in fact, with a sort of grand flourish, like what you’d see in the movies, so that if it wasn’t who he expected it to be, they’d know he wasn’t scared of them. That he wasn’t scared of anything.

But it was just who he’d expected it to be, even though he’d never seen her before in his life. The woman was as skinny as the leg of a card table. She had flat, lank brown hair. Both greasy halves of it fell away from a crooked middle part. Thin arms dangled at her sides. Each arm concluded in a dirty little scallop of a hand. She was wearing a tight white tank top from which the tiny nipples of her small breasts bumped out like minor imperfections in the fabric. Her jeans, even tighter than the tank top, ended at mid-calf, and the white band of exposed flesh had gone bloody from constant scratching. Clawing, it looked like, as much as scratching. She wore red flip-flops.

The flip-flops bothered Chill. This was fall, and fall wasn’t flip-flop weather. He also thought the flip-flops were disrespectful. This was a job, right? A profession? She was getting paid, and if you got paid for something, you damned well ought to think about the impression you were making to the boss. And he was the boss.

‘Come on in,’ he said. ‘You’re Lorene, right?’

‘I’m Lorene.’ She didn’t move.

‘I said to get on in here,’ Chill said. He was testy. She was pissing him off. ‘Now.’ He looked past her, out into the parking lot, and to the road beyond it. There was nobody there. His car was the only vehicle present. No cars went by on the road. Still, he was nervous.

She didn’t move. She didn’t even blink. ‘I gotta see the money first,’ she said. Her voice sounded so bored and generally absent that Chill wanted to smack her just to get a reaction. She was like a goddamned turtle, he thought; she was like one of those big slow turtles with the shells hard as concrete that live for, like, a couple of centuries, and only breathe or twitch once every fifty years or so. You can’t even be sure they’re alive unless somebody tells you they are.

For the first time, he took a good look at her face. Acne had done a number on it, turning the petite surface into a catalog of nicks and bumps and red-rimmed craters. Her eyes were blank. She’d tried to smear on some makeup, but the effect was comical; she looked, Chill thought, like a goddamned clown. Her nose was too big. Her mouth was too small. Well, he told himself, you get what you pay for, doncha?

He’d found her number the night before in a phone booth in front of the Shell station outside Rainey Hollow. The presence of the phone booth had surprised him. You didn’t see so many of them anymore. Everybody had cell phones now. After he’d gassed up the piece-of-shit compact, he’d gone over to the phone booth and pulled open the hinged door and peered inside. It smelled like somebody had puked in there a month ago and then turned around and slapped the door shut, trapping the smell, turning that sour puke smell into a solid block. The smell knocked him back, but he still wanted to look inside, so he did.

The black plastic receiver, its top half missing, was off the hook for good. It hung down on a ridged silver cord that looked like a dead snake. Somebody had maybe smashed that receiver against the side of the booth, because there was an angry-looking starburst pattern in the glass, and the top part of the receiver was, Chill saw, lying on the floor in a couple of pieces. What coulda made somebody mad enough to slam the receiver like that? Coulda been anything. The surprising thing to Chill wasn’t that people got mad enough to do shit like that. The surprising thing was that they weren’t that mad all the damned time.

This phone hadn’t been in working order for a long time. That was obvious. Before Chill backed out, though, he looked at the big black hunky thing bolted to the wall, the part that had the numbers and the rotary dial and the instructions for making long-distance calls printed on a sticker on the little metal plate. And the coin slot. Somebody had used a knife and scratched a message on the side: LORENE SUCKS DICK. And then there was a phone number.

Well, hell. He knew he might have some time to kill on Sunday, depending on how things went with his stakeout of the lawyer lady, so he’d repeated the number out loud and hoped he could remember it until he got back to his car. He didn’t want to stand out there in the open any longer than he had to. Once he was back in the compact, Chill had dialed the number on his cell. He got a recording. After the beep, he said, ‘Towser Motel out on Route Nine, room fourteen, don’t come before three on Sunday.’ He had nothing to lose, he figured. If somebody showed up, great. If not – well, he’d be checking out Sunday night anyway. Boss said he had to move on. Chill had killed three people, maybe he would’ve made it four by that time – Chill didn’t know how he’d get to Belfa Elkins, but somehow he’d make it happen – and he had to clear out. Lay low. Maybe even head on down to Virginia, or over to Ohio, until things cooled off.

So what the hell. He could have a little fun that afternoon, right?

This woman didn’t look like she knew anything at all about fun. She repeated her request for the up-front cash. Chill started to tell her to go screw herself, he didn’t need the aggravation, but damnit, he was bored. He was antsy. He could use the distraction.

‘How much we talking about?’ he said. He was sure that whomever had dropped her off was waiting just down the road in an old Pontiac with four bald tires and an iffy transmission, hanging close in case the customer got fussy about the price and kicked her ass out of there. In which case the guy – the pimp, Chill corrected himself, although that was a big-city word, not a word he much used – would circle back around and pick her up, probably. She was like a piece of livestock. You let her loose for a while and then you went back to fetch her. She didn’t have any say in the matter. You could put a collar on her if you wanted to. With your name and phone number just under the IF FOUND PLEASE RETURN to line. She wouldn’t fight you on it. She wouldn’t fight you on much of anything, Chill figured.

‘Hunnert bucks,’ she said.

He laughed. It came out like a bark, and she flinched. He was glad to see that she still had her reflexes. ‘I’ll give you twenty,’ he said with a sneer, ‘and I’ll be right quick, so’s you and your boyfriend can party the rest of the night with it.’ Chill loved a good negotiation.

She, however, didn’t. The woman who called herself Lorene appeared to have no energy left to bargain with. ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘Twenty.’ She stepped into the room. ‘There ain’t no boyfriend, though. It’s just me. Got a lift over here.’

He believed her.

He reached around her, to pull the door shut, and as he swept past she made a tired, halfhearted movement toward his crotch with her tiny right hand. The gesture felt like something she’d read about in an instruction manual and practiced a few times. There was nothing erotic about it. Nothing sexy or spirited.

He’d be doing most of the work himself. Turtle Girl was hopeless.

Door now locked, he nudged her stringy shoulder to get her to move farther into the room. He took another look at her, at what the pills or the booze – who knew which it was, and did it really matter? – had done to her. He’d be working hard to get himself off with this one. Twenty bucks’ll be a gift. A goddamned gift.