“If you lived,” Gretchen said matter-of-factly. “If you had died, I would have dismembered and buried you.”
It was hot in the room. Archie felt the moist burn of sweat under his clothes. Gretchen looked cool and calm. Maybe it was just the pills. He cracked his neck and wiped the sweat off his upper lip. He could feel the heart scar throb under his shirt, his real heart beating underneath it. “It was a good plan,” he managed. He planted his hands on the table and stood. “Except that I’m not like Reston and the jackasses you got to murder for you. I know what you’re capable of.” He looked around the room, the cinder-block tomb they met in every week. She had manipulated him again and again. They had manipulated each other. But he had one power. The card she thought he wouldn’t play. “You made one other miscalculation,” he said. “You got yourself locked up.” He raised an eyebrow and lifted his hands off the table. “And you can’t fuck with me if I’m not here.”
Gretchen was unimpressed. “You’ll stay away a few weeks. But you’ll need the bodies.” She tilted her head at him and smiled, radiant. “You’ll need me.”
Probably , Archie thought. “Maybe,” he said.
She shook her head sympathetically. “It’s too late. You won’t feel better.”
Archie laughed. “I don’t need to feel better,” he said. His tone turned cold. “I just need you to feel worse.”
She leaned forward, her blond hair brushing her shoulders. “You’ll still dream about me. You won’t be able to touch another woman without thinking of me.”
He put a hand back on the table and lifted the other to his throbbing temple. “Please, Gretchen.”
She smiled wickedly. “You’ll think about me tonight, won’t you?” she said. “When you’re all alone in the dark. Your cock in your hand.”
Archie hung his head for a moment. And then he laughed to himself, looked up, and walked around the table to her. She glanced up, surprised, as he stood over her and reached out and touched her hair, the blond slick beneath his fingers. She started to speak and he put a finger on her mouth and he said quietly, “You don’t get to talk yet.” And he cupped her face in his hands and leaned down and he kissed her. He moved one hand behind her neck in her hair as their tongues met, the heat of the kiss momentarily overwhelming him. In that kiss he could taste the bitter pills, the salt of his own sweat, and in her mouth a sweetness almost like lilacs. He had to force himself to disentangle his fingers from her hair, wrench himself away, his lips moving from her mouth, across her smooth cheek, finding her ear. “I think about you every night,” he whispered.
Then he straightened up and he said, “It’s over.”
He hit the buzzer by the door with the heel of his fist. The door opened and he walked through it.
“Wait,” she said, her voice faltering.
His heart was pounding in his chest, the taste of the kiss still in his mouth. It took everything he had not to look back.
CHAPTER
51
A rchie was sitting at the coffee table, studying his cab receipts wondering how he was going to explain them, when the doorbell rang. He hadn’t slept. His blood felt thick and warm, his brain muddy. He looked, he thought, even worse than normal. He half-expected to find a reporter at his door, a TV camera, microphones. But in his heart, he knew that it would be Debbie. He hoped it would be her.
“You caught him,” she said when he opened the door. She was dressed for work: a gray skirt and a fitted black turtleneck under her long double-breasted coat. They were almost the same clothes she’d been wearing that last morning he’d seen her, two years ago, that day he’d gone to Gretchen’s house alone.
“Come in,” he said.
She moved past him, pausing a few feet inside to look around the living room. She had only been at his apartment a few times. She tried to act as if his sad little residence didn’t depress her, but he could see it in her eyes. She turned back to face him. “The news said that there was a hostage situation. With that reporter. That you went in.”
Archie closed the door. “It wasn’t that dangerous. He would have killed her before he killed me.”
She stepped forward, cupping his face with her hands. “Are you okay?”
He didn’t know how to answer the question. So he avoided it. “Do you want some coffee?”
She let her hands drop. “Archie.”
“I’m sorry,” he said, rubbing his eyes. “I haven’t slept.”
She took off her coat and laid it on the back of the beige recliner. Then she walked to the sofa and sat down. “Sit with me,” she said.
He sank down beside her and rested his head in his hands. He wanted to tell her, but he was afraid to say it out loud. “I’m going to try to stop seeing her,” he said.