Three Times a Lady

Chapter 18

Nicholas’s first murder had taken place the previous August.

Leaning in close to the bathroom mirror at 969 Turning Oaks Drive on the west side of Chicago, he reapplied his bright red lipstick and remembered the night he’d stood inside a bathroom at a popular Atlanta nightclub just before he’d made his way back out onto the crowded dance floor.

Nicholas had felt a little nervous then, of course, but if he’d still had a penis it would have stiffened in delicious anticipation. And why not? Murdering people was a lot like f*cking them, wasn’t it? Of course it was. Both were intimate acts filled with unspeakable violence when done properly, and both caused stains that were extremely difficult to scrub away.

So, looking at things that way, Nicholas had decided he’d grow a new pair and do what he’d come there to do that night. Enough with all the preliminaries already. Enough with all the build-up. No more talking the talk and not walking the walk.

His mother was expecting this.

***

After scoping out the scene for several minutes, Nicholas checked his Mickey Mouse watch while he stood in the northeast corner of the club, his face mostly hidden by an Atlanta Braves baseball cap. Nicholas had chosen to appear as a man that night in the hopes that it would eliminate all the unwanted attention he surely would have received had he been dressed as a woman. As a man, though, Nicholas wouldn’t need to worry about any drunks offering to buy him shots or moving in to cop a cheap feel, drooling all over themselves as they did their best Brad Pitt imitations and tried their damndest to get into his pants.

Nicholas wondered how many of them would still be trying to spread his thighs if they’d known what used to dangle between his legs…

Fifty per cent of them, at the very least.

***

The Mickey Mouse watch was extremely difficult to read in the darkened nightclub. Straining his eyes, Nicholas finally caught sight of the little black hands as they were illuminated in the intermittent strobe lights flashing overhead and threatening to bring on a full-blown seizure.

One-thirty a.m. Only an hour or so to go now until show time.

Around that time, the curtains would finally go up and Dinah Leach would finally go down for the count for ever, never to rise again. That’s assuming, of course, that the weather reports were to be believed.

Nicholas shuddered again at the delicious prospect of what lay ahead for him, both tonight and for the rest of his life. After several months of careful planning, he and his mother had decided that Johnny’s Hideaway on Roswell Road would be the perfect place for all the action to start going down. And, from all appearances, it seemed to be a natural fit. Absolutely perfect for his intentions for the evening.

The Devil Went Down To Georgia played in Nicholas’s mind and competed with the rap music blaring over the speakers in the club to provide a jarring, discordant soundtrack for the scene. Wrinkling up his face in disgust against the audible onslaught in his ears, Nicholas took in a deep breath through his nostrils and steeled himself for what would come next. The devil had gone down to Georgia, indeed. And if the devil had his way, he’d have been wearing a beautiful red dress, a stunning pearl necklace and glamorous, six-inch high heels, to boot.

***

Nicholas had followed his prey for a solid week now – stalked her, actually, if you wanted to get technical about the whole thing, appropriately changing his appearance each night to avoid being recognised by her as a familiar face. Now all he needed to do was wait for the powerful storm to strike. And on this night – blessed of all nights – Hurricane Allison was scheduled to arrive in all her glory at precisely two-thirty a.m., according to the weatherman on the radio station Nicholas had been listening to when he’d pulled into the parking lot of Johnny’s Hideaway an hour earlier.

Nicholas had smiled to himself while he’d listened to the report, knowing the hurricane would provide the very noisy cover he’d need to get away with what he already knew would be his exceedingly bloody crime.

First things first, though. Nicholas still needed to get the woman alone.

Hardly an insignificant hurdle to leap, at all.

***

Johnny’s Hideaway was a hip, eclectic, upscale joint – the kind of place that played music ranging anywhere from Frank Sinatra and Tony Bennett and The Beach Boys to Madonna and Eminem and Rhianna. A little something for everybody. Just like Nicholas had a little something for Dinah Leach. The reality television star would just need to wait a little bit longer now to find out exactly what his gift to her would be. But it wouldn’t be the suspense killing her. It would be Nicholas himself pulling off the dirty deed.

Fifty feet away out on the crowded dance floor, Dinah Leach shook her shimmy to the upbeat sounds of Lady Gaga – looking like a complete and total slut as she did so, of course. As usual, the fame whore seemed to be enjoying the feeling of all the adoring eyeballs glued to her. Fake-ass celebrity bitch. With any luck at all, though, her fifteen minutes of fame would expire at just about the same time her worthless life did. And the clock was ticking now. Nicholas wondered if she could hear it. It was getting louder.

Tick, tick, tick.

Nicholas stretched his neck six inches to the left and sipped ice water through a plastic straw; wetting his lips at the same time he whetted his enormous appetite for murder. Of course Dinah Leach couldn’t hear the clock ticking. She was much too consumed with her own celebrity to notice something like that. Much too full of herself. Still, Nicholas supposed it would have been difficult for anybody to hear a goddamn thing above the deafening music blasting over the fifty or so speakers stationed around Johnny’s Hideaway, vibrating the floor beneath his shiny black dress shoes so violently that it reminded him of standing on the platform of a busy subway station in New York City.

From his shielded position in the corner of the club, Nicholas watched Dinah Leach swivel her hips suggestively in perfect time to Gaga’s Poker Face. The woman’s jeans looked expensive to him, and Nicholas had an eye trained to notice such things. The fancy denim had no doubt cost Dinah Leach five hundred bucks at a bare minimum, and they’d obviously been tailoured to show off her very best asset. Her only asset, really. The only thing that anyone in the world really valued about her.

Nicholas narrowed his eyes as a pair of hulking, muscular black men wearing oversized Atlanta Falcons football jerseys and matching baseball caps moved forward to sandwich Dinah Leach out on the crowded dance floor, trying their damndest to get some of her undeserved fame to rub off on them.

Nicholas smirked and took another sip of his ice water. Didn’t these idiots know that fake celebrity came with its own fake gloss that never quite rubbed off, no matter how hard you tried?

Apparently not.

Shaking his head, Nicholas lifted his wrist and checked his watch again. One forty-two a.m. now. Just a little bit longer until he could get this show on the road. And the clock was still ticking. He wondered if Dinah Leach could hear it yet. It was barreling down on her like a goddamn freight train now.

Tick, tick, tick…