Stu swallows.
Harper opens the door for Ida. “Let’s get you back to your truck. You’ve still got a drive tonight. Or we can put you up in a motel if you don’t feel up to it.”
Stu looks at Harper. “Who’s paying for that?”
Ida shakes her head. “I’m feeling okay now. I’ll drive home. Never been much for motels. Dirty sheets and even dirtier bathtubs.”
She climbs in. Harper shuts the door behind her. Stu is still standing there. “You okay?”
“I’m on the fence here,” he says in a low voice.
“I figured as much. But she’s right, Stu. If that name has any bearing, you have to believe her.”
Stu looks down at the window, the outline of Ida’s face there in the dark. “Or put her as a suspect,” he says, walking around the front end to the passenger side. “Anyway, what does it matter what I believe? As long as the case gets solved, I don’t give a fuck if tea leaves and chicken bones point us in the right direction. I just wanna bag this prick.”
Harper watches him climb in, then gets in herself.
Ida gives them a wave from the cab of her truck and then heads out of the parking lot and onto the dark streets. She feels cold, as if she’s back in the morgue, surrounded by the sleeping dead again.
Ida flexes her hand—she can still feel the icy kiss of the young woman’s skin against hers, the charge of electrified particles that connected them both in those long, torturous moments. Ida runs the heater, turning the dial all the way to max. Soon warmth fills the truck, but she still feels the chill that inhabits her bones.
For a short while, we were connected. I felt the ice in her marrow. The awful agony of his hands around her throat, squeezing, squeezing, forcing her last breath away.
She turns on the radio, hoping that will take her mind off what she just experienced. Bobby Womack singing “Deep River” warbles through on the radio waves, semi-distorted as if it’s beamed in from Mars.
Ida sings along to it, just to drown the voice in her head, the whisper of a broken soul saying a name, repeating it over and over and over and over.
“Gertie.”
8
“You want a beer, Lester?”
He pulls up a chair at the kitchen table and sits down. “No, I got to drive.”
“Coffee then.”
“Okay,” he says.
Ceeli called him over to her place on the pretense of another auto repair, but he can’t find anything wrong with the vehicle. He knows the real reason she wanted him to come to her house.
“Mack not here today?” Lester asks her.
She rinses two cups. “Nope. He got work out of town. Won’t be back till tomorrow night.”
“Workf hard,” Lester notes.
“Sure does. Not that I see any of the money,” Ceeli says, shaking her head.
Lester can hear someone walking on the flattened dry grass around the side of the house; then he sees Ceeli’s neighbor cross the window. The back door is already open, but Julie knocks on the frame. “Yoo-hoo!”
“Ah, hi ya Julie honey,” Ceeli says. “Want a coffee?”
“No thanks, Ceeli, I’ve gotta run.” Her gaze falls to Lester, and for the briefest moment, she is unable to contain her expression, to keep the mask up. Revulsion flashes across her features; then it’s gone, buried behind an exterior of mock acceptance. “Hey, Lester.”
“Hello Julie.”
“You headed out somewhere?” Ceeli asks her.
“Oh, yeah, heading into town. Wanted to know if you needed somethin’.”
Ceeli shakes her head. “Don’t think so.”
“Well, alright then. You got my cell, you need anythin’,” Julie says.
“I got your cell.”
Julie nods at Lester. “Bye to you.”
He smiles because he knows it repulses her. “Have a nife day!”
When Julie has gone, Ceeli breathes a sigh of relief and sags against the kitchen counter. “God, that woman gives me a headache. There’s no getting rid of her.”
She makes the coffee and tells Lester to go to the living room. Ceeli sets the cups on the coffee table as Lester throws himself down on the sofa.
She stands over him, pushes his head back, her finger under his chin so that he looks up at her. “You’re the only joy I got in this world right now, Lester.”
He swallows.
Ceeli straddles him, her big legs on either side of his, and kisses him. He can taste her bad breath, her cigarettes and coffee. The sleep that has covered her teeth in a gritty film she has yet to brush away. Pulling away from him, she sucks on his deformed top lip.
She reaches down, feels his limp dick through his jeans. She moves to the floor, kneeling before him, and sets about freeing his flaccid penis. His work bottoms gather at his feet.
“Honey,” she says, her hands on his thighs, bending forward to lick his genitals, then the end of his prick. She stops and looks up at him. “Somethin’ the matter baby?”
“Put it in your mouth.”
“Soft like that?”
He stares at her, silent. Demanding. Ceeli holds his floppy dick and puts it in her mouth. Lester sits back, one hand on the table, the other on Ceeli’s head, moving his fingers in her wiry black hair. He closes his eyes, thinks of the girl. In the field, in the rain. He was soaked through afterward, covered in mud. When he arranged her body, he’d wiped away the water that had collected in her eye sockets. Just thinking about her, about how he’d taken her among the rows of wet soybeans, is enough to get him hard. His cock throbs in Ceeli’s mouth, and she instinctively works on it. Her tongue slides around his shaft, the tip of his dick. Lester pictures the girls, sees them in his mind, and it’s enough to push him near the edge. He takes a handful of Ceeli’s hair and forces her to take him farther down her throat. Thinking of the young woman in the rain. On top of her, between her legs, his hands around her throat as she looks at him, big bright eyes pleading with him.
Ceeli gags as Lester thrusts his hips forward, mercilessly fucking her mouth. All the while, his eyes are closed.
There is the girl, the smell of the damp earth, the rain coming down around them in the dark. Cold water running down his back, dripping off his twisted face. After, he went back to the car for his Polaroid and the crown, then returned to her. He placed the crown on her head and took pictures. Polaroids are like printing your own postcards, your own mementos of something you want to hold in your heart forever.
Lester opens his eyes.
The girls are still there.
The Hope and Ruin Coffee Bar is busy as usual, everyone jostling to keep their place in line. Harper’s phone vibrates in her pocket. She checks it.
“Morelli,” she tells Stu.
“Answer it, I’ll get these.”
“Thanks,” she says, heading for the door to take the call outside. “Caramel latte.”
Stu waves her off. “I know, kiddo.”
Outside the heat is already cloying, the sultry air sticking to her skin. She swipes the phone and holds it to her ear. “Harper.”
“Detective. Where you at?”