Drawing Dead (7 page)

Wearing a summery red dress that finished most of the way up her thighs and understatedly showed what her breasts were made of. She had tan olive skin that was natural to her, effortless, and her eyes and hair went the exact same way, dark, shimmering, all loveliness and sparkling. She was alive and it throbbed from her. The truest beauty can do that I think. And she had it, she really damn well did.

Mr. Andrelli?

Call me Jack.

Could we speak?

Sure…shoot?

I’d like to hire you.

She must have seen the local advert. Terrible timing. The job I mean, meeting her could never be such, hell she could be the one flicking the switch on the juice when you were strapped into the electric chair, about to meet your maker, you’d still be glad you got to meet her, trust me now, you wouldn’t want it any other way.

Well uh, yeah… sorry…what should I call you?

Evangeline, Evangeline Lorenzi…Evie though, everybody calls me Evie.

Ok then Evie. I’ll be straightforward with you, it's best that way I think. I’m trying to travel incognito at the moment. Trying to stay outta trouble, move in the shadows, you know what I’m saying.

I really need your help.

What’s going on?

You’ll hear me out then?

Of course I will. Can’t hurt can it? Sit down. You want coffee?

No…thank you.

She smiled right then. Right after she’d said she didn’t want any coffee. I couldn’t breathe a moment. You don’t have to believe me but it’s true.

How do you think I can help you?

She took a deep breath herself then. Followed it with the pitch.

There’s a man. I was in a relationship with him. You know how it can be. He’s a violent, mean son of a bitch. I ran from him and he followed me. Convinced me to take him back. I did and it was the same thing again except this time he was even more violent and an even meaner son of a bitch. He drank more, there were other women. So I ran away again. And he found me again. Said he was going to kill me, but only put me in the hospital.

She started to cry. I let her. This guy she was talking about, this asshole loser, I can’t say I hated him, in fact, he sounded vaguely familiar to me. I wondered if he had a regular drinking partner.

I got away again. Out of the town I was in, he found me again, threatened to kill me again. He will too. I know he will. He’s crazy; he is, especially when he’s drinking.

I couldn’t help but feel sorry for the guy, another sorry sack of shit trying it on and failing. I also felt extreme jealousy for him, 'cause he’d been naked with this girl and I hadn’t. That said, at least I was her type.

I’m through running. I want my life back.

I watched her closely when she finished. Partly because of how she was built, and partly to get a make on her. If she wasn’t such a world-class piece of ass I woulda turfed her. I wasn’t buying what she was trying to sell.

What do you wanna do? Kill him?

No.

She uncrossed her legs, recrossed them in opposite, put on a serious as hell pout and then went on talking. Her eyes were beautiful. Large and clean, milk fresh from the cow with a dash of velvety melted chocolate in the middle, made-up just enough to matter, lashes like taunting fans wafting her perfume at you, brows that framed the whole of it into perfection.

I want you to kill me.

I was pretty sure I understood her from the get go but I let her go on with it to be sure.

Make it look like I died. Then get me new documents. A whole new life. A brand new one. Your advertisement said that confidentiality is assured.

It is baby.

She didn’t flinch.

I can pay you well. Twenty thousand dollars. Please, Mr. Andrelli.

After she mentioned the money saying please didn’t really sweeten the deal much more. I fished a little further though. I didn’t purchase the narrative she’d worked, not one bit. But she was sitting there making life worth living for a change and had offered me twenty large. It was gonna be a right awful bitch to pull off but I knew I was capable of it. I played hard to sell for a minute.

Call me Jack.

Please, Jack.

Sold! Make like you’re not.

Evie…What you’re talking about doing isn’t easy. There’s a great amount of risk involved, and even if we pull it off it doesn’t mean it will stick. It’s fraud. Could land us both in jail.

I’ll pay you more. Double. Forty thousand. I can’t live like this anymore Jack. Looking over my shoulder all the time, checking my locks ten times before I go to bed every night and then not even sleeping anyway. A new damn town every damn month.

Just leave the country.

Seemed easy enough. Not sure why I was putting such stupid ideas in her head though. I wanted her here and wanted her money. She started crying again goddamnit.

I like it here. Why should I leave? Why should I! Look if you’re not going help me I don’t know what I’m gonna do…I can pay you more. Would fifty do? Please. I only have this much on me.

Girl like this, money like that, situation I was in. Devil musta been laughing so hard he almost shit himself. I looked at Evie hard, I figured she rarely had to sell so hard to get what she wanted. She reached into her handbag and took out five pink-banded wads of cash. Five thousand in each I was guessing. I was starting to like her even more than I thought I did.

Fifty is fine. This is half yeah, I’ll take this now, and then the rest when we’re done. That work with you?

You’ll help me then?

Yes. But there’s no guarantees. You understand that right?

Yes.

And there’ll be other expenses that come from your end.

I understand.

I let it settle a second. For both our sakes. I sat up straight in my chair and gathered the money into a neat stack. Counted one wad quickly and it was five large on the button and real. I placed the lot of it into the top drawer of my desk and then wished I had a drink in my hand and Evie in my lap. When I looked into her eyes she smiled at me again. It was too much and I had to look away. Oh sweet lord for that vodka in my mouth and gushing down my throat.

It’s going to take me a day or two to get some things together. Hopefully everything runs smooth. I’ll take a couple of passport style photos of you now. That way we don’t have to see each other again until it’s time. Write your number down for me. I’ll call you from a payphone when I get everything sorted. If you need to call me, which I don’t want you to do, but if you absolutely have to, make sure you use a payphone. Chances are I won’t get it anyway, I don’t have a mobile. So call here, and don’t leave any messages. If things get crazy, we can’t have a trail of us calling one another, or your voice recorded on my answering machine. How old are you Evie?

Twenty-four.

No chance. She was lucky to be twenty. I took three or four photos of her. Just her headshot. I got her to smile for one of them, I couldn’t help myself. In those brief instants of daydream I fantasized about a number of things. You can guess at them I think. Wouldn’t be a stretch. Yeah you got it, Evie’s delicious mouth, that’s right, her luscious breasts, right again, her supple legs, her delicate wrists, her balmy armpits, her firecracker ass, her illicit and had to be buttery honeypot. But there was other stuff too. Flashes shot through brutal to the surface.

Knifed in the dark and left to die.

Lexy, at the beach and in the sunshine.

Lexy, platinum blonde in my bed and arms.

Lexy, bleeding now forever, pulling silly faces at me like she would, the bugs swarming in and around her rotting rancid flesh.

Her blues eyes burning like a hurtling planet.

So much dirt in between me and the coffin.

I could run away too. Take the money, square the debt, get on a plane and use my credit card to get anywhere but here.

Anywhere but here...

When Evie left she kissed me on the cheek and I breathed her hair and skin in. It was an agony worth enduring. Sun in winter lifting scents and joy into this isolated hellish sphere.

I’d went over everything once more to the letter and added a few other things I’d thought of in the meantime and she said yes, Jack that’s fine. I said ok then but thought to myself yeah, well, we’ll see about that won’t we honey, and when she left I printed out the photos passport style on high-quality polished paper and deleted them from my camera right after. I’d be lying to you if I said I didn’t print out the one of her smiling to put and keep in my wallet and gaze at from time to time. And the other one where I'd zoomed out and got her breasts in shot too.

It was hard to decide which of'em I liked better, 'cause she was only smiling in one. Goddamn was she a first-class beauty. Just undeniable. Irrefutable. As permanent as you will be one day dead. A fucking knockout. I doubt if you’ve ever seen a women like her. I never had. She’d got my furnace so stoked that I couldn’t think straight. Nah I was gone, out to lunch. Sitting at my desk migrant minded with inevitability written on the wall. What came next is what you’d expect I’d think, and if what you’re thinking is what I think it is well what can I do but tell that it wasn’t otherwise, and if I said it were that…

Yep.

I’d be lying.