Dublin Noir - Ken Bruen [54]
“I thought you looked like someone who could use some company,” Rory said, stretching and then rising from the bed.
“How old are you?” she asked.
“Twenty-four.”
He was she, she was Barry. How had this happened? She was much too young to be an older woman. And nowhere near rich enough.
“What do you do?”
“Like I said, I don’t worry about work too much.” He gave her his lovely grin, with his lovely white, very straight teeth. American teeth, like hers, she realized now.
“Was I … work?”
“Well, as my dad said, do what you love and you’ll love what you do.”
“But you’d prefer to do men, wouldn’t you? Men for fun, women for money.”
“I told you, I’m no cocksucker,” he said, and landed a quick, stinging backhand on her cheek. The slap was professional, expert, the slap of a man who had ended more than one argument this way. Bliss, who had never been struck in her life—except on the ass, with a hairbrush, by an early boyfriend who found that exceptionally entertaining—rubbed her cheek, stunned. She was even more stunned to watch Rory proceed to the minibar and squat before it, inspecting its restocked shelves.
“Crap wine,” he said. “And I am sick to hell of Guinness and Jameson.”
The first crack of the minibar door against his head was too soft; all it did was make him bellow. But it was hard enough to disorient him, giving Bliss the only advantage she needed. She straddled his back and slammed the door repeatedly on his head and neck. Decapitation occurred to her as a vague if ambitious goal. She barely noticed his hands reaching back, scratching and flailing, attempting to dislodge her, but her legs were like steel, strong and flexible from years of pilates and yoga. She decided to settle for motionlessness and silence, slamming the door on Rory’s head until he was finally, blessedly still.
But still was not good enough. She wrested a corkscrew from its resting place—fifteen euros—and went to work. Impossible. Just as she was about to despair, she glanced at a happy gleam beneath the bedspread, a steak knife that had fallen to the floor after one of their room-service feasts and somehow gone undetected. Ha, even the maids at the oh-so-snooty Merrion weren’t so damn perfect.
She kept going, intent on finishing what she had started, even as the hotel was coming to life around her—the telephone ringing, footsteps pounding down the corridors. She should probably put on the robe, the lovely white fluffy robe. She was rather … speckled.
But the staff came through the door before she could get to her feet.
“How old are you, then?” the police officer—they called them Gardaí here—asked Bliss.
“How old do I look?”
He did not seem to find her question odd. “You look like the merest slip of a girl, but our investigation requires more specific data.”
He was being so kind and solicitous, had been nothing but kind all along, although Bliss sensed that the fading mark on her cheek had not done much to reconcile the investigators to the scene they had discovered in the hotel room. They tried to be gallant, professing dismay that she had been hit and insulted. But their shock and horror had shown through their professional armor. They clearly thought this was a bit much for a woman who insisted she had been doing nothing more than defending herself.
“Really? You’re not just saying that?”
“I’d be surprised if you could buy a drink legally in most places.”
Satisfied, she gave her real age, although it took a moment of calculation to get it right. Was she thirty or thirty-one, possibly thirty-two? She had added two years back in the early days, when she was starting out, then started subtracting three as of late.
“I’m thirty-one.”
“That’s young.”
“I thought so.”
TOURIST TRADE
BY JAMES O. BORN
It might have been a death spasm or a reflex, but the man’s hand flew up and his long, clean fingernails raked across Reed’s face. He hardly reacted. So he had a scar to match the others now. His father had done worse to him by the time he was ten. This might be a tad more serious, as he could feel the blood trickle into