The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death - Charlie Huston [45]
She took the wet hand towel from my forehead.
—I know. Still. It's not as bad as it looks.
I looked at the blood on the towel in her hand.
—Well then, that explains all the relief pouring over me at this moment.
She bent and peered at the gash in my forehead, reopened when Jaime kneed me and I bit the floor.
—This should be stitched up. Want me to take a crack at it?
—What? No. What the hell with people who don't have any medical training at all wanting to stitch my tender flesh?
She straightened and dabbed the towel on my head again.
—I don't know. Just something I always kind of wanted to try.
—Stitching up an open wound?
—Yeah. Weird, huh?
I didn't bother with an answer, the weirdness of such a desire going without saying. The sexiness of it not being something I wanted to get into. As it would suggest too much about my own weirdness. A quality already on abundant display in my current mode of employment. Also by the fact that I was sitting in a motel bathroom at one thirty in the morning with a bag of ice in my bruised crotch and a beautiful and bookish and emotionally complicated young woman tending to my hurts while her brother got tanked in the adjoining blood-splattered room.
Instead, I got straight to the most important matter at hand.
—You smell great.
She took the towel away again.
—It must be the rose petals I've been bathing in.
I inhaled.
—Could be.
She tossed the towel in the sink.
—Or the deodorant I've been spraying on myself to cover the fact that I haven't bathed since my dad died two days ago.
I nodded.
—So I am kind of an asshole, huh?
She boosted herself on the sink and dangled her feet.
—You do have some moments of impropriety.
I took the ice bag from my nut bag and touched my numbed genitals.
—Yeah, certain things bring it out in me.
She picked up a pack of cigarettes sitting by the basin and put one between her lips.
—Like having the future generations of your family name put at risk?
I dropped the ice bag in the tub.
—Like being asked to an apparent murder scene to clean it up.
She struck a match and placed the flame to the end of the cigarette.
—Oh, that.
She shook the match out and let it fall to the floor.
—Jaime didn't actually kill anyone.
She blew some smoke.
—He just cut him up a little.
I rose from the can, testing my ability to move with a dangling pendulum of agony between my legs.
—Oh, is that all? Well then, let's get to work.
—He was being an asshole, asshole.
—One assumes.
—What?
I took my head from under the bed, where I was shining a flashlight looking for stray blood, and looked at Jaime.
—One assumes he was an asshole. Otherwise, one assumes, you would not have cut him up a little.
I looked at Soledad, standing by the open door of the bathroom, arms crossed, a cigarette she only occasionally bothered to drag from between the fingers of her left hand.
—That was the phrase, was it not? He just cut him up a little.
She looked from the floor.
—Yeah, that was it.
Jaime waved the latest in a long line of Malibu nips.
—A little? I just about did a Silence of the Lambs on him. Just about peeled him raw.
I looked again at Soledad.
She shook her head.
Based on the amount of blood I'd seen at her house, and how much less there was here, I was inclined to think he was full of it. But thinking isn't knowing. Is it?
So, not knowing which of them to believe, I went back to work.
I'd done as I saw Po Sin and Gabe do at the Malibu house, started at the top and worked my way down. Like cleaning a dirty window. There hadn't been anything on the ceiling, but along one wall next to the bed there was a nice spackling of blood that rose nearly to the top. I'd worked my way down it, spraying with a bottle full of Microban and sopping it up with paper towels that I dropped in the room's waste basket. To be disposed of later.
Jaime narrated as I worked.
—See, if he'd just come in here and conducted business in a responsible manner, I wouldn't have had to cut him. I mean, I understand that in this business contingencies