The Night Gardener

The bar was fine, sports themed but not too aggressive with it. There were many high tables designed for those who wanted to stand in groups and stools for those who preferred to sit. A bank of windows gave a view of the fake street. Holiday had a seat at the stick and placed his cigarettes and matches on its marble top, cool to the touch. One good thing about Virginia, you could still smoke in a bar.

'Yessir,' said the bartender, a low-slung blonde.

'Absolut rocks,' said Holiday.

Holiday drank and smoked down a Marlboro. The mostly male crowd was heavy with goatees, Ke

He struck up a conversation with a young route salesman, and they bought each other's drinks for the next two rounds. It had gotten dark out, Holiday noticed, by the time the salesman went up to his room. Holiday ordered another drink, got it in hand, watched as steam came up off the rocks in the glass. He was relaxed. He was going down that familiar darkened road, and still he had no desire to turn back.

An attractive redhead who would never see thirty-five again took a seat on the stool beside him. She wore a greenish skirt-and-jacket business suit that complemented her hair color and picked up the green of her eyes. Her eyes were lively and told him that she'd be a freak in bed. Holiday took all of this in with a quick glance. He was good at this.

He held up the cigarette burning between his fingers. 'You mind?'

He showed her his teeth and the laugh lines around his ice blue eyes. The first look was all-important.

'Not if you let me bum one,' she said.

'You got it,' said Holiday, and offered her the pack. He struck a match, put fire to her smoke, and blew out the flame. 'Da

'Rita Magner.'

'Pleasure.'

'Thanks for this,' she said. 'I only smoke on the road, y'know.'

'Me, too.'

'I get bored.' She winked. 'It's something to do.'

'Sales can be a drag,' said Holiday. 'Different hotel room every night…'

'Bartender,' she said, raising her hand.

He checked her out as she ordered a drink. He caught the sun line on her ring finger. Married, but that was fine; it only made them more eager. Her treadmilled thigh rippled as she crossed it over the other. He eyed her open suit jacket, her freckled chest, her small breasts, loose in a black brassiere.

'On my tab,' said Holiday to the bartender as she placed the drink in front of Rita.

'You're go

'I'll let you get the next one.'

'Deal,' she said. 'So what line are you in?'

'Security,' said Holiday. 'I sell trackers, surveillance equipment, wiretap devices, that kind of thing. To police.'

He had a friend, an ex-cop like him, who did just that, so he knew enough about it to bullshit her.

'Hmm.'

'You?'

'Pharmaceuticals.'

'You got any samples you wa

'Bad boy,' she said with a crooked smile. 'I'd lose my job.'

'I had to ask.'

'It's okay to ask.'

'It is?' said Holiday.

She drank vodka tonics and he stuck to Absolut on ice. She matched him one for one. They finished his pack of smokes and he bought another. He moved closer to her and she let him and he knew that he was there.

He told her about his most embarrassing moment as a salesman. It was a variation on a story he had told many times before. He changed the details as he went along. He was good at that, too.

'What about you?' he said.

'Oh, God,' she said with a toss of her hair. 'Okay. I was in Saint Louis last year. I had flown in that morning for a big lunch meeting, and I thought I had cushion time between my arrival and the meeting. So I wore some comfortable clothes on the flight. Comfortable but definitely not appropriate for the meeting.'

'I know where this is going.'

'Let me tell it. The plane was real late getting in, and I had to pick up the rental car as well. By the time I did it, there wasn't enough time to check into my hotel, change my clothes, and still make the meeting.'

'So where'd you change?' said Holiday.

'There was a garage under the restaurant where we were supposed to meet.'

'You couldn't use the hotel bathroom?'

'It was real dark in the garage and nobody was around. I changed in the backseat of the rental. I had my top off, I mean completely off, because I had to put on a different bra than the one I had on, and this old guy walks by on the way to his car. Instead of doing the decent thing and walking on, maybe doing a double take, he comes over to the window and taps on it, and he's staring at me, really checking me out…'

'I don't blame him.'

'… and he says something like, "Miss, can I be of any assistance?'"

Holiday and Rita Magner laughed.

'That's what makes the story,' said Holiday. 'That detail.'

'Right,' said Rita. "Cause otherwise, it's not all that unusual. I mean, it wasn't the first time I've been nude in a car.'

'And I bet it won't be the last.'

Rita Magner smiled, reddened a little, and knocked back the rest of her drink.

'That day in the garage,' said Holiday. 'Did you have on the black thong you're wearing now?'

'How do you know that?'

'You're definitely wearing a thong,' said Holiday. 'And it's gotta be black.'

'You're bad,' she said.

She mentioned the minibar in her room.

Going up in the elevator, he moved on her and kissed her mouth. She parted her lips, and against the wood-paneled wall her legs opened like a flower. His hand went up her bare thigh and touched the lace of her black thong and beneath it the dampness and the heat. She moaned under his kiss and touch.

An hour later, Holiday was walking back to his Lincoln. She'd been as needy and voracious as he'd expected, and when it was done he left her to her memories and her guilt. She hadn't given him any indication that she wanted him to stay. Rita was now like the others, a prop, a story to tell the boys at Leo's, something for them to imagine and be envious of even as she was wiped from his mind. He'd forgotten her face by the time he turned the key to his car.

CHAPTER 9

Gus Ramone came through the front door and heard 'Summer Nights' coming from the rec room at the back of his house. Alana would be there, watching a DVD, one of her favorite musicals. Judging from the smell of garlic and onions, Regina was in the kitchen, preparing di

They're here and they're safe. This was the first thought that came to Ramone as he walked through the hall. As he entered the kitchen, he thought of Diego and wondered if he was somewhere in the house, too.

'How you doin, little girl?' said Ramone to his daughter, who was standing in front of the television set, dancing, imitating the moves she was watching on the screen. The rec room, which they'd added to the house a few years earlier, opened up off the kitchen.

'Good, Daddy,' said Alana.

'Hey,' he said to Regina, who had her back to him, moving a wooden spoon around in a pot set on a gas stove. She wore some kind of athletic outfit, pants with stripes on the side and a matching shirt.

'Hey, Gus,' she said.

Ramone put his rig, a clip-on belt holster holding his Glock 17, and his badge case, in a drawer he had equipped for security and locked the drawer with a small key on his ring. He and Regina, and no one else, had keys to the drawer.

Ramone went back to his daughter, now doing pelvic thrusts in the center of the living room, aping the young actor onscreen. The man was smiling lasciviously, dancing in the bleachers, as lean and fluid as an alley cat, his Brylcreemed cohorts egging him on, singing, 'Tell me more, tell me more…'