Lovely Death Page 3

  “Sorry, cutie,” the bartender said, wiping her hands on a towel. “Didn’t see you sneak in. Glad to see you made it.”

  Nick wrinkled his brow. “Sorry?”

  She hooked a thumb at the digital Guinness clock on the wall behind her.

  “Last call’s in twenty minutes.”

  “Ah. Right. Yeah, cutting it a little close tonight. Can I get a beer?”

  She lifted her eyebrows. “What flavor?”

  “Cold,” Nick said.

  “Bottle alright?”

  “Fine by me.”

  “You got it, darling. I just need to see an I.D.”

  Nick snorted. “Really?” He couldn’t recall the last time he’d actually been carded. Sure, he was only thirty but he couldn’t think of a single bar in Los Angeles that wouldn’t serve booze to anyone who was tall enough to see over the counter.

  “Really,” the girl said. “Sorry, owner’s policy. And it’s the law.”

  Beside Nick there was a grunt and the gray-whiskered mechanic leaned over to him. “Don’t take it personal, champ. This little wiseacre even cards me. And she’s known me for two years. Ain’t that right, Layla?”

  Layla whipped the towel across her shoulder and cocked an eye at the man in the greasy jumpsuit. “That’s right, Andy. Somebody’s got to enjoy that mugshot you call a driver’s license photo, don’t they?”

  Andy just laughed. “You see the abuse I have to put up with? Hey, get me another mug of this overpriced slop when you get a chance will you, doll?”

  Layla nodded at him with a wry smile. She regarded Nick once more. Her eyes were soft blue, an attractive contrast to her dark hair. A horseshoe-shaped diamond earring sparkled from each ear. She continued to stare at him until Nick finally remembered she was waiting to see his I.D. He slipped the leather billfold out of his back pocket, dug the California driver’s license out of it, and forked it over.

  Layla held the plastic card beneath the bar to look at it in the light. She bit her lower lip unconsciously and looked up at him.

  “Hey, do I know you?”

  Nick automatically dipped his chin toward the bar top, rubbed his nose. He met her eyes and smiled, shaking his head slightly. “I don’t think so. I get that a lot. Just have one of those faces.”

  “Are you sure? I swear I’ve heard this name before. You look familiar too.”

  Nick shrugged, palms upturned. He stuck out a hand.

  Layla took it and shook. Her fingers were thin but her grip was strong. She wasn’t the kind of girl who worried much about manicures.

  “Nick Aragon,” he said.

  “I see that,” Layla replied, tipping the card at him with her free hand. The mischievous grin morphed into a sarcastic smirk as Layla set the card on the counter. She walked off, snapping up two clean glasses on her return trip to the tap.

  Andy snickered. “She’s a feisty one, kid.”

  “My kind of girl,” Nick answered, reluctantly dragging his eyes from the curve of her departing ass.

  “I mean it, man. That girl’s trouble.”

  “They’re all trouble,” said Nick, fiddling with a cocktail napkin.

  “Amen to that. Still, I’m jealous of you. Never was a handsome devil, but I’d give my left nut to at least have the same odometer as you.”

  “Yeah? Why’s that?”

  Andy cocked his head toward Layla. “Because then I’d just be ugly, and not a creepy old fuck.”

  From the far corner came a lightning crack of pool balls being broken and a couple of cheers ensued.

  Nick shrugged. “Nothing ventured, and all that. You want me to give her your phone number? Maybe tell her you’re hung like an ox while I’m at it?”

  Andy leaned back and barked a laugh.

  Layla returned with the beers. Nick eyed the bubbling foam appreciatively.

  “Sounds like I missed the punchline,” she said, setting the drinks down.

  “Not at all,” Nick said. “We were just discussing Andy’s overly endowed nether regions.”

  At that, Andy stopped smiling. He swallowed hard and tugged at the collar of his shirt. He offered a sheepish grin, gaze dropping to his beer.

  “Well, good for you, Andy.”

  “Indeed,” Nick said. He lifted the beer and took a refreshing draught. “I’ll take a shot of whiskey too. Jack Daniels. Please.”

  “Sure thing, handsome,” Layla replied. She spun to the backbar with a tiny glass in hand and hefted a black bottle of Jack off the shelf. She gave a heavy pour and slid it in front of Nick, crossing her arms.

  “By the way,” she said, “When I was pouring your beer I remembered where I knew you from.”

  Nick downed the shot, and set the glass on the bar top a little harder than was necessary. He offered his most nonplussed poker face. “Oh yeah?”

  “Yeah.”

  Layla leaned over the bar on her elbows, close enough to whisper directly into Nick’s face. “You’re the dirty dog who shot his woman down.”

  “I’d like another shot,” Nick said.

  “Yeah? I heard one was all you needed, cowboy.” It was a despicable thing to say, but the way she said it was disturbingly arousing. He could feel her breath play across his cheek, could smell the cherry kiss of her lip gloss only inches from him.

  Nick glanced at Andy and looked back to her.

  “Don’t worry, superstar,” she said, reaching a hand out to pat him on the cheek. “I’m really good at keeping secrets.”

  Layla eyed the cocktail waitress at the other end of the bar, wearing an impatient frown, and she stepped back to top off Nick’s glass.

  Nick winked at Layla, but simultaneously felt his stomach churn as she walked off. Whether it was the booze or a reminder of his dream that had done it, he wasn’t sure. And he didn’t really care. Because at that moment, the warmth of the bourbon had begun to spread to his extremities. And with an empty stomach, the world’s roughness had begun to soften around the edges. He didn’t need to think about Laura, about how he’d met her in an almost identical situation. Hell, there had been others before Laura, long before the fame. And long before her insanity. In fact, this was exactly what he needed to blow off some steam.

  Nick allowed himself a small smile as he sipped his second round of whiskey. Then he remembered his neighbor, who had become unusually quiet. He turned his head to regard Andy and spilled half his drink on the counter.

  The man who had been sitting beside Nick had changed. He still wore a dark mechanic’s jumpsuit, but now it was haggard and aged. It was riddled with holes, the majority of which had been patched with an assortment of randomly colored threads. Instead of the terrible comb over that had been there before, Andy’s head was now completely bald. A roadmap of thick, blue, squiggly veins stuck out against the taut skin of his skull. His face was now long and thin, eyes deep set in sockets so dark that they looked like bruises. His lips were thin and his nose was shaped like a pockmarked hook.

  This man was not Andy. But the terrifying thing was, Nick knew him.

  The man stared at Nick, parted his lips to release a rasping exhalation. A purpleish tongue darted to the corner of his mouth.

  “You,” Nick said, in disbelief.

  “Yes, it’s me.”

  “But, you’re not real.”

  “Don’t bet on it.”

  “No. You aren’t a real person. You’re a character, a figment of my fucking imagination.” But the moment he said it, Nick knew it wasn’t true. Because the man sitting before him—from his chipped yellow fingernails to the acrid, rotting meat stench of his breath—was very real indeed.

  His name was Leonard Harrow, also known as the South Side Skinner. As one may have surmised, he skinned young men for pleasure. He used shadows to travel, walking through them like curtains to other parts of the world, where he would stalk and capture his prey. Then he wallpapered the walls of his subterranean home with their peeled goods.

  But, as Nick had noted, Harrow was a supernatura
l character of fiction, one from Nick’s first film. He was the character. Like Freddy Krueger or Michael Myers, he had become an instant, gigantic icon in the horror movie genre. However, the man sitting before him was no actor. Hell, after four hours in the chair, Kenny Mandel’s makeup had never looked even half as realistic as this guy’s.

  Harrow picked up the beer glass with long, thick fingers and put it to his lips. He swallowed the whole drink with one pull, and then stared at Nick with those gray orbs that seemed to glow, suspended in the blackened pits of his face.

  “How is this possible? Where’s Andy?” Nick asked lamely.

  “I’m coming for you,” said Harrow. His voice was like sandpaper dragging across a concrete slab. “Your heart is hers, but your soul…” He reached a long, scab-riddled hand across the bar and dragged Nick’s beer away. “That’s all mine.”

  “This can’t be happening,” Nick said, returning his attention to his shot glass. “You’re not real. Not fucking real. It’s the stress.” It was like seeing Laura in the back seat. Like the dreams.

  Nick downed the rest of the drink and buried his face in his hands. He rubbed his eyes with his palms and counted to ten, taking deep breaths. He felt himself relax, breathing more steadily as the whiskey warmed a course down his throat. When he lifted his head, Harrow was gone.

  “You alright, man?”

  Andy stared at Nick with an almost sober concern. His face was his own again. The veins and hollow eyes were gone, replaced with a greasy comb-over and eyeballs that were bloodshot. But their sockets were covered by skin that was a normal, healthy pink, rather than the color of charcoal.

  Nick swallowed, not taking his eyes off the mechanic.

  “Dude, what just happened?” Andy asked. He was obviously concerned, but had unconsciously shifted himself a few inches back from Nick. “Are you—you know—on something?”

  Nick looked down at his fingers, which were shaking. He clenched his hands into fists, pumped them a few times until he felt the blood pulsing there beneath the surface. He looked to Andy once more.

  “I’m sorry, man. I don’t know what came over me.”

  “You just got this funny look on your face, pal, like you was scared to death of me. And then started talking to yourself. Or to me, I guess, and I didn’t even say nothing. Scared the shit out of me.”

  Apparently, Andy wasn’t the only one. His excitement had caused the businessmen on the opposite side of Nick to pause their conversation too. And at the end of the bar, Layla watched him with a curiously titled head and a blank expression. She slung a rag over her shoulder and stared at Nick. He couldn’t tell whether or not she’d witnessed his apparent freak-out. Maybe she was giving him her best catch me-fuck me eyes, or maybe she’d simply noticed the emptiness of both his glasses. Either way, she decided to walk over.

  From the speakers dangling in the rafters Bon Scott finished howling his way through Highway to Hell. The final chords of Angus’s furious electric guitar faded out and were followed by a time warp into an earlier decade of rock and roll. The first few counts were a simple strum that Nick recognized immediately. The guitar was quickly accompanied by a mechanical, redundant drumbeat. It was the song that had been playing when he’d met his once future, and now very dead, stalker. It was Laura’s song: Happy Together by The Turtles. What were the odds? On the very night he was trying to drink that crazy bitch off his mind some drunken fool with nostalgic taste in golden age rock n’ roll had picked her goddamn anthem off the electronic jukebox?

  It was hauntingly fitting that Layla’s hips found the beat as she walked. By the time the vocals kicked in, she reached Nick’s seat and stopped to lay her towel down on the bar. She got the bottle of Jack down again and refilled his glass. She reached for a second glass and lined it up next to the first, filling it too.

  “You looked like you wanted to buy me a drink.”

  Nick hadn’t even had an adequate moment to contemplate the hallucination he’d just had confusing the man sitting next to him with a movie monster. Now his attention was commanded by the pretty young woman standing across from him, hoisting her shot glass toward him in expectation. Both the booze in his system and the familiarity of the whole scene had wiped Harrow from his mind. Right now, all he could focus on was the sexual furrow and hillock of the bartender’s waist and hips. Even the song had faded into the background, leaving Nick completely untroubled as he raised his own glass of whiskey and tapped it against hers.

  “To the living,” he said.

  “To the living,” Layla repeated. She tipped her glass back, revealing a tattoo of a pair of blue swifts darting intertwining paths up her inner forearm. Nick followed their flight path and found himself looking into the pale sapphires that were her eyes. Their color was bright, but behind their glossy windows, Nick saw sadness. He had seen that inner dissatisfaction before, and not just on other people. He saw it every time he looked in the mirror. No matter how well it was masked, it was the mark of the damned: those who had realized what life was truly all about. That visible darkness accompanied the deeply rooted knowledge that there was nothing more to humanity than what one saw. No great heavenly afterlife awaited the dying. Nor did a hellish, brimstone prison. It was like Vonnegut had said, “We’re all just here to fart around.”

  And Nick saw that in Layla. He also saw that she recognized him. Whether from the news or from his first movie was beside the point, because by now the two were inseparably bound together. But that was also beside the point, because he knew that she didn’t care. It was more a thing of amusement to this girl to torment him with the mystery of her charade. She wasn’t a groupie. She would have flirted with him even if he hadn’t been a famous film director and actor flying under the radar. He knew it because he’d known others just like her. It was in her nature. Just as it was in his nature to seek out women just like her. Pretty, somewhat damaged, and looking for someone to forget about the world with for a night. No two were the same, and yet, all of them were. They were just like him. Except he’d never been a bartender.

  “You still alive, handsome? Looking a little pale over here.”

  Nick looked directly into the woman’s eyes as he set his empty glass down on mahogany. She upended the bottle once more to refill both glasses.

  “It’s been a shit day,” Nick replied. “Lot of weirdness going down. Even by my standards.”

  “Sorry to hear it,” Layla said, taking her eyes off him only long enough to reach behind her and ring the football-sized bell that reverberated throughout the bar. “Last call!”

  Protesting groans came from all corners of the establishment and empty glasses waggled in the air like alcoholic signal flares alerting the waitress of their owners’ emergency call. Men and women did the same at the bar but before tending to them, Layla leaned in to Nick once more. This time, her cheek grazed his as she whispered in his ear.

  “You know what makes me feel better after a shitty day?”

  “What’s that?” Nick asked.

  She was being hailed from all parts of the bar so she backed away from Nick. She began grabbing glasses, but did not take her eyes off of him.

  “Stick around after closing and I’ll show you, lover.”

  With that, Layla hurried off to take orders and sling the final round of drinks for the evening.

  Nick looked down and saw the shot glasses resting between his spread hands. His was still full. Layla’s was empty. He could barely recall her taking the thing. The top of the tiny whiskey lake in his glass glowed a soft blue, courtesy of the neon Miller Lite sign hanging directly across from him behind the bar. Nick reached for the drink, but then paused. His stomach felt like a rock tumbler, churning slowly inside him. He hadn’t eaten anything in hours, since yesterday, and when he stood up he knew he would be unsteady on his feet. Another shot on an already upset belly would result in him tossing his cookies in Lincoln Street.

  Nick scratched his chin, considering the booze. He slid the shot over in fron
t of Andy and nodded to the man.

  “Happy birthday to you.”

  “Thanks,” Andy said, pushing away the last of his empty beer. He watched Nick over the top of the gifted whiskey as he sipped. Andy shook his head slowly. “You lucky dog. She was practically taking your clothes off with her eyes, you know that? I get the feeling you might be a crazy son of a bitch, but you’re a lucky one, aren’t you?”

  Nick frowned, made a steeple of his fingers. “Yeah, that’s right. Just like John Lee Hooker, man. They call me Mr. Lucky.”

  Five

  When Nick awoke, he was lying prone in the backseat of the Cougar and his head carried a dull, bourbon-induced spike of pain somewhere in the region of his frontal lobe. The air in the car was thick with the smell of what Nick liked to call zombie-mouth, the abhorrent stench of one’s breath following a night of drinking and without any use of a toothbrush.

  Aside from the foul smell of his own halitosis, Nick was alone. When he swallowed, his tongue dragged across the roof of his mouth like sandpaper. He reached for one of the many half-empty bottles of water on the floorboard and gulped its warm contents down.

  One look out the window reminded Nick of what had happened the night prior. He was still in Spokane, but his car was now parked in a dirt lot behind the building which housed The Ransack Room. He remembered having moved the car around the block, guided by Layla, after she had locked the empty bar up sometime after two in the morning.

  He had barely gotten the ignition switched off before she’d climbed between the bucket seats and dragged him into the rear of the car, her breath painted with a mixture of bourbon and Juicy Fruit gum. She jerked her tank top off with one swift pull and then straddled him. Their lips pressed together as more articles of clothing were liberated and cast to the floor. Outside the car the air had been sticky wet; inside was twice as bad, but neither of them seemed to notice at all.

  It had been a wild ride. Nick couldn’t recall all of the specifics, but he did have a flashbulb memory that showed him the fantastic shape of her naked body. Illuminated by the pinkish glow of the lot’s single sodium light, her hips had a perfect bell shape where they met her waist. Her skin glistened, shining with sweat. And her perky little teacup breasts rose and fell with the rhythmic, pneumatic bounce of her working legs. Her body was long and thin and tangled perfectly with his in the confined space of the back seat.