Lovely Death Read online

  “Please,” Layla cried through the muffled barrier, “please, please, please. I don’t wanna die.” This was followed by audible sobs.

  Nick automatically reached for the trunk but it was, of course, locked. He remembered the keys and circled back to the front seat to retrieve them from the ignition. When doing so he threw the pistol on the floorboard.

  His hand was palsied when he tried to fit the key into the lock. With a ridiculous amount of effort it finally went in. Before turning the key, he paused to listen. Inside the compartment, all sounds had ceased.

  Nick took a deep breath, turned the key, and felt the latch click free. He lifted the lid.

  The next thing he was aware of was a boot kicking him in the face. It felt like a hammer connecting with his cheekbone and he reeled backward with white light searing across the field of vision in his left eye. He stumbled back, tripped on something, and lost his footing. Nick hit the ground square on his tailbone. Lightning shot up his spine and he cried out. He scrambled painfully in the gravel, trying to get to his feet. The vision was returning to his left eye in a misty haze, but his cheek and temple still hurt severely.

  Nick had only been stunned for a few seconds but that was time enough for the very alive bartender to crawl out of his trunk and take off running. Layla loped off unsteadily down the road, black leather boots shining like signals in the morning light.

  Nick took a step forward, twisted his ankle stepping on the goddamn ammo magazine he’d dropped, and hastily pursued his unwitting abductee.

  “Help me! Someone fucking help me!”

  Her gait was unsteady, no doubt due to the fact that she’d been cramped up inside the trunk for the last eight hours or so. That, at least, worked in Nick’s favor. With a sore ass and only half his vision working properly he sprinted after her. He had no idea what he would do when he actually caught up to the girl. And even though it had been at least ten years since his last track meet in high school, he moved swiftly. She was only fifteen yards away from the nose of the Cougar when Nick was close enough to stretch out and seize her shoulder.

  She did not stop. Instead, Layla screamed as she spun off balance, twirling sideways on the heel of her boot and sliding into the grassy ditch.

  “Get off me! Help! Somebody—hmmf—”

  Nick half-tackled half-crushed the woman as he fell upon her, straddling her prone body and pressing her arms and back into the ground. Not knowing what else to do and with a headful of panic, he clamped one hand over her mouth.

  “Stop it, Layla. Jesus Christ, I’m not going to hurt you. Please stop it.”

  Layla kicked and wiggled, her legs flailing uselessly behind Nick. She struggled to jerk her arms free, to no avail. He outweighed her by too much for her resistance to be of much use. She was, however, trying to bite his hand so he had to do a sort of cupping gesture with it to keep from being gouged. She jerked her head from side to side, screaming, which made it all but impossible.

  “You fucker! You sick—fucker! Somebody please—help me!”

  “Goddammit,” Nick screamed. “Shut the fuck up! We’re on the highway in the middle of nowhere. Nobody can hear you. I swear to God I’m not going to hurt you. Please just shut up and listen to me, Layla.”

  Tears spilled down her cheeks and Layla screamed. It was a primal thing, something that Nick imagined a trapped animal would make just before resigning itself to death at the jaws of a jungle predator. She screamed for a full ten seconds, muffled by his hand, until her voice went hoarse and she began coughing. Layla’s body shuddered from the hacks until they passed, and then she was still.

  Her legs stopped kicking but she was still riding the adrenaline rollercoaster. Her eyes darted left and right like pinballs and Nick became aware of how quickly her chest was rising and falling beneath him. Her jaw flexed open and closed under his fingers, like some sort of docile zombie.

  “I swear to you, I won’t hurt you. I have no idea what happened last night. I just—all I can remember is us leaving the bar, and getting into my car and having sex.”

  At that, she gave a short wiggle beneath him.

  “I woke up this morning with blood on my forehead, but it wasn’t mine. I went to a gas station and this kid, this fucking attendant hit the trunk release and—ohmygod—when I saw you lying in there—I’m so sorry. You’ve got to believe me, Layla. I have no idea what’s going on here and it scares me to death. You know who I am, and—what I did.”

  Nick pinched the bridge of his nose with his free hand.

  “Holy shit. How did this happen? I—I’ve been under a lot of stress lately. Ever since Laura died—”

  Again, another wiggle.

  “I’ve been having these awful dreams. Last night I even had a hallucination at the bar. I saw The South Side Skinner sitting next to me drinking a beer. Leonard fucking Harrow. He’s not real! Jesus, I think I must be having a break with reality.”

  Layla’s breathing steadied somewhat, though she never took her sapphire eyes off of Nick.

  “I’m so sorry. This whole trip, it was my friend’s idea. He thought going to Seattle and visiting Laura’s grave would be therapeutic, would give me closure. Said it would help me sleep better again. But ever since I left…things have just gotten worse. You’ve got to believe me, I have no idea what happened last night after we—you know. Do you believe me?”

  Layla nodded vigorously, eyes wide.

  Nick hung his head. “You don’t. Dammit. I’m so sorry. Well, now what are we going to do?”

  Her voice came up through his clasped fingers, followed by a burst of coughing.

  “If I move my hand, will you not scream?”

  She nodded slowly.

  Nick lifted his palm from her face. She stared at him with those piercing blue eyes. In the daylight they were even sharper, and even though red from crying, they were almost electric in their radiance. Her pixie haircut stuck up on the right, while the left side was smeared with dry blood. To look at her broke Nick’s heart. She was such a pretty girl. A deep purple bruise stained her right eye.

  “Good God—what have I done? Are you okay?”

  Layla swallowed hard. “You hit me.”

  Nick put his hands on her shoulders, offered her a pleading look. “Last night? Shit, I did that to your eye?”

  She nodded. “You—you changed. In the blink of an eye. Like you turned into a whole other person. Called me a dirty bitch and told me to stay away from your lovely.”

  Nick’s stomach soured at that.

  “Then you hit me. Hard. And I hit my head.”

  “On what?”

  “The window, I think.”

  Nick released both his hands from her and raised them. “I’m so sorry. You’ve got to believe me.”

  Layla gave no answer, but her gaze drifted off into the distance behind him.

  Nick slid backward, slowly, freeing Layla’s hands. “I want you to trust me. But I know you can’t. For fuck’s sake, how can you? I think I’m losing my mind.”

  “We can get you help,” she said, nodding again. “All we have to do is stop at the next town. Or call someone. Yeah, maybe we should call someone.”

  “The police?” Nick queried.

  Again, no response.

  “Fuck,” Nick said.

  “I don’t want any trouble, okay?” Layla said. She coughed. “I just want to go home. I promise I won’t tell anybody about—any of this.”

  Nick wanted to believe her. He really did. But how could he trust a technically kidnapped (and battered) woman not to report him to the authorities after a night like that? He did have the gun if it came down to a matter of physical coercion. But if he took her with him on the road, what then? What was his grand plan? To keep this girl against her will, further damning himself while trying to do just the opposite? And what would happen when he reached Sandra? At some point the ride would end, and from there it was only a matter of time before Nick went directly to jail. Because just as he couldn’t have buried
her body to save himself, neither could Nick ever kill this girl.

  Obviously, Nick had always been a creative thinker, but even he was surprised when the next thought popped into his head.

  “Can I please go home? I promise you, you don’t have to worry, okay? You don’t have to worry at all. I won’t say anything. I won’t give you any shit.”

  “No,” Nick said, matter-of-factly. He rose to his feet with a groan and offered his hand down to help her up. “I don’t think that’s smart. I’m driving to Chicago to meet someone. And you’re going to come with me.”

  “But—”

  “And I’m going to pay you $500,000 to do it.”

  Nine

  “I’m sorry about your face.”

  Layla said nothing, but stared out the window at the trees as they rushed by. The lush greenery of Washington was fading as they moved away from the coast and further East across the tip of Idaho on I-90. The two of them had passed a dozen or so cars via the fast lane in the last hour and the pseudo-captive had made no attempt to flag any of them down.

  So Nick began to relax some, which was a welcome relief to his body, which had grown weary with stress. He loosened his grip on the steering wheel. He didn’t feel great, having this potential hand grenade sitting in his passenger seat, but he felt a hell of a lot better than he had when the girl was presumably dead, sitting in his trunk.

  This was his third attempt at sparking a conversation with her since they had left the roadside. And it did not appear she would oblige him, until she ran a stiff hand through her hair and cleared her throat.

  “What’s the point?” Layla finally said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “When we get wherever it is you say we’re going. What then?”

  “I’ll drop you off at a bus station or something. I don’t know. I meant what I said, alright? I’m good for the fucking money.”

  Nick remembered her saying something the night before about being a starving artist or a student, or some such unpaid thing. Was she a student? Nursing? Psychology? No, he thought it was definitely the artist gig. Something off the wall. Like metallurgy. Whatever the case, he knew she could not turn down the cash.

  “I’m not talking about me,” Layla countered. “It’s pretty fucking obvious you have a problem. What I’m saying is what’s waiting for you in Chicago that’s going to help? Your therapist?”

  Sandra was all that waited for him there, and to say that she was waiting was a grossly optimistic misuse of the word.

  “I really don’t know,” he said. It was half true, which he painfully knew. “I just needed to buy some time to think, okay?”

  “Buy some time,” Layla said. “Does that mean you’re still trying to find a good place to shoot me and ditch my body?”

  Nick gave a sidelong glare. “Honey, if I’d wanted to do that I’d have choked you to death an hour ago when I had the chance.”

  The mention of Chicago brought Sandra’s shining face to the forefront of his mind. She had not returned his calls in the weeks since Laura’s death. But he supposed he ought not read too much into that since she hadn’t actually returned any of them since he’d finished the final edit of Return to the Grindstone three months ago, on that godawful day.

  Rage surged briefly through him and he flexed his fingers on the wheel. And that surprised him. There had been plenty of mad days after that fateful discovery, but with the help of Lewis (and copious amounts of Jack Daniels) it had been quite a while since Nick had felt such raw animosity toward the woman he had once loved.

  Nick took in a heavy breath through his nose, bit down on his lower lip.

  “I told you, you’re not in any danger. I’m not going to hurt you.”

  A silent pause hung in the air between them.

  “And what if you’re not you?”

  It was a valid question, one that caused Nick’s stomach to gurgle. She was right. There was something terribly wrong with him. Seeing hallucinations? Blacking out and near killing the innocent woman sitting beside him? This wasn’t just about having nightmares anymore. This was about an escalating spiral into madness. And it had all begun two weeks ago when Laura Scranton had bled to death, gut shot, in his home. It was all connected. The nighttime visitations, Leonard Harrow, the blackout: all of it pointed in one grim direction and the impossibility of it frightened Nick.

  Layla said that in his fit of unchecked fury, when he had become someone else, he had told her to “stay away from his lovely.” That was the affectation that Laura had bestowed upon him so long ago. Her lovely. The word made his skin crawl, thinking of the many emails she had sent, the countless voicemails and love letters which started off with that very greeting. The bitch had even sent him a picture of the word written in a cursive tattoo that she’d had emblazoned on her inner thigh.

  And then there was the bullet. Jesus Christ, the bullet from her grave. What sick motherfucker had etched the word into the shining brass of that spent round that Nick had willingly left in the dirt back in Washington? It must have been one of her friends, someone close to the situation, paying sickly homage to her incessant fanaticism.

  Laura had gotten under his skin. It was as simple as that. The hallucinations and the mental discord were all the result of his mind dealing with the stress, trying to find closure. And he did not relish the thought of talking about it to his makeshift therapist, Lewis. For one, there was no way he could tell him of the blackout incident, nor of the ensuing kidnapping. And secondly, Nick knew that he would not take lightly the report of his admitted hallucinating. No, if worse came to worst—if things escalated out of his control—then he would call his best friend. For now, it was up to Nick to keep a lid on things. He knew he was a higher-profile personality, and would have to be extra careful not to let any further mishaps happen until he got this thing figured out. If that meant restraining himself while he slept, then that was what would have to happen. According to the GPS mounted in his custom dashboard, the trip to Chicago would take twenty-four hours. They would have to rest at some point.

  Nick thought of Chicago and took a deep breath.

  Somehow he just knew that seeing Sandra again was going to help him. That holding her and forgiving her would set everything back on course in his life. He could almost smell the floral scent of her perfume again as he nuzzled the softness of her neck.

  She would make it all better. She had to.

  Nick reached over and unlatched the glove compartment. He reached down below his seat while still keeping one hand on the wheel. When he sat up he had the black matte .45 pistol in his hand, along with the loose magazine. Both of these he stuffed into the glove box, just inches away from Layla’s knees.

  There was no sense in biding his time. He wanted Layla to know that, at least in his voluntarily sane state, he meant her no harm. He nodded toward the weapon, which was far more within her reach now than his.

  “If I give you any trouble I give you full permission to shoot me in the head.”

  ***

  Nick and Layla had spent four hours on the road together. They were currently zipping through the mountains on the western half of Montana, following the curves of the interstate as it wended its way across the state. Traffic was still sparse by highway standards, and also given the time of day. It was now past noon and the sun blazed down on the open road, blocked intermittently by the evergreens that lined its shoulders.

  The Cougar handled well in the hills, motor purring evenly as the elevation rose. Just a few years ago, such a feat would have been unthinkable. The poor beast would have vomited her guts through her tailpipe if Nick had attempted to take her anywhere that wasn’t a flat journey. Or, better yet, downhill. Now, however, thanks to the help of a few dozen thousand dollars, everything in her had not only been restored, but for the most part completely replaced. Motor, drivetrain, electrical, suspension, and interior: all of these had been lifted beyond the standards of 1970 and into the modern age. It was like driving a brand-new
sports car, which was fortunate, since the elevation gain through the rolling mountains of Montana topped 4,000 feet above sea level.

  Nick itched his nose and stole a look at Layla. He didn’t know if she was asleep, but her eyes were closed and her head was wedged between the headrest and the window. Her arms were crossed. At this angle he couldn’t see the heavy bruise on her eye very well. Her wild hair, with some blood still matted in it, said she could probably use a shower, but in spite of that she was still beautiful. She looked like a rebel Tinkerbell with a penchant for Joan Jett music.

  They had not stopped once since the roadside wrestling match. And aside from the exchange earlier, she had said very little in response to his attempts at making small talk.

  Nick eyed the fuel gauge. Sure, modern technology may have alleviated the need to worry about his vintage ride’s motor overheating, but those five-hundred horses weren’t exactly produced by a fuel-friendly hybrid engine.

  They would have to stop soon for gas. The last sign they’d passed said that there was a pull off in the next twenty miles. According to the odometer that stop was approaching quickly and Nick knew he didn’t have much choice in the matter. Not if he wanted to keep the Cougar breathing and on the road. Beyond feeding the car, they also needed to feed themselves. Nick had chomped on a few overprocessed donuts, but Layla hadn’t touched anything beyond sipping at one of the water bottles.

  As much as he didn’t want to, Nick knew they had to pull over for gas. He didn’t know if he could trust Layla not to expose him. Did he have a choice? It wasn’t as if he could coerce her to climb back into the trunk and play dead again.

  Nick cleared his throat. “There’s a stop coming up. We need gas.”

  Layla did not startle—apparently she hadn’t been asleep after all—and she lifted her eyelids without a response.