Scar Tissue, page 11
But now, things are different.
In the beginning, Edison Winthrop went to Rifley’s only when his wife traveled to her mother’s with the kids. Through the decades, his patronage varied from once per month or as much as five days straight. Since Rifley’s is a “juice joint” any of the patrons who are drunk like Winthrop came in that way.
From his usual seat behind the left corner of the stage, he sips a cranberry juice and feels it mix with the vodka he keeps in his car under the driver’s seat.
Of all his trips in to Rifley’s, the girl he catches less frequently than all the others is the auburn-haired hottie called Cassandra. In addition to the beauty and the happy coincidence of seeing her there, she also has, along with overt sexuality, a seductive quality the other girls lack. Perhaps if she were there more often he’d notice her less and focus his attention on one of the big-titted blondes. There are plenty of those in the rotation, and Winthrop likes it that way. For a Wednesday, Rifley’s has a stellar cast on duty.
It’s eleven thirty and Winthrop has board meetings in the morning, but sleep is less valuable than this kind of stimulation.
Cassandra ends her set with a cowgirl finale to a ZZ Top song. She bucks the pole sensually and crawls and spreads, and on the last two notes, pyrotechnics of some sort pop from right and left of stage. The whole bar is lit like daytime, and in the bright light clarity he recognizes the face. He leans closer, making the association. He’d never believe it, except that he saw her only last week, in Dylan Rivers’s cubicle of all places. She brought lunch.
Before Abby makes it to the dressing room, Winthrop grabs her arm. “I want a private dance.”
She pretends she doesn’t recognize Winthrop, his tie loosened around his neck and the top button of his oxford shirt undone. Her ankle hurts, but like a cleaning service or a masseuse, she is for hire, and it is the necessary evil of sexual fantasy. “I’ll be right back.” If she has to delay the attention to her ankle she’ll live, but she really wants to ditch having to dance for him.
“Now,” Winthrop says, waving a wad of bills in her face.
The suits at the table behind them cheer him on, grunting some two-syllable name like unintelligible apes.
She doesn’t know which bouncer is working the door.
He’s just here for the show, she tells herself, and smiles at him and winks. “All right, honey,” she says. “Let’s go.” She’s sure her Louise Brooks wig, white frosted eye shadow, high and wide on the lids, heavy black pencil and false lashes like tarantulas will be an adequate disguise.
Winthrop walks fast and stumbles into a table on the way. It’s hard to tell if he’s drunk or just anxious. He’s moving quickly, but he hunches every time his foot or knee bumps into a chair on his way to the VIP room.
Once inside, Abby sets him on a leather bench along the back wall. Chardonnay is on the other side of the room with a trade guy, finishing off an orgasm of her own by humping his shoulder. She can do it on a guy’s knee too, but she generally earns higher if she uses his shoulder or bald head.
As Chardonnay and her man leave the VIP room, Abby squats down in front of Winthrop and spreads his knees apart. Her ankle is tight as it stretches in this new position, but it’s bearing her weight okay. She rubs her hands up his thighs as she rises to fly her nipples across his facial airspace. He reaches up, cups her breasts.
Shit like this is something she will not miss. Attention and cheers, fine. Grabbing and demanding, not fine.
She grabs his narrow shoulders in her hands and closes his knees with her own as she straddles him, and after double-checking that his zipper is closed, she grinds into him. Smearing herself, hoping she stains his pants. She doesn’t recall seeing a ring on his finger, but she hopes he’s got a disagreeable wife at home whom he’ll have to explain this to. The thought makes her smile as she tosses her head, slinging wig hair away from her face to look at his.
“Hump my leg, Abigail,” he says.
Abby flips her hair back into her face with two quick tugs and says, “I’m Cassandra, honey. Everybody knows me.”
“Yeah. I know you. And after you clean your cunt on my leg, you’re going to take out my prick and climb on it. Just like your pretty little mama does to your daddy.”
Abby slaps Winthrop with an open palm. Before she can get in another swing, she’s tossed to the couch by a punch of his own that connects right below her left eye.
She pushes herself up and lunges with her forearm and plants it in his throat. He gurgles once, then again as she reaches down and grabs whatever he’s got down there. She squeezes his dick until he hyperventilates and reaches for his pills. Abby knocks them away and then kicks them with her foot. She applies more pressure and forces him to sit on the sofa, all the while twisting her grip. To his gurgling, Winthrop adds moaning loud enough to make Abby muffle his mouth with a pillow until he stops squirming.
After a number of sets, Cleve watches the woman he has pegged as Abigail walk into the VIP area with a man roughly as old as himself. A short while after that, he hears a woman’s voice call out, barely perceptible, but distinct in its urgency. His ear traces the truncated sound to the VIP room.
“That son of a bitch,” Cleve says, abandoning his table, leaving his half-full club soda. He trots to the door to the little room. Without the spotlights, it’s dark inside and it takes a moment for Cleve’s eyes to adjust. He sees a woman bent over a man who’s reclining on a sofa.
“Abigail Stratton?” Cleve says. The wig threw him for the first two sets she danced, but he knows it’s her from the newspaper photo. At this range, he realizes for the first time that he also recognizes her from his nephew’s funeral ten days ago. He instantly begins to ponder. He wonders if there’s a common thread between his nephew, Vincent, and the dead deer on the Stratton property. But he still has no idea why Stratton’s daughter would be stripping when she has twelve million dollars at her disposal.
“He hit me,” she says.
“I believe you.” He wants to pick up that old son of a bitch and throttle him for laying as much as a finger on her. “Why don’t you get out of here and let me handle this?”
“Who are you?”
“Don’t concern yourself with that now. Just make yourself scarce.” He watches the hemispheres of her ass undulate as she walks out of the room without saying another word. With the door closed behind her, he turns his attention to the man on the sofa.
Abby makes record time across the Sunshine Skyway Bridge and down I-75. Traffic is light and she’s a bullet flying to her target. It’s one a.m. by the time she gets to the exit at Temple Terrace, and she gears down and runs the red light shining bright in the dark night air. She doesn’t believe in GPS and so navigates her way by the street signs until she finds the road she’s looking for, Applebee Place, in a modest subdivision of single-family homes, each on half-acre lots with retention ponds and an association run by obviously obsessive residents. She checks the house numbers against the one she wrote down at the library after spending a few minutes Googling directions to her house.
She checks her face in the rearview mirror. It looks swollen from Winthrop’s blow, but only modestly so. She touches the tender edges around her eye with light pressure then punches herself once, then again. The car shakes with her violent movements. Her balled left fist brings tears to both eyes.
After collecting herself for a moment, she checks herself again in the rearview mirror. That eye is now roadkill stuck to her face. If Dylan is the protective type, this could persuade her to go with Abby. And by going with her, Abby would be getting it all—tragedy chosen and severe. But if she’s the timid type, she might walk Abby out and slam the door in her face as she tries to explain. Either way, Dylan making a decision to go or not go while under this visual duress might nullify the whole feeling. Regardless, Abby can’t help but imagine the beauty of going with her.
Abby puts on sunglasses to hide the eye and walks to the door. The dark of the stoop makes her adjust the glasses to find the doorbell. She stands and flips the shoulder strap on her canvas bag over her shoulder. The bag hangs at her side like a dead animal. All that shit from work could have stayed in the car. If she had to have a bag with her, why couldn’t it have been that little bag of pot she had squirreled way in her dresser drawer?
Abby jumps as a lock clicks. Then twice more. Dylan holds the door open before her. She’s still wearing her work clothes, and despite the look of excitement and confusion on her face, she looks like she’s been sitting at a computer all day. “How did you know where I live?”
“I shouldn’t have come,” Abby says, hoping to bring out the caring side of Dylan.
“No,” she says, reaching feebly for Abby. “Come in.”
Dylan closes the door behind them, and Abby sets her bag on the ceramic tile. Abby pushes the sunglasses further up her nose with an index finger at each temple. Her hand is still sore, but she wants all the camouflage she can get, for now.
As Dylan shifts her attention, her face contorts in panic, and she dashes out of the room without a word. The sudden burst of energy makes Abby think she just remembered something boiling on the stove.
Looking around, Abby guesses Dylan’s either just moved in or didn’t fare well in a divorce. The house isn’t so much decorated as it is delivered. What there is of it is nice stuff: an assortment of old-fashioned oak pieces positioned around the room, but they’re paired with a Scandinavian sofa and coffee table and nothing else. It’s like she ordered things by item number in the index at the back of a catalogue instead of by looking at the pictures. The lack of curtains on the windows makes the closed vertical blinds blend into the bare white walls.
When Dylan returns, her face is just as frantic and wide-eyed as when she left the room, but now she has a bag of frozen peas in her outstretched hand. “Put this on your eye for twenty minutes. Then take it off for twenty minutes. We can alternate with a bag of lima beans as we repeat the process. It’s the best thing for that. But it will stay black a week to ten days.”
Abby removes her sunglasses. She’s momentarily speechless that Dylan saw past the sunglasses and knew what to do.
“Have the police been notified?”
“It happened at work. The bouncers got him.”
“Why? Why would someone do this to you?”
“He must have been mad about the other day,” she says, putting some effort into the illusion of tears.
“Who? Mad about what?”
“I don’t want to say.”
“Abby? Why? Tell me.”
“It was just so humiliating and it hurts so bad.” She peeks beneath the bag of peas to see if Dylan’s buying it, but she can’t be sure.
“Keep the peas on there. Once the inflammation is down, it’ll feel better.”
Abby snuggles into her a little, hoping she’ll hug her back. Instead, Dylan places her hand on Abby’s arm, as if for support, but nothing else. Abby worries that she’s spoiled her appearance. If Dylan no longer finds her beautiful, her plans could be fucked. She never thought about that.
She makes another crying sound and then says, “You wouldn’t think that old bastard could hit so hard. It really hurts.”
“Who? What old bastard?”
“Winthrop. Okay? It was Winthrop.” Abby stays quiet in order to watch Dylan’s face take its natural course. There’s shock first, then acknowledgement, then, finally and most deeply, anger.
“If he’s actually arrested, he’ll make bail by six o’clock,” Abby says. “Probably won’t even miss work. Most guys like that don’t want to draw any attention to themselves after something like that. But, you know…”
“That’s it. That little motherfucker has had it.”
Abby has nothing else to say. Sitting there, she tilts her head back, absorbs the cold over her sore eye. She’s so uncomfortable that she distracts herself with a landscape in oil hanging above the sofa behind Dylan. Through her good eye, this painting is the only color along white walls, white vaulted ceiling, and white built-in bookshelves. No framed mirrors hanging. No pictures behind glass. No shiny surfaces except for the sheen of a freshly polished coffee table. She reaches over and spreads the blinds on the sliding glass doors to see the backyard. No pool, just a couple of tall pines and oaks surrounded by grass and a few large rocks. She closes the blinds and turns to face Dylan again. “Some would say there are no coincidences.”
“Fate? That’s not likely.”
“Well, I’m not talking fate, necessarily. But are you more inclined to believe everything in the world is just random? Don’t you take notice of how well it all works and that maybe there’s a greater plan we’re supposed to ride?”
Seven
As the garage door slides open the next morning, the rollers and springs groan in protest. Ordinarily, Dylan would grab the oilcan and solve the situation, being careful to keep her skirt and blouse clear, but today her urgency precludes such details.
After speeding across the bridge and driving into Clearwater, Dylan parks in the vice president’s spot, which she soon learns is six hundred twenty-two steps closer to the side door than her usual spot.
She walks with only her stack of reports under her arm. She leaves her briefcase in the car and today has a hand free to swipe the employee badge to open the door.
The ever-present morning crowd is gathered like socialites around the coffee station, but instead of discussing their mundane activities and the television they watched, their usual bullshit camaraderie, pretend interest, and make-believe friendship, their eyes are downcast, as if the floor is the most interesting thing on earth.
“Winthrop here yet?” Dylan says, poking her head into the break room.
“Haven’t you heard?” the overweight receptionist says. Her eyes look up from the floor only for a moment and then pass back down quickly. “Mr. Winthrop passed away last night. Heart failure.”
“I never would have suspected he had a heart,” Dylan says.
The guy from accounting giggles, but then regains composure. Some guy from purchasing with a tie that ends near his crotch says, “None of us really liked the guy, but it’s rough when one of your own dies. You know?”
“I’m glad he’s dead,” Dylan says and turns to walk away.
“Sure, because you might finally get his job now.”
Dylan clenches her fists, pissed she doesn’t get to beat the shit out of Winthrop. “Not me,” she says. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got some files to clean up.”
As she sets down the stack of reports on her Formica desktop, she looks at the artificial fish tank. Plastic fish float in blue food coloring with a picture of the sea glued from the back. The metaphor is all too fucking familiar. Leaning her elbows over the back of her chair, she enters her login (mother) and password (fucker) into her computer then plugs in her thumb drive. For the first time, the action is like sinking a key into the ignition of a Ferrari. A surge of adrenaline flushes through her as she selects both the C-drive and the G-drive. Instantly, the file names highlight in muted yellow on the screen. Dylan then deletes all her files and those backed up, locally and on both redundant remotes on the cloud. If the Eidolon Corporation wants any of the research she’s done during Winthrop’s tenure, they’ll have to go back to the old data storage tapes and decipher file names she coded herself. Fuck them. Twenty thousand man-hours and hundreds of reports on multi-million-dollar deals are now digital dust. She has the same feeling of lightness in her chest and torso she had at the end of her enlistment.
She then reaches over the desk and unplugs the faux fish tank and picks it up from the shelf by palming the top of it like a basketball and walks out of her cubicle with the tank’s power cord trailing behind until she reaches Benny Sloat’s cubicle.
Benny looks up, obviously startled by the surprise visitor.
Dylan hands him the fish tank. “They don’t eat much.”
Benny’s face has that confused creaminess to it. That look of, You’re giving me a gift? Instead, he says, “Thanks. I think.”
“Good luck, handsome.” Dylan nods at him, turns to the exit, grabs her employee badge from her back pocket, and tosses it at the trash can.
At Abby’s house that morning, there is no sense in trying to hide it. Lawton looks up at her as she slides the sunglasses off.
“I’ll kill that fucking cutter.”
Abby waves the glasses at him. “It’s not her.”
“Who then?”
“It’s no big deal. It was at work.” She takes him by the shoulders and forces him back to his seat. “It’s no big deal.” But she couldn’t have planned it any better.
“That son of a bitch Rifley?”
“Customer. Some random suit,” she lies. “A broker or lawyer.”
“Did the bouncers get the motherfucker?”
“Yeah, and they were a lot rougher on him than either of us could be. Trust me.”
“You sure you’re okay?”
“Absolutely.”
She opens a beer, hands it to Lawton, and then opens herself one.
“Good news, bro.” She lifts her arms off his shoulders flips her hair. She kisses his cheek and says, “You won’t have to clean up after me anymore.”
“You’re finally going to jettison the excess? Unclutter your life? Actually start putting things away for a change?”
“Something like that.” Her laughter is more grounded in surprise than mockery. “I’m going on another trip. A long trip.”
“Already?” Lawton’s cynicism is so adorable. “You’re shitting me.”
“I wouldn’t shit you, Lawton. You’re my favorite turd.”
“Where are you going this time? And more importantly, with whom are you going?” He leans in pressing and urgent, like the bad cop in an interrogation. She knows he knows the answer to the last question. Knows it’s Dylan.
