Lawrence Block - Getting Off

She walked on, found a place to eat with better lighting and a reassuring commitment to hygiene. She settled into a booth with a copy of the morning paper, ate a big breakfast, and drank two cups of coffee.

And smelled him on her clothes.

“Right on time,” he said.

There were two customers in the place, and one of them was the same man he’d run off the night before. Did the old fart live here? He looked to be wearing the same clothes, too — a forest-green work shirt worn through at one elbow, with a pair of baggy trousers that must have started life as the bottom half of a business suit.

Well, what else did she expect? She hadn’t changed her outfit, and neither, she was unsurprised to see, had Steve. Classy joint, the Stavro’s Diner. Everybody wears the same clothes forever, and nobody bathes, and they all smell about the same. Be a shame to say goodbye to a place like this.

And damned if Steve didn’t run the old boy off again, and the shrunken blue-haired woman at the corner table along with him. “Gotta close for a few minutes,” he told them. “Gotta go over a thing or two with Carol here.”

He ushered them out. And bolted the door, and fixed the sign. And, with a wolfish grin, beckoned her to the kitchen.

It smelled of eggs and grease and bacon, and of course of Steve himself. His hand cupped her shoulder and turned her toward him, and she hoped he wouldn’t kiss her. Some hookers, she knew, drew the line at kissing, objecting to it because it was somehow too intimate to be available for a price. She had never minded kissing men regardless of what she might have planned for them, and her objection now was purely aesthetic; she didn’t want to kiss him because she found him revolting.

But she definitely wanted to fuck him. He might disgust her, but he also turned her on something fierce.

His hands, clumsy but confident, touched and patted and stroked and squeezed. She realized with some relief that he was no more interested in kissing than she was. Maybe it was an intimacy he reserved for his wife, maybe he didn’t like to kiss a woman without a moustache.

And then, as she had fantasized earlier, he turned her around and pushed her face down toward the counter. It was topped with a butcherblock cutting board, and she smelled blood and meat, along with the musky sweat smell, the Steve smell.

He pulled up her skirt, bunched it around her hips, then reached to lower her panties. They fell to her ankles, and she would have stepped out of them but she couldn’t because he was holding her by the hips.

She thought, Greek foreplay. Brace yourself, Athena! And then he was inside her.

She had to wait at the bus station for an hour and ten minutes, and tried to will the time to pass and the bus to come. She wasn’t anxious about the time it was taking, because it would be hours before the authorities found out about Steve. She’d found a set of keys on a peg by the entrance to the kitchen, and one of them fit the outer door. With the lights out and the door locked, and the CLOSED sign already in place, there was every chance that nobody would find him before morning.

As it was, she’d missed the bus to Tucson by less than ten minutes. She could have been on it with time to spare if she hadn’t insisted on spending a full half hour in the shower, soaping and rinsing and soaping and rinsing. I’m gonna wash that man right out of my hair— the song ran through her mind as she used up Marriott’s entire mini-bottle of shampoo. It left her hair smelling of orange and ginger, and wasn’t that an improvement on eau de Stavros ?

And now she was dressed in clean clothes from head to toe, and a plastic bag on the bench beside her held everything she’d been wearing: skirt, blouse, panties, socks, even her shoes. And it was the bag and its contents that made her wish the bus would come, because the plastic was no barrier to that godawful smell.

There was a trash receptacle in her line of sight, and the impulse to drop the clothes into it was almost irresistible. Bad idea , she told herself, over and over. There were bloodstains on her skirt and blouse, and she could imagine what trace evidence her shoes and panties would yield. Not that an investigating officer would need a microscope, or any of the battery of tools they used on CSI. The sniff test would be plenty for anyone who’d ever been within ten yards of Steve, living or dead.

The bus would take her north, to Flagstaff. She’d stay there long enough to get rid of the bag of dirty clothes, then take another bus and get across a state line or two. She could take buses all the way to her ultimate destination, but Chicago was a long ways off, and by the time she got there she’d need a long shower just to get rid of her own smell.

Crazy the way she couldn’t stop thinking about smells. Gross, really.

She thought about Chicago, and Graham Weider. Of the four living members of her personal alumni association, he had to be the softest target. Alvin Kirkaby, if he was still alive, could still be in Iraq, on another tour of duty. Or maybe his unit had been dispatched to Afghanistan. Or maybe he’d lived and returned home, wherever home might be. She didn’t know where he hailed from, and couldn’t guess where he might be now.

She’d met Graham Weider in New York, where he bought her a good lunch before taking her back to his hotel room for their quickie, the details of which had long since faded from her mind. They arranged to meet later for a good dinner, to be followed by a not-so-quickie. When he didn’t show up, she went back to his hotel, where he’d left a note at the desk. Sorry, business meeting necessitated immediate departure. Rushing to airport and flight to L.A. Call me, love to see you again.

And there’d been a phone number, but she had neither called it nor kept it. At the time she felt a little regret at having failed to close the books on Graham Weider, but not so much that she was going to hop on a plane and hunt him down. It hadn’t seemed all that important.

It did now.

Once again she managed to get a seat all to herself, toward the front but not too close to the driver. There was room in the overhead for her suitcase, and for the bag of clothes as well. She could still smell the clothes, even in their new location, but she had the feeling that she’d still be smelling them if she’d chanced leaving them in the trash can. Her nose was full of his scent, and it would take more than distance to clear them. It would take time as well.

She’d bought a novel at the newsstand in the station, but never looked at it again until she was on the bus. Even then she waited until they’d cleared the Phoenix city limits before she switched on the overhead light.

The book was a paperback thriller. Some wild-eyed eco-terrorist, crazy as a bedbug and twice as charming, had raided a secret government laboratory, killed half a dozen scientists, and made off with enough anthrax, plague bacteria, and smallpox virus to depopulate an already troubled planet. And, astonishingly enough, the only person in the world with even a slim chance of stopping this lunatic was a beautiful young FBI agent, the identical twin sister of one of the murdered scientists.

Well, sure, she thought. These things happen.

She read for a while, dozed for a while, opened her eyes when the bus pulled to a stop in Sedona. Three people got off, two got on. Next stop, Flagstaff.

She’d had one genuine oh-shit moment in the Phoenix bus station. She’d been sitting there, the suitcase at her feet, the bag of clothes beside her, the paperback unopened on her lap, when the room went dead silent, jarring her out of her reverie.

When she turned her head to find out what everyone was looking at, what she saw was a pair of uniformed police officers striding through the entrance. One had a hand on the butt of his holstered pistol.