Colin Harrison - The Finder

"Hey, baby," came Violet's voice.

The apartment was dark, but he knew his way.

She lay in her bed, smoking, as usual. "You bring me anything?"

He pulled a bottle from the bag. "Drambuie, you like it."

"Sweet, I like sweet. Good for late at night."

Since her teen years, Violet had always had a terrible time sleeping. Now she reached her enormous arm over to her side table and found two glasses. Poured an inch in each.

"Here."

Victor took it in one shot. Then he pulled off his shoes, took his gun from his sock, slipped it into his shoe, took off his pants, folded them. He didn't know why he did this, came to see her. Well, yes, he did. The ugliness excited him.

"Come here," she said.

He stood next to the bed and she hung her head back off the side of the mattress. He moved over her.

"You take a shower in the last week?" she asked.

"The Drambuie will kill the germs."

"You're probably right."

She took him. She was quite good and sucked him hard quickly. She began to finger herself beneath the covers. She moaned a bit. After a minute she pulled him out of her mouth. "All right." He walked around to the other side of the bed. She rolled over and presented her enormous ass upward. This was the ugly part, the part he liked. He slipped in from behind. She had never had kids, so even though she was a size eighteen or twenty-two or whatever the huge size was, she was tight as a glove inside. And Violet was fucked ten or fifteen times a month, so she was really in shape down there. He gave it to her hard for a minute or so, sensed boredom in himself, and made a point of watching the traffic on the boulevard out the window.

"Come on, Vic," she instructed. "Don't lose interest."

He pounded her and it felt good. The hot jolt running toward the tip. She squeezed herself at just the right time and he heard a noise come out of his throat and as he shot it occurred to him that he'd enjoyed killing Richie more. You might be a sick fuck, Victor thought. Well, look where you are, you must be.

"All right now," said Violet, her voice amused. "Finally, a little emotionality. You and me. I think we got a chance at Oprah."

He sat back.

"Nice to see you enjoy yourself," she purred.

"Maybe I actually did, yeah."

"Oh, you did."

"Okay, I did. You liked it, too."

"I'm a woman of capacious appetites."

"What's capacious?"

"Big."

"Right. Big."

"That's enough." She poured herself a glass. "You're lucky. Your real girlfriends wouldn't put up with this shit."

"My real girlfriends go out in the Brooklyn sunlight and interact with civilized society."

He wiped himself with the sheet. Violet rolled over.

"Something's bothering you."

"Nah."

"Hey, Victor. It's me, right?"

"Sure is."

"I'm just saying, is all. You seem like something's bothering you."

"You think you know me?"

She laughed and poured another glass. "I'm just saying, a woman can tell some things."

All right, his shrug said, I'll give it to you. He pulled on his pants and went into the bathroom.

"Plus I never complain about your girlfriends."

"How could you?" he called behind him.

"I could. But I don't."

He smiled. This was just play. "I got a guy messing with me, Violet. I don't know who he is."

He sensed her settling in for the conversation, pleased he'd opened up to her. "How messing?"

"Just came by the lot, asking questions." He flipped open the cabinet in her bathroom, reached his hand in the back and opened Violet's bottle of chloral hydrate, the same powerful sleeping pills that killed Anna Nicole Smith. Dissolved in both water and alcohol. He'd used five on Richie, explained to Sharon how to mix them in.

"Questions about what?" came Violet's voice.

"Just things." He poured out ten pills, wrapped them in a piece of toilet paper, and slipped them into his pocket.

"You doing some stuff these days now, Vic?"

He came back to the bed. "I'm always doing something."

She lit a cigarette. "What's he look like?"

"Regular guy. Built."

"Cop?"

"Doesn't have the swagger."

"Not confident?"

"No, no, very confident. But lone-wolf confident. Like that."

Violet was quiet. "I heard about those Mexican girls who got killed out by the beach."

He started pulling on his shirt. "Oh, yeah? I did, too."

She smoked her cigarette, wouldn't look at him. How did she know? he thought. How could she know? "Vic, they got killed with a load of sewage." She looked at him meaningfully. "Whoever heard of that?"

"Pretty tough to track sewage. Stuff degrades quickly."

"But the truck."

"Trucks can disappear. Guys in Queens buy them for scrap, crush them an hour later."

"But you said there's a guy-"

"Not a cop, like I said. Somebody's fucking with me."

"I can ask people," she said.

He found his shoes. "Don't ask. Just listen." He checked his watch. "Gotta go."

She looked at him. This was the moment when he used to give her a little kiss on the cheek, a momentary gentleness that recalled their shared childhood, her brain-damaged brother, the dead baby, the life together that never happened.

"Yeah," said Violet. She turned her back.

Downstairs he knocked on the glass. The Nigerian guy looked up from his freaky African newspaper.

"Hey, I forgot to ask you, you seen Richie?"

"He was here couple days ago, boss."

"Cash his check?"

The Nigerian shook his head. "Just paying us a social visit, Mr. Vic."

Fucking Richie, did he come and bang Violet twice a week, too? Did he tell Violet about the girls? It was quite possible.

Victor fingered the ten pills in his pocket, again checked his watch. The day had a plan. A goal. And to achieve that goal, he needed to go mix some chemicals.

She waited in the shadows, across the street from the truck bay on Fifty-first Street. She was dressed in the CorpServe uniform she'd last worn on the evening of the attack, yet now it was washed and pressed, all evidence of those events gone. She reached into her pocket and affixed her CorpServe ID badge. Straggling workers on their way home hurried by her, men and women thinking about dinner, the children, what was on TV tonight. A few minutes after seven p.m., the forty-four-foot CorpServe mobile shredder pulled up, #6 as usual, and the truck bay door was lifted by the security men. The truck was driven by old man Zhao, who always drove it. He had a perfect safety record, she remembered, not bad considering his age. His eyesight was excellent, too; she'd ordered him to be tested six months earlier. She had a soft spot for him; maybe he reminded her of her grandfather.

The two floor cleaners would have arrived by the service entrance already and would be upstairs at work in the Good Pharma offices. The truck was now parked for the evening in the truck bay, and Zhao had started up the actual shredder unit, which ran off an electric battery, not the diesel engine. The reason, of course, was that some trucks needed to operate within completely enclosed facilities and could not be a danger for asphyxiation by diesel exhaust of the operator as well as those nearby.

She darted across the street and found Zhao. He was surprised to see her, and she put a finger to her lips and drew him out of sight of the security camera.

"They said you were killed!" he exclaimed in Mandarin.

"Of course not," Jen Li answered him.

"They say all the operations must stay normal. Orders from the big boss in China."

Her brother, of course. "That's good."

"But everybody is nervous."

"Tell me, how did the other Mexican girls react to the news?"

Zhao shook his head. "Oh, they were very sad. I think some of the girls quit."