A Better Goodbye (26 page)

He kept his grind going and leaned close. Damn, the girl smelled good. His mind was right as he eased down the top of her dress so her right tittie was bare and he could play with the nipple, teasing it with his forefinger and smiling when it stood up proud. Then he pushed the hair away from her ear and whispered, “You gonna give it up nice for me?”

She said something back, but he couldn't hear it. Or maybe he didn't believe it.

“What's that you sayin'?” he asked.

“I said no,” she said.

DuPree turned her around to face him, not caring that he was rough about it, still enjoying the sight of her bare tittie.

“Not like you got a choice,” he said.

“You didn't have one either, did you?” she said. “I mean, coming in here just because Scott told you to. That's not very flattering to me, you know.”

She pulled the top of her dress back up without taking her eyes off him, and she smiled while she was doing it. Not snotty either. Making it friendly, like he'd stumbled upon her when she forgot to lower the shade.

But fuck friendly when the subject was pussy. “Scott got nothing to do with this,” DuPree said. “I make my own damn decisions.”

“Then that's something else we have in common,” she said, still smiling. “We think for ourselves. So as far as, like, me giving it up, I don't think so.”

“Got an attitude against black men, that it?”

“Black men are fine.”

“Uh-huh,” DuPree said. “Black men are fine, you just ain't giving it up for this one.”

“Or anybody else.”

“Black, you mean?”

“Black, white, whatever. I don't do that.”

“Shit,” he said. “What about those other bitches?”

“You'll have to ask them.”

“I have. Answer's always yes.”

He smiled back at her, cool, like they were in a bar, maybe along the water in Santa Monica, tall drinks in front of them, Alicia Keys on the sound system. No way this Coco girl could get around what he'd just put down.

“Maybe you should wait until Brianna's finished with Scott,” she said.

And stick his business where that motherfucker just stuck his? Even with a rubber, DuPree wasn't about sharing pussy.

“Maybe I'll just bend you over and fuck you,” he said. “What you gonna do about that, huh?”

She thought about it for a moment, her smile never changing, making him wonder if she was going to scream for the security guard. DuPree wouldn't have minded a bit, kick the man's ass and celebrate by getting his nut. Might even be better that way.

But she didn't scream. She just said, “You better make yourself comfortable so I can give you a massage. If we talk much longer, you won't have time for your happy ending.”

Nick couldn't stop himself from staring when she came out of the room. Didn't even try. Any sign of damage and he was ready to go in there and hold that asshole's head in the toilet until water came out of his ears. But there wasn't a hair on her head out of place. No tears in her eyes, no sign anywhere that she'd been roughed up. And then he saw her smiling at him.

Nick didn't smile back, not right away. He gave Coco a look that asked the question that was on his mind. She replied by heaving an exaggerated sigh of relief. That was when he smiled.

He did it again when DuPree emerged, looking like a guy who'd just had his pocket picked. DuPree glanced at the closed master bedroom door as if tempted to barge in and complain to Scott about what Coco hadn't done for him. Then he said, “Fuck it,” and left without looking at either Coco, who was wrapped up listening to messages, or Nick, whose smile probably would have stirred up some drama.

At first Nick thought the thing with the messages was just an act, but no, Coco really was giving them her full attention. There was one in particular that she replayed three or four times.

He wondered what that was all about, but before he could ask her, Scott and Brianna were back in the living room and Scott wanted to know where DuPree had gone off to. “What the fuck?” Scott said to Coco. “You didn't do anything to piss him off, did you?” And Coco, smiling sweetly, said, “No way. It's like Tom Cruise says in that old movie. You know, the one where he's in high school and there's all these hookers and—”

“
Risky Business
,” Scott said.

“Right, right,” Coco said. “And Tom Cruise at the end says he deals in human fulfillment. Well, me too.”

The amazing thing was she got away with it. Scott still wasn't happy, especially after he called DuPree on his cell and couldn't get him to pick up. But Coco had thrown him a bone straight out of Hollywood, and Scott was at least pacified. And then he was gone, off to wherever he went when he wasn't sleazing around the apartment. Brianna left fifteen minutes after that.

Then it was just Coco and Nick, with her finishing the last call she was going to take and sitting beside him on the sofa and saying, very softly, “Thank you.”

“I didn't do anything,” he said.

“But you would have,” she said. “Wouldn't you?”

He shrugged. “Something like that, you don't know what's going to happen until it happens.”

“I was so scared.” She looked like she might cry. “I didn't know what I was doing. I just knew I couldn't let him . . . ”

She shook her head, unable to make the words come out.

“It's all right, you got through it,” Nick said. “You won.”

“I don't feel like it.”

“It's like that sometimes.”

“Because you don't know what's going to happen, right?”

He was surprised to hear his words coming from her, surprised she'd been able to remember them when she was so shaken up.

“Was that how it was when you were a boxer?” she asked.

“After the bell rang, yeah, I suppose so,” he said. “Every fight's different. It's like a story you make up as you go along.”

It looked to him like she was thinking about that. At the same time she was studying his face, and he wondered what she was seeing.

“Did they hurt?” she said at last.

“What?”

“These.”

She touched the scars over his eyes, first the left, then the right.

“Only afterward,” he said.

“Even now?”

“Now it hurts to remember why they're there.”

“I'm sorry,” she said.

Her hand remained on his brow, cool and soothing. He didn't know why she was bestowing this balm on him. Was it for sport or was it out of kindness? He hoped it wasn't the first, didn't even want to consider the possibility. If kindness had inspired this gesture, he didn't think he deserved it, but he would accept it nonetheless.

Scott, his cell phone pressed to his ear, blinked in the late morning sunshine and uttered the closest thing he could think of to a prayer: “Come on, dammit, pick up.” An instant later he heard the message on DuPree's cell again and slammed down the phone. “Son of a bitch.”

Scott had called him until midnight without luck, and now that he'd hauled his ass out of bed, he was starting again. At least he wasn't feeding his pie hole as he wandered around his apartment in his boxers. Maybe he'd even lose a couple pounds before DuPree did him the honor of having an actual conversation. Then Scott caught a glimpse of his reflection in the living room mirror and realized he'd need more than twenty-four hours without double bacon cheeseburgers and chili fries. Twenty-four months was more like it.

He was about to hit redial when it occurred to him that DuPree was practically the only human being he spoke to regularly unless he was doing TV. There were the girls too, he supposed, though they weren't much more than hormone smoothies. Nick, on the other hand, looked at him like he was no better than a case of the crabs. Scott couldn't believe it—a fucking washed-up fighter who went all soft and gooey just because he killed some asshole who, given the chance, would have killed him. Who'd want to talk to a guy like that?

So Scott was down to DuPree in the friend department, and DuPree wasn't picking up. But maybe he would this time, Scott thought as he called again, hopeful and lonely, mostly lonely.

Sometimes DuPree just needed to jack somebody. It was a feeling that came over him, nothing financial, more like the urge to eat or fuck. He didn't know who else was wired like that, probably every motherfucker in prison, but fuck them, he wasn't worried about anybody except himself. He'd get this jangling in his head, and the hash he'd smoked would only make it go away for a little while. Now it was there again, the signal that told him to go get some, whatever it was, and he was trying to hold it together long enough to weigh his options. It was what a motherfucker had to do.

He was heading north on the 101 with Blanco riding shotgun, ignoring Scott's calls, thinking he'd get off on Topanga and take it over to Malibu. The overcast would burn off by the time he got there, and he could inhale some of that ocean air and get his head right.

It was going on three months since the bank robbery, and the only thing he could see in his future was the armored car job Slape kept talking about. Except Artie still wasn't in any shape to watch his back and DuPree damn sure wasn't going to work with Slape and the Aryan psycho he wanted to bring in as Artie's replacement. A criminally inclined brother dumb enough to do that was bound to wind up dead in a ditch.

He glanced at Blanco, who had stopped slobbering out the open window and hopped onto the floorboard to gnaw on a steak bone.
Dog's got life whipped
, he thought. And he could feel himself getting angry about it, wondering did Blanco laugh at him, did he, in his little pit-bull head, want to hear DuPree calling him massah? “You white motherfucker,” DuPree said, wanting to reach down and yank the bone away just to remind him who was boss. But uh-uh, not with Blanco. Damn dog's moods turned on a dime, and DuPree needed both his hands.

He just wasn't sure what for, was all. Any thoughts he'd had about taking down a bank solo had been forgotten when he heard the news out of Pasadena: same week, two jobs, two different robbers, two kills for the cops. He wasn't about that kind of a career move. Better to find him some more home-delivery drug dealers who needed robbing. But not Teddy George, who, if he was back in business, was guaranteed to have some crazy white boy with an Uzi beside him.

Motherfucker
, DuPree thought, looking to change lanes as he neared the Topanga Canyon exit, not seeing some punk-ass kid on a rice-rocket motorcycle coming up hard on his right until he almost hit him. “Well, goddamn,” DuPree said. The anger in his voice jerked Blanco out of his steak-bone reverie and sent him jumping back onto the seat to see what the cursing was about.

DuPree wanted to run the kid off the road and turn the dog loose on his bare legs. Him and all the other motorcycle fuckers weaving in and out of traffic on every damn freeway, riding the white lines in rush-hour gridlock, and most of the time looking like this bitch, in a T-shirt and shorts, as if that helmet on his head provided an invisible shield for the rest of him. But maybe DuPree wouldn't let the dog have all the fun, maybe he'd just drive right up over the kid himself, make him listen to the snap of his own spine.

Liking that idea a lot, DuPree stomped on the gas pedal, his speed going from eighty to ninety to . . . whoa, here came Topanga. What was he going to do, get off or kill the motherfucker? Another ten, fifteen seconds and he'd be past the exit, and the kid was already a speck in the distance. Damn, those rice rockets could move. And even if he caught the motherfucker, it was still the middle of the day, freeway crawling with witnesses. Fuck it, he'd rather be in Malibu.

On the drive through the canyon DuPree started thinking about how poor dim Scottie talked shit about wanting to walk on the wild side, play outlaw and wave a gun around. DuPree didn't think the man could rob a 7-Eleven without fucking up. But then DuPree thought something else: Maybe he could jack Scottie's massage setup. Just walk right in like those raping, robbing motherfuckers Scottie said his bitches were so afraid of, the ones that made him hire the punching bag he had for security. Scottie would never expect his dawg DuPree to fuck him over like that.