Dead Money by Ian Quarry

Author:Ian Quarry [Quarry, Ian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2020-02-13T16:00:00+00:00

14

Rader reached across the bed, finding Jill gone. He didn’t hear any sound in the house, which was unusual, because since he got here she’d played jazz while they drank whiskey and screwed and caught up, Jill doing most of the talking, Rader doing most of the screwing. Jill liked to talk almost as much as she liked to screw. Rader remembered this from when he dated her last year. The only thing that was different was the house. Back then they hung out in her Brink City apartment. Now she was in a suburban brick house with at least as many figurines in the living room as liquor bottles, and a vague story about wanting to try respectability before she died. Rader didn’t give a damn for bucket lists. He just liked that she hadn’t given up all her old ways, and planned to go with it until Brubaker’s guy called Gramercy’s Bar.

That was today. He thought about it, and he was sure. Time with Jill was like that.

Rader stepped out of the bed naked, past the closet door and the mirrors which lined the wall opposite the bed, thinking that there was nothing else for it than to trust that all that money he stashed there would be safe for his return. He trusted Jill; she was no thief. But her bedroom was no vault either.

He wandered through to the bathroom, where she was sitting in her underwear on the toilet painting her nails. She didn’t look up at him. In the harsh light that spilled down through the frosted window on her left above the oval bath, her skin had the pallor of the jazz-club frequenter whose evenings begin at midnight. She smelled of his body and her hair might’ve been styled with her hand. Her eyes, following each stroke with the tiny brush, were fierce and bright and smoky.

‘I’m going out,’ Rader said.

She made a fast stroke along a nail, retouching the tip.

‘And I could be away overnight,’ he said. ‘But it’s unlikely.’

Jill glanced up, then dipped the brush into the bottle of blue nail polish. She blew on her nails, gave a nod.

‘I’ll see you,’ he said.

Jill glanced at Rader again, once up and down his body. She frowned as she looked at her nails and laid aside the brush. Then she stood up and he yanked at her underwear and she kneeled on the floor, leaning on her hands and watching in a mirror as Rader kneeled behind her, his chest against her back.

‘I’ll see you when you get back,’ she said.

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