[...]
Layla’s back stiffened the moment she saw me, her least favorite ex-husband detective, in her club. Closer, and I might have heard a dull leathery squeak as her tight neck muscles tensed even more. Even across the clouds of cigarette smoke, and amidst the neon bar lights, her radar picked me up around the curve of the bar just as I turned her direction.
She wasn’t happy. That was fine. I wasn’t happy either and I was sure that nobody was going to get any happier by the time I left.
I knew she wanted to throw me out. As soon as she saw me, she turned into a stop sign – red all over, expressionless and rigid. I hadn’t often seen her like that, but however many or few times it was, was enough.
I suppose the time she took to walk around to my bar stool was what kept her from exploding upon arrival. I slipped my jacket off and laid it across the bar next to me. I’m sure it looked like I was bracing for a fight, but it was just hot in there. She was still sitting on a hair trigger as she knifed her body into the space between my stool and the next.
“I don’t know wha~”
“I’m not here because I want to be.” I didn’t bother myself to glance at her.
“Then leave. Tony will be glad to see you out the door.”
“Not out the window?”
“That would be ideal, sure. Unfortunately, Tony’s been having back problems lately. Must be the way he threw the last sorry bastard into that wall over by the hat check station.”
“Layla ... listen … you've ... ” my words sputtered and died. It wasn’t the implicit threat that grounded me. I just got tired sometimes of having the same argument with her. Different terms, different reasons, different places, same anger. Not even necessarily about each other. But our old angers always seemed to get aggravated by each other, and before we knew it there’d be a donnybrook. We’d been married two years, and spent a decade of that fighting. For what it was worth, the same things that made us explode that way made us explode other ways. Ways we both liked. Ways we probably needed. Ways we hated afterward.
“I need to catch you up on some things before they catch up to you. And, I need something from you.”
Her eyes told me the latter might take place in the vicinity of my dead body, if not directly over it.
“Where can we talk … that isn’t right here?”
Her answer was to turn and walk. I didn’t feel like running behind her like an unloved mutt, so I decided to make her actually say something, if she wanted me to move. Ten feet away, she realized that I wasn’t behind her and paused. When I still wasn’t behind her five seconds later, she turned. “Are we doing this or not?”
I slipped from my stool, hooked my finger into my jacket collar and slung it over my shoulder, nodding for her to proceed. She walked on. I caught up and took her elbow in my free hand. I could feel the quiet rage wafting off her and trailing in her wake.
“Nothing ever changes, does it?
“There is one favor you can do for me, Dix.”
“Which would be?”
“Go to hell. Sooner than later.”
“Been there – two years worth, remember?”
She tried yanking her elbow from my grip, but that didn’t happen.
“That’s not how this game goes, sister.”
We snaked through her half-open office door, which I kicked shut. I latched it as I spun her to face me.
She was ready. She added her own strength to the momentum she'd picked up being spun on her heels, and managed to deliver a solid slap across my left cheek. I didn’t give her the satisfaction of letting myself wince too much. Still, it made my eye water and my ear ring – plus, I dropped my jacket and tangled one of my heels in it.
She lifted her chin defiantly. My hand slipped in right under her chin and fitted itself to the curves of her throat. “So that’s how this game gets played?” I said.
“You said you have something you n~”
“Uh-uh – after …”
One of us shuddered. I think it was her. We’d both been here before, just in other places and for other reasons. I pressed her against the wall, then pressed myself hard into her. Her lips parted and any doubt I had was gone.
Our mouths met; our tongues danced. Her fingers glided down my shirt, following the trail of my tie, and found what they were looking for just south of my belt. My fingers blazed a similar trail, dipping down to her waist and gathering her dress up in six inch bursts. Her wardrobe took a loss against its bottom line as my fingers yanked a rift, one side to the other, in her panties. Fortunately for her, her stockings were thigh highs and her garter belt was in the way of nothing.
She freed me from the confines of my pants with similar dexterity. I plunged into her wetness with a force that drove a grunt from both of us, and a bang from the wall.
My hand at her throat kept her breath ragged and her face a rich, deepening pink but at the slightest sign my grip was lessening, she leaned in to my fingers. How could I deny such resolve?
I could write pretty paragraphs about being sheathed within the flower of her womanhood, but that quaint and idyllic meadow land was nowhere close to the place we were. Animals would have been embarrassed by our escapades.
It was a dark and savage fucking we were inflicting on each other. Every time my hand tightened on her throat, her nails raked down my back. She may have spared my underwear, but prospects didn’t look good for my last pressed, white shirt. Even if it survived intact, I wasn’t sure it wouldn’t be streaked in blood.
One leg on the floor, she wrapped the other around my right hip. Each time I seemed about to withdraw, her muscular thigh pulled me back in. I could have stood still and simply allowed her to drive me back up into her, gravity and her leg being the active agents, but I’ve never been much for just standing there, particularly when sex was involved.
We rode as hard to our climax as any Kentucky Derby winner, and it was all I could do to keep us both standing as we caught our breaths. Her one standing leg would hardly hold the both of us, and she was using the other to not slide down my body. I dropped my hands down to her waist and re-gathered my energy. She dipped her head to snuggle in between my shoulder and neck. The next thing I knew, she was biting – hard – on my shoulder. Nothing unusual there. It was her habit to mark her conquests thusly, new or not.
A long time passed. Maybe a week; maybe two. Finally, she pressed her hands against my chest.
“Off me, damn you.”
I leaned back to allow her egress. She straightened her skirt as she walked slowly and deliberately around to the far side of her desk.
She didn’t sit, but then neither did I. Neither of us were at ease enough to sit. Dazed, yes. At ease, no. But then, even when we were married, it sometimes took us hours to wind down afterward, warily walking around about the other like wrestlers. Neither of us trusted the other. More to the point, neither of us really trusted ourselves.
She was fascinated with her desktop and with the way her fingers seemed to wander aimlessly across it. With no clues available on her face, I took to watching her fingers, too.
Another week passed, by which time we had both grown disinterested in her fingers.
“For God’s sake, Dix. Tell me what you need to tell me; ask me what you need to ask me. Make it the Western Union version. Then get the hell out of my bar.”
“Layla, someone put the finger on you as a mob stool, and they know enough about you to make it ring true. Me, I’m sure it’s all gas, but what I think doesn’t help. I’m working a job for Evelyn Conklin and I think there might be a link. Have you ever heard of a guy named Cyril Anderson?”
She shook her head. It didn't ring a bell, but it rang something close.
“Maybe know him as Chip?”
She dropped into her chair, like a bird from a tree, and buried her head in her hands.
“You better tell me the long version, Dix.”
[...]
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