She gave a small huff. “Myself is funny. Because I am having more fears of staying in this room with you than of what we do with the killer.”
I sat still. “I don’t think it’s funny.”
“You have not European sense of humor,” she said. “In my country would be much laughter for this. The poor girl, afraid of man even when she is very much liking him, and not afraid of the bad killing man. Ha,” she said.
I moved carefully onto the bed, leaving a good space between us. I took her hand and just held it.
“How beautiful I now am,” she said. “With these, these—how do you call it, snowts?”
“I think you are beautiful,” I said. “But I don’t know what snowts are.”
She blew her nose again. “These are snowts,” she said. “From the nose.”
“You mean snot,” I said.
“Yes, of course, I am saying so. Snowts.”
“It’s not a real nice word.”
“So? What are you calling it then?”
“How about nose tears?”
She looked at me for a long moment, then shook her head. “You are also a poet. This is a beautiful thought, very nice.” She held up the soggy tissue. “But I think this is not beautiful. And not tears.” She threw it across the room and into the small brass trashcan. “Snowts.”
“Whatever you say.”
She moved closer to me. “I say, it would be very nice if you will hold me for a few minutes. If you do not object to the snowts.”
“Nose tears,” I said. “I don’t mind.” I put my arms around her.
We were still sitting like that, just holding each other and breathing, when Nicky smashed the door open and roared back into the room with a sound like the Spanish Armada breaking up on the cliffs of Dover.
“Hello-hello-hello,” he yelled at us. His arms were full of paper bags and before Anna and I could even straighten up he had spread the contents of several of them across the bed.
Nicky had found beer, two six packs of Samuel Adams, and a sixteen ounce bottle of Mountain Dew for Anna. He’d also found a Chinese restaurant, and there were spring rolls with lots of hot Chinese mustard, shrimp fried rice, sweet and sour pork, and kung pao chicken.
“Gung hee fat choy!” Nicky shouted, throwing chop sticks to Anna and then to me.
“It’s not New Years, Nicky,” I reminded him.
“Hell’s peppers, mate, celebration is celebration. Besides,” he said, ripping the lid off a container of rice and shoving a good handful into his mouth, “I can’t say another bloody word in Chinese. Eat up, love, it’s getting cold,” he told Anna.
She continued to watch him with something between amusement and horror as he polished off a good half of the food with a kind of suicidal carelessness that left rice stuck to the ceiling above him and small pieces of shrimp fastened to the bedspread.
When we were done eating Nicky belched happily. “Ahhh,” he said. “Hits the old spot, eh? Well then, Billy, what’s next, beddy-bye? Do we need an early start?”
“Very early,” I said. “How about fifteen minutes?”
He blinked. “What. Fifteen minutes from now?”
“That’s right.?
?
“Ohhh,” he said, and for the first time since this whole thing had started he looked a little uneasy.
“What’s the matter? A little worried about going out there into the Miami night?”