The Subtle Art of Brutality
Page 22
“Yes. I got just a tad angry.” He rolls his shiny new wedding ring around and around on his finger while he says this.
Read on Pierce White: Grade-A cocksucker. He’s scared of me, but he’s also sure he was slumming with Delilah and assumes everyone else thought so as well. And since he’s slumming, there should not have been repercussions like a divorce and getting fired.
“Married? Again?” I say.
“Yes.”
“That makes twice now?”
“Yes. A total of two, yes.”
“Why so bitter and spiteful towards Delilah?”
Cocky smirk. “You know, she just has a way of bringing it out in me.”
“Threatened her, right?”
“Now hang on. Are you police? You said ‘detective’ so I—”
I step into his personal space the way a bear does when the last thing you see is it swiping down. His breath is tinged with evergreen mint and the metallic smell of adrenaline. Fear. Fight or flight.
I stab a finger in his chest. “The last time you have seen her. Tell me now or I will knock that high-dollar nose job of yours right back to ugly-as-fuck.”
He actually touches his fingers to his nose, caresses. It’s as rare as Haley’s Comet to find vanity running this thick through a man who likes pussy.
“I saw her a few days before Halloween.”
“This Halloween?”
“Yes.”
A week or so before she went AWOL.
“Go on.”
“We...met at a hotel. Spent the night.”
Really.
“What hotel?”
“Boulevard Grand. You know the one, correct?”
“Pool on the roof and the restaurant that rotates?”
“Yes. Such a beautiful view of the skyline.”
“When she left where did she go?”
“I assume back to her new place. She said she was living with her mother again. Truth be told, I wasn’t paying attention. I just wanted one last taste before I blew her off forever.”
“What’s that mean?”
Distasteful and uncomfortable in his self-awareness: “Let me rephrase that so it doesn’t implicate me in any wrongdoing: I wanted to sleep with her one more time before I stopped talking to her. Completely.”
His eyes smile. “I mean, I was getting married to my new wife the following week. Now or never, right?”
“You’re one serious motherfucker.” I say, lighting a smoke.