The Wrong Woman

COLE

I should have turned around on the stairs. I told myself that every time, climbing past the kitchen and the busted elevator, past the two doors nobody opened for outsiders. Tonight the rain had soaked through my coat before I even reached the alley door, and I told myself the same lie I always did climbing up here: that I was only checking on her, nothing more. It never held past the top step.

I knocked twice and said the only words that could get me through that door fast.

“Police. Open up.”

It was a lie, and we both knew it the second she opened the door. Lenore stood there in a robe the color of red wine, one eyebrow raised, like she’d been expecting exactly this kind of trouble. Her mouth curved into a smile before she could stop it. Mine did the same.

“That’s not funny, Marsh,” she said. “Someone’s going to believe you one of these nights.”

“Someone already does.” I stepped inside before she could decide to be smart about it. “That’s the problem.”

She closed the door behind me, slow, like she wanted me to hear the lock catch. The room smelled like her perfume and old cigarette smoke, gin and candle wax. Somewhere below us the band was still playing, the bassline coming up through the floorboards like a second heartbeat.

I didn’t say anything else. I didn’t need to. I put my hand on her jaw and she tilted her face up, and that was the whole conversation we needed to have.

I kissed her like I’d been thinking about it all day. She kissed me back like she wanted to forget something. Her hands found my collar and pulled me until there was no space left between us, until her back was against the door and my coat was on the floor and neither of us cared where it landed.

“You’re going to get us both killed,” she whispered against my mouth.

“Probably.”

Her fingers worked the buttons of my shirt like she’d done it a hundred times, fast and certain. “Don’t make me care tonight.”

I told her I wouldn’t, and for once I kept a promise easy. The robe slipped off one shoulder, then the other, and I kissed the skin it left bare like I was trying to memorize it. She made a small sound against my ear, half laugh, half something rawer, and pulled me closer by the hair.

We didn’t make it to the bed. The door held us up just fine, her leg hooked around my hip, her breath coming faster against my neck, my name breaking apart in her mouth in pieces. Everything outside that room stopped existing for a while. There was just her skin under my hands, her heartbeat against my chest, the low gold light of her one lamp turning everything the color of something worth burning for.

After, we ended up tangled on the bed anyway, sheets twisted around us, her head on my chest, my fingers tracing slow circles on her bare shoulder. The rain had started up again outside. It always did, in this city. It never quite finished.

I reached for my billfold on the nightstand without being asked. Counted it out. Set it on the table beside her, same as always.

She glanced at it, then at me, and something flickered behind her eyes. Just the old, tired arithmetic of her life. She didn’t argue. She never did. That was the deal, and we both kept it..

“You don’t have to keep doing that,” she said quietly, but she didn’t push the money back at me either.

“I know.” I lit a cigarette, gave her the first drag like always. “Doesn’t mean I’m going to stop.”

She laughed, real this time, low in her throat. “You’re a strange kind of honest man, Cole Marsh.”

“It’s the only kind I’ve got left.”

She took the cigarette from my fingers, looked at it instead of me. “Where would you even take me. If you were serious. If this wasn’t just…“. She gestured at the room, the money,the both of us. “... Whatever this is.”

“Anywhere that isn’t here.” I sat up on one elbow, watching her face for the moment it would turn skeptical. It didn’t, not yet. “Somewhere with no Conti, no badge, no name anybody knows. I’ve got enough put away. We could be gone by morning.”

She went quiet in a way I’d learned to read. Not a no. Worse than a no, a maybe she was actually weighing.

“You make it sound simple,” she said.

“It is simple. You just have to say yes.”

She almost did. I saw it land behind her eyes, saw her mouth open on the shape of the word. For one second the whole rotten city held still and let us have it.

Then the wall shook.

A crash from the room next door hard enough to rattle the lamp on the nightstand. Lenore’s whole body went rigid against me.

“That’s Mae’s room. Sal usually keeps it quiet up here,” she said slowly. “Nobody fights on this floor. Nobody’s allowed to.”

Another crash. Then a scream, short and cut off too fast, the kind that didn’t finish because something stopped it.

I was already off the bed, pulling my trousers on, every soft, warm thing from five minutes ago burned out of me like it had never existed.

“Stay back,” I told her, reaching for my gun where it sat tucked under my coat.

She didn’t. She was already at the door behind me, pale, barefoot, my shirt thrown over her shoulders, when I wrenched it open into the hallway.

Footsteps pounded away down the back stairs, fast and uneven, like a man running with something heavy. The hallway light flickered. From Mae’s doorway, left hanging open a few inches, came nothing now. No scream, no struggle.

Just a silence so complete it felt louder than the crash had been.