If You Can't Stand the Heat (Kit Tolliver #1) (The Kit Tolliver Stories) (2 page)

At her door he said, “Any chance I could come up for a cup of coffee?”

“I wish,” she said.

“I see.”

“I’ve got this roommate,” she said. “It’s impossible, it really is. My idea of success isn’t starring on Broadway, it’s making enough money to have a place of my own. There’s just no privacy when she’s home, and the damn girl is always home.”

“That’s a shame.”

She drew a breath. “Jim? Do you have a roommate?”

He didn’t, and if he had the place would still have been large enough to afford privacy. A large living room, a big bedroom, a good-sized kitchen. Rent-controlled, he told her, or he could never have afforded it. He showed her all through the apartment before he took her in his arms and kissed her.

“Maybe,” she said, when the embrace ended, “maybe we should have one more drink after all.”

She was dreaming, something confused and confusing, and then her eyes snapped open. For a moment she did not know where she was, and then she realized she was in New York, and realized the dream had been a recollection or reinvention of her childhood in Hawley.

In New York, and in Jim’s apartment.

And in his bed. She turned, saw him lying motionless beside her, and slipped out from under the covers, moving with instinctive caution. She walked quietly out of the bedroom, found the bathroom. She used the toilet, peeked behind the shower curtain. The tub was surprisingly clean for a bachelor’s apartment, and looked inviting. She didn’t feel soiled, not exactly that, but something close. Stale, she decided. Stale, and very much in need of freshening.

She ran the shower, adjusted the temperature, stepped under the spray.

She hadn’t intended to stay over, had fallen asleep in spite of her intentions. Rohypnol, she thought. Roofies, the date-rape drug. Puts you to sleep, or the closest thing to it, and leaves you with no memory of what happened to you.

Maybe that was it. Maybe she’d gotten a contact high.

She stepped out of the tub, toweled herself dry, and returned to the bedroom for her clothes. He hadn’t moved in her absence and lay on his back beneath the covers.

She got dressed, checked herself in the mirror, found her purse, put on lipstick but no makeup, and was satisfied with the results. Then, after another reflexive glance at the bed, she began searching the apartment.

His wallet, in the gray slacks he’d tossed over the back of a chair, held almost three hundred dollars in cash. She took that but left the credit cards and everything else. She found just over a thousand dollars in his sock drawer, and took it, but left the mayonnaise jar full of loose change. She checked the refrigerator, and the set of brushed aluminum containers on the kitchen counter, but the fridge held nothing but food and drink, and one container held tea bags while the other two were empty.

That was probably it, she decided. She could search more thoroughly, but she’d only be wasting her time.

And she really ought to get out of here.

But first she had to go back to the bedroom. Had to stand at the side of the bed and look down at him. Jim, he’d called himself. James John O’Rourke, according to the cards in his wallet. Forty-seven years old. Old enough to be her father, in point of fact, although the man in Hawley who’d sired her was his senior by eight or nine years.

He hadn’t moved.

Rohypnol, she thought. The love pill.

“Maybe,” she had said, “we should have one more drink after all.”

I’ll have what you’re having, she’d told him, and it was child’s play to add the drug to her own drink, then switch glasses with him. Her only concern after that had been that he might pass out before he got his clothes off, but no, they kissed and petted and found their way to his bed, and got out of their clothes and into each other’s arms, and it was all very nice, actually, until he yawned and his muscles went slack and he lay limp in her arms.

She arranged him on him on his back and watched him sleep. Then she touched and stroked him, eliciting a response without waking the sleeping giant. Rohypnol, the wonder drug, facilitating date rape for either sex. She took him in her mouth, she mounted him, she rode him. Her orgasm was intense, and it was hers alone. He didn’t share it, and when she dismounted his penis softened and lay upon his thigh.

In Hawley her father took to coming into her room at night. “Kitten? Are you sleeping?” If she answered, he’d kiss her on the forehead and tell her to go back to sleep.

Then half an hour later he’d come back. If she was asleep, if she didn’t hear him call her name, he’d slip into the bed with her. And touch her, and kiss her, and not on her forehead this time.

She would wake up when this happened, but somehow knew to feign sleep. And he would do what he did.

Before long she pretended to be asleep whenever he came into the room. She’d hear him ask if she was asleep, and she’d lie there silent and still, and he’d come into her bed. She liked it, she didn’t like it. She loved him, she hated him.

Eventually they dropped the pretense. Eventually he taught her how to touch him, and how to use her mouth on him. Eventually, eventually, there was very little they didn’t do.

It took some work, but she got Jim hard again, and this time she made him come. He moaned audibly at the very end, then subsided into deep sleep almost immediately. She was exhausted, she felt as if she’d taken a drug herself, but she forced herself to go to the bathroom and look for some Listerine. She couldn’t find any, and wound up gargling with a mouthful of his Irish whiskey.

She stopped in the kitchen, then returned to the bedroom. And, when she’d done what she needed to do, she decided it wouldn’t hurt to lie down beside him and close her eyes. Just for a minute . . .

And now it was morning, and time for her to get out of there. She stood looking down at him, and for an instant she seemed to see his chest rise and fall with his slow even breathing, but that was just her mind playing a trick, because his chest was in fact quite motionless, and he wasn’t breathing at all. His breathing had stopped forever when she slid the kitchen knife between two of his ribs and into his heart.

He’d died without a sound.
La petite mort,
the French called orgasm. The little death. Well, the little death had drawn a moan from him, but the real thing turned out to be soundless. His breathing stopped, and never resumed.

She laid a hand on his upper arm, and the coolness of his flesh struck her as a sign that he was at peace now. She thought, almost wistfully, how very serene he had become.

In a sense, there’d been no need to kill the man. She could have robbed him just as effectively while he slept, and the drug would ensure that he wouldn’t wake up before she was out the door. She’d used the knife in response to an inner need, and the need had in fact been an urgent one; satisfying it had shuttled her right off to sleep.

Back in Hawley, her mother’s kitchen had held every kind of knife you could imagine. A dozen of them jutted out of a butcher-block knife holder, and others filled a shallow drawer. Sometimes she’d look at the knives, and think about them, and the things you could do with them. Cutting, piercing. Knife-type things.

“You’re my little soldier,” her father used to say, and she felt like a soldier the night of her high school graduation, marching when her name was called, standing at attention to receive her diploma. She could feel the buzz in the audience, men and women telling each other how brave she was. The poor child, with all she’d been through.

She never touched her mother’s knives, and for all she knew they were still in the kitchen in Hawley. But a few weeks later she left her apartment in St. Paul and went bar-hopping across the river in Minneapolis, and the young man she went home with had a set of knives in a butcher-block holder, just like her mother’s.

Bad luck for him.

She let herself out of the apartment, drew the door shut and made sure it locked behind her. The building was a walk-up, four apartments to the floor, and she made her way down three flights and out the door without encountering anyone.

Time to think about moving.

Not that she’d established a pattern. The man last week, in the posh loft near the Javits Center, had smothered to death. He’d been huge, and built like a wrestler, but the drug rendered him helpless, and all she’d had to do was hold the pillow over his face. He didn’t come close enough to consciousness to struggle. And the man before that, the advertising executive, had shown her why he’d feel safe in any neighborhood, gentrification or no. He kept a loaded handgun in the drawer of the bedside table, and if any burglar was unlucky enough to drop into his place, well—