Chapter 13
A Brief Interlude
Story's hand fits in mine like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle.
I've got our bag on my shoulders and a pistol tucked in the back of my waistband—which, let me tell you, is a lot more uncomfortable than they make it seem on TV.
We leave the car with the key fob clearly visible in the cupholder and the doors unlocked, windows down—hopefully a very clear invitation to steal it.
The group of recently departed young people was only a portion of the full group, and they're all speaking the same language—something from the middle of Europe, maybe, I don't know.
It's not English, Spanish, French, German, or Russian, but my knowledge of languages is pretty damned dismal.
There's another group of ten or fifteen twenty-somethings milling in the tiny foyer, chattering, laughing, and trying to check out while the harried proprietor looks ready to pull his hair out.
Which would be unfortunate, since he doesn't have much to begin with.
I tuck Story against my side and push through the crowd to the counter, my arm hooked around her waist. The proprietor, an older man with thin, graying hair and a wispy goatee, is trying gamely to manage the chaos of something like two dozen checkouts.
He sees us, but the cluster of people trying to hand him their keys so they can, I assume, make the ferry to the mainland prevents him from getting to us.
I peel a pair of one hundred euro bills from the stack now in my hip pocket and flash them at him with a raised index finger.
He nods, gestures to the pair of young men in front of him and snags a key from a hook behind him. He snatches the bills from me and shoves a clipboard into my hands. "Fill it out and bring it back, per favore. Room two-one-six." Two-ah-one-ah-six.
"Grazie," I say, and then look around for the stairs; it seems simple, but the tiny room and too many people make it harder than it should be, and the microscopic foyer is already cluttered with stands containing things-to-do-in-Olbia flyers, cartoon maps of the town, takeaway menus for nearby restaurants, and things like that.
Story, however, has already solved that problem while I was talking to the proprietor, and drags me through the chaos to a narrow doorway marked by a placard indicating a stairwell. Once we round the first flight, the din reduces dramatically.
"Jesus, what a clusterfuck," I mutter.
"Yeah, but it works in our favor," Story answers. "He won't think twice about us. Even if Pugli's goons do track us this far, he won’t be able to give us a description of us."
"True, true."
We ascend to the second floor and find our room—microscopic, with a sagging twin bed and decades-old oak two-drawer nightstand, a pitted, tarnished mirror, and a single high-backed chair from a dining set that likely dated back to the Truman administration.
But then, this building probably predates the United States by a century or two at least, so by those standards, a seventy-year-old chair is an upstart young whippersnapper.
There's no A/C, but the window is open, and a steady breeze flutters the gauzy white curtains and cools the air and reduces what would otherwise be a stultifying stuffiness.
"Well, Fred, here we are," Story says to me, lowering herself gingerly to the bed; the frame legit squeaks, as in actual rusty springs protesting. "Oh. Oh wow." She bounces up and down—squeaksqueaksqueak. "Wanna keep up the whole neighborhood?"
I stand with my back to the door, eying her. "Fred?"
"Fred and Ethel?" she looks at me expectantly. "Fred and Ethel Mertz?"
I shrug. "What are you talking about?"
She rolls her eyes. "Kids these days. Fred and Ethel Mertz are characters from I Love Lucy. They're famous for bickering all the time like the quintessential old married couple."
I snicker. "Oh. Because I called you Ethel."
"Hunky fella is a perfectly normal thing to say."
"No."
She sputters. "No? Just no?"
"No."
She shakes her head, laughing. "Give me that clipboard, Fred. I'll give us fake names."
I give it to her. "Good, because my handwriting is chicken scratch."
She snorts again, thinks for a second, and then starts scratching away at the intake form. "I work with doctors. You don't know chicken scratch, sweetie."
“Okay, but real talk, here. How do you read that shit? The scribbles on a prescription form, I mean."
She frowns at me, but she's thinking, not seeing, and then fills in a few more lines. "Uh? It's all part of the training. A lot of the gibberish is actually medical abbreviations derived from Latin, and then you have the dosage and such, and it’s all pretty standard, so even if I can’t read one part, I can usually decipher the rest using context clues. If I can’t figure it out on my own, I ask the doctor to translate.
And you'd be surprised how often even they have to stare at it for a minute to read their own writing. "
"You'd think there'd be a better system."
"There are redundancies and checks built in to prevent mistakes, obviously. But yeah, the script pad thing is a holdover."
She checks the back of the page, but it's blank, and she hands me the clipboard. "We're good."
"Fred Rogers and Ethel Mertz," I read. I give her a droll stare. "Fred Rogers? Really?"
She gives me a cutesy grin and a demure shrug. “You in a cardigan? Yum."
I snort. "You're sleep-deprived or something."
"Or something." She glances away. "Still trying to get over the fact that I murdered two dudes."
"Self-defense, not murder," I say, sitting beside her on the bed.
"But I get it. I keep seeing those first three every time I close my eyes.
I opened the door, and they were there. The one guy's eyes went wide, and I saw him reaching for his gun, and I just…
" I shudder. “His head jerked back. And the smell. God."
She leans against me, shivering. "There was so much blood, Kills."
"Kills?" I echo. "That's a new one."
She rests her chin on the cap of my shoulder. “Really?"
I nod. "It's been either Killy or Killian, my whole life." I turn my face to hers, nuzzle the tip of my nose against hers. "I hereby decree that henceforth only you may refer to me as Kills."
She grins. “Yay, that makes me happy."
I quirk an eyebrow. "It does?"
"Well, yeah. It's not every day you get a private nickname for someone." She wrinkles her nose. "Sorry, there aren't a lot of nicknames you can make out of my name."
"Not really, no." I nudge her nose with mine again. "Sweetheart works for me."
She melts at this. "Aww, Kills. You're too damn sweet, I swear." She searches my face. "So now what?"
"I do have an idea. It's a long shot, but possible. I'm gonna take this downstairs and step out for a few minutes."
She just looks at me. “You want me to stay here?" She sounds skeptical and unhappy.
"For appearances, yes. In case anyone is watching. I'm the fiancé running out to get us some stuff. You're staying here to rest after our long journey."
"Care to share your plan?" she asks.
I wince. "It's loose and vague and probably stupid. And it's based on a game Cal and I used to play."
She cackles. “Ohhh boy. You're on your own with that one."
I eye her. "I plan on bringing you some clothes back, but I’ve never bought clothes for a girl before."
She just laughs. "If you manage to come back with clothes that actually fit me, I’ll be seriously impressed.” Another laugh. "This oughta be good."
I frown. "I mean clothes, woman. Not lingerie."
She laughs harder. "I know! I'm not making fun of you.
It's just that we women have a hard enough time finding clothes that fit us right, and it's our clothing.
" She pats my chest and kisses me softly, quickly, chastely.
"Just do your best. I'd tell you my sizes, but I only know what I am in the US. I couldn’t begin to tell you what I am in European sizes. "
I head down and give the clerk the clipboard; the chaotic herd of twenty-somethings has gone, but a pack of older middle-aged British tourists is bickering in the foyer now, so it’s not that much less chaotic.
First, I take a circuit of the immediate block, so I know how to get back to this spot, and then I start wandering further and further afield, my eyes peeled for a few specific things.
I pass a touristy-looking shop and pop in, but it's too touristy—the products are all cheap and gimmicky, and the clothes are all either way too big or way too small. I also have limited funds, so I can’t exactly walk into a fancy place and buy expensive shit off the rack.
I waste way too much time, but eventually I do find a clothing store that seems to be what I'm looking for—decent quality, not tourist crap, and not super expensive. I get a plain black tee, a zip-up hoodie, and a pair of jeans for me—with a lot of help from the grandmotherly woman behind the counter when it comes to fit. Shopping for Story, however, is a whole different ballgame. Not only have I never even tried to buy clothes for a woman before, but I’m also doing it in a different country where I don’t speak the language and the sizes are all different, as Story pointed out—so even if I knew what size Story wore, it would require, at minimum, conversions.
All I can do is hold up an article of clothing, eyeball it, and hope for the best. Good fucking luck to me. I should have just brought her with me, but I'm worried my idea is stupid, and if it goes like I’m worried it’s going to, I don’t want her around to witness my embarrassment.
I go through several pairs of jeans before I find a pair that seems, to my eyes, to be pretty close. The tee and hoodie are easier to guess at, but I don't have a lot of hope that the jeans are gonna fit.
Clothing sorted out, I head out again in search of the next phase of my plan. This is a pretty small place so there's no guarantee it's going to work. In fact, I’m relatively certain it won't.
But it's worth a shot.