I don’t plan on disappointing them.
Once I’ve made sure The Contessa’s secure and I have my money and my passport on me, I head out, on the hunt for food. I need carbs, good beer, and cheese, and some of that delicious crusty bread. Olives, and sun-dried tomatoes, and—
Fuck!
Probably should have paid a little more attention to which direction Margarite headed in when she left the boat. I round a corner, following my nose, daydreaming about all of the local delicacies I’m going to devour, and boom. There she fucking is, crying on the cobble-stoned street, her mascara streaked all the way down to her chin. Her hair’s a mess. And she’s gesticulating wildly to the tallest, broadest, meanest looking motherfucker I have ever seen in my life. He’s gotta be six foot five. No neck to speak of. And there’s a jagged, ugly scar running from his left temple, across his mouth and down his chin, too—the kind of scar any Bond villain would be proud of. His face is bright fucking purple, his hands flexing into fists. No, not fists. His gargantuan arms end in meat hammers.
Gingerly, I back the fuck up and duck around the corner, a cold sweat breaking out across my shoulders despite the thick, humid Corsican night air. That was seriously fucking close. If I’d stood there for one more second, that insane looking bastard would have looked up and seen me—the unmistakably American looking dude with the shaved head and the tattoos—and that would have been it. I would have been fucking dead.
I hear Wren’s voice in my head, as I backtrack the way I came and head in the opposite direction, disappearing down a different, narrower side street. My friend was very clear about this kind of thing before he gave me the security code to board the boat:
“Scratch the hull? I’ll hurt you.
Spill soda all over the seats? I will hurt you.
If you have more than four people on that boat at any one time, I will find out. I will know, Pax, and I will hurt you.
If you do anything to cause trouble out there, I…will…hurt…you. We clear?”
Under any other circumstances, I wouldn’t be worried about a little tiff with a local thug, but Wren was as serious as a heart attack when he swore this to me. The guy’s never had a sense of humor. He won’t see the funny side if I wind up calling him to bail me out of a Corsican jail. He’ll leave me to rot behind bars just to prove his point. Not to mention, Wren’s been a total buzzkill ever since he got himself a girlfriend. He’s whipped. His girl says jump and Wren isn’t just asking how high. He’s asking how many times, and for how goddamn long. My friend’s balls are no longer hanging between his legs; they’re dangling from Elodie Stillwater’s keychain. It’s a truly sorry state of affairs.
I find somewhere that’s not too crowded and, more importantly, is far enough away from the marina that I’m not worried about Margarite and her meathead friend finding me any time soon. From all the televisions mounted on the walls of the establishment, the place is a sports bar, though tonight the screens are all on the same news channel. The bartender, a tall, dark-eyed dude with the beginnings of a beard, gives me a perfunctory nod as I plant myself at the bar and look over the menu.
Arguing with Margarite might have given me a stellar headache but fucking her repeatedly for three hours on the deck of the boat earlier has also given me a monster appetite. I could eat a horse right now and that’s the truth. The huge laminated menu offers typical tourist fare. Plenty of burgers. Fried. God, everything is fucking fried. My stomach twists as I scan down, down, down looking for some tapas or something fresh that might have been prepared in the past seventy-two hours, but all I see are options that will likely be pulled out of a freezer chest in the alley behind the restaurant.
“What can I get ya?” an American accent asks. I look up and the bartender’s standing there, an eyebrow curved into a question. I’m surprised he’s not Corsican. With his olive skin and his dark eyes, he sure looks like he could be.
“Huh.”
He lets out a deep, throaty laugh. “I know, right. Surprise! Angelino, born and bred.” A smile that looks borderline friendly begins to spread across his face. “Anything look appealing to you?”
The way he says this tells me a couple of things: he’s not mad about the fact that a customer’s walked in twenty minutes before he was supposed to go home. And he wouldn’t be opposed to taking me home with him when he goes.
I’m flattered. I’m also not interested. As far as I’m concerned, people can be attracted to whoever the fuck they want. Guys. Girls. Sexually ambiguous individuals. Doors. Lamps. Fucking spaceships. Cacti, if they’re brave or weird enough. I, on the other hand, am attracted to girls, and I choose not to venture outside of that category.
And the friendly smile? He’s just trying to be nice, but I’m far pickier over who I’m friends with than who I fuck, and I don’t waste energy on being nice to people I don’t know. “I’ll take the burger. Medium. Pickles. Tomato. No relish. Mayo on the side. And a Peroni.”
The bartender’s expression hardens at my tone. He’s reading me loud and clear, which means he’s good at his job. Probably rakes in the tips. A bartender who reads his customer in the first few seconds knows if that person needs a shoulder to cry on, someone to get the shots flowing and the party started, or someone to be respectful and give them their space. Or, in my particular case, someone to get them a beer and burger, and then fuck the hell off.
He looks disappointed. Sighing, he says, “Gotta card you, man. You got that sexier-than-sin, shaved head and ink thing going on, but you’re young. And I’m not gonna lose my job over a pretty face.”
Pretty?
Fuck him.
It wouldn’t grate so much if I hadn’t heard it a thousand times before. Would I be modeling for most of the summer in Europe if I didn’t fit a certain criteria? Hell no. Would girls trip over their own feet in the street if I didn’t look a certain way? Hard no. But this guy’s treading a fine line. If he veers too far from it, this pretty boy’s gonna knock his front fucking teeth out.
Balefully staring him down, I reach for my wallet and take my ID out. The bartender takes it, chuckling under his breath. “New Hampshire, huh?”
“A thrill a second.”
“Live free or die, right?”
I just grunt.
He hands me back my driver’s license. “What? No surprise? Most tourists are impressed when I reel off their state’s moto.”
“Your special talents are your own business, buddy.”
“All right. I hear you,” he says, shrugging a shoulder as he scoots down to grab my beer from one of the fridges below the spirits rail behind him. He cracks the top off and sets the bottle of Peroni down on a napkin in front of me.
“Hey, wasn’t there some kind of hullaballoo in New Hampshire recently? At some fancy, private school? A teenaged girl found dead there or something?”
I glower at him, grinding a fine layer of enamel from my teeth. How is it that everyone seems to know about that? I never liked Mara Bancroft when she was alive, and she’s been even more of a nuisance since she showed up dead. It’s as though the entire world and its dog has read about her or watched the footage of her desiccated corpse being loaded into the back of that coroner’s van back in Mountain Lakes. The news reports about the trial have tapered off a little back home, now that the guy who killed Mara has fully admitted his crime. But the less said about him, the better.