Bad Girl - By Blake Crouch Page 0,2
his throat and stared wild-eyed at her.
He staggered over to the sink and looked at himself in the bathroom mirror and all of that blood pouring out of his throat down the front of his white Oxford with a kind of disbelief, Lucy giggling as Mark tried to physically squeeze the opening in his neck back together but the blood kept coming and he gave up and started toward Lucy with a madness in his eyes but the floor was slicked with his blood and his feet shot out from under him.
He slammed flat on his back and his head cracked against the tile.
Lucy slid off the sink and stepped carefully across the floor, dodging the bigger pools of blood and watching a puddle widen around Mark’s head, his eyes already beginning to glaze and his hands at his side.
She stood there watching him bleed out and when he finally stopped twitching and blinking, she set the straight razor on the sink. Lucy weighed eighty-three pounds at her last physical, and she figured Mark had at least a hundred on her, but the shower wasn’t far. She only had to drag him over a two-inch lip and the blood on the floor provided decent lubrication for the job.
When she’d crammed him into the shower, she closed the glass door and looked at the bathroom.
Blood everywhere. Spots and spatters and streaks on the mirror, the walls, even the ceiling.
What a mess.
What a beautiful mess.
She got down on her knees and flattened herself across the tile and rolled through the pools of blood which were sticky and cool and gave off a dank metallic smell like a thunderstorm coming.
Lucy stood for a long time watching herself in the mirror, kept thinking it looked like she had the most lovely body art imaginable, how she wanted to walk naked through the lobby just like this and soak in the stares. What would Andrew Thomas think to see her like this? She suspected he might love her.
The blood was growing cold and beginning to congeal on her skin when she slid open the shower door and stepped inside. Bending down, she pushed Mark up against the wall and curled up to him, her spine against his chest. She draped his arm around her and closed her eyes and went to sleep.
Woke in the middle of the night, cold and shivering. Turned the shower on full blast and let the hot water pound the blood out of her hair and her face. She collected her clothes from under the towel atop the basin—not a drop of blood on them—and grabbed the robe off the back of the door and slipped out of the bathroom.
Mark’s wallet sat on top of the television, and she went through it and pocketed two key cards and two hundred in cash. She dressed and left the room. Rode down to the lobby which was mostly empty now save for a handful of die-hards who’d persevered beyond last call to sing drunken show tunes on a leather couch.
Outside, the autumn air was cool and scented with the spice of a city she did not know.
Wind blew between the skyscrapers.
The sidewalks were empty.
The streets were empty.
It felt strange to be out here alone, no sound but her footsteps on the pavement. Impossible that her father’s funeral had happened today. She wondered if there were people still at her house comforting her mother and brother, or if they had all gone home.
The glow of a payphone caught her attention on the other side of the street.
She ran across to it and dug some change out of her wallet, dialed the number.
Her mother answered on the fifth ring in a tired voice gone hoarse from crying.
“Hello?”
Lucy said nothing, just listening, her eyes filling up.
“Hello? Lucy, is that you?”
“Hey, Mom.”
“Oh my God, where are you? Are you okay?”
“I just wanted to tell you something.” She was beginning to tremble.
“What, honey? What?”
Lucy shouted into the phone, “He loved me, you stupid bitch! He loved me! I wish you had died! He’s the only thing I ever fucking loved!”
She slammed the phone down on the hook and screamed inside the booth until her throat burned.
She’d left her mother’s car in the only parking space she could find—a three-hour meter four blocks from the hotel that had long since expired. There were five orange envelopes under the windshield wipers, and the right front tire had been booted.
She unlocked the car and dragged the guitar case out of the