TWENTY-ONE

She was actually asleep when the man in the bed next to her threw back the covers and padded across the bristly carpet to the bathroom. She’d stared at the ceiling for a long time after getting back under the covers, wondering whether she’d ever nod off. Thinking about what she’d done, the life she’d left behind.

The body they’d buried.

But at some point, it happened. Her anxiety surrendered, at last, to weariness. If only it had been a restful sleep.

Like her, Dwayne had slept naked. Dwayne Osterhaus was a thin, wiry man, just under six feet tall, with a small tattoo of the number “6” on his right buttock. It was, he believed, his lucky number. “Everyone picks seven, but I like six.” His lean, youthful body was betrayed by his thinning gray hair. Maybe prison did that to you, she thought, watching him with one eye open as he crossed the room. Turned you gray early.

He closed the bathroom door but she could still hear him taking a leak. Went on forever. She reached for the remote and clicked on the TV, thumbed the volume button to drown him out. It was one of the morning news shows out of New York. The two hosts, a man and a woman, were jabbering on about which couples were in the lead to get married on live TV.

The bathroom door opened, filling the room with the sound of a flushing toilet.

“Hey,” he said, glancing at the set. “I thought I heard voices out here. You’re awake.” She hit the mute button as he crawled back into the bed.

“Yeah, I’m awake.”

“How’d you sleep?”

“Lousy.”

“Me, any time I woke up, I kept listening for the sounds of other guys breathing, snoring, having a middle-of-the-night wank. As much as that can fuck up your sleep, the sounds all start blending together, you know, and you get used to them. I guess it’s a bit like when you live in New York or something, and you hear horns honking all night, after a while you don’t notice it. Then you go sleep someplace where all the noises are gone, at least the ones you know, you really notice the difference. That’s how it was when I woke up. I thought, hey, where the fuck am I? Lot of truck traffic on the highway all goddamn night, but that’s not what I’m used to. You still got your headache?”

“What?”

“In the night, you had a headache. You still got it?”

“No,” she said, and immediately regretted it.

Dwayne shifted closer to her under the covers, slipped his hand down between her legs.

“Hey,” she said. “You’ve been away so long you think you have to get to the main event right away. No one’s marching you back to a cell in five minutes.”

“Sorry,” he said. She’d mentioned this before, but in a different context. At last night’s dinner at the Big Boy just off the interstate, he’d had his meal half eaten before she had her napkin unfolded and on her lap. He was shoveling it in like the restaurant was in flames, and he wanted his fill before his hair caught fire. When she mentioned it to him, he explained he’d gotten into the habit of finishing his food before someone else tried to grab it away from him.

He moved his hand away, lightly played with one of her nipples. She turned to face him. Why not be a bit accommodating? she thought. Play the role. She reached down to take him in her hand. She wondered what he might have done in prison. Had he had sex with men? She knew he wasn’t that way, but half a decade was a long time to go without. You made do. Had he? Maybe she’d ask him sometime. Then again, maybe not. A guy might be touchy about that kind of thing, asking whether he’d engaged in a bit of knob gobbling while he was away.

Not that it mattered to her one way or the other. She was just curious. She liked to know things.

Dwayne figured thirty seconds of foreplay was more than enough to get her motor running. He threw himself on top of her. The whole thing was over in a minute, and for that she was grateful.

“Wow, that was great,” she said.

“You sure?” he asked. “I kind of, you know, could have gone longer, babe, but it just happened.”

“No, you were terrific,” she said.

“Listen,” he said, propping himself up on his elbow, “what should I call you now? I need to get used to something other than your regular name. Like if we’re in public. I guess I could call you Blondie.” He nodded toward the wig on her bedside table and grinned. “You look hot as shit when you’re wearing that, by the way.”

She thought a moment. “Kate,” she said.

“Kate?”

“Yeah,” she said. “From now on, I’m Kate.”

Dwayne flopped onto his back and stared at the cracked plaster overhead. “Well, Kate, sometimes I can’t believe it’s over. Seemed more like a hundred years, you know? Other guys, they just did their time, day after day after day, and it’s not like they didn’t want it to be over, but it wasn’t like they had anything waiting for them when they got out. Me, every day I just kept thinking about what my life would be like when I finally got the fuck out of there.”

“I guess not everybody had waiting for them what you had waiting,” said Kate.

Dwayne glanced over. “No shit,” he said. “Plus, I had you waiting, too.”

Kate had not been foolish enough to think he’d been talking about her in the first place.

“I know you probably still think I’m the stupidest son of a bitch on the planet,” he said.

She said nothing.

“I mean, we were all set, and then I get picked up for something totally unrelated. You don’t think I wasn’t kicking myself every single day, asking myself how I could be so fucking stupid? The thing is, that guy provoked me. I never should have gone down for that. It was justifiable. My lawyer sold me out, that’s what he did.”

She’d heard it before.

“A guy takes a swing at you with a pool cue, what, exactly, are you supposed to do? Stand there and let him hit you in the head with it?”

“If you’d paid him the money you owed him, it wouldn’t have come to that,” she said. “Then he wouldn’t have taken a swing at you, and you wouldn’t have picked up the eight ball and driven it right into his forehead.”

“Good thing the son of a bitch came out of his coma before sentencing,” Dwayne said. “They’d have sent me away forever.”

Neither of them said anything for a couple of minutes. Dwayne finally broke the silence with “I have to admit, babe, every once in a while, I’d get a bit worried.”

“About what?” she asked.

“That you wouldn’t wait. I mean, it’s a long time. Even when it’s something good at the end, it’s a long time.”

Kate reached over and lazily traced circles around his nipples. “I don’t want to make it sound like I had it as bad as you,” she said, “but I was kind of in a prison of my own while you were in yours.”

“You were smart, I gotta hand it to you, the way you did it, getting a new name, disappearing so fast.”

The thing was, she’d already had that in place, even though she hadn’t started using it right away. Just seemed like a good idea. Planning ahead and all that. Even she hadn’t expected to be needing it so soon.

Dwayne had already been going by another name around the time it all went down-not that he had all the documents Kate had-and was confident if that guy started asking around, things wouldn’t get traced back to him. When he got arrested for the assault, it was his real name that went in the paper, so no major worries there. But once things went south, even before Dwayne did the dumbass thing with the eight ball, she started playing it safe. With so much waiting for her at the end of the rainbow, she didn’t want to end up dead before she got there. She didn’t want to leave anything to chance. Not when she realized the courier had lived.

“So this guy,” Dwayne said.

“What guy?”

“Whaddya mean, what guy? The guy you married. That guy.”

“What about him?”

“What was he like?”