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Unpleasantly noisy, but King steeled himself, and soldiered on.
CHAPTER6
Dawn was near, and the chick with the cat-eye specs was going for a walk with him. Or whatever that metaphorically entailed. Bruno’s brain churned out a dizzying series of pornographic possibilities.
Down, boy.A walk is just a walk is just a walk.
That stern directive buzzed in Bruno’s head like radio interference as he muscled his way through the rest of his shift.
This was way more than a walk. Everything about Lily was more than what it seemed. She had problems. He could smell them. He’d had plenty of trouble in his life. He’d started young, and he hadn’t stopped yet. But her trouble vibe wasn’t putting him off. Nope. On the contrary.
That was twisted. Sicko. Or at the very least, really, really stupid.
He was too wound up. He could feeling it coming over him, the perilous urge to babble. It was a self defence mechanism, he figured. Consider his family. Silent lumps on a log, every one of them. Tony had just grunted orders and growled obscenities. Zia Rosa had mostly smacked him with a spoon and screeched Calabrese dialect. And Kev hadn’t talked at all for the first year Bruno had known him, after Bruno came from Newark to live with Tony. He’d been too brain damaged.
Even now that Kev had gotten his life fixed, vanquished the evil zombie masters, found his biological family and was wallowing in true love, he was no chatterbox. Nah, that was Bruno’s God-given job.
Bruno took a peek at the outside thermometer. The coat crumpled on the booth seat next to Lily was too thin for this weather. He could get her into his car, he supposed. Turn on the chair heater. Let her inhale the scent of new leather upholstery. His car was made for seduction.
But he’d said a walk. A walk would keep him honest. His condo was across town, so he couldn’t walk her to his home, bullshit central. The babe lair. The whole place, carefully calculated to make girls wet. From the terrace with the stunning view of the Portland skyline and Mount Hood right down to the Jacuzzi, the high-tech appliances, the fridge full of gourmet goodies, and the stash of chocolate truffles, his fast rescue remedy for girls who displayed warning signs of hormonal imbalance. Oak floorboards, track lighting, Tuscan tiles in the huge kitchen, all of it was predicated on the ruthless law of the jungle; i.e., the female of the species will put out for the male who displays the largest and most up-to-date home entertainment system.
All bullshit. A cheap trick. Or come to think of it, hardly a cheap trick. A very, very expensive trick. But Lily would be wise to it.
He was uncomfortable in the place, now, especially since the Rudy dreams had come back. Must’ve been all that time spent sitting alone in the dark after Tony’s death and the zombie masters debacle, contemplating his own desperate compensatory bullshit. Seeing it for what it was, shivering and naked and small. He’d spent a whole lot of money on a whole bunch of silly, extravagant shit that he did not really need to make himself feel safer. To scoot him back from that cliff’s edge, where the smoke curled and the howls of the damned drifted up. But the edge was still right there. It didn’t work. There was no such thing as safe.
Mamma’s death had taught him that.
He brushed the thought away before it could dig its claws into his guts. Nah, he didn’t want to bring Lily to his condo. She wouldn’t be impressed by the espresso machine or the wet bar or the Tuscan tile. She’d look at him with those hard, blazing eyes, and see right through him. How hard he was trying. How futile it was.
He’d take her up to Tony’s apartment, if he took her at all. There was little or no discernible bullshit in the shabby hole in the wall where Tony had lived since he had opened the diner. Bruno had lived there, too, from age twelve until he left home.
Sid had finally gotten himself in gear, and Leona stumbled in late, bleary eyed and sullen. He could not wait for Zia Rosa to get back and deal with them. He was not cut out to be a restauranteur. It was like herding fucking cats. He came out of the back room, shrugging on his leather bomber jacket. Lily got up, sliding her arms into her own shapeless thin canvas coat. It was baggy, wide shoulders drooping. So she didn’t show that sexpot outfit off to just anyone. Good.
She belted her coat, caught him ogling. Her red lips curved. His face heated. He was so not smooth with her. His smoothness just fell off of him, thud. He became jerky, jagged. As dumb as a rock.
He held the door open for her, and offered her his arm as they stepped out. She accepted it. The tingling buzz of contact penetrated layers of cloth and leather. The cold was damp and penetrating. Mist blurred the street, tinted orange by the streetlights, fuzzing the headlights of the cars that passed. They walked silently, Bruno scrabbling for a conversation starter, and coming up blank.
She broke the silence first. “I must be keeping you from going home and getting some sleep.”
He snorted. Yeah, sure. He’d forgotten what sleep meant. “Actually, my day’s just beginning. Usually, I’d be heading home by now for a shower, and then it’s right off to work again.”
She shot him a curious glance. “Another job?”
“My real job,” he explained. “I own a company that produces kites and educational toys.” He read her puzzled expression. “Yeah, I know. So what’s with the graveyard shift at a diner, right? I’m just covering for my aunt, Zia Rosa. She runs the place, but she’s not here right now, and we’re short-staffed.” He sighed. “So I’m up. Good old Bruno.”
“This is the pastry making aunt?” she asked.
“Yeah, the very one. Taught me everything I know. She’s up in Seattle now. I don’t know for how much longer. But if it’s too much longer, I’m closing the place down, and to hell with it.”
Yeah, right. Brave words. Zia Rosa was reveling in her surrogate grandmotherhood. It helped fill the hole her brother Tony’s death had left in her life, which made it really hard to criticize her. Who was he, to mess with anybody else’s coping mechanisms?
“You must be so tired,” she said.
He wasn’t, actually. That point of contact where their arms touched was glowing, shooting impulses at random through his body. He’d be lucky if he didn’t start twitching and jittering.
“You’re not talkative anymore,” she observed. “What happened?”
He smothered the howl of laughter, so as not to sound psycho. “I’m nervous,” he admitted, in the spirit of total honesty, since she got off on that. “Too tense. It turns that faucet right off.”
