Urge to Kill полностью

Slipping into darkness, the last thing he thought was that he didn’t want to dream again about the gigantic bird.

Mitzi Lewis knew she was dying.

Perspiration ran down her face and stung the corners of her eyes, but she knew she couldn’t rub them.

“He was so stupid,” she said, “that he thought the B on elevator buttons meant Backward.”

The audience’s reaction was at best muted. A couple of smiles here and there, but Mitzi knew they were due more to embarrassment than amusement. Embarrassment for her. She hated that strained and polite expression on people’s faces. Right now she hated people in general, her profession, the human race, herself.

“You guys have been great!” she yelled through a frozen smile, her eyes glittering from sweat that might be taken for tears. She could feel waves of pity rolling up from the audience. She loathed pity. “Thank you, thank you, thank you!” She blew everyone a big kiss and did her trademark prance off the stage.

Thank God that’s over!

“Don’t take it so hard,” Jackie Jameson told her as she finally made it offstage. It was obvious that the game little girl from Brooklyn was upset. “It wasn’t you.”

“It sure felt like me out there,” Mitzi said, her shoulders slumping.

“It was the crowd. They’ll laugh at those same jokes tomorrow night.”

“You got a lot of laughs during your set,” she said, wiping at her eyes. Real tears now, dammit!

“I pay them a lot of money,” Jackie said, straight-faced.

Mitzi almost, but not quite, smiled at that. One corner of her mouth twitched upward. Jackie pointed at it and grinned.

“Bastard!” Mitizi said. “You won’t even let me feel bad.”

“Against the rules, Mitz.”

She pushed past him and hurried into Say What?’s communal dressing room, where she rinsed off her face and put on some fresh makeup. She yanked up her white blond hair into longer and more defined spikes, then reassessed herself in the mirror.

Okay, she thought. You’d never know I was run over by a train.

She left the dressing room and went down the short corridor to the exit. Once she got through that door, she’d have to work her way—unnoticed, she hoped tonight—through the back of the crowd, around the bar, toward the club’s street door.

She wished she were invisible. All she wanted right now was for tonight to be over.

Some loudmouth at the bar was holding court with a drunken story, creating something of a diversion, as she made herself small and edged toward the glowing red EXIT sign.

When she was almost at the door, a voice said, “I thought you were funny.”

She turned and found herself looking into the dark, dark eyes of Mr. Handsome from last night. He had even more of an effect on her close up. Her throat tightened so she couldn’t speak.

Not like me, to be at a loss for words.

“You must have been the only one who thought so,” she finally said in a choked voice.

“The others were too busy thinking you were beautiful.”

“That’s…uh, very nice of you.”

“Seriously, you were great. It was just a tough crowd.”

“Like when I played Arlington,” she said.

He looked blank for a moment. Blank, but still handsome. Then he smiled. “Oh, the cemetery. Sorry, you’re a bit quicker than I am.”

“I kind of doubt that.” She was finding herself now. The guy was easy to talk to, and smooth enough that she knew she should be careful.

“Since you’re convinced you died up there,” he said, motioning with his head toward the stage, “why don’t we go someplace else where we can have a drink and hold a proper requiem?”

She pretended to think about it, all the time knowing she was going to leave with him.

Gotta put up a front, signal that you ’re resisting. Every mother’s advice, as if we were all born through immaculate conception.

He moved closer to her, as if she had emitted some kind of magnetic field.

Had she?

“I think you’ll find” he said in a gentle voice, “that you didn’t really die onstage. It was only a near-death experience.”

She smiled at him and took the arm he offered. “That was pretty good,” she said.

“Use it in your routine.”

“I would if it was funny enough,” she said honestly. “I have no scruples.”

“Ah, we’re a perfect match.”

He pushed open the street door, and the damp heat of the night dared them to leave.

Mitzi thought she heard someone call her name, but she didn’t look back.

47

The morning sunlight’s warmth on his bare right arm woke Quinn. Something about the way it angled through the window made the flesh it contacted feel as if it might burst into flame. It was almost enough to take his mind off his terrific headache.

He didn’t open his eyes, but right away he knew where he was, on the floor of the Seventy-ninth Street office. He wasn’t exactly sure how he’d gotten there.