Strong Cold Dead (Caitlin Strong, #8)(22)

Rawls slid onto the stool next to the woman and fired up his lighter, feeling the bite of arthritis that had begun to plague his fingers and knuckles. “You know that’s illegal.”

“If that bothers you, why give me a light?”

“Who said it bothered me?”

The woman tilted the pack resting on the bar top his way.

“Don’t mind if I do,” Rawls said, tapping a cigarette out and firing up his lighter anew.

The bartender refilled his glass and poured the woman a fresh one. Cheap, warm, and poured from a gaffed bottle of Johnnie Walker. Rawls had a massive collection of single malts, maybe the biggest in the country, a fact nobody in this dive bar called the Relay cared two shits about.

And that suited Rawls just fine, as did sitting here, just a short distance from where he’d been born, without needing to impress anybody with his charm or his liquor selection. The woman seated on the stool next to him sipped her drink and then tapped her ashes onto the bar’s plank floor, for want of an ashtray.

“That all you got to say?” she asked, puffing again.

“I don’t recall saying anything.”

“You must’ve forgot to ask me my name. It’s Candy.”

Rawls took her extended hand, which felt cold and waxy, like shaking hands with a mannequin. Unlike a mannequin, though, the woman wore too much makeup and smelled of too much perfume, having maybe come here from someplace else without stopping for a shower in the middle.

Candy seemed a fitting match for the surroundings, which weren’t made up at all. The bar’s dome lights had lost their radiance to untouched dust caked up around the bulbs. The wooden walls were sun-faded in some places and stained by cigarette smoke in others. All entertainment was provided by an old-fashioned jukebox in the corner, which still played three songs for a quarter. “Cat’s in the Cradle,” by Harry Chapin, was into its final bars.

“That’s a stupid song,” Candy noted, blowing smoke out her nose.

“You ever listen to the words?”

“Not particularly.”

“Great meaning in them if you listen close enough. I should know.”

“Know what?” Candy asked him, resting her face in her palm.

“Cat’s in the Cradle” ended and “Sweet Home Alabama” started up.

“That’s more like it,” noted Candy. “So, what is it you know?”

“These songs. They were both released in 1974, the year I was born.”

Candy pressed what was left of her cigarette out on the bar top. “You from around here, sweetie?”

“Close enough. Matter of fact, you remind me of my mother, back when she was still young and pretty.”

“Oh, that’s nice.”

“Yes, it is.”

“So you in town visiting relatives, something like that?”

“Nothing like that,” Rawls told her. “Got an important verdict coming down tomorrow morning at the Wake County courthouse.”

“You a lawyer?” Candy asked him.

“Defendant.”

“What’d you do?” She smirked. “Kill somebody or something?”

“A whole bunch of people, according to the prosecution. Dozens, even hundreds. Candy,” Rawls said, pressing out his own cigarette in the charred outline of hers, “you are looking at what some would have you believe is a genuine mass murderer.”

“I guess I should be scared then.”

“You’re not?”

She shrugged a pair of shoulders that looked trim to the bone, her leatherlike pants struggling to shine in the Relay’s naked light as she laid a hand atop his. “Of a local boy? Not even one little bit.”

“Maybe you should be.”

Her hand left his and dropped to his leg, fingers easing up the inside of his thigh. “Why’s that? ’Cause of all those people you supposedly killed?”

“Nope. Of that, I’m an innocent. Never even met a single one of them.”

“Then what are you guilty of?”

Rawls gulped down the rest of his cheap scotch, and then Candy’s as well. “Why don’t I tell you about it somewhere else?”

*

Rawls took off his sock in the bathroom of the motel room and stuffed it with all four mini soap bars, twisting the top to catch all of them snugly. Then he walked back into the room, which was lit only by the letters of the flashing marquee shining through the flimsy shades and splaying off the walls.

Candy was naked from the waist up, seated atop the bed covers, starting to peel her pants off.

“Don’t bother,” Rawls told her, holding his weighted, balled-up sock low by his hip, where she wouldn’t see it. “I meant what I said about you reminding me of my mother.”

“I can be anybody you want me to be, sweetie,” she said, smiling up at him with bleached teeth.

“Then be my mother,” he said, starting forward. “Be my mother the night I was conceived in a room a lot like this.”

The smile slid from Candy’s face. Rawls’s frame now blocked the light of the flashing letters, so her features were lost to shadow.

“Hey, sweetie, why don’t we—”

Rawls hit her with the sock, not realizing his own intention until his arm was already in motion, feeling the miniature bars fracture on impact with Candy’s face. She was on the bed and then she was off it, staring up at him from the floor.