Chapter Twenty-six
Mannish arrived before Blasé and convinced Lola that killing him was the right thing to do. The plan was set in motion at ten after eight that night when the distinctive sound of shattered glass hit the marble floor.
“He’s here,” Mannish whispered from the walk-in closet in a voice he didn’t recognize as his own. The short hairs on his body stood like defensive quills as he watched Lola’s silent reaction to the hit man’s presence in her home through the louvered door.
Lola stiffened, then for the fourth time within the hour she started dry-heaving. Her state of being made Mannish feel gloomy, too. Lola, on the other hand, wished that she could actually vomit so she didn’t have to endure the excruciating pain of her innards trying their damnedest to crawl up her throat. To Lola, “he’s here” meant game over. Even though she no longer wanted to die and had plotted with Mannish to preserve her life, giving up the ghost without a fight seemed much easier. Her lustrous skin went pale. She somersaulted into a fragile shell of depression and sunk onto the bed because her wobbly knees would no longer hold her upright.
Mannish poked his head out of the closet. “Lola,” he whispered. “Lola.”
Nothing but a blank stare.
He raised his voice an octave, “Lola.”
Still nothing.
He fired a pair of footy boots at her. “Dammit, Lola, I know you hear me.”
She visibly came back from wherever she’d gone to.
“Cut this shit. Dig deep and get it together or our families will read about our deaths on the front page of tomorrow’s paper.”
Blasé popped the windowpane of the kitchen door with the handle of a Glock 9. As if he was doing nothing wrong, he reached a gloved hand inside and unlocked the door. From the day Lola showed up on his porch, something innate told him to stay the hell away from her. Now, inside her home, the feeling was back and it was stronger than its origin. Without any hesitation he went to the Brinks security keypad to make sure she’d disarmed the alarm as planned. If not, the place would be swarming with cops in the matter of minutes. That was a headache he didn’t need, even though he committed the security code to memory the first time they planned her demise.
The fact that the alarm wasn’t armed didn’t do a damn thing to stop the eerie feeling from creeping up his spine. Her purse was also on the counter as discussed. It sat next to a platter of chocolate cake. He helped himself to a slice of cake. At the same time he found his $2,000 balance in the purse. He decided it best to chalk his uncanny feeling to nerves because everything so far was in order.
Blasé gleaned a lot of information about Lola from her delicate mannerisms, her ridiculously expensive fashion, and her determination to make the ultimate sacrifice for her children. The chick had stainless-steel balls. But being inside the privacy of her home welded all his perceptions of Lola Jones into a tangible whole. He polished off a second piece of cake as he stood in front of a fireplace looking at framed school portraits of the children on the mantel. They were a handsome lot. Innocent and full of life. Then there was the one family photo that made Blasé wonder if putting Lola out of her misery was the right thing to do, wonder what three children would do with a million dollars without the guidance of their mother, wonder if he should simply turn his ass around and leave with another piece of chocolate cake and call it a day. Lola and Xavier stood in the center of the photo. She had the widest, prettiest smile he’d ever seen. Happy. Her arms were draped around her two youngest while Jeremy kneeled in front of them. Walt Disney World’s amusement park filled the background. But his opinion didn’t matter anymore. He was hired to do a job.
Blasé screwed a silencer on to his Glock as he climbed the staircase to the second floor. He heard water running when he hit the landing. A shower. He cracked a smile and shook his head. Figures. Typical of a broad of Lola’s caliber to make sure she was clean and presentable for her appearance on the coroner’s autopsy table. He’d be willing to bet that she had picked out a bad-ass outfit for the occasion as well.
The running shower drew him down a narrow hallway adorned with crystal chandeliers and ceramic vases that lined the walls. There were several closed doors that preceded the master bedroom on the far end. Cautious, Blasé stepped lightly and inspected the premises as he moved toward the water. With the point of the Glock, he pushed open a door to a room painted pink with glow-in-the-dark stars stuck to its ceiling. Life-sized stuffed animals were neatly positioned on a canopy bed. An elaborate dollhouse that had to take months to build took up a whole corner of the room, and plenty of posters of some white kid named Justin Bieber covered the walls. Blasé’s screwed-up feelings were back with a vengeance. Lola was fucking up by leaving her children to fend for themselves and he knew it.
The next door he eased open had an unmade race car bed in the center of the room almost as big as his Chrysler 300 C. Clothes were strewn about in a way only knucklehead little boys understood; video game controllers dangled from the desk of a cluttered computer station. Blasé thought back to when he was an innocent little boy, whose alcoholic mother, every time she polished off a fifth of Wild Irish Rose, constantly beat him with an extension cord for not keeping clean the room that he shared with two siblings.
He shook the memory off then popped the door to an immaculate bathroom that was empty, but still he heard a shower running. Immediately he understood that it was the shower inside the bathroom of the master bedroom.
He stepped inside her bedroom and saw a pair of jeans, a turquoise thong, and a lace bra that trailed their way along the carpet and led to her radiant silhouette behind the shower glass. The very first time he digested her beauty as she sat across from him at his rinky-dink kitchen table, he imaged being inside of her, imagined her bitter-sweet taste, imagined her telling him over and over “that’s my spot,” imagined the tenderness of her kiss, imagined the moment their intimacy exploded and made a wet spot on his sheets. So many times he imagined Lola beneath him and softly pleading with him not to stop. So many times he had forced himself to hang up on Finesse before he broke down and had her sent to him for the evening. Instead, he settled for masturbation to still shots of Lola’s beauty that were captured by his surveillance system, because one thing Blasé knew was that mixing business with Lola’s kind of pleasure was a dangerous combination.
Now, standing beside her inviting bed with a hard dick and her wet, naked-ass body only two feet away, the only reason he didn’t turn all that he’d imagined into a memorable reality and have his way with her was because the autopsy report would show she’d been fucked prior to postmortem, and his DNA was on file with the St. Louis Police Department.
Blasé glanced down at her thong and realized that she occupied too much of his thoughts. He had to end it. He raised the gun and stepped past the bathroom’s threshold, firing four slugs into Lola’s silhouette.
Lola didn’t budge.
Four hollow points and she stayed standing. Im-fucking-possible, Blasé thought. As he slid the shower door along its tracks, the tempered glass crumbled. That was when he found a naked mannequin standing in the steamy water.
Instincts screamed, turn around. Before he could, someone tackled him from behind and knocked the wind out of him.