Page 39 of Duke
I glanced back. “That’s not a giant pool. That’s a bit of splatter. If I’d nailed him in the head, there’d be a lot more of a mess. That’s nothing to worry about. It’ll wash right off your hands.”
“And my skirt?”
I growled. “Once I sort this bullshit out and get you safely back to Malibu, I’ll personally take you shopping to buy you a new fucking skirt.” I eyed her. “Now please…get me the shotgun.”
Temple groaned in disgust, but climbed gingerly onto the seat and leaned over the back, reappearing with an AR-15 in her hands. “This?”
“No, honey, that’s an assault rifle.”
“So that’s not it?”
“Nope. Try again. Big. Black. Red shells on one side.”
“This is big and black.” At my sigh of irritation. “Hey, what do I know about guns?”
She leaned over the seatback once more, the wind whipping through the broken rear windows, ruffling her hair and skirt. I was watching the through the rearview mirror because, come on, the view was to die for. That tight round ass of hers was all framed and spread out, bulging against the fabric of the skirt, which was inching up bit by bit as the wind blew it around. She leaned further over the seat, reaching, tiptoes pressing against the floor, and then…oh hell yes—the wind tossed her skirt up completely as she stretched to reach the shotgun, showing me that bare, delectable, perfect ass for a brief but beautiful moment.
She squealed as the wind blew her skirt up, tugging it back down and twisting to sit on the bench. She shoved the shotgun through the opening. “Here’s the stupid gun.” She stuck her tongue out at me. “Enjoy your free peep show?”
I took the shotgun from her and stuffed the barrel down near my left foot, leaning the stock against the side of my seat. “Hell yeah, I did.” I grinned at her as she climbed back over the console into the passenger seat. “I told you already, Fancy, you’ve got the most gorgeous ass I’ve ever seen. I could stare at it all damn day and never get tired of looking at it.”
She rolled her eyes at me, but couldn’t quite hide her flattered, pleased smile. Then she glanced at her hands, and lost the grin. “So gross, for real.” She wiped her hands on the front of her skirt, which helped only marginally.
“Your hands are just gonna be sticky for a bit, I’m afraid to say,” I told her. “Blood can be hard to get off your hands.”
She didn’t answer right away, staring at the tacky redness on her palms. “Do you mean that literally, or metaphorically?” She asked, after a while.
I sighed. “Wow, going right for the hard shit, huh?” On a whim, I dug into the console storage compartment between our seats, and found a bottle of hand sanitizer. “Here, squirt that on, rub your hands together, and then wipe them on your skirt, should get some of the blood off.”
I watched her squirt a ridiculous amount of sanitizer onto her hands, and then returned my attention to the road.
“Well,” I said, “I guess I mean it both ways. Or maybe I mean it literally because I know it to be true metaphorically, as well.” I thought for a moment. “Literally speaking, blood is an incredibly damn hard substance to deal with. It stains, it hardens, goes all tacky. Get it in your hair? Forget about it. You’ll be shampooing that shit for twenty minutes. Metaphorically speaking, the first few kills tend to stick with you. You never forget those. Then, after awhile, you just…learn to deal with it. You don’t think about it, because if you do you won’t be able to do your job. But sometimes when my insomnia gets bad, yeah, the metaphorical blood on my hands can be pretty fucking hard to wash off. ”
She was obsessively squirting sanitizer onto her hands and rubbing it off, even though her hands were mostly clean by that point. Eventually, she tossed the now half-empty bottle into the little cubby beneath the infotainment center.
Her eyes went to mine, blue streaked with green and brown, her expression unreadable. “Do you…do you enjoy it? Killing people?”
I narrowed my eyes at her sidelong. “That’s a shitty question to ask, Temple.”
“It’s an honest question. I want to know what kind of person I’m with.” She stared unblinking at me, until I looked away first.
I spent a good long time thinking as I drove us out of Denver, keeping an eye on the road behind us. “Do I enjoy it? No. I’m not a serial killer or a sociopath. I don’t do this job because I get some sick pleasure watching motherfuckers bleed out, okay? I do it because I’m damn good at it. I’d never shoot an innocent person on purpose, and I do my fucking damnedest to keep collateral damage as minimal as I can.” I fiddled with the A/C settings just to have something to do with my hand. “I’m good at what I do. I was a good soldier, a better special forces operative, and I’m one of the best goddamn security contractors in the game. I’ve got zero problem dropping some asshole who’s shooting at me, and even less problem taking out someone who’s done violence to someone innocent. But I don’t do it because I enjoy killing. Does that answer your question?”
“I suppose.” She picked at her fingers, scraping underneath one fingernail with her thumbnail. “Have you ever killed an innocent person?”
I eyed her. “Well, good goddamn, woman. Any other deep dark secrets you plan on ripping out of me?” I gripped the steering wheel with my right hand and used my left thumb to flip the safety button on the top of the shotgun from safe to fire and back again. “Yes. That’s the short answer.”
She waited a moment before following up with the next question, which I was expecting, but was hoping she might not ask. “And the long version?”
“Why do you want to hear this shit?”
“I told you, I’m trying to figure you out.”
“You do realize this is the kind of thing you’re not really supposed to just come right out and ask a guy?”
Temple just shrugged. “I’ve never played by anyone’s rules but my own.”
“Fair enough. But if I answer your questions, you have to answer mine.” She nodded, and I took a minute to put together my thoughts. “You have to understand the scenario. We were in Africa, the Congo. Part of that nasty business that’s been going on there for so fucking long. Can’t really say much, except that my unit was part of a larger offensive. It was urban warfare, in an occupied city. Innocent people everywhere, and damn near impossible to tell who was the enemy until they shot at you. Absolute fucking hell is what it was. Our orders were to push the bad guys out of that city entirely, which was like playing whack-a-mole at best, suicide at worst. Well, I was around the corner of a building with the other guys from my unit. We’d been chasing this group for several blocks in this back and forth sort of battle. They had us pinned down, and the L-T had tapped me to roll out and try to draw their fire while laying down some suppression.” I focused on just retelling the story without thinking about it too much. “So, I rolled out. Put down suppressing fire, drew theirs. It was all well and good until I saw this body peek out from behind the side of a building. I shot half a dozen rounds at him and it turned out to be this…it was a woman. Hiding, just trying to figure out how to get to safety. Hers is blood on my hands that’ll never wash off.”