like an act of friendship is abruptly, belatedly revealed as a Machiavellian maneuver. It wasn’t enough that Jason stole Megan from Lee; he also schemed to set up Lee to take the blame if things went wrong at Refine.
Lee remembers the warmth of Megan’s kiss. Megan Grassley. Now Megan Bookman. Almost fourteen years ago, they dated for two or three months. He’d never gotten more than a kiss from her. He was used to easy girls, and she insisted on commitment before sex. He’d decided to teach her a lesson by taking a break from her and going out with a hottie named Clarissa, so Megan would understand that servicing a man’s needs was the best way to gain his commitment. But after a month, Jason began dating Megan; eventually they married. At the time, Lee hadn’t blamed Jason for poaching. He was magnanimous. He wished the couple well and counseled himself that his friend would regret hooking up with such a frigid bitch.
Evidently, however, Megan had no problem giving it up for Jason. They flourished together, and year by year she looked hotter, much hotter than Clarissa. Okay. No problem. Lee hadn’t wanted her; she wasn’t fast enough for him. She was a Honda, and he needed a Ferrari girl. He had better options than her. The world is full of good-looking women, especially when you’re making seven figures a year and piling up stock options.
But now he is jobless, alone. Soon to be an outlaw on the run.
If he’d been more patient with Megan, she might have given herself to him. They might have married, and everything after that surely would have been far different from the current calamity.
He suddenly knows when he had been happiest, when his future had been most promising: when he was dating Megan.
Meeting his eyes in the mirror, he realizes that nothing is wrong with his face. The problem, if it is a problem, exists behind his face. Something is happening to his mind. There is a fever in his brain. If he purchased a thermometer, his temperature would prove to be normal; he has no doubt that it would be 98.6 precisely. However, there is a fever of excitement in his brain: agitation, fermentation, effervescence. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. He is exhilarated, electrified, galvanized.
He knows what he must do. He can’t travel back in time fourteen years and marry Megan, but he can go to her in California, where she lives now. She is a widow. Three years a widow. She will be easier now than she was when they were younger, ready for a new life, for the right life, the one that they would have had together if Jason Bookman hadn’t come along. Lee will take her with him to Costa Rica. The boy, too, if she really wants to bother with a mentally disabled mute. Hot Megan and steamy Costa Rica: This prospect stimulates Lee, inflames him. He can be happy again, with a fine future that holds great promise.
In the bathroom mirror, the reflection speaks to him, though it’s not his image any longer, but somehow that of Jason Bookman, the poaching Machiavellian betrayer of friends. “You’re infected,” Jason declares. “They’re swarming inside you. Something’s going wrong with your mind.”
“Liar,” Lee replies. “You just don’t want me to get in her pants.” He snatches up the pint of spiced rum and throws it.
The shattering bottle fractures the mirror, instantly beheading and dismembering Jason Bookman, daggers and dirks and stilettos and scimitars of glass spilling out of the frame, slashing down upon the sink and the faux marble encircling it, ringing like the silvery bells of some demonic fairy church. The aroma of spiced rum—orange peel, cinnamon, coconut, vanilla bean—spurts across Lee Shacket, splashes off the wall behind him.
In a state of high excitement, two hours before dawn, he returns to the bedroom and quickly dresses for the long drive.
7
For a few hours, Dorothy phased in and out of sleep, her hand always on Kipp, either still or caressing.
He remained awake, alert to her condition, asking only for another minute of her company, another and another.
Then she passed away.
Kipp smelled his mistress leaving first her flesh and then the room.
He cried the only way that his kind could cry, spilling not a tear, but issuing a series of thin, miserable whimpers.
In tears, for she had loved Dorothy, Rosa said, “Oh, sweet Kipp, please stop, please don’t, you sound so pathetic, you’re breaking my heart