Don't Look Now by Richard Montanari Page A

one perfect, fluid motion.
    ‘I saw you, you know,’ the woman said. ‘I saw what you did with him.’ She extended her legs and gathered Ellie closer to her, locking her ankles around Ellie’s chest. ‘Just tell me that you realize you made a mistake, and I won’t hurt you.’ The woman eased the pressure on the razor. ‘Tell me you’re sorry.’
    ‘I—’ Ellie began, fully prepared to say anything that this woman wanted. But the woman interrupted.
    ‘Because, you know what we do to scheming little cunts?’ She brought the razor to rest at a ninety-degree angle to Ellie’s throat and reached into her overnight bag. She pulled out a digital camera, turned the screen to face them, began flipping through the pictures. She stopped at a medium shot of the man Ellie had gone to the Solon Motel with. He was standing in the very same motel room, near the foot of the bed. Even considering the horror of her situation, Ellie was still taken with the man’s physical beauty: the marble hardness of his chest and abdomen, the aristocratic line of his jaw.
    He was naked and fully erect.
    ‘Look familiar?’ the woman asked. Playful now.
Girlfriends
. She flipped to another picture of the man, this one a side view. ‘Rather impressive, isn’t it?’
    The woman then flipped through three more photographs. The first picture was a close-up of a woman with a thin red scarf draped loosely around her shoulders. The woman was nude from the waist up and was lying across a bed, staring vacantly at the ceiling. ‘How about these?’ the woman asked. ‘You recognize these gals, don’t you? Sure you do. You read the papers.’
    The picture of Maryann Milius that Ellie had seen in the
Plain Dealer
had been cropped from what might have been an Olan Mills type portrait. Ellie had thought the young woman pretty at the time.
    But the image of Maryann Milius in front of her now – the likeness that soon told Ellie it was not a scarf at all but rather a broad swirl of blood from the gaping wound in her neck – was hideous beyond belief. She opened her mouth to scream, but the sound that came forth instead was small and thin.
    A doll’s scream.
    Earline Pender wrapped one leg around the base of the toilet for leverage and bore down with all her strength.
    At the moment the steel slid silently across Ellie’s throat, exposing her trachea to the cornflower-blue bathroom in room 118 at the Radisson East, Eleanor Burchfield looked at her shoes and thought about the day she had bought them.
    Funny, Ellie thought, to think such a thing at such a moment as this.
    Soon she thought nothing at all.

11
    SAILA GOT BACK into the car and I knew immediately that she had been bad. Her lips were slicked with saliva, her breast heaved, her eyes were rimmed with red and full of fire. Before I could shift into reverse and pull out of the space, she placed her hand on my forearm, and from the strength of her grip, I could tell she was wired. She pulled the release on the side of her seat and slid back, falling into a reclining position, unbuttoning her coat, spreading her legs. Her thighs were perfect in the light that drifted in from the parking-lot. I shut off the engine as Saila ran her left index finger slowly down her thigh, back up.
    She told me the details of what she had done.
    When she was finished, I moved closer. Saila placed her right foot on the dashboard and, with the draining hull of a woman she had cut with a razor lying no more than a hundred feet from where we sat, she took my head in her hands and directed it down between her legs.
    She stroked my hair as I did her bidding.
    Hers. Again.
    Within moments she began to hum a tune, one to which she had been a slave all evening.
    An old song by Peaches and Herb.

12
    PARIS ASKED THE first person he saw. Black woman, well dressed, early fifties.
    ‘Excuse me,’ he said. ‘I was wondering if you could help me. My cousin Eleanor left the bar about a half-hour ago, and I thought perhaps you