"Not on your life."
"And the result was...?"
"She doesn't exist, literally. And trust me, if the people I use can't find her true identity, nobody can."
Vin went light with the Hellman's on Jim's sourdough, heavier on his own rye, but it was a messy, imprecise job. Ambidextrous he was not.
God, it was so not a surprise about Devina...
"Still waiting for Thursday-night deets over here," he said. "And do us both a favor and just talk. I don't have the energy to be polite right now."
"Fuck..." Jim rubbed his face. "Okay...she was at the Iron Mask. I was with...friends, I guess you could call them, although 'sonsabitches' would also cover it. Anyway, she followed me out into the parking lot when I left. It was cold. She seemed lost. She was...You sure about this?"
"Yup." Vin picked up a tomato, put it on a cutting board, and started slicing with the grace of a five-year-old. Hacking was more like it. "Keep going."
Jim shook his head. "She was upset about you. And she appeared to be really unsure of herself."
Vin frowned. "How was she upset?"
"How...you mean what for? She didn't go into specifics. I didn't ask. I was just...like, I wanted her to be okay with herself."
Now Vin was doing the head shaking. "Devina is always okay. That's the thing. No matter her mood, down deep she's tight. It was one of the things that attracted me to her...well, that and the fact that she's one of the most physically confident women I've ever met. But that's what you get when you're built perfectly."
"She said you wanted her to get breast implants."
Vin's eyes flicked up. "Are you kidding me? I've told her she was perfect since the night I met her, and I meant it. I never wanted her to change a thing."
Abruptly, Jim's brows drew in tight, a hard look coming onto his face.
"Looks like you were played, buddy." Vin cracked apart the lettuce and went over to the sink with a couple of leaves to wash. "Let me guess, she poured her heart out to you, you saw a vulnerable woman tangled up with a mofo, you kissed her...maybe you didn't even think you would take things that far."
"I couldn't believe where it ended up."
"You felt bad for her, but you were also attracted." Vin turned off the water and shook the romaine. "You wanted to give her something to make her feel good."
Jim's voice grew low. "That's exactly how it was."
"You want to know the way she got me?"
"Yeah. I do."
Back at the counter, Vin laid out slices of roast beef that were thin as paper. "I went to a gallery opening. She was there by herself, wearing a dress that was cut down to the small of her back. They had these lights in the ceiling that were directed at the paintings that were for sale, and when I walked in, I saw her standing in front of the Chagall I had come to buy, that light hitting the skin of her back. Extraordinary." He added on a layer of ragged tomato and a fluffy blanket of lettuce, then top-hatted the sandwiches. "Sliced or whole?"
"Whole."
He handed the sourdough over to Jim and cut his rye in half. "She sat in front of me at the auction and I smelled her perfume the entire time. I paid a f**kload for the Chagall, and I'll never forget the way she looked back at me over her shoulder as the gavel went down. Her smile was what I liked to see in a woman's face at that point." Vin took a bite and remembered vividly as he chewed. "I used to like it dirty, you know, p**n -style. And her eyes told me she had no problem with that kind of shit. She came home with me that night and I f**ked her right here on the floor. Then on the stairs. Finally on the bed. Twice. She let me do anything to her and she liked it." Jim blinked and stopped chewing, like he was trying to match up the Leave It to Beaver lines he'd been fed with the Vivid Video routine Vin had gotten.
"She was" - Vin leaned to the side and snapped free two paper towels - "exactly who I wanted her to be." He handed one to Jim. "She gave me free rein to do whatever I wanted business-wise, didn't care if I was gone for a week on no notice. She'd come with me when I wanted her to, stayed home when I didn't. She was like...a reflection of what I wanted."
Jim wiped his mouth. "Or in my case, what would get to me."
"Exactly."
They finished their sandwiches and Vin made two more, and while they ate the second round, they were mostly quiet, as if they were both recalling their time with Devina...and wondering how they'd been played so easily.
Vin eventually broke the silence. "So they say they have me on a surveillance tape from last night. Coming up in the elevator. Security guard tells me he saw my face, but that's impossible. I wasn't here. Whoever that was, it wasn't me."
"I believe you."
"You're going to be the only one."
The other man paused with the sourdough halfway to his mouth. "I'm not sure how to say this."
"Well, considering you just told me you f**ked my ex-girlfriend, hard to imagine anything's trickier than that."
"This is."
Vin paused in midbite himself, not liking the look on the guy's face. "What."
Jim took his own damned time about it, even finishing his frickin' lunch. Finally, he laughed short and tight. "I don't even know how to talk about this."
"Hello? The aforementioned ex-girlfriend sex thing? Come on, grow a set."
"Fine. Fuck it. Your ex doesn't cast a shadow."
Now it was Vin's turn to laugh. "Is that some kind of military lingo?"
"You want to know why I believe that wasn't you in the elevator last night? It's because you called it. She's a reflection, a mirage...she doesn't exist and she's totally dangerous, and yeah, I know this doesn't make sense, but it's reality."
Vin slowly lowered what was left of his roast beef. The guy was serious. Dead serious.
Was it possible, Vin wondered, that he could talk for once about the other side of his life? That part that involved things that couldn't be touched or seen, but that had shaped him sure as his parents' DNA had?
"You said...you'd come to save my soul," Vin murmured.
Jim braced his hands on the granite counter and leaned in. Under the short sleeves of his plain white T-shirt, his arm muscles thickened under the weight. "And I mean it. I have a happy new job of pulling people back from the brink."
"Of what?"
"Eternal damnation. As I said before...in your case, I used to think it was making sure you ended up with Devina, but now I'm damn clear that's the wrong outcome. Now...it means something else. I just don't know what."
Vin wiped his mouth and stared down at the man's big, capable hands. "Would you believe me...if I told you I had a dream about Devina - one where she was like something out of 28 Days, all rotted and f**ked-up? She maintained that I'd asked for her to come to me, that we'd entered into some kind of bargain that there was no getting out of. And the most ridiculous thing about it? It didn't feel like a dream."
"And I believe it wasn't. Before I had Friday's little lights-out session with the extension cord? I'd have said you were nuts. Now? You bet your ass I believe every single word of that."
Finally, at least something was working for instead of against him, Vin thought as he decided to pull a bare-all.
"When I was seventeen, I went to this..." God, even with how well Jim was taking things, he still felt like a complete ass. "I went to this palm reader, fortune-teller...this woman in town. Remember that 'spell' I had back at the diner?" When Jim nodded, he continued. "I used to get them a lot, and I needed...shit, I needed some way to get them to stop. They were ruining my life, making me feel like a freak."
"Because you saw the future?"
"Yeah, and that shit just ain't right, you know? I never volunteered for it and I would have done anything to get it to stop." Images from the past, of him collapsing at malls and at schools and in libraries and movies, flooded his brain. "It was torture. I never knew when the trances were coming and I didn't know what I said in them and the people I didn't scare the shit out of thought I was crazy." He laughed in a hard burst. "Might have been different if I'd been able to predict the lottery, but I've only ever had bad news to share. Anyway, so there I was, seventeen, clueless, at the end of my rope, with nothing but a pair of violent, alkie parents at home who couldn't offer me any help or advice...I didn't know what else to do, where to go, who to talk to. I mean, my mom and dad? Fuckin' A, I wouldn't have asked them what to make for lunch, much less anything about that stuff. So one day close to Halloween, which is my birthday, by the way, I see in the back of the Courier Journal a bunch of ads for these psychics, healers, whatever, and I decided to give one of them a try. I went downtown, knocked on some doors and finally one of them opened. The woman seemed to understand the situation. She told me what to do and I went home and I did it...and everything changed."