Quiet Death

[dori_bell]

The blonde girl sat on the top step outside the Guardian Angel cathedral. She wore mourning blue, dark and conservative: a pleated skirt, a clean blouse with a tailored jacket buttoned too high, a wide-brimmed hat. She had pinned a wilted mum to her lapel. She tilted her face to the church with its stained glass windows illuminated from within. A night service carried on. She heard singing, an organ. It was a place of grief strangely juxtaposed against a celebratory city. On the high stone steps, people often remarked about the general lack of respect shown by tourists as they motored past the sanctuary. Dori smoked a cigarette and watched traffic crawl by. Her knees were pressed together but there was a view up her skirt if you got the right angle. White panties worn with no hose. Someone honked. Her gaze darted and flickered like a bird’s, but she didn’t adjust her ankles.

Sometimes she came to these things. People asked her how she knew so-and-such and vague answers sufficed. Dori knew them from the neighborhood, from school, from volunteering at the hospital… she could pick up all sorts of life details from an obit. She looked nonthreatening and half the time, people tuned out her answers because they had only asked to be polite, to show some semblance of proper decorum.

It was warm tonight. She considered peeling off her jacket and blouse and sitting there in a thin undershirt, where she would be mistaken for a half-dressed drunk. Someone would offer to walk her home, and maybe they’d be decent and do so, or maybe they’d steer her into a gritty corner to take advantage. Once she had taken a life that way… let him feel her up, exclaim over her innocence, and then –

Pffft

– she crumpled her fist and his life sifted away like dirt through her fingers. Quietly.

Dori scraped her shoe against the concrete and listened to the music from a car's open windows.

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[v_harkryder]

She was almost a foot shorter than he was, and out of habit Virgil hunched his shoulders. At six-two, he couldn't help but loom, but given that they were outside of a church he didn't want to seem so imposing. He could smell her cigarette. It made him want one. He'd smoked in 'Nam because it was a way to kill time, but he'd mostly kicked the habit.

"Time for what?"

The old couple on the steps had finally made their way onto the sidewalk, and now they were talking in low voices about the service. They were probably waiting for their younger, and more sprightly, ride. Virgil smelled the faint aroma of flowers, and he looked over his shoulder. He couldn't place the scent.

"Was Dean a friend of yours?"

[dori_bell]

“We were friendly,” she said.

Dori’s head cocked a bit. In her face was a peculiar wisdom, a stillness most people of her age group did not have. A petal broke away from the mum on her lapel and caught on her blouse.

“And… there’s still time to offer your condolences. But I think you may need mine instead. You seem…” she assessed him in search of a suitable descriptor. “Crestfallen.” Dori dropped her cigarette and ground her shoe onto the ignited end. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t be so frank.”

[v_harkryder]

There was...something...in the way she said it, and Virgil's attention sharpened. She couldn't have been much more than twenty, so she was too young to have been alive when the war he'd served in started, but he'd seen that wise expression before. She grew up too fast. It was a random thought, one that disappeared before he'd even really realized he'd had it.

"He was my age, only a coupla years older. I guess I feel a little bit like the Lord drew straws about who to take and picked him instead of me."

He watched her cigarette be extinguished, the sparks dying out against the concrete step, and the smell of flowers wafted past again. Was that carnations? The petal on her blouse caught his eye. He resisted the urge to pluck it off.

"You got another smoke?"

[dori_bell]

“Yes.”

Dori reached into the pocket of her small blazer, which contained a pewter cigarette case. She flipped the lid and offered him his pick of the contents and a book of matches. “I don’t think it’s so random,” she said, sniffing and looking at the dark sky. The clouds were tinted a putrid orange from light pollution. Her hat began to slip so she took it off and let it drift to the top step. “I don’t know if it’s God’s plan, but it is someone’s.”

The mum was held in place by a thick pin with a pearl head. The sharp end of it looked lethal poking out of her clothes.

[v_harkryder]

"I dunno, God can be random. And kinda cruel."

He said it around the cigarette in his mouth, his dark face illuminated in the orange glow of the match as he inhaled. The tip of the white cylinder flared bright red, then turned a more muted color. The sensation of smoke in his lungs relaxed his shoulders.

"You over at the college?"

He'd taken some classes at UNLV when he'd decided to open the gym, focusing on business management and how to keep the books in order. Doing his own accounting was cheaper than hiring someone, and he'd never had troubles with the IRS over it.Virgil squinted through the thin stream of smoke at the old couple, who were shuffling towards a huge, ancient Caddy in the church lot. A man of about fifty had joined them. The nearest streetlight glinted off the car keys in his hand.

"Or do you work in the city?"

[dori_bell]

“Neither.” Dori closed the case and placed it within her pocket. “I live in Searchlight and I’ve never been to school. I wasn’t allowed.” There had been a few attempts by foster parents to place her among other children, the hope being that socialization would improve on her strange habits and mannerisms, but it had gone poorly each time --

’Dorothy killed my pet turtle!’

‘That little girl keeps a rat in her pocket…’

‘Mrs. Banks, there are spiders in her hair!’

‘The cupcakes she brought made everyone sick.’

-- and so she had been home-schooled and tutored until receiving a general education diploma.

“My legal guardians were protective,” she offered softly, a reasonable lie. “Not cult members, if that’s what you were thinking. Do you work in the city?”

[v_harkryder]

"Huh."

It was a non-committal sound, the noise polite strangers made at chit-chat. The night was warm. Virgil unbuttoned his suit jacket, exposing the white shirt beneath. His tie was navy blue.

"I've got my own business," he said with a touch of pride. On any other occasion, he'd have produced a card, but shilling for customers at a funeral seemed classless. The cigarette in his mouth burned on.

"I was a cop for a while, but law enforcement turned out to be not my thing, so I put in my papers and went civilian again."

[dori_bell]

“What sort of business?” With eyes narrowed in contemplation, she assessed what he’d told her. Dori might have been swayed by his outfit when she suggested, “Personal security?” Las Vegas was a moneyed city with plenty of customers in need of protection, either because of their wealth or business dealings, and she supposed that those skill sets went hand-in-hand. Her own talents had led Dori to consider the mortuary business, but James was adamant that she not; her brother thought she might kill people just to boost the bottom line, an offensive concept because money had never been an interest of hers. She survived on a steady diet of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and thrift store clothing.

The man’s gesture with the jacket made Dori think of her over-warm wardrobe again. She took off her jacket and set it alongside her hat. The pair stood in stodgy outfits of white and navy blue, like matching flight attendants.