Lola: Chapter Eleven
The lights are out. With the still night air reality moves back into their lives minute by creeping minute. That reality enters Lola’s life before Walters because she is wide awake, listening to the sounds of night staring at the blackness of night. Walters is sound asleep next to her, snoring, apparently, he can process the events of the previous day more easily.
I can’t believe I just slept with my hitman.
Lola’s mind races. She looks over at her hitman. He is kinda cute, and he didn’t kill me when he first met me and had the chance, Lola thinks to herself. Those are a couple of positive traits. He’s certainly better than some of the guys I was with when things were looking bad. When that bitch in sunglasses led me down the downward spiral.
93 grand. Flirting with a guy for 93 grand. I knew it was too good to be true. But I needed that money. Desperate for that money. She used me. She betrayed me.
And that was the worst part to Lola. Roxanne had used her and betrayed her and she could do those things because Lola had grown to trust her. She really did trust her and look up to her and Roxanne did say a lot of things that made sense. Some of those things still made sense. Was it all just a lie? She had obviously been using her from the beginning, but Lola felt the emotion, the emotion from the big sister she never had. Okay, she had a big sister, a half-sister, but she didn’t like her or get along with her, so the big sister she never had and liked. Roxanne said she reminded her of herself at that age and it still feels like that was true. That’s why she left that card. Why on earth would a sociopath leave that card. “Goodbye Lola.” Does it make it any better if you’re murderer leaves you a goodbye note? Who was that damn card for anyway, for her? She was unconscious, she was never going to see it. It was for Roxanne. For her guilt. Is she capable of guilt?
Lola hates these damn racing thoughts at night. She looks over at Walters again. She wishes she could sleep like he’s sleeping. She shakes her head and tries not to think about Roxanne. She’s not successful, her mind circling the same drain of thoughts. The only things that would stop these thoughts are actions. Or a noise.
Wait, did I hear a noise?
It could have been a noise that mattered or maybe it was just a noise in the night that doesn’t matter. Those noises happen all the time. But this one didn’t sound like one of those. It’s like she’s stuck in a timeloop. The noise sounded like the noise Walters made when he first came to her house, but he's in bed next to her now. It’s so damn black. She can’t see anything. She can’t turn on a light because then the noise would find her more quickly. She can only lay there and listen. Listen in the dark for a noise that might be somebody who’s sneaking into her place to try to kill her. Sleeping next to a hitman should be more comforting in such situations, but Lola doesn’t find it comforting. She’s upset. No, she’s pissed off. That bitch in sunglasses betrayed me and now she sent someone here to kill me. She doesn’t even know where I live and she sent someone here to kill me. Probably wasn’t that hard to find out. The more Lola thinks about it the more pissed off she gets. She doesn’t need to wake up her hitman.
There is that noise again. That’s definitely a noise that matters, the noise of a person trying to get into her place, maybe he’s already in her place. Lola doesn’t have time. She reaches over to the gun on the nightstand. At least she thought to put it there before the sex.
The bedroom door is open, Walters never closed it after he entered the bedroom. It leads to a whole bunch of darkness. Lola peers into that whole bunch of darkness holding a .45, the same gun she used to shoot a man dead the day before. The noise has gone away but she thinks she sees movement, a black mass moving against black. She squints into the darkness, it doesn’t help. She feels like she’s dreaming, her conscience rising up to make her pay for, what, killing a man who was about to shoot someone else. Damn conscience, that doesn’t feel like a good thing to feel guilty over.
The black mass is still moving towards her, this ain’t no fucking dream.
She fires. A flash of light amidst the dark.
“Ah, shit!”
Walters snaps awake and flips on the lamp.
Marco is on the living room floor, shot in the arm. Walters reaches to his clothes for his gun. He raises it to fire again. Lola pushes the gun away. “No.”
Lola gets out of bed. She stands naked, her gun still aimed at Marco, holding it in two hands like she did when she shot the stooge the day before. She walks over to Marco and stands over him, barrel aimed at his forehead.
“Get up.”
Marco gets up from the floor.
Marco scoffs at the situation he finds himself in. A naked girl he was sneaking up and trying to kill now holding a gun on him. “That was a lucky shot.”
“The next one doesn’t have to be.” The barrel of her gun is now trained between his eyes.
“Turn around.”
Marco turns around. She frisks him and takes his phone out of his pocket.
“How did you find us?”
Marco doesn’t answer.
“I said, how did you find us?” She cocks the gun to try to intimidate him. He still doesn’t answer.
A shot whizzes by his head into the wall. Walters is still in bed but he has pretty good aim from there.
“I suggest you answer the lady.”
“I followed you here from the other place and then waited until you were asleep.”
“Is there anybody else with you?” Lola asks.
“No.”
Neither of them know whether to believe him. But if he wasn’t on his own, his backup would already be in the room with them. Maybe Marco took this on his own initiative, maybe he was afraid of going back to Roxanne with his screw up of letting Walters escape. Maybe he was trying to make amends before that screw up was found out.
“I think you’re lying. That means we have to kill you.” Lola says.
“I’m not. I’m not. I’m alone.” Marco turns around and puts his hands into the air. He shows real fear. Desperation. Enough to believe him. Even though he lives in Los Angeles he’s not good enough of an actor to fake that desperation.
“I’m alone. Honest.”
“That was stupid.”
Walters is out of bed, Lola’s a step ahead of him. She wants to keep Marco alive. She turns him around again.
“Start marching.”
Marco starts marching. They march to the front door and outside the front door to the front lawn. The first rays of the sun are sprinting over the horizon. Lola stands naked on her front step holding her gun on Roxanne’s second favorite bodyguard. Walters watches from the doorway.
“Tell Roxanne I want my money.”
Marco doesn’t know what to say to this.
“I said tell Roxanne, I want my money.” This time with menace.
“Get out of here!” She shouts at him. He doesn’t move, just staring back at her.
Lola shoots at Marco’s feet, watering the grass with a couple of bullets. Marco runs for the Hummer for the second time in two days. The Hummer drives off. A neighbor casually walking their dog sees a naked Lola on her front step.
“Good morning” Lola says to her neighbor.
“Good morning” the old lady says to the younger naked one, not noticing the gun she holds at her side.
“They know about this place. We need to get moving.” Walters says to Lola as soon as she is back inside.
Lola and Walters indeed get moving and dress and pack in minutes.
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Done packing, Lola, with a duffel bag that contains the last of her life around her shoulder, stops at the doorway one last time before closing it and locking. Walters is already outside.
“I know a place that’s safe.” Walters says. This is a man with more than one hideout at his disposal. “Do you have everything?”
“No.” Lola answers honestly. She’s pensive. Walters gives her an impatient look.
“Yeah. I have everything.” Lola lies.
“Then let’s go.” Walters walks the front lawn, gun drawn at his side. Lola doesn’t follow. Instead, she goes back inside her house one last time, for one last time. She reaches for a picture that’s hung on the wall near the entryway. It’s of her and her former husband looking happy. She slips it out of the frame, folds it and puts it in her pocket. She leaves her house for the last time.
Walters is already in the blue Honda, with the engine on. Lola throws her duffel bag in the backseat and slides into the passenger’s seat of her car. They drove off away from Lola’s former life.
Lola could turn to Walters and say there is no going back now, but the truth is there was no going back before either. Lola wasn’t sure when exactly she had lost any chance to return to her former life, maybe it was when she separated from her husband, or when she first met Roxanne, certainly by the time she had taken up Roxanne’s offer of seducing a stranger with a briefcase and most definitely certainly by the time she shot one of Roxanne’s henchmen in the back so she could the save the life of a hitman, that opportunity had been lost. Forever. There may have been a brief moment when she was laying down on her bed, when the kaleidoscope of her life returned most of her memories, that she hoped she could have it back again, but that was just a fool’s hope, a jester’s wish, there was never any chance of that. Some decisions are decisions. They stay with you for the rest of your life. The only thing you can do at that point is move forward. And Lola was now ready to move forward. To move forward and get her revenge on the woman who took it all away from her.