We Are Both In The Dirt Ch. 15

If Montana Jones has learned anything, it is that nothing much ever changes. She looks as stunning as she did the day her met her. His eyes drink up the careless flip she gives her hair as she enters the lounge-a place with a doorman out front holding a list of the who's who of Vegas. He is sure that Mira's name is not on the list, but when a woman looks like she does her name needn't be known by anyone.

She is painfully gorgeous. Deep, dark skin, large round breasts on a thin, lithe body. Her face is an anomaly, at least that's what his mother had said when she met her. She smells like sunshine on a bad day, the earth on a good one. Her voice is a familiar melody, her core as hot as fire.

It is for this reason that he aches for her. He is not proud to admit that she remains the one woman he can never get enough of, even after all of the turmoil.

She will never know it, but every time he sets someone on her trail he cries and sleeps and mopes. He feels a regrettable wave of relief every time the Murder Twins dispatch one of his goons. While his brother's death remains a punch in the gut he hasn't quite recovered from, to this day he feels a dull pang of relief every time he considers Fowler's failure.

In his most desperate moments, he even ventures to wish that she might stop this madness and come back to him.

He knows that he was not always what he should have been to her. He isn't sure he knows how to love a woman, is certain that he does not know how to love a woman as complex as Mira. She is a charming, calculating cheat with a penchant for crime, after all. The type of woman who can enter into any situation and fit seamlessly within it.

It is in this way, Mint had told him when they were close, that she completely and totally disarms you, breaches your defenses, and rips you hollow in the end. Mint was drunk when he said it, and Montana was, too, which is why he hadn't questioned how Mint could know such a thing-and also why he hadn't taken Mint's words as the golden piece of guidance that they were.

He enters the lounge a bit after her, his name is on the list. He watches her make the rounds and chuckles to himself as she shuns the advances of no less than five men who approach her in fast succession. She stands up on the bar foot rail and orders a translucent drink, probably some sort of vodka cocktail.

He settles into a cushy day glow booth in VIP and contemplates his next move. He'd only planned to confront her tonight, the way he will do this has not yet occurred to him.

"Here alone tonight?" A waitress approaches to take his drink order.

"What's it look like?" Montana answers distractedly. He orders a gimlet, and when she brings it he downs it and slides a twenty into her hand. He watches Mira order her second drink, and then she finally gives her full attention to a tall man who'd entered the bar with a slew of bodyguards. He looks vaguely familiar to Montana, and is nearly seven feet tall. Most likely a professional athlete. He hovers over her, laughs at something she says and places his hand at the small of her back which prompts her to move away from him.

"Do me a favor," he says to the waitress. He holds out a $100 bill. "I have to run to the bathroom. Sit here and watch that girl," he says.

"The black girl?"

"Yes," Montana says with a roll of his eyes. "If she goes anywhere, leaves the bar or anything, please come and get me."

When he gets into the bathroom, he enters a stall and removes an alcohol wipe from his pocket. He wipes down the top of the toilet bowl and then opens the plastic baggy that contains a few lines of cocaine, a drug he hadn't touched or desired before he met Mira.

He thinks, as he often does, of the night Sela killed herself. Looking back on it as he has over the years, he is finally able to place the blame solely on his shoulders. It couldn't have been Mira's fault. She'd only held the truth up to his eyes, made him face himself. She had no way of knowing that Sela would go as far as to kill herself. No one could have known, but they should have.

He gets the lines just the way he likes them. Moves them around like Mira had always done, no reason behind it, a part of a ritual that he finds most people engage in in one way or another before imbibing their drug of choice. He bends over and snorts one home, contemplates the other two. He thinks he has an idea of what he will say. He touches the gun in his breast pocket, tries to suppress the image of Sela placing the gun to her temple, tears running down her face. He wonders if killing Mira will solve anything. He is sure that it will not, actually, but it matters little now as it has to be done.

"I didn't know you'd picked up the habit," a voice says from outside of the stall. He knows it instantly, the Irish brogue is unmistakable. He smiles to himself. She is evil. Pure evil.

"Mira always leaves some sort of mark on her men," Montana says. He snorts the remaining lines home and unsnaps his gun from the holster and screws the silencer onto the barrel. He doesn't plan on living through this. Even before Mikowski had beaten him half to death, drugged him and thrown him into his cluttered trunk, he'd harbored a niggling fear of the man. Yet and still, he will not go down without a fight.

"Fuck you Mikowski!" he says as he manages to get a shot off that hits Mikowski in the shoulder. Mikowski's knees give out for just a moment, and then he recovers with a smile on his face.

"Mira gives her regards," he says before his knife flashes in the fluorescent light and sends the searing burn through the flesh of Montana's neck. Then Mikowski is gone just like that, like he'd never been there at all.

Montana doesn't think of much as he dies on the cold marble floor. There isn't much to think about as he'd rehashed and relived all of the important moments of his life while gagged and bound in the trunk of Mikowski's car-and again after -by sheer will- he'd extricated himself from the trunk only to fall out in the middle of a residential neighborhood littered with cruising cops.

He'd narrowly avoided arrest and had relied on people's good will to get in contact with Mya. Poor Mya, if any of them were straight, it was her. He would not be surprised if she is dead now, too.

He'd lived a bad life, and is dying a bad death. The waitress enters the bathroom before he can no longer see, and the last thing he hears is her piercing scream.