A tall, swarthy man with wavy, salt and pepper hair stepped out of a shiny, red Camaro and brushed ash off the leg of his moleskine trench. Bloody nuisance, he thought. touching his forehead where it had met the windshield, but his hand came away clean and he grunted in satisfaction.
The car was less fortunate. Its right quarter panel had been torn off and lay in the street a dozen yards behind him, reflecting fractured light from streetlamps and cheap neon signs, like the flickering of a thousand candles. In the loving care of a skilled mechanic, the engine might again function properly, but it didn't suit his purpose today and that rendered it worthless.
He withdrew a pack of Davidoff cigarillos from an inner pocket. The first was broken and he discarded it with a curse, but the second was whole and he casually lit the tip with a gold lighter and drew in a lungful of acrid smoke. The smell reminded him of dried keffene ferns, sprinkled over signal fires for their distinctive blue flames. It reminded him of home.
He ran weathered fingers through his styled hair and shook his head to give it the playful, tousled look he favored, then stroked his chin to smooth a neatly trimmed beard. First impressions were important. The thought made him chuckle. Tugging at the lapels of his long coat, he stepped briskly toward a second vehicle, inhaling deeply from the cigarillo.
The Honda had absorbed the worst of the collision, its passenger door now a concave mass of torn and wrinkled metal. A wet mat of dark hair dripped streams of red from a white web of shattered glass marking the moment a man's life had ceased. He knew from the smell it had been a man and that he was dead, but there was another scent in the air, like a field of dandelions after a spring rain. He circled the wreck to the driver's door, rested a forearm on the open window, and peered inside.
"Sorry about that." He smiled at the woman behind the wheel. She coughed, crying quietly, still in shock and pain and swimming in fear. Some of the blood she wore was hers. Her right arm hung limp, bent awkwardly at the elbow. She turned her pale face toward him, shaking uncontrollably.
"Help me," she wept, her voice barely audible.
"Yeah, see," He started to reply, then took another drag. "I have someplace to be, and this little fender-bender's gonna seriously fuck with my schedule. That your husband?" He indicated the gory mess next to her.
She didn't turn to look, but she nodded faintly while grief and blood ran down her chin. "Please," she mouthed but made no sound.
"I hope his suit was a rental." the man said through grinning teeth. "That's a nice dress by the way. Bit slutty if you're taken, though. Might give a guy the wrong idea. 'Course, that won't matter now." He chuckled at his own joke as the woman choked out another sob.
The man stood upright and inhaled once more, looking around. There were no spectators, which was lucky, but someone would drive by soon, then the police would come and they'd delay him more than he could afford. In the distance, through the cursed darkness, a bridge marked the edge of the city and another long stretch of lonely highway. He straightened his black and orange Stefano Ricci necktie before leaning back down, bracing his hands on his knees.
"I'm afraid I'll have to ask for your help, ma'am. I need a ride and neither of these pieces of shit are going anywhere soon." He reached his hand through the window and the woman found her voice. She screamed, but only once.
The pain didn't matter. Only he mattered. Her arm hung at her side setting off alarm bells in her brain, warning her that she was damaging it further, but they scarcely pierced the fog of her awareness. She only wished she could make it work so it could be useful for him.
Waves of pleasure still coursed through her body, causing her muscles to twitch involuntarily, and she worried she couldn't do what he'd asked. The heavy metal he'd pressed into her good hand shook, and her legs barely held her weight, but she had to keep going. He said so, and he was everything.
When the next car appeared, its driver hammered the brakes, surprised to see a naked woman standing in his headlights next to what looked like a recent accident. She stumbled toward him, skin streaked and glistening with fresh blood. He opened his door and stepped out.
"Oh god, are you okay?"
Her hand continued to shake when she lifted it, sighted down her arm, and pulled the trigger. The weapon kicked and roared and pain shrieked anew through her broken body. Her legs failed her at last and she fell to the pavement, but she wasn't finished. She levered herself back to her feet, shaking violently, and leaving the pistol in the street, she dragged the anonymous driver's corpse into a nearby alley. Her strength almost gave out, but she finally let him fall next to a dumpster where he would be found, just not quickly.
After a few moments of rest, she hurried back to the car as fast as her body would carry her and drove it to the bridge on the edge of town where he waited. When he called her a good girl, her heart soared.
The man used her up before driving off. It only took a few minutes, and with two mysterious wrecks, a gun, and two dead bodies left on a city street at four in the morning, the police wouldn't get around to tracking him down for several hours at least. When they found the guy in the alley they'd waste even more time trying to find a connection.
Once the woman lost consciousness, he extinguished the butt of his cigarillo on the skin of her back, then broke her neck and dropped what remained off the bridge into a shallow river, which would carry the body downstream, another mystery for the locals.
He congratulated himself as he took the car out of park, the back seat still reeking of sex and blood with a faint lingering smell of wet dandelions. He sometimes worried that this world had cost him his soul, but the woman had been useful and in exchange he gave her ecstasy beyond her comprehension before sparing her the agony of a lingering death.
After lighting another Davidoff he turned on the radio, starting down an empty road with the first blush of dawn rising slowly behind him.