This is part 3 of the serialized story What Brings You Back Home. Go here to start at the beginning. Paid subscribers can listen to this story here.
The five-star hotel in downtown Mobile is a real five stars. Everything is sparkling clean, the carpet plush and new, the chandeliers bathing everything in a soft white glow. The handsome concierge is sporting a rainbow tie, and even though he can’t be a day over 30, he speaks in an old genteel way, as if he spent his youth among great aunts in the garden district.
A woman in a pastel blue sundress hands Rebecca a mimosa upon arrival, which is nice, then a second mimosa after she finishes the first, which is exceptional.
She holds her breath when the porter takes her bags, but figures it would arouse suspicion if she tries to take them herself. Anyway, she doesn’t want the staff to think she’s not a tipper. It’s always like this: she doesn’t mind tipping and tends to overdo it, but she hates having someone carry her bags. It makes her feel colonial. When you come from poor, poor is always in your mind, and a part of you imagines your own grandfather carrying some guy’s bags, calling a stranger “Sir.” Her grandparents were sharecroppers, traveling from farm to farm in Louisiana and Mississippi, picking whatever needed to be picked, mostly cotton, their pale Irish skin blistering until it peeled. Coming from what was once known, unsympathetically, as “poor white trash,” she’ll never not feel like an imposter at a five-star hotel, although she sure as hell prefers them to the Motel 6.
In her room, after the porter leaves, Rebecca takes off her shoes and jeans and lies on the cool white bed in her T-shirt, enjoying the chemical chill of the air conditioner. After a while she gets up and showers. The bathroom smells like gardenias, and not just because of the soap. There are actual gardenias, fresh-cut, arranged in a mason jar. A nice touch—the mason jar—as if someone at the hotel has been watching design shows and wants to bring a touch of casual Southern charm to the five-star experience. She has always loved the sickly-sweet scent of gardenias, though the opaque, velvet whiteness of the flowers strikes her as funereal.
It’s half past nine in the evening when she gets out of the shower. She slathers on the hotel lotion, dresses in jeans, sneakers, a loose silk blouse, blow-dries her hair, puts on more makeup than usual but less than the mimosa lady. Her husband always joked that “the natural look” took an hour to achieve and looked about as natural as a dog in flip-flops.
The Senator’s wife won’t be home tonight. His two mostly-grown sons are away. It’s so easy to map a person’s home these days, to map a person’s life. So many details are public. The wife, Deborah, is the CEO of a telecommunications firm, and she spends a lot of time giving speeches. This week she’s in Cleveland. It’s good for the senator’s brand—such a visible, attractive, articulate wife. Well-spoken but not harsh, powerful without committing the cardinal sin of losing her feminine charm. A powerhouse in her own right. Why isn’t Deborah the senator? At press events and rallies and town halls, someone invariably asks, “When’s your wife gonna run?” and the senator invariably smiles and says, “The day she runs is the day I hang up my hat. One politician in the family is enough.” Polite laughter and nods all around.
Rebecca checks the sons’ social media profiles one last time, just to be one hundred percent certain. The youngest son just posted drunk pictures from a frat party at Vanderbilt, and the eldest is leading an all-night coding session as his startup in Greensboro, North Carolina.
All clear.
She puts the suitcase on the bed and unzips it. She throws aside the piles of socks and T-shirts, opens the zipper compartment, retrieves the Sig Sauer that she picked up at a gun show near the airport—no ID required, no background check, just cash and a big-ass smile. The guy who sold her the gun was wearing a T-shirt with a picture of a robed Jesus holding a machine gun. So much for subtlety. She wonders what her mild-mannered, turn-the-other-cheek-preaching grandfather would think of this passionate marriage between machine guns and Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.
She slides twelve rounds into the magazine, loads the magazine into the Sig Sauer, flips the slide release, and places the weapon into the small of her back.
Time to go to work.
A note on this story: This is part three of a serialized story that originally appeared in Alabama Noir, edited by Don Noble and published by Akashic Books. For years, I have had the idea of further developing this story, perhaps into a novella. I keep setting it aside and returning to it. Hopefully, sharing the story here will help me to grow it past its current ending. I’ll be posting it one segment at a time here on Novella and will see where it takes me.
You can read the first two episodes here: Part 1 / Part 2
Paid subscribers can listen to this story here.
Thank you again for reading Novella with Michelle Richmond!
Can I ask a question? About that "placing the weapon in the small of her back" -- I was just watching the show "Kleo" on Netflix, also a series about a female assassin, and that character does the same thing.
Is this really a thing? Is there a holster back there? It didn't look like it on TV. What keeps a gun stuck there for more than 10 seconds from falling out?