She Has A Broken Thing Where Her Heart Should Be

by J. D. Barker

  When finished, I went to my Jeep and slouched low in the seat. Earlier, I parked two cars over from Signorelli’s black BMW Z3 Roadster convertible.

  Stella and Signorelli emerged from the back door of the club twenty minutes later. She had changed into jeans and a long-sleeve red top. She still wore the gloves, though, and she held his hand.

  At his car, she pleaded for the keys, and he finally obliged. She climbed behind the wheel of the little two-seater with a laugh. He got in beside her, and the engine roared to life.

  Leo Signorelli leaned over then. In the silhouette of the parking lot lights, I watched as he leaned into her and she into him, her arms going up around his neck as she allowed him to kiss her. They remained that way for a long time, and I wanted to jump from the Jeep, yank open his door, pull him out, and beat him senseless. I wanted to hit him until the blood on my knuckles matched the bloody pulp of his ruined face. I wanted to hear him cry and whimper and plead until he was reduced to nothing more than a large child curled up on the ground in convulsive shivers.

  I did none of those things.

  I sat perfectly still and could only watch until she finally pulled away from him and settled back in behind the wheel.

  Stella gunned the engine of the BMW several times before turning on the lights, dropping into reverse, and spinning the tires as she shifted into first and raced from the parking lot. Gravel rained through the air, pinging off all the nearby cars.

  I started the Jeep and followed behind them, making the left onto I-118 with my headlights off, remaining a few car lengths behind. No streetlights lined the highway, the desert darkness here so complete it might as well have been black tar.

  On the empty highway, she must have floored the little sports car, because they shot far ahead of me. I nearly lost them, their taillights nothing more than tiny, red pinpricks. My Jeep coughed and sputtered but didn’t relent. Ten minutes later, when I-118 narrowed and became Wildes Road, Stella was forced to slow, and I reduced the gap. When pavement gave way to dirt, I risked getting too close and held back. A quarter mile later, she turned left off the dirt road onto what could only be described as a path—there were two ruts where past tires had rolled, but grass and weeds owned the space between them, and branches from the nearby trees slapped at the sides of my Jeep. Because the BMW had a lower profile, it avoided the branches, but I feared her car might get stuck in the dirt. More than once, I saw the undercarriage rub against the ground.

  I didn’t expect water.

  Not out here.

  There it was, though, this large body of water I would later learn was called Harmon Reservoir. Had it been daylight, I would have noticed the small feeder canals jutting out around the edges, but they were lost to the dark and encroaching night.

  Stella pulled up to the water’s edge, shut off the lights, and shut off the motor.

  I stopped at the mouth of the trail, hidden in the woods just beyond the clearing. I wasn’t sure when I picked up my switchblade again, but the knife was in my hand. I pressed the button that released the blade, then closed it. Pressed the button again, closed it, the motion somehow soothing as I watched Stella step out of the car.

  The little moonlight caught her, and even now her beauty was intoxicating, an irresistible pull. I so wanted to go to her, wrap my arms around her, kiss her as Leo had. Know the warmth of her breath on my neck, the touch of those slender fingers and arms around me.

  Stella rounded the car to the passenger door and opened it.

  Leo Signorelli slumped over and tumbled out, landing in a mound at her feet.

  She saw me then, my Jeep at the mouth of the trail, not hidden as well as I thought.

  As his body hit the ground, she looked not at this man, but at the trees where I parked, her eyes narrowing as she attempted to see past my windshield. She took several steps toward my Jeep before I got out.

  “Jack? Is that you?”

  I opened my mouth to speak, but no sound came out, I could only move toward her, my legs threatening to drop out from under me.

  “What are you doing here?”

  As I neared, as Leo Signorelli came into view, I saw his face. The skin around his mouth was black, charred. The side of his face, too. Half his hair was gone, his ear. My breath caught as I remembered Raymond Visconti, the mark that appeared on him with Stella’s touch in the basement.

  Stella’s kiss.

  “Why are you here?”

  The next few moments were over before I realized they happened at all.

  Stella took another step toward me.

  Leo Signorelli’s arm moved. At first, just a twitch. I wasn’t sure I saw it at all, it was so damn dark. But then there was the glint of metal, and he had a gun in his hand.

  The gun came up, pointing at Stella’s back.

  She started to turn, heard something.

  I dove past her.

  I dove between her and the barrel.

  My knee came down first, cracking against the point of a stone jutting out from the ground. My shoulder hit the car door, and the rest of me landed on Leo. My switchblade was out again. I had released the blade somewhere between my last two heartbeats, and I brought the knife down into the side of his neck. The tip punctured the skin with little effort. Then there was an audible pop as I punctured something deeper. One of his eyes was milky white, blind with cataracts, but the other saw me. The other went wide and fixed on me as warm blood sprayed my face and clothes, and soaked the earth.

  It was all over in a moment.

  Leo Signorelli stopped moving and would move no more.

  “Oh my God, you killed him!” Stella shouted, falling beside the body. She tore off one of her gloves and pressed her palm against his forehead, then his good cheek, then gripped his arm. Desperately moving from one portion of exposed flesh to another.

  “I…I had to. He would have shot you.”

  Her voice dropped to a desperate whisper. “But I…I hadn’t finished yet. I…wasn’t done.”

  “What does that mean?”

  Stella didn’t answer me. She only sat there, her entire body trembling. Each breath caught in her throat, and her eyes glistened with tears.

  She began to cry, and there was no consoling her. I reached for her shoulder and squeezed, the warmth of her seeping through the thin cloth of her shirt, and she shook me off. I tried to lean into her, and she pulled away, the word “don’t” barely audible through her sobs. A fleck of Leo’s blood was on her cheek, and when I reached to brush it away, she shot up and pulled away from me before I could.

  Stella stood and began to pace, her cries lessening.

  I stood too, and not knowing what else to do, I went to the water’s edge and washed Leo’s blood from my arms and hands and the knife.

  “You need to throw that into the water,” I heard her say behind me. So I did. The knife slipped through the surface about a hundred feet from shore and disappeared beneath.

  When I turned back to Stella, her arms were tight at her sides, her fists were clenched. “Oh God, Jack. Why are you here?” A desperation filled her voice. She was still shaking, her eyes red.

  I reached into my back pocket and took out her note. I had folded and unfolded the note so many times over the years, holes had worn through the paper at the creases. She recognized it, though.

  Stella closed her eyes and shook her head, the tears coming again. “That was years ago. I got out. I got away. I’m okay now.”

  “I don’t think you are,” I said softly.

  She pressed her hands to the sides of her temples, blood smeared beneath her touch. “He was a bad man.”

  “I know.”

  “I needed him.”

  I went to her again, I gripped her arms. “He would have killed you.”

  She pulled away and started pacing again from Leo’s body to the trees and back again, over and over. “You don’t understand.”

  “I do.”

  She shook her head again. “You don’t. You can’t. You
can’t possibly…”

  “I’ve known for years. I think I’ve always known.”

  “You don’t,” she said again, crossing back to the trees. “I. Needed. Him.” She drew in a breath between each of these words, then with her ungloved hand she reached for the tree beside her, a gray pine, at least sixty feet tall. The trunk of the tree blackened under her touch with what first looked like a burn, then became rot. Long pine needles began to fall from the tree, showering down on her. As they fell, their color turned from a grayish green to black before they hit the ground. When all the needles were gone, I heard a moan, then a loud creak, a harsh, high-pitched squeal, followed by a crack, and the tree was falling. It toppled to the right of her, and all the while, Stella remained perfectly still, her hand on the trunk. When it hit the ground, it broke into dozens of pieces—not the trunk of a newly cut tree, but that of one which had spent a lifetime rotting away before finally succumbing to gravity and crashing to the earth.

  When it was over, she didn’t look at me. She looked to the ground. “That thing you saw me do, in the basement,” she said. “I have to do it. If I don’t, I’ll die.”

  “They used you.” I said this in the calmest voice I could. I needed her to calm down. Already, her fingers were flexing, reaching for another tree. I knew, trees would not be enough.

  “They were feeding me. They kept me safe. I’m glad to be away, to be out, but…I need…”

  I went to her. I wrapped my arms around her, and although her arms remained at her sides, she pressed her face into my chest, carefully avoiding my flesh, the exposed skin of my neck.

  “We need to hide him. We need to get him into the water. Will you help me?” she said softly, her voice muffled.

  She pulled away from me and tugged her glove back on, her face pleading.

  I nodded silently.

  We dragged him around to the driver’s side and managed to get him in the seat behind the wheel. Leo Signorelli was my height, my build, but gravity somehow affects dead weight differently than alive, and moving him proved a struggle. Once inside with the seatbelt fastened, I started the car, turned the headlights back on, slipped the car into neutral, and released the brake. I took a last look around the interior to ensure Stella hadn’t left anything inside, then rolled down the driver-side window to steer.

  “What about this?” Stella held Leo’s gun between the tips of her gloved fingers. “Better to throw it out into the lake or put it in the car?”

  I thought about this for a second. “It’s no secret he was mixed up with some nasty people. Probably best to leave it in the car.”

  She opened the door and dropped it on the passenger seat, then together we pushed the small car into the water. The reservoir had a steep slope—the car went under fast. The engine died right away, the headlights blinked out after about thirty-seconds. Air bubbled up through the open window, then the BMW disappeared from view.

  We stood there for a long time, watching where the car had been, then she finally turned to me and her eyes found mine, the sadness in her look so deep, so overwhelming. When she opened her mouth to speak, two words slipped out. Two words worse than the blade of any knife through my heart. “I can’t…”

  She ran toward the trees. She pushed through the bushes and branches until the night swallowed her whole, and I was certain of only one thing—I couldn’t lose her again.

  Stella didn’t answer my calls.

  I screamed out her name as I chased after her. I didn’t care who else heard me. The same branches that had welcomed her sliced at my skin, scratched and bit me, but I didn’t care about that either. I ran as fast as I could, my arms and hands pushing them aside, oblivious to the pain.

  Twenty minutes passed before I found her.

  Stella was sitting on a large rock, her head buried in her gloved hands. When she heard me approach, her breath caught and she jumped up.

  I held a hand out to her. “Don’t run. Please, no more. Just… Just hear me out. Please.”

  “This isn’t you, Jack. It never was. You’re a better person than me. I can’t pull you into this with me. I can’t.”

  I took a step closer. “I love you, Stella. I’ve loved you from the very first moment I saw you all those years ago. The second I saw you sitting on that bench.”

  “We were only kids.”

  “You felt it too, I know you did. I saw the painting in your room. All the jabs, the mean comments, it was all bullshit. It was that old woman whispering in your ear. None of it mattered anyway, because the truth was in your eyes, it always was. Eight years old, eighteen, or eighty, it doesn’t matter. Every thought I have is of you. Every breath, every sight, every sound, it all reminds me of you. You’re a piece of me, and I’m dying without you. There’s a hole in me without you. I love you, Stella, with every ounce of my being. I know you love me, too. I know you do.”

  “I don’t deserve to love. I’m some kind of monster.” She said this so softly, tears welling at her eyes.

  “That’s the old woman again, Latrese Oliver. I know it is. You do too. You know what’s in your heart—what’s always been there.” I took another step toward her, only inches from her now. “Nobody else matters, there’s only us. Nothing else matters.”

  “They made me—”

  I took her hand then, felt her warmth through the glove. “Look at me, Stella.”

  She did.

  Her beautifully dark eyes found mine, and I ran my hand through her hair. She nearly pulled away as I did this, as my fingers brushed so close to her skin, but she didn’t, somehow knowing I understood—it was her flesh I had to fear. “They used you. You can do…this thing…and they used you. They took advantage of you. It’s over now. I’ll never let them hurt you, or use you, again.”

  “I don’t want to kill anymore. I can’t…I don’t…” And the sobs came again, soft, buried in my chest. “I want to stop.”

  “We’ll find another way,” I told her.

  “Jack,” she whispered, her sobs softening, “I can’t even touch you.”

  “We’ll find a way.”

  We stood there in each other’s arms for a long time, the two of us, no other words. Then I led her back to my Jeep, her gloved hand in mine.

  The Chestnut Motor Lodge was just off I-118 about a mile outside of Fallon between the town proper and Mike’s Gentlemen’s Club. It wasn’t much to look at, which is why I chose it. A squat two-story building that passed its prime about twenty years back, the landscaping was desert dirt and the blacktop parking lot had long ago lost the battle with the harsh Nevada sun. Two sodium lights blared down from opposite ends of the property, creating just enough light so it wouldn’t be missed from the highway. There was an enormous neon sign on the roof, but only the word lodge still burned, and judging by the loud buzz coming from the sign, it probably wouldn’t be lit for much longer.

  After leaving Harmon Reservoir, Stella directed me down a series of side roads, the last of which petered out at a dead end about a mile from any main road. When I stopped, she got out of the Jeep, went to the deep ditch beside the road, and retrieved a black duffle bag. She put it between her feet on the floorboards. “Everything I own,” she said softly. She planned to leave Fallon immediately after dispatching Leo Signorelli, so she left the bag here earlier in the day. From Fallon, she hoped to drive to Las Vegas, where she’d leave his BMW. From there, she wanted to cross the country to Charleston. She had never been to South Carolina. She told me all of this in a quiet, monotone voice, so far removed from the confident girl I remembered from back home. The girl from our bench, or her pool, or even the girl I watched dance only a few short hours ago. A curtain had been removed, a facade dropped. Although both were Stella, this was the real Stella. No longer putting up a rehearsed confidence but instead, sharing with me, albeit in careful fits and starts. I wondered if she had ever truly talked to anyone. She went from a captive in that house to running alone, a solitary existence I knew all too well.

  There were th
ree white cars in the parking lot of the Chestnut Motor Lodge. Stella saw them too, but she didn’t say anything. A man in a white dress shirt and chinos watched us pull up from the ice machine, then went back to the business of filling up his bucket. I had room 27 on the second floor, so I parked on the east side of the building, near the stairs but as far from the lights as I could.

  We waited for the man in the white shirt to return to his own room (first floor, three doors down from the west end of the building) before getting out of the Jeep. We both had Leo’s blood on us. We couldn’t risk being seen. Stella followed me up the stairs to my room and waited as I dug out the key and pushed open the door.

  “It’s not much,” I told her.

  Stella glanced around the room. A double bed, sagging in the middle with a floral quilt draped over the top in a rumpled heap. Green shag carpet on the floor with tan tile at the back of the room under the sink and continuing on into the small bathroom. There were three prints on the walls, all depicting horses at the Kentucky Derby. I left an empty bottle of Jack Daniel’s on the nightstand and wished I hadn’t. The cardboard remnants of a Coors Light twelve-pack sat next to a plastic trash can containing my empties. I drew the drapes and placed the Do Not Disturb sign on the door before closing it, locking the dead bolt, and putting the chain in place. If somebody wanted to get in, these things would only slow them down, but that was better than nothing.

  I pulled back the corner of the curtain and looked out over the parking lot, my eyes bouncing from one white car to the next.

  “It’s not them.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I just know. Not every white car belongs to them.”

  Somehow, that didn’t reassure me. “Did you have anything lined up in South Carolina? A place to stay or anything?”

  She shook her head.

  “I think we’re okay here for tonight, but we should probably head out first thing in the morning. We don’t want to be around when they find Leo. And there was only one white car yesterday. Probably nothing, like you said, but best to keep moving.”