They're Gone

by E. A. Barres

“Okay, that was an accident. Will you just listen to me?”

  She pointed. “Your gun.”

  “Yeah, I just need you to stop fighting … I don’t know what else to do. Okay?” He slid the gun into his holster, lifted his hands. “I’m not going to hurt you. I just want to talk, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “I’m sorry about this,” Levi said quietly. “It’s not how I wanted things to go down.”

  “Okay.”

  “I really am sorry.”

  Despite her fear, Deb was reminded of Grant, his habit of apologizing over and over again after an argument. Days would pass, and he’d send her flowers, jewelry, mention the fight before they fell asleep at night. It had been both annoying and endearing.

  Lately she’d wondered if his contrition had been in service to some greater guilt. As if he’d felt the need to always beg forgiveness from her.

  “Why am I here?” she asked.

  “Because I wanted to tell you all that. And I want to show you something, and I couldn’t do it anywhere else.”

  Just stay alive, Deb told herself, doing her best to keep her face calm. Do what he says and stay alive.

  She nodded, playing along.

  Relief started to break through his pained expression.

  He loves me.

  He didn’t bring me here to hurt me.

  Deb took a breath, tried to keep things light, normal.

  “So, I’m pretty complex,” Levi told her seriously.

  Deb had no idea where he was going with this. But she kept quiet.

  That pained expression returned. Levi walked over to the couch, slumped down on it. “This is all so messed up.”

  Deb glanced at the front door. It would take her four steps, she calculated, to reach it. Four steps.

  “Why?” she asked.

  “I never should have fallen in love with you. And I knew it was happening. Temple told me to watch you, keep an eye on you after Grant died. And I felt it happening.”

  “Temple? What temple? Are they the ones who killed Grant?”

  Levi ignored her. “I’d see you at the store or sitting in your backyard, or sometimes through the window while you were eating or getting ready for bed, and I could feel it.”

  “You watched me that much?”

  Levi misinterpreted her statement, took it as a compliment. He looked up at her with a slight smile. “Once I saw you, I did a lot more than he asked me to.”

  “Who asked you?”

  Confusion replaced the smile. “Temple.”

  “What Temple?”

  “Scott Temple.”

  The name meant nothing to her. She tried another approach. “So you watched me?” Deb crossed her arms over her chest, casually took a small step back.

  Three steps to the door.

  Levi nodded.

  “Why?”

  Two steps.

  “It’s what we do. Scope out someone once they sleep with one of our prostitutes. See if they’re worth anything. I watched Grant for a few weeks after he was with Maria, looked into him, found out he had money … especially after he helped out Maria. We started blackmailing him, and everything was going the way it always does until he snapped. Threatened to go to the cops.”

  “So the people you work with killed him?”

  Levi nodded. “But the thing was, I wasn’t just watching Grant. Not after I saw you. Once that happened, I …” Levi’s sentence trailed away.

  One step.

  “And then Temple told me to keep an eye on you, see if Grant had told you anything.” Pain on Levi’s face. “Look, I never wanted to hurt you. You know that, right? I could have caught you and tortured you for the information. I could have hurt Kim. I could have done anything else, if I wanted to.”

  Deb leaned toward the door, hoping it wasn’t enough for Levi to notice.

  “Temple made up the story about some insane hooker. It wasn’t some woman killing those men, those men we weren’t sure about, those men who knew too much. It was us.”

  “Us?”

  Deb was so close she could reach out and touch the handle.

  Levi jumped up from the couch, walked over to Deb, took her wrists in his hands.

  “Can I show you something?”

  He led her away from the door, down the hallway. She saw a fish tank in a small alcove, small brightly colored fish darting around. They walked into a small bedroom, and he turned on the light.

  “You see?” Levi asked, as if in awe of his own work.

  “What … what is this?”

  The room only had a television in the corner of the room, a metal folding chair in front of it. Compared to the rest of the house, it was empty. No personality, no design. No emotion.

  And something about that terrified her.

  Deb stared at the television. It was sitting on a television stand, showing black and white footage. She couldn’t tell what it was showing, a room on some sort of security feed. She looked closer.

  A bedroom, shown from a camera high in the corner.

  “What is this?” she asked again.

  On the screen, a woman walked into the room. She opened a drawer in a dresser, pulled something out and headed to the bathroom.

  Something occurred to Deb, a notion reluctantly tugging at her.

  How did I know it was the bathroom?

  “That’s you,” Levi said.

  “What?”

  “That’s your bedroom last night,” Levi said at the same moment she realized it. Deb should have known it before, but the angle of the camera confused her.

  “How did you get this?”

  “When you were out one day. I came in and set up the cameras.”

  “Cameras?” she heard herself ask.

  “I wanted to watch you. I wanted to see what you did when I wasn’t there. You’re so beautiful. I could watch you all day. Some days I did. I’d even talk to you when you were cooking or changing or crying.”

  “Where … where did you put the cameras?”

  “Everywhere.”

  And Deb realized how trapped she really was.

  CHAPTER

  31

  “LEVI PRICE IS the guy we report to,” Smith told Cessy and Chris. “Lives in Virginia, in Arlington. Used to be FBI or something. We go to him when we can’t get to Temple.”

  “You’re Jewish?” Chris asked.

  “What?” Smith asked back.

  Cessy sensed the conversation veering. “You holding out on anything else?”

  Smith looked down miserably at the ropes binding him to the chair. “That’s everything.”

  “Why don’t I believe you?” Chris asked. He tipped the chair back again, peered down into Smith’s face, now so far back his head was parallel to the ground.

  Smith’s arms and legs were flailing, and he was trying to push his body forward, trying to right himself.

  “Be careful, Chris,” Cessy warned.

  “Cessy, I got this.”

  “But he’s really far back.”

  Chris turned toward his sister. “I know what I’m doing.”

  One of Smith’s legs kicked too high. And kicked Chris’s arm off the chair.

  His fall was a short scream, not more than seconds.

  The landing was a mix of shattering sounds, chair and bones breaking all at once.

  “Fuck!” Cessy exclaimed.

  Chris was staring down to the alley, twelve stories below. “Oh, shit.”

  “Is he dead?” Cessy didn’t want to look over the edge. Her body felt cold, like a sheet of ice was being pulled over her.

  Chris nodded, still staring down. “He kicked my arm. It’s not my fault.”

  “What?”

  “I’m innocent.”

  Cessy squatted down, covered her face.

  Tried to calm herself, tried to corral her rushing thoughts.

  “We need to go,” she said. “We need to go right now.”

  “Where?”

  “I don’t know where.”
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  They hurried into Chris’s car. Cessy listened for police sirens, looked for the flash of lights. Nothing. She knew they were lucky. Rockville was a ghost town at night.

  They drove down the parking garage’s ramps, looking for cameras. Didn’t see any.

  “We need to find that guy,” Chris said decisively. “The one he told us about. Levi Price. And we need to find him now. Find him before they realize what happened, before they find us.”

  “Why?” Cessy’s stomach was churning, fear and nausea rolling over each other.

  “Because we need to get to them before they get to us.” He paused as they pulled into the street, then drove away from the garage and the crumpled body in the alley.

  It was hard for Cessy to concentrate. Hard for her to focus on one thing. She wasn’t even sure what had happened.

  Had Chris let him go on purpose?

  And did she care? Was she truly upset that a man had died … or did she think she needed to be upset?

  After all, Chris was right. They needed to control the situation.

  She pulled out her phone, punched in the name Levi Price and Arlington.

  An address appeared, less than an hour away.

  Cessy looked out the window as they drove, at the trees and yellow headlights racing past on the other side of the highway. Everything felt like a blur and had since Hector died. No, before that. Ever since Hector first hit her. That was when her life changed again.

  Moving to Baltimore gave her the chance to start over, and Cessy had, and she’d been happy. And then Hector had hit her, started hitting her, and she was lost. Thinking about running, about fighting. No matter what happened, about changing.

  Just like now.

  They were crossing Roosevelt Bridge from Maryland to Virginia when Chris broke the silence. DC’s lights glowed to their right, the dark Potomac River gleamed to their left. According to Cessy’s phone, they were about ten minutes from Levi Price’s house.

  “It really wasn’t my fault,” Chris said, his words echoing what she’d been privately telling herself:

  I didn’t do anything wrong.

  “No?” she asked.

  “He kicked my hand,” Chris said stubbornly. “I wasn’t going to let him go. I had more I wanted to ask.”

  “Yeah? Then what were you going to do with him? Call him an Uber?”

  Silence again as they entered Virginia. Cessy had only been to Virginia once since moving to Baltimore. A date with Hector, in the early stages of their relationship, to Old Town Alexandria, a cobblestoned area filled with shops and restaurants and crowds that reminded her of Fells Point. Hector had taken her to eat at a seafood restaurant, which was so good that it was almost worth the ridiculous cost of the dinner. Afterward, they walked along a trail next to the water, held hands, ate ice cream cones.

  That was the first time they had ever held hands.

  “You act like you’re blaming me,” Chris said suddenly. “What was I supposed to do after I was done talking to him?”

  “Call the cops?”

  “The last thing I need is the cops looking into me.”

  “You didn’t have to be there. We had him tied up. I could have waited with him.”

  “Yeah, okay, you say that now. We didn’t exactly have a plan then.”

  Cessy understood what her brother was saying; more than that, she agreed with him. But she didn’t let herself get deterred. “You wanted to kill him,” she insisted stubbornly.

  She wondered if she was just speaking to Chris.

  “And you didn’t? After he tried to kill you?”

  “It’s too easy for you,” she argued. “You like it.”

  “I don’t like it. I do it because it has to be done. Like that fucker who hurt Mom. Remember him? Remember helping me bury him?”

  “It’s why I left Arizona.” The sentence was short and honest. And incomplete.

  “That’s the thing. You always run, Cessy. But like you were saying, it’s not who you are.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  Cessy felt like Chris was digging a deep hole in the dirt, and the shovel was about to strike a hidden box.

  “It’s that thing, that thing we learned in school. You know, when you run or hide or something?”

  “Fight or flight?”

  Chris pointed triumphantly at Cessy. “That’s it! You act like your instinct is to run, to flight. But it’s not. You want to fight. That’s what you always do first. Then you think about it, and you think about me, and you don’t want that to be you. So you run off.”

  This wasn’t a conversation she could have now.

  She wanted to pour dirt back into that hole.

  “Bullshit. Turn here.”

  They took an exit off the beltway, headed into Arlington. The businesses thinned out as they drove into residential neighborhoods.

  “You know I’m right,” Chris said, a tone in his voice that Cessy had found annoying ever since childhood. His “I told you so” attitude.

  “Look, Chris, it doesn’t matter what I want to do; it matters what I actually do. You get that? Yeah, I want to kill the people who burned down Rose’s house. Of course I do.” Her voice thickened. “But that’s not what I’m going to do. You understand that? I’m going to find those people and … do something. And then I’m going to go in a different direction. Maybe I’ll move. Maybe I’ll stay. I don’t know, and right now I don’t care. All I care about is ending this.”

  “Eh.” Chris’s only comment.

  But this was better. Cessy felt like she was on even ground. Her breathing slowed. The flush in her cheeks receded.

  “And I care about you, pendejo. I need you to be safe and not, like, a little sadistic serial killer.”

  “I’m not little.”

  “Of everything in that sentence, I wished you’d picked another word to disagree with. Turn here. It’s at the end of the next street.”

  Chris turned a corner, slowed to a stop at the curb.

  “So what do we do here?” he asked. “With Levi Price? Knock on his door and ask if he can chat?”

  “No,” she said. “We do what we did with Smith. Except for the last part where you dropped him off the roof.”

  Chris leaned forward, peered through the window. “It’s only one story. So it wouldn’t really bother him that much. And I really don’t think your “Kumbaya” approach is going to work.”

  “That’s not my approach, and I know these guys don’t operate that way. We need to get the jump on him, force him to do what we want. And we can do that without killing anyone.”

  Chris looked doubtful. And disappointed. “I guess.”

  CHAPTER

  32

  THE KILLER STANDS blocking the door to the hall, watching panic overcome Deb. That same panic the killer saw in Maria’s face, right before he struck her with those brass knuckles, turned her face into a cave. But this is different, something about this is worlds away.

  The killer wants to step forward, peer deep into Deb’s face. Bite her lips. The killer can see all that emotion swirling inside her, and he wants more, wants to experience it, taste it, let it wash over. Like sex, the way you can see a woman’s emotions and feel them tightening over you.

  And like sex, his cock is so hard its straining, pulling him like those children’s games with magnets and metal, his skin and soul dissolving as he follows it.

  Deb wants to run past them. He can see her weighing the option, her legs tightening. He’ll catch her and maybe hurt her if she tries, and he knows Price doesn’t want that. Price will turn to him and fight, and they could get so distracted she ends up escaping. That’s happened before. Happened with Becky Morales when she ran out of her apartment and he told Price he needed to take over, and caught her by the dumpster, smashed her head into it until her hair came loose in his hand, until her arms stopped pushing him, until he came so hard he fell to his knees.

  He didn’t care, but Price had been upset.

  So ups
et that the killer vanished for a year or two, only reemerged when Price first saw Deb. Started thinking about her too much. And realized he might be needed.

  This was it; tonight was it. No point in hiding anymore. No reason to wait for Price to call him.

  It felt good for Deb to see him, to realize what he was. Like when those married men, near broke from blackmail, told their wives what had happened, what they had done. That sense of relief washing over guilt, regardless of consequence.

  Of course, if they’d felt that emotion earlier, they’d never be in this situation. Men never understand emotion in the moment; it’s always after, upon reflection or forced realization. The killer didn’t care for women, but they seemed to understand things as they happened. They needed to. Men didn’t. Prey need to be conscious of everything. A predator only focuses on the hunt, on himself.

  It wasn’t that the killer hated women, although he did hate a number of things about them and—actually, yeah, he hated women. Hated how they drew Price in, how everything was a reaction, waiting for him to do something. Always watching. Or if they weren’t reactionary, then they took charge, threw off his expectations. Acted like men.

  But there was a point with most women, when they were struggling and knew they were losing the struggle … that was the point. That’s when they were perfect. That’s when they would do anything, be anyone he wanted, offering spread legs or love or money or isolation.

  If he could just keep them at that state.

  The television snapped off and the lights went out.

  Deb was invisible in front of him, lost in the dark.

  “What happened?” he and Price asked.

  CHAPTER

  33

  “WHAT HAPPENED?” LEVI asked.

  Deb heard a rustling sound from him and then a small snap.

  He’d taken out his gun.

  “Stay here,” Levi said softly. “Something’s not right.”

  It was so dark Deb didn’t see him leave, only heard the floor creaking underneath his feet as he walked away from the room.

  Deb waited a few moments, then stepped into the hallway.

  A faint light from the bay windows; Deb cautiously walked toward it. She was scared and confused, but realized that this was her best and maybe only chance to escape. She peered down the dark hall to the living room, willing her eyes to adjust to the lack of light, to pull shapes.