by Keith Thomas
“I’m sorry,” the businessman said. “You okay?”
He didn’t hang around for an answer. Instead, pulling his coat tight to his chest, he melted into the passing crowd. Gabi made her way toward the dressing room with the businessman’s cell phone, a Samsung with a large touch screen that had clearly been shattered and replaced several times. But that didn’t matter, at least not for what Gabi intended.
As she walked, Gabi took the phone apart with a sure hand and near–military efficiency. She dropped the stuff she’d sell later in the left pocket of her coat; the rest—the GSM antenna, the Wi-Fi adapter—she slid into her right. Impressively, the cell was cannibalized within fifty-two seconds. Gabi would make a few bucks from the parts but it was the SIM card she was after, the access to a working line.
Stepping into a dressing room, Gabi locked the door and settled onto the tiny stool tucked into one corner of the room. The mirror was streaked, and Gabi avoided catching a glimpse of herself in it. She didn’t want to know how matted her hair was, how dusky her skin had gotten. In the immediate silence, without the crush of passing voices and the atmospherics of air recycled through endless vents, the voices came back, chanting their simple chorus:
Look, Gabi, look at what you’ve become.
Gabi pushed the voices away and pulled an indented MetroChime capsule from her pocket. She chewed it between her left molars, the good ones, before she got to work on the Raspberry Pi phone in her purse. It was a smart design, a hand-built smartphone with a touch screen. A little clumsy, sure, some of the soldering was rather ugly, and the 3-D–printed case she’d made at the library didn’t exactly snap on tight. But it worked, and it was untraceable. Gabi slid the stolen SIM card into her DIY phone. It took a second to come online. As it did, the voices hummed in the background. Gabi pushed her big toe back into her shoe and considered shoplifting a pair of sneakers on her way out. Seconds later, the phone was ready, the SIM card active; Gabi had only one phone number memorized. She dialed. Two rings later, a woman’s voice answered, distorted by disguising tech.
“Yes.”
“It’s Gabi. You got the message about Fifty-One?”
“Yes.”
Gabi cleared her throat and pulled up her coat sleeve. She had three watches on her left wrist. All displayed the exact same time. She tracked closely as the seconds clicked by. “They need a route to Dr. Song,” she said into her cell. “Contact Dirk. He can send Childers. You do know what this means, right? This is it. This is what we’ve been waiting so long for.”
“Of course.”
“Excellent.”
Hearing someone moving down the narrow aisle just outside her dressing room door, Gabi ended the call. Then she leaned down to peek through the two-foot gap at the bottom of the door. Seeing nothing, Gabi took the Raspberry Pi phone apart. She slammed the screen against the wall and cracked the SIM card in half.
Done, the voices said. Told you this was the day.
And that was exactly when a head appeared in the gap under the door.
A man’s head, bald with no facial hair. Not even eyebrows. Gabi recoiled, her adrenaline kicking in before the terror did. The baby-faced man held a gun in his right hand and aimed it at Gabi’s chest as he smoothly pulled himself through the gap under the door. As her hands started to shake, Gabi was struck by how easily the man could torque and stretch himself like a gymnast. She was dumbstruck even further to see how tall and thin he was when, fully inside the changing room, he towered over her. The man wore a hoodie, athletic sweatpants with reflective stripes, and latex gloves.
This is the devil, the voices in her head said, come to get you, Gabi.
“Where is Fifty-One?” the man asked.
Gabi could hardly speak. Her throat was so dry, collapsing in on itself.
“Where is Fifty-One?”
“I don’t— I don’t know.”
Gun still leveled on Gabi’s chest, the man reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a syringe filled with clear liquid. As the man bit the safety lid off the top of the syringe, the voices chanted, He’s the devil. . . . Devil come to get you. . . .
“Where is Fifty-One?” the man asked again.
“I’m telling you the truth—I don’t know,” Gabi said. “I haven’t seen her in decades. You have to believe me.”
He’ll take your heart; he’ll take your eyes. . . .
The man moved quicker than Gabi expected. In the space between heartbeats, he’d shoved the gun into her gut, pressed his left forearm up against her throat, and forced her back against the mirror. With her throat pinched, Gabi felt faint. She couldn’t push the man off. Her hands scrambled across his hoodie, her nails searching desperately for any exposed skin they could sink into.
“You’re going to have a heart attack,” the man said. “It’ll be caused by a coronary spasm. One of the arteries that feeds blood into your heart is going to clamp down. Real tight. It will be painful, feel like someone just hit you in the chest with a sledgehammer. But you’ll die within seconds.”
He’ll take your heart. . . .
Gabi gasped. Her vision blurred and the world spun around her. For the first time in fifteen years, she was happy to hear the voices. You’re going to be okay, they told her as they repeated Father Broderick’s favorite saying: Every end is a new beginning. As her body went limp, the man took the syringe and stuck the needle into the soft, red corner of Gabi’s right eye. Then he calmly depressed the plunger. The clear liquid burned as it went in. Gabi’s sinuses were suddenly on fire and, even as weak as she was at that moment, she bucked and kicked.
“Good,” the man said. “Fight it. Fight it.”
Gabi fought. And that was when the real pain hit. Her body wracked by a tsunami of ragged nerves, the wave of agony washed over her and stole the very breath from her lungs. Gabi’s eyes went wide as she spasmed once and heard her incisors break as her jaw clamped down too tight.
The man let Gabi fall to the floor of the dressing room.
Lying there, a final spasm shook her limp body before she was still.
In her last milliseconds of existence, the voices, the ones that had taunted and cajoled her for half her life, suddenly fell silent. Gabi’s oxygen-starved brain did the only thing it could think to do—it scrolled back through images, searching desperately for the few moments when she was happy.
It found sunshine . . . a beach . . . a welcome hand . . .
• • •
Rade cracked his neck, peeled off his latex gloves, and then emerged from the dressing room, closing the door carefully behind him.
On his way out of the Macy’s, he folded his gloves carefully before sliding them in a pocket of his hoodie.
Five minutes later, Rade was hot-wiring a black SUV in the mall’s parking garage when a Latino man with a ponytail noticed him.
“Yo! The fuck you doing?”
Rade sat up and looked the man over.
“That your car, man? Don’t look like your car.”
As Rade stepped out of the car, Ponytail stepped closer to look into the SUV’s interior. Rade’s tools were laid out on the front passenger seat in a roll-up leather case. It was the kind of kit a professional thief carried around.
“Oh, hell no. Can’t let you do that—”
But Ponytail stopped short when Rade dragged a box cutter blade across the softest part of his throat, just above the Adam’s apple. The wound was barely visible, like a long pink paper cut, before the blood welled up, bubbling out. It happened so fast, Ponytail had no final movements, no noise: just wide-eyed, horrible shock.
Ponytail crumpled at Rade’s feet.
Pocketing the box cutter, Rade got on his cell and, as his call rang through, reached into the SUV to gather his tools. A deep-voiced man answered.
“Talk to me.”
“Northgate Mall. I need all camera feeds wiped from four fifteen to five. And I’ve got collateral disposal on the fifth floor of the parking garage.”
“What a
bout Fifty-One?”
Rade crossed the garage to another SUV.
“Twenty-Two wouldn’t talk. But she did make a call on a burner cell. Home construction. Must have snagged a SIM off someone, possibly someone in the mall. We need to look at police reports, someone calling in about a lost cell. We trace the calls made with its SIM card and we move forward.”
“Dr. Sykes asks that you be more careful, Rade.”
“More careful how?”
“You’re not a Viking. This isn’t a slaughterhouse. Make them cleaner. We can’t have questions. You already know all this.”
Rade hung up the cell and slid it into his pants. Then he pulled a code grabber from a hoodie pocket to read the SUV’s remote keyless entry signal. It took two tries but the doors to the SUV unlocked. Rade climbed inside, unrolled his hot-wiring kit, and got to work.
Fifty-six seconds later, the SUV’s engine roared to life.
9
6:37 P.M.
NOVEMBER 13, 2018
MARCY-LANSING APARTMENTS
CHICAGO, ILLINOIS
MATILDA AND TODD were leaving a patient’s room on the seventh floor when an older lady with braided hair pulled Matilda aside.
“Can I talk to you, please?”
The woman’s eyes darted. She clearly had a secret.
“Of course.”
As Matilda followed the woman down the hall, toward the stairs, she turned and waved back to Todd. “I’ll meet you down at the car in just a few minutes,” she told him. He looked confused. “It’s fine,” Matilda assured Todd.
The woman brought Matilda into her neat apartment at the end of the hall, beside the elevator. It was homey, with a couch covered in plastic, dozens of framed photos of family, and several oil paintings of Jesus. There were potted plants in every corner, mostly wandering Jews and ferns.
“It’s about Janice’s daughter,” the woman said, “something’s wrong with her.”
“Okay.”
“My neighbor, Janice. Her girl, Ashanique, she just ain’t right lately.”
“Can I ask your name?”
The woman glanced back over her shoulder, at the door to her apartment. It was shut, though she was still clearly nervous, obviously trying to tell Matilda something she shouldn’t be. “I’m Carol. But that ain’t important. It’s Ashanique. You need to just talk to her, see if she’s all right. Last few days, she seems off. Different.”
“How old is Ashanique?”
“Eleven. Her momma has me watch her after school when she’s at work. She’s very protective, Janice. Ashanique’s her only child, and even though she’s tough with the girl, she’d do anything for her. That’s what’s got me concerned, you know? Ashanique ain’t acting herself, and when I brought it up to Janice . . . Shit, well, she basically told me to just mind my own business. But I know Ashanique. I know something’s wrong.”
“Is Ashanique home now?”
“She’s upstairs,” Carol said. “I can bring you up there.”
As they made their way up the stairs, Carol told Matilda about the family.
“Never seen the father, but Janice is a good mother. Don’t get me wrong, this place, it takes discipline to raise a child right. You got to have your hand on them, if you know what I mean. Temptation to do the wrong thing every day. A lot of bad people. A lot of desperate ones too, Lord. . . .”
Matilda followed Carol onto the ninth floor, where they stopped at a door marked 915. Carol said, “She ain’t gonna want to talk to you. Not at first.”
“I understand.”
“I wouldn’t bring you up here if I didn’t think it was the best thing for her.”
Carol pulled a key from her purse and unlocked the door. Stepping inside, she called for Ashanique. The apartment was stripped down to the bare essentials. Secondhand furniture and a few standing lamps. A window fan spun lazily.
Matilda’s cell buzzed in her coat pocket. It was Todd checking in. He sent a text telling her that he didn’t like the idea of her being alone in the building. He wanted to know where she was and if he should come back in.
Ten minutes, she replied. I’LL BE OUT SOON.
Todd sent the quizzical-faced emoji.
Followed by: FIVE MINUTES.
Carol knocked on a bedroom door at the back of the apartment. It was only when she saw the door that Matilda realized there was no art on the walls of this apartment. No family photos, no color. The door to Ashanique’s room looked as though it belonged to a different family. Its surface was a riot of drawings. Pencil, pen, finger paint, Wite-Out, charcoal—the little girl who lived behind it had used everything she could think of to create a complex mural of half-glimpsed shapes and strange figures. It was like viewing a car crash through a thick veil of fog.
“She done this just the other day,” Carol said, reading the surprise on Matilda’s face. “Stayed up all night to make it.”
Looking closely at the drawings, Matilda could make out soldiers, hills, trees, and a horse; its blackened body merged with the ruins of a building. It was clearly drawn with a child’s hand but there was a macabre power in the simplicity of the sketches. Something akin to a middle school Guernica.
“This is why I came to you,” Carol told Matilda. “She needs help bad.”
The bedroom door opened, and Matilda stood to see Ashanique.
She was struck by the girl’s gaze: like looking into the eyes of a much older person. Matilda had never believed the old aphorism about the eyes being the windows to the soul. It smacked of New Age cheesiness. But with Ashanique’s eyes, Matilda felt as though she were looking into the eyes of her grandfather. They were deep, wild pools of experience. Unbroken. Vivid.
“Ashanique? My name is Matilda. Is it okay if we talk?”
“Ashanique’s just one of me,” the girl said.
10
ASHANIQUE’S ROOM LOOKED just like her door.
Every surface crawled with crayon, pencil, and paint. Every inch of the room was ornamented by drawings of war and violence. Soldiers marched across the walls. Explosions sent spirals of black smoke into churning blue-gray clouds. There was blood and there was fire and there was rain. Matilda could not believe the varying styles of the artwork—from crimpled, highly detailed illustrations (she could make out the broken teeth in the mouth of a screaming soldier) to loose, abstract swathes of panicked, chaotic forms that suggested paroxysms of rage.
Matilda had never seen anything quite like it.
“Want to sit down?” Ashanique asked.
The girl dragged a school chair with an attached tray from the corner and set it beside her bed. Matilda sat. Despite the mania covering the walls, the bed was neatly, almost expertly, made. Perfect corners. The kind you could bounce a quarter off of. On one of the pillows was a drawing of a building, like a military base, ensconced in a snowy pine forest. Matilda smiled at Ashanique.
“My name is Matilda Deacon. I’m a professor and social worker.”
“I’ve seen you here before,” Ashanique said.
“Is your mother around?”
“No.”
“And who watches over you when she’s gone?”
“I’m old enough to take care of myself. But if she has to, Mrs. Carol looks after me.”
Law required Matilda to talk to the parent, with the exception of an emergency situation. If she were to encounter a child in immediate danger, she could intervene. Clearly, Ashanique didn’t appear to be in any physical distress, but Matilda was desperate to understand what was going on. It wasn’t such a leap, in her mind, to assume that the girl’s psychological condition was deteriorating.
It was bending the rules, but she technically could classify it as an emergency.
“Okay,” Matilda continued. “That’s good. My work involves talking to children. Children who might be having troubles, things that they worry about, things that keep them awake at night. Is there anything worrying you, Ashanique? Mrs. Carol says she’s concerned you might not be feeling well.”
Matilda glanced over to where Carol had been standing, but she was no longer in the room.
“I’m feeling fine,” Ashanique said. “At first, I thought I might be sick. I was scared when it started. But now, now I think I understand what’s happening.”
Matilda leaned forward. “What is happening?”
“The people inside me. They aren’t silent anymore.”
“What people, Ashanique?”
“There are so many.” The girl chuckled. “George was first. I didn’t know why, but I think now it’s because he died in shock. He didn’t know what hit him. That made a big difference. The others, they’ve been coming back slower. At first they’re just these echoes, but the more they show me, the stronger they get.”
“Have you told your mother about these voices?”
Ashanique nodded. “She tells me not to worry about them.”
“But are you worried?”
“No. Not anymore.”
“Do you mind if I make some notes?”
Ashanique shrugged as Matilda reached into her purse and pulled out a notepad and pen. She scribbled a few key words—auditory hallucinations? endaural phenomenon?—to guide her thoughts later. She didn’t want to admit that the case was unusual. In her experience, every past-life-regression case initially felt like it could be something she’d never seen before. But then, after a few minutes of directed talk, they always fell into established categories. Always. Matilda knew that mental illnesses were like snowflakes—no matter how unusual the expression of the pathology was, every illness could be categorized.
Still, Ashanique’s condition instantly felt unique. Not only did the girl seem preternaturally calm and collected, but she also didn’t speak like an eleven-year-old girl. She phrased things like an adult and used uncommon terminology. Ashanique spoke like someone very well-read. It was possible, Matilda considered, that the girl had been coached. Maybe she was just a good actor. Maybe this was scripted.