by Bryan Smith
She ended the call.
Pete put the phone away and drove up to the gate. He entered the code she’d provided and, as promised, the gate slid open. After steering his car through the opening, he pulled to a stop and listened to the rattle of the gate sliding back into place. There were units to either side of him. A spotlight was mounted above each of the orange rollup doors. The unit to his right was number 010. He took his foot off the brake and tapped the gas pedal, allowing his car to roll slowly forward. His head was on a swivel the whole time he spent navigating the maze of storage units, his eyes searching for signs of anyone lurking in the shadows. The complex was larger than the first impression he’d formed of it driving up to it in the dark. The dark was deceptive. It hid things. Obscured them. The nighttime was a friend to thieves, murderers, and everyone else up to no good.
I’m one of those people now, Pete thought. A villain. A murderer. A bad person.
Until his fateful encounter with the fake cop, a big part of the way Pete had dealt with the madness of it all was by clinging to the belief that he was essentially innocent. That he was a victim and nothing more. Well, that had changed. He had taken a life. There was no taking it back. Sure, it could be argued he’d acted in self-defense, in the name of basic survival, but that was stretching the truth of the matter quite a bit and he knew it. No matter what else happened from here, he was changed irrevocably. His soul was tainted. The knowledge made him want to scream and cry and rage against the world. Instead, he did none of those things. He remained numb within his new cocoon of detachment as he took turn after turn and finally arrived at unit 167.
A car that looked empty at first glance was parked off to the side, alongside the door to the opposite unit. This gave Pete enough room to pull up and park in front of the designated unit. The other car was a four-door Lexus sedan. He’d never seen the steel-gray vehicle before, but had a hunch it was the same car he’d caught glimpses of during the Facetime conversations with Mary. Unit 167’s rollup door had been raised and a light was on inside. The light was from a powerful electric lantern, bright enough to make Pete squint against the harsh glare of its bulb. The lantern had been placed atop a black card table. An open laptop computer sat near the lantern on the table’s surface. A single metal folding chair was positioned on the floor near the table.
Mary, now wearing a black trench coat and a black hat with a broad brim tilted partly over her face, was sitting in the chair with her legs crossed. She got to her feet as Pete got out of his car and came around to the passenger side. The gun she’d threatened him with before was in her hand again, its barrel aimed at his midsection.
She waved him aside with a flick of her hand. “Move over. Let me see her.”
Pete sidestepped out of the way, allowing Mary an unobstructed look at the body slumped in his passenger seat. She stared at the corpse a silent moment and then flicked her gun hand at him again. “Get her out of there. Bring her in here.”
Before he could begin to comply with this directive, Pete was distracted by something at the back of the storage unit. Something that, until now, had been obscured by his focus on Mary and the bright light from the lantern. He’d detected an unpleasant odor upon getting out of his car, but had not immediately been able to identify what it was. Now he understood. The bodies of two more dead women clad only in sexy underwear and platform heels had been dumped haphazardly there in the back. The unpleasant odor was the onset of rot.
Pete gave Mary a deeply perplexed look. “Okay, I’m sorry, but I have to ask. What in the holy blue fucking hell do you have against strippers? Did a band of machine-gun-toting stripper terrorists massacre your whole family when you were a child? Or is it some kind of radical statement about the objectification of women in modern society? If it’s the latter, I’d say there are probably more effective ways of getting your point across. Seriously, what gives?”
Mary gave him a long look of simmering anger before tersely replying, “Not that it is any of your business, but childhood trauma is indeed at the root of it, as is the hatred I’ve always harbored for my whore mother. Infer from that whatever you wish. Back to the matter at hand. I told you—”
She was interrupted by the sound of a car door opening. Pete turned around and saw Shane Watson emerge from the back of the Lexus. Pete could swear the car had been empty as he’d pulled up outside the unit, but he supposed Shane had stayed out of sight by stretching out across the backseat. The other man grinned when he saw Pete. “There he is! The Wildman. Hey, man, you ever think of getting into the stunt-driving business? I only ask because you’re a natural at that shit. With your skills, you could get work in one of those Fast and Furious movies. Anyway, just a suggestion. Think about it, bro.”
Shane’s face had been scrubbed clean and, like Mary, he’d changed out of the clothes he’d been wearing earlier, switching them out for a black track suit and black sneakers. His blond hair was mostly hidden beneath a black baseball cap, the front of which was unadorned with any kind of logo.
Pete cocked an eyebrow, eyeing him in a curious way. “You’re in a chipper mood.”
Shane shrugged as he moved past Pete and stepped into the storage unit, taking up a position alongside Mary. “What can I say, man? It’s been an amazing night. Maybe the most amazing night of my life. And I owe it all to this little lady right here.” Still grinning, he draped an arm over her shoulders and gave her a squeeze, making Mary wince in obvious discomfort. “Isn’t she something?”
Pete’s quizzical look gave way to a frown. “Huh. There seems to have been a radical shift in your attitude about … well, everything since the last time I saw you.”
Shane nodded, laughing. “Yeah, uh, about that … look, I’m sorry, man, but a lot of that shit was pure put-on. It was just more bullshit to mess with your head. I’ve been working with Mary on this project of hers from the beginning. I did all that batshit crazy stuff because I wanted to, not because she was forcing me to do it.” He leaned forward slightly, cupping a hand around his mouth to speak in a mock-conspiratorial way. “And let me tell you something, just between us guys, you ever get another chance to pork a dead chick, take it. That shit was the bomb. Huge fucking rush. And, bonus, they never get mouthy.”
He howled laughter.
Pete’s face twisted in disgust. “I think I’ll pass.”
Shane snorted. “Don’t get all judgmental on me, man.” He smirked. “Besides, it’s not like you’re ever actually gonna have another shot at it. Or at anything else.”
A chill went through Pete at those last words.
Mary abruptly shrugged out of Shane’s overbearing embrace and pushed him away. “Enough fucking around. We’re on a schedule here.” She waved the gun at Pete again. “Bring the dead slut in here.”
“Are you going to kill me?”
She raised the gun, aiming it at his face. “I’ll shoot you where you stand if you don’t do what I told you to fucking do right fucking now.”
Despite the dire nature of this threat, Pete did not immediately obey. He believed she would kill him if he didn’t do what she wanted. What made him hesitate was the abrupt change in her voice. Prior to just now, he’d always heard her speak in the same bland, vaguely mid-American accent, but there’d been no trace of that in this latest utterance. Pete wasn’t the most worldly man ever. He hadn’t traveled a lot. He had, however, watched a lot of Hollywood espionage movies set in faraway locations. She sounded like a sexy foreign agent in one of those movies, someone who could be from eastern Europe. Was Russia a part of eastern Europe? He thought it probably was.
Judging from Shane’s astonished expression, he was just as taken aback by the change. “What … the … fuck?”
Mary glanced back and forth between them in obvious exasperation for a moment. Then she appeared to belatedly realize what had happened. Before she even said another word, Pete understood that what they’d just heard was her real accent. He also understood that everything about Mary was a sham. A lie.
And in a moment of extreme exasperation, she’d finally broken character.
She shook her head in apparent self-disgust. “Fuck it.”
She spun toward Shane, aimed the gun, and fired twice. One bullet punched through his forehead while the second put a hole straight through the center of his face. A spray of blood and brains emerged from the bigger exit wounds at the back of his head. Shane staggered backward and fell against the wall, collapsing to the concrete floor an instant later.
The gun immediately swung back toward Pete. “You have one last chance to do what I have already fucking told you to do.”
The fake American accent was back in place. Strangely, its return now felt even more jarring than the original slipup. Pete had so many questions, but he chose to keep them to himself. The woman had just killed the man who claimed to be her equal partner in this thing. She surely wouldn’t hesitate to kill him if he caused her any additional aggravation.
He nodded and turned away from her.
He went to his car and opened the door on the passenger side. Reaching in, he took hold of the dead woman under her arms and dragged her out of the car and into the storage unit. At Mary’s direction, he dragged her all the way to the back of the unit, depositing the corpse in a corner.
She pointed the gun at the card table. “Sit there.”
Pete sighed and did as instructed, sliding the folding chair over to the table and taking a seat in front of the open laptop computer, which he saw now was his own computer. In the midst of all the craziness of the night, he somehow hadn’t realized it had gone missing. A glance at the lower right corner of the screen told him it was connected to a wi-fi network in the vicinity. The browser was displaying a page from his bank’s website. His savings account, specifically.
Mary placed the muzzle of the gun against the back of his head. “You have $41,569.83 in your savings account, the bulk of it deriving from a modest inheritance you received after the death of one of your uncles.”
Pete cleared his throat. “How do you know so much about me? I never told you that.”
Mary grunted. “I make it my business to learn such things.” She pressed the muzzle harder against the back of his head. “I have already set up a transfer from your account to one of my own. When the transfer is complete, I will reroute the funds to another account, and then to another. They will disappear without a trace. I want you to press the transfer button to initiate the transaction.”
Pete frowned. “What?”
She grunted. “You heard me, stupid boy. I’m taking all of your money. It’s not a fortune, but it should fund the beginning of my next adventure quite nicely.”
Pete twisted his head around to look at her. “Oh, I get that you’re ripping me off. You obviously have world-class hacking skills. Among many other skills, I’m sure. You could have done this yourself already and been on your way to wherever you’re going next ages ago. Why make me do it?”
She smiled. “Why do you think? To complete your humiliation, of course. To make you give me your money. Because it’s fun.”
Pete shook his head. “You’re crazy.”
Mary rapped the butt of the gun against the side of his head. “Do it now. I’ve told you all I’ll ever tell you about why I did any of this.” She grabbed him by the hair at the back of his head and forced him to face the laptop’s screen again. “Press the fucking button.”
Pete’s forefinger hovered over the laptop’s touchpad. He couldn’t stop shaking because he had no doubt Mary—or whatever her real name was—was seconds away from murdering him. His other hand was under the table, reaching for the stun gun he’d taken off the fake cop after killing him. It was tucked inside the waistband of his jeans and hidden by the bottom of his loose T-shirt. He had no confidence in his ability to get to it and effectively wield it before having his brainpan emptied by Mary, but he had to try. He had no other choice. At least the gun was no longer pressed to the back of his head. It might give him an extra precious second or two to get the stun gun out and turn around before she could shoot him. The hand beneath the table was just a few inches away from the stun gun when he felt a stinging sensation in his neck.
Slapping his neck and crying out in pain, Pete twisted around and saw the hypodermic needle held loosely between the fingers of Mary’s right hand. The gun had been put away.
Sliding numbly out of the chair, he landed on his back on the cold floor. His vision was blurry and his thoughts were rapidly turning muddy. He looked up and saw Mary looming over him.
He managed to rasp out a single shuddery inquiry: “Was … poison?”
Mary smiled inscrutably and said nothing.
Pete groaned.
Everything went black.
When consciousness began to return some time later, his head felt thick and his thoughts were sluggish. His vision was too blurry to make out much initially, except that the lantern was still on in the storage unit. A great blob of light obscured everything else in those first moments back.
He soon became aware of other things, though, all of them disturbing in the extreme. There was a weight atop him, pinning him to the floor. It felt like some other person was lying on top of him. He tried shifting out from beneath the other person, but found he was unable to move. As his vision came into sharper focus, he realized the weight pinning him to the floor was dead woman number two. Her remaining undergarments had been removed. All his clothes had been removed. But that wasn’t the worst of it.
The worst part was that someone—Mary, he assumed—had used a tremendous amount of duct tape to bind them limb to limb. He was completely immobilized. Pete tried to scream, but couldn’t due to the obstruction in his mouth. He twisted his head around and saw Shane’s bloody corpse propped against a wall. At some point while Pete had been unconscious, Mary had stripped Shane’s corpse of its clothing. Where his genitals should have been was nothing but a gaping, bloody ruin of shredded flesh.
Pete tried screaming again, and again was foiled in the attempt. It took hours of trying to finally expel the obstruction from his throat.
By then he was almost too tired to scream.
EPILOGUE
The elegantly dressed woman in seat 32B on United Flight 919 was traveling under an assumed name, a name that matched the name on the passport she was currently using. That name was not Mary Wilson, the name she’d used for the last year and a half while orchestrating her latest project. The alias was also not Irina Leskova, which was her birth name. No one had called her Irina for close to ten years. As far as anyone who had known her in that long ago life knew, Irina was dead.
This did not make her sad. She had been reborn so many times and was set to begin yet another new life shortly, this time in London as Sophia Wentworth. She didn’t know everything about Sophia yet. Her new creation was a work in progress. Crafting these new identities was half the fun of it. Before she identified her next victim, however, Sophia would be a perfect, seamless work of art. There would be nothing to tip off authorities or anyone else to the truth about her. For now, the primary differences were aesthetic. Mary Wilson’s retro-chic blonde hair was gone. In its place, a jet-black mane in a more stylishly modern cut. The professional attire of an office drone had been replaced by a more fashion-savvy sensibility. The rest of it—Sophia’s personality and background—would come in time.
She did the things she did because the life she’d lived as Irina had bored her, though most would have found her profession an exciting one. Even a relatively exotic profession is still a profession, bound by rules and performance expectations. The woman wanted to live life only on her own terms. And she wanted to play with people and hurt them in fundamental, profound ways, a thing that could only be achieved by fully integrating herself into their lives for a time. With the professional skills gleaned from her years of training, she was able to do this easily. By design, her targets were always small and insignificant people. She stayed away from wealthy and high-profile individuals so as not to provoke interes
t from the wrong agencies.
The hum of the plane’s engines grew louder as the aircraft began to pull away from the terminal. It wasn’t quite time for takeoff, though. The woman still had time to glance through the tabloid newspaper she’d purchased from a kiosk in the airport. She loved the sensational tabloids above all other news publications, with the way they focused on the most lurid stories. The cover headlines were often hilarious. Today’s headline for this particular tabloid was a prime example—DEAD STRIPPER STORAGE.
The huge font filled the page.
The woman once known as Irina wasn’t sure why she’d left Pete Adler alive. She was a pure sociopath with no discernible conscience and thus never felt any remorse for the many lives she’d ended over the years. But there had been something about Pete that made him even more pathetic than her usual targets, a quality that made her think it would be better to spare his life and let him live with the memory of the many humiliating and horrible things that had happened to him. She sensed this would be worse for him than it would be for the average person.
Far worse.
Just thinking about it made her smile.
A chime sounded and the plane’s captain spoke over the intercom. They were now taxiing out to the runway. Passengers were instructed to buckle their seatbelts and return table trays to the full upright and locked position. The woman tucked the tabloid in the seat pouch in front of her. Her seatbelt was already fastened. She felt the usual rush of excitement that was always there at the beginning of each of these rebirths. It was as close as she ever came to experiencing real joy.
In another ten minutes, the plane was in the air. Deeper into its journey, as it flew high above international waters, the woman in seat 32B fell into a doze and dreamed contentedly of violent and bloody things, visions of the recent past and glorious portents of things to come.
Acknowledgments