Kill You Twice

by Chelsea Cain

  There was a pause. Finally Prescott said, “She’s been making progress. She’s been quite adamant about needing to speak with you.”

  The white headlights heading south were slow now, too. Gawkers. Human nature. Everyone had to look. “She’s playing you, Doctor,” Archie said. “There’s no shame in it. I’ve been played by her.” That was an understatement. “Epically. But trust me, whatever she’s telling you to make you think that you calling me is at all appropriate in any universe, she’s lying.”

  “She says she has a child,” Prescott said.

  Archie’s body went numb. He swallowed hard, trying to recover his voice. “That’s impossible,” he said.

  “She thinks this child is in danger,” Prescott said. “That you are the only one who can help.”

  Archie had seen Gretchen’s medical records. Her tubes had been tied. The scars were old; the doctors who’d examined her thought the surgery had been done when she was a teenager. This was all part of the game. The sky was darkening and the traffic on I-5 looked pretty, a festive ribbon of red and white. Archie shook his head slowly and laughed. “This is insane,” he said. “This is what she does. She manipulates people. You know that. She’s convinced people to kill for her, for Christ’s sake. She fucks with people’s heads for entertainment.” He would not give her the satisfaction. Not this time.

  “What if it’s true?” Prescott said.

  “I would not save Gretchen Lowell’s child if it was dying right in front of me,” Archie said.

  “What if you’re the father?”

  There it was. Archie had always wondered why she hadn’t said anything. The waiting had made him crazy at first. Knowing at any moment that she could go public to a lawyer or a reporter or a cop. Archie had told a few people some of the truth. But no one knew the whole story. No one but Gretchen. Maybe Prescott didn’t know anything. Maybe he was fishing. “That’s impossible,” Archie said definitively.

  “Is it?” Prescott said.

  Archie’s mouth was dry. “Don’t call me again,” he said, and he ended the call.

  Blood throbbed in Archie’s throat. His chest ached. Acid rose from his stomach and made him gag. He tightened his fist around the phone, walked deliberately back into the hall, and then slammed the phone hard against the exposed brick wall. It made a satisfying cracking sound and split into three pieces and fell to the floor.

  Archie’s hand pulsed with pain and he lifted his bleeding knuckles to his mouth. But the impact had splintered away his anxiety. He was in control. It felt good, actually. He was starting to think about giving the wall one more punch when he heard a knock at his door.

  CHAPTER

  9

  Archie’s spine stiffened. He didn’t move. Every cell in his body was telling him to draw his weapon. He wasn’t expecting anyone. But so what? People answered doors all the time without an overwhelming feeling of dread. Then again, it had been a long time since Archie had. Sometimes he forgot that there were people who moved through the world unaware that someone might slam a hammer into their parietal lobe at any moment. What would those people do in this situation? They would answer the door, he decided. They wouldn’t even hesitate.

  He was reaching for the doorknob when he remembered his hand.

  He looked down at it. The knuckles were skinned raw, the folds of his finger joints filled with blood. He turned and looked behind him. The phone lay broken on the floor.

  Another knock.

  Archie stuffed his wounded hand in his pants pocket and cracked open his door.

  The woman in the hall on the other side of the door was smiling. But Archie could see the smile falter a little when she saw him. He could imagine what he looked like then: shirt unbuttoned, sweating, red-faced, and baffled. He never should have opened the door. He wanted to go back inside. He fumbled to button his shirt with his left hand.

  She smiled harder.

  She looked to be in her late twenties. She was wearing a ribbed black tank top, cut-off gray sweatpants, and teal rubber flip-flops. Her skin was bronzed. She was younger than he’d thought when he’d seen her through the window.

  “Hi,” she said. “I’m Rachel.”

  She held out her hand. Archie hesitated. He pushed his right hand deeper in his pocket. Then offered her his left. Rachel looked confused.

  “Sorry,” he said. “Injury.” It seemed too vague, and he searched for a more satisfying explanation. “I have a cat.” He groaned internally. A cat?

  But she seemed to buy it, and she held out her left hand, too, and they shook. Her handshake was firm and friendly. Archie made sure he let go first.

  Even in the light of the hall’s compact fluorescents, her body glowed. She was a picture of health and youth. Rosy cheeks. White teeth. Wide blue eyes and a broad smile. Her shiny blond hair was either natural or very expensive. The smile widened, earnestly. Her tan was all one shade of unblemished golden honey. Even her teeth looked expensive.

  “You’re not from around here,” Archie said.

  The smile faltered again. “I’m your new neighbor,” she said. “I just moved in downstairs.”

  He’d made her nervous. He hadn’t meant to. His hand was starting to hurt now. He wondered if it was bleeding through his pants. He didn’t want to draw attention to it by looking.

  “People here don’t tan,” he explained.

  Her eyes fell to his belt and he saw in the tiny jerk of her brow that she had noted the gun holster on his hip.

  “I’m a cop,” he said quickly.

  Rachel’s eyes brightened. “Oh, that’s you,” she said. “I heard there was a cop in the building.”

  The building manager. Archie wondered what else he’d told her about him.

  “I saw you come home,” she said. “So I thought I’d introduce myself.” She paused, waiting.

  Archie wondered how someone got a tan like that.

  She said, “It’s customary to share your own name at this point.”

  Archie cleared his throat. “Sorry. Archie.” Sorry Archie. That was him, all right.

  She peered past him. “You live here alone?”

  His kids came every other weekend, but that seemed too complicated to get into. “Just me,” he said.

  Rachel seemed to be waiting for something. Was he supposed to invite her in for a drink? Offer her a Welcome Wagon basket? Archie was bad at this sort of thing. He could solve a homicide, but social obligations left him mystified.

  “Do people not do this here?” she asked. “Go around and meet the neighbors? I’m from San Diego, so if this is weird, tell me, so I don’t continue to make a total idiot of myself.”

  “Do people do it in San Diego?” Archie asked.

  “No,” Rachel said. “But I thought that Portland was friendlier.”

  “We are,” Archie said. “But we are also socially awkward. I think they cancel each other out.”

  “So if I need to borrow sugar or a spark plug or something . . . ?”

  Archie thought for a moment. “I don’t have any of those things.”

  Her smile faded and she glanced back down the empty hall. “I haven’t seen many people around the place.”

  “Not many people live here,” Archie said. The one-two punch of the flood and the economy had left his building in development limbo. All the better, as far as he was concerned.

  “Well, it will be quiet, then,” Rachel said. She sighed and her breasts lifted against the tank top. “Nice meeting you,” she said. “I’ll see you around.”

  Archie had the urge to say something, but he couldn’t figure out what. So he settled on saying, “Welcome to the building.”

  She gave him an awkward little wave and walked off down the hall toward the elevator. He watched her for as long as he could get away with.

  CHAPTER

  10

  Susan’s feet hurt. She had bought a pair of red Frye motorcycle boots with her last Herald check and they were killing her, but she was determined to break them in.
It was August. She should be in flip-flops. But flip-flops did not look as awesome with a short black skirt as red Frye motorcycle boots.

  Still, she needed to get off her feet. Now.

  She banged on the door to Archie’s apartment. If he wasn’t going to answer her calls or return her voice mails, then he could at least tell her to get lost to her face.

  She shifted her weight from foot to foot and banged again.

  The door opened, and Archie peered out. He lifted his eyebrows and blinked at her, like he was surprised. That wasn’t weird. It wasn’t like he knew she was coming. But he looked surprised in a different sort of way. Like he was expecting someone else.

  “Hi,” he said.

  “Who were you hoping I’d be?” she asked.

  Archie glanced behind her, down the hallway. Susan looked, too. There was no one there. She hadn’t seen anyone on her way up.

  “My neighbor was just here,” Archie said.

  Whatever. “Now it’s me,” Susan said. She bent over and wrestled off a boot.

  “Hi,” Archie said.

  Susan wasn’t in the mood for Archie’s bullshit. “You said that,” she said. “Now let me in.” She squeezed past him into the apartment, carrying one boot, and immediately began tugging at the other one.

  “Let me guess,” Archie said. “You were in the neighborhood.”

  “You didn’t call me back,” she said. The boots were off. She set them side by side near the door and wiggled her toes on the floor. Her socks were mismatched and stank of sweat and funk and heat. There weren’t many people she felt comfortable enough around to reveal that level of personal fetidity, but Archie was one of them.

  “I had a lot of messages,” Archie said.

  She hadn’t been to Archie’s new place before. When they had first met he was recently divorced and was living in a sad apartment in North Portland, then he had moved back in with his family in the fancy house in Hillsboro. Then there was the psych ward, a stay with Henry Sobol, and now this. He had neglected to invite her to the new place. With Archie, she sometimes had to take things into her own hands.

  She moved inside, looking around, and he closed the door behind her. She saw his phone lying on the floor in pieces and glanced over at him, but he didn’t offer an explanation.

  The apartment was nicer than she’d been expecting. Exposed brick walls. Massive factory windows. Hardwoods. High ceiling with exposed wood beams. Archie didn’t have much furniture: a few bookcases, a simple black couch that looked brand-new, a couple of chairs Susan recognized from the house in Hillsboro. The kitchen was open to the living room, and full of midrange steel appliances. She couldn’t see the bedrooms. She assumed there were at least two—one for him, one or two for the kids. There didn’t appear to be overhead lights, just floor lamps and desk lamps, all of which were on. A couple of standing fans were furiously redistributing the apartment’s warm air.

  She took a step closer to the window. It was twilight and the city was all sorts of shades of ash. It was an impressive view. She could see Mount St. Helens. There was nothing Portlanders liked more than old-growth wood and a mountain view. This whole part of town had smelled funny since the flood, but still, he’d done all right for himself.

  “This is nice,” she said.

  “Don’t sound so surprised,” Archie said from behind her.

  She remembered then that she was mad at him.

  “Did you listen to my voice mail?” she asked, turning around to face him.

  “My phone’s broken,” Archie said, glancing at the pieces on the floor.

  Susan noticed his hand then. He’d had it in his pocket when he’d answered the door. It was wrapped in a few feet of toilet paper, but bright crimson spots of blood were soaking through the Charmin over his knuckles.

  She looked at the broken phone. So maybe hers hadn’t been the most notable call he’d gotten today.

  “Do you have a first-aid kit?” she asked.

  “I’m fine,” he said.

  “You’re bleeding,” Susan said. He had kids; he had to have a first-aid kit. Where would he keep it? “Bathroom?” she asked.

  Archie nodded.

  Susan walked to a hall she could see on the other side of the living room and found the bathroom. She opened the cabinet under the sink and pulled out a canvas bag with the words FIRST-AID KIT stamped on the side. It still had the price tag on it. Susan set it on the side of the sink and looked in the mirror. Her skin glistened with sweat and her eye makeup was smeared under her eyes. Why didn’t men ever mention that? You could spend four hours with a guy and have makeup all over your face, and he wouldn’t say a word. Then, when you confronted him, he’d deny having noticed it. How could you look at a face for four hours without noticing that kind of thing? Men were infuriating sometimes.

  She tore a piece of toilet paper off the roll, folded it, got it wet under the faucet, and cleaned the liquid liner off her cheeks the best she could, which wasn’t saying much. Now she looked like she’d been crying. She tossed the toilet paper in the toilet, flushed it, and checked back in the mirror.

  Not just a mirror. A medicine cabinet.

  Don’t snoop, she told herself.

  It’s none of your business.

  The last time she’d looked in one of Archie Sheridan’s medicine cabinets it had been full of painkillers.

  But that was before he’d almost killed himself and ended up rehabbing on the psych ward.

  A tiny peek.

  That’s all.

  A smidgen of a look.

  Susan kept the water running to stifle the sound, and she opened the cabinet.

  She held her breath. The three glass shelves were stocked with amber pill bottles of every size. She glanced at the bathroom door. She didn’t have the time to go through all of them. She would have to be fast. She started twisting the bottles around, looking for labels, scanning names, looking for medicines she recognized. What was all this stuff?

  The door to the bathroom opened. It was her fault. She hadn’t locked it. Why would she have locked it? She was just looking for the first-aid kit.

  Archie stood in the doorway looking at her.

  His medicine cabinet was wide open. Susan had her arm extended, her fingers on one of his pill bottles.

  “I’m looking for an Advil,” she said.

  “That’s Prilosec,” Archie said. “For my stomach. I’m off the pain meds.” He scratched the back of his neck and gave her a tired look. “But if I wasn’t, I wouldn’t keep them in there.”

  Susan slid her hand away from the pill bottle and closed the medicine cabinet. Her reflection stared back at her from the mirror, her face scarlet. Her eyeliner was starting to run again. Susan could feel it leaking down her face. Why did she even bother? This was so classic. She barges in, sweaty, with her frizzy orange hair and raccoon eyes, and then gets caught going through his medicine cabinet. This was the problem with Archie. She didn’t know where the boundaries were. One minute he was saving her life, the next he wasn’t returning her calls. She had been dead. She had been clinically dead. And he’d saved her, and now she was alive. So what was she supposed to do with that? Put it in a box and tuck it away somewhere? Bury it in the backyard?

  Susan turned toward Archie and nodded at his hand. “Have you washed that?”

  He looked down at his toilet-paper-bundled hand. “No.”

  “Put it in the sink,” Susan said.

  He watched her for a second and then unbundled the blood-soaked toilet paper from his hand and held the hand over the sink.

  She could see the extent of his injuries now. The skin of his first and second knuckles was smashed raw, leaving dime-sized open wounds. She held his hand under the faucet, but every time she moved it from the water, dark blood filled the wounds and snaked around his wrist and then trailed down the bowl of the sink. If it hurt, he wasn’t showing it. It must have been a hell of a phone call.

  “Did it help?” she asked. “Breaking your phone and smas
hing up your hand?”

  “Actually, yes,” Archie said.

  “Sit down,” she said, and she guided him to the toilet seat next to the sink. “This might take a minute.” She shot him a quick wry smile. “I wrote an article about first aid once, so I’m practically a paramedic.”

  She turned off the faucet and pressed some toilet paper against Archie’s wounded hand to stop the bleeding while she found a tube of Neosporin in the first-aid kit. Then she lifted the toilet paper and squeezed out some Neosporin gel onto the places where Archie’s skin was open.

  He could do it himself. Obviously.

  She was kind of amazed that he was letting her. Maybe he felt bad about not returning her calls. Maybe he felt embarrassed for her, catching her snooping like that. Maybe he felt bad . . . generally. She didn’t know. He seemed distracted, but that wasn’t exactly breaking news. He was always 15 percent somewhere else. Plus, it was a hundred degrees in his apartment. Her forehead was starting to sweat. How he got any sleep in this sauna, she didn’t know.

  The Neosporin slowed the bleeding a bit. Susan found a roll of gauze and pressed the end of it into Archie’s palm and then began wrapping the gauze around his hand.

  “I noticed something that might be important,” she said.

  “Right,” Archie said. “The local news.”

  So he had listened to her message. That was good. At least he wasn’t deleting her messages on sight.

  “Local news is often very revealing,” Susan said.

  “What did you notice?” Archie asked.

  Susan moved his hand from the edge of the sink to his lap, and knelt in front of him, still circling his hand with gauze.

  “The trees,” Susan said.

  “The trees on Mount Tabor,” Archie said.

  The roll of gauze was smaller now, most of it forming a misshapen white mitten on Archie’s hand. Susan leaned her face close to the bandage, took the gauze in her teeth, and ripped it. “The guy, your victim, he was tied to the tallest tree.”

  “The tallest tree.”