One Life to Lose

by Kris Ripper

  “I watched you.” The gun swung down toward my eyes. “I watched and watched and I could have taken you that night you walked to your car late from their apartment. I could have taken you on one of those nights you left the theater last. I watched, and I watched, but then I saw you with them, saw that you corrupted them, that they were fine, they were normal, until you.” His hold on the gun was unstable and his legs were shaking. “They were normal, until you screwed everything up! If it wasn’t for you, they could live, but now look at them! You did this!”

  “I’m sorry,” I whispered, trying to concentrate on the shades of silver and gray and black in the gun. “I’m so sorry.”

  “Sorry? You’re an abomination! Why did you have to be so fucking smug? Why does everyone think they’re better than me?” The gun hand came up to rub at the side of his head. “Ow. I can’t believe that little bitch attacked me. Like fucking Togg. You have no idea how hard I had to work him, how many weeks I spent, flattering him, making him think I was in awe of him, that fucking piece of shit. And he still almost got away. I made him pay, after I shattered his legs, but that fucking bastard hurt me. I couldn’t go to the hospital, I had to hide from my parents—he could have gotten me caught!”

  He looked so genuinely annoyed by this inconvenience, as if he expected me to sympathize.

  “But you—you—what the fuck is wrong with you? You just sit there, reading, like you don’t need anything, like you’re so fucking evolved the rest of us are fucking ants in comparison.” Joey stepped closer and stuck the gun right in my face. “Do I look like an ant to you now, motherfucker?”

  I didn’t hesitate. I grabbed the gun and twisted. I wasn’t strong enough to break his grip, but I got him off-balance and lunged. The gun clattered across the floor, but Joey grinned, like he didn’t have a care in the world.

  We grappled, but I was never one for physical fights. Pain registered somewhere in the back of my mind, impact, a gasping sense of knowing I would lose, that Joey would win and I would die.

  And judging by that toothy, feral smile, he knew it too. He quickly got the upper hand, pinning me to the ground. “You’re not so good now, you—”

  The candlestick took him hard on the temple and his neck snapped to the side. He roared and tried to go for Keith, but Keith was way too far gone to care. He swung again, cracking Joey hard enough to at least temporarily stun him, and when he fell over I jumped on top of him, trying to keep his arms and legs contained.

  Keith kept hitting him, as if in a trance, bringing the candlestick down again and again until Joey was no longer moving.

  His blood was bright, inescapably red, and my brain snapped to attention. “Keith, call 911.” When he didn’t move, I spoke louder. “Keith. Call 911 and get the gun. Right now.”

  He blinked at me for a long moment, but at least he dropped the candlestick.

  “The gun,” I said again, lowering my voice. “And your phone. Call 911. But hide the gun somewhere first in case he gets away.”

  Keith, eleven years younger than me and way more entrenched in the world of cell phones, managed to do both at once, holding his phone to his ear with one shaking hand as he deposited the gun in my freezer.

  “We need help.” His voice shook. “Help. Please. Oh my god, Josh.”

  I tried not to relax. It could be a trick, though some part of my brain registered that Joey had taken an awful lot of blows to the head. “Keith, c’mere. Put it on speaker.” I wanted to reach out to him, but I didn’t dare let go of Joey.

  Keith started to cry in a quiet, frightening way. He put his phone on speaker and placed it on the floor. Then he went to Josh, huddling protectively over him.

  “Sir?” the operator said. “Sir, are you still there?”

  I cleared my throat. “My name is Cameron Rheingold. We’re calling from 22405 Mooney, the apartment upstairs from the gift shop, next to the Rhein Theater.”

  “I have units on their way to you now, sir. Is anyone hurt?”

  It seemed like such a stupid question suddenly. I laughed. “Yes. Everyone’s hurt. Everyone here is hurt. I think we caught the La Vista killer.”

  “Sir? The what?”

  “The man who’s been hunting and killing queer people in La Vista. I’m sitting on him. I don’t think he’s dead, though.” I should stop talking. I knew I should stop talking.

  “Help is on the way, sir,” the woman’s smooth, controlled voice said. Nothing even betrayed that she was interested in what I was saying. She probably heard crazy people rambling all day long.

  “That’s good. We definitely need help.”

  Keith’s small, muffled sobs almost broke me. I wanted to go to him, comfort him, but I was afraid if I moved at all Joey would spring up and we’d have to live the whole thing over again. We were trapped inside a spell, holding us in our places, each where we should be: Keith holding Josh, keeping him together with his bare hands, and me holding Joey, who I thought with every second might kill me.

  Response time, Ed later told me, was twelve minutes. By the time the police and paramedics arrived, I was shaking with the effort of holding Joey down, Joey was found to be unconscious, Keith was in shock, and Josh was just beginning to wake up.

  They went to the hospital. Keith went with Josh (though he needed to be checked out, too), and once I’d explained to the police what happened, an officer went with Joey.

  “But you won’t—you won’t let him get away, will you?” I asked, and even to my ears I sounded hysterical.

  The female officer, with an air of always being The One Who Comforts Traumatized People, sat beside me on my sofa. “We won’t let him get away. We have a lot of work to do before we can charge him with all the rest of those crimes, Mr. Rheingold, but I’m looking right at the evidence we need to charge him for what happened here tonight. Will you go over it with me one more time?”

  It wasn’t one more time. I told her the story, and then they had me go down to the hospital to get checked out, where I told a nurse, and then some kind of counselor. My phone didn’t work inside, so I couldn’t tell where Keith and Josh were or how they were doing. Were they repeating themselves like I was? Was Josh okay?

  I sat alone on a collapsible bed in a curtained-off section of the ER, waiting to be seen. When a nurse came to get my vitals, she said I was shaking, but I didn’t feel anything at all. I told her that her scrubs were gray, but she didn’t get the joke and I had to pretend I could see color so they wouldn’t think I had a head injury.

  I asked about Josh, but no one told me anything. Confidentiality. I hoped they at least let Keith stay with him.

  Hours passed. Time dripped, drizzled, dropped here and there; sometimes an entire minute would pass without me looking at my phone. Sometimes I looked a hundred times and the digital readout seemed to have frozen. I forced myself to listen to all the sounds around me to prove that other things were happening in the world, that time had not stood still, because printers were printing and phones were ringing and carts were being wheeled down hallways, and curtains were being brushed aside on their metal rails somewhere nearby.

  Eventually they told me I was all right, that I needed rest, and did I have somewhere safe to go?

  I went to the theater. There were still people in my house—police? crime scene?—but I didn’t go upstairs. I let myself into the lobby and grabbed a few of the army surplus blankets we kept in our little modified emergency supplies cupboard (just in case, Dad always said, though I doubted this was what he had in mind). I curled up under the desk in the ticket booth, and drifted in and out of consciousness for a couple of hours.

  Whether you could call that state “sleep” was debatable. I didn’t wake up so much as my brain and my body made a mutual pact to stop pretending. I was chilled. I felt heavy and achy, like I’d been in a fight.

  I’d been in a fight.

  I checked my phone, desperately scrambling to see if Keith had texted, only to discover it had died at some point in the night.


  The charger was upstairs. Were the police still here? I didn’t know. I didn’t want to know. The theater was still locked up tight, so it wasn’t nine yet. If I got out now, no one would know I’d slept there.

  I folded the blankets, put them away, and slipped out while the alarm system beeped its warning at me. Except I had nowhere to go. Two cruisers were still parked on the street outside, so I walked the opposite direction. When I came to the Volvo, I got in.

  Most of that morning was a blur when I tried to remember it later. I went to a discount store and picked up a black coat with a soft lining. It wasn’t high quality and looked more like something Merin would wear than myself, but I didn’t care. It was warm, and I needed something I could pull around me. I needed something that could hug me back.

  I also got a charger for my phone. I ripped it open in the attached coffee shop and plugged it into the first outlet I could find.

  Three text messages.

  Keith: Phones don’t work in the hospital and my battery’s dying. You okay?

  Ed: I just heard what happened. I’m coming over.

  Ed: Where are you? I’m at your apartment. Please call me, Cam. I’m sure you’re at the hospital or something, but I’m worried.

  I knew I should call Ed. But I wanted to talk to Keith. I wanted to hear his voice. I wanted to hear his voice tell me that Josh was okay.

  When I dialed their phones, they went straight to voice mail.

  As I was sitting there contemplating the wrongness of being out of touch in a hospital, when it seemed like circumstances might dictate people wanting to remain in touch, my phone rang. A local number, but not one I knew.

  The police. Asking me to come down to give a statement. Did I need a ride? I assured them I did not need a ride. And yes, I’d come down. I had nothing better to do. I told them to give me an hour, and bought a cup of coffee, which burned in my stomach while I cradled my phone and prayed for it to ring.

  Detective Green showed me into a conference room and gestured me into a chair with threadbare pink upholstery that might have been red, in some distant past. He took the chair on the short side of the table so that we were sharing a corner.

  He was probably in his midforties, Filipino, and a pair of reading glasses was hooked on the collar of his shirt. He looked exhausted, though I figured I probably looked worse.

  “Mr. Rheingold, we spoke once over the phone. Do you remember?”

  “You called me about the boy. Steven Costello.” He’d been nice on the phone. Direct, but not unkind. I glanced around the room, wondering if this was where they put you when you were a witness, or if it was where they put you when you weren’t but they wanted you to think you were.

  “You were photographed with him. Do you want to see the pictures?”

  “No. I remember. Ed was a nuisance with his phone, but I guess if it helped the case at all, I’m glad he took all those pictures.”

  Green nodded. “Tell me about last night.”

  I went over it again. This time I was more collected, and I mentioned that I thought I’d seen Joey before, but I didn’t immediately connect his appearance.

  “So you knew him.”

  “No. He’d asked me about a movie I’d shown. Kind of . . . lingered, past when everyone else left.”

  “Did he make you uncomfortable?”

  “No. Well, maybe. I was happy when he left, but I—I don’t always know how to talk to people, or how to kind of—” I shook my head. “I didn’t know how to get rid of him. A few friends showed up, and he kind of took off on his own. But last night I didn’t immediately realize it was the same person.”

  Green raised his eyebrows. “What made you think it was?”

  “I’m not sure. I guess he talked a lot about watching me. And then I was trying to sleep and I kept replaying things, even when I tried not to, I kept seeing it all over again, his face, this horrible smile, the gun—”

  “It’s okay,” Green said. “Take a few breaths.”

  “Sorry. I’m sorry. I know it’s over, I know it wasn’t even that big a deal. But I haven’t talked to Keith, and I don’t know how Josh is, and I really—I really just want everything to be normal again.” I focused on the worn upholstery, willing it to stay pink. “I’m sorry.”

  “I understand. Tell me a little bit about your relationship with Keith and Josh. Were they the friends who interrupted you when you talked to Joseph Rodriguez the first time?”

  Joseph Rodriguez. He had a name. A full name. “Joey” could be anyone; Joseph Rodriguez was somebody’s son.

  “No,” I said faintly. “No, that was— Actually, that was Ed and Alisha. Ed Masiello, who’s the one who took all the pictures.”

  Green blinked at me for a long moment. “Ed Masiello also knows Rodriguez?”

  “No, no. No, he didn’t—” I paused, remembering the bags of food, the smell of turkey, Alisha’s voice. Ed, frowning, staring out the front windows of the theater. “Wait. He thought Joey looked familiar, but he couldn’t remember from where. Oh god. This means you have to talk to Ed again.”

  Green wrote something down. Probably Call Ed Masiello. “We have to investigate all leads, Cameron. Do you mind if I call you Cameron?”

  “I just want to get this over with. I don’t care what you call me.”

  “Let’s keep going, then. Tell me about your friends, Keith and Josh.”

  My throat closed up for a second, then released. “What do you want to know?”

  “What’s the nature of your relationship with them?”

  I wanted to lie. I wanted so badly to lie I could taste the words on my tongue. How could he know anything about our relationship? We’d barely gotten home before everything had happened. The most incriminating things in my apartment were two seasons of Project Runway and a computer with a few films I’d illegally downloaded to make sure I wanted to lease them to show at the Rhein. And they probably would have searched. Any secrets I had personally, they likely already knew. This was about Josh and Keith, damn it, and they didn’t have to know everything.

  Except when they asked Josh, when they asked Keith, both of them would tell the truth.

  “Cameron?”

  “I’m sorry. Yesterday I thought I understood what I was doing, what my place was, and today . . . everything’s changed. Josh and Keith are friends of mine. Close friends.”

  “Meaning there is a sexual relationship between you?” He said it like he’d expected it.

  “Yes. Yes, there is.”

  “And last night, was that why they were in your apartment? To continue your relationship?”

  “Last night they were in my apartment because they’re my friends, and it was the last night of the film festival, and we were celebrating. I have no idea what would have happened if Joey hadn’t barged in, hit Josh.”

  “And you say that you didn’t invite him in?”

  “Invite him—no. I’d been trying to get rid of him. He had more questions, about Notorious, but his questions felt off.”

  “Off how?”

  “Off like your question was off when you asked if my relationship with Josh and Keith is sexual,” I said. “Off the way a question’s off when someone already knows the answer. Did you talk to them? Are they okay? Can you—can you at least tell me if they’re all right? Please, Detective.” I bit down hard on my lip.

  Green sat back and put down his pen. He cracked his knuckles, which looked bruised. I wondered if he’d been in a fight recently, or if he was a boxer of some kind. He wasn’t tall, but he was the kind of skinny that sometimes meant strength you couldn’t see.

  “I spoke with them at the hospital. No permanent damage. But I need you to keep answering my questions, Cameron.”

  I wished I hadn’t granted him permission to use my name. It turned out it did matter, after all. “Thank you.”

  “I’m not judging anyone here. If you invited him up, it’s still not right what he did to you, or to them. But I need to know.”

&nb
sp; “I didn’t. I don’t know him. I don’t invite strangers into my home. I own the Rhein, Detective Green. I’ve spent some portion of every single day of my life in the theater, around people. When I go home I want peace, not chaos. I want familiarity, not—not strangers.” I didn’t want to cry, so I closed my eyes. “I tried to get rid of Joey politely, but he wouldn’t leave. Josh came down to open the door for me because I’d given him my keys.”

  “He doesn’t have a key of his own?”

  “To my apartment? No. No, why would he?”

  “I’m trying to understand the nature of your relationship. Are you dating them, Cameron? Is it just sex, some kind of friends with benefits thing? Is it an experiment?”

  “I don’t know what it is. But I—” I rubbed tears out of my eyes. “I care about them a lot. I don’t have a word for what I am to them, I only know that it’s good, whatever it is. And we don’t need a word to know that.”

  “What happened after Josh opened the door?”

  I’d been over this so many times I was numb to it, like I was reciting the plot of a movie. “I was relieved, because it meant Joey would leave me alone. I didn’t know his name then. So we went up the stairs, I went first, then Josh, and he—Joey—must have blocked the door or something, and we went inside—”

  “You went inside first?”

  “I went inside and Keith—” I didn’t want to remember this part. It was the best moment of the night. “Keith kissed me,” I murmured. “He kissed me. We moved to the sofa. And Josh laughed. And they said—I don’t know—they were playing with each other, and Josh started to say something and that’s when Joey hit him. He fell to the ground, right in the middle of his sentence.”

  Green pushed a box of tissues across the table.

  I took one, trying to get my breathing under control before I had to keep going. “I’m sorry. I know we’re all—we all lived, so it’s okay, but it was so scary, it was just so scary, and I thought we were going to die and it was my fault—”

  “Cameron, why would it be your fault?” He leaned over the corner of the table. “If you didn’t invite him in, why would it be your fault?”