“Thanks,” I said to Destiny genuinely. She shrugged but her reply was serious.
“I meant what I said. Girls like that make us all look crazy. And after you already told her you had a girlfriend? Rude. There’s a special place in hell for women who backstab other women. Say, what did she mean about who she was? Is she famous or something?”
“Her father is Senator Ellis.”
“For real? I voted for him. I hope I don’t get fired.” She suddenly looked much less confident.
“You won’t. And if you do, call me. I’ll give you my card. I’m a lawyer. I’ll make sure you get your job back.”
Destiny blinked at me and then nodded.
“You mean that? Thanks. Your girlfriend really is a lucky girl. But you better steer clear of that Ellis bitch. I’m not supposed to say this about customers, but she seems like the type that might cut your brake lines if you turn her down.”
“Duly noted. I’ll take the earrings.”
38
Eva
“Wait! Eva, hold on. You don’t understand.”
Damn right I don’t understand, Paul. I don’t understand why you would do this. I don’t understand why you would kidnap Edith. I don’t understand why you would kill Stephen. I don’t think I’ll ever understand, no matter what you say.
I flew down the hallways faster than I thought I was capable of moving. I’d worn my scrubs and crocs today because I knew I might get dirty, and while my shoes were comfy and good for walking, they were not designed for high-impact cardio. Still, unlike Paul, I had all my toes so I figured I had a huge agility advantage over my pursuer.
Paul was yelling after me, which conveniently told me how far behind me he was. “Eva, come back! It wasn’t what it sounded like!”
Bullshit. It was exactly what it sounded like. Murderer.
At least I knew I was faster than him. The mansion flew by at breakneck speed as he chased me. The portraits on the wall watched us running with frozen, bemused expressions.
“Eva! Just let me explain!”
Explain it to the police, asshole. Explain it to your victims’ families, if you even can. Explain it to your god, because he’s the only one that can forgive you now.
“Slow down, Eva! You’ve got to understand. I never wanted any of this to happen.”
Getting caught? Or murdering people? Oh, so you just accidentally murdered two people? Well then never mind. Let’s just forget the whole thing.
I’d never measured the distance, but I would guess the trip between my room and the garage was a good quarter mile of hallways. I was about a third of the way back to my room when a momentary slip up on the corner between the regency portraits and the postmodernism hallway sent me reeling and spinning. I went down at an angle, sliding across the floor on my hip and coming to rest against the wall. The fall knocked the wind out of me and it took precious seconds for me to get it back.
When I did, it was already too late to get up and keep going. Paul advanced on me with a curious mixture of regret and determination on his face. As soon as I could get a decent gulp of air I started screaming at the top of my lungs. I was loud, but I also knew it was probably pointless to scream. No one was around to hear me.
The moment I knew I couldn’t flee, I resolved to fight. My hands balled up into fists. I punched, and I bit and I kicked like I never had in my whole life. I went full honey badger. I even tried to fight smart. I went for his hands and feet, where I knew he was in pain. I aimed for his face, neck and groin, where everyone is most vulnerable to injury. If he was hurting me back, I didn’t notice. I was too hyped up to feel pain.
Having never been in a physical fight before, I thought I was doing fairly ok. I’d knocked Paul to the ground and we were sort of rolling around while I tried to get away enough to stand. I was on my knees and almost about to bolt when he pressed a rag soaked in something sweet and foul smelling against my nose and mouth.
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” he was saying over and over. His face was behind me, but it sounded like he was sobbing. I tried to pull away, but he was just too much bigger, too much stronger than me. I sunk my nails into his skin and scratched backward at his face in a futile attempt to make him release me. It only made him hold on tighter.
I sputtered and gagged against the chemical smell. It burned in my lungs and hurt my head. As the world went blurry, I was transported to my organic chemistry class back at Duke.
“Hydrocarbons are volatile and extremely useful for us in industry and cleaning,” Dr. Xiao intoned in my hallucination. “However, it should be noted that it’s easy to create dangerous mixtures out of them quite by accident. For instance, there was once an incident in a mechanics shop where a trainee was directed to clean the floors and had the bright idea to mix bleach with paint thinner to remove stains. Not a bad thought, right? Well it turns out that since paint thinner is a mixture of petroleum derived hydrocarbons in the C7 to C12 range, mixing with a powerful oxidizer like bleach creates a synthetic chloroform…”
Dr. Xiao’s hypnotic, Boston-accented monotone and characteristic Hawaiian shirt faded away. Instead, I saw Charlie.
I saw Charlie the way I first saw him, back when I was a freshman in college. It was a sunny day in my memory. The sky was very blue overhead, and I was slightly too warm under the bright North Carolina sun. I was wearing my blue, lace dress and a big floppy hat.
Charlie was sitting on a park bench and looking at me with that same concerned, confused look on his face that he had back then. That mixture of feelings I couldn’t guess and he wouldn’t articulate. In my hallucination he held out his hand toward me and I tried to grab it. But instead of making contact, my fingers slipped through his like a ghost and then I was falling into space.
Dr. Xiao was back in my field of vision. He sat on the corner of his desk as he lectured me.
“Now keep in mind that chloroform made in this way is nothing like you see in the movies. Even in its purest distillations it’s not a harmless knockout gas. It also isn’t instant. It takes at least five minutes to work, during which time the victim is essentially just painfully suffocating. The fumes from this sort of mixture are highly corrosive, and while they will absolutely cause hallucinations and incapacitation, they will also cause organ failure, particularly heart failure, and death if mishandled. The mechanic trainee I mentioned earlier died after passing out in the garage which had no ventilation…”
Finally, my dad appeared. My brother and I were sitting at our dining room table at our duplex on the base in Belgium. I was about twelve. In front of us on the table was my dad’s revolver.
My dad was talking, but his voice was cutting in and out erratically like a weak radio signal. “Never point a gun at any person or animal that you aren’t willing... I don’t care if it’s loaded, unloaded, cocked, un-cocked, or if the safety is on or off…don’t even load it… gun at anyone unless you are absolutely, positively sure… willing to end their life...hope you two never have to make that choice.”
His voice cut off and I had a sickening realization. The gun was tucked into my concealed waist holster, well out of reach. I’d remembered much too late, although of course it wasn’t loaded anyway. I had just enough consciousness left in me to feel stupid for not listening to Dylan and Charlie about the gun. I’d been so sure that I was safe at the mansion. I’d been so incredibly stupid and naïve.
Then there was nothing but quiet.
39
Charlie
I’d just finished up at the jewelry store when I got the call from Dylan.
“I wanted to tell you first, so you didn’t hear it from anyone else at the office. I quit Clark and Jeffries yesterday.”
Dylan obviously couldn’t see the fact that my jaw had hit the floor, but he laughed into my stunned silence. The sound coming out of his was unfamiliar. He sounded delighted.
“You did what?” I was honestly struggling to comprehend what I was hearing. Like Eva, Dylan did not quit. At least, I’d never s
een him do it. The pathological aversion to quitting was apparently dominant in that family.
“I quit Clark and Jeffries last night. In rather spectacular fashion, too.” Dylan sounded younger than he had in recent memory. He laughed again, and I found myself smiling too.
“Oh?” Not my most eloquent reply, but it was all I could manage at the moment.
“Yep. So, you know that one super old dot matrix printer? The one that prints on one continuous sheet of perforated paper?”
“In Marella’s office? Yeah.” That dinosaur was only used for printing the really old documents that lived on the floppy disks in the basement.
“Well I decided to print my resignation letter on it. Landscape. Font size one hundred. It printed a banner twenty feet long. Then I ordered a bunch of roses for the secretaries and paralegals that are going to get delivered Monday, hung up my banner, and peace-d out permanently.”
“When exactly did you do all this?” I tried to imagine Dylan doing this, but frankly couldn’t. Twenty-three-year-old Dylan? Absolutely. Current Dylan? Not so much. He was still laughing though.
“Three-thirty this morning. I was working on something urgent but pointless and I just… broke. I was just done. Totally done. I knew I either had to quit right then or I was going to go postal and end up in jail. And I’m too pretty to go to jail.”
“And then what?”
“Then I went home and went to sleep. I just woke up. Man, let me tell you, sleeping is fantastic. I highly recommend it.” He definitely needed it.
“Yeah I’ve heard it has health benefits. You’re not playing a trick on me, right?”
“When was the last time I even had the energy to play tricks on you? No, this is real. I feel amazing.”
“But our plans. Remember? Making partner—" I stuttered. We had this whole plan worked out. Or we did, back when we started at Clark and Jeffries. Not that any piece of it was really working out like we thought it would.
“I know. But Charlie, look at the partners. They aren’t happy. Most of them are divorced, and most of them have clinical depression. All of them are exhausted. I don’t want my future to look like that. I don’t want your future to look like that, either, by the way.”
Dylan had a point. The partners at Clark and Jeffries were just older, more jaded versions of the associates. Most of them rolled into the office later and left earlier than the overworked staff attorneys, and they made a hell of a lot more money, but the majority of them were still doing whatever it was that got them promoted up to partner in the first place. If Dylan didn’t want to do tax restructuring for the rest of his life, leaving now was his only option.
“What are you going to do?” I asked. I could almost see Dylan smiling as he thought about it. The world was his oyster. That must be nice.
“God, I don’t know. Anything else. Maybe I’ll move out west. I wanted to work in entertainment law. I’m not so old that I couldn’t still give that a try. Or maybe I’ll go work for the government. My dad wanted me to join the JAG Corps. Maybe I’ll check that out. Or maybe I’ll just take a long vacation and then figure it out.”
“It sounds like you want to leave Philly.”
“I think I do. I’m ready for a change.”
“What about Eva?”
“Huh? What about her?”
“You’re just going to leave her alone in the city? I don’t think she would have moved here if you didn’t live here.”
“I’m not leaving her alone. She’s got you.”
That shut me up in a hurry. For the second time in five minutes I found myself unable to reply for about thirty seconds. Long enough that Dylan continued.
“Look, I’m not going to say I like the idea of you with Eva. I’m never going to like it. It creeps me out. But I figure you get regular STD tests and aren’t the worst guy in the world--”
“Gee thanks!” I interjected. The best he could do was that he thought I wouldn’t give his sister herpes? What a lovely recommendation. Hey ladies, date my friend Charlie Townsend. He probably won’t give you a venereal disease. I ought to put that on my dating profile.
“Hey now. I wasn’t finished. In addition to not being the worst guy in the world, I know you really like her. Enough that you would risk my wrath to be with her. So, there must be something there between you two. Something worth having. You’re not gonna get my blessing or anything, but I’m not going to try to break you up.”
“When did you come to this revelation? Three-thirty this morning?”
“No. The other day when I was helping Eva buy a car and also trying to get her to quit her job.”
“She’s absurdly stubborn.”
“I see you’ve figured that out. You do know it has nothing to do with the job though, right?”
“What do you mean?”
“The reason that she won’t quit her job is entirely to do with you.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Me either, I just know it’s true. As we were talking about it, I could see it all over her face. The reason she doesn’t want to quit is because she wants to support you. To help you. She’s made her damn Sophie’s choice.”
“That’s crazy.” Did she still think that I considered her work? That was impossible. Wasn’t it? Dylan was oblivious to my thoughts.
“I never said she wasn’t crazy.”
“Ok. Let’s just recap this insane conversation real quick. Just so you and me are on the same page. Can we do that?”
“Yeah sure.” Dylan sounded like he didn’t have a fucking care in the world. Which I supposed was true. He didn’t have to go to work in the morning. It sounded like an incomparable luxury. We’d both been working seven-day weeks for years.
“Great. Item one, you quit your job. Item two, you’re maybe going to move to California, but definitely leaving Philly. Item three, you no longer care—or at least no longer have any objections—about my relationship with your sister.”
“That’s an accurate assessment of the conversation, yes.” I heard the sound of something being opened. A beer?
“Are you day drinking?”
“It’s pop. Christ man, it’s only one p.m.”
“I’m just checking. Also, please don’t call it pop. It burns my ears. That beverage is called soda.” He was so midwestern. Eva also called it pop. Through sheer force of nagging, one day I would break them both of the habit.
“Uh-huh. Whatever. It’s pop. Look, I gotta’ go. I have to find a… entirely new career, new place to live, and new purpose.”
I could only shake my head.
“When you put it like that, it does sound like a big lift. Can you call me before you make any other large life decisions? Is that too much to ask?”
“You know I would’ve called you first if it hadn’t been necessary to act immediately.”
“I get that. I’m not complaining. You did what you have to. I’m just asking.”
“I’ll do my best.”
“You sound a helluva lot better.”
“I feel a helluva lot better.”
We hung up and I sat behind the wheel of The Pussywagon and stared for a good five minutes. It took me a second to figure out what I was feeling. Envy. I was feeling pure, undiluted envy.
Dylan and I had been through law school together. We graduated within a few GPA points of one another, got a job at the same firm, and moved to Philadelphia together. We even dated a pair of twins together once (that situation had ended very badly, and we never spoke of it again). But now, Dylan was moving on with his life and going off to chase his dreams or whatever. Without me. It stung a bit.
So, when my phone rung a moment later, I assumed it was Dylan again and answered snidely.
“Oh, did you fail to mention that you also married a stripper last night and plan on moving to Tulsa to manage a trailer park?”
“Um, no.” The voice belonged to Murray. “But that sounds very interesting. And there I was thinking your friends were all as boring as you are C
harlie.”
“Shit. Sorry Murray. I should’ve checked caller ID. What’s up?”
“We’ve been tracking Isaac. Richard set us up with a Stingray, you know those devices that act like cellphone towers?”
“Yeah. The illegal ones?”
“Yes mom. The illegal ones. God, you’re such a goody two shoes. I’m the cop. Anyway, we aimed that baby at Isaac’s cousin’s house. It turns out he is there. But what we got totally turns our investigation on its head. Listen.”
Murray must have put a recording up to the phone because a muffled conversation played.
The first voice was obviously Paul, the driver. I’d sat through Flint and Murray’s interviews of the staff and could now easily identify all their voices.
Paul: Hey man, we talked about this, you weren’t supposed to call me again.
Isaac: The police are at my cousin’s house. They’re looking for me.
Paul: Yeah so what? Of course, they went to your cousin’s place. That was the address I gave them. Listen our deal was simple and didn’t involve your freakin’ cousin. Don’t whine at me because someone was inconvenienced.
Isaac: What did you do? This isn’t about your stupid gambling debt is it?
Paul: Isaac, listen. Don’t call me again. You’re supposed to be in Canada by now. I don’t care what the police told your cousin. I paid you to leave the country and not ask questions; not stay in Philly and interrogate me. You’re doing literally the opposite of what we agreed on.
Isaac: You’re framing me for fucking murder. Did you kill Stephen?
Paul: What exactly did you think this was about? Don’t act dumb. Look Isaac, are you sure you want me to answer that question? Do you really want to know? Think really carefully about this…
Isaac: That’s pretty much you answering the question. Our deal was for me to go to Canada with the cash, so your bookies wouldn’t know your ship had come in. I wasn’t expecting to be chased by cops who think I murdered somebody.
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