by Wendy Heard
Do I call and ask them for guidance? I don’t have time. He’s at the elevators now. I need to make a decision.
The syringe is shaking in my latex-gloved hand. I’m gripping it too tight. A tiny pearl of liquid beads at the razor-sharp tip of the needle and drips onto the concrete floor.
I can’t be caught sitting in his parking space with a syringe full of poison, for fuck’s sake. I maneuver the trembling syringe back into its plastic container and zip it into the fanny pack. Across the garage, the elevator dings. I peek around the side of the car, don’t see anyone and head for the exit, keeping low in front of the cars. I let myself out into the grassy walkway that winds between neatly-groomed flower beds toward the street. I pick up my pace. I try to keep myself from running.
I get into my truck. I fumble the flip phone out of the fanny pack and dial the 800 number. It takes all my concentration to keep my hands steady enough to punch in the six digits, and then I wait.
A man jogs past my window. I jump. He doesn’t even see me; he’s just a normal suburban jogger, and he crosses the street to run up the hill.
The phone buzzes. I flip it open. “Hello?” My voice is shaking.
“Jasmine? Are you all right?”
“I know this guy. Charles. I know him. Should I still do it? No, right? I know him.” My breathing is fast and tight.
“Let’s calm down. Why don’t you start from the beginning. How do you know this target?”
I take a deep breath. The wig is itchy, and I brush its bangs off my forehead. “I know his ex-wife. I was just at her house last night. He came by and we had a fight. Like, my DNA might even still be on him.”
“You were at his ex-wife’s house last night?” the voice demands, and the tone is full of controlled anger. “I thought you were at urgent care last night, Jazz.”
“After that. After I talked to you. She called me. She asked if I wanted a drink. I mean, I’m allowed to, like, live and do normal things, right?”
Another pause. “How do you know the ex-wife?”
“We met at Joaquin’s school. She works there. We’ve hung out a couple times.”
“Hung out? As friends? Or romantically?”
“I don’t know! We kissed. I haven’t bought the fucking ring yet.”
“Jazz. I asked you specifically if you had a significant other. Do you remember that?”
“I didn’t. I don’t,” I protest. “We hooked up one time and this douchebag Charles showed up at her place, posting naked pictures of Sofia on her door, so I knocked him down and Sofia made me let him go and—” I stop. I take a breath.
The line is quiet.
“Hello?” I say. “Are you there?”
“So you’ve met Charles in person. You’ve touched him?”
“Yeah. I mean, I pushed him down and I was choking him out and I was going to hold him there while Sofia called 911, but she told me to let him go. Oh my God, this is why she didn’t want to call the cops. Wait—did she do her murder yesterday? Is that why Charles is up today?” I remember Sofia saying she felt empowered for the first time, that yesterday was a good day in a strange way. Holy shit. She killed someone yesterday. Oh my God. The image of buttoned-up Sofia committing acts of murderous vengeance is so weirdly hot, I almost can’t stand it.
The voice on the phone is gravelly. “We have two problems here. First. The fact that you have a personal connection to another member of our organization violates our first rule of anonymity. You should have disclosed your connection to Sofia right away.”
“How was I supposed to know—”
“Second.” The voice is loud and angry. I shut my mouth. “Twice now you have failed to complete the assignment given to you. Twice. There is a string of people relying on you. And now, twice, you’ve let those people down. Lives are at stake, Jasmine. You are not the only one in a desperate situation. Do you think other people’s children, other people’s lives, are less important than your own?”
“No, of course not!”
There is a prolonged silence that almost makes me think they hung up, and then, “I need a little time to put together a plan for reassignment. What is your work schedule tomorrow?”
Hope flares inside me. They’re going to give me another chance. “I work till four again.”
“Can I call you after work? Will you be alone at five o’clock?”
“I’ll make sure I am. I’m so sorry. I promise I didn’t—”
“It’s fine. I understand,” the voice says, softer now. “I’m sorry I got so angry. This is a high-pressure situation for all involved. These things are going to come up. In the meantime, please do not give Sofia any indication that you’re a part of this organization. Can you do that? Or have you already told her?”
“No, not at all! I had no idea she was in it. First rule of murder club, right?”
“You’re sure you didn’t drop any hint of your involvement? Did she see the flip phone?”
“No. Not at all. I promise.”
“Okay. That’s good. Hang tight, Jasmine, and we’ll speak tomorrow.”
The phone goes quiet. I’m left with my eyes fixed on the little green window. The green light illuminates the tattoo that trails down my left middle finger: Fool me.
Once, the other finger reads.
SATURDAY
19
JAZZ
THE TRADER JOE’S customer parking lot is empty—we don’t open until nine—but the employee side lot is full, and the delivery truck is parked alongside the back gate. As I pull in, Carlos spots my truck and lets go of the pallet jack to wave at me. It escapes from him, and he has to run to catch it before it crashes into the ramp.
I park behind Phillip’s ancient Nissan and drain the last of my 7-Eleven coffee. It’s acidic in my empty stomach. I haven’t eaten and barely slept. My apartment felt empty and hostile, and I didn’t even want to look at the bedroom nook where yesterday I was fantasizing about putting in a bunk bed for Joaquin and me to share. I’m so worried about him, out there in the city somewhere, I don’t feel like I can bear another minute of this horrible not knowing. And yet the minutes keep ticking by.
I grab my purse and get out into the cold, gray morning. I shove my arms into my work hoodie and walk past the delivery truck. In the cluttered receiving dock, Carlos and Phillip are unloading a pallet of boxes. Carlos is built like a bully pit, broad and heavy with meaty hands, the back of his shaved head creased with horizontal wrinkles. He tosses a case of beans to little Phillip, who catches it with a grunt and blunders back a step.
Carlos spots me. “Jazzy J! You’re not in till eight.”
“I couldn’t sleep. Need help with the load?”
“Hell yeah, go clock in. Phillip, go help Henry with chips. Jazz’ll take over for your weak ass.”
Phillip looks happy about this. I clock in in the pit, where a few full-timers are clustered around the computer. The sales floor is bustling with crew members breaking down pallets and stocking shelves. The music is turned all the way up to KIIS FM’s morning show. “Despacito” comes on and the team of women stocking produce shrieks in delight. An answering “Ciaoooo” from the dudes in frozen echoes over the music, and I actually smile a little.
I make it to the yard just in time to catch a case of salad dressing hurled at me by Carlos. “Asshole,” I say, which makes him whoop with delight and launch another box at me, harder this time.
We get into a rhythm. Throw, catch, stack. Throw, catch, stack, in time to the pop music that blares out from the open warehouse doors. The gray fog lifts and the sky lightens. The heaviness of the boxes is satisfying, the burn in my biceps a distraction from the ache in my chest.
It’s Saturday, so we’re crazy busy from the minute we open the front doors. On my lunch, I don’t feel like sitting in the break room, trying to make conversation with everybody, so I eat a burrito in my truck and re
stock the cold produce cases, which look like Black Friday at Walmart even though we just stocked them an hour ago. I grab a flatbed of lettuce boxes from the walk-in fridge and start facing the ravaged kale section. These people and their kale, man. I just don’t get it.
The din around me—overhead speakers playing sixties music, customers arguing with each other, babies crying—forms a shell for me to hide in, and I’m left with thoughts about Joaquin. I check the flip phone for the hundredth time today. I have it in my pocket; I’m afraid to miss a call, but all it tells me is that it’s 1:12 p.m.
A guy with dreadlocks, baggy reggae pants and reflective glasses drifts by me, peering at my chest like he wants to read my name tag. I’m wearing the one Carlos made me, which says Jazzy J. “Do you need help finding something?” I ask him.
He shakes his head and walks away. I return to my kale.
My worries about Joaquin hit me hard right now, maybe because I’m anxious about the call later, maybe because I’m worried about Sofia or because I didn’t sleep. For whatever reason, it’s overwhelming, the sadness and rage, and I feel like I’m going to cry. I squeeze the kale, which pops one of the bags open and sends little shards of greens everywhere. I scramble to pick them up, bumping into a woman in yoga clothes that remind me of Sofia.
If Joaquin and Carol are still in LA like the murder club told me, I bet they plan on going to church tomorrow. Carol never misses church. I wonder if I could go check on him, sneak in, stand in the back. Maybe I could even pull him aside and give him his insulin, sneak it into his pocket. I could pull a murder club and just inject his ass when he’s not looking.
The reggae guy appears at my left elbow. I’m about to ask him what he wants when a woman taps me on the arm. “Are you out of organic basil?” she asks.
I scan the produce island. All I see is regular, pesticide-infested basil. “I’m not sure. Let me check the back for you,” I tell her.
I squeeze through the customers and carts. I have to wait in a crowd near the coffee grinder to get to the warehouse doors, and I’m about to start throwing elbows when I feel a nudge at my back. Someone’s getting too close. I try to step away, but a cart blocks me on either side. I look over my shoulder resentfully, sick of customers who refuse to respect people’s personal space—
The reggae guy is right behind me. He has a yellow syringe.
He lunges at me and tries to poke me with it.
I try to jump back but am blocked by customers. He pushes forward. The needle pokes my stomach, sharp through my shirt.
I thrash away from it, grab the sides of two carts, heave myself up and kick him in the stomach. He flails back into the woman behind him and crashes down on top of her. His syringe goes flying under a produce island. I launch forward swinging and get him in the temple. He catapults sideways onto the floor, scrambles up and bumps into a produce island. It catches his dreads and pulls them off; it’s a wig. He has receding brown hair. I clamber over the fallen cart as he pushes up off the floor and leaps away toward the front of the store.
I’m right behind him, vaulting a shopping cart. It crashes to the ground. People cry out. He runs, slips, grabs a shelf and takes a corner wild. I catch his shirt, pull him back, drop a kick to his leg. His face is wild, terrified. He leaps up, sprints out the front door. I make it onto the sidewalk as he takes a hard right and disappears around the corner.
“Motherfucker,” I whisper.
My whole body is shaking. I feel like I’m coming apart.
They put a hit on me. They assigned me to be murdered.
20
JAZZ
I REST MY head in my arms on the rickety table. The interrogation room—or interview room, as the cop called it to make me feel better about being in here—is cold. The air conditioner ruffles my arm hair, pimpling my skin with goose bumps. I wonder if this is an interrogation technique, some criminal psychology thing where they make suspects confess by freezing them out. I fold my arms over the baggy scrubs they gave me when they took my clothes.
Should I tell the cops about the murder club? I haven’t committed a crime. I have the flip phone in my purse and the murder kit at home in my closet. I could hand it over to the cops and come clean about the whole thing.
But then what? I’m pretty sure Sofia killed someone. She’d end up in jail. And what’s to say the police would believe me? It’s more likely they’d blame me for the other murders, the ones I don’t know anything about.
Could they blame me? I’m sure I have alibis for some of those deaths. That would be enough to convince them I wasn’t involved.
It hits me. The murder at Villains. I was there that night. I could totally be blamed for that one.
I’m fucked. I can’t tell the cops.
The door opens and a woman in a gray suit steps through it. “Jasmine?”
“Yeah.”
“I’m sorry to keep you waiting. I’m Detective Patel. Just give me a moment to catch up while we wait for my partner.” Her English accent is soft around the edges like she’s been here awhile. She sits across from me and sets a folder and a notebook on the table in front of her. She flips through the file folder, frowning as she reads through page after page of text. She has thick black hair pinned in a high bun and is maybe in her early forties. She looks familiar.
“Hey, I know you,” I say as it dawns on me. “I saw you on TV. You were at that press conference.” I stop, remembering that I was on the phone with the murder club when she was giving the press conference. Well, she can’t know that.
She smiles. “My mum always told me I’d end up famous if I moved to Los Angeles. I’m not sure a press conference about a serial killer was quite what she had in mind, but she takes what she can get.” She looks at the file folder. “And you’re Jasmine. Nice to meet you.” She reaches a hand across the table, and I shake it.
A man enters, pulling the door shut behind him. He’s tall and blond with pink cheeks and high cheekbones, maybe Swedish or Norwegian. He says, “I’m Detective Nielsen.” He takes the seat next to Patel. He holds himself very straight and stiff. I’d bet he served in the military before becoming a cop.
“Nielsen is my partner,” Patel explains. “He’s the junior officer. He mainly makes coffee, but today we’re busy, so we thought we’d let him do some real work.”
“Pssht.” He shakes his head, but I can tell he likes the joke.
She winks at me, flips through her folder and says, “I know you gave a statement to the officer on the scene, but I’d like you to go through it once more for us.” She points to a blinking green light and a little screen embedded in the wall above her head. “You’ll be recorded, but you’ll see me taking notes on points of interest.”
I frown suspiciously at the blinking light. “Do I need a lawyer or something?”
“You’re a witness, not a suspect, so, no, you don’t.”
Right. Yes. I totally trust this scenario. This is fine.
Nielsen says, “We want to ask you about this incident at Trader Joe’s first, but then we want to ask you about the show you played at Villains. Did you realize the Villains death was connected to the Blackbird Killings?”
“Not at the time. I thought the guy was having a seizure,” I say truthfully.
He nods. “You’re the first person that we know of who’s been at the scene of two of these attacks, and you’re the second survivor. We’re looking for patterns in the Blackbird Killer’s behavior, and we’re looking for connections between crime scenes. So let’s start with Trader Joe’s. Run us through what happened.”
My heart is beating hard and feels unnaturally high up in my chest. “Well, I was at work like usual. Stocking the cold produce case. The lettuce.”
Nielsen cuts in. “Do you remember what kind of lettuce you were stocking?”
“What kind of lettuce?”
“Yes, Jasmine, what kind
of lettuce,” he says in a tone that makes me want to smack him.
“It was kale. Organic. Trader Joe’s brand. Triple washed.”
Patel makes an impatient gesture. “Go on.”
“Anyway, this white guy with dreads was kind of hanging around close to me, which I didn’t think much of at the time because the store was packed. I asked him if he needed help and he said no, and I went back to facing the lettuce. Excuse me. Facing the kale.”
“Facing?” Nielsen repeats. “What does that mean?”
Jesus. “Pulling the old ones forward and putting the new ones behind. Do you want me to get you a job application?”
Patel snorts a laugh. She covers her mouth with her hand and keeps her eyes on her notebook. Nielsen cocks his head at me, a smile playing around his lips. “I think I’m good for now. Ask me again if we don’t solve the Blackbird case.”
“Like they’d hire you,” Patel says. “How long was he hovering around near you, Jasmine?”
“A few minutes at most.”
“And then what happened?”
“Some lady wanted organic basil, so I walked toward the back room, but the dreadlocks guy was there with this yellow syringe. I couldn’t run away, so I kind of kicked it out of his hand and it fell, and he ran, and I, like, followed him to try to get him to stop, but he escaped.”
Nielsen says, “You didn’t just follow him. You attacked him. Other witnesses said you assaulted him.”
I look back and forth between them. “Am I in trouble for that? I just punched him. He was trying to poke me with a fucking syringe. I saw the news. I heard the warnings.” Mentally, I pat myself on the back. So far, so good.
They seem to accept this. Patel scribbles in her notebook.
On the chair beside me, my purse starts buzzing.
Oh, shit.
Nielsen says, “You can check your phone. I’m sure people are worried about you.”
I try to keep my hands from shaking as I search for my phone in my purse. The familiar green light against the black lining tells me it’s the flip phone vibrating.