(Gunshot.)
Marlow pushed the volume up to eleven. The following moan sounded like the whole building was in pain.
(Gurgle of blood.)
“Did he just say ‘Why?’ ” Marlow realized.
“The bullet’s gone through his lung,” Kimrean explained. “Now the murderer is showing him why.”
(Breathing.)
(Fast, heavy breathing.)
(GUNSHOT.)
Dawes flinched at the sound of the blast.
“Does this tell us anything new?” Marlow polled, dialing down the volume.
“It does to me,” Adrian said. “It tells me Danny should cut down on the pot.”
“Who?”
“An ear-witness. He told me the two gunshots were a second apart; that’s a five-second gap. He was high at the time. Which also explains how he practically bumped into the murderer without seeing him.”
“How are five seconds significant?” Marlow asked.
“They are,” Dawes said. “It’s a trained assassin’s mark: a body shot to bring the target down and a cooler, well-placed round to the head.”
Kimrean whirled on their chair, addressing Marlow, pointing at Dawes: “And he’s a good listener too! What’s not to like?” (Whirls again, now facing Dawes.) “Only you’re mistaken; the second shot is not ‘cool.’ Listen to the breathing.”
Kimrean leaned over to click-select a hill range by the end of the sound file and press play. Breathing. Fast, heavy breathing.
“That’s Mikey,” Dawes ventured.
“No, it can’t be,” Adrian rebutted. “Mikey’s lungs are filled with blood; he wouldn’t sound like that. That is our murderer. And he’s not panting from physical exertion; he’s having an anxiety attack. This guy isn’t cool; he’s losing his mind. (Back to Marlow.) No reliable hit man takes their job to heart like that. This is personal. Mikey didn’t say ‘Yu’; he said ‘You.’ ”
Marlow nodded, a man convinced by the force of arguments. But the frown was still there.
“What about the flower?”
“Shit poopoo caca feces, always the stupid flower,” Kimrean snarled. “It’s a decoy. It’s not even a chrysanthemum.” They lay back, tipped their hat to scratch their hair. “I was expecting some verbal context, but obviously the intruder didn’t come to confer. You listened on Mikey for days; did he make any enemies?”
Dawes took a nearby notepad, flipped to a random page, and started reading.
“Wednesday the third, Mikey has a quarrel with one of his lieutenants in L.A.; he accuses him of being soft on his pushers, threatens to cut the guy’s balls off and hang them from the rearview mirror of his car. Thursday the fourth, Mikey on the phone with a lawyer in San Carnal; he promises he will steal his car, drive it into the guy’s house, and then set it on fire. Thursday the fourth, afternoon, Mikey almost drowns the pool boy because there’s a leaf in the water. Should I go on?”
“No, I get the picture.”
“But what about Frankie?” Marlow jumped in, visibly more engrossed with the case than he’d been in days. “Wasn’t he shot earlier today, with a chrysanthemum on his chest?”
“Not a chrysanthemum.”
“Whatever,” he insisted, now eager to score a point. “The question is, Mikey and Frankie didn’t share many contacts; they hardly saw each other. In fact, Mikey despised Frankie.”
“Everyone despised Frankie,” Adrian acknowledged. “He lacked guts. In a family of sharks, that made him a pariah. And yet he didn’t pose a threat; he didn’t feel like a threat; he had only one bodyguard and his club bouncers. Who could hate him so passionately?”
“Maybe it’s not the same killer,” Dawes suggested.
“Flower,” Marlow objected.
“The flower’s a decoy, you said it,” Dawes argued, pointing at Kimrean. “The first killer uses a flower to blame the Japanese; the second killer uses a flower to blame the first killer.”
Kimrean nodded. They did find that interesting.
“Good point,” they judged, standing up. “I’ll leave now, but you guys have made great progress. Close the shop tonight, go home, have a shower and a good night’s sleep.” Their left hand pointed at Marlow. “Then you go home, change your necktie.”
Marlow simply leaned forward and asked, “Has anyone told you before that you are weird AF?”
“Many times. Often right after I bring a crucial clue to their attention or I save their life,” Kimrean said from the threshold, and pointed at the surveillance equipment one last time. “Stay tuned, if you will. You may hear some interesting things.”
They closed the stucco display behind them and left the shop. They didn’t see how Agents Marlow and Dawes were left alone in the back room, one sitting by the computer, the other standing against the wall by the empty salad boxes.
Dawes said, “I thought you liked beets. Why do you always make me order them?”
“Because you like them.”
7
INT. A. Z. KIMREAN’S OFFICE—DUSK
An orange sky peeked through the blinds, along with the sound of waste boats and seagulls heading home for the night. Kimrean moved the white king’s bishop to h5.
“So, an efficient assassin. Who also has personal issues. And who signs with a red flower but is not with the Red Mums.”
They completed a half orbit around the chessboard and peeped back at the dying day through the broken window. (Close-up: skin pores south of mascaraed eyes yawn at the western sun.)
“Who is it?”
Kimrean twirled on their feet, nudged a black pawn to e3, then drifted toward the desk to gulp down a mouthful of bourbon straight from the bottle.
“Victor Lyon?”
They U-turned back to the chessboard.
“Too old. Too tall. Too heavy. Too attached to his children. And to his cartel. And to his cane. Just shut up.”
(Bxg6.)
“And if you can spare a moment, try and stop that bishop that’s wreaking havoc in your rear guard. No rush.”
(Takes their hat off, rubs their hair like a golden retriever evicting fleas.)
“I don’t know why I keep playing you. Chess is a game of logic; you’re incapable of rational thought.”
(Nd4. Steps on the stairway. A furtive smile slithers across their face.)
“It’s not a game of logic; it’s a game of wit. And I’m witty as fuck. I’m the queer Oscar Wilde. And you play me ’cause you have no one else to play.”
Someone knocked on the door. A wavy silhouette had crystallized on the glass panel.
“Hello?”
A.Z. watched the door open a crack and the femme fatale peep inside, a flame of Irish hair fending off the shadows.
“Don’t you ever turn the lights on?” she wondered.
“Never! It’s sexier this way.”
She stepped in, for some reason ignoring the broken glass swept into a corner and the bullet acne on the walls. She was wearing a who cares about her clothes, they’re just padding words meant to highlight her awkwardness. She breathed in, as deeply as her corset allowed, incidentally appreciating the booze-and-sweat aroma of the Kimricave.
“Have you made any progress with my case? The man who spies on me in my bedroom?”
“Yeeeees, of course not.” Kimrean folded their arms. “I haven’t given it a thought since you last left this room.”
“Okay,” she said, surprisingly not surprised by that answer. “Then about the money I paid in advance—”
“Yes, you can give me the rest in a check, if you wish.”
The woman froze once more, as disoriented as she should have grown accustomed to be.
“Nonononono wait, kidding kidding kidding!” Zooey exclaimed, stepping forward as the femme stepped back, hands talking at twice the speed of h
er mouth. “It’s a complex case, could take me a few days, I should go to your house and comb your bedroom, might as well go tonight, we could grab something for dinner and it was your maid.”
Zooey facepalmed. The femme needed a little more time to react, having to separate all the ramblings from the actual mystery solution at the end. And once that sank in, she responded with only two words, poorly chosen: “What…My…”
Adrian rose up from their palm.
“Okay, here’s what happened: yesterday when you visited you had a little yellow-brown stain on the neck of your dress: it was iodine—very characteristic. The previous night, your maid was stalking you hidden in the rosebushes; you noticed, screamed, she ran away and scraped her fingers on the thorns. The next morning, while helping you lock that vine-leaf necklace you were wearing, she stained your dress with the disinfectant on her fingertips.”
A blank lapse followed, perhaps a couple seconds longer than what it had taken Adrian to deliver the exposition.
The femme was simply left to inquire: “If you knew all this from my first visit, why didn’t you tell me then?”
The green eye glinted, incapable of lying. “I wanted to see you again.”
The femme pulled out a checkbook from her purse, scrawled a few lines, ripped out the check, shoved it into the extended hand opposite, and walked out. Zooey monitored the action, pouting like an abandoned dog. She remained silent after the femme left, listening to the heels fading out down the stairway for good.
Slowly over Zooey’s face was cast first a saddened frown, then a threatening snarl.
“You asshole!” she said, crumpling the check into a ball and throwing it to the floor. “I really liked her! She was special!”
“She wasn’t special—what are you babbling about? She was literally the first woman to knock on that door. And she was a terrible femme fatale.” They retrieved the check and hand-ironed it on the table. “If that’s all it takes for you to fall in love, you can just as well wait for the next one. But not now, of course: it’s the teeth-pummeling thug’s turn.”
They were walking toward the living area when they suddenly froze halfway, retraced their steps, exited the office through the open door, and stopped on the landing. Then they reentered the office.
And then Zooey threw a left to their face.
There was a fraction of a second, an aesthetically perfect photo still, during which their feet were off the floor, their eyes were shut down by the punch’s shockwave rippling through the face, and Kimrean—detached from the material world, cruising through the ether after a few drops of saliva that flew faster than the body by virtue of their lower mass—was pure Kimrean, with no other sensory stimulus than self-inflicted pain—100 percent idealism, perfect poetry.
And then they landed on the floor like a passed-out buffalo.
Immediately, one arm locked its opposite and a leg curled around the other leg and five fingernails dug into the other side’s side.
“You selfish douche! I wanted to see her!” Zooey bawled. “Why do you always push them away?! Why?!”
Outside, seagulls and rooftops stared bemusedly at the sight of a human worm writhing on the floor of its office, trying to punch itself again, dodging its own fist, and smashing its knuckles on the floorboards. Some seagulls hollered at that.
“Gaaah! (Shielding their injured left under their arm.) I push them away?! I push them, you demented goat?!”
(They stumble up, Quasimodoing toward their desk.)
“Where are you going? Wh—No! Nonononono please wait no no I’ll be a good girl I promise I promise I—”
She didn’t have a chance. Adrian yanked open the desk, grabbed the case with Gwen’s syringes, and spread the contents over the table. The left hand tried to slap the needles off the desk, but the right one saved one just in time; it drove it to the mouth, uncapped it with their teeth, and stabbed it into the left biceps like a wooden stake into Christopher Lee’s chest.
Two heartbeats were enough to carry the Diarctorol wave toward the skull and have it break against the brain like a typhoon on an aircraft carrier, flushing the crew off the deck. There was no other metaphor they both could agree on. For Adrian, it was like wings sprouting out of his spine, like the ropes snapping apart between rival ships in the maelstrom in the third Pirates of the Caribbean movie, like two white hands grasping each other and their fingers loosening and then slipping away, until the fingertips just kiss each other good-bye for the last time and Zooey gets lost in the quietly violent current toward the calm after the storm.
And Adrian, temporally weakened, accepting the physical pain for the sign of victory it is, listens to the seagulls and the waste boats outside and peacefully drops to the floor, finally alone.
* * *
—
Daytime and decent visiting hours had long slipped away when the groaning wooden staircase forewarned the arrival of a new visitor. It was a femme’s turn.
Only this time it was a true femme fatale: a deceptive, strong woman forged over fire and cooled in liquid nitrogen, escaping from a turbulent past and ready to dump her baggage on the first samaritan to fall for her charms. An angel of bronze skin and Kuiper Belt black eyes, whose sinusoidal silhouette on the door spelled only one word: trouble.
Or would have, had her silhouette been tall enough to jut more than six inches up into the glass panel.
She knocked, triggering a swift response from the dark-dwelling creature inside:
“Yes, I heard about God; no, he doesn’t exist; yes, your ancestors were as wrong as you are!”
Two seconds fluttered by. She knocked again.
Kimrean stomped to the door and almost tore it open.
Ursula Lyon dropped her backpack on the floor, spherical droplets of rain still unbroken on her coat shoulders.
“Hi.”
Adrian arched an eyebrow, peeped out into the landing, expecting to catch a young unwilling mother or the Easter Bunny hurrying away, then focused back on the little girl.
“How did you know where I live?”
“You said you lived near City Lights; I asked around in the pubs. You know, you leave a vivid impression on bartenders.”
“What are you doing here?”
“Somebody wants to kill me.”
“Have them call me tomorrow; I’m busy now.”
He tried to close the door, but Ursula stuck a fluorescent Rampage shoe in the gap.
“I need protection. I know you all think that since I’m eleven I must be a moron, but I can see the pattern: someone is killing Victor Lyon’s children.”
“His sons,” Adrian corrected.
“How are you so sure?”
“I’m not, but if you keep hiding we’ll never find out.”
Ursula exhaled, shifted her weight to her other leg. She was wearing Adventure Time leggings under denim shorts.
“Can I speak to Zooey?”
Kimrean seemed to check, the brown eye glancing for a moment behind the curtain of hair covering the left side of their face.
“No.”
He then checked the window. He raised a foot and retrieved a folded piece of paper from inside his high-top Converse.
“Okay, there are no trains now, so here’s what you’re going to do.” He unfolded a check for $150. “Take this, go get a room at La Bohème—it’s a hotel near here on Columbus Ave., all decorated with Beat memorabilia and pictures of Kerouac and Cassady looking all BFF in the bathrooms; you’ll love it. Tell the man at the counter you’re Adrian Kimrean’s guest. Not Zooey—Adrian. Got it?”
Ursula didn’t even motion to take the money.
“You can’t just send me away. There’s a killer on the loose.”
“They’re as likely to find you here as in a hotel. More likely, as a matter of fact.”
“But you can’t
send me into the streets, at night, all alone!”
“Should’ve thought about that before leaving your house, at night, all alone!”
“They don’t care about me there—they don’t know I’m gone! They don’t notice me!”
“I so envy them.”
“Do you even know how it feels?!” she challenged. “Being there, in a crowded room, and no one actually seeing you?!”
“Yes!” Adrian roared. “I know exactly how it feels!”
The rain patter on the window shushed them down like an offended librarian. Ursula took the hint.
“Can I stay here tonight? Please?”
Adrian seemed to wrestle back a cussword caravan. He managed to subdue it and swallow it, washed it down with a deep breath.
At last, he stepped aside. Ursula inhaled as if she were about to raid a lost temple and crossed the threshold.
Teeth-pummeling thugs all over the underworld beamed a carnivorous smile: it was their turn again.
* * *
—
The office lay in undersea darkness, except for the street lighting sneaking through the windows (one whole, one broken), drawing the furniture in pale colors over black like a Mike Mignola frame. Ursula noticed the scorch mark on the kitchen wall over the splintered stump of what must have been a kitchen cupboard.
Kimrean pulled the sheets off the bed, inspected the mattress. He flipped it over, winced, then flipped it over again.
“Try to stay on the white half,” he advised, flapping the sheets back on top. “Toilet’s over there.”
“Yeah, I can see it from here,” Ursula said, spying through the P.I.-shaped hole in the wall of the alcove, opening onto the ruins of a bathroom.
“I’m working on your case right now, so it’s in your best interest not to disturb me.”
With that he resettled to the middle of the room, a few steps away from the spotlighted dais with the chessboard, and stayed there, gaze strayed, lit in waxing first quarter.
Ursula remained expectant for a minute or two before she understood that that was Adrian working. Once she did, she sat on the bed and made a point to breathe softly.
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