This Body's Not Big Enough for Both of Us

by Edgar Cantero

  “These? They’re for Mr. Frank Lyon.”

  “That’s not what I asked—who brought them?!”

  “Er…I don’t know. Some delivery boy, I think…? I never saw him walk in.”

  “Did you see him walk out?!”

  That was the million-dollar question.

  And like most contestants at that stage, the receptionist just stuttered.

  By the time the words “I’m not sure” found their way out of her lips, A. Z. Kimrean had already plucked the rose out of the lilies and dashed down the hallway, jumping over the coffee table where one of Lyon’s sentrymen was sitting and racing toward the express elevator Mojave was about to enter. The red flower was all the emergency signal he needed.

  “Chrysanthemum?” he asked.

  “Not a chrys—who gives a fuck!” Adrian confirmed. “How many men are up there?”

  “Just Spence, Xander’s driver. But he can shoot.” He flicked a magnetic card over a scanner, Adrian thumbed the top-floor button two inches into the panel, and the elevator doors closed.

  * * *

  —

  They reopened onto a landing/foyer mediating between the elevator and the single suite on the thirty-seventh floor. A dreadlocked 260-pound muscleman in a gray suit standing there had enough reflexes to pull a gun at the mere sight of a red petal in the queer-looking mime’s hand.

  “He’s with me!” Danny said, waiting for him to put the gun down. “Has anyone come up?”

  Spence said no and stepped out of the way as Danny and the mime crashed through the penthouse doors.

  Kimrean had to close their eyes and peek through shielding fingers: a nuclear blast of adolescent sun flooded in through the wall-to-wall windows opening onto the terrace. It took a while for the darker blotches to define themselves as a sofa with its own tax district, a Narnia-fitting wardrobe, and a TV measurable in acres. The place looked calmer than some European states—and about as large. On the TV, the hosts of ¡Despierta América! were thrilled to welcome to the studio Golden Globe–nominated actress and star of the upcoming new legal drama Low Suits Cameron Diaz.

  Xander Lyon emerged from the bathroom, alarmed at the impetus of their entrance, clad only in a towel. A very small one.

  “Danny? What the hell is—”

  He cut himself off when he noticed Kimrean—or, more precisely, the red rose in their hand.

  Danny used up the pause to catch his breath, then checked with A.Z. They were still standing alert, muscles taut, eyes fixed on their naked host, mouth curled back in a snarl to say, “Grr.”

  “Adrian!” Danny called.

  Kimrean shook their head, but didn’t take their eyes off the naked man. Perhaps the one adjective nobody would use to describe Xander Lyon’s naked torso was disappointing.

  And yet.

  Xander stood still, too deep in confusion to allow anger to take over while the marionette zoomed in, examining his right side, head tilting to appreciate the hidden details. Not an inch of his body betrayed its resemblance to a Renaissance sculpture. Not even the amount of chest hair. Not even the aftershower glow.

  Not even the number of fresh wounds: none.

  “Danny, what the hell is happening here?” the gangster dared ask, despite having formed his own answer a few seconds ago.

  Danny didn’t need the close-up to reach the same conclusions.

  “We think you’re in danger,” he said.

  Adrian fired a few Gatling rounds:

  ADRIAN: How many entrances?

  DANNY: One.

  ADRIAN: Elevators?

  DANNY: No other reaches this floor.

  ADRIAN: Stairs?

  DANNY: Outside, on the landing.

  Kimrean tossed the flower on the sofa and headed for the balcony.

  It blazed painfully white. A table and a couple deck chairs sheltered under the yellow awning. A few rainwater lakes persisted on the table; the ascending sun would evaporate them in a few minutes.

  Kimrean leaned over the rail. Thirty-seven floors below, where the parallel lines of the façade converged, miniature cars honked at each other with their cute toy horns. A little closer, a curtain was swinging in the wind. Five floors below.

  When they returned inside, Kimrean and the sun spots in their retinas, Danny was still waiting for answers.

  “So?”

  “He’s in the building.”

  “All your reasoning was wrong,” Danny accused. “Every single thing was wrong.”

  “Not everything,” Adrian defended himself, pointing at the gangster. “He’s still banging his stepmother.”

  That effectively killed the dialogue right there. Even the television set glitched.

  XANDER: Excus—

  “Your toes,” Adrian felt compelled to reply, pointing at Xander’s feet. “You’re a size eight, but you wear an eight and a half, don’t you? Shoes in your size cause you discomfort because of your big toe: it’s quite shorter than the second. That’s called brachydactyly of the hallux, or Morton’s toe, and it’s a Mendelian trait, caused by a dominant allele. Your father doesn’t have it—he was wearing sandals when we met—so you inherited it from Miss Guatemala. But Ursula has it too, and her mother doesn’t—you can see her feet in the sarong picture from your wallet. So actually, not only are you banging your stepmother, but you fathered your stepsister.”

  A few parsecs away, on the TV, the audience of ¡Despierta América! burst into distant applause.

  Someone knocked on the door and opened it without waiting for an answer. Spence stuck his dreadlocks in, tried to read the room, somehow missed all the signs, and spoke anyway: “Uh…sorry. Mr. Lyon, the elevator isn’t working.”

  Adrian, at least, reacted to that.

  “Close your mouth and secure the room,” he ordered Danny. “I need a gun.”

  Danny pushed his chin up, still dazed, and pulled out his Desert Eagle.

  “And your radio, if you’re so kind,” Adrian solicited Spence, while squeezing the pistol into their pants. Danny nodded at Spence, who grudgingly handed the queer-looking mime his walkie-talkie. “Stay in contact,” Kimrean said before his exit.

  And they left, evidently not concerned with the aftermath of the bombshell they had just dropped.

  * * *

  —

  A service door blending into the landing led into the stairwell. The appel du vide invited A.Z. to stare down the shaft, mercifully too narrow for anyone to fall. A fractal pattern of rails and steps framed the microscopic bottom.

  Kimrean ran down to the thirty-sixth floor, opened the door, checked the elevator. It wasn’t there.

  He checked the thirty-fifth, thirty-fourth, and thirty-third floors. On the thirty-second he found a toilet paper roll wedged under the elevator doors, preventing them from closing. Facing the elevator, a red-carpeted corridor yawned into the east.

  The walkie-talkie in their hand crackled: “Adrian?”

  Kimrean whispered into the mouthpiece: “Not now.”

  He tiptoed ahead into the corridor, like a human cannonball disappearing into the mouth of the barrel. Movement sensors woke up the lamps as they went. Not the flimsiest noise ruined the suspense.

  They reached the room at the end—3210. They ducked and felt the crack under the door. A gentle breeze rocking the microfibers of the carpet chilled their fingertips.

  A card reader was on sentinel duty. Kimrean offered it the only magnetic card in their wallet: that of the public library. They inserted it between the door and the frame at lock level and pushed with their shoulder. The door clacked open.

  They kicked it the rest of the way and barged in, pistol in hand.

  A ghostly curtain swayed in and out the open window in the breeze, giggling like a dead little girl’s ghost in a Shirley Jackson setting. Kimrean had to shield
their eyes from the noisy sunlight to make out the taut vertical nylon rope tied to the radiator.

  They ran to the window and gazed up, away from the distant traffic. The sun wouldn’t allow them to judge how far up the line reached, but it was an easy bet.

  “Danny?” A.Z. radioed. “Check the balcony again.”

  * * *

  —

  “Roger.”

  Danny headed for the screen door, leaving Xander getting dressed and Spence watching the TV, where a prestigious nutritionist was just joining the kitchen set next to Cameron Diaz to debate the benefits of soy milk. Danny’s hand instinctively reached into his jacket for the gun Kimrean had borrowed. He regretted that as he slid open the screen door and stepped out onto the scorched terrace.

  His sunglasses barely countered the solar outburst. He walked the full length of the balcony, checking under the table and the deck chairs.

  Then he saw it, on the far end of the rail: a grappling hook.

  He went for the radio when he felt the gentle kiss of a 9mm barrel on the back of his head.

  * * *

  —

  On the thirty-second floor, Kimrean inventoried the room one last time: complimentary candy on the pillows, Do Not Disturb sign hanging from the door handle, late-night snack menus on the dresser. Everything was as it had been left by the cleaning staff.

  Except for that key card on the bedside table. That had been left by a guest. One who had left either through the window, or not at all.

  Adrian stayed on the balls of his feet, not risking another step while he mentally figured out the room’s blueprints and listed all the possible hiding places. Bathroom. Walk-in closet. King bed.

  He first skipped toward the bathroom, never entering: translucent shower screen, zero space behind the door. Nowhere to hide.

  He then hopped toward the closet.

  Coat hangers.

  It was then that Zooey realized she had a semiautomatic in her hand.

  “Is this thing loaded?”

  And much to Adrian’s surprise, she fired a round at the ceiling.

  And even to Zooey’s surprise, a ninja in white camo rolled out from under the bed and slammed them down to the carpet.

  * * *

  —

  Standing in front of the panoramic TV, Spence commented, “Man, I gotta start drinking soy milk.”

  He turned to get an amen and saw Danny out on the balcony, playing human shield to a hooded black figure holding a gun to his head.

  Spence almost made it to the first s in boss before a 9mm round went straight into his frontal lobe.

  The 260-pound driver fell like a downed ballista elephant just as Xander Lyon banzai’ed out of the bedroom, firing blindly at the blazing windows in the general direction of the assailant without any previous assessment of the situation.

  There was a discrete quantum of time in which Danny Mojave understood, as he caught sight of a lucky Taurus round in midair zooming toward his skull, that no previous assessment from anybody could have spared his life. No matter how well he played his cover, no matter how much the bad guys trusted him, in the end, he would always be a pawn, a disposable extra to someone like Xander Lyon when the latter’s life was at stake. In that moment of truth, no loyalty, no honor among gangsters, could stop that bullet for him.

  The screen door did. It blocked and deflected the bullet, shattering in the process and offering the killer a clear shot through to send two more rounds unobstructed into Xander Lyon’s chest.

  Danny seized that extra second of life to make a quick profile of his assailant: five-foot-five, lightweight, small feet.

  Wounded.

  He elbowed the guy’s left side, the shocked gasp betraying he had hit a very tender spot. He squirmed out of the chokehold, grabbed the murderer by the arm, and swung him toward the rail, hitting his head. The killer lost the Beretta to the void.

  * * *

  —

  Adrian’s brown eye was silently reprimanding Zooey’s green one for the earlier gaffe when each of them noticed the other reflected on the shiny twelve-inch steel blade with which Yu Osoisubame, the Phantom Ninja, was about to turn them into his twentieth and twenty-first confirmed kills with one strike. And probably get a bonus score for the combo too.

  It was in moments like this—say, lying on the floor of a hotel room with a ninja assassin straddled over them, pressing a knee to their neck and holding a traditional Okinawan stabbing sword over their heart, ready to pin them down like a collectible moth—when the Kimreans were most motivated to put aside their differences and cooperate for the common good. In the tenth of a second before the sword descended, Adrian gained control of their left hand and brought the walkie-talkie over their body so that the blade shish-kebabbed the whole device and barely stung their chest, with the point just jutting through the impaled plastic, the momentum bringing the ninja low enough for Zooey to attempt a headbutt.

  And it succeeded. Zooey chortled with delight at the sound of somebody else’s nose crunching like something you step on in a movie theater.

  * * *

  —

  The killer in the balaclava seemed to ricochet off the rail and charge again in pain-fueled anger before Danny deflected him with a haymaker that sent the lightweight rival sliding to the right end of the terrace. He ran to finish him, but before he could the enemy had stumbled back up and met Danny halfway. He deserved points for morale.

  That was the last noble thought to cross either contender’s mind before they crashed into each other and Danny slammed him back to the floor, landing on top—a circumstance the killer used for a very ungentlemanly knee strike to the crotch.

  In that lightning of pain, the tables flipped. As did the contenders. They rolled over, bad guy fist-hammering the good guy, and over again, crashing into the rail. Danny caught a glimpse of the miniature life teeming thirty-seven floors below before noticing the actually important element around them that would decide the fight. The killer noticed it a little earlier.

  In a lightning-speed movement, the killer unfixed the grappling hook and wrapped the nylon rope around Danny’s neck. Strangled, Danny could only attempt another elbow shot at the rival’s side, but the rival had learned his lesson—he would not expose his Achilles’ heel twice.

  Inside, Xander Lyon writhed on the carpet with two bullets cozying up to his vital organs.

  * * *

  —

  Kimrean kickflipped to their feet, tossed the sai-and-walkie-talkie kebab aside, and replaced it with a much better weapon: a rolled-up magazine.

  The Phantom Ninja too stood up and upgraded to a katana. A gleam from the yard-long blade momentarily blinded the white-collars in the office building across the street.

  KIMREAN: Boy, that escalated quickly.

  In the next ten seconds, more things happened than in ten hours’ worth of Danish cinema. A.Z. dodged the first swing by bouncing backward and hitting the table behind them; they lay back on the table and spread their legs to avoid the next downstroke; they rolled back on their head to dodge the third slash, off the table and onto the chair at the other end, tipping over the chair and rolling backward again to end up sitting against the wall.

  Their hat fell off and landed on their lap. And that was the most crucial event in those ten seconds.

  It was Zooey’s scattered attention that perceived the single raindrop on the fedora. But it was Adrian who found it relevant.

  Rain. When? It had stopped raining when he got in the car this morning. Car. San Carnal. Café. Hotel. Lobby. Elevator. Penthouse. Terrace. Yellow awning. Raindrops on the awning, shaken off by—

  KIMREAN: There was somebody hiding on the awning over the terrace!

  They pushed against the wall behind them to slide under the table just before the ninja dove in and sank the katana into the floor, then head
ed off to the minibar. They opened the door to block off the fifth thrust, which cleanly split halfway through the refrigerator door before the sword got stuck just six inches short of slicing the whole thing in two. Zooey seized the chance to grab a few cans of beer and started playing the maracas with them, stepping back for some playroom.

  With a scream that even a professional anime voice actor would condemn as overacted, the ninja managed to tear the katana out of the fridge door, just in time to fend off the can of beer that the P.I. had hurled at his face. The blade sliced the can in two, spraying foam all over the battlefield.

  “Good idea, Max—let’s play Fizzball!”

  They threw another two cans with a .5-second interval; the ninja lobbed away the first but only managed to bat the second; it hit the floor and immediately glided toward the opposite wall, propelled by the jet of beer gushing out of a fissure.

  “Whoa! Time bomb! We got a time bomb!”

  Zooey jumped out of the path of the can as it ricocheted off the corner, tunneled under the bed, bounced off the bedside table, and rocketed toward the ninja, who this time managed to slice it in two.

  Which was the distraction Adrian was waiting for to step in and bash the ninja’s head in with an ashtray. Zooey retrieved the katana, Adrian went for the key card, and both of them left the room. The ninja could wait.

  The corridor lights lit up again as they zoomed toward the elevator, flinging the katana down the laundry chute on their way.

  * * *

  —

  Danny’s consciousness was beginning to flicker away. His blood-smeared, bloodless fingers were losing their grip on the nylon rope squeezing his larynx. His vision was tunneling. He had not an ounce of fight left in him. Maybe half an ounce.

  Which he decided to stow away for the moment, until his attacker had finished dragging him back against the rail and tying the cord around his neck to one of the posts.

  In the penthouse, Spence was already cruising the Styx. Xander lay bleeding at the foot of the sofa, a desperate hand trying to lure the rounds out of his abdomen.