by Wild, Nikki
“Help!” I screamed. “Somebody, help—”
And then he slugged me—a good one, right to my jaw. He might as well have hit me with a Mack truck.
There’s a nerve there, in your jaw. One that keeps the lights on upstairs—or shuts ‘em off, if you’re not very lucky. One good hit and it’ll knock you right the fuck out.
As I hit the floor right at the feet of the man who was gonna kill me, I couldn’t help but feel like the unluckiest girl in the world.
Chapter 17
Gunner
Chelsea lived in a rundown apartment complex on the east side of town, which Simon was able to discover due to a domestic violence report she’d filed three months before. From the restaurant the two of us headed straight across town, where I was hoping to get a few answers.
“Do you think she’s home? I mean, she might be at work,” Simon said as we climbed out of my car.
“Well, let’s hope she’s here. Maybe we’ll get lucky.”
That’d be a change of pace_._._._
The two of us entered the dilapidated entryway, with its shabby wallpaper and crusty carpets. Simon and I walked past the unmanned front desk—something that would have meant the pinnacle of class back in the day. From what I could tell, this place hadn’t had anything resembling a receptionist in years.
“No accounting for taste,” Simon muttered as he pulled his coat a little tighter around him. I shook my head and pushed him a little to signal that he needed to pick up the pace.
We mounted the stairs, heading all the way up to the fourth floor. Something about that place gave me the creeps, almost like something was in the air, making everything seem oppressive and claustrophobic. The fuckin’ walls were closing in, and I hated every minute of it.
Near the end of the hallway lay Chelsea’s apartment, 410. The dingy brass letters could hardly even muster the faintest glimmer underneath the fluorescent lighting. Everything about this place seemed to exude hopelessness. In a way, it reminded me of the hospital.
“You want to knock, or—?”
I pushed Simon aside as gently as possible, rapping my knuckles against the peeling red paint on the door. Everything grew a little quieter, as though the entire floor were holding its breath as Simon and I waited for someone—anyone—to answer.
“Who’s there?” came a clear, feminine voice from the other side of the door. “If this is Mr. Caputo, I don’t need to give you rent for another week.”
“It’s not your landlord,” Simon said. “You know Tanya?”
The scratching of a deadbolt being undone reached our ears just before the door jerked open. The door groaned, the wood swollen so much that it had almost sealed shut.
“What’s wrong with Tanya?” The woman on the other side asked. She blinked those big baby blues at me and wrinkled her nose. “Is this about the—”
“Tanya’s fine,” I said, moving in front of Simon. “My name is Gunner. I’m Tanya’s brother.”
“Holy fuck,” she said, her doe eyes going even wider. “She never told me you were hot!”
Simon let out a caw of laughter from behind me, while all I could must was an eye roll. This was my baby sister’s best friend?
And why the fuck hadn’t she told her I was hot?
“Can we come in? We need to ask you a few questions.”
“This is about the guy right? The one from the club—with the mask?”
“The same,” Simon said.
“Gimme a second.”
The door slammed shut for a moment, at which point the scraping continued as Chelsea undid the chain from the top of the door and—with another groan of protest—it swung it wide to let us by.
“I almost didn’t believe her when she’d told me about it. I mean, who fuckin’ does something like that, y’know? That’s some Law & Order-grade shit right there.”
Simon and I gave one another a quick look before turning back to Chelsea as she closed the door behind us, putting all of her locks back in place.
The inside of her apartment was, surprisingly, very nice. The walls were freshly painted, the floors were tiled, and the smell that had bothered me so much out in the hallway was conspicuously absent.
“Are all the apartments this nice?” I asked, looking around.
“Nah,” she said, grinning, “But the landlord is a regular, so he let me get away with a little renovating in exchange for a few private shows.”
“Right,” I said, doing my best to leave my judgement at the door. To Simon, I added, “She’s a stripper. Not a hooker. Put your damn wallet away.” And then to Chelsea again, “You work with Tanya?”
“Yup, for a long time now. We even moved clubs together.”
“So, you two are around one another a lot?” Simon asked.
“Sure, we go out all the time when we’re not workin’. Blow off a little steam at the clubs, and whatnot.”
“What about your brother?” Simon pressed. “Does he know Tanya, too?”
At the mention of her brother Chelsea froze. She almost looked like she’d been physically stuck as she considered the question. Her face went ashen, but her cheeks turned rose red. She was embarrassed and terrified all at the same time.
“How do you know about my brother?”
“He’s got quite a record,” I said, my eyebrows raised. “Restraining orders, arson charges? I mean, he sounds like a pretty troubled guy.”
She folded her arms and drew away from me. “I thought you were a firefighter? What, do you moonlight as a cop or something?”
I held up my hands in mock surrender. “I just want to find out who’s trying to hurt my stepsister, Chelsea.”
Too late. She was already on the defensive.
“Connor’s just a little_._._._different. He was always a weird kid—he didn’t get along with everyone when he was growing up. Y’know, he was one of those ‘outsider’ types.”
I sighed, rubbing the bridge of my nose in frustration. She was trying to protect him, which wasn’t helping me get any answers.
“Chelsea,” Simon cut in, answering my prayers, “you filed more than one of these restraining orders. I know that he’s your brother, but I think deep down you know that he’s a little more than just ‘troubled.’_”
She turned, walking into the kitchen and out of sight of the two of us for a few moments. A few seconds later we heard the clattering of a cutlery drawer before she came back into view, a pint of Ben & Jerry’s in her hand as she plopped down at her dining room table.
Simon and I looked at one another for a moment before making our way over to her as she opened took her first spoonful of Phish Food.
“Connor’s just_._._._” she began, taking another moment to compose her words while she mulled over the ice cream in her mouth. “He ain’t normal.”
“What do you mean?” Simons asked, sitting down across from her at the table. “Normal’s a pretty broad generalization. Not everybody fits normal.”
“Especially not you,” I muttered, giving him a nudge and a look that said, C’mon, dude. Don’t make me be your Bad Cop.
“He was never really been like other kids, y’know?” she elaborated. “He was always doin’ shit that didn’t seem crazy, but just felt a little off. The way he’d look at you, or the way he’d just not speak for days at a time. He liked to hover, too.”
Chelsea punctuated her exposition with another scoop of ice cream.
“But it got really fuckin’ weird after Dad left—piece of shit.”
Christ, does everybody have a deadbeat dad? “Weird how?” I asked her.
“He got this obsession with being ‘the man of the house,’ like now that Dad was out of the picture, he had to take care of everything. He started getting really controlling over a lot of shit, like how I looked and dressed when I went out with friends.” She shook her head, resting it on her palm. “That fucker even tried to ground me once. Can you believe that? My younger brother tried to ground me.”
“What happened when you
said no?” Simon asked.
Chelsea didn’t answer for a long while, her eyes locking onto the reflective surface of her empty spoon, as though trying to gain some kind of confidence from her own reflection.
“He tried to ‘punish’ me,” she whispered, her teeth clenched. “He took me by my fuckin’ hair and threw me on my bed. And then he started to undo his pants.”
She might as well have punched both Simon and I in the gut. Everything in me wanted to leap back in time and rip that fucker’s head off. “He raped you?”
“No, but he sure as hell tried to. Piece of shit couldn’t even get it up—what a fucking joke. I ran as fast as I could and never looked back.”
“You left Connor there with your mother?”
“An abusive bitch, that’s what she was.” Now Chelsea seemed a little remorseful—if only a little. “God only knows what happened between them after I left. I moved in with friends and Connor stayed with her. I was eighteen, and as far as I was concerned, they were perfect for one another.”
“Tell us about the arson,” Simon said, trying to steer the conversation toward Connor’s other criminal activity.
“Yeah.” She nodded, eyes still locked on her reflection. “He tried to set this old theatre on fire, but he got caught before he could light the place up. Connor was nuts about drama and the arts. Mom always called him a faggot whenever he’d bring it up. Those were the times I actually felt bad for him.”
“Did he have a history with fire?” I asked. “Did he get burned when he was a kid?”
“Oh, sure, lots of times. That was how our dad would punish him when he’d been bad—he used to put his hand on the stove, or put his cigarette out on Connor’s arm. Upper arm, though. Where nobody could spot it. The stove thing stopped when Connor’s school called.”
Chelsea sighed and shook her head, wiping away a few errant tears that had begun streaming down her face.
“_‘Fire fixes everything,’ he’d say. Fuckin’ bastard.”
“Do you remember the last time you saw Connor?” I asked her. My heart was racing, I hoped that maybe this would be the lead that would get us closer to him—closer to finding out where this freak was hiding.
I knew it was him. It had to be. And as bad as I felt for Chelsea, as much as I understood how badly she wanted to protect him, when I found her brother, I was going to tear his motherfucking throat out.
“Last time I saw him was at mom’s funeral. I didn’t say a single word to him the entire time. He just stared right at me while the preacher was talking, with this_._._._” She gestured vaguely, disgusted. “This weird-ass smile on his face.”
“And you haven’t seen him since? Do you know where he lives?”
“No, and I never wanted to find out. Last I heard he didn’t even have a job—but what do I know? A lot can change in a year.”
Simon leaned forward on the table. “It’s important that we find Connor, Chelsea—we think that he’s got everything to do with what’s been happening to Tanya. She needs your help on this.”
Chelsea ran her fingers through her hair, lost in her thoughts for a few moments before looking up at me with a half-hearted shrug.
“The only place I remember Connor ever hanging out was at that theatre—the one he tried to torch back in high school. If he’s anywhere, he’ll probably be there. Corner of 32nd and Marathon. You can’t miss it. It’s a fucking eyesore.”
“It’s better than nothing,” Simon said, shaking his head. Chelsea hadn’t been as helpful as I’d hoped, but knowing where Connor hung out was better than leaving empty-handed.
“We’ll get out of your hair, Chelsea,” I said with a sigh, motioning Simon to follow after me. I pulled out my phone to check the time and realized that I hadn’t checked in with Tanya like I’d promised. I needed to do that, especially now that we knew the fucker’s name.
“Just do me a favor, okay?” Chelsea asked, walking us out. “Keep Tanya safe. If Connor is doing all of this shit, I don’t know what he’s willing to do. He’s not the kid I remember.”
“I’m going to do my best,” I said, giving her a smile as she undid all of the locks and opened the door for me and Simon.
As the two of us stepped out into the hall, I dialed the number of the burner phone I’d given Tanya, putting it to my ear as we walked back down toward the lobby once again.
“So, where to next?” Simon asked, his eyebrows raised as he followed me down the first flight of stairs. The phone rang in my ear until it went through to the automated message. I frowned and tried again.
“We’ll check the theatre, I guess. It’s pretty much all we’ve got to work with, at this point.”
We descended a few more flights, and once again the phone rang straight through to the machine. I could feel my stomach starting to drop. I didn’t like this one bit.
“Tanya’s not answering the phone,” I said as we exited the lobby.
“Hey, maybe she’s just in the shower or something. Don’t panic just yet.”
I nodded, but something inside of me told me that something was truly, desperately wrong.
Simon and I climbed into his car, turning over the engine as his radio and police scanner both flared to life in unison—the latter bearing the exact news I didn’t want to hear.
Chapter 18
Tanya
I didn’t even have to open my eyes to know that I was on a stage.
I could feel the lights on my skin. Their heat. Their radiance. I knew I was glowing the way I always did at the Domino. At the Dollhouse. Anywhere they put me, I knew how to shine.
Shine bright like a diamond_._._._shine bright like a_._._._
There was a musical going on in my head. An amalgamation of every shitty stripper song I’d ever heard. I knew how to make it look like the stage was my home, like I’d been born to strip and tease. But it never really felt that way. It was never what I’d really wanted for myself.
Dreams were for rich girls, though. Girls like me didn’t dare to dream. They only ever turned into nightmares, and we couldn’t afford that kind of pain.
“I went to the Garden of Love
And saw what I never had seen.”
I blinked, slowly. Oh, fuck. My head. It was like a hangover, only worse—I hadn’t even had the chance to get drunk first. The darkness was spinning and spilling into the light, bleeding like a drop of ink in a cold glass of water. I couldn’t tell where the shadows ended and the light began—if they ended at all.
I took a deep, shuddering breath of the murk. A spotlight was on me. Everything else was dark.
Except for the glitter of eyes out in the audience. Just one pair behind a mask. Tragedy. Yet I knew the man who wore it was smiling.
“A Chapel was built in the midst,
Where I used to play on the green.”
Those lights were searing. I shut my eyes again and my head lolled back. I almost tipped over and hand to slam my feet down onto the wood beneath me to keep my balance. A chair. I was in a chair—tied to it. My wrists were bound. One of them was smarting. Throbbing. Broken. And the hand, my burned one, was bleeding.
“What the fuck,” I muttered. It sounded like I had a mouth full of marbles.
Tom—no, not Tom, my stalker—I was sure of that now—he stood up from his spot in the audience, weaving between the rows of red velvet chairs. They’d probably been pretty once, but moths and rats and time had worn them all down. Picked some clean. Left nothing but their wood and metal. Left nothing but their bones.
“And the gates of this Chapel were shut,
And ‘Thou shalt not’ writ over the door.”
Against my better judgment, I pulled hard on the cords binding my arms. I pulled and gritted and screamed until long, dark lashes opened up across my skin—bruises the color of the night. I cried and hung my head, digging my nails into the arms of the chair.
I glared, panting, as he mounted the stairs. “What the fuck do you want?!”
He was moving toward me. O
ne foot at a time. So easy, so relaxed, like I wasn’t a hostage. Like I was nothing to him at all.
But there was that gleam in his eyes again—like the edge of a knife glinting at the edge of the spotlight beating down on me. I’d been thinking about paradoxes back in the hotel room with him, and now I understood that I was his paradox—the girl who meant everything, and yet nothing at all.
Part trophy, part empty vessel. I slumped in the chair. I was going to be sick.
He stood beside me. He was wearing opera gloves. Fuck, Gunner had it right—this guy thought he was the Phantom.