The Least of My Scars

by Stephen Graham Jones

  Riley. She’s been with me now for two years.

  And I’ve been here for three.

  And Jack—it’s stupid.

  Probably what happened was he was trying to flip the new Belinda, Singer’s replacement blonde, and she freaked, swallowed all her meds, end of story.

  Unless Singer left a year between daddy and daughter for some reason. Unless he popped Detective Jack on the street one day himself, plenty of witnesses so it’d be sure to be legend, then, just as the pension checks were starting to stack up in Riley’s college account, he took her away as well. Told her what everybody’d been saying at the funeral was wrong. That he knew where her daddy was, that her daddy gave him this badge so she’d know it was true.

  Meaning that, if it was Belinda Dead Detective Jack had been trying to flip, then she didn’t kill herself. Not exactly. Unless walking into my line of sight can count for suicide.

  Which, yeah.

  But the suicide Mary’s talking about.

  Maybe that’s just what Singer told around town.

  Otherwise he’d look weak, vulnerable.

  Better to let her die a hero, let her choose death rather than betrayal, and then punish the cop who put her into that position. And his daughter as well, so the rest of the force would know to stay away. So everybody would know that this guy, he’ll go after family too. And years later.

  Look what he did to me, I mean.

  Dispose of the evidence.

  The fuck.

  Not that I wouldn’t appreciate the stupidity of it all either, if it really went down this way. The stupidity of Mary not being after me for her daughter, in a dark room next door, but for her husband, who I never even touched, or saw. But she’s right, by taking Belinda into that storage room that day, I did kill him all the same. So she should be after me after all.

  It’s like it was meant to be, really, me and her.

  Clockwork. Fate. Loaded dice.

  Only, what if she knows all this somehow. Is leading me to think it, because it’s more real coming from me?

  One thing you have to learn to watch out for, it’s when you notice that all the bricks you’ve got lined up around you, they’re too even, too easy to count.

  What that tends to mean is that you put them there yourself. And that they can all come falling down on you at any moment.

  So I go with the next blonde instead. The unpoetic version. The one where daddy and daughter both got it during the same ice cream trip, only daddy went down hard, in the street, a very public hit, and then had to watch—and this I believe—his daughter be carried off into the night, her reaching back for him, him reaching ahead to her, fifty yards between their hands already.

  That’s more like it.

  “Riley,” I cut in then, right through whatever line of bullshit Mary’s trying to feed me.

  Silence. Nothing. All the sound in the world sucked back into one magic little phone.

  “What did you say?” she asks, something shrieky and perfect in her voice. It makes my naked scalp crawl.

  I smile one side of my mouth, can’t help it.

  “Her name is Riley,” I say, then hang up before she can ask if she heard right.

  Was, or is?

  Yeah. Exactly.

  Instead of carrying the mannequin back down to her upside-down post, I nail a cabinet hinge sideways over the corner of the trap door, smooth the carpet back down over it.

  Downstairs doesn’t exist for me anymore.

  I’m sorry to the others down there, but—but it’s like when you find a baby bird on the sidewalk, and try to cradle it back up to the nest. When Momma Bird floats home, she takes one sniff and her eyes go dull with disappointment. If she had lips, she’d purse them in right then, just keep to herself for a bit.

  What I’m saying’s that downstairs apartment, and the one under it, they don’t smell right anymore. Probably won’t for years.

  And upstairs. Upstairs, I don’t know.

  For the time being, I take the headboard apart, cut it, nail it over the hole then nail the closet door shut too, only hitting each nail five times, even if it’s not all the way in.

  Like I need any of the clothes in there. Nothing I can’t write on the list in the lefthand apartment anyway.

  Was it like walking through Heaven though, being up there?

  I can’t tell yet.

  Just like this place, my place, but paler. Less there. And empty, the waiting kind of empty, not the everybody’s dead and gone kind.

  It didn’t even care, either, me cutting on the kitchen cabinet. If it could have, it would have even leaned into it, I think, or at least stretched the other way from the chainsaw, to tighten the wood on top, make it easier to get through.

  And—shit.

  The refrigerator door. It’s fucking open.

  The light’ll burn through the linoleum in the kitchen first, and then’ll be a dim glow in my ceiling, tapered like a coffin.

  Not what you want to see at three in the morning.

  Step into the light, Billy. We’re all nice up here.

  Yeah. Never heard that one before.

  I push through the door to the lefthand apartment, write it on the list, for somebody to turn that damn light off. But then I erase it with the side of my fist. The less people know about it, the better.

  It must have been a rush for her, though. Dashboard Mary. To be up there, walking through that pale reflection of here. Was it like she’d been picturing for so long? Did she put her fingertips to the walls and keep them there, sure she could hear the echoes of saws, of promises, of voices raised high and then cut off all at once, or was it all just practice for her, a walk-through, the camera in her head snapping, snapping?

  I’ve got to remember that too, though, that she knows the floor plan now. That if she runs, it’ll be with direction, not just wild, anywhere.

  And—and why even hang a body up there in the window? That’s the real question.

  She doesn’t want the cops here, right? Has bigger plans for me, I’m so scared, blah blah blah.

  Too, how would she have known which mannequin to nab?

  For a bad moment, a possibility I have to shy away from physically, I try to put together what I know for sure of her.

  All it comes down to is a name on a phone. A woman walking away, across the street. Hands on a Girl Scout’s shoulders.

  Conversations that I can’t start thinking I was having with myself.

  A series of snapshots that I couldn’t have dug from a dead detective’s pockets, cut all the faces from, so I could be him.

  No.

  A Girl Scout uniform folded into the oven.

  Cookies I shouldn’t have eaten.

  A mannequin hung by the neck in the upstairs apartment.

  I back my way out of the bedroom, apologize to the wet-dry vac for the hundredth time—manners, manners—shrug into the plastic sleeves. The gas mask, so I won’t have to see my eyes, reflected in the black television screen.

  Soon enough the sun comes for me.

  Behind me on the counter, Kid Hoodie’s muttering headlines.

  I cry into the mask and the old man across the way can’t tell. That I’m human, even.

  Before the sun’s even all the way gone, there’s a noise at my door. A muffled knock.

  Instead of turning to look, I watch the mannequin’s face.

  She’s by the window opposite me. On watch.

  “Nothing, right?” I say to her.

  She doesn’t bat an eyelid, doesn’t flutter a dimple.

  I lower my head to my chest, the tube from the gas mask scraping my bare chest, holding my face up.

  And then I come up different.

  My robots arms test their joints. My mechanical voice hums.

  “Somebody order pizza?” I call out, just generally.

  No answer.

  I push up from the chair, turn around.

  “Too late for the mail lady,” I say, just loud enough.

 
The knock comes again, hard enough that the whole door shakes in its frame. Three knocks, the first set not even died away proper yet.

  “Couldn’t be flowers,” I say, “nobody sends me flowers anymore,” and have my hand cupped to take the brass knob when—

  Something’s wrong.

  I should have wired a Christmas bulb to the knob, so that if anybody’s ever juicing it from the other side, I’ll get an indicator light.

  That doesn’t help me now, though.

  And anyway, don’t be stupid: it would ground itself out whenever the door closed.

  What, then?

  “Who is it?” I singsong. Just another guy. Anybody.

  In the hall somebody laughs. It lasts about as long as a cough.

  Not Mary.

  I cock my head, angle my face over to the closet for the little hatchet, buried again in the dusty bag, and, just on instinct, I angle my side in, for the shotgun blast I know’s coming. That’s been coming for years now.

  Instead, I catch fire.

  It starts at my foot.

  The ankle rig, shit.

  I never—

  And then it’s dialed all the way in, redlined, the little battery going for broke.

  I look down in wonder, see the smoke wisping up along my shin, but after all these years it’s barely enough to even curl the sole of my foot up from the floor.

  And then it’s dead, spent.

  Too late, I realize I should have pushed something over. Something loud enough for the clunk of a falling body to make it through the floor, out into the hall.

  This ankle rig I thought I knew six ways from Sunday, though, it’s too interesting. I lift my foot up, suddenly lonely for the green light, and to keep my balance I go ahead and close my hand around the knob.

  It’s like reaching into boiling water.

  It is getting juiced from the other side. Grounding out like I knew, but passing all that current, it’s hot work.

  I snap my hand back up to my face, like seeing it’s going to make it better, and before I can even move, the sharp point of a fireman’s axe thunks through the wood, stops a bare inch from my right eye.

  And all I can do is watch.

  “Again,” somebody male out there says, and now the door’s falling in on me. I try to push it off, but.

  Singer’s two thugs, the Hot Iron Boys, Prod 1 and Prod 2, they’ve each got a thick leg cocked up on it. One of them whipping his hand, the one he must have put on the knob. He’s not looking away from me for an instant.

  “You are a freak, aren’t you?” he says.

  The mask, the sleeves. No shirt. Stubble head.

  “Let’s find out,” I say to him, and draw my lips away from my teeth, and am about to go down to hell and take two with me, thank you, when Singer steps into my apartment, a garage door looking remote in his hand, and it’s like that first time he saw me, the way he looks down. Like I’m this thing that was supposed to have been poisoned out long ago. But here I am, still wriggling on his floor.

  “Billy,” he says, more identification than anything like a hello, then skirts the laid-down door, tilts his head behind him.

  Prod 2 understands, peels the door up off me. Stands it back up where it goes, more or less.

  When the slash from the axe is still there he grunts, lays the door halfway back down.

  Prod 1 takes something from the inside pocket of his jacket.

  A bumper sticker I can’t read.

  He scrapes the backing off with his teeth, presses it over the hole.

  “Good as new,” Singer says, his back to me so he can take the place in. “Oh, yeah,” he shrugs to the Hot Iron Boys. As if in apology.

  They smile, are just remembering too.

  Such a fucking act.

  Prod 1 balances the door open a second time, watches me stand, frisking me with his eyes. But then all his senses are with Prod 2.

  From down toward the elevator there’s the sound of feet slapping carpet. Slippers probably.

  Prod 1 looks back to Singer for confirmation.

  “Her?” Singer says, and when the answer’s no he flourishes his hand up, is being extravagant today.

  Prod 2 steps back, out of the doorway, and in the same motion deholsters a bull-barreled little pistol. Through the frame of the door all I can see’s his long arm, the gun pointing like a finger, textbook form. And then it poofs, hardly even recoils.

  Prod 1 leans on the doorframe, looks out. Nods appreciation.

  Ten seconds later he walks back in with a body over his shoulder. He unloads it like a sack of feed. Chinese man, coffee on the front of his shirt, blood on the back.

  “Cute,” I say.

  Prod 1 cuts a smile at me, winks like we’re best friends here. Or like he’s an uncle, about to rape me in the toy room while everybody else is eating turkey.

  Then Prod 2 fills the doorway for a moment.

  From his wide shape, a figure steps forward. A woman.

  Clacky heels, black hair, milk-white skin.

  She slashes her eyes over at me and never breaks stride.

  Dashboard Mary.

  Hello.

  Singer’s in the dining room, studying the wall between it and the lefthand apartment.

  “You wrote something on the board the other day,” he says, never once looking my way.

  “Cookies,” Prod 1 fills in.

  “Thin mints,” Prod 2 adds.

  And now Singer turns to look at me, his face tilted so one eye’s higher than the other, his eyebrow raised up into a question.

  “I think it’s time we had a talk,” he says, and sits down at the table. Kid Hoodie’s seat. Lot of cereal eating there.

  Inside joke, I say in my head, to explain the smile nobody can see behind my mask.

  The Hot Iron Boys set me up in my usual chair. Dashboard Mary standing over at my window. Studying the street. Not once has she looked at the mannequin in her billowy blouse.

  Singer raps his knuckles on the tabletop. To wake me, I think. Or, like a gavel. Like I should pay attention now.

  In the living room, Mary laughs to herself about something.

  I weave my heavy head side to side, finally settle on Singer.

  “Billy, Billy, Billy,” he says.

  “Thought you forgot about me,” I say.

  “Never,” he says, his hand open on the table now, fingers spread. “I don’t want you to ever worry about that, okay? You and me, our souls are coiled together, the way I see it. Two sides of the same coin, as it were.”

  “Pretty thick coin,” I tell him.

  He nods, looks over to Dashboard Mary.

  “I don’t know what to think here,” he says at last. “You know her, that one?”

  I study her as well. Lick my top lip once, in the mask.

  What she said on the phone last time plays again in my head: your boss.

  I should have picked up on it then. That it’s not just about me.

  Could be that’s the only reason Singer’s here. Because he was listening in, and I didn’t deny what she said. Didn’t correct her, explain how I was a solo act. Not taking orders from him, anyway.

  You don’t get to where he is without instilling that into the people who work for you, I mean. Instilling it deep.

  “I know her story, yeah,” I say. Shrugging like it’s nothing new to me, all the pretty little widows this city has to cry for. All the widows I’ve made.

  I smile then, on accident: I’ve done it to her twice, really. As far as she knows.

  Could be a first, there.

  I thought she was special.

  “Want me to, you know,” I offer, knocking on the table too, once, but sneaking four fingers down to complete it. Just not as loud.

  “The mask,” Singer says.

  I just stare at him through the plastic eyes.

  “Dispose of her, you mean?” he says, and the way he smiles, it makes me flash on last time. In the storage unit. Disposing of the evidence. Not leaving that unit
until I’d cleaned up after myself. Buried her inside me.

  I throw up into the mask. It pukes from the tube, slides off my knee, into the carpet. Nobody says anything.

  “Mommy Dearest?” he says, flipping his chin to the mannequin by the window.

  “Toy,” I tell him.

  “Really?” Singer says, like he knows better but’s going to play along here.

  Maybe he’s peeled back through my history somehow. I have to assume he has. That he stole a print, had it run, looked me up down and sideways.

  It doesn’t change anything.

  Well.

  Except that it wasn’t Mary in the upstairs apartment. Just her shirt.

  Who it was was Singer, fucking with me. Of course the door up there was locked. He had the key, the super, a locksmith with a gun to his head. Whatever he needed.

  I swallow a little of the leftover puke.

  “So’d you bring the cookies then?” I say, spreading my fingers out on the tabletop. “That’s why this . . . this little visit? I say some magic word?”

  Singer chuckles to himself about this, makes himself stop, then leans forward slow enough that I have to watch and, still going slow-ass slow, pulls me closer with the tube descending from the mask, so that my plastic eyes are right to his face.

  The sudden, just-enough pressure on the back my head, it has a caliber, I know.

  I don’t jerk away.

  “If you’ve laid one finger on her,” Singer says, his eyes open all the way, then can’t finish. Has to just push me away.

  The gun behind me pushes into my head and then it’s gone. But still there, I know.

  I touch the divot where it was, look sideways into the living room, at Dashboard Mary. Then back to Singer.

  “You don’t know anything about her,” he says. “Just what she’s told you, right?”

  I study her again.

  “Mary,” he calls out, raising his hand like summoning a waitress.

  When she doesn’t turn around, the silent little pistol hisses again. The mannequin face just to the right of Mary shatters, dusts the air.

  Not bad.

  I should have protected her better, not left her out like this, but still: nice shooting. A dead eye. Something to remember.

  Mary turns around, her cheeks sucked in, eyes hot.

  It’s the only way I know she’s not with him.