by Steven James
“I’m never going to get ahold of this.”
“I’ll have Maddie walk it through for you.”
“Ah. Thanks.”
So, our itinerary: fly from Manila to Tokyo to Los Angeles to Las Vegas.
Tight connections all the way around. This is going to be a long night.
Or day, depending on how you looked at it.
After checking our bags, the three of us board the plane to start our journey home to see if we can untangle anything back in the States.
I’m not about to let the death of my friend get lost in a bureaucratic quagmire or get brushed under the carpet by police who’ve been paid off or intimidated.
No.
Not a chance.
Part III
Garbage Bags
The first time Calista Hendrix killed someone, it was a mistake.
It happened so quickly, so unexpectedly, that she hardly even realized what she was doing.
It was four years ago now, when she was twenty years old and still living in Florida.
One moment she was in her living room chilling to some Lady Gaga and flipping through Cosmo, and the next moment her friend Veronica was knocking at the door and then storming in and accusing her of sleeping with Jared Thacker, the guy she’d been going out with for three months.
Calista didn’t want to hurt her feelings or anything, so she wasn’t about to admit that she and Jared had been hooking up—what possible good could have come from that? So she denied it, even though sure, yeah, okay, she’d been sleeping with him pretty much the whole time Veronica had been seeing him. Instead, she told her no, no, no, of course not, no, she would never sleep with her best friend’s boyfriend! Not ever!
But Veronica wouldn’t let it drop.
Just wouldn’t let it drop.
She kept saying that she had proof—proof!—and then she slapped Calista and screamed that Jared had told her everything.
Well, that wasn’t very helpful of him.
Calista tried to explain that this was all just a big misunderstanding and if Veronica would just be quiet for a second, just listen, they could figure everything out. But Veronica got in her face, and Calista didn’t like that at all and told her so, but it didn’t do any good because then Veronica was crowding her against the couch that was pushed up against the wall beside her kitchen nook.
This girl was out of control, so Calista did what was natural, what anyone would have done—she tried to protect herself.
Veronica was so enraged that she was going to hurt her, maybe even kill her, so Calista reached across the counter, snatched a knife from the wooden block thing, and swiped it at her friend fiercely enough to scare her off.
But that’s where the mistake part came in, because she didn’t realize Veronica was quite that close.
Roni was wearing a halter top that left her midriff bare and the blade went right through the exposed skin and left a streak of seeping red across her stomach. Calista was still telling her to just be quiet and let her explain everything as Veronica shivered and stared disbelievingly at her stomach and pressed her hand against the warm blood and tried to push back inside of herself parts of her anatomy that were never meant to unfold into the day.
Then she staggered forward and fell into Calista’s arms, completely ruining her blouse. Calista jerked back, shoving her friend to the floor and telling her great, now look at what you did to my outfit!
Veronica didn’t die.
At least not right away.
Instead, her hands started twitching in this really weird way and thick blood oozed out all across the linoleum from the place the knife had gone into her. It was going to be a real bear to clean all that up.
Thankfully, the blood didn’t spurt or squirt or anything, like it does in movies, because if it had, watching something like that would have probably made Calista throw up.
As her friend bled out on the floor, Calista tried to figure out what to do.
Mercy Memorial Hospital wasn’t far. They might be able to get an ambulance over in time. She might still be able to save Veronica if she called 911 right away.
She unpocketed her phone.
But then had another thought. And paused.
Honestly, what good would that do, calling the hospital? If Roni survived, their friendship would be over, that much was for sure, and she might even tell the cops that Calista had attacked her when all she was trying to do was defend herself. And who knows, they might even believe her. And that would totally suck.
On the other hand, if she didn’t call anyone and Veronica died, then she would have a body to get rid of and if she were somehow caught doing that, it would make her seem guilty even though she wasn’t, not really, and it would not be easy at all to explain how she came to be disposing of her best friend’s corpse.
So, really, what was she supposed to do?
She leaned over to get a closer look and smelled a strange mixture of coconut suntan lotion, fruity perfume, and fresh, tangy blood.
Veronica was just lying there breathing shallowly, maybe trying to speak, maybe not, it was hard to tell.
Calista didn’t feel sorry for her, for someone who would get in her face like that. She took a deep breath, shook her head, and told her firmly, “I’m not gonna go to jail over you, Roni. Definitely not.”
She stood again and waited until Veronica was still and stopped making those disgusting, wet gurgling sounds. Then she knelt beside her again. She’d watched tons of CSI reruns and knew cops could lift fingerprints—even from skin—so instead of feeling for a pulse, she put her cheek just above her friend’s mouth, watched her chest to see if it would move, and waited to see if Veronica took a breath or exhaled.
Nope. Nothing.
Her friend’s eyes had become dull and blank and it was kind of freaky seeing someone who’d been alive and arguing with her only a minute ago lying there dead.
Calista had never seen anyone die before, and the idea that Roni would never breathe again, never complain, never accuse anyone of sleeping with her boyfriend again was something that made Calista think about how thankful she should be to be alive.
Yeah, life was something you should enjoy as much as you can and take advantage of every moment you have.
Okay, so it was a little late for Roni to do that, but for the rest of us, you know?
So then there was this blood and a body and everything, and all Calista had wanted to do was spend the evening reading and listening to a little music and not having to deal with anything until Jared came over later to party.
At least Roni being dead made the decision about whether or not to call 911 a lot easier.
But how do you deal with all that blood? With all that mess?
She’d seen a movie once where the killer wrapped up a body in a shower curtain, so that was a possibility, but unless you had an extra shower curtain lying around, that wasn’t really a good idea. If the police checked your place, they would be like, “Hmm . . . No shower curtain, huh? Guess what? We saw that movie too.”
If she did use her curtain, what was she supposed to do then? Drive out to Walmart and pick up another one? Totally out of the way. Besides, they took advantage of kid workers in China or something like that—at least that’s what she’d heard—and she wasn’t into supporting places like that.
Besides, that wouldn’t look suspicious at all, getting caught on a store’s video camera buying a shower curtain the night her friend disappears.
Yeah. Right.
She decided to use plastic garbage bags instead.
Duct tape did the trick, holding them all tightly in place.
Loading Veronica into the trunk wasn’t like she expected. Her body hadn’t really been dead long and Calista could feel the warmth of her blood, even through the plastic garbage bags.
The corpse wasn’t very cooperative. Roni hadn’t kept herself in shape and Calista cursed more than once wrestling her into the car. Veronica could have made it a whole lot easier if only she hadn’t eaten
out so much over the last year and put on, like, twenty pounds.
The pig.
But at last Veronica was in there and Calista collected her friend’s purse, her own bloody clothes, the knife, the roll of duct tape, and the towels she’d used to sop up the blood on the floor, then pulled onto the street and headed for the swamplands about ten miles from town.
As she did, something happened.
Something unexpected, but also rich and sweet and unforgettable.
Calista began to feel a small and secret pleasure. After all, she was driving around with a body in the trunk of the car and no one knew. No one had any idea.
It was like that feeling you get whenever you have something no one else knows about, when you know a secret and you get that quiet, private, tingling surge of excitement skip-scampering through you.
I know something you don’t know.
A secret I won’t share.
You’ll never guess what it is.
I won’t tell you unless I want to.
And you can’t do anything about it.
Yes, it felt good.
Electrifying, actually.
Heart thumping, fingers tingling, Calista drove along the edge of the swamp until she found an isolated place where she could dump the body.
It was a lot easier getting Roni out of the trunk than it’d been stuffing her into it.
On the way back to her apartment, she dropped the knife into a garbage can beside a streetlamp on Vine Drive, then tossed the plastic bags, Roni’s purse, her own ruined clothes, and the towels into a dumpster on the south side of the city.
She parked Roni’s car in the long-term parking at the airport, took a taxi home, and then called Jared to see if he’d like to come over early since the night was still young and she didn’t have any other plans.
The sex was especially good that night, and it made Calista think that maybe the secret that she knew about Roni was part of the reason why. It flavored the night with a buzz that was better than any drug she’d ever tried.
The police only questioned her once, but it wasn’t as a suspect or anything. She told them she hadn’t seen Veronica, had no idea where her friend might have gone—but all the while she was thinking about that secret that the cops didn’t know about, that no one knew about, not even Jared. And it brought the sharp spark of exhilaration back all over again.
In her freshman English lit class they’d studied a story by Poe called The Tell-Tale Heart. When she was speaking to the cops it came to mind again. It was about this guy who went crazy because of the horror over what he’d done, the raw, unbearable guilt worming its way into his sanity until it literally drove him mad.
He’d killed this old man but heard the dead guy’s heart continue to beat in his imagination. Calista had to admit, that would be pretty freaky.
But for her, the secret wasn’t driving her mad. Roni’s heartbeat didn’t haunt her; guilt didn’t scratch away at her conscience or invade her sanity or anything like that at all. Actually, thinking about what had happened was kind of thrilling and enticing and not really something she would want to have to ever give up.
The policemen just jotted a few things down and that was that. They never found the body, Veronica’s car was probably still there in long-term parking, and life had gone on just like it does whenever a person dies and their body gets lowered into the ground and people go back home and flip on the football game or channel-surf their way to their favorite sitcom, pull out the munchies, and settle in for the evening.
Calista had killed two other people since the day she sliced open the belly of her best friend. Jared first, when he started to act suspicious, and then another guy when their relationship didn’t really seem to be going anywhere.
But she had help with those two.
Help from this guy who called himself Akinsanya.
Man, it’d taken her forever to learn how to spell that. These days she pretty much stuck to calling him by his first name: Derek.
How he’d actually found her was still all a little fuzzy. He was friends with one of the cops who’d spoken with her, she knew that much. The cop hadn’t said it in so many words, but she was pretty sure he knew she was turning tricks to make it through college. Maybe that’s what it was, that’s why he’d passed her name along to Derek. Because she was a call girl and Derek was attracted to her type.
An escort.
A courtesan.
She liked that last term. It wasn’t so degrading and demeaning as prostitute or hooker or whore. None of those words brought any respectability to what she did. To who she was.
No one ever called her a courtesan, no one except Derek.
Anyway, after the cops talked with her, he contacted her because of this cop friend, and even though she said nothing about what happened with Veronica, she must have been pretty easy for Derek to read because he figured it out and brought it up one night when they were alone.
She denied it, of course she did, but somehow he could tell she was lying, and instead of accusing her of anything, he helped her get rid of Jared and made it look like he’d just taken off somewhere. As far as Calista knew, the cops were still looking for Jared as a suspect in Veronica’s sudden disappearance.
The victim, now assumed to be the villain.
Dramatic irony.
She remembered that from her English lit class too.
And it was all another little secret that she and Derek shared.
Having someone know your secrets leaves you vulnerable to him, but also draws you close in a way nothing else ever can.
So, yeah, in a sense Derek had power over her, but she also had power over him. She knew what he was capable of, what he had done, so they were indebted and, in a very real sense, beholden to each other.
Yes, beholden. A word Derek had taught her and she’d always wanted to use.
Maybe that’s what intimacy was really about—not so much trust and attraction like some people think, but about holding subtle degrees of power over your lover.
All because of the secrets you know.
And can use, when necessary, to your advantage.
Two weeks ago Calista had been there when they changed the role Thad Becker was going to play as the research progressed.
He hadn’t picked up on using the exolimbs in a timely enough manner, and after three weeks Derek had announced that they were going to have to move things in a different direction.
While they could have terminated the test entirely, as they’d done with others in the past, at this point in the study Dr. Malhotra considered that to be a waste of resources, so they decided to change the exact nature of the tests they were doing on Thad.
She’d asked if she could be the one to give Thad the injection, and Derek had given her permission to do it.
Tomorrow morning she was scheduled to return and see how he was doing in his new role.
She wasn’t sure about his condition, but from what she’d heard, he was not going to open his eyes again. Not ever again. But, connected up to the machines as he was, they would be able to keep him alive almost indefinitely.
It was sorta weird watching the guy just lay there like that. He looked like a total vegetable, but, at least from what she understood, he was still aware. That’s the thing. His mind hadn’t been affected at all. He knew what had happened to him. And he knew there was nothing he would ever be able to do about it.
Pretty wild.
Totally paralyzed.
Totally aware.
Forever, completely, irreversibly helpless.
Derek wanted one thing more than anything else—to live forever. That’s not what Calista wanted. No, she didn’t want to grow old at all.
He was looking forward to something he called The Singularity and would do whatever it took to “hasten its coming.” Fine. Whatever. She was looking forward to tonight and tomorrow and taking every day one at a time as they came her way.
No, she was not a high-end escort. She made maybe a ten
th of what some of them made. Totally unfair. She was just as good as any of them were—Derek told her so.
Well, she had something on her side.
Time.
They were going to age.
They were going to turn thirty and have wrinkles appear around their eyes and then turn forty and put on belly fat and sag in all the wrong places, and she was going to remain young and firm and desirable.
Derek had promised her this.
And one thing he’d never done was lie to her.
Now, she finished putting on her makeup and went downstairs to meet up with him in the living room.
She wore a tight, form-fitting dress that’d been designed with one purpose, made evident by the length of the slit up the side. And she was obviously well aware of what it was because, as she glided across the room, she made the most of every step.
“Are you ready for a memorable night, my love?” Derek asked her.
“Uh-huh.”
He pulled out his car keys. “Well then, let’s see how our dry run goes.”
Sin City
Our flights go well, but still, by the time we land in Las Vegas it’s nearly 11:30 p.m. and all of us are exhausted, travel weary, and ready to get acclimatized to our own time zone again.
Xavier has called ahead, and there’s a limo waiting at the airport to take us back to my place.
Even more than most cities, Las Vegas has a different mood at night. During the day, Vegas looks like any other major US city—business going on as usual, the rush hour traffic pulsing through at regular intervals, Minivan Moms, kids waiting for school buses, late afternoon joggers.
But here, as dusk arrives, you can feel electricity begin to sizzle through the air. Whether you’re downtown on Fremont Street watching five million lights put on a show above your head, or joining tens of thousands of other people walking the Strip, there’s no place in the world like Las Vegas.
Walk the Strip on a Saturday night and you’ll see all sorts of things: mimes, break-dancers gathering crowds around them and angling for money, musicians playing their instruments with their hats on the ground by their feet, people dressed up in outlandish costumes who’ll get their pictures taken with you for a tip.