Bulletproof Mascara: A Novel

by Bethany Maines

  She found Val leaning against the office shed and exhaling a lungful of smoke in curling waves.

  “Val!” Nikki hissed.

  Val’s eyes swiveled, but her head remained in position. “What are you doing here?” she whispered back.

  “I figured it out,” Nikki said. “We’ve got to get out of here!”

  Val yawned, stretched, and walked away from the hut and toward the corner of the warehouse. Nikki followed her path, but kept to the shadows. When she turned the corner, Nikki stepped out into view.

  “We have to get out of here,” she reiterated. “We’ve got to get backup and come back here with the police or something.”

  “Get it through your head,” said Val. “For us, there is no police.”

  “Well, we need some sort of help. We have to get them out of here.”

  “Slow down, Red. What’s going on? What happened with the lawyer?”

  “Forget the lawyer. You were right about him.”

  “I told you so,” Val said automatically. “Now, how was I right? What’s he up to?”

  “Probably the same thing we are,” answered Nikki. Val was still walking, aiming toward the edge of the pier. “He’s government,” Nikki continued, “probably CIA. He’s probably investigating Sarkassian.”

  “Investigating Sarkassian for what?” Val’s eyes looked like black slits in her face.

  “I figured it out,” Nikki said excitedly. “They’ve been bribing Amein to give them patient records from Lawan’s clinic. They go through the records and select the healthiest girls and then they sell them and ship them overseas in cargo containers. The girls have to be healthy to survive the journey and they have to be poor enough to go to Lawan’s clinic, otherwise someone would miss them. Lawan found out. She must have been about to go public, because they kidnapped her daughter to keep her from talking. Her daughter is upstairs in the warehouse along with the rest of the girls. We have to get them out of there!” Nikki finished her summation breathlessly. Val had stopped walking and was staring at her. The stare went on long enough that Nikki started to fidget.

  Val finally pulled her gaze away and looked out at the river. “The Chao Phraya looks beautiful this time of night,” she said.

  Nikki turned to see what was beautiful, but saw nothing but the lights from the other side. “Sure,” she said flippantly, her mood rebounding now that she had Val to back her up. “You can’t see the water.” She fiddled with the straps of her bag, cinching it down tighter on her back. Val’s mood was throwing her off.

  Val sighed. It was a sad sigh, as if Nikki had said something incredibly disappointing.

  “You’re funny, kid. You really are. I even kind of like you.”

  “Don’t sound so thrilled about it,” Nikki said, still staring at the lights on the other side. She wondered what stories were behind those lights.

  “I’m not,” said Val. “It would be a whole lot easier to kill you if I didn’t like you.”

  Nikki turned around laughing, then stopped, staring at Val in disbelief. She recognized the gun—the silencer was new—but the sight didn’t make any sense.

  “Sorry, Red,” Val said. Nikki looked left and right, for the guards. Val wouldn’t point a gun at her. But they were alone, and Val’s hand seemed perfectly steady. Nikki tried to decipher the look on Val’s face, but couldn’t.

  “Why?” she managed to stutter out. “We’re partners.”

  “Come on,” said Val, looking angry. “Don’t pretend you’re not spying on me for Mrs. Merrivel. You don’t really expect me to believe that we got paired together by accident or that you just happened to have met Jirair in Canada.” She laughed—a barking, unpleasant sound. “I was nearly free and clear. I’d sold the house. Most of my money had been transferred to the Swiss bank account. No one suspected anything. All I had to do was disappear, and Jirair and I could have been sailing to Bali with no one the wiser. And then you came along, all wide eyes and innocence. I might almost have believed it, except for the Canada story—but that’s what made you perfect, wasn’t it? You already knew what was going on. She just needed you to put the nail in my coffin. Mrs. Merrivel must have thought you were manna from heaven.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Nikki, enunciating every word as clearly as she could, as if her life depended on the transparency of language. She backed away from Val, one step at a time. She knew it was foolish. Val wasn’t going to shoot her. Not really. But she backed up another step anyway. She knew the river was close behind her. “I am not spying on you. Mrs. Merrivel just assigned me to you.”

  Val shook her head. “Well, then she just signed your death warrant. At least you know who to blame.”

  There was an odd popping sound and Nikki felt a burning pain in her side. The gun popped again and Nikki felt the second impact in her torso. She took one more step and realized she was out of ground, out of time, and out of luck.

  THAILAND XIII

  Down the Rabbit Hole

  It was Orion’s Belt that told Nikki she was alive. She had opened her eyes, or at least thought she had. But everything was darkness. Everything was the same temperature as she was. She couldn’t tell where her body left off and something else, anything else, began. There didn’t seem to be any sound, and when she opened her eyes she couldn’t remember the feeling of movement, and so she wondered if she was alive. And then, through the clouds and pollution, she’d seen the dim outline of Orion, forever shooting at an unknown foe.

  She opened her mouth and immediately swallowed a lungful of water. She coughed, her body contorting itself around the cough, and immediately gasped in pain. A shock wave of agony radiated out from her torso, manifesting itself as fireworks before her eyes and spreading out in rippling waves to the rest of her body. Freezing under the pain, she started to sink under the water again—she could feel it crawl up her nose. Her limbs began to move then, in an uncoordinated dog paddle fueled by panic. She tried to suppress her coughing, both to stop the pain that it caused and because of the realization that somewhere out there in the darkness, Val waited with a gun.

  Taking a deep breath, she tried to figure out what to do. She needed a plan. Mrs. Boyer always said that the first step toward creating a plan was to assess the current situation: where was she, what was her condition, what were her assets? She didn’t know where she was; everything was dark. She couldn’t tell if she was bleeding or not; everything was warm and wet. Panic was rising in her. Panic and fear. She felt herself beginning to slip into the place where there was no thought, only instinct, and that made her all the more afraid.

  “Assets!” she commanded her brain, and her voice was a frog’s harsh croak in the blackness. Her only asset was her buoyant waterproof gear bag.

  Realizing that her gear bag was really the thing keeping her afloat, and not her frantic paddling, she began to breathe a little more regularly. Painfully, she wormed out of the straps and pulled the bag around to the front of her. Wrapping her arms around it, she began to breathe a little easier.

  The second step in creating a plan was to identify the problems. Problem one—she didn’t know which direction to swim. Problem two—she honestly didn’t know if she was bleeding. She’d been shot. There were two spinning worm holes of pain in her chest, but she was breathing. Which meant that she might pass out from blood loss at any second or she might be fine. Problem three—even if she did manage to live, she didn’t know what she was going to do about Val.

  The third thing wasn’t really a problem, because she was probably going to die, and then Val would be someone else’s issue, so she could just ignore that one. And she couldn’t control the second problem, so she might as well act like she was fine. Which left the first problem—which way to swim? She tried to look in a circle, but from her vantage point everything looked black. She could feel the panic starting to seep back in.

  Inside the bag, her cell phone began to ring. Even muffled by the fabric, she could tell it was her mother�
�s ringtone, and long years of conditioning made the bumping rhythm of “Sympathy for the Devil” hard to ignore. It was her mother after all. She had to answer. And more than that, the idea of speaking to her mother made her eyes well up with tears. She wanted to talk to her—now, when she didn’t know what to do. Her mother might not be able to fix the situation, and would probably just nag her into some sort of rash, rebellious activity, but at least her voice would be familiar.

  Nikki pondered this and stared into the darkness. She’d managed not to answer many of her mother’s phone calls while she’d been in Bangkok. She hadn’t meant to; she’d just been busy. But the one time she actually wouldn’t have minded hearing the familiar tone of her mother’s voice, she couldn’t answer the phone without deflating her only asset.

  The river pushed against her in laughing little waves, and she glared at it angrily. It seemed to be mocking her pain. But it pushed against her all the same, pushing in one steady direction.

  Gingerly, Nikki paddled the water and tried to picture the map of Bangkok in her head. The river bent and twisted, but mostly flowed north to south. She’d entered from the right bank, which made it the eastern side. So if the water was pushing against her left side . . . She bobbed around until it was. Then she was pointing east.

  She kicked once and felt the responding fireworks of pain, which left her gasping and lightheaded.

  “Can’t stay here,” she said out loud. She knew it was true, but staying there felt so much easier. “Change is hard,” she quoted Mrs. Boyer to herself. “You must maintain momentum.” She had thought Mrs. Boyer meant big changes—losing weight, becoming tougher, taking charge. She hadn’t thought it meant little changes like moving her legs up and down.

  Slowly kicking, feeling every muscle and where it connected to her stomach, she began to make progress. It was a long journey. Things bumped into her. She could feel fish occasionally nibbling at her fingers—she hoped they were fish, anyway. And after what seemed like an eternity, she thought she could make out a pier. Lower jetties ran out from the shore. Moored boats bobbed in profile. Nikki tried to identify Sarkassian’s warehouse, but couldn’t. None of the landmarks looked the same. Even the pier looked different. Nikki realized, as she approached a floating dock, that everything looked different, because it was different. She had come up on an entirely different pier from the one she’d started from.

  Laughing slightly at her own stupidity, and in relief that she didn’t have to confront Val immediately, she reached the edge of the dock and tried to pull herself up. Her arms shook, her body screamed in pain, and for a very long moment she thought she wouldn’t make it, but at the last second she found a reserve of strength and pulled herself over the edge and onto the dock. She lay there a long time, feeling the rolling motion of the dock underneath her. Inside the bag her phone rang again.

  “Please allow me to introduce myself . . .”

  She tried to ignore it, but even the sound of her mother’s ringtone nagged her to some sort of action. Slowly, carefully, centimeter by centimeter, she pulled up her shirt and felt for the spot where the pain was coming from. She put her hand down to her chest and felt the stiff fabric of the Anastasia. Remembering the Kevlar bustier encouraged her and she felt farther. There were two holes in the bustier—one in her side and one in her chest, the edges frayed and torn—and when she pulled her fingers away there was still the faint smell of river water and cordite.

  It smelled sharp and burnt like shame. Nikki wanted to curl around herself and hide. She had failed. How could she not have known that Val would betray her? Of course, Val never really liked her. Why would she? Nikki was stupid and gullible.

  “I should have gone after Amein,” she said out loud, and tears leaked out of her eyes. His death was on her head, too.

  Her phone rang again and with a sigh she opened the bag and took it out—giving in to the strident tones. Giving in to her mother again, adding another trivial failure to the mountainous pile.

  “Hi, Mom,” she said, putting the phone to her ear. Her voice sounded funny, but she couldn’t say why.

  “You answered, so I know your fingers aren’t broken.”

  Nikki looked carefully at her fingers. Her nails were torn. She needed a manicure. And was that blood? That was going to hurt. Eventually.

  “I think you’re right,” Nikki said. “They just look icky.” She sounded a million miles away from her own voice.

  “Would it kill you to call me? You know I worry.” Her mother was ignoring her again. That was probably good.

  “Yes, sorry,” Nikki said, following the usual scripted answers. She felt disconnected from everything.

  “Well, just be careful. You’re so naïve. Maybe it’s my fault for sheltering you too much, but I’m just afraid everyone will take advantage of you.”

  “Yes,” Nikki said, twitching as her memory put Val’s face in front of her eyes. “You’re probably right.”

  “Are you all right, Nikki?” asked her mother sharply. “You sound tired. You’re not getting sick, are you? Maybe you should come home. It’s all right if this job isn’t working out. You can find another one.”

  “Yeah, maybe,” said Nikki.

  “Nikki!” said Nell, her voice shrill. “What’s wrong? What did you do?”

  “I didn’t do anything,” said Nikki. That at least was true enough. Why had she just stood there? “I just . . . it was one of the other women at work.”

  Talking was starting to hurt and other things were starting to wake up now. Her legs were clamoring for their fair share of the pain load. The breeze tickled a gash in her pants, creeping in to disturb the blood that seeped down her leg. Looking down the length of her body she saw that one shoe was missing.

  Val wasn’t going to be happy about that. She had bought her those shoes. Nikki reached up to rub her temple, but immediately dropped her arm again when it set off ripples of pain along her rib cage.

  “Nikki, what did you do?” demanded Nell suspiciously.

  “Nothing, Mom,” Nikki replied, trying to keep the pain and tears out of her voice.

  “Nikki . . ., ” said her mother in the warning tone that promised untold retribution if Nikki even thought about lying.

  “It’s Val. She walked out on me. And the company. She . . . left everything for a guy who’s a total dirtbag.” She couldn’t keep the tremor out of her voice, but she hoped her mom didn’t hear it.

  “Well, when a woman is in love,” said Nell philosophically, “she thinks she can change—”

  “Yeah, yeah, a man is a home improvement project. It’s dumb.” Nikki’s pain flashed over into bitterness, and carefully she reached up to wipe tears out of her eyes.

  “I was going to say,” Nell said, irritation frosting her tone, “that a woman in love thinks she can change herself to suit him. She thinks she can make herself not care about the unchangeable bits of him. But you can’t. You’re always going to care.”

  Nikki didn’t answer, aware, even in her aching state, that they were treading over very delicate emotional ground—cavernous pits of anger and bitterness were likely to open beneath her feet at any moment.

  “The joke is,” mused Nell, “that women do want to change a man. His clothes and whatever, superficial stuff, and really, all of that’s for his own good. But it’s women who change, trying to match themselves to what he wants. They try and try, but it’s a mistake. You should never try to be what you’re not.”

  “I shouldn’t try to be what I’m not,” repeated Nikki, hearing the death knell of her Carrie Mae career in those words. “Maybe I should come home.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Nell said sharply. “You were in training only last week, and now you’ve been given a plum assignment. This career may not be perfect for you, but clearly they think very highly of you. You can come home after you get the job done.”

  “I don’t know,” Nikki said. Breathing was getting easier. She took a shallow breath, then another.

  �
�Well, I do,” said Nell, her usual demanding tone returning. “Now, what are you going to do about this Val woman?”

  “I’m not sure,” Nikki said, still at a loss.

  “You should just do your little conference thingie on your own. You’ll look like a hero, and everyone will know she dropped the ball and you won’t have to say a thing.”

  “Yeah,” Nikki said, trying to remember what cover story she had given her mother and what conference she was talking about.

  “That’s what I would do,” said Nell. “I would just do it myself.”

  “It’s not that easy,” Nikki said.

  “Get over it,” her mother said crisply.

  “I . . ., ” Nikki said. “OK.”

  “Good. Now what I really called to tell you about was my week from hell with Mr. Van Der Meer. You remember me telling you about him? He’s Dutch and has wandering hands. Which fortunately I know how to deal with, but poor Cissy, at the office . . . did I tell you we hired a new girl?”

  “I have to go now, Mom,” said Nikki.

  “No, I’m telling you about Cissy. She wears false eyelashes and giant silver hoops . . .”

  “I’ll call you when I get back to the States. Talk to you soon, love you, bye.” She hung up the phone, ignoring the irritated bleatings of “Nikki! Nikki!” and let it fall onto the dock, where it landed with an echoing thump. It was the sound of a hollow victory. She’d just hung up on her mother. Well, maybe not that hollow. She felt a slight tingle of warmth that spread up her arm from the cell phone.

  “You’re going to have to move,” she told herself.

  “But it will be hard,” she replied.

  “It’s already hard,” she argued back. She got no reply to that one, and decided to consider the matter settled.

  “Stupid momentum,” she muttered as she rolled over onto her hands and knees and began the painful, slow process of getting to her feet.