Two in the Head

by Eric Beetner

  I turned another hard right at the next block and her car swerved, narrowly missing a line of parked cars. I heard tin can sounds of horns honking. I felt her pushing me out of her brain. I was a tick, trying like hell to cling on to the vein while someone pulled at my bloated body with tweezers. I gave it my last shot. I swerved left and aimed into a driveway.

  Her car cut across traffic. I braced myself for a head-on collision and realized how stupid this idea had been. She jerked the wheel back and I shut my eyes, her sight coming clearer now. In front of her/us was a man crossing the street sucking on a soda through a straw. His eyes went wide as he noticed the car. Instinctively I pushed harder on my brake. She pulled me out of her head by then.

  I underestimated her. A pedestrian in her way turned out to be no big deal. I heard the engine accelerate. The man bounced onto the hood, rolled to his side and slapped the strip of metal by the windshield with his temple before flinging off into traffic. He left a small smear of blood behind, but she never looked back.

  Okay, bad idea. Leave control of the car alone. It didn’t seem like I even gained much time. Then I heard sirens. I shut my eyes again quickly in time to see her steal a glance at her rearview mirror. A police car must have been right near the accident because it sped up behind her only a few car lengths away. She took off. I had my chance. With her detoured on a police chase I could keep my trajectory straight on to Randolph’s house and hopefully beat her there, depending on how good her evasive driving was. Oh right, I knew how good her evasive driving was. Same as mine. That is to say—damn good. And with no qualms about sprinting away from the cops and knocking over anyone who got in her way, I knew my little advantage remained a small one.

  The electric car wouldn’t go fast, even if I could have. It moved nimbly, I’ll give it that. Small enough to weave through traffic enough to get me to the Judge’s house first. His car sat in the driveway of his expansive tudor style house. The kind they love to renovate on those HGTV shows I love and Lucas hates. I am always down for a little house porn.

  The neighborhood was all wide lawns and houses done up in classic styles of the English countryside or French wine regions. Grass up and down the street was trimmed short and the flowers and bushes well maintained, but not by anyone who lived in the houses.

  I got out and ran up the walk, trying hard to think of what I would say to him. Before I reached the front step, she turned the corner.

  DON’T LISTEN TO THAT ME, LISTEN TO THIS ME

  I pounded on the door like a sorority girl in a horror movie. Sam half-assedly parked at the curb and got out quickly.

  Judge Randolph answered the door. “Yes?” he said politely considering he spoke to a girl trying to break down his door.

  “Judge, you have to listen to me. This woman is here to kill you.”

  “What?” he said as he turned to Sam coming up the walk.

  She shoved past me, knocking me against the door frame, and grabbed the judge by his shirt and shoved him inside. I ricocheted off and followed them in.

  The judge staggered, stunned like he’d entered a boxing match he wasn’t expecting. She shoved him to the tile floor of his entryway and he stayed down. I heard his head smack as he fell and thought maybe I heard a bone break. He had to be in his seventies, it wouldn’t have taken much to snap every bone in his body. I didn’t want to give her any ideas though.

  With him safely down she turned to me. Her level stare scared the crap out of me. Is this what I looked like when Lucas and I fought? He mentioned my “evil side” before. Christ, he had no idea.

  “Cute trick with the car back there.” I had no answer for her. “Why don’t you quit trying to fuck up my plans? I know you don’t know where Lucas is, but you know I’ll find him. And when I do, I’ll kill him, like I killed all those other people.”

  “You didn’t get everyone at the DA’s office.”

  “Everyone that mattered.”

  “Or the DEA.”

  “What, you mean Blake?” She stepped forward and I automatically retreated. “He can’t help you. All he wants to do is fuck us. That’s all he’s ever wanted to do. He’ll say he will help you but all he’s doing is trying to get a sloppy blowjob from a woman in distress.” She glanced down at the judge to make sure he was still out of it. He writhed around and clutched at his bruised head. “If you ask me, I think we should do it. I’d fuck Blake. At the very least he’d be really grateful and that means he’d be eager and attentive. I know you never would, but maybe I will.”

  The thought of her doing things with our body I stood very much opposed to made me cringe somehow more than the killing. Made things much more tangible. The dead bodies were abstract, a movie I saw and quickly forgot about. Sex with Blake is a reality in my life I live with day in and day out.

  “You have to stop this. You can’t go around killing everyone. Calder and Rizzo are going to get caught eventually. Are you going to kill the next team that takes up the case? And the one after that?”

  “Fuck no. I’ll be on a beach somewhere counting my twenty million.”

  “Who’s at the door, dear?” A sweet old lady voice came from the kitchen at the end of the hall. Randolph’s wife. I remember her from the party making the rounds like a First Lady in her color coordinated holiday pantsuit. I’d thought she was a stuck up bitch then, but now I feared for her life.

  Sam and I both turned to see her poke her head around the doorway from the kitchen. She saw us, the twins, and then her husband splayed out on the floor. It took a second to register, but she caught on. I bet she lived with the specter of some ex-con coming for revenge on the judge who put him away every day of her life.

  Neither Sam or I moved, waiting for her to take the first step. From the floor Randolph groaned and the sound spurred Mrs. Randolph into action. She spun on her creaky hips and went for the door at the back of the kitchen that led, presumably, to the back yard. As she passed by she reached up and hit a code on the tiny alarm panel by the back door. No sirens blared, no electronic whoop-whoop-whoop. We both knew she’d sent the emergency code though.

  “God dammit,” Sam said. She let Mrs. Randolph escape out the back door. The grey-haired old lady struck me as very unlikely to come back with a hidden pistol. I couldn’t decide if it was good news or not that she might come back with the police.

  Sam turned away from me and bent down to lift the judge off the floor. He looked even older, a wild fan of white hair rising from his forehead and a streak of matted red running down the side of his head by his ear.

  “Who are you?”

  “Me?” she said. “I’m her.” She pointed at me cowering against the banister of the staircase. “And she’s me.”

  Randolph wore an advanced Alzheimer’s kind of confusion on his face.

  “You can’t do this,” I said. Even as the words came out I knew how futile they were. Being friggin’ helpless made me so damn angry. I wanted to hit her, smash her with a fireplace poker, choke the life out of her to get her to stop, but I couldn’t. My arms stayed pinned to my side, incapable of violence. I was the U.N., the London police, Switzerland. All I could do was use a harsh Mom-like tone of voice and hope it did the job to get through to a person made of pure evil.

  She pushed him against the wall next to a grandfather clock. Oh God, I thought, is he a grandfather? Probably. He’s got kids, grandkids, a wife.

  “Please,” I begged. She laughed.

  “She wants me to put you out of your misery. Can you hear her beg for it?”

  “That’s not what I want!”

  He choked on a word that never fully formed. She lifted his tie and cinched it tighter around his neck. I reached out a hand, but my body wouldn’t let me move forward. I tried to move a leg, slide a foot across the tile, even tilt forward and maybe knock her over as I fell and give him time to escape. Useless, all of it.

  The sudden lack of oxygen snapped him out of his daze. He clawed at the tie and at her
fingers and I felt tiny pinpricks of sensation across my knuckles and phantom pains from his yellowing fingernails scratching the backs of her hands.

  I thought of my trick from the car. I shut my eyes and tried to reach deep down in to her brain to maybe get control of her hands and lift them off the tie, let some air through to his lungs again. When I felt myself moving from my mind to hers the feeling got more comfortable, easier. But, when I got deeper inside, this time I felt pain. A searing heat tore through my body and I recoiled, slamming my back into the long spindles of the banister.

  Being inside her head during the act of murder forced some sort of strange reaction. Her body shot through with ten thousand arrows and I felt every poisoned tip. I coughed, a foul taste in the back of my throat like ashes.

  She seemed to stand taller the weaker he got. His body began to bend and fold in on himself, weakness surrendering to her strength. Spit foamed in the corners of his mouth.

  I tried closing my eyes so I couldn’t see him suffer, but when I did I got flashes of her vision and with it, hot branding irons scorched my skin. I kept my eyes open but turned away, staring at a set of nesting tables in the entryway and a brass figure of a stork with its beak pointing skyward. I’d never be able to look at my house porn again. In every tastefully decorated foyer and sitting room I’d always wonder what it would look like while someone is being murdered there.

  His hands stopped clawing at hers and slapped, then brushed and then fell to his sides, giving up. He waited for the blackout to come, still with questions in his eyes. “Who? Why?”

  I looked up, not wanting to ignore the man’s dying breath. Well, he’d already breathed his last, but his dying moment anyway. Like the others, I wanted somehow to let him know it was her, not me. I wasn’t the one strangling him to death. Nope, all her doing. Leave me out of it.

  I caught his eye, but I think it was too late. I read no understanding there. As I watched his moist eyes, looking for the moment they moved from alive to dead, a blood vessel burst. A sudden shock of red filled the whites around his dark brown iris and wide black pupil.

  The red stained explosion became more than I could handle. I looked away again. He would die locking gaze with my eyes, but my eyes on a killer’s face.

  A LONG TIME COMING

  Then I did something so very unlike me. I cried.

  It came up from within me like another tormented layer of this whole body splitting shitstorm. The Tomboy me didn’t recognize it at first. I immediately, defensively excused it away as the wimpy, do-good side of me rearing her ugly cheer-squad head. Then I realized I should have been crying all along.

  The massive shootouts at work and at the DA’s office were impossible to grasp. That much destruction, that many dead bodies weren’t real. My only frame of reference seeing so many bodies on a floor were the sleepovers we used to have at Liz Mesa’s house. Six, seven, eight girls tucked into sleeping bags, mouths open, retainers drooling out onto borrowed pillows.

  Even the first two men Sam killed, my would-be bombers, I’d been too out of it to really register any emotion. Plus, they tried to kill me, the bastards.

  But this, one death, up close. This hit me as too real. I wept. Deep, choking sobs partly for Judge Randolph and partly for me.

  I did this. She is part of me. The ugly part I kept hidden, as we all do. If only everyone in the world were forced to confront the sludge black side of themselves I think things would take a very sharp turn for the good.

  Between the long sucking inhales of uncontrolled crying I heard him hit the floor. The way he’d been leaning into the grandfather clock must have pushed it forward as he fell because right after the body fall came the massive crash and shatter of the antique clock on the tile floor. I felt shards of glass drizzle over my feet. My body flinched at the terrible sound of it. The crash, the splintering of wood and breaking of glass, now that sounded like death. Not the quiet rustle of clothes and dull slap of flesh on the floor his body made. Noise. Din. Cacophony like a Greenwich Village performance art piece.

  I put both my hands over my face, the wet streaks of fallen tears smearing into my hands. I should have done something earlier. Months ago.

  I’d been making excuses. When Lucas and I started dating it became a trap, a slow quicksand I couldn’t escape from because to escape meant admitting everything. Before Lucas I convinced myself I had no choice. They threatened to kill me. A ready-made excuse for taking their money, turning my back on my coworkers, my job. I never hurt anyone, but I sure as hell handed Calder and Rizzo the knife.

  That first night, right after they made me the offer I couldn’t refuse, I should have nodded and said yes then gone immediately to Cranner. Told him everything. Gone into WITSEC. Maybe gone undercover to bust Calder and Rizzo properly. I took the easy way instead. The way that came with an envelope of money every week.

  Even since all this craziness started I’d been using the excuse that it wasn’t really me. It was someone else. Her. Sam. Bullshit. Wake up girl. It’s you. Those are your hands around that man’s throat. Don’t deny it.

  It ruined me. I could barely stand. She lifted my head and took my hands down.

  “This is fucking pathetic,” she said. I said nothing. I tried to get my breathing back to normal, try to sound a little less like a twelve year old seeing Titanic for the first time. “I want you to look.”

  She put a hand—our hand—under my chin and turned my head, then put her other hand on the back of my head and tilted it down. Randolph lay next to the grandfather clock—him in one piece, the clock in tatters. His one blood-filled eye fixed on me.

  “We did that. You and me.”

  “No,” I tore my face away and shut my eyes again. She yanked hard at my chin and made me look.

  “We did. And you couldn’t do a goddamn thing to stop it.” She had to know how sharp her words were. I wondered if she felt them tearing at my insides. Did it hurt her as well or did she enjoy it? “That’s what is going to happen to Lucas. And to Blake. And anyone else who tries to stop us.”

  A voice from outside, “Hello?” Not the police. We turned to see a mid-20s guy in a blue windbreaker with Pyramid Security over his heart and Mike written beneath it in script. So Mrs. Randolph had paged the rent-a-cops.

  He pushed open the front door that had swung mostly shut. It took him a second to take in the scene and as he did Sam already moved toward him. He saw Randolph on the floor, the smashed clock, and he reached for his belt. Mike fumbled for his taser, his fingers slipping on the snap that had probably never been undone before.

  Sam clamped a hand down over his and held his arm at his side while she drove her elbow into his nose. He forgot all about the taser then. He let out a noisy grunt and kept vocalizing throughout the beating she gave him.

  First she pushed him back into the nesting tables. He threw a hand out behind him to balance but it landed hard on the beak of the bronze stork. His hand came back to him bloody and with a small statue of a bird attached to it. The long beak pierced his hand and a tiny nob of brass beak poked out the other side. He howled long and loud. What a complainer.

  I huddled against the bannister some more, helpless and going numb inside.

  “Hello?” came another voice from the back door. Seriously, do they train them to be idiots? Who enters a possibly dangerous situation with, “Hello?” Hello never made anyone surrender.

  I stepped forward to warn the second security officer away, a short and stocky black woman packed tightly into her navy blue uniform. The script on her jacket read Latisha.

  “No, back out. Go, just get away,” I said as I moved down the short hallway to the kitchen.

  She looked beyond me and saw her partner being pummeled. She also reached awkwardly for her belt and fumbled with her taser. Must be part of the academy. I could picture the instructor like an extra in a Police Academy movie explaining the proper way to mess up drawing your weapon. Guess I knew why Latisha and I wer
en’t coworkers at the DEA.

  Midway through her comedy of errors, she screamed. I hadn’t noticed the tiny wires passing me in the hall. Tasers fire so much quieter than guns. Latisha shook in place and her body tensed, every muscle on electricity overload. I turned and saw Sam with Mike in front of her like a human shield, his taser in her hand blasting Latisha down the hall. I didn’t even know they reached that far.

  Latisha stopped convulsing and fell to the floor like someone unplugged her, and in a way someone did. Sam dropped the taser and hoisted Mike over to the fallen grandfather clock and dropped him, dazed and his face already swelling from the beatings.

  “Leave them,” I said.

  “What for?” Sam said.

  “They’re not going to follow you. Just go.”

  “They interrupted.”

  “That doesn’t mean you should kill them.”

  “It doesn’t mean I shouldn’t.”

  Useless. Arguing with the devil over how much fire to use. Did I really have this much evil inside me? My God, do we all?

  Sam bent over to pick up a shard of glass from the ruin of the broken clock. As she bent down, Mike looked at me with half-lidded eyes. Partly swollen, partly given up. Accepting he’d been bested by a girl. His ten-bucks-an-hour didn’t make it worth it to fight back any more. Lay back, play possum and wait for the real cops to arrive once she K.O.’s me and takes off.

  Then he recognized me. His half-asleep confusion registered and I could almost read his thoughts, “Wait, isn’t she holding me from behind right now? How did she get up there? She really hits hard, I got a concussion, double-vision, the whole thing.”

  She stood up straight and put the glass to Mike’s neck.

  “Please,” I tried once more.

  “I have to,” She said. “I can’t help it.”

  Something happened in her eyes, something I wouldn’t have noticed if they weren’t also mine. She wasn’t happy about it. She felt as compelled to do these things as I felt incapable of doing anything bad. Sam was as helpless as I was. It didn’t make her any less dangerous, only a tiny fraction more human.