Two in the Head

by Eric Beetner

  She moved with less confidence than before. Less Terminator-style relentlessness. She walked through a well-appointed lobby with a door to an indoor pool and even a shoeshine stand I doubted anyone else in this tower knew the scumbags living among them.

  On the sidewalk a man approached her. I heard him first, then she turned to the sound of his voice. We saw a black man, frail and probably ten years younger than he looked, but the street had aged him.

  “You got a dollar? Tryin’ to get some food.” He said it all in a slur, a line repeated a thousand times a day until it loses all meaning.

  She reached out with both hands, put one under his chin, one of the back of his head, and turned. The man’s head spun a half turn and his tongue slid out from between his teeth. I could hear the pop of vertebrae uncoupling in his neck.

  The expanding pressure pushed at the walls of my skull from the inside again. I wondered what it felt like in her head.

  She let the homeless man drop the way you let go of something you don’t want anywhere near you anymore. Like what you picked up wasn’t what you thought.

  Her hands moved so fast, the unfiltered rage inside her pulling the tendons in her arm to make the motions. She backed away from the body as he fell until she hit the side of her car with her back.

  She felt a regret. A thin part of my brain recognized another hairline fracture in hers. She hadn’t wanted to kill him. She couldn’t help herself. The new part of her acted on its own, like mine did.

  Then she did something I did not expect. And yes, snapping a guy’s neck fell into the ‘expected’ category. She cried. She leaned against her car, put her hands up over her face, careful not to touch to hard to her throbbing nose, and she cried.

  “Get out of my head!” she screamed. I felt someone wrapping a fist around my heart and then a head rush, dizzy spell, slight nausea. I opened my eyes and the world was all double images and tunnel vision. She tried to push me out. Shying away. Hiding from her twin so I wouldn’t see her secret.

  It worked. My world went black, then the dismal florescence of the jail faded back in front of me. I was crying too. I didn’t even realize the crying started until another warning pound of the bars came from next door. I snapped out of the intensity of watching her have a moment of real emotion and noticed the tears soaking my own face.

  “Lady, you got to shut the fuck up. Some of us trying to sleep,” came a desperate voice form the next cell.

  “Fuck off,” I said. My surprise stopped my tears. God damn that felt good.

  THERE’S SOMETHING HAPPENING HERE

  Here’s what I think happened: no one can be all good and no one can be all bad. Our bodies were self correcting. A tiny hint of morality crept into her skull and a little bit of nastiness slithered out of mine. Like the drug started to wear off, so to speak. But how long would it take to come down?

  SEVEN A.M. AND ALL’S WELL

  I slept another tequila drunk deep sleep. Once my brain finally agreed to shut down, it closed up shop hard and wouldn’t open the door for nobody.

  The clanking of a nightstick against the bars woke me up. I had to pee and the prospect of doing it on the open toilet in front of the quartet of inmates in the cell next to me, now awake and off the high from last night and each one of them suffering the effects, did not thrill me.

  “Got visitors,” the cop said.

  Visitors?

  Blake stepped around the corner first. He’d seen a doctor. His arm hung in a sling and a heavy bandage wrapped around his shoulder.

  “I told him this was a bad idea,” he said to me.

  Lucas came after him. I sat up quick, a gasp escaping my throat.

  He raised his hand in a tiny wave. “Hi there.”

  I ran to the wall of bars and push my arms through, reaching for him. He walked slowly to me and we hugged through the steel.

  “I’m so glad you’re safe.”

  “Me too,” he said. “I mean that you’re safe, not that I’m safe. I mean, I am glad about that too.” We laughed as we broke our embrace. Blake stood off to the side, a third wheel.

  “I’m so sorry for all of this,” I said.

  “Yeah, it’s a little crazy.”

  “He still doesn’t know how crazy,” Blake said. I locked eyes with him. “I haven’t told him everything. Not about her.”

  Lucas took my hand. “Blake said you’d have more to tell me.”

  “Did he tell you about Calder and Rizzo?”

  Lucas looked away from me to the floor. “Yeah.”

  “Then it can’t get any worse.” Lucas lifted his eyes to mine again. I could see the hurt and disappointment in them. Not half as hurt as me. “I’m surprised you wanted to see me.”

  “I need to know what happened.”

  “It’s still happening.”

  “Well, it involves me so I’d like to know. I get that Calder and Rizzo want me dead. They want their case to go away. That’s not hard to figure. How are you involved?”

  “Just listen. Don’t ask questions until I’m done. And trust me.” He looked away again. “Lucas, can you trust me?”

  It took agonizing seconds for him to meet my eye again. “Yes.”

  Then I went in for the sucker punch. “Do you still love me?” What the hell, why not? Everything was about to be out on the table from my end.

  “Yes.”

  Could have been a line to get me to talk, he is a lawyer after all, but whatever. I took it, locked it away like a valentine and told my tale.

  I kept my voice low so no cops could eavesdrop. I figured there had to be a decent chance either one of them could be wearing a wire, but the whole story wasn’t going to stay locked away for long. Not as long as me, anyway.

  I held a tight grip on Lucas’s hand as I spun the wild story of my evil twin. I at least hoped it sounded more Buffy The Vampire Slayer than some crapy old soap opera.

  To his credit he didn’t blink. He had seen her so it wasn’t all foreign to him, but he took it all in as if it were fact. Again, the guy’s a lawyer so he’s used to clients telling tall tales to get out of trouble. My story got me deeper in, though.

  I ended with what I’d seen last night.

  “And that’s it. Then I woke up. My God I wish it could be a dream. Or is this where you tell me it was and I’m the only one on those security tapes?”

  “I haven’t seem them. The DEA has confiscated everything from the office. My office is on lockdown too.”

  “You guys must have tapes. But darn it, we were never there at the same time. That wouldn’t prove anything. Everyone in the office sure thought we were the same person.”

  “Can you blame them?” he said.

  “No.” He let go of my hand and rubbed his chin, his thinking pose. “Lucas, do you believe me?”

  “I believe something happened. And I believe you could never do the things that happened in those offices, or to judge Randolph.”

  “But do you believe it was her?” A headache started behind my eyes.

  “No matter what, we know Calder and Rizzo are behind it. They called for the execution of government officials in order to obstruct justice. The trick is going to be turning this story into admissible evidence to get a warrant. I can’t exactly go to a judge with this story. He’d throw me out.”

  “But the tapes. The evidence.” The headache moved from leg cramp level pain to hand-over-an-open-flame level pain.

  “Tapes can be faked. It fits right in with something Calder and Rizzo would do.”

  “So you have nothing to use against them? You can’t pick them up?”

  “I’ll find something. With your testimony about the payoffs and the ambushes we’ll put them away for life easily. Right now, Samantha, you’re my whole case. Just you though, not the other you.”

  My headache moved into ice pick territory and I realized why. Sam. Watching. That meant she saw Lucas. That meant she knew where he was.

&n
bsp; YOU DON’T HAVE TO GO HOME BUT YOU CAN’T STAY HERE

  “Lucas you have to go,” I said, a new breathlessness in my voice. Blake sat up straight, recognizing my fear.

  “What’s wrong?” Lucas asked.

  “She can see you. Right now. She’s listening and watching. She knows where you are.”

  “Good, let her come. The best thing for us is to arrest her.”

  I tried forcing her out of my head the way she forced me last night but I couldn’t do it. I pinched my eyes shut and sat down on the cot, reeling from the pain.

  “You don’t understand,” I said. “She needs to kill you to get her money. She won’t care about anything else.”

  “Is she here now?” Blake asked.

  “I don’t know. I can’t tell. She’s blocking me out somehow.”

  “Samantha, it’s okay,” Lucas said. “We’re in a police station. She can’t get to us here.”

  Painful as it was, I opened my eyes to look at him. “I’m sure that’s what everyone at the DEA would have said.”

  The first shots were far away. They could have been anything if I hadn’t been listening for gunfire specifically. I felt like a bird watcher hearing a rare call. I I.D.’d it right away.

  “She’s got a 9a-91.” I knew we kept a few of those in the munitions locker. They’d be small enough to carry around and even get inside the front door with one hidden. The short, fast bursts came one on the heels of another. She got a lot of shooting done in a short amount of time.

  “You have to go,” I said. “Blake, get him out of here.”

  “Wait, Samantha, you really think she’s here?”

  I knew what he meant. Do I really think she’s real? Another cluster of shots and then some return fire. No doubt about it, upstairs in the lobby raged a full-on fire fight.

  “Lucas, go. Now. Don’t tell me where. Whatever I know, she knows. Please get out of here. Build your case and nail them.”

  The men in the cell next to me started moving quickly around the cell like trapped animals. “What the fuck’s goin’ on?” someone said to nobody in particular. The one desk cop on duty stood and crept slowly backward with one hand on his sidearm, but the gun still in his holster.

  “Is there another way out of here?” I asked Blake.

  “Yeah, come on.” He stepped up and put a hand on Lucas’s arm. Lucas gave him am unsavory look.

  “Sam, what happens to you? I need your testimony. You’re the whole thing.”

  “Don’t call me Sam. Please.”

  “Will you be okay?”

  “I don’t know. You won’t if you don’t get out of here.”

  The gunfire crept closer. You ever been sitting in a movie theater watching a quiet drama while the theater next to you is playing a big action movie and you can hear it through the walls? Kinda like that.

  “What is that, terrorists?” one of my cellmates asked. “Is it fucking terrorists, man?” The cop ignored him and kept his eye on the door, hoping like hell no one would come through it.

  “We gotta go,” Blake said to Lucas.

  I felt a sharp pain across the back of my legs and I fell to the floor of my cell. Lucas pushed out of Blake’s grasp and reached through the bars.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing. Go. She’s hurt.” It didn’t feel like a bullet. Maybe a truncheon across the legs? Whatever those cops upstairs were using to stop her, it wasn’t enough.

  Four quick shots from a .45 sounded right above my head. I didn’t feel any of them so I felt bad for whoever hit her across the legs. I knew they were hurting much worse than me at that point. Or, more likely, they didn’t feel a damn thing anymore.

  Blake tugged at Lucas again and he went with him, watching me in the cell the whole way out of the room.

  The sharp shock of pain to Sam broke the hold she had on me and I could see her view again. The upper floor hung with gun smoke. I counted three bodies as she swept her vision right to left. She was low, on the floor probably. She pushed up and stood. I saw the gun in her hand out in front of her, ready to show off more of her marksman skills.

  A head sprang up from behind a desk and took a pot shot in her direction. She fired a single shot and I saw a puff of red spray as the top of his skull came open. If this were a carnival she would have won the big stuffed frog with that shot.

  “You should go too,” I said to the cop.

  He turned and looked at me like he forgot there were people in the cells.

  “You should let us the fuck out is what you should do, motherfucker,” said the most vocal of the men in the next cell. The others agreed with him.

  The cop remained stalled. His mouth hung open, gasping for words. His gun remained in the holster, his keys on his belt.

  “She’s coming and I don’t want you to shoot her,” I said. “If you shoot her you shoot me.”

  He already felt freaked out so I figured why not load him up. I might scare him right out the door. So far, I’d only glued his feet to the floor.

  “You can’t kill her,” I said. Probably true. I meant he can’t because it would probably kill me too, but his shooting gallery skills didn’t match ours. I could tell from the panic sweat forming on his upper lip. “I know what she can do and she’ll kill you. I’m telling you, get out now.”

  He drew his gun finally. At me. Dumbass.

  Her 9A-91 must have run out of ammo because she shot him with the .45. Three shots all in a row up his spine. The first two hit flat and dull against his kevlar vest, the third landed over the top of it right where his spine met his brain stem.

  The blood spray over the watching quartet of men in the cell was impressive. The bullet passed through, unhindered by much other than strands of blood vessels and his trachea, which is only air. The bullet hit the wall inside the other cell and the four men all ran and bumped into each other like bloody rats in a maze.

  Sam stepped into the room slowly, checking the corners and sweeping the room. I could see her view of me. I leaned forward against the bars.

  The inmates were loud, mostly a lot of motherfuck this and motherfuck that. One started pulling at the bars just to feel like he did something to save his own life. The cop on the floor was too busy bleeding to help anymore.

  She lowered her gun and walked toward me.

  “They’re gone, you know.”

  “I know.”

  “Blake’s good. You won’t catch them.”

  “I know that too.”

  She bent down and—keeping her eyes on me—lifted the keys off the dead cop’s belt.

  “You gonna let me out?” I asked;

  “Sort of.”

  “I can find out what you’re up to, y’know?”

  I closed my eyes and started to burrow into her brain. She blocked me and my head lit up with sparklers, fast moving embers of pain fanning out to all corners of my skull. We were fighting. A brutal grappling match inside our minds.

  She broke the clutch.

  “I’m taking you with me,” she said.

  “Where?”

  “Try and find out.” She stared me down, daring me to dig into her thoughts again. Daring me to take the pain. I knew she’d fight back even harder. She’d make my blood boil and my skin burn away if I tried, with no thought to how bad it hurt her too.

  I was done fighting. If she wanted to take me somewhere—fine.

  “What about us?” said the vocal one from the cell.

  Sam turned to them. All four shrank away from the bars and stood back near the toilet and the cots.

  “You think I should let you go?” she said. The vocal one nodded. “Why?”

  “Because you are one badass bitch.” I wasn’t sure, but I think he meant it as a compliment.

  “What are you in for?” she asked him.

  “Nothing. Smoking a little crystal is all.”

  “How about you?” she said to the guy straddling the toilet.


  “Not a goddamn thing. I’m innocent.”

  “Okay innocent. Step on up.” Sam jangled the keys and unlocked the door. Mr. Innocent didn’t move at first. He scanned the faces of his cellmates looking for advice. They all watched their shoes. “Come on,” she said.

  He eased himself away from the toilet and crossed the short nine feet of the cell floor, moving slowly the way a solider in a minefield might. Sam waved him out with her gun, impatient.

  Innocent passed through the cell door to freedom.

  “You want to do something to that cop I bet.”

  “What?” He wanted to run for the door and get the hell out is what he wanted.

  “Now’s your chance to do anything you want to a cop. Come on. You know you’ve always wanted to.”

  “The dead one?”

  “He’s not dead yet,” she said. I had to disagree. “Come on.” She waved Innocent over. He reluctantly went.

  “You ever shoot a cop?” She asked.

  His eyes went wide and he shook his head.

  “Well, you’re gonna right now.”

  She put a hand on his hand. I felt the rough skin on my own palm. He let himself be manipulated by her, too scared to resist. She stepped behind him, placed his hand over hers and the gun, keeping it in her possession. Then pointed it down at the cop and his ever-widening pool of blood.

  “Go ahead. Shoot him.” Mr. Innocent didn’t know what to do. I could feel his heart pounding through her chest as she pressed tightly against his back.

  Tired of waiting for him, Sam squeezed the trigger and another bullet tore through the cop’s skull. Blood didn’t spray, most of it already decorated the floor. The shot did open up an all too clear view of his brain. Mr. Innocent nearly threw up.

  I hated that my own reaction was one of dull distance. Of giving in.

  “Who else wants a try?” she asked the group. Nobody moved. “How about him?” she aimed the gun at Mr. Innocent’s head. “Anybody have a problem with him while you were in there?” Still nobody moved, but I could sense them all tensing their muscles at once.