Two in the Head

by Eric Beetner

  She fired. Another open-skulled body hit the floor.

  “What about that one?” She aimed at the vocal one and shot. He fell. “How ‘bout him?” Another shot. One left. “You? Last chance.”

  The last man began to cry. The two bodies around him settled as their dead weight fell into each other. He put his hands out in front of him because he needed something to do. Nobody really thinks they’re going to stop a bullet. Maybe people do it more to block their view of what is coming.

  She pulled the trigger and the gun clicked. Empty.

  “Wait there,” she said. The man opened one eye, looked out through his tears and his spread fingers to watch her step over to the cop and pick his pistol up off the floor. She wiped blood from the grip onto his shirt, then wiped her hand on his pants making an annoyed grunt as she did. Even after the wipe, her palm was still a light pink, stained with blood. I felt its warmth.

  The guy in the cell obeyed orders. He stayed as she asked him and when she returned to her firing position he shut his eyes and put his hand up again. It didn’t stop the bullet this time either. All he got for his effort was a hole in the hand a split second before the hole in his head.

  It bothered me how little I felt. My insides were numb. A grief overload. The thrill of getting Lucas out to safety in the nick of time surely took some of the edge off more random killing. Being around the smell of gunpowder and fresh blood certainly wasn’t getting any easier though.

  NEXT STOP…

  “So now what?” I asked. I realized, along with the numbness, I doubted whether I would make it out of the jail cell alive. I was trapped, useless to her and ready to spill my guts to the cops. Everything in the rule book says she should kill me. Then there’s that damn little clause in the contract making it unclear whether taking my life would mean the end of hers too.

  “We go on a trip,” she said. She let the keys dangle in her hand, fingering through to find the right one.

  “You know I don’t know where he went.”

  “I know.”

  “So where are you taking me?”

  “You haven’t found out for yourself yet? You’re so fond of entering my brain and taking a walk around. Which I’m fucking sick of, by the way.”

  “You made that clear.”

  “It’s like mind rape.”

  “Just open the door and let’s get this over with.”

  She stopped outside my cell door. Her foot squished in the pool of blood spreading from beneath the cop. She deliberately rotated her shoe so the sound of wet friction filled the cinderblock room. Now that the gunfire faded and the noise from upstairs settled, down in the holding cells it became eerily quiet. Quiet enough to hear blood coagulate, which it did all around me.

  She smiled as she slid her shoe along the red smear. I refused to look down.

  “I want you to find out where we’re going for yourself.”

  “I don’t care. I’ll find out when we get there.”

  “No. Go ahead. Take a look.”

  She baited me. The hint of remorse form the night before seemed to have vanished. My urge to call her a bitch or something much worse wouldn’t come out either. New day, new resolve I guess. Amazing what even a lousy night’s sleep can do.

  “I can stay in here all night long. Or at least until the DEA gets here,” I said.

  “You and I both know it will take them fucking forever. They probably have to fill out a form just to enter the precinct.”

  She was right. Damn government bureaucracy. Sam pushed her face closer to the bars.

  “I want you to look.”

  I felt myself being pulled into her head. We were both getting better at using our strange powers over each other. I’d managed to reach back into her memories, why wouldn’t she be able to force me to see something?

  Her eyes began to water as she concentrated harder. I started to resist, but I was too exhausted. I let it come. What’s the damn point?

  She showed me more than only where we were going. She had a replay cued up of all the death and destruction so far. I watched body after body get cut down, blood flowed in rivers, eyes went glassy and cold as I watched. I sat down on the cot and started shivering. I opened my mouth to scream but nothing came out.

  After a good session on the shooting range I always liked to play with the spent shells. I liked to run my fingers over the little casings of metal, so harmless after being discharged. Still, the small black cave always seemed like a reminder of the death that lived inside. Right then, in that cell, I felt like that shadowed shell. Like my body—no, more like my soul—lived in that tiny space. The stink of gunpowder, the hard metal cold until the firing pin and then hot, burning hot. My brain felt stuffed into the charred black casing of a million spent bullets.

  And in the mix of images I saw a face. A face I recognized. I knew where we were going.

  ALL IN THE FAMILY

  We drove north on the highway in a stolen car. Four exits out of the city and she turned off and began the jaunt through suburbia. For the drive each of us had been concentrating on not letting the other one in our heads. The car hummed with electric noise, or maybe that was only in my head. Neither of us spoke. We both knew the directions.

  I got tired of the silence.

  “I saw you last night, you know.”

  “Yeah. And?”

  “I saw you crying. You didn’t want to do what you did.”

  Her hands gripped tighter on the wheel. I felt subtle vibrations in my own hands, the road beneath us rattling the wheel, feeling transferred from her body to mine.

  “I don’t give a shit what you saw.”

  “You felt something. Regret, I think.”

  “Yeah? You feel this?” Sam sent a shock wave of an image to my brain. My defenses were down and she took advantage. A full color replay of Randolph’s death filled my head. I jerked like a flame passed under my nose. The image vanished quick as it came.

  Sam smiled, happy for her little ambush.

  “It wasn’t just you, y’know.”

  “What, you cried? That’s not exactly fucking news.”

  “I told someone to F off.” She laughed. “It’s progress. We’re each gaining our other side. Restoring balance. I should have known no one can function on only one or the other.”

  “Why don’t you shut the fuck up and look for the turn?”

  I realized what Lucas and I had been all along. He’s my other half. I know people say that all the time in wedding vows and all that, “You complete me,” shit. But, before I knew two such different sides of me existed, he’d been my balance. The deeper I got with Calder and Rizzo the more I needed Lucas and his Captain America routine to make me feel good about myself. About the whole damn world.

  In a way he functioned as my enabler too. He allowed me to think I wasn’t so bad. I knew Calder and Rizzo would get theirs someday and I threw Lucas and his case a bone every now and then.

  My biggest regret is I never got to spend any of the money. Wouldn’t be prudent to suddenly show up in a new convertible or a Prada handbag and matching shoes on my DEA salary.

  “Hey, speaking of which, did you take my money?”

  “You mean my money?”

  “Our money.”

  “It’s safe.”

  I saw her concentrating on the road so I reached down into her brain and had a look around. It only took a fraction of a second. We were each getting so accustomed to these brain games it took almost no longer than searching your own mind for a fact or a memory.

  She hid the money in the trunk of a rental car parked in a 24-hour lot downtown. Her getaway car. Planning ahead, I see.

  Sam shoved me out of her head like an angry bouncer. “We’re here,” she announced.

  SISTER-IN-AGAINST-THE-LAW

  Lucas’s sister Marjorie always liked me. She said I could “tame” Lucas, whatever that meant. He seemed pretty housebroken when I met him. She’d obviously
never dated any Texas boys.

  I think maybe I lived some of Marjorie’s deeper, darker fantasies about her own could-have-been life. She’d been knocked up and married by eighteen. Two boys, both hellions. Both out at Junior College now, one a Freshman, one a Junior. Her husband, Barry, sold home and business alarm systems and came armed with a personality about as exciting as a grass growing contest.

  Marjorie had settled. Our first and best bonding moment came when Barry suggested I take her to the gun range and show her how to use the .38 he bought for her.

  “Oh, why do I need to know how to use that thing? I’m going to lock it on up and throw away the key.”

  “Marge, you need to know how to handle yourself. With the boys away you’ll be alone a lot more and what if something happens?”

  “Isn’t that why we have this alarm system installed?”

  That shut him up for a second, but I told her I’d be glad to take her to the range.

  First time she felt the sissy gun buck in her hand you’d think I gave her the first pull on a crack pipe. All she wanted was more. Emptied her chamber and then asked to shoot my gun. She grinned with the world-is-right satisfaction of a kid who makes his Halloween candy last until Christmas morning.

  The whole way home she made me tell any story at all from my years in the military and in the agency that involved firing a gun.

  Last year, for their anniversary, Barry upgraded her to a .44 cal Smith and Wesson. Part of me wished she kept it nearby for when Sam knocked on her door, part of me didn’t. Gunned down by my future sister-in-law wasn’t an auspicious end to this saga. Of course, I’d seen her shoot. She’d hit ten bystanders before Sam or I ever took a bullet.

  The clock in the car said three minutes after nine as we got out. Sam walked up the path, trusted I’d follow, which I did. She knocked with a fist while I stood at the bottom of the three step stoop.

  Barry opened the door, coffee cup in his hand.

  “Samantha, hi,” he said to her. “What brings you out this way?” He went for another sip of coffee and spotted me. “Oh, Saman…is this your sister?”

  “Far as you know,” she said and drew her gun from behind her back. “Inside. And I’ll take one of those coffees.”

  Barry is a man easily subdued. He goes where he’s told. I’m sure he thought my twin at the door was some sort of joke and he only had to wait for the punch line.

  Sam pushed him into the kitchen. His coffee spilled on the floor and his pants.

  “Who is it, Barry?” Marjorie said as she stepped into the kitchen, still in her bath robe. Must be nice not to have a job and sleep as late as you want.

  “Sit the fuck down,” Sam said.

  Marjorie shut down for a moment. She stood still, took in the scene—two of us, a gun, her husband with what looked like piss stains all down his front. She put her hands up like she’d seen in bank robbery footage and sat at the breakfast nook on top of the sunflower patterned seat cushions, beneath the sunflower adorned curtains. Already waiting for her was a steaming coffee mug with a ceramic sunflower on the side.

  “I saw something on the news about the DEA office…” She was putting together a picture in her head. If she only knew how far from the truth it was.

  “I’ll try to explain later,” I said.

  “Good luck with that,” Sam said. “Where’s my coffee?”

  Barry went to the coffee pot, reached into the cabinet above it and pulled out a matching sunflower coffee mug, and poured. When he filled one, he reached for another.

  “Oh, no thank you Barry,” I said. “Just one.” All very polite and familial.

  “Cream?” Sam asked.

  “We have milk,” Barry said.

  Sam huffed. “Fine.”

  Barry went to the fridge.

  “Samantha,” Marjorie said, her eyes darting between us. “What is going on?”

  “She said she’d explain later. Don’t make me start shooting before I have to.”

  Marjorie instinctively cinched closed the collar on her robe.

  “Call Lucas,” Sam said to her.

  “He won’t answer,” I said.

  “He will if it’s her.”

  “He won’t if he’s smart. And he’s smart.”

  Sam raised the gun toward Marjorie, sighting down the center of the sunflower on the mug sitting in front of her chest. “Well, call someone before I start killing people for nothing.”

  “Blake,” I said. “He’ll pick up.”

  I saw in Marjorie’s eyes her measuring the distance between where she sat and her handgun. But I knew. Up the stairs, into her side table. Gun in the walnut box with the velvet lining, bullets pushed to the back of the drawer with the gun oil and the shammy cloth. No way would Sam let her out of our sight for that long. Besides, if I knew where Marjorie’s gun slept, so did Sam.

  I turned to Barry. “Phone?”

  Still in shock, he pointed to a charging station at the end of the kitchen counter with a notepad next to it and three takeout menus pinned to a cork board on the wall.

  I dialed Blake. “Speaker,” she said. I pushed the button and we all listened to the ring.

  “Hello?”

  “Blake, it’s me. Is Lucas with you?”

  Silence. The static of the phone line. “He stepped out. I was listening to Springsteen and you know how much he hates him.”

  “Cut the shit, Blake,” Sam said. “Tell him we’re with Marjorie. Tell him he either comes out here right now or she dies.”

  Marjorie gasped slightly.

  “Who’s Marjorie?” Blake asked.

  “Would you fucking tell him Blake. Don’t be a fucking cop for once in your life.”

  The line went muffled, a hand over the receiver. Sam drank her coffee. Marjorie pulled tighter at her bathrobe and Barry stood flatfooted in the kitchen. I assumed he’d been trying to figure a way to get to the alarm system control panel and hit the panic button. Sam wasn’t about to let that happen again.

  Blake came back on the line. “He’ll be there.”

  “Put him on.”

  A pause, then shuffling. Lucas came on. “Marge? You okay?”

  Marjorie started to say something, but stopped the sound on the way out of her throat, looked to Sam for approval. Sam nodded. “I’m okay. A little scared. Confused. But okay.”

  “For now,” Sam added.

  “Samantha?”

  “Yeah. You got both of us here.”

  A pause filled with doubt. Two of the same person would be the easiest thing to fake over the phone. Lucas still wasn’t convinced. He knew something was up. All those cops at the station didn’t suddenly start shooting themselves. Even if he thought I went whacko and poisoned his entire office, I couldn’t be upstairs shooting while downstairs locked in a cell.

  Well, I could be both places at once, but not the way he thought. The half and half thing stymied him.

  “Marge, who is there with you?”

  Marjorie stammered. I didn’t blame her. “It’s Samantha. And I guess her twin sister. She’s got a gun.” Well done, Marjorie. You paint quite the word picture.

  “And which one am I speaking with?”

  “Which one do you think, dumbass? I’m the one you always wished came out a little more in the bedroom. I bet right now you’re thinking of having us both, aren’t you? What is it with guys and twins? It’s incest, you know.” She turned to Barry. “Even this sick fuck I bet was thinking it, weren’t you Barry? Miss Marjorie not giving you enough in the sack? Think you could handle two of us? News flash: you couldn’t.”

  “I’ll be there. Don’t do anything rash.”

  “Then you’d better fucking hurry.” She nodded to me and I hung up.

  “So now we wait,” she said and took a long sip on her sunflower mug. “Your coffee is shit, by the way.”

  (INSERT TOM PETTY LYRIC ABOUT WAITING HERE)

  “Now what?” I asked.
r />   “We wait. What did you think, we were gonna order in pizza?”

  “When he gets here, what then?”

  “I think you know.”

  I concentrated on my heart beat. I kept my mind empty, my nerves calm. My insides were as stable as a house of cards in a tornado (straight from Daddy’s lips, that one). I wanted like hell to think of a plan, to scan the room for a weapon, to find her weakness and exploit it like I’d been trained to do, but I needed to keep my thoughts blank or she would see.

  Kind of hard to come up with a plan when you can’t think of a plan. I stood by the end of the kitchen counter, halfway between Marjorie and Barry and facing my mirror image. Of course, on her side of the mirror, she held a gun.

  Marjorie sat still, but you could practically hear the gears in her mind grinding. A year and a half on the shooting range and it all came down to this. I wanted to tell her if she shot Sam, I would die too but something told me she didn’t give a shit about either one of us right then. One Samantha, two Samanthas, as long as we were out of her house, who cares?

  “So, okay, your coffee is shit, what’s for breakfast?” Sam said.

  Barry looked to Marjorie for an answer but she remained silent.

  “Doesn’t have to be fancy,” Sam said. “Some oatmeal, a bagel, some toast with jelly. I’m not asking for eggs fucking benedict here.”

  “We have toast,” Barry said and took a step toward an upper cabinet. He’d violated rule #1 of a hostage situation—no sudden moves.

  “Hold up there, Barry,” Sam said as she waved the gun his direction. Barry put the brakes on, hard. His feet skidded on the spilled coffee from his own cup and his loafers slid out from under him like he wore ice skates instead.

  Barry carried an extra twenty pounds of married man hanging over his belt. Not fat per se, but not at his college fighting weight anymore. When he hit the tile floor of the kitchen he hit hard. His palms slapped down in the puddle of cold coffee and made an awful noise, but he didn’t seem too damaged by it all. Then he started moaning and grabbing at his lower back.