by Brian Hodge
Justin didn’t reply. There was no earthly way he could begin to measure the shame and embarrassment she must have felt.
“So they know, all of his friends. I don’t see any of them anymore, so that’s good. And do you believe it, after Brad broke off the wedding, three of his friends called to ask me out. What did they think I was?”
Justin reached down to hold her moistened hands. Then pulled her up and held her to him.
“I don’t know who else knows,” she murmured into his ear. “I don’t even want to. Except there’s always, always, this fear I have inside that something’s going to go wrong, and my parents are going to find out. That is my absolute worst fear. Every night when I go to bed I pray to God to keep that from happening the next day. I pray for that like I’ve never prayed for anything.”
He held her, rocked her. Every ache and pain his heart had felt in the store and while driving around had melted, drained, paled into inconsequentiality. He felt like the most selfish person on earth.
“I love you,” she whispered, and her mouth sought him, found him. Hungry for something more than contact. Acceptance, maybe.
He wanted nothing more than to give it.
Justin knew that soon, very soon, he would lead her to bed. Maybe carry her, with April clinging to his body like a koala to a tree. He would lay her down, undress her slowly.
Kiss her all over, not missing a single square inch. He would try his very best to give and give and give and this time expect nothing in return. He would become a sponge, trying to soak up the hurt, at least for a while. He would try to make her feel better than she had ever felt before. He would probably fail, but the trying was all. He couldn’t heal the scars, but he could love her in spite of them.
April began to laugh into the side of his throat. A strange sound, a mix. Perhaps eighty percent sorrow and twenty percent hope.
“I liked you that first night we met,” she said. “But I really started falling for you the next night. When we sat at the edge of Davis Island and you told me what happened in St. Louis. I think I would’ve done anything for you that night. You know why?”
He shook his head. “Why?”
“Because I was sitting there thinking, here he is, the one I’ve been waiting for — the one who’s just as screwed up as I am.”
Justin chuckled softly. Understanding, then, that eighty-twenty mix. He took the comment as no insult.
It was, after all, the truth.
Chapter 17
STORMY WEATHER
At least half the time when the Weatherman saw a movie featuring a contract killer, he laughed out loud. Seldom did they get it right. Especially when they presented some screwtop who approached death with the mysticism of a Zen master. Thought they were absorbing life essences and whatnot. What a load of bullshit. Guy like that in the real world wouldn’t last any time. Go into it with such personal feelings — especially the deeply weird — and your potential for screw-ups would rocket past the ozone layer.
Fact was, the best in the field were generally the most boring. Total lack of feelings may not translate into high drama, but it definitely makes for cautious business practices.
He allowed himself one luxury of sentimentality: the turquoise ring. Souvenir from the first job he’d ever done on a purely professional level, no personal stake other than the half-up-front, half-upon-completion financial terms. Big Mexican woman in Albuquerque, trying to blackmail the wrong guy. Hefty pair of mitts on that mama; the ring fit his own finger just fine.
Dusk had fallen half an hour ago. Time to get a bit more active instead of sitting and watching the world go by. Saturday night’s all right for fighting, Elton John used to sing. It was peachy-keen for dying, as well.
The Weatherman was in his rental, parked in a small business lot across the alley from April Kingston’s place. Different vantage point from where he and Lupo had watched yesterday, but equally functional.
He wore a variation on yesterday’s attire: tropical geek. Wherever he went to work, if there was a stereotypical tourist look, that’s what he adopted. And nobody took a second glance. They had seen it all before. In the West, he wore tight jeans and cowboy shirts and gaudy boots. In California, he looked like a wannabe surfer. It never failed. On the rare occasions he was witnessed, an accurate facial description was nonexistent. They remembered the silly clothes. Which, by the time the witness was dredging his memory for details, had long been doffed. And if need arose, he simply pocketed the ring until on safe ground.
Weapons check: in perfect working order. For this evening’s job he was using a Beretta nine-millimeter semiautomatic pistol, silencer equipped. Hollow-point slugs that flattened on impact and tore tunnels of damage within the body and craters upon exit. Tough to salvage the slug for rifling marks, too, an added bonus. In actuality he preferred a revolver with the same sort of bullets. Semiautomatics could jam on occasion, and in a business where second chances were tough at best and often impossible, a jam was catastrophic. Didn’t matter if you had a fifteen-shot magazine if that first one jammed; if you couldn’t get past it, the rest might as well be suppositories. But hit a one-in-a-million misfire with a revolver, just rotate to the next cylinder, and rock and roll.
However. Silence was golden, literally, and silencers did not work on revolvers. No enclosure around the cylinder. Another famous movie fuckup. He always guffawed when he saw that. So he adapted. The Weatherman came fully equipped with his silenced Beretta and a small five-round .32 revolver backup, just in case. Happily, he’d never jammed. But readiness was everything.
Time to do it.
The Weatherman stowed his pistols. Beretta in his waistband beneath an untucked shirt, the .32 in a small holster riding the small of his back. Then he grabbed his ticket to her door.
Last night, he‘d staked out the place to make sure these two didn’t leave long-term. Once the girl had returned from wherever and the loft’s lights had gone out an hour later, he returned to his motel and ordered a pizza. He still had the empty box, the strip of adhesive scrawled with his temporary address now removed and burned.
Pizza box in hand, he left the car. A gusty night. His hair swirled in the wind. He was losing it, that hairline receding higher by the year, but he did his best to comb it to hide the fact.
They were both home. The Fiero was parked by the building, and since nightfall, he had seen a pair of shadows briefly cross the drawn blinds.
He preferred doing a double-header like this outside. Both together, side by side, where surprise was optimal and cover minimal. Didn’t look to be the case today. These two were the most nest-holing people he’d taken out in a long time. He’d only seen one today, and briefly. The girl, coming down for her morning paper and mail, wearing white shorts and an orange halter top. Not a glimpse the rest of the day.
The Weatherman took stock of logistics halfway to the stairwell. Nearby enough to make a difference, not a creature was stirring. Just the pizza man.
The stairwell. Twenty-five steps, give or take, straight up to a door, blank except for a round peephole eye. Before it, above the narrow landing, a single naked bulb glowed with harsh light. Once he was up that high, no one in the outside world would be able to see him unless they were standing directly at the bottom of the stairs.
He paused halfway up, out of the gusty windflow, and smoothed his hair into place, fretting until it felt just right. Then he covered the rest of the way. A quick over-the-shoulder glance. All clear. He eased out the Beretta with his right hand. In his left he balanced the pizza box like a tray on a waiter’s palm.
He knuckled the bell with his gun hand, heard a buzzer sound within. Held the gun behind his thigh, and with a practiced motion of his thumb, flicked off the safety.
Whoever answered, he’d say the pizza had been ordered in the other’s name. Momentary confusion, divide and conquer. Get the second one to the door, with a little luck.
He heard music from inside.
And then the unlatching of
the inner door.
Saturday had been as close to a perfect day as April could remember. They could have been anywhere in the world, for absolutely nothing had intruded to remind them where they were. No business calls, no personal calls, nothing. The world was on hold, and they had managed to escape it.
Until the doorbell buzzed.
They were on the couch, the stereo playing as they looked through two albums’ worth of her childhood photos. The past he wanted to know more about, and she was happy to pop on the tour guide’s hat. Just the fact that he was interested was enough to send her into emotional cartwheels.
Last night, she was sure she’d lost him. Lost another one. One who, faults and all, she had found far more intriguing and deep than Brad had ever thought about being. She was finally starting to feel glad that marriage to Brad had derailed two days prior to the event. Better things waiting.
A temporary Black Friday panic, then, finding that movie box on the refrigerator door. A world coming to an end, all ashes and dust. The difference in her spirits between then and now was like two distinct galaxies.
Because while it had obviously mattered to Justin, it had not changed him. He had loved her. Had taken her to bed to prove it. Not in the voyeuristic turn-on way that Brad’s friends had seemed to want after the Great Disclosure.
But in a way that healed.
He’d kissed her from eyelids to toes. Had ministered to every sensitive inch of her body with fingers and tongue. He had a wonderful touch, just right. Neither too gropingly rough nor too insubstantially light. It was a rarer happy medium than it seemed it should be. But he had it down right, with a magic tongue and musician’s hands. He had played her like a maestro at a vintage instrument.
And even now, she could catch periodic whiffs of the residue of their union, the blending of their fluids within her into a fragrance at once delicate and musky. She loved it. And him.
He could be the one, maybe. More time would tell. Once their lives were back to normal, she wanted to take him over to St. Pete to meet her parents. They would love him too, had to, just had to. Their opinions meant everything. For their lifelong love of her, their endless sacrifices — to disappoint them now would be unthinkable. They had loved Brad, his stability, his predictability. Good husband material, father material, son-in-law material. Their silent reproach at the demise of the wedding — whose cause they could never know about — was almost more than she could bear back in December.
That her parents might find Justin a second-rate replacement for Brad was a definite possibility. He was a good-looking man, but not from the clean-cut all-American mold Brad had been cast in. Not anymore, at least. Not since his career derailment. Screw it. She’d make sure he at least shaved on that day to come, and as for the rest, let the chips fall where they may.
The buzzer. Hated intrusion.
“I shall return,” she said. Left him grinning over a snapshot of her, gap-toothed and seven years old and holding a squirming cat.
Barefoot, April crossed from living room to kitchen to far-right corner. Swung into the little entry hallway and turned left to open the inner door. She stuck an eye to the peephole of the outer.
On the other side was a stranger, round-faced and smiling pleasantly. Hard to tell how old. He didn’t look terribly bright.
“Who is it?” she called through the door.
“Pizza dude.” Within the fisheye view, he stepped aside and raised one arm to show her the box.
“We didn’t order one. You must have the wrong address.”
She saw him frown and read from the edge of his side of the box. “Gray? Justin Gray?” He rattled off the address. “Don’t tell me somebody phoned in another joke. Aw, fudge! I’ll catch trouble for sure!”
Well, she didn’t want that if it could be avoided. Poor guy, he sounded very plaintive about it. Maybe Justin had phoned in an order and forgotten to tell her. Less than a half hour ago, she’d spent a few minutes in the bathroom. Maybe he had.
“Hang on a sec,” she said.
hand lingering on the lock
“Hey, Justin, did you order a pizza?” she called, louder.
while the music pounded on
“WHAT?” he yelled back over the stereo.
She sighed. Stepped back far enough so he could see her. “Come here a minute, okay?”
He nodded and stood, came forward. His hair caught a ruffling breeze that rushed in a near window and out a far one. He wore cutoffs, a sleeveless coral shirt. And looked absolutely adorable.
her fingers turning, unbolting the lock
“What’s up?”
dropping to the knob
“Did you order a pizza when I was in the bathroom earlier?”
twisting the knob so the poor dimwitted delivery man wouldn’t have to keep speaking to a faceless door
Justin frowned, gave his head a little shake. “No.” He was eight feet from the door, from her, and closing…
as the door eeaaaased open
And there he stood. The pizza dude. She almost laughed at his clothes.
She should have been expecting it, a blustery day like today. Sometimes that stairwell acted like a giant wind tunnel when her loft windows were open along with both doors.
A rushing airflow, circuit complete. Her hair flew back from her shoulders.
The pizza guy’s box, perched atop his hand, got sucked right out of his grasp. As soon as Justin walked up, suspiciously eyeing the door, the box went spinning into the doorway, as light as a paper airplane. For an instant, the bogus delivery man looked at it with utter surprise.
When she looked to Justin, he was already diving toward her. Definitely no pizza in that box. She got her hands on the knob to fling the door shut again, only to have it punted back open.
The pizza dude looked anything but dimwitted now.
Justin’s arms around her, they went spinning past the doorway toward the floor. She’d seen the long-barreled gun swing up, heard it bark with a soft little cough, and Justin cried out and flecks of blood speckled the inner door behind them.
She screamed once, thinking it would be loud. It wasn’t. It was like trying to scream in a nightmare. A weak, anemic warble.
The pizza box went sailing past her face like a hurled Frisbee, this time from the floor up, from Justin’s hand. It struck the pizza dude’s gun as there came that coughing sound again and the shot plowed into the wall.
They were rolling, and their bodies were blocking the door from swinging shut, and they were sitting ducks, Romeo and Juliet, they would die together, together, and with that as a part of the bargain she didn’t find it all a complete loss.
Movement from below, bottom of the stairwell, and she knew if she got out of this she’d never order a pizza ever again.
the silencer’s round hole, an unblinking merciless eye
And she saw yet another stranger down below, wearing a pale brown shirt and olive pants and her senses were overloading with excruciating clarity, why else would she notice that he had purple socks, purple socks, of all things to notice as he hoisted something that looked like it belonged in the Old West and something whizzed through the air until she couldn’t see it—
And Justin was covering her body with his own now while she felt warm trickles from him that were not sweat not tears had to be blood and she found her voice and shrieked a good one now.
And above them the pizza dude’s back arced like a sailfish breaking water and he gurgled, and she saw a bloody spike protruding from his lower shoulder by at least a foot, and he stumbled and spasmed and left a crimson smear on her doorway.
And his pistol clattered to the floor of the landing and her hands scrambled for it Justin’s hands hers closing first and she pointed into the ugly shirt looming over her and pulled the trigger pulled again again and now she was making the cute coughing noises.
And the pizza dude slid down on his rump inside the doorway and his head lolled bonelessly, and she knew that this delivery was incomplete.<
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April gently pushed Justin from atop her. He rolled beside her on his own, and she took that as a good sign. She wriggled on elbows and knees into the doorway, the gun held awkwardly in both hands. Just in case. The bowman was halfway up the stairs by now. An Indian of some sort, though definitely not native American. He watched her with piercing black eyes, and he had not reloaded another arrow.
“What do you want?” April scarcely recognized her own voice. So harsh, so taut, so feral.
“A man named Tony Mendoza,” he said. “And his green powder.”
She slumped against the floor, her last sparks of energy draining. She lowered the gun. Began to feel ill at the prospect of having crawled so close to this fresh corpse she’d just created.
Justin sat up behind her. Touched her.
And April knew that within some fifteen seconds, they’d been dragged into an entirely new game.
PART III
RITUALS
Chapter 18
CYPRESS
The night felt like a throwback to the more prodigious days of Justin’s former drug use. While he had at least managed to keep a clean nose since Apocalips, he was now having trouble assimilating the whole of reality all at once. At least he’d had a reason in the old days. Not a good one, but a reason nonetheless.
Take them one at a time.
First off, he had goofed. Tony Mendoza had exercised some effort, no doubt, and found him after all. Not surprising, with hindsight. He hadn’t exactly crawled into a hole and pulled it in after him.
Next, a dead man was sandwiched between the inner and outer doors. Deceased all of fifteen minutes. Justin had wiped the blood up, had packed the guy’s wounds with dish towels and stretchy shipping tape so he wouldn’t leak anymore, then retrieved the five spent shell casings. The body would have to be dealt with, and the sooner the better, given this heat and humidity.