by J. L. Murray
Viv raised an eyebrow, forgetting to fake panic.
“They don’t know you’re here,” she said. “You’re a bounty hunter.”
“So?” he said, irritated. “That means I can turn you in, or I can choose not to. Depending on how sweet you are to me, Genevieve. You know, that part was true. I have a thing for black girls. You’re a bit long in the tooth, but you seem like you have a nice body under all those blouses and slacks. I mean, would it kill you to put on a dress for a date?”
“It wasn’t a date,” she hissed.
“You didn’t know that,” he said, smiling again. Viv wanted to wipe that smile off his face. She wanted him to remember how he’d looked her up and down like a side of beef. She wanted him to remember how scared she looked right now. All she had to do was to get to the kitchen.
“I don’t know what it is, this thing I’m keeping for him. I’ll get it for you.”
“You think I’m stupid?” he said.
I hope so, Viv thought. She made herself smile again. “I thought I’d mix us some drinks and we could have some fun.” She felt her skin crawl as Tom took the bait.
He nodded after a moment. “Yeah. Yeah, okay. Let’s do that. I can see you wanting to be nice to me now. That’s smart.”
You don’t know the half of it, she thought. But she kept smiling as she stood up from the couch. She made her hips sway as she walked to the kitchen with Tom following behind. She opened the pantry and took out all the cans of vegetable soup and pinto beans and creamed corn and set them on the counter. Then she reached back into the cupboard.
“Easy,” Tom said, watching her. “Slow, so I can see what you’re bringing out.”
Viv smiled and slowed her movements. She saw him lick his lips. He thought this was going to be a double win for him. Viv brought out the model pump that she’d stolen from work, wrapped in towels. She passed it to him like it was a baby and he took it, looking confused. She glanced at his belt. He wasn’t even carrying a gun. She smiled and made her eyes soft as he looked at her, confused. He unwrapped the glass contraption, letting the towels fall on the floor.
“What the hell is it?” he said.
Viv shrugged. “I have no idea,” she said. “He said it was something to do with the blood.”
“Don’t you work at the blood factory?” he said. “The new one, where they’re going to do all the blood at once?”
“Oh, you know about that?” she said, trying to sound impressed.
“I do my research,” he said, turning the pump over and looking down at it. “I’ve been following you for a while.”
But you don’t know me, she thought. Smiling wider, she took a step toward the stove.
“What do you think you’re doing?” Tom said, watching her. She didn’t like the way he was looking at her. She opened the cabinet that was now by her hand and pulled out a bottle.
“Can I make us a drink?” she said.
“Bourbon?” he said, setting the pump down on the counter roughly and walking over to her. “Where the hell did you find Kentucky bourbon?” he said, obviously delighted.
“I’ve been saving it,” she lied. She bought it from a woman who lived in the old Catholic church. She’d heard that the woman had connections to Deacon, but who knew what was true anymore. Even now the papers described Mike Novak as a revolutionary leader. The world was made of lies. Maybe it always had been.
Viv unscrewed the bottle and reached for two glasses, but Tom grabbed the bottle greedily from her hand and sniffed at it. He watched her as he lifted it to his mouth and drank. He choked and coughed, spluttering booze down the front of his shirt.
“It’s strong,” said Viv. “If you’re not used to it.”
Tom sneered, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. He closed his eyes and drank again, more carefully this time. Viv touched the drawer with two fingers. Tom lowered the bottle and looked at her. She thought he was going to offer her the bottle, but instead he grabbed her arm and pulled her to him.
“You know,” he said, reeking of whisky, “you don’t look that good to me anymore.”
Viv smiled. “You never looked good to me.”
“You watch your mouth,” Tom said, but Viv was away from him and before he could move to grab her again she was holding the weird glass pump. She watched him stagger. She’d noticed at the bar that he got lightheaded every time he finished a drink and would follow each with a glass of water. He couldn’t even handle Rev alcohol. It was no wonder he was staggering now, trying to focus on her after slamming a quarter bottle of Maker’s Mark.
“Oops,” said Viv, and she hadn’t felt this good in years. “You’d better be careful, I might just go and drop this.”
Tom raised a finger, touching his head with the other hand.
“You put something in this booze,” he slurred, looking at the bottle in his hand.
“No, sweetie, you just can’t handle your liquor. Now, me, I’m an alcoholic. Getting drunk is better than living here and remembering how good it used to be. I drink one of those every few days. The hangover’s not too bad if you drink it straight. If you have a taste for that kind of thing.” She held out the pump, balancing it on one hand. “This is just everything you came for, isn’t it? It would be a shame if it broke into a million pieces.”
“Bitch, you better not,” said Tom, focusing on her. He set the bottle on the counter, but missed and the whisky fell with a crash, sloshing amber fluid everywhere. The bottle didn’t break.
Viv watched Tom, as he took a step toward her. His vision was clearing, but that was okay. She still had time. She pulled her hand away and let the glass object fall to the floor. It was made far more delicately than a whisky bottle, though, and it was almost art the way it shattered into a million pieces, tiny bits of glass catching the light as they flew in every direction. Viv was at the drawer by the time Tom started yelling, his face turning purple with rage. But the knife was in her hand and she had him quiet and sitting in the chair in no time, the point sticking straight into a pulsing vein in his neck. One twitch and he was dead.
“I keep my knives sharp,” she whispered, marveling at how easy it had been. “No one knows you’re here, Tom. No one will come.”
“The noise,” he whispered hoarsely. “Someone will call.”
“No,” she said. “No one calls any more. No one brings the Movers into their backyard on purpose. We sort our own problems now and no one bats an eye. No one even knocks on the door to see if everything is okay. No one will come. Not for you, not for me.”
“You don’t have the guts,” he said.
“You don’t think so?” Viv said. “Well, I was a family practice doctor, I’ll grant you that. But I still know every nerve in your body. I know what’s going to hurt you the most. I know how to make you scream, Tom.”
He swallowed thickly, his fingers twitching as he watched her. He was trying to find the best time to overpower her. He knew he could, and Viv knew it too. She wasn’t planning on torture. This was a necessary evil, she told herself. He was going to hurt her, he was going to turn her in. He had planned this so carefully. The Revs didn’t even force him to, he did it because he liked it. She looked into his cold eyes and felt his coldness fill her, too. She felt her face harden and her stomach fill with ice. She felt every nerve in her body stand up and emit a buzzing sensation. She thought of Griff, her husband. Lost before he literally lost himself. She’d hated him, hated his weakness, and he knew it. And then the Revs took Hunter.
“I’m not going to do any of that,” Viv said, and she didn’t recognize her own voice. It was a cool, hollow voice, a voice filled with barely-suppressed rage. Tom noticed too, and his expression changed from smug amusement to fear.
“No, please,” he said. “Genevieve, please?” Then he couldn’t say anything else because Viv had the knife in him. It was harder than she thought, the throat seemed so soft, but she had to use all her weight to shove it through the skin. But after that, it was easy. The knife we
nt in like it was meant to be there, over and over again. And when Tom tried to defend himself with his hands, Viv grabbed his wrist and extended his arm until she could see the soft, exposed back of his upper arm. She hooked his brachial artery with the tip of the bloody knife.
Viv stepped back as Tom gave a breathy gurgle, trying to hold his neck and his gushing arm at the same time. Viv gasped at the sight of it and looked down at the knife. She saw that her hands were bloody to the wrist, giving the impression that she was wearing scarlet gloves. She forced her eyes back to Tom. Everything was moving so slowly. The rage that she felt in her chest and stomach and eyes had dissipated, leaving her feeling empty and weak. Tom fell out of the chair onto the floor and his bewildered eyes met hers. It was shocking he was still alive, there was so much blood, all pooling around him, ruby red and beautiful. Viv crouched down next to him, the knife in her hand, dripping with blood. She stared at him. He hadn’t known her, hadn’t known what she could do.
“You know me now,” she said, her voice still not her own. A shiver went up her back at the chill of it.
Tom’s eyes dawned with acceptance and he let his hand fall from his neck, which was partly gone. Viv recalled a man during the Dark Days that looked like Tom did now. That man had been killed by Revs, monsters. She had just done the same. This man who had been working for monsters hadn’t realized that sometimes monsters looked like well-dressed, middle-aged black women with shabby apartments.
Tom's eyelids half closed as the pulsing blood became weaker. Viv rose to her feet and walked to the sink, rinsing off the knife and her hands. She felt as though she were pushing through water, as every movement took an incredible amount of effort. She kept reminding herself to keep breathing because she was holding her breath. Then she gathered every towel in the apartment, dirty and clean, and draped them around Tom to soak up the blood. Someone might report blood seeping through the basement ceiling. And despite what she said, someone might have reported the screaming.
She hadn’t so much as thought it when she heard voices in the apartment next door. The apartment Tom had moved into. Mike’s old apartment. She listened hard as two men argued. And then the door slammed and there were footsteps. Louder, louder, coming right towards her door. They were going to keep going, though. They were going to walk on past, she told herself. And then they stopped. And she heard a shuffle.
Someone was standing right outside her door.
Viv froze, her eyes wide. Vaguely, she felt the panic rising. She had just killed a man. Slowly, she looked down at her clothes, splattered with blood. It felt good to kill him, Viv had to admit to herself. But that was over and now she had to face the consequences. She had a dead man at her feet and someone was outside her door.
Go away, go away, go away, she said in her head. Please, please, please go away.
When the knock finally came, it was soft. They had found her. She looked down at the dead man.
“Who is it?” she heard herself say.
Nineteen
They met in a dark alley, on the darkest night Sia could remember. Not just because the blackness seemed to seep into the streetlights and wrap around the bars, muting their mediocre rock music. The first time Sia saw Joshua's face she had a gun in her hand. And her husband was gasping for breath at her feet.
She was shaking as she stared at Collin. He was shiny with blood and he was moving his mouth like a fish stranded on the beach. His small eyes were wide with surprise as he looked up at her. Fear. Fear for his life, but also he feared her. He. Feared. Her.
Sia knelt down next to him.
“You thought you had power over me,” she said. “But you were wrong. You will always be nothing to me.” She touched her throat. She could still feel his fingers there, digging into the soft flesh at her neck, squeezing slowly, watching her eyes as she gasped for air, fumbled in her bag.
When she shot him, he had screamed like a child. And then he hadn't been able to make any sounds at all.
“You'll never hurt me again,” said Sia. And then she did the oddest thing. She smiled. She couldn't remember the last time she smiled, but she was doing it now. And what's more, she felt happy, truly happy to see her tormentor bleeding out in a dirty alley.
“Are you going to finish him?” said a voice.
Sia started, turning quickly on her knees, falling back.
He was tall. So tall that he seemed a giant at first. He wore an old fashioned hat and a black cloak, like Jack the Ripper just coming from the opera.
“I...” Sia stammered, backing away.
“Don't leave that,” said the man. He walked over, closing the distance in a few steps on his long legs. He crouched down and picked something up and held it out to her. Her gun. Sia looked at his face then. He was smiling at her. Uncertain, she reached out and let him place the gun in her hand.
“Thank you,” she said softly.
“They have so many ways to catch you these days,” said the man. “You're not even wearing gloves.”
“I didn't mean to kill him,” she said.
“You didn't kill him,” he said, nodding to Collin. “He's still alive.” He stood and offered her a hand. She realized she was sitting on the ground where she had fallen. It suddenly occurred to her how vile it smelled in the alley. Rotten Chinese food and piss and old grease. His hands were warm and dry and large, and when Sia was standing again, she didn't let go. His soft cloak brushed against her, and she wished he would wrap her up in it.
“Do you want him to live?” said the man, his voice barely more than a whisper. He leaned his head down and she could see the glimmer of his dark eyes. He wasn't smiling, but she felt it there, just below the surface.
“What?” said Sia, confused. “I have to call someone, I think. I don't know...”
“You don't have to do anything, Sia,” said the man. “Do you want him to live?” He poked Collin with a toe. His shoes were very shiny.
“How do you know me?” she said.
“That's not an answer,” he said. “Do you want him to live?” He brought a hand up and touched her bruised neck with his fingers.
“No,” she said after a moment. “I want him to die. But I don't want to go to jail.”
The man smiled again. “And if he could just...disappear?”
“I would welcome it,” she said without hesitation.
“Go home, Sia. Go to your rehearsal tomorrow. Pretend nothing happened. Throw your gun in the river. We'll see each other again.”
“What?” said Sia, shaking her head. “Who are you? How do you know me?”
He took a step back and bowed deeply.
“Joshua Flynn. At your service.”
Sia pretended she didn't hear any noises as she walked out of the alley and across the street. She pretended she didn't hear the ripping or tearing, or the wet coughing noise that was Collin trying to scream with a lung punctured by her bullet.
When she walked across the bridge, she dropped the gun off the edge, watching the tiny splash as it plopped in.
No one ever found it. And when the police came to her apartment to question her the next week, she told them that she had kicked him out months ago for cheating, but didn't he have a girlfriend who lived in Brooklyn Heights? The police did not come by again and seemed apologetic. They didn't notice the fine silk scarf wrapped around her neck to hide the fading bruises in the shapes of Collin's fingers, grasping her throat tightly.
She had a show the following week. It was sold out. A small but ornate theater, where they made up for the small dressing room by bringing her some very good champagne and filling the room with dark purple irises, which the manager heard were her favorites.
The lights were bright and by the first half hour, Sia was sweating in her beaded dress. Prickly heat ran up her back and made her itch, but she focused all her energy on playing. She played well, she could tell that night. The audience was completely silent, no one even dared cough as she played arrangement after arrangement completely her own.
She no longer had to lie and say that her talented husband wrote all her music, that lie was as dead as Collin. And since he had disappeared, she worked feverishly on composition after composition, trying things she had never done before and making different sounds fit together that had no right to sound so rich, so hauntingly beautiful.
Murder made her whole again.
She knew he was there in the audience, but she couldn't say how she knew. And during the intermission, she peered around the curtain to look at the empty seats, coats bundled up in them as people went out for a smoke, or used the bathroom. But there he was. In the center of the fifth row. Sitting still and patient, hands in lap, hair rakishly messy, and dark eyes watching, searching, finding her and locking on. He smiled and she shuddered. She had to force herself to blink, to go backstage again, to hurry to her dressing room, panting and sweating all the more. She shook as she changed her gown and put on something black that flowed and touched everything around her. She downed a glass of good champagne to calm her nerves, and then she was back.
It didn't seem possible that she would be able to play anything after that, but as she sat down at the piano, the buzz of the theater winding down and finally quiet, she felt that they were the only two there. She felt his eyes on her and it was as if she wasn't wearing a gown at all, as though he could see her without even trying. The newspapers said she played so beautifully, the music dark and unearthly, that the reviewer found himself crying halfway through the second half of her show.
She waited for Joshua Flynn in her dressing room for half an hour, but he did not come. Sia put on her coat, checked her purse for her pepper spray, and walked back to her apartment.
The phone was ringing when she came in, cheeks numb from the cold. She dashed for it.
“Hello?”
“Setsuko?” said her mother's accented voice. “Setsuko, what is going on? Are you all right?”
“I'm fine, Mother. I just came back from my show.”
“Oh,” she said. There was a long pause. Then a stilted, “How did it go?”