Hades

by Russell Andrews

  Every day for a week, Justin and Reggie made love downstairs during the day and upstairs at night. They made love as often as possible and talked about everything they could think of. They drank ice-cold beer and Sicilian red wine and ate fresh tuna and lots of pasta with tuna roe. The third night, after a bottle of chilled Sicilian rosé, they made love on the very private patio. There was no one around to see them when they were outside. The house was a good seventy-five feet from the road in front, and it rested atop a cliff. There was a waist-high stone wall around the back of the patio. It was all that separated them from a three-hundred-foot plunge into the sparkling blue sea.

  They were on the patio now, in the late afternoon, both of them already brown from the sun. Reggie was reading a Dean Koontz novel about a husband whose wife was kidnapped. Justin was content to lie next to her, bask in the sun, and think about the fish they might eat for dinner, his hand lightly rubbing against her bare leg. At some point she put her book down and said, “I’ve been thinking.”

  He smiled and said, “Big mistake.” But then he said, “Okay, what are you thinking about?”

  Reggie said, “I’m wondering if you’re going to go back to the East End PD.”

  He stayed silent for a moment. “I don’t know yet. I haven’t decided.”

  She said, “Well, what I’m thinking is that, if you do, you never filled the opening you had from last year. You’re still a person short in the department.”

  “I never found the right person,” he told her.

  “Maybe I’m the right person,” she said.

  He looked at her, shielding his eyes from the sun, and smiled. “You want a beer?” he said. And when she nodded, he stood up and went inside.

  He was standing by the open refrigerator when he heard Reggie call his name.

  “Jay?” she said. “Could you come out here?”

  She sounded funny, there was the slightest quiver to her voice, and he called back, “I’ll be right there. You want a glass or just the bottle?”

  “Doesn’t matter,” she said, “but come out. I have to show you something.”

  “In a sec,” he said. “Well, maybe two seconds.”

  It was actually a minute or two before he emerged, and when he did he was holding two bottles of beer in his left hand. His right hand was covered by two large white linen napkins he’d found in the kitchen. He looked over at Reggie’s lounge chair, saw that it was empty. Then he looked toward the edge of the patio. She was standing in front of the brick wall. He could see the sea, deep blue and shiny, behind her. Standing next to her was a beautiful Chinese woman. The woman he’d seen near Wanda’s car. The woman the FBI had been looking for. The woman who, right now, was standing next to Reggie, holding Reggie’s hair pulled tight in one fist. In the other hand, the woman had a long, thin knife she was holding against Reggie’s throat.

  “I am Li Ling,” the woman said. She let go of Reggie’s hair. But the knife did not move away from her throat.

  “Yes” was all Justin said.

  “I have wanted to meet you,” Li Ling said. “I have wanted to meet the man who killed Togo.”

  “You’ve met him,” Justin told her.

  “You are a good player,” Ling said.

  “Player?” Justin asked.

  “Yes. Togo was excellent player. But you are better.”

  “I’m not playing,” he said. “This isn’t some game.”

  “Yes,” Ling said. “It is game. I want to play with you.” She nodded at Reggie. “I kill girl, as you kill Togo. Then we see who is better player.”

  Justin smiled calmly at her. “I don’t think I’ll play.”

  “You play,” Ling said. “I fuck you. I kill you. It will be good game.”

  “When you put it like that,” Justin said, “that does sound good. Okay.”

  And as he said okay, he dropped the two bottles of beer. Ling’s eyes shifted downward when the glass shattered on the stone—she couldn’t help herself. When she realized what was happening, it was too late. Justin’s other hand, the one covered by the napkins, was coming up fast. The napkins fell off to the side, revealing an antique pistol, forty, maybe fifty years old, and without hesitating he fired.

  It sounded like a cannon roar in the tranquil silence of the beach, and a large hole appeared in Ling’s otherwise flawless forehead.

  Reggie leaped sideways, falling to her knees on the stone patio, and just in time. Ling’s hand, the one with the knife, swiped backward exactly where Reggie’s throat had been.

  Li Ling stood for just a moment, staring in disbelief at Justin, then her legs wobbled and the knife dropped from her hand, and she started to topple over backward. The brick wall held her momentarily but not for long. She bent at the waist and then went over. She did not scream. She couldn’t. She was dead long before her body hit the rocks in the shallow water, several hundred feet below.

  Reggie stood slowly. She felt a sting in her elbow, which had banged against the patio floor, and she glanced down at her scraped knees. She went to Justin, who slowly lowered his arm. She took the gun out of his hand and set it on the small patio table.

  “I told you something once,” he said. “And I lied to you.”

  “What was that?” she said softly.

  “I told you that I didn’t think about the people I’d killed. I told you that they didn’t keep me awake at night.”

  “It’s all right,” Reggie said.

  “I think about them all the time. And I think about all of them, not just the ones I’ve killed. I think about all the murders, all the deaths. I think about them day and night. I think about them when I’m awake and when I’m dreaming. I can never stop thinking about them,” Justin said.

  Reggie put her arms around him and drew him to her.

  “I know you can’t,” she said.

  And then she said, “It’s time to go home.”