The Empress of Tempera

by Alex Dolan

  When he spoke, his voice was clear and resonant. “Kali, I’m with the police.”

  Trigger temper. I latched onto Leland’s neck with one hand. My volatile impulses set loose, I tried to crush his windpipe. I’d never attempted to hurt someone like this, but I dug my knuckles deep into his neck. To protect himself, he hunched his shoulders and stiffened his tendons into wires. His muscles flexed with a shocking power. This man was suddenly vital and dangerous. Leaning over him, I bore my weight down on his body. When my thumb wormed into the ribbed hose of his trachea, he gagged. His hands clawed at my arms, but in my furious blackout I kept my arms stiff as dowels. My palm clamped down over his arteries, and the way his eyelids flickered, I could tell he was losing oxygen fast. A few more seconds, he might have blacked out. I might have killed him.

  Something fast flew into my face, like a kamikaze bird smacking a window. His fist hammered my left cheekbone, and my head snapped to the side. The impact shook me loose. My fingers lost their grip. Slackening with the force of the punch, I slid off the mattress. When my skull struck the floor, needles burst through my brain before the pitch darkness enveloped me.

  Chapter 2

  “You went rabid on me,” he said, delighting in my ridicule. There were no ellipses between the words now.

  Leland only had a few seconds after he knocked me down, but he made use of them. He flopped me onto the bed and kicked my leather satchel across the room. Then he patted me down for weapons, even though the most dangerous thing on me was the syringe. He rolled that across the floor, too.

  Our positions reversed: I lay on the death-stink covers, tethered like a sacrificial goat. The mattress was still warm from his body heat. Leland was on his feet, looking down at me. Miracle recovery. His locomotive pajamas sagged at the crotch.

  With my left arm pulled across my body, I yanked the chrome chain taut with the hope that it might decapitate the carved pinecone atop the bedpost. Leland kept his distance, which was a smart move. As soon as my head cleared, I kicked like crazy. When I couldn’t reach him with my boots, I grabbed what I could with my free hand and chucked it at him, including his coffee-stained copy of The Peaceful End. The green plastic book clip fell out and into the covers, and the book only flapped a few feet. Envelopes whirled like Frisbees, but few hit him, and nothing hurt him.

  Leland gave me the same smirk as when he’d ask, “When are you going to tell me your real name?” But he’d mutated into a different man, fast and formidable.

  A residual ache swelled under my left eye, and Leland appeared blurry as he hovered over me. I savagely tore at my handcuffs. As a firefighter, I should have known this wouldn’t have gotten me anywhere, but the pain and panic prevented rational thought.

  It’s not that I’d never been punched. On plenty of calls, an addict half out of her senses could crazy it up and clobber me when I didn’t expect it. It wasn’t ever pleasant, but the shock of being punched was worse than the pain itself. Years of sparring taught me how to take a shot, and how to hit back. Leland Mumm hit hard, but he wasn’t Wladimir Klitschko. Just a tad stronger than my stepdad. He’d caught me off guard and landed a lucky blow. If I’d been ready for it, he wouldn’t have pushed me off my feet.

  He seemed to marvel at my flushed face and gurgle of obscenities. The past several moments had changed me too. My legs thrashed whip-wild, and my growls and swears sounded feral.

  The chain held. After a few minutes, my wrist burned and my lungs heaved. My skin pinked around a thread of crimson where the cuff sliced a faint incision line. I wasn’t about to break the bed frame. Not teak. The wood was too dense to crack the bedpost and too heavy for me to upturn the whole thing and whack apart the joints.

  I split my attention between my shackles and Leland. I was still finding new pain from the punch, shooting down through my jaw now, and found it impossible to concentrate on any singular thing. I stared at Leland’s face above me, trying to focus on the tip of his nose with my foggy eye. Leland seemed taller now, or maybe that illusion was created from him on his feet and me on the mattress. When he sneered, all those healthy teeth reminded me what a goddamned sucker I’d been. I should have known something was up when I saw those pearlies. What I wouldn’t have given to chip a few with a boot heel.

  “Who are you?” I ran a finger over the handcuff keyhole, as good as spinning a safe dial without the combination.

  I kept expecting Leland to climb on top of me, but he hadn’t moved since he shackled me. “I told you. Cop,” he said with no frailty in his voice.

  “No, you’re not. No fucking cop would chain me to a bed. Punch me in the face.”

  “Sorry you think that. Because that’s exactly what a cop would do.”

  Blood warmed the plumping welt under my eye. Where the cheek split, a trickle ran down my face and tickled the skin over where it hurt. “Fucker—I’m bleeding!”

  “Believe what you want, but you’re good and busted.”

  “Bullshit. What about Miranda?”

  “Keep your mouth shut if you want. Call a lawyer when you can. That about cover it?”

  I rattled my handcuffs, but if I fought anymore, I was going to spring a vein. Instead, I looked for weapons. I’d thrown all the loose stuff at Leland, leaving nothing on the nightstand. Pivoting off the mattress and stretching as far as the chain would allow, I stood on the floor and mule-kicked the nightstand at him. The flimsy table was light enough to sail at him, but he sidestepped it like fucking Fred Astaire. When it splintered on the wall behind him, he seemed amused. I went back to fidgeting with the lock, desperate enough to try working my pinky nail into the keyhole.

  “It’s not going to work,” he said.

  Handcuffs were easy. All I needed was a paper clip to spring it. But I didn’t have a paper clip. As Leland predicted, my pinky nail didn’t fit. All my tools were in my cowhide satchel, and that satchel sat by Leland’s ankle. Frustrated, I grasped the chain with both hands and tug-o-warred with the bedpost, but only succeeded in tearing the skin on my palms.

  “You’re not going to pull the chain apart. You’re going to hurt yourself.”

  The friction of steel against flesh dug down to the bone, and that hairline incision in my wrist began leaking rivulets of blood. The pain was enough for me to give it a rest.

  The loss of control overwhelmed me. I couldn’t control my own body, not with my heart shuddering and my lungs on fire. I couldn’t remember breathing this hard, not even during the physical aptitude test for the fire department, and for that I had to sprint up and down six flights of stairs with fifty pounds of gear. Worse yet, I couldn’t control the man in the room. Leland was out of my reach and unpredictable. If I expected him to zig, he might zag.

  He spoke like a toastmaster. “We’re going to have a long talk, but there’s something I’ve really got to do first.” He unbuttoned his flannel pajama top, button by yellow button. When I saw his bare stomach, I wrenched the chain again until the pain shooting up my arm made my shoulder spasm.

  He bunched the flannel and absently tossed it against the wall. I didn’t want to look at him, but I felt like I needed to monitor Leland in case he came at me. I imagined him on top of me, his hot mothball breath steaming up my nostrils. The baggy clothes had hidden his musculature. Leland Mumm was thin but tight, a welterweight. Sneaky mofo.

  “Kali. You killed nine people.” Again, it was twenty-seven. He’d counted wrong. “Did you expect this would have a happy ending?”

  I writhed against my clasp. Smears of my blood rouged the sheets.

  “Jesus Christ, calm down!” In the same breath, he pulled his pajama bottoms over his hips, and they dropped to his ankles. “You can’t imagine how good it feels to take these off.” He wore stained white briefs. In a moment he’d be naked. “I’m sorry to be so open about this, but we’re on intimate terms by now, aren’t we?” I dry heaved. He snapped. “For Christ’s sake, get a hold of yourself. It’s going to be a long day for you.”

  I waited
for him to charge at me. My mind raced, fishing for defensive options. He was naked, I reminded myself, and I was clothed. I could squat 260 pounds. His nuts were right there at the level of the mattress. If he ran straight at me, I might crack his pelvis. I drew my knee to my chest, readying my left leg, the strong one, for a kick.

  But Leland turned and walked through the bathroom door.

  A few seconds later, the shower ran.

  “I hope you don’t mind,” he called through the open door. “I have to get clean. You have no idea what it takes to stink like you’re dying.” His voice sounded like it came through a soup can. “I figured you’d have been around death enough to smell it on people. That means I haven’t showered for a week. I’ll be honest, that was tough. You ever been that long without a shower?”

  Now that he was out of the room, I fished around the sheets, in case I could find a stray object under the covers narrow enough to stand in for a paper clip. Nothing. The entire house had been staged, and since no one really lived there, no one would have carelessly discarded items during day-to-day routines. Leland had only packed in enough props to make the place believable. I’d knocked a pill bottle off the nightstand. It was close enough that I could snare it with a boot, but when I twisted off the lid, the bottle spilled out breath mints.

  He repeated himself. “Kali, have you ever been that long without a shower?” Presumably, he was checking to make sure I hadn’t popped out of my cuffs.

  “Yes,” I spat. I felt between the mattresses for a trace of something, maybe a safety pin. Nothing.

  “You know what the secret is to smelling like death?” He paused for effect. “FlyNap! You ever heard of it?”

  This time I didn’t wait for him to ask again. Maybe if I kept our banter going, we’d keep things congenial. “Fuck no.” Maybe not that congenial.

  He rinsed out his mouth in the shower cascade and coughed the backwash into the tub. Revolting. When someone is repulsed by the sound of body noises like eating, there’s a name for that. Misophonia. Mine flared up listening to the swish of his saliva while he hawked up the shower water.

  Soon enough the pipes whined and the water stopped. The curtain ripped back. Leland appeared in the doorway, dripping with a terrycloth towel wrapped around his waist. “FlyNap!” He sounded like a kid excited by something he learned in class. “It’s an anesthetic they use to put drosophila to sleep—fruit flies.”

  I positioned myself back on the bed so I could kick easily. “I know what drosophilas are.”

  “Of course you do,” he said dismissively. “I guess geneticists use the stuff to put flies to sleep, so they can count out which ones have red eyes, or some nonsense like that. It has the same compounds you find in rotting meat. So after a week of not showering, the added element you’re smelling is a few drops of…”

  “FlyNap. I get it.”

  “You know what you get? A perfect death cologne. I was worried you couldn’t be fooled, but I’m very happy you were.” He disappeared from the doorway. “You have no idea how bad it was. I mean, you only had to be around that smell for a couple hours tops. I had to live with it for weeks. A few days ago, I had to run a menthol stick under my nose just to get some relief.”

  The master of the quick change came out in charcoal slacks and a T-shirt. Over the tee he buttoned up a blue Oxford, like he was getting ready for a business meeting. “You ever heard of Richard Angelo?”

  “Is that the inventor of FlyNap?”

  He scoured my face for signs of sarcasm. “He was a nurse. I’m sorry, let me restate that. He was a murderer. He killed ten patients using pancuronium bromide, a muscle relaxant.”

  “Never heard of him.”

  “How about Efren Saldivar? Called him ‘The Angel of Death.’ Respiratory therapist, probably killed more than a hundred patients. Drug of choice? Pancuronium.”

  “I don’t know who those people are. And I’m not one of them.”

  “Pancuronium’s a funny drug. They use it in executions. You probably know that.”

  I did. It was one of three drugs. Sodium thiopental to induce coma. Pancuronium bromide to shut down respiratory systems. An optional third would be potassium chloride to stop the heart. But what he didn’t say was that they used the same cocktail without the potassium chloride in the Netherlands, where they had done the greatest work around euthanasia to date.

  “Nine other people in Northern California dead with ‘DNR’ cards on them. Pancuronium in the blood.” He snatched the syringe from the floor and flicked the barrel. “And I bet you I’d find it in here too.” He studied me, maybe waiting for a change in my mood, an “I gotta come clean” moment.

  My mood did change. I grew more afraid of him because the danger he represented was turning from a physical threat to something much worse. My diaphragm trembled as I forgot how to breathe.

  “That’s why this is happening to you.”

  He grabbed my satchel off the floor. Seated in the chair by the bed—now dragged outside my kicking radius—Leland dumped out its contents. “Let’s see what we have.”

  A different kind of panic crept into me. This guy might really be a policeman. If he was telling the truth, he was going to arrest me. We’d mentioned Miranda—maybe he had already arrested me. I thought about having all my dark secrets exposed for my shame and others’ judgment. All the infinite possibilities of my life whittled down to captivity. Beyond butterflies now, I really thought I might puke. This man had tricked me; and above everything else, I felt indignant that all of this had come about because I’d been the rube in an elaborate prank.

  I talked so I wouldn’t hurl. “You’re not even sick, are you?”

  Leland picked through my purse litter without looking up. “’Fraid not.”

  “You look sick.”

  “Just skinny. Always was.”

  “You should get yourself checked. I’ve seen a lot of sick people, and you look sick.”

  “In the pink. Just had my annual physical. I have a quick metabolism.” He found my backup syringe and squinted into the empty barrel.

  “You had medical records. X-rays.”

  “Borrowed from a hospital.”

  I remembered the phantom phone physician. “Dr. Thibeault. Who’s she?”

  “My partner.” He unscrewed my eyeliner and sniffed the brush.

  “Where is she now?”

  Maybe he would have answered, but he jubilated in something he snatched off the floor. “Yahtzee!” He held up my driver’s license, eyeballing the photo and comparing it to the purple-wigged gal on the bed. Crap. I felt my wig. In the scuffle it had been pulled off kilter, and some of my own plain caramel-colored hair showed through.

  Leland’s joy didn’t linger. Not when he read the name on the license. “Martha Stewart.”

  This should go without saying, but the license was phony. I sassed, “I have to explain it a lot, but it’s what my parents wanted.”

  Sunlight glinted off the lamination as he scanned for the golden seal of California. “You actually get by with this?”

  “I rented a car with it.”

  “People are morons.” Now he rolled my lipstick between his fingers, uncapped it and twisted the charcoal tip out of the tube. “You’re smart, I’ll give you that. Fake license. Rental car.”

  On this point, I felt victorious. Anything with my real name on it was back in my apartment. “Sorry to disappoint.”

  Examining my ID again, he mused at my photo. “You have a great smile. When you do smile, that is.”

  I didn’t want this man judging my appearance, for better or worse. Plus, he was patronizing me. I looked goofy and toothy in that photo, surprised at my own happiness as if the prom king had just asked me onto the dance floor. I have pale and pinkish skin, but I’d been out in some sun back then. The sun brought out my nose freckles, and my teeth stood out like marshmallows in cocoa.

  He found cash in my purse, and not just what he tried to give me as a donation. “You just carry cash? No
credit cards? What happens if you run out of gas?”

  “I plan ahead.” More than he knew. In addition to the purse money, I toted a hundred-dollar fold in my underwear.

  “Kali, Kali, Kali.” He said my name like it was a dessert he was about to gorge. “Why don’t you tell me who you are?”

  I tried to confirm for myself that he was a police detective. “Where is your partner?”

  “Somewhere busting some other jackass,” he said halfheartedly. “You’re not going to give me your name?”

  “What do you think?”

  “Worth asking, though.” He rustled a packet of travel tissues decorated with illustrations of She-Hulk. To himself, he noted, “Cartoon superheroes. Interesting.” Then to me: “We’re going to be at this a while, huh?”

  “Looks like it.”

  Leland poked through the items on the floor with a pen and found my car keys. He dangled them in front of his nose as if trying to spy a wasp in amber. “Now we’re getting somewhere. Don’t go anywhere.”

  He bounded off the chair and walked out the front door, leaving me alone. The door gaped.

  As soon as he was out of sight, I was back at my handcuffs like I was buried alive and tunneling my way out. I rolled out of bed as far as the chain would allow and fished under the pillows and sheets to find something that could pick a lock. Nothing bigger than a sandy breadcrumb ran between my fingers.

  A moment later, my rental car honked as he tested the locks. Hopefully he’d comb through it a while. Nothing of mine was in there.

  I thought about screaming for help, but the first person on the scene would be Leland Mumm. If I made enough noise, maybe a distant neighbor would phone in a disturbance. That just meant more cops would show up. I remembered that Leland never showed me a badge. If he wasn’t a detective, then I’d be inviting law enforcement into a situation, putting myself in serious legal jeopardy. Then again, if Leland wasn’t with the police, he might do much worse if no one came. I told myself that if he wanted to rape or kill me, he might have gotten started by now—but I wasn’t sure.