The Empress of Tempera

by Alex Dolan

  My fingers poked something sharp and thin by a leg of the bed frame. A toothpick? A paper clip? Whatever it was, it was a prize. I snatched it. It was the green plastic book clip he’d used for The Peaceful End. I pinched it gently, and then snapped off the delicate loop around the outside. The fragment gave me a piece of curved plastic that fit into the keyhole. I worked the green plastic shard around the hole, but popping the lock was harder than when I’d practiced. My hands quivered. Leland would return any moment. Every few seconds, I snapped my head over my shoulder to check the front door.

  While my right hand maneuvered the plastic, my left hand shivered in the manacle, raw and slowly swelling. The lock shivered with it. Time after time, the plastic slipped around the keyway.

  “Now we’re getting somewhere.” Leland spoke two seconds before he came back through the door, allowing me to palm the plastic and pounce back on the mattress, as if I’d lounged the whole time he was raccooning through my car. “I saw the remnants of that tarantula on the walk. You really don’t like spiders, do you?” I said nothing. There were plenty of those crawlies around there, and just to fuck with me he might pluck another from his lawn and let it scrabble around under the sheets. “I get it. They’re creepy. Good to know, though.” He tapped his temple. “I’ll file that little factoid away in the safe deposit.”

  Leland slid a waiter’s mini spiral notebook out of his pocket and scribbled. “You removed the plates. Very smart.” I rented the most generic car I could; in this case, a silver hatchback. Replaced the plates with a generic dealership placard, so it looked like I’d just bought the thing. “Not as smart as you could be, though. Know what you missed? The VIN.” The triumphant bastard sang to me: “The…fucking…VIN.”

  I didn’t own a car. Hence, I didn’t know what a vin was. The Vincent? Leland noticed. “VIN. Vehicle identification number. Right in your glove compartment.” The VIN. The fucking VIN. “You know who they tracked down using the VIN?” No guesses from me. “Timothy McVeigh.”

  The way my left hand stretched over my forehead, I might have been swooning on a fainting sofa. This provided just enough of a blind spot for me to work the lock with my right hand. Clumsy so far, I kept missing the keyhole. My fingers started cramping.

  Leland opened a cabinet and produced a laptop. When he sauntered back to the chair, he ignored me while he unfolded it and clacked at the keyboard. I fidgeted with my lock. We could have been miserably married for all the attention we paid one another.

  “Eureka,” he said dryly to himself. “Got the rental agency.” Detective or not, he had access to some kind of restricted information.

  The plastic pin snapped. Leland lifted his head and combed over me with his eyes, trying to identify the source of the sound. Blood flushed my face, and my chest rose and fell. After the scan, Leland looked back down at his screen, and I felt between my fingers. Half my plastic needle had dropped behind my pillow, and I choked up on the remaining splinter and found the keyhole again.

  Leland typed a number on his cell phone and raised a polite “one sec” index finger. To someone on the other end, he said, “Got something.” He read the name and address of the rental agency. “Used a fake name. Draw a five-mile radius around the rental place and check for gyms. She has muscles.” He studied my shoulders and legs from across the room. Coming from my captor, the comments about my body again made me uneasy. “Trains with weights. She looks broke, so start with cheapo gyms and mom-and-pop joints. I’ll send you a headshot.” He hung up, and then angled his camera phone over me. “Cheese.” Flash. My scowl shot out into the ether.

  As he messaged my photo, I felt something magical at my fingertips.

  The point of my plastic pick found its pressure point. The cuff unclasped from around my wrist.

  Open a rabbit cage and the bunny won’t rocket out. Similarly, I stalled to consider my options. Leland still had my car keys. Sprinting to my car wouldn’t get me anywhere. If I ran for it, I’d tumble down the grade in clunky heels. The neighbors, if I reached them, might not be home. If they were, they might believe him over the raggedy tower in the white and purple cocktail dress. They might even call the police, and I’d be back to square one.

  Another option would be to physically subdue Leland Mumm and take my keys back. He was strong, but I hadn’t gotten the chance to properly fight him.

  Right after Christmas last year, the firehouse got a call on Jerrold Avenue in Hunter’s Point. Gunshot through the thigh. A massive 300-pounder had just got out of prison and didn’t want to go back. Wrestling him down to the stretcher was Herculean, even with a partner. He thrashed around, and between the latex gloves and the blood, our hands were slippery. That guy was like a wet bar of soap, and strong. But when he bashed me in the forehead, I caved in his nose with an elbow and he went limp. If I could immobilize that monster, I could handle the bean pole.

  Leland passed on instructions through the phone with his back to me in the bathroom doorway. When I stood, my legs creaked from lying down for so long. I stretched out my fingers to test their strength and rotated my swollen wrist. Stalking toward him, I stayed quiet as a ghost, even in the boots. I snatched a syringe off the floor. Not the winged infusion set I was going to use, but the backup hypodermic, dart-shaped with a two-inch cannula. Extending the plunger with a thumb, I siphoned air into the barrel. I had no idea if an air bubble would actually kill him. The air bubble heart attack was a kind of urban legend, and I’d never tested it. I didn’t like the idea of having to stab someone, much less kill him, but I would today. Kali might have come there to dispatch Leland Mumm, but I shouldn’t have to explain that this kind of death was a different breed of chinchilla.

  I skulked toward the bathroom door, lifting my feet lightly and rolling my soles on the ground. My ribs shook from my heart throbbing. I should have just run for it, but I needed to destroy this man if I wanted to escape. He wasn’t ready for me, lollygagging in that doorway on his cell. And as I approached him, I fumed with anger. My face felt hot. I wanted to hurt him.

  Leland thanked the person on the other end and disconnected. After a few seconds of heavy silence, he spun, noticing the silence in the room. We stood face-to-face.

  “Son of a bitch!”

  I lunged with the syringe, but not fast enough. That wiry prick had some fast-twitch muscles, and he dodged me. Maybe I was too hesitant and didn’t thrust deep enough to be lethal. Still, I got him the second time. The tip punctured his stomach, but only far enough to break skin, just to the side of the scar he’d told me came from his Arctic knife wound. Someone had taught Leland what to do during a knife attack. Moving with a fluidity that came from trained repetition, he clawed my forearm and twisted me counterclockwise. The hypodermic rattled on the floor. Twist an arm the right way, and the attacker can be on his knees in seconds. A potential game ender. But someone had taught me this move and how to defend against it. I jabbed my free thumb into his neck, and we broke apart, stumbling farther into the bathroom. He tried to say something, but only gargled.

  Elbows are a girl’s best friend, because the whole body goes into every blow. When Leland covered his throat, his face opened up as a target, and my elbow caught him on the cheek. He reeled back into the shower, cracked the tiles and smeared a little blood on the ceramic. I landed a couple more heavy elbows to his head. When he tried to prop himself up on the tiles, he lost his footing. Backing into the shower stall, his leather sole slipped on the porcelain and Leland collapsed, knees over the tub rim, feet in the air.

  I dropped to my knees and used my fists. When Leland threw up his forearms to protect his ears, I got inside and belted his solar plexus. He wheezed, but I didn’t debilitate him. An hour ago this guy’s body seemed like it could snap like a biscuit, but now his arms rigidly braced over his face. I always knew I was winning in a scrap when my opponent’s arms started to get lazy. This guy was a rock. I pounded harder because I could feel how his muscles coiled. Like Ali against the ropes when Foreman was laying
into him, he took the punishment and waited for his chance to spring back when I stopped. A disorienting high surged through me, and I stopped thinking about where to place my punches and started whaling on him. Trying to get to his face, most of my punches landed on his arms.

  I should have used my legs. Such a dummy, getting down on the floor with him. With legs hanging over the sides of the tub, I could have driven a heel into his shins. Knocked out the knees. It would have been so easy. But I got carried away, fueled by a numbing heat, which made me forget the pain in my right wrist as I brought down both fists with equal abandon. I kept battering, and he just waited until I punched myself out.

  The moment I gasped for breath, Leland came alive. One of his hands dropped. He pulled something out of his pocket roughly the size of a small vibrator, not much larger than a lipstick tube. I owned one of these in pink and kept it in my nightstand drawer. In the moment, I thought Leland Mumm might be attacking me with sex toy. He snaked it under my arm, then sprayed me in the face. A moment later, the most intense pain of my life burned my eyes blind.

  Pepper spray doesn’t necessarily paralyze the victim. On the contrary. With my sockets searing, I went wild. My arms and legs swung like medieval flails. Unsure of where to aim, I flagellated my limbs in all directions. Guttural screams punctuated the movements. Instead of disabling me, the pain only stirred me up. I kicked a dent in the plaster and bashed the sink out of the wall, so it sagged on the pipes. Somewhere in the maelstrom, a distinctive crunch told me I’d crushed the hypodermic under my heel.

  Leland had the advantage, and he found a way to evade my punches and kicks. I felt his body maneuver around me, and his arm slithered around my neck from behind. He threw a sleeper hold on me and dragged me back to the bed, my heels sliding on the floor. I thrashed my legs and toppled the bedside chair, but that didn’t help me. The handcuff found its way back around my wrist. It hurt more this time when the steel cut against my bones. I scratched some skin with my free hand, but it didn’t stop Leland. Seconds later a cuff closed over the other wrist. I lay flat on the mattress again, now with both of my wrists lashed to the bedposts. All I could do was scream in protest.

  Sometime between a half hour and an hour later, my eyes registered blurs, the most prominent being a smear shaped like Leland’s face. Hovering over the headboard, my legs couldn’t get him. Then he started with the water. He poured water over my eyes and dabbed them with a towel. I thought the prick was waterboarding me and bucked as much as the chains would allow.

  “Hold still,” he said. “This will make the pain go away faster.”

  One might think that this kind of pain would limit my ability to speak, but despite the panic, I was able to curse just fine. Someone walking through the front door might have thought they stumbled across an exorcism.

  Diligently, Leland Mumm poured the water over me, talking me through it as he went. “I know, it’s the worst. I’ve gotten sprayed three times. Once I nailed myself while making an arrest. I was just starting out. I pointed the thing the wrong way and blasted myself in the face. Can you believe that?” Initially, the water made the pain even worse, like vinegar in a wound, and I writhed in response. “Second time, we were in the same kind of situation, trying to hold down a guy hopped up on PCP, back when PCP was still a thing. My own partner missed the guy and got me.” He softened. “Open your eyes to let the water in.”

  I shook my face and moved every part of my body that I could. The bed bounced on its teak frame.

  He waited for me to calm down, and then went on. “Third time was plain trickery. I washed out the canister, and the steam carried some of the vapors into my face. It got in deeper, the way the cold can creep in under your clothes.”

  I fought the towel, but he found a way to dab my face.

  “Kali, hold still. Open your eyes to let the water in.” More water drizzled over my face. Some snorted up my nose. “Have you ever taken chemistry class?” He asked.

  I responded by howling into his face like a crazy person.

  Without raising his voice, he said, “I know you can hear me, and I know you can respond. Have you ever taken a chemistry class? Kali.” He stressed Kali.

  I articulated for the first time since he sprayed me, and my voice croaked from all the screaming. “Yes. I’ve taken a chemistry class.”

  “Remember the water fountain? The one you use to flush out your eyes? That’s what this is like. I’m flushing out your eyes. You need to open them. It will make the pain go away faster. I promise.” Opening my eyes was a challenge, but I did it. The water eventually helped. Eventually, the piercing sting faded to a dull soreness, no more painful than dry eyes after an all-nighter. The skin around them smarted like a mild sunburn.

  He picked the chair off the floor and returned to his seat. “You’re a dangerous woman, no doubt about it.” I squinted, and some of the excess water and tears drained out. Slowly, he came into focus.

  “Stops you in your tracks, doesn’t it? Nice belly ring, by the way.” My dress had torn, and my navel was exposed.

  He laughed heartily and patted down his body, especially a few inches left of his navel, where I’d stuck him with the needle. “You almost gave me my own belly button piercing.” Now that our tussle was over, he seemed gleeful. “You got me good. I have to hand it to you. Jesus!” He prodded around his ribcage where I’d landed some of my deepest punches. “Do you realize how phenomenally fucked you are right now? You just assaulted an officer.”

  “Show me your badge.”

  “Fair enough.” He opened a closet door and found a suit jacket that matched his trousers. From the inside pocket, he pulled out a gold shield and flopped it close to my face. In the time afforded me, I could read the words “Alameda County,” and the number “5417.” It looked real enough. The moisture drained from my tongue.

  “You’ve never been arrested, have you? Probably never been stopped.” I didn’t reply, but he guessed the answer. “Lucky duck. Don’t worry, I’ll guide you through every step of the way.”

  Having just traded blows, I was less afraid of him. “If this is an arrest, why am I still here?”

  “Technically, I haven’t arrested you yet. I’m detaining you right now.” He retrieved the copy of The Peaceful End and thumbed through it in his chair. He breathed deeply as he settled into his seat and cracked the cover. “I’m not sure what to do with you yet.”

  The Euthanist is available now!

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