Nine Days: A Mystery

by Koenig, Minerva

  “Yeah?” I said, slowing down. The radar, exhausted as it was, had started to ping.

  “You know how people talk about the Indians down there cutting people’s hearts out on the pyramids and stuff?” Neffa said. “Fella that wrote that says the church made it all up. The Spaniards didn’t want people back home getting mad about them killing everybody. They had to make ’em think they deserved it.”

  My heart slammed against my chest like a bird flying into a plate glass window. The understanding of what I was really doing here had finally gotten through. Maines hadn’t been the only one making lemonade. Olmos/Escobar had “recommended” me because he knew who I was; he knew that I would flush Hector out into the open because he’d watched me pick every psychological scab that formed within arm’s reach back in California.

  A sharp rap on the café window made me jump, and Lavon put his head around the door. “Girl, you got customers in here. Don’t be standing out in the street like you ain’t at work.”

  Neffa rolled her eyes and went back inside with a small smile in my direction. I continued down toward the bar, gingerly pointing the brain back at what I’d just realized. A smaller realization slowed my pulse down a little: if they already knew that Hector was their Bolivian, why the hell had they bothered with me? The question banged around between my ears as I climbed the stairs to Hector’s apartment, book in hand.

  The red and black blanket had been hastily tossed over the rumpled sheets, and as I approached the bed I felt a sudden urge to lie down and take a very long nap. The world had gone cold and distant, but my head was hot with images of mummies and machetes and sticky rivulets of blood. Luigi came in and jumped up on the sofa. I started to hear my heartbeat inside my ears. The cat and I stared at each other for a long minute; then he opened his fanged little mouth and said, “Khitis jan wal sarnaqixa, jan walirü tukuwayi.”

  I jumped away. The dark corners of the high ceiling undulated. The furniture was poisonous. I noticed that I was shaking.

  An eon or a second later, someone who looked like Hector appeared at the kitchen table. A gun hovered into my peripheral vision. The Hector-looking being froze, hands up and open out in front of him. I was aware that something was very wrong, but the brain wasn’t doing much to help me figure out what. It was just telling me to get the hell out of there.

  I backed out onto the landing and fled down the stairs. The dark cavern of the bar felt safer, but fear that something awful was following pushed me through it and out onto the front sidewalk. There my limbs turned to liquid lead, and I paused to lean against the storefront. A car appeared at the far end of Main. I tossed myself back into the doorway of the bar, crouching and flattening myself into the smallest target possible. The shots were deafening. I clapped my sweaty hands against my ears and waited for the pain to come.

  Somewhere very far away, I heard someone saying my name. I kept my eyes closed, my hand pressed against my side where I’d been hit. I didn’t want to see Joe again, lying there on the pavement with his brains sluiced across it. I let myself be led away to the ambulance, eyes squeezed shut.

  FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 9

  I

  I was lying in a bed that smelled familiar. The room was dark and there were people talking in it somewhere.

  “… you should know that, Pops.” It was Connie.

  Hector answered her in a strained voice. “The doc gave her a couple of these.”

  I heard a pill bottle rattle, and then Connie’s voice again. “Yeah, probably a good idea, until she can get a psych evaluation.”

  Holding my eyelids open felt like a chore. I let them close. I heard a glass being put down and Connie asking, “What set her off?”

  “I don’t know,” Hector said. “She was standing by the bed when I got home, and just flipped out when she saw me.”

  There was some more rustling and clinking, and then I heard them again, farther away.

  “Well, Liz would have sent her to the ER if she thought it was necessary,” I heard Connie say. “Just keep things quiet, minimize stress, let her talk if she wants to, but don’t push her if she doesn’t. You know the drill.”

  My body felt heavy and inert. I opened my eyes again, just a sliver, to see how the darkness looked. It wasn’t hiding anything scary now. I let go of everything, and sleep took me away.

  II

  I woke up—or came to—much later. I knew this because the sun wasn’t blasting through the east windows, though it was still bright enough to make me roll over and grab for a pillow to put over my face. I got a handful of hair instead. The head attached to it moved, and I opened my eyes. Hector was lying on top of the covers, still wearing yesterday’s clothes. There was a book facedown on his belly, and he was watching me through his reading glasses.

  I felt down along my side: no new holes. I turned over and looked at the ceiling. It didn’t have anything to tell me.

  Hector took off his glasses and rolled up onto his elbow. “I think you cured me.”

  I blinked at him. “What?”

  “I was so busy worrying about you that I didn’t zone out, like I usually do when shit gets intense,” he said.

  An urge to cry choked up into my throat. I swung my legs down to the floor, pushing myself off the mattress. Hector’s dry, warm hand came gently over and around my elbow.

  “Take it easy getting up,” he cautioned. “You might be a little woozy.”

  “Woozy,” I repeated, wanting to laugh. All the things I’d seen and heard for the last week—how much of it was real?

  A patter of soft, quick steps sounded on the stairs, and Mike came in, tapping on the door as he did so. “I just saw Connie,” he said, looking at me. “You all right?”

  “I’m fine,” I said, glancing at Hector. He didn’t look convinced.

  “Anything new?” Hector asked Mike in a low voice.

  Mike shook his head and tossed himself onto the sofa. “You know lawyers. He’ll figure something out.”

  I got up, saying, “I’d better get home.”

  Hector and Mike both looked at me like I’d just told them I was going to jump out of a plane without a parachute.

  “I’m fine,” I said again, starting to believe it now. “I just need some time to myself.”

  I found my stuff on the nightstand, stuck it into my bag, and came around the bed.

  Hector walked me to the door. “I’ll come by in a little while,” he said in a low voice.

  “I’d rather you didn’t.”

  “No, you don’t understand. I’m not offering you a menu of options. I’m telling you what’s going to happen. I can’t help it. It’s the way I’m wired.”

  His expression almost made me laugh. “Is that word for word?”

  He didn’t say anything, just pulled me over and kissed me like he meant it.

  III

  The apartment felt weird and vacant, like I was a visiting ghost. I started a bath running, trying to ignore the brain, which was still making up stories that bore little resemblance to reality. I could tell the difference now, but the sheer volume of the fictional stuff impressed me. Bits and pieces of the various story lines I’d made up to explain Teresa’s death had started branching off and forming increasingly fantastic colonies along the periphery of my consciousness. The inside of my head sounded like a fucking aviary.

  Half an hour in the tub didn’t help, and as I dried off, I remembered the mild-aired sunset I’d watched on top of Enchanted Rock. Maybe Hector’s strategy of getting away from it all would work for me, too. I got dressed and left a note clipped to the screen door.

  IV

  The shadows were getting long when I turned onto the gravel park road. I pulled well off to the side, locked the truck, and ducked under the gate.

  It took about half an hour to hike up to the main trail and another fifteen to climb to the bald top of the main rock. I picked a nice flat spot facing west and sat down on the bumpy granite. The air had gone coolish, and I wrapped the flannel shirt I’d
thrown on over my tee around me, waiting for my shoulders to relax. To my relief, the cacophony whirling through my head slowly began to settle, until only one fragment remained:

  You saw them both.

  I listened to it repeat over and over, waiting for it to die the natural death of its fellows. When it hadn’t done so after half an hour, I gave it a poke, hoping to shut it up.

  And then I saw them. Keys. Two sets of them.

  My neck jerked tight, my pulse jumping back into overdrive. I closed my eyes and ran through the pictures in my head again: Connie dropping her keys into her bag, then taking them out of her pocket in the alley. She’d been in my field of vision the whole time in between, and I hadn’t seen her transfer them.

  Something rustled off to my left, near the trailhead, and I startled, my heart nearly beating out of my chest. It was just past sunset, getting dark, and the stars were starting to come out. I kept my eyes glued to the spot, and when nothing moved after fifteen minutes, I got up. I was plainly still hallucinating, and too on edge to be out here alone.

  I was about halfway to the trailhead, almost dead center in the middle of the rock, when another movement flickered, on my right this time. I whirled, my breath catching, but something human-sized was on me before I could get all the way around to look at it. It hit my right shoulder hard and I dropped to the granite with it on top of me, feeling my ribs crunch as I landed and rolled. The fall knocked some wind out of me, but I came up into a ready crouch a few feet away, my feet planted firmly. The human-sized thing had disappeared.

  I held still, squinting into the half darkness, wishing I’d talked Hector into giving me back the Kahr before I’d left his place. There was still enough light to make out shapes, but nothing was visible on the smooth arch of the rock in any direction.

  Something crawled down my left arm, and I reached up to brush it off. My hand came away wet. Feeling under my shirt, I found a deep gash close to the shoulder joint, just below my collarbone. The blood was coming in a rapid, pulsing gush, soaking through the fabric and running down my arm. I’d been stabbed.

  It instantly dawned on me that I was dead. Any wound close to the heart is dangerous, and the location of this one was such that a tourniquet would be pointless. At the rate it was flowing, I estimated I’d bleed out in about ten minutes. I could slow it down with pressure, but that would work only until I lost consciousness. I was at least half an hour away from the truck.

  I took off my flannel and wadded it against the wound, holding it there with my right hand. Ten yards to my northwest was a long ridge of granite about four feet high. I made for this as fast as I could, feeling the blood pump more quickly from my shoulder as I moved. I pressed harder on the sodden mass my shirt had become, but I knew it was a lost cause. My core muscles were already feeling shaky.

  “It was too late for me,” I heard Connie say in her lilting voice, from the darkness off to my right and behind me. “If he’d come just a year earlier, none of this would have happened.”

  I pushed myself up and peered over the top of the ridge, into the darkness where I’d heard her. The rock sloped off more steeply there, into a shallow valley populated with the pale shapes of loose boulders. After a few minutes I saw her, coming up the slope. She used her knuckles to steady herself as she climbed, holding the blade in her right fist, point down. She was breathing hard when she came vertical and stopped, about ten feet away. I dropped into a sitting position, with my back against the ridge, one leg stretched in front of me.

  “It’s called the Westermarck effect,” she said, her voice cool and quiet. “Children who live together during the first six years of life are highly unlikely to develop sexual attractions to one another. Tova dodged the bullet. I wasn’t so lucky.”

  She’d come closer now, and I saw that her eyes had gone wild. The contrast to her intellectual tone was unnerving, even in my rapidly fading state of awareness.

  “If you could have seen it,” she said, her voice dropping to a low snarl. “That pig of a woman, using him like some kind of sex toy.” She paused, her fingers undulating around the knife handle. “You’d have done the same thing.”

  I knew I shouldn’t waste the energy, but I croaked, “Maybe, but I wouldn’t have tried to frame somebody else for it.”

  She grew suddenly animated, crouching down within a foot of my outstretched right leg. “No, but see, that was the beauty. That hand—it made me pay attention to Marie’s babbling about seeing body parts in Teresa’s basement. I never would have, otherwise.” She leaned toward me with a chuckle, her eyes bright pinholes in the darkness. “Then I get to the car and I’ve got Richard’s keys. I’d somehow picked them up by accident—if you believe in accidents.”

  A faint regret bloomed in the weakness at the base of my neck. She’d hidden it so well. She’d make a damned fine criminal.

  “I went over there and looked,” she said, her voice dropping to a singsong monotone. “There weren’t two, like Marie said. Only one. It was in this little blue suitcase thing, like the case my clarinet came in, in high school. I knew it had to be related to the one we’d found behind the bar, so I took it, to give Teresa. Then I went back to the bar to put Richard’s keys in the lost and found. The lights were on upstairs, so I went up to show Hector what I’d found.”

  Connie stopped and shuddered. “That disgusting woman.” She seemed on the brink of some violent movement, crouching there. When she spoke again, her voice was as flavorless as the wind. “I grabbed the knife from Hector’s kitchen, but then I couldn’t breathe, so I went up to the roof to get some air. When I heard Teresa coming up, I thought maybe hitting her with that piece of wood would be enough. So I did. But it wasn’t.”

  She turned her pinpoint pupils on me. “Have you ever stabbed anybody?”

  I didn’t respond. She wasn’t really talking to me, anyway. “It’s interesting,” she said, sounding rational again. “There’s something viscerally satisfying about it. That hot flood of blood. It warms up your hate.”

  “What’d I do to earn that?”

  Connie’s head came forward in the darkness, like a striking snake. “Don’t pretend you don’t know. I could smell you on him.” I flinched and she pulled back. “I’m not proud of it, but it’s not my fault. I can’t help how I feel.”

  My senses were all going loose, but as Connie stood up, they congealed on her proximity to my right foot. As if moved by some outside force, it lifted and hooked around the back of her knee, and I yanked with all the strength I had left. She went down with a grunt, the knife skittering—incredibly—right at me. I rolled away from the stone ridge and got it before she could recover.

  She came up to standing again, shaking her head. “You’ll be dead in a few minutes. All I have to do is wait.”

  Unconsciousness was coming at me fast. The faint clatter of distant traffic, which I hadn’t been aware of hearing until then, cut suddenly off. Soon I wouldn’t be able to hear or see anything.

  A weak, raw fury broke over me. In a photo-flash of clarity, I saw what would be left when life got done burning away everything I thought was true about myself. I was too far gone to feel or think anything about it. It just hung there like a ghost.

  I gave up fighting with it and closed my eyes, letting myself go limp as if I’d passed out. A few seconds ticked by; then I felt Connie come close and lean in, reaching for the knife. I turned the blade up, fast as light, and drove it into her midsection.

  She stumbled back, gaping down at herself. A broad shape appeared over the crest of the rock behind her. Then I was gone.

  V

  I don’t know how long it was until I found myself awake again. And alive. There was a painfully bright light in my eyes, and I tried to raise my hand to block it, but couldn’t remember how. I began to hear hospital sounds.

  “She’s coming around,” somebody said, a woman. “Can you hear me, hon? Squeeze my hand if you can hear me.”

  Thin, cool fingers fluttered against mine, and I s
queezed them as commanded. The voice went humorous, throwing back away from me. “Dawn, you owe me fifty bucks.”

  I kept my eyes closed against the blinding light, and her voice came again. “Just lie still, sugar. You’re going to be OK.”

  She said some other things, but they faded off into meaninglessness. My body felt weighted and sore, except for my shoulder, which was a numb, blank hole in space. The antiseptic smell and quiet sounds of people moving around lulled me. I fell back into the black hole.

  An instant later, my eyes opened again. This time there was no bright light, and I was in a private hospital room. My shoulder was still numb, so the young doctor poking at it didn’t bother me much.

  “Looks good,” he said, folding the dressing back over it. He picked up a clipboard from the bed and made a few notes, then offered me his hand. “I’m Dr. Han. I performed the surgery on your shoulder.”

  He had a very precise British accent, an odd counterpoint to his Asian features. I shook his hand with my good one.

  “You should get full range of motion back, but while you’re healing, I’ll want you to limit what you do with that arm. The wound was deep, and it will take a while for the inner repairs to heal sufficiently.” He looked at the chart. “What sort of work do you do?”

  I had to think. “I’m pretty sure I’m unemployed.”

  His clear eyes flickered with a combination of humor and confusion. “Well, don’t take up sculling or anything for a month or so, right? I’ll fix you up with a sling before you leave, so that you don’t forget.”

  I nodded, then asked, “How did I get here?”

  He referred to the chart again. “It says you came in on STAR Flight—that’s the airborne emergency service—via a 911 call.”

  “But I was dead,” I said.

  “Then this must be the afterlife,” he replied with a grin. “I’ll be by in the morning to check you again. If you’re still doing well, we’ll send you home then.”

  I nodded again, and the doctor left. A nurse came in to give me an antibiotic pill the size of a kalamata olive and show me how to work the bed call. I turned off the overhead light and went to sleep.