A Shameless Little Con

by Meli Raine

  “The who? The what?”

  “Lab courier. The person delivering some of your blood.”

  I stare at my hands, which are rust-colored, covered in coagulating blood. “Whose blood? This isn’t mine. It’s Tara’s.” My face goes cold, so cold, my hands starting to tingle. I’m spinning on the inside, completely frozen on the outside, and the taste of copper and something savage is making me start to retch.

  I move to open a window. They’re locked.

  “OPEN A WINDOW!” I scream, furious I can’t push the button.

  “If Tara’s killers are after us, we can’t leave an opening for a bullet.” Silas’s voice is matter-of-fact, too calm and collected.

  Too perfect.

  “Increase the air,” he says to the driver, who complies, the sound from the vents getting louder, a blast of icy air hitting my shins.

  “Tara, Tara, oh my God, Tara,” I moan, rocking back and forth, groaning her name. I can’t stop. I don’t want to stop. I look down at my legs and see blood seeping into my shoe, the top of my foot coated in it. I wiggle my toes and feel the viscosity of it.

  Silas’s phone buzzes. He takes the call.

  “Yes. News reports already? Fuck. No problem. What? No. Definitely not. No, Drew. I have proof. Ironclad.” I hear Drew say the word “good,” then the rest is babble.

  Silas finally says, “I’ll check out social media later. Right now, we need to get her secured.” Drew speaks. Silas looks surprised. “There? You think it’s safe? There was paparazzi on the property when we were there before.” Drew says a few words. Silas nods. “Okay. Will do.”

  Click.

  “She was just alive! Telling me all about… oh, shit. All about how people were trying to kill her.”

  “People,” Silas repeats.

  Something in his tone shakes me out of my crazed state. “You think I did it? You think I killed Tara back there? You were right there, Silas. I was in that bathroom for a few seconds before I started screaming. Do you seriously think I’m that–that I–fuck you!” I scream.

  “No. I know you didn’t do it.”

  My phone buzzes. I pick it up, swipe, and look at a text.

  Oh my God, Jane, what happened? It’s Lindsay. She attached a link to a news site.

  Stupidly, I click it.

  It’s a picture of me, covered in blood.

  Chapter 18

  I look like that famous picture from Stephen King’s horror novel, from the 1970s movie version, except I’m not on stage in a prom dress. I’m next to Silas, who is mercifully turned away from the camera, broad shoulders tight and big as he moves to rush me away from the fracas.

  “I didn’t! They’re claiming I killed her! But they can’t!” My eyes blur, moving so fast, I can’t focus. I see the word “Carrie” and the rest of the headline becomes unreadable.

  “Give me your phone.” Before I can answer, Silas takes it away, shoving it in his jacket pocket.

  “Where are we going?”

  “To Alice’s.”

  “We can’t go there! If someone’s trying to kill me, I don’t want her to become a target!”

  “First of all, we went there before when someone was trying to kill you. Second, she’s insisting–called Drew herself a minute ago. And third, you have no choice now. You’ll do as I say.”

  Normally I’d argue, but not this time.

  I really will do whatever he says.

  “That headline. They think I did it,” I cry.

  Silas’s mouth tightens. “You didn’t.”

  “I know that! You were there and you know it! But–but–we’re running and the police must be looking for witnesses and–”

  “It’s covered.”

  “What’s covered?”

  “Your alibi.”

  Alibi. The word feels so slimy.

  “What alibi? You’re my alibi!”

  “And the footage.”

  “Footage? What do you mean, footage?”

  Before he can answer, I get it. My God. “The bar has cameras in the bathrooms?” I give him an incredulous look.

  He starts to fidget and looks away. “No.”

  That shakes me. And then a hot flush of fury pumps my blood.

  “Wait a minute. You planted a camera on me?”

  “Yes.”

  “One hand in this mess is trying to do cavity searches on me, and the other hand is planting cameras? You bastard!” I can’t scream anymore. All I can do is accuse and judge with a raspy voice.

  “No comparison. I never pierced your skin, and it wasn’t an implant.”

  “Where is it?” I look around wildly.

  “On your purse. On the buckle. It looks like a tiny chain with a charm on it.”

  I practically throw my purse on the seat between us and find the chain, which is covered in Tara’s blood. He’s right–it’s a tiny charm with a pinhole lens in it.

  And the charm itself?

  A button battery.

  “You sneaky jerk.”

  “Go ahead, call me names. I don’t care. I did it to protect you.”

  “Protect me? From who?”

  “From whoever just killed Tara.”

  “Killed? What? She committed suicide!” I know I’m in denial, but I can’t help it.

  “Jane, do you really think that was a suicide back there?” He’s in my face, intense. “Really? Tara’s probably right handed. Did you see how clean the right arm’s cut was? Both were equally strong and straight, and both went top down.”

  “Top down?”

  “From elbow to wrist. People trying to slit their wrists always go wrist up. Tara didn’t kill herself. That was a homicide.”

  “Oh, no,” I groan.

  “And whoever killed her is trying to frame you. You know what happens when people are trying to frame you? What the next step is if it doesn’t work?”

  I don’t answer.

  “They try to kill you. Maybe with a firebomb to the car. Maybe they poison your drink in a bar. Or maybe they ambush you in the women’s room and slit your wrists.”

  “STOP!”

  He grabs my upper arms, holding me in place with a grip so tight, I can’t believe he doesn’t have super powers. His nail beds are a sickly red-rimmed pink, a reminder of blood hastily wiped off. Tara’s blood. “I won’t stop!” he thunders, his voice filled with pain. “Someone is trying to kill you, and whoever just butchered Tara is suspect number one.”

  “You know who it is?”

  “No idea. But you aren’t going to end up in some rundown bar’s toilet, bleeding out like a six-point buck on the first day of hunting season.”

  My stomach rebels, threatening to empty. I look down at my legs and find blood all over them. The arms Silas is grabbing are coated in Tara’s blood.

  Then I look at him. From the elbows and knees down, he’s red, too.

  How much blood does the human body hold? I wonder, memory kicking me back to elementary school, when that was a test question and not what you ask yourself after finding a friend performing a one-woman experiment to find out.

  Silas’s gaze is piercing, intense and frustrated, firm and unyielding. “I do not ever, ever want to find you like that. Not with a bullet in you, not with a knife in you, not in a car on fire. Do you understand me, Jane? DO YOU?” he roars, his voice low and loud, as if he can use sound to make the world bend to his command.

  “Pretty sure that’s a life goal for me, too,” I say weakly. He’s breathing so fast, like he’s just run a marathon, and his eyes are dark, tinged with an emotional panic that deepens as I stare at him. His grip lessens but his fingers remain wrapped around my biceps.

  “Do you understand?” he whispers, grabbing my shoulders and pulling me to him, my ear landing over his heart.

  It sounds like rain on a tin roof. Tara’s blood is all over me. The heat of Silas’s body combines with my own panicked self and makes me squirm out of his arms.

  “Blood,” I gasp. “Blood. Too much blood,” I s
ay, keening.

  He grasps my hand, holding it in his. “This better?” I look down at our joined hands and realize that yes, it is. I need connection of some kind. Silas senses it, pushes for it.

  I nod, then close my eyes.

  And immediately see Tara’s vacant stare in my memory.

  My eyelids fly open and I tip my chin up, looking at the upholstered ceiling of the SUV. “Where are we going?”

  “Straight to the airport. We’ll shower before or on the plane. They’ll have a change of clothes for us.”

  “A change of–okay.” I try to close my eyes again.

  I fail.

  “Talk to me about anything but what just happened,” I say. “Please.”

  “What do you want to talk about?”

  “Did you go to college?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where?”

  “UC Irvine.”

  “Is that where you met Drew?”

  “No.”

  “How old are you?”

  “How old do you think I am?”

  “Older than me.” I look at him. “No grey hair. Under thirty.” The stupid trivia helps my heart to stop jumping in my chest.

  He’s amused. “I have friends who are under thirty and have grey hair.”

  “Really? I don’t.”

  “I’m twenty-eight.”

  “My guess was close. Twenty-seven.”

  He just nods and squeezes my hand. This is working. I’m calming down. Then I look down at my body and sit up, fast. I move closer to Silas. He opens his arms, as if to embrace me.

  That’s not what I’m seeking.

  As I angle my head, I get a glimpse of myself in the rear-view mirror.

  I start hyperventilating.

  I saw the photo online, but as I look in terror and touch my bloody hair with my bloodied hands, it feels like I’m dying. Me. Like this is my blood. My slit arms. My vacant eyes.

  “Shhh,” Silas says, his grip tight on my hand. “Don’t look. Wait until we’re at the airport and you can shower. It will come off.”

  “How do you know?”

  His stare is steady, words an icepick to my heart. “Because I’ve been covered in far more blood after an IED explosion. And some of it was mine.” He lets go of my hand and bends down to lift his bloody pants leg, the cloth growing stiff as the blood dries. A jagged line of scar stretches up the side of his calf, burrowed under his sock and traveling to his knee. His leg hair doesn’t grow on the white, gnarled skin.

  “Oh, Silas.”

  He drops the cloth and looks at me. “I’m fine now. But I wasn’t that day. I was lucky. I was the one picking pieces of my friends off my body. But I had a body. One that was still alive and breathing. My friends didn’t.”

  The SUV stops in front of a small white building, all the walls made of metal. We’re at a small helipad in an industrial park. I’ve never been here before.

  “What’s this?”

  “A safe place to use a helicopter. And they have bathrooms. No more problems with the plane and the shower doors,” he says.

  I grimace, remembering my foible.

  “It’s safe here,” he adds, almost as an afterthought, even though I know it’s most definitely not.

  It is neither safe nor an afterthought.

  I get out of the SUV, flanked on both sides by Silas and Duff. We enter into a concrete-floor building, an open warehouse with an office in the back. As we walk through the glass door, I find a simply decorated space that looks like someone lives here.

  “An apartment?” I ask Silas.

  “A safehouse.”

  Ah.

  He hands me a small plastic bag. I peer in. Towel, shampoo, some pink underwear. A dress.

  Flip-flops.

  “Best we could do on short notice. Alice is having some clothes delivered to the ranch for you.”

  I accept this as my new reality and look around for a bathroom.

  “Here,” he says, guiding me to the doors. There are two, unmarked.

  “I’ll be in the bathroom next door. Be quick. We need to move fast. Duff will stand guard.”

  I nod and go into the bathroom. There’s no tub, just a shower. It takes longer than it should for me to figure out how to turn on the water. I shimmy out of my clothes, peeling them off like leeches, shoving them in the garbage, shoes and all.

  I get in the shower. The water is ice cold. I haven’t given it enough time to warm up.

  My skin welcomes the intrusion. The sooner the blood is gone, the sooner I can think again. The drain fills with swirling pink water, small bursts of thicker red making it look like a tie-dye bucket. I start to sob.

  That is blood.

  Tara’s blood.

  I leave the shower, dripping all over the floor. I fish through the bag to find the small travel-size bottle of shampoo and soap. No conditioner. A man with short hair must have put this together.

  Lathering up, leaving the soap wrapper on the shower floor, I scrub so hard, my skin starts to hurt. I use the bar soap to wash my hair, then switch to shampoo until no more pink water remains. Now the water is warm, turning hot just as I need to rinse my hair again.

  I do.

  I stand under the burning-hot spray and let my hair feel like it’s on fire, the heat hurting my back.

  And then I turn off the water and stand there, dazed.

  A small mirror above the sink, directly across from me, shows a wet, naked woman who can’t quite believe she’s here.

  It reflects the truth.

  Tap tap tap.

  “Jane? You ready?”

  “No.”

  “Can you be ready in two minutes? We need to go.”

  “No.”

  “No, you can’t do it that fast, or–”

  “No.”

  He goes quiet. I grab a towel and start drying off, my hair first, body second.

  “No,” I whisper as I drop the towel and slip my legs into the pink panties.

  “No,” I hiss as I toss the simple A-line sundress, a size too big, over my head, instantly covered. The bag has no bra.

  “No,” I say, louder, as I slide my soles into the flip-flops, jamming a comb through my hair as if my scalp has offended me.

  Then I open the door, look at Silas, and say, “No!”

  “No–what?”

  “This entire day–hell, this year–deserves nothing but no.”

  He nods. “Yes.”

  And with that he takes me right back outside, through a back door, where a helicopter already has its rotors turning.

  We board. I click my seatbelt.

  And let the roar of the engine take me away.

  By the time we reach the airport, I am good for nothing. Silas has to take me by the hand and navigate, showing me where to go. I can move my feet. That’s it.

  We board the plane and I take the seat that looks the most comfortable. Silas sits next to me. It’s so different from our previous flights. Grabbing a blanket, he waits until I’m clicked in and then drapes it over me.

  “Need a pillow?”

  I shake my head.

  Settling in the seat right next to mine, he puts his seatbelt on. There is no self-conscious posturing of his body, trying not to touch me. We’re not intimate. None of this is romantic. I’m in survival mode and his focus is on taking care of me. You don’t keep tight physical boundaries when your goal is survival.

  You can’t.

  I jolt when I feel the plane move, my ear brushing against Silas’s shoulder. My vision swims, my wet hair moist against my cheek.

  I drift off, his hard, solid body a comfort.

  One that invades my dreams.

  * * *

  I’m in the house where the party was, in the hallway upstairs by all the bedrooms. Each door is numbered, one, two, three on the left, four, five, six on the right.

  A bright red waterfall of blood is at the end of the hallway.

  Copper and fresh meat fill my senses, the odor all-consuming, lik
e I’m eating it. Small animals lick my ankles, obedient, excited pets. When I look down I can’t see them, a black smoke covering everything below my knees.

  But I feel them, licking and nipping until the sensation increases, painful bites stabbing my ankles. I have no choice.

  I have to pick a door.

  I don’t want to choose one because the hallway is the safest place. Each choice is a kind of death. Closing off options and entering wholesale into one of them means all the other doors are no longer mine to try.

  But the bites intensify until my calf screams with pain and I lift my leg.

  To find a tiny animal with red, closing eyes and teeth the size of a steak knife feasting on me.

  Behind door number one, the rush of fresh water and cloves makes me take a step forward until a green gas floats around me. I choke. As the mist clears, I see bodies piled on the floor, all of them female, all of them naked.

  And all of them with eyes plucked out.

  Slamming the door shut, I move forward down the hallway, wading through increasingly bigger animals that I now have to kick away from me.

  I smell my own blood.

  Door number four is to my right. When I touch the doorknob, an electric bolt sprints through me until my teeth go numb. As I pull away, all the animals scream at once, then stop biting me.

  I don’t open that door.

  Door number two beckons, glowing with sunlight in all the cracks, making promises I hope it can keep. Hope is light, so my eyes try to tell my heart this is the safe place.

  Until I open the door to find a man in a white ski mask, holding a bright searchlight pointed at my eyes, his body naked, the animals feasting on his flesh as he moans in ecstasy.

  I close door number two. Fast.

  “Jane!” my mother calls, somewhere behind a door I’ve not yet reached, her voice soothing and frantic at the same time.

  “Mom!” I scream, opening door number five fast, my face consumed by fire. Hair burning, my head a candle, I turn to door number three and open it–

  And a shotgun blasts me, pushing me into the blood waterfall at the end of the hall, where I fall and fall and fall into an endless, eternal abyss.

  “Jane!” my mother calls again, only her voice is deeper, more urgent, coaxing me out of the abyss until I startle and scream–