Sanguine Vengeance

by Jason Dias

  “You can promise me one thing. Get me close to her. I’m going to kill her myself.”

  “I can try.”

  She clammed up. Shut her eyes, leaned back in the seat. Withdrew.

  I kept driving.

  Nausea had never departed and now it crept up: a roiling feeling in the stomach, and a juiciness in the mouth and throat as they lubricated the way for inevitable vomit. I pulled over. I crouched over a storm drain and let go of breakfast. It tasted about the same coming up as it had going down, just stewed in coffee.

  Watanabe, shut down a second ago, flew to my side. “What’s wrong? Are you sick?”

  “I don’t think shame is good for the appetite.” I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand. “I need to sleep.”

  “I can drive. Where should we go? I want to kill that bitch.”

  “Nothing to do until nightfall, then she’ll find us. I have no leads.”

  “Motel, then.” She drove like a chauffeur with a rich rider. Pulled in at a mom-and-pop motor inn on the east side, where Stanton Springs meets the prairie. Inside. I worried about our appearance but imagined no solutions.

  “Help you?”

  Asian guy behind the counter, white shirt, plaid jacket. Mid twenties. He hardly glanced our way.

  “Need a room for the day.”

  “Check-in is at one.” He indicated his wrist-watch.

  “We work at night. Do us a favor.”

  “I’ll check what’s ready, ma’am. Gonna need a credit card.”

  I started to pile cash on the counter. “What’s a room here, sixty bucks?”

  “Seventy-nine.”

  “Here’s eighty. And here’s forty more. Convenience fee, let’s say.” He sighed. I glanced at his workspace. College math. “You know what? Textbooks aren’t cheap. Here’s forty more. I bet you’re living on Ramen noodles and peanut butter.”

  He sighed again. Passed over a key. “If you fuck me over…”

  “Thank you. You don’t know what it means to us.” We split while we could. He’d put us on the ground floor. The hotel had room doors on the outside – relatively anonymous to come and go. My officers visited on a semi-regular basis to bust drug dealers or prostitutes who gave up their money to pimps. It would do. The room was small and dark. But also dry and clean.

  “I’m taking a shower.” She shut herself in the bathroom. I wished I’d called it first: I stank of blood and urine and fear.

  I lay on top of the coverlet and shut my eyes. Sleep came hard. Like death. Ysabeau didn’t bother me with dreams; maybe there was nothing left to learn. When I opened my eyes again, the light had changed. Blackout curtains and room lights, all blazing. A weight on my shoulder: Ayame had curled up next to me and now she lay on me, one arm across my chest, one leg over my waist. It felt good, natural. A point of human contact in a universe gone dark.

  As usual, I was starving but too sick with grief and self-loathing to eat. My hands shook with it and my middle felt hollowed out.

  “You’re awake.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “What time is it?”

  “Three.”

  “Which three?”

  “Afternoon. You must’ve been wiped.”

  “Yeah.” She rolled away and I missed the contact. I felt incomplete without it. “I’m gonna use the shower. You need the head first?”

  “No.” She sat up and turned on the TV. Looking for news, maybe. I couldn’t blame her.

  I threw my clothes on the room’s one armchair, an absurdly passion-fruit colored thing more stain than fabric. The shower, sanitary but old, dribbled rather than sprayed and still it warmed and cleaned. Ay had used all the shampoo and half the bar of soap. I sympathized. I used the other half and stood in the water so long I started turning into a prune. The water left my skin red but still I needed it hotter. No water is hot enough for absolution.

  Steam vortexed into the room and dissipated as I stepped out of the shower, thinking of Ysabeau’s lover and his scalded hand. Had he attained absolution from her? Given himself freely and thus cleared his sin?

  It made me think of Ysabeau materializing. Me naked, her in my space. I had gooseflesh.

  I stood in an empty room. Ayame was gone.

  I said her name, pointlessly. Impotent.

  On the air conditioner under the window, Samantha’s wallet lay open. Still daylight; Ysabeau could not have taken Ayame. Maybe she went through my clothes, because why wouldn’t you, given the absurdity of my story? She’d found the wallet and assumed the worst: that I’d killed her myself. Not a stretch of the imagination.

  If she’d gone, she might be back with police any minute. Best if I dressed. Same clothes as yesterday. I wished for time to wash them and hang them up. The motel had a laundry room with a drier. As long as I was wishing, I might as well wish none of this had happened. So I put on dirty clothes. The socks were the worst.

  No keys in the pants pocket. No luck if I needed to run. Watanabe knew her business.

  The door opened. It seemed sudden. I jumped. Just Watanabe, with one arm around a paper grocery bag. “I brought food. Can’t vigilante on an empty stomach.” She dropped Burt’s keys on the air conditioner.

  She had Chinese food in a series of cardboard containers. Hot and sour soup in Styrofoam.

  “I can’t eat.”

  “People die when they don’t eat. You’ve lost a bunch of weight. Did you notice?”

  My clothes flapped around me. I hadn’t had time to think about it. “No.”

  “If you can’t keep any food down, we aren’t hunting vampires. We’re headed out of town to a hospital. Okay?”

  “Fine. I’ll try some soup. Gently.”

  She used chopsticks with alacrity. Ate like she meant it. I sipped soup straight from the container, resting between swallows. The sugar washed through my system, restoring strength and energy. I resisted the urge to slurp, to drink it down. The spices roiled in my belly.

  “You’re done?”

  I’d had maybe five teaspoons of soup and felt green, but still better. “I don’t want to just throw it up. It’s something. I feel good.”

  She sighed. “Not long to dark.”

  “I’ve been thinking about this. Ysabeau wants me to find her. So she can keep torturing me with the deaths of everyone I love. She wants me to kill them when she can set that up. She’ll come for you. Like she took Jolene.”

  “I won’t go quietly.”

  “I told you, she can manipulate your feelings. When she comes, you’ll want to go with her. You’ll walk off hand in hand.”

  “So what can we do? Just give up and go along?”

  “Give me your handcuffs.”

  She stared at me. “Why?”

  “We’re going to sit on the bed together. Handcuffed together. If she takes one, she’ll have to take both. I still have my set. My left to your right, your left to my right.

  “Hard to fight that way.”

  I shrugged. “How to fight? Only faith will do it. Do you have a faith?”

  “No. I had something, but losing Sammie… All my faith was in love.”

  I shook my head. She joined me on the bed and we watched the clock. Half an hour to dark. “It’s possible all we can do is die well together. I still have bullets. Four of them.”

  She said nothing. She sat cross-legged, like a preschooler.

  “How long to sundown?”

  She checked her phone. “Sixteen minutes.”

  “Set an alarm.”

  She was halfway through with that when someone pounded on the door. We both jumped. We locked eyes. She rolled off the left side of the bed onto her feet, and I scrambled to the end and jumped up. Neither of us moved to answer the door. We pulled out guns.

  “Dom? Are you in there? It’s Jo. Open the door.”

  Ay relaxed fractionally, took a step forwards. I stopped her with a hand. “It’s not her,” I whispered.

  “I recognize her voice.”

  “Think. I lost her last night.
Nobody knows we’re here. Nobody but Her. Even the kid at the desk doesn’t know who we are. We paid cash.”

  “But if it’s Jolene…”

  “It isn’t. She’s as dead as Burt and Sammie. We can’t save her.”

  From outside: “I hear you in there. Dom, help me. Only you can save me now. Please let me in. It’s cold out here.”

  Ay yielded to pressure. She covered the door with her automatic.

  “Dom? It hurts. I need you. Please?”

  I broke. “Go away. There’s nothing for you here.”

  She hissed. Like a cat. Pounded on the door. Clawed at it.

  “Go away,” Ay said, steady. “In the name of the Holy Trinity.”

  What Jolene said next, I didn’t understand. She used a low, mannish voice, full of sibilant syllables. Some kind of curse. Then she said, “The Master will sow fields with your broken teeth before you die. She will eat your soul when everyone you love has died. She’s going to fuck you, Dominique. Fuck you bloody.”

  While she ranted, I moved to the window and twitched the curtain aside with the barrel of my revolver. I could see her at the door. She stood hunched over, fingers dripping blood. Her clothes were dirty and her hair hung in greasy locks. Her dead, gray eyes anchored a face absent expression even as she threatened violence. And her face from nose to chin oozed with dried blood as though she’d buried it in a corpse.

  I backed away to let Ayame look. She glanced, shuddered. Jolene looked up as she did, making eye contact with Ay.

  “We killed your woman. Ayame Watanabe. Cut her throat like the cow she was. She wept all the time. Begged for her life. We said we would let her go if only she would renounce you and she did, she did gladly. She said she never loved you, that she would help us take you in if only we would stop hurting her. She died upside down with her own blood in her eyes.”

  Ayame stepped to the door.

  “No,” I said.

  She didn’t reach for the handle, though. She shot through the door. The window shattered from the shock. Jolene made a strangling, gurgling sound and went down, broken window glass tinkling around her. I checked the window again. Jo lay on the pavement outside, splayed out.

  “Fuck.”

  “You were right, Dom. I believe you now. She was already dead. I just set her free. Now let’s kill that bitch Ysabeau.”

  The sun went down. I felt it. The weight of night slipped onto my shoulders. I breathed out and couldn’t breathe in again, not as deeply. Night, an anaconda wrapped around my chest, slowly constricted me to death.

  “The handcuffs…”

  Too late. Ysabeau stood there between us, smiling, tiny. “You are running out of friends, Dominique. Your Beatrice was hard to break, but so satisfying.” Ayame spun around, took aim at Ysabeau. If she shot, the bullet would pass through her and into me. “Jolene was weak. So easily made into a driveling servant, my priest of darkness. This one… Oh, the woman who likes women. I will have fun with her.”

  I tried to grab her, stop her. She wasn’t there to grab. I stumbled into Ay, knocked her against the door. She sat down in the pool of blood seeping in from the other side. Then Ysabeau swept me away like the wind blows rice after a wedding. I tumbled into a corner.

  When I recovered my bearings and put my feet under me, they were both gone, leaving me alone again with another corpse. Another dead friend. Another…

  Jolene. Poor Jolene. I couldn’t keep her safe. I couldn’t keep Ayame safe. I’d tried to save them and ended up killing them. I grieved Ayame, now as dead as Beatrice and Jolene. I grieved them all. I sat on the spongy bed, hands hanging between my knees, hair in my face, and sobbed.

  How long? What does time mean to the condemned?

  Once more, sirens prodded me out of reverie, out of the human process of grief. It would be State Patrol this time, and they would not be looking to arrest anyone. They would lead with their guns.

  Time to go. Grief or no grief, hope or no hope, time to go.

  I went.

  I snagged the BMW key on the way out. Holstered my gun. Started the car and drove, sedately, away from the sound of sirens. No direction, no hope, just another minute of survival that added to another minute and another and became an hour, a day, a night.

  One way and another, I ended up parked in the shadows of a loading dock behind a Walmart. The nose of the car faced out into the night. The back bumper touched concrete.

  “Ayame, where are you? How can I help you?”

  Hopeless self-talk.

  After the church shooting, I’d been pretty shaken up. One of the ministers up there, he was shaken, too. He’d asked me how I dealt with the guilt of all the people I couldn’t save. I could have taken that badly, as an accusation, but he only meant he had guilt that was fresh and I must have been used to coping with it.

  I remembered a talk with the staff psychologist. Daniels, same as the Captain. No relation. I hadn’t been able to help that minister because he was wrong. Nobody gets used to dealing with the guilt. They either find a way to blame someone else or they go mad with it.

  Daniels had said, “But there is a way out, Sanchez. Tell him this: tell him, the man with the gun pulled the trigger. We all go through life doing the best we can. Sometimes, in spite of all we try to do, someone loses their shit. Afterwards, we just pick up the pieces. There is someone to blame in all this, and that’s the man with the gun.”

  “There’s always more we could have done.”

  “And that’s how terrorism works. When you start blaming yourself for the actions of terrorists, they win.”

  A strong memory offering little comfort. I was the man with the gun in this scenario and never mind that I had little choice in the matter. Philosophers balanced the greater and lesser evil, not police detectives. A tired detective who should be planning retirement.

  I could have done more. I could have killed myself rather than Beatrice. I could have refused to smother Daniels – Captain Daniels – and made Ysabeau do her own dirty work, no matter how I felt about it. So many other choices. I could have burned down the funeral home on suspicion. I could have run away, dragging her with me, maybe.

  I hated her for what she’d done to me. For what I’d become at her urging. How easy to corrupt me. In despair and grief, hate called like a beacon. It put strength back into limbs and resolve back into minds. But I still had nowhere to go.

  I mumbled to myself, muttered. It sounded like someone else talking two rooms away. Better to say something coherent, anything, than let myself slip out of control. So I said the first thing that came into my head:

  “Our father, who art in Heaven. Hallowed be thy name. They will be done, thy kingdom come, on Earth as it is in Heaven. Give us this day…”

  A second voice joined with mine from the tiny back seat. I was too exhausted to react much. My voice hitched for a second, then I stammered on.

  “…Our daily bread and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.” The voice behind me recited in Latin rather than Engish. My words should have sounded vulgar by comparison, but they did not. While I know nothing of Latin, still I knew she uttered profanities. “Lead us not into temptation.” I’d lost my place. I hadn’t said this prayer, well, ever. It had been on a sampler on the bathroom wall when I’d lived with Enrique. I’d read it involuntarily every morning when I took a crap. “Uh, though I walk through the valley of-”

  “Death!”

  “-of death, I will fear no-”

  “Evil!”

  “For I am, uh, washed in the blood of the lamb.” She distracted me sufficiently that I couldn’t think of the rest. I could mouth sanctimonious platitudes but I’d already seen how useless those were, even in the mouths of more faithful people than me.

  “Awash, I should say. Awash in blood. You speak it no better than Clearey did. No worse, for that matter.”

  “Ysabeau, what do you want?”

  “Your soul. You have given up so much of it to me already, now
I want the rest.”

  “Take it. I’m not using it.”

  She tittered, such a delicate sound in her evil throat. “I am taking it. Ayame Watanabe is mine now. You should have left her to discover her bloody home. I would have been content with her grief. Now I have her soul, too.”

  I recognized the trick: make the victim blame herself for the actions of the attacker. Thing is, I was so disheartened that I still believed it.

  “Whatever you want, just take it and go. I’ve never seen a soul. If that’s what you want, have it. If you even believe in it. If you want to bite my neck and suck my blood, do that. Just… I can’t take any more.”

  “Enrique is alive and well.”

  Despite myself, I sat up a little straighter. “You’re lying. That’s what you do. Mother of lies.”

  “I do enjoy a nice deception now and again. But the game grows dull as you surrender. What I want is the fight. The soul is indeed an abstraction. But yours is found in the fight. Enrique is alive and he will stay alive for at least a little longer. Ayame is mine. I have sent her to seduce him.”

  Maybe Ysabeau didn’t know as much as I thought she did. Or maybe she enjoyed the perversion of sending the lesbian to seduce the Catholic man. As always, her motives were confused, confusing, inscrutable. “I suppose you want me to stop her.”

  “They are at the slaughterhouse. You know the way.”

  “If she’s going to fuck him, what do I care?” The vulgarity sprang from me, surprising me as much as her. “You’re going to corrupt and murder him no matter what I do. Wouldn’t it be nice if he got laid first?”

  She laughed again, a real, full-throated laugh. Then she appeared in my lap, having covered none of the cluttered distance between us. She took my head in her hands and forced her lips against mine. I resisted, pushed against her. She overpowered me. It lasted only a second, but that second informed me: fresh blood filled her veins, making her material enough to struggle with. If she’d sated her appetite, I wasn’t in any particular danger.