by Dan Jolley
Julie hadn’t come home the night before. That worried him a little, but it was nothing she hadn’t done in the past. Standing at the bar in the kitchen, Julie’s mother Irene muttered to herself and methodically ate a bowl of high-fiber cereal.
Robert finally got the knot in his tie right and, feeling positive about the day ahead, opened the front door.
Annoyed, Irene Worley strode into the living room when she heard her husband violently retching.
“Robert? Robert. What’s wrong with you? What’s the matter?”
She saw the thing on the porch, and her voice left her. She continued walking. Slowly. Drawn to it, couldn’t keep her eyes away from it. On the floor, Robert retched again, spewed his breakfast across the hardwood, and started to sob.
Something that had once been her daughter sat propped against the porch railing, its hands folded in its lap, still dressed in the outfit Julie had left the house in the day before. Irene recognized her only by the clothes.
Pinned to Julie’s brown-stained, crusted shirt was a note written on yellow legal paper, printed in clean block letters.
I’M SO SORRY.
* * *
That night, Jake Friskel’s breath hung unexpectedly in the air before him as he kept a lookout. It flickered and danced beneath a blinking, dying streetlight. Just in the last few minutes, just after 11:00, the temperature had plummeted. Jake didn’t think much about it. He did think for a second he felt someone watching him, but he was sure the place was clean, so he didn’t say anything to Marko or De’shan.
De’shan had picked up enough knowledge of wires and circuits over the years from his older brother, the electrician, to take care of the simple alarm system rigged to the chain-link fence. Now the three of them, pressed into the shadows in the loading zone of Grant’s Discount Electronics, moved silently up the concrete steps to the heavy back door.
De’shan and Marko looked as if they’d been stamped by the same cookie cutter: both well over six feet tall, both skinny as scarecrows. They dressed alike most days, and they both drove customized Honda Civics with enormous sub-woofers taking up the trunks. De’shan’s head was smooth and bullet-shaped, though, while Marko wore his hair in rows. Tonight they both carried 9mm revolvers, but Jake didn’t like the idea of anything that couldn’t take down more than one target at a time. He held a sawed-off, 12-gauge, pistol-grip pump shotgun pressed against his left thigh, one finger on the trigger.
De’shan and Marko worked on the door, and gave Jake time to think.
Every so often it occurred to him how needless their crimes were. Not one of them came from a family that took in less than sixty-five grand a year, and Marko’s dad was president of a bank. They only did it for the thrill. Still, Jake loved it. Loved the rush. They all did.
Jake massed nearly as much as De’shan and Marko put together. At six feet one inch, Jake weighed in at two hundred sixty-seven pounds, very little of it fat. De’shan and Marko referred to him as “Cinder,” short for “cinderblock.” Jake was two years younger than his friends, and that was the only reason he wasn’t in charge.
Long seconds passed, and the feeling of being watched grew stronger, though the night remained perfectly still and Jake couldn’t see anything moving. The clicks from the lock sounded unnecessarily loud.
Jake whispered, “What’s takin’ so long?”
“Shut the fuck up, nigga,” De’shan hissed, in his best “hard” voice. “It’s comin’.”
They heard a thump from inside the store, and Jake watched as the lock flipped over of its own volition under De’shan’s fingers. As De’shan and Marko traded panicked glances, the door popped open, and the Grant’s night manager backed his way out onto the dock, humming a tune, his arms filled with empty boxes.
He was a short, overweight Hispanic man with receding hair and a moustache, dressed in cheap slacks and a short-sleeve button shirt with a loosened necktie through the collar. The door thumped into De’shan’s leg. The manager pushed harder, didn’t look around, thinking it was just some innocuous obstruction that kept the door from opening. He still hummed.
The three boys froze for several seconds. Jake saw De’shan’s face clearly, and his expression said Shit! What now?
Marko spoke in controlled, icy tones meant to sound grown-up and dangerous: “Get out here, bitch!”
He grabbed the manager by his shirt, from which hung a name tag that read “Hi, my name is RICO,” and yanked him out onto the loading dock. The door immediately swung shut. Rico swiveled his spherical head around, realized what was happening, and said, “Don’t hurt me! Don’t hurt me, I just work here! Don’t hurt me!”
“Shut the fuck up!” Marko barked out, and shoved the barrel of his revolver into the manager’s cheek. By this time, Jake had moved up the stairs, and said, “What the hell, man? You said everybody’d be gone by now!”
De’shan had his mouth open to answer, but before he could say anything the latch clicked again and the door punched open.
Marko said, “Shit, another one?” and De’shan cocked his gun and had just started to turn when a narrow gray boot pistoned out of the darkness inside the doorway and crushed his nose. His head snapped back and he pitched nervelessly off the loading platform.
Jake scrambled down the stairs, the shotgun forgotten in his hand, and watched De’shan fall the six feet to the concrete lot. De’shan landed solidly on his back, and his head struck the pavement and bounced. He didn’t get back up. Jake glanced at the open doorway and felt his bowels loosen.
A tall woman dressed in gray body armor stepped out onto the loading platform.
Jake tried to make out her face, and realized a mask covered the woman’s entire head. Solid black eyes floated in the mass of smoky darkness. The woman remained silent, but moved quickly forward, toward Marko and the night manager.
Jake had momentarily forgotten about Marko, but he stepped back and away, and waited. Marko would deal with this. Jake was big, sure, and strong as a bull, but Marko had a black belt. He was fast.
Marko stood halfway up the stairs, Rico pressed to his side, and even as the woman approached him he took the revolver from Rico’s face and raised it toward her.
As soon as the barrel of the gun moved away from his head, Rico screamed, “Hijo de puta!” and rammed his elbow into Marko’s ribs.
Marko gasped, surprised, and his gun hand faltered. Rico jumped off the steps, but landed badly and crumpled. He rolled over onto his back and clutched one ankle.
Alone and confused on the stairs, Marko tried to speak, but before he could get anything out, a police baton seemed to leap into the woman’s hand. It flashed, lightning fast, and Marko’s gun clanged out of his grip.
Marko howled and jumped off the stairs, landing beside the writhing night manager. He looked around for his gun but couldn’t see it.
The masked woman slammed into him.
Marko had studied tae kwon do and jujitsu since he was thirteen, had trophies to prove it, but the woman in gray never gave him a chance. The baton flew out and down and connected with Marko’s ankle bone. Marko landed hard on the pavement. He absorbed the impact with one arm, as he’d been taught, but it still shook him.
Instead of wading in after him, the woman collapsed the baton, slipped it into a sheathe on her right thigh, and stepped back, and motioned for Marko to get up.
The young man surged off the ground, teeth gritted. He launched a brutal kick at her head—and shouted as she blocked it with an arm that looked solid as a tree limb. Marko spun off-balance and the woman in gray moved into him.
The woman’s armored back was to Jake and partially blocked his view, so he couldn’t see exactly what happened next, but it didn’t sound like punches landing on Marko’s ribs and chest and face. It sounded more like his friend was getting pummeled with a baseball bat. The sound of impacts rattled together like a great ratcheti
ng, and when the woman stepped calmly aside, Marko slumped forward onto his face on the concrete.
Rico lurched up to one knee, pale and sweating. The woman turned toward him and began to extend a hand when Rico saw Jake, back in the shadows at the base of the concrete steps. Rico’s eyes grew huge and round. The woman, who had not yet spoken a word, spun around and threw herself between Jake and Rico.
Jake didn’t realize he’d raised the shotgun until he felt it buck in his hands. He hadn’t fired it more than three times in the past, and he didn’t have a tight enough grip on it: even as the roaring battered his ears, he felt the weapon jump backwards, and the hammer embedded itself in his hand between his thumb and index finger, slid and grated against bone.
But pain or no pain, an image struck him, stamping itself on his eyes: the woman in gray, her feet planted, taking the shotgun blast straight to the chest. The spread was too big, though, the woman hadn’t positioned herself quite right, and several pellets ripped into Rico’s face and neck even as the impact of the shot slammed the woman backward. Blood sprayed from Rico’s skin as the woman in gray landed heavily beside him.
A land mine seemed to go off inside Jake’s hand, and he started screaming. Tears filled his eyes.
Under its own weight the shotgun dropped. The hammer slid out of his hand with a wet sucking sound. Jake collapsed against the wall, his hand gushing blood, and squeezed his eyes shut as he screamed.
Because of the pain, it didn’t fully register on him that the woman in gray, who’d just taken most of a shotgun discharge at five yards, immediately stirred and rose shakily to her feet. All Jake could think about was his torn and broken hand, even as the woman spoke briefly to Rico and helped the shorter man to his feet.
Jake’s attention narrowed down to a needle point, however, as the woman in the mask threw a long, slim, metal dart and blew out the guttering streetlight.
The loading area plunged into absolute darkness, and a breath of scorching-hot air raked across Jake’s tear-stained cheeks. He could see nothing but a huge greenish-purple after-image amid the black, but he knew the woman wasn’t there anymore.
De’shan groaned.
Marko made no sound other than ragged breathing.
In the distance Jake heard sirens.
* * *
Unable to sleep, Zach Feygen staged a rule-bending after-hours visit to Chooley, who had benefited greatly from getting shot. After admission to the hospital, the nurse who examined Chooley found five separate ailments he needed immediate treatment for, not the least of which was acute malnutrition.
“I’m amazed this guy could walk around,” the nurse had said. “I’ve seen healthier corpses.”
Ill or not, Feygen had never seen the man quite so ...intact. “It’s the hospital food, buddy,” Chooley said. “It’s like a laxative for the brain. Purges you.”
Odd declarations aside, Chooley seemed clearer of mind than Feygen had ever known him to be in the past, and had engaged the detective in an unexpectedly cogent discussion of the second season of Supernatural, which he’d apparently been watching for the last several weeks in one of the common areas of the Georgia Tech student center. Feygen surprised himself by not really wanting to leave when his cell phone rang.
Feygen left Chooley and made his way down to the E.R. According to the dispatcher, an ambulance was making its way to the hospital, carrying three young men who may or may not have been assaulted by the same woman who’d both humiliated Feygen and saved his life at the Hargett Theatre. One of them was still conscious.
Lounging against a wall and wishing he could smoke in the ER hallway, he’d already checked his watch three times. He couldn’t believe it was taking the EMTs so long to get there.
* * *
Chief Resident Carla Gates leaned wearily against the admissions desk in the emergency room of Gavring Medical Center.
Her shift was almost over, no car wrecks or third-degree burns were on their way in, her husband’s return flight from Tokyo would arrive at Hartsfield International in another two hours, and she looked forward to doing absolutely nothing but spending the entire night in bed with him. Awake or asleep, it didn’t matter; she was exhausted and knew he’d be jet-lagged as well. But for the first eight or nine hours, she only wanted to lie next to him, breathe in the smell of his skin, and let the rest of the world drain away from her mind and body.
An odd sound shook her from her half-dream. She looked around and tried to pinpoint its source, and heard it again. Harry, one of the admissions clerks, came to the counter and said, “What was that?”
“You heard that too?” Gates frowned and moved toward what she thought was the noise’s source. It came a third time, a muffled rattling, from a supply closet tucked away in a small alcove.
As she reached for the handle, the door swung partway open, and two people stumbled out. One was a portly, gray-faced Latino, clutching a square of cloth ripped from his own shirt to his bleeding face and neck. The other, supporting the first, wore some kind of gray body armor—and a full-head mask, featureless except for two patches of black mesh over the eyes. Gates backpedaled and said, “Oh my God.” The Latino’s shirtfront was soaked with blood, and he grunted and sank to one knee. As the person in the mask turned to face her, Gates felt a chill skitter over her skin.
That’s a woman. Gates backed up fast.
That’s a fucking terrifying woman.
“He’s been shot,” the masked woman barked. “Twelve-gauge shotgun pellets. I don’t think they pierced anything essential, but he’s losing blood.”
A team of nurses rushed forward while Gates gave orders, focusing on what she knew best. The wounded man held onto enough consciousness to cooperate in getting himself onto a gurney, but she thought he was going into shock. Gates glanced once over her shoulder at the woman in gray, but focused her attention on the wounded man completely as she followed the gurney through the swinging door.
* * *
The masked, armored woman turned and stepped back toward the closet. When she saw Feygen standing in the middle of the corridor staring at her, she froze for a couple of seconds before she ducked into the tiny supply room and snicked the door shut behind her.
Feygen turned his head aside for a second at the blast of heat as he yanked open the closet door. He flipped the light switch. Fluorescent bulbs hummed and lit up, revealing mops, buckets, cleaning supplies, and a haze of steam around the back wall.
Feygen’s stomach shrank, his balls drew up tight against his abdomen, and his brain did a hitching little dance.
He tore into the closet, pulled bottles and boxes and sacks off the shelves as he searched the back wall for concealed doorways or traps. After five minutes he growled in frustration and backed out of the tiny room.
This couldn’t be what it looked like.
But he’d seen it. First at the theatre. Then here. Tonight. Just now.
After a few moments he wiped a sheen of sweat from his face and muttered, “I’ll be damned.”
Feygen shut the door, turned around and stuck his hands in his pockets.
He lumbered down the hallway with unfocused eyes, shaking his head.
CHAPTER SIX
Despite the weather services’ forecasts of scattered showers, the next morning dawned with an intensely blue sky, marred only by a few thick clouds on the eastern horizon. Traffic was noisy as usual, but the air tasted clean, and Darius Clay enjoyed it as he walked to work.
A neatly-kept man in his late thirties with coffee-colored skin and a few threads of gray in his tightly cropped hair, Darius adjusted the lapels of his double-breasted suit as he made his way down the sidewalk.
Monolithic buildings rose all around him, and every now and again he amused himself by imagining they were all made of stone, each one a single colossal shard meticulously carved out by a giant sculptor.
He related
them in his mind to the Chinese ivory eggs he’d seen in a museum: each piece of ivory, about the size of a large man’s fist, intricately fashioned into an egg and covered with tiny figures of people on bridges and balconies, in windows and doorways. And yet, inside that egg was another egg, completely separate from the outer one, that had been carved inside the larger carving. No seams, no hinges. The sculptor had to send tiny picks and probes through the openings of the outer sculpture to fashion a totally separate egg.
Staring at one such egg, mightily impressed by the feat, Darius thought about describing it to his friends—and realized there was a third egg inside the second, and a fourth inside the third, each of them unconnected to the outer ones and all of them just as exquisitely carved.
The patience and mastery of skill required to accomplish such a thing, the lifetime it would have taken, boggled his mind. Thinking of it still filled him with a delicious sense of awe.
And so he tried to imagine, every so often, that all of the city’s buildings were like the Chinese eggs, all of them the products of a master craftsman’s life work. Every hallway, every elevator, every light fixture carved from living rock. In this way he could sometimes appreciate them as something besides the festering ant hills they so often turned out to be.
Darius moved up Peachtree Street and prepared to turn onto Ellis. The newsstand he passed every day would be there, he knew, and he switched from his contemplation of the city’s architectural structures to the somewhat less lofty debate he’d held internally, for about twenty seconds each morning, over the last seven weeks. Rounding the corner, he stopped at the stand, picked up copies of the Chronicle and the AJC, and stared at the latest issue of Mandate, the gay skin magazine his new lover, Frederick, enjoyed so much.
They’d laughed about it when Frederick first mentioned it, Darius wondering aloud why Frederick didn’t just get his porn free online like everyone else in the developed world. “I guess I’m old-school when it comes to my prurient interests,” he’d said.