Splintered

by Jamie Schultz

  The chairs were gone now. She couldn’t even see the one she was sitting on, though she could feel it. That was something. The worst days were the ones when she couldn’t feel things, exactly. On days like that, the chair would support her, but her senses would insist it wasn’t there, and the result was a crushing cognitive dissonance that made her brain feel like a wrung-out sponge. The sensation was so awful, so disorienting, that she’d thrown up both times it happened.

  Today, though, it wasn’t that bad. The room looked empty. New. Unfinished. She could see the plywood decking of the floor, spattered with plaster, and the clean white sheetrock walls. People moved through it. Dozens of them. Construction workers at first, but others joined them. A woman with dyed white blond hair, leaning over blueprints with a cigarette held between two of her fingers. An entire Mexican family, speaking in excited Spanish she could barely follow. Two big men holding a third man with a bag over his head. The man with the bag over his head screamed, “I don’t have your money. I don’t know where it is. I don’t know—I don’t—” A gunshot, and Karyn flinched. A messy spray of blood spattered the white wall, then vanished. The body didn’t.

  Anna walked in. Another Anna walked in. A third, a fourth, a fifth. One of them, thin arms jutting out of a loose white tank top, brushed wavy dark hair out of her eyes and leaned toward Karyn.

  “You doing okay in there?”

  Karyn hesitated, unsure of whether this was Anna talking, or just another phantasm. She didn’t know which she’d prefer. It was only after she’d gone under, after the regular world had finally drifted out of touch, that she fully appreciated how big a part of her life Anna was. It wasn’t just the jobs, or the shared living situation, or the endless ways Anna helped her manage her condition. It was everything. A million little things, every day. Stupid anecdotes shared over breakfast at around the crack of noon, neither of them being particularly early risers. Karyn’s endless jokes about the women Anna dated, and Anna’s endless complaints about same. Bickering about the radio, when Anna wanted to load up goddamn Ministry for the six thousandth time, and Karyn just wanted to tune to KIIS and nod along to pop candy. The card games with the guys.

  It had never consciously occurred to her before, but Anna was the one person she spoke to every single day. Karyn’s mother was dead, suicide at eighteen, not long after Karyn was born—and Karyn had spent many an hour wondering about that, and whether her condition was hereditary. Karyn’s father, whom she thought of as “the sperm donor,” though his deposit had been made in a decidedly old-fashioned way, had made himself scarce even before that. Her great-aunt Florence was now in a home, and had become detached from reality in a more prosaic fashion than Karyn herself. There had been a handful of men in the last decade, but nothing even approaching anything she’d call a relationship, never anybody she felt comfortable enough with to even dream of discussing her condition.

  Just Anna, and now not even that. The loneliness was as bad as not being able to see the world as it was. She and Anna had done so much together, fought their way through some unbelievable crap, and now she was cut off. The brief moments of interaction were painfully unsatisfying, rarely long enough to exchange anything meaningful before they got swamped or confused—but she kept trying.

  She braced herself for the inevitable disappointment, trying to stifle the wavering flame of hope that kindled itself despite her efforts, and answered, “I—I don’t really know.”

  “What do you mean?”

  That hope grew steadier, a thin candlelight in the blackness. “I mean, I can’t tell if this is another day, or if I’ve finally just lost my mind.”

  Anna chuckled. “Well, yeah, it tastes like shit, but it’ll keep you from dropping dead.”

  “What?”

  “No, no word from him yet.”

  “I don’t—”

  A different Anna patted her on the knee. “You feeling any better?”

  Karyn closed her eyes. Maybe they’d just . . . disappear. It had happened before.

  “Who cares what the doctor says? You just gotta pull through this.”

  No luck. Worse, both Annas were talking now. Maybe others, too. It was impossible to tell.

  “Nail will cut his nuts off if he screws us.”

  “You’re going to be okay. I know you are.”

  “—up in Van Nuys, of all places. Three hundred bucks’ worth of—”

  “I hate this. Can’t find Adelaide, though. She’s cleared out, and nobody’s saying shit. If she had suppliers, nobody’s talking. I’ll find them, though. For reals.”

  Karyn closed her eyes tighter, hoping it would shut out the endless conversation of non sequiturs, but new voices layered themselves on top. It wasn’t fair. Just one minute of real conversation, just one honest exchange with her best friend, instead of this stream of nonsense, and she could hold it together.

  I’m going to hold it together anyway, she thought.

  From nowhere, cold metal pushed gently against her lips. She opened her eyes. Only Annas, everywhere. Then an invisible spoon pushed her mouth open, and the taste of cold breakfast cereal hit her tongue. Feeding time.

  She squeezed her eyes shut even more tightly than before, but the tears escaped anyway.

  * * *

  Anna left Karyn’s room and slumped against the makeshift plywood door, staring vacantly across the ruins in front of her. Karyn’s room was one of the classrooms along the outer edge of the building, across the width of a hall from a big open space that might have been a cafeteria once and was now a wreck full of broken glass, floor tiles, and moldy acoustic ceiling panels. Much of the space must have been windows at one time, since now it was largely open, just a few columns holding up the ceiling, lined with sawtooth edges of glass. Anna could see across the space to the wide stairs leading down to the building’s entry—which, she supposed, was the reason Nail liked this spot. Gold-orange rays of morning light glinted off broken bottles down there.

  Anna let the cinder block wall of Karyn’s room hold her up for a moment. She felt like a dishrag that had been wrung out and thrown under the sink. It had been two months since the fight in Sobell’s office, two months since Karyn’s last dose of the drug that kept her visions at bay. Anna wasn’t sure how Karyn was holding up in there, but Anna herself wasn’t doing so hot. She’d seen Karyn in bad shape before, but never this bad, never so . . . disconnected. And who knew how bad it might get? Her worst fear was that one day Karyn would no longer even feel the spoon at feeding time, wouldn’t know to open her mouth or to swallow, and that Anna would have to resort to an IV or a feeding tube or whatever the fuck it was you did for people who couldn’t eat anymore.

  Her phone vibrated. She took it from her pocket and glanced at the caller ID. It was Bobby, calling her back. She hit him up constantly for tips and rumors, and he’d had a couple of good leads for her regarding Karyn’s situation. They hadn’t panned out, but that wasn’t his fault. She flipped the phone open.

  “Hey, Bobby. Got something for me?” she asked.

  “Yeah. Usual spot, forty minutes?” His voice was rough, like he’d just smoked half a pack and downed a fifth of bourbon. Given the hour, he probably had.

  This is gonna be another waste of time, Anna thought, hating herself for feeling so defeated. A lead was a lead, though, and even if it was probably a waste of time, she couldn’t afford to pass it up. “See you there.”

  She hung up and ducked into the next classroom, the temporary quarters she and Genevieve shared.

  Genevieve, also enjoying a streak of insomnia, looked up from the arcane paperwork she was always shuffling. Occult research, magic prep stuff. The kind of stuff Tommy had always been fiddling with back when. It made Anna anxious.

  “You all right, babe?” Genevieve asked. “You look like hell.”

  “Ha-ha. I gotta go do a thing. You wanna ride along?”

  “Not this time. If we’re gonna snatch that guy, I gotta make sure his room’s secure. This is not someth
ing I can afford to fuck up, you know?”

  “Yeah.” Anna paused in the doorway. “Hey, any idea what Sobell wants this guy for? Looks like lots of people are looking for him, you know? Might be a good idea to know what he’s into.”

  “No idea.”

  “All right. See you later.”

  * * *

  The “usual spot” looked awful in the daylight. Usually, when Anna met Bobby Chu here, the building’s interior was shrouded in darkness and fog, split with colored lights, thrumming with bass and bodies, and full of shouting, sweat, and commerce, legal and otherwise. A hyperkinetic intersection of burnouts, dope dealers, and bored suburban kids too dumb to know they were partying damn close to a line past which their families’ college funds and two-car garages couldn’t help them.

  All that had cleared out now, the party having petered out or moved underground, and the building was revealed for itself: an empty, corrugated metal box sheltering a concrete slab. The only light now came from sunlight seeking the cracks and gaps in the metal shell. It was enough, once Anna’s eyes adjusted. Bobby sat on a crate over by the table that served as the D.J.’s station, staring at his phone and wiping at the corner of his left eye. Anna walked toward him. She wrinkled her nose at the lingering smell of body odor and spilled booze, walked around a wet patch that, from the pattern, suggested a drink thrown violently to the ground, or projectile vomiting.

  She stopped in front of Bobby. “So this is what’s left when the party’s over.”

  He didn’t look up from his phone. “Not pretty, huh?”

  “No.”

  He kept typing something with his right hand and wiping at his leaky eye with his left. Nothing new there—his eye had dripped for as long as Anna had known him. He laughed about it, swore that he could tell when he was about to get sick because the fluid turned cloudy. She thought there ought to be some medication for that.

  After a minute or so, he stood. Sweat sheened his forehead and gave a greasy look to the sparse black stubble across his chin. It had to be ninety degrees in the building, but he still wore the same ragged brown corduroy jacket as always. The damn thing could probably run his parties for him at this point. Just stand it up in his chair and nobody would be the wiser.

  “What’s shakin’?” she asked.

  “Know anybody that can move six keys of coke?”

  This wasn’t what he’d called her for, she knew. This was just his basic conversation opener—hey, I need a thing. Pissed some people off, that he treated everything as a transaction waiting to happen, but she thought it was all right. You knew where you stood with Bobby, anyway. No bullshit. “That’s not my kind of business,” she said.

  “Didn’t figure.” He reached into the inside of his nasty old jacket and pulled out a piece of unlined white paper that had been folded a couple of times lengthwise. He held it out to her.

  “Hope this isn’t a bill,” she began, but her smile faltered as she took the paper and opened it. There was a black-and-white photo of Karyn on the page. No—it wasn’t a photo, she realized. A drawing, done in immaculate detail, in what looked like ink from a cheap ballpoint pen. Karyn’s head and shoulders. Her face was drawn close in concentration, an expression Anna had seen her make maybe a thousand times. “What the fuck is this?”

  “Yeah. Thought you might be interested in that.”

  “What the fuck is it?”

  “Guy came around waving it at anybody who’d look at it. Got my attention.”

  “You know him?”

  Bobby shook his head. “Dude definitely didn’t belong here. Looked like he got lost tryin’ to find his way back to prep school. I shit you not, he asked me if I thought there might be ‘illicit narcotics’ in use around here, and not because he wanted some. More like he thought the cops were going to kick in the door any moment.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “Not a friend of yours, then?”

  “Doesn’t sound like it.”

  “Tall kid, clean-cut, dressed like half of one of those traveling Mormon recruitment drives? A little spacey?”

  Anna thought, but nothing clicked. “That doesn’t sound like my crowd. Client, maybe, or a client’s kid.” Or maybe a target, or a target’s kid. Was this somebody the crew had ripped off at some point? Maybe they’d gotten wise? But why flash a drawing instead of a photo? “So, what did he want?”

  “To talk to the woman in the drawing.”

  “He call her by name?”

  “Nope.”

  “Did you?”

  “Fuck no,” Bobby said. “Give me some credit. I just told him to leave the picture with me, and maybe I could hook him up.”

  Anna shifted her weight. “I don’t like this.”

  “Looks weird to me, too. You can see why I called.”

  “He was just wandering around, showing this to everyone in the place?”

  Bobby nodded. His phone buzzed, but he thumbed the call to voice mail. “I asked around, but nobody ever saw him around here before.”

  Anna didn’t know what to make of it, but this didn’t sound like something she could safely ignore. She got out her phone and showed Bobby a grainy photo of Van Horn. “He with this guy?”

  “No. But the guy in the picture was around last night, too. Rollin’ with a buncha freaks and askin’ about Adelaide.”

  Anna felt a creeping sense of paranoia prickle the hairs on the back of her neck. One thing was a coincidence, but two . . . Somebody looking for Karyn, and somebody else for Adelaide? That felt less like coincidence and more like sharks circling in the water. “Yeah?” she asked cautiously.

  “Yeah.”

  “You have anything for him?”

  “I’d give it to you first if I had anything. You know that.”

  She nodded.

  “I got nothing new, or at least nobody’s saying anything,” Bobby said. “Far as the usual suspects are concerned, Adelaide is smoke. Poof.”

  “Nothing? Not even a tiny lead?” She sounded desperate, she knew, and she hated that—but she was desperate.

  “Davy’s tip didn’t pan out?”

  “Davy’s tip cost me twenty thousand dollars and almost got me shot in the head.”

  “Ouch. Sorry ’bout that.”

  “Nothing else?”

  “No. Wish there was. Seems like there’s a lot of noise out there about her—I could make a lot of money, if I knew anything. I didn’t know she was such a big deal.”

  Anna frowned. “She’s not, that I know of. Except to me, and maybe a handful of other people.” She’d been working with the Brotherhood, though. Maybe they’d gotten all the use out of her they could. Maybe she was in a hole somewhere. Poor Adelaide. “You get a number off the Mormon?”

  “No. No name, either.”

  “Well, if he comes back around, tell him I want to meet him. Maybe I can help him out with his problem.” Or not. “That everything?” she asked.

  “Yeah.”

  Anna pulled a roll of bills from her pocket and peeled five hundred bucks off. “Here. Keep me posted. Anything you hear about Adelaide, or this new guy. Or the old guy,” she added, after a moment’s hesitation. “His name’s Van Horn. Edgar Van Horn. You hear anything, you come to me first, okay?”

  He took the money. “I’m happy to keep taking your money, but you know you don’t have to do this. I’d tell you this stuff anyway.”

  “I know you would, Bobby. But I’m in a spot where I can take care of my friends for once. I’m gonna do it.”

  He wiped at his eye. Anna pretended it was because he was touched.

  Chapter 4

  “You sure about this?” Nail asked.

  Anna pulled out a cigarette, crumbled it into pieces, and dropped the pieces. “I don’t have any better ideas. You?”

  “Nada.”

  She waited as the sun went down, trying to shake the paranoia that had been with her ever since meeting Bobby. This stretch of street wasn’t abandoned, not exactly, but neither did folks
hang out in front of their doorsteps past eight at night. The last few nights either she, Nail, or Genevieve had come down here watching Van Horn and his entourage, and nobody else had stirred. Lights went out early in the graffiti-tagged tenements just down the street behind, and they never came on at all in the boarded-up meat-processing plant ahead. Other than a brief appearance by the sorriest-looking dog Anna had ever seen, ’long about day three, Van Horn and company were the only things moving out here after ten or so. Even the rats had better places to be.

  The three of them were down here together now—Anna, Nail, and Genevieve. Anna hated leaving Karyn alone, but they were shorthanded, and there was no good way to do this without taking some risk. Leaving Karyn by herself for a few hours seemed like the least bad alternative in a field of shitty options.

  She and Genevieve got out of the car. Nail stayed put. He’d run spotting duty, tailing Van Horn and company and making sure Anna and Genevieve had ample warning if they decided to come back. Anna and Genevieve ducked into an alley with a decent view of the packing plant and settled in to wait.

  The streetlights flicked on, and soon after, the sun retired for the night. Not ten minutes later, the doors to the plant swung open and Van Horn’s traveling revel came out. They came out through the gate in the fence and walked up the street, laughing and staggering. One cut loose with a bloodcurdling scream, apparently just for the hell of it. The group came closer, closer, until finally it drew abreast of the car, only forty feet or so away across the street, their laughter raucous and grating. Anna mentally clamped down on a rising tide of revulsion that threatened to sweep her away, to cause her to jump back in the car, twist the key in the ignition, and stomp on Nail’s foot if she had to to reach the gas. They were just people, she thought, but if you saw them in a bus station, you’d come back and catch a bus tomorrow rather than get in a confined space with them. If a couple of them stood on the sidewalk, you’d go a block out of your way rather than even cross the street. If they cornered you in a dark place alone, you might just shoot yourself rather than . . . Rather than what? Genevieve’s un-joke about them eating their own sprang to mind. It had never seemed less funny.