“You have no idea what you’re talking about,” he spluttered, making a grab for the portrait.
Jerking it back out of his reach, I screamed, “You bought a frame for it! What the hell is wrong with you?”
A thick square of glossy black wood, inset with an ivory matte, now surrounded the carefully penciled face of my ex-girlfriend. The picture was heavy in my sweatshirt-covered hands, and kept slipping as I tried to maintain a hold on it without letting it touch my bare fingers. Panic finally flashed across Cedric’s face, and he gasped, “Be careful with that, it is fragile!”
“Tell me how you got it,” I ordered him. “Admit it!”
“She … she gave it to me. Reiko. She knew how much January meant to me, how special our bond was—”
“Liar!” I roared. “You filthy, disgusting liar! You didn’t have any ‘bond’—she told me you were a creepy old pervert! She felt sorry for you.”
“That isn’t true. It simply isn’t true! We had a … a special…”
“You forced yourself on her. You attacked her, and then you killed her to keep anyone from finding out about it, because you wanted to make sure nothing stopped you from doing it again, you disgusting, twisted—”
“THAT ISN’T TRUE!” he screamed, his chest heaving, and I recoiled, startled by the vehement outburst. “She was special—she was different. From the very beginning there was something between us, something real. I don’t expect you to understand that. You’re too young, too immature, to comprehend—”
“She was fifteen, you sick fuck!”
“She had an old soul,” he said piously, and I nearly vomited on his carpet.
“It wasn’t her soul that you roofied—”
“I don’t have to explain anything to you!” he interrupted, incandescent with hate. “You know nothing, can prove nothing, and I am done listening to your—”
“I know what happened at Hazelton,” I barked acidly, “and when the police hear about it, they’re going to be real interested in you. You and this portrait and your sick collection of memorabilia.”
He froze, his mouth dropping open, and the color drained from his face. His mouth moved a couple of times, but he didn’t make a sound. And then, without warning, he spun on his heels and started sprinting for the nightstand. The sudden movement caught me by surprise, and the distance he had to cover was so short that by the time my reflexes kicked in, it was already too late for me to beat him there—too late for me to make it out the door, down the hall, and all the way to the stairs before he could manage to put a bullet in my spine. So I did the only thing I could; I took the heavily framed portrait of January and threw it at Cedric’s head with every bit of strength, determination, and anger I had left.
It revolved in the air, and then—to my amazement—actually caught the man behind his left ear with a satisfying crack. The portrait ricocheted to the floor, its glass shattering on impact, while Cedric fell to one knee and pitched forward against the nightstand, propelled by his own, prodigious body weight. Everything on top of the little unit smashed to the ground, and the man landed hard among the debris, sprawling sideways onto the carpet with a sharp cry.
I was on top of him before he had a chance to right himself. Blinded and deafened by wrath, I have no idea what words came out of my mouth, and only a vague notion of how many times I must have hit him. When I became aware of myself again, my arms were sore, my knuckles raw and tender, and my throat ached from screaming obscenities. Blood was smeared across Cedric’s broad, puffy face, leaking from his nose and a gash above one eyebrow, his glasses were smashed, and his meaty forearms were flung over his head in self-defense.
“Where is she?” I shouted hoarsely, my eyes swimming, my hands clutching his collar and shaking him as hard as I could. “What did you do with her?”
To my complete surprise, he began to laugh—a bitter, contemptuous laugh that rattled in the back of his throat like gravel pouring down a metal chute. “You’re a pathetic child. You think you’re a hero, some sort of Galahad defending his fair maiden’s honor? You have no idea what she was!” His eyes flickered brightly, gazing up at me from his blood-streaked, sneering face with a kind of manic delight. “She was a temptress, a succubus, and I only gave her what she wanted!” I punched him again, and his lip split open like a rotted peach, the blood rushing over his yellowed teeth making his malicious grin twice as gruesome. “How pitiful you are. A sniveling, snot-nosed boy. You would never have been enough for her, you—”
I hit him again, in the side of the head, but the blow landed wrong; after a sudden, sharp twinge, my hand went numb, and I could tell instantly that I’d hurt it seriously. Incensed, I grabbed his throat with my other hand, saliva dripping from my bared teeth as I spat, “She was just a girl.”
“She was a Venus mantrap,” he retorted, unmoved by my ferocity, “a siren, determined to lure me to my ruin. I knew it. I knew it from the moment I set eyes on her, but I was powerless to resist. I knew exactly what she was, what was inside of her, but still I loved her. So help me, I really and truly loved her. She made me do those things! I had no choice. No choice at all.”
“She was going to be a scientist.” I was crying and exhausted, and if I could have hit him again, I would have, but my right hand was immobilized, a distant ache beginning to throb rhythmically within it. “She was going to move to California and study astronomy and be someone, do something important, but you took all of that away from her! From her and Reiko, both.”
He came alive then, his face darkening with rage, and he growled, “Don’t you dare compare January to that little Japanese bitch!” He shoved me off him with such force that I practically flew across the room. I landed on my ass, my head striking the doorjamb so hard that light strobed briefly behind my eyes. Struggling to his knees, Cedric glared at me through a mask of blood, his eyes glowing like hot brands. “There was nothing special about that girl, nothing enchanting! She was a vile, foulmouthed shrew, who didn’t understand January and me any more than you do!” Panting, he spat a streak of pink, bubbling slime onto the carpet. “She threatened me! She came to me spewing filth, accusing me of things in the most appalling language—this … this offensive, unladylike bilge—and she expected me to grovel, to show her some sort of respect!”
“Is that why you killed her?” I asked groggily. The room was tilting madly, and my hand was rapidly turning fat and purple. “Her ‘unladylike bilge’?”
“She claimed that she would destroy me, that she would tell the police a number of terrible things she said January had told her about me. I couldn’t let her do it, could I? My career would have been over. My life would have been over.” He grinned again, evilly, and his body shook with smug, proud laughter. “So I stopped her. I begged her to stay quiet—begged her, if you please—and once she thought she had the upper hand, I put a screwdriver through her throat and cut out her vulgar, spiteful tongue!” His grin spread wider, bursting with madness, and he began shuffling backward, eyes on me as one hand groped through the air for the drawers of the nightstand. “And now I think it’s time I did something about you.”
I tried to get up—whether to run away or to attack again I wasn’t sure—but the floor wouldn’t stay put under my feet. I fell back down with a thud, the room Tilt-A-Whirling around me in a nauseating square dance. At the same time that Cedric took his eyes off me, turning to the nightstand, I heard a distant, frantic hammering at the apartment door. Then my name, shouted with utmost urgency: “Flynn! Flynn!”
The door crashed open, feet pounding through the entryway, while Cedric fumbled the gun out into the open, crammed bullets into it with panicky fingers, and jerked back the hammer. He had just managed to take aim when Kaz appeared in the doorway beside me, drawing up short and turning gray from the collar of his peacoat to the roots of his rain-slicked hair as he beheld the tableau in the bedroom.
“Oh, thank G-God someone came!” Cedric stammered unconvincingly, the gun pointed directly at my chest. If he s
o much as flinched, I would be dead. “This boy, this … this thief, he broke into my apartment and attacked me! I was very nearly killed! Please call the police—there’s a phone in the living room.”
“I’ve already called them,” Kaz reported mechanically, his voice a quaking half whisper. He stood in the doorway like a pillar of salt, transfixed by fear.
“Oh.” Cedric’s eyes shifted as he recalculated, his mouth jerking into a smile of false gratitude. “Good, thank you! You had best wait in the hall for them. This young man is quite dangerous, and I don’t want anything to happen to you.”
“I told them—” Kaz’s voice choked off, and he went silent. For a weighty moment, he stared blankly at Cedric’s weapon, eyes wide and glazed—and then he looked over at me. I saw something shift in his expression then, and he swallowed hard, his voice barely steady when he spoke again. “I told them you asked Flynn to come here. I told them he learned about what you did at Hazelton, that he called you to give you a chance to explain, and that you asked him to come to your place. I told them that I was afraid, that—that I thought you were going to hu-hurt him.”
Cedric’s gaze flicked between the two of us, his mouth flexing, his right eye beginning to twitch. Gravely, he said, “You should not have done that.”
“It doesn’t matter, Cedric,” I told him. I wish I could say I was stalwart and unflappable in the face of death, that looking down the barrel of a gun freed my inner existentialist badass—but the truth is that I was unreservedly terrified. My legs were jellied, I was a heartbeat away from losing control of my bowels, and my only hope for survival lay in convincing a madman there was no point in killing me. “Even if you tell them he lied, it’s already too late. Whatever you do to us now, the cops will have to investigate. You’ll never get rid of all your creepy trophies before they get here; and even if you do, I saved photos of them to the cloud, and the police will find them sooner or later. Then they’ll uncover the Hazelton story, they’ll find the kids I spoke to at Dumas who told me about your obsession with January … and they already know you were the last person to see Reiko alive and that Reiko knew about January’s rape. At that point, they could never believe you killed us in self-defense. No matter what, it’s already over for you.”
After an agonizingly long moment, Cedric finally spoke. “Well then,” he said, his tone brisk and disturbingly hollow, “I suppose I’ve really got nothing left to lose, do I?”
And he pulled the trigger.
TWENTY-SEVEN
THE NEXT HOUR lasted for about ten years. Most of it was a blur, a series of disconnected images that I could barely organize into a sensible timeline afterward. I remembered the gun going off, the roar of it shocking, much louder than it ever seems on TV; the top of Cedric’s head exploding, his body pitching forward as the smoking barrel of the weapon slipped from between his teeth; the grisly red crater in his skull. He’d chosen not to kill me after all, but to turn the weapon on himself. And, to tell the truth, in spite of everything I’d said to him at the very end, I still wasn’t entirely convinced that he couldn’t have somehow bluffed his way out of trouble with Kaz and me dead.
I remembered speaking with the police, one officer after another, faces shuffling around like a deck of cards. My voice played like a recording, a distant, quiet monotone, as I explained again and again about what had happened that day. I spoke to some EMTs, too, who diagnosed me with a mild concussion, and announced that my hand was most likely broken. My parents were called, and I spent a long time sitting in the back of an open ambulance with them beside me, uniformed men and women cycling through with questions, advice, and veiled accusations. Night had fallen, the rain had stopped, and the bright, brilliant synthesis of light from lampposts, emergency vehicles, and gathered news teams formed a strangely beautiful and abstract smear of color across the slicked asphalt of the parking lot.
It wasn’t until I was informed that I could finally leave and was following my parents to where they’d parked their car—not far from the vibrant yellow ring of crime scene tape that held back a steadily growing mass of spectators and media representatives—that I finally saw Kaz for the first time since the police had arrived on the scene.
He broke away from a knot of people outside the building and came sprinting across the parking lot, feet splashing in the puddles that still streaked the ground. “Flynn!”
I turned around just as he caught up to me and, as my parents stood beside the car and watched—bewildered, frightened, and fatigued by their brief involvement in the evening’s ordeal—he pulled me into a fierce hug, tight and possessive. Pain scissored clear up to my right elbow, and I jerked backward with a grunt. “Ouch—careful.” Glancing awkwardly down at my arm, draped across my solar plexus in the protective cradle of a sling, I explained, “I’m on my way to the hospital to get this x-rayed. They think I broke it on Cedric’s face.”
His hands on my shoulders and his head bowed, Kaz mumbled something that sounded like stupid. I told him I couldn’t understand him, and when he looked up at me I was shocked to see tears rolling down his cheeks. “That was so fucking stupid, Flynn! What you did … you almost died!”
His mouth was trembling, his hazel eyes filled with fear, and I squirmed uncomfortably as if I were seeing something I shouldn’t. “I didn’t, though. Thanks to you. You actually … you saved my life.” I tried on an off-kilter grin. “Just don’t think that means I’m your bitch now or something, because I—”
“Stop trying to make this into a joke!” He was really upset, his voice too loud. My parents were paying attention now, glancing at each other as if unsure whether they ought to step in, and I got the feeling some of the looky-loos beyond the crime scene tape were tuning into our little two-man drama as well. “If I hadn’t gotten up there when I did, if I had been one minute later…”
“But you weren’t,” I said, as if it were as simple as that—as if I hadn’t been thinking obsessively about the exact same thing. Truth was, I wouldn’t even have had one full minute left to live if Kaz hadn’t shown up the second he did.
“Damn it, Flynn, I thought you were dead.” He was crying, his Adam’s apple bobbing like a cork and tearing his voice to shreds. “When you didn’t answer your phone … when I heard the struggling, the shouting…”
“It’s okay now. It’s over, and I’m still here.”
“He had a gun, Flynn, a gun, and it was pointed at you, and I was sure you were about to die and all I could think, the only thing that kept going through my head, was that you’d tried to kiss me and I’d pulled away! I’d thought we had all this time, but then there was this gun, pointed at you, and I couldn’t stop thinking that I’d never get to kiss you again, ever, that I’d had my last chance and I’d blown it, because I thought … I thought…”
Something clenched hard around my heart, and my breath whooshed out of my lungs as I looked back at him. “Kaz…”
“I was wrong, Flynn.” He actually started to laugh through his tears. “I don’t want to be your friend.”
I laughed, too, just as my eyes began to prickle and my vision clouded. “I don’t want you to be my friend, either.”
And then he pulled me in again and kissed me. It didn’t matter that my parents were watching—that, in fact, half the neighborhood was watching, along with a couple of local news teams—I lost myself immediately, and we were alone. His mouth was soft and warm and perfect, like melted chocolate, and I felt it all through me. My entire body hummed to life, and maybe it was because I’d just come so close to dying, but the feeling was so much more intense, so much more real, than anything I’d ever experienced before—even than it had been the first time. My aches and pains, the freezing cold that had woven itself through my very bones while I was sitting outside for an hour in the chill, damp night air … it all disappeared in an instant. I was aware of nothing but Kaz and the kiss that fused us together.
When he drew back again, far too soon, he pressed his forehead to mine and gasped for
air. With a raspy laugh, he said, “You should … you should go to the hospital. But call me as soon as you can, okay? Promise.”
I smiled, wider than I had in days. “I promise.”
He said good-bye and, with a lingering look, turned and started for his car. I could feel my parents immediately, staring carefully at anything but me, and I kept my own eyes averted and my expression neutral as I crossed to the rear door of my dad’s sedan and waited for him to unlock it. I didn’t exactly regret casting aside my inhibitions for that kiss, but now that it was over and Kaz was gone, my face was already starting to beat with warmth as I imagined what kinds of questions my parents would be asking me on the way to the emergency room.
The locks blipped open at last, and just as I started to get into the car, my gaze settled on two very familiar people watching me from the edge of the crowd. Standing directly under a streetlamp twenty feet away from me, their stunned, openmouthed expressions lit up like displays in a museum, were Micah and Tiana.
* * *
The X-rays showed that I’d broken one of my metacarpals, and I was fitted with a massive, temporary cast that my dad immediately signed, over my vociferous objections; after that, I was given some phenomenal painkillers and finally sent home. I slept so well I surprised even myself, despite the fact that my parents woke me up repeatedly during the night to ask me my name, my address, and how old I was, just to make sure—as my dad put it—that my cerebellum wasn’t “gushing blood like those elevators in The Shining.”
The questions they had for me about Kaz were disconcertingly respectful and polite—of the what’s his name, how old is he, is he your boyfriend, when do we get to meet him variety. They kept me home from school the next day, and so Kaz himself dropped by in the afternoon—dressed like a Young Republican on his way to a job interview—and got a chance to answer most of the questions in person. We spent much of the day watching the news coverage, which was split between Cedric Hoffman’s death and Senator-elect Jonathan Walker’s victory at the polls, and for that reason I didn’t see Micah again until Thursday.
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