“Sure.” He waited, threw more bread. “Listening. Look. Like I said. If you need help. I can do it.”
“This is...” I waggled my hand, then half-covered one eye while I tried to think. “Beyond you. You’re a librarian.”
I’d said that easily. Could I sort of circle the subject, hint at things? But then what? Could he shoot Reuben for me? Go to jail? Hah. No. I didn’t want him arrested, or beaten up, or killed, if he failed. Like I might be too, if I ever confronted Reuben with the gun.
And I’d deny any wrongdoings by Reuben and his men to the cops, if they asked me directly. Doomed. I’d be Reuben’s fucktoy until he cast my aside.
“Shit,” I muttered.
“Violence was all around me when I was growing up, Zorie. My brother...did bad stuff, had some of it happen to him. If you’re in a hole, I know people who know people.”
Mouth agape, I thought that through. Grimm knew bad people? And he’d been a bouncer, which led to nightclubs. Depending on where, that could mean he’d been around crime. Or so I gathered. What was he talking about? Drug dealers? Biker gangs? Prostitution?
Maybe he meant he knew the ice-cream-van man? I was out of my depth here too.
A willy wagtail, eye cocked, long-feathered tail twitching, hopped across the grass chasing worms. The ducks quacked.
The day was too damn bright for this.
Did everyone around me have a sordid past?
I curled forward and buried my head in my hands. “Even if you could do something about...whatever. I...can’t talk.”
“Whatever?” He muttered something else and yanked up a stalk of grass, then twirled it, idly. “I think I’ve established there’s something. You’re here. You want me here. But I need you to talk. At least you aren’t saying, I’m fine.”
“True.” I lowered my hands to peer over them at Grimm. Yes. I wasn’t saying that. I’d edged closer to the real topic than ever before.
Skirt the topic. How?
“Graffiti. Haiku.”
He stared at me directly now, maybe thinking I’d lost it. So much for secrecy and pretending they weren’t talking to each other.
“One question. One, Grimm.” I took my keys from my shorts pocket and began to scratch at the paint on the seat then said quietly, “I’ve never vandalized before.”
After a few seconds he looked out over the small lake again. “Lost me. I don’t understand. Is this a strategy to defeat your lack of talking?”
Too direct. My tongue tangled.
Go around.
“The sky is blue. Yes.”
“What the fuck?” Grimm muttered. “So that’s a yes.”
A statement, that. He was catching on. Lucky I had a librarian and so he’d hopefully read some strange books.
“We need a dead letter drop. Invisible ink. A code book.”
“Not... Uh.” I wanted to tell him it wasn’t just the need for secrecy stopping me. Resistance was growing in my head. I massaged my temples. “No. Fuck.”
All the mind wrestling I was doing. I was stuck. The world squeezed in whenever I tried to elaborate.
“Graffiti, hey? I hear conflict, stress, in what you’re saying. How you’re saying it. I’m probably nuts. But, hypnotism? Has someone made you unable to talk?”
The man was a goddamned genius.
I stared, feeling bug-eyed, and wondered if I was going blue. With all the messing about I was doing in my head, I wasn’t breathing.
Answer him!
I gasped then drew a long, zig-zaggy scratch with the key on the seat. Breathe. Looking down through the gaps at the ground and some migrating ants let oxygen return to my blood.
“Prove me right. Graffiti?” He’d torn up another grass stalk and was playing sword fights or something with them while pointedly not looking my way. “One question. I’ll be back tomorrow, here, same time. I’m on holidays until university starts. I’ll make it simple. Tell me this. Yes or no. Do you want me to help you?”
Then he rose to his feet, dusted off the back of his jeans, and he strode away, just in time to avoid us confusing an old man on a walker coming along the path.
I nodded to the man and waited for him to stomp on past, before placing the key’s tip on the paint.
At first I was frozen. Then I remembered Mister Black’s lesson. I remembered how to side step. How to push against the compulsion.
Took me half an hour of stopping and starting, but I carved out a big Y.
If he didn’t return to read that, I’d given myself a headache for no bloody reason.
When I opened my car, and slid into the seat, I realized I’d brought the gun after all. It was underneath the magazine on the passenger seat. Totally illegal to carry one about like that.
That wasn’t what bothered me. When had I decided to bring it? This side-stepping in my mind might be causing side effects. Or was there another reason?
What if none of this was happening, and I was simply going mad? I snorted. I wrapped my arms around the steering wheel, and lowered my head until it touched the leather.
I contemplated the twig pieces, dirt, and grass in the foot well. The floor in here needed vacuuming.
“Well. After all the horrible stuff, I’m due for something nice, like going insane.”
Killing a person was said to be hard to do. Reuben though? I had a world of hate and disgust stored up in the sewer part of my mind. If I didn’t have Reuben’s eyes on me, watching me, I might do it. Except that would be murder. Imagining was easy.
I’d killed before but that had been accidental. Accidental at first, anyway. He’d asked for it. Deserved it. It’d been night time. Seeing him dead afterward had wrecked me – the police walking around, lights strobing across the scene, with me shivering and clutching the blanket someone had given me.
I pulled an ugly face. If Reuben didn’t simply make me put down the gun, if I made myself do it, what were my chances he’d stand still? He’d know. Mister Black had seen when I meant to do things.
When I failed, he’d beat me, or worse. Reuben wasn’t a man to stop at mediocre. He’d do worse. Much, much worse. My imagination stuttered; my hands tightened on the wheel.
Ugly, ugly thoughts. Me, bludgeoned and dying, blood spreading.
Maybe he wouldn’t go that far. Maybe.
Fear would stop me from shooting him.
If I couldn’t do it, could Grimm, my librarian who knew bad people? He wanted to help.
Oh, that was such a sucky idea – turning him into a murderer.
Wait... I let my thoughts play with each other.
Was that why he didn’t want anyone knowing we’d talked? If Reuben died, would the police ever connect A to B? Librarian to lecturer? We’d only had one café date.
“Shit! No!” I banged my hands on the wheel. “What am I thinking?”
I started the car and drove off, trying hard not to think about anything bad for a while. Failing, but trying.
Chapter 17
“Let your plans be dark and impenetrable as night, and when you move, fall like a thunderbolt.”
- Sun Tzu, The Art of War
Zorie
The morning started off surreal. How did I plan my day, when any minute a man might arrive and tell me to follow and come be his sex slave?
There was no plan. I just lived it and suffered the dread cycling through my head. I made myself do...stuff.
Grimm wanted to meet me at the same time, same place? I filled the day with housework then the drive to the university to tidy up nothing much worthwhile. I swam laps in the university pool and found the gurgle of cool water past my ears did more for me than anything else. Underwater, nothing could touch me. It was a type of meditation.
I struggled with ideas of murder. Now that I’d broached the topic, had pointed the gun at Mister Black, and seen the possibilities, I wondered.
The internet would contain a wealth of information on murdering someone without trace. There’d been that gruesome news story years ago ab
out the laboratory researcher who murdered an ex-lover, or was it a rival, with some chemical no one could detect.
Which led me to wonder how they’d found out he or she had done it.
If I touched a computer to look up those sorts of things, I’d have to be so sneaky. Forensic labs could do things the internet might not know about and any forensic clues, if linked to internet search records, would point straight at me.
I paused, elbow on my desk, pen in mouth.
If they knew Reuben was fucking me, and fucking with me, they would concentrate on me. Well, they would know, wouldn’t they? My prints would be all over his house. At least I didn’t have to worry about killing Madoc or Dirke. Once Reuben was gone, I’d be free of his influence.
I bit down, squashing the plastic with my teeth, hearing the crunch as the shaft split.
“Clearly,” I murmured around the pen. “I’m no longer normal.” To be planning a murder, in my office, in the middle of summer holidays?
I should be crying, but it seemed my tears had dried up.
Having someone to lean on, figuratively speaking, helped.
Grimm was at the park. I jogged and sat. He nodded as I did so, and indicated the place on the seat where I’d scratched the Y.
So, he’d seen it.
A young woman with two toddlers was letting them play nearby so I pretended to catch my breath and retie my shoelaces. I circled the lake again, watched ducks at a distance, watched Grimm too. The ducks were going to get fat with all the bread he was feeding them. Finally the woman left, shooing her squealing toddlers up the gentle slope.
The man talked and talked and tried to get me to elaborate, again, and failed. The frustration made him swear. I could only frown at him through the throb of my headache.
“So writing worked?” he said, looking away and talking to no one, as he stood brushing the grass and duck poop off his shorts. “Write it out then. Write me something so I know what this is about.”
Then he walked away.
Write it out? So much for not leaving evidence. Maybe I could write it in some vague way, as if it was a story.
When I tried doing that, sitting at the kitchen table, nothing would get past the block. Maybe I couldn’t write anything at all. Try. After an hour of hair pulling and drawing doodles of stick men on the paper, I hurled the pen at the wall. It bounced into the sink full of dish water, vanishing with a plop.
He couldn’t help me if he knew nothing.
Sleep was full of nightmares and I woke red-eyed and feeling useless. The numbness had faded. Now I was scared all the time.
Would this be the day Reuben wanted me?
At the park, I ambled straight to the bench, empty-handed. Grimm wasn’t there. After ten strained minutes, I swore and stood, only to see him walking across from the car parking area.
Bugger jogging. I sat again with my arms folded, scowling. When he approached I voiced a simple no and shook my head.
For a while he stood there in silence, staring across the lake. The ducks had figured things out and were cruising over, making rippling arrows in the water. “Nothing?”
“No.”
“Sorry, guys, I didn’t bring food for you today.” The brown ducks quacked at him anyway, and a few flapped up onto the grass to waddle about quacking even louder.
It made me smile. “Look on the bright side,” I murmured. “There are ducks in the world.”
Grimm must have heard me. He too smiled. “Yeah.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Most people would give up. I don’t give up. Not when it’s someone special.”
“Thank you.” My smile weakened. We’d only been on one aborted date but I wasn’t about to look a gift horse in the mouth and kick its balls in.
Was there another way? Smaller. Less threatening? Pushing the barrier only a little.
“Ask me something small.”
“Okay.” Grimm stared down at one of the boldest ducks that was almost on top of his gym shoe. “A name. Give me one.”
A name. I stared outward, thinking about random things – Christmas and how my sister hadn’t come to visit due to a Bali holiday. About how I should get in touch with Sandra and organize a coffee date, about the man who...
“Reuben.”
I’d done it. That had spat out. Didn’t mean anything particular, as he’d not asked for any name in particular.
“Reuben. I’m going to guess that’s him. I wonder if you have any addresses? Any address will do.”
Fuck. I blinked at his back. He’d faced away as if all he cared about was the view across the lake. London, New York, anywhere nice would do but there was one place, one address...
It stuck. My throat refused to cough it up. The words had screwed in like hooks. An ache nudged at my temples. I softly pounded the bench beside me with my fist.
Grimm waited and waited. The ducks wandered off, plopping back into the water and cruising away. Children screeched with joy and car doors slammed. The wind picked up, humming in my ears.
He nodded. “It’s fine. I’ll be back. Maybe not tomorrow though. Two days time. Think about this – what do you want me to do? That’s our final destination even if we get there in tiny jumps.” He turned and walked across the squishy edge of the grass next to the water.
What do you want me to do?
“Three two three Aberjule Close!” I rushed the words out and felt dizzy immediately. My fingers were clawed into the seat slats.
“Got it.” He headed off, whistling. “See you next time. We’re getting there.”
Had he got it? Really? He’d probably misheard me. What do you want me to do?
Lots. Plant a bomb. Tell the cops. Nuke the damn house.
Yeah. None of that was reality. Grimm wasn’t some hotshot SAS operative. The cops had nothing on Reuben. I sucked on my cheek. No headache. I’d still won, a little.
I could do this. Two vital pieces of info. I could absolutely do this. We needed more time, only that.
The coffee date with Sandra. I should organize it. The answer to overcoming my problem with talking was being a little random and not thinking about what was wanted from me. I could practice on others, perhaps, though they might think me mad.
Sandra answered my text and agreed to meet me the following day at the little café we frequented – The Blessed Cup – at ten AM. The woman was a lawyer and came across as a bubbly, well-dressed socialite, but when it came to anything important that needed doing, she was hard as nails. If only I could enlist her. Friends who could help, I needed the maximum number of those, before this situation drove me mad.
Another text message came through as I was about to put away my mobile. After a shaky breath, I opened it, trying not to see the sender.
See you in two days, sweetheart.
I double-checked. The screen blurred and I found it difficult to take in the sender’s name. My hand shook and I had to blink away moisture. “Read it, you coward.” Reuben. “Damn. Damn it.” I flopped back my head. The sky was a clear, pale blue when surely it should be dark and thundery with ravens flying across.
Whoever organized the heavens today was slacking off.
“Fuck everything.”
Would I see Grimm before then? This was too soon, too damn soon.
That night, as I lay sleepless, I counted the flashes of car headlights sweeping across my window. The message only made me more determined. I wasn’t a victim. Mister Black thought it was okay to let me wait until Reuben discarded me. After that I’d only be another little victim. His.
I’d thought about just leaving. Leaving everything. Going so far away he would never find me. And I couldn’t. Even getting a suitcase down to pack it had made me stall dead.
“F. U. C. K,” I spelled out to the ceiling, quietly, in case I stirred some night demons. I had enough of those.
I sat up, dragged the gun from my bedside drawer, and stomped downstairs to make myself a mug of hot chocolate. Sitting at the table, I watched the foam
swirl on the surface. The Beretta lay on the timber a few inches beyond the mug, all fatalist and innocent with ten bullets hiding inside it.
A tear curled over my cheek, then another. At last, I was crying again. There was relief in being able to feel properly.
“I am not going to be a victim.”
I’d killed a man before, even if it was kind of by proxy, using a car handbrake. I could kill again.
Doing nothing, waiting to be dragged away like the next target of an executioner, that was the passive, the standard, the pissy lie-down-and-take-it-way. If I had to kill him, I would. I’d rather go to jail.
Was that true? I sucked in a weepy breath, shut my eyes, and pressed finger and thumb over my eyeballs. Drastic. Could I really kill him? It was late, I was tired. I was probably going to hallucinate any second.
What a shitty, fuck-everything, fuck-the-whole-world moment this was. I’d reached the edge of my tolerance. Yes, I’d kill if I had to; I’d step off into space and take whatever evil fell upon me as a consequence of my actions.
I’d invent my own bloody, insane, and wicked way.
This was one acquired who would fight back.
The rules of humdrum, lawful life could go out the window. When the chance arrived, I would use the gun. Not if, when.
I unloaded the gun. Until four AM, I practiced holding up the pistol and imagining Reuben’s face in the sights then squeezing the trigger. At first it was nearly impossible, but after an hour or so, I felt a change. The action became not too difficult, then easier, then smooth as swallowing melted fudge. I was in with a chance...
The sounds, as I slipped the magazine into the gun then seated it in place with my palm, were very final. Ten shiny rounds.
*****
A late text the next morning from Cherie, to talk personally, triggered a weird flip-flop sensation in my head. Time was of the essence. If I delayed talking to Cherie, I might be unable to help her. Giving her advice seemed almost a marker of the barrier between my past life and whatever cataclysm lay ahead. I aimed to kill Reuben. That would have terrible repercussions.
I tapped out my reply.
Meet me at the café, Blessed Cup. Ten AM.
Whatever it was, I’d do what I could for the girl. Strange that she’d not just set it out in an email.
Wicked Ways (Dark Hearts Book 1) Page 9