The Killer in Me

by Margot Harrison

  We share a time zone now. And he’s not out driving tonight; I can feel Eliana breathing beside him and the pillow humped under his arm. This is his bed, where he sleeps like other people. I’ve been here before, but only when he turned in early because he had the flu.

  His sleep is shallow. Something makes him turn over and open his eyes, showing me a stucco ceiling. Thoughts form: Home Depot. First thing after breakfast. Eighty-four by forty-four—wait, no. Forty-two?

  The measurements slip from his mind’s grasp, and he sleeps for real. We sleep together, Dylan and I.

  And that’s how he becomes “Dylan” to me.

  At 6:15, my eyes snap open. The AC churns. Desert sunlight already glares around the edges of the blinds.

  I’m wide-awake, a resolution fully formed in my mind. I’ve been making lots of plans recently, but this one is new, born overnight.

  I pull on clothes that won’t stand out.

  The flamingo-colored cinder-block motel belongs to a middle-aged gay couple who’ve decorated it with Southwestern kitsch. Downstairs, I pause by the pool, under a teal ceramic kokopelli, and snap a few pics for my mom and the blog. I text my mom, then Warren: On the road again! Getting an early start.

  They think I’m headed to Arizona. Becca Cantillo thinks I’m spending the next two days in Albuquerque with a nameless “friend” who has family in the city. Before we started on the road, I e-mailed the motel owners, using my mom’s account, and reserved the room here for tomorrow night and the next. Then I pushed back my Arizona reservations. Change of plans, I said.

  It was easy. I didn’t like lying, especially to Warren, but I needed the time.

  Time to explore the mine shaft by myself, without someone looking over my shoulder and wondering if I’m this close to cracking into a million pieces. Time to see him with my own two eyes.

  I won’t even leave the car, I promise myself. I’ll keep a safe distance from him, and I can’t be scared with the sun shining like a ten-thousand-watt spotlight. Albuquerque in broad daylight is a far cry from the desert nights I know through Dylan’s eyes.

  His street is quieter than the Gustafssons’. It’s a funky little suburban neighborhood; I pass a hippie market and a terraced café before turning onto Piedmont, which is a cul-de-sac. Most of the houses have mature trees and front lawns, but the green stops in back, making room for tawny rock gardens and swimming pools.

  The house is easy to recognize: the only two-story one on the block. It’s older than the others, too, with its cream-colored stucco and rose-shaped window. There’s a Big Wheel on the lawn, and the Sequoia stands in the driveway beside a white Honda Civic.

  I park three houses down and wait.

  The girl comes out first.

  Girl, woman. Eliana. I know how her breath feels against his neck. I know her low laugh. Here she is in the flesh, dressed in a stylish A-line dress with a peacock-blue scarf, opening the Civic’s door and buckling her little girl into the car seat.

  Trixie. Short for Beatrix. Currently obsessed with dinosaurs, stuffed kitties, and pretty hula girls who wear flowers behind their ears. Leaves her colored-pencil drawings on the counter, couch, floor.

  Trixie is usually asleep when I’m there. When Dylan thinks of her, it’s a memory of her reaching up her arms, her eyes glittering and her smile wide enough to devour him. She calls him by his name, struggling with the L sound. Lately she’s been calling him “Daddy,” and Eliana doesn’t stop her.

  The driver’s-side door slams. A few minutes later, Eliana swooshes past in the Civic, while I hunch low in my seat.

  Twenty minutes pass, and the house door stays closed. Of course—Dylan doesn’t have a nine-to-five. He can read the paper over breakfast and waltz over to Home Depot whenever.

  My sluggish synapses ache for caffeine, but I don’t want to miss him.

  I must not be paying attention, because the revving motor catches me off guard. I sit bolt upright just in time to see the Sequoia headed toward me.

  Shoulders hunched, head down. You’re lost, looking at a map.

  Then I’m rushing to turn around in the nearest driveway before the SUV disappears.

  When I reach the stop sign, he’s already two blocks ahead of me. In a second I’ll lose him.

  The transmission groans as I gun the Legacy down a wide commercial street, reminding myself this isn’t a repeat of Schenectady. I know where he lives now, and exactly where he’s going.

  The Home Depot is mammoth, like everything out here, with acres and acres of dusty parking lot. I make a mental note of the section where the Sequoia turns in, then hunker down to watch Dylan stride across the asphalt to the sliding doors.

  I can’t see his face from this distance, yet my hands shake uncontrollably. The Thief and I are probably closer now than we were in Schenectady when Warren spotted his license plate.

  I’ve been calling him Dylan. Human, vulnerable. But is “Dylan” only a mask to hide the Thief?

  He wears faded jeans and a dark-red T-shirt. His stride is long and confident. He’s skinnier than I expected, but tall, with long arms and broad shoulders.

  I’ve caught blurry glimpses of him in mirrors when he brushed his teeth or shaved. But when he looks at himself, he doesn’t really see. He knows he can rely on his face, with its strong, symmetrical features, to inspire trust in others. Nothing else matters, except when his eyes zero in on a pimple or shaving nick.

  Now I’m looking at him with my eyes, not his. Controlling the gaze feels surprisingly good—so good that when he disappears inside the store, I scramble out of the car, lock it, and follow.

  I’m at the sliding doors before I stop. What am I doing?

  The lady selling hot dogs and nachos from an outdoor stall is looking at me, so I step through the doors and tense, waiting to find him on the other side.

  Instead, I find a blast of AC and a heap of red buckets that don’t look like shopping baskets.

  I’ve been to this store exactly twice, inside Dylan’s head. (At home, the closest one is thirty-five miles away.) I immediately discover it’s less like shopping than visiting a foreign country.

  The ceiling soars as high as the Notre-Dame Basilica of Montreal, paned with fluorescents that make me squint. Everything dwarfs me: the three-story display shelves, the jumbo carts, the people pushing them.

  I want to scurry for cover like a field mouse on a parking lot. But where is he? Did he start with the first aisle on the right, like I would, or head straight for his goal?

  The first aisle blinds me with lights: dangling from chains, perched on posts, illuminating places where vanity mirrors should be. No monster.

  Drawn to the glitter, I keep walking like an idiot. If he appears at either end of this aisle, I won’t be able to hide.

  I need a weapon—something I can hold, cold steel to palm, just to feel safer. But the screwdrivers to my right are all bubbled in plastic.

  It takes forever to reach the back of the store, but at last I’m turning the corner into a dimmer, perpendicular corridor. I’ll eyeball each aisle from back here, and then—

  Crap, crap, crap—I can’t breathe. He’s standing right smack in my way, back turned to me, tapping on his phone.

  What’s in the next aisle down? A hall of mirrors, like I’m in a carnival. They reflect my red, blotchy cheeks and terrified eyes times five, ten, twenty, fifty.

  Get a hold of yourself. Nobody’s chasing you. This is just an ordinary trip to Home Depot to buy…sponges? Detergent? A water filter? A saw? An ax? Do they sell guns here?

  Guns. I know Warren left them unloaded in the locked box in the Legacy. I couldn’t demand the key without giving my plan away.

  “Finding everything okay, sweetheart?”

  A smocked lady with stringy blond hair dangling from a sweatband peers at me, her eyes narrowed like she knows I don’t belong.

  “I’m looking for…water filters.” Something small enough to carry.

  “Aisle six, right through the ki
tchen displays to your right.” She stays put like she wants to lead me there, so I fish out my phone and pretend to be texting till she drifts away.

  There’s a text from Warren, but I’m bathed in sweat and shaking too hard to swipe the screen. Ordinary trip. Think water filters.

  Something flickers in the line of mirrors to my right, and without warning, there he is.

  Behind me, reflected in the mirrors I’m still facing. For an instant his red shirt hovers right over my shoulder, but he walks briskly, a bright blur moving from mirror to mirror as I stand frozen, willing him not to turn and see my face (would it matter?), my heart trying to bolt like a spooked horse.

  Something roars in my ears as he reaches the aisle’s end and disappears. My body is a dry leaf caught in the gutter during a storm. Wet-eyed and shaky legged, I lift the phone and gaze at my wallpaper of Sugarman toying with a catnip mouse.

  I wanted to see Dylan Shadwell. Now I have—reflected many times over. Leave, says the drumbeat in my head.

  He’s not following me; he hasn’t noticed me. It’s this place scaring me, full of sharp things he knows how to use and I don’t. Warren wouldn’t be cowering. Neither should I, and I still haven’t seen Dylan from the front. What if I have to testify against him in a courtroom someday?

  I recognized his house and car. If I look him in the face, will I know for sure?

  Just one look, one real look into the eyes those seven people saw just before they died. Maybe everything will be in those eyes: T. Rex the turtle, the sheet dangling from the apple tree, the old man bleeding on his rag rug.

  First I need to feel the solidity of wood or steel in my hand. Something dangerous.

  I cut across the open kitchen displays, feeling that urge to bolt again. It’s okay. He doesn’t know me. I’m just another girl.

  This is where he comes to stock up for his expeditions. Where he buys lumber, paint, flooring, and saw blades, and where he buys duct tape, plastic sheeting, gloves, rope, and knives. What’s on the list today?

  At the end of the water-filter aisle hang serrated utility knives—in plastic bubbles, of course. Useless.

  I’ve lost track of him. I peek into a new aisle, see it’s clear, and creep between a lit-up display of fancy drills and one of saw blades, round and toothy as ninja throwing stars. I saw Dylan buy one of those once.

  The aisle splits, and I head left. At last, here are hard things that aren’t in safe bubbles. Dangling hammers with wicked claws, mallets, chisels.

  Blunt force, or a blade? Trying to choose, I realize these could be his thoughts. Can I slit a throat and clean it up? How long will it take to crack a skull with this hammer that fits perfectly in my palm?

  My thoughts, his thoughts, am I sure I know the difference?

  A woman’s voice from the drill area, too far away to be addressing me: “Are you finding everything okay, sir?”

  She’s talking to him. He’s here. Everything’s frozen, my fingers poised inches from a steel hammer, and I don’t dare turn to look. But I have to move. Just a few more steps, and I can see without being seen.

  I press my back to the display, knees shaking. Twenty feet away, Dylan holds an electric drill. The blond smocked lady has accosted him, looking as bored as ever.

  Something comes loose behind me, and I grab it before it can slide from its peg and hit the floor with a thud. A tiny hatchet. I pick up another one with a blade as long as my hand and swing it, testing. Much lighter than Warren’s ax.

  Dylan screws in a drill bit and asks something I don’t hear because the drill is already whining, the sound boring its way through the air between us and deep into my head.

  The smocked lady stays still, foot tapping. When the drill goes silent, she drones, “See, when they released the half-inch seven-eighty, they discontinued the seven-fifty.”

  “Seems like kind of a rip-off.”

  His voice. Not reverberating inside my own head. Real.

  He can’t see me here, but I can’t see him well, either. Hatchet in hand, I scoot to the end of the split aisle and tiptoe down the one parallel to Dylan’s. Here I can peek through the gap between two tall galvanized-steel pipes.

  What if Warren’s right not to believe me? What if Dylan’s just what he seems?

  The shadows under his eyes are too big for his narrow, angular face. He’s pale like me, and he’s good-looking, but you can tell he doesn’t sleep enough. There’s an intensity to his movements, a readiness, that must put people on edge.

  When he tells the lady he’ll think about the drill, his voice is low, confident, reassuring. Like it must have been when he surprised the Gustafssons in bed and promised he’d only rob them.

  What the hell am I doing?

  Sweat blossoms on my palms, and my heart reverberates in my suddenly tight throat. I back out of the aisle past the line of self-service checkouts, my mind telling me stupidly that I need to buy something or it won’t look right. People will notice. He will.

  Dylan follows me.

  No, he doesn’t. He just happens to step toward the cash wrap as I do, but it’s okay, because I’m safe in a side aisle again, and oh, shit, he’s still coming this way.

  Steady pace, no glances back. He isn’t following me; he’s just chosen the same route. The hatchet’s wooden handle is slick in my palm as I reach the back of the store and dart sideways, skipping several aisles to choose the last one.

  Silver-white lumber rises to the ceiling here, smelling like pine woods at home. There are no women in this aisle, even employees, so I stick out. Burly men push flatbed carts piled high with boards that could crush me.

  I look back, and there he is again—sauntering steadily between the towering stockade walls of lumber, just like I am. Well, I’m trying to, but I seem to be trudging in drying cement.

  He can’t possibly know me. He can’t know.

  Hatchet. Lumber. Warren taught me to split logs with an enormous ax. The burly men won’t let anyone hurt me. But Dylan isn’t stopping to look at lumber prices or anything else. He hasn’t chosen this path for his shopping needs. He’s after me.

  I can’t know that, can I? To know someone’s following you, you have to meet their eyes.

  At last, here’s the cash wrap, but I can’t bolt through the sliding doors. Parking lots are dangerous. Wait here where it’s safe, let him leave. Stop trembling.

  I need to buy something besides this freaking hatchet, something innocent. A home décor magazine? No. A bag of M&M’S? Yes. I’ll give it to Warren when I see him, which will be soon. I’ll never tell him about this. It’ll be fine.

  It is fine. He wasn’t following me, just wandering in the same direction, or he’d be here. I pretend to scan magazine covers, my eyes darting toward the lumber aisle. Nothing yet.

  “You in line, honey?” She’s right beside me, a large woman with a cartful of louvered door panels.

  I shake my head. And as I turn to make room for her, there’s Dylan, ten feet away from me, a coil of black nylon cord swinging from his hand.

  He doesn’t look at me, just disappears into the next checkout to the left. Now he’s even closer, separated from me by a rack of magazines and Altoids, and my breath has jammed up in my chest. I try to cough, but all that comes is a croak.

  The large lady’s scanning her doors. She’s having trouble finding the bar code, has to lug the doors out of the cart and flip them. I want to help, but I’m frozen.

  After he checks out, I’ll give him five minutes to leave the parking lot. Ten. An hour. Then I’ll drive to Arizona and try to forget this ever happened.

  The thought floods me with relief, so why are my eyes wet? Warren will never know how close I came to losing it.

  “Hey, ma’am, can I help you with that?”

  He’s here. He’s in our checkout lane. The hatchet’s in front of me, half raised, before I know I’ve moved.

  The large lady lets go of her second door with a groan. “You sure can, young man. These things are like granite.�
�

  I stare at Altoids and gum packets while Dylan passes within inches of me, his hip grazing mine. Grabs the louvered door, lifts it effortlessly to the scanner. “Here we go,” he says.

  I hold the hatchet poised over the conveyor belt, trying to make it look natural. What a good Samaritan. If they were alone in the dark, he’d shoot the lady in the face or strangle her without thinking twice.

  I didn’t imagine any of those things he did. I couldn’t have.

  “Can’t thank you enough, son. I could’ve put my back out.”

  “No problem, ma’am.”

  Then, at last, he turns to face me. And I can no longer deny that he sees me.

  He meets my eyes awkwardly, like a shy person who’s been pretending not to see you in the hopes you’ll notice him first. Almost like Warren might do.

  “Nina?” he says.

  This is not a dream. The hatchet blade glints against the black rubber conveyor, my knuckles white on the handle. I could turn with one motion and bury it in his neck. Easier than splitting a log.

  “Nina,” he says, no question mark this time.

  The scanner beeps. Maybe it is a dream, because the floor is starting to waver like Jell-O, or else my legs are, and I don’t seem to be breathing.

  “Sorry. I know this is weird. But you look like—somebody.”

  I don’t look like anybody you know. Shout it, turn, raise, chop—

  I don’t do it. I raise my eyes. His are the exact same color as mine, the goldish-brown Warren insists on calling bronze.

  “How do you know my name?” The words sound heavy and foreign, a language of nightmares that makes no sense in daylight.

  His eyes glisten. “You don’t know who I am, do you?”

  I lie with my head, a tiny shake.

  “I’m Dylan,” he says, and somehow, suddenly, he’s holding my free hand. A solid grip from the fingers that strangled Kara Ann Messinger. The cord in his other hand.

  My other hand doesn’t drop the hatchet.

  “Becca sent me your pics,” he says. “That’s how I recognized you—but she didn’t say you were coming.”

  “How do you know Becca?” It comes out in a whisper, but I already know the answer. I knew as soon as I looked into his eyes. Tears rise in them now.