“I don’t really. You kind of just walked out of the night and started talking, bro.”
He laughed a bit. “So I figure you know who I am, by now, and I know who you are. And maybe that’s better. I’ve made much sadder trades, if you can believe it, but here’s ours. I give you Marlo. Well, I give you his spot, and you go there tomorrow morning to pick him and his precious, precious laptop up. I won’t be there myself, but you will take him and leave, and keep my name out of your mouth forever.”
The familiar, excited kick Greta felt jangling up her nerves made her feel bad about herself. With men like Alan Mouse it’s always a trade. And they’ll try as hard as they can to avoid telling you who gives and who gets what. “Why? What do you want back?”
Mouse pulled a bottle of pills out of his pocket and placed it gently on Greta’s thigh. As soon as his tiny beautiful fingers released it, the bottle tipped over and fell in the grass. “You want to know, I’ll tell you, Manic Pixie Dream Hitman. If you want to know, you deserve to. For a hot second, I thought I’d go to bat for Marlo. Hero it up, get him out of town. And then I remembered: I’m shot. My nerves are shot. By my thinking it would take about six smart, sturdily made moves to get Tommy out of this alive. And I don’t have that in me anymore. That’s why. What I want is simple: we go back to your room, and you stay with me, and we get lit up like Christmas trees. Like Christmas trees on fire.” He reached over and tapped the side of her nose, intrusively. “I’m guessing you have the other half of the speedball with you. But you do have to stay with me tonight, and let me leave alive. That’s . . .” There he was, weirdly looking at his hands again. “That’s the whole deal.”
Greta flopped to her back and looked at the dark, wide-open sky again. She felt the heft of the baggie of coke in her pocket, and she could sense Mouse beside her, breathing jaggedly in and out. So it came back to this, again. She spoke, mostly, to the openness of the sky. “You were an accomplished, if not respected, police officer and low-level political fixer, right?”
“I’d say that was accurate, yeah.”
“Right, so before we go up to my room, I wanted to run something by you. It’s a public policy idea.”
“Shoot.”
Greta raised herself to an upright position. “Elevator pitch: make it 100 per cent legal for women to murder anyone they want.”
“That is an idea.”
“So let’s think about the murder rates. Do you think that’d make the rates of murder equal, as in women commit as many murders as men? Keeping in mind it’s totally legal for women to kill whoever they want in this scenario. I’d say it’d get close, maybe fifty-five/forty-five. Those are percents I’m talking about there. The idea is to fully just legalize murder for women.” Mousey laughed but nodded evenly as he did so. Greta continued to table her proposal. “If we, as a society, came together and gave women the right to murder other people for whatever reason they wanted, I think they’d kill almost as many people as men.”
Mousey seemed to be legitimately thinking about it. He tilted his head from side to side and then spoke. “Empirically, I’d say you might be right. About what it’d take to line up the rates.”
“But you don’t agree, policy-wise.”
“Policy-wise, you might need to really put some heads together and think about the logistical side of it before you tried to get it on the books.”
“So you don’t agree. How? How can’t you agree? You’ve seen, like, a ton of murdered women, right? I’m assuming.”
“Yeah, I’ve spent a fair amount of time with murdered women.”
“And you’d agree, based your first-hand experience and all the empirical data that we have and are actually acknowledging today, that we, as a society, have a women-getting-murdered-and-raped-and-generally-accosted-and-abused-by-strangers-and-friends-and-relatives-alike problem, correct?”
“Correct.”
“Right, so maybe what it finally takes to curb that species-long and -wide problem would be to just make it so that whenever you interact with a woman, you have to keep in mind that it is 100 per cent legal for her to murder you for whatever reason she wants.”
Mousey sucked a smile into the back of his cheeks. “That’d include for money, right?”
“Oooooh, was that supposed to be some kind of half-assed morality jab? Fuck that noise, sir, fuck it. Debate me on the issues.”
“I think most, maybe not all, but most of your objections are going to be about logistics and implementation in terms of enforcement.”
“At least fight if you don’t agree, that’s all I’m saying. You might say it’s unfair, and I’d say if we don’t act, we’re okay with the fact that life is unfair, since women kind of have to entertain the idea, not that it’d be technically legal, that a ton of people they meet or talk to or are bothered by could kill them. Life’s unfair right now, and you’re cool with it. This is just a reformed version of being unfair. I mean, you know this better than anyone, but it’s already legal to kill someone under certain circumstances. Those circumstances being a certain level of threat to your life or property, right? So it’s not a ‘do we ever legalize murder or not’ thing; it’s an argument, purely, of degrees.
“So a better argument against me might be that I’m, in principle, advocating for a eugenic population-shaping on a global scale on the basis of sex. But that counter-argument is still flawed, son. Because in my scenario the murder is legal for women for whoever, if they’re killing a man, woman, baker, candlestick maker, whatever the fuckity-fuck. Take it from someone who knows, you can never be sure who a bitch is going to kill, one moment to the next. You just can’t. And whether or not we, as a society, ever succeed in legalizing murder for women in this country, you should know, before we go to my room, that I am both a woman and an entire industrialized nation. And that law is on my books.”
“Let’s get to the room.” He moved to stand and then re-crouched and allowed one of his eyebrows to droop the rest of the way down. “Was that you making a threat just now?”
“Oh, Mousey, Mouse, Mousey. No. That wasn’t a threat. It was much, much too classy to be a threat. And what is a classier version of a threat?”
“A promise.”
Greta grabbed the drugs and popped to standing using only her core muscles. “Well, look at that. Good for you.”
The only measure of how much time had passed was how much of the coke/crushed-up-Percocet mix was left. Mousey stared spacily at the table and realized it had been a while. They were playing a get-to-know-you game.
“Marry, bang, kill: a tree, the word free, the number three.”
She responded almost before he was finished with the last vowel. “I would fuck the number three, marry a tree, and kill the word free. That’s, like, so obvious I’m surprised you asked.” She dug her chin into the heel of her hand and fixed him with a bloodshot stare. He could tell that he was shaking in her vision. “Do you even respect me a little?”
Mousey’s head was swimming, and he was starting to regret the size of the rails he’d done. He leaned forward and brought both hands pleasurably through his hair, then consciously fixed his posture. “Does it count if I’m really, really afraid of you?”
“It does not.”
“Oh, then no. You’re a real piece of shit.”
The hitman laughed so hard she toppled the rickety hotel chair sideways, ejecting and sprawling across the carpet as it hit the ground. Mousey moved to help her, and she pulled her ankle gun, pointed it at him, those eyes still bloodshot like they were an ocean with a leaky oil well at the bottom. “I prefer the term ‘sack of shit.’ That’s what I call myself when I watch Top Chef and drink a bottle of wine instead of cleaning my apartment. Sack of shit, please.” The gun wobbled a bit, but in a friendly way.
Mousey turned his attention to gathering and gumming some of the scraps left on the table. “I can live with that.”
She replaced the gun in her ankle holster, then unstrapped and threw it aside. “I’m goi
ng to go to the bed, you’re not. You’re going to stay there.”
“How about you unstrap that other piece there, big boy.”
“I’m not big, I’m not a boy, and I’m not doing shit you tell me to do.”
“Fair enough.”
There was a small part of Mousey that wondered if he had hallucinated Greta doing a straight-up standing backflip onto the bed after she did it. Either way, she ended up in the bed, and he ended up leaning against the wall by the door, not entirely remembering having walked there. To make himself feel a little better, he looked at his hands some more. “So I haven’t met a ton of real hitters. A few gangland body droppers, sure, but not many purists, y’know? Assassins like yourself.”
She framed her face with two loose-jointed hands. “We are few and far between.”
He used one of his beautiful fingers to point at her piece. “Can you draw that thing?”
She rocked her shoulders from side to side, the gun moving in the rig, nudging her left breast now, button undone over the handle. “Like a cowboy? No, that shit’s stupid.”
“Ah, I get it. You’re a button man. Not an assassin.”
She rolled over, spoke to the ceiling. “Yeah, chief. Put a small-calibre behind the ear. Two in the chest as he gets out of his car. Sometimes maybe walk up, poke a knife between his ribs. Bread-and-butter stuff. They should change that expression. I don’t know a soul who eats bread.”
“I remember a time before carbs. I remember a time before a lot of things.”
“Motherfucker, I was born in a Costco. Your nostalgia doesn’t do shit for me.”
Mousey eyed her profile now, saving the smirk for when she was looking. He thought about the janitor at Tommy’s building she’d killed, and kept sizing her up. Calm as anything when she was talking to you but quick on the trigger in the moment. Not a talk-your-way-out type, she’d drop the bodies and call the cleanup crew. Must have a serious backer behind her, afford that style.
She nodded towards the bedside table. “Pass the pad. Pen too.” Mousey ambled over, knocked the pad and pen over onto the pillow beside her. She snorted and reached over like it was a real effort. “You want to see me draw? I’ll draw.”
Mousey stayed where he was, trying not to sway too much, and watched as she drew on the pad. When she was done, she flung her arm up, and Mousey plucked the drawing out of her hand. She let the arm drop slowly and limply and in the same kind of way a very heavy bird falls into a swimming pool.
The drawing was one of those sketches that people who are good at art do where the outside lines of everything look frayed. It was a pretty good rendering of her gun, with a long, ornately bordered speech bubble coming out of the muzzle that said: “All birds have to do is move their arms and they fly.” The period was as big as the y, the middle of it left white and empty.
“You make me sleepy.” Her neck was feeling the Percs now, eyelids starting to hang a little.
Mousey moved over, pushed her softening body backwards and tucked her in. She pulled that rig, sleepy but quick.
“Make your move and I’ll make mine, old man.”
Barrel pressing into his neck, Mousey slid forward and kissed the top of her forehead.
The hitman laughed. “You just want what everybody wants.” Barrel twisting hard into the gaunt skin of his neck, pulling it into folds. “A headless woman with a pretty face who sucks dick.” Letting the gun relax its hold on his skin a little, still keeping it pointed at his carotid. Mousey’s feet were falling asleep. She continued, a little more softly now. “You ever killed anyone?”
“Depends what you mean by killed anyone.”
She shoved him back firmly with her off hand, and Mousey allowed himself to fall, unresisting, into the wall, taking the impact pleasantly against his ribs. “Ugh. What a formless dollop of loose shit you are, dude. Seriously. Say a thing. Not this same tiresome ‘depends,’ ‘does it even matter if,’ ‘you could look at it that way’ nothingness. You open your mouth and fucking soap bubbles fall out. I don’t even care what your answer is. Obviously. I asked you so that when it was my turn, I’d say this: the first time I killed someone, I looked down at the body, and my hand was bleeding and I couldn’t feel it at all and the blood was dripping down the edge of my pinky nail, in a rich, red, vein-blood line. I took a long look at this kid I’d just deaded, and I had one thought in my mind, and I was calm enough for the thought to be in words: I’ll never suck another dick. I will die before I put one more sweaty cock in my mouth.”
She shifted her body, bum scooting to the other side of the bed, resting the gun gently on the pillow she’d just had her head on. “That’s hope. That’s what hope means to me. A long, beautifully appointed hallway of a life, with a gorgeous, useless coat rack, and a huge clock with an unreadable face, and very expensive hardwood floors that I get to walk down alone, forever, with zero smelly dicks in my face.”
Mousey gave the speech its deserved moment of quiet, his legs buzzing in a long, rippling sheet. Finally, he stood straight, tipped his imaginary hat on the way out the door, which he almost latched.
The hitman laughed one more time.
51
Tommy woke up in a sick haze, hanging just on the edge of hallucination. Wrapped firmly in his blankets, he shuffled out of the tent towards the rustling sound that had woken him. The bear who was nosing through the remainder of Tommy’s prepackaged sushi bowl was ugly as fuck.
Tommy realized that it was unfair to think of an animal who had never seen a mirror as ugly. But what, finally, did Tommy have but the folds of his brain? All the weird things stuck there that were his, because they were in his folds. If that was how brain folds worked. He was very sick and tired and overwhelmed.
A black bear, the guy was small, but not compact or cutely so, more squat, like an old man who had lifted many heavy things for many heavy years but had also eaten six eggs and three servings of meat a day the whole time. The bear glanced over at Tommy then dug back into the rice and fish.
Tommy didn’t know why, but he felt less afraid of this bear than he would a dog off its leash (he’d never been bitten on the ankle by a bear).
“Hi, Bear.”
The bear looked up from the meal, sniffed a grain of rice straight up its nose, then settled oddly onto its haunches, nosing slightly forward to Tommy.
“You’re, like, moulting. That’s the word. Word of the day, man, moulting. Maybe that’s for birds. Snakes? Like when they shed their whole skin and feel brand new.”
Bear swivelled his head in a twisty, sidelong direction that would have put a human neck into spasm.
“Lick me, Bear. Lick me.” Tommy extended his hand, and Bear obliged, his tongue seeming to take over the surface it touched, like a very old, very heavy jar of oil spilling across Tommy’s hand. “I doubt you can catch a human flu. Well, why? Why do I doubt that? Fuck, I feel bad, Bear. I’m not . . .”
Bear raised himself, as if in response, and assumed a hovering posture as he began releasing his bowels.
“Timing. Man, you have timing. I know you’re just a balding bear shitting in the woods, but ...” Bear grunted slightly as he encountered what seemed to Tommy’s untrained eye mild constipation. Tommy started shaking his quivering index finger at the bear. “Hey, when you’re in a new place, sometimes you have to go the extra mile to make a new friend. Put it out there, right? A real friend.”
Tommy rose from his knees, discarded his blanket, waited out the spine-rattling reactive shiver when the wind hit him, and dropped his pants. He stood an extra second, looked at Bear’s decreasingly impassive face, and kicked the pants away from his ankles. He moved over, still in his odd, febrile crouch, and squatted next to Bear.
There was almost no chance that whatever caused Bear’s locked bowels to release at the precise second Tommy’s did actually had anything to do with Tommy. It was almost certainly a pure coincidence. But that didn’t mean it wasn’t one of Tommy’s favourite things that had ever happened to, or near, or
because of him.
Now that he thought about it, consciously breathing the fecal air without smelling it through his clogged face, most of the things that had ever happened to, or near, or because of him had been, at least at some point, pure coincidences.
Tommy looked past Bear’s partially bald head to the sun cresting over the green, spiking treeline, and he thought that was fine.
52
At three minutes to nine a.m., Mike stopped in front of the hotel room door, giving himself just another second to breathe, unsure if the way his blood felt thin and fast and empty was excitement or fear, and sure that it didn’t matter. The door was a sliver ajar, so Mike walked straight in.
The young cop had obviously been suspicious of Mousey, so he had prepared himself for Mousey and Marlo jumping him, for Mousey to be there shrugging and shuffling and making excuses; he was prepared for Marlo to beg. Mike had run these scenarios in his mind, in the seemingly endless stretch of hours since he’d slept. He’d even imagined an empty room, what he’d do, how he’d search it. He was ready for the details of any of these outcomes; he’d pictured them so minutely that he was prepared for the smallest moments, prepared to act smoothly and bravely and intelligently.
He had not pictured a young woman sleeping with a gun in her hand, and he had not pictured himself making a strange, terrified croak from somewhere deep in his throat. He had not imagined the bullets feeling like two tiny donkey kicks in his chest. And although he had, actually, pictured himself getting shot, he had not pictured his arms reaching aimlessly out, away from his wounds. He had not pictured himself canting over at the waist, his legs bowing in on themselves and somehow holding. He hadn’t imagined swaying around suspended like that long enough to see his first aspirated breath splatter the hardwood floor — the boards so old they were fraying around the edges — before slumping rather than falling down.
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