Mondo Crimson

by Andrew Post

  Fuck.

  All of that had been so Felix could get this other business settled into place around her.

  She had to hand it to him: the wily old prick had successfully pulled a fast one. Was all that weirdness and jittery behavior an act, to come off like he was falling apart and therefore seem no longer able to arrange a complex multi-mark simultaneous hit? Evidently, if her suspicions were true.

  And as obvious as it was that the focus of this morning was to be Brenda killing Melanie Latisha Williams when she mistook her for just a run-of-the mill car thief, Brenda couldn’t deny it felt like there was so much more at play, some of which was possibly currently opening up around them as they yammered away here in a parking lot like a couple of sitting ducks or…fish in a barrel.

  One fish gets eaten by a slightly bigger fish then that one gets eaten by an even bigger fish. Brenda turned around in her seat to look out the car’s back glass. Nothing but empty parked cars, slowly getting buried under the snow. No giant mouths peeling wide ready to swallow her whole. But she could still feel it coming. Somewhere. Getting closer every second. Do something.

  Brenda faced the girl again. “What do you prefer to be called?”

  “What?”

  “Do you like to be called Melanie or Mel?”

  “What’re you asking me that for?”

  “We can always stick with shithead.”

  “Mel,” the girl said. “Mel’s fine.”

  “Mel, I’m Brenda.”

  “Okay….” the girl said. “That mean to you we’re BFFs now or something?”

  “Mel, did Felix ever introduce you to someone named Merritt Plains?” Brenda said, having to force herself to utter the man’s name. She recalled Felix suggesting that if she didn’t take the job, he would send Merritt – the Midwest being his ‘neck of the woods’. Merritt, as far as Brenda could remember, lived in some shitty little crossroads in Wisconsin. It’d take him no time at all to get here. A few hours’ drive, a hop and a skip. For all she knew, he was already in town, looking for her. And Felix knew if it meant keeping Merritt from getting any money, Brenda would jump at the Minneapolis job. She’d walked right into this.

  Again, fuck.

  “No,” Mel said. “Who’s Merritt Plains?”

  Brenda didn’t respond. The girl was better off only knowing his name – hopefully, that’s all she’d ever learn of him.

  “What’s in that thing?” Mel said, nodding at the cooler standing on Brenda’s lap.

  Brenda had forgotten it was there. “IV bags with a hair under four liters of some guy’s blood in them.”

  When the girl didn’t say anything, Brenda looked over at her. She was making the clearest rendition of the WTF face she’d ever seen. “I don’t know if you’re being serious, or…?”

  “I can show you.”

  “No, no, that’s all right, I believe you.”

  Brenda checked her phone. Still no text with an address for the drop.

  When she looked over at Mel, she was still making that face at her.

  Brenda said, “You want to know why I have somebody’s blood.”

  “Not particularly, but seeing how nothing this morning has been normal, we might as well if you feel I need to know.”

  “I don’t know why I have it.”

  Mel blinked. “You have a cooler with somebody’s blood in it but you don’t know why. So you’re out of your mind. Great. Wonderful.”

  “I’m not crazy,” Brenda said. “All right? This isn’t exactly a standard Sunday morning for me either.”

  “Says the white lady with a cooler full of human blood, the owner of which I can assume is now….”

  “Yes, he is now a dead person, good guess.”

  “So you killed somebody?”

  “Christ sakes, yes. Figured you’d be able to connect those dots on your own, but if you need every fucking thing spoon-fed to you, affirmative, I murdered someone this morning.”

  “What did he do?”

  Brenda shrugged. “Something bad enough that it’d warrant sending me.”

  “You’re a hitman. I’m in Minnesota stuck in a car with a hitman.”

  “In the trade, we call ourselves fixers. Not to split hairs. But, as told, I took their blood and after that, apparently, I was supposed to kill you too.”

  “What? Why? Bitch, I don’t even know you.”

  “I don’t know you either. But that doesn’t mean we’re not still both caught in this.”

  “So you were supposed to kill me and take my blood too? For what?”

  “Nobody said anything about taking your blood. I wasn’t told one fucking thing about you, same as you weren’t told one fucking thing about me. That’s how setups usually go, most of the intended recipients of bad news are blissfully unaware it’s coming. You know, like a surprise birthday party, except instead of eating cake everyone gets their head blown off.”

  “Why is this happening? Why is he doing this to us?”

  “I was wondering the same thing.”

  “Lady, I told you, I don’t know shit.”

  “Watch the volume. I’m sitting right here.”

  The girl remained loud, her side of the windshield fogging over. “If you know something, I’d appreciate you telling me why the hell this is happening, because all my ass was trying to do was work off some debt.”

  “We’ve gotten set up, as I’ve said. Beyond that, I have no idea. But it didn’t go off as planned, seeing how you and me are still both alive. Now, we’re here. All caught up?”

  “Meaning what?” Mel’s blinks remained fast. She searched Brenda’s face. “What do we do now?”

  “Mel, I can tell that you want to ask me to let you run,” Brenda said, “and as much as I sympathize with that, it’d be a completely understandable reaction to something like this, but right now I think it’d be better if you and me stuck together.”

  “But I don’t think I want to do that,” Mel said, her voice rising to a childlike peep. “I mean, you’re carrying around some person’s blood in a fucking cooler. And what’s worse is you don’t even know why.”

  “Felix bet on me killing you. If I don’t do that and let you run, whoever he sent to kill me will pick up my slack and kill you too. I haven’t, but they will, which means staying with me is your best chance of staying alive. Think about your girlfriend, what’s-her-name.”

  “Dani.”

  “Dani. You want to see Dani again? Do you want a chance to patch things up? Staying in this car is the only way that happens. Think about your sick aunt.”

  “Uncle.”

  “Fucking whatever. The way you made it sound, they don’t have much time left. Would that be fair to say?”

  “Yes.”

  “So, would you prefer that your family only puts one of you in the ground in the near future, or two of you?”

  It seemed to pain Mel to answer that. “One.”

  “Like I thought,” Brenda said. “Mel, I’m not trying to scare you when I say this, but outside of this car you might make it the rest of the day. Maybe. That’s a generous estimate. In reality, and this is nothing against you as a person, you seem like a good enough kid, but if who’s after us is who I assume is after us, you’d probably squeeze out two hours, three tops.”

  “But how would he find me?”

  “Couldn’t say. Maybe ask him when he finds you, which he will. Guy’s a weirdo of the highest order but his people-tracking skills are some of the best I’ve seen.”

  “We should call the police. You’ve got a phone, call them, tell them that someone’s trying to kill us and they need to get here right away and—”

  “Not happening. Out of the question.”

  “Why?”

  Brenda glanced down at the cooler on her lap then looked at Mel again. “I wonder.”
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br />   “Hey, that shit’s your problem, lady, not mine. Toss it out if you don’t want it, I don’t give a fuck. And if people are after us, why the hell aren’t we moving? We shouldn’t just be sitting here out in the open waiting for them to find us.”

  “Calm down. Let’s address one panic attack at a time. When Felix asked me to take the blood of the person I was…visiting this past week, he made it sound like it was very important that I do so. For whatever aim or motive, I have no idea, but I think this guy’s blood could be useful to us.”

  Mel’s face twisted. “Fucking how?”

  “I don’t know, but I’m not leaving it. It’s coming with us. End of story,” Brenda said. She checked the burner phone. Nothing. “The way I see it, Felix planned this down to the minute with you being told to steal this car at a very specific time that’d conveniently overlap with when I was going to be wrapping up…doing what I was doing this morning.”

  “You mean murdering someone?”

  Brenda ground her teeth. “I was blunting edges for your benefit. But think about it, how you and me oh-so-conveniently bumped into each other? To me, that proves this was tightly coordinated. It was meant to go off like a chain reaction. Things didn’t go that way, obviously, so now the person who was supposed to kill me will be trying to kill us.”

  “How do you know someone was supposed to kill you?”

  “Because if Felix wanted me to know I was supposed to do you, he would’ve asked me to do it and he would’ve offered––” she looked Mel up and down, “––a couple hundred bucks. On top of that, I find it hard to swallow it was by sheer coincidence two people who work for him just happened to be in the same place at the same time.”

  Hope drained from Mel’s face.

  “Again,” Brenda said, “I’m not trying to scare you, Mel, but this is what I assume is happening. I don’t want to be right about this, but right now I’m not seeing much reason to start thinking I’m wrong.”

  The girl seemed to have to force herself to ask, “Is that why you were asking me if I know this Merritt Plains person?”

  She’d never met him and here she was, already scared. If Brenda dared to lower herself to compliment him, she might think of Merritt Plains as some kind of phonetically transmitted disease, something so bad that it could install in your mind an indisputable understanding of the extent of harm it could cause just by knowing how to say its name.

  “He’s who I assume Felix has sent,” Brenda said.

  “Is he worse than you?”

  Brenda rolled her eyes. “Have I shot you?”

  Brow furrowed, Mel said nothing.

  “I’d think that’d be easy enough to remember,” Brenda said. “Well? Have I shot you? Yes or no.”

  “No, you haven’t shot me,” Mel said, “but you sure seemed like you wanted to.”

  “But I didn’t, did I? So, given that, for the time being you’ll just have to trust I’m not as bad as him.” Brenda nodded past the girl, to the handle of the driver-side door. “If you want to take your chances going solo, have at it. But when he catches up to you and turns you into a lampshade, you can’t say I didn’t warn you.”

  The girl looked at the door handle, then out the window. It probably looked a whole lot like freedom. Then back at Brenda. A subtle nod. “Fine.”

  “Smart choice,” Brenda said.

  The burner phone hummed. Brenda’s blood ran cold. The text had come from a number that started with 651, a Twin Cities area code.

  Ready to do the drop?

  PART TWO

  HERE COMES THE NIGHT

  Chapter One

  After Now

  The house was foggy with smoke. The smell of blood was inescapable, nauseating, cloying. The club music being played in the next room sounded like it was being run at one-and-a-half speed, too fast for any one human dancer to keep time. There was a painting on the wall of a man in a shiny suit of armor who had one really bad haircut. A man sat in a chair before the painting with his head back, his mouth full of maggots. Newborn flies took flight, born from that open mouth, and seemed to enter the painting behind him, or she’d just lost track of them because of how dark it was in this room. Buzzing in her ears. Little legs alighting on her neck, her forehead. She was always too slow to slap them away. Every movement requiring concerted thought and was still languid, difficult.

  Mel noticed someone, at some point, had written your fucked on her cast. It was the only thing anybody had written there. Maybe she’d written that. She couldn’t remember.

  What she’d learned in grade school grammar seemed to have remained intact, though.

  Your fucked. My fucked what? How can one own a fucked?

  If she had ever not been in this house at any point in her life, it felt like so long ago it may as well have been someone else’s memories. Dreams of a bird that had been put in a cage before it had felt the touch of the sky. A worm that never surfaced, not even when it rained, and never known there was anything but the dark and the cold and the endless tunnels in the dirt but still had dreams. Fragments. A flicker of happiness, however small, still seeming like a sick joke. To ever laugh knowing this place waited to close around you one day. So unfair. Driving at full speed with the headlights off, that is what she now knew being alive was all about: agreeing to be alive was agreeing to be blind. And if you ever hit something with your car, nothing good ever resulted. It never undid damage that was already there before the collision. It was never a bag of money. It was somebody’s cat. A deer that could come tumbling in through the windshield on you, all kicking hooves and broken glass and piercing antlers. Someone’s child chasing after a ball.

  She had already become resigned to the fact that she would soon be dead but she could not remember what she’d seen or what had been done to her or what she’d been forced to do that had made her think, It’s true, I will not survive this. Part of her felt like she already was dead. Breathing out of habit now. Sitting upright like a puppet. The trap that a body can become.

  There were men walking around out in the hall with metal straws sticking out of the corners of their mouths like cowboys with hand-rolled cigarettes, bobbing the metal straws up and down like antennae, like it was what guided the partygoers about the house, picking up scents, tasting the air.

  Mel had seen the metal straws up close. Had them linger near the soft surface of her eye. They weren’t blunt at the end like a typical straw. They were made from surgical steel and they’d been cut at an angle at the end, like an oversized hypodermic needle. The men walked around in their tuxedos with their bow ties dangling undone, their eyes glassy, making sharp whistles that’d carry all through the house sucking on those straws.

  Mel had heard them referred to as mosquitoes. How they preferred to take their treat labeled them as such. There were also the leeches and the bats. The leeches wore PVC bodysuits that were so black and shiny they looked like they’d been bodily dipped in crude oil and they wore masks with no holes for eyes but only their hungry, red mouths. Presumably they liked the impediment of having to feel around for their treats, blind as their namesake.

  The bats had leather wings and leather ears and were by far the worst dancers.

  A few mosquitoes and a couple leeches drifted into the parlor, keeping to the edges of the room. There was little light, and what there was came with a red tint like a photographer’s darkroom, but they still steered clear of every bulb, backs to the walls, spectating from afar, peeking over chairs and from around sofas and end tables, always moving as one in a roving clot of bodies.

  From the mantelpiece, with reverence, Felix brought down a wooden box. Inside the box was a revolver. With bloodstained fingers, Felix slid one hollow-point round into the revolver’s cylinder and showed it first to Mel and then showed it to the man seated across from her.

  The man’s head was swaddled in bandages. Including across his eyes. B
ut Felix, as if oblivious to this, still hovered the open gun before his guest’s gauzed head for a moment, showing him what he, presumably, wouldn’t be able to see.

  Felix spun the cylinder. It buzzed like an insect. He snapped it shut. The buzzing stopped. He slammed it on the table between Mel and the man and with a flick of his wrist, cast the revolver spinning.

  It made lazy rotations, the metal rumbling against the dark wood tabletop. Mel slow-blinked at it, too tired and drained and defeated to care what came next. One of us will blow our own brains out. The survivor will live to hear the applause. It would not qualify as the worst thing she saw happen in this house tonight. Bets weren’t being made. This was just something to pass the time.

  The shape of the man’s head seemed incorrect, misshapen. Like under his wrappings he had nothing below the nose. The head too round and small. He was dressed in a hospital gown, seated in a wheelchair. Like his head, the man’s hands were bandaged. A handcuff was still biting into one of his thin wrists. The chain was broken, the last link hanging stubbed and soot-stained, melted, looking like, for lack of a key, it’d been severed with a torch.

  The revolver came to rest with its barrel pointing at the man, who, if he was aware, did not reach for the gun. He didn’t do anything. Mel could hardly tell there was anyone alive under his wrappings if it wasn’t for the slow rise and fall of his shoulders and the occasional twitch.

  Felix was wearing only a pair of nylon tracksuit pants that made a zipping sound when he walked, which is often how she could tell when he was coming down the hall to the room they were keeping her in. She had not seen him wear anything else since she arrived. The blood splashed across his bony chest and concave stomach, that too had yet to be washed away. It had been red when she’d been brought here, but now it had dried on him, crusting and flaking off.

  He leaned down to whisper something in the man’s ear but was looking across at Mel as he did so. Secrets. Sweet nothings. For us to know and you to find out. If the man could not speak or see, it seemed he could still hear.