So I get it, Jerome. For me, each girl is a buoy. And they’re all lined up, bobbing pretty in the waves for as long and far as the eye can see. Infinity is a beautiful thing, ain’t it? You can have your dusty bookshelves, though. To each his own.
But hey, you pretty little nigger. Just ’cause you fucked up your shot at the big time, just ’cause you lost the girl and your momma got killed way back when, just ’cause you’re bored as hell stocking shelves and ringing up Slim Jims and rolling papers don’t mean you get to slack on the job. See, I grew up down by 69th Street and I know that 7-Eleven you work at. Since it’s on the way from my place in Yeadon, I stop by every morning for my large coffee with that cardboard sleeve so you won’t burn your fingers. Good coffee, too. You guys always have one of those pots that’s been sitting awhile with about an inch or so at the bottom, pure sludge, strong as bull!
Never seen you there, pal. They probably have you on the graveyard shift, but don’t worry. Someday you’ll grow up and they’ll make you assistant manager!
And you’d best be careful on that late shift. That place has been hit a lot lately, I seen it on the news. You’d better watch out for guys in twos or threes, guys in hoodies with gorilla masks, guys with agendas that would have made Zimmerman an American hero. Might as well follow his lead, find an ankle holster, and get something to fill it with. Tough old world, huh? Guys like us have to watch out for the thugs, don’t we?
Poor niglet. Marissa Madison fell for you, but you ain’t no Beyoncé. I’m no judge of guys even though I did have the fine opportunity to “experience you” through a particularly disgusting lens of lust, but you can’t really be all that after all, now can you? Burberry? Saks Fifth? Hmm . . . didn’t sell many records, now did you?
Hell, I don’t even see you staying on at the 7-Eleven when all the smoke clears and you push into your thirties, wondering how everything went by so fast and wound up twisting straight down the toilet. I actually picture you in red and yellow with a paper hat, asking in that velvety tone,
“Want French fries with that?”
Go ahead. Greet me at the drive-thru window. Be good and careful that I get the right change, and make sure the receipt is tucked on one side of the small stack of coins for the perfect delivery from your fingers to my open palm. Fold the bag neatly at the top, and when you hand it out to me don’t forget to smile, thank me, and wish me a good and safe evening.
Go ahead, nigger.
Make me a memory.
CHAPTER
NINE
Marissa couldn’t find parking up by the nearest mall entrance, so she had to drive down a level where the thick concrete ceiling came so close to the roof of the car she instinctively ducked. Shadows washed over the vehicle and a sudden dread came into her face; she could feel it. A moment before she had been the most confident girl on the planet, a superhero. But while it was one thing to connect with a demon on some psychic wavelength, to trust the patchwork, to have the faith to enter the web, it was quite another when you actually had to do it. Suddenly you realized that this wasn’t a movie, that you were in this for real, that some grisly savage was working the periphery one step behind you and closing.
This guy was no joke: she had heard about him on the news like everyone else and had whispered about him with relative strangers in the hall after class, made speculations over coffee. He was the talk of the Widener campus and the entire tri-state area mostly because there was so much mystery about him.
Since a year ago March there were twelve young women who had never come home. Since they were all extraordinarily pretty, the media had played it up by revealing the photographs on television like some sexual stable, all of them prize horses. It played on the same fascination we had with college cheerleaders and their lovely bare legs, the given school’s insignia like an owner’s brand placed just above the cheek and the colored ribbons fluttering in their manes.
So who was he? And more horrifying, what type of maniac was this? Was he the shadowy creep with the dingy basement prison or the soft-spoken bachelor with the side business that required night hours and a nondescript van? Was he a collector or a ripper, did he have an assortment of handcuffs, soldering irons, car batteries, and electrical cables, or was he more the meathook and freezer, smock and goggles kind of fella, slit and drain or bludgeon and spatter, breaking knife or meat cleaver, shotgun or axe, tarp or plastic, frayed rope or duct tape?
And if he was killing them, where were the bodies? And more so, if the poor girls were in fact corpses, the question was why.
Of course, one could draw the most obvious conclusions in terms of forced seductions, but there seemed to be so much more going on here. It was this fiend’s absolute invisibility. He was faceless. A pristine enigma, a dark vacuum. Watching.
And girls kept on vanishing.
Marissa had no idea what he looked like. The patchwork had only sketched for her a pure evil, a black cloud that moved to the other back shoulder when you tried to pin your eyes on it. Of course, she’d thought of the police even though her psychic burst had indicated that she wasn’t supposed to tell anyone about this, but she had no description to offer in the first place, certainly not one they would be able to use.
He drove a Toyota. Or a Kia or Hyundai, she couldn’t be sure, something small or midsized. He’d passed her quickly, and she’d been occupied with the lust he’d brought up in her, another thing she wouldn’t be able to relate very well to a badge trying to piece together some sort of sober documentation. And besides all that, she knew this monster would sense interference. He was attracted to her, she could tell, but he wasn’t careless and she could tell that as well. The cops would put a protective tail on her and he’d sniff it out before they had even parked by her house and cracked open their first box of Krispy Kreme doughnuts. Then he’d fade into the woodwork. Move on to another prize racehorse.
Before turning left under the low ceiling, Marissa saw that out through the back of the lot, past a low barrier wall and a cyclone fence, there was a sign cluster for Route 202, 476, and the turnpike. In here it was nearly empty except for a spattering of cars parked way back in toward the mall entrance and two enclosed staircases, and she pulled into the nearest space available right here by the end of the ramp in front of a support column that said “2H.”
She turned the car off, and her breath quickened. What was she doing? Why would she park in relative isolation here, when there were townsfolk, or at least their parked cars, over yonder by the stairwells?
Well, that one was a no-brainer. Clearly, she didn’t trust fellow vehicles. Anyone could be hiding in them (as if he could have gotten down here first somehow). And stairwells were deathtraps (as if he’d not only defied the timeline and beaten her to the punch in terms of advancing and setting his physical positioning, but also predicted the stairwell, and the right stairwell mind you, that would have been her chosen exit artery).
Marissa’s mouth went dry. She had instinctively parked by the ramp in a vast ocean of empty parking spaces so she could see him coming, so she was closer to the opening back here where you were in the same zip code as the street signs outside if you had to make a run for it. Marissa’s heart was thudding now; she could feel it. Seeing him coming was a fallacy: she’d be nothing more than a deer in the headlights if he raced right at her, screeched his tires, jumped out, and manhandled her into the back seat. Moreover, any witnesses by the stairwells would be hard-pressed to make a description of him, let alone catch his license plate. And what was this nonsense about being in some nearer proximity to the highway signs? Did she really think she’d have an advantage making a run for it, jumping the half-wall, scaling the fence, and pushing through the decorator foliage?
She wasn’t thinking straight, and she had to get her shit together. Boyfriend was playing for keeps here, and even with her advantage of the patchwork and the promise of a “win-win scenario” she couldn’t just lay dormant, sit stupid, bank on cryptic prophecies. Jerome had not maintained h
er vision of him, poor thing, and if she had learned anything from his horrific public failure, it was that prophecies were tricky, sometimes offered in symbols and codes you never quite figured out.
She suddenly thought of the real victims here, the long string of abducted young women and just for a moment she wondered “why me?” wishing deep down that she was someone else entirely. If only she could become plain and invisible, free to untie and remove her own proverbial “cheerleader’s ribbon” long enough at least to give her the time to think rationally!
Marissa laughed out loud, and it sounded harsh and forced in the car. To hell with this son of a bitch! She liked being a girly-girl, liked being pretty, liked being looked at, and hey, if she was aware that she was being stupid and hesitant, she was actually being self-observant and careful, wasn’t she? It was called “metacognition,” thinking about your own thinking, duh. Smart people did that, the strategizers. And she was going to win this thing, she just had to think positively! The patchwork had only failed her one time in a thousand—no, more like a million—and she had to have faith. She grabbed her shoes, got her purse, and made to open the door. She suddenly decided to walk back up the ramp in her stocking feet and felt herself ultimately practical for choosing not to hoof it in heels.
The hinges squawked. They never did that before! She pulled herself out, and after shutting and locking she thought she heard a pebble fall and tick along the concrete back by the stairwells. It halted her right there, making her do an impression of a Marissa statue that must have looked absolutely ludicrous.
But he couldn’t be there, now could he? She’d been over this once already. If he was following her he’d have come in from behind, down the ramp, and she’d have seen him. Despite all this, Marissa leaned forward and squinted back into the gloomy expanse of the parking area. Nothing. No one, just a few empty cars.
Like tearing off a Band-Aid she pulled herself away, turned, and walked as fast as she could around the near corner and up the ramp, back out to the open, to safety. The air was different out here, and the wind in her face was refreshing, making her feel as if she were moving this forward, getting down to business, not letting herself get totally freaked.
Business. First things first, she had to throw out her underwear. As disgusting as it was to be aware of stuff like this from Sex in the City and Californication, some girls evidently were “squirters”—that is, if the writers had to keep that kind of stuff real. And though Marissa was most definitely not one, she might have spotted, and that wasn’t acceptable even when you were being stalked by the evil faceless vicious black shadow. A girl had to do what a girl had to do, and she ran up the concrete ramp with her stuff clutched to her chest, her stocking feet pitter-patting in mini-steps she would have giggled insanely about in any other circumstance. By the time she got to the crosswalk she was breathless, and when she heard someone cough from behind, she spun too quickly and almost tripped off the curb.
It was an Asian man, thin, graying sideburns, and black turtleneck sweater, looking in a laptop he was carrying. His name was Frank Ho, and he was the third partner in a new medical practice that he had helped finance with a second mortgage on his house in Ridley, and he was looking at a patient’s bloodwork, considering starting him on a combination of Uloric (40 milligrams) and Colcrys at 0.6 for gout. He was walking and computing as he usually did, but today he was simultaneously occupied with thoughts of his teenage son Stanley and the kid’s ridiculous idea to come to malls like this and stand in front of the fountain area selling this new-fangled bouncy ball that turned to quivering slime-jelly when it settled on the floor, then forming back to its original spherical shape right there before your eyes. The kid had already invested his summer lawn-mowing money in seventy-five pounds of this crap that he had stowed in the second detached garage, and he wanted Frank to get him juggling lessons so he wasn’t just some kid tossing balls in the air, but more of a performer, a professional, and no matter how many times they had argued about this and a hundred other little schemes Stanley had cooked up lately, the stubborn boy had no interest in burying his nose in a never-ending series of textbooks next year and wasting so much of his youth in “antiquated pedagogical institutions that were totally overpriced and far short on delivery when you considered the current global economical tendencies . . .”
Marissa hit the trigger-killer on her belt loop and paused there on the sidewalk to put on her heels. As a result of overhearing so many pre-college teens of late re-expressing the trendy idea that higher learning was more of an expensive, corroded ideal than a practical and useful avenue to success, she was tempted to tell Dr. Frank Ho to kick the kid out for a year so he could try supporting himself juggling magic slime-balls and quoting the fancy chatter he found on the Internet. Quick fixes wasted precious time. And some old dinosaurs, so called, still patterned themselves across the landscape for a reason. Shit, she didn’t want to commit either, knuckle down, tread water in a sea of scholarly articles. She’d never been comfortable with the idea of becoming a nurse actually, but it was the most practical and positive way for her to utilize her psychic abilities, and even though she was falling into the same trap as the Internet mimics in that she felt she was draping her mother’s words over her own, she had come to admit a long time ago that you couldn’t run away from universal truths. We all had to work, and we all had to work hard learning the methods and traditions of something at least somewhat traditional, something we might not necessarily like . . . well, not in a shopping spree or run-upto-your-bedroom-to hear-that-new-song-and-dance-in-front-of the-mirror kind of a way.
That’s why they called it work.
And just because the idea of forever reading the patchwork of the sick deeply saddened Marissa on certain emotional platforms, she knew on a more fundamental level that there would be long-term satisfaction in knowing she spent her time on this earth helping people understand and manage their pain as opposed to riding shotgun to a bunch of crazy dreams like slime-ball juggling, or pop music records that turned into onehit failures at the Citrus Bowl.
She walked toward the Legal Seafood restaurant, heels clicking on the cement, and had that awful feeling that someone was going to stop her at the door and say, “Can I help you?” therefore forcing her to ask out loud for permission to use the restroom. That would be ultimately embarrassing, and even worse, it was always possible that she could get a real gatekeeper taking special pleasure in stating a patrons-only policy, and she was stressing over dumb stuff now, and she had to focus.
“Don’t sweat the petty things . . . pet the sweaty things,” she thought. It came from nowhere and she couldn’t for the life of her recall its origin, but God, it was hysterical! She put her hand in front of her mouth to hide the mad grin that had plastered itself there and pulled open the door.
Smelled like fish, and that one almost made her double over. There was a hostess station across from a Plexiglas wall display with wine bottles stacked in it and strange bubble water rising up the facing. A family of four was waiting to be seated, partially blocking the path, and a there was a woman with a black skirt and loose paisley top bending to reach into the back of the podium for menus.
The guy was hooked on Internet porn and his wife was thinking of backstabbing a male co-worker who had spread it around the office that she was the one who misplaced the paperwork on the Garber account. Their boys looked like twins but were actually a year apart, the fifth-grader stuck on the idea that his high voice made other kids call him a faggot, and his sibling considering the idea of faking being sick so he could stay home from school again tomorrow and use the pump BB gun to shoot birds off the phone cables cutting through the back yard. They had all taken the day off together to get flu shots, and instead of the “sneak-away family day” both parents had envisioned, they’d all done nothing but fight in the car. The hostess straightened up and Marissa was struck with her perfume and her Daddy issues, and she hit her trigger-killer five times in a row. School was hard enough,
but restaurants were torturous for some reason, as if people focused harder on their personal shit when they didn’t have to worry about cooking, serving, and making sure they ate their lima beans for a hot minute. Marissa made her way past the oyster bar pressing the button at her belt loop again and again, chastising herself for choosing a bathroom in an eatery in the first place, and immediately forgiving herself because it was closer than the generic mall lavatories placed God knows where out there, and she was scared, damn it.
The bathroom was dressed up to look cutting-edge, but came off tired and worn. The black wall tiles had calcium build-up at floor level, and the steel sinks looked water-stained and dull despite the fake ferns in the vases between them. Marissa waved her hand in front of the towel dispenser, got two sheets, and moved to the handicapped stall. She slowly pulled the door open, more wary of the kind of deposit left in the bowl that would make you say, “Whoa!” than disturbing an occupant careless enough to leave the door unlatched.
Vacant. Clear in the toilet too, thank God for small favors. She pulled the door closed, turned, and took down the top lid. Feeling prissy and silly about it, she papered it with her two towels, careful to cover every square inch of the solid oval-shaped plastic, and no, she wasn’t OCD or anything, but it was an expensive leather bag. She set it down on the makeshift tablecloth, kicked off her heels, and started to drop her drawers, thinking how silly that phrase was when she had to do such a wiggle-dance to get them down to her ankles.
She had just hung her jeans on the hook and pulled one foot out of her panties when the door out there to the hall crashed open. She jumped up on the toilet seat and gripped her knees tight to the chest. Her big bag contoured nicely to her bare bottom, but through it she felt the edge of what felt like her Kindle and it seemed that if she moved even a little bit the entire rank and file in there would make noise shifting positions and settling. There was an awful clattering out there, followed by a thud and metallic “toink” that sounded like a billy club making contact with the sink area.
Phantom Effect Page 14