The Doll

by Taylor Stevens

  Munroe said, “Funny how that decision came full circle.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Munroe stood and, hand outstretched for Neeva to follow, led her back to the bedroom and out of the confining space, where it had been harder to keep attuned to the sounds in the hallway and the street. She listened and, certain that things were still as they should be, said, “The same baggage you tried to save yourself and your family from is pretty much what saved you now—all the media attention, the speculation, put your face on every TV in the world.”

  Neeva sat on the floor beside the mattress. “I guess,” she said, and Munroe tossed a package of cookies and a bottle of juice in her direction.

  Neeva touched the mattress. “Why is this here?”

  “So when the shooting starts and I shove you into the bathroom, I can put another layer of protection between you and the bullets.”

  “I thought I was here to help.”

  “You won’t be much help if you’re dead.”

  “But what about you?”

  Munroe joined Neeva on the floor. Placed herself so that the room’s one window was ahead on the opposite wall and the hallway door between her and Neeva. Unlike American construction, which relied heavily on drywall to partition rooms and often used hollow doors, this hotel was European and old, which meant stone and solid wood—meant that unless Lumani or Arben Number Two, or anyone else who might be with them, intended to blow the place up, they’d be coming through one of those two openings.

  Munroe put the Jericho on the floor, took a cookie out of Neeva’s package. “Like I told you, if I don’t get them first, then I’m dead either way, so it doesn’t much matter.”

  “Who did that to you?” Neeva said, and she moved to touch Munroe’s torso but stopped with her hand hovering in the air above the jacket.

  Those who dared to ask about the scars inevitably used questions framed in the context of what and how, but Neeva had cut to the heart of the question with who. Munroe glanced at her, one victim of violence to another. Neeva withdrew her hand and, like a wounded child, went back to the cookies.

  “It was a long time ago,” Munroe said. “Done over the course of a few years by a man quite similar to the one who put the purchase price out for you.”

  “Do you ever think about trying to get even?”

  “He’s dead now.”

  Neeva stopped chewing and very slowly swallowed. “Did you kill him?”

  “Yes,” Munroe said, mimicking the slow speech, “I did.”

  “Was it difficult to get away with it?”

  Munroe shifted, shoulder to the wall, so that she stared fully at the girl. Measured and deliberate, she said, “It was a long time ago, in a place most people don’t know exists. Why all the questions, Neeva?”

  Neeva shrugged. “Sometimes I think about how it would feel.”

  “Revenge is best left to fantasy,” Munroe said. “It feels better there. In real life you can eventually learn to deal with the pain and trauma, learn to cope on some level, you know? But you can never undo death, and even if you think they deserve it, killing doesn’t take away your pain, just puts you on dangerous ground that can collapse out from beneath you at any time.”

  “You did it.”

  Munroe stared at her a moment longer, thoughts running in a melee that amounted to My point exactly, but she said, “I did. Partially out of revenge and partially to save my life and the lives of future victims, but even if it had been entirely to settle a score, that means I, of all people, should know.”

  Without meeting Munroe’s eyes, Neeva nibbled on a cookie, said, “Would you take it back if you could?”

  “I wouldn’t, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t paid a price.”

  Neeva huffed. “Well, I still think people like this doll guy and the Pretty Boy, people like them, will never learn or ever stop unless someone goes up against them, fight fire with fire, you know? Someone has to teach them.”

  “The problem with fighting fire with fire is that you can get burned and you risk becoming like them.”

  “Has that happened to you?”

  “It has at times,” Munroe said, and shifted back against the wall, forearms resting on bent knees, and stared across the room at the curtained window.

  Neeva tilted sideways and tipped her head so that she rested against Munroe’s shoulder. “I like you, Michael,” she said, “even if sometimes you don’t like yourself a whole lot.”

  Munroe smiled, leaned over, and kissed the smooth top of Neeva’s head. “Thank you,” she said, and after a pause, “What happened to the one who hurt you?”

  “Nobody knows,” Neeva said. “They never found him.”

  Munroe understood, then, what had driven Neeva to leave the safety of the consulate. The offer to give herself up as bait was more than just an exchange of one life for many lives. Neeva’s actions were those of trauma victim refusing to be the victim again—revenge surrogacy, insistence on playing an active role in what happened next. She rested her cheek where her kiss had met smooth skin.

  “How do you know about the man with the dog?” Neeva asked. “Who he is and what he has planned?”

  “I don’t know who he is,” Munroe said, “only what he represents.”

  “So you’re guessing?”

  Munroe shrugged Neeva off her shoulder and placed her hands, fingers splayed, across her abdomen. “There are these. The man with the dog is just another version of the psychopath with the knife.” She turned to Neeva. “He paid to have you kidnapped so he could own you as a slave. Do the details of why or what for make a difference?”

  “Not really,” Neeva said. “I mean, sort of, in terms of physical pain and the idea of murder, they do. But people like the doll guy who sells women and the dog guy who buys women, and other guys who, say, rape women, or maybe don’t go as far as violent rape but treat women like objects instead of people—sure, there’s a difference in the level of crime, but it’s all the same thing, where women become a canvas for throwing emotional baggage, Jackson Pollock style.”

  Munroe said, “Those are some pretty big thoughts for such a little person.”

  Neeva’s face clouded. Her mouth shut, then opened again. “Was that a joke?”

  Munroe flicked a finger against Neeva’s nose. “Yes,” she said. “It’s called dry humor. You should try it sometime.”

  Neeva smiled. Slumped back against the wall. “This doll-guy situation is an extreme of what I deal with in everyday life,” she said. “Where men believe that what they want I want, and they project that on to me and then blame me, curse me, when I don’t respond the way they’ve fantasized, like it’s some personal attack on them, like they’re entitled to something. Doll guy and dog guy and rape guy, the dangerous ones, they just go a step further and take it anyway. Then they blame you and the way you look for what they did. What’s worse is that a lot of the time, society blames you, too.”

  Munroe put her arm around Neeva and moved the girl’s head back onto her shoulder. “You are way too young and innocent to be forced to understand these types of things,” she said.

  “I’m not as innocent as you think I am.”

  “And apparently not quite as naive.”

  Neeva pulled her head off Munroe’s shoulder and shifted to her knees, hands on her thighs, eyes happy and smile wide, then pumped a fist and whispered, “Yessss.”

  The smile and simple joy were infectious to the point that Munroe, in spite of circumstances, couldn’t help but smile in return—a smile that faded fast in the wake of a barely perceptible tap against the door handle. Not the movement of the door being tried but a gentle rocking of the latch in its holder as if the wood had only been touched or brushed against.

  Munroe’s hand moved to the weapon on the floor. Fight-or-flight instinct would have her unload the magazine into the door and push on after the hunter, but the same wood and stone that protected her also protected him.

  Focus never leaving the hallway door
, she turned slightly so that her mouth was to Neeva’s ear and whispered, “Go to the bathroom. Lock yourself inside. I don’t care what you hear, or what you think is going on out here, don’t come out till I call for you.”

  Neeva, who’d been oblivious, turned to follow Munroe’s line of sight and, staring wide-eyed, whispered, “Are they here? I want to help.”

  “You’re here. That’s the help. I need you alive. Get your gun. Go.”

  Neeva reached for the weapon that lay in the shadow between mattress and wall, low-crawled to the bathroom, and with a near silent click shut herself inside, taking the light with her. Munroe closed her eyes, allowing fingers, hands, and senses to work where sight failed, and shifted the mattress so that it straddled the bathroom door.

  The door handle moved again. Subtle. Audible only because Munroe anticipated the movement. With the Jericho aimed toward where she expected a body and the two spare magazines shoved tight against her waistband, Munroe moved the few steps to the desk. The heavy side faced out where it could provide the most benefit in shielding her body from whatever came through the door, and she kept behind the furniture, one knee to the floor, hands on the desktop for control.

  Silence ticked along until the next subtle rocking of the latch against metal.

  But the door didn’t open, which she would have expected by now if the person on the other side had even a modicum of lock picking skills. Munroe leaned out to scan the floor. Had it been she on the other side, had the equipment been available, she would have run a camera under the door to confirm the location of the room’s occupants, and if she hadn’t had the equipment, she would have waited until the dead of night, when people slept the deepest, would have used stealth to enter and dispatch. But no hair-thin wire snaked in silhouette to the sliver of light beneath the door, and so she braced for an explosion that never came.

  Instead, another subtle tap arrived, and less than a minute later still another, louder and more obvious: each new noise, like scratching at the door, was an invitation welcoming the curious to approach and discover, a juvenile trick encouraging the strategist to overanalyze. If the hunter was lucky, tapping might bring someone like Neeva closer, but Neeva wasn’t alone, and Munroe wasn’t stupid, and Lumani knew this.

  Another tap.

  The man-boy had sent an underling to flush her out.

  Strategy to strategy, Munroe mentally placed herself on the other side, stood in the hall facing the door, blocked off from her quarry but so close she could feel them, hoping for some sound, some giveaway to point in the right direction so as not to immediately walk into the line of fire; sweating each protracted second because she’d already attracted attention coming into the hotel and couldn’t wait long in the hallway.

  She understood. Stretched out and snagged a bag of food, pulled it toward her, and right hand still steady on the desk, removed four of the small juice bottles. Left-handed, she tossed them in a patterned succession toward the door, the closest she could get to imitating footsteps with what she had.

  Whatever the hunter wanted—noise, vibration, shadow—he’d received the cue. The door blew inward; an explosion neither small nor controlled. Light from the hallway flooded the room. Dust and haze and smoke filled the hole where the door had been.

  Time slowed. Movement filtered into her brain in incremental gaps. The door lay in thirds, one part braced against the foot of the bed, the others strewn across the floor. Ears ringing, eyes smarting, Munroe emptied half the magazine in a diagonal across the hole, placing bullets where she imagined an enemy she couldn’t see, shots that thundered back in recoil, noise that masked the spit of return fire, which came not angled down from a standing man, but up from off the floor, splintering the desk, sending fragments flying.

  He was rolling. Crawling. Moving toward the desk.

  She went up, slid over the top to avoid his line of fire, hands first, counting rounds, giving up precision to protect her head, hoping for a hit to his legs, groin, face, something unprotected, because bullets to his chest didn’t appear to stop him.

  Behind her, stone shattered, spitting shards.

  Beneath her, wood chunked off.

  The slide across the desk continued, a slow-motion eruption of noise and fragments. She dumped onto the floor behind her target, swapping magazines as she went, that frustrating swap that stole seconds and slowed her down, and happened only as quickly as it did because of long practice.

  Fired again until the click.

  Released the second magazine and, wasting more time, loaded the spare while crawling forward. Pulled the slide and, all or nothing, continued around the desk, shooting hand leading the way. And then, after another six rounds, the realization dawned that the return fire had stopped.

  She paused to deafening silence. Ears useless.

  From her position, she could see the edge of the enemy boot.

  She fired into it.

  Nothing.

  Moved to her knees. Inched toward the empty door frame.

  Head out once and back.

  Nothing.

  Again and back.

  Nothing.

  Stood and stepped into the hallway.

  A door opened, and the amped-up adrenaline took her within a hair of firing. Wide eyes in a wizened face spotted her or maybe the gun.

  The door slammed.

  Idiots. People were idiots. Why? Why did they have to risk a look?

  Munroe spun, ears still deaf, eyes burning.

  Lumani was near. Maybe not in the hallway, but close.

  If he’d sent Arben Two to flush her out, then he was here—in a hide watching the exit or in the hotel itself.

  Munroe stepped back into the room, kept low to avoid casting a shadow on the window drapes. Paused at the body on her way to the bathroom.

  He’d been hit several times. Two in the chest, slugs nestled into his vest, one in the calf. Maybe that’s why he’d fallen, but a random shot had killed him, had to have been one she’d taken while on the floor, had gone up through his chin and out the side of his head. He was missing an eye and part of his face.

  Munroe knelt to examine his weapon: HK USP .45 Tactical with a suppressor. Wanted to take the gun but wouldn’t, wanted his vest as well, but it would require too much time and effort to get the thing off him, and so she shoved aside the mattress and knocked on the bathroom door.

  “Neeva, come on out,” Munroe said. “We need to move quickly.”

  The door opened a crack and Neeva peeked out from it.

  “Let’s go,” Munroe said, and she reached for the packed bags beside the bed.

  Neeva said, “You’ve been hit,” and she pointed at Munroe’s thigh, where tears ripped into the pants outlined blood and flesh, and surrounding the holes, wetness seeped and stained the cloth a darker color.

  Munroe paused and glanced down, feeling for the first time what she hadn’t during the rush of adrenaline. Droplets ran from her leg onto the floor.

  “And your face,” Neeva said, and Munroe swiped her free hand across her forehead, her cheek, and drew it away bloody.

  “Give me a second,” Munroe said, and moved past Neeva into the bathroom. Didn’t have time for this crap. Needed to get out before Lumani closed in, but escaping the hotel alive wouldn’t do much good if she was going to bleed out fifteen minutes down the road.

  With Neeva watching, she unzipped and pulled down the pants.

  “In the bag is a bottle of peroxide and the roll of duct tape,” Munroe said. Peroxide she would have used on her hair if Neeva hadn’t taken so damn long in the bathroom. “Get those for me, will you? And quickly please. We need to go.”

  Neeva jerked back, as if from a trance, turned for the bags, and rummaged through items from the drugstore. While Neeva busied herself, Munroe examined the wounds: two from shards of stone, one massive splinter that might as well have been a dagger, and one from a bullet that had grazed her thigh and lodged elsewhere. She gritted her teeth and pulled the largest of the chunks f
rom her leg above the knee. Ran water and soaked the towel, irrigating the wounds as best as she could given the passing time, then pressed the towel as a compress.

  Seconds counted.

  Neeva placed the items on the closed toilet lid, and Munroe tore at the packaging. “Get that open,” she said, and when Neeva handed the hydrogen peroxide back, Munroe dumped it on the open wounds. Took a dry washcloth, wadded it in place against the largest bleeder, and wrapped it with duct tape. It would be enough, would have to hold until she could get a better look.

  The pain she could block out, that was the easy part, and it had nothing to do with being tough or a badass and everything to do with how she’d gotten through those nights in the jungle with the knife coming at her time and again.

  Block it out. Push past it. And then kill.

  Munroe tossed the tape at Neeva. “Pack it up,” she said. “We’re moving.”

  She’d also taken hits to her chest and abdomen—those she’d felt, like a punch in the gut that sucked air out of her and would most likely leave bruises, would keep her sore for a while—hits that should have torn holes through her torso and created massive trauma. In this she’d had the advantage. She’d had reason to expect the hunter would wear body armor and had adjusted during the firefight to compensate. He, on the other hand, had had no idea.

  She wouldn’t bother searching for the slugs, they’d be there waiting, nestled between the leather and the repellent lining durable enough to protect vital organs from an assault rifle. Miguel Caballero, the Armani of armor. They’d been stupid to let her keep the jacket, and now the stupidity had cost them.

  Munroe pulled her pants back up, zipped, and stepped from the bathroom. Grabbed the satchel and the bags from beside the bed, handed the bags to Neeva, and moved on toward the hallway. The time for battle dressing had stolen two minutes.

  At the hole in the wall Munroe paused. In the far-off distance, as expected, came the sirens. If Lumani had been inside the hotel, he would have struck after the firefight, during the moment of weakness, before she’d had a chance to gather her wits and get upright again. But even knowing this she moved with caution, taking another peek out into the hallway—a quick scan front and back before continuing on.