by Gary Jonas
“Yeah, a movie sounds good.”
“Well, all right then! It was my suggestion, so it’s my treat.”
The movie was okay, but afterwards over drinks at Hudson’s, the conversation about the movie was phenomenal. I admired the way Liz relished each action scene and her knowledge of fighting chorography. Amanda’s eyes glazed over as we talked about Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan. By the end of the night, I was glad that Amanda had such a good friend and ally at DGI. I couldn’t always be there to watch her back, so I was thankful Liz was.
CHAPTER THREE
I felt great as I put my students through their paces. I thought of that chunk of meteorite the whole time, how it was melted down, poured out, hammered and folded, and finally sharpened until it could slice through a sheet of paper.
The class wrapped up and my students went their separate ways. They were friendly enough with each other, but not tight like Jessica’s classmates. Jessica was responsible for that. From the second she walked in, she got to know everyone. And then she made sure they knew each other. She did a better job of pairing women up to spar than I did. While I looked at physical attributes and skill level, she looked deeper, and that’s why I trusted her to suggest pairings. The women she set up as sparring partners always ended up going out for coffee together afterwards.
Monique and Brianne burst through the door. “Where’s the party at?” Monique shouted.
More women followed with bottles of champagne, candles, and strings of lights then went to work turning my bare-ass dojo into a cotillion. I did my best to stay out of the way.
“Where’s Jessica?” everyone kept asking. The guest of honor decided she wanted to make a statement. She walked in last, carrying a stack of pink boxes covered in arcane designs and magical sigils.
“Voodoo Doughnuts!” the other women all said at the same time. The boxes had obviously cast their spell. Before Jessica could put them down, the women swarmed her trying to attack the tasty goodness.
“I’ve never had one,” I said.
The crowd gasped and turned to me as one.
Jessica laughed. “Kelly gets first pick, because she’s our gracious hostess and because it’s her first time.”
“Voodoo Virgin!” The shout passed like a virus through the crowd, an embarrassing virus.
“I thought I taught you guys self-control and discipline.”
“Girl, you must be a total Voodoo Virgin,” said Monique. “Now get over here and pick yours already, ‘cause we’re dying.”
I looked in the boxes. The doughnuts looked like doughnuts to me, sprinkled with various kid’s cereals and drenched in chocolate. Then one of them got my attention. It was shaped like a doll with frosting X’s for eyes and a pretzel stick jutting out where the heart would be. Raspberry filling oozed from the wound.
I smiled. “That’s mine.”
“Knew you’d pick that one.” Jessica took out the voodoo doll and handed it to me. The other women fought over the rest of the doughnuts with all the skill and none of the discipline I’d taught them. Erika popped open a bottle of champagne and filled the flutes I’d bought.
“We should make this a regular thing,” Monique said.
“Might as well,” I said. “These glasses won’t get used otherwise.” I bit into my doughnut and my mouth flooded with raspberry. Okay, that and drool. With one bite, I got the enthusiasm.
Monique raised her glass. “To Jessica,” she said. “And to better times.”
Jessica’s cheeks turned pink. She pushed her long blond hair behind one ear. She raised her glass and looked at me. “And let’s toast the hostess, who’s looking incredibly uncomfortable right now” – laughter interrupted her – “for providing a place for us, not just tonight where we’re stuffing our faces, but every day. A place where we can come and get strong again, no matter what crap we’ve been through. To Kelly. Our mentor.”
“To our mentor!”
That word. Jonathan had always been my mentor, had always shown me there was more to life than killing. I didn’t realize – hell, I’d never dreamed – that I would become a mentor to anyone else. It took Jessica to point it out to me. And standing there surrounded by my students, all of whom had gone through their own darkness, and were now celebrating themselves and who they were becoming, that word felt right. It felt absolutely right.
When the party ended, Jessica stayed to help me clean up.
“It’s all right,” I said. “I’ve got this.”
“Nonsense,” she said. “You’ve been there for me, the least I can do is help clean up, and you know I’m always interested in doing the least I can do.”
I smiled, and we worked together to put the dojo back together. When we finished, the only sign there had been a party was the smile we shared.
“See you next class,” she said before I closed and locked the door behind her. I watched her get safely to her car and drive away.
Jessica never made it to the next class.
CHAPTER FOUR
I was parsing through my email, deciding whether or not I wanted to play bodyguard at Snoop Dogg’s next Leafs party, when someone knocked on my office door. There was a time when I wouldn’t have let anyone into my office or my apartment upstairs. Or into my life.
“Come in.”
Monique opened the door just enough to stick her face in. “Can I bother you, Miss Kelly?”
Her tone of voice made me look up from my screen. Monique hadn’t called me Miss Kelly since her first few lessons, until she got comfortable along with everyone else in Jessica’s class. She opened the door a little more. Monique is a big woman with an equally big, bold voice. The woman standing in front of me was doing her best to take up as little space as possible.
“What is it, Monique?”
“It’s Jessica.” Monique closed the door behind her. “I can’t find her.”
Jessica missed class the day before, but it wasn’t the first time I’d had a student skip when she was in the middle of a big life change. It was almost a rite of passage, just another step forward into a better life. “That doesn’t mean anything’s wrong.”
“No, Miss K, there’s more to it than that. When she didn’t come to class, I thought maybe she was sick. We were supposed to go out for drinks tonight after her first day at work, you know, to celebrate. After she missed class, I texted her but she didn’t answer. I called her earlier today and left a message about tonight. I was supposed to pick her up from work, so I went, but they said she wasn’t there and escorted me out.”
I filed that away.
Monique fiddled with her necklace, a long gold chain with a small cross hanging on it. “I got scared and went to her apartment and knocked. I thought maybe she was really sick or something, you know? She didn’t answer and the place was dark. I went back downstairs to the lobby and looked in her little mailbox slot and it was stuffed full, like she hasn’t picked it up for a couple of days.”
“Hmm.”
“And then one of her neighbors came in and asked if I was watching Jessica’s apartment. He said he ain’t seen her since Monday.”
The same day we’d had the party. Now it was Thursday.
“Have you called the police?”
Monique rolled her eyes. “Miss Kelly, you know the police don’t listen. Not to us.”
I knew what she meant. Jessica wasn’t a Highlands Ranch soccer mom. She had a troubled background and no family. The police would put Jessica’s disappearance down to another bad boyfriend, or a drug problem. They’d shrug, tell Monique to give it a couple of days and then they’d get back to pushing their papers around.
“I’m afraid she’s like them other girls that’s gone missing, Miss K.”
“What girls?” I asked.
“You ain’t gonna read about them in the paper or see them on the news, but over the past few months, my office has been getting calls about missing girls. Most range from fourteen to seventeen, and they been in and out of foster care. Cops say they’
re runaways, and my boss agrees, but that just don’t ring true to me.”
“I trust your instincts, but Jessica doesn’t fit that profile. She’s an adult.”
The way Monique’s face fell, made me add, “But I’ll go check her apartment. Cool?”
Monique finally smiled. “I was hoping you’d say that. Thanks, Miss Kelly.”
***
The windshield fogged as my truck’s heater battled the cold outside. Everyone thinks Denver is covered in snow eight months of the year thanks to South Park, but mostly it’s miles of brown lawn and bare trees punctuated by storms that leave two feet of snow which melt away in a couple of days. We were between storms as I headed west on Colfax into Lakewood. The sun had already slipped behind the foothills and rolled on toward California to disappear into the ocean. Clouds gathered behind the mountains like a listless mob waiting for an excuse to riot.
Jessica’s apartment building stood off Fourteenth near Casa Bonita, a locally beloved tourist trap of a restaurant featuring cliff divers and Montezuma’s revenge if you ate anything besides the sopapillas. I pulled into the parking lot facing the mustard yellow and brown brick building. It rose three stories with a Mansard roof. I walked past a chain-linked playground with a rusty old set of pipe metal monkey bars that would have caused any helicopter parent to crash and burn. There was a fenced-in sand pit for a dog run and a Saturn with a Denver boot on the front tire, locking it in place. I imagined a lot of the tenants were locked in place too.
I stepped into the hall and suffered a 420 contact high. It smelled like the Sixteenth Street Mall on any given day. A bank of mailboxes lined the wall and I checked Jessica’s. Monique was right – it was stuffed full of flyers and other junk mail. A sign over a door at the end of the hall read, “Office.” It was dark through a window next to the door, though the Venetian blinds were open. Nobody home. Didn’t matter – I wasn’t going to need a key, or even a door.
Back outside, I walked around the building to stand under Jessica’s third floor window. It was full night now and there were no lights on in her apartment. I took a running start and climbed the wall to her balcony. An old, cheap sliding-glass door stood between me and Jessica’s apartment. I put on a pair of gloves to hide my fingerprints and yanked the door to the side. I counted on the frailty of the latch and hoped Jessica didn’t use a broom handle in the door track. I got lucky on both counts as the lock snapped and the door slid open. I made a mental note to reiterate to my students that living on the third floor was no guarantee that someone wouldn’t come through the balcony door.
Jessica’s apartment was sparsely furnished but clean and tidy. The air felt and smelled stale. I barely caught a whiff of her perfume coming from the bathroom. It was a studio apartment, so half the space was a carpeted living room that doubled as a bedroom, and the other half was a vinyl-floored kitchen. The bathroom door was open and a small closet door was closed. Jessica’s coat hung in the closet along with her winter clothes. Her purse hung from the back of a kitchen chair. Jessica’s checkbook sat on the table next to a stamped and sealed credit card envelope.
A faint stink wafted in from the kitchen. I opened the trash can lid. On the top was a foam container that had held raw chicken. It reeked. I walked back to the kitchen table, picked up her checkbook, and flipped it open. The carbon copy of her last check was dated Monday and made out to Citibank. I assumed it was in the sealed envelope.
A small fishbowl filled with cloudy water sat on the table. A little ploop sound caught my attention as the fish inside gasped for air from the surface. It was a Siamese fighting fish, red and blue and beautiful, but now listless in its dirty water.
“Dammit.” The fish confirmed everything I feared. Jessica might have had a reason to suddenly run, but she never would have left her fish to die. “Tough luck, little fish.” I dropped in a few pellets from a fish food container. They disappeared quickly.
I checked the bathroom for any signs of blood in the sink and shower and did the same with the kitchen sink. Nothing. If Jessica had put up a fight, it hadn’t been here. If someone grabbed her, they’d taken her to a secondary location, the most dangerous situation you can get yourself into. I checked the front door for signs of forced entry, but there were none. The door was locked and I found Jessica’s keys in her purse along with a couple of twenties in her wallet. I went back to the balcony door and that’s when I saw the broom handle lying on the floor. So, she had used one, but it wasn’t in place. She might have been outside, or opened the door, but that was unlikely in winter. I examined the sliding door for other signs of tampering and only found my own, which I covered up.
I started to leave the way I’d come, then stopped and looked back at Jessica’s table. Specifically at the fish bowl. I had wanted to leave no trace.
Ploop.
“Oh, to hell with it.”
I walked back to the table, scooped up the fish bowl and left through the front door.
CHAPTER FIVE
“Nothing? Not a trace?”
“Not a trace.” My headache returned as I told Amanda about Jessica’s apartment. We sat in my office and watched Jessica’s fish circle its bowl. The water sparkled.
“It’s a classic locked-room mystery with no clues.” Amanda tapped the bowl. The Siamese fighting fish brightened from purple to scarlet.
“Except maybe the broom handle. Though the sliding door was latched.”
“There are other ways to get into a room.”
“You’re thinking magic.” I didn’t want to consider that option. If magic were involved, it meant the possibility that I had somehow endangered Jessica, and that all my students, women I was trying to empower, were now potential victims not only of their own abusers, but of someone who wanted to get to me.
“Maybe not magic exactly. You said the apartment was dark?”
“Yup.”
“Full of shadows?”
“Ah. You think it’s vampires or Watchers?” Both creatures were able to travel through shadows. I’d been dragged along one night by a Watcher. It was a real pain in the ass way to travel, not nearly as cool as it sounded.
“That would be my guess. Are you still in touch with Victor?” The way Amanda said “in touch” made me cringe inside. Victor Pavlenco is a vampire. Once upon a time I was subjected to his charm and it turned me into the worst sort of fangirl. The first time I saw Victor, I wanted to have his babies – and conceive them right then and there in front of a room full of strangers. I’d long overcome the spell, but sometimes I still thought of his handsome face and how it felt to want someone that much.
“I haven’t spoken to him in a while. I’m not even sure how I’d reach him.”
“That’s a shame.” Amanda wasn’t particularly fond of Victor, but she had a bit of a thing for vampires. Too many paranormal romance novels. “I can see if one of the vampires at DGI would be willing to contact him.”
“Yeah, good luck, Amanda. Victor likes his privacy.”
“Oh, he might be tempted if your name is mentioned.” Amanda’s grin made me want to punch her straight through the desk between us.
“That’s the last thing I want you to do. DGI doesn’t need to know my business.”
“I’ll be discreet, I promise.” Amanda stood up to leave. “I can ask tonight as a matter of fact. I’m working late in-office. There’s bound to be a vampire or two hanging around.”
“How is life at DGI?”
Amanda shrugged. “Oh, you know. I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you.” She meant it. DGI made sure their employees kept a tight lid on company business. Otherwise, they doled out more than a reprimand in the permanent record. Amanda only mentioned vampires because I already knew they existed.
Her grin got worse. “You know, I could always talk to Victor for you.”
“I thought you were dating someone already.” With Amanda, it was a safe bet to assume she was always dating someone.
“Who, Chaz? He’s pretty enough, but
terribly boring. And he doesn’t read comic books, couldn’t tell you the difference between DC and Marvel. I’ll probably dump him before the next Avengers movie comes out.”
“You think Victor reads comic books?”
“No, of course not, but the hickies might make up for that.”
“You’re a disturbed woman.”
“I try.” Amanda reached for the doorknob.
“Wait.” I picked up the fishbowl. “Have a parting gift.”
“Oh, no. I don’t do sushi.” Amanda waved her hand in a warding gesture.
“I’m not asking you to eat it, just take it with you. Give it a good home.”
“I had fish when I was a kid. They’re a pain in the ass. Besides, you need a pet.”
“I don’t need a pet.”
“Then get an aquarium and a few more fish and set it up in the waiting area. Add to the Asian ambiance.”
“I’m going to hurt you for that, white girl.”
“Before or after I do this favor for you?” She spread her fingers and waved as she left. My headache left with her.
I watched Jessica’s fish swim and swim and get nowhere, just like me. I dropped in a few pellets and left the office for my dojo. Jessica’s class would be coming in soon and I wasn’t looking forward to facing the other students, especially Monique. I had a feeling she didn’t just approach me on her own but was prompted by the other women. Maybe she drew the short straw.
I took my favorite katana out of a display cabinet. I studied the pattern of dark lines threading through the blade, made by folding the metal and burning away impurities, like carbon. It wasn’t as cool as a knife made from a meteorite, but it had saved my ass on many occasions. The katana flashed as I put it through its paces, letting my mind wander, hoping to make connections. The sword’s balance was near-perfect, the edge sharp and deadly. I’d lost count of the people I’d killed with that katana. I thought it was funny how carbon was an impurity in metal, but that people are carbon-based. To make a weapon, it was necessary to burn away the humanity.