Under the Bones

by Kory M. Shrum

  They were running out of time.

  Lucy. King. And Lou.

  They were all running out of time.

  5

  Lou dropped Konstantine on the floor of her apartment. She left him there, crossing to her back bathroom where she opened the cabinet and removed her kit. A tin box the size of a laundry basket. It had plastic shelves within, army green. The top row held tweezers and twine, needles and iodine in its square compartments. The second row, rubbing alcohol and gauze of every conceivable shape and size. Wraps and cotton. Surgical scissors and clamps. Fire for cauterizing. A small bottle of whiskey. A mouthguard and bit of leather for biting down. A belt for slowing circulation.

  She carried the box into the living room with a handful of old, faded and stained towels, their edges frayed. She rolled the man onto his side and put two towels beneath him to protect her floors. Then she pulled him up long enough to get the shirt over his head. With his cheek to hers, she could smell him. Blood and gunsmoke and beneath that…something that belonged only to Konstantine.

  She let go and his head hit the hardwood floor too hard. He didn’t complain.

  She inspected the wounds. The deep cut in the neck. Four bullet holes—not three—in the torso. Two knife wounds in the back. He’d lost a lot of blood, but she could help with that. She, like Aunt Lucy, was O negative. If it came to it, she had the tubing for a transfusion in the bottom of the kit.

  But she would begin with sanitizing the cuts, then digging the bullets out. She dragged the lamp over and angled it, giving her a bright, unobstructed view of the work ahead of her. Then she filled a plastic white bucket with warm water.

  She settled down beside him to begin, her knees pressed against his ribs.

  With alcohol and iodine, she disinfected the wounds. She pried open the scorched flesh, checking for debris. She inserted the locking tweezers into the first bullet hole, feeling it scrape against metal. A sensation she felt in her teeth. She opened the tweezers wider, spreading the wound until the metal slid around either side and clamped down.

  With a sucking sound, she plucked the bullet free and dropped it into the pan beside her utensils.

  Konstantine’s eyes flew open, followed by a stream of Italian curses. “Abbi pietà di me!”

  His eyes fluttered and she hoped he would drop back into sleep. But as she grabbed the second bullet. He was awake and cursing again. She moved fast, dropping the second bullet into the pan beside the first.

  His hand seized her wrist when she inserted the tweezers into the third hole. He rolled those brown eyes up to meet hers. He was fully awake now, panting. He clutched her wrist hard enough to bruise it, but her face remained placid.

  She slowly arched a brow. “Do you want me to leave it in?”

  His nostrils flared, eyes dilated. A sheen of sweat stood out on his brow. “Be quick.”

  She plucked the third bullet out as he opened and closed his other fist. The bloodied knuckles went white, filled with color, only to go white again with each clenching motion.

  She moved onto the fourth hole without pause. This bullet must have been blocking an artery rather than sitting squarely in muscle. Once plucked, blood ran like rivulets across his abdomen, following the lines of his muscles. He groaned, releasing her wrist as the tweezers hit the pan.

  Too much blood. She grabbed the metal rod no wider than the face of a dime. She plugged it into the wall socket beside her bed and the heating element immediately began to glow.

  “What are you—?” Konstantine began.

  “You’ll bleed to death if I don’t.”

  “If you don’t what?”

  She stuck the white-hot rod into the oozing bullet hole and straight out again. The blood smoked and hissed.

  Konstantine howled and kicked the floor with his boots. Lucky for him she’d already moved the rod away or he’d have cauterized more than the bullet wound.

  She wet a towel in the bucket of warm water and raked it over his skin, trying to see what was left to be done. She let her left hand rest on his stomach, the towel pressed beneath it as she inspected each wound in turn. That gash where his neck and shoulder met would certainly need stitches.

  He came up onto his elbows, trying to inspect it for himself. “I’m fine.”

  “Lie down.”

  “No more. I’m fine.”

  “Lie down or I’ll put you down.”

  He didn’t. He placed a hand over hers. The sweat on his face shone.

  Lou met his gaze, weighing it with her own.

  “Please,” he said, squeezing her hand.

  She threw a right hook across the man’s jaw. He dropped, the elbows folding out from underneath him.

  She shook out her fist before breaking open one of the nylon suture packets.

  “I don’t have a way to anesthetize you and I don’t want to listen to you cry anymore.”

  You don’t have to explain. He can’t even hear you.

  She took a breath and pushed the needle through his flesh, deep enough to close the wound in his neck without popping through the skin. When metal peeked through the other side, she tugged the black string through in small jerky movements until there was enough blood to make the string glide slick.

  She stitched the bullet holes and the ugly cut in the side of his neck. Then she added the rough gauze pinning it into place with masking tape. The water in the bucket was pink by the time she finished. Stained, bloody rags bobbed on its surface.

  Confident she’d repaired the worst of it, she pressed her fingers to his pulse and found it rapid. His breath wasn’t shallow. No blue tint to the lips or fingernails. His skin was warm to the touch. He might need that transfusion yet.

  The urge to bend forward and lick the blood and salt from his skin swirled in her mind. She ran a finger across his jaw where she’d struck him. The line of it already darkening with the promise of a bruise.

  You need fucking therapy, her exasperated aunt had cried once. Lou snorted at the memory.

  She sat back on her heels and stared at the unconscious man. She rolled him onto his side to check his back.

  If she had wanted to kill him, why stitch him up? Why stare at his body, searching for signs of hypovolemic shock? Why give him blood from her own veins if only to kill him later?

  You know why, her father said.

  If she was being honest with herself, she did know.

  It was what had happened one night a month after her fourteenth birthday. She’d slipped in her sleep, unbidden, to the bedroom of an Italian boy.

  Why him?

  Of all the boys and all the bedrooms in the whole wide world, why had she appeared in his?

  She had theories.

  Their shared hatred for Martinelli had been enough. The man responsible for killing Lou’s father was the same man who ruined and betrayed Konstantine’s mother.

  But was that really all of it?

  Two dark-hearted children drawn to each other because they hated the same man? But Lou hadn’t known Martinelli was behind the kill yet. So this theory was shit.

  As well as a second theory that he could slip too. That perhaps they were drawn together out of that commonality. But if he could slip, he would have saved his own life tonight. Used it to cement his power with the Ravengers. So that wasn’t it either.

  And why should she care about the why anyhow? Konstantine was a street rat, like any other piece of gang trash that she wiped from the world. Worse, he was a leader of the trash heap. He was the puppeteer and she wanted to cut his strings.

  And she could. Right now. While he was laying on her apartment floor with the Martinelli crest on his ring finger. A gold ring bearing an ornate capital M and two dragons chasing one another head-to-tail around the letter.

  He’s an enemy. I should be putting a bullet in his head, not draining my veins for him.

  She pulled her reloaded Beretta and pressed it against the temple of the sleeping man. The cool trigger thrummed beneath her finger. The slightest pr
essure would be all it took to spray his brains across the floor.

  He didn’t stir. He didn’t open his eyes, his soft breath fogging the wooden floor beneath his mouth.

  I’m not your enemy, he’d said to her once.

  Was that true? Or the sort of lie that a man like Konstantine relied on?

  It felt as though they’d reached some agreement in their last encounter. He’d delivered the information needed to clear her father’s name, and restore him to hero status. And she’d helped him find his mother’s unmarked grave. Helped him unbury her and carry her back home.

  But he was still the son of the man who had her father killed. He was still one of the crime lords she was trying to wipe from the face of the earth.

  It didn’t matter how he’d looked the night they dug up his mother. The glow of his relaxed and pensive face as they’d stepped from his dark apartment into the Italian countryside to find the night alive around them with insect song, summer in full swing, and the heat so thick it was like trying to breathe with a blanket over her face.

  Yet she remembered how the sweat on his neck and back had shone in the moonlight, every muscle shifting as they dug their spades again and again into the dirt. The look in his eyes when the spade hit bone—when he knelt and uncovered what remained of her with gentle hands.

  Lou lowered the gun from his head.

  Nothing needed to be decided now. Others waited. Henry deVanti. Ricky Flint. Freddie Calzone.

  She would start there. And if those three men weren’t enough to slake her bloodthirst tonight, Konstantine would still be here.

  He wasn’t going anywhere. There was nowhere in this world he could go that she couldn’t find him.

  * * *

  Her own wounds cleaned, and guns and ammo replenished, Lou stepped into the emptied linen closet once more. She planned to start on the East Coast, where the sun was below the horizon, and work her way west. Henry deVanti in Atlanta or Ricky Flint in New York—either would do. And hopefully by the time she was done with them, sunset would have made its way to San Diego.

  Surprise me, she told that inner compass. Henry or Ricky, it made no difference to her.

  The thin veil between this side of the world and the other began to give, sliding out from under her. Her hand shot out and touched the grainy wood of the closet’s opposite wall. She held this space.

  The sounds materialized first. A taxi laying on its horn. Someone shouting in a harsh New York accent. Voices speaking Chinese excitedly. Tourists arguing over prices while a tired child cried.

  She stepped out of the closet into the streets of New York’s Chinatown. The scent of fried noodles and fish hit her nose. The red gates at the end of the avenue were spotlighted, twin dragons ready for a fight. The street itself illuminated with paper lanterns suspended on string.

  So where was Ricky?

  She scanned the crowd, checking each face in turn. She spotted him on a metal stool outside Mr. Wang’s Noodle Shop, a walkup window where any passerby could stop for a quick bite. Ricky with his black baseball cap turned backwards slurped fat noodles into his mouth. His motorcycle boots with bright brass buckles kicked out arrogantly into the walkway, so that pedestrians had to maneuver around his extended legs in order to continue down the street. A mother scowled, angling her large stroller around Ricky’s legs first, and then a grate spewing foul air.

  A subway car screeched somewhere out of sight.

  Lou leaned against the wall, her guns hidden beneath her leather jacket. She pretended to look at her phone, no doubt resembling any number of women her age all up and down New York’s streets. Few would’ve noticed her occasional glance over the top of her screen at the man slapping cash onto Mr. Wang’s counter before entering the wave of nighttime bodies.

  He worked a toothpick in his mouth as he walked past Lou up the sidewalk.

  She fell into step behind him, noting how he moved, which side he favored. If his gait was short or long. His pants loose or tight. Buckles or straps that could be pulled or wrapped around a throat. Bulges where a gun might sit, or the hint of a sheathed knife.

  She enjoyed this part of it almost as much as the kill itself. Measuring her prey. Sizing them up. She always knew a great deal about her targets long before she put her hands on them.

  When he started down the steps of the subway tunnel, she followed. She kept the same pace and distance. When he slapped his commuter card to the turnstile’s sensor, she paused to glance at a magazine stand, pretending to give a damn about a European prince and his impending marriage, a celebrity’s new baby. Someone’s bout in rehab.

  When he moved toward the northbound platform, she put the magazine down and stepped between two ticket-dispensing machines, and out onto the platform. She hovered there, at the very edge where the darkness met the stairwell.

  This put her in front of Ricky.

  No matter. She calmly walked forward, spacing herself evenly away from everyone else as the others had done. The train came. Everyone got on. Ricky worked his way to another car while she stood near the door between a pregnant woman reading a romance novel and a black man with a purple mohawk and gauged earrings wide enough to hook a finger through.

  She hovered, not daring to raise her hand to the handles overhead, lest someone see how much heat she was packing under her leather.

  When Ricky exited four stops later, she let him go. Making her way to the back of the car as a new throng of passengers wedged themselves aboard. A gaggle of drunk girls cackled loudly, everyone a similar shade of blonde, eyes painted black. They were her age and yet she couldn’t have felt more different from these candy-coated creatures than if she’d been born with a second head.

  Lou slipped through the shadows connecting the two cars and found herself in Central Park.

  A small stream babbled off to her right. A dog and its master trotted by, white reflectors bouncing in the darkness.

  She spotted Ricky a few feet away, smoking a cigarette and talking to a Latina woman with hair as red as the dress stretched tight over her comically large breasts. When she turned away from him, he grabbed her wrist and brought his open palm across her face.

  Lou’s hand was on her gun before she thought about it. She was going to put a hole through that hand. She caught herself, reigning in her thirst.

  She would have him, but there was a process. A fool-proof procedure and she wouldn’t throw that away just because he’d pissed her off.

  Be careful, Jack said. And he’d said as much when he was alive. When you’re angry, that’s when you have to be careful.

  They’d been doing dishes together. He was wet up to his elbows and she was drying plates. She’d been complaining about her mother, no doubt. And Jack told her the story of Bernie Jensen, a young agent who got himself shot twice in the face because he couldn’t control his temper.

  Anger is powerful, he’d told her. That’s why you have to be very careful when it’s on you.

  When it’s on you.

  He’d made it sound like a beast that could seize you in the dark if you were caught unaware. She’d had quite the education in anger before his death, and much more after. And she had to agree with him. It was a beast in the dark and sometimes you didn’t know it was on you until the teeth were quite deep.

  Her eyes scanned the park. Most had vacated this area in the coming nightfall. Just as well.

  When Ricky’s hand connected with the side of the woman’s face a second time, Lou slipped up right beside him.

  She grabbed the back of his neck and pulled, yanking him clean off his boots, away from New York and what remained of his life.

  Central Park was replaced with an isolated lake thick with midnight fog.

  Once the fresh air hit her, she let him tumble to the sandy bank. One of his hands, the one that had slapped the woman, hit the water’s edge. The place didn’t smell like pine as her Alaskan retreat did, but of dense forest all the same. Trees she’d never smelled in the U.S. mingled with the evergre
ens. Linden perhaps. Maybe scotch broom.

  Lucy would know.

  Her chest clenched.

  The frogs fell silent, the croaking chorus stalling at Ricky’s splashing. But the rest of the night remained alive with sound. Something screeched in the darkness overhead. Nighthawks or an owl searching for a meal. Crickets continued to sing. She breathed deep. The only shame was the cloudy sky blocking out the stars.

  This wasn’t her favorite lake. But this little plot of remote Nova Scotia wilderness was priceless in its own way. It was harder to find water like this far from human eyes and the industrialized world. The perfect entry point to her alien dumping ground.

  Ricky’s boots slid in the dirt as he regained his balance. He reached behind his back for the .357 he kept there. Then his face pinched with predictable confusion. They always reached for their guns like this, only to find she’d already relieved them of it.

  Lou pointed the pistol at his face.

  This was her process. A clear-cut, no error approach to killing. Take them to the water’s edge. Somewhere dark. Somewhere remote. Slip through the waters to La Loon, that otherworldly destination unknowable to any but herself and her victims. Kill them and leave their bodies for the beast who prowled its shores.

  No bullets. No casings. No gunpowder or evidence. No bodies. No blood. No witnesses, except maybe those from the point of abduction—like the prostitute turned drug mule who no doubt stood in Central Park right now, trying to wrap her head around Ricky’s disappearance.

  “Get in the water,” she said.

  He didn’t. Instead, he lunged toward her, hands out to grab the gun.

  No sense of self-preservation then. She shot his hand. The one he’d used to slap the woman in Central Park. It stopped him in his tracks. He turned, howling, crushing his wounded hand protectively against his body. This did nothing to staunch the blood. It ran down his front, soaking his shirt.