“I can’t let you in on an expired license,” the bouncer is saying.
“Look, man, I just spent seven years in prison. I didn’t have a chance to get to the DMV,” Colin replies.
“Oh, well in that case, I definitely want to let you in my bar,” the bouncer replies.
“Come on, man, can’t you give me a break?” Colin says. “How about trying not to be an asshole right now?”
“Now what, exactly, is that supposed to mean?” the bouncer says, standing up. He’s easily a head taller than Colin, and likely outweighs him by a hundred pounds.
“Okay, time to go,” I say, slipping between them and pulling Colin back through the entrance. “Sorry,” I call over my shoulder to the bouncer as we step out onto the street. It’s damp outside, and the asphalt is wet. It must have rained while I was inside.
I consider Colin, who looks different, in jeans and a White Sox T-shirt. Strangely normal. I realize I’ve only ever seen him in his prison uniform, or in a shirt and tie in courtroom footage.
“What are you doing here?” I ask, my mouth feeling a bit thick as I speak. Everything around me has a strangely pleasant tinge, like the warmth of bathwater. Like the fuzzy thrill of a vivid dream.
“Ava called,” he replies, showing his square little teeth as he grins. “Asked me to come get you. She said you seemed a bit . . . overserved.”
“Such a polite term,” I reply.
“She asked me to take you home.”
“Does she think I need a keeper?”
“Do you?” he asks. And I can feel it radiate off him, that shrewdness. The way he seems to be figuring everything out, as he watches me. The look of a predator, I think. Perhaps this is what Detective Richards meant when he described looking in Colin’s eyes and finding nothing there but a mechanical intelligence.
I, however, see something else. Something that I assume has everything to do with the fact that I’m a twenty-nine-year-old drunk woman and he is an ex-con, freshly released from prison. He seems to come to the realization at the same moment I do.
“How about I take you home.” He says it like he’s describing something illicit. And, like every other time I’ve been in this position in the past year, I feel my heart rate pick up. I wonder what Andrea would think of me. I wonder if this would make my fall from grace complete.
This is the reason I came out tonight, after all. The reason I drank three weak cocktails—no match for my tolerance, after months of straight vodka—and called Ava from the bathroom, leaning into the slur in my words. It’s why I slipped a pocketknife into my purse before I left my apartment, a knife I opened and tucked into the back of my pants as Colin argued with the bouncer. Because, somehow, I knew Ava would call her brother. I knew her instinct would be to protect me. Or, at least, to keep tabs on me. To test me, maybe. See if I will go with Colin, or if I’ve figured out enough already to be afraid of him.
Now there is nothing left to do but move forward. There is nothing left to do but commit to what must happen now.
“Hail a cab,” I reply. “I’ll give you the address.”
* * *
* * *
HE’S A PERFECT gentleman in the taxi. He even seems cheered, momentarily, when he sees my bottle of water. Up until the point I let him smell it, discover it’s vodka. And then he rolls his eyes and takes a long swig from it. He keeps his hands to himself though, holds the car door open for me when we arrive outside my apartment. Waits, patiently, as I fumble with my keys, get us through the front door. Staggering a bit, to make myself look drunk. He follows me up the stairs to my apartment. The presence of the knife, open, throbs at the small of my back as I move.
He’s a perfect gentleman, until I let him through my apartment door. And then, so quickly I have to stop myself from reflexively ducking away, he pins me up against the wall, letting the door slam shut behind us. He kisses me like he’s forgotten how, like he’s acting on instinct alone. It would be just the sort of thing to excite me, if he were nearly anyone else.
I can feel the knife’s tip biting into my skin as he presses me back against the wall. My teeth catch his bottom lip as he pulls open my blouse, revealing the red bra I put on, hoping he’d see it. Knowing how pale my skin would look, almost pearlescent in the low light, against the red lace. Walking that edge, waiting to be dragged over.
His mouth moves to my neck as his thigh slips between my legs. I can feel the pinprick of the knife breaking the skin at the increased pressure, and I gasp, my neck arching. He kisses me again as he rests his hand against the base of my throat. He must be able to feel my pulse hammering against his fingers. He must know, as he presses down, just enough, that I’m afraid of him. No matter how good I am at hiding it. He eases back, looking at his hand against my neck. His eyes almost wild, a look I recognize from the first time I saw him. I think of the knife as he pops the button on my jeans. My head drops back against the wall.
Wake up.
“You couldn’t just keep quiet, could you?” I whisper, and I know he can feel the vibration of my words against his hand.
“What?” he asks.
“You looked right at the recorder and said it. You asked her if everything was in place.”
He eases back, his eyelids lazy, low over his irises. His pupils wide beneath them. Eyes so blue they look fully black in the dark. “Yeah,” he says. “My appeal.”
“That’s not what she said,” I reply, feeling his fingers tighten, almost imperceptibly, around my throat. “She said you made a joke at my expense. That you’d prefer she bring women with bigger tits next time.”
He lets out a hushed little laugh. “Sounds like something I’d say.”
“But it wasn’t,” I say. “And anyway, you’d already lost your appeal by then.”
His fingers grow tighter still around my neck. A warning.
“What are you doing?” he asks.
“You wanted me to know, didn’t you?” I say, watching him carefully. Waiting to see if he will give himself away. “That you killed her. Sarah Ketchum.”
Something comes alive in his eyes, a swarm of recognition. He releases me for a moment, an unexpected opportunity. I should move, I think. I should knee him in the stomach and get him in a chokehold. Land a few punches. Run. But it’s not enough. I’m in danger, now that I’ve turned my cards faceup on the table. Danger if he stays here in the apartment with me. Equal danger if he leaves.
I remain still as he reaches down and slides a hand through the open zipper of my purse, still hanging from my shoulder. Pulls my recorder from my bag, watching its digital screen as the seconds tick by. Recording, ever since I spotted him at the bar. He grins at me, all bared teeth.
“You don’t really think I’d be dumb enough to fall for this, do you?” he asks, switching off the recorder.
“I don’t know,” I say. “I mean, Ava is really the brains in your little operation, isn’t she?”
He smiles, and then, in one swift movement, smashes the recorder’s digital face down onto the little table in my entryway. I jump at the movement, the violence, my nerves wound tight. He lifts the recorder, the glass of its screen a spider’s web of cracks. Gone, just like that, my chance of saving Ted. There is still time to save myself.
I wonder if he’ll leave of his own accord. Now, before he implicates himself. Or I wonder if I can escape back out the door, get down the stairs and out into the street before he can catch me. But even as I think it, I know that either of those possibilities is just as lethal as Colin’s standing inches away from me here in my apartment. I’m no safer with Colin McCarty out in the world than in my apartment, especially once Ava understands how much I know about what they’ve done. No, my only chance is here.
“Ava’s smarter than all of us put together,” he says, almost a whisper, the edge of a growl.
“Too bad she’s saddled with you, then,” I rep
ly, shaking my head. “She never would have hurt anyone, would she? If it wasn’t for you.”
“You’re fucking crazy,” Colin says. “Your sister running off fucked you over good, didn’t it? Ava’s basically a saint. She would never hurt anyone.”
“My friend who found the photo of the Tesla outside of Dylan’s house that night?” I let him see my satisfaction. Let him see that I think I’ve won. “She found a new one, from a tollbooth just across the state line. It’s pretty grainy. But it’s of Ava behind the wheel.”
It’s a lie, of course. I don’t have a new photo. I only have my own suspicions. But I know I’m right. I’m certain. And even though I know it will happen, it still takes my breath when he hits me.
I’ve been hit before, but never like this. Never with bare knuckles, never directly to my face without the protection of headgear or gloves. Sparks bounce across my vision and my stomach roils, and I feel myself make a choking sound at the impact. Choking on nothing, as pain washes across my face and clutches at my skull.
Still, my body is wired for this, to react to these particular circumstances. It takes all the restraint I have to keep myself from stepping into him while he’s on his back foot, striking a decisive kick to his knee, using leverage to shove him back while he’s off balance. It takes everything in me to stand there, with a hand to my face, look him defiantly in the eyes, and let him hit me again. This time catching my jaw and the corner of my mouth, wheeling my head around. I can feel it when my lip breaks open.
“Who knows about it? Your producer?” he asks, and when I shake my head he hits me hard in the stomach. And I only realize I’ve collapsed when my palms hit the floor with a decided smack, pain ringing out through my wrists. I barely register it; it is as if my lungs have both collapsed, like a steel belt is wrapped around my diaphragm. I gasp, but my lungs won’t open, the pain in my abdomen overtaking everything. As if my stomach is a ripened fruit that has split open on impact, pouring out acid inside me, burning me from the inside out. I can’t breathe.
Wake up. Wake up.
He kicks me in the side. Once. Twice. I can feel the pop of my ribs cracking beneath the toe of his shoe.
Panic takes me. Black spots appear before my eyes, like droplets of ink on paper, the beginning patter of rain on pavement. This will only work if I stay conscious. I have to stay conscious. If I black out, that’s it.
He grabs me by the hair, dragging me back up onto my feet. Something in the movement opens up a bit of space within me, and air can flow in again. First, in a tiny corner, and then more, until I’m gasping, taking in huge breaths. I flash back, for a moment, to sitting on the floor of the train car. The man sitting in front of me, waiting until I caught my breath.
“Tell me who’s seen it,” he spits at me, his teeth bared. All animal fury, and it’s the only answer I’ll ever need. He killed her. He killed Sarah Ketchum. A machine that wants things. A man who sees other people as insects. And I have set him free.
“Please,” I beg him as he wrenches my hair back, and I’m afraid the skin will come away from my scalp with the force. I can already feel strands of hair ripping out in his fist. My neck is bared to him. I clutch at his wrist, trying to loosen his grip. Trying to get any relief, as he pulls harder, bends me farther back.
And then he has me by the throat, his hands so tight it’s like breathing through a coffee stirrer. I can hear a whistle in my windpipe as I gasp. I can feel the blood, trapped in my head, pounding in my face, unable to get past the grip of his hand. This is how she died; I know that now. He has done this before.
I grip his wrist with one hand, and with the other, I grab the knife from the back of my waistband. The knife, which is already tipped with my blood. And with all the force I can muster, I sink it into the underside of his arm, just above his armpit. It scrapes against bone, and then slides forward and slips in. The hands around my throat go limp, and Colin lets out a sound like he’s choking on a cough. Like a sip of water has gone down the wrong pipe. He raises his arm, considering the wound.
And then blood is falling from his arm in thick gouts, almost black, surging along with his heartbeat. He grips the wound with his other hand, as if he can stanch the bleeding, but it’s like holding a hand to a running faucet. Blood slips around his fingers, between them. And he looks up at me, as if he’s confused. As if he’s unsure of what to do now, and I will be the one to tell him. He licks his lips, which are going white, and then lurches to the side, collapsing to the floor at my feet. A marionette with cut strings, just a heap of limbs bending at odd angles.
I gasp for air, leaning back against the wall. Breathing so hard, so desperate for oxygen, that it feels like I may just pass out yet. I sink down next to Colin, settling into a puddle of his blood, my shoes already soaked with it, my hands and my jeans sticky and warm. I lean forward, putting my head between my knees as I gasp, and then retch out hot water and a string of bile onto my shoes and Colin’s left hand. I cup my hands over my nose and mouth, just like the man on the L showed me, and I breathe. Breathe, as the voice in my head keeps running on an endless loop. Begging me to wake up.
I wonder how long it takes for someone to bleed to death. Minutes only, I think. The metallic tang of his blood hangs around both of us, the smell of tin and ozone. I could let him go. It could end here. All I have to do is wait.
I sob once, twice, into my cupped hands. A child again, hurt badly enough to be frightened. I want my parents. I want my sister.
Maggie is the one who comes to me. Sitting on my bed, combing through my hair with her fingers. Separating it into sections, preparation for a braid.
Maggie, who wouldn’t let my dad spray the spiders that spun their webs on the balcony outside her bedroom. Who took the brunt of whatever violence was waiting in that car, so that I might have a chance to run away.
My fingers fumble at the buckle of Colin’s belt, though they’re wet with blood and tingling with adrenaline, but finally I’m able to get the buckle free. I yank it from around his waist and wrap it around his upper arm, pulling it tight until the surge of blood from his wound becomes a slow trickle. Pull it tighter still. He doesn’t move, doesn’t make a sound. My phone is in my back pocket, and I leave streaks of blood on the screen as I dial 911.
* * *
* * *
OLSEN MUST HAVE heard the call come over the radio, or someone alerted him to it, because he arrives just after the ambulances and the first wave of cops. One of the paramedics is crouching in front of me, giving me instructions that I’m not following very well, while the other paramedics wheel Colin’s gurney out the apartment door. The paramedic wants me up, on the stretcher; that much I understand. But I keep telling them to wait. I can’t move just yet. Every time I tilt my head, the floor surges beneath me. I’m afraid if I try to move, I will be lost to gravity forever.
“Come on,” the paramedic says, and I try to fend him off. I can’t go. I can’t move. Everything around me is still too fragile; everything could have so easily tipped the other way. I think of the black spots in front of my vision. I think of his grip on my throat. I think of all the points at which it might have turned, might have left me beneath Colin, on the floor. I almost laugh when I think of the call Colin would have had to make to Ava, if he’d killed me tonight. The call, to clean up another woman’s body, when he’s barely out of prison for the murder of the first.
Olsen shoulders his way in, and I can see in his face how bad it is. It must be pretty fucking bad. The color in his lips disappears when he looks at me. Olsen, a guy who doesn’t rattle easily. It seems I found his limit, after all.
He crouches down in front of me. He’s wearing a pair of latex gloves. There’s so much blood, after all. Colin’s. Mine. I’m part of a crime scene, I think. I am evidence now.
“How bad?” I ask, bringing a hand up to my face, though my hands are still sticky with blood. He must realize at the same time
that I do that I’m sitting there in blood-soaked jeans and my bra, because he takes off his jacket and wraps me in it. The warmth of its lining makes me realize how cold I am. My teeth are almost chattering.
“You need a hospital,” he says.
There’s blood in my mouth, I can taste it, like dirty metal and salt, the skin of a penny. I pray that it’s mine and not Colin’s. My face feels numb. My body feels numb. I can’t feel my fingers, as if I’ve been out in the cold for too long.
“Ava called him, to take me home,” I say, my voice a mumble. There’s something wrong with my mouth. At some point I bit into my cheek, hard. Perhaps when his hands were around my throat. There’s a wagging chunk of flesh hanging there, inside my mouth. I can’t keep my tongue away from it.
“You can tell it to us later,” Olsen replies, and his use of the plural is distinct. Us, the representatives of the CPD. Not a man who has been in this apartment before, on his night off. Not a man whom I would very much like to hold me. But I will not ask him to hold me, even if I need it. Even if there is a chance he would.
I allow Olsen and the paramedic to help me up, though the minute I straighten, my ribs feel like a jumble of splintered wood inside me, and I let out a little jerky mewl in spite of myself. When I glance down, dark bruises are already blooming where Colin kicked me. They settle me onto the stretcher and the paramedics make quick work of covering me up and buckling me in. I watch as Olsen remains in the room, his attention now fixed on the pool of Colin’s blood on the floor, as I’m pulled away. Always a cop, I remind myself.
The Lost Girls Page 26