Spiders in the Grove

by J. A. Redmerski

  After cleaning the crime scene with bleach and a laundry basket full of rags, and I pull my car into the privacy of the garage, I take Dante’s body, wrapped in a tarp, and hide him in the trunk.

  I get inside the car and the engine hums to life.

  With both hands on the steering wheel, I sit here for a moment, quietly, calmly, because I know she’s in the car, sitting in the seat behind me. I’m not afraid. Monsters aren’t usually afraid of other monsters.

  I can’t see her face, only the outline of her hair.

  “What did you want me to see in the mirror?”

  “Your face.” Her voice is as soft as I’d always imagined it.

  Then I feel a cold prickle in the side of my neck; my hands go slack, falling away from the steering wheel.

  And then her face comes into view just as my vision is failing me.

  “Willa…”

  Niklas

  I pick up a shaken Jackie at the airport and she doesn’t say anything on the ride to her trailer; she just stares out the windshield, her hands folded on her lap, her legs pressed together. She’s been here for hours, waiting for me to get back from Mexico.

  “Why didn’t you call a cab?” I had asked her when she got inside my car.

  “I just…don’t want be alone at my place right now,” she had said. “I’d just rather be here, out in the open, with a lot of people.”

  I never should’ve sent her to Mexico. I’m gonna regret it for the rest of my life, I can already tell, because I feel guilty as hell. Why I feel guilty is what I haven’t figured out yet. She agreed to it. I told her everything—a big part of me even tried to make her refuse—and I warned her, but she chose to go. Because she wanted the money. I thought that was the reason I went through with it and let her go, after all—because of the money, and the desperation, and how badly she probably wanted to spend it on drugs. I thought to myself, Hey, she’s just a drug addict, and if anything happens to her, it’s her own damn fault. But deep down, I didn’t really feel that way; I was conflicted. Conflicted because I haven’t seen Jackie do drugs in a while. Conflicted because nothing about her lifestyle or her little trailer gives me any real reason to believe she has a drug addiction at all. Conflicted because my suspicions aren’t enough, and when they aren’t enough that usually means they’re dead wrong.

  Which leads me right back to the damn money. She spent every cent of it, not on drugs, but to save the lives of young women she didn’t even know.

  And that’s how I know I’m a fucking prick, and that I was wrong, and that I knew it in my heart all along, but I didn’t want to believe it because I needed someone there to watch Izzy for me. I’m a prick because I used Jackie and ignored what my gut was telling me about her—that she’s a good person, a better person than I’ll ever think of being.

  “Thanks for the ride, Nik,” she tells me and goes to get out of the car.

  I had intended to stay here with her for a while.

  “I thought you didn’t want to be alone?” I say.

  She pauses but gets out anyway, and then peers inside at me. “I don’t,” she says. “I’m gonna go over to Shellie’s”—she points at the trailer across from hers—“I’d say thanks for the free trip to Mexico, but, well…” She doesn’t finish.

  I stop her before she closes the car door. “Uh, Jackie, I really am sorry. About all of this. I shouldn’t have—”

  “Nah, don’t do that, Nik,” she cuts me off. “I’m a grown woman, perfectly capable of making my own decisions. And you warned me. You didn’t do this, I did. I’ll be fine. I made it back alive and that’s what matters. I’ll get over it in a couple days and be back to my old self.” She smiles in at me, trying to lighten the mood, but it just makes me feel even more like the piece of shit that I am. “And we can get back to normal soon too. If you want.” She grins suggestively, but I know she’s just trying to be strong, pretending she’s not traumatized by her experience, and that sex with me is the last thing on her mind.

  I try to force a smile, but I don’t think it comes out as one.

  “I’ll come over tomorrow and check on you,” I say.

  “OK, Nik.” Her smile brightens, and it chokes me up a little because I can tell it’s real and that she’s already forgiven me and that she’s innocent and kind and—dammit!

  I back out of her driveway and pull onto the road, passing up a black SUV blinding me with its bright lights as I leave. Tomorrow I’m going to put a lot of money into her bank account; set her up for life. I know it’ll never make up for what I put her through, but I have to start somewhere.

  Fifteen minutes later, just as I’m reaching for my phone to call a number back that I’d missed—it could be Izzy—Jackie’s name lights up on the screen.

  “Changed your mind?” I say with the phone pressed to my ear as I take the exit heading toward my room above the bar.

  “You have forty-eight hours,” a man says in Italian on the other end of the phone. “I want you for this whore.”

  I pull onto the side of the road; my tires skidding to a halt on the pavement. The SUV…Jackie mentioning unfamiliar cars had been the talk of the trailer park as of late…I should’ve known. I should’ve fucking known!

  “Who the fuck is this?” My heart is hammering in my ears.

  There’s a pause, and then the voice: “You murdered my daughter,” he answers. “Francesca Moretti.”—(my heart stops)—“And in precisely forty-eight hours if you’re not at the address I will text you following this call, this woman will be at the bottom of the ocean.”

  No…

  My mouth is dry; my mind is racing; I hear Jackie’s muffled cries in the background.

  I don’t even have to think about it. “I’ll be there,” I tell Mr. Moretti. “Bet your ass I’m coming.”

  He ends the call and three seconds later the address comes through, and I’m on my way to the airport again, even faster and more reckless than I had been when trying to get to Mexico for Izzy.

  And for the first time in my life, I feel like…I might not make it out of this one alive.

  Izabel

  Mozart is one of the top surgeons in the United States, and while although he performs surgeries on average Americans, he is paid amply to be on-call whenever one of us needs him; and to keep everything he sees and hears and does off the books.

  I’ve never personally met him before—only seen him once—and his real name isn’t Mozart, of course.

  I pull into the driveway of his modest little house on the lake—really, it’s quite a nice house, with an enormous window overlooking the water, and a koi pond alongside an extravagant mosaic walkway, but for the money this guy makes, anything one-story is considered modest.

  Rapping my knuckles on the front door, I feel like he’s taking too damn long to answer when it’s literally only been two seconds, and I start to invite myself in.

  The door opens just before my hand touches the knob.

  Mozart is standing there looking at me; not a maid or a doorman or anyone else, but Mozart himself—modest.

  “Can I help you?” he asks; he eyes me with that look of knowing he’s seen me before but can’t quite remember where.

  “I’m Izabel,” I say, “Victor Faust’s…girlfriend.” Wow, I didn’t expect that to feel so awkward. Not that I don’t love being his girlfriend, but the word just feels so…High School; I don’t know why that even bothers me.

  “I need to see him.”

  Again, I start to invite myself inside, intent on pushing my way past him since he’s taking forever, but again I’m stopped.

  “No one can see my patient,” Mozart says flatly; he’s standing with one hand on the door, the other on the doorframe; his body language is casual, but clearly, he has no intention of stepping aside to let me pass. “Doctor’s orders.”

  Gritting my teeth, I step up to Mozart, my eyes blazing into his. “Move aside or I’ll move you myself.”

  “I’m not afraid of you.”


  Judging his posture and the lackluster tone of his voice, he’s telling the truth. You smug little shit!

  Cocking my head to the side, I look him over; he’s a handsome man of fifty-something, with dark salt-and-pepper hair, scrawny build—I could easily take him without a gun, but he’s Victor’s doctor, and that kind of puts me in a tight spot.

  “Then tell him I’m here,” I demand sharply. “He’ll definitely want to see me.” The first thing that crosses my mind after that comment is that it’s not because I’m his ‘girlfriend’ he’ll want to see me, but because I have information he’ll want; this hurts a little, like a realization biting me in the ass, but I ignore it.

  “Victor doesn’t want to see anybody,” Mozart says, and my heart falls. “Technically, the doctor’s orders came from Victor Faust.”

  I can’t speak for a moment; not only because I have no idea what to say to that, but my chest feels heavy, and there’s an ache in my heart, twisting and squeezing the life out of it.

  I shove him to the side and push my way past anyway.

  When I make it into the room, I expect to see Victor laid-up in a bed with tubes hanging from him, but that’s not what I see at all. Victor is standing near the bed, and he’s putting on his dress shirt, with difficulty. I go over to help him, glad that he doesn’t push me away like I halfway expected him to do. His midsection is bandaged all the way around; over the gunshot wound, blood had seeped through the gauze and dried.

  “What are you doing, Victor?” I try to lead him back to the bed, and this time he pushes me away.

  “I have somewhere I need to be,” he says, not looking at me.

  “Where? Where could you possibly need to be other than this bed after being shot?” There’s no hiding the anger and disapproval in my voice.

  “I tried to tell her,” Mozart says from the doorway, “but she…insisted.”

  “It is fine,” Victor tells him, and buttons up his shirt. “I need a moment alone with Izabel.”

  Mozart nods and leaves the room, closing the door behind him.

  I turn to Victor immediately.

  “If this is about me going to—”

  “Everything is about you, Izabel,” he cuts me off, and I flinch. “It just took getting shot to realize it.”

  I step back, pause, searching for words. “You…got shot because of me?” I’m not sure that’s what he’s saying, but it feels like it.

  Victor sighs; he closes the last button.

  “Can you not see what having you in my life is doing to me?”—(I flinch again at his words, dreading the rest of them)—“It ends today,” he says, and my heart sinks.

  “What ends today?” Please don’t say it…

  He limps over to the chair beside the window where he sits, grimacing with the effort, and attempts to put on his shoes.

  I can’t move; I want to help him with that, too, but forcing my body into motion seems like an impossible task right now.

  “What ends today?” I repeat.

  Raising his eyes from his shoes, Victor looks across the room at me.

  “Tell me about Javier Ruiz,” he says.

  “What do you want to know? You want me to tell you that I never killed him that night in Texas? That I was going to betray you?” (I just assume he knows all this stuff; and even if not, I had planned to tell him anyway.) “Well it’s true, all of it: I didn’t kill him that night, and yes, I agreed to help him, and I was going to betray you. But you know what”—I move across the room toward him, anger, and guilt, in every swift step—“I didn’t betray you. I didn’t help him. And I was only going to go through with it because of my daughter—you would’ve done the same. And you know what else? I did kill him this time.” I stop in front of him, glaring down into his eyes. “You want me to tell you about Cesara? You want me to admit to sleeping with her. Well I did. I did it only because I had to. I did it for my job, for my life—again, you would’ve done the same. What else do you want to know?”

  Victor stands, and I take a step back.

  “Where the hell are you going?”

  He casually walks past me toward the door, taking his suit jacket from the coat rack on his way.

  “Victor!”

  He stops; his back is to me.

  I feel like I’m about to fall apart, that my whole body is held together by a single thread, and that Victor is about to pull it and unravel me when he walks out that door.

  I’m not going to let him.

  But I’m not going to beg him, either. I will never beg a man not to leave me. Not even Victor Faust. I love him, more than anything. But I. Will. Not. Beg.

  “No—this is about the things I said to you the night you asked me to marry you, isn’t it?” I step right up to him, gritting my teeth, and I grab his arm and turn him around to face me. “I meant every word of it. I needed—I still need—time to live on my own; I need to be my own person; I want to be independent—none of that changes just because you’re threatening to…walk away from me. But I still love you, and I want to be with you, Victor. That’ll never change, either.” I’m scrambling to find the reason for why he’s doing this. And I’ll be damned if I let him use what happened in Mexico as an excuse for facing the truth.

  When he still doesn’t say anything—(fight with me, dammit!)—I switch gears. “You betrayed me, too!” I shout into his face. “You gutted me when you tried to pass me off to Niklas! You destroyed that part of me that never could’ve—.” My eyes find his chest; my mouth is incredibly dry. Then I look back at his face, and face my own truth; I tell him what I’ve wanted to tell him since that night. “You destroyed that part of me that never could’ve allowed myself to sleep with someone else, even for the sake of a job.” I said it. I can’t believe I said it. No, I can’t believe I admitted it to myself.

  Look at me, Victor! I clench my fists at my sides.

  But he doesn’t look at me.

  After a moment: “But I didn’t do it for revenge—you need to know that.” I calm myself, and just try to make him understand. “Yes, it’s what I tried to tell myself every time it happened; letting myself believe it was for revenge, that you deserved it because of what you did; it was the only thing that got me through it. But deep down, I only did it because I had to. I did it because there was no other way; I never would’ve made it out of there alive if I didn’t play the role. And I went there for a reason—to find Vonnegut. Because I remember what you said that night, too, Victor, and you were right. About the fate of your Order; about the fate of us all—about the fate of you and me.”

  “It is only a matter of time that all of this freedom, this life, will come to an end. I have told you, since the beginning, that until Vonnegut is dead and I am in control of his Order, none of us are free; we are but a breath away from the end of everything. And no walls or secrets or disguises can hide us forever. Vonnegut must be identified, and eliminated, before he eliminates us.”

  Feeling defeated, I step away from him and look at the floor. “We are a breath away from the end of everything…” I recall his words aloud. But in my heart, they mean something different this time, and I can’t bear it.

  “Do not carry that weight on your shoulders, Izabel,” he says, and I raise my head. “It is part of the job. I do not fault you for it. But let me ask you something.”

  “Ask me.”

  “If it had been me, would you be able to forgive me for sleeping with another woman?”

  I swallow.

  “Yes,” I answer with truth. “I’d hate it, of course—it would make me crazy. But I’d forgive you because…well, because I knew going into this that things would never be like they are out there in the world of the oblivious.”

  Victor nods.

  “Then I did not destroy any part of you, Izabel,” he says. “I only made you stronger.”

  I start to speak, but he doesn’t let me.

  “If I had not done what I did with you and Niklas, do you think you still would have allowed yourself to s
leep with Cesara?”

  “No,” I answer right away. “I wouldn’t have. But like I said, I didn’t do it for revenge; it only made it that I could do it at all.”

  “Then I made you stronger,” he repeats. “So, do not let it weigh on your mind.”

  Reluctantly, I nod. But it’ll always weigh on my mind.

  “Our relationship has never been conventional,” he says. “It was never going to be. And the sooner you learned that, the better.”

  I swallow again, pause, and nervously ask, “So, does that mean you…?” Hell, I can’t even say it out loud.

  “No,” he answers. “I have never, but that is not to say I would not have if, for the sake of a job, I had no other choice. Just like you.”

  Oh my God, my throat feels like I swallowed a handful of bees, but I suck it up, and fight down the jealousy. Because he’s not wrong in admitting it, and I wasn’t wrong in doing it.

  “And did you find Vonnegut?” he asks a second later, already knowing that I didn’t, or he’d know by now.

  “No,” I answer with regret. “He wasn’t there. I thought he was a Russian man named Iosif Veselov, but it wasn’t him.” I lower my head momentarily. “But before I killed Javier, he gave me information. Lysandra Hollis. He said this woman works closely with Vonnegut; I’m going after her next.”

  “No,” he says. “There will be no more hunting Vonnegut. There will be no more…anything.”

  “What do you mean…?”

  He turns with pain-filled movements; he can’t look me in the eyes.

  “I am…tired, Izabel,” he says, and my heart sinks deeper. “I tried. I tried with everything in me to live this life, to mold and shape the man I have always been, into a man unfamiliar to me—I even asked you to be my wife, a gesture I never thought I would consider in my lifetime being what I am. But I am not that man. I will never be that man.”

  “What are you saying, Victor?” I walk toward him; my heart is pummeling my ears. I want to force him to look at me. And finally, he does.

  “As you are becoming stronger, Izabel,” he says with a heavy heart, “I am becoming weaker. I have stepped so far out of the only life I have ever known, that I do not know myself anymore. My mind is no longer as sharp as it used to be; I stumble when I walk; I have become blinded to the obvious dangers around me, and that is a fatal mistake for a man like me. I cannot continue to live this way. No matter how much I wanted it, that kind of life with you, I can no longer pretend that it will ever be mine to have.”