by Marcus Sakey
The door to the men’s room was heavy. The space was all marble and gold plating. A Spanish-language tape played over the sound system, a resonant voice saying, “¿Puedo afilar mi lapis?” and then, a second later, “Can I sharpen my pencil?” A couple of the stalls were filled, but not his. Given the choice, men generally took stalls at the end over the middle. Daniel stepped inside, fumbled with the lock. The Sig Sauer was still strapped behind the toilet tank. He peeled the tape away. The gun was wonderful and terrible in his hands.
“Me siento enfermo . . . I’m feeling sick. Me siento enfermo . . . I’m feeling sick.”
Daniel dropped onto the toilet. The porcelain was cold through the thin material of his slacks. He buried his head in his hands. The gun pressed hard against his temple.
She’s lying to you.
But why?
Was she working with Bennett? Could this be some sort of elaborate scam?
It didn’t seem possible. No one could have planned on his vanishing, his amnesia.
So what happened leading up to that?
The parts of his life he could remember, it all glowed. But it was mostly history. Of the week or two leading to her “death” and his dash to suicide, he’d gotten nothing but the briefest of flashes. What he could remember was confusing and painful. There was guilt and shame and sickness, he knew that. Something terrible had happened. He’d assumed that was the arrival of Bennett.
But what if he was wrong? What if it was something else?
What if you discovered something that changed the way you felt about her?
What if she turned out not to be the person you thought?
An urge to retch, cry, scream tore through him. He clapped his hands against his head, hard, the hit of the gun blunt and painful.
Ever since Maine, he had put his whole trust in Laney. He’d rebuilt his identity, such as it was, around her. Even when he’d thought her dead, he’d defined himself through her.
What if she’d been the problem from the beginning?
He had a powerful impulse to get up, walk out of the bathroom and the club and the city. To just go. Pick a direction and leave all this behind, all these questionable certainties and uncertain questions. To forget figuring it out, and just start again as someone new, somewhere else.
But as who? Where? Why?
You are who you choose to be. But does that mean you can choose again and again and again? Does nothing matter?
No. You’ve made decisions. Live or die by them. Besides, maybe there’s an explanation. Ask. Give her a chance to explain.
And then do whatever you have to do. One way or the other, it ends tonight. All of it.
Even if it means the end of everything.
He prepped the Sig, then tucked it in his waistband and climbed up on the back of the toilet tank.
5
From his shadowed table, Bennett watched Daniel walk out of the washroom. The man did not look good. Pale and shaky and wound too tight, ready to explode with the slightest touch.
His suit was nice, though. Gray and slim. The jacket buttoned. Hayes threaded his way through the crowd to the side bar, where Laney waited. She looked great, her dress cut for cleavage but longer at the leg, that balance that kept it from going slutty. The blond hair wasn’t really her; skin like that worked better with her natural brown. But there was no denying the sex appeal of the string of diamonds dripping down her neck.
Daniel slid in beside her. She smiled thinly. Her hands fidgeted with the strap of her purse. Hayes took the bag from her, hung it on the back of a chair, then said something to the bartender, who nodded.
Had he put the gun in her purse?
Bennett rested his camera on the edge of the table for stability. The digital display glowed as he focused. The lens magnified the image, brought him as close to Daniel’s midriff as if he’d been standing beside the guy.
No. There’s the bulge, on the left-hand side. The same place Hayes had tucked his gun before. People were predictable.
He slipped in the earbud and turned on the microphone. 5
“Chardonnay and a Booker’s neat, double.” The bartender set them down.
Daniel nodded, laid a couple of twenties on the bar. “Keep the change.”
“Thanks.”
“For luck?” Laney held her wineglass by the stem.
“Something like that.” Daniel raised his heavy rocks glass, took a swallow. The Sig felt strange tucked into the front of his pants, heavy and intimate. The sights dug into his flesh. He leaned back against the bar, glanced around. The place was filling up, and the flashes of glowing light reduced the crowd to anonymity, just teeth and shoulders and hair and sweat.
“Did it—”
“Yes,” Daniel said, and nodded to her purse, where he’d hung it over the back of the chair. “Just like we planned.”
He tracked her eyes, saw the panic in them. She hated guns. At least, he thought she did. That could be a lie too. “Can I ask you something?”
She looked up at him.
“Is there anything I don’t know?”
“What—how do you mean?”
“I have this feeling there’s something really important I’m missing. I keep almost getting it, but not quite. You know when you’re trying to remember somebody’s name, you know it starts with R, and you just keep thinking Robert, Ryan, Rick, Randy, Roger . . . Roger . . . Roger . . . I feel like that.”
“Well.” She shrugged. “You have amnesia.”
“I know,” he said. Come on, baby. Please. “But I feel like there’s something specific.”
“You haven’t slept in a week. You’re exhausted. Your head is probably playing tricks on you.”
He was tired. God, was he tired. Could that explain things? Paranoia and exhaustion were a dangerous combination. Daniel took a swallow of bourbon, didn’t taste it. You know what you saw on her phone. “Bennett will be here soon, and then we’re all in. Win and live or lose and die. And I guess I’m just asking if there’s anything you think I need to know.” He turned to her. “Anything at all.”
Laney sipped the Chardonnay, her lipstick leaving kisses on the rim of the glass. “What are you getting at, Daniel?”
“I’m not sure.” He stared. This is it, baby. This is your chance. Our chance. “I’m hoping you’ll tell me.”
For the tiniest fraction of a second, she hesitated. He let himself hope. Hope that it wasn’t all a lie, that she wasn’t tied up with the monster in their lives. That he hadn’t saved his life just to learn it was a ruin.
Then she said, “I’m sorry. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Daniel stared at her. Kept his face smooth and still, while behind it, everything fell apart.
It was all for nothing.
All of it.
“But I hope you know,” Laney continued, “that I love you. More than you can imagine.”
“Me too,” said a voice from behind him. “I love you both.”
5
There was a reason he worked alone.
Bennett had listened in on their conversation, amused. Poor Daniel, knowing just enough to suspect he was being lied to, and drawing the wrong conclusion. Poor Laney, trying so hard to protect her man. Both of them pure and true and on a collision course. Neither the iceberg nor the Titanic had evil intent, but they still made for a hell of a smashup.
It was good TV. But he was on a timeline.
So he’d slipped out the earbud, set the camera on the chair beside the microphone, and given both a quick wipe before walking away from them. The crowd had grown, and he threaded his way between party people, Daniel and Laney now in sight, now out of it. He’d come up just in time to hear Laney’s proclamation of love.
“Me too,” he said, smiling. “I love you both.”
Laney started, took a fast breath in. But Daniel seemed almost calm as he turned, wearing the unsurprised look of a man who’d been expecting the worst. “You’re early.”
“I’m a go-get
ter.” Bennett glanced at Laney. “Lovely necklace.”
“Take it,” she said, one hand moving to her throat.
Daniel said, “Not here.”
No, you’ll want to go somewhere quiet, won’t you brother? “Where?”
“There’s an exit over there,” the man gestured across the crowded dance floor, “behind those curtains.”
“It might be alarmed.”
“It’s not. I checked this afternoon.”
“Why not just go out the front?” Bennett curious what kind of a lie the man would come up with.
“Too many photographers out that way now. If anyone notices Laney, we’re in trouble.”
“All of a sudden you don’t want the crowd?”
“I know you don’t have a gun. That was the point.”
Which you think I’ll read as an amateur’s overconfidence, since of course I don’t need a gun to take care of the two of you. So now I’m supposed to feel so pleased about the fact that you’re willing to walk into a deserted alley with me that I never stop to wonder if you have a gun yourself. Kinda slim, brother. You should respect your opponent more. Bennett said, “All right. Before we go, I want you to know. It was just business.”
“Die screaming.”
“I guess that covers the formalities. Shall we?”
“I want your word that you’ll leave us alone afterward.”
“I promise.” Bennett stuck out his hand.
One of the neat things about people: hold out your hand long enough, the person opposite will take it. Daniel stared at him with disgust. But after a long moment he returned the shake.
The moment their hands touched, Bennett clenched down hard, and then with his left hand jerked open Daniel’s suit and snatched the Sig Sauer. The gun was his before the button torn from Daniel’s jacket hit the floor. He thumbed the safety off and put the barrel to the man’s belly.
“You don’t mind if I hold this, though, do you?”
Daniel’s mouth fell open. The blood rushed from his face.
“There are enough people here that I can shoot you both and walk out while everyone is busy panicking.” He kept his face calm, the mask of ease that hid everything. “But I don’t want to do that. Okay?”
“What.” Daniel coughed. “What do you want?”
“First, I want your beautiful wife to give me my necklace.”
Laney had gone pale. Slow as a reluctant bride, she reached up, unclasped the necklace. Held it out to him. “Here.”
Bennett didn’t let go of Daniel’s hand, didn’t take his eyes off the man. “Put it in my pocket.”
Laney hesitated, then moved up beside him. He felt her hand steal into his pants, felt the sharpness of the stones. Hello, Mexico. With Laney’s hand still in his pocket, Bennett winked at Daniel. “Good. Now. Let’s all take a stroll.”
Laney started to protest. “But you said—”
“Easy, sister. I’m not going to kill either of you. I only want a few more minutes of your time.”
Daniel said, “Maybe you should just leave.”
“Sorry. I can’t trust you not to run to one of the bouncers. No, the three of us are walking out together. Once we’re outside, we’ll go our separate ways.” He released his grip on Daniel’s hand, stepped back. “It’s almost over. Hold it together for a few more minutes, and then everything will be fine. I promise. Here.” Bennett tucked the gun in his belt. “See?”
Maybe it was the words. Maybe it was the action. Maybe it was desperate, animal hope. But Daniel and Laney looked at each other, and then Laney picked up her purse. With what must have been a heroic effort, she turned her back on him and started for the alley door. Daniel followed, and Bennett took up the rear, close enough that neither would bolt, but far enough that they couldn’t make a suicide play for the gun.
Every detail was crisp and sharp. The constellation of freckles spilling up the décolletage of a girl raising a martini glass. Each star in the crystalline heavens above the dance floor. The texture of Hayes’s suit jacket and the safety pins serving as temporary hems on the cuffs of his pants; the tension in Laney’s bare shoulders and the sweat beading her neck. The beat was thoom-thoom-thoom and it was the beat of his heart, the strike of his footsteps. Half a million dollars in his pocket and a gun tucked in his belt and the pure sure rush of victory.
If there was another reason to be alive, he couldn’t think of it.
5
Laney’s heart hammered a hundred beats a second. Her breath came shallow. The dancers seemed warped and slow, their motions twitchy in the flashing light. She could feel the music but couldn’t hear it.
It’s going to work. The plan is going to work.
There had been a moment, at the bar, when she had thought everything was coming apart. Daniel obviously suspected her. Had he remembered what had happened? The truth behind what drove him so close to the edge?
She didn’t know. But he had been fishing for something, and the war inside her had raged fierce and brutal. Half of her had desperately wanted to tell him the truth, no matter what it would do to him. The other half remembered how very close the truth had come to destroying him, and argued that every moment spared that pain was a victory. In the end, it had been a pragmatic decision—she couldn’t risk him coming undone. Not now. They just had to get through.
Laney glanced over her shoulder. From five feet back, Bennett tapped the gun hidden beneath his shirt. She winced, looked forward. Used the move as a cover for letting one purse strap slip so the bag fell open. She could feel the extra weight, and the hard edges.
She’d been afraid that Bennett might ask about the purse, or even search it. When he’d come up behind them, all he would have had to do was look into the bag and it would all have been over.
Daniel walked half a step behind her. Once they’d made it out the door, she would be in a perfect position to reach into the bag, find the snub-nose revolver, and pass it back to Daniel. That was the plan.
Only, she had a modification in mind. It was her mess. She was the one who had brought Bennett into their lives. She was the one who should clean it up.
Somehow, her heart managed to beat even faster.
This is right. Daniel has done enough. It’s time you did your share.
Fast, too fast, they had crossed the crowded floor. The door was painted black and partly hidden by velvet curtains. Laney glanced over her shoulder again. Daniel wouldn’t meet her eye. He knows you lied to him.
It doesn’t matter. In a few seconds, it will all be over. She pushed open the door. Night air poured over her sweating skin. The loading dock was broad and bright, a sodium lamp on the building casting remorseless light down on concrete stained and pitted. Two huge Dumpsters ran along the wall, the metal rusty. The air smelled sour.
Let them both get outside. Then finish it.
She took a few extra steps, ears straining. She could sense them behind her by the way they blocked the sound. Wait until—
The heavy door banged shut, turning the music down.
Now.
Laney reached into her purse, feeling for the revolver. Her fingers traced the hard, cool edges of the—
—glass?
She jerked her hand out, found herself holding a heavy-bottomed tumbler, a couple of drops of amber liquid still in the bottom.
An image flashed across her eyes. Bennett coming up behind them. Close enough to her purse that all he had to do was look down.
He must have seen the gun and slipped it out of her purse, trading the glass in for weight.
Oh god. Oh, god, no.
She turned, wanting to warn Daniel, to tell him to run, but Bennett was right there. His smile was bland and cold. “So, Daniel, you were wrong. At your house today, you said at the end of the night, you’d be holding a gun”—Bennett reached for his waist, drew the pistol, and pointed it at her beautiful husband—“and I wouldn’t.”
No, it won’t work, not now, no—
“Tell me something. You
’re a writer, you’re supposed to understand the human heart, all that stuff. Why is it that when you tell people to trust you, they tend to?”
“We want to believe in each other.”
“Simple as that?”
Daniel shrugged. “I wouldn’t say simple.” He looked at Laney. He’s waiting for you to hand him the gun. And all you have is a
glass.
Her head and heart screamed to move, to try something, to charge Bennett.
“Never made sense to me. Words are just breath with sound. For example, I promised I wouldn’t hurt you.” Bennett pulled the trigger.
The hammer fell with a click, as she expected.
“Actually,” Daniel reached behind his back and pulled out the snub-nose revolver. With his left hand, he drew out a handful of shells from his pocket. “What I said was, I’d be holding a loaded gun, and you wouldn’t.”
It was like she’d been bound by iron bands and someone had cut them. She could suddenly breathe, smile, even laugh. He’d done it. Somehow, her baby had pulled it off.
Then Daniel turned and pointed the gun at her. “Go stand over there with him.”
5
There was a high-pitched hum ringing through his brain, and he knew it for the howl he wouldn’t let himself make.
She lied to you. She and Bennett are in this together. There’s no way to win. But that doesn’t mean you have to let them.
Better all three of them end up on the concrete.
Laney said, “What?”
Bennett said, “How?”
“I hid two guns in the bathroom. We picked up this one,” he moved it to point at Bennett, “at the house this afternoon, and I hid it in the ceiling. The plan was to put it in Laney’s purse in case you searched me. But that was before I knew she was lying to me.”
“Daniel, what are you doing?” Her voice frantic. “What are you—”
“I saw your cell phone. You talked to him yesterday. From the hotel.”
She looked at Bennett, then back at him. “Yes. But it’s not what—”
“I don’t want to hear it.” His headache was an avalanche, a stampede, a typhoon. “You know, ever since I lost my memory, I’ve been looking for you. I thought you were the center of my world. But you were the reason I tried to kill myself, weren’t you?”
