Generation of Liars

by Marks, Camilla

  “You did what?” He slapped his palm to his forehead. “Alice, that was so incredibly stupid. Didn’t you stop to think that I was able to break out from there? It isn’t secure.”

  “What do you mean it isn’t secure?”

  “There’s a trap door down there. It’s what I used to escape. It’s hidden by a limestone façade, but obviously since Motley designed the thing, he knows it’s there.”

  “I can’t believe this is happening. Just stay very still, maybe they won’t see us.”

  “Alice, I have nowhere else to go but towards the water. I need to get this bomb off dry land before it blows up and takes a chunk of the park with it.” His hand was doing something inside his pocket. “Besides, I have my Glock, so mabe I can just take care of him for good right here and now. Sink him along with the dynamite stick.”

  The boat was now gliding into clear view. Cleopatra cut the engine. Motley jumped off. The brown Smith & Wesson hanging from his wrist was already pointed between my eyes. Cleopatra was strutting behind him, still draped in the resplendent jade robe she had on earlier, which had turned gem-like in the moonlight. She had an exotic lily flower tucked into her ear, no doubt plucked from one of the greenhouse gardens housed inside the park. I wondered how long they had been trailing us.

  “Hello, Alice,” Motley said. So casual. So pompous. “Funny meeting you here.”

  “How did you know to find us?” I asked. This showdown was the last thing I wanted.

  “That strung out friend of yours, Spicy Cinnamon.”

  “You mean Sara?”

  “I visited her in Pigalle about a week or so ago, while you were still hiding, and I gave her a necklace I told her that if she ever saw you again to make sure she gave it to you. I told her I would give her money if she did it. She didn’t know there was a GPS tracker imbedded inside the necklace, but even if she had, I’m sure she would have sold you out for her next junkie fix regardless.”

  I cupped the pendant around my neck. “A GPS? No wonder it’s so heavy. I thought it was real diamonds.”

  “When you showed up on my radar tonight, I hopped on the boat, and once I monitored your journey through metro I deducted you were headed for Citroën.”

  I hardened my knees, which were prone to buckling at the weight of his voice. “It’s over, Motley. You can’t hurt me anymore.” I ripped the chain from around my neck and flung it into the water.

  “Tsk, Alice. You always were an ungrateful one when it came to gifts. I mean look at the way you double crossed me after all I did for you. I think you’ve double crossed a lot of people so far in your short little life, haven’t you, girl?”

  “Just go away, Motley. I told you, it’s over.”

  His eyes slid to Pressley. “Alice, does this boyfriend of yours know who are you? I mean who you really are?”

  “Of course he does,” I replied. “He is probably the only person in the world who does.”

  “Are you sure, Alice? When you came to my house and so rudely trapped me inside my own cellar, I stumbled upon something of yours after our little struggle.” I braced myself because I knew exactly what he was going to say next. “It was a piece of paper.”

  “Shut up, Motley.”

  “This piece of paper had some very interesting information written on it. It really gave me some insight into just what kind of person you really are, Alice.”

  “Shut up,” I repeated.

  “I wonder,” Motley said, pleased with himself and pivoting on the blockish heel of his alligator loafer, “if your boyfriend here knows what was written on that piece of paper.”

  “What is he talking about, Alice?” Pressley couldn’t mask his concern.

  “Oh?” replied Motley. “Looks like he doesn’t know.”

  My tongue was almost too frozen to speak anything in my defense as Pressley asked, “What piece of paper, Alice?”

  “It’s nothing, Pressley. He’s just trying to scare me and to get you all riled up.”

  “Oh, am I, Alice?” Motley asked. “Why don’t we let your boyfriend here decide what is or isn’t worth getting riled up over, since luck of lucks, I just happen to have the note you left behind. It’s right here in my pocket.” The crinkly sound of his hand reaching into his pocket and pulling out the battered and ripped piece of paper sounded like the crushing of bones.

  “What is on that paper, Alice?” Pressley wanted to know so badly. His eyes paced between my pale, shocked face and the note in Motley’s hand.

  Motley stole the opportunity to answer for me. “It’s a confession. A murder confession, penned by your girlfriend.”

  “Murder?” Pressley asked. I noticed his voice quaking beneath its rough veneer. “What’s this about? Alice?”

  Motley was licking his lips and spreading the note out. “Now, Mr. Connard, do you mean to tell me that you were never curious of the real reason Alice ran away three years ago? You didn’t just think it was because she was bored with you, did you?”

  Pressley was trying his best to keep calm, but his distress crept over the thin veneer of machismo calm. “Alice, what the hell is he talking about?”

  My mouth was too dry to swallow and I still couldn’t get any words out amidst the cotton-like state of my tongue.

  “Alice is a little tongue tied, it seems,” Motley gloated. “Here, let me go ahead and read the note for her.” He licked his lips before tearing into the words: If found dead, please contact the parents of Heather Gilmore at the following phone number and share the enclosed information.

  If you are reading this letter I am dead. My name is Margaux Grace Fix and on the evening of the cyber attack against the United States, I killed a girl. That girl’s name was Heather Gilmore. I have been running ever since. Her parents deserve to know who killed their daughter. Please contact them at the phone number at the top of this letter and let them know it was me.

  Pressley eyes were glued to me. “Alice? Is what he is saying true?” I opened my mouth and only a squeak came out. “Damnit, Alice, we don’t have a lot of time here, I need to know the truth right now.” I suddenly became aware once more of the sound of the bomb ticking. The sound grew all around me. I couldn’t distinguish its sound from the sound of my heart thumping inside my chest.

  Finally, I was able to open my mouth and get the words out. “Yes, Pressley, it’s true. It’s all totally true. Except the part about Heather being dead. It turns out, she’s not. She’s fine. She walked away with some minor scrapes.”

  Motley’s eye scrunched up like he tasted a bitter lemon. “You can’t slip by on that one, Alice. You thought you had killed a person and then you ran away. The facts are here.” He was rattling the paper in his hand like a torch of indictment.

  “Alice, did you really walk away from what you thought was a murder scene?” Pressley asked.

  “I was scared, Pressley.” I could feel a ribbon of hot tears flood-bursting down my cheeks. “I didn’t know what else to do.”

  “If it was an accident, why didn’t you go to the police and tell them? Why didn’t you at least come to me? I could have helped you.”

  “I tried to,” I said. “That day when I told you to meet me in the lawn on campus, the day you keep asking me about, I planned to tell you then.”

  “That’s why you called me there? This whole time I thought you asked me there so you could break up with me. I figured you lost the nerve to do it person so you just ran away instead.”

  “No, Pressley, no, I never wanted to leave you. But once I saw you that day I lost the nerve to tell you. I thought you would look at me differently if you knew what I had done.”

  “I’m looking at you a whole lot differently right now. That’s for sure.”

  Motley brushed his shoulders against Pressley’s. “So, Mr. Connard, can you still love Alice knowing who she really is?”

  Pressley eyes were glistening with embroiled hatred. “Listen, Motley, you may think know who Alice really is, but I know all about you. I know all about L
eon Leor, the Leor family fortune back in Las Vegas, and your fall from grace. I know why you want the dynamite stick back so desperately. If the feds ever find you, you’re toast.”

  “But Alice and I, we’re both one in the same - both murderers.”

  “Alice may have panicked and run away from an accident scene, but you intentionally murdered and tortured dozens of innocent women.”

  “What?” I gasped. I was dizzily trying to cope with what had just been said. “Murdered dozens of women?”

  “Alice,” Motley said, “I told you the day we met that I hadn’t been a free man in a very long time. That day we met at Grand Central, I had just escaped from Rikers Island after being handed a life sentence on six counts of first-degree murder. Only six counts because they never found the other sixteen bodies.” He said it like he was proud, like it was an achievement.

  My hand flew to my chest. All the air seemed to evacuate my lungs. “You’re a serial killer?”

  “It’s true, Alice,” Cleopatra interjected. She had been so silent up until now, so organically concealed in the dock’s creeping daylight, that I had forgotten she was there. “He was Leon Leor, rich-boy heir to the Fool’s Luck playing cards franchise, handsome as a movie star, and a spoiled psychopath to boot. Forgive me for saying so, honey,” she said, bracing a delicate hand on Motley’s shoulder. “He got his kicks out of torturing and killing women from the Vegas strip and burying their bodies in the sands of the Mojave Desert. Some coin hunter with a metal detector found a dismembered hand full of cheap metal rings buried beneath a cactus plant. There was a joker card lying beside the badly decomposed body. They dug up six more bodies by the time the search was done, all with a joker card close at hand. All the lawyers paid for by his granddaddy’s casino money couldn’t save Leon once he got caught. The cops on the beat gave him the nickname The Fool, on account of his trademark of leaving the cards beside his victims.”

  “You know all this and you stay with him still?” Pressley blurted.

  “What can I say? I’m the type of woman who can love a monster. We met at one of the hotels his granddaddy built. I was just a hungry girl in feathers and glitter, trying to Can-Can my way into the credits of a b-movie, when we met and fell in love. We had only been married three months when the police knocked on our door one morning and I found out about his grizzly secret pastime. I stayed by his side all during the trial and sentencing; but being separated for so long while he was in prison was just too much. I left him. I did my own thing, amassed my own fortune in stolen diamonds, and eventually found my own trouble. Then my beloved Fool came to me calling himself Motley and told me about using the dynamite stick to get immunity and how we could live together again, free from the shackles of prison. That’s when I came onboard.”

  Motley turned his eyes onto me. “So you see, Alice, we’re like two peas in a pod, you and I. Both murderers. Except the pod is getting a little crowded and now it’s time to eliminate you.”

  “You can’t touch me anymore, Motley.” The defiance in my voice excited me, my chest was rising and falling with a puff of nervous exhilaration. “It’s over. I told you I didn’t really kill anyone, so I have nothing to run from anymore. I don’t care if you know my real name. I can get protection for me and my family, the police would love to make sure a serial killer like you doesn’t get near us.”

  Motley gave a cold-eyed smile. “I told you when you signed onboard, Alice, that this job would lead you down a very dark hole. I told you that day on the train. But you were so desperate to get away from your own secret that you didn’t care. You couldn’t see the forest from the trees. It’s your blind spot. Even David tried to teach you about it that time in Rio with the black briefcase and the white briefcase.”

  “What do you know?” I asked. I was feeling very uneasy all of the sudden, uneasy that he would mention my mentor, David Xad. “You weren’t even there when David taught me in Rio.”

  “No, Alice, I wasn’t, but I sent you down there for a very specific reason.”

  “What reason?” I asked.

  “David had been assigned to kill you.”

  “I don’t believe you. David had every chance to kill me when I was in Rio. I was inside his house and he didn’t lay a finger on me.”

  “I didn’t send you there so he could kill you that day. That was only part of the preparation. David is all caught up in that garbage about being a noble warrior. He told me he could only slay you the noble way, by giving you a chance to correct your blindsides before battle.”

  “I don’t believe you. David is my mentor. He would never hurt me.”

  “Alice, why did David tell you he was down there in Rio?”

  “He said he was training for a battle. A battle against a certain adversary.”

  “That adversary was you, Alice.”

  “What do you mean? You’re saying I’m the opponent David mentioned he was down there training to defeat?”

  “That is exactly what I’m saying, Alice. David wasn’t training down in Rio, so much as he was preparing the conditions of battle. He insisted that you needed your flaws pointed out before he could destroy you. He said I had to give you a fighting chance before he killed you.”

  “Well, David isn’t here, and after tonight I am going to disappear.”

  Motley let his head tilt back onto his neck. He was laughing, spastically, like it was bringing him some sort of physical relief to get the sound out of his body. “I have a surprise for you, Alice.”

  Chapter Fifty-five: The Sword

  “SURPRISE?” MY PALE lips eked out.

  “You’re so preoccupied with worrying about this confession in my hand that I’ve been stalling you here just long enough for another boat to arrive.”

  As if on cue, the low hum of an engine began approaching in the darkness. A trail of skids formed on the water and my eyes followed them up to see a black speedboat with David Xad behind the wheel. David emerged from the boat dressed in a white linen suit and his hair was slickly pressed back into a ponytail. “Hello, Alice.” My name was so gentle on his pale lips that I could easily forget he was an assassin who had come to kill me. He slithered towards me with steps that made no sound.

  “David? How could you?” My lips were difficult to pry apart in their dryness.

  “Do you remember during our time together in Rio, I told you that I was preparing for a very specific adversary?”

  “I remember.” My teeth were shaking behind my lips.

  “Well, here she is.” He drew his hands out to me. “Kitto Katsu, Alice.”

  “You set me up.”

  “You set yourself up. By signing up with Motley. This has always been the plan. From the beginning, Motley knew he would have to destroy you once he got what he wanted. My final part of the mission was to take you out. But I gave you a chance.” During the process of his speech he had swiveled to face Pressley. I didn’t like the way his eyes were targeting him. “Why don’t you have your little boyfriend there hand the dynamite stick to Motley so we can get started?”

  I heard the action on Pressley’s Glock breaking against the silence of the dock. He wasn’t going to stand around and take this.

  “No,” I said to Pressley, “this is my battle. Let me fight it. I can’t let you rescue me.”

  “Fine,” Pressley said. “But I’m not handing over the dynamite stick just yet.”

  Motley was thumbing the trigger on his Smith & Wesson too. “Not that I would have let you rescue her,” he said to Pressley smugly. He tucked the gun back into his pants and smiled at David.

  David’s arm slid behind his back. He gallantly wrapped his fingers around the handle of the long sword that was fastened to the back of his belt. He drew the sword up carefully and slowly, his body forming into a defensive crouch. The embellishments on the sword’s handle shimmered in a catch of the quickly-fading moonlight. I recognized it. It was the sword that had been hanging in Motley’s poker room.

  “That’s why Motley boug
ht that tacky sword?” I bitterly asked. “So he could get some sick ceremonial kick out of murdering me?”

  “No, Alice.” David’s voice had grown harsh, harsher than I had ever heard, even in the broiling strain of our training sessions three years earlier. The thing in his voice sounded like hate. “I insisted on the sword. Did none of my lessons on an honorable death reach you? I told Motley that I would only kill you with the utmost of dignity.”

  David eyes were pinned to mine and I saw a flicker of malice swimming in his those dark irises, which were trimmed in blanched skin. He aimed the sword forward, swooshing it in a figure-eight motion, and jacking it to my ankles. I hopped over the blade. I was teeter tottering, trying to balance myself from falling over.

  “Alice,” he said, his voice so dripping with faux empathy, “don’t you remember any of my lessons on a noble surrender? Of giving up and accepting death honorably once you realize you cannot overtake your opponent?”

  My focus was ripped to shreds. There was a racket coming from the water. The sound of a motor churning in the distance. I stretched my eyes and saw a line of ripples in the water moving towards the banks. A white yacht. It was zipping over the water, sleekly bouncing above the shaft of currents. David heard it too and he let his grip on the sword loosen as he turned his head to where the sound was emanating from. I shot a look to Motley. “Great, who else did you call in to help kill me?”

  Motley’s face, however, revealed a bewildered state of mind. His eyes were scrunching. A grimace was overtaking his lips. He was just as wary of a new arrival as I was. His eyes glided at Cleopatra with a look of accusation. “Who else did you order in?” he asked her.

  “Me?” she rebuffed. “I didn’t call anyone in.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Are you accusing me of some sort of espionage? How dare you,” she stammered.

  “It wouldn’t be the first time you betrayed me in all our time together, Can-Can girl.”

  “And what about you, Fool? How do I know you didn’t call someone in to finish me off? We know how much you like watching the pretty ones die.” She was clutching the key that dangled from a black velvet string around her neck, the one she always wore. “Or maybe you are only after my diamonds.”