by Wendy Heard
The air outside is cool, and I fold my arms across my chest. I don’t want my nipples poking out through my thin bralette and tank top when I walk into the den of dudes. I ring the doorbell. As I wait, I cast suspicious looks around the street, half expecting someone with a syringe to pop out of the bushes.
The door opens and a pair of guys poke their heads out like Tweedledee and Tweedledum. “What’s up,” one of them drawls, eyes raking down my body.
“Is Kevin here?”
“Somewhere,” the one on the left says. Their eyes are bloodshot, their voices fuzzy.
I push past them into the living room. It’s a regular-sized house with two bedrooms and a bathroom squeezed into about eight hundred square feet. In the living room, a group of people younger than me dances to some old-school R & B. More are gathered in the kitchen—Sofia would call this kitchen “vintage,” I think—which is where Kevin leans against the counter, the king in his court, a Corona in hand. A handful of people I don’t recognize is chilling around him, close-packed in the tight space.
All eyes turn on me as I step inside. “Hey, old man,” I say to Kevin.
“Jazzy J! What are you doing here, girl?”
I approach him for a hug. His powder-blue eyes are bloodshot, his mouth loose in a half smile. “Sorry to bust into your party,” I say as he squeezes me briefly.
“I heard about some crazy shit at work today. You almost got taken out by that serial killer. Dude!” He grips the tops of my arms, stares deep into my eyes. “You could be dead right now. You need a drink.”
“I do need a drink,” I agree.
“I got some wine for the ladies.” He guides me to the fridge with a hand on my lower back. I want to slap the hand away, but I’m here to ask him a favor, so I let it stay.
A tall, lean guy materializes next to Kevin. “Hey, man, you’re not gonna introduce me to your friend?”
Kevin is pouring pink wine into a plastic cup. “Jazz, this is A.J. A.J., this is Jazz.”
“What’s up?” A.J. says to me. “You come alone? You didn’t bring your man?”
I look to Kevin for help, and he laughs. “Man, you are barking up the wrong tree. Jazz is the competition, sucker. None of our girls is safe around this one.” He crooks an arm around my neck and strangles me in a brotherly half-noogie-hug.
A.J.’s eyes go wide. “No shit. She likes pussy?”
“Can you blame her?”
A.J. looks like it’s Christmas morning, which is a reaction I never understand. “I need to talk to you,” I tell Kevin. “Do you have a minute?”
A.J. cries out in protest. “Naw, wait—hang on. Let me find you a girl. Let me watch. Please? Please?”
“Hard pass.”
Kevin laughs. “C’mon, Jazz, we can talk outside.” I follow him through the living room, where a few couples are dancing, out through a steel screen door onto a plain concrete patio. Kevin pulls the door shut behind us with a clang, and strains of Wu Tang trickle through it to keep us company. He leads me to two rickety plastic chairs, which sit facing the neat, concrete-fenced yard. Once we’re seated, he lifts his bottle, and I clink my cup of pink wine against it. He says, “What do you need, Jazz?”
“I need a favor.”
“I figured.”
“If you can’t do me this favor, I need you to forget I ever asked, okay?”
He cocks his head, sips from his half-empty bottle and nods. “All right.”
“The favor is pretty chill. But it’s sort of...deceptively chill.” I take a sip of the cold wine and wince. It’s as sweet as Kool-Aid.
“Go on.”
I lean forward with my elbows on my knees. “I wondered if I could crash here tonight and hang out with you for the next day or so.” He frowns and opens his mouth to ask a question, but I hold a hand up. “I want you to tell the police later that I never left, that I was here all night and all day tomorrow. But I actually want to go do something for a few hours in the morning, and I don’t want the cops to ever find out.”
His eyebrows shoot up. He leans back in his chair. His arms cross over his chest, and the diamond in his left ear sparkles in the porch light. “You want an alibi. What are you into, Miss Jasmine?”
“Nothing.”
“And you’re pretty sure the cops will come knocking on my door and asking where you were because of this nothing.”
“Maybe. Possibly. Probably.”
He huffs out a breath and looks up at the sky. “That’s a motherfucker of a favor to ask, little J.”
“I wasn’t thinking of it as a favor. I was expecting to have to pay for it.”
I have his attention. “How much?” he asks.
“What are you thinking?”
His eyes are reptilian, calculating. “Five grand.”
“That’s crazy! I could go to anybody with this and they’d do it for less.”
“But you came to me because you know I’m gonna come through. And I’m a reliable witness.”
“I know a lot of people who are reliable,” I argue.
“Then why don’t you ask them?”
I look down at my fists, clenched between my knees.
“I know why you don’t ask them. Because you and I are not that good of friends for the cops to imagine I’d lie for you. I’m not into any crazy shit. And a lot of other people are going to see you here tonight, so you get a bunch of alibis for the price of one. I understand why you’re asking me this. It’s smart. But you’re gonna have to pay for it.”
“Fine. Five thousand. But I have to get it out of the bank later, after the cops have finished looking at me.”
He pins me with his eyes. “I’d give you two months to figure it out, but after that...” He spreads his hands, and a diamond glints on his pinkie.
“All right.” I feel heavy, like gravity is crushing me.
Kevin scrutinizes me, and I think he sees more than I want him to. At last, he leans forward and clinks his bottle against my cup. “Cool.”
I take a deep breath and let it out slowly. This is happening. I’m doing this. “I just need to go home and get a few things. I’ll be back in an hour,” I say.
“Hey, do what you gotta do,” he says. He gets up. Before he goes back inside, he rests a hand on my shoulder. I think he’s going to say something, but he just gives me a pat and heads back into the house.
The night sky is high, lit from below by the city. I lean back in my chair and look up at it, but I can’t find a single star.
I like being alive. I like my stupid little existence. I want to see Joaquin grow up, break free from the generations of poverty and addiction, and do something big with his one precious chance at life. A tear escapes, and I wipe it away with the heel of my hand.
This is me facing reality. I might die, and soon, and I can’t leave Joaquin with Carol if I do. At least in a foster home, they’d give him his insulin and let him go to school. At least in a foster home, he’d have a chance. Right now, he only has a few days left. I’m out of time. I have to do something now.
Tomorrow is Sunday. I have the poison. I have the disguise.
I’m going to kill Carol at church tomorrow morning.
23
JAZZ
OUTSIDE MY TRUCK’S dirty windows, the city breathes and blinks in time to my turn signal. It pulses, alive, every car carrying the anonymous potential for violence. For the hundredth time, I check my rearview mirrors. No one is behind me.
A homeless man wheels a stroller across the street in front of my truck. He glowers at me, like my headlights are an attack on him. Another homeless man stationed at the opposite corner watches the stroller’s slow, limping progress. This man looks just like Jesus, with a mane of tangled black hair and a thick black beard. His filthy shirt hangs off him in tatters, the sunbaked skin peeking through the rips.
I
wonder, when was the last time someone touched him? When was the last time someone touched me, for that matter?
Sofia. Her fingertips were soft, trailing down my arm.
A honk makes me jump. A car has pulled up behind me and is pissed; the light’s been green for two whole seconds. I gun it and leave Jesus behind.
I make spontaneous, sudden turns on my way to my apartment, backtracking, but I see no signs that I’m being followed. Still, I don’t park right away. I drive through the streets around my neighborhood, scanning all the parked cars and looking for anyone sitting still, anyone who looks like they’re watching. I creep past the tent city at the end of my block. It’s quiet, everyone tucked away inside their tents for the night. At last, I park around the corner.
I have no weapon with me, unless you count the pair of drumsticks I keep tucked behind the headrest. I grab a stick, wish I had my leather jacket to at least make it harder to poke me with a needle, and let myself out of the truck.
Keys in my left hand, drumstick in my right, I cross the uneven, cracked sidewalk. I catch every detail from the apartment buildings on the way: the couple yelling at each other inside an upstairs unit, the smell of weed drifting out of a downstairs window. A pair of headlights flashes, and I hide behind a bush, but they pass without slowing.
Two stories and small, my building looms humbly in front of me. Most people who live here keep to themselves. The lights are on in a few of the windows, but it’s ten o’clock. The families have mostly gone to sleep, and the young people are out partying. I peek around the corner toward the outdoor hallway and the stairwell. There are no planters, nothing to hide behind. I don’t see anyone lurking.
I ease around the corner toward the stairs, which are open-air without anywhere for someone to conceal themselves, but anyone could be hiding up on the second-floor landing and I wouldn’t see them. I grip the drumstick.
I tiptoe up the steps. I’m about to emerge onto the landing when a dark shape moves, slithering against the shadows in front of my front door.
I jump back, press myself into the stairwell and peek out around the corner.
The figure slips forward. Hands press against my window; the person is looking for me in there, trying to figure out if I’m home.
My heart pounds a hollow, empty beat.
It’s a woman. I can see that from the way the figure moves, from how the scant light hits her body. And it doesn’t look like she has her syringe out and ready yet, not the way she’s pressing both hands to the window. A dark lump against her side must be a purse. That’s where she would keep the syringe.
My body takes over for my brain and I bolt forward. I close the distance in two seconds and, as she gasps at the suddenness of my approach, I flip her around and pin her up against the metal screen door, my drumstick slammed across her throat. With my left hand, I yank her purse and send it flying with a rattle of spilled objects. She makes a choking noise. I open my mouth to yell at her, but then adrenaline and shadows clear from my vision and I see her face.
“Sofia,” I gasp. I drop the drumstick with a clatter. Her hands fly to her throat and she leans forward, coughing. I cry, “Oh my God, I’m so sorry! What are you doing here?”
She can’t talk; she’s still coughing. I feel like a monster, like Charles, and I remember the look on her face when he slapped her.
All my fears about the murder club come back to me. “Sofia. I’m sorry, but we need to get inside.” I bend to retrieve her purse and slip her wallet and keys back into it. My hand freezes over a shiny palm-sized object that lies on the ground: her flip phone. She lunges for it and grabs it before I can get it.
“I know what that is,” I tell her. “I have one, too.”
With huge eyes, she says, “Explain what you mean.”
“It means I am in the—the—” I gesture wildly. “You know what I mean. The fucking murder club.”
She’s silent, shocked, for a long moment, and then she just says, “How?”
“You should come inside. They could be watching us.” I get the key in the lock and usher her into the apartment. I switch the lights on, slam the door shut behind me and lock the dead bolts. “Stay right here.” Drumstick in hand, I check under my bed, in the closet, behind the shower curtain.
“Jazz?” Sofia calls from her post by the door. “Are you okay? What’s happening?”
The bathroom is clear. Back in the living room, I recheck the locks on the door. I make sure the curtains and blinds are drawn shut. I check the locks on the windows. I open my closet and check the top shelf. My murder kit is still up there.
Sofia says, “Jazz? You’re kind of freaking me out.”
I toss the drumstick on the table. “You don’t know what happened. Right? You don’t know about Trader Joe’s?”
“Trader Joe’s? What are you talking about?” She looks genuinely confused. One hand rubs at her neck and I feel horribly guilty.
I go to the kitchen and rummage around in the freezer, emerging with a bag of frozen corn. I wrap it in a dish towel and bring it back to the living room. I hand the soft, cold bundle to her. “Put this on your neck. I’m so sorry. I thought you were one of them.”
She sits on the sofa and presses the corn to her throat. “What happened at Trader Joe’s?”
I sit down next to her. “I messed up my murder, so they put me on the hit list. They tried to kill me at Trader Joe’s today.”
She drops the corn from her throat. “You messed up? How? They make it so easy.”
I gather my thoughts, trying to figure out how to explain things to her, wondering if there’s anything I shouldn’t say. “They sent me to some shady biker bar to kill this meth dealer and it went real wrong for me.”
“A biker bar? Seriously? They sent me to Costco.”
We look at each other for a long moment, and then we both start laughing, a grim, almost hysterical sound. “What does that say about me?” she manages to say when she catches her breath. “I’m just this teacher mom. Oh my God.”
“What does it say about me? They sent me to hang out with meth dealers!”
We dissolve into giggles again, the graveyard humor fueled by fear. At last, she says, “So is that where you hurt your forehead the other day? At the biker bar?”
I wipe eyeliner off my cheeks and decide to be honest. “Well, first Carol beat my ass, and then the bitches at the bar opened the stitches back up.”
Her laughter dries up. She looks like she wants to say something reassuring, but I can’t open that wound right now. I say, “Anyway. So after the biker bar, they reassigned me. But they assigned me to Charles. I got all the way to his parking garage before I saw him and realized.”
“Wait. Back up. They assigned you to Charles?” She presses her hands to her forehead. “Did you kill him? I didn’t hear anything.”
“No. I told them I knew who he was, that I shouldn’t be the one to kill him, and I guess they were pissed. Then today they sent someone to my work to kill me. I only barely escaped.”
“They’d kill one of their own members? They’d kill you? But it wasn’t your fault they assigned you to Charles.”
“They seemed super pissed that you and I know each other. That’s why I haven’t called you or anything. I’m worried they’ll be mad at you, too.”
“How is this our fault? They contacted me. It’s their job to make sure none of us know each other.”
“They just missed it, I guess. Or they knew we were connected by Joaquin’s school, but look at us. It’s not like they’d think we’d become friends.”
“You didn’t tell any of this to the police?”
“No. I mean, they interviewed me, but I didn’t say anything.” It’s such a mess. I think about Joaquin, about Carol. Am I insane to try to kill her tomorrow? Has this whole thing made me lose my reason? I wish I could get Sofia’s opinion. She’s so clearh
eaded and smart. Of course I can’t, though. I have to rely on my own judgment. Fucking great.
Sofia asks, “Have you told anyone at work, any friends? No one knows about any of this?”
I smile weakly. “First rule of murder club. Don’t talk about murder club.”
“Why didn’t you just tell the police? They could protect you, put you in witness protection or something.”
“Yeah right. More likely they’d blame me for all the murders and be stoked they solved their case. Sofia, do you think they’ll come after you next?”
She considers this. “I doubt the... Did you call it a murder club? I doubt they’re following either of us right now. If I were them, I’d be keeping my distance until I knew it was safe and there were no cops around. If they come back for you, it’s going to be at work or something like that. Somewhere crowded, somewhere unexpected.”
“They sent me for Charles in a parking garage. That’s not crowded.”
“Yeah, but I’m sure they know you well enough by now not to think they could send some random person to overpower you alone in a parking garage. They’d have to take you completely by surprise. You’d have to be distracted—they’d want to sneak up on you. Like at Trader Joe’s. Or at one of your shows.”
Hmm. That’s interesting.
She lowers her voice. “Is Carol why you joined?”
I hesitate, afraid she’ll think less of me. It’s one thing to want your abusive ex-husband dead. It’s another to order the death of a seemingly harmless woman. At last, I say, “She’s going to kill Joaquin. I can’t let her.”
“Oh, Jazz. That’s...”
My chest hurts. “Stop. Don’t. I can’t talk about it.”
She stops. I take a few deep breaths. I shove the feelings aside. I’m going to help Joaquin. Tomorrow morning. I’m doing everything I can.
Sofia rests her hand gently on mine. Her fingers are long, the nails painted glossy clear. “I’m sorry,” she murmurs.
“Me too. The other night when I came at Charles like that... I didn’t know. I didn’t understand.”
