Palindrome

by E. Z. Rinsky

  As we pass back through the salon, I pick up a few fifties that must have been on the poker table when the shooting started. Courtney notices, raises an eyebrow, but lets it go.

  Out in the front gym area, the whole sad room smells a little like Crew rotting behind the front desk.

  “Let’s get out of here,” Courtney says, heading for the glass doors.

  “Wait,” I say, still standing in the center of the room. I point to the locker room, my gut experiencing a visceral reaction at the memory of that hairy communal shower. “We didn’t look in there.”

  “Looked for what?” Courtney asks. “We have the tape already.”

  “Orange,” I say. I take Crew’s gun out of the back of my jeans. “We still have to make sure he doesn’t come after us.”

  Courtney nods in reluctant agreement. Holding the gun out in front of me, I lead the way. Wet tile floor that reeks of mildew. Not that this place was exactly an exemplar of cleanliness, but a few days without any sort of maintenance has noticeably magnified the smell. We turn the corner into the changing area lined with shitty wood lockers. Empty.

  I peer into the shower. Empty.

  “Okay,” I say. “Let’s go.”

  “Just one more place to check,” Courtney says, walking through the shower, around the corner, toward the telltale hiss of steam.

  I follow him, find him with his nose against the steamed-­up glass, squinting, trying to discern any gorillas in the mist.

  “You really think Orange is just chilling here, shvitzing?” I laugh and grab the handle to pull open the door. It doesn’t budge.

  “What the fuck?” I say. Tug again. Then I see why: A metal hook has been bored into the base of the door, and another is screwed into the wall beside it. A slice of black ribbon is strung between them, effectively locking the door from the outside.

  Courtney kneels with me to inspect it. Adrenaline picks up again as I consider the very limited number of reasons why someone would lock a steam-­room door in this fashion. I untie the ribbon and fling the door open, getting blasted in the face with rancid steam.

  I throw my sleeved arm over my mouth and cough. The hot steam carries the worst smell I’ve ever experienced. It’s like powerful mold mixed with sewage. Courtney also is coughing uncontrollably; my eyes are watering.

  “Oh god,” I moan as the steam pours out, dissipating into the locker room way too slowly. “What is that smell?”

  Courtney steels himself and takes a step into the shvitz, momentarily disappearing into the white cloud. Then he reappears, face the color of milk. Rushes past me into the shower room and pukes his guts out.

  My disgust at the smell, at seeing the bile pouring from Courtney, is surpassed only by morbid curiosity. I take a deep breath and plunge into the steam. The smell intensifies, but for a moment I look around and see nothing. I step in it before I see it, my boot sinking into something the texture of rotting melon.

  It’s not immediately identifiable as a body. It’s contorted and bloated beyond belief, an order of magnitude far beyond even Orange’s living proportions. The form on the ground is like an enormous pink grape that was dried, left out in the sun to wrinkle into a raisin, and then puffed up with some sulfuric gas.

  His arms, now inflated with moisture, are like two tubular pink pillows groping for the door, his sausage-­link fingers frozen in his pathetic last gasp of strength. His stomach is a huge bubble of flesh that looks like I could pop it with a pin and his liquefied innards would come gushing out.

  The smell is pure death, and I’m dry heaving within moments as I drop to my knees. I want only to get as far from this as I can but am getting light-­headed and weak.

  But it’s only when I’m on my knees, once I’m close enough to what used to be Orange’s face to see it through the steam, that I grasp the true import of what’s happened here.

  His eyes are oversized, bloated by steam and literally bulging from their sockets in what looks like an exaggerated mask of terror. His lips are puffed up so thick that it looks like he couldn’t really open his mouth by the end. But these are secondary.

  Orange’s face and shaved head are covered in a colorful tattoo. A bright painting that covers every surface, from his chin, up through his cheeks, wide forehead, the entirety of his scalp. Faces, all of them, bright faces. And a black snake wrapped around the circumference of his head, from his temples past his ears. A black snake eating its own tail.

  BACK IN HELEN’S apartment. Five in the afternoon. Just a few hours until Greta is supposed to call. I sit on the floor of the shower, let the warm water dribble down what’s turning into a beard and pour down my back.

  I stare at my phone resting on the sink, turned to maximum ring volume. Beside it is the tape, still in the case I found it in.

  I crack my knuckles and lean against the white porcelain siding, run through the path of destruction again in my head. Savannah, Silas, Candy, Lincoln and the rest of the Beulah Twelve, Orange . . . Where does Greta fit into this?

  I feel small and weak. I want to give up. Why can’t I just fucking surrender? I don’t want anything from anybody, except my daughter back. Greta must understand that. I don’t want anything more from her. I wouldn’t dare bring the cops despite Helen subtly but firmly implying that of course I have to tell her where I’m going to meet Greta. What if something happens to me? What if the handoff is botched?

  But Helen doesn’t understand Greta. Neither does Courtney. They can’t. Without meeting her face-­to-­face it’s impossible to understand the way she seemed powered by a bronze steam engine in her chest, the hunger in her green eyes, her otherworldly affect, the way her presence seemed to make the temperature in the room drop.

  I look up at the showerhead and let it sprinkle my cheeks.

  A knock on the door, Helen’s voice: “Frank? You okay? Been in there for like a half hour.”

  “I’m fine,” I groan.

  “Okay, well when you come out, Courtney and I might have figured something out.”

  I snort under my breath. Nothing is ever figured out. The only thing to understand about the past three weeks is that the tape leads you down a dark, cold hole that never ends. False bottom after false bottom; just when I think it’s done, there’s another trapdoor and I tumble into deeper, thicker darkness.

  What if I just destroyed the tape?

  It would be idiocy, obviously, since I need it to get back Sadie, but there’s a part of me that is certain that as soon as it ceases to exist, so will all my problems. That everything will be undone, like that Superman movie where he reverses the Earth’s rotation and makes time go backwards. The last three weeks will all be a bad dream. Hands still trembling from yoga, I’ll be watching Sadie eat ice cream in Washington Square Park, when my phone rings. But this time I don’t pick up.

  Hot water is running out. I take my time standing up, imagining the sad irony of making it this far only to slip and die in the fucking shower a few hours before the meet-­up. Turn off the water and gingerly step out of the shower. I hold my face in one of Helen’s fuzzy towels for a long moment, exhaling into it, then dry off my hair and wrap a different towel around my waist. Grab the tape and phone and walk out.

  Helen and Courtney are sitting side by side on the black leather couch. Helen has her laptop out, looking at the pictures Courtney insisted on snapping of Orange’s corpse once the steam cleared.

  “Frank,” Courtney says. At first I think he’s half smiling, but that’s not quite right. Weird expression. Painful bewilderment, perhaps. “We are idiots.”

  “Why, Courtney,” I sigh, pulling a chair in from the kitchen and sitting to face them, not even self-­conscious about the wretched state of my physique or the possibility of them catching a glimpse of my genitals under my towel—­they’ve both seen it all before. Feels like my body has become something external to me, simply a burden that I mus
t drag along with my consciousness.

  “Not just you,” Helen adds. “Everyone on the case.”

  “What case?” I ask, setting my phone and the tape on the coffee table.

  “Silas Graham’s murder case.”

  I raise an eyebrow. “Go on.”

  “I don’t think Silas killed Savannah,” Courtney says. “Or at the very least, he didn’t do it alone. It should have been obvious all along, but it didn’t click until I saw what happened to Orange.”

  I cross my arms. Helen is giving me a look like your friend is pretty sharp.

  “Explain,” I say.

  “Silas’s tattoos are exactly the same as Savannah’s, right? Based on the pictures,” Courtney says. “Not similar, exact. And then Orange’s are the same, too, which was what made it click. If Silas had tattooed Savannah, then he couldn’t have also tattooed himself. At least, certainly not in the exact same way. Think about it. A barber can’t cut his hair the exact same way he cuts yours, right? At the very least, maybe it would be a mirror image. But no. Exactly the same images. And the same person who tattooed Savannah also tattooed Silas and, presumably, Orange.”

  I mull this over, listening to the traffic down on the street.

  “Greta?” I ask.

  “Would make sense,” Helen says. “Explains how she knew about the tape, why she went to visit Silas in prison. Maybe they were partners, he took it, and she wanted it back.”

  I nod slowly.

  “Yes,” I say, biting my lip. “And think about why Savannah was tattooed . . . it was like, sacrificial, right? So why would her killer put the same tattoos on himself? Doesn’t make sense.”

  “So maybe Silas was going to be the next victim,” Courtney says, excitement edging into his voice. “So he stole the tape and turned himself in. To avoid being murdered.”

  “Christ,” I mutter.

  “Think about it. He became terrified after Greta’s visit! That’s when the transformation happened. He probably felt safe in that institution until she showed up. Found him. Now he lives in fear of her returning.”

  “Oh man,” I say, lowering my head into my hands. “But Orange? Why tattoo Orange?”

  “Maybe she’s afraid she won’t get the tape back. Tried to make a new one.”

  This makes too much sense. I laugh.

  “Of course, Court. Of course the only person who would be this desperate to get the tape would be the person who was willing, who was crazy, enough, to try to make it in the first place.”

  “We got played real bad, Frank.” Courtney shakes his head. “Worse than we even realized.”

  All I can do is shake my head and stare at the floor.

  “It always gets worse,” I whisper.

  The three of us stare at each other in silence. I should be colder, just wearing a towel. Maybe I’m just used to feeling like overall shit. My shit receptors are fried.

  “Fucking hell,” I mutter. I can’t believe how gullible I was. I should have figured this out the second “Greta” told me her story and showed me the police report. “Fucking shit.” I smack myself in the forehead a few times with my open palm.

  Finally Helen says softly, “So, Frank. Seems that this woman you’re supposed to rendezvous with this evening is, in all likelihood, a serial killer—­”

  “Fuck!” I stand up and kick my chair over, towel almost slipping off. “Fucking fuck!”

  “If we don’t catch her tonight,” Courtney says delicately, “she’ll disappear. Probably to kill again.”

  “This goddamn . . .” I kick at the chair, grab the closest object to me—­a bottle of wine sitting in a rack on top of Helen’s bookshelf—­and hurl it against the wall over the TV. It smashes into a dozen pieces. Glass and wine fly everywhere.

  “Fuck!” I scream, dropping back into my chair and clasping my hands over my eyes to catch hot tears of frustration.

  “It’s my fault,” I whimper. “Sadie getting taken . . . it’s my fault for getting involved with this woman. How did I not see this . . .”

  Courtney is behind me, his lanky hands on my shoulders.

  “Listen . . .” he says. “It’s not just you. I didn’t see it either. Nobody made the connection—­”

  I shove him off me and storm into Helen’s room. Throw off my towel and pull on a pair of jeans, T-­shirt, and my jacket, which is stiff with sweat. Shove the pistol from Orange’s into the back of my jeans.

  I tear back into the living room, huffing, face burning.

  Courtney is seated back on the couch beside Helen, and they’re both eyeing me with something between sympathy and fear.

  “I’m sorry about the wine,” I say, noticing the crime-­scene-­esque stain dripping onto the TV. “I’ll clean it up when I’m back.”

  “Where are you going?” Helen says warily.

  “I’m going to get my daughter back,” I say and look down to the tabletop, where I left my phone and the tape. Neither remains.

  Slowly I look back up at the two of them. Courtney is rubbing his cheek with one hand, the other hand is covering a familiar-­looking lump in the pocket of his blue jeans. He’s avoiding my gaze. Helen’s face is a mask of seriousness.

  “Courtney . . .” I say slowly, trying to keep my voice level, under control. “Give them to me.”

  “Frank,” Helen says in her all-­business voice. The kind she uses around the office to make it clear she’s not looking for a conversation. “This woman is a deranged serial killer. I can’t allow you to go after her like a vigilante and get you or your daughter killed. I’ll have a professional hostage negotiator talk to her, we’ll make the swap with a dozen armed officers stationed in a three-­hundred-­foot radius, waiting to take her down once your daughter’s back—­”

  “You said—­” My voice cracks. “You told me if we found what she wanted, you’d help us do it ourselves.”

  “That was before I knew she’s a murderer, which makes it infinitely more likely that she’ll simply kill both you and your daughter as soon as she has what she wants if she thinks she’ll get away with it.”

  I force myself to breathe. A film of red is slowly descending over my vision; my hands are quaking in rage.

  “You don’t understand,” I gasp to Helen. Courtney chews on his pinky and inspects the leather grain of his armrest. “It has to be her way or it’s over. Now give me the tape and my phone, and let me go get my daughter back!”

  Neither budges. I feel a vein popping out above my right eyebrow. My chest feels like it’s squeezing my heart up through my neck.

  “Courtney!” I plead. “You know what I mean. You’ve heard Greta. She’s not human. If she thinks the police are involved, it’s over! It’s OVER!”

  Courtney fidgets beside Helen on the couch. His hand squeezes the rectangular bulge in his pocket. He looks at Helen, then back to me.

  “I think . . .” he practically whispers. “I think she might be right, Frank.”

  My pulse is spiking, a low bass-­drum sound track thumping through a vein in my neck. I feel this slipping out of my control.

  “Don’t bullshit me,” I say. “You want to listen to it yourself. You know if I walk out with this you’ll never hear it. That’s all you care about, admit it. You care more about that fucking tape than you do about Sadie!”

  “No, Frank.” He shakes his head, eyes getting wet. “I really think Helen’s choice gives Sadie the best chance. And if we let you walk out and something happens to either of you, that blood is on our hands.”

  I rub my eyes. Getting light-­headed. Hard to think clearly, knees quivering, entire body feeling like it’s going to explode.

  Helen and Courtney sitting calmly on the couch. Are they right? I can’t think. Helen slowly reaches for her cell phone, which is resting on the bookcase just below the wine stain on the wall.

  “So,”
she says gently, fucking patronizing me. “I’m just going to call my office—­”

  “Put down your phone,” I say. My hand works on its own accord, grabbing the pistol out of the back of my jeans. And before I can think it through, I’m pointing it first at Helen, then at Courtney.

  Helen opens her mouth but doesn’t say anything. Courtney’s eyes are wide.

  “Frank,” he says.

  “I’m sorry.” I’m choking on my own words. “You have to give me my phone and the tape. I’m so sorry, but give them to me.”

  “Fr—­” Helen starts.

  “You don’t have children,” I say, gun shaking in my hand, salty tears on my lips. “Neither of you. You’d do the same in my position. I have to. You don’t understand Greta . . . She has some kind of power. It’s like she’s in my head. She knows everything about me.”

  Courtney stares at me in disbelief.

  “Give me the tape.”

  Shaking his head, he pulls first my phone, then the tape, out of his pocket and sets them on the glass coffee table. I grab them both and scoop them into the side pocket of my jacket, then lower the gun, tuck it back into my waistband.

  “Now the blood’s not on your hands,” I say softly. “I forced you. Both of you.” I wipe my nose with my sleeve. “This case fell into my lap, not either of yours. And I’m genuinely sorry for bringing all of this fucked-­up madness into your lives. But you’re done now. Both of you. You’ve helped me as much as you can. You’re relieved. I have to go finish this now, alone.”

  They stare at me.

  To Helen I say, “I’m not going to tie you up, but I hope you have the sense to wait until tomorrow to go after Greta. Once I have my daughter back.”

  Helen doesn’t respond. Stares at me like she doesn’t know who I am.

  “I’m sorry,” I say again to both of them. Give a tight-­lipped nod and step out into the hall, letting the door slam behind me. I stomp down the stairs, mind replaying what just happened on a loop. I burst out onto 86th Street, still unable—­or unwilling—­to process the last five minutes of my life. Instead I grip the bulge in my jacket pocket and focus on the feel of the hard plastic beneath my fingers.