“Good. Are we ready?”
“I am,” Tommy says.
“The family that slays together, stays together,” Kirby chirps, then giggles.
Tommy and I don’t laugh.
We leave in the afternoon so we can arrive around dinnertime. The dark is better for what we’re after. There isn’t much talking; even Kirby keeps relatively silent. I watch California turn into the desert, feel the change of the temperature in spite of the air-conditioning. Watch as nothing turns back into the overwhelming something of Las Vegas. It appears as it always does, like some Flying Dutchman of a city. Mammon pricked his finger and let a drop of blood fall onto the sand. Up sprang Las Vegas.
There are two locations. One is the storage facility where he’s kept his Nevada victims. The other is a house, titled to a name that surprised me, even as it confirmed what I suspected about Dali based on what I’d seen. The reverse GPS confirms that Dali is at home.
We rent no hotel. No paper trails, thank you very much. Besides, we won’t need one. If you’re going to commit murder, better to come in and leave with the night. A page from Dali’s playbook of simplicity.
We do stop to eat at a diner on the outskirts of the suburb Dali’s home is in. I have a cup of coffee and a slice of toast. Tommy has even less; he skips the toast. Kirby has a T-bone steak, two eggs sunny-side up, hash browns, toast, orange juice, and coffee.
“What?” she asks, noticing that I’m staring at her. “Girl’s gotta eat. Who knows when we’ll get a chance again?”
I’m sure she’s right. She certainly has more experience at this than I do. My stomach, though, seems to contain the last bastion of my conscience. I stick to my coffee and toast.
Kirby finishes and sighs in satisfaction. “Good stuff. So—we ready to go kill someone?”
“It’s the third house down,” Tommy says.
We are parked on a suburban street, hidden under the nighttime shade of a rare tree. The homes are all adobe exteriors with rock and cactus front yards. Water is at a premium in Vegas.
“Small place,” Kirby says. “Good cover. Never a smart idea to flash those ill-gotten gains around.”
“Dali will have cameras,” I say, “but not too many. No reason to feel insecure here, and, again, too much concern for security makes you stand out. This is a safe house, probably used only when Dali is in town. The primary residence will be in Los Angeles.”
“How should we approach?” Tommy asks Kirby.
She grins, winks. “I’m for the direct method. I’ll go knock on the door. It’s not likely Dali knows who I am, right?”
“There’s no guarantee of that.”
She shrugs, pats the gun hidden under her light jacket. “If Dali doesn’t answer, then I’ll just have to pull out Big Red here and let myself in.”
“Kirby,” I caution. “We can’t afford to draw attention to ourselves.”
She rolls her eyes. “Relax, boss lady. Professional here, remember? This is a throwaway vehicle with false plates. You two pull those stocking caps over your faces, and we’re golden. Trust me.”
I don’t trust her, I don’t trust any of this, but I have no choice. Kirby is the assassin of the group. She’s been killing for a long time and by all accounts is very good at it.
“Fine.” I sigh. “We’ll follow your lead.”
“Just relax and wait to hear from me. Either I’ll give you a chirp on the cell phones or you’ll see me kicking the door in. Okay?” She winks one more time and exits the car.
“Crazy,” Tommy mutters.
“Yeah.”
We watch her saunter up to the door of the house and knock. A few moments pass. Then another few. Sweat beads on my head, annoying me.
The door opens. We can’t see the occupant, but we do see Kirby reach into her jacket, push forward, and disappear into the home.
“Jesus,” I breathe.
The lack of hesitation. Given who Kirby is, what she does, it’s a disturbing glimpse into just how quickly a person could die.
About five minutes pass before my cell phone rings.
“I got Dali secured,” Kirby says. “I left the front door unlocked, so just park in the driveway and come on in. No worries, right?” She hangs up.
I stare at the house. No turning back now. “Well?” Tommy asks me. “Let’s go.”
The home is not what I expected. I had pictured a kind of suburban gulag. No decorations on the walls, a single carton of milk in the refrigerator, freeze-dried microwavable food in the cupboard.
Instead, I find various paintings, photographs hung in tasteful frames. Most of it is good. Some of it is very good, particularly the photographs, which are a mix of subjects, from people to landscapes. The floors are honey-colored hardwood, inviting and warm. Throw rugs are tossed in tasteful and useful places. The furniture is clean and just less than new.
“Kirby?” I call out.
“In the living room.”
“Is that music?” Tommy asks.
I strain an ear. “Classical. Beethoven, I believe.”
We move through the entryway and sitting room and arrive in the living room. It’s next to the kitchen, one broad, open space that builders are calling the “great-room concept.” I don’t like it. I like my rooms with walls. The living room has a nice couch, a midsize flat-screen TV, and a coffee table. Floor lamps light the space. The curtains on all the windows are drawn, and the blinds are closed on the sliding-glass door that leads into the backyard.
Dali sits in one of the kitchen chairs, cuffed at hands and feet, eyes cool.
“Hello, Mercy Lane,” I say. “Hello, number 35,” she replies.
I suspected it, and then the name on the house’s title confirmed it, but it still surprises me in the flesh: Dali is a woman. That thing I’d seen in my cell, the thing I’d kept to myself, had been a smooth neck, sans Adam’s apple. Eric Kellerman’s corpse, on the other hand, had a prominent one.
“How’d you know?” she asks me.
I don’t answer right away. I take time to study the person who brought me to this shadow land, a place where murder is both acceptable and desired. She’s a short woman, with a beautiful, aquiline face. She keeps her brunette hair cropped close, and it works for her. Her eyes are a shocking blue. She’s wearing blue jeans and a thin pullover shirt. She looks stunning and innocuous, like a cobra with its hood down.
“That was some plan,” I say. “How long have you had that escape hatch in place?”
Dali had been pragmatic in all things. This included planning for the possibility that we might someday find her. She’d decided to have a patsy, ready-made and waiting, and she’d sown the necessary seeds years ago. She put Eric Kellerman’s fingerprints on the body bags. She faked the symphorophilia fetish, choosing it because it was so unique. If anyone closed in, it would be Eric Kellerman’s corpse they’d find, along with his collection of car-crash memorabilia and his fingerprints.
Dali would be officially dead, and Mercy Lane would be safe forever. I’d considered the possibility that they were working together but had dismissed it; Dali was a solitary machine.
She shrugs. “The last piece fell in place eight or nine years ago. Eric. But I’d been laying the groundwork for a long time.”
“The car accidents.”
“Yes.”
I vocalize what I’ve surmised, not so much for confirmation but because I want to show her that, yes, I figured it out, you weren’t smarter than me, I win in the end. I want to wave it in front of her face and taunt her with it.
“So if we caught on to you—or someone else did—you could suicide your patsy and leave incontrovertible evidence behind to link him to the crimes: the videos and photos of the car wrecks. Too unusual, too distinct, to be any kind of coincidence. The fingerprints left on the body bags would serve as confirmation. Is that right?”
“Essentially. It was a good plan. Where did I go wrong?”
“You grabbed me.”
She shakes her head. It�
��s not assertive, just dismissive. “That’s posturing, not logic. You were really no different, in terms of risk, than any other unit.”
Unit. My finger twitches on the trigger guard at her use of the word.
“Fine. Let’s just say that I’m more observant than most people. I saw something germane, and then you made the really big mistake of letting me go.”
“What did you see?”
There’s an edge to her voice, to the question. It’s not driven by idle curiosity. She wants to know where she went wrong. Where did her pragmatism fail to serve her?
“Something. I saw something.” I smile, and I know it’s a cruel smile, even worse than the one I gave to Douglas Hollister.
Mercy scowls. “You’re not going to tell me.”
“No.”
“Childish.”
“But satisfying.”
“So? What’s the plan, then? Am I under arrest?”
“I’m afraid not.”
Her face clears. “Ah, I see. You’re going to kill me.” She nods her approval. “That’s smart. Practical.”
“How’d you get Eric Kellerman to pull the trigger on himself?” I ask.
“I kidnapped Eric and a young woman almost nine years ago. I convinced him that the young woman was his illegitimate daughter. Eric was an orphan, so this had a particular significance to him. I tortured them both for years to demonstrate to Eric what I was capable of.
“A few years ago I told Eric I’d moved his ‘daughter’ to another facility. I gave him the choice: pull the trigger when the time came and I’d set her free, fail to do so and I’d keep her in darkness ’til she was old and gray.” She shrugs. “He made his choice, as planned.”
“And did you? Let her go?”
“Of course not. I killed her almost two years ago.”
“Why?”
Mercy looks puzzled. The question, it seems, is a stupid one. “Eric had been suitably prepared. I had more than one hundred hours of recorded video available, on the off chance he demanded visual proof she was still alive. The woman was using up space, water, food, and electricity. I didn’t need her anymore.”
I feel Tommy stir next to me. He is as disturbed by this answer as I am.
“Why, Dali? Why did you do this?”
Mercy; Dali—I move back and forth between the names. She is both of them but neither.
“For the money, number 35, of course. My father had a daughter, but he raised me as a son. He taught me three basic lessons: Joy is everything that comes after survival. Survival is based on money. There is no soul; we’re all just meat. He didn’t only say these things to me, he proved them.” She pauses. “For example, he took the woman meat of me and turned me into a man.”
I frown, taking in the beautiful face. “You look pretty female to me.”
“That’s my cover, number 35. The mask I wear in the outside world. Would you like to see the real me?”
“Yes.”
The eyes go flat. The face changes subtly, becoming more brutal. The shoulders drop, and a faint aura of menace surrounds her. “Go ahead,” she says, speaking to Kirby but looking at me. Her voice has changed, lowered, deepened, becoming the voice I’d heard outside the trunk. “Go ahead and check my breasts.”
“Excuse me?” Kirby asks.
“Feel my breasts.”
Kirby raises an eyebrow at me. “Go ahead,” I say.
“If you insist.” She winks. “I prefer the men, but I’ve been known to like the ladies too.” She reaches down without hesitation and squeezes Dali’s right breast with her left hand. She frowns. “That doesn’t feel right.” She reaches inside Dali’s shirt. I watch as her hand fumbles.
Distaste passes over her face. Her hand comes out clutching something breast-sized and rubbery. “Silicone,” she says. “Nothing else.”
“Do you see?” Mercy Lane rasps. “Just meat to be molded. Dad cut away my breasts when they’d finished growing. He said they’d make me weak, that it was too hard for a woman to survive in this world.” She smiles. “He made me strong.”
I search for pity, but even now all I see is Leo. My desire to pull the trigger has been transformed into lassitude. The injured finger throbs.
“Time to die, Mercy,” I say.
She shrugs. “Meat to meat. I was going to die sooner or later. We all go back to the dirt.”
I screw on the silencer and walk over so that I am facing the creature in the chair, this breastless woman with the man’s voice and the faded, empty blue eyes. I raise the gun and point it at her forehead.
A last question.
“Why did you change such a successful MO? The notes telling us you existed, letting Heather go without a lobotomy, releasing me: Why’d you do those things, Mercy? They made no sense.”
She cocks her head and gazes up at me. I see no fear there, no anger, no acceptance. Mercy Lane lives in the now of an animal, a human convinced that it has no soul. She has nothing to lose to death.
“I devised my business plan years ago, after a tremendous amount of analysis. I tried to consider everything, and that included my retirement. However perfect the execution, if you do the same thing too many times, you’ll eventually make mistakes. Eric’s involvement was a part of that plan. He wasn’t just a—what did you call it? An escape hatch?”
“Yes.”
“Right. Eric wasn’t simply something to use in an emergency, he was the cornerstone of my retirement plan. The best way to fade into the sunset, when you’ve been running a criminal enterprise, is to let people think you’re dead.”
“We’ve already covered this. You’re not answering my question.”
She continues blithely, as if I hadn’t spoken, as though I’m not holding the gun that is going to kill her.
“I needed someone to find Eric after searching for me, in order to bring my retirement plan to completion.” She looks at me again, and I see an acknowledgment of some kind in her eyes. “I’d researched you, among others. You’re very good at what you do, very competent.
“When Douglas Hollister violated our agreement, he provided me with the opportunity to start laying bread crumbs. You were the logical recipient, given the geographical area. Dropping Heather off at the wedding was the first step. I knew keeping her cognizant, so she could tell you what she’d been through, would motivate you more than handing her over as a vegetable.”
I stare at her and my head starts to spin.
“So … you wanted us to find you?”
“On my terms, but, yes. More precisely, I wanted you to find Eric Kellerman and think it was me. That would allow me to retire unincarcerated.”
It all shivers into place. The discrepancies in the profile. The notes. Letting Heather go intact, grabbing me. These weren’t accidents; they were planned, purposeful anomalies.
“Kidnapping you was key,” she continues, “as I knew it would provide motivation like nothing else.”
I press the silencer into Mercy’s forehead, hard. My hand shakes and my heart thunders. “So all that—everything you did to me—it was just for show?” My voice is too loud, almost a shout.
“Quiet, boss woman,” Kirby murmurs. “Don’t wake the neighbors.”
Mercy gazes up at me, unafraid. “It needed to be authentic.”
“And Leo?” I ask, the gun trembling in my hand. “Why him?”
She shrugs. “More incentive. When I found out who he was and what he was doing, I decided to utilize him as well.”
My stomach heaves, and I feel momentarily faint.
If…
I try to push the thought away, but it rolls over my resistance, inexorable and oh so ugly.
If I hadn’t used him in the undercover operation, he’d still be okay.
I want to vomit. I am filled with self-loathing and regret and a terrible rage. I stare at Mercy, and I search for something, a reason to wait. I see nothing, nothing at all.
I take one step back and raise the gun and I quiet my mind, but my mind is a hurrican
e of hatred and grief and it breaks that silence. I see too many things all at once, visions of light tracers and dark moons and Leo’s empty eyes.
“You deserve to die,” I whisper, the gun trembling in my hand.
“No one deserves to die,” Mercy says. “It just happens.”
A wide wind blows through me, pushing me toward a chasm with no bottom, an ocean with no shore. My senses have sharpened to an excruciating point. I can smell gun oil and the scent of shampoo. I hear Tommy’s foot shift on the floor and feel his eyes upon me like touching hands.
Don’t do this, Mother. I don’t want to be born in death. I don’t know who this voice belongs to. Is it Alexa? Is it the baby? Is it just me?
My finger tightens on the trigger, feeling the resistance that is both too much and not enough, a march toward destruction that can’t be reversed once the final step is taken.
“What are you waiting for?” Mercy asks.
A phrase rolls through my mind. It sounds like a gull’s cry, echoing above the wind.
The lighthouse! Swim out too far and the light goes out forever!
My finger moves back on the trigger, pulling it toward me.
I want to kill you so bad. I want to look into your eyes and pull the trigger and watch as the hole opens up and your life pours out. I want to know that you died because of me, because of what you did to Leo, because no one gets to touch my family like that and live.
I lower the weapon. Small rivulets of sweat run down my cheeks, dancing across my scars on one side. I feel as though I’ve run a mile and then boxed ten rounds.
I want to kill you, but I can’t.
“You’re under arrest, Mercy.” My voice quavers.
She shakes her head, a gesture of pity. “You’re weak.”
Tommy says nothing. He places a hand on my shoulder and squeezes it once, gently. He is with me.
“What an anticlimax,” Kirby murmurs.
But there’s a quality to her tone that tells me maybe, somewhere down inside her, she is relieved that I did not do what she would have done so easily.
I wade back in from the big, dark deep and collapse on my shore, while the lighthouse burns and the foghorn blows.
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