The Mask: A Vanessa Michael Munroe Novel

by Taylor Stevens

  “How many are in the house?”

  Words came out of his mouth, but they were slurred.

  She hit him again and he went out. She put her hands to his shoulders and scooted back, pulling him around the corner. With her feet she shoved him under the house and then crawled under and pulled him fully in.

  She searched his pockets and found his phone. Her gloved hands fumbled in the dark to pull out the battery. She found his wallet and left it open on his chest. Pushed his arm up and plunged a knife inward.

  Blood pooled quickly, a sign that she’d hit his axillary.

  This was killer semantics: she hadn’t murdered an unconscious man outright, but even if he came to before he bled out, he’d still likely die all the same.

  Munroe pulled out from beneath the house, kept low, and tested the sunroom’s sliding door. The Okadas hadn’t been much for locks; she could thank herself, or Jiro, for this one. She slipped back under the house and crawled to the carport and skirted beneath the balcony for the front, where only a door stood between her and the thugs inside. Beside the entryway neatly groomed tree branches reached toward the second floor.

  Less than four months ago, her mornings had begun in the dark, pulling herself four stories up, handgrip and toehold from wall to balcony, balcony to rooftop edge, and over, where she could sit in solitude under the sky’s cathedral and wait for the sun to rise. But back then there hadn’t been parents and children waiting to be slaughtered if she failed.

  Munroe tested a tree branch for strength.

  Her internal clock said she’d passed 2:00 A.M.

  Inside the house footsteps pounded down the stairs.

  Munroe shimmied as far as the tree branch would take her. High enough that her toes could find purchase on an upper window ledge and her elbows reach the lowest part of the rooftop’s gentle slope. She dragged upward, until she rested on clay tiles, and moved slowly up the incline, body weight distributed through forearms and shins.

  The moon laughed in its arc across the sky, stealing time.

  She didn’t have long before Jiro grew anxious and began calling his lieutenants. He would need to be gone before the neighborhood began to wake. Alina’s still fresh scars had spoken to the pleasure Jiro took in combining psychological pain with the physical; they spoke to the sincerity of his threats and to the possibility that he might not wait until first light for the killing to start.

  Munroe crested the roof, slow in the descent, shoulders and arms pushing back to keep from sliding headfirst over the side. She reached the edge and tipped her face over, marking the man who kept watch on the balcony.

  He was near the middle, far more alert than he’d been the last time she’d seen him, making a slow pace back and forth, seeking and searching for something in the dark. She inched to where the balcony had no doors or windows.

  She closed her eyes, measuring time by his footsteps.

  She rolled in a controlled fall off the edge, grip releasing last of all. She dropped behind him. Hand around his mouth, she yanked him into her, into the blade that sought his organs and finally, as he dropped, his throat.

  She shoved him up against the house, where he couldn’t be seen from either room that opened to the balcony. Felt through his pockets and found his phone, same as she had with the others. She pulled the battery and placed the pieces beside him, then searched for more and found nothing.

  Munroe hugged the wall, inched toward the front of the house, and nudged the sliding door. The glass was open, the screen locked. Voices, softly spoken from down the hall, filtered toward her, and she placed that man in the hall below. Footsteps creaked up the stairs. She pressed palms to her eyes, creating a deeper darkness. When her eyes had adjusted, she lay on her side, floor level, less likely to be seen should someone in the room be looking out, and pressed her upper face to the screen.

  This was Okada’s wife’s room, where she and the children had slept. The futons were spread across the floor like so many camping mattresses, the blankets and sheets disturbed, indicating that the occupants had been roused and pulled out of bed. Munroe slipped the tip of the blade into the screen and, one small nick at a time to limit the noise, poked up the frame until the hole was wide enough that she could peel it back and slip inside.

  Her torso was on the tatami, legs still outside, when the footsteps entered the room. She pulled hard, made it fully through but was not off the floor before rough hands grabbed her hair and a muzzle pressed in on her cheek.

  Munroe dropped the knife and lifted her hands.

  The fingers in her hair yanked her face upward, toward a grinning mouth with crooked teeth and eyes laughing in triumph. He ordered her up, impeding the process with his manhandling. Muzzle to her head, he turned to yell into the hall, to tell the others what he’d found, and that one microburst of distraction was his last mistake: blade of her hand into his elbow joint, the fingers of her other hand stiff into his throat; knee to groin, palm heel-up under his nose: four movements, swift and fluid in less time than it took to inhale.

  Mute, gagging, bleeding, he dropped to one knee. Knife to palm, she took him down at the base of his skull, then knelt beside his bleeding head, fingers racing through his pockets. She nudged the weapon out of his grasp and disassembled his phone, wasting precious seconds in the contemplation between metal and metal.

  She’d never be faster than a bullet, but in close contact she was faster than the hand that drew the gun. Knives, personal and silent, were her weapon of choice, but she wasn’t a knife fighter; she was a survivor, fast, brutal, and effective with a blade for whom self-preserving pragmatism would always win in the end. Munroe picked up the knife she’d dropped, sheathed it, then hefted the 9 mm and crept toward the door, map to the interior shifting inside her head.

  One room cleared; three men still inside, at least one downstairs; hostages on the upper floor. She stuck her head beyond the door frame and back: empty hall. Two upstairs bedroom doors closed.

  Then Jiro’s voice broke through in angry whispered yells. Muted thuds with the timing of punches reached out from the room down the hall, followed by muffled cries as Jiro threatened. No phone calls were getting through, his men were missing, the man responsible hadn’t come, and that made the hostages useless. The children were pawns, the parents less than that.

  The cries and thuds reacted to every sentence, begging for mercy, swearing to innocence. Time was up and first the children would die.

  Munroe grabbed a porcelain figurine from off a narrow shelf, stepped through the room, and threw it hard toward the floor just at the edge of the stairwell.

  The figure shattered. The door flew open. Footsteps thundered up the stairs. Munroe stepped into the hallway and fired. First round to the chest of the man on the stairs and he fell backward and tumbled down. Second round into Jiro’s thigh. The third spit wood as Jiro drew his own weapon and fired back.

  Munroe charged the hall, firing as she ran, rapid pulls that forced Jiro to rush for cover; rapid pulls that bought her time and got her to the end of the hall and to the door where he’d retreated; rapid pulls that emptied the magazine and made her gunpowder deaf.

  She threw herself along the floor toward Jiro’s feet, while his bloodied arm and shaking hand sought a target higher up and the reports from his weapon thundered over her head. She pulled him down before he had a chance to grab a child as collateral and bargaining chip and, before the muzzle could find her, plunged the blade into his wrist, severing tendons to the hand that held the gun.

  She knocked the weapon away, counting seconds, counting life, counting time to flee. The neighborhood had come alive, even with her eardrums ringing she could hear the noise, the calls, the yelling.

  Soon the sirens would come.

  Jiro’s free hand darted to his leg and came back stabbing.

  Visions of Alina and the still fresh scars burned hot beneath the motion. Munroe rolled. Jiro’s knife connected with her thigh.

  Pain was out there, somewher
e, in the night, in the jungle, inflicted by the man who had taught her to hate. They grappled on the floor, hand to wrist and wrist to hand, struggling for dominance. Jiro broke free of her defensive grasp and in microsecond slivers she felt the knife plunging for her side. She threw her head forward, into Jiro’s face, smashing cartilage and shifting the center of gravity.

  Blood gushed forth beneath her, Jiro’s knife hit high, slicing through the leather of her jacket, grazing skin, adding a wound that would add to the scars. She stabbed his arm, stabbed his gut, fighting to survive, to kill, to win, fighting mad and fighting blind because reason had fled and the past returned and the only thing that mattered was keeping the animal alive. She stabbed until Jiro’s movements settled into whimpers, and only then did she glance up to assess what she’d taken in through the fog of war.

  Okada and his wife were to the side of the room, tied together back to back, Okada’s face bloody and his wife’s mottled from a recent beating. The children were huddled, terrified, in the corner, eyes squeezed tight, arms wrapped around each other.

  Downstairs the front door opened and rapid footsteps faded into the distance. Munroe stretched for the firearm lying on the floor. She grabbed Jiro’s foot and stood, then limping, dragged him into the hallway. She closed the bedroom door to hide him from the children, from the parents, to shut away her own atavistic animal and remain separate from the human Okada had known.

  Red dripped from Jiro’s lips. Gurgling sounds came from his throat as he drowned in his own blood. Munroe stood over him and he stared up at her, eye to eye, killer to killer, and he mocked her even now.

  She pulled the two bullets taken from the weapon down the hill and put one in Jiro’s hand. “A gift from me,” she said, and clenched his useless hand around it. She racked the other into the 9 mm and put the muzzle to his head. “A gift from Alina,” she said, and staring him in the eyes, she fired.

  In the far distance, sirens wailed.

  Like a preying beast startled by noise in the forest’s calm, Munroe’s head ticked up. She dropped the gun and ran the hall, pushed through the mother’s room and out the ripped screen. She went over the balcony and dropped to the roof of the carport, then went over its side and crouched in the small backyard while lights and yelling and dogs and confusion responded to the chaos inside the Okadas’ home.

  Adrenaline pumping, pain far off beyond awareness, she skirted open windows, went over the fence, grabbed her boots, and hustled on. Far down the hill another weapon report rang out.

  The sirens were closer now: the cavalry had arrived.

  She’d be on the ocean by the time anyone put sense to the massacre inside the house. Strength came in many forms, not least of which were speed and cunning and the ability to think fast on her feet; she was the predator reborn, fully formed and ready for flight.

  If you’re a new reader to this series, I’m so glad you’ve discovered Vanessa Michael Munroe and were willing to take a chance on her most recent adventure. I truly hope you’ve enjoyed it and I would love to hear from you if you have. If you’re a fan, or a former reader back for another round, I can’t tell you how happy I am to be able to share this world with you again. Thank you for keeping Munroe riding.

  Now that this series has grown to five and a quarter books, I’ve begun to receive more frequent inquiries on the chronology, as well as questions asking if it’s necessary to read the series in order.

  The short answer is no. I do my best to keep each story self-contained, providing just enough backstory that it’s possible to fall into any book in the series and pick up from there, but not so much as to annoy those who’ve started at the beginning and heard it all before. When it comes to plot, each book is a stand-alone and one could read a single volume, or all of them, in order or out of order, and each story will work well in isolation.

  There is, however, an arc that flows from the beginning, where the characters—just like real people—are affected and changed by prior events. For readers who read primarily for plot and thrills, the chronology won’t matter. For those who read as much for character as for plot, there will probably be a richer reading experience by at least including the first book, The Informationist, at some point.

  In order, the books are:

  The Informationist

  The Innocent

  The Doll

  The Vessel (a novella that ties up loose ends from The Doll and leads into The Catch)

  The Catch

  The Mask

  In addition to the Vanessa Michael Munroe stories, on my website I also share extensively about the publishing industry, the mechanics of storytelling, behind-the-book research that has gone into each volume, and my path from growing up as uneducated child labor in the communes of the apocalyptic cult into which I was born, to bestselling novelist.

  If you’d like a more personal connection, or would like to go beyond the book, I welcome you to join me on this journey. You can find me at: www.taylorstevensbooks.com/connect.php and I look forward to hearing from you.

  At author engagements and book events, I’m often asked about the cadence and vocabulary in my writing, and how, seeing as I grew up deprived of an education, I’m able to do what I do. The best answer I can give, really, is a story that also does quite nicely in acknowledging the many hands that have touched this book.

  Shortly after The Informationist was published, on the third stop of my very first book tour, I found myself doing a Q&A for a cozy little group. After the interviewer had finished her questions, we opened the floor to the participants, and it was then that an elderly gentleman, mid-seventies if we’re generous, leaned forward and pointed a thin, shaking finger in my direction.

  “You claim to only have a sixth-grade education,” he said. “But I’ve read your book, and I don’t believe you.”

  “Well,” I said, “you would if you’d read the first drafts.”

  Much like those invisible early years where teaching myself how to write came into play, what we have in this beautiful, finished package belies the hundreds of raw, rough pages that wouldn’t have been fit for reading without the unseen effort of so many along the way.

  To everyone at Crown Publishers—those in publicity, marketing, sales, foreign rights, production, audio, design, and more—everyone who’s put in so much effort on behalf of this series, I thank you. Through structural changes and personnel changes, you have been a constant, and I appreciate your support more than you know. To Lindsay Sagnette and Nora Evans-Reitz, thank you for making the production and publication process run smoothly.

  A very special thanks to my editor, Christine Kopprasch, for being the bestest, smartest, hardest, fastest, and amazingest; for “getting” me, my stories and characters, and for knowing just how to bring out the best in me; for being collaborative and a perfect teammate. It’s been a joy and privilege working with you.

  Love and appreciation also go to my agent, Anne Hawkins, for her knowledge, experience, and instinct. I wake up every day grateful that she has my back. Anne, you got me into this game and you’ve been my rock since day one: thank you for being you.

  When a larger-than-life character like Munroe fills a story, it’s the political, cultural, and geographical accuracy that grounds the adventure in realism. Google works fine for laying a foundation, but you can’t smell the streets, feel the texture of the air, or get a reliable sense of humanity over the Internet. For that, and so much more, I make every effort to acquire firsthand experience in the environments I write about. But even with having traveled to Japan to get that boots-on-the-ground vibe as I did, authenticating the level of detail that threads through these pages wouldn’t have been possible without the help of two friends who, between them, share roughly four decades of living and working as gaikokujin (foreigners) in Japan. To Dawn McDonald, thank you for answering my questions, for not getting tired when I kept coming back for ever more clarification; thank you for the things you investigated and the details you confirmed, and for so ge
nerously sharing your time with me. Erinn L. in Kansai, without you, and the places we visited, the stories you told, the experiences you shared, the knowledge you imparted, the interpreting you did, and the way you humored my sometimes odd requests, this story would have been something else entirely—something far, far less—if it could have been told at all. Thank you for making this one possible.

  To my friends, family, and children, who are always there even when I’m often not, thank you for your patience and endurance. To the muse, thank you for the laughter, insight, and always stretching my thinking in new directions. And to my readers and fans—especially all the “cool kids” who interact with me through e-mail—you bolster me daily with love, support, and encouragement, keep this series alive, and are responsible for the days I go without washing my hair or getting out of my pajamas. Thank you for that.

  TAYLOR STEVENS is the award-winning New York Times bestselling author of The Informationist, The Innocent, The Doll, The Catch, and the novella The Vessel. Featuring Vanessa Michael Munroe, the series has received critical acclaim and the books are published in twenty languages. The Informationist has been optioned for film by James Cameron’s production company, Lightstorm Entertainment. Born in New York State into the Children of God, raised in communes across the globe, and denied an education beyond the sixth grade, Stevens was in her twenties when she broke free to follow hope and a vague idea of what possibilities lay beyond. She now lives in Texas.