My pack has spilled my car keys, some spare change, things that I can’t leave lying around for evidence. I scramble to get them up as fast as I can.
Mercifully, the rope harness I rigged up behaves itself. Another simple knot, learned from my new favorite book before I got up to the ceiling, is shaken easily loose. The nylon cords slide down from the support beams and I stuff them in my pack.
I pull myself over to Susan and watch her pupils dilate and her face freeze. She frowns at me. The PA paws at her from below, struggling for breath. Security probably would have gotten a kick out of this video in the morning. But their recorder is in the parking attendant’s booth, which will be my last stop on the way out. The attendant left for home a couple of hours ago. After all, nobody can get into or out of the garage after nine o’clock without the gate opener. Everything looked perfectly safe on his last security sweep. He walked his route and left, and never looked up to see me.
I’m only wasting time thinking about the guard because it takes my mind off the hurt in my body. Every time I extend my right arm, there’s pain. Not like a bump or bruise pain. More like a rusty-nail-lodged-in-my-shoulder-socket pain. Guess I jammed my arm along with my leg. White spots flare in my eyes and my mouth tastes like copper. I need to get out of here.
I go to the corner of the garage, where my flatbed cart full of raggedy blankets waits for me. The rope shifts around in my backpack, clinking against the little clear bottle inside, and I hear it talking to me.
Feeling bad, huh? You’re not going to make it out of here without me.
Shut up.
You’re going to pass out. They’re going to find you. You need me.
Like I have time to shoot up.
Drink me.
What am I, fucking Alice?
It takes everything I’ve got to lift myself up six inches and flop onto the flatbed roller. I pull the filthy blankets around me, the camouflage of being just another hungry mouth on the street. I huddle inside the dirty warmth, safe on my wheels. I slap at the floor with my hands, propelling myself towards the garage exit. I think the bottle is going to win when I get back to the van. This hurts way too much to be anything less than a sprain.
Susan’s body jerks and I hear her draw breath. It gets my attention, but it doesn’t scare me. People do this when they die. Few people know about it because Hollywood doesn’t show it. Muscles twitch and dilate, including the diaphragm, so the lungs can pull in minimal air, rush it over perfectly relaxed vocal cords, and you get a nice little dead man’s laugh.
I watch her, hoping to see some kind of spark leave her, a black mist escape from her mouth.
A series of images flashes across my brain.
A courtroom. A woman, crying. Another woman watching, stern faced. Vasili, smiling. Somewhere else, blood. A lot of blood and sound, and I should be doing something to stop what’s happening, should at least try to…and in the courtroom again, I’m crying, not me. Not me. Not guilty. Not guilty. Not…
Someone is crying here. Someone is sobbing. Susan? Did I miss a vital?
“Where…where?”
It’s one of the PAs.
She’s rolling on the ground, clutching her stomach
I aimed for her shoulder. Sloppy work, but down is down, I guess. Better her than me.
What will she tell the media? She will talk to the media, they all do. I’m not going to ask her not to, because that’s going to make me look even worse.
I should say something. Your boss. There are things about your boss you don’t know. She’s bad. She’s a very bad woman.
I don’t say anything. Instead, I gather up their scattered cell phones.
“Where…my book…why…I left in the…”
She’s in shock. She can’t even see me. She doesn’t know who I am. She never will. She gasps for breath, reaching her hands down to her stomach, bringing them to her face, checking for blood again and again. A bruise, I want to tell her. All it will leave is a big ugly bruise, and most of us would be thankful for that.
She closes her eyes, convinced she’s going to die. She keeps breathing and breathing. Susan’s blood has trickled over, so I move. Can’t get any on my wheels. The police will see the blood, and they will question this poor girl just out of college. They will accuse, they will prod, but eventually, they will figure out she had nothing to do with it. I will be far away by then.
The PA opens her eyes again and her hand hits Susan’s blood. When she sees it, she’ll think it’s hers, and that will be just enough to trigger a surge for a life-saving scream.
So I swallow the pain and I hustle, pushing harder, telling myself that the bottle didn’t win tonight. I will have earned it. I’m not addicted. I’m in pain and it helps me.
After stopping to nab the security tapes, I move to the street entrance. It takes a little bit of doing to get around the tire spikes at the exit. When I finish, I’m out of breath. I want a place to rest. I want my van. I want a bed. I want my old life.
I stop at the curb as the pain wins the battle against my resolve, emptying my guts into the parking lot. Homeless people do this sometimes, and if people see, they’ll turn away. The plan survives, I tell myself. Just keep on puking.
The street is empty. Or almost.
There’s that damn car again.
Sitting across the way. I stare at the driver’s-side windows, obsidian curtains blinding me to the truth. The car takes off like a shot. Nothing thrown at me this time. No cryptic messages. This message was loud and clear. I am being watched and they want me to know it.
This is getting old. Maybe I should find a new hobby.
It starts to rain, loud and heavy enough to cover the PA’s screaming.
Chapter Five
Brown sedan. I think it’s brown. Could be dark gray, could be some other color that doesn’t reflect well in moonlight. Four doors. Didn’t catch the license plate.
I’m actually glad the car was there. The adrenaline keeps me sharp. I’m in a blazing amount of pain, and that little bottle sings the sweetest siren song in the world, but I’m ignoring it. For now.
I make my way back to my van, the sound of rain hitting my roof, each drip matching the ragged breath in my lungs. The wet streets absorb the headlights and there’s not much in the way of ambient light. It’s just one big, smeary twenty-minute jaunt. I know the route so well I could do it with my eyes closed.
The next time I blink, I’m in the library, my staging ground. You can learn about anything here. Makes and models of cars, for instance. Helpful tips on hunting. If you like learning how to kill, the Library of Congress suggests Gray’s Anatomy, Archery for Beginners, Rifle Hunting the NRA Way, Perky Patty’s Perfect Guide to Pulverizing Household Pests. Books that detail the weakest parts of the human anatomy, best spots for kill shots, helpful household products that make great poisons, that sort of thing.
The main branch of the library is attached to the records department of City Hall. I can look up anything about buildings: when they were built, why, the architecture style, ventilation systems, unused hallways.
The architecture of City Central is incredible. It’s a ridiculously huge complex, laid out (as the name suggests) near the center of the city, all domes and sandstone and brick and green gutters and bas relief. Magnificent. I could climb this building with just my arms, there’s so much relief and stonework. The library is here, City Hall, the County Seat, DMV, BLM, you name the letters, they have an office here.
I love the library. I hate being rushed. I don’t know who’s following me, but if their intention was to mess up my plans by making me think too much, it’s working.
Frances, my contact behind the desk, thinks I’m a graduate student. He greets me with a smile every day, runs about as fast as his chubby legs will carry him if I need something. I think Frances likes me. I don’t like Frances, but I don’t hate him either. He feels sorry for me because I have no legs. He feels bad for me because of my hairline. He told me once that he could s
ee through the scars on my face, that underneath was a radiant flower.
He actually said radiant flower.
He touched my cheek when he said it, and I haven’t been quite as nice to Frances since. He’s lucky I didn’t dislocate his fingers and sprain his wrist, but honestly, I was just shocked that another person would want to touch me.
Frances is the kind of guy who’d really like the person I think I used to be. The lady who did arts and crafts and watched daytime TV. Somehow, Frances would be interested in these things. Once I start to learn more about my past, I think I will talk to him a little more. Just to see what kind of friends I used to make.
But the museum tour of my mind is a full package deal, and if he sees one exhibit, he’ll get nosy and want to see all of them. Letting Frances into the newer corners of the museum would scare him. I think he’s the type of man who, if sufficiently provoked, would wet his pants. It may also lead him to make phone calls, to brag to his two or three good friends over their game of Might & Magic at the coffeehouse. And maybe he’d call the cops. So I don’t let Frances in. He’s still professional towards me, still helps me as much as possible. But we both know a line has been crossed.
Right now, Frances is bringing things up from the basement archives. He ran when he left, trying to impress me, I think. He told me about his diet. He’s lost ten pounds in the last month, all from eating only one kind of sandwich, every meal, every day. Honestly, I think he’s got one of those faces where it will never make a difference, all round and wobbly. All I could hear was the screaming of his corduroy pants as he scuffed away. I imagine it’s what a three-hundred-pound cricket would sound like.
I asked him for the ground plans of three different parks on the outskirts of the city. I wanted original layouts, landscaping receipts, anything he could find. Frances has been working for at least a month on this. It’s for my thesis paper, as far as he knows. I’m comparing and contrasting the city as it is now to how it was forty years ago. I’m exploring the impact of urbanization, poverty, and gang activity on underdeveloped commercial properties. Or something.
Loud metallic thumping starts up behind me, screeches and groans and cables and chains. The elevator is hauling Frances back to me. The doors rattle open. Frances tries to whistle as he approaches, but his breathing is labored. Frances doesn’t enjoy walking.
“It’s our lucky night!”
Our. So clingy, Frances. Let me go, let me be.
Frances sets down three musty rolls of blueprints. He hands me an old brown folder, bound with string, still warm from being held under his armpit. There are photos inside, neatly divided by decade, showing the progression of the parks.
“I don’t know if you needed them, but I also found a great bunch of newspaper clippings from when they converted half of Bremmerton into a parking lot. A bunch of real nifty stuff. Did you know the soccer field used to be a natural amphitheater? All sorts of reactions from the citizens when they converted it, you know? Still holding on to the idea that art could win out over the suburbs. Like the city wasn’t growing like…like a…”
Frances isn’t good with metaphors.
“…big…city. Anyways, it gives you a good idea of what the people had on their minds.”
I nod my head at Frances and bury myself in the photos. The grounds surrounding the soccer field. I had no idea it was built so perfectly. Tailor-made for my needs. It’ll give me time to set up, time to get away, natural blinds. The acoustics. This is going to be poetry. Dangerous, too. I need to get a closer look at things. But…
Frances hangs by the table expectantly, shifting a little from foot to foot. He feigns interest in the photos. After a few minutes he pretends to look at the blueprints, running his fingers across certain lines, saying “hm” thoughtfully, hoping, begging me to ask a question.
I don’t. Frances slinks into the shadows. I think he’s pretending to reshelf some books, but I know he’s watching me.
Hunters have remarkable patience. I can wait him out, pretend that there is a detail in one of these photos that is somehow crucial to my work. But I don’t. I spend about three minutes on each photograph and jot a note on my notepad. If you’re fascinated, other people will be too.
Unfortunately, Frances is in love. So he waits and shuffles and breathes and wheezes and sighs and clears his throat and moves and dusts and reads and looks out the window and brushes by the table three times to see if I need anything and goes back to re-shelving and begins the cycle over again and all of it lasts forty-five minutes.
Forty-five minutes.
I wanted to give Frances a hundred dollars. A hooker could have given him something for forty-five minutes that he needed, and I could have told him where to go to get the best rates. I feel bad wasting his time, and I feel bad that he’s wasting my time. Finally, the elevator doors rattle open and Frances’s breathing recedes down the open shaft.
I’m alone again.
Now I can get into the specifics.
Where are the highest trees? Where are the tallest bushes? How often is the area landscaped? Where are the service roads? What can you see from the most-traveled roads? The least? Is there a back door, a way few people enter? If you have no legs and have to run across open fields on artificial jogging legs, which path will give you the most cover and the fewest obstacles?
I have to make the park my home. I have to know everything about it, because the next job is going to be horribly public, and fairly dangerous.
Up until now, I’ve been been what the media would call a random act of violence. An anomaly. Two in a row will probably bring new tags: obsessed or focused, a possible vigilante, a probable criminal warlord. This next one is going to be ugly. It’s going to put me in the category of brazen or crazed or even lunatic, although I think they’ll only use that on the tabloid news shows. It could even land me the big M. Monster.
But still, the hit has its upside and downside.
Positive: It’ll be the last hit before I drop into the underworld. You start by nailing public figures. The kind of people who, when killed, elicit responses like, “I just don’t see what anyone could have against him.” The kind of people who are called genuine citizens, caring individuals and pillars of the community. You make it look like an organized hit. A family thing. Maybe one of the drug cults getting out of control. Anger the public. They yell enough, then the police feel like they have to act. So the cops roll into Red Light, or the wharfs, or the warehouse district, and they start busting heads. The criminals lay low, bunker down. They stand still. My kind of target. The cops don’t stick around for long, but the beasts are slow to come back out of their caves.
Positive: This will make two women in a row. Again, that ghost of the feminist I used to be cringes. Wives will focus on this. They will talk about it incessantly. On the phone, while their husbands listen. To their husbands over dinner. To their boyfriends. They won’t feel safe going out at night. They’ll gather and protest. The men will feel compelled to do the same, all in the name of getting the females to stop talking. It’s all marketing, pure and simple. If anything will make cops start moving, it’s the assassination of two prominent females in the community.
And best of all, it will cement the image of the killer in the press: he’s a man with a grudge, a crazed misogynist, all of the hastily chosen talking-head experts will say. A religious fanatic, someone with an axe to grind. Someone who hates women.
Negative: This will be very public, and noting my past two performances, the fuck-up factor will be high.
Susan Schrader was probably the second or third most popular female attorney in town, if such things as popular attorneys exist. If you made a list of the top ten, she’d be the only woman on there, near the bottom of course, damn glass ceiling. She has helped a lot of people get their lives back in court. One of her clients in particular I didn’t like so much.
That vision I had in the garage, the courtroom scene, had left a few solid facts. Susan Schrader defended Vasili i
n the courtroom. I think I was testifying because he tried to kill me. It had something to do with my husband, too. Susan, that bitch, didn’t care. She just put Vasili in a shiny suit and stood up next to him with her Honorable Citizen paintbrush. Maybe it’s because she made me out to be a hysterical wench on the stand. I say maybe because I’m not entirely sure.
The bottle would be great now. I can see all ten of them swimming around in my head when I bliss out. But now I need focus.
Focus.
Number Eight: Grace Brooks. A powerful woman, one who controls many different things by day and even more by night. When they syndicated her TV show, she took out a healthy life-insurance policy on everyone in her family. Rumor has it her husband tried to cash hers in early. He even added some additional accidental dismemberment riders to the policy. And then he found out that everything he knew about her was just the surface of a very deep, dark pond. He also found out she had a policy out on him, too. Not too huge, since she was already rich. She had connections, and they made it all look like a horrible act of random gang violence. She’s been the merry widow ever since. Her ratings are higher. She even established a charity fund for after-school programs in his name.
Ruthless businesswoman. Personable, yes. She gives to a lot of different charities. Her own empire, stretching far and wide across the land, and for the most part, perfectly legal. She’s a bit of a recluse. Her shooting studio is located on her expansive ranch. She doesn’t have to go anywhere for anything.
In fact, Grace Brooks only sees daylight in public once a week in the late summer and early fall, and only for one thing.
Grace Brooks is a soccer mom.
A professional game would give me so many opportunities. So many different ways to get close. But a kid’s game is too intimate. The no-legged lady puffing her way across the grass would be singled out in no time. Grass is hard for me, unless I’ve got my running legs on, and those make me the center of attention. They’re big springy things, sort of inverted question marks, loud when I move because of the way they spring back. So I have to do this one long distance and hope no one hears my springy serenade as I flee. I hate it.
Miss Massacre's Guide to Murder and Vengeance Page 4
