The air thickens and smells sweet and cold. Rain’s coming. That’s a good thing if it holds off until after the job is done. Grace felt it too. She’s looking for an umbrella somewhere in the clutter of jackets and coolers and junk at her feet.
Grace Brooks, you should not have been so greedy. There are legal ways to make money. There are things that don’t require shadow operations. Shadow operations that employ shitbag gun runners. The jury has come to a decision. Your execution must be carried out before a rain delay hits.
She looks excited. Her little Haley or Ashley must be doing something good. I can’t be bothered. A quick glance at the field: They’re battling in front of the far net, a big mass of kids and dirt. Colors massing and writhing and wrestling, chasing a ball and laughing and screaming.
Execution will commence in five, four, three, two…what is Grace looking at?
One.
My finger is squeezing on its own. I feel the gun buck against my shoulder, the silencer taking away most of the sound, the breeze in the trees finishing the job. Everything is so slow. I feel like I’m watching the bullet. Like I am the bullet. Riding the bullet right for Grace’s forehead.
What the hell is she looking at anyway?
No…
No, Haley.
No, Ashley.
Stephanie.
Whatever your name is.
What the hell are you doing there? What are you doing there? Why aren’t you in the pile at the other end of the field? Did they sub you—
Things are speeding up. Betty-Ashley-Stephanie-Marcie spins, a lovely pirouette, a small spritz of red shooting from her shoulder.
No.
It doesn’t happen this way.
I don’t miss.
I never miss.
Do you have time for Murphy’s Law now?
Oh shit.
Grace kneels over her daughter, unsure of what happened. Now she’s rising up, her lungs filling, preparing to push the most primal of screams from her body.
I grip the rifle again. Which way did my shot go? Where was the drift? I adjust. Please let this be right. Let this be right.
Exhale. Close eyes. Inhale and hold. Open eyes. Sight-acquire-fire. Squeeze. Slow squeeze and exhale. All in less than a second. Shot number two. This time I’m not riding the bullet. I’m on edge, ready to pull as many rounds as this takes to finish.
Grace Brooks gets a small bark out before the bullet passes through her throat.
Roll over Stephanie-Ashley-Jill, don’t look at your mother.
I clean up my stand, taking my bags of bile and my bullets and my case. I’m tumbling out of the tree now, sliding down the rough bark with my rifle shouldered, moving fast. I barely remember to push the remote for the flash pops in the decoy tree. They go off in rapid succession and everyone hits the dirt.
The legs stayed dry and straight on the climb down, thank God. Something went right today. I make it all the way to my van before the heaves hit me again. My stomach finds new things to lose. I feel like my very essence is pushing its way from my insides to my mouth. Like some blackened demon is wrenching its way through my throat and out of my mouth. I have to tell myself that somewhere in that puddle, somewhere on the ground there, is my heart.
I don’t care, I don’t care, I can’t care.
Grace Brooks deserved what she got.
Ashley-Miranda-Katie is going to heal. Non-lethal shot.
But look what you’ve done…She wouldn’t be suffering right now if you were humane…if you were a better shot…
The next wave of nausea rolls over me and I have to gun the motor of my van to cover the noise of my scream. I leave the park, one hand on the wheel, the other scrambling in my backpack for comfort, too shaky to grip the bottle as a swarm of people move on the field.
Colors massing and writhing and wrestling and screaming and screaming and screaming. Not for a ball. Not for a game. For Grace Brooks and her daughter.
For her daughter, please God, for her daughter.
Chapter Ten
No sleep tonight.
If I stop for a second, if I let exhaustion take me, it’s going to be nasty. I can just imagine the things I’ll see, little girls, all decked out in the colors of the rainbow, moving across little plastic green hills, and I’ve got to hit them with a rifle to win a prize. So I keep moving.
I’m all over the radio. Well, not me. The suspect. They’re looking for a man, small and skinny, size-twelve shoes. I peppered the fake sniper stand and the ground around the tree with bootprints to throw them off my scent. The suspect may have been drunk or may have a previous war injury because his gait suggests a stiff-legged limp. I left a half-full can of beer on the decoy stand, next to a copy of the Bible, the Qu’ran, and Living with Grace Brooks magazine.
But the main focus is on Deborah Marie Holden. “Brave Little Debbie”, the newscasters dubbed her. And of course, as consolation, kind Samaritans from around the city have been sending in snack cakes.
Keep your strength up, Debbie.
These cakes aren’t as sweet as you, Debbie.
Little Debbie.
Debbie, whose shoulder was shattered by a steel-jacketed round from a high-powered rifle. What the hell was she thinking? At any rate, the chief of police has sworn to apprehend the man responsible, which is just fine with me.
Grace Brooks died at the scene. They say Debbie went into shock the moment she got hit. I hope so. I hope she missed everything. And that she doesn’t watch the amateur video snapped up by the news stations and replayed every half hour. That it took Grace five minutes to choke on her own blood. That it took half a dozen people to hold her back from her daughter. That in the end, she managed to squeeze Little Debbie’s hand and share a final moment between mother and daughter, back to you in the studio, Bob.
I’m not happy with this turn of events. I want to get away, but there’s no time out here. Things are in motion. I started it. I have to finish it. I have to go into the city, deeper. Into its darkest heart, the abandoned warehouse district, home of the drug cults and the slum runners. Where the fiends and the misanthropes play.
I suppose the best part of all of this is that I haven’t gotten any visits from my friends in the dark car. For a moment I allowed myself to think that perhaps Grace was sending the car. But that couldn’t be it. They would have seen me coming. I wouldn’t have come close to making that hit.
Whoever it is must be bolting down the doors. The first few hits got the underworld worried about a civil war. And now the cops will be breaking down their doors, looking for information. I know where to find my information. Number seven.
Shakes.
Shakes is a walking database. He spent the early part of his street career as a kind of litmus tester for each new designer drug. Messed him up a little. His spark plugs don’t fire in the right order anymore. Comical at first, fun to watch and listen to, but then he became unpredictable, dangerous. Then he became powerful.
He’s going to help me shape the rest of my mission. Not of his own free will, of course. Persuasion will be required. He knows people higher up on the list. As the head of a lesser church in the warehouse district, he deals with everyone I need to know, directly and indirectly. He sends his people out with the goods. They come back with money and information. He works closely with a floating brothel ring, which in turn works closely with the higher echelons on the list. One good turn deserves another.
I wish I had a partner for this. Not for backup. I just need a mouthpiece. Speaking is no longer my strong suit, and I’m not sure it ever was. I drool incessantly when I try to talk. My lips struggle for half a minute or more to form certain sounds. I’m positive my face scrunches up and makes me even harder to look at, because I’ve seen the way people find other things to look at when they converse with me.
But I’ll make an exception for Shakes. So many questions to ask him. How much was he paid to set me up? Who hired Vasili? Why was I attacked? Did he see what happened to my daughter?
And why do I remember the name Hooded Jack?
And for every question I ask, I’ll take a little piece of him. Shakes is going to lose his legs. And tongue, I think, as it seems fair. The faster and better he answers, the less his misery will be—
Something darts in front of my van and I swerve a little. Probably a tree branch. I slam on the brakes and jump out of the door, the van still rocking on its springs.
There is wildlife in the city, hidden by the tall buildings and deep alleys. Creatures great and small who have been cut off from the woodlands, wandering the concrete jungle searching for food. It isn’t unusual to see antelope migrating in the park fringes before sunrise. There’s a reason the alleys smell like skunk. And condemned buildings have become aviaries for many exotic breeds of birds.
I search the perimeter in the front of my car and see nothing. Behind me, barely visible in the glint of the taillights, I see twin golden reflections. My rifle is up and ready and I exhale and squeeze, and everything goes into slow motion.
There’s a shape moving across the street. Bouncing. A little girl in a soccer uniform. I reach out to her and yell for her to get down. And the bullet passes right through her, striking whatever small creature I thought I saw back there. For five minutes, I’m afraid to move. Afraid to track my quarry because I think I’ll have to step over a dead body.
But there is no body. Only a shopping bag with a neat hole in it, and ten yards further on, a dead fox. I use my forearm to wipe the tears from my eyes, hoping it will be enough to stop them from falling. I sling the rifle over my back and whip out my knife, trying to lose myself in the work of dressing this fox as fast as I can.
I hobble back to my van, leaving behind everything that was in the fox and a little that was in me as well. I need to clear my head. I can’t handle Shakes on no sleep.
I pull over at a rest stop and pop a can of sterno, cracking the windows to let out the stench. I skin the fox as best as I can in the dark, and get to roasting. Eventually, the fox smells good enough to eat. As soon as I’m full, I stow my gear, lock the van down, and hide in the back, covering myself with as many blankets as I can find. My right arm is snaking some surgical tubing around my left. I don’t even remember filling the syringe. I should probably get a new one. I can’t stop myself. The tears start to come as the needle goes in.
I see the little pill box in front of me, three piercings and empty bottles under the labels V, S.S., and G.B. The bottle under “Sh” is in my fingers. I wonder what I’m going to see. Which window in my mind will have the boards torn off? How bad will this get? Will it be part of my life or a nightmare of dead soccer kids?
I spring up, the needle still in my arm, and close all of the windows while I have some strength. I don’t want anyone to hear the screams when I wake up. I know they’re coming. I know I’ll have legs, but I don’t know if it will be worth it.
I’m sorry Deborah Marie Holden.
So, so sorry.
Chapter Eleven
Dinner time.
I’m coming out of the kitchen with an armload of casserole, my shoulders burn, remind me of how long I’ve been working. I bring this cheesy steaming goodness into an empty dining room, a masterpiece in a deserted museum. I call out to my family.
Dinner time.
They don’t answer. I scratch my chest under my shirt as I head for the door. In the living room, my daughter sits on the couch, slack, empty. Her eyes are hollow.
She’s been crying.
I want to ask her what’s wrong, but instead, I stand at the door and wave. She doesn’t wave back. I motion to the kitchen. It’s dinner time. She shakes her head, looking at the TV. She won’t look me in the face.
“We ate,” she says.
Well, you shouldn’t have, I answer. I told her what time dinner was. I must have.
I ask her what she thinks of my legs. Partly to make her laugh, partly because I wonder what other people think. She shakes her head imperceptibly, ignoring me as only she can. I dance for her, just a short little jig, something that would embarrass the shit out of her in front of her friends.
Dinner, I say.
She won’t look.
Dinner time, I plead.
There’s no answer.
You don’t like my food?
She stands up and starts to leave the room. She picks up a dirty plate from the coffee table. “I’ll do the dishes.”
I grab her arm. It’s dinner time, I scream at her. Where’s your father?
“We ate, Mom! We ate! We ate! Three hours ago, it’s midnight now. Fuck!”
I don’t think I’ve ever heard her snap this way before. She’s retreating up the stairs. I decide to follow.
You don’t want to spend time with…
Bang. Her bedroom door slams in my face. I rest my hand on the door, concerned that I’m losing her. I must have been making food for a reason.
Whenever something in our lives would go drastically wrong, my daughter would blame me. If I had been normal, maybe Dad would have stuck with me. If I had done things different, maybe she’d be getting better grades now. Why can’t I apologize, make things better?
And I’d tell her, a woman shouldn’t define herself by her husband. There are plenty of strong females out there, raising kids on their own, juggling work, making success out of apparent failure.
“Making curtains with your daughter is not a sign of success. Teaching me how to use greenery to make the living room warmer doesn’t do shit for me, Mother.”
It would if you tried.
“You’re not Grace Brooks, Mom, and you never will be.”
The hallway grows darker, a shift like a sudden cloud across the sun. Her door bursts open and she blows past me.
“I’m going out.”
No. No no no no!
I’m screaming, stomping, pulling at her sleeve. Begging her not to.
“Don’t touch me! Sooner or later, you’ll have to get over this.”
She jerks her hand free and jogs down the stairs, knowing I can’t follow too quickly.
Stop! I scream. Stop, stop, please!
I wish I knew why I was so scared. She doesn’t even look back as she slams the front door shut, and it makes me weak in where my knees used to be. I look down, and I see the familiar steel pipes. I don’t have legs. They’re gone. That’s why I was dancing. Trying to show her I could adjust, things were getting back to normal.
But they weren’t. My mind’s in a blender. My daughter never saw my steel legs, I’m sure of it. This is two memories competing, battling like rams for supremacy over a craggy ravine.
I lose my balance on the lip of the stairs. I swear I hear voices outside. Chains. Guns. Vicious things, a world waiting to swallow my daughter whole. I need to get out. Out. Follow.
And then the world turns upside down, and I’m drifting through space, watching the steps pitch in front of me, the bottom one rising up fast. If I break my neck in a dream, will I really die like they say? Falling and falling, and I hope it’s true, I hope it’s true.
Images skid across my mind. Carpet. Nosebleed. Front door. Pill after pill, bottle after bottle, nothing putting out the fire inside. Pain.
Get out. It’s all I can do. Fuel first, stop the pain, save her. Get out. Find her. Make her safe.
Chapter Twelve
Well. That was pleasant.
My mouth is glued shut with dried saliva. I crank my way free from the blankets at the back of the van and crawl towards the front. It’s a grey morning, the kind of early you can feel in your stomach. Nice and quiet here on the side of a transition road.
Shakes. Shakes and I are going to have a long talk. A long, long talk. And I’m not ready. I can’t imagine three words together. Not a sentence. What the hell am I going to do, write out the questions for him? I bet Shakes can’t even read.
I’m out of the tree-lined roads and into the sprawling flatlands of the city’s industrial quarter. Business hasn’t been good here. Not since they shipped all t
he jobs overseas and built the nuclear power plant upstate. The city got blessed with a lot of large brick buildings full of equipment that nobody wanted to buy, in an area no one wanted to revitalize. The warehouse district.
Cops call this place the “Breeding Ground.” From an airplane, I once saw the Breeding Ground as a bird sees it. A patch in the middle of green rolling suburbs, several miles wide. Like God reached down and pried off a chunk of the city with a spatula. Brown and grey and mud everywhere, the roads covered in veins of greenery that pushed up through asphalt that nobody drives on. It looked empty, like a museum dedicated to the failed effort of post-war optimism.
It’s completely empty here. As close to a vacuum as you can get. No life but for the roaches. The few birds that do stray out this way get jumped by the homeless, become a week’s worth of meals. If Dr. Fortescu is near the top of the food chain, the Breeding Ground is the primordial soup from which life springs.
I feel comfortable in the ugliness. This should be my front lawn, the only place I can feel part of society. But I don’t. It’s all bad memories. Nothing worth saving. I wish I could run a torch through the streets, watch it all turn to embers in one night. I’ll have to settle for a piece at a time.
Some people would call taking Shakes out a futile gesture, like weeding. Sure, other weeds will take Shakes’s place, but I love knowing that he won’t be on the lawn anymore.
I’m weaving the van in between row after row of buildings, paying careful attention to the graffiti and territorial markings. The van has already been pelted with a shoe and an empty can. Homeless people I didn’t even see. I got a little too close to their doghouse, and they barked. They’re lucky I don’t have the time or bullets to waste barking back.
I turn a corner and the decay starts fades a bit. The center of the Breeding Ground is where the buildings haven’t fallen apart so much. It’s where rich people have invested their money in security systems and reinforced walls and barbed-wire fences.
They have things to store, goods to move, none of it legal. I’m in the territory of the drug cults. Each building here is called a church, and each congregation is very protective of its parish. They tolerate their neighbors as much as possible. They have no patience for trespassers. The rest of the city treats the cults as no major problem. Out of sight, out of mind. But if a holy war were to break out here, the whole town would collapse.
Miss Massacre's Guide to Murder and Vengeance Page 8
