Two in the Head

by Eric Beetner

  I didn’t get it word for word. Calder and Rizzo were surprised but kept cool. She got right to the point.

  “I’ll take the deal.”

  “Samantha, this is quite a turnaround.”

  “Yeah, that was quite a double cross downstairs.”

  “You understand,” Calder said. “We had no choice.”

  “You had a choice. You chose wrong. Now I’m choosing wrong.”

  “But you want the deal?” Rizzo asked, understandably confused.

  “For twenty million.”

  What was she doing? Was she bargaining?

  “Twenty?” Calder repeated.

  “Twenty. For that you get everything.”

  Calder: “The district attorney?”

  I watched the world bob up and down, her nodding our head.

  Rizzo: “The DEA office?”

  She nodded again.

  “Nothing touches us?”

  “Nothing except me if you try to fuck me again. My twenty million is walk away money. You can call me for favors, but I’ll be hard to find and harder to kill.”

  There was silence. I couldn’t tell if the sound cut out or if they were simply contemplating the offer. I cupped my hands over my ears to try to tease out a tiny bit more from the bad connection.

  “Deal.” Not sure which one said it, but next thing they were shaking hands on it.

  “I’ll get started right away,” she said.

  The connection cut out as the bus moved away. Two police cars rushed by outside, no doubt responding to the explosion. A fire truck wailed its siren close behind. Part of me wanted to get out and help them secure the scene. Old training kicking in, I guessed.

  Another flood of subconscious knowing hit me. I didn’t have to parse out what she meant. She meant Lucas and she meant tonight.

  LAST ONE HOME IS A ROTTEN EGG

  As soon as I disconnected the mind meld or whatever the hell happened, the headache went away. Who was this woman? Had she really promised to take out Lucas? She was taking my deal. Of course it made sense that Calder and Rizzo had more than one option on the table. Why should I think I was the only one to get the job done?

  So I was in a race. My cell phone was dead so calling Lucas to warn him was out.

  The man with a walker finally made it down to the curb and the bus began to move. I should have relished a moment to take a breather, but my brain buzzed along at hummingbird speeds. Waking up from this crazy dream in a pile of ash and pools of my own blood still seemed a very viable option. Things kept moving along as if it was reality so I accepted I was wide awake, and maybe more awake than I’d ever been.

  As much as I probably needed a hospital right then, I knew getting to Lucas was my priority. He’d help me and I’d tell him I saw some freaky hallucination where a woman who looked like me promised to kill him.

  Thinking it didn’t make me feel crazy. Knowing that is was crazy made me feel okay, actually. I had a brain injury and it was doing some very freaky things to me. I needed Lucas to take over. He’d bring me to a hospital, he’d make sure they stopped the visions. And, just in case there really was someone trying to kill him…I willed the bus to go faster. But not over the speed limit. An odd feeling, but what about my world wasn’t odd at that moment?

  Lucas had a heat seeking missile racing toward him and I had to get there first.

  Lucas, my do-gooder. My Eliot Ness. With him I became Scout and to his Atticus, the lawyer who towered as a hero in my eyes. Yes, I also think he’s hot so maybe the father/daughter thing is a little wrong.

  I saw in him all the things I let slip from my own life like his passion for justice I once shared. I felt jealous he wasn’t constantly playing angles, always worried if his time had run out on a whim. And here I come, flirting up a storm and starting our whole relationship by lying my ass off to him. I nodded and smiled on our third date when he told me the major case he’d been working on. The case that would finally bring down Calder and Rizzo and maybe even build a bridge to getting the Cantado cartel out of Juarez.

  Y’know how some women spend so much time being good and they end up wanting to date a bad boy for a little spice? I’m the opposite. I’d become so bad that dating Lucas and his choir boy starched shirt reputation was the thrill. Give me a guy on a motorcycle who rides weekends and smokes pot once a month and I’ll throw him back in your face. Yeah, bad boys are a dime a dozen. I could make one phone call and get a lineup of ten guys who’d slit someone’s throat and give them a Columbian necktie* and stand them next to ten other guys who snorted lines of cocaine off the edge of a knife in the storage unit where they make the stuff.

  (* A Columbian necktie is where you cut open a guy’s throat and pull his tongue out from the inside so it hangs out the neck hole looking like a necktie. Popularized in Columbia in the Eighties. Pretty self-explanatory.)

  At the risk of getting all “He completes me” about this, I can say I did not want Lucas to die. I did not want to miss out on what we had coming in life. I did not want to blow my chance for him to lead me in starting over.

  I’m a girl. I wanted my wedding day. I wanted to grow old with him and my idea of him dying is for him to go two days after I do at age 95 because he’s heartbroken and misses me so much he gives out like James Garner in The Notebook.

  I may be a tomboy, but my heart isn’t made of rocks y’know.

  THE MOST ROMANTIC NIGHT OF MY LIFE

  Let me tell you about the night I almost got Lucas killed.

  We’d been dating a while and things were going great. We got along, we laughed, the sex was great. All still true, by the way.

  We were having dinner at a cute little Italian place with a piano player and dual clarinets doing jazz standards in the corner. A candles-in-wine-bottles, smell-of-garlic-in-the-walls kind of place. He knew I had to do a work thing afterward so I had a hard out at nine o’clock. What he didn’t know is my “work” was really for Calder and Rizzo.

  I’d been contacted by a member of a rival cartel offering information on the twins. He figured, and I can only guess as to the inner workings of a cartel mind, if he gave the DEA enough to nail Calder and Rizzo then they would be out of the way and he and his cronies could move in. The fatal flaw with all these jerks is they fail to see there is someone else right behind them waiting with the same information about him and just as eager to turn it over to the feds. Ah, the circle of criminal life.

  Anyway, I told Calder and Rizzo about the offer. They said to meet with him, see what he was selling and report back. So, fine, easy enough. No one gets hurt, the way I like it.

  Well, Lucas had been a bundle of nerves all night long. He’s talking too much, laughing at everything. I figured, hey, Friday night after a long work week and he wasn’t used to drinking that much wine so I chalked it up to nothing special.

  The night got away from us and before we knew it I checked my watch and it was quarter ‘till. Time to run.

  “I wish you didn’t have to go,” he said. “Can’t it wait?”

  “Sorry.” I kissed him, leaning over our half finished tiramisu. I sucked down the rest of my wine and grabbed my purse.

  “I thought we could talk,” he said. “Maybe later?”

  “I don’t know how late I’ll be. I’ll see you this weekend for sure.”

  “I know, it’s just…”

  “Hey,” I said, playfully. “You work plenty of late nights and odd hours. The DA has you running in circles sometimes. You figure out how to get him to give you a night off, you tell me and I’ll bring it to my guys.”

  “Oh, fine, I just really…”

  “Babe, I gotta go.” I kissed him one more time before sticking him with the check.

  I made my way over to an office plaza where we were supposed to meet. I waited across the street from the Symphony Hall which hadn’t let out yet. Odd place for a drug kingpin to request a meet, but I felt safer around there than in some of the sleaz
e pits I usually found these guys.

  He was late. All my rushing around and I’m the one waiting.

  Imagine my surprise when Lucas walks across the plaza. He came out from behind the big fountain there and it felt like a movie. Tons of tiny string lights hung from every light pole and all the trees were up-lit. If you strained hard over the rush of water you could hear a little of the symphony floating on the breeze.

  “Lucas? What are you…you can’t be here.”

  “I know, I’m sorry.” He always discounted the dangerous nature of my job. I think he thought of me more as a desk jockey than a real field agent. Better he think that than learn the truth.

  “Seriously, you’ve got to go.”

  He’d been emboldened by the wine enough to follow me. I thought maybe he shouldn’t be driving.

  “Hold on, Samantha.” He seemed poised for some great speech. A speech he’d forgotten. He looked down at his shoes.

  That’s when I saw them. Two men I knew from Calder and Rizzo’s army. They came out from behind the same fountain, but this time they were in a very different movie. Lucas started his speech.

  “You see, Sammy, we’ve been so happy these past few months. I never expected it to go this fast or be this good. But it is.” I thought he might start crying. I thought I might start screaming when I saw the men reach into their jackets.

  So this is how it’s all going to end, I remember thinking. Then it hit me. They think Lucas is the guy. They think I’m having my meeting and they’re here to kill him.

  So, okay, quick on my feet time. I need to let them know Lucas isn’t the guy without Lucas knowing it.

  “And with every day we spend together I feel more and more sure in my heart. And in my head. My head and my heart together. Like us together. You and me. Together.” He’d gone off script, but I wasn’t paying much attention anyway.

  I saw the glint of a blade in the symphony courtyard lights. The two men spread out, one to either side of Lucas. Twenty feet away. Ten.

  I reached out and grabbed Lucas by the lapels, pulled him in and kissed him. I broke him off mid-sentence.

  “And I feel like if it could stay this way forev—”

  The two goons were genuinely confused. It stopped their march forward. I held my eyes open during the kiss, seeing what I could past Lucas’s head. I waved my hand, shooing the two assassins away.

  They took their cue. Still confused, they started to retreat. I saw the blade go back inside a coat pocket.

  As I was about to break the kiss and give up on the idea of the meeting for the night, my nine o’clock arrived. Late.

  I pulled Lucas even tighter, not letting him up for air. My eyes went wide and I turned my head to gesture toward the short, nervous man who came around the opposite side of the fountain. Inside, the orchestra swelled.

  The two hit men took the clues. My contact gave an equally puzzled look as he approached for our meeting to find me kissing another man. His confusion was the right distraction they needed.

  Like two dark swooping birds they came at him from both sides. The knife blade reemerged from the jacket then disappeared again into his chest. It flashed in the light before quickly plunging back into the man’s heart. Four times, again and again and again and again. I’m sure my kiss was shit. I wasn’t exactly paying attention to Lucas right then.

  The man with the knife stepped back and his partner slid an arm up under the dead man and walked him off like a drunk pal after a long night. The knife got a quick wash in the fountain water and they were gone.

  I ended the kiss. Lucas took a deep breath of air.

  “Let me finish, Sam. I know you know it’s coming, but…” He dropped to one knee. I did not know it was coming.

  “Samantha, will you marry me?”

  There you have it. The most romantic night of my life played out against the backdrop of a switchblade assassination. Story of our relationship, really.

  THE LOCAL, NOT THE EXPRESS

  The bus stopped. It’s what busses do. My anxiety creeped up each time we pulled over, though. I knew the movies in my head were a product of the concussion, but a part of me also wanted to be really sure and to make it to Lucas before the movie-lady made it there first.

  With my eyes open I had a hard time tuning in to the frequency that made the head-movies play. I shut my eyes and try to latch onto the signal floating on radio waves or x-rays or whatever it was that let me see through the other woman’s eyes. The image came in tiny and flickering like an old silent movie. She was driving, I think. I saw a stop sign. She blew right through it. She was moving fast. I knew that. Faster than the bus.

  I saw it as a good thing that the images were getting harder to see. It might mean my head was going back to normal. The swelling going down or something.

  We were still stopped and I looked around for another guy with a cane. What I saw was worse, in a way. A woman had just gotten off loaded down with what looked like laundry. She waddled off the bus and away down the sidewalk but had left her purse behind on the seat. It was black, simple. Probably nothing of much value inside. She was taking the bus, after all. But I felt that tug inside me.

  I had to return it to her. Why? Because it was the right thing to do. No other way to explain the feeling. Before, I could look at that and know that running after her was the right thing, but now I had to do something about it. I had to.

  My feet were up and moving before I knew it.

  “Hold it,” I called to the driver. I snatched the purse. “She left this.”

  As I made my way to the back door I pleaded with the driver.

  “Please don’t leave without me. I’ll be right back. It’s really important I stay on this bus. Please.”

  My last few words were lost as I stepped onto the sidewalk and began jogging after her. I waited to hear the sound of the bus roaring away, but I didn’t. Up ahead the woman struggled under her burden.

  “Excuse me. Excuse me, ma’am.”

  She kept walking, ignoring me. In this neighborhood, probably a good idea.

  “You left your purse. Ma’am?”

  A tiny spark lit in my brain and with the pain came a flash of the other woman behind the wheel of a car. A stolen car. How did I know that? She skidded around a line of stopped vehicles and blew through a red light. A pain stabbed behind my eyes.

  I’d reached the woman and held out her bag.

  “Oh, thank you. Thank you.”

  I waved her off, breathing heavy and trying to massage away the headache. I turned back for the bus, now half a block away, and started running.

  “Bless you, child,” she called after me. I hoped the blessing stuck. I’d need all I could get.

  Halfway to the bus I heard the engine rev. I picked up my pace. With all my training, I was in good shape. I could sprint it out if I needed to. And I knew I needed to.

  “Wait. Wait, you—”

  My brain wanted to curse him out, to call him a jackass, a douchebag, a motherfucker. My mouth wouldn’t obey. If I couldn’t swear, my brain must be seriously damaged.

  I reached the rear of the bus as it pulled away form the curb and I slapped the side.

  “Hey, I’m here. I’m here, don’t leave.”

  The bus downshifted. I sucked in a deep breath of exhaust. He slowed and I made my way to the front door and slumped up the steps inside. He gave me a withering look but I thanked him anyway.

  HONEY, I’M HOME!

  Lucas’s house is one of those wedged into the side of a hill types with no back yard to speak of since it’s all a sharp rise of wooded hillside. The garage is on the ground floor and the front door sits on a second level with a third level perched on top. It’s very mod, very sixties, and it took some getting used to, but at the moment I got off the bus and started running down the block toward it—and saw no strange cars parked out front—there was no other place in the world I wanted to live.

  I sprinted up the
steps to the entrance and pounded on the door, thinking how she could have already been there and gone. Tossed off another murder like a cigarette butt and moved on to the next victim. Then I slowed down my thinking. No strange car. Because there was no other woman. My head trauma had made it all so real, I’d really convinced myself somebody was coming here to kill Lucas and squash the case against Calder and Rizzo. Whatever Freudian anxiety I had from turning down the same offer must have written the script for my hallucinations. I fully expected to spend a few weeks in a psych ward after this. Or at least in intensive care.

  Lucas, my little goody-goody, was in bed by ten every night. He woke up two hours before me on any given day and more like four hours on the weekend. It’s when he did all the working out to perfect his abs so I wasn’t going to complain. Waiting for him to get out of bed and get to the door was something I would complain about.

  The sound of screeching tires is something you don’t hear that much in real life. I thought he had the TV on for a second. Then the sounds got louder. An engine approaching. I turned away from the door and saw her. She was racing from the corner and aiming right at Lucas’s house. She was real.

  I pounded with a renewed vigor until I saw a light come on through the frosted glass. With my luck he’d already called the police.

  He peered out, trying to identify the shapeless blob outside—those window were fairly unforgiving on details.

  “Yes?” he said tentatively.

  “Lucas it’s me! Let me in.”

  The deadbolt turned and he stood there knowing something was wrong. Showtime. How to explain and make him understand and do it quick enough before she showed up? I had no idea so I went ahead and started talking and hoped he’d listen.

  “Lucas you’ve got to get out of here. You’re not safe.”