Two in the Head

by Eric Beetner

  “Wait. Don’t leave her there.”

  My shin bone twinged as she swept a leg under him, clipping his feet and sending him to the carpet. She grabbed a fistful of his hair and snatched up a pillow from the floor beside her. She caught my eye and sneered a crooked Dick Cheney smile at me before pressing down with the pillow.

  For God’s sake, not again.

  “Stop,” I pleaded. Pleading being the only arrow in my quiver at that point. I’ll state the obvious—she did not stop. I wanted a fraction of the bad side back. Just enough to smack her in the head and get her off Blake. This all-good-all-the-time shit was useless. I knew why people told white lies, cut in line once in a while when your kid is sick, cheated on the boyfriend in college with the guy you end up marrying. People need the balance. It’s useful sometimes. It would have been really useful right then to save my friend’s life, like I could have saved Randolph’s or about two dozen other people in the last twenty-four hours.

  I began to realize everyone needs a little cutthroat, otherwise it’s you who gets your throat cut.

  Sam pushed down with the pillow, rolling over on top of Blake and using her body weight to hold him down. Blake, flat on his back with her above him, could easily reach out and latch on to her arm. The bloody arm. The painful arm.

  You’d think I’d been hit by another bullet the way I squealed and writhed my body. She screamed out too. I think Blake must have forced a finger down into the bullet hole. Anything to get her to lift the pillow off his face. Finger-fucking a bullet wound did the trick.

  Blake did some sort of break dance move to get up off the floor and he stood next to me before I knew it.

  “You need to get out of here.”

  “What about her,” I said pointing down to Sam as she recovered from the wound-prodding.

  “I’ll tie her up. I’ll call the cops. Let me handle it.”

  I almost got out that I’d already called the police but it became more important to say, “Look out.”

  I respected her/our stamina. She didn’t have any quit in her, as my Daddy would say. She moved away from Blake this time. We both knew where. The gun, wrapped in a towel on the floor like it recently got out of a sauna.

  Blake caught her around the middle. I tried to ignore the pressure below my ribs as he hauled her up, kicking and screaming loud as a toddler who has to leave Disneyland early.

  “In the living room,” he directed me. “Get some rope.”

  “Where?”

  “I don’t know.” She thrashed in his arms, smearing him with the blood running from her arm. “Pull the curtain cords or something.” In other words—make yourself useful you damn pacifist.

  I ran ahead to the living room. Simple furniture, Ikea most of it. A big TV, stereo with too many lights on it. Drab, single man decor. Not house porn. The tugging at my ribs and squeezing of my spine continued as he moved her into the room and walked her toward a high backed recliner.

  I ran my hands along the side of the blinds, no curtains. Did he not even know what his window treatments were? I grabbed the thin cords and pulled. My hand ached as the razor thin ropes dug into my skin. I pulled again but they weren’t going anywhere without scissors.

  I thought I heard a siren.

  Blake dropped Sam into the chair, then put a knee on her chest. I gasped for air.

  He looked at me like I’d gone nuts. I pointed to her, to his knee. He lifted off and I sucked a breath.

  “I can feel it. Her. Everything. Kind of at sixty percent but still—”

  She kicked. Hard and high. Like, Rockettes at Christmas hard and high. Blake’s head snapped back. She shot up and out of the chair animal fast. She bolted for the front door. I took a few steps to follow her but stopped myself. What would I do? Yell at her to knock it off again? Threaten to tell Mom? Damn, I’m useless.

  She stopped in the doorway. The tiny migraine burrowed into my head. She listened in, reading me. She knew the cops were coming for her, she read it like a headline in my brain.

  She turned and walked back to me, stood there like a full length mirror. I hated when she looked me in the eye. Those weren’t my eyes she stared back with. She contemplated something for a second then drew her hand back and punched me in the face.

  She bent over and let out a grunt. She decided it would be worth it, I guess, the momentary pain in her own face. She wanted to hit me that bad.

  “Stay the fuck out of my head,” she said, then turned and ran.

  The fist hit me weaker than I knew she was capable of. What I was capable of. She avoided my nose so hers wouldn’t hurt so bad. It would probably be a shiner in an hour or so, but nothing compared to Blake.

  I bent down to him. Blood oozed from his nose. The gunshot to his shoulder didn’t look too great either. I definitely heard sirens.

  “Blake, I can’t deal with cops. They won’t believe me. They won’t understand.” He tried sitting up. “They might know about the video by now. They’ll arrest me. Blake, are you listening?”

  “Yeah. You’re probably right. But don’t you think—”

  “No. We gotta go.”

  “My car keys.”

  “Where?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  I helped him to his feet. He shook out his head, trying to throw off the effects of a decent punch in the kisser. He patted down his pockets and lifted his keys. “You drive,” he said.

  “Long as you don’t mind going slow.”

  FREE HBO!

  Blake checked us into a motel. I wondered how many times he fantasized about bringing me to a place like this, under different circumstances. And maybe not a place like this exactly.

  We went with the first place we found that seemed far enough away. A dump called the Two Diamonds. The name alone should have been a good indication the place was a pit. Why not go for four diamonds? Or four stars, or hell, ten diamonds? Two sounded like they weren’t trying. And guess what? They weren’t.

  A deep groove in the carpet ran between the bed and TV, a space about the width of a greyhound. The dog, not the bus. The trail of threadbare carpet ran to the bathroom and abruptly turned into peeling linoleum tiles around a once-white bathtub and shower combo with rust stains and what appeared to be a family reunion of silverfish.

  The lighting: florescent, the art: dismal, the walls: covered in some bumpy wall covering probably holding the structural integrity of the whole damn building together. We were on the second floor. I expected any minute to plunge through the termite ridden ceiling of the room below and end up as a foursome on another broken Magic Fingers massaging bed.

  Blake seemed embarrassed. I knew he looked at the one bed, the busy pattern of the bedspread hiding all manner of stains and human fluids, and realized this would be nothing like the romantic rendezvous he always planned out in his head.

  He unwrapped a glass from the thin plastic shrink wrap and handed it to me.

  “I’ll go get ice.”

  “Y’know what? I saw a Coke machine in the lobby. I’ll just get something in a can. You want anything?”

  “I’ll get it. You should stay out of sight.”

  I hated to think who might be happening by a place like this who might recognize me, but I let him make the chivalrous gesture.

  “Just a Coke, then.”

  “Be right back.”

  He left me there. I tried closing my eyes and tuning in Sam but got only blackness. Fine by me. So damn tired.

  I folded down the bedspread to a thin strip at the end of the bed. I’d seen enough crime scenes with infrared lights passing over a motel duvet to know the soup of human misery awaiting me there. I sat up in bed, stacking up three limp-dick pillows behind me.

  So, okay, where was I? Lucas was still alive. Score one. That summed up my score though. Sam’s score must be up over fifty or so. Two entire offices, a few stragglers and one VIP. And Blake. Give me two I guess, although he defended himself much more than
I saved him.

  Time to really contemplate giving myself up and letting the real cops take care of things. It certainly couldn’t go much worse for me. If I went in of my own free will they might give me leniency. I might even be able to turn in evidence and cut a deal to keep me free in exchange for…me. Other me.

  That would be a first. Think of the paperwork. The DA cuts me a deal to turn against myself. How would that even work?

  The trouble is, in any of these scenarios, I have to convince people there are two of me. So far, the people who find out that information have found out a bit too late. And then there’s the sticky detail of the eventual shootout with Sam. No way she’s going in easy.

  So let’s say I turn myself in, use my brain tapping technique to find her, they send a SWAT team to bring her in, shooting starts (she starts it, I’m no idiot) and my other half dies in a hail of bullets leaving me to die in the cold comfort of a jail cell.

  I think not.

  Besides, I need to get to Lucas, make sure he’s all right and tell him face to face about this whole thing. Spilling my guts to the man I love through an inch and half of plexiglass on a dirty plastic phone used for some nasty-ass phone sex an hour before is not my idea of coming clean.

  And do I have enough to bring down Calder and Rizzo? That’s where I need to turn my focus. I know I’ll eventually turn myself in, if I don’t die first, so I’d better be damn well ready to go with a case someone would see valuable and air tight enough to cut me a deal over.

  Blake came in without knocking. I jumped like a cat who’d been sleeping next to a vacuum cleaner. I rolled and ended up flipping off the side of the bed, landing on my knees in a crouch, using the steel cage of the bedsprings to protect me against the certain death I thought was coming through the door. Nine times out of ten I would have landed with my gun pulled and ready to dance. Not Good Samantha. She decides to hide. A church mouse, quivering and short of breath.

  By the time I noticed Blake he stood frozen, a can of Coke in each hand and his eyes looking around for the big emergency.

  “We need to come up with some sort of knock or something,” I said.

  He relaxed. Wish I could say the same. “Sorry about that.” He held out the Coke to me and I took it. The carbonated bite in the back of my throat felt good, the teetotaler’s whiskey sting. And Good Samantha sure as hell rode the wagon. Hell, she drove the thing.

  One of Daddy’s big life lessons was how to take a shot of whiskey. Daddy was a tip it back and take it in one kind of drinker. He said if you were supposed to sip it, they’d have made the glasses bigger. He taught me on my sixteenth birthday with the same reverence he gave to shooting a deer. The shooting lesson came at twelve. It’s no secret my Daddy wanted a boy. Didn’t bother me one bit, though.

  Maybe if Mom hadn’t died young—breast cancer, why I get checked every year like clockwork—I’d have been a little more girly. Or maybe Dad would have had something else to focus his energy on other than training me like I was a one-woman Navy Seal.

  There were times growing up when I thought for a moment I wanted a sibling. Brother or sister, didn’t matter. Then I’d go back to enjoying my over abundance of Christmas gifts, birthday parties, weekends alone with Dad. And now that I’d had a day or two with a twin, I’m here to tell you that bullshit is not for me. I couldn’t wait to go back to being an only child.We drank in silence, Blake and I. He sat on the chair set next to the TV watching a news report. A headline crawl across the bottom of the screen said City Under Siege. They ran back-to-back stories of the DEA assault and the DA’s office poisoning. They seemed to think there was some connection but didn’t have the thread between them. At least they didn’t show my face from any surveillance video or anything. Maybe the DEA was keeping that one all in the family. And so far it seemed like they hadn’t connected the explosion to the siege. The reporter then tied in the killing of judge Randolph and they threw out wild speculations like terrorism, a Central American death squad, gang violence. Reporters up in a lather was not good, but they clearly didn’t have much to go on which meant the noose wasn’t tightening around my neck just yet. “Go ahead,” I said.

  “Huh?”

  “Ask. I can see it in your face.” And I could. A million questions, and him not knowing if he wanted to really hear any of the answers.

  “You really worked for Calder and Rizzo?” I admired his bluntness. Might as well get right into it.

  “Work for. Yeah.” I wanted another Coke, but didn’t want to make him go run errands for me again. “They threatened to kill me, so I took the deal. Simple as that.” He soaked it in. “And I know it’s also not so simple. Don’t think I’m stupid, Blake. I know I did wrong.”

  “Yeah. That’s about…as wrong as you can get in this job.”

  “It was small stuff. Honest. I didn’t think it was worth losing my life over. Anything I did, any information I gave them, I worked extra hard to dig up some new angle to make up for it. I honestly feel like I didn’t set back the investigation at all. More like one step back, one step forward.”

  “Did you, like, have meetings with them?”

  I could see the disappointment on his face and it hurt me. Old Samantha, the one with the bad part still inside, would have lied. Made excuses. Done anything to keep that look off his face. And I know why. It wasn’t what was there, it’s what was gone.

  The desire. The longing. He didn’t want me anymore. He wanted a past version of me, and he knew the old version was a lie. So thrown them both out. I’m sure if he had this much time to think about helping me before he went ahead and did it, he’d have left me behind hours ago.

  “I only met with them the first time. The deal. Everything else happened through handlers. Middlemen. They would come sometimes with specific questions. Other times I’d be somewhere and a guy would just show up. I’d be out at a restaurant, this happened one time, I saw him come in and I knew who it was. I was by myself, they were good about never bothering me with other people around. I went over to him before he got to my table. He asked what I had for him. I said I didn’t have anything. He said to think about it and come with him.” I didn’t look at Blake. I stayed inside the memory, staring at nothing and seeing the past. “He said, ‘Let’s go’ and I had to leave without paying my check. That was nothing to them. He fished around for information and I told him about a stakeout taking place the next week and he dropped me off a mile from the restaurant. I walked back and snuck my car out of the parking lot. I could never go back there again.”

  Blake leaned forward, put his elbows on his knees. “What stakeout?”

  He had a good reason for his suspicious tone. He worked undercover, he’d run a dozen stakeouts. It could have been him.

  “Yeah,” I said. “That one.”

  “Tell it.” For the first time since I’d know him, Blake’s eyes went hard when he looked at me.

  “I gave them a place and time. That’s it. I don’t even know exactly what the stakeout was for.”

  “It was a drop spot. A shipment up from Mexico. A direct link across the border.”

  Innocent information, so I thought. Turns out I’d handed them one of the biggest breaks they could get.

  “I didn’t know that.” Excuses. Shut up, girl. Own it. “You know the rest. Four men dead. Their heads taken back to Mexico. Those photos we got…”

  “You ever see them?”

  “No.”

  “I did.”

  His words bore into me deeper than the pain in my arm, deeper than the hole inside where half of me used to live.

  Thinking about my own pain reminded me of his. Also, it seemed like a good way to change the subject.

  “How’s your shoulder?” I said as I slid off the bed.

  He leaned back in his chair. “It’s alright.”

  “Let me see.”

  If there was anything left at all to his desire for me I’d know it as I unbuttoned his shirt and peeled it
away from his chest. He remained stoic, hard to interpret.

  I found both more blood and more muscle on his chest than I’d anticipated. I don’t know why I always thought of Blake as thinner, weaker. His shoulders were wide, like a swimmer, and his body sculpted all over. A workout fanatic. A lot of agency guys were. Unlike them, Blake never showed it off with shirts a size too small or tank tops in late October.

  Our faces were inches apart, but we both looked away. I had his wound to concentrate on and he studied the awful decor of the Two Diamonds Motel.

  The wound went through and through north of his lung, south of his collarbone. Not lethal, but painful. And lucky. He’d been hiding it so well I almost forgot he’d been shot. A tough guy. Daddy would have liked him. Much more than Lucas. Lawyers were the enemy.

  “I bet you’d like a stiff drink about now,” I said.

  “I’m fine.”

  Fine, be that way, I thought. “Let me at least dress it for you.”

  “Go ahead,” he said to the wall.

  A REGULAR FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE

  Everything I know about dressing a wound I learned from field stripping a deer. When Daddy first showed me how to skin and gut a buck I nearly threw up. Each time after it got easier and the clinical way Daddy talked about it as he worked made it easy to distance myself from it. So I can approach a gunshot wound, and I’ve seen my fair share—this made an even half dozen—I can see it for muscle, bone, sinew and blood. No person in the equation at all.

  I made Blake wince a few times, but he never said a word. I felt fairly sure Sam was somewhere across town cursing a blue streak and biting down on a bullet as she repaired her arm from Blake’s shot. She must have been far away because I felt nothing, saw nothing. Maybe she was as tired as me.

  “Were you ever planning on quitting?” he said, his voice so close to my ear he barely had to whisper.

  “Yes,” I said, telling the truth. “With Lucas, he had to know eventually. Either I’d figure out a way to leave them or he’d find me on his trail of evidence leading to Calder and Rizzo’s door. I hadn’t quite figured out how to get myself free yet.”