Burn

by Nevada Barr

  Once one was truly indifferent, life would be easy. Choices were easy when the outcome was of no consequence. Guilt would be a thing of the past; hope, a joke upon others. Once truly indifferent, would one be a god or a monster? Clare doubted she would ever find out. By the time she ceased caring for Vee and Dana, the earth would be a cold, still, lifeless rock drifting away from the sun.

  She toweled off and dried Mack as best as she could. Where he had been white and black before, he was ecru and brown and black. “We both have a role, Mackie,” she said.

  Dye ruined David’s expensive towels, and that pleased her till she remembered she didn’t want to advertise the change of appearance. When she left, she’d take them and give them to the homeless people who gathered under the freeway overpass down by the docks at the end of this street. Police didn’t see homeless people, or at least not as clearly as those more affluent.

  Showered and dried, she dressed in the shabbiest of the clothes in David’s closet: a pair of immaculate Lacoste linen trousers in black and a collarless silk shirt with a DKNY label, silk boxer shorts, white cotton T-shirt, and black cotton socks. David was the same height as she, so the length of the inseam and the shirtsleeves was okay. He was beefier, and the clothing hung on her. Good. Her breasts, never large, were still significant.

  Thoroughly Modern Millie. Julie Andrews’s breasts popping out of their bindings and sending the necklaces swinging. Julie Andrews in Victor/Victoria.

  The trench coat would have to cover Clare’s until she could find something to strap them flat. Shoes were never going to transgender. David’s were so big she’d walk out of them, and she might have a lot of walking in her future. Careful to keep her back to the corpse of her husband’s other wife, she sat on the edge of the bed, put her running shoes on, and laced them up.

  Having freed Mackie from the bathroom, she carried him past Jalila’s body into the front room and closed the door. At the kitchen counter she took the Halloween makeup from the bag. It was crude. If the charade went on for any length of time she would have to find a supplier and replace it. She darkened her skin a half tone, enough to make it look coarser, thickened her brows, and used the pencil to suggest a hint of sideburns, nothing obvious, just a place missed while shaving. Her disguise would never pass close inspection—she didn’t have the time or the tools—but it should suffice for the moment. Below her lower lip she put a bit of double-sided tape and used the hair cuttings to create a tuft.

  Finished, she surveyed herself in the long mirror. The hands were wrong. She bit the nails to the quick and darkened the knuckles and nail beds. The total effect wasn’t bad. To the casual observer she’d look like an underweight man of indeterminate age, with a bad haircut and nervous habits, dressed in expensive clothes.

  Next would come the cleaning: wiping her fingerprints from every surface, scrubbing her vomit from the carpet, vacuuming up every bit of hair and fingernails she’d missed.

  Suddenly she was so tired she could scarcely stand. Letting gravity do the work, she sat hard on the couch. Mackie jumped up beside her to give moral support. “I don’t know if I can do this, little guy. I don’t know if I can do anything.” She started to cry, then stopped herself lest she wreck her makeup. Mack licked her face, then, evidently deciding she tasted too vile to kiss, laid his chin on her lap and sighed loudly.

  Resting her head against the sofa’s back, Clare closed her eyes. In the semidarkness behind her eyelids she saw time running out, a comet tail vanishing over the horizon. “Okay,” she said and sat up with a suddenness that dislodged the dog. “Screw DNA. I’m up for three murders. Who cares if the law knows I was here, right, Mackie?” With speed born of the necessity of not thinking and not stopping lest she never start again, Clare cleaned up the evidence of her sex change operation and left the rest of the apartment as it was.

  “Maybe our visiting freak left semen by Jalila’s body,” she said to the dog. “That’s one thing they’d have a hard time pinning on me.”

  The money she’d found went into the pocket of the trench coat; the cell phone she left on the counter. Mackie she leashed with the coat’s cloth belt. The nightgown and women’s underpants she’d arrived in she balled up and stuffed into the Walmart bag along with the towels, leftover makeup, and the hair dye bottles and instructions.

  “Is this an adventure, Barnaby?” she said to the dog as they left the apartment. If Mack recognized the line from Hello, Dolly! he didn’t say anything. She closed and locked the door and started down the stairs, headed for Bourbon Street, New Orleans, Louisiana.

  Flying was out; the airports would be on the lookout for a murderess of her stature. The same went for bus and train stations. Without a doubt there would be a cop or two watching David’s SUV and her Honda. That left hitchhiking. She’d walk to the edge of the city, where cops would be less likely to stop and take a hard look at her, and stick out her thumb.

  On the street, in the harsh light of midmorning, Seattle failing her and not providing its usual drizzle, Clare looked up and down. David’s apartment was by the docks, near his factory and warehouses. Up was toward civilization. Down was toward industrialization. Guessing the police would be less likely to look for a woman in the rougher climes of docks and boatyards, and needing to get rid of the towels and other signs she was now male, she headed down.

  Beneath a tangle of overpasses and raised train tracks was a scattering of the homeless. As was the American way, Clare moved a little more quickly and kept her eyes straight ahead. Sitting on the curb, unavoidable unless she crossed the street, was a scrawny old man, ratty beard halfway down his chest, cradling a bottle of orange juice. He was wearing an army surplus coat.

  It occurred to her that she had to get rid of David’s trench coat. The police knew she’d been wearing it, and, in the light of day, turning it inside out would call attention to her.

  She stopped when she reached the old man. “Will you trade coats with me?” she asked bluntly. “This is a Burberry, warm and water repellent. I’ve also got some towels if you want them.”

  The man looked up with bleary eyes, bleary but not blind. “You running from the law?”

  “The dogcatcher,” Clare said.

  He looked at her another minute. A minute onstage with no lines is an eternity, and Clare felt the flop sweat start between her breasts. She was about to move on when he said, “There blood on anything?”

  “No. Hair dye.”

  “Sure, I’ll take the stuff and your coat, if it fits.”

  Clare remembered the money about two seconds before handing him the trench coat and slipped the envelope unobtrusively inside her T-shirt. The army coat was filthy and stank of tobacco and rancid fat and despair.

  That was good, she realized. Like her, most people didn’t want to see homeless people. They were scary, tragic, and dirty; they smelled bad. As she slipped the coat on, the world boiled into noise so loud it made the air shudder and the viscera quake. A freight train was passing overhead.

  Three men and two women—too young to be homeless, maybe runaways—stood up from where they’d gone unnoticed in the deep shade of a concrete pillar. They were gray with filth, their hair chopped off or in dreads achieved the old-fashioned way for white men: by never washing it. Two dogs were with them, one black with a white blaze on its chest, one probably yellow when it was clean, and both mutts. They watched the train with interest, then, when it had gone, sat down again.

  “Travelers,” the old man said and spat on the sidewalk. “Rich kids dropping out and riding the rails. Punks. That bunch is mean. Ugly mean.”

  Hopping trains.

  With dogs.

  “You want to trade shirt and pants, too?” Clare asked.

  TWENTY

  Anna’s left hand touched the back wall as the door swung open to happy barking. Her other hand hit only empty space. Moving to her right she slipped into the bedroom, or whatever the room was, and stepped out of the frame and pressed her back against the wall.
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  Light came on in the front room. A bright square fell through the doorway she’d just vacated, and she could see it was a bedroom in the barest sense of the word. A single mattress lay on the floor. There were no sheets, just a ratty sleeping bag and a pillow without a case. These were arranged neatly, the bag straightened, the pillow centered at the top with a goose-necked lamp next to it, the cord snaking across the floor to an outlet by an open door to the bathroom. On the pillow, as if awaiting a child, was a much-loved bedraggled stuffed dog. There was no dresser, no rugs, no chair, and the walls were bare. Evidently even monsters didn’t like their monstrousness gazing down at them as they slept.

  “What a good boy you are. Did you miss me? Love my little dog.” Crooned endearments drifted in with the illumination, the doting voice at odds with the man who could decorate his life with the ruins of childhood.

  “Want some dinner? How about dog food? I know how you love my dog food.”

  The cloyingly sweet voice grated on Anna’s ears, cutting like razor blades hidden in candy and given to trick-or-treaters on Halloween. This was followed by rummaging sounds as Jordan dug into the dog food bag.

  Along the wall to Anna’s right was another small door, this one firmly closed. The closet, probably. Unsure of what else she could do, she crossed the room quietly and opened it. One black shirt and one pair of black trousers, the cheap polyester kind one finds at uniform stores or Walmart, hung on plastic hangers. The shelf above held a pair of folded jeans, a T-shirt, running shoes, and an Ace bandage folded into thirds. On the floor was a black garbage bag lumpy with whatever was sequestered inside.

  Anna stepped through the door, then closed it till there was the merest crack between her and the room. There was no knob on the inner side; if she closed it completely, she would be locked in. If Jordan closed it, she would be locked in. That thought nearly sent her crashing out and taking her chances.

  The closet was old-fashioned; there was barely room for her and the black ensemble. Her foot nudged the garbage bag, and a vile odor puffed out. Anna felt her innards drop an inch. Was she sharing this tiny prison with the rotting corpse of a child? With only parts of a child? With a store of dead pigeons awaiting voodoo duty? As the stench thinned it occurred to Anna that, as Geneva had said, the apartment did not stink in general. Jordan, the gutter punk, smelled like he’d slept in a cellar once used to store old sewer pipes. Why would his apartment smell only of old wood and clean dog?

  “There you go, little buddy. You’ve got to keep your strength up. We’ve got little girls to find.”

  Jordan used his dog as child bait.

  Maybe that’s why he kept him clean and good-smelling. Come pet the doggie, honey, he won’t bite. Jesus, Anna thought. Candy from babies. Puppies to pet. She very much wanted to tear this man into little pieces and flush the pieces down the toilet. She also wished very much she’d thought to bring her cell phone. Dialing 911 would be such a fine thing. Despite her unkind thoughts about the New Orleans Police Department, she would dearly love to see a great big cop with a 9 mm and nightstick about now. A double-barreled shotgun and a baseball bat would be even better.

  After the dog ate, Jordan would take him out for a walk, Anna reasoned. At that point she would make good her escape.

  The dog ate. Jordan babbled. Anna tried not to think about what might be in the plastic bag at her feet, tried not to think about quietly killing Jordan as he slept and dumping the body in the river lest he slip through the legal system.

  “Good boy,” Jordan crooned. “Out you go. If you see Geneva, tell her I’ll scoop tomorrow. Tonight I can’t stand the thought of handling any more shit.” Anna heard the door open, then shut. Jordan wasn’t going to walk the pooch; he was going to let him use the courtyard for a toilet. Just the sort of thing a prick like him would do.

  Hatred of the most corrosive kind was eating Anna from the brain stem out. Bad guys were bad guys, and they kept her in business. The destroyers of nature and history, the builders of campfires out of bounds, the dogs off leash in the wild places: Anna didn’t hate them. Her job was to correct and educate.

  The vacationers who beat up on their wives, the concession workers who raped a waitress—these she disliked. Twenty minutes earlier she’d have said “hated.” Now that she knew what hatred was, she wondered how the people who hunted down the Jordans of the world kept from being destroyed by it.

  Scratching. Door opening and closing. Minute snick as Jordan pushed the button lock in the knob.

  The sliver of light in Anna’s purview went black, then bright, as Jordan turned off the light in the front room and flicked on that in the bedroom. A click of claws on hardwood and the dog’s nose poked through the crack, trying to push open the closet door and expose Anna.

  “No you don’t,” said Jordan, still using the higher vocal register that he’d adopted to talk sweet nothings to the dog he’d dyed black and used to find little girls. Then a smack on the wood and the closet door closed and latched. “That wonderful smell in there isn’t good for little dogs,” Jordan said.

  The baby corpse? The pigeon bodies? Whatever was in the garbage bag. Whatever Anna was now locked in with.

  In a pinch, with the closet wall to brace herself against, she could probably kick her way out without too much trauma to her feet, but it would certainly blow the element of surprise all to hell. Maybe, after Jordan had gone to sleep, Anna would be able to slip the lock and let herself out undetected. Not for the first time, she was glad she never went anywhere without her library card.

  Outside her charnel house/prison/closet the going-to-bed noises that were standard in homes all over America, comforting noises of showers running, toilets flushing, teeth being brushed, were made. The juxtaposition of what Jordan was and these homey sounds was jarring. When a perverted monster readied to lay his monstrous head down on the collective filth of his lair, there should be at least the crunching of fragile bones between big teeth, grunting and scratching and a fee or fie or fo or fum. It was wrong that Jordan sounded like a human being. Then again, the monsters that could pass for human were the ones that survived the pages of the storybooks to walk among ordinary citizens.

  Other than the occasional word to the dog, Jordan didn’t hum ditties or whistle happy tunes. That was a help.

  Each time foot- or paw-falls headed in the direction of the closet, Anna tensed for a fight. Each time, they turned another direction. After a while she began to feel silly, like the lover in a French farce, dressed only in his shorts, hiding in the armoire listening to the cuckolded husband make his toilette.

  The old wood of the closet’s door had shrunk and the house tipped till straight lines and square corners were the exception rather than the rule. Lines of white showed on both sides where the door had receded from the jamb. There was a dot, unpleasantly reminiscent of the red laser dots from high-powered scopes, on Anna’s abdomen where light penetrated a keyhole. Had she not been afraid of kneeling on the garbage bag and loosing its contents, as well as its perfume, she would have put her eye to the keyhole like the classic sleuths.

  As her vision adjusted, she looked around her tiny prison a second time, craning her neck rather than risking moving her feet or body. If sound came in, it would go out just as effectively. The weapon she hoped she had overlooked before did not appear. Her flashlight wasn’t the marvelous club a six-cell aluminum patrol flashlight was, but a pretty blue Maglite no more than seven inches long and half an inch in diameter. There was the library card. She made a mental note to suggest to the Estes Park librarian that the cards be made with at least one good slashing edge.

  The light leaking around the door dimmed. Jordan had turned out the overhead and turned on the gooseneck lamp by the bed to read.

  Or look at pictures.

  Anna promised herself that if she heard him masturbating, she would cast caution to the winds and kick the door down. No such luck. In keeping with the normal noises the bastard had the gall to make, he said a sweet good
night to the pooch, and the light went out.

  Creaks settled the house. Scratching and turning circles settled the dog. Anna had just centered herself to listen for the deep, even breathing of sleep when the pastoral audio was burst by an “Oh shit” and the light came back on.

  Before Anna had time to adjust to the new circumstances, the closet door was snatched open and Jordan stood in front of her looking absurdly shocked, his mouth a big O.

  “Hey, Jordan,” Anna said and shoved him hard in the middle of the chest. The man was half a foot taller than she, yet he weighed so little it took her off balance, and she almost followed him over onto the floor. Recovering her equilibrium, she got her legs under her and ran for the front room.

  “No!” Jordan screamed.

  A shadow flashed in the corner of Anna’s eye and then she was down. The dog, wittingly or unwittingly, had tangled itself in her feet. Before she was even on hands and knees, Jordan was on her back, straddling her, smashing his fists down on the back of her neck. His sudden weight pushed her face onto the planks of the floor; his knees pinned her shoulders down. The blows made it hard to think.

  Gathering her hands beneath her breasts, she pushed up and over, rolling him off the way an unbroken horse will try to roll off a saddle. He fell to his side. Anna scrambled to her feet and reached for the door. Jordan’s hand shot out and grabbed her ankle. He hugged it to his chest and began to climb up, using Anna as a support. Unused to fighting—or just worn out from his lifestyle—he was gasping for breath. Each gasp came out on a “no.”

  Anna clubbed him on the temple with her fist. Instead of dropping him, the jolt gave him a last surge of desperate strength. He caught her hand in both his and began flipping over and over as if he were spinning on the end of a rope. His weight greater than hers, Anna could do nothing but go with him down onto the dusty boards in a tangle of arms and legs.