A Blood of Killers

by Gerard Houarner

  Kisses on the ear, the neck, the inside of the thigh. Fingernails scratch the arms. Leather. Thighs. Breasts. Lips. Strong arms holding.

  Boys fill the cartoon panel. Holding knives held high. Panel with just hands, and knives. Knives coming down, like lightning bolts, flashing through a dark background. Stabbing. Men, women, children …

  Cartoon caption above the last panel: whose blood is on the knife? Tongue runs over ear. Hot body presses against yielding flesh.

  Tell the story. Tell me whose blood it was. Tell me how you did it. Tell it again.

  Cartoon mask knocked away. Underneath …

  It’s me. Leo. Don’t you recognize me?

  But I’m Leo.

  Laughter. Lip stick smudged. False eyelash hangs delicately from the lid. Wig crooked. My brave little lion, aren’t we all?

  THE REAL

  Leo set the tape recorder on the edge of the bathroom sink and pressed the record button. It was an old machine, and he’d had to salvage batteries from a flashlight he found in Tracey’s kitchen to make it work. He was lucky to have found the recorder in her bedroom. Her parents’ old bedroom. He needed an audience as he sat on the closed toilet lid and talked. Told his story. That was all he wanted. To give what was in him back. But he had to know he was giving what he had to someone, or something. A machine was just as good as a person. Better. Machines listened to stories, never interrupted, and remembered every word. They accepted everything you gave them, without condition, without judgment. If they were the right kind of machines. “So you want to hear a story?” Leo asked. “You want to know whose blood was on the knife?” No one answered. Water dripped slowly from the faucet into the full bathtub. The sound reverberated in the bathroom, along with his voice. His butt was numb from sitting on the convex toilet lid. He breathed through his mouth to avoid smelling the stench of feces. But he didn’t look at the tub or move from his seat or search through the cabinet for a deodorizer. He’d stopped breathing hard. His hands were no longer shaking. He felt real. Solid. As if he’d just awakened from a long, convoluted dream. Images from the dreaming teased his consciousness: a soft, fleshy landscape lit by lightning bolts; a cartoon girl pointing; his own face made up like a woman’s, framed by a long-haired wig. But the images were fading, leaving Leo’s vision clear. He saw Tracey’s house the way he remembered it, with her parents and sisters filling it with life long ago when he and friends came over to visit or be supervised while their own parents were away. And he saw the house as it was, a mausoleum, dead and silent. He saw his life as it had been: a childhood of secrets and pleasures beyond his understanding, followed by years of desperate searching for something real and true to hold on to. And he saw his life as it was now: free of the fear and lies that had imprisoned him for all the years since he’d last seen Tracey.

  No more running away. No more thoughts scuttling across his mind only to disappear under scrutiny. No more confusion, frustration. Past, present and future were all the same. The world in his mind had at last connected with what was happening in the real world.

  He was home. He’d surrendered to Tracey, belonged to her, as she belonged to him. At last, he was wild and free. At last, he was truly her little lion.

  “Well, first I’ll tell you the truth,” he said. “The question really is, whose hand held the knife.

  “I did come over to your house that night. Because you told me to. Because that was the plan. I ran to your house in the middle of the night, after my folks’ had gone to sleep, telling myself the story you’d told me over and over in my head. I was living two lives at the same time: the story in my head, and what was real. It wasn’t a problem. There was plenty of room for both. As long as I knew you were there.

  “I came in through the back door, just like you said I did. You told me you’d make sure the back door was open, and not to worry about that part of the story.

  “I went through the kitchen, past the front door, up the stairs. Didn’t look at you standing in the dark corner of the living room, out of the light. Just kept thinking about the story, even though I could feel your eyes on me. Waited on the top landing, running the story in my head, until it had caught up to me and I had a knife in my hand.

  “I went to the bathroom. Your father was there. Under the water, except for an arm sticking up. He was already chopped up. Crotch, neck, a few other places. He must have fought. I could smell the blood and shit from his body. I concentrated on the places where you said I’d gotten him with the knife. Those were the important places, the places I remembered. I couldn’t remember the other places. That’s what I said, when they asked me later. I just couldn’t remember.

  “I pulled the knife out of his stomach, ran it over his crotch and neck, then tossed it on the floor. Like you’d told me to do. Reached into the body water, unplugged the drain. The water was still warm. I watched the water go down.

  “You came upstairs. You waited outside the bathroom for me to come out. I wanted to kiss you, then. I wanted to hold you, and feel your arms around me. I wanted you to throw me to the ground. I needed to feel your weight and the heat between your legs on my chest. But it was too late for that. You looked away. I started downstairs, but you hissed like a snake. I’d forgotten to hide in the bedroom. I went in. Crouched behind the bed. Dripped some blood and water on the bedspread. Went downstairs. Out the back. Ran back home.

  “I was still telling the story to myself when the detectives came. Mom cried and Dad, I think he wanted to kill me. They believed me. The cops and families believed all of us. Because we weren’t such good kids to begin with, and we told our stories so well. And people generally knew we were sort of in love with Tracey.

  “We were sent away for a long time. When I came out, both my parents were dead. Dad had a heart attack, Mom died drunk in a car crash. There was no one left. Except for you. And I wasn’t ready for that. I was afraid you’d look away, like you did that night. And I was scared you might take me in, as well. The psychiatrists upstate taught me that wouldn’t be such a good thing. So I got a job, married, had a family. Looked for you in other places. Lost the life I’d managed to make for myself.

  “That’s all there is to the truth. It’s not as exciting, I know, as the stories. And that’s why you wanted me back. For stories to make you feel alive. But there’s always truth behind stories, and I thought we’d start with that. It’s important to remember whose hand really held the knife. Just so we can all tell the differences between what we dream, what we think happens, and what’s real. Truth makes a story’s lie more interesting.”

  Leo paused. Glanced at Tracey submerged in the tub full of bloody water. Her dead, empty eyes stared back at him like a pair of dull stones. He leaned over the tub and pulled the drain plug. The knife he’d left on the edge of the tub fell in. Water gurgled down the pipe. In the driveway to the house next door, young children burst into a laughing rendition of “Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer” as they scrambled out of their parents’ car and into their house. Their voices faded, the car’s engine died. A while later, the last of the water swirled down the drain.

  “Now, let me tell you a story,” he said to her. He kissed her cold, wet forehead, and continued.

  “ ‘It was a time,’ Tracey always began, ‘when sons killed their fathers and daughters murdered their mothers, and all the children ran wild and free …’ ”

  The words came easily, more easily than he’d ever remembered them coming. The words came bubbling out of a subterranean darkness, where the real world was swallowed and dreams were made. He felt like he could go on telling stories forever.

  COMES LOVE, NOTHING CAN BE DONE

  “I work alone,” Max said, standing in the entry to the apartment building.

  City traffic at his back nearly drowned out the sound of breathing, but the Beast caught the scent of prey, subdued, treated, undetectable in the mix of odors from garbage cans, laundry, and six floors of apartments.

  There was work to do. He was prepared to restra
in his demon, for the moment. Appetites frequently found their satisfaction in the course of his work.

  “I’m not with you,” the woman said. “My target’s in 607.”

  “That’s across the hall from mine.”

  “I don’t know why they say the things they do about you,” she said. “You sound pretty smart to me.”

  The Beast settled into the tall grass of Max’s temper, creeping slowly forward. The caution surprised Max. He took a step in, catching the dim outline of her shape in the faint trace of a street lamp’s glow bouncing into the hallway. His cock stirred. His fingers curled. The Beast, momentarily distracted by Max’s desire, growled.

  She didn’t run. Instead, she leaned forward so Max could see the faintest of smiles on her lips.

  “Easy, boy,” she said, then started up the stairs. “I’m not that type.”

  By the time she reached the first landing she was moving silently, like a shadow. Her stealth impressed Max. He’d never met a woman who could match him.

  He followed, just as quietly.

  No need for identifications, code words, secret signals. They were killers. The rest would sort itself out.

  A baby cried on the third floor, and the woman paused, hesitated.

  Max caught the vulnerability in the angle of a slight dip in her shoulders.

  They continued up the stairs until they reached the sixth floor. Max braced himself against a wall to launch himself through his target’s apartment door, but she produced a key with which she opened his door, first, then hers. She didn’t look back at him when she entered her target’s apartment.

  The job was quick. He checked the bathroom first an saw the man, naked in the shower. He broke the target’s neck, shut off the water, made the call for the movers. Clean and quiet, just as he’d been ordered to do.

  The Beast had no interest in the body. It was straining to detect the woman.

  Max went across the hall, entered the other apartment.

  The woman was sitting on the couch, staring at the wall of shelves tightly packed with CD cases across from her. Her target, a woman, lay sprawled on the hardwood floor, her neck also broken. The blinds had been drawn. Television news boomed from one side of the apartment, a Merengue from the other.

  “We have time,” Max said. His cock pressed against his pants. The Beast was aroused, but Max strained to keep the demon in check. As far as he could tell, she wasn’t an enemy. His employers would frown at the collateral damage.

  He could leave enough of her so she’d be back to working condition in six to nine months. If he worked the corpse over, he could make it look like victims and assassins had beaten each other up.

  Of course, the best solution for him would have been her targeting him for assassination.

  The woman retrieved a CD from the wall of shelves. She gasped, shook her head, slid the disc out and slipped it into the stereo player.

  Max recognized the voice, the shuffling rhythm, but not the words. The refrain—come love, nothing can be done—didn’t make sense.

  “That’s Billie Holiday,” he said.

  “How the hell would a mook like you know about her?”

  “I ran into a song of hers recently,” said Max, pushing away the unpleasant memory. The Beast happily leapt to consume it.

  “I hate to think what happened,” she answered, and went back to sitting on the couch. “There’s an Ella Fitzgerald version up there, if that would make you feel any better.”

  He noticed the automatic in her hand.

  “I don’t understand the song.”

  The woman didn’t answer him, at first. She stared at the wall in front of her, then at the body. “They’ll be here to clean up in a couple of minutes. I’ll be sure to put in a good word for you, that you didn’t try to rape me.”

  “I could have done them both.”

  “Not at the same time. And that’s what was required.”

  “Why?”

  “No logical reason. You wouldn’t understand.”

  “Try me.”

  “They were lovers. But she was also someone else’s lover. Somebody from our side. And she was carrying that man’s baby.”

  Max hadn’t noticed the pregnancy. The Beast didn’t care. It was beginning to show interest in the cadaver. Young, blonde, still warm, even moist, the woman was well within the Beast’s parameters for desire. The gentle curve of her belly, bare and smooth, was enticing.

  “I could have handled them both.”

  “No, you would have hit this one first. Because you wanted to, no matter what the orders. And you would have savaged her before going to the man, and probably mutilated him, as well. But there would have been a delay between the two. Not moments, like with us. What, ten minutes? A half-hour?”

  “Sometimes I take my time.”

  “What the contract required was that they die at the same time. So they could move on together.”

  “Move where?”

  “People have funny ideas about what happens after death.” It was another thing Max couldn’t understand.

  With the Beast torn between corpse and living woman, Max focused on the need for two assassins. He hated to be set up on jobs, though he had to admit it was happening with increasing regularity. He wanted to understand why his handlers felt it necessary to trick him. And the fact that they’d such an arrangement told him he had a blind spot. They knew what he’d do. He was too predictable. Perhaps even vulnerable. Hunters should never have blind spots. “This one betrayed the contractor. Why didn’t he want them punished?”

  “Because he loved her. And he loved the child she was going to give him.”

  “But he had her killed.” Love was too complicated for him to understand.

  “So he wouldn’t have to think about her and the child. So they couldn’t hurt him anymore. So the woman could be with the one she really loved, and the baby find its way to a promised land. That’s how much he loved them.”

  “He could have just killed the other man.”

  “She would never have forgiven him for that.”

  “Accidents happen.”

  “Not when love’s involved.”

  Max believed her. “Why not move the woman and the kid?”

  “Because our contractor knows people like us would always be able to find them. They’d always be on his mind. A ticking time bomb. A vulnerability. Every day he’d remember the kid, the guy who stole them from him, the woman betraying him. And he’d have to be afraid of losing them, again. It would have been like living with a loaded gun at your head waiting for someone to pull the trigger.” She looked Max up and down, tightened her grip on the gun, and said, “It would be like you having raw, naked pussy in front of you all day long and never being able to go for it.”

  Max could understand that.

  The Beast had settled on the corpse as its main interest. It seemed the easier choice, with the woman holding the gun. Max wondered what the woman would do if he let the Beast loose.

  The woman had set the song on replay. It kept coming back to taunt him.

  She’d made her choice.

  He made his.

  The Beast leapt from the cover of Max’s appetites, clothed in rage and ravenous hunger and burning bright hate and lust for flesh. The living woman surrendered a little cry. The dead one stayed where she’d been murdered.

  The Beast burrowed into the corpse, tore into it, ripped and shredded muscle and bone, feasted on soft eyes and hot organs. Together Max and the Beast spent their seed in a dead womb torn from a still-bleeding gut, and together they found companionship in the crimson borderlands of death.

  Somewhere in the chaos, the stereo broke and the song stopped playing.

  When the Beast quieted, fulfilled at last, Max cleaned himself up but let the apartment stand as he’d made it, a bloody mess.

  The other assassin had moved from the couch, which was torn and upended, but remained by the door. She’d watched “The movers are taking care of your work in the o
ther apartment. They didn’t want to interrupt you here.”

  “You didn’t leave.”

  “I wanted to see just how bad it could get.”

  “Did you want to see what you missed?”

  “I already saw that when I killed her,” the woman said.

  “What?”

  The woman turned to leave, opening the door. A baby’s cry echoed in the hall, from the stairwell. The woman closed the door, put her forehead against it. Wept.

  The gun was still in her hand.

  Max let her cry. If they hadn’t indulged themselves with the corpse, the Beast might have driven him to take his chances with her aim and reflexes. It would have been hard to pass up such vulnerability. Though with the gun still out, it was hard for Max to judge just how exposed the woman had allowed herself to become.

  She might have gotten a shot off, but he could have taken it. He always had, before.

  When she was finished, she spoke in a low, hoarse voice. “The most terrible thing that can happen is having the child taken away from you. There’s nothing worse. Not losing the man you loved, or even dying. Not … what you did. I wasn’t as lucky as this one. I was allowed to live. Made to kill. And I can kill just about anything. I think I’d have a chance against you. But I can’t reach the one I want to kill. Because he took my baby away from me. Killed my lover, too, but that doesn’t matter. I was left alive. To use. To feel the pain of my baby’s absence every day. To think about where she might be, and what would happen to her if I let myself go after him, if I don’t do exactly what I’m told to do. He loves seeing me suffer more than he ever loved me. That’s the kind of love we had, I guess, and all we have left.”

  “This one was lucky,” Max said. “She really was loved.”

  He didn’t like what he’d said. It made him feel like he understood something about love.

  Her face, pale, dead, hollowed-out from eyes to cheeks, told him why she’d been sent out on this particular job. He wanted to laugh at the cruelty.