Fitch finished stirring and set to pouring the mix. He stuffed strips of linen down the throats of glass bottles and screwed the caps down tight, his breath hissing all the while through his respirator, until he had an even dozen. The bottles sat in neat rows, gently sweating, the napalm inside thick as glue.
Fitch finally removed his respirator and wiped his forehead. "Six each is enough. Any more will get awkward, and we've gotta worry about noise. Yeah, that'll do. Whole place'll go up like Guy Fawkes." He wasn't looking at her. His eyes and his attention were somewhere else, somewhere distant. "Nothing but ashes in the rain. That'll show them."
"Hey, Fitch."
Fitch didn't look up. He was engrossed in arranging the bottles, first into two rows of six, then three rows of four, and then six by two again. He wiped their sides with a dry cloth and set them carefully into a canvas bag. Every click of glass sent a thrill down Kimberly's spine, like they were dealing with highly volatile uranium and not sticky petroleum gunk.
"Fitch, you okay?"
Fitch glanced up. "Huh?"
"You're distracted. Worried those kids will come back, or something?"
"Kids?" Fitch licked his lips. "Real racket they made last night."
"I must've been in a coma. Didn't hear a word."
"After that heist, don't blame you for sleeping deep." But Fitch still looked nervous. There was a peculiar twitch to his left eye as he checked and rechecked the bottles. "Nothing left to do but wait, now. Soon as Rosenfeld feels the tug..."
"How's she gonna contact us? This place doesn't have a phone."
"She'll find a way. You can pray in the meantime, if you're the praying type."
"Do you even know if fire will be enough? If everything you and Rosenfeld said about this place is true, we're walking into a meat grinder."
"Wish I knew more. Don't have a clue what's living in that place. Seen some shadows." A cloud passed over Fitch's face. "Nobody's been in since before I was a boy, you understand. A real cursed place. Once, I was standing on the hill above the river, and I saw the convent doors open a crack. Too far away to get a good look... wish I'd thought to bring some binoculars, you can bet... but I got a glimpse. Man walking down by the riverside. Well, thought it was a man. Couldn't tell under that hood." He mimed shrugging a cowl over his head. "Knelt down by the river and did... something. Looked like he was ill. Shoulders all jerking, you understand."
Kimberly's heart was a steady thudding in her ears. "Then what?"
"Threw up. Him, not me. Something all black and red and black again. Might've been blood. Might've been engine oil, for all I could tell." Fitch's mouth was a thin, grim line. "Then he looked up, and hell, I couldn't see his eyes, but I knew he was fixing on me. So I ran."
There was no mistaking the quaver in Fitch's voice. Kimberly had heard him truly afraid only a few times before, and this was one of them. "You seemed a whole lot more sure about this yesterday."
"Yeah," Fitch whispered. "Maybe I got ahead of myself."
"What, you're changing your mind?"
"Hell no! Soon as Rosenfeld says the world, we're going in." But he couldn't hide the hitch in his voice. "I got this under control. I-"
"Don't say that. You can't just palm me off whenever you don't want to tell the truth. Yeah, I don't know anything about molotovs or sneaking into convents or... I wanted to be a publisher, for Christ's sake." When she closed her eyes she could almost remember the phone call. The cold plastic receiver against her ear. We have an internship position available, but you'd need to do an interview as soon as possible. No, we can't delay until next week. There are a lot of young people vying for a position with Penguin, and you're lucky we considered you, so...
She'd been so excited she could smell the ink already. Paperclips and deadlines and red marker, slush piles and paper shredders, whole paragraphs crossed out because that was the power an editor had. Small steps over years, maybe even decades, but she'd known she'd get there eventually. No baby to tie her down. Just her and New York and dreams too big to fail.
And... the guy. Aaron. She needed to get his name tattooed on her hand or something. What sort of a woman forgot her own boyfriend's name?
"The truth," she said. "If you've got this all planned out, why do you need me? At least you had a plan for stealing the benzene. What the hell am I supposed to do in there besides make you feel like some big hero?"
There was a long silence. Fitch hands twisted together. He lifted one molotov, peered into its murky depths, set it down, and sighed. "Because I don't want to go in alone."
Kimberly could only stare. "You're afraid?"
"Didn't say that, no sir, no way."
"I saw you rip that clicker-thing in half. You came into Bo's house with nothing but a stick! I wouldn't have gone in there with a fucking machine gun, but you-"
"So you get how scary this place is? Shit, nowhere I'd rather be less. Maybe the baths..."
The baths again. Something about the way Fitch skipped away from the word made Kimberly shiver. "You ever going to tell me about the baths, or do you just like having some grand mystery to lord over me?"
"I..." Fitch's hand quested deep into his pocket. "Let's get out of this pit, huh?"
It wasn't until Fitch was slumped into the rat-eaten sofas in the theatre lobby with a glass of murky water in hand that he felt ready to talk. His shirt was soaked with petrol and there were curious patches burned into his corduroys where splashes of benzene had landed.
For someone who'd talked so much about the care and attention you had to pay their stolen payload of chemicals, Fitch sure didn't walk the walk. Kimberly eased into her own chair. Even with the stuffing torn out and the stitching busted, it was curiously comfortable. Tempting to stretch out and forget her worries, forget all the bullshit waiting for them at the convent, forget the monsters outside the door.
Forget, relax, and pray.
Fitch's right hand was folded across his stomach. His left was still in his coat pocket, and Kimberly could swear something wriggled over the lip of the fabric for just a moment. Something pink that wasn't a finger. Too thin, too flexible.
She blinked. Maybe it was a trick of the light. Or maybe not. Who could tell any more?
Fitch took a deep breath. "I don't like talking about the baths. Same reason I don't talk about Bourtet Primary, or what happened down Canif Street. Sometimes bad things go down in this town and you can make sense of them. Other times it weighs on you so you can't breathe. Clickers, the things with those fucking sunglasses, you can see them coming. But this... This just happened."
Kimberly found her own fingers tensing on the arms of her chair. "Tell me."
"Not that easy. I know what happened but I don't know how. The baths... One of the oldest places in town. Big old Georgian building. A bit baroque, a bit haunted house. Two bucks let you use the steam rooms. I went a couple times. Didn't like everyone staring at my ass."
"And?"
"I'm getting there." Fitch's left hand squirmed in his jacket pocket. Goddamn, what did he have hidden there. If it wasn't a knife or a pistol... wedding ring? Credit cards? If she could just turn that pocket out, just for a moment...
"Middle of the day," Fitch said. "Thirty, maybe more people inside. Kids, mothers. One whole family, I hear. The Ludlams had three girls. All of them in the low end of the pools, I reckon. I knew the Ludlams. Weren't friends or anything, but their girls waved at me sometimes. Oldest girl was just growing out of dresses. Cute thing, stomping around in Doc Martens and torn up Levis...
"I wasn't inside at the time, I only came after. Luck, I swear. Middle of the goddamned day. One minute the baths are there, and the next it's just a big old empty lot. Rubble and rotten beams. People walking past like nothing was wrong."
Kimberly shuddered. "Places don't just disappear."
"You'd think so. But I swear, it got snipped out of Rustwood. People that vanished inside were forgotten. But I didn't forget. No way could I ever forget that smell." He closed
his eyes, nostrils flaring. "Things go missing around this town all the time, but they go missing clean. Houses, dogs, people... Poof. But the lot where the baths used to be stank. Like when you forget a roast in the oven. Even in the rain, you could smell it. It was in the dirt. Took one step in the lot and blood came up around my boots."
"Jesus."
"That's what I said. Well, with a bit more profanity. Anyway. Bourtet Primary was the same. Popped right out of the world. This was much earlier, before I understood the way of things. I was only a kid at the time, I think."
"You think?"
"Time's a bit funny when you're my age. I remember Principal Huang, though. A real peach. Ran that school like clockwork, never yelled. Had her photo in every classroom. We all loved her. Didn't get on with any of the other kids, but her... Then one day, bam. Whole school vanishes. Hundreds of children, just... Town was real quiet that year, and nobody fucking blinked. Goodbye Principal Huang. Goodbye childhood."
Kimberly's mouth was dry as chalk. "And this is still happening?"
"Sometimes. If it does, most times you don't notice. Just another demolition so quick you didn't hear it come down." The fingers of his right hand trembled by his lips, like he was imagining taking a long drag on a cigarette. "That's why I'm going into that convent. Because I'm not sitting still while this town eats whole families alive. You get me?"
"Yeah." Her voice was a low whisper. "I get you."
There was a long silence, during which the only sound was the scritching of fingernails against fabric as Fitch dug inside his coat. Wet noises, too. Like meat slapping on a chopping board.
She couldn't bear it any longer. "What the hell do you have in there?"
Fitch looked up guiltily, eyes wide, like a puppy caught licking itself on the sofa. "What?"
"In your pocket! You're always..." She jumped up from her chair and stalked across the room. Fitch shied back, shielding himself. "What's in there? A stress ball? Or are you just playing with yourself?"
"I'm not doing anything!"
"Then quit it! You're freaking me out!" She reached for his coat pocket and Fitch rolled off the busted chair, pressing into the corner of the room. "Show me, for Christs's sake. What-"
"I can't!" Fitch's face was white, lips pressed tight together. "I can't, I swear."
"Show me!"
She got her fingers on the lip of Fitch's pocket, but he tugged away so hard that Kimberly was left grasping at air. "Fine," she panted. "Fuck it. I'm taking a walk." She paused by the door, reconsidering. "Actually, I'm taking a drive."
Still pressed against the wall, both hands over the hip pocket of his coat, Fitch said, "Now?"
"Getting stuffy in here," Kimberly replied. "I think I'll get some air."
"You're..." Fitch licked his lips. "You're not skipping out on me, are you?"
"I don't know." She snatched the keys to the stolen Audi off the floor where they'd been dumped. "See how I feel when I get back."
Fitch called after her, but she was already marching out into the rain.
* * *
Snow liked to talk about his job over dinner. Dumb shit bragged endlessly about arrest records or how he'd stuck his boot up the ass of his subordinate detectives so hard they could taste the rubber tread. "Told him he could file overtime when he had an arrest and he just about cried," was one good line. "Results, that's what I get. Hard results." He laughed and shot the shit and patted himself on the back while he chased wine with beer and wine again - sniffing at the bottles presented by the sommelier like he had half a clue about what made a good vintage beside grapes.
He waved his hands around for emphasis like she couldn't read the wedding ring-tan on his finger. He rested that same hand, that lying, cheating hand, on her knee and squeezed when he got up to use the bathroom.
He asked her to remove her sunglasses when they first sat down for dinner. She refused in a voice like the midnight surf crashing against granite, and he didn't ask again.
They'd met the evening before at a bar less than a hundred yards from the Rustwood PD. She'd been waiting for him. Knew he'd be there within fifteen minutes of six PM. Knew he'd be angry at everything and everyone, knew he'd order a bourbon and coke.
She'd sidled up to him smoothly, rested her fingers on his wrist, asked for a drink. He looked at her with red-rimmed eyes and fumbled to slide his wedding ring into his pocket without her noticing. By the end of the night he was begging for her number.
All of this, in pursuit of Fitch.
It was hard to hide in Rustwood. The town was a labyrinth of nerve endings and they twitched when the wrong people stepped into the wrong places. But Fitch was a blind spot in the centre of Rustwood's watching eye. She didn't know how. Her master hadn't dropped any hints. Only the command: Break him. Make him worship me before the end.
But there were ways around blind spots. Hers would be Goodwell. She knew the detective had lines on Fitch and his little friend, the newcomer. Goodwell was protected, but there were gaps in every suit of armour.
Goodwell's weakness was Commissioner Snow.
She'd almost forgotten how easy it was to twist people. How simple they were when you broke them down into a series of switches and toggles, needs and wants that you could feed or deny them at leisure. Snow was simpler than most. He fed on the illusion of power, on shunting people around and seeing the despair on their faces when he shovelled more shit into their laps.
He liked his employees wilting, looking up at him with puppy-dog eyes, begging for his approval. Basic power fantasies. She'd always known how to tease those into shapes she liked. Her master - the beast, the pretender, the Queen-in-Waiting, whatever the plebs wanted to call it - had taught her that much.
She'd give him just what he wanted, until the moment when he was most vulnerable. Then...
Snow returned from the bathroom and bent to give her a peck on the cheek. His lips were dry and chapped. "You want to go back to yours?"
She smiled softly, innocently. "Won't your wife be waiting?"
Snow's expression stiffened, but only for a moment. "What're you talking about?"
"Isn't she enough for you?"
"Shut up." His hand tightened on her shoulder. "Think you'd better shut up."
She rose from her seat, shrugging his hand away. "Does she know you're here? Does she know what you do?"
Snow's expression was set. His brows were narrowed, almost snarling. "You don't say a damn word about my wife, you-"
"Shut me up, then." She ducked in and pressed her lips to his. When she pulled back, his eyes were wide and glassy. "My place."
That was yesterday.
Commissioner Snow was naked and bound.
They'd gotten as far as the bed - Snow's paws on her shoulders, dragging her shirt down to her waist, popping buttons in quick succession. She didn't mind losing the clothes - she'd taken them from a woman in a parking lot, creeping up beside her while she fiddled with her keys, strangling her as neatly and quietly as twisting the lid off a freezer-chilled Coke before dumping the ruin of her body in a culvert far from prying eyes. The apartment was the woman's as well, as was the car parked outside.
One day, maybe two, and people would come looking for that missing woman. By then she'd have moved on. Clothes and cars were always easy to come by in Rustwood, so long as you could find someone your size. Sunglasses, on the other hand...
Snow had tried to lift her glasses away, and she'd swatted his hand down. "Not yet," she hissed, and he responded by clamping his hand over her mouth and shoving her to the bed. Her lips mashed against her teeth. She tasted blood, thick and sluggish.
Good. Blood was always good. Kept her angry. Kept her mind on task.
"Shut up," Snow growled. He was already reaching for his belt buckle. The bulge in his slacks was unmistakable. "You shut that mouth or I'll-"
"Or what?" She licked her lips, smearing blood across her skin. "You'll make me?"
"You're goddamn right."
He came at h
er, pants around his ankles, the hard muscles of his gym-rat body bulging like a condom packed with walnuts. The lust in his eyes was almost bestial. He pressed her down to the bed, one hand questing inside her shirt, cupping her left breast, the other tugging away the remains of her stolen shirt.
Snow's expression skidded between excitement and confusion as his thumb rubbed the thick wire of scar tissue striping across her chest. His hand went lower, trailing across the plain of her stomach. She couldn't hide her smile. The light shone on her canines. "You like?"
Snow reared up. "What the fuck is wrong with-"
She grabbed Commissioner Snow by the wrist and twisted, slamming him face-first into the bed. He bounced hard, fetching up against the headboard. Something cracked - either the wood, or his skull. "Bitch!" he grunted. "You fucking-"
She drove the heel of her hand into his stomach and all his breath whoofed out. "Bitch," he grunted.
She replied by breaking his little finger.
Snow's scream came out as a high whistle. He collapsed into the bedsheets, curling around his left hand, shielding it with his body.
That wasn't going to fly, no sir. She climbed atop him, pressing his shoulders into the mattress, leaning low until her nose was almost brushing his. "You paying attention now, big boy? You listening close?"
Snow's eyes were wide and glassy, full of the awful animal realisation that he was snared. "Why're you doing-"
"I need you," she whispered. "I need what you know. I need your eyes, Commissioner. I need your tongue. I need to get inside your head."
"I don't understand, please, I'm sorry, just-"
"Too late for that. I came for you, remember? You're my ticket to Goodwell. Now, hold still."
Snow didn't look away as she removed her bug-eye sunglasses and let him see what lay beneath. "Good boy," she purred. "Good, good boy."
She pressed her forehead to his. They were eyeball-to-eyeball.
In a manner of speaking.
Rust: Two Page 9
