Call Me Killer

by Linda Barlow

  There is something satisfying in total demolition. Rip that shit out until there's nothing left but the building's bones. You had to be careful, of course, especially when you got down to the electric wires.

  You also saw some nasty stuff behind those walls—dirt, plaster, rotting insulation, mouse shit, roaches and small animal bones. Sometimes there was even weirder shit in there, like beer cans, used condoms, children's toys.

  Once we found a pistol in the walls of an old Victorian. Turned it into the police, who said it had come from the 1880s. Made me wonder if one of the original builders had committed murder and walled the murder weapon up. Great hiding place.

  A carpenter I knew told me he'd once found a human femur behind some dining room walls. Said he'd spent ages looking for a skull and other bones to match it, but there was only that thigh bone. No one had had a clue how it had found its way in there.

  Made me wonder about all the dark shit people hid behind the facades they build around their inner selves. With some folks you could see who they were, right down to their hearts. But with others, all you saw were blank, shiny walls, hiding God-only-knew what garbage.

  I didn't much like my job, but there were days when I didn't hate it, either. The guys I worked with were great, mostly. It had been my uncle, my mom's brother, who gave me the job full-time after the whole arrest thing had happened. The cops had had to let me go because they didn't have enough evidence to charge me with anything. But since practically everybody in town believed me guilty, no other jobs had been forthcoming.

  I knew I was lucky Uncle Mike had been willing to give me the work. I'd turned down a solid permanent job he'd offered me a couple of years back when I'd been trying to finish college, and he probably thought me an ungrateful fuck.

  Back then I'd naively thought that life had something better in store for me than building new kitchens, bathrooms, and finished basements for rich people's suburban homes. Carpentry was skilled work, but I saw myself in a suit, Italian shoes, a fancy car, a high salary. One day I'd be hiring carpenters and plumbers myself to renovate my own suburban mansion.

  Ah, dreams.

  * * *

  When I got home that evening, I was surprised to find my door unlocked. The FBI checked up on me now and then, and those guys were even worse than the local and state cops. There was one guy in particular who had specialized in interrogating my ass. Since Hadley's body had never been found, there were some theories that she might have been kidnapped, which had been all the excuse the Feebs needed to add their personal contribution to making my life miserable.

  But it wasn't the FBI at my place, after all. It was Rory. She had jimmied the lock on my front door.

  “What the fuck?” I shouted at her when I busted in, fists hot with rage. At that particular moment, I felt like I might be capable of killing someone after all.

  “I know.” She jumped up from my computer where she had once again parked her ass. The late afternoon sun was slanting in the window beside her, giving her heart-shaped face a golden glow. “I'm like that sad-eyed puppy who keeps turning up even when you try to dump him off at the pound.” She grabbed a hank of her long hair and waved it back and forth in front of her face. “Wagging my tail 'cause I'm so happy to see you.” She shot me that big, wide, engaging smile. “Careful. Don't get too close or I might pee on the floor.”

  And fuck, just like that I started to grin. My entire body felt lighter somehow, as if the air had cushioned up under my feet. She was something. As far as she knew, I had murdered my girlfriend. If she'd been sensible, she might have figured that she'd had one hell of a lucky escape.

  Instead, she'd bounced right back to me. Was this silly girl with the sky-high IQ naive enough to trust me?

  “You shouldn't have turned your back on me at the train station,” she said, still laughing.

  “You didn't board the train.”

  “Nope. And it was only about a fifteen minute walk back here. I'm sorry,” she added, sounding all earnest and contrite. “It's only for the weekend. My friend Izzy will be back in town on Monday, and I can spend the rest of the week with her.”

  “Don't you have any other friends?”

  “Sure I do. But they're away getting wasted in places like Cancun and Panama City.” She nodded toward the kitchen. “Are you hungry? I cooked.”

  I'd noticed the yummy smell wafting in from that direction. I was starved. Things were looking up if the girl could cook.

  “I could probably eat something.”

  She beamed at me, probably because I'd just implied she could stay. She looked adorable. She'd cleaned up real nice. I liked the tight jeans, which revealed that she actually had a waist, hips, ankles. She was still wearing that short-sleeve top. I could tell that there were actual boobs under it, even if they weren't quite as large as the ones I'd given her in my fantasy last night.

  Her arms and hands were well-shaped and she had a long neck and an impish face. Her skin was almost translucent. She wasn't beautiful, but there was something about her features that drew me. Weird though it seemed, her smile made me happy.

  “I think I'm making progress,” she said, gesturing at the computer screen. “I've been at this all day.”

  “Were you telling me the truth when you claimed to have hacked the cops?”

  “The local cops are well protected against hackers. Surprisingly secure for such a small-ass town. Still, I got most of the police info, yeah. I had to go through other channels.”

  “What other channels?”

  She grinned. “Best you don't know. There could be documents I haven't found yet. I didn't dare breach the FBI files. I don't want the feds to get a whiff of me.”

  I shook my head. I couldn't figure her out. “Why are you doing this? What's in it for you?”

  “I'm just trying to help.”

  I tightened up again. I wasn't used to people being helpful. “Don't fuck with me. Nobody helps for no reason. Are you on the run and using my place as a hideout?”

  Her back had gotten all stiff and bristly now and she sounded ticked off, too. “The only thing I'm on the run from is being homeless for a week. It's spring break, and my dorm got shut down because a water main broke and flooded the basement. As for why I'm helping you,” she paused, shaking her head for a moment as if she weren't quite sure herself. “It's because you helped me. You didn't have to, but you did. I owe you.” She dropped her voice low and intoned, “'The Lannisters always pay their debts.'“

  “The Lannisters throw children off towers and fuck their sisters.”

  She grinned. “Ok, bad example. How about this: I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you clothed me.”

  “You don't seem like the Bible quoting type.”

  “You don't seem like the Bible quote-recognizing type.”

  I scowled. My mother had dragged Sean and me to Sunday school for years.

  “I have this photographic memory,” she added. “I could quote a whole lot more of the Bible, but you'd be bored.”

  “I've been bored with you since about five minutes after we met.”

  “Fuck you, Griff,” she said, her attention already back on the computer screen.

  And the truth was, for some peculiar reason, I wasn't bored at all.

  Chapter 9

  Griff

  “So what do you think happened to her?” she asked as we were sitting at the kitchen table, eating the ziti with meat sauce she had cooked. It was tasty, nicely spiced. She'd whipped up garlic bread to go with it and even a salad. When I'd asked her where she'd found the groceries, she'd reminded me about the supermarket not far from the train station.

  She'd neatened up the place, too. The bathroom had been scrubbed. The floors were clean, and I think she might have dusted. She'd even made my bed, which, like, never happened.

  “I don't know.”

  “You must have thought about it. Developed some theories.�
��

  “Of course I've fucking thought about it.”

  “The weird thing is that she disappeared without a trace. No blood. No sign of a struggle. Her place wasn't broken into and her car wasn't taken. They couldn't track her cell phone, which disappeared along with her. That's unusual, you know that, right? Most people don't know they need to disable those things.”

  I grunted. I hadn't forgotten the way she had disabled her own cell phone.

  “Whoever grabbed her took her purse, too, along with her credit cards, bank cards, and various IDs. But none of that stuff was ever used. It's like she vanished off the face of the earth. Got beamed up by a starship. It makes no sense.”

  “The only thing I can figure is that she went for a walk and got ambushed by some wandering serial killer. He drove off with her, dismantled her cell or threw it in a pond, killed her, disposed of her body somewhere clever, and left the area. Someday in another state they'll find the guy and discover that he traveled cross country, killing women as he went.”

  “Would she get into a car with a total stranger?”

  I looked at her, eyebrows raised. She blushed. “Okay. I suppose it could happen. But the whole thing stinks to me.”

  “What d'you mean?”

  “It feels wrong. It's like someone committed the perfect crime. People don't just vanish.”

  “Actually, people do just vanish. It happens more often than you'd think.”

  Rory, obviously following a train of thought, ignored this. “Unless...maybe it was something to do with her wealthy friends. If she pissed off somebody rich and powerful, they could hire professionals to get rid of her, leaving no trace.”

  “I thought professionals shot you in the head and left the body.”

  “Well, these professionals wanted her to disappear completely.”

  “Why?”

  “I don't know. Maybe she was into something weird.”

  I wondered if she had discovered anything about Hadley's unusual sexual interests. The cops had questioned me hard about that.

  “I need a list of everything she was into. Everyone she was involved with. I've already checked out a lot of things. I know about her family, her friends, the places she volunteered at, the places she worked.”

  “You found all that out online?”

  “Dude, there's not much you can't find out online these days. Especially if you can crack certain databases.”

  “The police have been all over this stuff, you know.”

  She was stubborn. “Fresh eyes. I might see something they didn't.”

  * * *

  After supper I went into the living room and turned on the TV. There was a basketball game on that I wanted to watch. Rory stared belligerently at the speakers, loud with exuberant commentary and revved-up crowd noises, but she didn't comment. She planted herself in front of the computer again. I popped open a beer and set about trying to ignore her.

  This proved to be difficult. I wasn't used to having girls around the place. Especially if they were doing something other than fucking me. Unlike some of my friends, I didn't grow up with sisters and I wasn't that close to my mother, so I'd never been too comfortable with women. Hadley had been my only long-term girlfriend, and our relationship hadn't been conventional.

  There'd been other girls over the years, plenty of them, but they were hookups, not people with whom I shared my living space.

  I didn't seriously believe that Rory could uncover anything new about Hadley's disappearance. I didn't like cops, but I gave them their due—they'd done a decent investigation. Gathered all the threads and followed all the angles. The case was ice cold now that almost a year had passed. Rory could poke through it all again, but what was she going to learn? Nothing, nada, zip.

  I knew the only reason I hadn't taken Rory by the scruff of her neck and forced her out my front door was that my dick was starting to do my thinking for me. Ever since I'd come home from work and found her back, I'd been extra-aware of her movements, her voice, her faintly feminine smell.

  I liked the way her thick brown hair bounced on her shoulders when she shifted her weight or turned her head. I liked her legs, which were long in proportion to the rest of her body, and her feet, which were dainty and small and always visible because she padded around barefoot. She was wearing chipped black polish on her fingers, but her toenails were unpainted. I wondered how she'd look in a pair of crazy-high heels.

  The game was a blowout. During a commercial break, I muted the sound. Rory took this as a signal to restart the interrogation. She pushed the desk chair back from the computer table and whirled it around so she could look at me. She had pulled one leg up with her heel resting on the front of the seat and her chin leaning on her bent knee.

  She gave me her big irresistible smile again, and this time it had a deja vu quality about it. For a moment she reminded me of someone else with a smile like that, although I couldn't fathom who.

  “So what's this job you have to go to, Griff? What kind of work do you do?”

  “Construction.”

  I could feel her checking me out again. “Guys who work construction usually have good bods.” I couldn't tell from her tone whether she thought I fell into this group or not. Probably not. I used to work out regularly with weights and run cross-country, but it had been a while since I'd done either. Work kept me in shape, but I was no longer in tiptop condition.

  “At least I don't sit in front of a computer screen all day.”

  “True,” she said cheerfully. “I'll probably be toting lard by the time I'm your age.”

  “I'm not that much older than you.”

  She laughed. “I know exactly how old you are.”

  Yeah, and how much I had in my bank account, too. Not to mention what kind of porn I liked.

  “What I don't get is, how come you have so many textbooks?” She nodded to a couple of bookcases up against the far wall. “You've even got some literary classics along with all the science fiction and fantasy stuff.”

  “I can fucking read,” I snarled. I loved to read, in fact.

  “If I didn't know better, I'd figure you were in college yourself. You're obviously not stupid.”

  “Gee, thanks. We can't all have an IQ of 204.”

  She waved a hand as if that were insignificant. “Those tests aren't that accurate, anyway.”

  “Don't worry. I'm not threatened by intelligent women.” This was actually true. I had a lot of hang-ups about women, but brains wasn't one of them. I'd gone to a good high school and I'd known plenty of smart girls. Hadley had been an honors student.

  Rory glowed when she heard this. When she lit up like that, it was as if she were channeling sunshine. She seemed to be remarkably cheerful considering her friends were prostitutes and their boyfriends were gun-toting wackos.

  “Are you working construction because of some fallout from your girlfriend's disappearance? Is that why you dropped out of college?”

  Yeah, and she knew that, no doubt, because she had access to my whole fucking life. Sunshine or no sunshine, I was starting to get irritated.

  “Maybe you could think about finishing school? So you're not stuck in a dead-end job for the next forty years?”

  “You know what? Fuck you. I've been grilled by professionals, baby, and I'm not gonna sit here and listen to you try to dissect my life.”

  I needed some exercise, so I slammed out the door and set out to run. Running made me feel better when I was stressed. My calves were tight, though, and the first mile was painful. Shit, I needed to work out more. I wasn't getting winded, but my muscles complained for a while before they calmed down. The run became easy after that, and I settled into a comfortable pace and took one of my longer routes.

  Rory wasn't the first person who'd given me shit about not finishing college. My mom went on about it so often that I'd been avoiding her. “Your brother was so proud of your good grades,” she would say, working the guilt angle. “Sean was determined that you would get your deg
ree. Have you forgotten the money he used to send for your college fund? He said you were smart enough to be a doctor or a lawyer someday, and that if anything ever happened to him, I should make sure you finished your education.”

  Yeah yeah. Sean had been a pain in the butt when he'd been my perfect big brother, but he was even more of a pain now that he was dead.

  I told myself that a lot. What a shit Sean had been to me at times. Bigger, stronger, more athletic, more handsome. Kind to puppies and prone to helping old ladies cross the street. Volunteering to go fight terrorists and protect the homeland. Getting himself killed, and all for what?

  Shit. I couldn't let myself think about Sean. The hole in my heart deepened into a black, bottomless well when I thought about Sean. Fuck. Sometimes I missed him so damn much.

  Chapter 10

  Rory

  Maybe I just should've left on the train.

  This was messed up no matter how I looked at it. I didn't have anything in common with this guy who’d picked me up in the rain, and I wasn't sure why he intrigued me. All we seemed to do is squabble.

  It wasn’t up to me to ride his ass about why he hadn’t finished college. Anyway, why was I being snobby about it? There was nothing wrong with working construction.

  I pictured him, shirt off, muscles sliding under his skin as he lifted a wooden beam and hefted it up over his head. Working outside, in the fresh air, the sun beating down on his perfect body. Oh yeah. I could lie back and watch that all day.

  Damn. Was that why I’d stayed?

  I’d been telling myself that since Griff had helped me out of a tricky situation, I oughta do something to return the favor. I owed him. If the townsfolk who’d turn their backs on him had all been wrong, he deserved the chance to hold his head up high again. Maybe I could help with that? At least maybe I could make him understand that someone cared enough to try to clear his name?