by Mark Henry
She followed a warm glow to a candlelit table. Luce’s hopes soared at the sight of the romantic setting. She wanted nothing more than for Aaron to sweep in and rescue her from the torture of the high school stockades. Hitch lingered in the shadows, eyes narrowed and suspicious.
“It’s going to be nice,” she assured him.
Pots clanged in the kitchen, cueing Luce to straighten hopefully, to fluff out the skirt of the dress she’d borrowed. But when the door opened, Aaron didn’t appear, but rather a dozen rats were released into the room and rushed the table. Luce kicked away screaming, only then noticing the piles of food around the table legs. Her screams were Polly’s payday, the girl came rushing from the shadows video camera held high and circling the scene, capturing Luce’s horror for perpetuity.
Her heart sunk to see Aaron appear from the darkness, as well, a wicked grin on his face.
That was when Hitch crossed a boundary she never believed possible. He swept in from her right, first knocking the camera out of Polly’s hand, leaving her shocked and spiraling about the room searching for her attacker. Next, he approached the rats, who turned to look at him in unison and then sped toward Polly, scrambling up her legs and swarming about her hair. She spun and spun. Arms snatching at the rodents, scratching her own face.
In the end, she’d ended up in the psych ward at Harborview for a forty-eight-hour observation so, Luce thought, compared to the split melon in the toilet stall, no biggie. What was huge, though, was the fact that Hitch had protected her. She’d wished for nothing more than to have him near always.
And here they sat with her saying the exact opposite.
“I’m sorry,” she acquiesced. “I just need to give this a shot.”
Hitch winced.
She had to explain. “I felt powerful during that attack. I felt like I knew what I was doing for one lousy second. Do you know how huge that was for me?”
He nodded slowly. “I can’t watch though. I just can’t.”
“Well that’s good, because you need to stick to your end of the bargain and back off.”
Hitch popped out of sight and Luce finished her coffee, signing the contract before heading back to The Parts Department and her future.
Chapter Six
Wade wished he had stopped by Quince’s coffeepot on his way out. Anything to keep his eyes from drifting closed would have sufficed, though. In fact, strategically bent paper clips were looking more and more appealing.
Normally, he slept quite well, dreamless but deep. But last night had been rough, full of the most lucidly sexual fugues he’d ever experienced. He’d been jarred awake three times alone from tossing and turning onto a raging erection.
Wade didn’t need Jung’s analysis to decipher what was going on.
Lucid.
Luce.
He told himself he’d avoid her, cleanse his palate with YouTube videos of kittens pouncing on sleeping faces, banal watercooler conversations, anything. Quince too was to be avoided. Her drilling of their alley liaison had been a brutal and brilliant exercise in interrogation. If she’d resorted to waterboarding, Wade would have been sunk…literally.
Plus, Quince happened to have a Parts Department requisitioned inverting chair, with straps and a crank that could easily accommodate even Wade’s girth. He imagined the woman gleefully leaning him back and sopping towels for no other purpose than to hear juicy gossip.
Clearly insane.
But telling yourself to do something and actually following through were two different things, so when Luce appeared on the monitor approaching the hidden door in the parking garage, he was already standing there watching.
Waiting.
And fantasizing about her mouth, the subtle curve of her breasts he’d sampled on the sly, or possibly not so sly, or, to be fair, who gave a crap if it was sly. He’d wanted to do far more. He’d wanted to do everything.
But rather than succumb to the twitching memory coming alive in his groin, Wade wiped the back of his neck with the cold rag he carried and opened the door before Luce could ring the bell.
“Oh!” She sprang back, clearly unnerved. “I was expecting someone else.”
Wade nodded. “We have an actual doorman. I’m not moonlighting or anything, just happened to be here.”
To be honest, Wade had sent their doorman on a busy errand to gather up empty plastic spray bottles. He had plenty but told himself he could always use more of the holy-water dispensers of choice. A sprinkling may have been fine in the old days, but that was before domestic animal behaviorists discovered the power of a quick spritz to the face. It turns out demons were a lot like cats in that department. Also, fantastic if the possession involved excessive marking of the demon’s territory.
Not on this carpet, Beelzebub!
Bam!
Two spritzes if Wade was feeling sadistic, which was almost never, but occasional enough that he had to make a note of it or it could sometimes get out of hand. At least, that’s what Sister Mary-Agnes’s last employee evaluation had claimed. Though, in all honesty, she’d probably been drunk when she wrote it.
Wade didn’t think he had a problem. Not at all.
Luce on the other hand.
“Are you staring at me?” she asked, face tilted and lips pursed in a grin that implied both that Wade was being naughty and that she appreciated that fact in a wholly unwholesome way.
“I don’t think so.” He quickly changed the subject. “Today you’ll be watching the orientation video.”
“That sounds entertaining.”
“It does?”
“No.”
“Don’t scare her off, Knives McGee.” A woman swept in beside Luce, hooking her arm and nestling in close as though they were old friends.
“Oh hello, Jessica,” Wade said. “How goes the Shelly thing?”
The woman’s lip curled into a heinous sneer. “Oh she’ll get what’s coming to her. I’m compiling a dossier.”
“That sounds mysterious,” Luce said, smiling.
But Jessica needed some recovery time to return to her originally bubbly attitude. The grimace slowly subsided and after a heavy sigh, she shook her jaw into a happy grin. And they called Luce crazy.
“I’ve got her from here, Wade. You just run along and do whatever it is you do when you’re not slicing and dicing,” Jessica said, dragging Luce down the hall.
“I don’t dice!” he yelled after them, fists stiff at his sides.
Jessica waved him off as they walked. “You’re going to have your hands full with that one. He’s a real poonhound.”
“Oh no. My hands won’t be full of any of Mr. Crowson.”
Jessica brightened. “I see. The lady doth protest too much!”
“What no—” Luce began her defense.
But the woman just kept at it. “He does have a certain burly, thick-necked, man-musk, to him. Sexy, no doubt. But dangerous. Which is, of course, part of it. But you need to be careful.” She leaned in close to Luce’s ear. “They all die. All of his partners…and his wife. Don’t bring it up though. Jesus. And don’t tell him I told you if you do.”
“What?” Luce reeled. Too much information. Too quick.
“And we’re here.” Jessica pushed Luce into a nearby doorway.
Her hand still on the small of Luce’s back, Jessica guided her toward a chair in the center of an otherwise-sterile room, white walls, ceiling and an industrial linoleum tile floor. The only other thing in the room was an old TV-and-VCR combo on a stainless-steel stand. Luce shot an uncomfortable grin over her shoulder.
“This isn’t a kill room, or anything, is it?”
“No, but I see where you’re going with that, and it’s funny. I love it.” Jessica glanced around the room. “Easy clean up. The only thing it’s missing is a drain.” The woman scrunched her face up disappointedly.
“Well,” Luce said, taking a seat. “I was joking.” She left out the part where she was going to say, “At least you’re not completely insane.�
�
But inside she’d begun to think, for some very odd reasons—very odd indeed—that the best place to hide from the thought police was amidst the rest of the crazies. The Parts Department certainly seemed to fit the bill on that count.
Plus. If Wade were a little nuts, too, that would be sort of cute. Like they were kind of on a level playing field or something.
“I know the whole thing sounds like they’re making it up, but once you’ve gone out on a case, I think it’ll clear a lot of this stuff up. And maybe the video will, too. Who knows?” She waved her hand at the TV as though it were a formality and then slipped out.
Luce was relieved that his discomfort seemed to have abated and whether or not he refrained from pursuing her in the future—read soon—didn’t seem as important as learning the stuff that had brought her here in the first place. Luce picked up the remote and hit play.
Moments later the TV flickered to life and an animated instructional video popped onto the screen.
How to Repo Organs from the Damned.
It followed the adventures of Timo and Chicklet as they happily—this seemed to be the salient point, the character’s mouths were so cheerfully arched they seemed fractured into place—lured a possessed man out of his car—Chicklet seemed quite valuable in this regard, as did her short skirt and fishnet stockings.
“Hitch?” Luce called. “Are you seeing this?”
Nothing. Hitch had been noticeably absent since the contract signing, a fact that didn’t displease her, really. Also, she figured he was entitled to a little of his own privacy from time to time, maybe he could go meet a nice imaginary girl at Weiner’s and play some imaginary alley tonsil hockey.
It could happen.
Back on the TV, Chicklet’s seduction, which consisted of a hip-swiveling dance to a nineteen-fifties stag film chicka boom, ended with the man—skin now a bright green as is clearly indicative of evil, as well as the Irish according to his shamrock shirt—accompanying a ludicrously excited Chicklet into a motel room. She joyously slipped some white powder—identified as happy sleep dust—into a glass of brown liquid. The green guy took a sip and achieved a boyishly cute, sleepy face and dropped onto the bed. Timo bounded from the bathroom with a sparkling scalpel and touched it once to the sleeping man’s stomach and the cutest kidney monster popped out shaking its little green fist at Timo and Chicklet, who scolded it harshly before planting their fists on their hips and laughing hysterically.
The video ended with the demon kidney hopping into Timo’s surgical bag and waving as they walked away from the sleepy-time guy and the arriving paramedics from Happy Fun Hospital.
Luce gawped at the screen long after it went dark. Whoever these people had manning their training department was clearly deranged, or possibly a child.
Or both.
She certainly couldn’t imagine Wade ever cracking a smile as broad as Timo’s. Though, if she were being honest, she’d always wanted to try on fishnet stockings and do a little bump and grind. Also, the work did not seem to be very taxing, at least not the way Chicklet did it.
A couple of hip thrusts and a roofie, what was difficult about that?
She glanced at the door, expecting Wade to be standing there with a rankled brow, assessing her disapprovingly. Despite his personality fluctuations, Luce couldn’t help thinking he was simply agreeing to her employment just so he could get back to work, back to harvesting organs from the unsuspecting possessed. She’d be crazy if it didn’t cross her mind that the man might simply be a serial killer who’d lucked into a job that paid him for his proclivities. But since it’s already been established that Luce was perfectly normal and getting more normal all the time, she figured she’d give him the benefit of the doubt—plus, serial killers probably weren’t excellent kissers. Good at laying bodies in unmarked graves, yes, laying pipe, no.
A sharp bang from the direction of the hall jarred Luce from her thoughts, and her eyes to the door. The metal knob still shook from the impact. A moment later, muffled screams began and before she could stop herself, Luce darted into the bunker-like corridor.
People ran panicked in either direction. Victor the Vegan tripped over his own feet and slid several feet on his knees before scrambling past a very relaxed Hitch—leaning against the cinderblock wall like a street hustler—into a janitor’s closet and hunkering down behind a rolling mop bucket. Luce shut the door on him as she passed and ran headlong into a melee in the mammoth room full of cubicles.
Cloaked figures crashed over the flimsy cubicle walls in inky waves, one heading right toward her.
“Wrap that cretin up!” Hitch shouted from the sidelines like a football dad.
She snatched a roll of cling wrap off the potluck table nearby and as the figure barreled face first toward her, clawing the air, Luce sidestepped, unrolling the clear plastic and wrapping the Satanist’s face not once, not twice but three times—he might suffocate but he’d be damn fresh when they did the autopsy.
Luce staggered back, startled at her own instincts, at her voracity and propensity for violence. Hardly the time for back-patting, she jerked back toward the center of the room.
She’d seen enough massacre footage on TV to know that when the crazies were this close, you didn’t hide under a table, like the bulk of the staff in the room, you armed yourself. She scrambled for options on the nearest desktop, wishing that computer monitors were still heavy glassy things that could be dropped, exploding, onto a marauder’s head, and damning the new flimsy flat screens and the thin plastic keyboards.
Useless.
She settled on a shiny red Swingline stapler, opened it, and swung it in midair a few times, imagining it coming down on an attacker’s head—bap-bap-bap—like a cat’s paw stunning prey…only with sharp—hopefully tetanus-rusty—staples.
“Bravo!” Hitch yelled again.
…
Across the room, Wade watched with growing interest. He slouched against the wall, crossing his arms comfortably as Luce launched herself over the wall of a nearby desk and onto the back of the nearest presumed Satanist, tackling him to the ground and stapling the shit out of his face.
Wincing with sympathy pains, Wade couldn’t help but be impressed. Thorwald’s report had indicated a tendency toward rapid problem-solving and explosive violence, two traits he respected greatly in a partner—also a lover, but that was only in theory, he’d yet to find a woman who exhibited both.
As he watched Luce battle her attackers he couldn’t help but think of his beloved Catherine. The athleticism. The strength. The catlike movement. They were similar in those respects and different in so many others—his wife had been sane, for one. Still, Wade found himself following Luce’s every punch and roundhouse kick and wanting to see more. To know more.
To know everything about this woman.
So strange. Bizarre, even.
So sexy.
He couldn’t take his eyes off her and that’s probably why he didn’t call off the dogs before Luce had managed to staple several hood and cloak hems to Parts Department employee flesh. When he realized the situation had gotten completely out of hand, Wade reached for the whistle and blew it. The attack stopped still, hoods dropped revealing sour faces. Most of them pointing in Wade’s direction.
Grace from accounting mouthed a very easily readable, “You suck,” before marching off down the one of the cubicle rows and tossing her robe in his direction.
“What the hell!” Luce screamed, throwing her arms out in confusion.
By the time Wade located her in the midst of the changing atmosphere, she was already stomping toward him, stapler raised. “The Satanists? All of it! Some kind of test?”
Wade raised his hands defensively, half expecting to pull back an office supply injury. “We had to be certain you could handle yourself.”
“What?” she bellowed. “Sick. You’re all monsters.”
“If we’d asked you, would you have known you could do this?” He pointed out the wounded aroun
d them, already nursing staple punctures, cubicle-related abrasions, ergonomic lumbar injuries.
Luce frowned but then slowly her jaw stiffened into a smile. “It is kind of amazing. I didn’t know I had it in me. But, it just seemed like the right thing to do.”
“Stapling was inspired.”
“You know what else?” Wade pressed in close to her, feeling the heat rise from her adrenaline-infused muscle.
“No.” Her voice shook, but she didn’t seem embarrassed by it, wasn’t self-conscious but rather too excited to be either.
“It was a beautiful thing to watch.” The words vibrated in that deep growl he reserved for secrets.
“Chicklet would have done it with a smile.”
“That’s true,” Wade said. “But Timo’s teeth sparkled while he watched, believe that!”
Luce grinned broadly. Proud of her damage, he supposed.
…
She had been a bad-ass.
Wade retreated into the bowels of The Parts Department. Luce wondered if there would be another test just around the corner, or if she’d proven her worth. She supposed if she’d done it dressed entirely like Chicklet, she’d have been instantly promoted.
“Jesus,” she said aloud, pulling her shirt together. The top four buttons had been torn free in the fight.
“I think I have a spare shirt in my desk.” A woman hunched over an open drawer at a nearby cubicle desk, rummaging in the back and then retrieving a pink cotton polo. When she turned around, Luce gasped. The woman wore the same thin-lipped face as the Satanist upstairs. Of course, she thought. The whole thing had been part of the test. “So we meet,” Luce said.
The woman sneered, patting at her scalp the way women do when their extensions are too tight, but this woman’s hair was blond, thin, as well. No extensions would wear so flat, so lifelessly. “I’m Grace,” she said. “You really hammered in those staples, I feel like a piece of upholstered furniture.”
“Sorry.” Luce accepted the polo and snatched a staple remover from Grace’s desk, snipping them in the air to the other woman’s horror. “You want help with that?”
“Uh, no. Psycho,” she said, angling away. “I’ll figure it out.”
