by Alex Moss
“Her?”
“The girl.”
“Girl. What girl?”
“There’s always a girl. That gets in the way. That fools all the boys. Didn’t you know that?”
The prosecutor seems at a loss.
“So what did you sell Victor?”
“Time. Just time.”
Benjamin Koit is already on his way out. He knows he must pursue Victor.
“So thanks to your sick friend, you have my eyes and they are collateral,” says Bobby.
“A mere consolation prize.”
“So you can do something for me now.”
“Don’t push your luck.”
“Please. I ain’t got shit so just make me a Saint. I’m tired of this life.”
The prosecutor considers him and nods. He’s in a weakened state of giving. “Consider it done.”
“About the therapy. I need to know what happens to you when it’s done.” For once, he seems fearful of something. Something unknown and life altering that makes him feel so incredibly small. “If your bad is gone for good, are you still you?” Bobby asks, hoping for an answer.
He doesn’t get one. The prosecutor is tired. He knows full well that Victor and the girl are probably long gone by now and he just wants to sit in the dark somewhere, alone, and consider his loss. “Goodbye, Mr. Floyd.” He turns and heads back toward the exit.
THIRTY-EIGHT
Earlier.
Stelson pulls up to the Fayne mansion on South Muirfield Drive and cuts the engine. It takes him a few goes to apply the parking brake.
A passing driver in a Mercedes CLS second-glances him but keeps on going. There are no pedestrians or neighbors in sight so he jumps out, grabs the red bag, and slings it across his shoulder. He heaves Anna from the back seat and carries her across the front lawn to the main entrance like a fallen maiden returning to her fairy-tale castle.
Inside, Anna’s eyes skim over the portrait of her mother on the stairwell. She seems to roll her eyes back to get another look at her and the way she is knelt down and tying her running shoes. There’s some new feeling here–an accusation and an acceptance all at once.
Her mother.
A monster.
There was never any fairy tale to tell.
On the landing, Stelson pads her down the hall to her bedroom, stepping lightly over broken glass and torn drapes and lays her down in her bed.
He pulls off the red bag and shoves it under the bed and pulls out the Glock from his waistband and places it on a nearby chest of drawers.
Anna is watching him, and hoping that he we will give her some space. He finds a silky nightdress in a nearby drawer and hands it to her and she puts it on and then he leaves her bedroom. She sits up and leans over the side of the bed and reaches for the red shoulder bag to check that it’s there, safe, close to her body. She unzips it, nearly falling out of bed as she studies the contents. Satisfied, she zips it up, shoves it back under the bed, and pulls herself back up and lays back down.
Stelson returns with a warm, damp towel, a jug, and a bucket that he uses to clean her up and wash her hair over the side of the bed while she is laying on her side in a fetal position.
Once he is satisfied, he sits next to her and strokes her forehead and hushes her to sleep. As soon as her eyes close, Stelson leaves the bedroom.
Seconds later Anna climbs out of bed and grabs the red canvas shoulder bag from underneath. She looks at the window as an option for an exit, but she is shaking and quite weak. Her posture is low and labored, so she takes the long route down to the garden via the hall and staircase.
She is poolside with the bag.
She kneels down next to one of the cleaning ducts and reaches inside, stretching, and contorting her long slender right arm. She struggles to retrieve the object from this angle. It’s too awkward. So she strips off her nightdress and climbs into the pool. She shivers violently and reaches into the duct all the way to her armpit. After a moment of fumbling about in there, she pulls out the original red canvas shoulder bag containing the item–the pearl necklace saved for collateral.
She unzips the other bag and transfers each of the sixty-nine dirty, bloody items to the original bag with the necklace. She zips it back up and pushes it inside the cleaning duct, but not as far down as before. It won’t be there for long.
Anna pushes herself out of the pool and takes the original bag and heads, half-naked, toward an empty flowerbed. She kneels again and starts to dig frenetically with her hands. This, combined with her state of undress and disheveled hair reduces her to a feral status once again. Seconds later, she is pulling out flower bulbs. Tulip bulbs. They are about the right size and weight to pass off as the precious items. She rubs one between thumb and fingers. All they need is a trim and peel. That will be the next task.
To achieve the deception, she keeps digging, hoping to find a number of tulips bulbs close to the sixty-nine filling the other bag.
THIRTY-NINE
Present time.
In the mind of Anna Fayne, the taxi and runway at Bob Hope Airport in Burbank is a desert. It’s a dark night and the distant mountains and blinking lights from taxiing aircraft seem like dynamic elements of a grand and sophisticated mirage. She is walking across the tarmac from the private terminal building to a small Cessna Mustang six-seater jet that’s been prepped for a flight plan.
She is carrying the red shoulder bag.
Victor Lesko is a few steps behind and drags a flight case and some hand luggage. He seems concerned about something.
The evening squall blows Anna’s hair sideways into a flowing pattern like a wind-sock, perhaps strengthening enough to threaten the flight plan.
A jet, landing, wobbles on touchdown.
She is looking for him across the tarmac, wondering if he’ll come after her. Anna half expects him to unblend himself from the darkness and join the other elements of the mirage. An image of false hope on the horizon that grows larger but never reaches her. She imagines this vision and it makes her tingle.
Anna climbs the staircase and enters the Cessna and turns for one last look into the distance and the dark patches between the bright taxi and runway lights and the distant green glow of Burbank and the greater environs of Los Angeles.
“Anna, lets go.” Victor beckons her into the aircraft.
She does, reluctantly, and finds a seat and buckles the safety belt. There are only six to choose from. Victor climbs aboard and closes the door to the plane as the engines of the aircraft engage and the decibels increase. He sits opposite her as she clutches the red shoulder bag. He smiles. She doesn’t, and then stares outside as the jet lurches forward and starts to taxi toward the runway.
“Anna?” Victor is trying to distract her. He leans forward and touches her knee but she shoves his hand away, remaining glued to the porthole window.
The red canvas bag falls off her lap down to her feet and she kicks it away.
“Anna!”
There is a sharp intake of breath from Anna, her eyes widen, and she smacks the palm of her hand against the window as if she was trying to reach out.
An abandoned Jeep Cherokee has been shunted into the airport border wire fence on Vineland Avenue. It’s created an entry point to the airfield. A figure running at full stretch inside the perimeter toward the main runway where Anna’s jet is about to take off sticks his hand in the air and waves. It’s Stelson, but he’s too late. His waving gesture is futile.
He reaches the start of the runway as the jet turns ninety degrees from the taxiway and it accelerates immediately, the jet’s nozzles and exhaust glowing fiery orange and it seems to shrink into the distance at a rapid rate. The flashing red, white, and green navigation lights seem to merge and blur and then rise up above the mountains in the distance.
Stelson’s bright molten green eyes remain trained on its fli
ght path, his laser sighted gaze focusing on the lights, unblurring them so that the blips are precise and defined. He know it’s her in there, fading out of his life. The hollowness inside him is blowing up like a balloon, taking over every inch of his body as though his internal organs, guts and all, were no longer needed to function. What’s the use of them anyway, without her?
The blinking lights of the Cessna seem to go out. A black dent in the atmosphere is formed. He takes a sharp intake of breath and then holds it in, deep inside the hollow core of his belly. He knows something is wrong. He can feel it.
A fire flash from an explosion replaces the black spot where he last saw the aircraft.
The sensation of nausea is overwhelming now.
The fiery mass of energy seems to swoop like an eagle at a steep trajectory downwards for what seems like an eternity until it disappears behind the mountains somewhere over the wilderness beyond LA.
He was trying to keep it airborne with his mind, slow down time, whatever it took to keep her alive. But he is powerless.
Stelson holds his head in his hands and sinks to the ground, on his knees now. The evening squall kicks up and makes him shiver. Cold and sick, he sinks further and curls up into a fetal ball on the tarmac.
EPILOGUE
Another Island // After now
A city at night, somewhere else. Another time. Another pace and hum and an ambient glow with a different shade of light derived from its northern latitude. It’s cooler, edgier, and more reserved. It’s another island along the continuum of space and time–the spectrum where one time shifter can jump to the inverse moment in their lives.
A building that resembles the Eighth Sister that towers above Moscow, but this isn’t Moscow. The building stands alone on a wasteland set apart from the rest of the city. It’s a new construction in the Stalinist style of skyscraper–huge and imposing. A wide central tower and four octagonal flanks are crowned in the gothic style and the stucco is ornate and ostentatious in the extreme. It’s beautifully lit.
A further thirty stories below, another wider set of four flanks, and below that, a broader, stepped, eight story base with a stately entrance of high columns. The whole building looks like a rocket ship that was built too heavy to lift off the ground.
It’s mainly apartments above and offices closer to the ground. Naturally, the greatest luxury has been reserved for the residents of the highest floors, and inside the grandest penthouse on the fifty-seventh, there is a middle-aged man apparently dressing for dinner in a dimly lit pentagonal-shaped black chamber with a high stucco ceiling.
He turns and looks up. His eyes look strange–their motion seems mechanical and the surface is hard and glassy, almost phony. He stands half-naked in the center of the chamber, and from four of the five doorways step smartly turned out butlers in turn, each with a different role and task, each bearing gifts of clothing or grooming aids.
The middle-aged man might not actually be middle-aged at all. There are signs of cosmetic enhancement. Less elastic wrinkled skin can be seen around his neck. There is a clear mismatch that he hates. An imperfection in the way he’s invested in his looks and the first butler has a visual antidote for this–a pristine white shirt with an unusually high neck collar. The middle-aged man spreads his arms to feed the shirt onto his back.
The next three butlers fulfill their duty in a well-choreographed routine that could almost be mistaken for a musical number, dressing the man, buffing his shoes, waxing and combing his hair, and applying subtle amounts of make-up to his face to highlight his cheekbones and jaw line. Once done, they step back in a line and check their handy-work, top to bottom, and wait.
The man is dressed in a black dinner suit, white silk shirt, and patent black leather shoes with wafer thin soles. He twists his neck an inch each side to express mild displeasure for the high-necked collar that just brushes the bottom of his chin and forces him to pivot his nose higher, in an expression of his supremely elite status in this society.
And this is what they are waiting for–a fifth butler dressed in white, not black like the others, enters from the final door with what looks like a huge pair of black angel wings. He moves around and behind, opens them up and straps them onto the man at the shoulders and waist. The material used in the construction of the wings seems stealthy and high-tech. The main material is ultra-thin polyurethane and the frame to keep them taut is Kevlar–they have a modern aesthetic, designed for lightweight comfort and looks more than anything else.
The man steps off, majestically, and exits via a sliding glass door that seemed part of the wall to the chamber. He moves across a wide-open landing and into an atrium with a grand spiral staircase that overlooks a round hall below. The opulence continues throughout, most of it visible from the ceilings–intricate black and gold painted stucco, and glass chandeliers made up of thousands of shards cut a hundred different ways. There is a complete absence of artwork, though. If there were some, they would distract from the materials used to build and decorate this apartment.
He descends the staircase, the wings just narrow enough to not brush the walls on the descent. In the hall, there are four large sets of double doors fanned out, but only one set is open and he passes through them into a dining room with a table that personifies the probable loneliness of this man. The room is big enough for banqueting, but he sits down on a stall at a table that could serve three people at best if the place setting weren’t too elaborate.
In the center of a white clothed table are three items–what looks like a virtual reality headset, a one-piece sealed glass container about the size of a box of cufflinks, and a miniature icepick laid next to the box as though it were an item of cutlery.
Inside the box, and clearly visible, are a pair of clean and trimmed exotic molten eyes. The delicacy of the chlorophyll green deep pool of each iris and pupil–the black eye-of-the-needle–are a hard sourced and extremely expensive gift.
The man with the seemingly mechanical eyes looks up and around the ceiling cornicing in the corners of the room. There are cameras. Each one has a blue light to confirm that it’s feeding live picture to whoever is watching. He can almost feel the frustration of the audience, directed at him, for holding up this process. His hesitation is unnerving. He knows full well that he must go through with this ritual. He takes a breath and picks up the icepick and pauses and stares at the eyes. If he could cry, he would.
He smashes the glass box with the icepick so that he can get to the eyes. He then flips open a panel on the front of headset which has two deep ocular sockets. He picks up each eye, inserts them into the headset ocular, snaps the panel shut, and then places the headset over his head. He doesn’t cover his own eyes yet, the front panel of the headset raised up and resting on his shiny, overly smooth forehead.
He sighs and leaves the table, the wings trailing him, seemingly trying to beat as he wafts through another set of doors at the opposite end of the dining room that leads onto a terrace that overlooks the cityscape and night-lights. Straight ahead, there is an infinity pool with stepping stones that are lit like runway landing lights, merging into the skyline, and he takes this route, almost appearing to walk on water as he strides from one square stone to the next, all the way to the edge and oblivion.
He licks his fingers and wipes his eyelids then closes his eyes to accentuate the coolness of the breeze. It makes him shiver and half-smile in a comforting way–a simple pleasure. He lowers the front panel of the headset over his eyes so that they are covered like a blindfold. He places his hands by his side, takes a breath, and leaps into the night.
The wings seem to spread but they’re only there for symbolism. They quickly bend back on themselves once he hits halfway close to terminal velocity. He falls like a stone toward a glass roof thirty stories below that seems like a small target at first, but just prior to impact is wide and expansive like the roof of a tropical glasshouse.
Crashing through, he is shredded, and appears to land face first in the center of a ballroom that was cleared for his deliverance, but within a nanosecond his presence seems to evaporate, as though he had spring boarded elsewhere at light speed. He is nowhere to be seen. Not a trace of him left behind.
At the edges of this ballroom, on each side, is a large crowd of very well-heeled party-goers, all spectating, a glass of champagne in hand. And once they’ve surmised for themselves that this man is definitely no longer living amongst them, his spirit free and passed on–they raise a toast and wish him well.
The Island of Los Angeles // Now
Stelson Floyd’s green, piercing snake-like eyes flicker open. He’s laid out on a bench in a lobby area and someone is tapping him on the shoulder. The tapping turns into more of an aggressive shake. He grabs the person’s wrist and glares at the assailant–a female cop with a kindly, helpful looking demeanor. Stelson releases his grip and quickly composes himself. He has a bloody cut above his left eye–fresh and red raw.
“Mr. Floyd. Detective Lesko will see you now. Follow the hall through the double doors. His office is the seventh on the right hand side of the corridor.”
Stelson likes the way she doesn’t abbreviate or shorten ‘right hand side of the corridor’ and it reminds him of an old verbose school teacher. He gets up and strides along the hall toward the double doors. He looks tired and edgy which makes him seem older than his nineteen years. He’s a good looking guy in another time and place but today the pressure within his angular shoulders and taut neck is evident and the aura of stress is felt by the frazzled and deranged looking cops who stride past, eyeing him as if searching for a reason to lash out and behave like attack dogs.
He pushes through the double doors and counts the offices to seven from the corner of his eye, not wanting to make eye contact with the beat cops seating at their desks laboring with simple administrative tasks.
