The 22 Murders of Madison May

by Max Barry

  A passing mother pulled her daughter close. Felicity peered into the store glass, and even in that pale reflection could see that she looked like someone who couldn’t be trusted. She hadn’t expected this part to be so hard.

  On 177th Street, the stained brown carpet of an empty bedroom had been pockmarked with yellow police markers. In an alley, Maddie had bled to death, and again on a sidewalk outside the New York Public Library. She had lain in a hospital bed with her head shaved, her face black and blue.

  This was how it happened: how people like Clay got away. They went unpunished because it cost too much to punish them.

  She peeled herself from the wall. She stuck her hand back into her bag and curled her sweaty fingers around its secret. She breathed. She walked around the corner.

  They were still seated together by the escalators, Maddie facing in Felicity’s direction, Clay away. Felicity held her bag across her body. Her legs shook but didn’t falter. Twenty feet away, Maddie’s eyes shifted to her, but Maddie couldn’t recognize her, Felicity told herself, even as Maddie’s brow furrowed with something that resembled recognition but was more likely alarm, given the pale, sweating woman shambling toward her with a hand in a bag. Please, Felicity thought, transmitting the thought directly into Maddie’s brain. Please sit still and let me do this.

  Maddie’s face filled with concern. Clay began to turn.

  Felicity broke toward the table. There was a tremendous temptation to shoot before Clay could react, but she was not going to kill anybody by mistake today. She saw Clay’s face, at first surprised and then angry, and he rose from his chair like a wave. He was at once too close and too far away and there was no perfect distance from which to fire, she realized; something could always be better. She lifted her bag of secrets and pulled the trigger.

  She wasn’t holding it the right way: not clasped in two hands with her feet shoulder width apart, but rather on a loose, idiotic angle inside her bag. As a result, it exploded like a thunderclap and wrenched violently at her wrist. Clay jumped, but not in a way that suggested she’d hit him. He lunged toward her. She fell back, trying to avoid him, and squeezed the trigger again, as Levi had told her, and then a third time.

  The back of her head hit the ground. There was screaming. Not from Clay. From others, many others. Everywhere were legs. She had missed Clay, she thought. She had gone and missed him. The table had overturned. She was surrounded by bowls, cutlery, and, curiously, a walnut cracker. Maddie was on her hands and knees. “Wait,” Felicity said, before she could go anywhere. “Maddie, stay.” She looked around. Much of the crowd was booking it. But Clay, she saw, was not. Incredibly, he was scampering back and forth, his eyes raking the floor.

  She had a bag on the end of her hand. She brought it around and pointed it at Clay.

  He leaped behind a pillar. Why he hadn’t taken the opportunity to flee, she had no idea, but she would take it, because the clock was ticking, running down a timer that had begun the moment she pulled the trigger, and that would end when the police arrived to arrest the crazy woman with the gun.

  Clay yelled: “What are you doing?”

  She was surprised by the question. It seemed self-explanatory.

  “We have a deal!” he shouted. “You’re ruining it!”

  Right, she thought. She had forgotten about the deal. She was still unclear on why he hadn’t run, though. Why he’d scurried around, hunched over, like he was searching for something.

  She looked at the mess surrounding her. By an overturned chair lay a small gray block. She crawled toward it. When she picked it up, it was bitterly cold. Her own egg, she could see now, must once have been more angular. Over time, it had worn down from a shape like this. It was hard to the touch, but there was a fragility to it, a brittleness; she had always thought so. She raised it for Clay to see. “Is this what you want?”

  His face contorted. “Leave that alone!”

  “I thought you didn’t need it anymore. Isn’t that the deal, Clay? You get Maddie and you stay? So why do you need this?”

  He stared at her.

  “I think it’s your Plan B,” Felicity said. “A little something to keep in your back pocket, just in case.”

  “Put it down!”

  But no. She didn’t think she would. She had a gun and he didn’t. When the police arrived, she would have a lot of explaining to do, but right now, in this moment, she had control. She spied the walnut cracker. She had to remove her hand from her bag for this next part, but it was worth the risk, so she leaned forward, picked up the cracker, and fitted Clay’s egg into it.

  “No!” he shouted.

  He actually started toward her. She felt a little goose of fright, and squeezed the cracker as hard as she could. Clay’s egg gave a noise like tearing wood. It fell to splinters, sending little bouncing gray shards everywhere. For a moment, she was so amazed, she forgot where she was. Then she looked up and saw Clay only ten feet away, his face murderous.

  “I’m going to kill you,” Clay said. She got the feeling there was more to this, like it was the beginning of a more detailed soliloquy, but she got her hand into her bag again and he ran, zigzagging toward an exit.

  She looked back at Maddie. “Come with me.” Maddie’s face filled with alarm. Maddie did not want to come with her. Maddie wanted the woman with the gun to go away. “Maddie, my name is Felicity Staples. I’m here to protect you. But I have to go after Clay. Please come with me.”

  To her relief, Maddie nodded. Very likely she was merely playing along to appease the armed woman, but that was okay; that would do. Clay’s bright T-shirt bounced toward a hallway leading to the restrooms, and there were elevators back there, too, according to the sign, which was maybe good: He might be stalled there long enough for her to catch him.

  She gripped her bag. She was very worried that, despite the bag, someone might figure out she was the shooter and decide to take her down, administer a little direct justice. She held out a hand for Maddie, who was trailing, but Maddie didn’t take it. The closer she got to the corner, the more she thought that Clay was hiding just around it, waiting for her. She stopped. “Maddie, I need to tell you something. The man you were talking to is Clayton Hors. He’s a murderer. He’s killed before. He will kill you.” He has killed you, she wanted to say, but that would only confirm in Maddie’s mind that Felicity was deranged. “The police won’t stop him. Only I can.”

  Maddie nodded, which was pure performance, Felicity saw. Maddie was pretending to be agreeable, because Felicity had a gun in a bag. Her wrist throbbed. She flexed her fingers inside the bag and could barely feel them.

  They passed beneath the restrooms sign. Felicity pressed her back against the wall and slid toward the corner. But Clay wasn’t there, and he wasn’t in the hallway, either, which stretched away to the elevators, where people milled at the doors, some hurrying down the stairwell, and he couldn’t have moved that quickly, could he?

  To her left was the female restroom. To her right, male.

  He had come around the corner and realized he wouldn’t be able to break through the crowd at the end of the hallway quickly enough. So he had ducked into a restroom. She looked from one door to the other. If she guessed wrong, he could escape. She glanced back at Maddie, who was drifting away; every time she wasn’t looking, Maddie put a little distance between them. “Come here,” she said, and Maddie did, quickly and obediently. Pretty soon Felicity was going to get distracted, and the next time she turned around, Maddie would be gone. “You have to listen to me. If I don’t get him, you’re going to die. He’ll track you down and kill you.”

  “Yes,” Maddie said, as if she hadn’t thought about this before but it made perfect sense. “I see.”

  Christ, she thought. “Stay close,” she said, and pushed into the men’s, because she couldn’t imagine Clay deciding to hide in a women’s bathroom, she just couldn’t. The floor was
beige and gray tiles, the wall a tasteful two-tone. There was a high mirror on her right, and four more as she turned the corner. She found herself looking at a marble bench with four sinks spouting angular tapware. An orchid sat in a black vase. There were stalls. The room was empty.

  He might be stealing out of the women’s right now, escaping on the back of her bad psychology. Or he might be in one of these stalls.

  She squatted. She saw no feet.

  She didn’t want to get closer because there was no room to move. He might spring out at her before she could shoot him.

  She looked back. Maddie was by the door. “Come,” Felicity said, and Maddie did, looking not especially thrilled to be in a restroom, which Felicity understood; she was not thrilled with the situation herself. It was too small in here.

  She approached the first stall and pushed the door with her foot. It didn’t swing far enough, and she had to kick it again before it revealed an empty toilet. She adjusted her grip on her bag of secrets.The next stall, she gave a solid push. When the door swung back, it revealed Clay crouched there, lower than she’d expected, because he’d stolen down to the tiles, and her aim was too high, and he sprang.

  Before she could react, he slammed into her. They flew backward into the marble counter. Suddenly his forearm was in her face, pushing against her mouth. Instinctively, she bit down, sinking her teeth into oddly hard flesh, like scar tissue. Then Clay’s hand closed over her face and he thrust her into the mirror.

  * * *

  —

  She felt heavy. Like she was climbing from a pool, struggling to drag her weight from the water. Clay breathed in her ear. He was behind her, his arms wrapped around her, swaying slowly from side to side, as if they were dancing. His pelvis was grinding against her. His hands enveloped her own. She didn’t know what he was doing. She tried to push him away.

  “Shhh,” Clay said. “Easy.”

  Maddie was gone. There were only two people she could see: Clay and herself. She was looking into a mirror. Clay was cradling her. Her head lolled on his shoulder like a lover’s, like someone who had surrendered. She was holding the gun. No: Clay was making her hold it.

  “You can’t ruin this for me,” he said. “You tried, but you failed.”

  He maneuvered her around, his thighs bumping against her. Now she was looking at a stall.

  “I was in here,” Clay said, “and you came in . . .”

  She felt pressure on her finger. She tried to turn away. The sound was louder than she could have believed, exploding from the floor and walls like a slap. Clay flinched, almost dropped her, clutched at her waist.

  “Ow,” he said, and laughed. “Ow, shit, that’s loud.”

  He let her fall against the countertop. She clutched at a sink to stop herself from sliding to the floor. When she managed to turn, he was standing a few feet away, holding her gun. He nodded, satisfied.

  “Then I got the gun from you . . .”

  He raised the gun. She hadn’t seen it from this angle before. It was huge. The end of the barrel was a pit, crawling with evil things.

  There was a noise.

  Footsteps, Felicity thought. Running.

  Hugo burst from the doorway. Clay cried out and brought the gun around. He fired: once, twice, three times. The tile behind Hugo burst; the other two times, Felicity didn’t know where the bullets went. Hugo roared like a bear, charged into Clay, and knocked him down.

  The gun bounced across the tiles. Felicity watched it go, end over end. She needed that. She had to fetch it. She tried to move her heavy body and pain lanced down her left side. But then she started to get organized, started remembering what the different parts of her body could do, and she slid down the counter and fell to her knees. Hugo and Clay were making an incredible commotion, grunting and snarling, but she didn’t look at them. She had her own thing going on. She moved doggedly on her hands and her knees. Like this she crawled toward the gun.

  A pair of feet appeared. Two neat shoes. She looked up and saw Maddie.

  What Maddie made of this scene, Felicity could only imagine. She didn’t know why Maddie had returned or what she’d come to do. “Give me the gun,” Felicity croaked.

  Maddie looked at her. She did not give Felicity the gun. She didn’t do anything. Felicity would have to do that herself, apparently. She would have to get the gun and wrap her numb fingers around it and try to shoot Clay as he wrestled with Hugo.

  She didn’t know how Hugo could be here. He should have moved hours ago.

  Maddie glanced behind her, as if there was someone back there, and suddenly there was: a cop in a dark blue uniform, a well-built guy with wide eyes, shouting and shoving, and then another cop appeared behind him, bigger and older, who pushed Maddie to the ground. There were boots and legs and Felicity lost track of the gun. The cops screamed to lie down and put your hands behind your head and so she did.

  With her chin on the tiles, she could see Clay lying on his back. His face was bloodied. Hugo was kneeling astride him, one fist raised, his lips pulled back from his teeth, like an animal. Like a savage.

  Lying on the tiles, Clay made a wet, bubbling sound. “Help,” he called. “Help me.”

  The police were still screaming at Hugo. He wouldn’t stop, Felicity saw. He had caught Clay at last, and that was all he could think about. Clay and Rosie. He wasn’t hearing the cops.

  “Hugo,” she said. “No.”

  He looked at her. His head swayed. He was shot, she realized. He was barely conscious. Clay had hit him when he’d entered.

  Hugo’s fist sagged. The younger cop rushed forward and pulled him off Clay.

  “Nice try,” Clay said from the floor. His lips were swollen; the words were barely intelligible. There was blood on his teeth. “But no good.”

  This was her moment, Felicity realized. She had to find her gun. But there were cops everywhere, like they were multiplying, and she couldn’t see where it had wound up. An officer crouched before her, peered into her eyes, and asked if she was hurt. It was gone, Felicity saw. Her moment. She’d lost it.

  * * *

  —

  She was wrapped in a blanket and allowed to sit at a table on the terrace. Then the blanket was taken away and she was put into the back of a squad car and driven somewhere by two silent cops. After that, she was fingerprinted, deprived of her phone, and put into a holding cell. Each of these situations was a little worse than the one before. She suspected that they charted the increasing distrust with which she was being viewed by the Los Angeles Police Department. Someone had talked, Clay or Maddie or some bystander she didn’t even know, and said, I think she had a gun.

  She sat on a bench and gnawed at her nails. Thirty minutes passed. A young cop unlocked her cell and escorted her to a room with pleasant green walls. In a ceiling corner was a camera. “Make yourself comfortable,” the cop said, and left. This was worse again, she thought. It didn’t look it, but it was.

  Two people entered and introduced themselves: Detective Monohan and Detective Primrose. Monohan wore little gold-rimmed glasses and was about fifty, with a beer belly pushing out his white shirt. Primrose was half his size, a Latina woman who gazed at her as if they had attended the same high school and Felicity had been an incredible bitch. She stood, but Monohan waved her back into her seat. “Sorry to keep you waiting. How long have you been here?”

  “Am I under arrest?” she asked.

  Monohan almost looked offended. “No, no. We’re just hoping you can help us answer some questions.”

  “Then I want to go.”

  Monohan folded his hands over his belly. Now he looked disappointed. He was cycling through emotions. Beside him, Primrose’s expression hadn’t changed. “That’s your choice. However, I should inform you, if you don’t wish to cooperate, we will be forced to place you under arrest.”

  “What for?”


  “Open carry.”

  So someone had seen her with the gun and told the police. But they didn’t necessarily know she’d fired it. She’d had it inside the bag. It could be they were doing that thing where they charged her for something minor that would stick while gathering evidence for more serious crimes. But they might also be open to the possibility that she simply happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, and had drawn a gun in response to shots fired by someone else. By Hugo Garrelly, for example, the escaped felon, who they’d caught in the act of assaulting Clay.

  “Any comment?” Monohan said.

  She shook her head.

  He shrugged. “Felicity Staples, I’m placing you under arrest. You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to an attorney. If you cannot—”

  “I want an attorney.”

  “If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be provided for you. Do you understand these rights as I’ve read them to you?”

  “Yes, and I want an attorney. And my phone.”

  Monohan looked at Primrose, who gave him nothing. “Well . . .” said Monohan. “I guess that’s the end of the conversation.” He rose from his seat.

  When they reached the door, Felicity said, “What have you done with Clay?”

  Monohan paused. “You’ve asserted your right to counsel. I can’t speak with you.”

  “He’s dangerous. He was going to kill me. You have to hold him.”

  Primrose said, “It’s impossible for us to talk unless you waive your right to counsel.”

  “I don’t want to waive my rights. I just need you to understand that Clay is a killer.”

  Monohan turned to Primrose. “Did we release him already?”

  “We never had him,” Primrose said. “They took him straight to Good Samaritan.”