The Insides

by Jeremy P. Bushnell

  She hears him mutter something, profanity she guesses, although it doesn’t sound like English. And then he descends three more steps, coming, finally, into view. He reaches Angel’s body, prods it with his boot. He takes aim at Angel’s skull with his pistol and fires a bullet into it.

  Ollie must cry out because the shooter whips his head up and spots her. OK, now. She punches the button and the dumbwaiter lurches awake. For one horrible second she’s afraid that the shooter is going to turn and run back up the stairs—he hadn’t gotten as deep into the basement as she’d hoped—but instead he rushes at her, trying to catch her before she vanishes up the shaft. The gap through which he is visible closes as she ascends; she lowers her head, trying to get a good look at him as he charges closer, but she ends up with little more than an impression of menace.

  It feels like it takes a long time to get up to the kitchen. The dumbwaiter is slow but it’s never in her whole life seemed this fucking slow. She sniffles. She touches her face and finds it wet with leakage, snot and tears that she hadn’t even realized were coming out of her.

  At long last, she reaches the top of the shaft and she tumbles out into the kitchen, breathing hard. She has, what, seconds maybe, before the shooter comes back up from the basement. She uses these seconds. She crosses the kitchen swiftly, with determination. She reaches out toward a rack without breaking stride, without even really turning her eyes away from the basement door. Her fingers brush the handle of a cast-iron skillet and grasp. She slides the pan out as she advances, feels its heft in her hand.

  This, she thinks. This will do.

  She presses herself against the wall, at the door’s edge. She brings the pan up to her shoulder. The sound of clambering footsteps, boot-shod, grows louder, but she makes herself wait: until you see the whites of his eyes, she thinks, the phrase swimming up from somewhere.

  She tries to calm her breathing; she tries not to shake.

  She sees the shooter’s fingers grip at the jamb.

  And the moment she sees his profile emerge from the doorway, she swings.

  During the month Ollie worked on Ulysses’s homestead she helped him to kill pigs, and he thought it was important to learn all the ways in which this could be done, and one method, which he’d learned from his dad, was killing them with a blow to the skull from a sledgehammer. And when she feels the pan hit the shooter’s face, when she feels the recoil drive into the palms of her hands, into her arms, that is what she remembers. It feels exactly the same.

  The shooter groans tremendously and goes over backward, down the stairs, into the darkness. She stands there for a second, breathing hard, tempted to follow him down there, finish the job, straddle his chest and pound his head with the pan until he stops kicking. But she’s not stupid. He still has his gun and in any battle between a frying pan and a gun, the gun’s going to win. So she releases the pan, lets it clang to the floor: with its utility expended it’s just extra weight. Her hands, now free, wipe frantically at her eyes: once she can see the way, she hurries to her station, gets Guychardson’s box up under her arm, grabs her messenger bag, leaves everything else. She heads to the service entrance, notices the broken lock, pushes her way out into the night, and she runs.

  She wants to call the cops but first she just needs to get the fuck away.

  She rounds the corner and nearly collides with a dark-haired woman, middle aged, just standing there in the middle of the sidewalk.

  She knows she should say to this woman You need to get out of here. She knows she should say There is a shooter in the building, get to safety. But something about the way the woman just stands there, agog, staring at Ollie’s miserable wet face like the worst kind of tourist—it still manages, even in the thick of every other Goddamn thing, to just rub Ollie wrong.

  “Don’t fucking look at me,” Ollie has time to spit out, before she shoulders past the woman and keeps running, down the street, around the corner, away, anywhere, away.

  16

  PROFESSIONALS

  “Don’t fucking look at me,” says the woman to Maja, and then she flees. She has the knife, in a box shoved up under one arm. Maja does not pursue, does not engage. Instead she turns, watches the service door that Pig forced his way into, waits for him to reemerge.

  He finally does, a minute later, with a pub towel clutched to his face. Even from a distance Maja can see that it’s stained with blood.

  “You drive,” Pig says, his voice muffled. He flings her the keys, and she snatches them out of the air.

  She doesn’t know what’s happened, but OK: she opens the car door, gets in the driver’s seat. It takes her a few seconds to find the right key and jam it in the ignition, but she does it while Pig fumbles at the door, trying to open it without dropping the towel from his left hand or the pistol from his right.

  In the time that it takes him to stuff the pistol in his waistband and get in, Maja looks at the recent history of Pig’s gun. She sees a bullet being fired and she sees the outcome: blood gushing from a man’s chest. She sees a second bullet and she sees the spatter pattern blown out of a skull. So there’s a body. She retrieves a fresh set of black gloves from her purse and she dons them. If she has to be a getaway driver fleeing the scene of a homicide she at least doesn’t want to leave incriminating prints all over the steering wheel while she’s doing it.

  The desire—the need—to wear her gloves isn’t just a way to reduce the traces of herself she’ll leave behind. It’s also a way to reduce the amount of Pig’s person that she’ll pick up through her palms. Even with her gloves on, she can tell that the wheel is tacky with sugars, the residue of treats. And she absorbs an awareness of other things, too, things below the sticky surface: to take hold of this wheel, to sit in his seat and steer his car, is to feel herself in his position, to literally take on his point of view. Even with the gloves on, she begins to apprehend his appetites, to feel his stunted furies. She begins to understand the way this city looks to him: fallen, overrun with subhumans, a world soiled by the hands of inferior beings. She sees the empire that he envisions as his birthright, purged, clean. The continent that he hopes to leave to his descendants, horrifyingly purified, rising into being upon unfathomable tiers of suffering. She presses down on the gas, pulls the car out into the street, attempts to blink these visions away.

  There’s no time to consider them anyway. Instead they have to run. The woman with the blade is going to be calling the cops any second now, if she hasn’t already, and police are going to be all over this block.

  She makes a turn.

  Pig tilts his head back as they drive, keeps the stained towel pinched to his face. When he hears the sirens, he drops it into his lap, hoping to look normal, just another passenger in the flow of nighttime Manhattan traffic, as inconspicuous as anyone.

  Maja sneaks a look at him. She can’t help but speak her immediate observation aloud: “You’ve broken your nose.”

  “No shit, Sherlock,” he whispers savagely, as two police cruisers shriek by in the opposing lane. He works hard to keep a neutral expression on his face, but she can feel fear pouring off him like an odor. The fear of being spotted, of being caught, of getting this close to having what he wants and then fucking it up.

  Once they’re safely past the police, Pig reaches up abruptly and does a thing to his nose with his hands; he makes a stifled cry of pain as he does it. Then he stretches into the backseat and retrieves his satchel, roots around in it until he has his mask back out. He lowers it down, over his face, and then he’s quiet again.

  He does not ask to be taken to a hospital, and she does not offer. In the absence of any other instruction, she heads back to the motel in New Jersey. There’s nothing they can do to get any closer to the blade, not tonight: the woman who has it is going to be talking to police for who knows how long. Hours, probably. And so their only move, right now, is to wait until morning. Pig seems to understand this, or, in any case, he has fallen into a sullen silence that she reads as understan
ding.

  Four now, says the Archive again. Four bodies, up from three.

  Yes, Maja thinks.

  That’s a lot.

  It could be more, Maja replies. There have been times when it’s been more. You know that. Remember Osaka. The whole boardroom.

  I haven’t forgotten, the Archive says. But still.

  But still what.

  But still, four is a lot for a job that’s ongoing. Where the client still doesn’t have what he wants.

  Yes, that’s true.

  Because it means there are more to come.

  More to come: at least one more, anyway: the woman. The running woman. Maja has seen people run like this before. They always do one of two things: either they keep running, or they stop somewhere to hide. It makes no difference which of these options the woman with the knife will take in the morning, Maja tells herself: either way, she will be found.

  And once she’s found, she will be shot, the Archive offers.

  Yes, thank you. I understand. At least then it will be over. The killings don’t matter. All that matters is that the job ends.

  All that matters is that the job ends: this is what she tells herself, when things get ugly. Once it’s over, she can go home, where things are orderly, and she can collect the other half of her fee, and then after that there will be a long period in which she will not have to do anything. All she will need to do is remain quiet, and the record of her passage through this city will fade, and time will pass, and it will bury whatever traces connect her to these crimes, and with it, her memory of the crimes themselves will be effaced.

  She can feel the camera on the bridge take a photograph of their license plate as they cross back into Jersey.

  Pig doesn’t speak again until they’re back at the motel. She follows him into his room, waiting to talk with him about tomorrow’s strategy. He heads into his bathroom, and she pauses in the doorway there. Over his shoulder she can see him in the mirror; she watches him as he inspects his swollen face.

  He catches her looking. He looks into her eyes in the mirror. She holds the stare.

  “You saw her,” he says, after a minute.

  “Who?” Maja asks, although she knows who.

  “That woman. The woman who did this.”

  “Yes,” Maja says, flatly.

  “Well,” Pig says. “Let me just tell you.”

  Maja waits.

  “I’m going to enjoy killing that woman,” Pig says.

  The killings don’t matter, she tells herself again, but to hear Pig say this with such obvious relish pulls distaste out into her face. She quickly relinquishes the expression, but not so quickly that Pig fails to notice.

  “You think that’s wrong?” Pig says, watching her reflection closely.

  “Not wrong, exactly,” Maja says.

  “Not wrong, exactly,” Pig says, with a sneer in his voice. “Regrettable, maybe?” He wheels around, comes toward her, contempt beginning to contort his swollen face. She keeps meeting his gaze but simultaneously she considers what objects in the room behind her might work as a weapon. She remembers a pen on the desk, the coffeepot’s glass carafe.

  “I know people like you,” Pig says. “With your moral codes. Let me guess what you’re thinking: the loss of life, in pursuit of a goal: always so regrettable. Best avoided where possible.”

  Maja considers a set of conciliatory things she could say. Noises that might soothe this man. Making those noises would be the safest thing to do. All the same, she’s tired of being frightened of Pig. He’s not going to shoot her. He’s not going to shoot her, because he needs her. Deep down, she knows this, and she knows that he knows this as well. And so she says exactly what she’s thinking.

  “It’s not regrettable to kill people,” she says. “It is wrong.”

  Pig looks like he might spit. “Listen to you,” he says.

  “It shouldn’t be so surprising a thing,” Maja says, “to hear me say this. It is wrong to kill people. As a—how did you put it?—as a moral code, it is neither elaborate nor unusual. It is, ultimately, very simple.”

  “Still though,” Pig says. “I bet it’s real nice, to be in possession of a moral code that allows you to feel bad when somebody dies but that’s still flexible enough that you can pal around with killers when there’s enough money involved.”

  Maja composes a line of thought in her head, and then gives one slow, deliberate blink, and begins to speak, as calmly as though she were reading from a document. “You have—or, rather, your father has—employed me to find and retrieve something for you. That is all. Any moral judgments I make regarding the activities that you should undertake in the process fall outside of the scope of any obligations concerning my employment. I may choose to either issue these judgments or withhold them. Whether the motivating forces behind my moral code appear hypocritical to you is of no concern whatsoever, from a contractual perspective. However. If, for reasons that I could not possibly begin to fathom, it has become important to you that we redefine my contractual obligations in a manner that requires me to present the appearance of moral consistency, or to offer you a regular opportunity for moral absolution, then please, by all means, get on the phone to your father and convey this to him, promptly, so that, from there, we can discuss the consequent adjustment to my fee. I ask only that you be alert to two facts: one, that this adjustment will be substantial, and two, that should your father and I fail to reach an agreement, I will not hesitate to walk away from this job.”

  Pig regards her.

  She reaches behind her without looking and lifts the phone handset, offers it out toward him.

  “Go ahead,” she says.

  At this, he cracks a smile.

  “You know what, Finder, you’re hard-core,” he says, shaking his head infinitesimally. “But you’re all right. Within the, uh, the scope of the contractual obligations of your employment, you’re all right. If I may say so.”

  “You may say so,” Maja says, after a moment.

  “OK, good,” Pig says. “I’m saying so.”

  She hangs up the phone.

  17

  MONARCHS

  The police take Ollie in until morning. They put her in a grubby room where two separate detectives bring her two separate paper cups of equally bad coffee and ask her essentially the same set of questions. They move her to a cubicle where she answers more questions from a guy who tries to use his computer to make a face of the suspect. Were his eyes closer together or further apart? Did he have more of a square chin or more of a rounded chin? Her answers all effectively amount to: It was dark. I couldn’t see. I don’t know.

  She doesn’t talk to anyone about the knife, in its box, inside her bag.

  At some point they give her a brochure from the Witness Aid Services Unit and leave her in a plastic seat in a hallway. She flips the brochure open, stares at its information without exactly reading it. Counseling, support groups, shelters, orders of protection. She has no idea which of these she might need. The only thing she can really think of that she needs for sure is sleep. No one’s attending to her but no one’s told her she can leave, either. She curls up as best she can in the hard shell of the chair, holds her messenger bag against her belly, and falls in and out of fitful dreams.

  When she wakes up there’s like thirty notifications on her phone. Texts, e-mails, Facebook messages. She blinks at them groggily, tries to untangle what’s happening. It seems that the murders at Carnage made the papers: front page of the Post, first page of the Metro section in the Times. Everybody wants to know where she is, whether she’s OK. Messages from Victor, messages from Jon, messages from Carnage people she didn’t even realize had her phone number: random cooks, servers, even one of the dishwashers. There’s a message from Ulysses: SAW WHAT HAPPENED. WHAT THE FUCK. CHECKING TO MAKE SURE YOU’RE SAFE. This followed by another one: I’M COMING DOWN. WHERE ARE YOU?

  There’s nothing from Donald. Not that she expected anything: it’s been a year since he’s be
en in touch. To the best of her knowledge he doesn’t even look at her Facebook page so he might not be seeing what people are posting there. Unless some mutual acquaintance of theirs forwarded him the Times article, he might not even know. But still. She remembers the early conversations they’d had in the first years of their relationship, the way he could calm her down, just using words like they were their own form of magic. She remembers the way he could seem to reach into her skull and help her to untangle the snarled emotions she’d jammed away in there. She could use that deftness today. She misses it, even though she tries not to, even though she works hard to forget that it ever was a thing.

  There is also no word from Guychardson. She looks at the last text she sent him. Still unanswered. She gets an awful feeling in her gut.

  She begins the process of replying to everyone. She texts Victor back first, just the words I’M OK. WITH THE COPS. She texts Ulysses with the precinct name. She texts Jon, asks him to let everybody else in the Carnage network know that she’s alive, just so she doesn’t have to deal with reaching out to every last person. She thinks for a second and then sends Jon another text: SORRY ABOUT ANGEL. It feels like such a worthless thing to say, but you have to say something. He replies with like a million questions, which are basically the same questions that the cops asked, and for now she just ignores them all.

  One of the detectives she talked to earlier comes down the hallway. “Hey,” he says, “you’re up.”

  “Listen,” she blurts at him. “This guy? The—what, the suspect? The shooter? I think he might also have shot somebody else. Maybe Sunday night, late. A guy, Haitian guy. My friend. Guychardson.”

  A phone call is made. A third detective gets called in; she ends up back in the same grubby interview room.

  “Wait a second,” she says, before he can begin in on the questions. “I just need to make sure of what’s happening. I just need to ask—is he dead?” She can hear her voice begin to get unhinged, but she keeps speaking. “You’re a homicide cop, like the others, but you’re not the same cop, that means, I mean, that has to mean he’s dead, doesn’t it? Just tell me. Fucking tell me.”