Under the Bones

by Kory M. Shrum

  “I’ll be fine,” she said and turned before Mel could see her grimace.

  Mel let her go. “I’ll look out for Mr. King. Take care of yourself.”

  Lou gave some sort of noncommittal nod, only somewhat aware of the room around her. Already her thirst, her desire had risen up in her. Her nerves seemed to thrum with it. Every fiber in her being begging for some kind of release from the anguish plucking at her nerves. The whine filling her mind like razorblades on guitar strings.

  She stepped into the shadows of the armoire and out again. She wasn’t sure where the darkness would take her. Where she wanted to go. She only knew she couldn’t be near King and all his anguish. And she sure as hell couldn’t be go back to her apartment to face Konstantine and all his desire.

  People with their fucking feelings. She didn’t even want to deal with her own.

  No, she needed a distraction. A nice, dangerous distraction that would take up all the space in her mind.

  A kitchen materialized from nothing.

  A gleaming surface held pots and pans. Dishes ready to be served. She expected people in little white uniforms, familiar chef’s attire to appear any moment. Instead the prep table was lined with white bricks. Rows and rows of white bricks wrapped in clear plastic.

  Then she heard the male voices. The angry arguing. She crossed the grimy tile of the kitchen, checking the gun at her side. She marched right down the center aisle. Reckless, her mind breathed, as it searched for nonexistent shadows.

  She pulled the gun with her bad arm and it burned.

  Reckless.

  Still she marched forward.

  And then there they were, two men arguing so fiercely amongst themselves that neither of them saw her. At first.

  “This isn’t enough!” the one screamed, his broad back to her. His bomber jacket bouncing with exaggerated fury. “Where’s the rest of it?”

  “Tony, I fuckin’ told you. This is all he gave me. Call him and ask him yourself. This is all there is.”

  “But I paid for twice as much, at least. If there’s no dope then give me my fucking money back!”

  The bomber jacket shoved the shorter man. By pushing him out of the line of view, it revealed him for who he was. A squat Asian man, maybe no more than 5’5, 5’4. His eyes wide at the sudden push. But his new angle gave him a full view of Lou, approaching from behind.

  “Don’t be looking like a scared little bitch, Po. You aren’t going to fool me with shit again. Looking behind me, trying to get me to turn and then when I turn around, you fucking bolt like a pony at the track. No way. Fool me once and all that shit.”

  Tony pulled his gun and pointed it at the man named, Po.

  “But—” Po began.

  Lou seized Tony by the back of his leather jacket with her free hand, her good hand, and with the butt of her gun, opened the freezer. Po stood stunned, and unmoving as Lou dragged the howling man into the freezing dark. The cold didn’t last.

  His knees hit the dirt.

  Lou wasn’t sure if they always toppled like this because she released them so abruptly after the slip, or if slipping through the dark was such a dizzying affair. King had complained about it once, but she herself had no problem emerging from the dark on her own two feet, head clear, and the night calm around her. Unless of course she’d been shot, or was dying. She supposed that was true.

  But she hadn’t even put a scratch on Tony. Yet.

  She should change that.

  Her right hook crashed into the side of the man’s face. Her knuckles slid along the jaw bone finally connecting with the mouth. The lip split over the teeth. It swelled instantly, blood pooling in the crack.

  She waited. She stood there waiting for him to retaliate. She wanted him to retaliate.

  Not in my name, Lou. Lucy’s plea rang through her mind the second before Tony’s fist connected with her gut, winding her. She went down on one knee.

  His leg rose, and she knew he meant to kick her in the face.

  She let herself fall. Fall through the dark and appear three feet behind him in a moonlit patch that seemed made for her.

  His foot connected with earth with more force than he’d expected and he was pitched forward. His arms waved comically trying to reestablish control. She kicked him in the tailbone, and he cried out. His back arched furiously as he threw back his head and howled his pain.

  Why do you pick fights? Lucy asked.

  It was the aunt she remembered best in her mind’s eye. No more than 42 maybe. Lou was fourteen and halfway through her first year in a new school.

  There are better ways to deal with your anger, Lucy told her after she picked her up from school on the principal’s orders and walked her down to the city bus stop. They did public transport to and from school at Lucy’s insistence. No slipping in school.

  Apparently, kneeing a guy during gym was also forbidden.

  “He slapped my ass.”

  “Language.”

  “He assaulted me,” Lou had said. “Be glad all I did was knee him.”

  Lucy’s silence after that had weighed on her. Gave her mind such a wild and menacing playground within which to dream up the possible insults she must be composing for her niece in her mind. Lou had braced herself for her rejection. For her cold regard. But on the bus, halfway to their Oak Park apartment Lucy said, “Fighting isn’t an appropriate way to dispel your anger.”

  “Don’t start up about yoga again.”

  “No, not yoga,” Lucy agreed. “I have something else in mind.”

  The next day she’d dropped Lou off at an aikido dojo on Chicago’s east side and Lou took to it like a bird to the air.

  But all the training in the world hadn’t seemed to prepare her for this. For the moment when her life was thrown into the pool again.

  She was drowning.

  She was falling through and there was no one to pull her out.

  Nowhere to go but down.

  And now, thinking of her aunt’s calm face, the fight left Lou. Her heart sank to irretrievable depths and with the last of her fury, she seized Tony by the back of his neck and hauled him up. She threw him into the lake with one great shove. He hit the water the way Lou must’ve hit the water that June night her father saved her life. Mouth open in surprise. Arms out as if to break a fall. An ugly splash that had winded her.

  She marched through the water after him. And just as his head surfaced, she was on him.

  She wrapped her legs around his body and pulled him down, squeezing the way an octopus with its many tentacles must squeeze its prey before pulling the food to its beak for rendering.

  The water warmed. Turned the color of blood.

  And then there they were on the other side.

  Tony’s reaction was one she’d seen a hundred times. Blind, abject terror. He flailed in the water. He screamed at the terrible landscape. He followed her to shore howling, as if she were his salvation instead of the person who’d condemned him to die in this place.

  Then the familiar screech she’d come to expect broke open the sky.

  The beast bounded around her, circling her twice and swiping at her stomach with its head as if in greeting. Then she chased after Tony the way a puppy chased after his master. But when she caught him, the sounds that emitted from his mouth couldn’t be mistaken for play.

  Lou sank onto the embankment, and put her face in her hands. She wiped the water away, and smoothed her hair back from her face. She’d lost her sunglasses. It was hard to give a shit about sunglasses when Lucy was dead.

  She breathed, head between her knees. When the world stopped spinning, she shrugged off the leather jacket to give her burning arm a good look. It was swollen, the flesh pinched red between the black wire. But it was not bleeding, not oozing puss.

  She heard Jabbers behind her but didn’t bother to turn. “Fucking eat me. Put me out of my misery.”

  She wouldn’t.

  The beast had saved her life by shoving her into the water before she’d
blacked out. Lou understood that now. She’d known it was smart, possessing an intelligence of some kind. But now she suspected the walking nightmare had even more than she imagined.

  It understood that she came and went by the water. And it understood that somehow, on the other side, there was a possibility that she could heal.

  It sniffed Lou’s wounded arm, and sneezed.

  Lou cringed, using the water to rinse the wound. “Hope you don’t have some horrible tropical disease in your snot.”

  The monster sat on its haunches beside her. Its white tongue licked the blood from its snout before chewing the guts from the webbing in its feet.

  Then it slid into the water, paddling a circle before diving underneath. Lou only watched, catching her breath, taking in the eternal twilight and double moons.

  Seemingly tired of water play, the beast crawled onto the shore again, once more taking a seat beside her, reclining on all fours and licking what could only be called forearms.

  Lou reached out and touched the cool, damp flesh. The beast made a sound, not unlike purring.

  “Who needs retail therapy, when I’ve got you,” Lou said, patting that reptilian snout.

  And then, just as she had on the night her father died, Lou cried herself hoarse on the banks of La Loon.

  27

  King woke on his red sofa, staring up at a long patch of sunlight across his ceiling. At first all he could taste was the burning, citrus taste of booze, like maybe salt and lime had been left in his mouth all night to putrefy. He smacked his lips a few times and found the moisture gone.

  He sat up and the world spun. His arm shot out and grabbed the first thing he could find—which turned out to be his enormous coffee table. He held its smooth surface with a weak grip until the room stopped spinning and came into focus again. The large armoire in the corner, cherry wood that looked especially red in the light pouring through the open balcony. Sunshine glittering across his white bedspread in the adjacent bedroom. The quiet kitchen with a water glass sitting half full beside the silver basin.

  A leather jacket on a hanger, hanging from the trim above his bedroom door. Its hook was placed so that the weight kept it steady despite the slight swing in the breeze.

  Lou was sitting his armchair. Beside her rest his record player on its stand and a stack of vinyls leaning against it. Their fraying cardboard edges reminded him how old, how vulnerable they were. His eyes slid to the Bob Dylan vinyl where he kept his weed and a half-used pack of rolling papers.

  Seeing Lou in the chair, flipping through one of the bridal magazines that had no doubt been on his coffee table, and those records—all of it brought Lucy to mind.

  Had it really been only three months since she’d walked into his life again?

  Three months since she’d stretched on his red leather sofa, an icy glass of sweet tea balanced on her bare knee. Her body had been ethereal in the moonlight sparkling through the open balcony door. It was as if she’d never left him if he overlooked the longer hair. What would he give to rewind those three months and start all over again? And how much more, to go back twelve years, when he’d let her leave and hadn’t even tried to stop her.

  A wave of sadness slammed into his chest. A fist seized his heart and squeezed.

  He wiped at his eyes with balled fists. Doing so made his knuckles burn, reminding him of the split flesh from the night before.

  “Are you still drunk?” Lou asked, closing the bridal magazine and tossing it to the floor with disgust. He saw she was sporting her own bloodied knuckles.

  What a pair we make, he thought.

  “No,” King croaked. “Unfortunately. I hope to change that very soon.”

  “Your landlady will kill you if you do,” she said. Her mirrored sunglasses were up on her head and she regarded him with Jack’s unflinching eyes. But the glasses looked different. Maybe she got a second pair.

  “Is that your jacket?” he asked, pointing at his bedroom door. It hung from a hanger balanced precipitously on the top of the frame.

  “It got wet,” she said, as if this explained everything.

  Then more of the room came into focus. The dried vomit on the rug. His bloody knuckles which burned as he flexed and balled his hands in turn.

  Dead. Lucy was dead.

  She’d died in his arms on a beach in Maui. And as fucking romantic as that sounded, it didn’t spare him an ounce of the grief.

  Then he was crying. Really crying, his whole body convulsing. He hadn’t cried like this when his parents died, nor his beloved grandfather. Not even Jack, whose death had hurt his heart in a way none had before.

  Before he knew it, Lou was pressing his red rescue inhaler into one of his hands, pushing against the knuckles until he unballed his fist and accepted it.

  She was shoving a bottle of Jack into the other.

  He laughed, a strangled, humorless sound, when he saw it. “Where the hell did this come from?”

  She didn’t seem to hear him. She was fishing his cell phone from the kitchen island and handing it to him. “Your phone has gone off several times. You’ve got messages.”

  King put down the bottle of Jack on the coffee table and accepted the phone.

  He did have messages, so many that his screen looked like an emergency. Red flags blaring at him from several icons.

  He listened to each one in turn, informing Lou of its contents.

  “Piper got my car and parked it in the alley.”

  “They found Lucy and want to know if I want to see her before they send her to the morgue.” His voice cracked and broke on that last one.

  The last voicemail was from Sampson informing him that he would be visiting him today at approximately eleven. His tone was grave.

  King squinted at the green clock on his stove. 10:53. “Shit.”

  The fire escape rattled the same moment as Melandra blew into the apartment. “Mr. King, get up. There’s a cop looking for you.”

  Before he could process this, Lou had crossed the room, snatched her leather jacket from the hanger and disappeared into his bedroom.

  “What did he look like?” King asked. But he didn’t need her answer. In the same instance, one finely clad leg stepped onto his balcony followed by another. The spit-shone black shoes. The uncreased navy blue dress pants. A nice cotton, collared shirt tucked into the pants. A gray mustache trimmed and clean.

  Sampson hadn’t aged a day since King saw him last.

  “What did I tell you?” Melandra started before Sampson could even cross through the open balcony. One hand was on her hip, the other pointed a fierce finger at the man’s face. “I will call the law on you, do you hear me? I want to see your damn warrant!”

  Sampson held both hands out in front of him, palms out in surrender. Or they would’ve been, if the left hadn’t been clutching a manila folder.

  “Mel, it’s all right,” King said. He would’ve said this even if it wasn’t. He was desperate for some quiet with the throbbing headache splitting his brains in half. It was the headache, no doubt. But crying hadn’t helped. “Sampson and I are friends. And we had an appointment.”

  Without missing a beat Sampson said, “We do.”

  With no target, Mel threw up her hands in exasperation. And perhaps that would have been the end of it had she not spotted the bottle of Jack on King’s coffee table.

  She yelped and snatched it up with one clawed fist. “No, sir!” She shook the bottle at him, brown liquid sloshing against its sides until it was King’s turn to hold up his hands in surrender.

  “It was from…a gift,” he quickly corrected, dropping Lou’s name from the sentence. “I didn’t drink any.”

  Something flashed in her eyes and King suspected she knew what he’d meant to say, but she arched her brow all the same. “Who gives half-drunk bottles as gifts, King, I can’t say.”

  But she took the bottle and left him alone with Sampson.

  “A spirited woman,” Sampson said, in obvious admiration.

&nb
sp; And King laughed at the unintentional pun. Because surely he hadn’t meant Mel’s penchant for cards and conversing with the dead. Instead he said, “You have no idea.”

  Sampson glanced around the apartment. “Nice place you have here, Robert.”

  “Thank you. But I don’t think you came all the way from St. Louis to compliment my paint job. What’s going on?”

  “I needed to talk to you,” he began.

  “Obviously.”

  “And it wasn’t something that should’ve happened over the phone.” Sampson regarded him with dark eyes. “Lest it be admissible in a court of law.”

  King’s heart stopped on a dime. When he recovered he said, “I would offer you a drink, but I’m afraid Mel took it away. Water?”

  “No, thank you.”

  Sampson took a seat in the leather chair that Lou had just vacated.

  “If we are talking court, do I need to ask you to lift your shirt for a wire?” King asked solemnly.

  Sampson didn’t even look offended. He untucked his nice collared shirt and showed his tight brown belly. Swaths of gray hair covered his chest, but no wire.

  “Who is investigating me?” King asked.

  “I am.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “As of this morning,” he said and tapped the folder against his leg.

  “May I ask what for?”

  “We know that you signed onto the server and accessed unpublished information.”

  King’s heart sank. Now he really wished that Mel had left the bottle behind.

  “Though looking at you, I can hardly believe it,” Sampson said, ramrod straight from the leather chair. He’d always had impeccable posture from years of band followed by a military career, he’d once told King.

  “Why do you say that?” King asked, wondering if he should lawyer up. And if so, with whom? Someone expensive no doubt.

  “Robert, you look like hell.”

  “I’ve had a rough 24 hours,” King said, lying back against the cushions.

  “How rough.”

  “My wife died.”

  My wife.

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t realize you were married.”