Not long after I saw the bloodbath on TV, I knew what I was going to do. It took a couple beers and some sweet talk, but Luis dropped the attitude. The fact was he was screwed, and I think he knew it. He decided to stick around until I at least got him out of no- man’s-land, which was what I wanted.
Luis was the kind of guy you didn’t want to take your eye off of. He was a sneak, and was too good at palming shit not to be a thief. Not that I had anything to steal, but any guy that could walk in and find his family dead on the floor, then look in your face and act like nothing was wrong could probably do a lot of things. I had to change, so there was a door between us for two minutes, but that was as much time as he got out of my sight.
When I came out, he was still in the can, getting pretty. He messed with his hair in the mirror.
“You all set?” I asked.
“All set.”
“Go warm up the seat. I’ll be right down.”
He put up his hands, but he went. When he was out the door, I threw on my jacket and zipped up. I checked the pockets, but it was all there: the ID, the knuckles, the keys, my phone, and my black lipstick.
The door downstairs slammed shut and I saw him step out and hang near the building. I stepped back and punched up the number from the TV bulletin that came on right after they showed the bodies.
The phone rang twice, then picked up.
“Federal Bur—”
“I can deliver Luis Valle to you,” I said. The voice on the other end stopped for a second, and the line clicked but didn’t go dead.
“Do you still want him or not?” I asked.
“Hold on just one moment, please,” the guy said. The line went quiet.
Through the window, I saw Luis put his hands in his pockets and pace, shoulders hunched.
The line picked back up.
“This is Agent Wachalowski,” a new guy said. “You have information regarding Luis Valle?”
“I can give him to you.”
“Give him to me how?”
“There’s a reward for this, right?”
“Is he alive?”
“He’s alive.”
“Where is he now?”
“I’m not saying where he is right now, but I can tell you where he’s going to be. Am I getting paid for this?”
“Yes. Where is he going to be?”
“You know where the Arena Porco Rojo is?”
“I’ll find it.”
“That’s where he’ll be.”
“Where in the arena?”
“In the audience. I don’t know.”
“When?”
“In a half hour.”
“I’m on my way.”
“Wait, don’t you need my name?”
“I have your information, Ms. Flax,” he said. “Keep your phone on. I’ll find you.”
The line cut.
I headed out and locked the door. It was best anyway. Luis was in deep shit whether he knew it or not, and the Feds might pinch him, but at least they’d let him live. He’d live to fight another day, and that was the best he’d get at this point. Fuck him. He got himself into this mess. He put me in it too. Fuck him.
When we got to the fights, he called his cab, then sat in the bleachers to wait. With luck, he’d get grabbed before I even got in the ring.
By the time I put my gear on and got back out there, I’d lost track of him. In the octagon, Eddie waited in my corner while the other bitch tried to stare me down.
“You seen her before?” Eddie asked.
“No.”
The canvas had blood on it, but she just sat like she didn’t see it or didn’t care. She was skinny and tall, with skin black as night.
“She wants you,” he said. “Because of the last fight. Watch out for her.”
Yeah.
When I climbed up, there were cheers, but more boos. A lot of them hoped I’d get stomped after last time. I’d knocked that bitch off the roster for the rest of the season.
“You ready?” Eddie asked. I rolled my shoulders.
“Yeah, I’m ready.”
The bitch looked up then. She looked like she could stick a knife in my neck and twist it.
“In the left corner,” the judge barked into the amp, “weighing in at one hundred forty-two pounds, a new-comer to the arena …”
The crowd started stomping the bleachers and I wondered where Luis was.
“…here to replace the injured Brick- House Bonnie Bast …”
That kicked things up. The canvas shook with all the stomps and screams. They were geared to rush the fence already.
“Skinny …Minnie …Botma!”
Minnie? The bitch’s name was Minnie?
“And in the right corner,” the judge said, “weighing in at one hundred fifty-one pounds, undefeated this season in her class …”
More boos. More stomping. I stuck up both middle fingers.
“The Bitch from Bullrich …Calliope Flax!”
We met in the middle of the ring, and the more she stared me down, the more I could not wait to force those big teeth of hers straight down her bitch throat.
“Shake hands,” the ref said, and we did.
“Guard up!”
We put them up, and waited for the buzzer.
The second it went off, she threw a hard punch at my throat and almost caught me. If I was a hair slower, she’d have put me out. As it stood, she just clipped my neck on the left side. She was quick too, and blocked me when I whipped an elbow at her face. For two beats, we both backed off.
She had a long reach, so I came in like I meant to throw a punch but threw a heel right at her ear at the last second, and I almost had her. It would have dropped her too, but that bitch was quick. She went down flat and scooped my other leg out from under me with an ankle sweep.
My back slammed down on the canvas, and as soon as I looked up, I saw her big black foot coming down on me. I rolled, and it stomped down right where my head had been with a loud boom.
“Point!”
I got up quick, but she didn’t try to pounce when I was down. She didn’t want it to go on the ground, so first chance that’s where I’d take it.
To do that, I had to get in close, past that reach. I lunged in at her, throwing a flurry of punches and getting my knee up in her gut. She got some in too, but by then we were face-to-face. She tried to pull back and I grabbed on, trying to get hold of a leg while pushing her back. I thought she was off balance, and steered her away from the fence….
Right then, a face jumped out at me from the crowd. Luis was there, cheering and waving his fists. A row back, a big guy in a dark coat was going for him.
I saw the fist just before it connected, dead on my right cheek. Sweat and blood sprayed in a burst of white light, and all at once I was falling.
“Ten points!” the judge screamed. “Minnie Botma! Ten points!”
The lights spun in front of me. I was going down.
“Calliope Flax is down!”
I hit the canvas on my back as that big foot came down again.
“Flax is d—”
There was no time to think. I rolled back and got the balls of my feet on the ground as her heel left a dent in front of me.
I sprung from a squat and blasted my elbow out like a jackhammer. It dug deep in her solar plexus and she choked. She had one arm out and I grabbed it, clamping down on her wrist. Blood poured out of my nose. I was in a rage, and she was going to get it.
When I rolled her arm, I put my full weight on and it came out at the shoulder. I heard it. She showed me her ribs, so I fired a side kick and broke those too.
Her eyed bugged out and her jaw dropped. Her legs gave out, and when I let her go, she dropped like a stone.
“Ten points! Calliope Flax!” the judge screamed.
The ref came out into the ring and ran over to her, but she wasn’t getting back up. He looked up at the booth and made an X with his forearms.
“That …is …the …fight! Winner, Calliope Flax! She takes it again!”
The ref had a needle and stuck her with painkillers so she could breathe. Two other medics came on to take her out back so they could put her shoulder back in. She stood—I’ll give her that—but she didn’t stare at me anymore. She didn’t even look my way.
“In round one, Minnie Botma is out of the fight!”
The crowd screamed so loud it hurt my ears. They spit and threw trash, stomping on the sides of the cage. I felt something cold on my back and something brown and sticky splashed down my leg as a paper cup hit the fence. Chew spit, by the look of it. A bottle skipped across the top of the cage; then another one smashed on the corner.
“Okay, settle down, people!”
It was a mob scene. I tried to see if Luis was getting picked up, but I couldn’t see shit. Something was wrong; I knew when I saw the guy going for him. That guy didn’t look right.
“Flax! Flax is number one!”
“Flax, you bitch, rot in hell!”
I was getting dizzy. Christ, that bitch rattled my cage….
There was blood all down the front of my tank top, and when I grabbed a towel and wiped my face, there was a lot of red. One of my front teeth was gone. I grabbed my water bottle and poured it over my face, letting it run down my neck and chest.
I had to get the hell out of there. Maybe Luis would try to meet up with me. He might try the locker room or the lobby. I climbed out of the ring and shoved past Eddie.
“Hey!” he yelled. “Where the hell do you think you’re—”
I pushed through the crowd, heading for the lockers. My hands were shaking as I got my padlock open and took my jeans and sweatshirt out, pulling them on over my fight clothes. I threw on my boots and jacket and made a run for the lobby. That’s when I heard the scream.
It was a guy, and it was loud, but it came from outside. I slammed through the doors and out to the sidewalk. No one was there. The fights were still on, and most everybody was still inside. I looked left and right; then I heard the scream again, real low, like it was from the gut. It gurgled and stopped.
I stood there, listening. My breath came out like smoke in the cold, and every time I sucked in air, it stabbed my broken tooth. A second later I heard another grunt.
The bathroom. There was a public can that filled up after the fights, but now there was no one hanging around them. I moved to the door and looked, but it opened so you couldn’t see in from outside.
“Hello?” I called. No one said anything.
I reached into my jacket and pulled out the brass knuckles, just in case. Blood still dribbled down my lip as I squeezed one set into each fist.
“I’m coming in!”
I gave it another second, then marched down and turned into the men’s room.
It took a second for it to sink in. A guy was in there, wearing a dark coat with the hood up. He stared at me when I walked through the door. On the floor in front of him was Luis, or what was left of him.
“It’s you,” the man said.
I didn’t see a knife, but Luis was cut up bad. One arm was hacked off at the elbow and was on the floor next to a toilet. His other hand was short a thumb, and the other fingers just dangled there. His guts were in a pile under him where he lay facedown, with his ass still in the air like he was trying to get up. The floor was wet with blood. It was fucking everywhere.
“That was quick,” the man said, stepping toward me. He had a weird look on his face, like he was zoning in front of the TV. An orange light was lit up in his eyes.
“What was?”
“Your fight.”
“Look, I don’t want any trouble,” I said. I took a step back, but he pulled out a gun and pointed it in my chest.
“Quickly,” he said. “I monitored the call you made to the FBI. I know he was with you, and I know the FBI is on their way to pick him up.”
“What the hell do you want?”
“The data spike,” he said. “I know you have it.”
“I don’t have it,” I said. “He told me about it, but that’s it—”
“He told me you have it.”
He was stepping in on me. I tried to fade back again, but he stuck the gun right in my chest. The look on his face never changed. The barrel was aimed dead center, right at my heart.
“This is your last chance,” he said. I smashed the wrist of his gun hand. The gun went off, but the bullet slammed into the tile next to me and I punched him in the side of the head. I gave him everything I had, and I had plenty. Something crunched under my fist. Even without the brass knuckles, it should have dropped him, but it didn’t.
When he came back around, still holding the gun, I bashed him with the other fist too. He fell back and I grabbed his gun arm, then rolled him, slamming him face-first into the wall.
I broke his wrist on the urinal, but he wouldn’t drop the piece, so I smashed the side of his face with my elbow a few times, then blasted a knee into his ribs. He went down, cracking his head on one of the sinks and rolling onto his back.
Black shit was coming out of his mouth. With the light on his face, I saw it was white as a sheet. The veins underneath looked black.
He was getting back up. I stomped down right on his face and he fell back. More of that black stuff was coming out of a cut on his forehead and his nose. One of his eyes had turned light gray or silver.
He hooked the butt of the gun on the urinal pipe to pull himself back up, so I stomped his elbow on the side and broke his arm in half. His coat fell open, and I saw the bricks underneath, each one with a thick wire coming out of it. Some kind of timer display was counting down on his chest. The guy had a bomb strapped to his chest.
I don’t know how his hand still worked, but he still had the gun, even though it just hung there. Something made a loud snap, and just like that there was a big knife in his other hand. It came out of nowhere.
He was still coming, and I would have hit him again, except for the bomb. The bomb changed everything.
The tip of the knife scraped the tiles behind me as I turned and ran like hell.
Two blocks from the arena, the signal from Calliope’s cell started moving. Without the exact layout of the place, it was impossible to tell exactly where in the area she was, but from the basic blueprint, it looked like she was leaving the premises. She left the building, lingered near the outside, then went on the move again in the parking area.
Wachalowski, this is Sean. We just got wind of a disturbance down at the arena; we’ve got shots fired, one dead, and one missing.
Who was killed?
No name yet, but a young male. It could be our guy.
They beat us to him. They got to him and she got too close; that’s why her signal was moving. She was running.
Try to get the cops to hang back. I’m almost there.
By the time I got to the arena, blue and red lights flickered over the faces of patrons who had streamed out to see what the commotion was about, and the cops had their hands full keeping them back. Inside the lobby, faces were pressed against the glass, looking out. I pulled over near the blockade and got out of the car, holding up my badge. A handful of the arena-goers hooted when they saw me, but the officers looked less impressed.
“Who’s in charge?” I asked.
One of the men held up his hand, looking at me under the brim of his cap.
“You,” he said. “I got the call to hang back until you got here.”
“I appreciate it. Can we get these lights off?”
He nodded to one of the officers, who ducked away, and a few seconds later the flashing lights went dark one set at a time. I switched to a thermal filter, but there was still too much interference; too many people had been through to pick out any one signature.
“There’s a woman down there somewhere,” I said. “Has anyone seen her?”
“Not since the attack. Word is she took off down toward the lower levels, and the guy went after her.”
“Who was the victim?”
“Name was Luis Valle.”
“Where’d it start?”
“Men’s room,” he said, pointing. “One of the fighters came out and heard something, then went to check it out and got into it with the shooter. There was an altercation that spilled out into the garage; then Sawed-off Sam over there comes out and starts shooting.”
He gestured to a stocky, balding man with a thick neck who was standing cuffed next to a pair of officers. Following the path he traced, I saw one of the cars nearby had sustained several shotgun blasts at medium range. Glass and spent shells littered the pavement.
Wachalowski, this is Noakes. Secure that body immediately.
If he had what they were after, he doesn’t have it now.
I’m not asking you.
“I need the crime scene locked down,” I told the officer. “No one in or out.”
“Already done,” he said evenly.
The attacker might still be here, and I’ve got a civilian in trouble. I’m going to try to bring him in.
Without the kid, the information he was holding is the first priority.
I get it.
“The fighter was female?”
“Yeah.”
On my map, I was still reading the signal from her phone. The blip was stationary, so the phone was still in one piece, even if she wasn’t.
“Start getting these people out of here,” I said.
He shook his head, but he got moving. I dropped the thermal filter to 20 percent transparency and bumped the light up a little as I headed down the ramp through the rows of cars. At the same time, I started scanning the JZI communications bands, pulling out the police chatter until it got quiet. If the attacker tried to communicate with anyone else, I wanted to pick it up.
Crouching next to one of the vehicles, I scanned the area, but again, there were too many signatures. I listened, but I didn’t hear anyone nearby. The blip was brighter, though. It was close.
Staying low, I adjusted my visual filters until I found recent thermal prints that probably belonged to Flax. With the concrete to my back, I scanned the area in front of me, but the garage was quiet.
“Calliope Flax,” I said, “this is Agent Wachalowski with the FBI. If you can hear me, don’t speak out. Stay where you are.”
Her signal was maybe five spaces away to my left, keeping perfectly still. I put one hand on the cold pavement and leaned down to look under the vehicle I was using as cover. Beneath the undercarriages of the other cars, I saw a tiny light move somewhere in the distance near the ground.
I zoomed in toward the movement. It was the LED on her phone. She had spotted me and was waving it to get my attention. Her chin rested on the pavement as she lay flat under the axle of a truck, her face flecked with blood and her eyes wide.
I wasn’t sure how well she could see me, but I held out one palm to indicate she should stay put. That was when my phone rang.
It was a rookie mistake, and it was almost a fatal one. The shooter had a pretty good bead on me already, and that cinched it; the garage erupted with gunfire, and bullets punched into the vehicle I was crouched behind. The windows sprayed out, and several shots sparked off the ground less than a foot away from me, one of them puncturing the rear tire.
Stupid …
I grabbed the phone as air hissed out of the hole, struts groaning as the vehicle leaned onto the rim. The display on the phone flashed the name ZOEOTTas I shut it off.
The shots stopped for a minute, and I could hear him reloading. Staying low, I changed positions, moving several cars down before scanning in the direction the shots had come from. No thermal signature that I could see was there, but when I flipped through the other filters, I finally got an outline. He was hiding under another LW suit about three cars away, but based on the body structure, it didn’t look like the same guy I’d shot at outside the FBI building.
I’ve got him.
I raised my weapon and turned up the intensity on the filter until his outline stood out sharply and I could target the shoulder joint of his gun arm.
A three-round burst caught him and he pitched back. His gun fell out from under the LW drape and clattered to the ground.
“Freeze!”
He moved like he was going to go for the gun, but his arm wouldn’t cooperate. He stood up.
“Kick it over!”
He did, and the weapon skittered to a stop in front of me. I picked it up and slipped it under my belt, keeping my gun trained on him. He kept the LW suit active, still appearing as nothing but a silhouette in front of me.
“Ma’am,” I said, “come on out. Stay on the other side of the car.”
I heard her come out from under the car, and moved to join her. She was kneeling on the ground, and I reached out to help her to her feet, but she batted my hand away. She stood up, glaring at me.
“Nice ringtone.”
“Go back to the barricade and stay with the cops,” I told her.
“Who the hell are you looking at? There’s no one over there.”
“Just do it.”
The shooter moved, his outline shimmering as he started closing the distance between us.
“Stop right there,” I yelled, even though I knew it wouldn’t work.
He kept coming and I fired three bursts, nine shots in all. On the third burst, the air in front of us rippled as the LW suit shorted out and the guy came into view.
“Holy shit!” Calliope yelled.
“Go back to the others!”
As the LW field flickered away, he opened the defunct suit to reveal a device strapped around his middle. He raised a detonator in his good hand.
I fired one last burst, tearing through his throat. I didn’t look to see what happened; I grabbed the girl and carried us both behind a concrete divider.
“What the he—”
The bomb went off, and for a second the inside of the garage lit up. I clamped my hands over her ears as the explosion pounded through the air. Everything went white as glass, metal and concrete sprayed across the divider, scattering tiles. It was over in a second, a cloud of flame huffing back up the ramp as the twisted remains of a vehicle rolled off another one, crunching onto the blacktop. I grabbed her hand, and this time she held on. I pulled her to her feet and half dragged her back up toward the barricade.
Through the muted ringing, I could already hear footsteps approaching as the cops came storming down. I stopped, holding her back by her wrist, and pushed her to the wall.
She was maybe five-eight, with short hair that was cropped on the sides and back. She was all muscle, solid and scrappy. One of her front teeth had been knocked out very recently, and her lips were painted with black lipstick. She glared up at me, a pixie-haired prizefighter.
“Did he give you anything?” I asked into her ear.
“What?”
“Luis! Did he give you anything? Anything to hold on to? Anything like that?”
“No!”
“Hold still!”
Taking a step back, I peered through the fabric of her clothes, starting at the top and working my way down. The pocket over her left breast was shielded with something and I couldn’t see in, but in her right-side pocket I could see a set of keys, a tampon, and what looked like a tube of lipstick. I focused on it, turning up the intensity of the scan, and she frowned.
“What are you looking at?”
There was something inside of the tube. Something besides the lipstick itself.
“Give me the lipstick,” I said.
“What?”
“Now! Just give it to me!”
She continued to glare at me as she reached in and pulled out the tube.
“I don’t think it’s your color,” she said, tossing it over.
I uncapped it and turned the stick out all the way, pulling it free. When I shook the tube, a data spike fell from the hollow base into my palm.
“What the hell is that?” she asked. I held it up so she could see.
“That,” I said, “is the thing five people have already died for today. You were almost number six.”
She looked at it, and her thin lips, lacquered with that same black lipstick, curled into a sneer.
“He put that in there.”
“I know.”
She didn’t look scared anymore; she looked angry. She never even looked back at the carnage behind her.
“You owe me a lipstick,” she said.
“Yes, I do.”
“And a reward.”
The police were heading down the ramp, and in the distance I could hear sirens approaching. Somehow I knew better than to touch the girl in front of me again, so instead I gestured toward the uniformed officers.
“You’ll get both,” I told her.
“Your goddamn phone almost got us killed,” she muttered.
“Quiet.”
I fished it back out and turned it on. Zoe had called twice; the first was a hang-up, and in the second she left a four-second message with a picture attachment.
When I opened it, the picture expanded to show a photograph of Faye kneeling in front of the burning prison transport, the revivor in her lap.
I listened to the message. Her voice was heavily slurred.
“She’s in trouble,” she said. “She’s going to die.”
By the time the blood sample had been dropped at the lab, it was dark, and I was grateful when Shanks offered to swing me by my place and deal with signing the car back in himself. As he cut the engine on the dark street in front of my apartment, wind buffeted the vehicle, peppering the windows with snow and grit.
“You going to be all right?” he asked.
“Yeah.”
“Come on, I’ll walk you up.”
Shanks had never seen the inside of my apartment before, but he had seen the street I lived on, and it looked a lot worse from the outside than it did from the inside. For a moment, the whole thing felt a little awkward, and all of a sudden the dream came back to me. When he looked across at me, I remembered the feel of his hands on my hips, how rough he was.
It was just a dream; don’t be ridiculous. He’s a good man and he’s doing you a favor; be nice to him.
The irony was that Shanks was far too polite to ever even suggest something like that. He was the kind of guy who would wait forever to be asked. He’d wait until the moment had long passed. As he looked at me, what I saw was the look he seemed to always have these days when he saw me, and that was concern. It was unnecessary, but I found myself being grateful for it. Even though we’d never have a romantic relationship, he was one person who would care if one day I ended up in that cold box or in the ground.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “You don’t need me to—”
“No, come on up.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah, have a cup of coffee before you drive all the way back.”
“Thanks.”
Outside on the steps I flashed my ID at the security camera, and it made Shanks show his too before it would open the door. We didn’t speak as the elevator made its way up, and he didn’t say anything until we actually got inside.
“Nice place,” he said.
Dropping my satchel next to the door, I made my way into the living room and hung my coat on the rack. Scanning the room quickly, I saw it was reasonably clean, which wasn’t surprising, since it seemed like I barely set foot inside my apartment myself these days.
“Take off your coat. Make yourself at home,” I said, gesturing at the sofa.
He hung his coat next to mine and sat back on the couch, looking around.
“Looks like you’ve got a message,” he said, pointing at the computer terminal set up at the edge of the living area. A green light flashed on the printer, where a couple of pages were sitting in the bay. I grabbed them on my way to the kitchen.
“You want coffee or a drink?” I asked. “I’m having a drink.”
“Make it two, then.”
“Wine okay?”
“Sure.”
I probably didn’t need the alcohol, but I definitely didn’t need any more stimulants, and there wasn’t much time available to wind down. Uncorking a bottle of red wine on the kitchen counter, I poured out two glasses before shaking out a blue capsule and dropping it in mine. I drank the first sip, making sure to get the floating pill, and swallowed it as I looked at the papers from the printer. It was a copy of the lab report.
“That was fast,” I said, bringing the other glass to Shanks.
“What?”
“It’s the results of the blood sample we just dropped off. How can they be done already?”
The header on the top sheet read ERRSAMP. That was the code for “Erroneous Sample,” which was shorthand for a field slipup. They had decided it was an innocuous substance. No wonder it came back so fast.
“Son of a bitch. They’re saying the sample was a mistake.”
Double-checking the sample code and identification number, it looked like they had processed the right sample. I read farther down to see what the determination was.
SAMPLE TYPE: BLOOD.
DETERMINED: INORGANIC OR INERT.
That couldn’t be right. The sample was organic; it had showed up as organic under the ALS light; that’s why I had taken it. The pattern was consistent with the spatter from a gunshot wound. It had to be blood.
“I must be losing it,” I said, skipping to the end.
SUBSTANCE: UNKNOWN.
“The report says it’s not organic, that it’s some kind of silicate or something.”
“It’s an error at the lab,” Shanks said. “Let it go for now, and forensics will find something.”
I put the wineglass down and crossed over to the computer terminal. Originally, I had planned to wait until I was alone to look at the contents of the data card that I copied from the Craig house, but suddenly I didn’t want to wait anymore. I wanted to see who I was dealing with; I wanted to see his face.
“Faye—”
“This will only take a minute.”
The footage came up and I saw Rebecca Valle, still alive and sitting facing the camera as, presumably, she typed on the keyboard, which was out of frame.
“What’s that?” Shanks asked, leaning forward.
“I grabbed it from the computer at Craig’s place.”
On the screen, Rebecca’s face looked pale in the glow of the monitor. She glanced at the camera every so often, sometimes smiling, sometimes frowning. There was no sound to go along with it.
“Score one for me,” I said, “and zero for the voice in my head.”
“Huh?”
“You say I’m not losing it, Shanks, but I don’t know. I think I am.”
“You’re not, Faye. It’s not your fault.”
There was something strange about the way he said that, but I didn’t pick up on it right away. I was too busy watching the woman on the video screen as she wiled away the last moments of her life. It was so mundane, almost like watching someone watch television, that it was eerie in a way. She had no idea that her life was about to end. She had no idea that this was how she would live the last sane moments of her life, sitting in front of a computer screen.
“I got a pass on my last psych evaluation,” I said, “but I’m coming apart, Doyle. You see it. You pretend you don’t, but I know you do. I’m on too many chemicals and my body is getting too old for this. My mind is getting too old for it. I want to slow down just a little bit, but I can’t.”
The footage continued to stream by as I watched, and Shanks had gotten quiet. I wasn’t looking at him, but I guessed he was probably trying to figure out the shortest path to the front door. When I agreed to have him come up, I was pretty sure I had no intention of dumping all this on him, and I wanted to stop—I knew I should stop—but the relaxant I had taken along with the wine had loosened my tongue.
“There really is a voice in my head. I’m not even kidding about that, and the worst thing about it is that this voice, this inner me or intuition or whatever it is, makes half of my decisions for me, it feels like.”
Shanks sighed, and I thought he might leave. Instead he spoke again in that odd tone of voice.
“It’s not your fault, Faye,” he said. “This hasn’t been fair to you. I haven’t been fair to you.”
“What?”
He was quiet for a minute, and I could see he was struggling with something.
“You don’t know how important you are,” he said finally. “What you do, I could never do. I realized that after I got assigned to you and I’d worked with you for a while.”
“Shanks, that’s not—”
“Sometimes I think we forget that. Sometimes I think we forget that people like us will always need people like you.”
Slowly, my mind was refocusing. I realized that Shanks was behaving more strangely than I had ever seen him before. Something about his tone of voice had become very disconcerting.
“What do you mean, ‘people like you’?” I asked.
He looked me in the eye then, and for a minute I thought there might be tears forming in them.
“I’m really sorry, Faye.”
“Shanks, what—”
“You deserve to know.”
“Know what?”
“The truth.”
On the screen, Rebecca Valle turned as she heard the sound that lured her to her death. She got up and left the room.
“Wait,” I said, watching. The image stayed static for several seconds.
Shanks stood up and moved next to me, but I couldn’t look away from the screen. As I watched, the killer walked into the computer room. There was a little blood on his right hand, but he wasn’t carrying a weapon. He sat down in front of the camera, not realizing it was there, and I looked right in his face.
“Oh,” I whispered.
His skin was pale and waxy. He had a heavy brow and a wide face, with some kind of scar in the middle of his throat. He was wearing a dark coat with the hood up over his head, which appeared to be bald. At the bottom of the frame, around chest level, I could see what appeared to be explosives strapped around his torso, but that wasn’t even the strangest thing.
His eyes, looking down at the screen as he typed, had irises that were pale and silver, like moonlight. In the darkness of the room, they emanated a soft glow. I realized then that the scar on his neck came from the entry wound of a bullet. It was a revivor.
“We suspected,” Shanks said.
The blood that showed up under the ALS but wasn’t human blood, the complete absence of trace hair, skin, sweat, or saliva at the crime scenes, the lack of any detectable breath or heartbeat on the phone recordings; it all made sense. The killer wasn’t human at all. These people had been killed by a revivor.
“Doyle, no offense, but what are you talking about? Who the hell is—”
On the screen, the revivor turned and looked over its shoulder, as if something startled it. It started to get up, and disappeared.
I rubbed my eyes and checked the video, backing it up. When I replayed it, I got the same thing: the revivor turned, started to get up; then the area around it flickered and faded away until it was gone. It was as if it had turned invisible. For just a second, there was a distortion in the shape of a man in the air, then nothing.
Sometimes a single detail caused a series of others to suddenly fall into place, and what I saw on the footage was like that. The killer was wearing some kind of suit that cloaked him or camouflaged him. At the truck fire, I wasn’t seeing things. The human outline in the smoke that I thought was my imagination was real. The revivor that killed the Valles had been there; it stood right there in front of me. What was it doing there? Was it following me?
Standing up quickly, I felt the blood rush from my head and I stumbled back into the chair. Shanks started to catch me, but I had righted myself. What had he been talking about?
“Doyle, what did you mean, ‘we suspected’?”
The killer couldn’t have followed me to the truck; even if it was unable to be seen, it was far too big and the train was too crowded for it to go unnoticed. There was no way it could have been waiting there for me, because I didn’t know I’d be there myself.
The only explanation was that it was already there for reasons that had nothing to do with me. It was responsible for the attack on the truck. It was up to something bigger than a string of simple murders.
Shanks held out his hand like he was going to touch my arm, and when I pulled away, he looked hurt. The way he was looking at me made me very uneasy, like he had dropped some kind of facade. The things he was saying and the way he was acting seemed out of character. Had he been working for some other department this whole time? Had they had him watching me for some reason?
I thought of what the revivor had said on the phone. The man sitting next to you is not your friend….
My phone vibrated in my pocket. I glanced at the display. It was Nico.
“Faye, please,” Shanks said.
“Shut up.”
“I—”
“Doyle, shut up.”
I flipped open my phone and started talking.
“Nico, I know who the killer is. These murders and what happened that morning are related, I—”
My voice trailed off as I noticed the spots on the floor, like blood but darker. As I watched, several more appeared, dripping down from out of nowhere. I followed the drops upward, and the source should have been right in front of me.
“Faye, you’re in danger,” I heard him say. “Where are you?”
The air rippled, and all at once the revivor appeared. It was standing right there in front of me. It must have already been in the apartment when we came in. It had been watching us the whole time.
I was still staring when it lashed out and I caught a metallic flash under the light. Something warm spattered the side of my face and neck. Shanks collapsed onto his knees, then forward onto the floor, his gun falling free from his hand.
“Faye!” Nico’s voice barked from the phone.
It turned to me. The moonlit eyes glared down at me, orange light flickering behind the pupils.
“It’s here—” I said into the phone, as the revivor reached forward and took it, snapping it closed before placing it on the end table.
There was no way it was going to leave me alive. I went for my gun, but before it was fully clear of the holster, the revivor’s right hand and forearm split apart to reveal a dark gap inside where something metallic caught the light.
It struck me in the chest with its palm, hard enough to knock the wind out of me, and at that same instant, I heard what sounded like a burst of air followed by an awful crunch.
“What a waste,” the revivor said.
All the strength went out of me, and my fingers slipped off its wrist. Looking down, I saw that some kind of blade had actually thrust out of a chamber inside its forearm, impaling me through the middle of the chest. With a loud snap, the blade pulled free and disappeared back into its arm, which closed over the seam, and the gun slipped from my fingers and onto the floor as I began to fall.
Don’t leave me like this, I wanted to say, but my lips wouldn’t move. Don’t let them bring me back….
At the last second, terror welled up inside me. It came on like a light from inside, and everything seemed crystal clear. There were no flashes or memories from my life, just that terror, pure and solitary, for just an instant.
The fear subsided, and I was floating weightless, drifting backward into the darkness and a long, long overdue sleep.