“A lady,” he finally said. “On your stairwell.”
I grabbed my holster and stumbled out of bed. My eyes were still foggy, but my hands were singing. This time, this time, they said and I told them not to get their hopes up; I was through with the justice racket.
But still, I ran out in an old teddy and bare feet and took a holster with four sharp knives, eager for whatever had scared my lover so.
I pushed open the fire door. It was heavy with a body’s weight, and I thought the woman might already be dead until she slid down three steps and groaned. Her face looked worked-over: cut, bruised, crusted with dried blood. Livid welts circled her wrists, about the width of Victor’s preferred rope, but her limbs were free. A gun bulged from a pocket of her skirt.
I climbed over her and squatted. “Now who the hell are you?”
I pushed back her hair—dirtied and gray—from her forehead—bloody—and studied her features, which a few thuggish fists had done their bit to rearrange. I didn’t recognize her. The woman started moaning again and shaking her head back and forth; she would come to soon and I didn’t like the look of that gun. I pulled it from her pocket and a crumpled paper with familiar writing spilled out onto her lap.
Victor. My pulse sped. I checked the stairwell again, but saw only the dentist peeking nervously around the door.
“What’s this about, darling?”
“Shh.” I swatted at his voice.
I read:
Phyllis, meet Maryann West. I know you haven’t worked on my word alone yet, so Red Man will be by to give you the details later, but I wanted you to get a chance to meet your next job. Thought maybe it would whet your appetite. She’s done some very, very bad things, dollface. More than enough for my angel. Don’t you like her? Don’t you miss it? This isn’t the job for turning me down again, baby. Weren’t we great together, once? I miss you.
I put my head between my knees and counted to ten. My hand already held a knife; it jumped with each breath. I didn’t remember pulling it.
“Phyllis?” said the dentist from the doorway.
“Oh God,” whispered the woman, whose name was Maryann West. She pushed herself away from me, fell down a few more steps and lurched to her feet. Above us the door slammed; the dentist’s heavy gallop receded. Coward, I thought amiably. The woman lunged for the gun and I let her, at first because Victor’s threat filled my head, and then because I got curious about what she might do next. She fumbled with the catch. I watched this, judged the opportune moment, and leapt. She only had time to squint before I slashed her trigger finger and tugged the piece gently from her grip. Maryann West screamed. It echoed in the stairwell and grew into something eerie, hideously familiar.
My guilty burden, momentarily suspended by an unholy joy, reasserted itself.
For fifteen years, I’d killed almost every time Victor asked. Was it any wonder he wanted my uncanny hands back at his disposition? If I refused this time, I wouldn’t be his angel anymore. I’d just be Phyllis from 401 Lenox. Phyllis, who went downtown and came back haunted. Phyllis, alone and probably dead.
Oh, goddamn Victor—he could have knocked this woman off easy as you please, no mess about it. He didn’t need me to kill for him. But he wanted me, which was worse.
“What have you done?” I asked Maryann West. “What’s your mortal sin?”
Sometimes their confessions made it easier. She glared at me with furious, frightened, swollen eyes. “Are you going to kill me finally?”
I should have said no, but I tossed the five-inch knife from hand to hand, frightened her because I could.
“What did you do?”
We locked eyes for a long moment. Then the woman turned around and walked slowly down the steps. She didn’t look back once, even when she stumbled. Braver than a lion; I admired her and loathed myself and prayed she would get out of town quick, before I could catch up. A muffled sob echoed from four stories below, then the slam of a fire door.
I took the gun and the note and staggered back to my apartment. My lover was long gone; he hadn’t even bothered to shut the door behind him. I found my cigarettes and my lighter by the bed, then sat by the window to smoke. I sucked the first cigarette down fast. When I went to light a second, my thumb caught on the circle that Dev had scored into the chrome with a fishhook (This means it’s yours, Dev said, and I said, It’s lopsided, and he had smiled, slipped it into my coat pocket, took my hand, and told me it was time to run again).
I flipped the lighter in my right hand, balanced it on my fingertips one at a time, then on my knuckles: tricks that marked me just as much as the knives.
The world didn’t hold so many of us, and often the juju was about as useful as a nickel at Tiffany’s. But Dev was different, not just because of his dusk-brown skin and aura of beatific serenity. Dev’s hands, his knack for feeling threats, made him a good gin runner and a reliable bartender to have at the Pelican. He could even lend the service to whoever he was touching—but he had stopped telling me about my threats early; it must have felt like bailing out the Titanic with a spoon.
Dev only started working with Victor after I left him. After Red Man came to find me in that little house on the river and showed me the pictures of Trent Sullivan’s victims. All those bodies, young and old, women and men, all races, bound in a
