Losers Live Longer

Below her brown eyes were dark jaundiced pouches, a flattish nose, and a wide mouth now set in a tight straight line like she was biting down on the meat of her lips. She looked frightened. She said nothing, just reached out one bare arm from behind the door and handed me a black plastic bag. Something small and heavy swung like a pendulum at its bottom, but I didn’t relieve her of it. I hadn’t come here just to be handed a bag.

I’d never seen her before in my life, but I felt a vague sense of recognition. Trying to pin it down, I stalled her.

“Open the bag, show it to me.”

“What?”

I didn’t care what was inside the bag, but a dark suspicion was niggling at me and I wanted to see the other hand she was keeping out of sight behind the door.

“How do I know it’s what I’m here for?”

“Please, take and go away. I want no more.”

I heard it clearly then, the Eastern European accent that had been barely audible in the monosyllabic responses she’d given before. But no mistaking it now, nor the sound of her voice. She was the woman who’d left the message on my machine asking for George Rowell.

I’ve never had much of a poker face, even when the stakes were low, and I must’ve shown my excitement now. I spooked her and she yanked the hand with the bag back in and tried to slam the door in my face.

I gave it my shoulder and all my 155 pounds with interest. My enthusiasm got the better of me. The force knocked her down on the other side with a thump that shook the floorboards.

As I stepped into the dim apartment, she was scrambling to her knees. She’d dropped the plastic bag, but she’d held onto what she had in her other hand. A lethal-looking carving knife with an eight-inch blade.

My momentum carried me too far into the apartment to back out into the hallway. I retreated a step and my spine hit the door, shutting it with a smack.

It was a studio, what real estate brokers like to call a cozy pied a terre, with a kitchen area, a living room/bedroom area beyond, a tiny closet, and a door that presumably led to a tiny bathroom. The room was decorated mainly in glass and chrome, nicer than you might expect from the condition of the building—or of the young woman occupying it.

She was on one knee in front of me. She held the knife low to her chest, the point in line with my groin. More than an arm’s length away, but still…

I reached behind, pulled out my gun, and pointed it at her.

“Don’t move,” I said.

The Luger’s safety was on. I left it that way. I really didn’t want to shoot her—didn’t want to shoot anybody. But I also didn’t want a knife in the pecker. So I kept my thumb ready near the safety.

This is the reason I hate guns: they end thought. Pulling a gun preempts all other options. You’ve got a gun, you don’t have to think how else to work out a situation, just hike up and unleash your piece. If I’d left mine back in the office, I wouldn’t be facing the task of convincing this woman I wasn’t a threat to her. But I had my gun out now, so I had to make do.

I instructed her, “Put down the knife.”

She shook her head no.

“Put it down. I’m not here to hurt you. But I’m not here to get hurt either.”

She looked me in the eye and then cast a long look at the knife in her hand. She stopped pointing it at me. Turning it sideways, she reached over and drew the edge across her other arm. A shallow three-inch gash smoothly opened across the back of her forearm. Blood humped up out of the fresh slit, swelling from her wound thick, wet, and dark.

“Christ, what are you doing?”

She said in her thick accent, “Put the gun down.”

I shook my head. Correction, I shook all over. Head to toe. She had shaken me. I was shook.

“Put it down,” she told me. “Or I say you do this to me. You come in here and you cut me.”

I took a deep breath and exhaled.

“Look, go bandage that up, willya?” I said. “We can’t talk with you standing there bleeding like that.”

She half-frowned, glancing at the wound, at the blood from the cut trickling into the hair on the back of her arm. Her nose wrinkled at the sight. There was something oddly familiar about the expression, though also something strange about it: no show of pain, no emotion. Her eyes empty, flat, as if saying, “What? You mean this? This is nothing. I can do worse.” And the tracery of scars on her arms showing that, many times before, she had.

She raised the knife again.

“Stop,” I said, “you win.”

I tilted my gun up so the barrel pointed at the ceiling. From where I stood, it looked like a capital L. L is for Loser.

But what was I supposed to do? I’d just seen her do worse to herself than I would’ve ever dreamt of doing. She was more a danger to herself than others.

Though lord knows she could still be a danger to others, starting with me.

I put my gun away in my jacket pocket. It sagged there.

She said, “Now go away.”

“No. Not yet. And no more Ginsu demonstrations, either. Put something on that cut, then we need to talk.”

She reached over to the sofa, picked up a crumpled t-shirt, wrapped it tightly around her arm. “Okay, talk now.”

“I’m the guy you called this morning, asking about George Rowell. You left a message on my answering machine. My name is Payton Sherwood.”

I reached in my pocket for my wallet, intending to show her my driver’s license. Instead, the first thing in my hand was the photograph of Owl and the young girl. I brought it out, started to ask if she knew this man, when all at once I knew: it was her. The girl in the picture, Elena.

She asked, “Where did you get that?”

“From Owl,” I said. “Are you Elena?”

She backed away from the question.

I said, “Look, relax. I put the gun away, didn’t I? I told you, I’m not going to hurt you. I’m a friend. Owl hired me this morning. I was supposed to help him out with a job he was doing.”

“Where is George? Why isn’t he here? He doesn’t answer at his hotel. Where is he?”

“Let’s sit down first.”

She raised the knife once more and stepped forward. I stiffened to keep my hand from reaching for my gun again.

“It isn’t good news,” I said. “Owl—George is dead.”

This time the D-bomb hit its target.

Elena’s face collapsed and I saw her hands start trembling.

“No. No. I do not believe—when did…?”

“This morning, around nine-thirty. He was hit by a car.”

“No!” She was whipping her head back and forth.

“I’m sorry.”

“Who are you? Why do you tell me this?”

I took out both my driver’s and my investigator’s license.

“See,” I said, “I told you, I’m Payton Sherwood.”

“How do I know you tell the truth? Those could be a fake, I have as good. You could be anyone.”

“I wish,” I said glumly. “And also that it wasn’t true, but George Rowell is dead.”

“How did it happen?”

“It was an accident.”

“Did that woman have something to do with it? Did she?”