“Get me a fucking drink if you’re going to keep yammering at me, Vic,” I said. “I’d rather be back in bed, but I’ll settle for bourbon.”
Victor tsked. “Got a mouth on you, dollface. But sure, anything for my angel.” He poured two generous shots, dropped in two lopsided spikes of ice, and walked back over to hand me one. His eyes were glassy, as though he’d been drinking all morning, but he didn’t smell of liquor, he smelled of meat.
I stared at him, and the bottom dropped out. Only the most rigid control kept me from shaking. I would die, I knew it.
To kill him—to right the balance of my debt—I would have to tear myself apart and still, somehow, keep breathing.
Dev had kissed my knuckles that morning, each one separate, a saint’s devotion.
I said, “I heard a funny thing this morning.”
“You did?” Victor said. “A coincidence, Phyllis, since I’ve heard a lot of funny things about you lately, too. You left your place two nights ago, a couple of hours before that rat tried to kill me. And do you know, I just remembered—something fell in the alley before they got away. Clattered on the stones. A gun, right? But it didn’t go off. And it sounded lighter than a gun, right? So what do you make of that?”
“Could have been a knife,” I said blandly.
Victor crunched ice between his teeth. “Just what I thought, dollface.”
We stared at one another. I lifted the tumbler experimentally. It would do, but it would be a shame to waste such good bourbon.
“They found two more bodies missing hands this morning,” I said. “Which is strange, since Maryann West was already dead.”
Victor narrowed his eyes and gave me that small, hard smile that was his truest face. “Just some trash, a pair of gypsies no one’ll miss. The police don’t care, don’t know why you do.”
“I’ve got the hands too, Vic.”
“And so you do, Phyllis. Which is strange, you know, because I have to tell you in my long experience with you people—let’s be honest for a moment here and admit that it is extensive, right?—I can’t say I’ve ever come across another white girl with the hands. Not that I’m complaining! Good to have one on staff, as it were. But you’re an odd one, Phyllis LeBlanc. Singular, in so many ways.”
I heard myself laughing.
So that’s how he knew. How he’d always known, and kept me scrambling to hide myself. Most white folk didn’t even believe in the hands. Figures that the one white man who did would decide to steal them. Like with the poor Barkley brothers, no crime was less interesting to the fine men of the New York Police Department than one acted upon a black or brown body.
“That funny?” he asked, and I lifted the tumbler, as though to toast him.
Someone pounded on the door. A soft grunt. It opened and Dev stumbled inside, sweating and wild-eyed.
“Dev? Where’d Jack get to?” Victor asked.
“Tied up,” Dev said behind me. I felt that hot wind rise up. The hands told me precisely what they thought of me, and what it was my duty to finish. I, who had taken so many unnecessary lives, would finally execute their perfect justice. There was no more time. They would break me, or I would break myself. I lifted the tumbler and let it fly.
It should have hit Victor in the temple with enough force to drop a cow.
My aim was perfect. The hands did not fail me.
But Dev had rushed me the moment I drew my arm back. He slammed me to the ground just as my hand released. And so the tumbler spun out and shattered to powder against the wall, an inch above Victor’s head.
I stayed on the floor, groaning. Dev had smashed into my bad shoulder. Deliberately, I knew.
When I managed to look up again, Dev was slamming Victor’s head against the wall. Victor grabbed his gun, but the shot went wide, cracking the plaster above my head. Dev knocked the gun out of Victor’s hand with his knee, then dragged him to the floor. I hauled myself to one elbow, then to my feet. I kicked the gun, at least, out of reach. My hands were oddly quiet; or perhaps that was merely my own heart, gasping for air. Dev had my five-inch knife, the one I’d left on the table back in the front room. Could I save him from what he’d so clearly determined to do? I could get the last tumbler from the sideboard. Hell, I could throw my shoe.
My hands spasmed. I watched the man I loved and the man I had resigned myself to murder struggling for their lives on the parquet floor, and I held myself still. I knew why Dev was doing this. And my heart, bruised and twisted but unexpectedly whole, decided to let him.
Victor shouted until he was hoarse for Red Man and Jack and Marty and anyone else. But he must have known as well as I did: no one would be here to save him. Dev lifted Victor’s shoulders and slammed him with a wet crack on the corner of his desk.
“You bitch,” Victor sobbed. There was blood and snot in his mustache; blood and spit dribbling from his torn lips. “You fucking bitch—”
Dev raised the knife and drove it straight into Victor’s sternum. Victor screamed. He bucked against Dev, hitting him again and again across the face and chest; bruising blows made stronger with mortal terror. I knew that strength; I had stumbled away from my kills as soft as pounded meat more times than anyone still human should remember. And now I watched this violence happen to someone I loved, and I held still my hands, which could have stopped it, and
