finds you and brings you home and for the next six months you’re in and out of hospitals and you can’t speak, can’t feel, can’t think. You sit in a chair facing a window and everyone thinks you’re looking out the window, but you’re actually staring
And then one day it’s fall and the wind is blowing the leaves off the trees and one errant leaf snags on the window pane next to the wooden slats and when it does, you focus on the leaf. For the first time in months, you see there’s something on the other side of the window, and if there’s something beyond that window, then maybe it’s something big enough to live for.
You begin the process of building your life from scratch. But you’re not building the life you were meant to live, you’re building something else altogether.
You realize you’re alive and not dead or dreaming. But you also realize that while you’re alive on the outside, on the inside you’re dead. A few months pass and they send you back to school, but something’s different. All the kids know what happened to you. They taunt you, hit you, but when they do, you feel no pain. That’s because none of them can hit you like the man hit you. And yet, you want to be hit, so you taunt them back. They hit you and you laugh. They hit you some more and you laugh harder. You love the feel of your own blood in your mouth. The taste and texture makes you feel almost alive.
You’re fifteen now, and you keep growing more and more beautiful, but you could care less. You start taking drugs, you flirt with the fathers of your former friends, and you get some of them to sleep with you in return for money you use to buy more drugs.
You eventually get busted for prostitution and you’re sent to a state hospital for evaluation. You’re coming off your drugs cold turkey and you freak out and they give you an injection and put you in restraints. The first time you wake up you find your arms, waist and ankles strapped to a bed. The next time you wake up, two orderlies are molesting you. You scream and wail and they run away and you think you know how to beat them, but all you’ve done was teach them to give you a stronger dose next time.
You spend a few weeks in the ward and by the time you’re clean you learn you have an IQ of 182, which is a hundred points more than you need for the life you’re willing to accept.
So you’re back home and back to other things, as well, like buying drugs and selling your body. And by the time you’re eighteen, you’re doing some new things, too, like stealing cars. You love the cars, love boosting them, love driving them fast, with the windows down and the radio up and the bass line thumping strong and steady.
Like a beating heart.
One night you’re driving a tweaked out Super Bee and you’re blitzed enough to wonder what it feels like to slam into the car that’s parked near the bushes where it all changed for you. You hit it hard, but you survive, and then it’s back to the ward, back to the knockout drugs that make the late night rape sessions possible for the otherwise un-dateable orderlies.
And you go on like that for a number of weeks or months until something happens: for the second time in your life, a man shows up and changes your life. Except that this man understands you and knows what you need. His name is Donovan Creed and yeah, he knows exactly what you need.
You need a reason.
You don’t get to be like eighteen-year-old Callie without experiencing soul-crushing trauma. And you don’t become the empty, broken, killing machine Callie of today unless you have a reason.
So yeah, I gave Callie a reason. I took her under my wing and trained her. She was an easy study because she was indefatigable, and because she flat didn’t give a shit.
Callie’s reason is revenge.
That’s why it’s easy for her to put a bullet into a total stranger, or kill date raping young men in cold blood. That’s why sometimes, for Callie, it’s personal.
I looked at her in the Gulfstream, sitting across the aisle, facing me, reclining, eyes closed. And God help her, she was and is the most exquisitely beautiful woman to ever walk the earth.
And the most deadly.
I couldn’t fathom this request of hers to see a Vegas show, but if Callie’s heart had opened to the point that she could appreciate theater, then I wanted to be there to experience it with her.
Still, I wondered what she meant by the life and death part.
Chapter 19
The Cirque du Soleil stage production of “O” was considered so important to the success of the Bellagio Hotel, they actually built the stage first, and then built the hotel and casino around it. And what a stage it is! It houses a pool containing one-point-five million gallons of water! There is a platform in the pool filled with thousands of tiny holes that allows it to rise and fall in seconds, without creating a wake. This enables cast members to perform high dives into the pool one minute, and skip across the surface the next.
Tickets are sold out months in advance. I didn’t ask Callie how she obtained our front-row balcony seats, and didn’t need to. Callie gets what Callie wants.
