No one does. I step back out onto the sidewalk and cross the street to Officer Colleen’s building. A multitenant intercom is bolted to the brick beside the entrance. Only half of the ten slots have names on them. C.L. is scrawled across a label in what appears to be a sharpie next to a number sign, a 1, a letter D, and a fat gray button. I assume the letters are her initials. None of the other names start with C.
My finger hovers over the buzzer. I want to talk to her, reason with her, appeal to her sense of justice. Surely she can understand how awful it is to be a new mom, home with an infant, while your husband spends half the night with his girlfriend. She can’t really justify her actions. She’ll have to admit that whatever feelings she has developed for my husband don’t trump my claim to him as his wife and the mother of his child. She’ll let him go.
What if she won’t let me up?
Music penetrates the door. Someone is having a party inside. The music is live. Lots of drums. A garage band jamming in one of the semiconverted loft spaces, most likely. Brooklyn’s underground music scene is literally underground. Again, I stare at the buzzer menu. “Flying Free” appears to own the entire basement level. Either someone had hippie celebrity parents or it’s a private venue.
I hit Flying’s buzzer, and the door unlocks. No one asks for a name, despite the fact that there aren’t any visible cameras to check whether I’m an armed gunman. The fact that I know the location of the party is, apparently, good enough. I pull back half of the double steel door and walk up a narrow staircase.
Each landing opens to hallways with heavy, factory doors on one side. Tribal drums pound from the basement, louder than the house music at any club. Guitars screech. I ascend the first flight, my speed fueled by the rhythm reverberating up the stairwell. Normally, my thighs would burn from the effort of running up stairs. Yet I feel nothing except my determination to make my husband’s lover see reason.
A door opens several yards ahead. Quickly, I pivot to face the wall, holding the pipe and my purse close to my chest so it appears that I am searching for my keys. Scaring some poor tenant is the last thing I want.
Officer Colleen fills my peripheral vision. She’s dressed now, skinny jeans and a tight black tank with a looser button-down open on top of it. It’s one of those outfits that flatters both genders as long as the wearer is on the skinny side. A black bag hangs from her shoulder. Her mouth is painted a deep red. I realize with horror that she is heading out after my husband. She intends to show up at our apartment and spill the truth. She thinks he’ll leave me and our daughter for her.
What if she’s right?
I whirl around as she passes. The pipe is in my hand. It connects with the back of her head with a sickening crack, the sound of a home run at a baseball game. I see my hands trembling on the metal cylinder. Red is splattered on the wall. Something sticky spills from her scalp, gluing her hair into a clump.
What have I done?
I reach for her as she drops to her knees, ready to apologize and promise to call an ambulance. Though my cell is back at my apartment, her purse lies half open beside her body. There must be a phone in there. It’s three easy numbers—9-1-1. I couldn’t have hit her that hard. EMTs will be able to fix this. She’ll have a concussion. Stitches.
Her hand claws for the bag. I see a flash of something black and silver inside it.
Before she can grab her gun, I swing the pipe again. It strikes the curve of her shoulder, and she screams as bone snaps beneath the metal. Her voice doesn’t sound human to me. The figure beneath me isn’t a person. All I see is a hand, long fingers like strange arachnid legs, crawling toward a weapon.
If I want to live, I must stop the spider from reaching the gun.
The pipe comes down on her back. She’s pressed flat against the floor now, still struggling to raise her broken shoulder, to bend her elbow so that her arm can snag her purse’s shoulder strap. I drop the pipe, grab the gun. I turn it over in my hands; the metal is cool and smooth. It’s so much lighter than the pipe. Like it’s barely even real.
An animalistic, gurgling sound comes from beneath me. Her face is pressed to the concrete floor. There’s blood on my dress. Blood on the pipe. Bits of skull in her hair. Jake will never stay with me now. I’ll go to jail. She’ll go to the hospital. She’ll raise my Victoria.
I fall back from her. Suddenly, there’s a bang, louder than any drum.
I see myself standing over a lifeless body. Both of my hands are wrapped around the gun’s grip. My right index finger is on the trigger. A thin line of smoke curls from the barrel into the hallway. I must be imagining this. Maybe I am asleep in my apartment. Maybe I took Tyler’s advice. Went home.
Blood pools onto the concrete. This is real. Oh, my God. I fall to the ground, head bowed, ready for the army of neighbors that will pour from the apartments and overwhelm me, pin me to the wall as they call the police. An agonizing minute passes. Nothing happens. I think of my little Victoria and look back up at the body. Maybe, just maybe, fate has other plans. Perhaps I can return home to my baby.
I kneel and wipe the weapon on the dead woman’s shirt, trying to erase my unseen prints. All it does is smear blood across the gun. I slip the weapon back into the officer’s bag. There’s no leaving all this here. My prints are on the pipe beside the body and on the gun. My DNA must have shed all over her during the attack. I pick up the pipe and shove it into my handbag. Then I slip my purse over my shoulder and put her handbag on the other one. Balanced with a purse on each side, I grab her feet and drag her to the stairs.
A high heel breaks as I heave the dead weight toward me. I pull off my shoes and squeeze them into my handbag. Barefoot, I yank her the rest of the way to the landing. I sit for a moment and catch my breath. My limbs vibrate from exertion. I shake out my arms and then pull the body until the torso is draped over my own and the head rests on my chest. Another moment to prepare myself, and then I scoot my butt down each step, hoisting her along with me while unknown body fluids leak onto my chest and bare legs. I move quickly, back banging against the edges in the process, trying to reach the landing before anyone comes through the door. Somehow, no one enters. Everyone must be at the party or staying elsewhere to avoid the noise. Or maybe the industrial factory doors have made the apartments sound proof and no one realizes that a fatal shooting has taken place.
I prop the body against the wall while I open the front door, praying the whole time that the basement party continues blaring downstairs. God or the devil answers me. I press my back against the door, holding it open while I fit my arms beneath the dead woman’s pits and drag her from the building.
Once outside, I head straight for the broken door and into the fenced-in construction zone. I drop the body beside a man-sized mountain of dirt. My idea is to shovel the earth on top of it, hopefully hiding her long enough that whatever physical evidence I’ve left becomes sufficiently contaminated to be unusable. But the bloody trail I’ve carved into the soil makes me realize that she’d be discovered by morning. Besides, I can’t move enough dirt without a backhoe.
On the far side of the construction site is the East River. My arms ache from supporting the dead weight. I grab the hands and drag it across the dirt. At the riverbank, the ground gives way to an old concrete pier. Near the end is a pipe railing, erected, undoubtedly, for the safety of the construction vehicles rather than the workers. The railing is too high to hoist the form in my arms above it. Easier to push it beneath.