Mara sways in her chair, her skin dull as chalk.
I take her cold hands in mine, looking her in the eye.
“But that’s not fucking happening,” I assure her. “We will make our plan, and he’ll never get closer to you than the length of a room. You won’t fight him. You won’t even touch him. I’ll do what needs to be done. I just need your help to create the illusion. He’s bigger than me—I need one moment of surprise. Just one single moment.”
Mara swallows hard.
“I can do it,” she says. “I want to do it. For Erin, for Valerie, for everyone he’s killed and everyone else he’ll hurt.”
She lays her right palm over the scar on her left wrist, and the left palm over the scar on the right, clamping her hands tight like a covenant, like an oath.
“And I want to do I it for me. He tried to kill me, too. I’m only alive because of myself. Because I ran down that fucking mountain.”
“Yes, you did,” I say, feeling another bolt of guilt. I could have carried her down. But I wasn’t awake yet. Mara hadn’t alivened me.
I explain to her, “Shaw has to die to protect you. But also, because I’m responsible. I didn’t think so at the time. I thought whatever he did was his business, and had nothing to do with me. I see it differently now. I may not be Doctor Frankenstein, but I helped flip the switch on that particular monster.”
“We’re the only ones who can stop him,” Mara says.
“We’re the only ones who will.”
17
Mara
Cole and I have made our plan.
We’ve run over it again and again in the safety of his living room.
Cole said he would prepare me for our confrontation with Shaw. At the time, I stupidly thought that meant that he would train me, like a fighting montage in a movie.
Now I realize how foolish I was.
I have no hope in an actual fight with Shaw. I might as well try to wrestle a grizzly bear. No training Cole could give me in months or even years could ever compensate for the biological imbalance in reach and mass.
Cole has no intention of me ever touching Shaw. But he’s intensely aware of the danger I’ll be in all the same. He knows what a killer can do. He knows Shaw’s violence because he knows his own.
So he drills me again and again and again, even though my only role is to be the mouse running from the cat.
Cole needs that one single moment of distraction to put a knife in the side of Shaw’s neck.
I’ll lure Shaw.
I’ll be the bait.
The real preparation was watching the tape.
Cole made me watch Randall die, because I had never seen someone killed before. Especially not someone I knew personally.
Cole knew I’d have to desensitize myself to blood, to screams, to the impulses of pity that might cause me to deviate from the plan. Cole knows the terror of violence, the physical effect it has on a person. He knows how it breaks apart your mind, causing you to act on instinct in all the wrong ways.
He drills me over and over and over, so that in the heat of the battle with Shaw, I’ll stick to our agreement.
“If worse comes to worse,” Cole says, fixing me with his dark stare. “If things are going wrong … you run, Mara. You don’t try to help me. You don’t try to stay. You fucking run. Because he’ll be right behind you—and if I’m gone, there’s no one left to save you.”
“That’s not going to happen. He’ll be dead before he even knows what’s happening.”
“That’s the plan,” Cole agrees.
That would comfort me, except I remember the old quote, “No plan survives contact with the enemy.”
Another complication is the continued surveillance of Officer Hawks.
Cole complained to the SFPD. He has enough connections in city government that Hawks has been told to back off. Hawks ignored this order, still trailing Cole on his own off-hours, showing up to every event where they’ll let him in the door, and visiting Clay Street more than the artists that keep studio space in Cole’s building.
Hawks takes his opportunity to intercept me when Cole is at Corona Heights Park, overseeing the final stages of construction on his monumental sculpture. Probably freezing his ass off, because a frigid wind is blowing in from the bay.
Officer Hawks steps in front of me before I can touch the heavy glass doors of the Alta Plaza building.
The wind whips our hair into our faces—his as well as mine, because Hawks hasn’t had it cut in a while. In fact, his entire person looks ill-groomed. All these after-hours stakeouts are taking their toll on him. He’s unshaven, eyes bloodshot.
“Doesn’t it bother you?” he demands, “Sleeping with the man who killed your roommate?”
I round on him, equally as indignant.
“I told you who killed Erin,” I hiss. “I have to see him at every fucking party I attend. Shaw is the Beast, not Cole. Why don’t you do your fucking job and arrest him?”
Hawks lets out a bitter laugh.
“He’s really got you fooled, doesn’t he?”
“Cole isn’t trying to fool me, and I’m not trying to fool him. We’ve seen each other’s scars. You think you’re a good man? I bet there’s something you’re ashamed of. Something you’ve never told anyone. Cole’s told it all to me. ALL of it. I’m not saying he’s a saint. But he is honest.”
“An honest killer?” Hawks sneers.
“You’ve never shot anyone?” I sneer right back at him.
“I’m a cop. It’s my job to catch criminals.”
“Yeah? I bet you only shot them when you had to, right? I bet every time you pulled your gun out, you absolutely had to do it, there was no other way. No part of you made a judgment on that person. No part of you thought they deserved to die.”
Hawks stares at me through the smudged lenses of his glasses.
My time with Cole has taught me to look for signals: the motions on the face that the mind can’t control.
For Hawks, it’s a twitch of his right eyelid, blinking over his iris like a camera shutter.