“Who do you think will be faster?” Her voice not much above a whisper, it carried in the night’s stillness.
His lids twitched. Nothing cold there now, his eyes filled with the hot spark of fear. A torn pocket hung from his once navy jacket. Specks of white spittle clung to the corners of his mouth. His nostrils flared with each harsh breath. His hand trembled, and the gun shook. They both knew who would be faster.
“No matter what you do right now, you’re a dead man.”
Dilated pupils obliterated any trace of his irises. Without his voice, he looked neither as big nor as tall as she remembered. Nor as frightening. The only thing remaining of the man who’d shot her husband were his boots. Those bore the rankness of putrefying flesh, the leather cracked, the soles worn to scraps.
“The cops will find you soon.” She widened her stance, bent her knees an equal amount, readied for his move. “In your apartment, I think.” Something flickered in Dennis Martin’s eyes. She went on. “You hate that place, don’t you? The cracks in the walls, the overhead light that’s merely a bulb hanging from the ceiling.” She saw it all, as if images jumped from his head to hers, as if someone had turned on that overhead bulb inside her head. “The walls are the color of dirt. The carpet stinks like cat piss.”
His head tilted like a dog’s, first this way, then that. She saw his life as if she stood inside his head, in the very room where he spent his days and his nights.
“But that’s not the worst of it. No, the worst is that damn green couch, the one you sleep on, the one that smells like the old guy who died on it before you moved in.” She let her voice drop intimately. “Can’t get the stench out, can you, no matter what you do? The puke, bowels letting loose. Wish Dickie hadn’t told you all the details with such relish, huh?”
“That’s bullshit.” Flecks of spittle flew with his words. His eyes darted in fear.
She lowered her voice, both the pitch and the level, let it surround him, mingle with his dread, then she set a torch to it. “When you hear the cops coming for you, you’ll go out that window, the one at the foot of the sofa, the one the old guy used to spit his tobacco through. Out you go, only you can’t go down, can you, Dennis?” she said with a purr. “No, you can’t go down because they’re at the bottom of the fire escape, too. So it’s up, up, to the roof.”
“What the hell is going on with you, bitch?” His voice quavered, and the gun shimmied. He’d lost his power long ago.
She stomped his nerves the way he’d stomped her ribs, beneath the spiked heel of her shoe. “The roof, Dennis. You run and you run, but ... where the hell are you gonna go? Jump, it’s your only chance. You think it’s not so far to the next building. You think you can fly, and if you don’t quite make it, you’ll surely be able to grab the ledge and pull yourself up. Yeah, Dennis, think you can do it. You have it all planned as your escape route.” She paused, licked her lips, savored the panic quaking through his thin body made frail by drugs and lack of conscience. “But guess what?”
His eyes wide like the saucer of tuna she fed Buzzard, Dennis Martin couldn’t move if his life depended on it.
She let him hear it all, sealed his fate with words. “Guess what, Dennis. You’re not going make it. You’ll jump and...” She let one hand fall from the grip of the gun. “Splat. It’ll take them weeks to clean you off the concrete.”
“You’re a sick fuck.” He chomped his bottom lip to hide the tremble.
She smiled, and it was the closest she’d come to being like Bud Traynor. “Sssssplattttt.” He jerked at the sound. “Don’t worry, Dennis,” she whispered like a night creature. “I don’t think it’s going to hurt much.”
Max watched him run. He took the fence with a two-handed climb, disappearing beyond the rim of light.
Max fell to her knees with her face in her hands.
*
Max managed to cross the freeway, then her limbs shook so badly, she knew she’d have an accident if she didn’t pull over. Couldn’t crash Sutter’s SUV. She parked beneath the glow of a street lamp, wedging the car between an old Maverick and a sparkling Beemer.
Her eyes burned. Oil stained her skirt and jacket. Her tights were torn at the knees. Sweat and blood reeked on her hands. She’d touched Bud, had to make sure he was dead, because it didn’t seem possible. Too fast, too other-worldly. Karma. She’d left Cameron’s gun in his hand. Now she couldn’t get the stink of his bodily fluids out of her nostrils or off her fingers. She wiped them down her ruined skirt.
“You’re okay, Max.”
She almost cried with the feel of Cameron’s voice inside her, his peppermint scent settling over her.
“You feel lost now. But you’ll find yourself again, I promise.”
Lost, yes, and somehow diminished with the knowledge that Cameron’s death, too, had been part of a plan. Bud’s plan. It wasn’t random. Without randomness, her gut screamed she could have done something to stop it.