My hands trembled. I wanted to feel good. I wanted to get the old Cassidy back, the way I had this weekend. I didn’t want to look at her through the wrong end of a telescope, barely recognizing the person I used to be or the person I’d become. I was too good for that.
But when I returned to my room and pulled the small plastic bag from the inside of my music box I felt a twinge of misgiving as I stared at the yellow pill balanced between my fingers. Something wasn’t right about these, or was it that something wasn’t right about me? I knew I needed to figure it out and I promised myself that I would start first thing tomorrow.
For now, exhaustion and depression picked apart my willpower until all that was left was crumbs. I spun the pill around and around in between those two fingers. Around and around. Until the crumbs were picked over, too.
Only half, I promised myself. That was all I needed. Just a half and then the calm would be there to carry me away.
Just a half and I’ll be okay.…
TEN
Marcy
Whoever said murder was an ugly business hadn’t tried it. The way the world bloomed red had been nothing short of poetic, but not even I had expected it to feel that good. With my fist closed around the knife as it sank through his skin, slipped between his ribs, and found his organs, I felt like a goddess. His blood had been warm—just how I’d imagined freshly churned cow’s milk—spilling over my fingers.
Blood everywhere. So much blood. I replayed the moments, a reel of the night’s greatest hits, and grinned like an idiot at the memory. Each recollection sat in my mind like a gift that could be unwrapped over and over. There was the second when he realized he’d made a mistake. The one when he knew with utter certainty that I wasn’t the quarry. The heartbeat when he saw the knife. The shriek when he felt the first stab of pain. The space in time when at last the light went out in his one remaining eye.
I wanted to celebrate. I wanted to raise my glass to justice. And revenge.
I twisted my hands around the steering wheel impatiently as I drove along the dead street of Grimwood. At stoplights I revved the engine, craving the roar of it in my chest. I wanted more. I reached over toward the passenger’s side and snapped open the glove compartment. Fishing around, I felt the phone and wallet I’d stripped from the body, the things that told me Mick Holcolm was dead. That was Short One’s name, it turned out. I bypassed both of these things—for now—and pulled out the two scraps of paper with jagged handwriting scrawled across it that I’d found last night discarded in the cup holder. When pieced together, I’d recognized the name.
Lena.
I could easily picture the face that went with it, staring up at me from the pavement with big, frightened eyes.
Lena Leroux.
I read the numbers and punched them into the keypad. The phone rang in my ear. I was about to hang up when a breathy voice came on the line. “Hello?” I waited, listening to the thud of my beating heart against the phone. “Hello?… Is that you?”
*
THE GAS STATION at Third and Mulholland cast a flickering, fluorescent glow that made it look like the inside of a freezer display case. Oil stained the concrete in slick puddles. An overstuffed trash can spit up plastic soda bottles and cardboard. I found Lena standing underneath the white, cascading light, hand clutched around the top of a six-pack of beer.
I pulled the car halfway between two parking spots and rolled down the window. “Where’d you get that?” I asked. Lena wore a long-sleeved fishnet top that showed off thin, fuchsia spaghetti straps that poked out from underneath it. Faded gray jeans hugged her skeleton-skinny legs all the way down to a pair of black boots that stopped at the ankle.
Lena rested her elbows on the side of my car. Her chunky black bangs fell against her eyelashes. She jerked her head to gesture back at the gas station. “Inside. I paid the cashier twenty bucks to give it to me. You said you were in the mood to celebrate, didn’t you?” I nodded. She reached up and parted the bangs to push them from her large, cartoonish eyes. “May I?”
I nodded again and Lena tucked her bony knees into the seat beside me where she cradled the beer in her lap.
Inside, the cashier who’d sold Lena the beer watched us over the top of a National Enquirer. “Were you sleeping?”
She shrugged. “Barely. I have insomnia. It blows.”
“Me too,” I said. The car felt ten degrees warmer with her in it. “But I don’t mind it.”
She hugged the cardboard carton to her chest and the cans rattled. “That’s good, I guess. My dad says nothing good happens after midnight.” She turned her face toward me expectantly. Everything about Lena was a paradox. Her wide eyes gave her a look of innocence and sweetness at odds with the dark fringe of hair that masked most of her face. She seemed equal parts helpless baby deer and streetwise feral kitten.
“Your dad’s full of shit.”