“God dammit,” Sam said. She let Mrs. Randolph escape out the back door. The grey-haired old lady struck me as very unlikely to come back with a hidden pistol. I couldn’t decide if it was good news or not that she might come back with the police.
Sam turned away from me and bent down to lift the judge off the floor. He looked even older, a wild fan of white hair rising from his forehead and a streak of matted red running down the side of his head by his ear.
“Who are you?”
“Me?” she said. “I’m her.” She pointed at me cowering against the banister of the staircase. “And she’s me.”
Randolph wore an advanced Alzheimer’s kind of confusion on his face.
“You can’t do this,” I said. Even as the words came out I knew how futile they were. Being friggin’ helpless made me so damn angry. I wanted to hit her, smash her with a fireplace poker, choke the life out of her to get her to stop, but I couldn’t. My arms stayed pinned to my side, incapable of violence. I was the U.N., the London police, Switzerland. All I could do was use a harsh Mom-like tone of voice and hope it did the job to get through to a person made of pure evil.
She pushed him against the wall next to a grandfather clock. Oh God, I thought, is he a grandfather? Probably. He’s got kids, grandkids, a wife.
“Please,” I begged. She laughed.
“She wants me to put you out of your misery. Can you hear her beg for it?”
“That’s not what I want!”
He choked on a word that never fully formed. She lifted his tie and cinched it tighter around his neck. I reached out a hand, but my body wouldn’t let me move forward. I tried to move a leg, slide a foot across the tile, even tilt forward and maybe knock her over as I fell and give him time to escape. Useless, all of it.
The sudden lack of oxygen snapped him out of his daze. He clawed at the tie and at her fingers and I felt tiny pinpricks of sensation across my knuckles and phantom pains from his yellowing fingernails scratching the backs of her hands.
I thought of my trick from the car. I shut my eyes and tried to reach deep down in to her brain to maybe get control of her hands and lift them off the tie, let some air through to his lungs again. When I felt myself moving from my mind to hers the feeling got more comfortable, easier. But, when I got deeper inside, this time I felt pain. A searing heat tore through my body and I recoiled, slamming my back into the long spindles of the banister.
Being inside her head during the act of murder forced some sort of strange reaction. Her body shot through with ten thousand arrows and I felt every poisoned tip. I coughed, a foul taste in the back of my throat like ashes.
She seemed to stand taller the weaker he got. His body began to bend and fold in on himself, weakness surrendering to her strength. Spit foamed in the corners of his mouth.
I tried closing my eyes so I couldn’t see him suffer, but when I did I got flashes of her vision and with it, hot branding irons scorched my skin. I kept my eyes open but turned away, staring at a set of nesting tables in the entryway and a brass figure of a stork with its beak pointing skyward. I’d never be able to look at my house porn again. In every tastefully decorated foyer and sitting room I’d always wonder what it would look like while someone is being murdered there.
His hands stopped clawing at hers and slapped, then brushed and then fell to his sides, giving up. He waited for the blackout to come, still with questions in his eyes. “Who? Why?”
I looked up, not wanting to ignore the man’s dying breath. Well, he’d already breathed his last, but his dying moment anyway. Like the others, I wanted somehow to let him know it was her, not me. I wasn’t the one strangling him to death. Nope, all her doing. Leave me out of it.
I caught his eye, but I think it was too late. I read no understanding there. As I watched his moist eyes, looking for the moment they moved from alive to dead, a blood vessel burst. A sudden shock of red filled the whites around his dark brown iris and wide black pupil.
The red stained explosion became more than I could handle. I looked away again. He would die locking gaze with my eyes, but my eyes on a killer’s face.
A LONG TIME COMING
Then I did something so very unlike me. I cried.
It came up from within me like another tormented layer of this whole body splitting shitstorm. The Tomboy me didn’t recognize it at first. I immediately, defensively excused it away as the wimpy, do-good side of me rearing her ugly cheer-squad head. Then I realized I should have been crying all along.
The massive shootouts at work and at the DA’s office were impossible to grasp. That much destruction, that many dead bodies weren’t real. My only frame of reference seeing so many bodies on a floor were the sleepovers we used to have at Liz Mesa’s house. Six, seven, eight girls tucked into sleeping bags, mouths open, retainers drooling out onto borrowed pillows.
Even the first two men Sam killed, my would-be bombers, I’d been too out of it to really register any emotion. Plus, they tried to kill me, the bastards.
But this, one death, up close. This hit me as too real. I wept. Deep, choking sobs partly for Judge Randolph and partly for me.
I did this. She is part of me. The ugly part I kept hidden, as we all do. If only everyone in the world were forced to confront the sludge black side of themselves I think things would take a very sharp turn for the good.
Between the long sucking inhales of uncontrolled crying I heard him hit the floor. The way he’d been leaning into the grandfather clock must have pushed it forward as he fell because right after the body fall came the massive crash and shatter of the antique clock on the tile floor. I felt shards of glass drizzle over my feet. My body flinched at the terrible sound of it. The crash, the splintering of wood and breaking of glass, now that sounded like death. Not the quiet rustle of clothes and dull slap of flesh on the floor his body made. Noise. Din. Cacophony like a Greenwich Village performance art piece.
I put both my hands over my face, the wet streaks of fallen tears smearing into my hands. I should have done something earlier. Months ago.
I’d been making excuses. When Lucas and I started dating it became a trap, a slow quicksand I couldn’t escape from because to escape meant admitting everything. Before Lucas I convinced myself I had no choice. They threatened to kill me. A ready-made excuse for taking their money, turning my back on my coworkers, my job. I never hurt anyone, but I sure as hell handed Calder and Rizzo the knife.
That first night, right after they made me the offer I couldn’t refuse, I should have nodded and said yes then gone immediately to Cranner. Told him everything. Gone into WITSEC. Maybe gone undercover to bust Calder and Rizzo properly. I took the easy way instead. The way that came with an envelope of money every week.
Even since all this craziness started I’d been using the excuse that it wasn’t really me. It was someone else. Her. Sam. Bullshit. Wake up girl. It’s you. Those are your hands around that man’s throat. Don’t deny it.