It struck me how close this felt to wearing a wire. If only. A recording of this conversation would be the end for Calder and Rizzo. Unfortunately my brain isn’t a tape recorder.
The edgeless pain in my skull sharpened and felt like it expanded, the bones in my head straining against the pressure.
She attacked.
“What are you doing?” I yelled out. I got a loud bang on the bars from my cell neighbors. Guess I’d disturbed their cold turkey night.
She walked several paces forward and reached out for Calder. She had no weapons and I knew she could move faster. She moved with such steady restraint, I got a sense she might be trying to hold herself back. Somehow I knew hate propelled her, not logic. Another one of those things I knew, but didn’t know how I knew it.
I felt pressure on my shoulders and her vision snapped back by several feet. I heard shouting in Spanish. The two guards held her from behind.
“Samantha!” Calder said from the safety of his chair, though he looked clearly rattled.
My body tensed with hers and she swiveled. Next thing I knew one of the guards went sailing over her shoulder. She reached forward, grabbed a tiny Mexican flag off Rizzo’s desk and spun. I watched a close-up view of the little wooden flag pole spiking into his neck.
The man reached for his throat. It looked like he only pushed the stick in deeper as his hand slapped over the wound. On the carpet below I could see the other guard rolling and holding his crotch.
Our view spun back around and then my field of view filled with a fist. My nose radiated with a faraway pain and as the fist pulled back I saw Rizzo gritting his teeth angrily. I wasn’t sure I’d ever seen him standing up before.
I called out in pain, got another rattle on the bars and a, “Shut the hell up” from the next cell.
Sam staggered back. Rizzo did not follow on the attack. He only stood to prove his point. My pulse raced. She was going to get us killed.
“Get the fuck out,” he said.
“I’ll do the job,” Sam said. “And when it’s done I want my money. All twenty million.”
“You’ll do the job because if you don’t we’ll kill you,” Calder said. “Fucking crazy bitch.” His accent came out heavier than ever. “What the fuck is wrong with you?”
If he only knew. Hell, if I only knew. I got one of those strange sensations she didn’t quite know the answer either.
“You owe me for this rug,” Rizzo said looking down. “God dammit, he’s bleeding fucking everywhere.” He spoke to the other guard. “Get him the fuck out of here.”
“I’ll be back,” Sam said.
“You call next time,” Calder said. “No more unannounced. I want to hear the job is done. You come back here before that, you’re dead. And you better fucking be sure nothing can be traced back to us.”
Sam stumbled out. The angry Spanish yelling of the guard who still had a throat chased her out the door.
I writhed on my cot like a kid with a nightmare. My eyes were crazy glued shut as I watched her fumble her way to the elevator and ride down, checking her reflection in the mirrored walls and gently touching her nose to see if it was broken. It didn’t appear to be.
She moved with less confidence than before. Less Terminator-style relentlessness. She walked through a well-appointed lobby with a door to an indoor pool and even a shoeshine stand I doubted anyone else in this tower knew the scumbags living among them.
On the sidewalk a man approached her. I heard him first, then she turned to the sound of his voice. We saw a black man, frail and probably ten years younger than he looked, but the street had aged him.
“You got a dollar? Tryin’ to get some food.” He said it all in a slur, a line repeated a thousand times a day until it loses all meaning.
She reached out with both hands, put one under his chin, one of the back of his head, and turned. The man’s head spun a half turn and his tongue slid out from between his teeth. I could hear the pop of vertebrae uncoupling in his neck.
The expanding pressure pushed at the walls of my skull from the inside again. I wondered what it felt like in her head.
She let the homeless man drop the way you let go of something you don’t want anywhere near you anymore. Like what you picked up wasn’t what you thought.
Her hands moved so fast, the unfiltered rage inside her pulling the tendons in her arm to make the motions. She backed away from the body as he fell until she hit the side of her car with her back.
She felt a regret. A thin part of my brain recognized another hairline fracture in hers. She hadn’t wanted to kill him. She couldn’t help herself. The new part of her acted on its own, like mine did.
Then she did something I did not expect. And yes, snapping a guy’s neck fell into the ‘expected’ category. She cried. She leaned against her car, put her hands up over her face, careful not to touch to hard to her throbbing nose, and she cried.
“Get out of my head!” she screamed. I felt someone wrapping a fist around my heart and then a head rush, dizzy spell, slight nausea. I opened my eyes and the world was all double images and tunnel vision. She tried to push me out. Shying away. Hiding from her twin so I wouldn’t see her secret.
It worked. My world went black, then the dismal florescence of the jail faded back in front of me. I was crying too. I didn’t even realize the crying started until another warning pound of the bars came from next door. I snapped out of the intensity of watching her have a moment of real emotion and noticed the tears soaking my own face.
“Lady, you got to shut the fuck up. Some of us trying to sleep,” came a desperate voice form the next cell.
“Fuck off,” I said. My surprise stopped my tears. God damn that felt good.
THERE’S SOMETHING HAPPENING HERE
Here’s what I think happened: no one can be all good and no one can be all bad. Our bodies were self correcting. A tiny hint of morality crept into her skull and a little bit of nastiness slithered out of mine. Like the drug started to wear off, so to speak. But how long would it take to come down?
SEVEN A.M. AND ALL’S WELL
I slept another tequila drunk deep sleep. Once my brain finally agreed to shut down, it closed up shop hard and wouldn’t open the door for nobody.
The clanking of a nightstick against the bars woke me up. I had to pee and the prospect of doing it on the open toilet in front of the quartet of inmates in the cell next to me, now awake and off the high from last night and each one of them suffering the effects, did not thrill me.
“Got visitors,” the cop said.
Visitors?
Blake stepped around the corner first. He’d seen a doctor. His arm hung in a sling and a heavy bandage wrapped around his shoulder.
“I told him this was a bad idea,” he said to me.