Blood Price - part 2 (Patreon)

The handle turns, and standing there with a dresser I can't move and a body that just told me exactly what it's worth, the idea comes up whole. Ugly, and useful, and the useful part is that it's ugly.

He's here for a two-hundred-twenty-pound contractor with his ribs stove in.

Men like him carry one script for walking in on a man and a different script for walking in on a woman, and the half second it takes him to turn that page is a half second I own. I'm about to be worth nothing to him. That's the whole plan. There's nothing else in this room I can use.

Noise and steam, already running, already doing the one thing I'd never have had time to set up. Two things that put a man's eyes where I want them.

Four steps to the bed. My heart is going hard and high and I let it, because pressing it down takes time I don't have and because I'm about to need it on my face. The gun is still in my hand. The grip is still too big for it. Doesn't matter.

Then the covers up over my lap and bunched high at my chest, the way a frightened woman covers herself, and my legs together with the knees drawn up, small, taking up as little of the bed as a person can take up. The blood on me works too. It's somebody's, and he won't know whose, and a man walking into a room like this one wants it to be somebody else's. I take a breath. The handle finishes turning.

The door doesn't swing open. It stops.

A pause. A low voice outside, muttered, half a word into a phone or just to himself. Then the door kicks open, slamming against the wall, and I do the only thing I can: I make the first sound.

I scream.

It comes out high and ragged and breathy, and the terrifying thing is how little I have to fake. My voice cracks up into a register I've never owned, and I'm not faking the pitch of it, only where it's pointed. I scrabble back against the headboard, dragging the sheet with me, one arm clamped across my chest over the covers, knees pulling in, eyes wide. I know exactly how this looks, I've protected women who looked exactly like this, I've been the man who turned toward the noise, and every man I've ever worked with would have turned.

He fills the doorway.

Big. Bigger than the door almost, heavyset through the shoulders in a long dark coat, and the gun in his fist comes up first, sweeping the room, past the empty desk chair, past my shirt draped like a tent over its back, past the boots, and his face is doing exactly what I need it to do. It's a face built for this work and I watch the confusion move through it anyway. He came here to finish a man. He's looking at a naked girl in a cheap motel at three in the morning with the shower running, and none of his script pages fit.

"Whoa - whoa, hey - hey, please -" My voice. This voice, breathy and thin, and I pitch it up, crack it. "I didn't - please don't, please -"

His gun stays up but drifts, no longer aimed at me, aimed at nothing, aimed at the middle distance of a man recalculating. His eyes do the sweep I knew they'd do: the bed, the bathroom door, the steam pouring out of it in a thick white curtain, the sound of the shower hammering acrylic. His body turns toward the noise, toward where a wounded man would be, because that's the story the water tells.

"He's - oh God - he's in there," I say, and I point, frantically, arm shaking, genuinely shaking, toward the bathroom. "He told me not to say anything, he's got a - I think he's got a gun, please, please don't let him -"

I let the sentence break into a sob. It isn't hard.

The thug's jaw works. I can see him deciding. The girl is noise. Not his problem unless she starts screaming loud enough to matter, and I'm already modulating even the screaming, keeping it under the shower's hiss, keeping it a problem he can walk away from. His problem is in the bathroom. His target is in the bathroom. The steam is moving, the water is loud, and somewhere behind his flat eyes the decision finishes: turn your back on the crying woman, because women aren't threats.

He steps past the foot of the bed.

His back is to me. The long coat, the wide spread of his shoulders, the gun rising toward the bathroom doorway, toward the white billow of steam where nobody stands.

My right hand slides under the sheet and finds the grip.

The trigger sits against my finger, and my hands are trembling and my heart is going fast and the covers are pooled around my waist and my chest is bare and none of it matters. He taught me the last lesson himself, walking past me, deciding what I was in one glance. He looked at this body and saw a victim, and he's about to learn what I learned just minutes ago in this room: the body is just the chassis. The chassis carries the gun.

I'm still shaking. I let it shake. A trembling hand pulls a trigger just as dead.

He takes his second step toward the steam, coat swinging with his weight, and I throw off the sheet and stand up fully nude beside the bed behind him, both hands finding the grip, the stance I've fired from ten thousand times settling into this narrow frame like it never left, arms locked, the pad of my finger taking up slack, and I aim at the center of that broad turned back and I say the name.

"Groz."

It comes out high and thin and nothing like I meant it. He turns anyway. The name does the work; it was never going to be the voice.

He starts to turn at the word. That's the last thing he ever does with his spine.

The shot is enormous in the closed room, a single hard crack that punches through the shower's hiss and keeps going, ringing off the tile and the thin walls and somewhere behind my eyes. The recoil that used to be nothing goes up and back through wrists that aren't built for it, and further than it has any business going, and I ride it down.

I put the round through his back, just left of center, where the spine meets the ribcage and the great vessels live behind it. I know the anatomy. I've known it since my first deployment. What I didn't know until this second is that knowing it and using it from this body would feel like reciting a prayer in someone else's voice.

He doesn't fall right away. He arches, the whole big frame of him bowing backward, coat swinging wide, arms flung out from his sides, the gun tumbling out of his fist and dropping onto the floor. The exit wound opens on his chest in a dark bloom that spreads fast through the pale fabric of his shirt, and his mouth opens too, and what comes out isn't a shout, it's a soft surprised grunt, the sound of a man who has been told a fact he can't argue with.

The steam is still pouring out of the bathroom behind him. The shower keeps hammering, indifferent, and the white cloud rolls in a slow, churning curtain, and for one suspended moment this is the whole image, framed and held: him mid-arch in the thick of the vapor, blood blooming, coat flaring, and me, standing naked beside the bed at the far edge of the frame, both hands locked around the pistol, smoke curling thin and gray from its muzzle, my chest heaving with breath that comes high and fast.

He folds. His knees go first, driving him down onto the stained carpet with a double thud, and then he tips forward onto his face, and the weight of him landing shakes the lamp. The room goes very quiet under the shower's noise. Just steam and water and the smell, hot copper, sharp over the bleach and stale tobacco of the bedding.

I stay in the stance for three more breaths. Muzzle on the center of his back. Finger indexed along the frame, out of the guard, because that's trained in, though not into these hands. He doesn't move.

And I'm listening past him the whole time, waiting for the rest of it. A bed going in 112. A voice. The walkway boards taking somebody's weight. A nine millimeter in a closed room at three in the morning puts a face in a window inside ten seconds anywhere people have anything to lose.

I count thirty. The Starlight gives me back the shower running and the compressor behind the ice machine and one truck out on the access road that doesn't slow down.

Nobody here is calling anybody. That's what a place like this is for, and it's the same reason the man on my carpet walked up to my door at a normal speed without bothering to be quiet.

Dawn.

Her name comes up in me the way the steam comes out of the bathroom, inevitable, filling everything. The sound her head made. The machine that breathes for her now, the slow mechanical sigh of it, the way her hands don't close around mine anymore. This man worked for the people who did that. Maybe he was there. I'll go through his pockets in a minute. Right now I take one breath of the plain fact and let it be the only thing in my head: he's dead, Groz isn't, and the list is shorter by one.

I lower the pistol. The smoke thread from the muzzle has thinned to nothing. My arms are shaking now that they're allowed to, fine and fast, shoulders to fingertips, and my legs aren't much better under me. Standing still is its own negotiation with this low center, this wide-set balance, my weight shifting around underneath me looking for somewhere to sit. I put a hand on the nightstand to steady myself and the laminate is cool and slick under a palm with no calluses at all.

I cross to him. My bare feet make almost no sound on the carpet, and that wrongness moves through me again, the quiet of my own footfalls, the lightness, a body that arrives places without announcing itself. I step over his outflung arm. Up close he smells of tobacco and gun oil and the iron of his own blood, and his face is turned toward the bathroom door, toward the steam, toward the empty stall where nobody ever stood. He died pointing at a lie I built out of hot water and a scream. I want to feel something complicated about that and I don't. What I feel is the cold, level satisfaction of a job step completed, and under it, faint and far away, the grief that this body is the one that finished it.

His coat first. I kneel beside him, carefully, knees apart, because even kneeling is different now. I've had my hands on the door and the tap and the drawer and now his coat, and there's nothing to be done about it, and it occurs to me halfway through his inside pocket that the prints I'm leaving all over Room 114 might be fresh, might not be on file anywhere in the world.

In his inner pocket, wrapped in a plastic sleeve, a photograph. Me. The old me, the broad, squinting man from my contractor's license photo, creased down the middle, handed out to the crews like a wanted poster. He was carrying my face so he could know it when he saw it. He never got to see it. The man in that photograph is as gone to Groz's whole organization as he is to me, and something in my chest turns over, slow and heavy, at how useful that is. They're hunting a dead man's ghost and I'm something they have no picture of at all.

I take the photo. Cash, paper, phone, keys. His gun goes with me too, because a gun I don't need is still a gun nobody else gets to have, and because leaving it beside him tells whoever finds him that the shooter brought her own.

The shower's still running. I go in and shut the tap off and the silence that comes down is enormous, ringing, and my own breathing sounds wrong inside it, higher in the throat, quicker to come back.

Then I run the sink hot, because it's finally hot, and start getting last night off me with a washcloth the size of a playing card. Hands. Forearms. Face.

The chest stops me. I take the cloth across one nipple with no thought in it at all, same as I'd have gone over any other part of myself, and the whole of me reports it, loud, out of all proportion, a signal sent at a volume set for somebody else's house. I stand there with my hand in the air. Then I do it again on purpose, because I need to know whether that was a one-time thing, and it isn't, and the second time my breath goes out of me over a washcloth.

Lower is worse. There's dried blood down the inside of both thighs and it has to come off. It doesn't take long. It doesn't need long. Something turns over low down, unhurried, with no interest whatsoever in the room it's happening in, and my face goes hot, and I make a sound in that voice that I would give a finger to take back.

I finish anyway. I'm shaking again by the time I'm done and it's not the same shake.

So that's in here too. Whatever the mesh built, it wired the thing live and it doesn't check with me first, and it's going to do that again, at a worse time, somewhere I can't afford it. Add it to the list of things about this body I have to work around. It's a long list already.

The water in the basin goes brown, then pink, then I do it again. It isn't good enough. It's what there's time for, and what's left is under a coat by the time anybody sees me.

I don't look at the mirror. What's in it is the weapon I've got now instead of the one I had, and a weapon doesn't need looking at. It needs maintaining and aiming.

Then the harder problem, which has been sitting at the back of all of it since I put my feet on this carpet.

A shirt that hangs off me like a tent. Jeans I could get both fists inside the waist of, stiff and black down one leg with what came out of me at the dock. Boots I'd swim in. That's the inventory. I stand in front of the nightstand holding all of it under a lamp that isn't doing me any favors, and there isn't one square inch of covering in my hands that would hold up to a stranger looking at me.

Sixty feet to the lot. That's the whole distance. Sixty feet of open walkway past eleven other doors at three in the morning, and behind any one of them is somebody who would remember a naked woman going past for the rest of their life, and remember her to a detective by lunch.

So I go back to the body.

The coat comes off him the way things come off the dead, badly, an arm at a time, his weight rolling back down onto the carpet every time I let go of him. It takes four minutes and both hands and a foot braced against his hip, and twice I have to stop because my arms quit on me. There's a hole in the back of it I could put a pencil through and a wet dark patch spreading out from the hole, and the lining under it is soaked. But it's dark wool and it's long. In a lit room it's a coat a man was shot in. In a parking lot it's a coat.

The coat goes on over skin that's still tacky in the places I couldn't reach. The wool is cold and wet down one side and I flinch when it settles and then I stop noticing, which happens faster than it ought to.

It's a tent on me and it still isn't enough. The shoulder seams sit halfway down my arms. I roll the cuffs twice to get my hands clear and the whole weight of the thing hangs straight down off shoulders with nothing on top of them to carry it, and inside two minutes there's an ache across the back of my neck that I would not have felt in March.

The lining moves. Every breath, every time I turn my head, it drags over skin that has opinions now, and there's nothing underneath to stop it, and standing there in a dead man's coat with a dead man on the floor I understand in a completely practical way why women wear the things they wear. I put it with everything else I'm going to have to learn in a hurry.

My belt needs a new hole to shut it. I make one by grinding the tip of his car key through the leather, working it back and forth, and it takes longer than I can afford because my hands can't do it fast. When I pull it closed the coat quits being a tent and turns into a shape, in at the middle and out below it, and I'm looking down at myself belted into somebody's overcoat and what I'm looking at is a woman, and there's no argument left to make about it.

The hem hits my shins. Bare legs under it and cold air going straight up, and when I take a step the coat swings off my hips and comes back, and it does it on the next step too, and it's going to keep doing that from here to wherever this ends.

The boots are the part I can't fix. His are worse than mine. I put my socks in the toes of my own and lace them down as far as the eyelets go and take three steps and nearly put myself into the desk. So I carry them. Sixty feet of cold asphalt in bare feet with a dead man's coat belted over nothing, and it's not a good answer, it's just the one that doesn't end with me on the ground outside Room 114.

Behind the seat of the truck there's a duffel with some of Dawn's things in it. Her jacket. A pair of sweats with a drawstring, which is going to matter now. Sneakers, and I've got no idea whether they'll fit, and that's the first hopeful thought I've had since I opened my eyes tonight. I packed that bag the day they moved her and I've never taken anything back out of it.

Sixty feet to the truck for the duffel, and then the truck stays where it is. Then his car, and I don't know which one his car is, so I'll be standing in that lot pushing a button until something answers.

I stand over him one last time in his own coat, the man who walked past a woman to go die facing a shower.

The mesh took the rest of me in April and finished the job last night and it's welcome to it. It never got as far as the fourth floor, where somebody is breathing through a machine and waiting on me.

I press the slide back a half inch, catch the gleam of brass, let it go. Then out into the walkway, barefoot in a dead man's coat with my boots in one hand, and the cold comes straight up out of the concrete into a body with nothing anywhere on it to keep cold out. Eleven doors. Not one of them opens.