Killer Move

I scrambled to my feet, pushing myself upward via the sofa, meanwhile stepping on the saucer Cassandra had been using for an ashtray, flipping it over, and spreading ash and lipsticked butts everywhere.

I grabbed my phone. I lurched over to the bathroom door. The letters there had not been written in wine, of course. Wine would have simply run, leaving nothing but a faint residue. These letters had dripped more slowly, viscously. The red was browner, matte where it had dried. It was blood. It had to be blood.

I pushed the door open. “Cass?”

Just the bathroom. The shower cubicle. Water dripped from the fixture slowly. No one there.

More banging on the front door. I turned toward the bedroom. My head was pounding and I could feel sweat popping out all over my body and scalp.

I pushed the bedroom door. It opened six inches, showing me a strip of the far wall.

“Cass? You in here?”

There was no response, so I said it again, fighting against the climbing volume of the hammering coming from the front door and against the knowledge that I was going to have to go into the bedroom.

“Cassandra?”

I pushed the door farther, and took a step.

The smell of whatever perfume it was Cassandra wore. A bed, empty. The comforter thrown back. Everything covered in blood. Just so much blood.

There was no sign of a body, but I knew Cass could not have lost so much blood and still be alive.

All the perspiration on my body turned to ice. I stumbled back into the main room. It seemed clear I was going to have a heart attack and I didn’t care. The front door was beginning to splinter around the lock. I stumbled in the opposite direction, toward the frosted glass door.

Out on the balcony it was very hot and very bright. The balcony was three feet deep, four feet wide. A rusting railing, broken brown tiles underfoot. A couple of stories below lay a patch of waste ground, once landscaped but now overrun with scrub and tilted palm trees and discarded household items dropped off the balconies on this side of the building. Those either side of Cassandra’s were too far for me to hope to get to. I leaned over the railing, feeling it shift and squeak beneath me, and couldn’t see how I could hope to get down without breaking my neck. This was a dead end. There was only one way out of the apartment. I stepped back into the room just as the front door finally flew open.

A woman burst in. She was wearing jeans and a black T-shirt, brown hair tied in a tight ponytail. She clocked the word daubed on the bathroom door.

“Where is she?”

I must have glanced toward the bedroom. She ran over, ducked her head through the door—and swore violently, in a voice that sounded close to cracking.

When she came back out I realized I’d seen her before, dressed differently. She was the waitress from Jonny Bo’s. The one who’d served us on Monday.

“What . . . what are you—”

“Come with me,” she said, grabbing my arm and driving me toward the front door with enough force to almost throw me over. “Come now. Or you’re going to die.”

She herded me in front of her along the walkway toward the spiral stairs. I stumbled down them, round and round, my head splitting, and I didn’t start to resist until we got down to the courtyard at the bottom, and she started to trot toward the gate.

“Who are you? Why are you—”

She stopped and turned in one fluid movement, and before I knew it had her hand at my throat, thumb and fingers gripped around my windpipe. She looked me directly in the eyes and tapped my cheek lightly—tap tap tap—with the tips of two fingers of her other hand.

“No questions. Do what I say, and do it now, or I’ll leave you here and that will be the end of it.”

She let go of me and ran off toward the gate. I followed. I didn’t know what else to do. There was a battered pickup parked in the street outside. I went around while she opened the driver’s-side door. I’d barely got my ass on the seat before she stamped on the gas and yanked the vehicle in a hard fast 180-degree turn and accelerated off up the road.

After thirty yards she slammed hard on the brakes, however, staring intently through the windshield up the long, curved road that passed the condos I’d walked by the night before with a girl who . . . whose blood had since been used to write a word on her own bathroom door.

“Shit shit shit.”

The woman jammed the truck into reverse and pulled a long, fishtailing U-turn to hurtle back the way we’d come. She bumped up over the curb as she completed the turn and sent the side of my head cracking into the window frame. I crashed back down into my seat and grabbed the seat belt as she kept the vehicle accelerating along the last fifty yards of the two-lane.

At the end was a low gate between two short metal poles, and I’m glad the gate was open, as I don’t think she would have stopped.