Dead Souls (23 page)

AND THE MONSTER WAS HERE,
in my apartment. Police will trace the car to my address. His cell signal to my apartment. There's blood evidence everywhere, and plenty of witnesses at the New Parish to link me to him as a drinking buddy. How to explain it?

Dan stole my car
.

My parents were expert stage-setters—when things got hot, when they were tipped off that the police were about to make an arrest—they would take an immediate break from the drugs until they were sober enough to implicate one of their friends. Stashing rolls of cash in pockets, planting crack pipes in passed-out hands, making sure to leave several bags of weed so that it looked like their friends were the dealers. My job was to wipe down the hard surfaces of fingerprints.

So the first thing I do is call the police on the nonemergency number, report my vehicle stolen, my purse and cell were in it, and I walked all the way home, etc. They'll be in no hurry to do anything, not until they match the VIN to the car that just exploded on the Holy Names campus.

Now for the rest of the evidence. Dan, the psychotic killer, acting alone, got my address from the registration, decided it would make as good a place as any to lie low. I came home, took care of Justin, and then went to my bedroom to relax. Only I found Dan there. He'd broken in through the bedroom window, which I never checked because it was always too hard for me to open. His fingerprints are all over both sets of windows.
That's good
. But did I fight back? Why not?

He held a pair of scissors to my throat
.

I take the scissors off the floor, press one of the sharp tips against a vein near my jugular. Push it slightly, hard enough for the blood to bead. Then I wipe my prints from the handles with my shirt, toss them back to the floor.

The bloodstained duvet is good enough as is—evidence to the crime scene, check. But not much evidence of an altercation. Carefully, so I don't alarm the neighbors above or below, I place the lamp on the floor, punch a hole in the shade. Next I
pull out drawers, throwing clothes around to look like the room was ransacked, open the doors of the armoire, yank out papers, scattering them randomly. It doesn't look half bad.

Valuables. Dan would definitively have taken valuables. I grab an old glasses case from Justin's sock drawer where we keep a few hundreds in case we need a cab late at night for a ride to the hospital. I then take the Istanbul out from my closet, unzip the waist belt, stash the bills in it. I have a small jewelry box where I keep Justin's recent purchases that I never wear—­diamond stud earrings from Tiffany, a ridiculous Rolex watch that makes my skin break out in hives, a vintage emerald brooch shaped like a row of peas. Giving me things he knows I'll keep, that will remind me of him in the long-distant future when he's gone. I shove them all into the waist belt too.

And the ring. The engagement ring I'd seen Justin stow away in a sock in his sock drawer. I dig around for that.

There's a soft splash of water in the tub. He's still so trusting, that Jeb, in spite of the world demonstrating firmly that he shouldn't. His DNA will be harder to fit into the narrative, unless he was an accomplice.

He was with Dan
. They came together, but Jeb was injured badly. I used that to divide them after Dan threatened to kill me. With Jeb in the bathroom, I was able to convince Dan that he should leave Jeb behind, that Jeb would just hold him back. So Dan took what he could, left me to be Jeb's problem. But no, he wouldn't have just left me—I could have called the police. So he tied me up instead, with what was left of Jeb's T-shirt.

I grab a strip of it, wrap it around my wrist and pull it tight, twist my arm so hard that it leaves marks on my skin.
Then I do the same thing with the other. For good measure, I take a longer strip of the T-shirt, wrap it around my throat and yank hard. It'll look convincing with the small bruises starting to form from where Saul choked me.

The ring, where's the ring?

I go through all the socks again, feeling the toes but no, it's not there. Did Opal take it?
And she had the nerve to judge
me.

Next I grab Justin's laptop. I'll have to destroy it afterward, maybe toss it out the window so no one can recover the browser history.

But what about Justin?
How long before he wakes up?

Among all the ransacked items on the floor is a roll of black duct tape, something I bring with me to all photo or video shoots because it's the go-to item for when shit goes wrong—you need a skirt hemmed fast; you need to mark an actor's spot on the floor; the cable from one of the ancillary lights is frayed and might electrocute the production assistant.

It'll all work out in the end. It'll all come out in the wash.

I'm doing this for him. I'm doing all this for love.

Am I?

A lingering doubt makes an appearance again, one I thought I'd safely bricked away,
You sure you're not doing this to save your own ass?
The truth is I don't know anymore, it's all I can do to hang on to the frayed end of a burning rope. The rest, well the rest will have to be sorted out later.

“WHAT THE HELL DID YOU GIVE HIM?”
Jeb slips back through the door to the bedroom, black duct tape in hand. I couldn't do it myself. I couldn't risk his waking up,
seeing
me
do it.

“Is he okay?”

“Define okay. If you mean breathing, yes. But he didn't move at all. Not when I taped up his wrists, his mouth—”

“So he's okay.” I adjust the pillow behind my back.

Jeb gives a noncommittal shrug. But we're close now, we're almost through the hardest part. I finally have some time to think. It's still dark—my favorite time for thinking, when most of the world is asleep. I swipe a finger along Justin's trackpad to wake it up. The laptop is warm on my lap.

Jeb crosses over to Justin's side of the bed and flops down on it. He works at the edge of the tape, sticking and unsticking it. “I didn't realize a tumor could get so big. That must suck.”

“You got the video ready?”

Jeb pulls at a bit of the tape. “I still don't see why we have to post it.”

Christ, we've been through this ten times
. I carefully modulate my voice though, to make it calm, authoritative. “Because, Jeb, we need to implicate Dan. Or do you want to get a double deal and then spend the rest of your life in prison?”

He says nothing, digging at the edge of the roll with his fingernail.

“Dan left you behind, remember? He's not your friend, not anymore.”

“And you are?”

“I'm you're partner. We're partners in this.”
He forced me to get the laptop, Officers. I don't know why, I thought maybe he wanted me to transfer money into his account.

A background appears on Justin's laptop, a selfie taken years
ago, Justin holding an outstretched arm to capture us leaning our heads together, the Tetons in the background, gray, threatening storm clouds gathering just above them. It'd rained the whole time. We hadn't minded.

An ache, a physical pang.

Jeb sighs but grabs Dan's cell phone, clicks over to the video. “YouTube?”

I nod.

“Whose account?”

“Just make a new one.”

He sighs again. Early twenties—the worst years ever to be alive.

Justin's login and password appear on the screen. Not surprising, this was a work loaner and I can't imagine Fealtee allowing their employees to wander around with an unencrypted data portal. Login has been saved,
Just!n5!0
, so I try the passwords I know first, ones he's handed over to his bank accounts, credit cards, so I can pay the bills online for him. F!0N@5!0, !WHODUNN!T, NOT@P@SSWRD5!0.

None of them work.

“The video is uploading.” Jeb drops the cell on the bed, peers over my shoulder. “Is that the Rockies?”

“No,” I say tersely.

“You look happy.”

And I do. Here I am, staring at my picture, myself looking back at me, a creepy déjà vu. The funny thing is I don't remember being happy. I remember being worried about ticks, or that Tracy was taking advantage of my radio silence to erode my credibility at work, or that I'd left the front burner of the stove on. What would I tell the girl in the photo, if I could? Beware
the man who offers a drink in Make Westing? No, she was too sure of her world, that one, thought she knew every inch of the bottom of the rabbit hole, the darkest bits, and had escaped it.

“That time you asked Alejandro about the double deal,” says Jeb. “Dan and I were up all night talking about it. Dan said . . .” His voice cracks, but he rallies. “Dan said we should create a game app.
Mr. Evil Deeds
. You know, people could sell their souls, do bad shit, and unlock levels. Kill a nun and you get a gold hamster. That kind of stuff.”

“It's not a bad idea,” I say. Christ, I wish, at the very least, I hadn't balked at the m-word, that I'd done the normal thing, cry with happiness or something. Justin deserved that.

“Coding would be a bitch though.”

Think, Fiona, think.

Justin always substitutes an exclamation point for
i,
an
@
for an
a
, a zero for
o
. Something occurs to me, a disturbing possibility. I try it.

0P@L5!0

The laptop hums as the desktop appears. Password accepted. I feel a tight ball of icy jealousy somewhere in the lower quadrant of my stomach, something I haven't felt since I saw Justin get into the cab with Sarah in the pink coat.

“All right!” says Jeb. The phone vibrates on the bed, and he reaches for it. “Video's uploaded too. I'm going to create a Twitter account and post it with hashtag sorority sister massacre.”

There has to be an innocent reason, although I seriously can't think of one, but there
has
to be. The last time I thought Justin was cheating on me, well, that was the door Scratch came through, and if I suspect him now . . .

“Great,” I say thinly.

Wouldn't there be some relief too? An absolution of my own sins? But I just can't picture it, the two of them together. Our own sex life came to a soft, unattended close when the pressure of the tumor on his intestines started causing unexpected accidents. No, what I
can
picture is Justin offering her the use of his laptop—maybe to look for a good movie on Netflix—and her changing the password since he wasn't using it anymore. Staking her claim about as subtly as a cat spraying its territory with urine.

I open the Firefox browser, click to Recent History. Good, it hasn't been deleted. There are more than a few Google searches of my name—“Fiona Dunn Promoted to Global Communications Manager,” an article in the
San Francisco Chronicle
, then there's my Facebook page, obligatory when you're in marketing but not something I actually use—why hand over your personal data to the biggest unpaid survey in the history of time?—my Twitter account that I haven't updated in a year.

What exactly are you up to, Ms. Opal?

“That's not the Fealtee site.”

I turn, startled, to find Jeb watching me intently. “I know,” I say. “I was just . . .”

Right
.

Next I scroll through Justin's bookmarks, and there it is, the Fealtee backend Joomla! URL. I click it and a simple white screen appears with another prompt for a login and password. For this one I'm quietly pleased that F!0N@5!0 still works—
not so easy to change
that
, huh, Ms. Opal?
—and click
Yes
at the prompt
Save this password
. Of course, this is just the company intranet, but Jeb's assured me he can easily hop into the main
content of the website. We just have to change something minor to demonstrate proof of concept to Scratch, a sentence in the terms and conditions section, a forty-page volume of text. Justin says only 0.001 percent of users read the first few pages before they click
I accept all the terms and conditions
.

Not exactly the signed confessions of the Inquisition, but it just might do.

CHAPTER
TWENTY

W
HILE JEB DOES HIS HACKING THING,
I grab my own laptop to start working out the language of the double deal, my exact conditions. Still no sound from the living room, which hopefully means Justin's asleep. It will probably do him some good, a decent night's sleep, although I worry that Jeb might have bound his wrists too tightly with the duct tape. He has enough circulatory issues as it is. I almost want to check, but the important thing is to close this deal.

Jeb's arm is getting worse. It's swollen and pus drips down from where the acid hit his skin. His face glistens with light sweat, a fever.

So, what do I want from this double deal, and what will I give in exchange? The single biggest question ever faced in the life of Fiona Dunn. Best start with the basics.

I, Fiona Dunn, am hereto released from the contract made Friday, October 12 with . . .
(what is his name? He told me once, but I couldn't understand)
 . . . with the person or entity known as “Scratch.” Said entity also promises to restore one Justin Goodman to health, and endow Goodman and Dunn to an estate valued at $10 million
.

Where could the catches be? “Health”—health could have different interpretations. Cancer-free is more like it but then what if
I
get cancer? One in three people will. Or what if Justin takes after his grandfather, who died of a heart attack before he was fifty? If I'm going through with this, I want a nice, regular-lifetime to enjoy with him.

Another thought tingles.
What if he leaves you?
Odds aren't good with the whole institution of marriage, I know because I've researched the demographic. Women in marriages can afford the Bauhaus, ultra-modern and at $359, an affordable alternative to a Louis Vuitton, while we offer women post-divorce a sixty-five dollar version, the Horizon, in canvas without the removable sternum straps and ports for electronics. There are two divorces every second, which means we've sold about three times as many of the Horizon and plan to expand the line with baby bag options for single mothers.

What is Opal's intent? How much longer before she turns the hairline fracture into a real crack?

Don't get ahead of yourself, Fiona.
First things first.

Said entity also promises to restore one Justin Goodman to good health, ensure that both Goodman and Dunn remain in good health for the duration of a typical human lifespan (seventy-eight years), and endow Goodman and Dunn to an estate that would currently be valued at $20 million
.

Because $10 million won't be much if and when we reach our seventies, the way inflation's going.

Jeb sighs again. Sighing seems to be his thing.

“What?”

“It's just you would think they wouldn't leave the endpoints so vulnerable. Seriously.” He bites his lower lip.

“Can you access the terms-and-conditions page?”

He just mutters under his breath, so I leave him alone and read through my offer again, think of about another fifteen or twenty things I could add. But I know the more complex it gets, the more opportunities there might be for some twisted interpretation. Money and stellar health should be good enough for the daughter of crack addicts.

What if I'm settling though?

Because if he
were
to leave me, it's conceivable he could get all the money. I don't want to have excellent health into my seventies and watch Opal, or some other woman, waltz away with the prize while I burn with my evil deeds.

Said entity also promises to restore one Justin Goodman to good health, ensure that both Goodman and Dunn remain in good health for the duration of a typical human lifespan (seventy-eight years), and endow Goodman and Dunn to an estate currently valued at $20 million, unless Goodman should end relationship with said Dunn, in which case all funds would go direct to Dunn, and Goodman would lose health entitlements.

No, that seems a little over the top, vindictive. I can afford to give him his health. I strike
and Goodman would lose health entitlements.

Now that I've made this magnanimous concession, I almost feel virtuous.

“
Ha
!
” says Jeb. “
Ha
, double ha!” He turns the laptop to me proudly, and there it is, the simple word-processing screen with the entire terms-and-conditions text readily accessible, alterable. Eight-point-two million users who just checked the box and moved on. Who has time to read anymore? Funny thing is though that once you click that checkbox, you're legally bound
to every six-point-font word. Once, I asked Justin how many people sign up daily, and he said it was around twenty thousand, double when they really hit the mobile advertising.

Numbers that will definitely get Scratch's attention.

But it makes me sad, the next part. There can be no further complications, and right now, Jeb is a complication.

“Jeb, you know you've got a fever going there. I have some Advil in the bathroom.”

He wipes his forehead with the back of his good hand. “Shit, you're right.”

“It's not fatal,” I say with a forced smile. “And it's all going to be over soon. But you're not much use passed out.”

I stand, grab the water bottle, head to the bathroom.
I played on our friendship, Officer, he didn't even notice me slip the Xanax into his drink. But he was threatening to kill me. I didn't have a choice.

“What should I write?” he calls from the bed.

“Something jokey.” It's awkward, but I manage to fit the bottle under the faucet, start to fill it. The air is filled with vapor from his bath, clouds the mirror. The bath towel is wet under my feet. “Not the actual thing. Just proof that we can do it.”

I hear the buzz-hum of the cell on the bed again.
What's that about?
I pull the water bottle from the sink, look into the medicine cabinet mirror, but all that's reflected behind me is the window and the indigo sky, which is now tinged with the slightest gossamer of pink. What time is it? Shit, I need to remember to call in sick. A bad back this time; I've already supposedly had the flu.

Then Jeb steps into view, holding the roll of black duct tape.

“That was Jasmine,” he says, his face wan. “I'm so sorry, Fiona.”

He raises his arm, the good one, and lands a solid punch on the back of my head. I fall—
She read my mind, why didn't I choose clairvoyance? So much more useful
—and feel my skull hit the back of the porcelain bathtub.

And then nothing.

MY HEAD FEELS THICK,
impossibly heavy. There's a high, tinny ringing in my left ear. Something warm and wet trickles down the back of my neck. My mouth—I can't open it. I taste blood, and glue—the duct tape I gave Jeb, ha-ha—and my tongue finds a tooth is loose, barely hanging on.

Somewhere close by, I hear something
tick
.

I open my eyes. It's a struggle. They would much rather stay closed, they would much rather that I go back to sleep, or back to wherever it was that was black, silent, and still.

I'm in some kind of a van.

Tick
.

My sight is blurry at first. An amber light from outside shines in through the back of the van window, casts eerie shadows on the floor. It's cold. My cheek feels numb. I'm lying on a bench, hard metal—
a police van?
—but no, there's all kinds of cubbies with emergency gear, a gurney, a defibrillator, an oxygen tank.

An ambulance.

Tick
.

Renata's favor. Steal an ambulance.

Tick
.

Ambulances. I hate them. Only been in one once, after my mother OD'd and I'd made the frantic call to 911. The technician kept asking me questions I didn't know answers to—
What did she take? Did she use a needle?
—during the long ride to the hospital, and when it became apparent I wasn't going to be much use, he ignored me for the rest of the way. She was so pale, so stiff, I was sure she'd died. I was all of nine.

Tick
.

I try to move my hand, sit up, but of course I'm bound, taped to something unseen behind me. My shoulders ache from being pulled back so hard, so no telling how much time has gone by, or how close I am to Scratch calling in my favor.

Tick
.

Is that a sound in my head, or real?
I look over to where it seems to be coming from, and see black duffel bags, the army/navy kind, cheap, easy to get anywhere, and far more durable than anything Sumpter, Inc. makes. They're packed tight, the zippers straining from whatever's inside. I see a wire sticking out of one of them.

Tick
.

Why do I get the feeling that I'm in the underground garage of the Transamerica building? That Alejandro is out there somewhere nearby filming?

I start to laugh, but can't because my mouth is taped shut. It's suddenly grotesquely funny that all my ambitious planning has landed me here, in the belly of a new disaster with unknowable repercussions. Since I'm immortal, what will happen when the bombs go off? Will all the bits and pieces of my tissue, scattered among debris, still quiver with life? I imagine a crow pecking at a choice morsel, my flesh making it through its
stomach, out the other end, still horrifically sentient. Or will all my broken parts try to find one another, reassemble into some strange new Frankenstein form? I picture my hand, cut off at the wrist and crawling through the rubble, looking for my missing stump of an arm.

No. Stop. That's not helping.

I've been laughing so hard, tears have formed.

Tick
.

I could ghost out. Maybe it wouldn't be so bad, stuck in the gray space where all the colors blend into one.

Face it—Jeb and Jasmine have probably already made the pitch. You're done for anyway
. It's a defeatist idea, and like all defeatist ideas, easy for me to believe. There's a part of me that's always known my life would end badly—maybe not
this
badly, even my paranoid imagination wasn't that creative—but I've always felt a certainty during the good times that they wouldn't last forever. That happiness was a mirage, bringing with it a foreboding sense of impermanence. Suffering is much easier for me. Familiar and comfortable as an old sweater.

And Justin, what about him? I picture him waking up in the living room, bound, scared, alone. Opal won't get there until eight, and when she does? When he sees the ransacked bedroom, the blood on the scissors?

Tick.

Imagine living with that for the rest of his short life.

Tick
.

No, I can't
.

I try my feet, and while they're bound to each other they're not tied to anything in particular. If I'm right and I am in the Transamerica parking garage, then there are people parking
their cars, starting their day at work. Praise Jesus it's not a weekend. I kick the side of the ambulance, righteously loud thumps that would wake the dead if there were any in the vicinity.

Tick
.

THUMP, THUMP, THUMP.

Like the guard pounding Saul's prison door, like my neighbor knocking to give me my wet clothes, like my heart when Justin said the m-word.

Tick.

THUMP, THUMP, THUMP.

I kick the wall of the ambulance until my bare feet feel numb, the shock of it creeping up my legs. I kick it with force, I kick it with glee, I kick it until the metal gives slightly, dents. It feels real, cathartic, this return to ordinary violence. My screams are muffled, but they're loud, and I pull at the duct tape binding my wrists, I go all in for the fight until finally I see someone peer through the ambulance window, a security guard.

He tries the handle, and it's unlocked. He opens the door, flashes a light in my eyes, and his own widen when he sees the duct tape.

“Holy shit,” he says. “Are you okay?”

Sweat drips from my forehead, my chest heaves, and I try to scream
Bomb!
but it comes out as “Ommm.” He frees my feet first
—Christ, why doesn't he free my mouth first?—
then my hands, and then finally, finally, grabs the edge of the tape on my mouth, says, “This is going to hurt,” and quickly rips it off.

“Bomb!” I shout.

He turns, sees the duffel bags.

Tick
.

We run.