I
WOULD MAKE
an excellent stalker. I had Gretchen Van Der Hoef in my sights. My consciousness had become a laser beam focused on fucking up Gretchen.
I pictured her when I was doing my conditioning, like she was right there and I had to beat her at pull-ups and sit-ups. I had to do more than her.
I pictured her when I was hitting the bag. I felt her ribs breaking from my body shots. I pictured her when I was doing my omoplatas on poor Cake.
Destroy Gretchen.
That was my mission now.
Life can be so crazy, but in the gym what you got to do is clear. Punish yourself now so you can punish your opponent in the cage. It’s solid and you can bank on it. Nothing else in life is clear like that.
I put Shea out of my mind. I put away all thoughts of missing pączki and little girls chanting in my bathroom. I went out of the gym feeling high and light.
Then:
‘Hold up, Jade.’ Khari was waiting for me in the parking lot. He took out his phone. I thought: if he calls Eva right now so help me god I’ll take him out with a flying head-butt.
‘You know that thing you were asking about the other day?’
My stomach dropped. I nodded. He handed me his phone.
‘I thought you should see this. Mr. B deleted it—I guess he don’t want the police to see it. I picked it up off his computer.’
‘If you could take it off his computer, the police can, too,’ I said.
‘If they make the effort to look,’ Khari said. ‘But Jade.’ He paused dramatically.Khari towered over me, his head ducking away as he rubbed the back of his neck like he always does when he’s embarrassed.
‘Somebody already doctored it,’ he finished. ‘You’ll see what I mean. Take a look. But don’t copy it. Mr. B don’t even know I got it.’
He turned and went back into the gym.
The footage was grainy, and the screen on Khari’s phone was small. But I could tell that I was looking down from the corner camera in Mr. B’s office. You could see a little bit of blurred movement going on in the main gym through the two-way mirror, but nothing clear enough to identify. There was very little light.
A figure was pacing up and down just beneath the camera. The shot looked down on them at an angle that only captured their head and shoulders from behind, and in shadow. The rest of the body was out of shot. I strained my eyes, trying to confirm that it was Mr. B, but I really couldn’t tell.
Then, right in the middle of the room, out of nowhere appeared the girl in the red dress. It was like she’d been edited to fade in. She was holding a small bundle in her hands. For a few seconds no one moved; then the girl stepped forward and put the bundle on the ground, and the shadowy person took it. The girl seemed to be saying something. She stepped back and faded away. The shadowy person slipped through the door without showing their face. I was pretty sure they were too slim to be Mr. B, but that’s all I could really say.
It was dated weeks ago, while I was in Thailand.
I gave Khari his phone back. Then I hoisted my bag on my shoulder and went to the bus without saying one single word. I didn’t hear nothing, didn’t see nothing. I went to Mandino’s and did my shift on autopilot, thinking. But I didn’t get very far with that. If Einstein had been a dishwasher he never would have figured out relativity. It’s just too easy to get distracted and cut yourself with a fish knife.
What was I supposed to think? People don’t just pop in and out like that. Khari thought it had been doctored, but Khari wasn’t in my bathroom when the girl pulled the same trick. The police weren’t going to find any of this amusing.
How was I supposed to go into this fight with so many doubts about my manager? It was looking more and more like Mr. B was into something really despicable. Just my damn luck. Finally start to get a break with a big fight, and now my manager could be arrested any day for involvement in pedophilia and drugs. Great. The only hope I was clinging to was that maybe Mr. B didn’t know.
He doesn’t know, Jade. He doesn’t know. Please, god, let him not know.
A
S SOON AS
I let myself into the apartment I knew someone was there. I could smell that weird flower-shop smell again. A little zing of adrenaline rushed into my forearms and hands. After the incident the other night with Malu, I’d started keeping a baseball bat in the hallway just inside the front door, and I grabbed it now, flexing my fingers around its neck.
A voice called from the kitchen.
‘Jade? Down, girl! It’s only me.’
The voice was Shea’s. He waved a hand out of the kitchen.
‘Is it safe to come out?’
I lowered the bat as he emerged. He had a bottle of wine in one hand, which he waggled at me like I was a dog and it was a Milk Bone.
‘How did you get in?’
He shrugged. He was unshaven and wearing the same jeans as the day before, although he’d changed the bloodstained shirt for a white t-shirt. His hair was a mess.
‘Do you really want to know?’
‘What about the police?’
‘I don’t want to talk about it. Look, Jade, I’m sorry about imposing like this. I wanted to see you, but I don’t blame you if you don’t want to see me.’
He was lying. That was obvious. The only thing is, I couldn’t figure out which part was the lie. He was leaning against the refrigerator like he was trying to take up as little space as possible. How was I supposed to believe Shea was a killer? But what other explanation could there be?
‘OK,’ I said. ‘We can talk about it over food. I’m starving.’
‘I thought you worked in a restaurant.’
‘It was too busy tonight to take a break. Move over and I’ll make us something.’
‘Have you got anything beyond those cardboard things you eat?’
‘My protein bars not good enough for you? You want somebody’s arm, or maybe a thigh...?’
He didn’t rise to it. ‘Actually, if it isn’t too much of an imposition, could I use your shower? I’m feeling rather grimy.’
He looked way nastier than people look after a night in jail. He was lying so bad. Where had he been? I said, ‘Didn’t you go back to your hotel, then?’
‘Er... no. The police gave me the shirt.’
‘And here I thought you stole it.’
He even had the nerve to grin at me.
‘What’s so funny?’ I said it with an edge.
The smile wavered. ‘Nothing! I just... well, I thought if you were the type to prefer a bit of the rough, then maybe this would be my opportunity...’
‘A bit of the
what
?’
Smile vanished completely. ‘Never mind. I was making a feeble attempt to appear to be something other than the mild-mannered reporter I obviously am.’
‘Towels are on the shelf,’ I snapped, trying to untangle the string of words that had just come out of his mouth. Who talks like that? He was making my brain hurt.
While he was in the shower I started making a stir-fry. It gave me something to do with my hands. I was all jumpy and excited and... happy. Damn. And not ‘damn’ in a good way, damn for real. I was flying to Las Vegas tomorrow and Shea was
not
a mild-mannered reporter, and—
hey, what the hell happened to all the food in my fridge?
I bent over and stuck my head deeper into the fridge to see if there was some chicken in the back, and
a feather
floated up against my nose. I’m not talking about one of those little tiny butt-feathers that sometimes get stuck to free-range eggs, which are gross but explainable. I’m talking about a big feather that could have belonged to a damn peacock, if peacocks were bright red.
Was my fridge being raided by a hungry showgirl? What the hell.
I closed the fridge and opened the freezer.
The phone rang.
‘Hello?’
‘Put your friend on the line,’ Perez said.
New Kid in Town
A
KNIFE-SHARP SLIVER
of cool forest air came with Mya as she slipped into the prayer room by dark of night. Rain thrummed on the roof of Mr Richard’s stilt house, and the air was saturated with moisture. The windows were shuttered against the rain, and the only light in the prayer room came from the computer monitor in the adjacent work room. Mya stiffened, afraid that Mr. Richard was working late. But the monitor was running a screensaver, a series of photographs. Mr. Richard shaking hands with a film star. Mr. Richard at the orphanage, surrounded by smiling children. Mr. Richard and his wife on the red carpet at a society event. Mr. Richard receiving blessings from a bishop.
The address list she’d seen had been in the work room. She remembered exactly what it looked like, and it wouldn’t be hard to find because Mr. Richard wrote very little down on paper. The work room had more test tubes and jars than it had paperwork. Tonight, in the intense humidity, the acrid smell of the medicines he had been concocting hung in an invisible pall. The smell struck fear in Mya.
She had to be quick, or she’d lose her courage. She had brought a small torch from Jade’s kitchen drawer, and she switched it on. Better to risk light than to knock something over and make a noise. The thin beam roved over the disarray of chemicals and unwashed coffee cups and spent syringes. Had he been trying to go to the forest alone? No, she mustn’t think about that.
It was almost impossible to search without disturbing what was there, and with the walls themselves watching her, with the glassy eyes of the dead monkey on her, Mya felt sure that Mr. Richard would be able to feel her presence. He would know she had been here. She had to be quick, or—
There!
A sheet of pale blue paper, barely visible beneath a stack of DVD cases and a jar of powdered naga venom. Mya gently extracted it, wincing when the jar of powder wobbled. When she finally got the paper free, it turned out to be coffee-stained but readable: hotel stationery from Madrid. An English word was underscored at the top, followed by scrawled names and addresses in Western letters.
Mya pressed it to her chest. Now, to get out of here—
But something else caught her eye. In her efforts to extract the paper, Mya had moved the keyboard and exposed another piece of paper. This one contained a child’s drawing: a little girl holding the hand of what must be her mother. In the sky was a sun. Flowers grew around them. The drawing stopped Mya cold.
It was like the pictures she had drawn herself, when she first came here. But Mya had not made this one. In fact, it was unfinished, the sky only half-colored. A few crayons lay on the mouse pad.
Her heart was beating fast. Mr. Richard had found another child. A very young child, judging by this drawing. Was this child sleeping in Mya’s old bed, in a corner of the hallway outside the kitchen? Had this child already learned to travel to the forest—was that why there were syringes on the counter?
A mixture of fear and guilt and, as ugly as it was, of
rivalry
rose up in Mya.
No,
she thought.
Don’t think that way. Think of how many he has hurt.
She would go down there, find the child, and take her into the immortal forest before Mr. Richard could use him or her for evil as he used everyone else. She would do this, because if Mya didn’t do it, who would? Who could?
She would do it. As soon as she found the courage. She glanced around the computer room, as if courage were to be found in the jars and bottles—well, it probably was, oddly enough.
‘Do you know who this monkey is?’
Mya inhaled a shrill gasp and whirled. Mr. Richard was in the prayer room, one hand on the stuffed monkey’s head.
Mya tried to form a prayer to return to the forest, but something held her back. The question he’d asked, it clung to her like a thorny branch, holding her to this earth. She switched off the torch but could just make out his slim figure in the reflected light from the monitor, which now displayed a photo of Mr. Richard planting vegetables with two little boys.
‘This little monkey was the first to take me to the other world,’ he said in his familiar soft voice. ‘I was testing drugs on her—ordinary drugs, from the ordinary world. One day I gave her a drug and she disappeared. She came back with a flower that doesn’t exist in this world, and I learned that the legends of the immortal forest are true. So I trained her to fetch plants for me. Some of them were powerful plants, like the night orchid. Eventually she brought me enough of the flowers to enable me to go with her, and in this way our essences were mingled.’ He paused, seeming to savor the last few words.
‘Just as my essence has been mingled with yours, Mya, time and again as we’ve travelled. This little monkey was the beginning of everything. When she died, I couldn’t bear to be parted from her. So I had her stuffed. Her eyes still watch for me. She is better than any burglar alarm.’
Rain buffeted the roof, the shutters, the walls. Mya shivered. The paper that she clutched to her chest was damp with her sweat.
‘You need a teacher, Mya. You are empty of knowledge. The path you walk is without honor or merit.’
Mya knew she should return to the forest without a word. Vanish. It was her one strength, that ability to step sideways into the eternal forest. But Mr. Richard’s words gripped her, dragged at her. It was like he was a sea creature reaching out with word-tentacles, trying to reel her in.
She couldn’t resist saying, ‘Mr. Shea has honor.’
He took this in for a moment and then let out a startled grunt of laughter.
‘The boy reporter? Are you serious? Mya, the fool is
dead
. Surely you understand that? His time on earth is over. You see, this is what I’m trying to explain to you. There’s so much for you to learn. You’re not ready to go out on your own.’
No, she wasn’t. She hadn’t been ready to leave her family, either. She wasn’t ready for any of this. So what?
‘You have a new student,’ she said softly.
The screensaver now showed Mr. Richard at the Yi Peng festival, putting his lantern on the river to honor the water spirits. It made Mya think of Lek, saved by the water-spirit Naga but doomed to give up his venom so Mr. Richard could exploit the spirit world. Mr. Richard disgraced the meaning of the word merit.