“I’m paying you for something else.” The idea hits me suddenly, and I hold up the cash just a little higher when he reaches for it. “Tell me who gave you this.”
“Oh, that? He was…” The boy blinks a few times and looks around the hallway, like he’s afraid the man in question is going to jump out from behind the wall. “He was sort of scary,” he admits, and shifts his weight from one side to the other. “Tall. Like, over six feet. Fit, but not too muscular, you know? Black hair, dark eyes—he was Asian. That’s vague, I’m sorry. But I’m not sure…maybe Japanese? He had a hood on. I think he had tattoos on his wrists.”
“Scary how?” I almost cut him off, my curiosity getting the better of me.
The boy doesn’t answer right away. He lowers his eyes and slowly shakes his head, brows knitted together. “I can’t reallyexplain it,” he says at last. “Just scary. He didn’t do anything like threaten me or get in my space. He was polite as fuck. Paid me more than you are. Sorry.” He glances up sheepishly, but I shrug. “Thanked me and walked away like he knew I’d do it. And I did do it. I don’t know why. I could’ve just taken the money, you know? But there was something about him that made me think that would be a bad idea.”
We stand there silently, with him staring at the floor and me pondering the information. Finally, I lower my hand, pushing the money in front of his face, and he takes it gingerly before pocketing it with careful, slow movements. “Could you maybe not spend it on drugs?” I suggest, knowing I won’t get that promise from him. “I don’t know…don’t you think food would be better? Or something warm to drink? It’s cold as fuck out here, kid.” I’ve determined from his mannerisms he can’t be even eighteen, and some half-dead part of me feels bad for his situation, though I had nothing to do with it and can’t offer him a way out.
When he looks up at me, his eyes wide and guilty, I know he’s already trying to figure out how to lie. But I sigh and shake my head. “Whatever. It’s not my life. Thank you for telling me, and for delivering this. His…uh, his name is Yoichi, by the way.” I gesture at my snake with my free hand, who’s happily resting across my shoulders like he belongs here.
“He’s pretty.” The boy glances around before shoving his hands in his pockets. “Thanks, lady.” He turns to walk away, then pauses, and I just barely notice before closing my door.
“He was scary like you,” the kid ponders out loud at last, turning to glance back at me. “A little bit different, but not really. You both seem really similar, though I can’t really explain it.” He doesn’t give me a chance to reply as he walks away, his shoulders up around his ears as he jogs back to the elevator and leaves me with more questions than answers.
Scary like me?
Once he’s gone, I head back into my apartment, already groping for the expected USB stick in the envelope. Sure enough, when I open it, the small drive and a card fall out into my hand. This time, I read the card first.
Meet me tonight.
Ten pm.
Where you dumped Alan’s body.
A chill goes through me when I read his name written out. Is it supposed to be a threat? Is whoever sent me this trying to remind me he knows about Alan, from his death to his identity, and could turn me in?
Probably.
The card goes in the trash in my room before I sit down on my recliner, legs curled up under me as I drag my computer up and over my lap. “How many times do I need to watch Alan’s body dump?” I grumble, jamming the stick into the side of it with maybe a bit too much force. Sure enough, it shows a video file, and I roll my eyes before clicking on it to let it play.
Static flickers across my laptop screen, causing me to tilt my head in confusion. I don’t remember static in the other video, and?—
Voices murmur, then the person holding the camera pushes open a wooden door to a small cabin. My eyebrows knit together in confusion, and I tilt my head until the door swings open enough that I can see the inside of the house.
“Fuck,” I whisper, just as the officers step inside. One of them gasps, and the camera pans to the television in the corner, where there are VHS tapes scattered around and a home movie plays on the screen.
And there’s a man on the floor who is very, very dead.
He opened the door with his wide smile and false concern. He held out a hand to me, not even asking why I lookedso fucking wretched. Never questioned why I was covered in blood, or dressed in my pajamas with only a pair of boots and no jacket on.
“Come in, darling. You must be cold. I can?—”
The video pans further around the room, then zooms in on the man lying in a pool of his own blood. There are claw marks on his face, one of his eyes is ruined and the other is wide, staring at the ceiling above with a look of permanent terror on his features.
“What the hell?” one of the officers whispers. “I know the neighbors said they heard screaming, but what do you think did this? Some kind of animal? His eye isgone. Literally?—”
The other officer shushes him and I hear a noise in the video that prompts the officers to whirl around?—
Initially, I was too out of it, too far in my fugue state, to realize what he wanted until he started trying to take it. His hands on my arms had turned rough, and his fingers gripped hard enough to bruise. The man had murmured in my ear that he could make everything okay, and he could make my problems disappear.
All I had to do was be good for him.
“Stop,” I’d whispered as that cold feeling creeped through my veins. “Please don’t. You don’t understand. You don’t?—”
“I won’t hurt you,” he breathed against the shell of my ear, the air hot and moist and awful. “You don’t have to be afraid of me.”
“You don’t understand,” I tried to explain, with my fingers curling around the shattered, bloody flashlight in my hand that he somehow managed to ignore or not care about. “I’m not the one in danger here.”
