12

Flip lay curled on his side, hands clasped between his knees, brow wrenched tight, eyes closed against the afternoon sun streaming into the room around the protest of drawn drapes.

The kid’s face played against his eyelids as if its image were tattooed there.

The face was gray, swollen, and cut, with blood hardening on soft skin, the way it had looked behind the gas station. Headlights of a car passing on the street on the other side of the small building flashed across the kid’s face and cast it in sharper light for an instant.

Flip rolled over on the bed, and the springs creaked like coffin hinges. The mattress stuck to his side in the hot, compacted air.

He opened his eyes.

It wasn’t his first killing. At least two others. And many more he’d left bleeding and unconscious. He played them out in his mind with a vague hope that remembering them would steel him from this haunting.

The first was when he was seventeen. The second came after all that time in gladiator school turned him from a kid into a criminal.

But this one, this boy, was somehow different.

Flip sat up. He put his bare feet flat on the carpet. He looked fearfully around the room as if the walls might fold in on him any second. The drapes glowed against the sun. On the other side of the glass the LA air was packed dense, and the sidewalk was two stories down—no way for anyone to crawl up or in. But he sensed the fragility of the glass as a thin barricade against the outside.

He walked into the kitchen. Shards of glass from the broken coffeepot still sparkled on the linoleum. He passed an instant of wanting to grind the soles of his naked feet into the curved spikes of glass winking in the light like crystal claws.

He stepped into the living room, the carpet under his feet stiff with wear and accumulated dust. Here sunlight through another window was barricaded off by blinds, parallel lines of glare seeping between and illuminating him and the yellowed walls. Where two of them joined the ceiling, a cobweb dangled, a gray wisp like a tiny hangman’s strand.

At the edge of the door, the metallic bar of the dead bolt was visible in the crack beside the jamb. Locking out. Locking in. He went to it, put his fingers on the switch. He twisted it to make sure it was locked.

His hand. He brought it up and stared at the back of it, brought up the other next to it to compare them. The right was still purple where he’d bruised the knuckles on the kid’s face, but the cut was healing. He had needed no weapon other than these bones, this skin, these muscles and tendons all clenched together into a club. These were his weapons. He flexed them into fists, regarded the tools he’d used to steal a life.

A knock on the door startled him. He dropped his hands and took a step backward.

He should look through the peephole, but his feet stayed rooted to the carpet.

It could be Cole. The prospect of seeing the PO nagged at Flip’s chest as inevitable as gravity. He couldn’t handle Cole now. In this condition, he might as well give him a signed confession.

Another knock, softer. A woman’s voice. “Flip? Flip, darlin’, you in there?”

He rushed to the door, his purple-backed hand fumbling with the dead bolt. Sliding it clear, he twisted the knob, and there was Diane. She stood in that lifeless, stained hallway like a flower crowding through a crack in the city’s asphalt. Her lips shifted into a smile, and they moved to form words, the soft pink flesh of her tongue grazing her front teeth.

Flip couldn’t process her words. Her presence in his doorway shocked his mind until she reached out to press her fingertips into his arm. “Aren’t you going to invite me in?”

He wanted to seize her, fold his arms around her and squeeze, feel her warmth against his chest as a denial that he could do the things he’d done.

But all he did was step aside.

She moved before him, some inches shorter even though she wore heels. Her hair passed him, its fragrance bringing to mind cleanness, freshness. He wanted to bury his face in it and drink in the scent.

He slammed the door. Locked it.

She was talking again, words with meanings that escaped him, her back to him, blouse snug against her waist where it slipped into the top of the skirt hugging her hips, covering her to where her calves emerged like twins flexing until she turned to bring that face back to him. Those lips, damp and red. Those eyes.

She dropped onto the sofa, folded her legs beside her. A hand went to the sofa cushion next to her, patted.

Mute as a crab, he scrabbled across the floor to her. He couldn’t take his eyes off her face. When she smiled, his own face bloomed into a smile too, the oppression of his memories ascending from his mind. Cradled by the sofa cushions next to her now, he brought his eyes down to her hands where they were folded on her lap, nails painted pink, fingers tapered, bending, smooth and white.

One of the hands moved to his. The contrast of this delicate hand on his made him recoil upon himself. Underneath her hand, his was a bruised mallet, his fingers like knotted, blackened sausages cobbled into the lumpy meat of his backhand. This hand was who he was. It was what he’d done.

“Flip?”

Faint eyebrows lifted over those eyes, smile angling the tissue of her lips upward at their corners to reveal her teeth again.

“Yeah?”

“I asked how you’re doing, darlin’.”

“How I’m doing?”

She nodded, chin dipping into the softness underneath it.

“I’m . . . I’m all right.”

Her hand rose from his and came to his face, cradled his jaw, and as it stroked, he heard the sandy grate of his stubble against her smooth palm.

“Tell you what, honey. Why don’t you get a shower and a shave, and we’ll see if we can make you better than just all right?”

She smacked his face with her fingertips. Her smile was back, and with no more words, he was on his feet and peeling his shirt over his head on the way to the shower.

* * *

After she was gone, the taste of her still lingering on his lips, he was able to close his eyes again. His body melted into the mattress, imageless eyelids shut, and his mind drifted with thoughts of her.

She’d whispered to him the next things to be done. She’d mouthed the words with her breath puffing softly, secretly against his ear. Her voice was warmth that passed into the deepest parts of him. Her words entered his mind as if needless of eardrum or mental process to become part of him like light absorbed through skin.

His mind rested on her, his hands still bearing the sensations of her, the gravity of his pulsing blood settled now in his veins thanks to her, his whole being as if formed by her.

He turned his head against the pillow, and her fragrance came to him out of the pillowcase. What he’d done to the boy, and what Diane had asked him to do next—it was all pushed aside with the remembrance of her touch.