With her right hand, she reached out and searched the wall near the door, found a light switch, and flicked it up.
Seeing the space laid out before her, Rose felt a powerful and inexplicable rush of loneliness. The room was furnished sparely, almost spartanly: a thin-backed couch in front of a small television, a desk against the wall with the chair pushed in, some papers scattered around, a lap-top computer folded over on itself.
On the breakfast bar separating the living room from the kitchen was a single framed photograph of a man and a woman, both older, the man with a full dark mustache and black hair streaked with silver, the woman dark-haired and olive-skinned, wearing a flower-print dress.
Rose picked up the simple silver frame and ran a finger gently over the glass. The couple looked familiar, but only passingly so, as if she might have seen them once in an old movie, or in a dream. She replaced the frame on the white Formica bar.
The walls of the living room were off-white and devoid of decoration. No art; no photos. Plain and unremarkable. The apartment reminded Rose of a model home, but then it occurred to her that no semi-competent interior decorator would make a space so soulless, not if they wanted to make a sale.
There was a sliding glass door onto a small balcony, and Rose stepped to it and drew the hanging white blinds into place. No need to risk being seen while she reconnoitered.
Safely sheltered from any would-be prying eyes, she turned and regarded the room critically.
What the hell? her mind complained. It was like no one actually lived here at all. Why had she been so powerfully drawn to this place, then? And there was no doubt in her mind that this apartment was precisely where she’d been pulled.
Maybe another room.
On the far side of the living room, opposite the front door, was a door, standing slightly open, and Rose started toward it. Bedroom, she thought, check the bedside table.
She stopped in mid-step, puzzled.
There was no way she could know that the room behind the door was the bedroom. If this was a two-bedroom apartment, it might be a study or a den, or even the bathroom. But it was the bedroom. Standing there, still ten feet from the door, she realized that she even knew what the bedroom looked like. A queen-sized bed pushed midway between the two bordering walls, a dark faux-oak bedside table, a matching chest-of-drawers facing the foot of the bed, the kind of cheap furniture one might buy at Wal-Mart or Target. In fact—and there was no way she could possibly know this—the bedside table and chest-of-drawers had come from a Target, a Target in Columbus, Ohio.
Rose walked slowly to the door and gave it a push.
The room was exactly the way she’d envisioned.
* * *
Five minutes later, she sat down on the futon with a journal and a sheaf of loose papers. Some of them she’d found in the desk, a couple more in the bedroom, piled on top of the bureau. The journal she’d discovered hidden away in the top drawer of the bedside table.
The paper on top was a folded over bit of newspaper. Printed across the top was the headline: CHARLOTTE TEACHER HEALS STUDENT. Puzzled, Rose read the rest of the article, which had been clipped from the National Enquirer. When she was finished, she sat back and put her feet up on the coffee table.
John Barron? The name was oddly familiar, but, like the picture on the breakfast bar, she didn’t know from where. And a healer, at least reputedly? Something about that made sense.
Lost in thought, Rose got up and went into the kitchen, opened the fridge, and without looking, reached in and pulled out a beer from the top shelf. She twisted the top off and drank deeply—
The cold beer still in her mouth, she froze.
Shaking a little, she put the beer down, the article forgotten. A drip of beer ran from her bottom lip and onto her chin. Rose reached out her left hand and tore a paper towel from the dispenser screwed to the wall. She wiped her mouth, then reached down and opened the cabinet under the sink and tossed the towel in the trash.
And stopped again, suddenly breathless.
Half of her brain was paralyzed, shocked into uselessness. The other part of her, the reptilian, instinctual part that had been dealing with bizarre occurrences for her entire life, still seemed to work.
From all appearances, she had been drawn from hundreds of miles away to an apartment she didn’t recognize, but somehow knew intimately. In the brief time she’d spent inside the apartment, she had seen a picture of two people she could almost place in her memory, and she had read an article about a man whose name sounded more than familiar.
Which left her where?
Rose took a sip of the beer and sat back down on the futon. She was surprised at how unrushed she felt; in much the same way she’d been led here, the way she’d found the papers in the bedroom, the way she seemed to know her way around this apartment as if she’d lived here for years, she also knew that this John Barron wasn’t coming home, at least not anytime soon.
She opened the journal. And nearly recoiled in shock.
Staring up at her from the page was a face she recognized. The rendering wasn’t anything to write home about, just an amateurishly sketched representation, but there was no mistaking the sunken eyes, the week’s worth of scruff, and the tattoo… On the neck of the man in the drawing was a black sun, and issuing from it, a fan of dark red rays. She’d killed this man in Florida, not a day before she’d felt compelled to leave the beach house.
Hands shaking slightly, she flipped back a page. Another sketch, this one of an old woman wearing a pearl necklace. Rose had found her walking on the beach with her little dog and a glass of white wine and torn her throat out behind a sand dune. Oh, Jesus. Rose let the pages sift through her fingers, seeing face after face, a catalogue of her victims. And then one drawing in particular stopped her and she hitched in a quick breath.
“Oh, no,” she whispered.
In the sketch, a little girl slept soundly in a farm-style bed, the covers pulled up to her chin. In the foreground of the drawing was a cross that bisected the view both vertically and horizontally, and Rose knew the view was through a window. And she knew what the sketch could not show her, that it had been snowing that night—a blizzard, in fact—and that the little girl’s blood was sweeter than anything Rose had ever tasted…
Enraged, Rose stood and threw the journal across the room. It hit the wall and fell behind the television, fluttering down like a bird that has flown into a window. Wanting to be out of this place, out in the night, Rose stuffed the papers from the coffee table into her bag and stepped toward the door.
She was almost gone when she saw the small white square of paper sitting on the edge of the breakfast bar.
Written on the paper was a name, Mary Ann Shaw, and one other word: Call. Beneath that, a phone number. It was the one thing in the apartment that signaled a connection between Barron and any other person. She stuffed the paper into her pocket and turned again to leave.
That was when a man’s voice said, “Well, now, who the fuck are you?”
Chapter 17
Phylum stood in the doorway of Barron’s apartment, a Glock 17 in his right hand, and regarded the woman standing in the living room. She was youngish, somewhere in her late twenties or early thirties, and she was, Phylum thought, about as drop dead fucking hot as a female could get without combusting. He felt movement below his belt and grinned, waiting for the woman to panic.
But she didn’t. Instead, she just stood there, looking at him implacably. Phylum felt his grin falter.
“What are you doing here?” he asked, stepping into the apartment and closing the door behind him.
“I could ask you the same question,” the woman responded. Damn, she even had a nice voice, low and husky, like one of those chicks from the phone porn places. Of course, most of them were fifty, filthy, and fat as fuck, holding the phone with one hand while they shoveled KFC or Taco Bell into their faces with the other.
He nodded. “I’m here looking for John Barron. I don’t guess
you’re him.”
She smiled, actually smiled, at that. She wasn’t supposed to be smiling, goddamnit. He was huge, and he was holding a fucking gun. What was wrong with this girl? She shook her head. “No,” she said. “Not him. But I’m looking for him, too, I think.”
“Any idea where he is?”
“No,” she said. “If that’s all, I was just leaving.”
Phylum reached behind him and flicked the deadbolt on the door. “Not quite all.”
Her eyes widened and then she nodded resignedly. “I figured as much.”
“How do you know Barron?” Phylum said, stepping closer.
She stepped back, edging toward the breakfast bar, putting it between them. “I don’t,” she said.
“Then why do you want to find him?”
She looked at him stonily, measuring him. “You ask too many questions. That’s a good way to get yourself hurt.”
He surprised himself by laughing. “Hurt? That’s good.” He took another step closer and she retreated an equal distance. Now they stood on opposite sides of the bar, him in the living room, her in the kitchen. She was trapped.
“Look,” she said, her eyes never leaving his, “I don’t want to kill you, but I will if I have to. Just back off and let me go, and we’ll go our own ways. Deal?”
Oh, she was fantastic. “And how are you going to kill me?” Phylum said. Now he was edging around the bar, entering the kitchen, the gun still at his side. The woman had stopped backing up and stood facing him in the tight kitchen, the counter behind her. Nowhere else to go.
She smiled again, and he saw that her teeth were very white. “I’m going to rip your throat out with my hands and then drink your blood,” she whispered. “If you make me.”
“My god,” he whispered, raising the gun and pointing it at her chest. “I think I’m in love.”
There was a sudden banging on the door, and a muffled voice yelling, “Mr. Barron, this is the police. Are you okay in there? Open the door!”
Phylum’s head turned in the direction of the door for the briefest of moments, and then he was ducking as the microwave oven, one of the old ones—it must have weighed thirty or forty pounds—came sailing toward him. It smashed into the wall behind him with tremendous force and drywall dust cascaded down all around Phylum. The door of the microwave, which had come open on impact, clipped the hand holding the gun as it fell to the floor and the Glock discharged with a deafening CRACK.
“Fuck!” Phylum yelled, trying to regain his balance. He stood and looked back into the kitchen, but the woman had hopped the breakfast bar and was heading toward the sliding glass door out to the balcony.
He raised the gun and fired twice. One of the rounds punched through the glass door, and it exploded outward with a shimmery cough. The second bullet caught the woman high in the back, just to the side of her right shoulder blade. Not a kill shot, but a crippling one.
Gotcha, Phylum thought. But the woman never stopped, never so much as paused. She gained the balcony, braced her hands on the wooden railing, and then vaulted over the edge.
“What the fuck?” Phylum said aloud. And then the door flew open and two uniformed cops were suddenly in the doorway.
“Put the gun on the ground!” one of them yelled—screamed, really; Phylum could hear the panic in his voice. The other stood behind the first, gun pointed at Phylum’s chest.
Still thinking about the way the woman had gone over the second floor balcony, Phylum very calmly raised his gun and shot both of the cops. He aimed low because he knew they’d be wearing body armor and a direct hit center-mass would do little more than knock the breath out of them, maybe break a couple ribs if he was lucky. He hit one of the cops in the crotch and the man fell, his mouth open in a silent scream. The other, Phylum hit in the shin, halfway between ankle and knee, and the bone snapped like a toothpick, dropping the cop to the floor. This man’s scream was not silent, and the shrill sound did Phylum’s heart some good.
As he walked past the two writhing men, he shot each in the head. Three minutes later, after a cursory check of the grassy area below Barron’s balcony, he had scaled the back fence of the complex, where he’d entered earlier in the day, and was trotting across Harris Boulevard toward his car. When he climbed in behind the wheel, he was still shaking his head. Who the fuck had that crazy bitch been? There was only one thing he knew for sure: she wasn’t like any person he’d seen before.
* * *
After his encounter with the woman at Barron’s apartment, Phylum had taken it upon himself to do a little research. Sitting in his car in the parking lot of a McDonalds twenty minutes outside of the city, Phylum booted up his MacBook and connected to the internet via a wireless card. He surfed over to Google and searched for information on John Barron. The number of hits was awe-inspiring, nearly two million, and all seemed to have been generated over the last couple of weeks.
Barron, it seemed, had supposedly healed a girl who was mortally injured in some kind of hit-and-run jackassery at the school where he worked. According to the articles he read—and these were articles from reputable sources like the New York Times and the Washington Herald, the girl’s head had, for all intents and purposes, been spread across the road like jam on bread. And then she had been back in school a couple of days later.
“Huh,” Phylum grunted, ripping open a pack of salted peanuts and upending it into his mouth. “Weird, man.” He went back to his search.
Fifteen minutes later, he’d managed to gather a few other seemingly salient pieces of information.
People were by turns worshipful and exceedingly skeptical about the healing; after the incident at his school, Barron had been laid-up in a local hospital for a number of days, convalescing after suffering some kind of physical breakdown of his own; Barron had been attacked during his stay in the hospital by a cancer patient; the Catholic Archdiocese had been called in to investigate the veracity of the healing and had pronounced it false. That struck Phylum as odd. Barron didn’t seem to be using the purported healing to garner attention, money, or fame. In fact, from all reports, the exact opposite was true. There were no direct quotes from Barron in any of the articles, and several referenced the man’s reclusive behavior. In short, just the way the Church might want to see a man acting in the wake of such a “miracle.” Denying the authenticity of the healing seemed a stupid move in what should have been a win-win situation for the Catholic Church.
And then there was what Phylum had observed inside of Barron’s shitty little dwelling. Nothing. No plush furniture, no fifty inch flat-screen TV. It wasn’t the home of the kind of man who borrowed money from Mr. Prince, in other words.
* * *
Phylum dialed Mr. It’s Me and was gratified when the man answered on the first ring.
“You shouldn’t call me,” the man said, sounding uncharacteristically annoyed. In all the years Phylum had been taking calls and receiving jobs from the man, this was the first time he’d ever initiated contact. Phylum’s business operated on much the same premise as the United States armed forces had for years: don’t ask, don’t tell. When he got a call from Mr. It’s Me, the understanding was that Phylum would complete the job without question. It was an arrangement that had worked well for a long time. But this job was different.
On the surface, it had made little sense to begin with; he had been hired to bump off some regular Joe in North Carolina. Not New York or L.A., not Vegas or Atlantic City. Those were the kinds of places Mr. Prince’s customers regularly did business. So from the very beginning, Phylum had assumed Mr. It’s Me was hiring him on behalf of some other party. Now, given what he had learned during his brief foray into the World Wide Web, he was sure of it.
“Yeah, well, them’s the breaks.”
“What do you want?”
“There was a woman in Barron’s apartment. Someone else looking for him. She wasn’t normal.”
There was a pause on the other end of the line. “Explain.”
??
?I shot her in the back with a Glock 17 from about fifteen feet away, and then she jumped off a balcony two stories off the ground and still felt good enough to run off, no problem.”
“Don’t worry about her. Just take care of Barron.”
“He’s gone,” Phylum said. “Hasn’t been back to his apartment all day. And I want to know who this woman is.”
“Never mind the woman,” Mr. It’s Me reiterated. “Can you find Barron?”
Phylum laughed. “Of course I can find him. But I want to know who wants him dead.”
“That’s not part of our agreement.”
“No,” Phylum agreed, “but this isn’t a normal job, is it?”
There was silence for a moment as the other man turned thoughts over in his mind. “No,” he finally said. “That’s not part of our agreement.”
Phylum exhaled. “I want you to understand a very basic fact,” he said, his voice level and still agreeable. “You are not very smart. In fact, you’re about the dumbest motherfucker in the world. Not to mention the dumbest motherfucker in Reston, Virginia.”
He waited for the words to sink in. Six months ago, Phylum had taken it upon himself to do a little research into the real identity of Mr. It’s Me. He’d done so for no other reason than that he had begun to resent the way the man seemed so comfortable ordering him around. Phylum was no trained monkey. It had cost him nearly twenty thousand dollars, but Phylum had learned from a contact inside the FBI that the number that always popped up PRIVATE when Mr. It’s Me called his cell phone actually belonged to a forty-three year-old schmuck named Harold Colson who lived with his wife and two children in a suburb of Washington, DC. He’d been waiting for the right time to use the information.
He heard the other man’s breath click dryly in his throat.
“Are we communicating now?” Phylum asked.