Chapter 18
SYLVIE
THIS IS A fabulous chair: high-backed, wingback, upholstered in a green velvet that’s gone bald at the arms from decades of somebody’s elbows.
It’s a reading chair, the central focus in a living room that has no television.
On the table right next to it, there’s a lamp and a little corkboard coaster on it and nothing else.
It’s hard to believe someone who uses a coaster could be such a fucking menace to society.
I’ve been in it for two hours and forty minutes now, gloves on. If I were to be caught for the crime I’m about to commit, lying in wait would most definitely be among the charges. But I won’t be caught. Because Mabel Edwards is a coward. All internet bullies are.
The chair is nice. This room is tolerable. But everything else in this house is garbage.
Not metaphorically. Actual garbage, in drifts.
Old newspaper towers going soft along the baseboards.
A dining table that hasn’t seen a plate in years, buried in mail she never opened and catalogues for furniture she’ll never buy.
Six wine bottles on the kitchen counter, empty, in a row, and I counted eleven more in a paper sack by the door.
I stopped counting after that. The air is thick with the stench: old wine, old paper, the hint of ammonia that suggests a cat, rebelling against its litter box, either lives here or died here.
I haven’t seen it and I’ve scoured the house.
There’s sort of a makeshift road through the filth. She’s worn a path from the door to the desk to the bathroom, one person wide, but there is still scattered clutter here and there, small roadblocks on her savage path of indifference.
Brinley Cage’s face is on the front page of a newspaper four feet from my boot.
I’ve been looking at her for a while now.
Just like Vesper said: a sweet smile, dark hair.
She left out the rainbow braces. In this picture, she’s on the floor, Chinese takeout menu in hand, pointing to orange chicken for whoever is holding the camera with a look of delight on her face.
I take the burner out of my jacket and hold it in my lap. Black, cheap, prepaid. It has not made a sound in twenty-one days.
Salisbrie’s warned me to get the job done quickly last time we spoke.
I’ve come up with a million ways to explain my plan, but I haven’t gotten a chance because I can’t reach her directly.
That is the arrangement. She contacts me.
I do not contact her. I have no number for her, and even if I had one…
well, I’m not actually eager to have this conversation.
Who knows how she’ll react. I may feel like I have the upper hand, but it’s just a feeling.
Let’s be honest: the woman is being confirmed to the Department of Defense.
I’m a freelance thief and killer with no papers. How easily I could disappear.
There’s only the simple question of if I’d disappear by choice.
I made a solid plan weeks ago in Callen’s apartment at two in the morning with a manuscript open on my knees. A beautiful plan.
Belai brings me the black box, I take it, destroy it.
I reason with him to gut the manuscript.
Tell his story but omit the details that could get him killed.
Everybody lives. Callen lives. He never learns who I really was and what I had agreed to.
Because that girl is gone. I want to be the woman who watches cartoon movies, eats Indian takeout, and helps take care of this prissy little cat he wants.
I want to be his future instead of either of our pasts.
I was so eager to get it done and moved on, but of course, that’s when everything halted.
Because plans need people, and Belai hasn’t texted yet.
It’s been weeks of me checking my phone under Callen’s arm at two in the morning, and nothing, with no way to reach the man.
Any more emails will look suspicious. All I can do is sit here and wait, and pray the puzzle pieces fall into place in the right order.
I am surprised Salisbrie hasn’t called though.
That’s the sinister part that’s been eating through my stomach lining.
Is she waiting patiently? Is she distracted?
Has she implemented another plan? This is why I sleep at Callen’s every night I can.
It’s why I barely sleep at all. He doesn’t know it, but he’s gone from prey to client in my mind.
I’m the bodyguard he didn’t ask for and doesn’t know he needs.
The anxiety of it is starting to eat away at me and every day that phone doesn’t ring is a day I live in fear that she’s making other arrangements about Callen. About me.
The clock is running. She said that. She told me to my face in a parking garage and I was too busy being insulted to be afraid. I have spent a few weeks being extremely happy. And in tandem, I am now extremely scared of losing the thing that makes me so happy.
I’ve eaten breakfast with my sister. I’ve fallen asleep on a man’s chest with his hand in my hair. I’ve been asked to move in and I said give me a few weeks, and I meant it, and the whole time this dead black rectangle has been sitting in my pocket like a tumor.
That’s what happiness is for me, evidently. It isn’t the absence of the tumor. It’s being able to think about something else for even an hour.
Which might explain why I’m sitting in Mabel Edwards’s reading chair. I need to be in control of some sort of justice.
It isn’t money. Nobody’s paying me or promising jack shit.
It certainly isn’t Vesper. She said no. Or did she?
Vesper looked at me across a tablecloth and told me PALADIN does not do this, and then she told me I’m not yet part of PALADIN.
She gave me the teacher’s name, and slowly too, unmistakably.
And regardless of her actual intention, I took it as permission.
I couldn’t not.
She had to at least know that. Right?
The real reason I’m here is more significant than blurry orders.
I have spent my entire life watching people do harm without consequence.
They relish in the ability to inflict without enduring it.
My father. Luca. Every man who ever put his hand somewhere it wasn’t invited and then went home and slept.
So fucking entitled. And I know I’ll see all those people again when I join them in hell.
But the afterlife, if it exists, can’t wait.
There’s an innocent girl in a grave, and a shit stain of a human being who gets to be alive. Not in jail. Not paying shit for consequences. I’m about to change that, for once.
There’s a jingle then a click at the door. Fucking finally. Keys in the lock…kind of late, Mabel. What have you been doing all night?
She struggles with the door as if the lock is a Rubik’s Cube.
Once she figures it out, she swears at the door before coming through it shoulder-first. A burst of humid August air and the redolence of a bar enter with her.
The door slams. The deadbolt clicks. Her bag hits the floor and she says something venomous under her breath to nobody at all.
She’s not what I pictured.
The media showed her face, of course. I expected a monster. What comes through the door is a woman in a shapeless cardigan and shoes with the backs crushed down, mid-fifties, hair going gray in a way she’s given up managing. She’s not ugly. Just unattended. Like a house nobody lives in.
She apparently has put every ounce of effort she has into the demolition of other people and none at all into building herself, and it shows on her the way it shows all around the room.
Of the two totes that went down by the door, one tilts, making a whoosh as papers fan out of it across the floor.
I look at it, and my brain snags. Those are lesson plans. Photocopies of lesson plans. A worksheet with a cartoon owl in the corner. A stack of essays, still stapled, red ink in the margins.
She was fired. She was fired the week they charged her; it was in every article I read. She will never stand in front of a classroom again in this country.
So why is she still carrying children’s homework around in a canvas bag?
She doesn’t pick up the mess which doesn’t surprise me, given the state of her little hoarder’s paradise here. It might be the reason she still hasn’t noticed me, sitting dead silent, cloaked by the shadows in her dark living room.
She disappears from my view into the kitchen, and from the sound of it, pours a glass of wine the size of a soup bowl.
The glug, glugs don’t stop until I’m certain the entire bottle is drained into a cup.
She reappears, a giant wineglass in hand, already half guzzled, and heads right to her desk, and collapses into the chair, her back toward me now.
The screen lights make her glow from behind, giving her a discomfiting angelic blue hue in the dark.
Except, it’s an ugly light. It highlights the frizz of her ponytail and the holes in her sweater.
It’s literally like she crawled out of a mousehold.
I’d pity her if I didn’t know what she was capable of.
To my shock, I watch her open four tabs.
I know what I’m looking at before I can read a word of it, because I spent four years looking over Dani’s shoulder learning exactly how people like this operate.
Sock accounts. Cycled handles. She’s got a spreadsheet open in one tab.
An actual spreadsheet. She’s cross-checking something in it against a school directory, and she is doing this at midnight, drunk, in a house full of trash, with a dead girl’s face on the floor behind her.
She scrolls. She types. Something she reads makes her laugh, one short ugly bark, and she takes another pull of the wine.
I let her as I continue to sit so still I’m nothing more than a fucking shadow. Until I get fed up and worried she’s doing actual irreparable damage. She’s probably making someone cry as we speak. So, I let her finish the sentence she’s typing…then I speak.
“You really haven’t learned your lesson, have you?”