CHAPTER NINE
Wearing only a shirt, Paolo leaned back on the airport motel’s crisp white sheets and muted the television’s sound. On the screen, the videotape of the yoga instructor in her pink leotard played, just as it had been playing when he’d sneaked into apartment 3D. The woman on TV turned sideways, bent over, and practically touched her nose to the floor. But it was the way her compact little ass flared toward the ceiling that sent Paolo’s heart aflutter.
He removed the small cardboard sheath that protected the new utility razor blade, examining its miraculous edge in the yellowish light of the motel room’s bedside lamp. In flashes, his face reflected partially in the steel of the tiny sharpened mirror-an eye, his teeth, another eye. He’d grown thinner in recent months, his face stretched unnaturally over sharp cheekbones, more like the face of a mummy, the dark eyes sunken deeply inside pronounced sockets. The rich brown color of his eyes only revealed itself when he tilted his head up into light. Despite the look of his gaunt frame, he’d never been this fit, this strong, this fast on his feet, in his life.
He accepted that with crimes came punishment. Guilt gave way to confession. Release. He felt no pain, internally or otherwise, when he did these things to others, only when he did them to himself. Without pain there was no payment. It confirmed his existence.
He examined the perfection of the blade. He loved it, and hated it.
Propping his head up with two pillows, he saw past his erection to the screen where the pink leotard continued its contortions. He could picture the woman he’d killed mimicking those movements. He could smell her.
He unbuttoned his shirt. It fell open revealing dozens of raised scars. Some pink and fresh. Others dark and older. A few lucky ones had been cut repeatedly and now protruded a quarter inch or more, a geometric lump of scar tissue.
Under the glow of the lamp’s dim light he placed the blade to a vacant space on his abdomen and applied pressure, gentle at first, then pressing more firmly as the skin separated and curled away from the blade. He gritted his teeth, watched the television and stroked himself.
He dragged the razor deeper, creating a red, feverish wound three inches long. As he climaxed he dropped the razor, awash in relief, a flood of departing tension, like a drain being opened beneath him. He closed his eyes, sighed deeply.
Later, when he bothered to look, he realized he’d gone a little deep with the razor. The pink leotard had been lying on her back at the time, stretching her legs up and apart. He’d overreacted. The wound would require butterfly bandages, but he carried them with him wherever he went.
For a moment he was not alone. For a moment he’d done nothing wrong. For a moment he felt at balance with the world and his own place within it. These feelings would change, would forsake him over the next several hours-he’d been here enough times to know. The kill might return in his dreams, might linger for days or even weeks. That he’d fucked her while she died beneath him only made matters worse: his moment of creation, hers of destruction. But he took opportunities when they arose and paid for them later in his own way, as he did now.
He might rest later, but now the adrenaline from this painful act would carry him. He sometimes stayed awake days without sleep, never bothered by it, never fully understanding it. He couldn’t remember if or when he’d last eaten and reminded himself to eat something before continuing.
Under the glare of a fluorescent tube, he wetted a towel and cleaned himself.
His black hair wet and combed back, he left the room for a twenty-four-hour diner, envisioning pancakes and a hot cup of coffee, an aging redhead in a tight shirt who would call him “Hon.”
A bead of blood seeped through and stained his shirt despite the butterfly bandages. He failed to notice it, his body numbed and distant. His mind whirring. He felt right again. And that was all that mattered.
CHAPTER TEN
Alice Dunbar’s Jefferson Square loft apartment lacked a view of the St. Louis arch or the Mississippi. Instead, it looked out onto what only a few years earlier had been a needle park. Gentrification had relocated the drugs and dealers a few blocks south and east. Now the park offered Penny a place to play on the jungle gym or to swing on the swings during the steamy, sultry afternoons.
But Penny wasn’t in the mood for playing. She stared at her mother, tears pooled in oversized blue eyes, poisoned by betrayal. “But we just got here…”
Alice packed furiously, a maternal storm leaving debris in its wake. She’d been through this before, she reminded herself, wanting to stay calm. Only months ago, in fact.
She felt bad for uprooting Penny for the third time in her five short years. This time Penny had found a set of kids at day care to call her friends, and her mother hated to lose that.
Until this most recent move Penny had pretty much kept to herself. She liked American Girl dolls and to be read the accompanying stories. McDonald’s Happy Meals, her hamburgers with onions, mustard, and ketchup. She’d outgrown a macaroni-and-cheese phase. Now it was frozen Gogurts, pancakes, and flank steak when Mommy could afford it.
She liked for her mom to read to her before bed, her baths hot, and her pillowcase cold.
She’d learned to watch her mother for signals when on the bus or the street. With little in the way of discussion, instruction, or explanation, she’d intuited that they lived a secret life, a different life from others.
“It’s not forever,” Alice lied. In fact, Alice had no idea when they might stop running. “We’re not moving, we’re just leaving for a while. Like vacation.”
“Not me! I’m not going anywhere! I’ll run away! I will.”
“That’s the point: We’re running away together, sweetheart,” Alice said in as loving a voice as she could muster. “We’ll be back.”
Despite this outburst, Penny was significantly more mature, more worldly and sophisticated than her peers. It no doubt stemmed from their nomadic, secluded life. Whether those qualities would benefit her remained to be seen. She acted like a five-year-old, but she read at a sixth-grade level and spoke with an adult vocabulary. Though adults were impressed, Alice wasn’t thrilled with what she saw developing: a precocious, challenging, willful child who acted as if she were entitled.
Garage-sale furniture had failed to adequately fill the loft space that had once housed a printing press and been home to a citywide giveaway newspaper. Alice had left the yellowed front pages of past editions stapled to the rough wood walls as artwork.
She checked the TV, tuned to CNN, wondering how often they would run the ad for the ID bracelets. She’d seen it only once, about an hour earlier, but that had been enough to make her leave St. Louis today. Possibly forever. The WITSEC deputies had drummed into her the need for her to keep up her daily watch of USA TODAY and CNN. And even though she’d fled WITSEC years before, she’d never stopped looking for the warning signal. If she ever saw an ad for a silver-plated ID bracelet, with the name “Johnny Anyone” on the bracelet, and the address on the mail-in form “ PO Box 911, Washington, DC,” she was to take immediate action. Sight of the ad today had knocked her sideways: one moment struggling through life on its typically difficult track, the next, pure panic.
Something drastic, something radical had happened within WITSEC that must have jeopardized all protected witnesses. Sadly for Alice it was just more of the same-the endless dance of reinventing herself.
She packed while containing an anxiety she hadn’t experienced since fleeing St. Luke’s. The unsettling existence of living with the knowledge that someone was after her, wanted to kill her, preoccupied her every thought, every movement. WITSEC tried to explain such feelings in its orientation literature, but had no idea what they were talking about.