Deja Who (20 page)

H
ad to be done. It absolutely had to be done.

Oh, God, forgive me, the look. The look in his eyes.

“I had to do it,” Leah tearfully told the cabbie. She was a matronly woman in her forties, blond and brown-eyed and fair-skinned and running to plump, she and a million others like her in the Midwest. She wasn't at all alarmed by the crying once she made sure Leah wasn't physically hurt, or needed a hospital or the police.

“Don't take me back to the police,” she begged, “I just got out of there. I had to get him clear of me. Of my life. My mess. Everything. I had to get him away. But oh, you should have seen. How he looked, oh, God. God.”

She burst into fresh tears, accepting the box of tissues and instantly going through half of them. “Please put the price for these on the meter,” she ordered between sobs.

A snort from the driver. “Not charging you for tissues, honey.”

“Thank you, that's very nice. If you had a daughter you wouldn't make her do cattle calls for tampon commercials unless she really wanted to, right?”

“A what for a what?”

“An audition where they call in dozens of actresses and see them all in the same one- or two- or three-day period.”

“
Cattle
call?” the cabbie (Brenda Morgan, per the ID helpfully posted on the plastic divider between them) said, lips thinning in distaste. “Is that what they call those? Awful. Well, hon, here it is. I have four daughters, two in med school, one in law school, and one is teaching history to seventh graders. None of them ever wanted to do a cattle call and never have.”

“You're a good mom. Your daughters are so fortunate,” Leah said, more grateful than she could express. Although why she was grateful to a strange cab driver for not charging her for half a box of tissues she did not know. Was she so starved for positive maternal attention that she would latch onto any older woman who was nice to her?

No, of course not.

No, except for Cat.

Cat!

Oh holy hell.
Leah clutched damp tissues in her fist and thought hard. Her killer wasn't content to murder Leah and be done with it once the purpose of both their lives was fulfilled. Sometimes he was arrested and sometimes he lived to a ripe old age and sometimes he was killed while killing her, but one way or the other, they both ended up dead.

This time around he went for Leah's mother first, doubtless
assuming that their parent-child dynamic would dictate a bond. Next time, he could beat someone to death she
did
care about: Archer. Or Cat. Archer was safe, she hoped.

“Can you please go faster?” she begged. “Please please go faster. I'll tip you one hundred percent.”

“You won't,” the cabbie said with an envious air of serenity as she took the second-to-last turn to Leah's apartment. “I'm not letting you do that when you're obviously not yourself.”

“You have no way of knowing what ‘myself' is; you don't have a baseline,” Leah argued, annoyed out of her tears. “This could be daily behavior for me. I might often weep in cabs and tip one hundred percent. Two hundred percent!”

“Somehow I doubt it,” came the dry reply. After a pause, the older woman continued. “I'm not charging you for the ride, either.”

Leah sat up straight and bit off the words. “That. Is. Just. Ridiculous! How do you expect to make a living if you don't charge?”

“My husband works, too.”

“But that doesn't—”

“You helped my niece. Years ago.”

Blowing her nose, she looked up in mid-honk and caught the cabbie's gaze in the mirror. “I did?”

“If you're Leah Nazir, yeah. You were on TV a couple years ago, you helped the cops figure out who that Cereal Rapist scumbag was.”

She vaguely remembered the Cereal Serial Rapist. A local reporter, one more insensitive than the rest of the herd, hung the nickname on Marcus Farrady, who, after he raped his victims, hung around long enough to have a bowl of cereal (his first preference) or toast. Something breakfast-y, at any rate.
He took the bowl and utensils he used with him. When the cops caught up with him, a full quarter of his unfinished basement was shelf after shelf of mismatched cereal bowls, small plates, bread knives, and spoons.

Leah had been called in to consult, and reasoned that he could have been the reincarnation of three deceased serial rapists (deceased number 1: electric chair, 1990; deceased number two: succumbed to cancer in prison, 1991; deceased number three: shot and killed by last victim, 1992). She backtracked birthdays to their dates of death and was able to come up with a list for the cops. It helped that the Cereal Serial Rapist actually looked and acted like a rapist: shifty eyes, blocky hands like bowling balls, murderous temper, bull-like shoulders, crippling misogyny, juvenile record of peeping, adult record of assault. Leah found it refreshing; bad as their crimes were, it was always much more horrible when the monsters looked like they could be your next-door neighbor.

It also helped that he obsessively ate bowl after bowl of cereal while being interrogated. Obtaining a warrant was not difficult. And though he'd had ample time to ditch the evidence in his basement, Farrady hadn't bothered. That behavior was not at all refreshing. She had ceased wondering why so many serial
anythings
wanted to be caught years ago.

“Yes,” she said, remembering, “just a couple of years ago. They stuck a microphone in my face and asked me why I hadn't figured it out sooner, preventing the last two rapes.”

“Oh, dear.”

“I invited them to fuck the fuck off.”

“I sure hope so!”

“Sorry about the language.”

“It seems appropriate in that instance.”

“That was the part of the interview that didn't make it past their editors.” Not to mention one of the last interviews she'd had to endure. She should have tried the “fuck the fuck off” method earlier. She should have tried it on . . .

No. She couldn't think of Archer now.

The cabbie snorted. “No doubt. Anyway, that's how I knew what you looked like. I never met you when you treated my niece for her chronophobia. Five years ago?”

Leah thought about lying, but couldn't stomach the thought. “I . . . I apologize, I don't—”

“It's fine. I wouldn't expect a doctor to remember every single patient she saw.”

“But chronophobia isn't that common, you'd think I—”

“Stealing clocks?”

That
socked the memory home. “My God, yes! I can't believe I forgot.” Leah giggled in spite of herself. “Your niece, Maya. She was . . . well, kind of a treasure.”

The old-fashioned endearment perfectly fit Maya Ryan, who feared time and the passing of time. She was Leah's second client with chronophobia, and by far the most interesting. Maya believed the best way to prevent time from passing was to break every watch or clock in her home, and steal and hide/bury/destroy every watch or clock outside of her home. The police, of course, eventually got involved.

“My niece couldn't sit in a classroom, she couldn't go to a movie theater or the grocery store or a school play without being obsessed with the clocks, with the watches people around her were wearing . . . she was a wreck. So was my sister. But you were pretty nice about the whole thing.”

“I was?” Nice? Really? Was it possible there were two Leah Nazirs living in the Chicago area?

“Yeah, you figured out that she'd died some ten or fifteen times already, always because she'd run out of time.”

Leah remembered. In 1881, Maya had ingested poison as a child in Wyoming and hid rather than confess what she'd done; by the time she'd been coaxed from her hiding place and rushed to the hospital, her time had run out. In 1927, she had ignored all the
Danger
signs, found a hole in the fencing, and sneaked into the William A. Clark house, which was (as the signs had warned helpfully) set to explode. Tick-tock boom. As a young mother-to-be in Seattle twenty-three years later, she hadn't realized she'd developed eclampsia; when her labor started, so did her convulsions. By the time the baby had been removed via emergency C-section, Maya had been clinically dead for three minutes.

The cabbie brought Leah back to the present by saying the last thing she expected. “‘You were right to be afraid then, and you're right to be afraid now. Your fear is a gift; not a thing to suppress or fight.'”

“How did you know what I—”

“She said it at least once a week, often enough that I memorized it. She was so grateful to you. I am, too.”

“Oh. Well, thank you.”

“She's dead now. There was an accident by the side of the road and she got out to help. Got clipped by a truck crossing the midline.”

Leah groaned. “Of course she did. I'm so sorry.”

“Us, too. But you
did
help her when nobody else could.” The cabbie adjusted her rearview mirror, the better to gaze straight into Leah's eyes. “I've hopes I'll see her again in her next life.
I've hopes she'll live a lovely long life and die old and loved in her bed. You helped her break the cycle, you know.”

“I did? Hmm.
She
did, at any rate,” Leah replied, thinking hard. “Or it was broken for her. Something changed and the pattern broke. That's . . . hmm.”

She didn't say another word until the cab pulled up to her apartment building, which looked a lot like a long gray Lego upended on its side. The cabbie didn't, either, but got out of her seat and gave Leah a slow, careful hug, which Leah managed to return in kind without bursting into fresh tears.

L
eah's studio apartment always made her sad, but never more than today. She much preferred Archer's place. He might be only renting the tower, and his landlord might be gone all the time, and the place might be on the market, but it nonetheless felt like a real home.

Or maybe that was just the Archer Effect. Either way, her small studio (or was that redundant?) seemed to scream “this is the home of someone who does not care, does not anticipate marriage and children, and is only waiting to die.” Maybe it was the beige wallpaper. If she lived through the end of the month, she promised herself she'd repaint everything in Wild Moss. Or maybe Fennel Seed. Wild Turkey?

Her plan—get to a working phone to warn Cat—worked perfectly until she picked her broken cell phone up off the floor. She couldn't believe she had forgotten such a vital detail. “Son of a
fuck
,” she swore, poking ineffectually at the thing. She had
no landline as they were almost obsolete in the twenty-first century, and even if she did, Cat's number was stored in the dead phone. She almost never called it, and couldn't begin to recall what it was. Cat was one of those people who just appeared when they were needed, and existed quietly offstage when they weren't. Which was a terrible way to think of her best friend, but if she got mired in her faults, nothing would get done.

Dead phone. Hmm. She had another phone. This one wasn't dead so much as on near-permanent vacation. A homophobic client had not taken well to the news that he used to be Oscar Wilde. He managed to snatch her phone away, then tossed it into the vase of flowers on the small table beside her desk. Unfortunately they weren't silk flowers but real ones that required water. (She'd never made
that
mistake again.)

She'd gone home and plunked her dead phone into a bag of rice, but assumed it wouldn't work, assumed she'd need another, and acquired a new one. But rather than ditch the old one she behaved the way most people did: tossed it into a drawer and forgot about it. Did the rice work? Or not? Cells being so cheap these days, it didn't much matter.

She went to the kitchen junk drawer, pawed through the mess of seed packets (she had never planted a seed in her life), Elmer's glue (she could not remember the last time she used it, literally years and years ago), twine (did people even use that anymore?), expired stamps (or send snail mail?), broken pencils (why in God's name did she save broken pencils?), and a battered cell phone.

She plugged it in to charge, gripping the thing so hard her knuckles ached, waited a couple of minutes, and then gave it a tentative poke.

“Yes!” Cat's number, Cat's number, CatCatCat . . . “There!” She pressed it at once, hoping she was catching her friend on a rich day, not a park day.

“Have you fucked up this thing with Archer yet?”

She was so relieved she could barely summon the energy to bristle. “Excellent, you haven't been stabbed.” Then, “How did you know who this was?”

“Who else would be calling the crazy homeless lady who lives in the park? Social services? An Air Force recruitment center? AT&T?”

“Listen, my mother—”

“Should I bother to waste your time with condolences?”

“Probably not. Listen, get the hell off the streets, you understand? Check into the Ritz—”

“No way. They don't have streaming. After a hard day of panhandling and feeding pigeons, I really need classic
Daily Show
.”

Ugh.
“The Peninsula?”

“Pass. No room service after eleven.”

“Listen, I don't care where, but do
not
loiter at your usual haunt, which would make it easy for my killer to kill you. Anybody who's been watching me for more than a few weeks will know about you and where to find you . . . in the park. They won't have a clue you're the former mayor of the nation's twenty-first-largest city.”

“Yeah, well. If this were a TV show—”

“TV is getting everything wrong this month!”

“—I'd say something tough yet caring, like ‘I can take care of myself' and then promptly get my big ass murdered. So to Hotel Felix I shall go.”

“Is that really a hotel?”

“Yes, you plebian.”

“Sounds like the name of a hotel in a cartoon.”

“Wicked plebian.”

“Stop that. Maybe you should leave town altogether,” she fretted.

“If he knows me, he only knows Cat, not Catherine Carey. It's a good idea, Leah.”

“So you're going, right? Right now? You're on your way? Right now?”

“Cripes, you're a bigger nag than my handlers and my private school tutors combined. Yeah, I'm going.”

Relief made her knees buckle; she sank into a kitchen chair with more than a little gratitude. If the chair hadn't been there, she'd be on the floor. “Great, Cat. That's wonderful. Okay.”

A pause. “You
did
screw up the thing with Archer, didn't you?”

“I had to get him away from me. This wretch went for my mother.”

“Yeah, he must have thought you loved her.” She could hear Cat's sigh over the phone. “Friggin' moron. So you . . . let's see . . . went into bitch overdrive to drive him away?”

“Bitch four-wheel overdrive.” Was that a thing? Possibly not.

“But once you prevent your murder, you'll fix it. Right? Leah? Right?”

“I . . .” She shook her head, viciously swallowed the lump in her throat. She had
zero
time for that nonsense. “I can't imagine, Cat. And it's just as well.”

“Friggin' moron.”

“I suspect you're not referring to my killer.”

“Come to the hotel with me. Stay as long as you want, we'll
get a suite. My treat. Because you've got that ‘I think I'll do something so fuckin' stupid I'll top every stupid thing I ever did' tone in your voice.”

“No more hiding.”

“That's
also
something they say on TV, and it's usually followed by the hero having to duck a hail of bullets.”

“Bullets, ha. If only. Go.
Now.
”

“Fer Christ's sake think it o—”

Leah hung up. Archer was safe. Cat was safe. She, of course, was not. But she never was, not in any life. She had never, ever felt safe and for a moment she couldn't help thinking of Maya the Clock Snatcher, who always felt terrified at how time slipped by no matter how much she tried to slow it down. Who died an untimely death, but not the one she'd been doomed to relive dozens of times.

Leah had no plans to be hit by a car while helping someone else who had been hit by a car, but she did know the variable in this life: Archer. He was the thing that never happened before. He was the key to tricking fate into cutting the shit already.

But the cost was too high. His life for hers? Never.

Oh, never.

She stepped to the kitchen window and looked down at the streets. Archer was out there somewhere, which was fine. Her killer was, too. Which was not.

“Come on, come on,” she breathed, fogging the glass. “You know you want me. Come and get me.”