Killing Sarai (16 page)

The metal door closes over me, shutting out the only light I had which had been shining thinly through the single bedroom window from the streetlight outside. And then I hear the chest being moved back over the metal door and my heart sinks like a stone at the thought of being trapped down here, regardless of what’s up there.

Make that one more thing that I fear, Victor: being trapped in a small space.

I hear Samantha’s footsteps move across the floor above and then the sound of the bedroom door clicking closed once she makes her way out.

Everything is eerily silent: the heaviness of my breath, the pumping of blood through my ears; I can’t hear either of them though I know both should be raucous in the small confined space that conceals me. I can’t see a thing, so I reach my hands out in front of me and start feeling my surroundings. I painfully count three walls to my left, right and in front of me, but am relieved that behind me there is no fourth wall to keep me confined. It’s a narrow hallway.

I don’t have time to investigate it further when I hear the first gunshot, although suppressed like Victor’s always sounds, but I know that this time it isn’t Victor.

Pepper isn’t barking anymore.

I hear a voice. It sounds far off but it echoes from somewhere above me. That’s when I feel a small draft on my hairline and I reach up my hand to feel for the ceiling. There’s a vent, though far too small of one for me to fit my head through much less the rest of my body, but it’s a vent and I know now that’s how I heard the echo of the voice.

There’s another suppressed shot and this time when I hear the voice that
succeeds it, I know that it belongs to Javier.

“I have four bullets left in this gun,” Javier says to Samantha somewhere in the house. “And I’m going to put one in you every two minutes that my sweet Sarai is still in hiding.”

My hand comes up involuntarily and clutches at my heart.

“Victor is coming back,” Samantha says in a weak, strained voice.

It fills me with dread to think of where Javier has already shot her.

“You lie,
puta! You stink of lies. Now tell me where Sarai is. Because I
know
she’s here.”

How did he know I was here?

Then in Spanish Javier shouts, “Search the house! Every room. Turn it upside-down and find her!”

Two seconds later the sound of furniture being overturned, glass shattering and feet stomping across the floor echoes through the walls.

“She’s
not
here,” Samantha says as if pushing the words through her teeth. “Victor was here earlier. With a girl. A little black-haired girl he called Izabel. But he took her with him when he left.”

Thwap!

Another shot sounds and Samantha screams out in pain, but then her screams are muffled and I can only imagine that it’s by Javier’s hand. Or maybe someone else within the room. Tears stream down my hot cheeks. There’s a chill in the air being so close to the cold ground outside, but my blood pressure is so high from the incredible amount of stress on my nerves that it feels like my head is on fire.

“I know she’s here,” Javier says coldly. “I know she didn’t leave with him because I was watching. Now you have six more minutes. The last bullet I’ll put in your brain.”

Then Javier’s voice rises:

“You hear that, Sarai?” he calls out to me. “In six more minutes you’ll kill her. Just like you killed Lydia. All I want is to take you home. I could never hurt you, you know that.”

My legs are shaking.

After the ransacking noises finally stop, the extra sets of footsteps, two judging by the pattern, move back into the room with Javier.

“Both of you go outside,” Javier demands. “Look everywhere, search the neighborhood but don’t draw attention. Go!”

I can’t leave Samantha up there with him to die.

“I told you there’s no one here!” she shouts.

The noise I hear this time I know is Javier’s hand across her face and then her body hitting the floor. The floor beams shake above me with the force of her fall.

I turn behind me and start feeling my way through the narrow passage, hoping that it leads me out. Because I won’t leave her like this. Javier can take me back. He can kill me if he wants to, but I won’t hide under here like a coward and let her die for me.

Thwap!

My breath hitches and my bones lock up, but I keep on moving forward and finally come to the end. There’s nothing here, nothing but more walls and the same passage I just walked through. I reach up above me and feel around on the ceiling for another metal door hatch. And sure enough, there is one. And just when I think there’s no way I can lift that lid all the way and climb my way out without making enough noise to tell Javier exactly where I am, I stub my toe on a four-step set of moveable stairs shoved into the corner.

I pick the steps up instead of pushing them across the floor to avoid making any unnecessary noise and I set them underneath the hatch. Climbing to the third one, I have to bend over forward to keep from hitting my head on the ceiling. I reach up with both hands, pressing my palms against the hatch and close my eyes as I push, hoping that it’s not blocked by anything and that wherever it leads it’s not anywhere Javier can see me.

The hatch opens, creaking once which makes me wince and freeze holding it partially open above me. I push again and walk up to the fourth step and my head emerges inside a closet. I see that a foam mattress pad had been folded over and placed on top of the hatch door to conceal it and there is carpet on top of the hatch that matches the carpet on the closet floor; I feel it with my fingertips as I raise the hatch the rest of the way and leave it to lean against the back of the closet wall.

I climb out and quietly push myself through the clothes hanging from the bar above.

Thwap!

“Two more minutes, Sarai!” I hear Javier warn from the living room.

I open the closet door and make my way more quickly now through Samantha’s bedroom, down the hall and into the living room where Javier is waiting on me, every bone and muscle in my body trembling.

“Ah, and there she is!” Javier raises both hands out beside him, his gun latched in the right. He smiles and looks genuinely excited to see me. He’s crazy….

His hands drop to his sides.

“I’ve missed you, Sarai.” He cocks his head to one side to appear sincere. “If you were unhappy why didn’t you just say so? I’d have done anything you wanted, you know that.”

I don’t care about what he has to say, all I care about is making sure that Samantha is alright. Trying to keep my eyes on Javier, my gaze carefully scans the room out ahead of me, looking for her.

Finally, I see her bare feet sticking out from behind the recliner on the other side of the room, her skin stained with blood.

“Samantha, are you OK?”

She doesn’t respond so I know she’s hurt pretty bad.

I look back at Javier, pleading in my eyes.

“Let’s just go. Please. Javier please don’t hurt her anymore.”

He smiles at me, appearing thoughtful but amused.

He’s wearing black from top to bottom: long-sleeved black shirt, black belt, black pants,
black shoes. Black heart. He raises his gun at me and motions it for me to go over to him.

He curls his finger at me. “Let me see you.”

I walk closer, my bare feet moving over the
Good Housekeeping
magazines scattered about the floor. The grandfather clock standing tall in the corner ticks ominously behind me.

“Javier, she’s going to die if we don’t call for an ambulance,” I urge as I get closer. “Let me call nine-one-one. Then we can leave.”

I see her knees now, but it’s all that I can see as the rest of her is obscured by the chair and the darkness.

Javier reaches out his hand.

“Did he fuck you?” he asks and pulls me closer to him by my fingers. “Did you let him fuck you, or are you still mine?” He leans inward and inhales the scent of me, a loose strand of hair fallen from my ponytail he plays with in the tips of his fingers.

“No,” I say breathily. “I’ll always be yours.”

He’s wearing cologne, the same kind he always wore when he’d come to me in the night. And his hair, somewhat long on top, is clean and groomed, the way he always wore it when he’d dress me up and take me with him to the wealthy houses.

“Don’t lie to me,” he says quietly and I feel his breath on my neck. “You don’t know what you’ve done to me. You shouldn’t have left.”

I reach up with my left hand and curl my fingers softly around the back of his neck. I lean into him, the side of my face navigating the opened buttons at the top of his shirt until I feel his chest on my cheek. “I know and I’m sorry.” I kiss his skin lightly. “I am so sorry for leaving you like that,” I add in Spanish.

I shudder, both from pleasure and from disgust, when he slides his hand down the front of my pants and puts two fingers inside of me. It doesn’t matter that he’s insane or that he’s a murderer or that he might kill me any second, the touch still makes me wet. It’s my body betraying me, human nature betraying me, not my mind or my heart. I had conformed years ago to react to him in this way. A twisted survival instinct that they don’t teach in self-defense classes. Javier had to believe he was turning me on or he’d know everything else about me was a lie, too, and so my body learned to react in the way that it knew would keep me alive.

He pulls his fingers out and brings them to his lips, inhaling deeply, his eyes closed as if to savor it. Then he puts them in his mouth.

I take a step backward while he’s distracted, to put as much distance between us as I can manage although small.

“I’m not sure I want you anymore,” he says.

My heart hardens. If he doesn’t want me then I know he’ll kill me, especially after everything that I’ve done, all of the trouble that I’ve caused.

“Javier,” I say, trying to hide the nervousness in my voice, “let’s go. I’m ready to go back.”

His top lip furrows and he shakes his head.

“Izel is dead,” he says probingly, probably wondering if I did it. “I know you hated her. I don’t blame you. But she was my sister.”

I shake my head and start to back up some more.

“I-I didn’t kill her,” I say. “I didn’t know.”

Javier laughs.

I take another step back and two to my right, stepping on a sharp piece of plastic from some random object, but it doesn’t break the skin. I press my hands against the wall behind me.

And then I see her, Samantha, much clearer from this angle. I abandon my dire need to watch Javier’s every move as he approaches me slowly, tauntingly, and all I can see now is Samantha. She’s not moving. She sits slumped over with her back against the wall. Her bloody legs are splayed out into the floor. Her arms lie limply on either side of her, her fingers uncurled.

Her eyes. They’re open. And they’re dead.

Bile churns in my stomach, my hands begin to solidify, hard like metal, down at my sides. I’m shaking all over from anger and hatred and guilt, and
godammit,
fear
.

“You
killed
her,” I say, my lips trembling.

“I did,” Javier admits proudly. “On the fifth shot.”

“But you said…,” I look to and from him and Samantha’s body, my heart feels like its closing in on itself. “You said if I didn’t—”

Javier raises his gun at me, that last bullet I know now why he didn’t use it on her.

I stand frozen, one hand still on the wall behind me, the other somehow made its way to my stomach as if it could keep the vomit down by being there. I stumble on more debris and then press my back against the wall to let it hold me up. Because my body is still betraying me, my legs weak and unstable, threatening to give way beneath me any second.

I stare across the small space separating Javier and I. I stare into his cold, bottomless dark eyes, not the barrel of his gun pointed directly at me, but his eyes.
I hear a click, just a click, and we look blankly into each other’s faces, both of us confused by what just happened. Then a shot rings out and my head falls against the wall with my back. I feel my body sliding down until I’m sitting on the floor just like Samantha. Limp and spent, just like Samantha. The room spins around in my vision like a thick haze of gray.

And I close my eyes and let the darkness take me.

Victor

I’m forty thousand feet above the Texas landscape when I get the call.

“Victor,” Niklas says into the phone, “Javier is not in Tucson. He was reported to have used a known credit card with an old alias, just outside of La Grange, Texas.”

I raise my back stiffly from the seat.

“That’s less than a two hour drive to Houston,” I point out, more to myself. “At what time did the card process?”

“At three-twelve this afternoon.”

My body becomes rigid.

Hanging up the phone, I crush it in my fist down at my side as I make my way to the cockpit.

“Turn the plane around,” I demand.

Less than an hour later I’m driving through traffic
heedlessly, I know drawing unneeded attention to me. But I speed on through, running a number of stoplights, not knowing how I managed to drive all the way back to Samantha’s house without having to lose a cop or two in a high-speed chase on my way there.

There’s a car parked out front on the street between Samantha’s house and the one next door. I don’t remember seeing that one before I left. With my gun in my hand, I stay low as I get out and rush up the driveway, using Samantha’s car as a shield just in case. There are no lights on inside the house. It’s
unusually quiet. Samantha’s dog would normally be tangled up in the window blind by now, trying to see out after hearing a vehicle pull up.

I hear another, larger dog, barking in the backyard of the opposite neighbor and I stay crouched low, making my way underneath the carport and next to the older car parked there.

One figure emerges from the side of the house just after I move silently across the space and make it to the brick wall underneath the carport. I grab him by the throat too fast for him to react and throw him to the ground. His gun hits the concrete and in that same moment, I put a bullet through his temple before he has a chance to seize it.

Another man calls out a name, looking for the man I just killed. I don’t wait for him to come around the side. I step right out in front of him, raise my gun to his face and get my shot off before he sees me fully. His body hits the grass.

I wait only seconds in case there are anymore and then I rush inside the house through the side door underneath the carport.

The house has been destroyed; Samantha’s dog, shot to death on the kitchen floor. I smell gun smoke, blood, freshly brewed coffee and unfamiliar cologne.

The first body I see is Samantha’s. The second, Javier’s.

“Sarai?” I say when I see her sitting against the wall to my left, partially hidden by the darkness. I take off my black gloves and shove them inside my jacket pocket and go over to her. “Sarai?”

She doesn’t look up at me, so I crouch in front of her.

The gun I left underneath her mattress lies next to her foot. I slip it into the back of my pants. Both of her knees are drawn upward against her chest, her hands lay palm-up beside her on the floor.

“He’s dead,” she says, her words distant as if she’s still trying to process the truth. She raises her eyes to me; pain and confusion and disorientation reside within them. “I killed him, Victor.”

I reach out and lift her into my arms.

“I’m going to get you out of here.”

Holding her close to my chest, I carry her through the death and debris and out of the house. She doesn’t speak, but she holds onto me as if she’s terrified I’ll drop her. Or, perhaps, terrified I’ll intentionally let her go.

I set her carefully in the passenger’s seat.

Three police cars fly past toward Samantha’s house one block over as we leave the scene, doing the speed limit this time around.

Sarai is quiet and motionless,
e
motionless, all the way back to the private airport where the jet awaits us.

There’s only one place to take her now. Home. To
my
home on the New England coast.

~~~

My driver picks us up from the airport hours later. Sarai rode all the way to my cliff-side beach house with her head pressed against the backseat window. She never moved. It’s the first time since I found her in my car in Mexico that I would welcome her chatty one-sided conversation and annoying questions. But I get nothing from her. And I find myself silently yearning for it.

The first kill is always the hardest, the one you never forget. But the first kill is also what drops the chances of living a normal life by half.

Sarai is no longer in the fifty-fifty zone.

I shouldn’t have left her there….

Carrying her across the cobblestone driveway and into the house, I take her inside and lie her down on my sofa. It’s been a month since I’ve been here and it still smells as clean as the day I left and set out on a job to kill a man in Columbia. It is because of jobs like that one that I can afford such luxuries. But it’s a shame that because of what has happened with Sarai that I will have to leave here soon, too. I thought perhaps I’d get to stay in one place for at least a year this time, but such is the life I lead, a dark and lonely path lined only with the solitude of death.

Sarai lays on her side, her head propped against a couch pillow.

I remove my suit jacket and drape it over the back of the chair next to me and then start to go into the kitchen to get her some water, but her voice stops me cold.

“The gun jammed.”

Standing in the arched kitchen entrance, I turn to look at her across the expanse of marble tile and expensive furniture. I walk toward her again, slowly, breaking apart the button of my shirt cuff.

I wait patiently for her to go on. She still doesn’t look at me; she stares out ahead of her seeing only the scene as she relives it.

“I’d be dead if it weren’t for that.”

I walk closer, still keeping my distance as though some part of me doesn’t want to disrupt her thoughts with my presence. I break apart the button on the left cuff and roll up my sleeves.

“I froze,” she says, remembering it. “I thought I was dead. I just stood there waiting to die.” She moves her head backward just enough to finally see me. “I don’t know how I reacted so fast, but when his gun jammed…that look on his face…next thing I know the gun in the back of my pants is in my hand and Javier is on the floor. I didn’t hesitate. It was like someone else was inside my head at that moment.
She
was the one who grabbed the gun.
She
was the one who pulled the trigger. Because I didn’t realize what had happened until it was over.” She looks away again. “I killed him,” she adds distantly.

“He deserved it,” I say calmly.

Her head snaps back to see me again, making me think that when she looked at me moments ago, she wasn’t really seeing me at all. It’s as if my voice just woke her.

She raises up from the couch.

I watch her curiously in a vague, sidelong glance. I glimpse her hands shaking and the corners of her mouth trembling. She curls her fingers towards her palms until her hands are balled into fists. And then she lunges at me.

“You left! You bastard! You left!” She cries out, beating her fists against my chest as hard as she can.

I let her. I stand motionless and let her until she can’t do it anymore and her body starts to fall exhaustively at my feet. But I catch her before she hits the floor, wrapping my arms around her small frame. She sobs into my chest, choking on her tears, grasping the seams of my suit vest with her trembling fingers. “You left…,” she repeats over and over again until the words fade into a whisper on her lips. “
You left
….”

I hold her tight. Awkwardly. Because I’ve never done this before. I’ve never experienced this type of sorrow and pain and have been the one to be expected to help mend it. My mother was the only one who had ever held me like this when I was a boy and I can’t remember the way it felt.

I feel like I want to press my lips against the top of her hair. But I don’t. I have the urge to squeeze her a little tighter and take her completely into me. But I can’t. I just can’t bring myself to do it.

“Sarai,” I say, gently pulling her away so that I can see her eyes. “I need you to tell me what happened. Tell me everything. Did Samantha make any phone calls? Did she receive any strange calls that she made mention of?”

Sarai’s expression distorts offensively.

“You think
she
had something to do with this?” She pushes herself away from me. “She died
protecting
me! How could you think she had anything to do with it?!”

I sigh deeply. “No, I can’t believe that she did. Samantha was trustworthy. But she and Niklas are the only two people besides you and me who knew where you were.” I step forward and place my hands on her upper-arms in an attempt to make her understand and when she doesn’t push me away I’m relieved. “It had to have been one of them and I’m only trying to get the facts.”

“Then it was Niklas,” she spats angrily at the thought of him. Her eyes are wild and narrowed. “He hates me, Victor. He hates it that you’ve been helping me. He all but said so when I was in the SUV with him. I
know
it was him!”

I step away from her, my hands falling away from her arms and I cross one arm over my stomach, propping the other on it. Rubbing my hand over the short scruff of my face, I contemplate the situation. Sarai is right. Niklas is the obvious answer and although often the obvious turns out not to be the answer after all, this time it must be. Because it’s the only thing that makes sense.

My brother betrayed me.