Lisa Unger - Die For You

A cheap lipstick, a bottle of glitter nail polish, a half-smoked pack of cigarettes. Or half-unsmoked, if you’re an optimist.

“That depends,” he said, reaching for the tube of lipstick. He opened it and rolled the bottom until the little pink tip of makeup emerged. Then he recapped and tossed it back on the table.

Her tacky sequined wallet was overstuffed with singles and receipts-a nail salon, Taco Bell, a bookstore. A small black makeup bag containing more cosmetics-lip liner, mascara, a small black compact of blush.

“You have it or you don’t, Jack.”

A small plastic photo book, grimy in the way of something that’s been in your purse forever, well-thumbed. I flipped through the images, feeling a weight settle on me. Camilla smiled with an older woman, clearly a relative, probably her mother. Another young woman with Camilla’s eyes and nose, but darker, less pretty somehow, held a sleeping, wrinkled baby wrapped in a pink blanket. A little girl in pigtails and a blue corduroy jumper smiled, revealing an adorable gap in her teeth. There was a photo of a man I recognized as the missing Marcus Raine. He sat on a bed, holding a guitar, but looked directly at the camera with a smile. A man in love.

The rest of the contents-a bag of M &Ms, a cigarette lighter, a little notebook covered with hearts-littered the table. The detritus of a life. All the stuff she collected and bought and carried with her, things that were important to her. All now in the possession of a woman she’d never met, who’d stood over her dead body, touched her dead flesh, then took off with her belongings. If someone had told her that when she bought her M &Ms, what would she have thought?

I remembered the gun, took it from my pocket and put it on the table.

“Hey-whoa. What you doing with that?”

It was a small.38 revolver. I only knew this because a cop I’d interviewed once showed me a similar one. It was a gun cops often used as an off-duty piece, smaller, less conspicuous. It was light and perfect for a woman’s hand. My nephew would be pleased. You might need one , he’d warned, prescient.

“It was in her bag,” I said. “Are you going to answer me? Did you get my money?”

“So wherever she was going, she was going armed?” I could see it in his face: curiosity breaking and entering, making off with common sense.

He reached out and picked up what I’d thought at first glance was a small silver cigarette lighter. In Jack’s hand, I realized that it was a thumb drive, a tiny device that stored computer files. I reached for it quickly and he snatched it back.

“I heard the whole conversation,” he said. “I know what you’re thinking.”

He probably did know what I was thinking. It didn’t take a genius to figure it out. He held the thumb drive up in the air.

“But what’s your agenda, your goal for this meeting?” he asked. “How will you recognize who you’re supposed to meet, and what will you do once you’re there?”

I hadn’t really thought that far ahead. He should know this about me. He seemed to read it all on my face. He rolled his eyes, leaned back in his chair.

“Let’s look at that drive. See what’s on it,” I said.

“We don’t have time,” he said, standing up. “And maybe it’s better if we don’t know.” He walked over to the closet and took out a distressed brown leather jacket and shrugged it on, pulled a stocking cap over his hair.

“It’s never better not to know. Trust me.” I held out my palm.

He ignored me. “Do you even know what the Children’s Gate is?”

I gave him a look. Mr. I Know Everything About New York City. It was a hobby of his; he was always explaining, correcting, pointing out items of interest. Sometimes it was cool; more often after our many years of friendship it was annoying.

“There are twenty gates to Central Park,” I said. “That one’s on Seventy-sixth and Fifth.”

He raised his eyebrows in mock surprise, gave a deferential nod. “A-plus,” he said, zipping up his jacket. “We’re close. Let’s go and get this over with.”

How easily he slipped into the plot, became accomplice and co-writer.

“We have time to look at the drive,” I said. “If he waited this long, he’ll wait awhile longer.”

He paused another moment and I thought he was going to put up more argument. But instead he moved quickly to his office down the hall. By the time I caught up with him, he was already sitting at his computer with the drive in his USB port. It was a simple room, not yet finished. Just a shining glass desk and ergonomic black chair. Atop the glass sat an impossibly thin black laptop, a spindly halogen lamp. The walls were floor-to-ceiling shelves filled with books. He was the only one in the world with more copies of my novels than I had. They lined his shelves-U.S. copies, foreign editions, trade paperbacks, mass market editions. All my stories, my imaginings bound, translated into languages I wouldn’t understand, my millions of words offered in neat packages. I saw my name in myriad typefaces and colors: Isabel Connelly. Not Isabel Raine. No, I was never that in print. The place where I was most real, most alive, most myself-on the page-I was never Isabel Raine. I felt a strange gratitude for that now.

“Pictures,” he was saying.

I came to stand behind him, feeling a bit wobbly, and steadied myself on his shoulder. Without looking at me, he stood and gave me the chair, keeping his eyes on the screen, his hand on the keyboard, flipping through what looked like fifty or sixty black-and-white photographs.

Four men stood in a loose group at the edge of a dock, hands in pockets, hunched against the cold. Three of them wore long black coats. The water behind them was gray and choppy. The fourth appeared to be dressed only in a suit. His shoulders were hiked up in tension, arms wrapped around his middle obviously for warmth. In the next frame one of the coated men had a big hand on the arm of the suited man. In the next a gun appeared. Each frame-grainy, moody-was separated from the last by a matter of seconds. I could almost hear the rapid shutter clicks. The next frame zoomed in and with a start I recognized two faces-Marcus and Ivan. Ivan, the man with the gun. Marcus with his arm locked in another man’s grasp.

“Is that Marcus?” asked Jack, incredulous.

But I’d lost my voice. In my head I heard the screaming, that horrible keening, and all the hairs on my arms and neck started to rise. As Jack flipped through the frames, faster now, we watched as Marcus laid his hand across the hand on his arm and moved into a quick, hard, practiced twist that dropped the other man to his knees and left him on the ground, his mouth open in a scream. The camera caught a muzzle flash from Ivan’s gun, but in the next frame the gun was in Marcus’s hand. Each successive frame saw another man on the ground until it was just Marcus and Ivan surrounded by bleeding corpses. Two frames showed them standing there, Marcus holding the gun, Ivan with his hands up in supplication. In the next frame Ivan was on the ground. Marcus started rolling bodies into the river, the dock splattered with blood. Then it was just Marcus and Ivan again, the big man lying on his side writhing, his face a mask of pain, arms around his center, Marcus standing over him, the gun aimed at his brother’s head. He lowered the gun. The camera caught him walking away, Ivan’s mouth open in a scream of pain or rage or both.

“Izzy” said Jack, after a moment of us both staring at the screen. “Are you okay?”

I leaned forward and continued scrolling to watch Marcus walk, unhurried, up the dock and disappear between two large warehouses. He was wearing the suit he’d been wearing when he left me.

“He killed three people,” Jack said, his voice dropping to an amazed whisper. “Left the other one to die.”