Carol O’Connell - Killing Critics

“I tried to stop her-to turn her around before she could see. ‘Don’t go in there,’ I said. She misunderstood. We’d left a message to say it was an emergency. She thought something had happened to her uncle. I couldn’t stop her. She ran into the room. And then she stopped, frozen. Koozeman was just turning around, naked and holding the head of Peter Ariel in his hands. Aubry turned to run. Emma Sue screamed, ‘Stop her!’ I did stop her, I was even trying to explain when Dean Starr dragged her back into the room. Emma Sue was already running across the floor. She brought the axe down on Aubry.

“No one had expected that to happen. Emma Sue did it again, and again. The others stood back, and I turned away. Aubry was screaming to me to help her. I’d known her since she was a little girl. We were friends, you see. And now she was bleeding, dying, and she was asking me for help. I turned my back. Then, all I could hear was the gurgling. I closed my eyes. It went on for a long time.”

And now he put his hands over his eyes as if it were all happening again. “She would not die. I listened to the sounds of the axe, the scrabbling on the floor. She was crawling back toward the door. Her hand was within an inch of me when I turned to see Emma Sue strike the final blow to the back of her skull.” His hands fell away from his eyes. “That ended it.”

He turned to Sabra. “Then the others made the pact. They were all involved now and there was no way out. They each took the axe and made a cut in her body. And then they came for me. They forced me to take the axe. Starr pressed my hands around it and dragged it across her throat.

“They sent me back to the window. Quinn was due, but Koozeman, that crazy man, he was intent on his work of art. Starr and Emma Sue left the gallery. I stayed by the window, crying, waiting for it to be over. When Koozeman was done with them, he forced me to look at what he had done with the bodies.”

Andrew looked at Sabra. “Well, you saw what he did. You were there. When Koozeman had cleaned himself up and put on his clothes, he dragged me through the door in the wall. You and your brother were just coming in as we were leaving.”

He bowed his head. “I remember you wore that fabulous multicolored coat. I saw you as the door was closing. You looked so much like Aubry. Koozeman watched you and your brother through the pinhole. He couldn’t resist. He wanted to see how his work would be received. You were to be his first critics. I left by the back door. I ran all the way home.”

When the story was done, Sabra rose and walked to the back of the terrace where the fire escape ladder cropped up from the low wall. She reached out to the curled rail of the ladder.

Mallory lifted her gun. “I can’t let you go.”

“I don’t think I’ll get far, but I don’t want to end here.” Sabra lifted her head. “You understand?”

Mallory nodded. “But I can’t-”

Sabra walked back to her. She brought her face close to Mallory’s and kissed her cheek. “Yes, yes you can.” Then Sabra returned to the low wall at the edge of the terrace and lowered herself over the side and down the rungs of the fire escape.

Mallory walked to the ladder and watched the descent. Sabra climbed down slowly; blood smeared the handholds and dripped to the rungs below her feet. She slipped and lost one foothold and then the other. She hung there for a moment, and then she was falling, screaming out as she fell past all the dark windows. She landed on a large metal trash bin parked below. She lay spread-eagled among the garbage, her head twisted at an unnatural angle.

An ambulance was parked outside the apartment building. The screaming sirens of two police units pulled up alongside of Riker’s car, all their spinning cherry lights flashing codes of fear and urgency to all the civilians hanging from open windows and clustering on the sidewalk. The young uniformed officers moved quickly out of their cars and into the building, guns drawn. As Riker left his own car, he heard the scream. It came from the alley to one side of the building. He ran into the narrow breach between the brick walls.

An old woman was spread out on the trash, which was piled high and overflowing the large metal bin. He didn’t need to reach out and touch her to know that she was dead. He stepped back and looked up to see Mallory leaning far out over the ledge of a terrace.

“No!” she yelled, as though ordering him to undo this death.

He held his breath as she swung her long legs over the side of the building and hung for a moment in the air, trying to gain a foothold on the slippery ladder, descending now to the fire escape. She skimmed the stairs with her running shoes, moving with fluid speed down the zigzag of the ironwork. When she was level with the trash bin she jumped from the fire escape and landed on her feet beside the body of the old woman.

“She’s gone, kid,” said Riker, as she knelt down beside the corpse. “I’ll put in a call for the meatwagon.”

Mallory eased herself off the trash bin, her running shoes slapping hard against the cement. She reached over the rim of the bin and tugged at the body.

“Hold it, Mallory. The meatwagon will take her.”

“No! Not like this.” She pulled Sabra’s body into a slide, passing it down the rubble of ripped plastic bags, eggshells and coffee grounds. She received the dead woman into her arms, and stood there for a moment, holding this ragged burden as though it weighed nothing. Then, slowly, so gently, Mallory laid the body down, taking great care in settling the corpse to the ground, as though afraid of causing the dead woman any more pain.

The alley was protected from the flashing lights, the noise and energy of the street. No wind blew here, no dust stirred as Mallory arranged the body in the pose of sleep.

“I’m sorry,” she said to the dead woman, as her hand moved across the face to close Sabra’s eyes. She folded the rag doll arms across the breast. “I’m sorry.”

Riker watched Mallory at her ministrations, gentle as a mother with a child. Deep inside of him, permanent damage was being done as the roles reversed again, and he watched the child bending down to the mother to kiss her brow and say good night.

When Mallory stood up and moved toward him, there was no emotion in her face, and that frightened him. He reached out to catch her arm as she stalked past him. She shook him off and continued down the alley toward the street. He watched her retreat for a moment, then looked back to the corpse on the ground. Caught in that sad middleground between the living and the dead, he didn’t know his own place in the world anymore, but thought he might have overstayed his life.

The first thing Riker noticed about his apartment was the smell of fresh air which had displaced the stale odors of garbage and ashtrays filled to overflowing.

He turned on the light and blinked twice. He had forgotten the color of the braided area rug in the living room. Gone was the litter of pizza boxes and old newspapers which had once protected it from dust. And he could see city lights beyond the window glass for the first time in the ten years he had lived in this apartment. The two-years-dead houseplant had been replaced with a live one.

He moved on to the bathroom. Everything was in order, every fixture sparkled and the porcelain gleamed. He pulled back the shower curtain. The garden of fungus no longer grew on the tiles of the stall.

Oddly enough, she had not made good on her threat to toss out the plastic Jesus night-light. She had only cleaned it, and now it glowed even brighter. Perhaps she thought he might need guidance in the dark hours when his drunk’s bladder awakened him.

It was predictable that the kitchen would be spotless, but inside the refrigerator all his beer bottles were upright glass soldiers, standing in formation. He pulled out one cold bottle and wandered into the bedroom.