A. Rich - The Hand That Feeds You

“We’ve got to leave. Morgan?”

I grabbed my purse and stood up to go. Billie was already heading to the door. She asked me to drive and tossed me the keys.

As I was starting the car, the tall one knocked on my window and said to Billie, “Get your ass back in there.”

“My boyfriend is waiting for me,” Billie called out.

“Oh, your boyfriend is waiting.” The tall one’s face colored. “What, you come up from the city to fuck with the locals? That your idea of a good time?”

“Remember that girl at the bar? Blonde. Drinking alone. Ask her what song makes her cry but she’s ashamed to admit it.” Billie looked at me when she said the words. I thought it was a look of scorn, but then I felt certain it was impatience — she had had to hand it to me.

Billie said to the tall one, “You come tell me her answer and I’ll go back inside with you.” He strode off. “God love him, men are so predictable.”

She had thought this through. She had picked her moment. She had gotten rid of the men and gotten me into her car in an empty parking lot.

I grabbed the door handle but Billie stopped me. She was holding a gun. “Just drive.”

“Where are we going?”

“Head south for now.”

I considered crashing the car, but feared the gun would go off, so I did what she told me to do. Feelings of stupidity nearly trumped fear. My hands were steady on the wheel; physically, I was surprisingly calm.

“What’s today, Friday?” Billie asked. “By tomorrow night, guests at the Omni King Edward in Toronto will start complaining to the front desk about the taste of the water.”

I had no idea what she was talking about. I looked down at the gun. The safety was off.

“A body in water, as in a water tower, decomposes about twice as fast as a dry one. It takes about forty-eight hours for a body in water to release enough gases to be detected.”

“Who’s in the water tower?” I knew who was in the water tower. I knew Samantha had paid for the room at the Omni. I changed lanes so that I might sideswipe the barrier on the passenger side. But at sixty miles an hour, could I control the car when it hit?

“You tell me.”

I was strategizing desperately. What was in my best interest — playing dumb, or tipping my hand? “How would I know?”

“Process of elimination.”

“I can guess who, but I can’t guess why.”

“That would interest you. What interests me is why you think you’re not in the water tower.”

I held the car at a steady sixty. Billie’s question was not rhetorical. “I’ve been asking myself the same thing.”

“Causality is overrated,” Billie said, seeming to reverse her stance. “I mean, shit happens.”

Coming up was a split on the parkway — south to New York City or west to New Jersey. “Which lane?”

“Head into the city.”

I did, and I did something else as well. I leaned on the horn. She wasn’t going to shoot me at this speed. But she did — shoot, that is. She aimed at the roof and fired.

I screamed.

“If this doesn’t bring help, honking sure won’t. Oh, come on, let’s talk. I’ve had no one to talk to since Bennett died.”

“Was he the intended victim that morning?”

“There is no right or wrong answer to that.”

But I knew that there was. I knew they had an assignation in my bed that morning.

Billie opened the glove compartment and removed a pack of gum. “Want a piece? It’s sugarless.”

I took one hand off the wheel and held it open. Billie used her free hand to remove the wrapper before placing the gum in my palm.

“Samantha wasn’t a challenge. You told her yourself he was dead. And I came along and said, ‘I’m alive.’ You know who she believed. All I had to do was get her to Toronto.”

“Samantha killed herself?” So Billie had gone to Toronto, not the Caribbean.

“Samantha couldn’t swim. Ask me about Susan.”

“Did Bennett know what you were planning?”

“Susan became tiresome. So earnest: the homeless, the homeless. I told Bennett to stop seeing her. He wouldn’t, so I took over and it felt right. So you see, it was really Bennett’s fault. Though isn’t blame boring? Where does it get us?”

The gas gauge was nearing empty. I pointed this out to Billie and she said we were almost there.

“Interested in Pat?” she asked.

“That was you in the bushes.”

“Who doesn’t have a bathroom in their studio? I didn’t care for her or her work, did you?” Billie didn’t wait for an answer. “Though Bennett did. He kept up with it. He thought the nude self-portraits with pig hearts showed a bravery he hadn’t seen before he left her. He wanted me to buy one, said it was a good investment. But when I saw the work in the studio that night, it only confirmed my opinion. It wasn’t brave, I mean it wasn’t a human heart. I think of what I did as collaboration.”

I didn’t dare take my eyes off the road.

“Oh, don’t look like that.”

Billie told me to take the 116th Street exit off the FDR, and soon we found a parking space in front of the shelter annex. Billie got out first, came around to my side, and took me by the arm. I felt the gun in my ribs.

It was just before 11:00 p.m., and Billie knew that the garage entrance would still be unlocked for about another fifteen minutes before the last of the kennel staff left for the night. Sure enough, Jose was unloading one of the industrial dryers in the garage. He said, “Buenas noches,” and didn’t ask why we were there so late.

This was probably my last chance to enlist anyone’s help, but Jose had already turned his back on us and resumed his work. There would be no imploring glance on my part; on the other hand, I had not endangered an innocent man.

We slipped past him into the wing that housed the overflow of small-dog cages. The only light came from the occasional red EXIT signs. No one was swabbing a hallway or hosing down a last kennel. Billie had timed our arrival perfectly. We walked down the hallway past ward after ward.

“I never did anything to you,” I reminded Billie.

As we approached Medical, I started to shake. I thought surely she was going to euthanize me. I mean, what more fitting way to mock what mattered so much to me. But we didn’t stop.

I knew that the moment we opened a ward door, the preternatural silence would explode with barking and wailing. Billie had slipped behind me. She didn’t exactly tiptoe, but moved soundlessly, at the ready. As much of a performance as she’d given at the pool table, these movements were authentic. She was in her element, it seemed to me, and failure was not an option. It occurred to me that this rush was what she lived for. The moment she opened the ward door would be like the moment a skydiver jumps from the open door of a plane.

You could draw out that moment just before you jumped — or were pushed — but once you were in the air, it was out of your hands.

Billie opened the door of the ward that once held Cloud and George and motioned me inside with the gun.

I experienced the moment first as a visual. The single bulb was sparking like a strobe, so that each time Billie was illuminated, she was in a different pose. The dogs in their kennels were likewise lit like wild creatures in a lightning storm. I observed this before the wall of sound hit me. As expected, the noise was a visceral sensation; I felt my body vibrate with it. I could hear the different voices, different pitches. Some sounded baleful, others sounded frightened, still others frightening.

The next time Billie was visible, she held out a key ring. “Open these two.” She waited for me to unlock the kennels. When the light next sparked, I looked to see which dogs I was freeing. For a blink, I saw two large, white dogs, ghosts in the dark that followed. Eerily, they made no sound. I recognized them as the Dogos Argentinos in the kennels that formerly housed Cloud and George. The mirrorlike stances of these dogs had spooked me the first time I saw them. I felt no more comfortable with them now that I was releasing them.