Past midnight, the door unlocked and he fell into her arms. She felt her breathing stabilizing and thought about how close she had come to losing everything. Just like the first time, she cupped his face and kissed him, and her entire body was riddled with a blinding happiness. His hands were not as active as hers, she realized. Then the trembles started. At first, they were small tremors, but they grew as the minutes stretched. She lifted her face from his chest and looked at him. His pupils had disappeared.
Jennifer felt terror. She needed to act, and fast. First to save him, then to save their love.
It was better if he was outside. If they found him in her apartment, there would be too many questions, then repercussions that would foil their plans. She took his cell phone and shoved it into her back pocket, then she kissed his mouth, even as it foamed. She pulled him from the couch and toward the door. With his limp arm over her shoulders, she dragged him by the waist, out into the streets in the dead of night. She did this out of love.
At the street corner, she called for help. She kept her breath steady and enunciated her words correctly. Any mistake she made, such as giving the wrong address, could cost him his life.
She felt an urge to cover his shivering body with her own, or with her jacket or a bedspread from her house. But this could be traced back to her, so instead she left him words filled with love and plans to escape when he got back from the hospital.
As she entered her house, she heard the siren and breathed a sigh of relief. For the rest of the night, she thought only of packing as she waited for him to burst through the door. The hours were not many, but they were long.
They stretched into the morning, into her workplace. One hour into her history lesson, the principal appeared at her door and motioned for her to step outside. Jennifer walked in silence next to the principal, whose usual jovial spirits were missing. Jennifer broke the silence, but the principal assured her the matter was better broached in his office.
Had they found out? she wondered. The familiar longing emerged within her. Inside the office, Jennifer stood still, waiting for the principal to say something. She motioned for Jennifer to take a seat on the couch next to her, opposite the mahogany desk. The principal said Miles’s heart had stopped in the early hours of the morning, and that the doctors had done everything they could.
For a second, Jennifer felt relief, because it meant the principal did not know. Then the reality of what she had heard set in, and her mind went blank. She did not hear the principal offering to tell her students that their classmate had succumbed to a drug overdose, or saying how heartbreaking it must be for Miles’s single mother, who had sacrificed everything to get her son to college.
Jennifer went straight home from school. Just like in her vision, she stealthily stepped onto the chair. She carefully placed the rope, like a necklace. Then she pushed the chair.
Part IV
Up-and-Coming Areas, Newly Revitalized
Happy Hunting
by Icess Fernandez Rojas
North Shore
Hunting is not a sport. In a sport, both sides should know they’re in the game. — Paul Rodriguez
The dark-green Ford F-150 skids across the three lanes of Beltway 8’s feeder road, tires smoking like a dying fire. It roars past abandoned gas pumps and overflowing garbage cans, then rumbles to a stop at the convenience store. Its front door is only a few feet away, close enough for Marisol Gomez to see into the brightness inside.
She grunts as she steps out of the truck. Since the killings started, her muscles have forgotten how to relax. Glaring at the cashier through the thick, dirty store windows, she almost smells him — the foulness of what he is.
“Murderer,” she whispers.
This Stop & Shop is the only convenience store still open at night in the crumbling, frightened East Side. Inside, he perches on his stool like a fat toad behind the counter. Reading. Hardly paying attention. In plain sight. He’s taunting her, she knows. She wishes she’d figured it out sooner. Maybe then, Demetria and all the other women would still be alive. Children would have their mothers and boyfriends, their loves.
The oppressively hard rain has been beating on more than just pavement and buildings. Marisol is damp all over. Her clothes cling in an unbearable hug and her hair is wild with frizz. Her perfectly applied makeup is long gone. Everything she thought made her intimidating has washed away. Everything except the 9mm at the small of her back.
This is her moment. She’s done something the puto cops couldn’t do — or didn’t want to. Her hustler’s brain has figured out who the serial killer is, and she’s going to bring him to justice. North Shore justice.
This could go one of two ways: a long chain of devastation and sorrow ends, or she becomes a statistic — one more body for the cops to find and put in the unsolved file. Marisol stuffs that thought down inside herself as she walks to the door, opens it, and steps in from the rain.
This one is for her girls.
“You’re scary when you get like this.”
Yessenia, timid as a newborn cat, tried to cool her fear with frozen yogurt. It was more soup than yogurt, with chunks of mango floating like ice cubes. The more she heard about Marisol’s crazy plan, the more the soupy yogurt found its way into her mouth. Her best friend had conjured a plan that terrified Yessenia. Marisol wanted to capture the serial killer hunting brown and black women all over the East Side — North Shore, Channelview, and Sheldon — meaning every woman they knew. The plan would result in either jail time or death, and Yessenia didn’t think her friend would look good as a corpse.
“It’s gonna work, chica,” Marisol practically yelled, her voice ringing through the interior of Menchie’s frozen yogurt parlor. She used her siren-red manicured fingers to mimic shooting a gun. “Two pops to the head and it’s over!”
The two young women sat in the long, narrow establishment that screamed with hot pinks and lime greens. It echoed with bad pop music, meant to keep up customer spirits. Outside was a sweltering wet heat; inside was comfortable enough for a penguin and his family to enjoy. But the blinding colors and air-conditioning couldn’t keep customers’ minds from the news: there was a serial killer on the hunt.
So far, eight women had been found in nearby parks or wooded areas, each strangled with a piece of clothing they’d been wearing: shirts, bras, panties, even shoelaces. Not raped. Never touched below the neck. It wasn’t about sex. Yessenia said it was about control, winning, or maybe even ending something. She and Marisol knew all the victims — they were all friends, friends of cousins, or former classmates. That was the East Side: more connected than a politician and only half as shady.
“Aren’t you tired of this shit?” Marisol asked, hands gesturing to accentuate every word. “It’s like the freaking Hunger Games. It’s to the point that we’re not sure if our own friends are out to get us.”
“They aren’t. Probably aren’t.” Yessenia tucked a sliver of dirty-brown hair behind her ear, avoiding Marisol’s wildly gleaming eyes.
“Come on, Yessenia.” Marisol’s own hair — curly, wine-red, crunchy with hairspray and gel — shook with her words. “You haven’t left your house in three weeks. Every time I call you, you’re too scared to answer.”