“Farrow.” Kiko’s mouth moved without a sound, stretching in slow motion, so I caught the drift of her air breaking.
The door latched with a sound loud enough to make it clear that we were all locked in together. Only a faint shuffling followed. There weren’t any sirens in the air. No voices on the sidewalks. No construction, banging, clacking. No trucks idling or horns honking. NYC wasn’t even here anymore. We were in America I guess after all. It was a dead man’s apartment that resembled a colonial house. My daughter’s birth certificate missing my name was balled-up flying out the window. The cops were tip-toeing up the stairs.
Sgt. Bethany Powers stared me down with a joker’s grin, keeping a hand on the gun in her holster for effect. Kiko seemed to wish she had longer nails. The type that could skin alligator scales.
“Hey Farrow, you got your book back.” The cop moved in on me shifting my dick with a carnivorous lick of her lips.
“I’d rather have Chiara back.” Saying her name felt powerful. A new strength was building inside me that should have always lived there.
“Chiara. Funny this must be her bedroom. Strange it never came up in conversation when we first met.” Sgt. Bethany Powers stood over the crib, spinning the soft cartoon stars attached to the mobile. “But I guess your heart isn’t aching for Percy, her legal father. And the mother… Hmmm… what I would do to meet Missy Featherton. Think she’ll come back for her share of the inheritance? Did you know he left her this townhouse? Think it’s worth twenty million in this market?” Sgt. Bethany Powers drew her gun, jabbing me in the belly with it.
“If you cops are so fucking smart, where’s Missy? Where?”
“Answering questions with questions, are we? It must annoy you that we figure out so many things before you. When you do something day in and day out, you get good at it. Just like writing Farrow. Except for us somebody already wrote it, but we can’t see the whole story. We have to play with what’s missing until it makes sense.”
“Sounds the same to me. Maybe you should become a writer and I should become a cop.”
“Farrow you’re more than a writer. The con you pulled with Percy was no less than criminal genius.” Sgt. Bethany Powers pursed her lips with yearning.
“You’re sitting on a fortune now, time to invest in some new shoes.” Detective Anderson stepped on my dirty sneaks with his combat boots.
“What did you do Farrow?” Kiko tugged on the neck of my shirt pulling me into her ribs.
“Tell us or we’ll write it ourselves.” Detective Anderson had both hands in fists, but didn’t seem aware of it in the least bit.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. All I want is to see my daughter. I can’t get my friends back. Please help me. I don’t want to lose her.”
“Help yourself Farrow. We’re taking her with us.” Sgt. Bethany Powers grabbed Kiko, twisting her arms behind her back.
“Someone’s got to take the fall. No way around it.”
“It’s okay Farrow. I’ll go with them.” Kiko’s loyalty gave me chills.
“Take me not her.”
“Farrow you’re not here. I don’t hear you. I definitely don’t see you.”
“She’s innocent.”
“Nobody’s innocent.”
{XXXVI}
FADED DEVIL IN MY POCKET, I stood lonesome squeezing the carved oak of Chiara’s crib. I flicked the mobile’s dangling stars one more time. It was still spinning as I stuck my head out the window facing the street.
Kiko kicked her legs wildly knocking trash into the street as the two cops shook her around like a vending machine that ate their money. I didn’t have to say much to get their attention. The three of them looked up at me in anticipation.
“It was a fucking hoax. A false flag attack. A marketing ploy. I’d known Percy a long time. He was overdue to put something out for me. He could afford the patience due for the perfect moment to arrive. He told me that my technique finally caught up with my passion in A Greater Truth. I wrote two different endings. He liked them equally and we figured out a way to use them both. We hustled Missy because of her charisma. She breathed sex. She wanted to be a writer and took the credit. We set her up to be the thief and for me to be the victim. Percy put enough money behind it to turn it into a best-seller and while I was waiting for the scandal to break: I got restless. Somebody else got homicidal.”
“Who’s that somebody Farrow?” Sgt. Bethany Powers yelled up to me filled with satisfaction.
“You already know don’t you?”
“When will you ever learn that life’s only a mystery if you want it to be?”
A new look I had never seen before. The pages were in Missy’s hands. Haphazard scribbles and stains. I went out to wander away from my edit. I returned to catch her in the act. She saw me writing, but never asked to read. Now she was deciphering it. Connecting pages to a man. She might as well chew on all my pens until the ink runs down her chin.
Sgt. Bethany Powers played with Kiko’s hair a little before she took the cuffs off. Furious Kiko’s spit flew everywhere. Sgt. Bethany Powers wiped it off her eyebrow and flung it back at the inconsolable girl. Then she threw Kiko on her ass and hopped in the passenger side door. Detective Anderson looked up at me, chuckling behind the steering wheel. Embodying heartbreak, Kiko hammered her fist into the cement swallowing fumes to the sound of squealing tires.
{XXXVII}
“YOUR LIES ARE SO NATURAL they’re dangerous.” I guess the details were easy to obsess over. Kiko and I were standing in the same spot I found Percy’s body. Bookshelves from the floor to the ceilings, filled with classics, closed in on us by design.
“As fucked up as it sounds… the deal I had with Percy was one of the greatest successes of my writing career… the career, but not the writing… when it was happening… it was just happening… you know what I’m talking about?”
“No. I don’t know. Monika’s dead. Percy’s dead. Lars’s dead. Books are ruined. Lives are ruined. You don’t even care about your daughter. I understand how Missy felt. She must have found out. Everyone is just a pawn in your grand strategy to make writing worth something in a time when it’s worthless. In a time when everyone can write their own stories. We don’t need writers anymore. We don’t need you.”
“I made you need me.”
“You did you bastard you did.” Kiko stretched both her arms out in a martyr’s stance grabbing an encyclopedic hardcover from each wall. Howling with anguish, she clapped both books together on my head. It was all adrenaline. My brain rattled as I dropped to kiss a familiar floor.
I couldn’t believe how angry the truth made her. Kiko went ballistic. Books rained down on me as she emptied the bookshelves. I got flashes of Percy’s corpse. He was long removed, but I was his chalk outline. Gritting her teeth, Kiko jabbed her bony knee, pinning me where my repugnant idol finally made sense of it all. I didn’t take it serious enough while I still had a chance. The beating didn’t stop. Her anger turned the lights out.
“Da-da. Da-da.” It was a voice I’ve never heard before. Just hanging in the air. The words lifted me up. I looked down at her. My daughter. Could she look like that? Was she even that old already?
{XXXVIII}
“YOU KNOW FARROW I HAVE a confession of my own to make.” Kiko was on her knees caressing my face. I was lying flat on the floor of the sauna in the same spot I saw the lioness. Beside us, Kuroneko was digging up the floorboards. Her eyes had a luminous clutch as she manipulated the crowbar seeping rapture.