“Sounds lovely,” she told me, adding with a disbelieving frown. “Did you say years?”
“Oh, I’m sure we’re talking years, Jess.”
She looked at her watch, as if tired of me.
“You really are quite psychotic, you know, and not smart enough to hide it.”
She looked doubtful.
“You boiled a woman alive,” I told her. “Beat her with a poker — broke her arms and legs, then boiled her alive — and there’s no remorse in you.”
She looked less doubtful.
“No remorse, no regret — just a pathetic sense of having done yourself justice because another woman dumped you?” I laughed. “You are insane, Jess.”
“Really.”
“Yes,” I said, smiling a little more inhumanity at her. “It’s not what you’ve done, though, as much as it is what you are — so you’ll be at Tillicum a long time.”
She tried looking bored again, but couldn’t quite pull it off.
“But the drugs will be a big help,” I went on. “And what you’re able to feel, you won’t really mind.”
She sighed and I watched again for the advantage.
“You’ll barely notice waking in your bed, soaked in your own urine.” I shrugged. “Happens when you’re doped past caring, as you surely will be.”
Her lips pressed together slightly, but that hadn’t yet rocked her.
“You won’t mind having no one to talk with except brain-fried drug addicts, schizophrenics, and a few psychopaths like yourself.”
She brushed an ash from her sweatshirt.
“You may even get used to the hands of the guards, as they move you from one room to the next.”
She only looked at me.
“Do you mind being handled, Jess?”
She stayed silent.
“Well, you’ll be handled a lot, so you’ll get used to it. You may even get to like it — just as you may come to enjoy the very close confinement.”
Her eyes moved — fractionally — toward the opened door to the balcony.
Yes, I thought.
“You’ll have your own cell,” I told her. “A full eight-by-eight — very cozy.”
She started to gently bite the inside of her lip, and I could almost smell her sudden fear.
My advantage, I thought.
It made me feel good.
I got up, moved to the patio door, and drew the curtain open a bit more, and looked at her. “You like high places, don’t you Jess?”
She rubbed her arm and looked away.
I smiled. “I don’t mind telling you that I don’t, but you like being high up — the cleanliness of being above everything? Above the corruption?” I shook my head. “You’ll miss that feeling of openness and height for a while, but then...” I drew the curtain closed. “...there’s a certain sense of security and comfort in being caged.”
A vein began to prominently throb along her throat.
“It won’t be as if you’re entombed, though it may feel that way at first.”
She scratched her neck idly.
“It won’t be as if you were buried alive.”
She looked up at me with sharp irritation.
“It won’t be as bad as you think...”
“If you’re trying to frighten me, think again.”
“You’re frightening yourself,” I told her. “I’m just telling you how it will be.”
“You’re exaggerating.”
“Am I?”
She put her thin cigar out and lit another.
“If I’m boring you, I could call the police now.”
She swallowed and whispered, “Do what you like.”
I watched her think for a moment, then I put my hands in my pockets and moved around the room, coming to rest facing a large mirror.
“The thing about being in custody, Jess, is that your options become so limited.”
She was quiet.
“Yes,” I said, watching myself. “Once you’re in custody, you’ll stay in custody — there will be no bail for you.”
In the mirror I saw her looking up at me with doubt in her face.
I laughed at her. “You’re insane, Jess — and it shows, right there in your face. You’re a danger, to others and to yourself, and they will not let you go.”
And she believed me. She swallowed fear, looked away.
I looked back at my own face, and wondered who I was.
I said, “Fellow I knew once in San Diego was arrested for dealing drugs.”
Something about my eyes was different, I thought.
“He knew he was facing a lot of jail time, and he knew he could never do that time, but he wasted the little time he had before he was arrested.”
Something vaguely dead about them.
I turned and waited for her own dead eyes to come up to mine.
“The problem,” I explained, “was that, once he had been arrested, his options were so limited.”
She frowned up at me.
“He had the advantage of being sane, but they watch people closely because suicide makes cops look bad, uncaring or something, so that all he could think of in the end was to bite through the arteries in his own wrist.
“You’re out of your mind, and they’ll be watching you every minute, so...” I shrugged, letting her fill in the blanks.
The wind ruffled the balcony curtain.
I waited a moment more, then retrieved my hat and said, “McGowan will have already told the state police what he knows and what I’ve told him to say. It will take a while to sort out, but my guess is the Seattle police will be here shortly. If not, I’ll give you an hour before I call them myself.”
Her look was blank.
“I’ll be across the street,” I told her, nodding toward the open balcony.
She said nothing. Neither did I.
I rode the elevator down to the lobby, stopping only to ask the security guard the time — six fifteen A.M.
I jaywalked across the highway to a coffee shop where I took a seat along the front window, which had a full view of the parking lot of Jess Collier’s building, and ordered coffee and a bagel to have while I waited.
I was watching the road outside fill with morning rush-hour traffic, hoping McGowan had managed all right with the state police, wondering if the Seattle P.D. would arrive.
And thinking hard, cold, unforgiving thoughts that seem to come easier the older I get. I had no second thoughts whatsoever.
And she took nearly the full hour.
Doing what, I never knew, but at 7:05, having paid for my coffee, and thinking I’d have to call the police about Collier after all, I saw someone running.
He tore across the street from the parking lot to the front of Collier’s building, where he opened the door and shouted something inside. Then the security guard came out and both ran back to the parking lot, looking up.
Which is when I left the coffee shop, and although I couldn’t see the parking lot well from that vantage point, I stayed standing where I was.
I didn’t see her fall.
But despite the noise of the traffic around me, the sound of her body slamming down, forty stories, through the roof of a parked car, came through to me loud and clear.
And it sounded as final as it should.
Benjamin Cavell
Evolution
From Rumble, Young Man, Rumble
Part One: Sex
On our first date, Heather Gordon orders the Maryland crab cakes with red-pepper polenta and when I walk her home she asks me to take her to bed. On our second date, she has portabello and endive salad followed by veal tenderloin with poblano chiles and we make love on the swing set of an empty playground. On our third date, she tells me she is going to marry me.
For our one-month anniversary, Heather lights candles all around my bedroom and strips me naked and walks me to the bathtub, which is filled with warm water and rose petals. After three months, she takes me to Paris for the weekend. When we have been dating for six months, she asks me to kill her father.