Let it go, Greg, Tom thought. Turn around. Walk into your apartment. Shut the door. Save your life.
And then, after a tense moment, he saw that it was going to happen. He saw Greg catch himself, go still, probably trapped by his bottom-line problem, that Tom had threatened to tell the police he hit Rebeca. Did he want everyone in the building to know that? The cops? Greg squeezed his eyes shut. He was digesting shame. He rocked back and forth on his heels. When the eyes opened the combat was gone, replaced by an impotent hatred.
It’s going to work. He’s going to turn around. He’ll probably take it out on her. But that’s her problem.
But then — just at the wrong moment — Rebeca spoke up, trying to make things better. “It’s just one room, honey. Don’t make a big deal out of it, Greg.”
Tom sighed. It was over.
Lou was gone; probably by now the exterminator had reached the lobby. The three of them were alone. Greg stared into Rebeca’s face and his posture straightened. Tom felt a slow drumbeat of inevitability. He felt as if he watched the scene from the future, and time was catching up to what he knew he must do.
Greg demanded, “What’s in that room anyway?”
“I told you. I take pictures.”
“Pictures my ass. Is it drugs?”
Tom shook his head with an exaggerated grin, as if to dramatize the absurdity of the suggestion, “Sure, Greg. I stashed drugs there. Fifty tons of cocaine.”
Greg smiled thinly, on the hunt now. “Porno? Naked kids on the walls? I never see you with women. Or even guys. Or anyone, actually, except my girlfriend.” He ignored Rebeca’s restraining hand on his arm. He stepped closer, so that his handsome jaw seemed to hang an inch from Tom’s face. Tom smelled tuna fish on his breath. Greg said, “I warned the board what would happen if we let strangers stay here, like we’re some cheap Airbnb.”
Tom Fargo felt a deep calm take hold.
Rebeca managed to draw Greg away, took him by the arm, and practically pulled him into their apartment. Greg looked back with malevolence and calculation as the door shut. Tom sighed, then slammed his door as if he, too, had retired to his residence. But he stayed in the foyer, listening to the arguing behind Greg’s door. He was familiar with the buildup from rage to action. He’d seen it too many times. The language was different here, but the outcome would be the same.
Greg’s voice said, “What’s he doing in there anyway? What’s so secret in that room, Rebeca?”
“It’s about privacy. That’s all.”
“What is it between you and Cycle?”
“Nothing. I keep telling you that.”
“You defend him all the time.”
“He’s my friend, honey. He has a right to privacy. They even teach that in citizenship class, in America! The right to privacy!”
“You’re pathetic.” Tom heard a sudden scrape of a table pushed across a floor, and had a sickening vision of a big man shoving a small woman into it. Greg’s bully voice was drenched with disdain. “You meet someone for ten minutes and suddenly they’re your best friend. You don’t know this guy! He works in a shitty souvenir shop, so how could he pay cash to rent that unit? I ought to call Zhang overseas and tell him what his damn tenant is up to.”
“Greg, don’t make it worse. Please.”
Slap!
Tom heard quiet crying behind the door. The sketches on the foyer walls, the bewigged British barristers, were caught up in their own cases.
Greg was saying, “I ought to call the police! Call 911. Then we’ll find out what’s in there, all right.”
The crying got louder. Tom sighed.
Greg said, “Did you hear what he said to me? How he talked to me? I think he was going to get violent.”
“Honey, he wouldn’t do that. And you’re too nice to call the police.” She had a talent. She really did. She somehow always said the wrong thing at the wrong time.
“Don’t tell me who I am!” Greg said.
“I didn’t mean it that way. I know you make up your own mind. I’m just saying… Oh, Greg… please… please don’t… I’m sorry. I won’t talk to him anymore!”
Greg suddenly sounded slightly mollified. Now that someone was hurt, his needs had been soothed. “I didn’t mean to get mad at you, babe. I’ve been working hard and we lost that client. And then Cycle goes and lies and the police really need to…” he was saying as Tom turned away, opened the door of his apartment.
The heavy darkroom door swung open. The 9mm lay in the third drawer from the top, the silencer beside it. He stood staring down at it. He liked Rebeca. He really did. She was like a sister.
Tom Fargo quickly walked back across the living room, the heat of the setting sun on the side of his face. The roadways of the Brooklyn Bridge were almost deserted out there. The cold gazes of the British barristers on the foyer walls watched him rapping on Greg’s door. He heard approaching footsteps. From the heavy tread he knew it was Greg, and Greg would know, since no doorman had called up to say he had an outside visitor, that Tom was at the door. Maybe Greg thought that Tom was back to apologize. Greg’s ego was big enough for that to be true.
Tom kept the gun at thigh level in case Greg looked into his peephole. But Greg just swung open the door. Tom looked into a face that had probably always reflected the certainty that the world owed it things.
“Now what?” Greg said.
Tom shot him in the head—spppppt—and Greg fell to the side, flailing, a look of astonishment beginning to reach his eyes but never making it. The big body crumpled into a glass table, knocking a framed photo of Greg and Rebeca — happy nightclub scene — onto his thick pile. Gray ooze pumped from the black, round wound.
Rebeca was not in sight. She was probably in the bedroom, crying, or the bathroom, treating the latest bruise. Tom called out, “Rebeca?” He walked into the rear of the loft. She was not in the bedroom. She was in the bathroom, the door open, and he saw two Rebecas when he stopped outside. The face in the mirror. And the back of the head in front of it. She’d been applying a wet rag to her cheek. To the most recent blow.
She looked confused, making eye contact with him in the vanity mirror. And embarrassed. “What’s the matter?”
He shot her in the head, too, as she was starting to turn.
He never should have befriended her. He never should have done it. The calendar affixed to Greg’s refrigerator told him that the cleaning lady had last come five days ago. Rebeca’s office was closed during the outbreak. Greg often worked from home. With luck days might go by before anyone found out the pair were dead.
Tom dragged the bodies into the bedroom. He stuffed a rag over the crack in the door when he left. That way, when the bodies started to smell, it would take longer for the odor to reach the foyer. He turned the air-conditioning lower all over the apartment. Cold would slow decay.
I had no choice. I’m sorry, Rebeca.
Tom cleaned his prints off surfaces he’d touched and went back to his darkroom. He systematically cleaned away all traces of the insects. The pans and equipment and the smashed, incriminating laptop went into a black garbage bag. He used Clorox wipes to eliminate any chemical traces. He worked diligently, attentive to detail. Two hours later, he used a rear hallway fire exit to take the bag to the basement, and out the side entrance of the building. There were no security cameras down here, and no one saw him exit onto the street.