Blink & Caution (6 page)

“Merlin,” she says.

“What?”

“I’m sorry.”

He stands up, tucks his T into his jeans, pats his back pocket to make sure his wallet is snug. “Good,” he says.

“Don’t you want to know where the money came from?”

He smiles. “You think I don’t know?”

He doesn’t wait for her response. He’s through the door and gone.
Poof!

Caution sits on the couch, rubbing the tops of her legs with her hands. So he
does
know. But how? They have no landline. Does Drigo communicate with him telepathically? She wouldn’t put it past either of them. But, no, she thinks. Merlin doesn’t know. And this is a little hard-won victory.

After a minute, she gets up and goes to the window to look down on the alley in back where his beater is parked, a rusted-out blue Nissan. She presses her nose against the glass, warm under the sun. She waits; he doesn’t show. So she waits some more. Nothing. Odd. Merlin never takes public transportation. Wizards just don’t. So his business must be nearby. She tries to think of any clients close by but remembers that he didn’t leave with any dope.

And then it comes to her. Just like that. All of it: why he didn’t seem to care about where the money came from; where he was last night until forever; why they haven’t had sex in weeks. She marches to the door, closing it silently behind her. She sneaks down the hallway to number four and puts her ear to the door. Claudia is laughing. Someone speaks in a low murmur. She laughs again.

Caution remembers how Claudia looked. Still in her nightgown but tarted up — lipstick, mascara, the whole nine yards; plucked and moisturized, her thirty-something-year-old wrinkles painted over. Caution can see her again in her mind’s eye, leaning against the doorjamb, her fingernails polished.

And tuning into her very recent past, Caution pictures Merlin. She had been so frightened of him, she hadn’t really noticed that he was showered and shaved, doused with L’Homme — reeking of it!

She staggers back from the door. What catty thing was it Claudia had said when Caution told her she wasn’t lost?
Maybe you should look into that.
Which is the same thing Merlin had said when Caution said she wasn’t turning tricks. The exact same words.

Caution stares at Claudia’s door. She saw inside the apartment once when she came around to borrow something. She remembers thinking how great it looked, with cushions everywhere and Indian printed cotton flung over the table lamps. There was a beaded curtain and some kind of exotic bird in a cage, green and gold and singing.

Caution: Corrosive. May Cause Blindness.

She wants to smash on Claudia’s door with her fists — knock it down. The only thing stopping her is she’s not sure which of them to kill first. But even as the thought occurs to her, that worst of all possible four-letter words cracks opens in her skull and out flows the strong poison inside it. To even think the word
kill
is to let it loose inside her system, like some paralyzing drug. She stumbles, has to reach out and support herself against the wall. Is this what a heart attack feels like? she wonders. She starts to sob, inconsolably, burying her face in her hands to keep anyone from hearing her heart break.

She leans there for hours or minutes or until there are no sounds from inside Claudia’s apartment. Then slowly she gathers herself together and makes her way back to the apartment.

C
aution sits in the buzzing silence of the sun-filled apartment. Apart from the sun, it is also filled with flies — filling up with flies — she isn’t sure from where. Perhaps there is something dead in here, she thinks. She is sagging now — hot, worn out. She unzips her jacket. Under the fuzz, it’s quilted, way too warm for this weather. She’s wearing a pink tank top with a silver-sequined kitten on it. She leans back, her arms cradling her belly, though there’s nothing really there to hold. She’s worn out from so much weeping.

For the second time today, she is sitting on a couch with nothing before her but an oversize TV. But what is she waiting for now? Nothing, as far as she can tell.

Merlin found her on the street, sitting cross-legged behind a fabulous straw hat she’d lifted from somewhere. It had a wide, purple polka-dotted sash and yellow feathers. He wanted to see it on her, and so she had emptied the few coins in it into her hand and modeled it for him.

“A girl should be going to a garden party in a hat like that,” he’d said. She’d laughed and it hurt, like any kind of exercise you pick up again that you have abandoned for too long.

And he did take her to a party that very night, although it wasn’t in a garden — it being March and freezing. He introduced her as Lalalania — she hadn’t given him a name, and he hadn’t asked. At that point she hadn’t given herself a name — not one she could stick with. It changed with everyone she met. All she knew was that she wasn’t Kitty Pettigrew. Not anymore.

He was so attentive, his arm around her as if she were his and his alone. She wasn’t fooling herself. She guessed where the night was heading, knew she’d have to pay for so much attention, one way or another. She’d been living on the street for four months, after all. But that night, high, and warm in someone’s eyes, she was beyond caring. It was enough to be loved. And whatever came next . . . well, that kind of fit into her plan in a way, if you could call it a plan. She was not fit to live, so this handsome man with the scar through his right eyebrow and the blond ponytail could be her private executioner.

That he wasn’t a pimp was the first surprise.

He wanted her. Wanted a lot out of her. He was rough, but there was a certain sweetness to the pain. And, yes, she could help with the business, if he liked. Run errands, sure. Do the odd transaction, especially in situations when a thirty-year-old male might look conspicuous. Selling pot at high school: no problem. She was useful. She wanted to be useful. And when she screwed up . . . well, the punishment was almost a relief. It was all she deserved. She remembers lying in bed one night, with him snoring beside her, while she nursed a bruised cheek with a frozen bag of peas. One of these days, he’s going to kill you, she had thought. Something to look forward to.

But he loved her, sort of. Or he had loved her. Or said he had. He would set up a video camera sometimes. It turned him on to watch. He’d get the lighting just right, as if maybe he’d worked in the movies. Or maybe just done this kind of thing before.

Caution looks up at the TV, remembering the porn movie she’d seen that morning. Merlin had a few himself. Everyone did, didn’t they? Guys, anyway. She pushes herself up from the couch and, kneeling by the shelf where he kept his DVDs, she looks for the one he’d made of her. She finds it and stares at the cover of the jewel case. He’d titled the little home movie. Had she ever noticed that? She doubts she had — she’d never had the slightest desire to watch it on her own. Now her hand trembles. He’d titled it “Come Again.”

The scene at Drigo’s office came flooding back into her mind, swamping her, drowning her. Boris’s last words.
Come again,
he’d said.

It can’t be. There is no way. He wouldn’t.

She shakes her head, back and forth, back and forth, and even in this gesture of denial, the motion knocks the last shred of doubt from her mind. He could. He would. She may be blind, but she isn’t a fool.

She gets up and finds his laptop. The top of it is covered with decals as if it were a guitar case or something. She flips it open and boots up. The computer asks for a password; she types in P-A-I-N-T-E-D P-O-N-Y and waits. It had taken her a while to figure the password out — weeks, actually — but there had been no hurry. For her it had been an exercise, a brain game called “How Well Do You Know This Man?”

Not as well as she thought, obviously. In less than twenty minutes, she finds “Come Again” on the website
Amateur Whore.

She had cleared a space at the table to set up the laptop, and now she sits there watching the video, watching them — the two of them. She makes herself watch it all the way through.

“What’re you doing now?” she asks Spence.

“I’m accessing a search engine,” he says.

“What’s that?”

“Think of anything you want to know about.”

“Hmmm. How about why Auntie Lanie has more moles than Mama.”

She laughs and Spence laughs, and he types in “moles.” They look at a couple of mole sites and then at a few genetics sites, and even though they never get a real answer for why Lanie has so many moles — because Spence has homework to do — she gets the idea of how a search engine works. How one question leads to another and then another, and you get closer and closer as you narrow the field of your investigation.

“Show me more,” she asks her brilliant big brother, and he says, “Go brush your teeth; it’s way past your bedtime.”

Caution closes the movie. She sits for a moment, limp, her hands in her lap, her mind reeling. But like a spinning top, it stops eventually. Then she sits up straight, takes a deep breath, and proceeds to erase every file on Merlin’s laptop. She makes sure they aren’t still around in his trash or on any other backup system as far as she can tell. Spence taught her a lot about computers.

It occurs to her after a while that there is a hammer somewhere in the apartment and that it would probably be therapeutic to just smash the laptop to smithereens. But the noise might travel down the hall and bring him home, and she doesn’t want that. As far as she is concerned, he can stay there until tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.

She closes the computer down and stares at the blank screen. She can’t get rid of “Come Again.” It is out there. She can’t stop total strangers from seeing it if that’s the kind of thing they’re looking for. She can’t stop friends, for that matter — people she had taken to be friends. And so shame is added to her sorrow, but that’s okay. For her, sorrow is so deep, the shame is no more than a hard pebble thrown into a vast emptiness.

She closes the computer and puts it back right where she found it. She feels different. Lighter. How can that be? It may have something to do with hunger. But the ham sandwich she had been looking forward to no longer appeals to her. She is too edgy, too distracted. No, that’s not quite right. Her focus has shifted — that’s all. This place she has lived in all these months suddenly seems more sharply defined; there are sharper edges and contrasts. It’s the light, of course — so harsh. But it’s something else, something vibrating in her nerves, lifting her.

She no longer feels sorry for herself.

With the computer dealt with, she looks around the apartment to see what other surprises she might leave behind for the magic man, whenever it occurs to him to come home. She imagines buckets of pig’s blood suspended above the entranceway like in
Carrie.
She imagines hacking off the head of the painted pony and placing it in his bed, like in
The Godfather.

The painted pony.

It stands there smiling at her. She grabs its metal muzzle and tries to lift it. Too heavy. She tries again, grunts with the effort — puts her whole heart into it. It doesn’t budge. Merlin is strong, but Caution’s anger is stronger. Breathing hard, her hands on her hips, she stares at the smiling muzzle. She can’t just stick a quarter in the slot and expect it to trot away. She walks around it, patting its blue flank. If she could shove something under the base, make a lever. . .

She surveys the apartment. There is nothing long enough, but the idea won’t go away. Outside, she thinks, in the alley maybe. She seems to recall leftover building supplies out back. She goes out and looks around, kicking through the waist-high weeds growing through the cracked concrete of what was once a parking lot. There’s a rusted-out fence and metal wire looped through holes in angle irons, but the irons are stuck fast. She looks up, looks around. Down the block, she spies a Dumpster where someone is renovating. She makes her way there and soon finds an eight-foot-long piece of steel reinforcing rod. She lugs it back home, hoping Merlin hasn’t returned, then thinking that if he has, an eight-foot-long rod might come in handy. Her brain is on fire. She wants to laugh out loud but holds it in for fear that once she starts, she’ll never be able to stop. She is on the verge of hysteria. She imagines herself on a tightrope far above the city, holding the reinforcing rod to keep her balance.

Walking up the alley, she is suddenly aware of the line of windows only a couple of feet above her head. Stepping back, she recognizes the curtains to Claudia’s place, and she has to stop herself from launching the half-inch steel rod like a spear through the plate glass. The party crasher to end all party crashers! The rod, with any luck, would pierce Merlin through the chest, pinning him to Claudia forever. Sagittarius the archer!

No. Stay focused, she tells herself.

It’s something else Spence taught her.

In the end, the lever she constructs is a complicated affair. She shoves the thin-edged blade of a meat cleaver under the base of the pony, then shoves the reinforcing rod under the cleaver and uses a low stepping stool as a fulcrum. The steel is bendy and the cleaver keeps slipping, but she perseveres. She piles magazines and Merlin’s CDs beside the base of the pony, and as soon as she can lift it high enough, she pushes as many of them as she can underneath the corners of the base with her toe. She likes the sound of the CD cases cracking. This allows her to take a break and move the fulcrum closer. Slowly, slowly, she tilts the horse farther and farther over. Finally gravity takes over and the thing tips until its stupid blue head is resting against the wall. She clears away the assorted parts of her machine and, on her knees, lifts the board and removes the cookie tin.