Red Glove (12 page)

“That’s creepy, dude,” he says.

I point to my head with both hands. “Expert, remember?”

Then we go out the window and close it behind us. I think of the night before and Lila, her back pressed against the lawn. The smell of crushed grass underfoot is as heady as any perfume.

“Walk casually,” I say.

We get into my car, which stalls twice before it starts, causing Sam to give me the wide-eyed expression of a man who’s looking down the barrel of explaining a suspension to his parents. A moment later, though, we’re pulling out of the lot with the headlights off. I click them on as we turn onto the highway.

Then I head toward the address in the file, the one where Janssen was last seen. Quarter of an hour later we’re parking near Cyprus View apartment complex. I get out.

It’s one of those modern places with a doorman in the lobby and probably a gym up near the penthouse. There are bright lamps burning on the manicured lawn, bushes cut into round balls near the stretch of concrete walkways, and a park across the street. A block over is a supermarket, and a block from that is a gas station, but when you look at it from the right angle, the place is nice. Expensive. Sprinkler system, but no cameras that I can see, and I walk twice around one of the lights to be sure.

“What are we looking at?” Sam asks, leaning against the side of the car. In his uniform jacket, with his tie loose, he could almost be a gangster. So long as you don’t notice the Wallingford logo over his breast pocket.

“Janssen’s mistress’s condo. I wanted to see if it felt—I don’t know—familiar.”

Sam frowns. “Why would it be familiar? You didn’t even know Janssen. Did you?”

I’m slipping up. I shake my head. “I don’t know. I just wanted to see it. Look for clues.”

“Okay,” Sam says skeptically, glancing down at his watch. “But if this is a stakeout, I vote for us getting snacks.”

“Yeah,” I reply, distracted. “Just give me a second.”

I walk across the grass and past the groomed bushes. I don’t remember any of this. I must have stood on this grass and waited for Janssen, but I don’t recall a single thing.

A woman in jogging clothes runs in the direction of the apartment building. She’s got two of those big black standard poodles on a leash. Staring at her, I get a flash of memory, but it feels so distant that I can barely catch it. She looks in my direction, then turns abruptly, jerking the leashes. I get a really good look at her face just before she takes off down the street.

She must be an actress, because the memory I have of her is a scene from a movie. I’m sure it was the jogger, but she was wearing a short black dress, with her hair up, and a necklace with a single sparkling amulet dangling in the valley between her breasts. She had a bruise on her face and she’d been crying. A faceless actor in my brother’s leather jacket took her by the shoulders. A man was lying on the grass, facedown.

I can’t remember anything else. No plot. Not even whether I saw the film in a theater or on television late one night. The memory makes no sense.

If she’s some actress, how come she started running when she saw me?

And how come one of the actors was wearing my brother’s leather jacket?

Only one way to find out. I chase after her, my Walling-ford dress shoes clacking like beetles on the pavement.

She veers off across the street, and I follow. A car’s high beams catch me, and the grill of a Toyota nearly slams into me. I hit my hand against his hood and keep going.

She’s almost made it to a small park. There are a couple of other people, walking under flickering streetlights, but she doesn’t call out to them and they don’t seem to want to involve themselves.

I pump my legs faster, pounding my feet against the dirt. I’m gaining on her now. One of the dogs barks as I reach out and catch the hood of the woman’s pink velour top.

She stumbles, and the dogs go crazy. I had no idea enormous poodles were so protective, but these things look like they want to rip my arms off.

“Wait,” I say. “Please. I’m not going to hurt you.”

She turns back toward me, the barking dogs between us. I hold up my hands in surrender. The park is quiet and dim, but if she starts running again, she could make it to the buildings beyond it, businesses that would probably not see my chasing her in a favorable light.

“What do you want?” she says, studying my face. “Our business is over. Done. I told Philip I didn’t want to see any of you.”

The creeping realization that there was no movie comes over me. Of course. Barron must have taken my memory and changed one small detail—the part where it happened in real life. That must have been easier for him than erasing the memory completely. And I’d forget it the same way I forget every other late-night cop show.

“I already paid you,” she’s saying, and I focus on memorizing her, shaking off all other thoughts. Her dark hair is pulled back into a ponytail, and her artificially plumped lips are painted a bubble-gum pink. Her eyes are tilted up at the corners, her eyebrows high enough to give her a perpetual expression of mild surprise. Between that and her wrinkled neck, I guess she’s had some work done. She’s beautiful and unreal; I can see why Barron changed her into a movie star in my head. “I’m not giving you anything else. You can’t blackmail me.”

I have no idea what she’s talking about.

“He strung me along, you know. Told me he was going to marry me. Then, bam, starts knocking me around when I find out he’s already married. But what do you care about that? Nothing. You probably have a girl back home that you treat no better. Get out of here, you piece of trash.”

When I look at her, I still see the woman I mistook her for. I wonder what she sees when she looks at me. A drip of sweat runs over the curve of her cheek. Her breathing is rapid and shallow. She’s scared.

An assassin, that’s what she sees.

“You’re the one who wanted the hit,” I say, untangling what she’s saying. “You paid Anton to take out Janssen.”

“What are you, wearing a wire?” she asks, raising her voice and talking into my chest. “I never killed nobody. I never had nobody killed.” She looks back toward her apartment building, like she’s thinking about bolting.

“Okay,” I say, holding up my hands again. “Okay. That was stupid.”

“Yeah,” she says. “Are we done?”

I nod my head, and then suddenly think of another question. “Where were you on Tuesday night?”

“Home with the dogs,” she says. “I had a headache. Why?”

“My brother got shot.”

She frowns. “Do I look like a killer?”

I don’t point out that she hired a team of hit men to kill her lover. My silence must make her feel like she scored a point, because with a final triumphant glare she takes off, dogs sprinting alongside her.

I walk back to my car, feeling each step. A blister has risen on my big toe. These shoes were never made for chase scenes.

The door of the Benz opens. “Cassel?” Sam calls from the driver’s side. “She tell you anything good?”

“Yeah,” I say. “That she was going to mace me.”

“I was ready to fire up the getaway car.” Sam grins. “Doesn’t she know that muggers don’t wear ties?”

I straighten my collar. “I’m a better class of criminal. A gentleman thief, if you will.”

I let Sam drive. We head back to Wallingford, stopping for drive-through coffee and fries along the way. When we hop back through the dorm window, the smell of take-out clings to our clothes so strongly that it takes half a bottle of air freshener to disguise it.

“Stop smoking in your room,” the hall master says at lights-out. “Don’t think I can’t tell what you’ve been doing in here.”

We laugh so hard that, for a moment, it seems like we’re never going to be able to stop.

The next morning I am walking to Developing World Ethics when Kevin Ford runs up to me. He stuffs an envelope into my hand.

“What are the odds that Greg Harmsford nailed Lila Zacharov?” he asks, breathless.

“What?” I say.

“Am I the first one to put down money? Dude!”

“Kevin, what are you talking about?” I resist grabbing his shoulders and shaking him, but I don’t think I manage to keep the edge out of my voice. “I can’t calculate odds on something when I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Last night I heard that they went into the sitting room and did it. Greg was bragging about it. His roommate, Kyle, had to totally distract their hall master.”

“Okay,” I say, nodding. My mouth feels dry. “I’ll keep the money, but if no one else bets or no one bets against, I’m going to have to give it back.” That’s my standard line for things like this and I say it automatically.

He nods and races off. I stagger into class.

Greg Harmsford is sitting in his usual desk by the windows. I take a seat on the other side, staring at the back of his head, flexing my gloved hands.

While Mr. Lewis rattles on and on about trade agreements, I think about what it would be like to shove a sharpened pencil into Greg’s ear. This is the kind of rumor that people start about new girls, I remind myself. They’re never based on anything but wishful thinking.

Once we’re dismissed, I head toward the door, passing Greg. He smirks, raising his eyebrows like he’s daring me to start something.

Okay, that’s weird.

“Hey, Cassel,” he says, his smile getting wider.

I bite the inside of my cheek and continue into the hallway. The copper taste of blood fills my mouth. I keep walking.

As I stalk toward Probability & Statistics, I see Daneca, her arms full of books.

“Hey, have you seen Lila?” I ask her, my voice strained.

“Not since yesterday,” she says with a shrug.

I clamp my gloved hand on her shoulder. “Do you have any classes with her?”

Daneca stops and looks at me oddly. “She does a lot of remedial stuff.”

Of course. Being a cat for three years might leave you a little behind on your schoolwork. But I’ve been too much in my own head to notice.

I get passed three more envelopes in statistics. Two of them are betting on Lila and Greg. I hand both of those back with such a dark look that no one asks me for an explanation.

She’s not at lunch, either. Finally I walk into her building and head up the stairs, figuring that if I get caught, I’ll come up with some explanation. I count over the number of doors, assuming that, like in my dorm, everyone gets one window to a room.

Then I knock. Nothing.

The locks are simple. I’ve been breaking into my own room for so long that I don’t even carry my keys half the time. Just a quick pin twist and I’m inside.

She’s got a single, which means her father must have made a pretty hefty donation. Her bed is jammed up against the window and there’s a tangle of light green sheets dragging on the floor. An overstuffed bookcase that she must have brought with her sits against one wall. A totally forbidden electric kettle, and a tiny scarab green iPod glittering in an expensive-looking speaker system, wires connecting it to headphones, all rest on top of a low trunk. She’s also brought in a vanity with a mirror that sits against the wall where a roommate’s desk usually goes. The walls are covered in black-and-white photos of old movie stars: Bette Davis, Greta Garbo, Katharine Hepburn, Marlene Dietrich, and Ingrid Bergman. And Lila’s pasted-up quotes near them.

I walk up to the picture of Garbo, smoldering behind a Vaselined lens. The paper near her says, “I’m afraid of nothing except being bored.”

It makes me smile.

I relock the door and turn to go down the steps, when I realize that the dull hum in the background—a sound I barely even registered—is a shower running in the hall bathroom.

I head toward it.

The bathroom is tiled in pink and smells like girls’ shampoos, tropical and sugary. As I push open the door, I realize that there is no excuse that can explain my being in here.

“Lila?” I call.

I hear a soft sob. I stop caring about getting caught.

She’s sitting in the middle shower stall, still in her uniform. Her hair is plastered to her head and her clothes are soaked through. The water is pounding down so relentlessly that I’m surprised she can breathe. It runs in rivulets over her closed eyes and half-open mouth. Her lips look blue with cold.

“Lila?” I say again, and her eyes open wide.

I did this to her. She was always the fearless one, the dangerous one.

Now she looks at me like she doesn’t believe I’m really here. “Cassel? How did you know—” She bites off the question.

“What did he do to you?” I say. I am trembling with fury and powerlessness and sick jealousy.

“Nothing,” she says, and I can see that familiar, cruel smile of hers, but all of its mockery is turned inward. “I mean, I wanted him to. I thought maybe it would break the curse. I’ve never really—I was just a kid when I changed—and I figured that maybe if I slept with someone, it would help. Obviously it didn’t.”

I swallow carefully. “Why don’t you come out of there and dry off? It’s cold.” I put on a fake voice, like I’m one of the old ladies from Carney. You’ll catch your death.

She looks a little less dire, her smile a little less like a rictus. “The water was hot before.”

I hold out a towel that’s lying on a bench nearby. It’s a sickly shade of magenta, covered with purple fish. I’m pretty sure it’s not hers.

She gets up slowly, stiffly, and comes out of the shower. I wrap her in the towel. For a moment my arms close around her. She leans into me and sighs.

We walk together across the hallway to her room. There she pulls away to sit on the bed, dripping onto her sheets. She looks curled in on herself, arms crossed over her chest.

“Okay,” I say. “I’m going to go stand in the stairway and you’re going to get dressed, and then we’re going to get out of here. I’ve got lots of untried schemes for walking out of Wallingford in the middle of the day; let’s try one. We can get some hot chocolate. Or tequila. And then we can come back and kill Greg Harmsford, something I personally have wanted to do for a while.”

Her fingers pull the towel tighter. She doesn’t smile. Instead she says, “I’m sorry I haven’t been handling this—the curse—very well.”