“I was just going to throw it away, but you’re mooning over this guy hard. Maybe if you see him again, you can give it to him.”
I unfolded the slip of paper. It had a few lines of numbers written down on it, a code or something. Next to one of the lines, the word important was underlined twice.
“What is this?”
“Beats me. Maybe you can ask him to explain it to you when you see him.”
“I’m not going to see him.” I’d already resigned myself to not ever finding him again. Okay, yes, I was boring. But I also wasn’t about to go chasing a guy who had already told me he didn’t date. What kind of guy didn’t date? It was the politest brushoff I’d ever gotten.
“If you see him, then you can talk to him again. How about that?”
“How about you butt out of my beeswax?”
I crumpled the paper and stuffed it into my back pocket.
“Sure, I’ll butt out. So you’re going to keep it?”
“Shut up.”
“Shutting up!” Jules grinned and took the carton of discard books from me. “Shutting up right... now!”
Later I came into the back room to find Jules staring at the television in the break room. With a pile of old textbooks in my arms, I came and stood in front of her.
“Get out of the way!” Jules kicked out with her foot and knocked a textbook off the top of my stack.
“Earth to Jules, we work in a library. What are you doing watching TV?”
“You’ll never guess who got murdered,” she said.
“The president,” I said.
“No.”
“Your mom.”
“No. Jesus, Kat, that’s insensitive. What if my mom was murdered?”
“Who, then?” I let the pile of textbooks slump to the table near me and turned to the television screen. If our boss wasn’t around, I guess a bit of TV wouldn’t hurt.
“That guy that comes in every couple weeks,” Jules said, motioning to the screen where a police captain was being interviewed.
“That’s really specific.”
“The professor who reads the shitty John Grisham knockoffs. You know, the one with the creepy look.”
“No way.” The screen switched over to a shot of the man with the mustache. I’d seen him just a few days earlier. He’d been checking out a book. Idly, I wondered if his family would bring back the book to the library.
“Way,” Jules said.
“Someone murdered him?”
“Well, he’s missing, anyway.”
“So he’s not murdered.”
“Oh, sure, he ran away to Costa Rica and left his wife and kid and six figure job. Yeah, right. Trust me, he was murdered. God, you have such a boring mind.”
“I don’t think I’ve ever known anyone who was murdered before.”
“Well, now you do,” Jules said, turning off the TV just as Sheryl rounded the corner, her face stuck in that perpetually pissed-off look that some bosses have. “And now he’s dead. Back to work, slacker.”
Gav
I told him not to move when I shaved his mustache off. He moved. Then the tablecloth was bloody. He didn’t start to scream until I began to shave a little deeper.
It was beautiful.
The begging, too, that was delicious to hear. It drove the shadow away. The blood spilled and made a mess, but it had to happen. He’d hurt his wife, and now he was being hurt. It made a kind of sense, didn’t it? And I did so love to hear him beg.
So many promises, this one.
“Let me go, and I’ll give you anything. As much money as you want.” His voice was whining, needy.
I gestured around me with my knife.
“You’ve seen my house,” I said. “Do you think I need money?”
“What do you want, then? Please. Please! I’ll give you anything.”
I couldn’t wait to cut out his tongue. Maybe in a few days. I poured water over his face and he drank it, lapped it up greedily like a dog. A thought was nagging me at the back of my head. Something I had forgotten. But no, I hadn’t forgotten anything. There were no tracks for anyone to follow.
The young woman at the library, the one who kissed me, came floating into mind. I pushed the thought away. Maybe I would go back and return the book, retrace my tracks, make sure I hadn’t missed anything. What could I have missed? Still, the nagging thought at the back of my brain kept itching. The shadow darkened my vision and brought me back to my world, to the dead man who did not know he was dead lying on my kitchen table.
“Please,” he continued. “What can I do? What do you want from me?”
“Right now?” I raised my eyebrows. “Right now, I want you to suffer.”
“Suff-” his words cut off as I came towards him again with the knife. “No, please. Oh god, please, no!”
“Scream,” I whispered, bringing my knife down to his cheek.
He obliged.
CHAPTER THREE
Kat