Killer (14 page)

Zolov took a few moments to consider the question. “No. I haven't seen Ceendy in a long time,” he finally answered.

Neither had Mr. Haq, apparently. Mr. Haq just shrugged, frowning at the chessboard. A headache pounded Sam's temples. Where the hell was she?

She'd cleared out of her house, so she wouldn't be there. Ed Fargo said he hadn't seen her since this morning. She hadn't told Ed where she was going, either. And Sam hadn't seen her at Krispy Kreme or Ozzie's Café or Gray's Papaya. It was scary. Gaia didn't often stray from her usual haunts....

As far as he could figure out, there were only two possibilities:

Either they had been running circles around each other all afternoon.

Or she was gone for good.

Zolov suddenly looked up. “Ceendy's your girlfriend.”

It was a statement, not a question. Sam's rib cage
tightened around him like a steel band. “I . . . I wish she was,” he confessed.

“Ceendy loves you,” Zolov said with an impish grin.

Sam smiled politely, even though part of him wanted to smash Zolov across the face in frustration. But it wasn't his fault.
The old man was obviously confused.
He might be a formidable chess master, but he knew nothing about love.

 

IT WAS WELL AFTER MIDNIGHT BY
the time Gaia headed toward the small East Village neighborhood known as Alphabet City. The area got its name for the lettered avenues that ran through it—not for any whimsical, childish reasons, like Alphabet Soup.
It was a neighborhood of crack houses and abandoned buildings, of crime and hustlers and drugs.
Even Mary, one of the more adventurous people Gaia had ever known, had never ventured too deep into Alphabet City alone. Day
or
night.

Ambush

It was a good thing Gaia was fearless. Right
now, fearlessness was a good thing. The threat of street thugs and crack fiends wasn't enough to turn Gaia away. Nor was the possibility of running headlong into another one of Ella's traps.
And as much as Gaia wanted to believe that Ella wasfinally ready to come clean, she knew it was unlikely.
This very well could be one big setup. After all, why would the stepmonster suddenly turn on a dime and start being nice?

Because I saved her life,
Gaia reminded herself.

Right. That had to count for
something
.

Gaia kicked a broken beer bottle to the edge of the curb, where trash was overflowing from a long-neglected garbage can. The outlines of listless bodies slumped in doorways faded as Gaia headed east; fewer and fewer streetlights worked.

“Ssssssssss.”

Wait. Was somebody hissing at her? She glanced into the street. Yup. A guy with a pathetic excuse for a mustache had rolled down the window of his beat-up Chrysler LeBaron. Gaia had to laugh.
Among the city's population of Neanderthals, hissing was actually considered to be a compliment.

“What are you, a snake?” she asked him.

The guy wagged his tongue at her. “No, but I've got one I can show you....”

An inventory of kung fu moves flashed through Gaia's mind, but ultimately this caveman wasn't worth her energy. Gaia kept walking. After a moment the car sped away, turning the corner with a screech. Maybe that was supposed to communicate the man's disappointment. How clever.

What would Ella be doing around here?
Gaia wondered. She pictured Ella walking by, wearing one of those spandex headbands that barely passed for a miniskirt, getting mauled by every other guy on the street. Then again, knowing Ella's voracious taste in men, she probably liked that sort of thing.

At last Gaia made it to the southeast corner of Avenue C and Eighth Street.

So. Here she was. Even among all the burned-out buildings and abandoned tenements, this
had
to be the worst block in the neighborhood. It looked like a war zone. Every window was broken or boarded up. Every wall was scribbled with spray-painted graffiti. On the opposite corner was a building with police tape draped across the doorway, declaring it condemned.

This
had
to be a trap.

Gaia nodded to herself. Ella would have never set a high-heeled foot anywhere
near
this place. So she had to be hiding in the shadows somewhere, waiting to pounce. Fine. Gaia balled her fists.
The old, electric tingle shot through her body.
She would wait for the ambush. It was all she could do.

 

FROM THE FOYER OF THE ABANDONED
apartment building, Ella waited. She could see the street corner clearly through a cutout in the plywood that boarded up the window—with its dented mailbox that had been partially uprooted from a bad parking job.

No Safety Net

Maybe Gaia isn't going to come.

Why would she? It was ridiculous to expect that she would trust Ella enough to show up at such a seedy address. Ella wasn't sure she even
wanted
Gaia to show up. Yes, there was a lot that Gaia needed to know for her own sake.
But that meant that Ella would have to own up to her own past and the part she played in Loki's schemes.
It was difficult enough admitting the truth to herself, let alone the person she'd been trying to hurt ... even kill.

Absently Ella chewed on her newly cut fingernails while she waited. Maybe, just maybe, opening up to Gaia would be liberating. Maybe she would even catch a glimpse of her former self, that hazy vapor of a person stuffed into the bottom of her mind . . . the person who had once determined her own destiny and made her own decisions, without interference from anyone else.

No. She was fooling herself.
Freedom wasterrifying. She'd been a slave for too long.

This was uncharted ground—like hurling through space without a safety net. This was choosing one path among an infinite number. It was trusting yourself when you weren't even sure that you
could
be trusted.

Ella sighed and pressed her face up to the open hole in the plywood. What if, in the end, she discovered that she didn't like the person she was?
Anything's better than who you are now,
Ella told herself.
You can always change
. . . .

There she was. Gaia stepped up on the curb. She looked around, with her hands squeezed into tight fists, as if she were unsure she had remembered the address correctly. As if she didn't trust Ella at all.

Poor thing,
Ella thought in silence.
She has no idea her life is about to change forever.

 

THE DOOR TO THE RUN-DOWN
apartment building creaked open. Gaia hesitated. This was it. The moment. But Ella was nowhere to be seen. A young woman in olive cargo pants and a white T-shirt stood in the doorway....

Ella Sponge

“Hello, Gaia.”

Gaia blinked. No. It was impossible. Long gone were the miniskirts and sequins. The layers of makeup had been chiseled off and the offensive red hair had been pulled back into a loose bun, revealing a much younger looking face. Even the hideous red talons Ella had glued to her fingernails had been ripped off. It was hard to believe there had actually been a
person
under the clown costume Ella had always worn.

But there she was ... looking not so different from Gaia herself. It was beyond strange; it was
creepy
.

“I barely recognize you,” Gaia stated.

Ella managed a sad smile. She held open the door, glancing out in the street. “Come in. We shouldn't be outside.”

Well, if this was a trap, Ella was doing a damn good job. Gaia hesitantly followed her inside. The entrance smelled of must and mold. There were no lights on anywhere, only a trail of votive candles leading from the front door to the second-floor landing. A rat whisked by in the shadows. This place was like . . . what? A crash pad from some sixties movie? A house of junkies?
If there wasever a place built to the exact inverse specifications of Ella's personality,
this was it.

“Sorry, there's no electricity in here,” Ella apologized,
handing Gaia her own candle to carry. “Or running water, either. It's a squat. The roof leaks, and sometimes plaster falls from the ceiling. But hey, what do you want for free?”

Gaia shook her head. “How did you . . . find out about this place?”

“As soon as I moved in with George, I knew I had to find a place where no one could find
me,”
she answered. “Nobody who knows me would look for me in a crack house in Alphabet City. Right?”

She had a point there. Gaia's limbs felt sluggish and dull, as if she were moving through a dream. She had no idea what to make of any of this. Footsteps creaked across the floor above them. A tinny radio echoed in the stairwell.

“Do you stay here a lot?” Gaia asked.

“Are you kidding?” Ella laughed, leading her down the second-floor hallway, past several doors marked with their own letters, to a single door at the end of the hall. The paint on the door was mottled and chipped, and a faded letter
E
materialized in the flickering candlelight. “I like the high life, remember?”

Gaia didn't answer. She decided she'd simply listen, observe,
soak in.
She would be a sponge—a sponge that absorbed Ella ... or whoever the hell Ella really was.

Ella pushed open the door and led Gaia inside. It
was a dingy studio apartment—hardly bigger than Gaia's bedroom on Perry Street. A small army cot was set up in the corner, next to a sickly yellow bureau with flower decals that looked like it had been rescued from a street curb. On the other side of the room were a small chrome table and mismatched wooden chairs and milk crates filled with papers and folders. Candles dripped slowly on every available surface. A cockroach scurried up the wall.

“Sorry I can't offer you anything,” Ella joked.

“Right,” Gaia said blankly. She took a seat at the table. She scanned the apartment for weapons—guns, carving knives, baseball bats—but didn't see anything remotely threatening.

Ella sat down across from her. Again Gaia was struck by how
different
she looked without all the makeup.

“So, is this totally shocking to you?” Ella asked.

I'd have to say that's the understatement of the century,
Gaia thought. But she kept her comment to herself.
Ella wasstill an opponent, an enemy.

“I know it must be strange to live with some-one and think you know them, only to find out they're someone totally different,” Ella stated in the silence.

Gaia clenched her jaw. “I never felt like I knew you at all.”

Ella arched her eyebrows. “You formed certain opinions about me,” she said. Her tone wasn't angry; it was just matter-of-fact.

“I thought you were a back-stabbing witch who couldn't be trusted,” Gaia replied. Maybe if
she
opened up, Ella would be more inclined to open up, too. “And I always knew you were playing George for a sucker.”

Ella just smiled sadly again. “Sometimes you had good reason to be mad at me,” she answered. “But a lot of times, in the beginning, I interfered because you were in dangerous situations. And occasionally . . . I did feel bad about George. Not often, though.”

Okay. Ella was being honest. Gaia supposed she could grudgingly respect her for that. On the other hand, it was pretty damn convenient to say that Ella felt bad about George
now.
In fact, this whole freaking setup was just a little
too
convenient.
And a little too weird. Ella was suddenly a lost, homeless waif . . . out on the street. From the West Village to Alphabet City. In less than a day. No way. Gaia still couldn't believe it.

“You were trying to keep me safe, so you end up trying to kill me,” she remarked flatly. “That makes total sense.”

“No—at first I tried to protect you, but after a
while you started to get in the way of a lot of things.”

Gaia laughed bitterly. “Like Sam?”

Ella nodded without so much as batting an eye-lash. “Like Sam. You've got to understand some-thing—Loki had me locked in a marriage with a man who was twenty-five years older than me. And Loki was ignoring me. I was looking for a way to feel young again.”

Loki was ignoring you?
Did that mean what Gaia thought it meant? A bitter taste formed in her mouth. Hearing vague hints about a possible sexual relationship between Ella and her father was about the
last
thing she wanted to deal with right now. The Sam issue was bad enough. She didn't want to talk about
any
of this. But she could feel herself slipping . . . as if she'd lost her footing on a rocky slope. She was beginning to lose control.

“You could have gone after anyone,” Gaia found herself saying. “And you went after Sam—”

“What can I say? I was jealous of you.” Ella swallowed. “That night we spent together—”

“I
really
don't want to hear about it,” Gaia interrupted. She felt a sudden urge to bolt from this freakish little room,
from this strange bizarro universe where nothing was as it seemed.
Even the Perry Street Penitentiary was preferable to this.

“Look, Gaia, the whole thing with Sam was
my
fault,” Ella insisted. “I followed him to a bar and went after him. He was bombed out of his mind. He had no idea who I was until he stopped by the house to see you a few days later.”

A lump formed in Gaia's throat. This was too much. Too much ...

“It was just one night, nothing more,” Ella continued. “I wanted a real relationship with him, but Sam didn't seem to want anything to do with me—”