The Ferryman Institute (34 page)

“Not exactly the Ritz-Carlton,” Alice said as she waltzed into the room from behind Charlie, “but it's better than I was expecting ten seconds ago.”

“You and me both,” he replied. He wandered over to the coffee table and took to riffling through the stack of magazines, looking for possible further instructions, as Cartwright had promised. Alice paced the room, humming indistinctly as she did.

Truth be told, Charlie had been having a hard time talking to Alice ever since her . . . vaguely romantic overture. It had caught him completely by surprise, though strangely enough, he got a sense the person it had surprised the most was she herself. Not that he wasn't flattered by it—quite the opposite, actually. In fact, he couldn't think of the last time he'd been . . . well, kissed.

During his early days as a Ferryman, Charlie spent most of his time quietly pining over his wife. The chance to see her again had driven him into taking Cartwright's offer in the first place, so being forcibly secluded from her while knowing full well she was alive was its own distinct torture. By the time he'd finally been able to let her go—and that was no short spell—his reputation had grown with such cancerous ferocity that all of his coworkers, male and female, treated him with the tulip-tiptoeing caution usually reserved for temperamental dictators. Not that he acted any different than his perfectly normal, charming self, just that he was Charlie Dawson—
the
Charlie Dawson. Apparently fame had a unique way of making pariahs out of its chosen few.

He stole a glance to see Alice standing at the window, her
back to him, weight placed on her left leg, face looking down at the mostly deserted Manhattan street below. The city lights cast her into a nearly perfect silhouette, a lithe shadow pressed against the glass.

She knew nothing of his fame or what his accomplishments meant to humanity at large. Maybe she had an idea now, a general sense of it perhaps, but it was impossible to appreciate without the context a job at the Ferryman Institute provided. She treated him like just a normal guy . . . which, now that he thought about it, was kind of odd. Here she was, the one person who had every right to treat him like a comic book character, instead acting like they'd just had drinks at a bar.

It was . . . kind of nice.

Alice turned around at that exact moment, and despite his best efforts to look natural by flipping through an old
Time
magazine, Charlie knew she'd caught him staring. “Gonna use the ladies' room,” she said casually, to which he murmured some unintelligible reply. The door clicked softly behind her.

He shook his head.
Because kidnapping her wasn't enough, let's stare at her like a creep while alone in a small apartment together. Real smooth, Charlie.

Eager to take his mind off the faux pas, Charlie moved to the kitchenette and spotted the notepad magnetically held to the refrigerator door. A cartoon knight posed heroically in the lower left corner of the stationery, his sword pointed across the paper at a similarly cartoonish dragon, a small puff of flame spurting from its nostrils. The header, written in a blocky, bold font, read,
Fortune favors the Brave!
Paper-clipped to the pad was some cash, a twenty on the top and at least five more bills underneath. However, what had caught his attention was the handwriting scrawled across in a flowing script.

1 AM. 34th and 8th. Time waits for no man.

Though Charlie had never seen Cartwright's handwriting before, the phrasing had all the hallmarks of the man's instructions: purposefully vague and generally unhelpful. At least some things never changed. He pocketed the cash—all one hundred and forty dollars of it—then ripped the top sheet off the pad and stuck it into the breast pocket of his jacket.

The distant blare of a taxi drifted by the window, while in the east, the sky had just begun to brighten. Charlie slumped up against the bathroom wall neighboring the door and let his weight carry his body down to the floor. There he sat, hands in his lap, eyes closed. Then, for the first time that night, he began to earnestly wonder just what the fuck he was doing.

ALICE SLUNK
into the bathroom—a toilet, a mirror, and a sink, all clean, praise be to God—and felt an immediate sense of relief. It took her a moment to realize that since Charlie's second unannounced arrival at chez Alice earlier that night (i.e., the time after she plunked him in the noggin with a nine-millimeter slug), this was the first time she'd been alone. That hadn't been her intention—she actually just really had to pee—but it felt good. Refreshing, even (the alone time, not the peeing, though emptying her bladder felt nice, too). Suddenly, she didn't need to be funny or witty or interesting and she could just be
blah
.

Not that she needed to be any of those things when she was with Charlie. Of course she didn't need to be. Why would she?

Alice and Charlie, kissing in a tree. K-I-S-S-I-N-G . . .

Alice sighed, wondering why her brain had to be such an asshole all the time.

She alternated between feeling exhilarated and deathly mortified by that kiss. For the life of her, she couldn't remember what she was thinking when she jumped in for that particular kill. Actually, that probably explained it. No sane person would sloppily kiss their kidnapper (rescuer?) hours after they'd been whisked away, being fed nonsense (confided in?) all the while. To be fair, Alice had been dubious on the whole sanity front from the very beginning. Perhaps this was the evidence she needed to prove she'd been right this whole time, the missing piece she needed in order to write a big fat
I'm insane—QED
on this fucker, turn it in to the proper authorities, and wait for them to arrive with the straitjacket.

She turned to leave, but stopped when she caught sight of the pale face of a tired girl looking back at her from across the cracked mirror above the sink. The eyes drew her in, gazing at her with disapproval. Disappointment even. The lower left corner of the mirror was gone, snapped clean off in a neat break. She'd seen that face earlier. Only then she'd had a gun to her head.

She heard Charlie's voice call to her from the outer room. “Looks like we're holing up here for a while.”

“Really?” she said, watching the girl in the mirror speak the word.

“If you want to listen to Cartwright's advice, then yes. Meeting at one a.m., Thirty-Fourth and Eighth. At least, I think that's what he means. I'm never entirely sure with him.” A pause from behind the wall. “Come to think of it, aren't you tired? I don't have the faintest idea what time it is, but it's definitely late. Or early, I guess.”

Alice moved a strand of hair out of the girl's face. She might have been beautiful at some point, that girl, that sad-looking girl. “Insomnia. I don't sleep.”

“Fair enough.” Another pause. “There a reason for that?”

The girl in the mirror smiled at that. Apparently she found it
funny. Why was that? Because he'd asked that question already? No. Because the girl who might have once been pretty should be dead, but she wasn't, and that was funny.

Then the thought hit her again, like a mental double take.

She was alone.

“You don't like talking about yourself much, do you?” Charlie's voice again.

Alice wrenched her gaze from the face in the mirror, only to see a dozen more staring up at her from inside the bowl of the porcelain sink. The broken corner of the mirror must have fallen in, shattering into pieces . . .

. . . some of them very sharp.

“No,” the dozen Alices said, “I don't.”

She stared at the shard of glass that somehow had found its way into her hand. It wasn't the biggest of the dozen or so lining the sink, but it looked like the sharpest, its tip arriving at a mean symmetrical point. It stared back at her, and she quickly flipped it over to its nonreflective backside.

This was it—the moment that had eluded her ever since Charlie dropped into her life with the subtlety of a construction worker's catcall. Despite the gamut of emotions she'd been put through already, her pervading sense of failure had never left her. Stepped out of the limelight for a bit, perhaps, back into the shadows where it waited, patiently, for a chance to make a dramatic entrance. Then, just as Alice let her guard down, it came forward, announcing itself as Alice's reflection in the looking glass.

“I find it a little unfair that you know so much about me and I don't know anything about you,” Charlie said through the wall.

Now, if only she could get Charlie to shut up for two seconds.

“You know a lot about me,” she said. “Dead mother, no job, suicidal.” She almost laughed at that last one.

“Fine. I don't know anything about you that you've told me. Better?”

Not really
, Alice thought. Honestly, why did he even care? Sure, this whole little adventure or whatever you wanted to call it had been fun at times. The chase, now that it was over, was kind of exciting. The whole secret society thing was pretty cool. But it was destined to end. All of it.

That was the problem: after it was over, everything would just go back to the way it had been. Alice was as sure of that as anything she'd ever been in her life. Best-case scenario, she'd end up back in her room, waiting for the little demons of doubt to return to finish the job. It was inevitable, then, and there was no use prolonging the inevitable, was there?

Alice held the makeshift blade to her wrist.
Down the road, not across the highway.
Two quick swipes, boom-boom, and Bob's your uncle. She wasn't entirely sure what that meant, but she'd heard it in a movie once and thought it sounded cool.

“Do you have a boyfriend?”

She stopped. For a brief moment, she looked away from her exposed arm. “What?” she said.

“Girlfriend?”

“No! What does this have to do with anything?”

Alice could almost hear his shrug through the wall. “Just curious. Trying to make conversation and not wonder what's taking you so long in there.”

Her heart skipped a beat. He couldn't know what she was doing in here . . . could he? Though Alice didn't see it, focused as she was on talking to the door (even if Charlie was behind the wall), the girl in the mirror lowered her arms to her sides. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

“Aside from the obvious?” he asked.

“What,” she said, a smooth jet of anger now turning up in her gut, “a girl can't go to the bathroom in peace?”

“They can. I've just never met one that does.”

She snorted at that, and if she'd been looking at the mirror, she might have caught the sparkle in her eyes, the contentment on her lips. But as is so often the case in life, she never did, and so the moment was missed. Maybe she would have put down the glass shard in her hand if she had, and who knows how differently things might have turned out?

“I'm taking care of business,” she said, then quickly added, “Lady business.”

That appeared to do the trick. “Right,” he said. “Sorry.” Joyful, wondrous silence followed. At least, for a few seconds until he interrupted again. “How long did you date your ex-boyfriend for?”

The question caught her like a sucker punch. She deliberately hadn't talked about Marc with him . . . not that she'd talked about much of anything from her end, to be fair. She hated thinking about her ex, let alone bringing him up, so when Charlie hadn't, she'd hoped that maybe he didn't know anything about that particular situation. So much for that.

If before he'd been slowly dialing up the heat on her anger, now he'd just ratcheted it up to high. Not only was she mad that he
did
know, but she couldn't focus on the task at hand with him stupidly yapping.

“So you
did
know more about me! I knew it!” And to think, she was stuck in an apartment with this guy. Alice was tempted to march back out into the room and stab him a few times just to put him in his place.

After a short pause, Charlie said, “No, just a guess. I've had a couple hundred years' worth of practice at reading people. You pick up a thing or two. Happy to see I've still got it.”

That was it—all bets were off. Forget stabbing him. Oh no. She was going to cut him up into little pieces and feed him to a pack of ravenous stray dogs so he'd have to spend several days running through some pit bull's digestive tract until he was very literally turned into a piece of shit. “Listen, you—” she began.

But then his voice was rolling along, not even aware he was interrupting her intended outburst. “If I had to guess, I'd say you two dated around two and a half, maybe three years. Fairly recent breakup, maybe a year or two ago, and you were almost definitely on the receiving end of it. Probably out of left field, too. I think he might have had an exotic name, like Giuseppe or Fernando. You haven't dated anybody since, even if you'd secretly like to, but you're scared you'll never find anyone better than him and will therefore spend the rest of your life wondering what could have been. In fact, you're so scared of that future that you're willing to erase any possibility of it happening by choosing not to play the game at all. Can't lose if you don't play, right?”

Alice stood in the bathroom with her mouth slightly open, completely at a loss for what to do or say. Where the hell did he just pull that out of? Not perfectly accurate but . . . shit. She wondered if he was doing it by accident or if it was all part of some long con that she couldn't see. A section of her mind resented him for the words he'd just loosed, yet bizarrely enough, it was more so because he'd stumbled on a raw splinter of truth.

She would never understand how he did it, but just like that, he'd flicked her wrath dial to off. The anger that she'd been building briefly turned inward before Alice let it flow down, down, down, all the way through her feet and into the ground below her.