The Next (35 page)

Shit! No time!

I tossed the phone to the side.

Where’s that gun?

I’d dropped it in my last trip to trauma town.

A shiny black loafer appeared on the step in front of my eyes.

Did Layworth have a gun? Did he have a knife? Fuck!

I couldn’t find the goddamn gun! I could turn on the lights, but that would only reveal his target even clearer.

I ran to the front door, unlocked it, and placed my hand on the knob.

I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t get my two eyes to focus on one thing. My veins surged like a torrent. Marzoli was right. My past found the right moment to finish me off. My years of shoving memories into the blades of the disposal failed to destroy it, and for all of the grinding and screeching, it still crawled back up from the dark hole at the worst possible opportunity.

I opened the door.

The amber hall light funneled across my floor to my window.

Layworth faced me on the other side of the shard-encrusted window frame. .

I placed my foot onto the faded hall carpet.

Layworth placed a foot on the inside of my window frame on the sill.

My knees buckled.

God damn it! I can do this now! There’s no fucking logical reason why I can’t!

My mouth was dry and my throat was so constricted I couldn’t utter a sound. My vision was filling with red explosions. I was passing out. I fell against the door. My palms were lubed with sweat, which provided zero friction to keep me propped up. I slid to the floor, slamming the door against the wall with the full weight of my body combined with skyrocketing adrenaline. The doorstop tore off. The doorknob gouged into the drywall.

Too motherfucking much too motherfucking fast!

Minnie started yapping up a storm at the crash.

I heard a thump and looked up.

Mr. Perfect stood on my floor in front of my window, spotlighted by the stream of hall light. No gun blackened his hand. No knife gleamed. Instead, what I saw was even worse.

I’d seen him in a towel only a couple minutes ago, but now he wore an expensive black Armani suit, shining with thin pinstripes, buttoned over a contrasting solid black vest, punctuated by a shiny silk white tie. It was tailored perfectly to show off the breadth of his shoulders, the flatness of his stomach, the muscularity of his thighs, and the bulging sex of his package. Mr. Perfect, in-goddamn-deed, dressed up for this confrontation like a CEO at a stockholder meeting delivering some bad news. It was clear what his intent was. He only had one reason to dress to the nines just to confront li’l me. He had a dead body bagged in a box spring in his closet, a policeman stabbed in his bedroom, semen on towels, and his wife’s blood speckled on the walls. He had no chance of emerging innocently. The fucker knew his kingdom had been overthrown, but he had no intention of going down naked. He’d come to my apartment to die with all the outward dignity he felt a suit represented. He would die hailed as a fallen emperor.

Drops of sweat stung my eye, causing me to squint.

Then I saw it illuminated between his feet.

Marzoli’s gun.

Mr. Perfect looked down.

He did not bend down to claim it, but instead looked back into my eyes with a strange tranquility. He stood in my apartment emotionally resolved. The oddly un-confrontational standoff seemed to span minutes.

I found the words my brain was forming stunningly ironic. “Pick up the fucking gun!”

He didn’t.

And in the blaring hush of stillness, I realized something…

I had no desire to give up. I sat on the floor in a pool of my own sweat, dizzy, incapacitated with fear, but I was
not
pathetic. I was
not
a loser. I was
not
hopeless. I had a life of dreams I was actively fulfilling. I had injustices I was actively righting. A brother whose memory I was actively maintaining. Even more importantly, I’d been gifted by this cold city a man who seemed to need to care for me as much as I needed to care for him. And, even on my knees before the King, I had the dignity of being in the right.

I no longer desired death.

So, Mr. Perfect,
fuck you!

“What’s with that racket?” I heard Mrs. Abraham croaking distantly to her dog.

“Help…” I heard myself mutter to myself, squeezing sound out of my Death Valley dry throat. “Help…”

I heard Mrs. Abraham’s door open.

I started crawling my way up the door back onto my feet.

Suddenly Mr. Perfect kicked the gun. Like a hockey puck, it slid swiftly over the wood floor toward me. My fingers twitched to pick it up. My muscle memory immediately itched to palm it, wrap my finger around the trigger, aim with cool precision…but I did not touch it.

I realized as the gun settled against the edge of the carpet in the hallway that my greatest act of justice would be to
not
kill him. To let him receive the humiliating justice of a trial. To be excommunicated from whatever homophobic circles he’d affiliated himself with. To see his children grow to adulthood over the years through thick silver-grey bars. I would not play by the King’s rulebook.

“Pick it up,” he growled.

I stared right into his pupils. All at once I knew how Marzoli did it—how he navigated the channels of another’s thoughts. The secret, of course, was absolute selflessness. No agenda. No prejudice. No expectation. No control. Just a willingness to accept and understand. Yes, Mr. Perfect was a killer, and he still could kill me. But for this split instant, he was an emotional wreck, desperately trying to keep it contained in the shell of an Armani pinstriped suit. Imprisoned like the rest of us.

I knew the second it dawned on him that I would not kill him. I knew he knew why I would not kill him. I knew he’d concluded he had no recourse but to force my hand. I was in no way surprised when Mr. Perfect suddenly rushed toward me. His knees braced my biceps to the door as his hands wrapped around my throat, and squeezed. Not hard enough to kill me, just hard enough to scare me.

But was I scared?

No, I was not.

No, for I now had the clear recollection of the much more horrific attacks of my past: Graves, the Blond Boy, my Dad. No, I would not be frightened by this. Here this awesomely beautiful and handsome face was inches away from my face, the Old Spice deodorant still wet on his muscular armpits and seeping its way up his collar into my nostrils, his thick strong fingers wrapped around my throat, and I felt nothing but compassion.

He squeezed tighter, growling. “Pick it up.”

I put my lips together, inched closer to his face, and pressed them against his rugged, sharp, clean-shaven jaw.

He stopped.

The kiss confused him.

I could see right into his brain. He could not get me to kill him. I watched his resolution fall like Sally’s had once Paul whispered “Stop.” I watched his mortification battle with yearning as Graves had when I first caught him staring at our bodies through the trailer window. I watched his struggle evolve into alarm just as Mom’s had when Paul pleaded for her to snap out of it in the shower. Then my heart froze as I watched him react with a surprising grin just as Grandfather had when he entered his trailer to find the white walls speckled with blood.

Huh? What had he suddenly become satisfied with?

I heard the wobbling behind me before seeing it.

Mrs. Abraham neared us in the hallway. If Mr. Layworth could not intimidate me with the threat of my own death, he would threaten the death of the little old lady with the barking pooch.

He reached for the gun. I kicked it farther down the hall. He leaped after it. I bounded on top of him, landing with the full weight of my body straddling his, slamming his torso into the floor. The wind knocked out of him momentarily, he recovered and twisted to throw me off. I wrapped my legs around his and wove my arms under his armpits to prevent him from throwing me. He inched like a soldier desperately crawling through the mud on the battlefield toward the gun. I felt his hard buttocks thrust into my groin and I dug into him to force him to drag on the carpet.

Goddamn it! I could not stop him!

“Run!” I yelled at Mrs. Abraham, just as I commanded Paul to run. “Run!”

Suddenly Layworth bucked with the strength of an ox, his body jackknifing. I flew off him, hit the wall, and fell to the floor.

Bang!

I knew the sound instantly—sharp, crisp, and loud.

I knew the sound of the thumping of a fallen body on the carpet like the sound of all the deer we’d shot collapsing to the forest floor. I heard the exhalation of air from his lungs as they collapsed inward.

Layworth lay dead in front of me.

Minnie had finally shut the fuck up.

Mrs. Abraham stood above him, holding the gun.

“Look, dear,” she pointed to me. “You’re out in the hall.”

Holy fuck!

I was fully outside my apartment, lying down on the carpet in the hallway!

“Congratulations, dear.” She held out a plate wrapped in tin foil. “Have some strawberry rhubarb pie to celebrate. Yes, fruit from jars, but I think it’s rather a success.”

I looked with amazement at this woman. She seemed absolutely unfazed by having taken the life of another man. I realized I’d no earthly idea what kind of past she shared with her sister. To shoot someone with one hand and not even drop the plate of pie in the other required a background consisting of far more than knitting and cooking. I knew nothing about this wondrous woman—my beautiful neighbor.

I smiled and took the plate, feeling surreally disconnected from reality yet one hundred percent clear-headed at the same time.

I hugged her, squeezing Minnie between us gently.

She patted my back and said, “Now, now, dear. It’s just pie.”

My cell rang in my apartment.

“Go,” she ordered me. “And do let me know how it tastes.”

I entered my apartment and retrieved my phone.

“What in shit happened? You okay?”

It was Marzoli.

Thank you!

I turned to look across the courtyard. He was standing above the body of Mrs. Perfect facing me. Thank fuck he’d recovered. To face the future without the hope of seeing him again…

God, I loved him.

I’d no idea when he recovered, but he’d obviously seen enough of the attack to have the sound of dread in his voice.

Suddenly he turned.

Someone was knocking at the Layworth’s door. I watched Marzoli walk out of the bedroom into the dividing hall and open the front door.

The mattress movers had arrived.

Too late, boys. Too fucking late.

Chapter Twenty-Five

The feel of Marzoli’s lips on mine was every successful completion of every new song I’d ever put a double bar on, funneled into one moment. Bloody leg, bruised throats, stained clothes…nothing could diminish it.

Marzoli had been ambulanced right from the Layworths’ apartment to the hospital, where he received a quick couple stitches to his leg in an in-an-out procedure, a set of crutches, and a bottle of antibiotics. He’d requested to return to my apartment rather than his. When he finally stepped through that door, right in front of the police officers in my apartment, even right in front of some of his peers…wham. His lips locked on mine and stayed.

Our kiss was a rock in the whirlwind of confusion as the police scrambled to understand how one courtyard could be dotted with four dead bodies all at once: Mr. Layworth, Mrs. Layworth, Ruben, and the Little Old Man. Let them ask their questions. Let them pry into the filthiest corner of all of our lives in their investigation. I had Marzoli, and he had me…completely.

The snow continued to fall even harder as the masses of police wrapped up late that evening, having yellow-taped all they could possibly tape. The stretchers were the last to arrive, and the bodies were the last to be hauled away. That’s when Marzoli and I witnessed a curious, almost incidental moment.

The Little Old Man’s body was removed, and the plump, short, uptight landlord followed the last tired, supremely uninterested officer out the door, anxiously, verbosely, and uselessly chattering about owed rent and utilities. For a brief moment, the Little Old Man’s apartment was completely empty and still.

Then there was movement at the door.

The Beached Whale entered. Her expression was sad but curious. Her emotions seemed raw, as were everyone’s at that point. But as she walked through the Little Old Man’s apartment, her expression was particularly pained. Having lived in the same apartment building all these years, I realized they would have grown quite accustomed to each other’s presence. I’d no idea how many years she’d lived in that building. Perhaps they had even at one point known each other more intimately.

She paused in front of the gilded painting, whose subject Marzoli and I had still not caught a glimpse of. As she stared at it, her expression went from sadness to…I would not call it happiness. Understanding.