The guy looked like a pizza deliveryman. The guy looked like Gary, twenty years older. Jane saw that face and the world went blank for a second and she tried to walk right through a cinder-block wall. But it wasn't Gary, no matter how much she hoped he'd come back and give her a chance to explain two bullets. The guy just looked like him.
She caught herself, leaning against the dorm corridor wall and fiddling with her shoe as if that had been the problem. Don't catch his attention. You're just another coed, not even a pretty one. Hair curlers under a wet bandanna, baggy sweats, backpack full of books, no makeup, no hair dye. If Gary described you to his family, damn sure you don't fit the image he gave them. Be invisible, just like Gary.
And nobody paid any attention to the guy, just like with Gary. Sometimes she swore she was the only person who could see that boy. Like the invisible rabbit in that movie. And this guy had just waltzed right into the dorm lounge, human-engineering his way past ten grand's worth of electronic locks and security cameras with a pizza box. That was Gary all over.
Gary. She squeezed her eyes shut against the pain, as if she'd just caught her finger in the door.
She'd been sitting in a dim corner, waiting, chewing her fingernails up to her elbows. He hadn't come back to the dorm. Dashed up to his room, checked, back down to the study lounge, back up to his room, back down to the other lounge, the noisy one, with a card game going. And this guy had waltzed in with a pizza box and dumped it on a table and left it there.
No way he was a pizza man, letting go of that box without cash in hand. And he looked like Gary, twenty years older. She didn't know a lot about Morgans, but she knew damn well that they didn't need to earn a living by delivering pizzas on the midnight shift.
Not Gary's father, not the picture in the obituaries, but he damn sure was family. Make that capitalized Family, like in the Mafia. The way they'd cleaned out her squat, that was The Mob operating there. Scared the shit out of her. She was still shaking, just thinking about it.
His glance swept over the room, over her without pausing, and he shook his head. He was looking for somebody. Looking for Gary, had to be.
He left. Headed down the corridor, toward the east stairwell. Nobody noticed him going, either. She went the other way, up the other stair, not going to wait half an hour for the elevator to show up. If that was a Morgan, had to be a Morgan, she didn't want to try following him.
She'd tried following Gary once, waited outside a class they didn't share, wanted to see where he went when he vanished downtown. He'd noticed her within ten steps, had waited for her to catch up, they'd turned and gone to get hamburgers at the Union, no questions, not even a lifted eyebrow. She'd thought she was good at following people. Following marks and Johns without letting them notice. Part of the shakedown — know your enemy.
She'd learned not to try to follow a Morgan. Besides, she knew where this guy was going. She ran up the stairs.
Up on the fourth floor, Gary's room was on a dogleg dead-end, he paid extra for one of the rare singles. She'd thought that was weird, a waste of money, but it beat chasing out his roommate every time they wanted to fuck. Now she thought that it maybe tied into the Mafia bit, Morgan family secrets, worth paying for the privacy.
She slouched along down the corridor, wet sneakers squeaking, eyes down, shooting a glance into that dead-end without turning her head. Yeah, the guy was there. He had a key, looked like, not a set of picklocks. And he gave off a sense of belonging there, not nervous, no way he'd attract attention.
She kept on going. He glanced up, nodded to himself more than to her, then slid the key into the lock and opened it. Gary hadn't mentioned giving a key to anyone else. Her teeth were chattering. If that guy had noticed her downstairs . . .
Down the other stairwell, back into the lounge. Stay in public, watch the card game, stay close to people. People were witnesses. Even the Mafia wouldn't wipe out a dorm lounge full of students just to nail her ass. Her pictures in that DHS file, seven years old, she didn't look a bit like that kid any more. Her hands were shaking. She hadn't had anything to eat all day.
That guy wouldn't come back for the pizza. She sat in a chair close to it, a corner chair facing both doors, nobody was going to sneak up on her with a knife. Close enough to the pizza that someone glancing in would think it was hers. Claiming territory without actually touching it.
She pulled a book out of her pack and pretended to read and chewed on her nails some more. If that guy stayed upstairs, she'd have to find another place to squat. Probably should anyway, if Gary was handing out keys to every second cousin and uncle. But she had to wait. She had to know.
She heard the stairwell door. She didn't hear footsteps — she never heard Gary walking unless he wanted her to. He made noise on purpose, so he wouldn't startle her. Scare her. He understood.
The guy walked past the lounge door, didn't look in. Nobody noticed him. She turned in her chair, looking out the other door, the one that gave a view of the entry. He went out. The door clicked behind him. Locked. Safe.
Not safe. He got in once. He can get in again, anytime he wants. Morgans are like that. Gary showed me. Showed me stuff I bet he shouldn't have. Trusted me to the point I could almost trust him.
Almost.
I am the cat who walks by myself, and all places are the same to me. Jane repeated her mantra, half-remembering a story told in the long-ago when she'd lived as a normal child in a normal home, before her mother declared war on her father. I should vanish back into the Wet Wild Woods, waving my wild tail and walking by my wild lone.
But she couldn't leave. She'd found a place by the fire, and warm milk, and the Wet Wild Woods were filled with sharp teeth and Maine winter coming on. And she'd found Gary. Gary. She swallowed a moan.
Something clicked in her head, the faces, some weird ways that Gary talked. It made sense. So that was Gary's father. Or his dad. Lover Boy seems to use the two words for two different people. I wonder which one is paranoid. Or is that a family trait, describing both of them? All of them, him too?
She reached across to the pizza box and claimed it. She didn't care who had bought it. She hadn't eaten all day. Cost of living in the shadows, but it was better than not living. She'd been down that road before.
But if she was going to eat someone else's pizza, maybe she should haul the evidence back to her den. She hoisted her backpack to one shoulder, grabbed the still-warm box in both hands, and left the lounge.
I'm pretty sure Daddy didn't recognize me. He'd have been looking for green hair and Hot Topic, not 2 AM all-nighter student grunge. He did look a lot like Gary, though, more than that obit photo of Daniel Morgan.
She clicked the stairwell door and nudged it open with one foot without stepping through, checking the corners and shadows and listening. She was paranoid, whatever diagnosis you pinned on Gary's father. Or his whole family, him included. She'd learned paranoia the hard way.
Daddy looked a lot better than the average John, back when Tina and I were running the badger game. Underage worked real good for that, statutory rape charges carried more clout than blackmail. And I didn't actually have to do it with most of those marks. Tina usually showed up first. No way for the John to know her camera didn't work. Trashcan special.
Paid better than straight hooking, too.
They'd caught a judge once, real good shakedown for a blank roll of film. Slime must have been looking ahead to the State House or federal bench. And that Baptist preacher, spouting hellfire and damnation with his pants tangled around his ankles . . .
She unlocked Gary's door with the key he'd given her, no way to trace it because he'd filed it out of the blank himself. She waited outside the doorway for a minute before reaching around the frame and switching on the light. Someone Lover Boy called "paranoid" might have left a trap behind, might have let another person in. Just because she'd seen one man go in, one man go out, didn't mean a second man hadn't just wandered by from down the hall.
She'd outlived Cindy, outlived Tina, outlived a bunch of others. Not paranoid, just not taking chances she could avoid. She squatted in the hallway and looked under the bed, checked through the hinge side crack for anyone lurking behind the door. Then she sighed her breath out, relaxed, and stepped inside.
A note hung on the computer monitor. Call Ben? Jane frowned. There'd been a Benjamin Morgan in that obit, Daniel Morgan's older brother. "Predeceased," the obit said. Date of death given, over twenty years ago. Didn't make sense for Gary's "father." Except, Lover Boy said his paranoid father wasn't really dead.
His voice came back to her. "We've been hiding people for centuries. Morgans don't end up in jail."
This family was getting interesting. Complicated, but interesting.
She locked the door behind her, now that she could trust the room. Now that the door had become a defense rather than the jaws of a trap. Remembering that other key, she set the jam bar that Gary had rigged up, a four-foot length of angle steel that braced between the door knob and the closet. Daddy would have to break the door off its hinges to open it with that in place. Paranoids, all of us together.
She slid the pizza box onto a bare section of desk, grabbed another slice, and chewed. Too bad she hadn't been able to snag a liter of Pepsi to go with it.
Gary.
She squeezed her eyes shut against the sudden burn of tears. Maybe he'd come back here. Maybe he wouldn't. Maybe he'd kill her even if he did come back. She thumped her backpack down on the bed, blind, not caring about the laptop inside. She could steal another.
One thing she knew he wouldn't do, was call the cops. Those files told her that.
I can't believe the gun went off. Fucking .25 automatic, I was switching the safety on and the bastard fired. Fired twice. Cheap-shit Spanish junk went off and my finger was nowhere near the trigger.
She didn't know if she hit him. Odds were against it. Most of her guns were back alley specials and you'd be lucky to hit a barn from inside the hayloft with one of them. She kept them mostly for show, she'd never had a chance to practice, had fired any gun maybe ten times max in her life. She hoped she hadn't even come close. He ran away. He couldn't have run with a bullet in his back.
Yeah, sure. That baby .25, you'd have a hard time stopping a mouse with a single shot. Doesn't mean it wouldn't crawl off and die in its nest.
She'd bought the gun because it was so small. Small enough to tuck into her bra, tuck into the front of her panties. If she wasn't wearing either, the waistband behind her back would do, or taped to her armpit under a loose sweater, even the crotch of her pants. The ways she'd carried it, it looked a pure mess. She'd never have bet good money it would fire.
It would. It did. Fucking piece of junk.
Forty feet away, not aiming, she couldn't have hit him. She found herself gnawing at a thumbnail instead of pizza.
Gary. The room felt cold and lonely without him, nothing to do with the hyperactive heating system in the dorm. She'd been alone almost all her life, long before her parents split. Alone, even with Tina guarding her back, even with Cindy sharing a bed at the Sweeneys.
She'd never felt lonely before.
She'd told him things she'd never told anyone before. She'd told him things, showed him things she damn well shouldn't have, their first day talking and on, almost as if she'd been talking to herself. And he understood what she said, saw things like those scars that no one else had seen. And he'd never tell.
Fucking gun. Bottom of the river now, serves it right. I can't believe the gun went off.
She abandoned the pizza to chill on the desk and petrify into tomato-pepperoni shoe-leather. She couldn't eat. She stared out into the darkness and the rain, hoping he'd see her against the light, come up here to beat the living shit out of her for being such a fool. Hoping he was alive.
But you shot at him. No way he'd know you aren't waiting up here to kill him. No way he'd know you threw the gun away.
She stripped off her sweatshirt, her pants, her underwear. Pulled off the bandanna and curlers, her hair already dried from the rain. If he came in and saw her naked, he'd know she didn't have a gun. Maybe he'd decide to screw her before he killed her, give her at least a moment to say she was sorry.
That was another thing she'd done, another thing she'd shown him, damn few Johns had ever seen her stripped. She'd always kept some clothing on, just pulled her pants down and lifted her sweater or shirt. Always kept someplace to hide the gun or blade.
She'd felt safe with him, safe enough to be naked. She'd let him do things she'd never done with a John, gave up control. Trusted him. And he'd made her feel things she'd never felt before.
Damn few people she'd ever trusted in her life, once home blew up around her. Dana had been the first, back at the shelter. First and last, until now. Look where it got her.
Pure luck you stayed clean, used rubbers at the right times, never shot up with shared needles. Pure luck — she'd never cared whether she gave a John AIDS or chicken pox or pneumonic plague. The bastards couldn't die fast enough. But Dana had grabbed her by the ear and hauled her to a clinic, and the tests all came back clean.
I am the cat who walks by myself, and all places are the same to me.
She wasn't thinking straight. The light was more likely to scare him away. She switched it off. She shifted her backpack to the floor and lay down on the bed, wool blanket scratchy on her bare skin, buried her face in the pillow that smelled of him, used the pillowcase to mop tears from her eyes.
She couldn't remember the last time she'd cried.