Only Chan and the Pitch knew what she’d stolen. Yesterday, as she slipped out, finding her father’s old Chevy parked beside a jungle of weeds, she became aware of the winter moon. She was leaving. Chan lay wrecked on the waterbed. Before their excursion he’d been jumpy, wired to the gills and grinning to himself. He’d taken something. Pills. She didn’t know which ones. She could see the hard-on inside his jeans. He kept saying he wanted to go and see. “Come on, baby. Let’s peek in on those funky bitches. See what the Pitch did to them.”
Then he took her there.
To the witches’ house.
And she saw the dead women.
It was a dreary afternoon, following a dreary morning. He’d been in the house once already, hours earlier, in the middle of the night, to conduct the theft. They say criminals return to the scenes of their crimes.
Chan brought his girlfriend with him.
They drove in circles. The Loop was due east; the Chicago skyline stacked in the distance. West Garfield Park—Vera saw the opaque zeppelin dome of the hundred-year-old conservatory rising above the rooftops. She’d never been there. Never seen the tropical hothouse blooms and palms. The park itself was barren,
emptied of life. She wouldn’t have stopped her car in this part of the city. Faces not like hers; a sense of trespass invaded her blood.
Vera watched the sun cannonball into the stripped trees.
Instant night.
They parked blocks away. And waited. Chan’s plan was to walk shyly up on it. Scout it. Run if necessary.
She wondered if he’d wait for her to catch up.
Finally he said, “Let’s do it.”
They left the car.
Two- and three-story residences hemmed the boulevard. Shadow dwellings. Vera paid close attention to her surroundings. Wooden- plank back porches slapped onto cliffs of smudged brick. Through the alley, around the corner, Chan tugged her. Stone facades unblinking like witnesses. Once they were grand. Now these subdivided homes became the shelter of last resort. This was living on the knifepoint. Those who tread here did not go lightly.
Or they did not go for long.
Fences—all varieties. Plywood closures snug at windows and doors; a prevalence of padlocks. Suspicion like a pall hung overhead. Whatever you were doing—this place, this hour, out of doors—was the devil’s business or trying to escape it. The local graffiti artists were gifted. Shocks of shaped color injected into the bleakness.
Light traffic.
Telephone junction boxes expelled cable to nowhere.
A pair of scissors lay dropped on the sidewalk like a warning. Glass, sampling the spectrum, decorated the gutters.
Here it was.
Rough-hewn and crooked as a tombstone.
The house. All the lights were out.
Chan slipped into a gangway between residences. He motioned for her to follow and keep her head down. Vera saw a shadow dart behind Chan.
“Was that a rat?”
“I didn’t see anything. Hold my light for a minute.”
They went in through a basement window. Chan mentored Vera in lawbreaking. Keep your hands in your pockets. Don’t touch anything. Walk where I walk. Ears open. Listen to the house. There may be others inside.
There was no one.
No one alive,
“Holy fuck,” Chan said.
Eight women. Vera knew when Chan had last been inside the house, they were asleep. The rooms were redolent of Nag Champa, patchouli, and a pot of curried rice cooked and eaten for dinner. He said he’d stumbled upon marijuana plants in a closet growing under egg yolk orangey lights. Another door revealed a workbench, a mounted mini-vise, and small drawers of beads, chains, and spooled wire. The witches made jewelry they sold online. He peeked into the bedrooms. They shared their beds, lying together in pairs, lovers asleep under warm, homemade quilts. He had listened for their slow regular breaths.
Now they were naked on the floor.
Six white women. The other two might’ve been Latinas; their skin was darker. None of the women looked dark under the flashlight beam. Their blood shined red black. It wasn’t theirs anymore. It had left them and gone wandering.
Gone wild.
Chan and Vera surveyed the carnage.
The smell... she couldn’t stop gagging.
“Let’s get out of here,” she said.
“Crazy for them to live in this neighborhood,” he said, tying a bandana around his nose and mouth. “They stood out. The Pitch knew they bought this house. They knew every move these hippie skanks made. Followed them cross-country from Corvallis. That’s in Oregon.”
“I know where Corvallis is,” Vera said.
It was hard to believe what she was seeing was real.
Chan couldn’t stop talking. “These motherfuckers got a thing for the eyes. It’s their symbology or whatever. They go for the
peepers. Get a load of what they did to this senorita before they tore her throat out..
Vera threw up on a wall.
Hot bitter tang coated her lips. She stumbled. She rested her forehead against a door frame to keep from falling over. The dizziness resolved into an internal sloshing. The bottom of her alligator boot stuck to the floor. She peeled it up and wiped it on a bathroom rug without looking down. She wanted water. Her hip bumped a sink. She turtled her hand into her sleeve and twisted the cold tap. But she couldn’t bring herself to drink. She turned it off.
“What the fuck? I told you not to touch anything.”
“I want to leave.”
“Shit, babe, I know. This is heavy-duty. What am I doing bringing you here?”
“I don’t know.”
His look cut to the outer room. “I had to see it. Curiosity killed the asshole. I had to know what they did. I knew it would be fucked up. But talk about overkill. . .”
He lifted his bandana and kissed the top of her head.
“Okay, you saw it. Now can we please—?”
“Shhh . . . shhh. You hear something?”
Chan clicked the flashlight off.
Wind blowing—the moan made her neck hairs dance.
Scratching.
He gripped her in the darkness. His hand snaked under her jacket. He was sweating. Breathing through his mouth. Electrical current flowed through his wet fingertips. He was kneading her breast. She felt a tug on the zipper of her jeans. The noises coming from him were feral.
“You sick fuck, get off me.” She pushed him into the dark.
He laughed.
If something happens , he’ll leave me here. With the other girls.
“Follow me,” he whispered.
She did.
They made it back to the car. Before Vera could shut her door, Chan was leaving rubber on the pavement. Plunging off his high, paranoia kicked in. He rattled on and on. Pausing just long enough to draw another smoke-laced breath. He kept switching lanes, tailgating every bumper ahead of them. His look said he was punched out, a black-eyed terror. Full-body exhaustion sandbagged him. Then came the silence; his mouth tight as a suture. He couldn’t hold eye contact.
“What’re we going to do?” she asked.
“That’s murder 666-style back there, babe. We’ve ventured deep into the black. I messed up big time. I’m dealing with psycho murdering devil worshippers, okay? Fuck me! After I get paid, I got to disappear for a while.”
“You’re disappearing?”
“You and me, I mean.”
Vera had to wonder. Chan the bad boy. Always playing angles and seeming to win more than lose. One step up on the competition. She’d first met him more than three years ago, in a Bridgeport bar with a shamrock on the door. She was downing cinnamon shots with a couple of roommates who’d just bought cruise tickets to Puerto Vallarta. The three girlfriends had talked for weeks about going down Mexico way.
Toes in the sand. Swim-up bars. A fruity drink with an umbrella and a name you couldn’t remember. Maybe a hook-up to match.
When the time came, Vera didn’t have the cash.
She’d started a new job. Office admin for a company that sold plastic coffee lids and stirrers. No vacation days accrued on her paycheck until Christmas. That, plus she was switching apartments. Trading her spot in their sixth-floor triple for a cheaper, garden level studio closer to the El train.
She was deeply bummed and trying not to show it.
A supercell ripped across the South Side that night. Thunder
rolled. The lights flickered, drawing a chorus of oohs and ahhs. In walked Chan. Wearing his bike leathers and soaked to the bone. He was drowned-rat cute. Mirrored aviators pushed up into his slicked hair. He had a quick toothy smile and, when he shucked off his jacket, Vera could see through his T-shirt: a hard stomach ribbed like a desert road. He walked up, pulled out a wad of cash, and ordered a whiskey shooter. His eyes were large, acid green. He looked right at Vera.
“Where you been hiding?”
Lightning struck a transformer down the block.
The bar went dark.
It was a thrilling game. Over the next forty months she learned about how he made his bankroll. Home invasions. He was good. He had the tools, the skills, the guts. He had future plans. He wouldn’t call himself small-time, not with the cash he pulled down. He stole from rich assholes. They had insurance, right? He shunned violence. Said it was impractical. Classless.
Bars and clubs. Vera guessed they spent more hours in them than the people who worked there. She didn’t work anymore. Chan forbid it. He kept her in finery, he said. She made new friends. Chan’s friends. Or she sat alone while Chan did business. He set his goals high. He mixed with a heavier and heavier crowd. Times were good. She wouldn’t deny the excitement she felt in the beginning—and later, too. When he scored, it was Christmas on steroids. She didn’t think about danger as anything real. It gave off energy. You’d catch a buzz. The aphrodisiac effect never failed. Chan always wanted her, in every permutation conceivable. She wanted him, too. It was animal. They tore into each other. They made each other raw. This was the most fun she’d ever had with a man. Her eyes were open wide to the fact it wasn’t love and it wasn’t going to turn into love. Three years together, knowing one another’s secrets and fears, maybe that was all you could hope for.
Sharing imperfect lives.
One night, when he told her about how two of Chicago’s finest
walked inches from his nose, shining their Maglites as he recoiled inside an air vent, she tasted the dust and metal. Her stomach twisted for him.
And when Chan came home with a pit-bull bite—blood saturating the leg of his jeans—his belt in his mouth to keep from screaming . . .
She knew she needed to get away.
But she didn’t.
Chan hit a dry spell and money got tight. Police stopped by their apartment and questioned him about a Gold Coast condo job he had nothing to do with. His name was floating around. There always seemed to be a patrol on their street or behind them when they were driving. Vera had trouble talking to acquaintances without lying. Everything felt like a setup.
It was like the lights in the bar had finally snapped on.
She didn’t like what she saw.
Chan told her about this special assignment. A freaky group needed him to steal something for them. They couldn’t do it themselves. It wasn’t the danger involved that bugged them, it was freak rules. They were a kind of sect and another sect took their stuff. They wanted it back. He didn’t ask too many questions. Because it looked like easy money. A decent chunk of coin to bounce them out of this rut. Vera thought it sounded too weird. She didn’t like the name the group called themselves, either.
The Pitch.
Back inside their apartment, their security felt weak. Chan cracked the seal on a bottle of Old No. 7. Drank. The bottleneck clinked against his skull rings. She watched his whiskered throat move in jerks. The stolen item sat on the kitchen table. He came up for air. His face sweated rivets.
“Put that thing in the closet. I can’t look at it,” he said. He rubbed the bottle against his flushed cheeks.
He went into the bedroom. Taking the bottle with him but not
taking Vera. He shut the door. Her heart tripped when she heard the lock turn.
“Tired,” he said.
Vera jiggled the knob. “Let me in, Chan.”
“I can’t do that.”
“What do you mean?”
She’d never seen Chan scared. She felt like a lost kid. If she had a mom, then she would’ve called her to cry. Chan talked to her through the door. It sounded like he’d fallen down a mine shaft. He needed to rest up before he turned the item over to the Pitch.
“Tonight, you hear me? Midnight I’m supposed to see them. I’ve about had it with these fucking Satanists!” He swore at himself. He laughed without joy. Hollow thumps as he banged his head into the wall.
Then he realized she must still be listening.
“I’m gonna be okay, babe. We’re okay. The creature features want to meet me at midnight. So be it. I have to be prepared. Sleep a little bit first. Clear my mind. Now you go away. Let me do this thing like a man.”
He wasn’t sleeping. She smelled his Marlboros under the door.
The item.
It was a box. That was what Vera decided. Though it looked a whole lot stranger. The shape was not cubic. Instead, it was two pyramids with their bottoms melded together. She couldn’t locate any seam.
If it opened, she didn’t know how to open it. But it must.
Why would anyone want a box that didn’t open?
She sat beside the box with her feet on the kitchen table. With the pointy toe of her boot, not really thinking about what she was doing but just doing it, she gave the box a little push. Eyeing it dreamily as it slid.
She sat up.
This didn’t make sense.
She rubbed her fingertip on a mark she found on the table.
A scorch mark. She pushed the oddly shaped box out of the way.
There underneath—three dark brown burns on the butcher’s block ... an outline in the shape of a triangle.
The wood was grilled.
What the hell?
Chan owned an old Zippo lighter. A flip-top. It had an oily metal touch. He liked to play with it. Flip and shut it again. When he got bored. Flip. Shut. Open a flame and hold it to things. See how they reacted. That must’ve been it. Vera nodded as she envisioned him doing it—the hot lighter pinched between his fingers, the flame licking at the box.
Though Vera hadn’t actually seen him do it.
He told her the Pitch treasured this item. To them it was sacred. Why risk spoiling it because you were bored?
She felt a sudden terrible conviction that they should not, could not, give this thing, this box, whatever it was—-they couldn’t simply hand it to those killers.
She knocked.
“Chan, open this door right now. Let me in, or I’m walking. I’m walking and taking that thing with me. Maybe I’ll throw it in Lake Michigan. That’s exactly what I’ll do. You can freeze your balls off diving for it.”
No way was he sleeping. He’d heard every word.
This was a test. Chan’s game of chicken. Well, he’d always underestimated her. She had more guts in her pinky than he did in his whole damned body. Then something occurred to her. She knew the bait that might lure him out of his hiding place.
“I’ll take the Pitch’s precious box and give it to my Aunt Helene up in Manitoba. She’s a nun. She’ll know how to destroy it.”
Chan wasn’t answering. She didn’t smell any smoke by the door.
As she stood there, sniffing, the door jerked open. Chan’s shirtless torso canted into the light. Greasy jeans snagged off his pelvis. The bedroom lurked behind him. His tongue traced sandpapery lips.
“You wouldn’t,” he said.
“Try me.”
Arms loose, he hooked his elbows over her shoulders. He pulled
her close and kissed her. His devilish mouth tasted sour from the whisky and too many cigarettes. She hated what he stirred inside her. How easy she made it for him. An old wind-up doll ready for play whenever he cranked her key. He bent his knees like a boxer and cornered her until her backside slid up the doorpost. Her hips unstuck. She swiveled like he’d squirted her joints with WD-40.
He pushed.
She pushed back.
He growled his satisfaction.
“Don’t cross me ever,” he said, backing up to take her measure.
“I might.”
“And you might get more than you expected.”
“Never from you.”
He hit her.
The slap landed a heartbeat quicker than her surprise. The sting crawled on her skin like a thing alive. She tried to rub it away.
He slammed the door.
She was caught outside, staring groggily at unpainted pine- wood.
He’d actually hit her.
Bastard.
Shame on me, she thought.
She went to the hall closet and collected everything of hers that wasn’t locked in the room with Chan. She lifted the box from the table. It was heavy, like the dumbbells Chan scattered around the perimeter of their king-size waterbed. The box’s surface was metallic. She was sure it glinted in certain light, though at this moment, with no sun sketching her situation, she thought it resembled stone. She wrapped the box in her leather jacket. She didn’t want it to touch her skin. Through her jacket she wondered how it would feel. It felt like nothing but pure weight.
She made her way out.
No cries of remorse from behind the bedroom door.
Downstairs.
Into the night, under the moon.
She placed the box inside her trunk. Where was she really going?
She didn’t know.
Aunt Helene would be an old woman by now. Her mother’s eldei sister, a Grey Nun of Montreal, lived and worked with the poor in Winnipeg. They’d taken the train up to Manitoba one summer, Vera and her mom, to visit Helene at the convent. The trip was a blur. Vera remembered birch trees. The train rocketing through vertical trunks—the repetition hypnotized and exhilarated her. A memory so keen she once shared it with Chan. She told him about the lakes surrounded by high lichen-carpeted cliffs. A wolf stepped out onto a ledge, nose to the wind. She alone saw it. The woods seemed cold even in July. Places formed by ice, its mark imprinted on their souls.
Aunt Helene might be dead for all Vera knew. They had written to each other weekly for years after her mother died of cancer. Aunt Helene’s words and prayers had helped her in ways Daddy couldn’t. There was comfort in the idea of her—a petite woman, dressed plainly, kneeling at her bedside and praying—out there talking to God and the angels on little Vera’s behalf, if she believed her. And she had no reason not to. Helene did nothing but show her kindness. One Christmas, Aunt Helene mailed her a silver cross on a chain, informing her that the relic had been dipped into a font of holy water at St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome.
It was blessed.
Vera touched the cross around her neck.
She had warm fuzzy recollections. But in high school, she stopped replying to Helene’s letters. Her aunt had become as real as Santa Claus. Vera was too old for Santa. She had more important things to do, like live her life.
Now she didn’t have anywhere else to run.
North was as good a direction as any.
Away from here. From Chan. From the Pitch.
She didn’t even know exactly why the box—the artifact as
Chan said they called it—why the artifact was so important to them. Meriting elaborate plans, money, and sacrifices .. .
A cause for extreme violence.
The Pitch feared it.
She knew as much. That was why they hired Chan to steal it for them. They told him they couldn’t enter the greystone as long as the women were in possession of the artifact. It wasn’t permitted. That’s why they needed an outsider to steal it for them.
They may not obey society’s rules, but they had a rulebook of their own.
They killed to possess the artifact.
They killed after they had it. Going for the women when Chan called to say he had the box. He’d boosted it. He didn’t know the Pitch’s ultimate designs.
The women at the house—those hippie witches—were their victims. The ones she knew about. Chan said the Pitch told him this struggle had been going on for ages. They were in a war. The Pitch needed allies. There were benefits. They had resources, influence. They would pay cash.
So the box, stone, whatever it was—it had to be worth money.
Vera’s life philosophy didn’t contain a lot of absolutes. A few. Example: You don’t murder people in cold blood.
And you don’t slap your girlfriend.
She had to keep the box away from the Pitch.
Chan would give it to them. He owed them.
Now she took it and left.
Would they hurt him?
They had killed and were ready to kill again. She felt it in her blood. They were chasing her. She felt that, too. Their pursuit made it hard to breathe.
All these hours on the road, she’d pushed a question from her mind.
Chan heard her leave the apartment. The cheap apartment was too small not to hear. He was probably watching her from the bedroom window as she climbed into the Camaro and drove away.
He didn’t stop her.
Why not?
Maybe he didn’t stop her because she was going to be his excuse, his private escape tunnel; he could tell the Pitch she ran off with their artifact. He’d get out of the midnight meeting. Wash his dirty hands of the whole affair.
Chan would bail out.
He’d put them on her trail instead.
The man tugged at the leash and spoke to the dog. Vera saw the frigid air make clouds of his words. Turning his body, but not his stare, he urged the dog to return. They went away. Disappearing behind the brick wall from where they had come. Around the corner, out of sight.
She kept a lookout. Her heart revved. He’s just a guy. An old guy from the way he’s shuffling. Out for his morning stroll. He’s harmless. He’s an old curious guy, that’s all. He sees an attractive girl. She surprised him. What was she worrying about? She needed to chill. As soon as Adam got back with the key, she’d try for some sleep. Remember sleep? Sleep was good. Sleep worked wonders. Maybe later Adam would stop by. A few beers and, who knows, an early gift? Wrap him with a bow? Hang a star on his tree. Stop giggling. That’s nervous energy. He’s not going to hurt you. Neither is the old guy. He has a cute dog. Could a really bad guy have a cute dog? I mean she had every right to be terrified but not of these two. . ..
A dark oval peered at her from the bricks.
The hooded man studied her.
Taking her in and taking her apart. Like I’m being swallowed , she thought. She gulped. Chewed up. Devoured. She almost blacked out.
The old man. Something about him was ... wrong.
Adam clicked her room key against the window.
She jumped.
The blackout feeling fled. Adam pulled open her door, asking if she was okay. Being gentle because he saw she wasn’t fooling around. He was a good guy. She knew it. Looking back, her eyes sifted through the arabesques of snow.
No old man.