24. Brian

TWENTY-FOUR

brian

I knock on the front door. A moment later it swings open. Eliza, obviously thinking Aidan missed his bus, seems ready to start shouting, but then she notices me.

“Oh,” she says. “Hello.” She says it with a bit of a question mark at the end.

I allow my gaze to drag slowly over her. She’s far more attractive up close than brief glimpses during my surveillance allowed me to catalog. She’d fetch a good price at the house. But I shake that thought out of my head.

I would have to keep Eliza’s identity a secret, and the one normal functional relationship quality I have with Mina is honesty. And if I did tell her, she’d never forgive me for ripping a non-kinky woman out of her normal life and into the darkness of the house. She’s got a soft spot for the women.

Shame, because it’s a great financial opportunity—not that I give much of a fuck about finances, but it seems like a somewhat normal thing to think about. And lately I’ve been trying to think more about what seems normal. I live in fear that one day Mina will wake up and think: “Well. He really is an irredeemable sociopath.” and pull away from me for good.

But I mainly look at Eliza this way to get her to drop her guard. I’m not unaware of my charms and that air of danger so many women are so attracted to. If she thinks I want to fuck her instead of murder her, it might get me in the door. After all, I’ve been watching this house for a while and despite her beauty, she doesn’t have a lot of gentleman callers. I also happen to know—courtesy of the listening devices—that she goes through a lot of batteries.

“I hate to trouble you, but my phone died, and I was wondering if I could use yours.” I put a bit of Gabe’s Aww Shucks Ma’am drawl into my voice.

She hesitates. “Where’s your car?”

I point up at the house across the way. She recognizes it. Or thinks she does.

“Oh! You must be my neighbor.”

How oblivious can she be to only know her neighbors by their cars?

“Guilty,” I say, plastering a sheepish grin onto my face. “I went off and locked my keys in the house. Donna is always saying I need to put my house key on the same ring as my car key,” I say, shifting my cover from hapless sexy stranger to non-intimidating neighbor.

She looks a bit disappointed at the mention of a wife, but the guy in that house does have a wife named Donna, and surely Eliza has noticed her out gardening before. But the fact that I’m now her neighbor and have a wife bitching at me about how I organize my keys, drops her guard even further. And I don’t need to seduce her, I just need inside the house.

She opens the door, “Please, come in.”

I don’t think I could be happier at those words if I were a vampire. I smile and cross the threshold into the foyer. The golden retriever growls at me and starts barking.

“Shut up, Baxter!” she snaps.

He whimpers and gets that sad dog face where you see too much of the whites of their eyes.

She turns around to dig through her purse, and I take the opportunity to grab her and slam her against the wall.

“You should have listened to your dog. He’s got far better instincts than you do.”

The dog barks again and leaps on me. I did not expect that from a golden retriever. I shake him off and grab the gun from the back of my pants. I shoot a nearby lamp, and the shattering glass sends the dog running out the still open front door. It would have been easier to shoot him, but Aidan loves that dog.

By this point, Eliza is running up the stairs—just like the dumb horror movie victim. I pull the gloves from my jacket pocket and slip them on.

All this dumb bitch had to do was not hurt the kid. All she had to do was give him a safe place to live and maybe just maybe he could grow up semi-normal, but the evil rot in her is the same as my stepmother’s. There is no saving her, and only one way to get Aidan out of her care.

“I’m calling the police!” she says from behind the locked bedroom door when I bang on it.

“With what? A tin can and string?” She never got her phone out of her bag.

“I have a landline, you piece of shit!”

“No you don’t.”

She’s dead quiet.

“H-how do you know that?”

“What difference does it make at this point?” I kick in the door.

“You’re not my neighbor.”

I laugh. “Wow, that’s probably the most clearly obvious thing I’ve ever heard a person say out loud. Congratulations.”

She grabs a lamp and swings it at me. She gets me in the shoulder, but I’ve already grabbed her and pushed her against the wall.

There is a part of me that knows deep down I don’t have to do this. I can make a different choice. Surely the threat of me now is big enough that I could make sure she never raises a hand to Aidan again, but she’d call the police. I wouldn’t be able to get close to the house again. They’d find my bugs. Too many things could go wrong.

Besides, it’s too late now. When I look into her eyes I see my stepmother, and there is only one way that story ever ends.

“You don’t have to do this. Do you want money? Take whatever you want. I don’t care. It’s all insured.”

But I only barely hear the words, and their meanings certainly don’t register in time for my rational sanity to come back online.

A moment later she’s grabbed a cigarette out of a nearby ash tray and presses the burning ember against the side of my neck. And with that one small act, any chance of mercy is gone.

“Not this time, Linda,” I say.

“Who’s Linda?” They are the last words she says before my hand crushes her windpipe.

The body slides to the ground, and I give her lifeless corpse a kick and then back away. Who the fuck even smokes anymore? I look down to find my hands shaking. This never happens to me, well, not since the very first time. I squeeze my eyes shut and put my hands over my ears, blocking out Linda’s shouts and the sound of the switch slicing through the air... my dog whimpering...

My ears ring, and the room gets very loud with a long tone before I readjust to the silence of the room. It’s only then that I finally hear the dryer down the hallway. I jump at the sound of the dog barking again, but then he sees Eliza. He blinks and looks at the body and then looks at me and back at the body again.

He’s thinking as hard as I’ve ever seen any dog think—as though he’s trying to decide if she’s worth mourning.

“She kicked you a couple of times, too,” I say.

He just whimpers and slinks out of the room and back down the stairs as though he actually understood those words. I flush the cigarette butt down the toilet in the attached bathroom and follow the dog downstairs. I shut the front door so he can’t get out again and put food and water in his dish.

He eyes me warily, but nothing can keep him from his food bowl for long. Then I go through the house and remove all the listening devices.

I’m still shaky when I get back out to the car, but I start it up and pull away. Once I’m well outside the neighborhood I use a burner phone to tip off the police about the murder then toss the phone out the window. I couldn’t let Aidan come home to that. I just hope they find a delicate way to get him to his Uncle Martin’s house. There’s no reason he needs to go to another funeral right now.

When I get back to the house, I find Mina in our dungeon room, staring at the wall.

“What is this?” she asks. She hasn’t yet noticed my clearly shattering mental state, and I’m glad for the brief reprieve.

“That’s my murder wall. It’s just something I’m trying.”

There are photos and thumbtacks and post-its and red strings connecting things. I guess now is as good a time as any to tell her about the new contract.