Pariah

ONE

She draws a breath, and the icy air crackles like fire through her lungs. The cry that she pushes out into the night is driven by the burning pain. Thick blood bubbles from her nose and trickles down the back of her throat. She coughs, and something clicks in her chest. A busted rib, she thinks.

Slumped between overflowing garbage bags, she waits. And counts.

One. . two. . three. .

She has always counted. When she was tiny — in a parallel universe it seems now — her parents listened to her interminable counting and optimistically packaged her up as a child prodigy. Stepping from dream to dream, they conjured up futures for her involving nuclear science, brain surgery, accountancy, high finance.

She wonders what they would think of her now. Lying in a stinking vacant lot, her body battered and broken. Craving a hit of heroin to numb the pain.

. . six. . seven. . eight. .

She can count while thinking of other things. Like her mind is working on two levels. A useful skill, maybe, in some walk of life. Not so much in her own, though. In her life, it would often be far better if the numbers could eclipse all other thoughts. . . twelve. . thirteen. . fourteen. .

She tends to think of people in terms of numbers. She sees them as having big numerals painted on their foreheads. Her customers especially, most of whose real names she doesn’t want to know. Like Sammy Sixty-Nine, for example, his appellation deriving from his exclusively oral sexual preferences. Then there’s Freddy Five-O, with his uncanny ability to climax after precisely fifty thrusts — no more, no less. And not forgetting, at the other end of the scale, poor old Two-Stroke Tommy.

She saw this movie once. The Producers. Laughed all the way through. Not because it was especially humorous, which it wasn’t, but because one of the actors was called Zero Mostel.

Oh, to have a few more johns with that moniker, she wishes.

Lights dance in her eyes. She is not sure if they are real or imagined. One too many blows to the head maybe.

She forces out another cry, hears her plea reverberating off the featureless brick walls. Hears something scuttling away from her in the trash. The pain in her chest is worse now. She starts her count from the beginning again.

One. . two. . three. .

She decides she has done well to stay in the life this long without more such beatings. Some of the girls she knows have had real numbers done on them. Like Moira, for example, who lost all her front teeth in one assault. Irony is, many of the tricks she turns view the absence of incisors as a bonus.

‘Hey! Who’s there?’

She struggles to push open her swollen eyelids, and can just make out a figure on the other side of the vandalized chain-link fence. She lets out a groan, the most she can manage. A flashlight comes on and searches her out. She winces as it stabs at her eyes.

‘You okay?’ the man calls.

Yeah, sure, she thinks. Lying here in garbage, freezing my ass off, is just a hobby of mine.

The man starts coming toward her, playing the cone of light over the ground in front of him. She counts his steps, and wonders who this might be, what his intent is. Maybe he’s the Good Samaritan. Yeah, right, because New York is just overflowing with those.

More likely is that he’s a scumbag. A lowlife with a hard-on who can’t believe his luck at coming across a piece of ass who is currently incapable of resisting his amorous advances.

Yes, she tells herself, the scumbag theory is definitely the most statistically likely.

It sits oddly with her that she is hoping to be correct.

The man stops after fifteen paces, then scans her form with the flashlight. Despite her profession, this seems such an invasion. She tries to pull herself into a ball, and her body protests at the effort.

‘It’s okay,’ he says. He shines the light onto his other hand, and the metal badge he holds there gleams and twinkles. ‘I’m a cop.’

A cop. Great. In her experience, being a cop is no indicator of where one sits on the moral spectrum.

‘You a working girl?’

She nods, thinking, We gonna play Animal, Vegetable, Mineral now?

‘So who did the fandango on your face? A john? Pimp?’

She turns the slits of her eyes on him, and as if sensing her discomfort, he lowers the beam. All she can see is a large silhouette against the night sky — a human-shaped hole in the starry canvas. Again she wonders if he is a good or a bad man. She hopes that he is evil. She hopes that he is a child molester, a rapist, a serial killer, a man who rips babies limb from limb with his teeth. She hopes that there is not an altruistic bone in his body.

‘I’m gonna come a little closer, okay?’ . . sixteen. . seventeen. . eighteen. .

He kneels down in front of her, turns the flashlight toward his chest.

‘See, I ain’t gonna hurt you. We’re gonna get you fixed up.’

She can see his face now. And despite its being bathed from below in a ghostly yellow glow, she cannot tell herself that she finds malice there, cannot convince herself that this man intends anything other than to offer help.

The acceptance of that makes her want to weep, and she has not shed tears in a long, long time.

She looks at the man and waits and counts, and it is only brief moments before a second hole appears silently in the sky and sends a spear of flame into the head of her benefactor.

She sees the cop’s expression twist into puzzlement as his body pitches forward. The side of his head smacks into the ground and he lies there, his eyes still open and the flashlight still in his grasp as he twitches.

She watches in horror and sadness as the second man steps closer to the body. In the reflected light she can see the gun in his hand, and she counts as two more tongues of fire lick out at the cop’s skull.

As the cop’s twitching stops, her own trembling grows. She peers up at the assassin.

‘I did what you wanted, right? Exactly how you said, right?’

The man pauses before answering. He still holds onto his gun.

‘You did.’

‘I was on cue, too, right? I called out at exactly the right time, right? Soon as you flashed that light at me?’

‘Yes, you did.’

‘So I did good? And now you’ll keep your promise?’

There is another pause, worrying in its length.

‘What promise was that?’

‘To let me go. You told me. You promised. You said that if I did everything exactly as you said, you’d let me go.’

‘Yes, I did say that, didn’t I?’

‘And. . so, now we’re done. You got what you wanted, and so you have to let me go. Like you promised.’

‘Like I promised.’

‘I ain’t gonna say nothing, if that’s what’s bothering you. Just. . let me go. Okay?’

‘Yes. Okay. You can go now.’

He raises the gun. She starts to count.

She doesn’t get beyond one.

In the car he cries.

He feels hot tears coursing down his cheeks as he unscrews the still-warm silencer from the Colt.

A mixture of emotions stirs within him. Before tonight he has never killed. And to do so at such close range, in such cold blood, is intensely empowering. It is a feeling he tries to suppress. He can understand now how this could easily become habit-forming, and that must not happen. He has to remain in control, to adhere to his plan.

He cries also from relief. He has postponed this for too long. And now he wonders why he procrastinated. No longer does he have to suffer the agony of debating what to do and how to do it.

What he does not experience is remorse or sadness, but then he never thought he would. In fact, he is surprised at how satisfied he feels.

It has begun, and it cannot be undone.

The next killing is inevitable.