fifteen
In some recess of Liz's mind, she knew the shower was hot, but if felt like nothing in the world could possibly melt the dense, icy core that rose like a frozen column within her.
The weight of the metal was in her hand; the trigger felt spongy against her finger. Inexplicably, her mind flashed back to an ancient Humphrey Bogart film and, without taking her gaze off those golden brown eyes, she slid her thumb over the safety and released it.
There was a noise in the room. A jagged keen, like a dog with a broken back. Only when it reflected off the tiles did she realize she'd made it.
"You..." she started. But someone had slit her throat. She couldn't catch enough breath to finish what she'd started. Liz took a shattered, steamy gulp of air.
"What..." Again she couldn't order the words right or find enough volition to push them out. She took another breath.
"What do I do now?" When the question came out, it was barely a whisper, almost lost in the hiss of the water's flow.
Jack's eyes didn't move from hers. She was waiting for him to do something - to grab her hand and pull the gun out of it, but he didn't. He just stood there, the spray from the shower patterning his shirt with tiny, shining beads.
"What the fuck do I do now?" she asked again. This time her voice broke on the last vowel, hurting as she brought it up. "Why couldn't you have been the person I met on the pier, looking at fish? Or the person on the beach? Or the person in the post office? Or the person in my bed? Why, Jack?"
"None of those people were real, Elizabeth." He said it calmly, slowly, as if he were talking to a child.
Breath caught in her throat and came out as a wretched sob. She nodded and felt tears break lose and stream down her sore face. "They never are, are they?"
"No."
No, they never were real. And she wasn't real either - not anymore. Once she was the woman who got on the subway at 5:30 in the morning and traveled to work, reading a romance to pass the time. Once she was the efficient machine that calculated the profitability of a short sell and relative liquidity and corporate assets. Once she was the doormat who stood with her eyes pinned on the office tower panorama while Harland Jeffries bellowed at her at the top of his lungs for having the temerity be in the vicinity when a share price fell. Once she was all those things and more. Now...
Suddenly, with crystalline clarity, she thought of how the blood spatter would ruin Jack's shirt, would mar his handsome face. How the shot, when it came, would make him flinch. There would be trouble after.
The shower sounded like rain - the kind of heavy downpour that she had loved as a child. "I'm sorry, Jack," she whispered, easing the muzzle away from his chin, pressing it to her own temple. Then she squeezed the trigger.
* * *
Jack didn't bother to take his eyes off the gray landscape of New York as he pulled and clicked his seatbelt into place. The trip back had not bothered him, and had not made a dent in the monstrous rage that roiled in his chest like collapsing pack-ice in an arctic sea.
He had done what he was best at - cleaning up. He'd gotten what he went down to Cayman for - the money. Now all that was left for him to do was meet Harland Jeffries.
"I have the money. Your problem is resolved," Jack had said on the phone.
What it had cost him to stay quiet after hearing the naked, braying triumph in Jeffries' response was something even Jack couldn't calculate. A dental crown had given way as he clenched his jaw in an effort to keep silent.
At first the rage had been white hot. Had the man been standing in front of him, Jack was convinced he would have eviscerated him slowly, starting at his gut. Behind his closed lids every image was ripped and bloody. No imagined surface escaped the spatter of her gore.
He hadn't slept. He'd sat in that sterile chair, in that sterile room, hour after hour. And as the hours passed the anger grew cold and malleable. Finally, when he could touch it with his mind, he made his plans and reworked them step by step until everything slotted into place like the most perfect of Chinese puzzles.
"Bring the money with you - in cash," barked Jeffries, when Jack had called to set up the meet.
"Of course," he'd answered dryly.
But ludicrousness of what Harland Jeffries was asking just underscored Jack's growing conviction that, not only was the man a sadistic monomaniac and a murderous bastard, but he was monumentally stupid as well. You didn't walk around with $16 million in a Gucci briefcase. The irony of the fact that Harland Jeffries - hedge fund manager and financial genius - couldn't figure out that it would take five good sized cardboard boxes to pack the money didn't escape Jack. It just drove home the fact that the man, like so many others of his kind, was criminally divorced from reality.
Once he was back on US soil, Jack used his resources; there were people in New York who owed him the kind of favors you cash in only once in a lifetime. This, he decided, was that time. The meeting was set for 10pm on Thursday in a room in a run-down hotel on the corner of Washington Avenue and E. 167th Street in the Bronx. Harland had balked at the address, but Jack wouldn't shift. The address was perfect for his plans.
On October 14th, at 9:30pm, Jack sat on a threadbare chair in room 604 with a loaded gun and $5000 worth of high quality cocaine and waited.