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“Oh, thank you,” Daneca’s mother says. She looks surprised, but pleased. “It was no trouble at all, Cassel. I’m always here if you want to talk. ”
“You mean that?” I ask, which is maybe laying it on really thick, but I need to push her a little. This is her chance to repay me. It doesn’t hurt that I know she’s a sucker for hard-luck cases.
“Of course,” she says. “Anything you need, Cassel. ”
Bingo.
I like to think it’s the gratitude that makes her over-generous, but I guess I’ll never know. That’s the problem with not trusting people—you never find out if they’d have helped you on their own.
Daneca is on her computer when I come into her room. She looks up at me in surprise.
“Hey,” I say. “Your little brother let me in. ” I’m already not being entirely honest by failing to mention I talked with her mother, but I’m determined to do nothing more dishonest than that. I hate myself enough already without conning one of my only friends.
“Chris is not my brother,” Daneca says automatically. “I don’t even think it’s legal for him to live here. ” Her room looks exactly like I would have expected. Her bedspread is batik, studded with silver discs. Fringed scarves drape over the tops of the linen curtains. The walls are covered in posters of folk singers, in poems, and with a big worker rights flag. On her bookshelf, next to copies of Ginsberg and Kerouac and The Activist’s Handbook, is a line of horses. White and brown, speckled and black, they’re arranged like a chorus line.
I lean against the doorjamb. “Okay. Some kid who’s always hanging around at this address let me in. He was pretty rude about it too. ”
She half-smiles. I can see past her to the paper she’s writing, the letters like black ants on the screen. “Why are you here, Cassel?”
I sit down on her bed and take a deep breath. If I can do this, then I can do everything else.
“I need you to work Lila,” I say. The words come easily to my lips, but my chest hurts as I speak them aloud. “I need you to make her not love me anymore. ”
“Get out,” Daneca says.
I shake my head. “I need you to do it. Please. Please just listen. ” I’m afraid my voice is going to break. I am afraid she is going to hear how much this hurts.
“Cassel, I don’t care what reason you have. There is no reason good enough to take away someone’s free will. ”
“It’s already been taken! Remember when I said that I tried to stay away from Lila?” I say. “I’ve stopped trying. How’s that for a good reason?”
She doesn’t trust me. Surely she can understand if I don’t trust myself either.
The look Daneca gives me is full of disgust. “There’s nothing I can do anyway. You know that. I can’t take the curse off her. ”
“Work her so that she feels nothing for me,” I say. My vision blurs. I wipe the dampness away from my eyes angrily. “Let her just feel nothing. Please. ”
She looks at me in an odd, stunned way. When she speaks, her voice is soft. “I thought the curse was fading. It might already be gone. ”
I shake my head. “She still likes me. ”
“Maybe she likes you, Cassel,” Daneca says carefully. “Without the curse. ”
“No. ”
She waits for a long moment. “What about you? How are you going to feel when she—”
“It doesn’t matter about me,” I say. “The only way that Lila could be sure—that anyone could be sure—the curse was over is if she didn’t love me. ”
“But—,” Daneca begins.
If I can just get through this, then nothing else can hurt me. I will be capable of anything. “It has to be this way. Otherwise I’ll create reasons to believe that she wants me, because I’d like that to be true. I can’t be trusted. ”
“I know that you’re really upset—,” Daneca says.
“I can’t be trusted. Do you understand me?”
She nods, once. “Okay. Okay, I’ll do it. ”
I exhale all at once, a dizzy rush of breath.
“But this is a onetime thing. I will never do this again. I will never do anything like this again. Do you understand me?”
“Yes,” I say.
“And I’m not even sure how to do it, so there are no guarantees. Plus the blowback is going to make me act all weird and emotional, so you are responsible for babysitting me until I am stable. Okay?”
“Yes,” I say again.
“She won’t care about you. ” Daneca tilts her head to one side, like she’s seeing me for the first time. “You’ll just be some guy she once knew. Everything she feels about you—everything she felt about you—it will all be gone. ”
I close my eyes and nod my head.
The first thing I do when I get back home is go down into the cellar. I open the cooler. Janssen is right where I left him—milk pale, with sunken eyelids and frosty hair. He looks like a demented marble sculpture—portrait of a killer, killed. All the blood must have made its sluggish way to his back before it froze. I bet if I turned him over, he’d be purple.
I strip off my right-hand glove and place my hand on his chest, pushing aside the stiffened fabric of his undershirt, letting my fingers rest against his icy skin.
I turn his heart to glass.
The change takes only a moment, but recovering from it takes longer. Once the blowback wears off, I rub my head where I smacked it against the floor. Everything aches, but I’m getting used to that.
Then I go upstairs, take the gun out of the plastic bag, close my eyes, and shoot two bullets into the ceiling of the parlor. Dust rains down on me, covering the room in a powdery cloud. A single chunk of plaster nearly brains me.
Cons aren’t glamorous. They’re hauling out the ancient vacuum from the closet, changing the bag, and making sure you get up most of the dust. They’re sweeping in the basement to hide that you were recently rolling around after a transformation. They’re fieldstripping the gun according to instructions on the Internet and carefully buffing off any fingerprints with a lightly oiled cloth, then wrapping the whole thing in paper towels. They’re driving a mile to an abandoned stretch of road and soaking the murderess’s coat and gloves with enough lighter fluid that they burn to ash. They’re waiting to make sure they burn to ash and then scattering that ash. They’re smashing any remaining buttons from the coat with a hammer, then tossing them along with the vacuum bag and any hooks or metal parts in different Dumpsters far from where you burned the clothes. Cons are all in the details.
By the time I’m done, it’s late enough to call Sam and get the next part of the plan under way.
My mother’s a purist when it comes to scamming people. She’s got her thing, and it’s pretty effective. Glamorous clothes, a touch of her hand, and most people are willing to do what she wants. But I’d never really thought about costumes or props until I met Sam. I have my computer open to Cyprus View’s website. They have examples of the layout of their apartments for prospective renters. Very helpful.
Sam’s expectantly holding up a fake wound on a thin rubbery piece of silicone. “Look, you said yourself that guard wanted to be a hero,” Sam is telling me.
It might be true that I said that. I don’t remember. I said a lot of things on the stakeout, mostly boring observations about the place or completely exaggerated claims about how I was going to beat Sam at cards. “But then we need another person,” I say. “That’s a three-person job. ”
“Ask Lila,” he says.
“She’s all the way in the city,” I say, but it’s a halfhearted objection. The thought of seeing her one last time before I lose her is poisonously compelling.
“Daneca and I are still . . . I don’t know. Besides, she’s not the best actress. ”
“She did fine at Zacharov’s fund-raiser,” I say, thinking of the way she smiled in my brother’s face moments after she slipped me a fake bloo
d packet.
“I had to give her a pep talk on the way,” he says. “How about if I’m the one who calls Lila?”
Mutely I hand him my phone. I want her to come. If I resist this, I don’t think I will have any resistance left.
We pick Lila up at the train station in Sam’s hearse. He works on her in the back while I fiddle with the radio nervously in the front seat and eat a slice of pizza.
“Almost done?” I call, looking at the clock on the dashboard.
“Don’t rush the artist,” Lila says. Her voice goes through me like a knife, leaving a wound so clean I know it won’t even hurt until the knife’s pulled out.
“Yeah,” I say. “Sorry, Sam. ”
Finally she climbs into the front seat. She’s got a bruise painted on her cheek. It looks real, partially hidden by curls of a long blond wig.
I reach out automatically to touch her face, and then jerk my hand back.
“Don’t mess me up,” she says with a lopsided grin.
“We ready to go?” I call into the back.
“One second,” Sam says. “I just have to get this scrape on my mouth, and it’s not sticking. ”
Lila leans toward me, nervous and determined. “That thing you said before you hung up the phone,” she half-whispers. “Did you mean it?”
I nod.
“But I thought it was all fake—” She stops and bites her lip, like she can’t quite bring herself to ask the rest of the question, for fear of my answer.
“I faked faking,” I say softly. “I lied about lying. I couldn’t think of another way to make you believe we couldn’t be together. ”
She frowns. “Wait. Then why tell me now?”
Crap. “Because I am about to be devoured by poodles,” I quip. “Remember me always, my love. ”
Mercifully Sam picks that moment to lean into the front. “Okay, all done,” he says.
“Here’s what you asked me for,” Lila says, pulling a green glass bottle out of her backpack. It’s wrapped in a T-shirt. “Is this what you’re going to plant in her house?”
I take it, careful not to touch the neck of the bottle. It’s bizarre to think that this small thing is what Lila took from Philip’s house. It’s even more bizarre to know it used to be a living person. “Nope,” I say. “My plan is even more secret than that. ”
She rolls her eyes.
I pull my pizza delivery boy cap low and start the engine.
The plan is pretty simple. First we wait until Bethenny Thomas leaves the building without her dogs. This is the twitchiest part, because she might decide to spend her Saturday night at home, curled up in front of the television.
At ten, she gets into a cab, and we’re on.
I go into the building with three boxes of pizza. I’m wearing the cap—which was pretty easy to lift from the busy shop where we ordered the pizzas—and regular clothes. Keep my head down in front of the security cameras. I say I have a delivery for the Goldblatts. We picked them because, of all the people we were able to identify as living in the building—thanks to the white pages online—they were the first not to answer when we called.
The big guy behind the desk looks up at me and grunts. He lifts the phone, pressing a button. I try very hard to act like I am bored, instead of nearly jumping out of my skin with adrenaline.
Sam comes roaring out of the darkness, hitting the glass wall of the lobby like he barely notices it. He starts screaming, pointing at the bushes. “Stay away from me. Stay the hell away!”
The guard stands up, still holding the phone but no longer paying any attention to it.
“What the hell?” I say.
Lila runs up the path toward Sam. She slaps him so hard that all the way inside the lobby, I can hear the crack of leather glove against skin. I sincerely hope that he taught her some kind of stage trick, because otherwise that had to hurt.
“I saw you looking at her,” Lila shrieks. “I’m going to scratch out your eyes!”
If he was a different person, the front desk guy might just call the cops. But when I saw him toss that homeless guy off the property Friday night, I realized that he’s not the type to call anyone if he thinks he can handle it.
Now I just have to hope I read him right.
When he puts down the receiver, I let out a breath I shouldn’t have been holding. That’s no way to look casual.
“Wait a sec,” he says to me. “I got to get these kids out of here. ”
“Man,” I groan, trying to sound as exasperated as possible. “I need to deliver these pizzas. There’s a fifteen-minute guarantee. ”
He barely even looks at me as he heads for the door. “Whatever. Go on up. ”
As I step into the elevator, I hear Lila yell about how the front desk guy better mind his own business. I grin as I hit the button.
The door to Bethenny’s apartment is identical to all the others. White doors in a white hallway. But when I slip my pick into the keyhole, I hear the dogs start barking.
The lock is easy, but there’s a dead bolt on top that takes longer. I can smell someone frying fish across the hallway and hear someone else playing classical music with the sound turned way up. No one comes out into the hallway. If they had, I would have asked them for a number that’s on a different floor and headed for the elevators. Lucky for me, I make it inside Bethenny’s apartment without a lot of detours.
The minute I’m inside, the dogs run toward me. I close the front door and sprint for the bedroom, slamming the door in their snouts. They scratch against the wood, whining, and all I can hope is that they aren’t scarring the door too deeply. I silently thank the building again for putting the layout of their apartments online.