The Disappearing Act(82)

“Here’s what we’re going to do, okay,” I say as clearly as I can, my smashed and swelling face already making talking hard. My voice sounds weird. “I am not going to shoot you for a part. No one is dying for a part. Do you understand me? You have to stop. You have to leave me alone. There are other parts, other people. Even if I walked away from this role today you wouldn’t get it, Marla. That ship has sailed. Kathryn has the film, not Moon Finch. You’re playing with fire but if you really need this then go back to them and take whatever lead they offer. It doesn’t have to be this one. Either way, this stops. I want you to go.” I twitch the barrel of the gun toward the ladder. “Go now. I’m leaving tomorrow. You won’t see me again. But if I see you, if you follow me, I will protect myself, do you understand?” My hand has stopped shaking but the quake is now inside me, deep in my core muscles, like shivering in the cold. Marla studies me, unsure of her next move. “If you go now, I won’t report this,” I push on. “Any of it. I don’t want to be involved. But if I see you again, I swear to God, I will make sure they put you somewhere that you can’t ever get to me. Do you understand?”

Marla looks at me quizzically. I wonder if she believes me. If I’d believe her were the tables turned. I don’t even know if I believe myself. Because right now all I want to do is call the cops as soon as she’s gone.

She looks at me silently until I pull back the hammer on the Sig and finally she speaks. “I’ll go,” she blurts. “But I’m going to need your word. Your word, Mia,” she repeats with unassailable firmness. “If you go to the cops, if you get in my way, I will find you, do you understand? And next time you won’t have a gun.”

I feel my breath tighten in my chest. I believe her. She will kill me. Like Ben Cohan killed Emily. I will disappear. Of course, I can’t be sure she won’t try to do that either way; she could come for me again, anytime, any day, this woman who can pass for other people. Even if I reported this the police aren’t going to be able to immediately protect me from her. The legal system doesn’t work like that. People aren’t locked up without evidence.

I think of the iPhone buried in my pocket recording all of this, seconds ticking over seconds. This is my only evidence. Everything that’s happened out here. And that evidence will show I brought a stolen weapon to meet a stranger in the middle of the night. The best protection from Marla I could hope for pre-trial would be a restraining order, and something tells me Marla might not take that entirely seriously. I taste the blood in my mouth as the dark drop all around hazes in and out of focus. My thoughts come hard and fast, terrifyingly clear in their logic: the only way to be truly safe, to know for certain that this woman could no longer be a danger to me, would be to pull the trigger. Here, now. I could claim self-defense.

Fear fizzes through me at the mere idea of it, and I squeeze the gun’s grip tighter as if I suddenly might do something crazy. But I’m not like her; I’m not willing to kill for this. I’m not that kind of person. Am I?

“You have my word,” I tell her. “What you do is up to you. But you need to leave me out of it.”

“Agreed,” she replies.

And with her words I realize what I’ve just said, my statement making the recording in my pocket purely a form of evidence against me. I have verbally acknowledged that I will not report her crimes if she promises to leave me out of them. It’s a promise I make her take at gunpoint.

She begins to shuffle out of her wedged-in position between the two struts and sidestep carefully along the metal beam beneath us, taking as wide a berth past me and my weapon as possible, one foot painstakingly placed next to the other until she is almost close enough to reach out and touch. My eyes follow her every move, aware that at any moment she might lunge and grab the gun or knock it from my hands as she passes. My stinging face is a clear reminder of how dangerous this woman is and the precariousness of our current location. Once past me she pauses momentarily, steadying herself before moving on. She takes a deep breath and steels herself before swinging around onto the ladder. And that’s when it happens. Half on, half off the rungs, eyes still locked with mine, she loses her footing. I see the horror flash in her eyes as first one foot then the other slips from the rung. She drops, catching her own weight hard in her arms as she hangs two-handed from the top rung. And without thinking I am pitching forward, gun in one hand, as I grab for her flailing form. I reach her struggling body, her eyes desperate as she tries to find her lost footing.

But as my hands fly to help her I catch the look in her eyes, too late.

The air is knocked clean out of me. Her feet having easily found purchase on the ladder—she was never really in any danger—has freed up her right hand, which is now gripped viselike around my throat. The impact of her hand leaves me spluttering for breath as my windpipe burns under her tight hold. Without an option, I release the gun, my hands flying up to the choke hold on my neck. My weapon, my only lifeline, skitters onto the grating of the platform.

I stumble back as she pushes me hard against the metal of the platform away from the ladder, my breath knocked from me again. She slams me again, violently, onto a strut. The raw corrugated steel of the letter’s lip digs painfully into my mid-back as she tilts me backward over the front of the sign. She’s going to push me over. My eyes dip down into the darkness nearly fifty feet below; the sheer drop from this height at this angle will almost certainly kill me. I feel a sharp whip of panic as I struggle against her, trying to prize her fingers from my throat as her nails begin to break the skin. Unable to free myself from her grip I hook a foot under one of the metal struts to stop her pushing me any further as I gasp for breaths that just won’t come. Then from the deep recesses of my memory I recall something I learned in an after-school self-defense class years ago. Instantly I stop struggling, I stop pulling away from my attacker and burst toward her instead.