Chapter Text
There were things that were almost always true: men were dogs, it was easier to get ahead with dirty tricks, and betrayal could never come from a stranger. Ifrit knew these principles, possibly better than most women her age. Her past was surprisingly marred with blood and sacrifice.
Once, as a girl of fourteen, she had been a gymnast. Her mother had been a ballet dancer, that’s what people always said followed by clutching their hands over their hearts and a pity filled, “Oh, you’re so much like your mother.” Her name had been different then. Those days were filled with hope, her future looked so bright, and maybe it still was. Maybe it just looked different than she expected.
Maybe, for some people, a bright future looked like a killer hiding in a hotel bathroom while they waited for the poison to do its awful work. She was sat on the counter, twisting the shiny rings on her fingers and trying not to catch her own eye in the mirror. She didn’t want to see the way she looked right now, different hair, different eyes, a whole different painted face.
This wasn’t what any child dreamed of being, and she was no exception. When she was a little girl she wanted to be a ballet dancer, to perform Swan Lake, maybe even as the lead. That dream had long since been put to rest, along with nearly every dream that followed. A ballet dancer, a journalist, a pastor, when she was a child, a boxer when she was a teenager. Lately Ifrit dreamed mostly of being safe, of being free from these nighttime excursions that had her sitting here, wasting time. But at every bend, when she tried to change her path, it always ended back here, somehow. Not this exact place, of course, but this same pattern. A sharp knife, a well placed poison.
A solid sounding thnk! stirred her from her regrets, the sound of the man outside falling on the floor as he went to stand. It was too late now. Even if he knew what was happening. The lethal injection of his favored poison would make him convulse and spasm, he’d choke on the vomit that couldn’t quite be expelled, and that would be that. Afterward she’d call the cops and play aggrieved girlfriend.
It wasn’t the first time. It wouldn’t be the last. Normally, at least, it wasn’t so close to home. But this was an emergency, or so she heard.
Ifrit’s ears perked up as the door of the room creaked open. A pair of steady, careful feet snuck into the room, hardly making any sound at all. But she was used to listening intently, holding her breath to keep from making any noise as something much more dangerous unfolded on the other side of the door.
“Shit…” It was a man’s voice, familiar somewhere in the back of her mind, which wasn’t exactly helpful. Her day job meant that she met so many men, sometimes only for handfuls of minutes or seconds. Whoever it was, she couldn’t place it with her heart beating so loud in her ears, panic coursing through her veins.
The hotel room door clicked closed as she reached for one of the bathroom drawers, swearing silently as the slides caught loudly. So much for her element of surprise.
“Is someone there?” The man no doubt staring her victim in his blue face called. He was not convinced by the moment of silence as Ifrit carefully wrapped her fingers around the grip without resting her finger on the trigger. A last resort. Messy, loud, and far more likely to make a problem instead of solving one. “C’mon out now.”
She slunk against the wall, opening the door slowly and holding out her empty hand, palm toward whoever had walked into her perfect crime. As she slid through the door frame she saw a familiar face, a gun between them.
There was no mistaking her best friend’s father in-law for anyone else. He managed to look disappointed at everyone, all at once, smiling only at his granddaughter or daughter in-law. His wrinkled face reminded her of a beagle the first time she saw it.
The woman couldn’t stop the crestfallen “Oh, no” that fell from her mouth before he heard it.
This was very bad.
Mike hesitated in the same way she did, recognition sparking in his eyes as he cocked his head. “Ifrit? ‘S that you?”
Ifrit swallowed hard, holding her gun down as he lowered his. “Oh, hey Mike. Listen, I can explain.” She couldn’t, actually. Explaining what she was doing here with a dead man, while hiding in the bathroom was much more complicated a task than she could even begin to imagine.
He was already looking around the room with narrow-eyed suspicion, his gaze stopping on the little bit of staging she had done. “Somehow I don’t think you can.” His tongue worried against his lower lip. “Seems like you know what you’re doing.”
Was that a compliment? From Mike? Ifrit shook her head and cleared her throat, pulling her gaze from him and shrugging. “I sure think I have things handled.” Her eyes trailed down his arm to the gun in his gloved hand, to the silencer in its muzzle. “You seem like you came prepared. We must’ve been after the same thing.”
“I guess so.” Mike tucked his gun away into a holster under his jacket, still watching her carefully as she copied him, stashing her gun into the concealed holster at the top of her stockings.
“I should have this wrapped up and off your hands in a couple hours.” Ifrit crossed her arms over her chest, trying to hide the deep plunge of the cocktail dress she was wearing. “Assuming no one saw you come up here.”
He looked almost offended, or exasperated. “You’re not busy later, are you?”
God knew she didn’t want to have this talk, but there would be no putting it off. Mike knew where she lived, knew her only friend, her brother. The dancer ran her tongue between her teeth, looking for some sort of excuse, but she came up empty handed. “No, I’m not.”
It was better to get it out of the way, to not feel it weighing on her chest for however long it took her to get the nerve together to finally see him again. “Where?”
“We can meet at the park and ride half way between here ‘n Albuquerque, should be an okay place to stop for a chat.” He put his hands on his hips. “I suppose I don’t have to tell you that this isn’t a friendly meeting.”
“I know.” Ifrit struggled to keep her head above the rising tide of her panic. “You should go. Before someone else comes knocking.” Somehow this felt so formal, like they were discussing a business dinner instead of whatever this was. She stepped over the cooling body to corral the old man back towards the door.
He let her get surprisingly close to him, maybe half an inch of empty space between them before his hand finally rotated the door handle. Mike cleared his throat and ducked his head. “Careful out there, Ifrit.”
And then he was gone, leaving just her in the hotel room with a corpse. She wouldn’t know if anything would come of it until later. The hardest part of this whole thing was pulling the dead body of a man she hardly knew into the bed he expected to share with her.
The phone call was easy. Crying on command was a skill Ifrit had long since mastered, and the blubbering sobs were once real. The teary-eyed explanation to two cops made her look sympathetic, another sober girlfriend who woke up to her boyfriend over-dosing after a millionth chance. It helped that he’d had priors, of course, drug related.
All and all it took a couple hours, her performance would have looked good on a silver screen, but she was really just worried that the cops would have more questions later, that they might realize they were given a fake name and the number of a burner phone now smashed to smithereens. It was always a risky business.
The road was quiet, it gave her too much time to think about what had happened. What would happen when she saw Mike at the park-and-ride. There was no way Stacey knew that he was out here shooting people, so it was unlikely he would dump the truth on her. It could be that his boss and her boss were at odds. It could be lots of things.
At this time of night the park and ride was almost empty, save for Mike’s car and her own. He’d parked way in the back, so she joined him there, where no one else was, and turned her car off. The old man approached her passenger side and she unlocked the door for him to get out of the freezing temperatures the desert was known for this time of year after dark.
He hesitated, door open, staring down at her. “You look like hell,” he said, matter-of-factly, “doin’ alright?”
“Mhm, long night.” Ifrit’s hands were still on the steering wheel, her eyes focused on the moon in the sky over his face. “You gonna sit?”
“You gonna shoot me?”
Her head shook slowly, sending the artificially soft, short waves bouncing around her shoulders. “No, sir.” Finally her eyes peeled away from the sky to meet his, as though assuring him it was the truth. “I don’t shit where I eat, I don’t shoot people I know.” Despite the levity in her voice, she could tell he took her words to heart.
Mike slowly sat in the passenger seat and closed the door behind him. There was no space for either of them to run, forced instead to sit with their arms nearly touching in the confines of the car she’d gotten just for this job. “Oh, Ifrit,” he sighed, exasperation drenching his tone, “what have you gotten yourself into?”
Blood rushed to her face, coloring her cheeks deep red as she blinked at him slowly. “Sorry?”
The old man watched from the corners of his eyes. “Well, you can’t be workin’ for my boss, which would normally put us at an… impasse, of sorts.” He sucked on his teeth like he was thinking. “We seem to be aligned, for now, but you know as well as I do that that could change-” He snapped his fingers. “-like that.”
Ifrit let her hands slide down the sides of the wheel to meet in the middle, tapping her fingers against the leather. “But for now, we’re fine.”
“Sure, for now.” Mike rolled his head toward her, watching her from under his brow. “I know how important you are to Stacey and Kaylee, so I don’t want this to escalate if it doesn’t have to. For now, for tonight, you and I are partners, and my boss appreciates your cooperation.”
Her head nodded again, almost without her permission. “And I suppose I don’t get to know who your boss is.”
He rolled his eyes, leaning back in the seat again. “Surely,” he muttered, “you’re better trained than that, aren’t you? How’s a girl like you even end up in a line of work like this?”
“A girl like me,” Ifrit parroted, her nose wrinkling, “presumptuous to assume you know much of me, Mike. What does that mean, a girl like me?” Her hands slipped from the wheel completely, all of her attention spent burning holes into his skin with her eyes.
“Pretty, young… Smart to boot, so I hear.” The old man paid her scathing gaze no mind, his eyes tracing the stars that were visible from out here in the middle of nowhere. “So, what’s a girl like you, with all this potential, doin’ messing around in my line of work?” He paused, once again meeting her eyes. “Real odd, if you ask me.”
There was no answer that would satisfy him, beyond the truth. The truth was painful, a story she only told inebriated in someway in small chunks. Instead of answering Ifrit batted her eyelashes at him. “Well, a lady never reveals her secrets, right?”
It was enough to get a rare, surprised chuckle from him. “Yeah, I guess. So I’ve heard at least.” He leaned away from her and sighed, scrubbing his hand over his face. “You and Stacey met when you moved, right? From somewhere cold, up north, with your brother.”
Never once had it occurred to her that he might have peeked into her past. “Mike, did you use your connections to look into me?” She allowed some of her disappointment to register as a slight pout. “How would you feel if the tables were turned, huh?”
“I look at anyone who got close to my boy, and, by extension, to Stacey. So, yeah, I might have taken a little look-see,” Mike explained, as though it were the most natural thing in the world, “didn’t seem like there was too much in the way of knowledge, beyond you ‘n Derek being runaways, and that your name isn’t really Ifrit. Seemed like a rough household.”
There was a pause, during which he sat with his mouth open, blinking at nothing as he tried to appropriately word his next point. “I think that line into dancing, into escorting makes sense, especially when I found out about your father.”
The memory of the man who raised her scorched her from the inside out, even now. Even though he was long dead. “No father of mine,” Ifrit interrupted before he could say anything else, her voice low and soft, “just some asshole who gave me half his genetics and threatened to have me killed.” She tore her gaze from his, avoiding the probing stare as she tacked on, “Derek and I ran off when he died, figured we’d make it on our own.”
“Seems like you have.” Mike reached to put a hand on her bare shoulder, his skin rough and calloused, a sharp contrast to her own. He offered her a reassuring squeeze. “It’s a good life, huh?”
There were so many ways in which her life could have been better, but it could have been worse. It was worse. So this life, the one she had so painstakingly carved out for herself with nothing to her name but her father’s gift for lying and her mother’s determination, it had to be worth something. “It’s a good life,” she echoed, leaning her head back into the head rest. “It’s the only one I have.”
Some days it seemed more trouble than it was worth. But sometimes the sun shone just right, sometimes the coffee was just sweet enough, sometimes something happened that reminded Ifrit what made the days so precious. Most recently, spending all day in the kitchen with Kaylee and Stacey making chocolate chip cookies for the man crowding her front seat.
Mike gave another sigh, like this was particularly difficult on him. Some part of her felt like a child sent to the principals office to be scolded. “I assume we’re both in agreement that Stacey doesn’t need to know about whatever’s going on at work. What about your brother? Does he know?”
Derek decided to be a trauma surgeon because of that first job. She remembered sitting on the bathroom counter as he put what he’d learned into practice, carefully sewing her skin together again. The careful precision of her brother’s steady hands burned into her memory, the way her own fingers trembled and shook, pale under the bright lights in their bathroom.
“He knows.” Her brother’s eyes, blue like ice under the black bangs stuck to his forehead. “Only as much as he needs to. As little as I can get away with.” Worry, his brow knit together as he reached out with his hand, patting her cheek, trying to keep her conscious. She swore it never happen again, but it did. Not all the time, but often enough that he stopped showing his fear when he met her slumping in his doorway. Often enough that he turned his basement into a recovery room. “Not that you’ll ever see him out and about, I hope. He patches me up sometimes.”
“Yeah? I’ve heard the clientèle of those joints can be a little…” He made a gesture she couldn’t quite see. “Rough, in some spots. You must have some scars.”
“A couple real big ones,” Ifrit agreed, stretching her neck out and tracing her finger along a thick scar that started near her collarbone. “But the small ones are almost worse.” Her eyebrow arched. “What about you? You used to be a marine, and a cop after that. You must have some stories.”
“I’ve got a few, but it’s probably best for another time. It’s a long drive home.” Mike peeked around the car, like he was looking for something specific. “You plan on takin’ this thing home?”
“Nah, I’m gonna ditch it here. It’s not mine or anything. I’ve got a ride I’m supposed to call at the payphone.” The keys would be left here, someone would pick up the car like it was never here at all.
“Nope. C’mon, I’ll drive.” The old man stood up out of the car before she could open her mouth to protest. He rounded the front end and opened her door, offering his hand to help her follow his lead. “I know where you live, I’m headed that way, might as well carpool.”
“You’re not going to shoot me, are you?” Ifrit half joked, looking from his offered hand back to his face. “You seem awful eager to stay with me, alone.”
His shoulders rolled forward, his hand dropped as he tried to find an answer that might sway her opinion. “I know I’m the best shot at keepin’ you safe. But you gotta let me try for that to work.” Mike offered his hand again, and when she didn’t take it immediately, he added, “you can stay here, if you want. See how it goes with your other ride.”
But Ifrit slowly gathered her purse and elegantly turned from the inside of the car, only taking the offered hand when she went to stand for leverage. He had warm hands. That was all she could think about as he stood next to her, that she could feel how warm he was through the sleeve of his jacket.
The old man opened his car door for her too, he held her purse as she sat like a true gentleman. She didn’t even have to reach to close the door. This was common place for most of the dates she went on with clients, but Mike wasn’t a client.
As Mike sat in the driver’s seat she gathered all her courage just to say, “Thanks for all this. You didn’t have to make the whole thing so easy, I know that.” She gathered her hands into her lap and carefully crossed her ankles. “I expected you to hold this all over my head.”
“Don’t go thankin’ me yet,” he warned as he turned the car over, “there’s still lots of time for both of us to regret this.”
Ifrit carefully set out to unpin the wig affixed to her scalp, feeling for each bobby pin with her fingertips. Normally she tried to remember how many she used, but the day had gotten away from her. Truth be told she wasn’t even sure she would remember the conversation they had in five minutes.
She moved on to fish out her contact lens case and carefully removed her colored contacts. It always took her a couple tries, especially using her knuckles since her fingers were adorned with thick acrylic nails. Makeup wipes didn’t do much for her, but it did scrub a couple layers from her skin that made her feel less trapped.
“Quite a parlor trick you’ve got there,” Mike remarked from the driver’s seat as they pulled onto the freeway, “must come in real handy.”
“It makes my life easier.” The woman leaned back again, blinking to distribute the tears that had collected in the corners of her eyes. “I can teach you, if you want, but it might not do you much good considering—.” Her jaw snapped shut suddenly, preventing the words “how wrinkled your face is” from leaving her mouth.
“Is it that I’m old?” He raised an eyebrow, glancing at her for just a second. “You can just tell me that it’s because I’m old.”
“It’s not that!” Ifrit insisted, too quick to be telling the truth. No doubt Mike knew instantly. “It’s just that you’re so, I mean you’re really…!”
The ex-cop’s wry smile gave him away, but he didn’t push it any further, instead changing the subject entirely. “You should probably call whoever was supposed to pick you up. You got a phone?”
“Somewhere.” She’d almost forgotten. No doubt they already figured she’d failed, or maybe they were out there watching from the shadows, waiting for her to check in.
Her purse wasn’t big enough to hold the medium length wig, so it was abandoned in Mike’s back seat while Ifrit dug for her newest burner phone. It wasn’t anything fancy, normally just for emergency communication, sometimes about a location or a target.
The number was usually scrawled somewhere on a note she was instructed to burn that was long destroyed by now. In the quiet moments of her week she would repeat the number, practice keying it in without dialing, and draw the shapes on her skin with her nails to try and memorize it. The other phone always rang exactly twice before someone on the other side would pick up, silently awaiting her confirmation.
“Car’s at the park and ride, I’m already on my way home, no pick-up required.” These conversations were kept short, clipped for ease, so she was surprised when a voice responded on the other end.
“You were supposed to get picked up. Did something happen?” The voice on the other line was smooth like butter, deep for what was expected of women. It made her skin prickle unpleasantly.
Ifrit ran her tongue along the backs of her teeth, stalling time while she tried to think up an appropriate answer. An answer that wouldn’t get both herself and Mike killed. “A small complication. Nothing I couldn’t handle.”
“And you are in a cab now? Or…?” The voice trailed off, she could almost hear whoever it was on the other line tilt their head, rest their face in the palm of their hand.
“No. It’s not important.” Ifrit carefully scratched the corner of her nose with her thumb nail. “Everything went fine.”
The line suddenly went dead, the only tell that the conversation was over. She immediately bent the phone at the hinge, snapping the damn thing in half with a bit of effort. It was weird to be answered, to have a conversation with the person on the other end of the line. Normally she’d confirm the job was done and the line would go dead, and that was it.
As though her companion could read her mind, he said, “Is everything okay?”
Ifrit nodded slowly, replacing the broken phone into her purse to dispose of at a later time. “Oh, yeah. Everything’s been just peachy.” But at least she didn’t have to worry about keeping her heavy eyes open and focused on the road. “I’m looking forward to crawling into my bed and pretending today never happened.”
“If you’re not satisfied with the direction your life is taking, why not go a different way?” Mike wondered, “ain’t so hard to start over. You did it before, you can do it again. This time you’ve got some means.”
Every other life the killer had lived felt like a mirage, something fake and intangible. A dream that she always woke up from. “I’ve tried, it never really sticks.” There was a moment of silence as she turned her head to look out the window, watching the desert go by in the pitch black night. It was interrupted by her own voice, again. “Do you think some people are damned to this life, no matter what they do, Mike?”
“No,” he answered simply, “everything that happens in this life is cause and effect.”
Her lower lip trembled before she willed it still, her warm face pressed against the cool glass like she was searching for relief. “Are you a religious man, Mike?” When he didn’t answer, she clarified, “do you believe in God?”
“I might have, once.”
“But not anymore?” It must have been nigh impossible to hold on to any faith after the death of his son. Ifrit was no stranger to loss. It was the loss of her mother that slowly unraveled the throne of lies her father ruled from.
Mike’s seat squeaked as he adjusted his weight. “No, not anymore.”
The silence that followed was caustic. It ate away her peace. All that she could hear was the noise of the road beneath their tires and the steady increase of the her heart beating ceaselessly against her ribs.
“Are you?”
“Am I what?” Ifrit raised her head from the window to look at him.
“Religious.”
Well, it seemed Mike didn’t do a very good job looking into her. Else he didn’t care about the occupation of her father, who had been dead for almost a decade now, back in ‘93. “I used to be. I used to be in the church choir.” The woman she was now didn’t resemble that girl at all. “I showed up to every bible study, we had Sunday school and then on Wednesday evenings the whole church would get together.”
Her father’s smile from those nights burned her eyes, too white under the bright lights of the church. She could still see him in her mind’s eye, stood on the church stage, his arm looped around her mother’s waist. All she remembered was his wide smile, the straightness of his teeth, the bleached white that could have been a parable all on its own. She hardly remembered the details of her mother’s face at all.
“But that was a long time ago.”
The rest of the drive was relatively silent. Mike seemed to know that her own faith was a particularly sore spot, perhaps he could see her demeanor change. It didn’t matter. Ifrit’s thoughts were consumed by her own morality, or perhaps the lack there of. She often had little idea why her clients were single out to die, did they deserve it? Was the man she killed a monster? Or was it her?
Was she aware enough to know if she had gone too far? Or would the line she crossed blend into the foreground? It was impossible to say, which made it all the more upsetting. Once she had believed Mike to be some sort of paragon of virtue. Stacey always talked about what a good man he was. Was it possible to be a murderer and a good man?
Mike pulled up to her apartment building, but as she wordlessly reached for the door he held her back. His hand, hot like the desert sun, wrapped around her forearm. “If you wanna make a change in your life, you’re gonna have to leave all this behind. You can’t change your life surrounded by exactly what made you this way. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
Ifrit frowned deeply, her eyes widened a little as she reckoned with his advice. “Mike, I don’t have anyone else. This is it, and I can’t ask—”
“Ifrit, that’s what I’m sayin’. You got into this life to provide for yourself and your family, to keep ‘em safe. As long as you are here, where they are, you will continue to be what necessity has made.” As she settled back into the car he paused thoughtfully before adding, “whatever you decide to do, it has to be all or nothin’. You gotta decide, and you gotta decide before the decision is made for you.”
Her head swam, his words flooded in like ocean water at high tide. She turned to face him, to really truly look at him under the lights along the street. “If you could do it all again, what would you choose?”
Mike’s mouth pressed into thin, hard line as his hand fell from her arm. “I can’t make the choice for you. It’s gotta be you. Take some time to think it over.”
Ifrit took a deep breath in through her nose, as though steadying herself. “Okay, Mike.” She opened the door and this time he didn’t stop her. The woman carefully gathered the last of her things and stepped onto the sidewalk, hesitating before she shut the door. “And thank you again, for everything.”
“No sweat. I’ll see ya around.”
She scampered off, only turning back to watch his car when she got to the second story landing. It surprised her to see that he stuck around until she had turned to close the door behind her.