Chapter 10: Baggage Claim
The 737 touched down with a shudder that ran up through Marnie's spine and settled somewhere behind her teeth. She had spent four hours in seat 14C pretending to read a paperback with a broken spine, and two of those hours she had spent watching the woman across the aisle spoon applesauce into a toddler's mouth and thinking about how easy it would be to take the spoon and jam it up under the woman's soft chin. She hadn't. She was saving it. Six days of it accumulating now, the pressure behind her sternum building like water against a dam.
She stepped off the jet bridge into the terminal and the air changed. Recirculated, chemical, over-cooled. Her canvas bag rode heavy on her shoulder and she patted the side pocket out of habit, feeling the shape of the locket through the fabric, the needle inside it.
Her phone said 11:47. Vera's surgery consult would be over by now, she thought. Or maybe it hadn't started. She didn't care. She pocketed the phone.
Baggage claim smelled like ozone and old carpet. The carousel groaned its mechanical groan and a knot of travelers stood along the belt with their eyes fixed on the rubber seam, waiting. Marnie walked past them, following the numbers stenciled over each claim area, and found hers at the far end where the crowd thinned.
Joaquin was already there.
He stood at the mouth of the belt with a duffel in each hand, one of them hers, the canvas straps looped twice around his knuckles and the thin silver band on his index finger catching the light as he turned. He had shaved. His jaw gleamed clean under the fluorescents, and the dark restless eyes found her over the heads of two businessmen arguing about a gate change. He didn't smile with his mouth. He smiled with everything else.
Marnie walked up to him and took the bag from his right hand. Her fingers brushed his knuckles and stayed there a beat too long.
"You've been here a while," she said.
"Forty minutes." He shifted the other bag to his left hand. "I parked in the short-term lot. I wanted to watch you come through the doors."
"Did you."
"I always want to watch you come through doors."
She let that sit between them like something warm. The carousel coughed and a black hard-shell suitcase came tumbling down the chute and went around. Neither of them looked at it.
"So," Marnie said. "What did you tell her."
Joaquin's mouth twitched. "I told her my mother in El Paso had a fall. Compression fracture in her L4. She's in a rehab facility for a week and someone has to sit with her and sign the paperwork because she can't hold a pen." He shrugged one shoulder. "Vera has never met my mother. She doesn't know my mother has been dead since I was nineteen."
"El Paso," Marnie repeated. "That's a long drive. Did you tell her you were driving?"
"I told her I was flying. I told her I'd text when I landed." He looked down at the cold floor between their shoes. "I won't text. She'll call twice and then she'll stop. She always stops."
"And if she doesn't stop?"
"Then I'll answer and tell her the rehab has terrible reception and the walls are thin." He lifted his eyes back to hers. "Your turn."
Marnie adjusted the strap of the canvas bag on her shoulder and felt the locket knock against her collarbone. "My father had a heart attack. ICU. Hugh drove me to departures and kissed me through the window and told me to call him when I got in. He held my hand the whole way to the airport like we were twenty-five."
"That's sweet."
"It's worse than that." She finally permitted herself a smile. "He's going to text me tonight to ask how Dad is. And I'm going to text him back a thumbs up and a photo of a hospital vending machine."
Joaquin laughed. It was low and real, rougher than the polished voice he used in the Marsh house, and it seemed to catch him off guard. He looked at her like the laugh had come out of his chest without permission.
"That is the absurd part," he said. "The vending machine. We both, we both built these whole men out of what they needed to see and then we—"
"And then we get a week off for good behavior," Marnie said.
"Good behavior." He shook his head slowly. "There's a body under the pines with lye in its gut and you call it good behavior."
"The pine trees aren't complaining."
He laughed again, shorter this time, and something in his shoulders unlocked. The two businessmen had moved on. The carousel had cycled three times and gone still, its belt bare, and the fluorescent lights buzzed overhead with a sound like a fly trapped behind glass. Joaquin shifted the duffel to hang alongside his leg.
"Come on," he said. "Before somebody asks why we're both standing here smiling at an empty belt."
The rental car was a grey sedan with a crack in the windshield shaped like a wishbone and a smell of lemon cleaner that did nothing to hide the ghost of stale cigarettes underneath. Joaquin drove. He kept both hands on the wheel and took the highway north, past the airport hotels with their empty parking lots, past a billboard advertising a dentist who also did cosmetic veneers. Marnie rode in the passenger seat with her bag between her feet and watched the strip malls slide by in the late Thursday light.
"Where are we going," she asked.
"Forty minutes out. A motel called the Copper Creek Inn. It's the kind of place where nobody looks at faces and the desk clerk takes cash." He glanced at her. "I booked it Tuesday night on a prepaid card I bought at a grocery store in a town I've never been to. The name on the reservation is Mr. and Mrs. Daniel Hollis."
"Daniel Hollis," Marnie said. "That's a name a man gives himself when he wants to sound trustworthy."
"He'll do."
"And your wife," she said, and it wasn't exactly a question. "She'll be alright for a week."
Joaquin was quiet for a couple of miles. Then, "She's got the consult on Thursday and she'll take the rest of the week to be impossible about it. Mrs. Hollis. She won't miss me." He tapped the silver band on his finger against the wheel. "She hasn't missed me since the second year."
The Copper Creek Inn had a hand-painted sign with a copper creekside trout on it and a parking lot of broken gravel. The desk clerk was a young man with a thick neck and a phone propped against a receipt spike, and he barely lifted his eyes when Joaquin handed over a folded stack of twenties and a driver's license that Marnie clocked from two feet away as a forgery good enough to fool a bored man at eleven at night. Room 112, second floor, east end. He handed over a plastic key card and went back to his phone.
The staircase smelled of chlorine from a pool that had been filled in sometime in the eighties. Room 112 had a bed with a green blanket and a window facing the highway and a bathroom with a shower curtain printed with seashells, and Marnie was still noting the exits and the light switches when Joaquin dropped the bags inside the door and turned the deadbolt and took her face in both hands and kissed her.
She dropped her canvas bag on the carpet and got both fists in the front of his shirt and tore it open. Buttons scattered. He backed her into the door and got his hands under her shirt and down the back of her jeans and she bit his lower lip hard enough to leave a mark, and he grunted, not from pain, from the pleasure of it, the masochist's pleasure, and drove his hips into her hip against the door and ground slow circles there while her breath came out ragged against his jaw.
"I missed this," she said into his neck. "I missed this so much I was thinking about it on the plane. I was thinking about the way your hands feel when you've got them on my neck."
He pulled back one inch to look at her. His pupils had gone wide. "Stupid thing to miss," he said. "I've been thinking about you with your arm soaked to the elbow."
"That's not the only thing."
"Tell me the rest."
She got a hand between them and unfastened his belt and shoved her palm flat against him through his boxers, and he inhaled through his nose, a long wavering breath, and let his head fall back against the doorframe.
"Say it," she said.
"I missed the sound you make when you come." He said it low, in her ear, and she felt it go all through her. "I missed that little cut you do at the end, the two inches deep. I missed how you get in the car afterward and fix your hair like nothing happened. I missed you."
The rain started on the roof of the motel, hard and sudden, drumming against the window.
Marnie dropped to her knees in front of him on the green carpet and pulled him free. She stroked him once, twice, watching his jaw tighten, and then she took him in her mouth and worked him with her tongue flat against the underside, and his hand came down into her auburn curls and fisted there, hard. She moaned around him and took him deeper. The salt and heat of him. The way his whole body went rigid and shook against the door.
He pulled her up before he finished. Not yet. He yanked her shirt over her head and unhooked her bra and got her out of the jeans, and she stepped out of them and kicked them against the bag and he picked her up bodily and carried her to the bed and dropped her there on the green blanket with her legs already open for him.
He got between them and got a hand down between her thighs first, two fingers working her slick and slow, watching her face, and she arched up off the mattress and grabbed the back of his neck and pulled him down and bit his shoulder.
"Fuck me," she said. "Stop being gentle. You're never gentle. I need the other thing."
He gave her the other thing. He pushed in without ceremony and her body took him and she swore loudly enough that the walls had to hold it. Then he drove. Fast, deep, one hand braced on the headboard and the other clamped over her mouth not to silence her but because he liked the way she kept trying to talk through it. She bit his palm. She hooked her legs around his back and pulled him in harder and he kept up a rhythm that had the old bed frame ticking against the wall like a clock.
"You're going to be inside somebody else's blood next," he said through his teeth. "That's what I want. I want to see you covered in it again. I want to put my mouth on your neck while you're still wet with somebody else."
"Say it again."
"I want to watch you do the cut."
"Yes."
"I want to lick it off your wrist after."
She came then, hard, with her heels dug into his back and her hand in his hair and a raw sound dragged up out of her chest, and he came inside her two strokes later with his forehead pressed to her collarbone and her name, her real name, said quietly into her skin like a secret he couldn't keep.
Rain kept coming down on the roof. The bed frame stopped ticking. Their breath slowed to something that matched.
Joaquin rolled onto his back and she lay half across his chest with one leg still tangled between his and his hand moving slow up and down her spine. The window was a dark square of water and blurred headlights off the highway.
"Tell me the lie one more time," Marnie said. "The El Paso one."
He did. She laughed into his chest until the laugh turned into something with teeth in it, and he laughed with her, and neither of them moved toward the bags still lying by the door. There was a week in front of them and a locked room and a stolen name on the desk ledger downstairs, and for tonight, no one anywhere knew where they were.
They slept for a few hours with the rain on the roof and woke to a sky the color of wet slate. The clock on the nightstand said 1:20. Joaquin was already dressed and sitting on the edge of the bed, lacing a boot. Marnie watched his back in the dark and felt the pressure behind her sternum lean forward like a dog on a chain.
"Hungry?" he asked, without turning around.
"Starving," she said.
They took the grey sedan west, out past the last of the lit strip malls and into the part of the city that had been left to go to seed. Warehouses with plywood over the windows. A rail yard with a line of cars rusting on a dead siding. Joaquin drove slow, one hand on the wheel, and neither of them talked much. They didn't have to. It was the same thing they'd done in the woods behind the development, the same patient circuit, and the car smelled of lemon cleaner and wet wool and the thin metal taste of anticipation.
After twenty minutes they found the corner.
A woman in a pink tube top stood under a streetlight on Ransom Avenue with her weight on one hip, working the slow traffic. She had a phone in her hand and a coat over her arm, and she looked tired in the way that only shows in the shoulders. Marnie watched her from two blocks back and felt nothing yet. Then a man came out from under the overpass.
He was big through the chest and gone soft through the middle, with a beard down to his collarbone and a quilted coat that had been somebody else's a long time ago. He walked straight at the woman. She said something and held out her hand, palm up, and Marnie saw her mouth shape the word money. The man said something back. She said it again, and laughed at him, a short, dismissive laugh.
He hit her once in the face. She went back against the light pole and dropped the phone, and he hit her again, and this time she didn't get up.
He kept going. He got on top of her on the wet sidewalk and struck her until the movement had no rhythm left in it, just repetition, and Joaquin sat behind the wheel with both hands on the rim and watched the whole thing with his head tilted a little to one side, like a man reading a menu.
Marnie's hand had found the locket at her throat. She didn't open it. She just held it.
"Three years in this neighborhood and nobody walks past," Joaquin said quietly. "That's what people do. They walk past."
"He's not done," Marnie said.
He wasn't. He stood up eventually, breathing hard, checked her pockets, took the phone and the cash, and walked back toward the overpass with his shoulders hunched against the rain. He didn't look around once. He never once considered that anyone had seen.
Marnie opened the door. Joaquin caught her wrist.
"Two blocks," he said. "Not here. Not where she is."
She looked back at the woman under the streetlight, crumpled in the puddle, and something in her chest went very still. Then she got out of the car.
She walked north, parallel, staying on the far side of the parked cars until she was in front of him. She let her shoulders drop and her hands shake. She rubbed her arms and made her face small. It wasn't hard. She had spent twelve years learning how to look like exactly what the person in front of her wanted to see.
He saw her and stopped. He had the phone in his fist and dried blood in the creases of his knuckles.
"Hey," she said. "Hey, you holding? I'm sick, man, I'm really sick. I'm shaking. Look at me."
He looked at her. She pulled the sleeve up her arm to show him the inside of her elbow, pale and bare, and swayed on her feet like the sidewalk was moving.
"I got money," she said. "Not much. I'll do whatever you want. Anything. There's an alley right here, I know a spot."
The man grinned through the beard. It was the slow grin of a man who had never in his life been offered anything for free and had just discovered he could take it.
The alley ran between a laundry that had closed years ago and the back of a tire shop. Wet cardboard, a dumpster with graffiti tags, the far end chained off and dark. She led him in past the first pool of light and stopped where it was blackest, and he came up behind her fast and put her against the brick wall with his forearm across her throat.
"Take your fucking clothes off," he said. "All of them. Right here."
The brick was cold on the back of her head. He stank of wet wool and old liquor. And Marnie started to laugh.
She laughed and laughed, quiet at first, then louder, until her shoulders were shaking with it and tears came to her eyes. The man's face changed. He pulled his arm back half an inch and looked at her like she had spoken a language he didn't know.
"What's so funny," he said.
She pushed him off her. Both palms to his chest, hard, and he staggered back a step with his mouth open. Then the confusion turned to rage, and he charged her.
She stepped out of the way like she was opening a door. His own weight carried him past, and she hooked a foot around his ankle and kicked out at his knee, and he went down hard onto the wet asphalt and slid.
He came up against a pair of legs. Joaquin stood in the shadow at the mouth of the alley with his hands loose at his sides, exactly where he had been the whole time, watching.
The man grabbed at Joaquin's pant leg and put on a show. His voice went thin and cracked and pitiful.
"Please," he said. "Help me. This crazy bitch led me in here. She's gonna kill me, man, she's got a knife, please, you gotta help me, I got nothing, I'm just trying to sleep."
Joaquin looked down at him. Then he crouched to the man's level and put a hand on his shoulder, and his voice was so full of gentle concern that Marnie felt her skin prick up.
"Oh no," Joaquin said. "That sounds terrible. Are you alright, sir?"
The man nodded and pointed a shaking finger at Marnie. "She's crazy. She brought me in here, said she wanted food. She said she was gonna do anything. Please."
Joaquin smiled. He straightened up and looked over at Marnie, and the smile stayed on his face, warm as a lit window.
"Now, honey," he said. "That is no kind of way to treat our guest."
Marnie made her face ashamed. She ducked her head and put her hands behind her back like a scolded child. "I'm sorry," she said. "I just got a little excited."
The man on the ground looked from one of them to the other, and Marnie watched it land. She watched him understand. The shoulder under Joaquin's hand, the tone in Joaquin's voice, the way the two of them stood at either end of the alley, calm, unhurried, and not one bit afraid of him.
His mouth worked. He started to crawl backward across the wet asphalt, and Joaquin let him go a foot, two feet, and then put a boot down on his quilted coat.
The rain came down harder. Somewhere back on Ransom Avenue a car door shut and drove away, and then there was only the drumming on the dumpster lid and the sound of a man realizing he had walked into a room he was never going to leave.
The man got halfway to a sit on the asphalt, one palm flat on the wet ground, and started talking fast. The same thin voice, pitched for sympathy.
"Look, I didn't, I wasn't gonna do nothing. I thought she was a junky. You know how they are, they come up on you, they try to sell you something, they're always lying. I was just moving her along. I never touched her, I swear to God I never put a hand on her."
Joaquin looked down at the blood drying brown in the creases of the man's knuckles. Then he looked at Marnie. He didn't say anything. He just waited, patient as a landlord.
Marnie crouched in front of the man until her knees were level with his eyes. Rain ran down off the edge of the dumpster and spattered on the cardboard. She tilted her head.
"Is that right," she said. "Well, what about that hooker you beat to death?"
The man's mouth opened. Nothing came out the first time. He tried again and it worked, but the voice had gone high and wobbly.
"That's different. That was, that was different."
"Was it." She kept her voice kind. It was the voice she used at the library when a child had lost a book. "Was that your definition of not really doing anything?"
"That bitch was trying to trick me." He jabbed a finger at her. "That's what they do, they trick you, they take your money and then they laugh at you. You don't know. You don't know what she said to me."
Joaquin made a low sound, almost a hum, and shifted his weight onto the boot pinning the quilted coat. It wasn't hard. Just enough to remind the man what was on him.
Marnie didn't look away from the man's face. "So it's tricking, then. That's what deserves it. You got tricked and so you hit her until she stopped moving."
"I didn't hit her that hard."
"Did we not trick you?" Marnie said. "I put my hand out and said money. I said I'd do whatever you want. I brought you into a dark alley all by yourself." She smiled. It was a warm smile. It reached her eyes. "Are you going to beat us to death?"
The man looked from Marnie to Joaquin. He measured the alley mouth behind them, the dark chained end behind him, the walls on either side. Whatever he saw in the two of them standing there, it wasn't mercy. It was a trap that had closed while he was busy being clever.
And then he stopped playing.
"Fuck you both." The whine dropped out of his voice and the real one came up from underneath it, thick and wet and furious. He lunged, got his hands under him and shoved. "You two are crazy. You hear me? You're crazy. I'll kill you. You come near me again and I'll kill you both, you understand, I'll fucking kill you."
Joaquin did not move his boot. He let the man surge up against it and flail there like a hooked fish, arms swinging at nothing. Then he turned his head toward Marnie with an expression of perfect, theatrical worry.
"Oh no," he said softly. "I'm so afraid."
The man roared at that. Spit flew off his lip.
Marnie got to her feet and dusted the rain off her knees. She looked at Joaquin over the man's back and let her mouth curl.
"Whatever shall we do, honey?"
Joaquin finally lifted his boot and stepped over the man like he was stepping over a puddle. Then he crouched, caught the quilted collar in one fist, and hauled the man to his knees in the middle of the alley. The man swung at him. Joaquin took the punch on his forearm the way a man takes rain, and used the swing to pull the man's arm behind his back and hold it there. The man screamed. Joaquin didn't blink.
"Stand up," Joaquin said. "There we go. Now walk."
He walked the man deeper into the alley, to the black end where the chain crossed and the cardboard was stacked like mattresses. Marnie went ahead of them and unhooked the chain and let it fall with a clank in the puddle. Past it a loading bay jutted out of the tire shop's back wall, recessed, out of any line of sight. She had clocked it on the way in. She clocked everything.
"Please," the man panted. "Please, I got kids, I got a mother. I never did nothing to either of you. You can't just—"
"You hit her in the face twice and then you kept going," Marnie said. She stopped at the loading bay and turned. "I watched you. You put your whole body behind it. Nobody made you do that."
"I'll go. I'll leave town. I'll never come back here, I swear on my mother's—"
"Honey," Marnie said to Joaquin. "I have a few fun ideas."
Joaquin's eyes went bright and dark at once. He pushed the man down against the lip of the loading bay and pressed his face flat to the wet concrete. The man's cheek squashed and one eye rolled up, white and terrified, watching the two of them.
"Tell me," Joaquin said.
Marnie reached up and unclasped the small silver locket at her throat. She thumbed it open and took out the needle. It was two inches, bright as a fish bone, and she held it up between two fingers so the alley light caught it.
"She's still alive back there," Marnie said. "The woman on the sidewalk. He didn't finish. I want her to see him again before this is over. I want her to know it was the last thing he ever saw too."
The man started to thrash. Joaquin put a knee into his spine and he stopped thrashing and started crying.
"That's one idea," Joaquin said. "What's the rest of them?"
Marnie folded the needle back into the locket and clicked it shut. Then she took the locket off her neck and put it in Joaquin's front shirt pocket, patting it flat.
"That one, you handle," she said. "I want the other thing. I want to see how long the beard holds up when he can't breathe right."
Joaquin smiled down at the man under his knee. The rain picked up on the loading bay's tin lip and drummed there, and down Ransom Avenue a light changed from red to green for no one.
Joaquin kept his knee in the man's spine and reached into his own front pocket. His fingers came out with the locket and the needle pinched between them. Rain beaded on the silver and ran off. He held it up where the man could see it.
"That's a needle," the man said. His voice went back to whining, quick, the way a dog turns circles before it lies down. "What are you gonna do with a needle."
"You'll see, sir."
Joaquin put the needle between his teeth and hauled the man up by the back of his coat. The man's feet scrambled for the wet concrete and found it. Joaquin got one arm twisted up behind his shoulder and walked him back down the alley, past the chain, toward Ransom Avenue and the streetlight.
Marnie followed with her hands in her pockets. She watched the man's shoulders the whole way and counted his breaths. Short. Fast. He was already crying again, quiet about it, and she liked the sound better than the whining.
The woman was still on the sidewalk under the pole. She had rolled a little and gotten a hand under her cheek. Blood ran from her nose down into her hair. When Marnie crouched beside her the woman flinched, and Marnie put a hand flat on her shoulder.
"Hey," Marnie said. "Stay with me. There's something you need to see."
The woman's eyes didn't focus right. Marnie took her by the jaw and turned her face toward the street. Joaquin had the man kneeling in the gutter with his head down, and the man was trying to pray now, mumbling it into the asphalt.
"That him?" Marnie asked.
The woman's mouth worked. She tried to pull her face away and Marnie held it. "That's him," the woman whispered.
"Good. Watch."
Joaquin bent over the puddle and pushed the man's face down into it. Not all the way, just his chin and mouth. The man sputtered and bucked and Joaquin held him there steady, counting out loud, one, two, three. When he let up the man came up gasping, beard black with dirty water, and Joaquin pushed him back down. Four. Five. Six.
The woman on the sidewalk started to shake. Marnie kept her hand on the woman's shoulder and watched the man's legs kick against the curb.
"Please," the man said, when Joaquin let him up. Water ran off his beard and he sucked air in through his mouth. "Please, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'll never—"
Joaquin tipped his head back down. Seven. Eight. Nine.
Marnie let go of the woman's jaw and stood. She walked over to where the man knelt and crouched in front of him. His eyes were open wide and streaming and his beard was flat to his neck like a seal's coat. She took the needle out of Joaquin's hand and turned the man's face up to hers.
"Look at me," she said.
He looked at her. She put the needle against the soft place under his jaw where the pulse ran. He went very still.
"You hit her until she stopped moving," Marnie said. "You know what I do to men like you? I don't hit. I go in and I stay in. I take the thing that makes you loud and I make it quiet."
She pushed the needle in an inch. Not deep. Enough. The man made a noise like a kettle and tried to pull back, and Joaquin's hand closed on the back of his neck and held him there.
Marnie drew the needle down the line of his throat. It went in easy through the wet skin. The blood came up thin at first, then all at once, hot and dark down over the beard and into the collar of the quilted coat. The man grabbed at her wrist. He didn't have the strength to move it. She opened him wide, corner to corner, and the sound he made was the sound of a man with his hand in a door.
"You're already dripping," Marnie said. "Look at that. The whole beard's ruined."
She stepped back and let the blood go. Joaquin held him upright, patient, until the man's weight went slack and his mouth stopped. Then he laid him down in the gutter, on his side, facing the streetlight like a man who had finally fallen asleep on the job.
The woman on the sidewalk was watching. Her breath came in short wet gulps and she was crying now, no sound to it. Marnie went back and crouched beside her.
"Thank you," the woman said. It came out cracked. "Thank you."
Marnie looked at her. She had a bruise coming up under her eye already, a bad one, and one shoe off. She was maybe thirty-five. She probably had a kid somewhere, or a mother, or somebody who wondered. Marnie took a breath and put the needle back in the locket and clipped it around her neck.
"You're welcome," she said. "You don't know us. You never saw our faces."
The woman shook her head. "Never saw you."
"Say it."
"I never saw you."
Marnie patted her on the shoulder, twice, the way she patted the HOA treasurer when the budget passed. Then she stood and walked back to the car and got in the passenger seat.
Joaquin came out of the alley a minute later. He had taken off the coat he'd worn over his shirt and left it balled somewhere dark. He opened the driver's door, got in, and started the engine before he looked at her. The lemon cleaner smell came back. His hands were clean.
"El Paso," he said.
Marnie laughed. It came out low and she put her head back against the headrest and let the rain run down the windshield in sheets.
"Do you want the radio," he asked.
"No."
He put the car in gear and pulled out slow, and the streetlight went past the window and the two shapes under it went past, one kneeling, one still, and then they were just brake lights in the wet and nothing behind them.