Chapter 3: The Hunt
Over the next week, Marnie watched them come and go like she was studying specimens under glass. Vera left at seven forty each morning in her sedan, heels clicking across the driveway, and returned at six with takeout bags and the faint smell of gin. Joaquin tended the garden. He bought groceries. He waved at passing neighbors with an apologetic little smile, the kind a beaten dog gives after it has been kicked once too often.
But at night, the sounds came through the walls. The thud of a body against drywall. The crash of something ceramic. Vera's voice, a low venomous rasp that carried through the shared fence line, calling him a useless faggot, a waste of oxygen, a pathetic little cunt who could not even get his wife wet. And Joaquin took it. He took it the way a man takes a beating he has paid for.
Marnie lay awake in her own bed, Hugh snoring softly beside her, and listened. Her hands ached. That old familiar itch, that antsy crawling beneath her skin, had sharpened into something with teeth. She had been so close. She had stood over Vera's sleeping form with her needle and her knife, ready to prune that particular branch of ugliness from the world, and she had let Joaquin talk her out of it. She had believed him when he said he would handle it.
Foolish. A decade of careful hunting, and she had let a pair of dark restless eyes and a matching darkness talk her out of a clean kill.
She should have known he did not have the balls.
By the following Thursday, the itch had become a pulsing thing. Marnie found herself gripping the paring knife under the kitchen counter during breakfast, feeling the familiar weight of it, the balance. Hugh ate his eggs and read his phone. He asked about the HOA meeting on Saturday. She said she would handle it. He did not notice the knife in her hand or the way her knuckles had gone white.
She needed to hunt. She needed to find someone who deserved it, someone new, someone who had not yet seen her coming. She had started making a list in her head. The man at the hardware store who had spoken to the teenage cashier like she was trash. The contractor who had overbilled Mrs. Ellison for work he never finished. The new hire at the library who had laughed when a homeless man asked for water. None of them quite fit. None of them felt right.
That night, at 1:47 a.m., she heard the tapping.
Three soft knocks against the kitchen window, unhurried, almost polite. Marnie set down the glass of water she had been holding and crossed the dark kitchen. She pulled back the edge of the curtain.
Joaquin stood on her back porch, hands in the pockets of his rumpled cardigan. In the low light he looked almost spectral, pale and thin, but his eyes caught the glow of the porch lamp. He smiled. That same neighborly smile from the morning he had winked at her, but there was something else underneath it now. An invitation.
Marnie let the curtain fall. She closed her window shade with a decisive snap, then walked to the back door, grabbed her shawl from the hook, and stepped out into the cool night air.
Neither of them spoke as they walked. Their footsteps fell in an easy rhythm on the sidewalk, past dark houses and sleeping lawns, under the watchful glow of porch lights that had all been turned off hours ago. Joaquin walked with his shoulders still slightly hunched, but the posture was different now. Loose. Alive, somehow. In the dark, away from his wife's eye, he moved like a man who had finally taken off a costume.
They talked about nothing at first. The weather. The HOA. The way the Henderson's dog barked at three in the morning every night without fail. Then the talk turned strange.
"Twelve years," Marnie said, and she did not have to clarify. "She was a supervisor at a bakery I worked at for a summer." She was a woman who delighted in humiliation, who made a game of sending the quiet girls home in tears. I gave her a birthday gift she never opened. A needle. A very long needle, slipped in behind her ear while she slept."
Joaquin nodded, slow and appreciative. "My first was a man who thought he owned the street I walked on. I was nineteen. He followed me three blocks after last call, telling me what he would do to me when he caught me. I let him catch me. I wanted to know what it felt like." His hands were still in his pockets. "It felt like I had been asleep my whole life and suddenly woke up. I cried for an hour after. Not from guilt. From joy."
They walked past the last house on the block, and the pavement gave way to a dirt path that curved into the treeline. The streetlights behind them flickered and faded, swallowed by the dark canopy of oak and maple. Marnie did not slow down. She stepped onto the path like she had walked it a hundred times, though she had never once been this far from her cul-de-sac at night.
"Where are we going?" she asked finally.
Joaquin stopped in a small clearing, just beyond the reach of the last porch light. He turned to face her, and his grin widened, showing teeth.
"Nowhere, really. Just thought it was a perfect night for a walk." He tilted his head. "Maybe a hunt."
Marnie stopped. The itch in her hands had transmuted into something else. Something bright and humming, like a tuning fork struck against her sternum. She looked around the clearing. The trees pressed close, black and patient. Somewhere in the distance, she could hear the faint rush of the highway. No houses. No lights. No witnesses but the moon.
Joaquin pointed deeper into the trees, where the path split into two barely visible branches. "There's a transit shelter about half a mile that way, at the edge of the county. The night bus drops off there. People sleep under the pines between here and the overpass. Drifters. Runaways. People with nowhere else to be." He shrugged. "People no one will miss."
He looked at her. His dark eyes were almost gentle, and that made it worse.
"First one to find a stray wins," he said.
Marnie laughed. It came out of her throat without her permission, a low husky sound she had not made in years. The paring knife was already in her palm. She had slipped it into her shawl pocket before leaving the house, without consciously deciding to. It felt cool and familiar against her skin.
She looked at him. Looked at the treeline, at the twin paths disappearing into the dark. She could go home. She could pretend this was all a strange dream. She could climb back into her bed next to Hugh and wake up to her bake sale and her HOA meeting and bake another perfect pie.
In the clearing, Joaquin waited.
"Fine," Marnie said. The word tasted like butterscotch. Sweet and dangerous.
She chose the left path and did not look back. Behind her, she heard his soft laugh, and then the rustle of fabric as he moved into the dark after her. The moon slid behind a cloud. The trees closed in. And for the first time in ten years, Marnie Boyd went to work with company.
The left path wound deeper into the treeline, the earth soft and uneven beneath Marnie's bare feet. She had not stopped to put on shoes. The shawl was wrapped tight around her shoulders, the paring knife warm in her palm, and the dark pressed in around her like a familiar blanket.
She walked slowly. Carefully. Her breath came shallow through her nose, tasting the night air for traces of anything human. Cigarette smoke. Cheap cologne. The sour tang of sweat and neglect. She had learned to hunt this way years ago, in the hours after midnight, when the world softened and the predators came out to play.
The path narrowed. Roots snagged at her ankles. She stepped over a fallen branch and paused, listening.
Behind her, nothing. Joaquin had taken the other path, and whatever sounds he made were swallowed by the distance between them. She wondered if he was as good at this as he claimed. She wondered if he was lying. She wondered if she cared.
Ahead, the trees thinned slightly, and she caught the glow of a distant streetlamp through the trunks. The transit shelter, she guessed. Half a mile, he had said. She could hear the faint hiss of tires on wet asphalt now, the low rumble of an engine idling somewhere beyond the treeline.
She left the path.
The underbrush was sparse here, mostly ferns and dead leaves that crackled if she moved too fast. She slowed to a crawl, dropping to a crouch, using her hands to feel her way forward. The knife stayed in her right palm, pressed against her thigh.
A sound. Small. Human.
She froze.
It came from her left, from a cluster of pines near the overpass embankment. A cough, wet and phlegmy. The rustle of a sleeping bag. Someone muttered in their sleep, a wordless complaint, and then settled back into stillness.
Marnie crept closer.
The moonlight broke through the canopy just enough to show her the shape of him. A man, lying curled on his side beneath a makeshift shelter of cardboard and a blue tarp. His sleeping bag was stained and lumpy. Beside his head, a half-empty bottle of something amber caught the light.
She watched him for a long moment. His chest rose and fell in a steady rhythm. His face was slack with sleep, mouth slightly open, stubble gray against weathered skin. He had the look of a man who had been ground down by the world, who had made choices or had choices made for him, and who now lived at the mercy of weather and strangers.
Not her usual type.
Her usual type had power. Her usual type used that power to hurt people who could not fight back. Her usual type walked through the world with their cruelty on display, daring anyone to stop them.
This man was just tired.
Marnie stood there, knife in hand, and felt the itch pulse through her like a second heartbeat. She could do it. He would never wake. He would never know. In the morning, someone would find him cold and still, and they would write his name in a file somewhere, and no one would come looking.
But that was not why she was here.
She backed away. One step. Two. The leaves shifted beneath her weight, and she held her breath, but the man did not stir.
She moved on.
She found a woman next. Huddled beneath the overpass itself, wrapped in a filthy coat, a shopping cart tipped on its side nearby. Marnie watched her sleep for a moment, then slipped past.
She did not know what she was looking for. That was the problem. She had told Joaquin she would hunt, and she had meant it, but her hands were not cooperating. The itch was there, sharp and hungry, but her eyes kept passing over the sleeping forms without settling.
None of them felt right.
A sound behind her. Footsteps. Slow and deliberate, crunching through the underbrush.
Marnie turned, knife coming up automatically.
Joaquin stood at the edge of the tree line, hands still in his pockets. His cardigan was rumpled, his hair mussed, and there was a flush on his pale cheeks that had not been there before. He smiled when he saw her, a lazy knowing smile that made her stomach clench.
"Nothing?" he asked.
She lowered the knife. "Not yet."
"Me neither." He stepped closer, loose and unhurried. "I found a man sleeping under the old railroad bridge. Looked like he had been there a while. Had a knife on him, but he never heard me coming." He paused. "I could have taken him. I wanted to. But he reminded me of someone I used to know, and I could not do it."
Marnie said nothing.
"What about you?" he asked. "You find anyone?"
"A man by the pines. A woman under the overpass."
"And?"
She shook her head. "They were just sleeping."
Joaquin studied her for a long moment. The moonlight caught his eyes, dark and unblinking, and she had the strange feeling that he could see through her skin, into the wiring beneath.
"You want to know what I think?" he said.
"No."
"I think you are a woman who kills for a reason. A woman who needs her victims to deserve it." He tilted his head. "I am the opposite. I do not care if they deserve it. I just like the way it feels. The power. The control. The sound they make when they understand there is no one coming to save them."
Marnie's grip tightened on the knife.
"But I think," Joaquin continued, "that we could work well together. You with your reasons. Me with my hunger. We could cover each other's weaknesses."
"Or we could kill each other," Marnie said.
"Also possible." He grinned. "But wouldn't that be a shame? Two of us, in the same neighborhood, after all these years. If I had known you were there, I might have moved in sooner."
Marnie looked at him. The itch was still there, pulsing beneath her skin, but it had changed. It was no longer aimed at him. It was aimed at the world, the whole sleeping world beyond the treeline, and for the first time in years she did not have to aim it alone.
"He's still there," she said. "The man by the pines."
Joaquin's grin widened. "Is he?"
"He was sleeping when I left."
"Then perhaps we should go back." He took a step toward her, then another, until he was close enough that she could smell him. Soap and sweat and something metallic underneath. "Consider it a test. A first kill together. To see if we can trust each other."
Marnie considered it. She considered the man's sleeping face, the bottle by his head, the cardboard shelter that would be gone by morning. He was not a good man, probably. He was not a bad man either. He was just a man who had ended up here, in the dark, under the pines.
She turned and walked back toward the tree line.
Joaquin followed.
The pine needles gave way beneath Marnie's feet as she retraced her steps, guided by the memory of the man's wet cough, the glint of the amber bottle. Joaquin moved behind her, quiet as a shadow, and she found herself adjusting her own footfalls to match his rhythm. Two predators, same prey. The thought should have disgusted her. Instead, it made her grip the knife tighter.
The old man was still there. Still curled on his side beneath the blue tarp, his chest rising and falling in that same steady rhythm. The bottle had tipped over at some point, spilling a dark stain into the dirt. He smelled of sweat and cheap whiskey and the particular sourness of a body that had not been washed in weeks.
Marnie knelt. The knife was in her hand, warm from her palm. She positioned herself over him, one knee on either side of his hip, and raised the blade to the soft hollow beneath his jaw. One quick motion. He would never wake. He would never know. She had done this a dozen times before, always with a reason, always with a target who deserved it. This man was not her usual type. But he was here, and the itch demanded satisfaction, and Joaquin was watching.
She felt his hand on her shoulder.
"Wait," he said.
Marnie stilled. The blade hovered a finger's width from the old man's throat.
"What are you doing?" Joaquin asked.
"What does it look like?"
"It looks like you're about to end him without even looking at him." He stepped past her, moving with that loose unhurried grace he had worn since they entered the trees, and knelt in front of the old man. His head tilted. His dark eyes traveled over the man's body with the slow deliberate attention of a collector examining a piece he was considering for purchase. The gray stubble. The cracked lips. The weathered hands with their broken nails. The thin chest beneath the stained t-shirt.
"I'm imprinting this to memory," Joaquin said softly. "For later."
Marnie lowered the knife. "Why? The longer we hang around, the more likely it is we get caught."
"Isn't that the best part?" He looked up at her, and in the dim light filtering through the pines, his eyes were almost black. "I know you're used to justified quick killings. In and out. Clean. But there's something special about savoring it. The anticipation. The way the moment stretches when you know exactly what's coming and they don't."
He reached into his pocket and pulled out a small cloth, folded neatly. Marnie caught the sharp sweet smell of chloroform before he even brought it to the old man's face. He pressed it over the man's nose and mouth, holding it there with a practiced gentleness. The old man's breathing deepened, then slowed. His body went slack.
"Come on," Joaquin said, rising. He bent and lifted the old man like he weighed nothing, draping him over his shoulder with an ease that spoke of long practice. "I know a place we can take our guest."
Marnie stood there for a moment, knife still in hand, watching Joaquin's thin frame carry the unconscious man through the trees. Everything in her screamed to run. This was wrong. This was not how she worked. She killed people who deserved it, people who hurt others, and she did it on her own terms, on her own schedule. She did not follow strange men into the woods to do unspeakable things to sleeping strangers.
And yet her feet moved. She followed him.
The shack was a quarter mile deeper into the treeline, hidden behind a tangle of blackberry brambles and dead oak. It had once been a hunting cabin, maybe, or a gardener's shed for a property that no longer existed. The windows were boarded over. The door hung crooked on its hinges. Joaquin pushed it open with his shoulder and ducked inside.
The interior was bare. Dust motes hung in the thin shafts of moonlight that slipped through the cracks in the walls. A single bulb hung from the ceiling, but Joaquin did not try to turn it on. He laid the old man on the floor in the center of the room, then crouched beside him and began going through his pockets.
A crumpled twenty. A bus pass. A keyring with two keys and a small plastic dolphin. A photograph, creased and faded, of a woman and a child standing in front of a house with a red door. Joaquin studied it for a moment, then set it aside with the other items.
He stripped the old man methodically. The t-shirt first, then the pants. The worn socks. The underwear. He folded each piece and placed it in a neat pile near the wall, as if he were doing laundry rather than preparing a man for something unspeakable. When he was done, the old man lay naked on the dusty floor, pale and vulnerable and still deeply unconscious.
Marnie stood in the doorway. Her mind screamed at her to leave. This was wrong. This was so far outside the careful lines she had drawn around her double life that she could not even see the lines anymore. And yet something inside her stirred. Something that was not fear and not disgust, something that felt disturbingly like recognition.
"What do we do now?" she asked, and her voice sounded strange to her own ears. Distant. Curious.
"Normally I would tie him up and sit next to him, waiting for him to wake up." Joaquin looked at her, and there was something almost vulnerable in his expression, a crack in the mask of easy confidence. "But with you here, I'm at a loss."
They stood there, the three of them. The old man on the floor. Joaquin beside him. Marnie in the doorway. The silence stretched, thick and heavy.
Then something moved in Marnie. Something old and buried, something that had been waiting for permission. She walked forward before she had consciously decided to, and knelt beside the old man. She found a rag in the corner, dusty but usable, and wet it with water from her shawl pocket. She began to clean his face, wiping away the grime and the road dust, revealing the lines and wrinkles underneath. The face of a man who had lived hard and slept rough and probably died a thousand small deaths before ever reaching this moment.
Joaquin watched her, and his expression shifted into something like awe.
"How kind of you," he said softly.
"It's the least I could do," Marnie replied. "Besides, his face is too dirty to see him clearly."
The old man stirred. His eyes fluttered open, unfocused at first, then sharpening with alarm as he took in his surroundings. The bare walls. The dust. The absence of his clothes. His body tensed, and his hands flew up, ready to fight or flee.
Then he saw Marnie.
She was still straddling him, her shawl pooling around her hips. In the half-darkness of the shack, with her auburn curls loose around her shoulders and her freckled face lit by the thin moonlight, she must have looked like something out of a dream. The old man's hands found her hips. His grip was rough, calloused. Below her, she felt him hardening against the thin cotton of her nightgown.
"Well, well," the old man rasped, his voice cracked from sleep. "This must be my lucky day."
He ground his naked hips against her, a clumsy graceless motion, and grinned up at her with yellowed teeth. He smelled of whiskey and sweat and the particular desperation of a man who had not been touched in years.
"Is it?" Marnie said.
She smiled. It was not her neighbor smile, the one she wore at HOA meetings and bake sales. It was the smile she wore when she slipped a needle behind a sleeping supervisor's ear, when she watched the light fade from eyes that had once mocked her. It was the smile of a predator who had just realized the hunt was not over.
It was only beginning.
Behind her, in the corner, Joaquin sat quietly, his dark eyes gleaming in the shadows. He did not move. He did not speak. He simply watched.