“You have a gun? Jack, what are you doing with a gun?”
“How come the people with guns always question why citizens have guns? I got it after the Poet, you know?”
She nodded. She understood.
“Well, then, if you’re okay, I’ll leave you here with your gun and call you in the morning. Maybe one of us will have a new idea about Angela by then.”
I nodded and knew that, Angela aside, it was one of those moments. I could reach out for what I wanted or I could let it go like I had a long time before.
“What if I don’t want you to leave?” I asked.
She looked at me without speaking.
“What if I’ve never gotten over you?” I asked.
Her eyes dropped to the floor.
“Jack… ten years is a lifetime. We’re different people now.”
“Are we?”
She looked back at me and we held each other’s eyes for a long moment. I then stepped in close, put my hand on the back of her neck and pulled her into a long, hard kiss that she did not fight or push away from.
Her phone dropped out of her hand and clunked to the floor. We grabbed at each other in some sort of emotional desperation. There was nothing gentle about it. It was about wanting, craving. Nothing loving, yet it was all about love and the reckless willingness to cross the line for the sake of intimacy with another human being.
“Let’s go back to the bedroom,” I whispered against her cheek.
She smiled into my next kiss, then we somehow managed to get to my bedroom without taking our hands off one another. We urgently pulled our clothes off and made love on the bed. It was over before I could think about what we were doing and what it might mean. We then lay side by side on our backs, the knuckles of my left hand gently caressing her breast. Both of us breathing in long, deep strides.
“Uh-oh,” she finally said.
I smiled.
“You are so fired,” I said.
And she smiled, too.
“What about you? The Times has to have some kind of rule about sleeping with the enemy, doesn’t it?”
“What are you talking about, ‘the enemy’? Besides, they laid me off last week. I’ve got one more week there and then I’m history.”
She suddenly was up on her side and looking down at me with concerned eyes.
“What?”
“Yeah, I’m a victim of the Internet. I got downsized and they gave me two weeks to train Angela and clear out.”
“Oh, my God, that’s awful. Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I don’t know. It just didn’t come up.”
“Why you?”
“Because I have a big salary and Angela doesn’t.”
“That’s so stupid.”
“You don’t have to convince me. But that’s how the newspaper business is run these days. It’s the same everywhere.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I don’t know, probably sit in that office and write the novel I’ve been talking about for fifteen years. I think the bigger question is what are we going to do now, Rachel?”
She averted her eyes and started rubbing my chest.
“I hope this wasn’t a one-time thing,” I said. “I don’t want it to be.”
She didn’t respond for a long time.
“Me, neither,” she finally said.
But that was all.
“What are you thinking?” I asked. “You always seem to go off to dwell on something.”
She looked at me with a half smile.
“What, you’re the profiler now?”
“No, I just want to know what you’re thinking about.”
“To be honest, I was thinking about something a man I was with a couple years ago said. We’d, uh, had a relationship and it wasn’t going to… work. I had my own hang-ups and I knew he was still holding out for his ex-wife, even though she was ten thousand miles away. When we talked about it, he told me about the ‘ single-bullet theory.’ You know what that is?”
“You mean like with the assassination of Kennedy?”
She mock-punched me in the chest with a fist.
“No, I mean like with the love of your life. Everybody’s got one person out there. One bullet. And if you’re lucky in life, you get to meet that person. And once you do, once you’re shot through the heart, then there’s nobody else. No matter what happens-death, divorce, infidelity, whatever-nobody else can ever come close. That’s the single-bullet theory.”
She nodded. She believed it.
“What are you saying, that he was your bullet?”
She shook her head.
“No, I’m saying he wasn’t. He was too late. You see, I’d already been shot by someone else. Someone before him.”
I looked at her for a long moment, then pulled her down into a kiss. After a few moments she pulled back.
“But I should go. We should think about this and everything else.”
“Just stay here. Sleep with me. We’ll get up early tomorrow and both get to work on time.”
“No, I have to go home now or my husband will worry.”
I sat up like a bolt. She started laughing and slipped off the bed. She began getting dressed.
“That wasn’t funny,” I said.
“I think it was,” she insisted.
I climbed off the bed and started getting dressed, too. She kept laughing in a punch-drunk sort of way. Eventually, I was laughing too. I pulled my pants and shirt on first and then started hunting around the bed for my shoes and socks. I found them all except for one sock. I finally got down on my knees and looked for it under the end of the bed.
And that was when the laughter stopped.
Angela Cook’s dead eyes stared at me from under the bed. I involuntarily propelled myself back on the carpet, smashing my back into the bureau and making the lamp on it wobble and then fall to the floor with a crash.
“Jack?” Rachel yelled.
I pointed.
“Angela’s under the bed!”
Rachel came quickly around to me. She was only wearing her black panties and white blouse. She got down to look.
“Oh, my God!”
“I thought you checked under the bed!” I said excitedly. “When I came in the room I thought you’d already looked.”
“I thought you did while I was checking out the closet.”
She got on her hands and knees and looked up and down the under-side of the bed for a long moment before turning to look back at me.
“She looks like she’s been dead about a day. Suffocation with a plastic bag. She’s naked and completely wrapped in a clear plastic sheet. Like she’s ready to be transported. Or maybe it was to contain the smell of decay. The scene is quite diff-”
“Rachel, please, I knew her. Can you please not analyze everything right now?”
I leaned my head back against the bureau and looked up at the ceiling.
“I’m sorry, Jack. For her and you.”
“Can you tell, did he torture her or just…?”
“I can’t tell. But we need to call the LAPD.”
“I know.”
“This is what we’ll say. We’ll say I brought you home, we searched the place and we found her. The rest we leave out. Okay?”
“Fine. Okay. Whatever you say.”
“I have to get dressed.”
She stood up and I realized the woman I had just made love to had completely disappeared. She was all bureau now. She finished getting dressed, then bent over to study the top of the bed at a side angle. I watched her start to pick hairs off the pillows so they couldn’t be collected by the crime scene team that would soon descend on my house. The whole time I didn’t move. I could still see Angela’s face from where I sat and I had to adjust myself to the reality of the situation.
I barely knew Angela and probably didn’t even like her too much but she was far too young and had far too much life ahead to suddenly be dead. I had seen a lot of dead bodies in my time and I had written about a lot of murders, including the killing of my own brother. But I don’t think anything I had ever seen or written about before affected me like seeing Angela Cook’s face behind that plastic bag. Her head was tilted back, so that if she’d been standing she would’ve been looking upward at me. Her eyes were open and frightened, almost glowing at me from the darkness under the bed. It seemed as though she were disappearing into that darkness, being pulled down into it and looking up at the last light. And it was then that she had made one last desperate push for life. Her mouth was open in a final, terrible scream.