Foxes (7 page)

Holding me. It’s like a dream.

I hope no one else can see.

By the time I step around the tree and inch along the wall to take a look at the warehouse building a little more closely, I think the adrenaline that got me here is starting to wear off—my hands are shaking, my legs feel like jelly, and I’m as cold as fuck.

Moving quietly, I creep in the shadows until I am crouched beneath the metal staircase, looking up. I can see the stars scattered through the metal slats, but that’s not what I’m looking for.

No lights are on in the warehouse, unless all the windows are blacked out so anyone outside can’t tell. That’s unlikely, I guess.

I wait, but the place remains dark. From the separate letter boxes next to the door, it looks to be divided up into quite a few flats.

I get a little jolt of excitement when I notice there is an electronic keypad entry instead of a lock. Can I figure out the code to get in? Maybe. But if I did, what would I do? Break in? I have no idea which flat he has gone into or even if it’s his. What if he caught me? Would it be worth it?

Too many questions again.

I rub my hands up and down my arms to warm my fingers up. It’s enough for tonight that I’ve found this place. Whether or not it’s where Dollman lives, he’s here, and it’s still a tether. Now I need to write everything down in my pad—every detail, before I forget.

When I get back to the swimming pool, I can curl up in my nest and decide what to do.

I try and tell myself I’ve done well tonight. This is good. This is something. But the satisfaction lasts for less than ten seconds. Dashiel’s face is there when I close my eyes. I won’t let myself forget.

After I’ve filled a page and a half with notes, I crawl out from beneath the stairwell and start walking back the way I came. I hunch over, protecting myself against the onslaught of wind that whips around me as I reach the park, and push my hands deep in my pockets to stop my fingers freezing.

It’s strange, but even though I’m only walking, some small part of me is yelling and running through the dark.

A LITTLE
while later, I’m in the shadows, out of sight, and on the other side of the road to where I saw Dieter earlier, when a car pulls up about twenty meters ahead of me. The door swings open and someone slumps out of it, landing in a heap in the road. The door slams shut and the car’s wheels spin as it speeds off, driving right past me. It’s going too fast for me to read the number plate. The windows are blacked out, the driver invisible.

My heart is hammering—not in a good way. Whoever landed in a heap is still in a heap, though they’re sitting up, they’re moving. Someone rushes out of the darkness across from me and kneels down in the road. Startled, I realize it’s Donna who’s rushed to help. She has her high heels in her hand, and she puts her arms around the girl on the ground. I’m pretty sure it’s a girl, but I know I’ve been wrong about that before. I quicken my pace.

As I step out of the shadows, I hold my hand up in a sort of hello wave so they don’t think I’m some weirdo creeping up on them. They don’t notice me—the girl in a heap is crying. Her shoes are in the road and her sparkly top is ripped. Donna is making shushing noises in her ear and trying to guide her backward onto the pavement. I can see Donna’s bra as she leans forward. The dress she’s wearing shimmers as though it’s made of rain-covered cobwebs.

“Donna?” I say, wondering if I should say anything at all. Perhaps it might be better if I went and stood back in the shadows for a bit. I’m not about to desert them, but sometimes being upset is something you want to do without too many eyes on you.

They turn to look at me. And even though she’s crying and makeup is staining her cheeks, I can see how the girl in a heap glitters brightly.

“Hey!” Donna says with a smile that looks like it’s causing her pain. “Can you give me a hand?”

I step forward, bending down to pick up the girl’s shoes from the middle of the road, glad no cars are around. The shoes are silver and weigh nothing at all. They’re pretty.

“I mean, can you come here and help me get her up?” Donna’s smile gets tighter by the second.

I crouch down, and feeling about as awkward as I’ve ever felt, I slip my hand around the girl’s back. With Donna lifting from the other side, we get her to her feet. The girl doesn’t help us any—she remains mostly limp. We walk down the road a little way until we reach the bus shelter. When we try to prop her up on a seat, the girl slips off onto the ground.

“Don’t suppose you saw what happened, did you?” Donna asks me.

I nod. The girl has her arms wrapped around her head. She has hair like Micky’s, all blonde and soft-looking. I sit down on the cold ground next to her.

“Can you remember the car?” Donna asks.

I shrug and pull my pad out, think for a minute, then write down what I remember. Donna presses three digits and puts her phone to her ear.

“Yeah, police,” she says.

“What are you doing?” the girl beside me asks quietly.

A familiar tightness squeezes my chest at the mention of the police. Images—of flashing lights, police officers with brittle smiles and notepads smaller and neater than mine, and Dashiel and the way he danced in the rain the last time I saw him, his head back, eyes closed—flick through my head in less than a heartbeat.

“Yeah, it’s an emergency,” Donna says into the phone. “I want to report an assault.”

With reflexes like lightning, the girl shoots to her feet and snatches the phone out of Donna’s hand.

“No,” she says, breathing hard and shaking her head. With her thumb, she disconnects the call. “No, no-no-no.” Her hands are trembling.

“Are you fucking crazy?” Donna looks furious. “Some guy chucks you out of his car in the middle of the road with rope burns on your wrists and a ripped top, you’re crying, and there’s some sick fuck out there killing prostitutes… and you don’t want me to call the police?”

Up until this point I’d assumed they knew each other. Now, as they stand staring each other down, I realize they don’t know each other at all.

“Give-me-back-my-phone,” Donna says through her teeth.

I put my pad away and stand up. I don’t like arguments. The atmosphere is full of shadows. It makes me feel lost and at sea.

“What’s your name?” I manage to say to the girl who glitters. She doesn’t make my heart beat faster, but she’s pretty, even with smudged makeup, and that alone makes me feel shy.

The girl turns away from Donna and looks me up and down before saying, “Davina, but everyone calls me Vinny.”

She places the phone in Donna’s outstretched hand.

“Thank you,” Donna mutters under her breath.

“What’s your name?” Vinny asks me. She’s still a bit shaky, but I sense she’s glad we’re not talking about the police anymore. She’s ignoring Donna’s death glare pretty well.

“Loki,” I say.

My skin prickles. I can feel Donna’s eyes on me. She knows my real name’s not Loki, but she doesn’t say anything.

“Like in that film? With the guy with the hammer?”

“Sort of,” I say softly.

“Wasn’t he the bad guy?” Vinny hugs her arms around herself as she studies me, and just like that, I sense we’re playing a game.

“Misunderstood.”

“Oh, I’ve known a lot of misunderstood guys. Mostly they turn out to be the bad guys.” Absently Vinny rubs her wrists. They’re red and sore-looking. She takes a deep, shaky breath and pushes her hair behind her ears.

“If they make you think they’re misunderstood, maybe they are bad guys,” I say, concentrating hard on getting the words out right. “People who are really misunderstood might not want you to think too much about it.”

Vinny raises her eyebrow. I’m watching her through my hair.

“Are you misunderstood? ’Cause I don’t think you’re a bad guy.” She cocks her head.

“I hunt the bad guys. I hunt the sharks.”

I don’t know what I’m doing. I have no idea what the rules of this game are. It’s new. It feels a bit like we’re both winning, though.

“For real? You’re crazy.” Vinny smiles, full on, dazzling.

Out the corner of my eye I can see Donna smiling too. Their smiles are like helium, and I’m lighter than air.

Vinny leans forward and peers beneath my hair. “How old are you?”

“Eighteen.” I’m not normally so honest, but I’m so featherlight I’m almost floating away.

“What happened to your face?”

And just like that, I fall back to earth. All my happy feelings go. The game is lost.

I shrug. “I don’t remember.”

It’s the only answer I ever give.

WE WALK
Vinny back to the huge bed-and-breakfast where she shares a room. It’s an imposing redbrick building. Vinny tells us it was once part of an old mental hospital. It’s all the way over the other side of the park. The same park I followed Dollman across earlier.

We walk up the cracked concrete path to the front door. Donna doesn’t say anything, and I never do anyway, but Vinny turns her head and gives me a sad smile before putting her hand on my arm and leaning in close to whisper in my ear.

“Don’t let her call the police. The guy was my pimp. After tonight I’m getting out of this.”

She presses a cold perfumy finger to my lips and I sort of taste the chemical smell. I wish I could remember more about the car—I know Vinny doesn’t want me to ask her. Dashiel told me pimps take care of their own business and not to get involved. He never had a pimp, though plenty of them pestered him.

“Sometimes I wonder why I fucking bother,” Donna mutters as we walk away. “That girl was quite fucking happy to be treated like that. Quite fucking happy to be fucked over. Pisses me off.”

I shrug. I don’t want to argue. I understand why Vinny didn’t want to go to the police, because they’re the same reasons Dashiel didn’t like going to the police—they treat you like you’re the criminal for doing what you do. Dashiel said they make you feel inhuman, and deep down you’re scared they’re right: you really are nothing more than a piece of meat because you sell your body out here.

“What if that guy was the fucking one? What if that guy was the killer and she didn’t fucking want to go to the police? Doesn’t that make her responsible for the next person who gets hurt? Doesn’t she want to fucking stop it?”

I wish Donna would stop. I think she wants me to walk her home, but I don’t want to be part of this conversation.

I keep my mouth shut.

“Sorry,” Donna says after a while.

She hugs her coat tighter around herself as the wind gets stronger. It whips her black hair in every direction. My hair would be doing the same if I didn’t have my hood up. I think mostly she’s just shaken up.

The mist over the park turns to rain. I start to worry that I’m going to run out of dry clothes if what I’m wearing gets soaked again. I really need to get a coat—but the one place I can get a coat from, I’m not sure I’m ready to face quite yet. Not on my own.

Donna starts to limp a little. “Hold up a sec. Sore feet,” she says.

I stand under a creaky grocery-shop awning and wait while she slips her shoes back on.

As we walk on, I sense she wants to link arms. Dashiel would link arms with her. But all she does is step in close and our arms brush occasionally as we walk. It’s okay. Some of the other girls she hangs around with used to stare at me, but Donna never did. She never made me feel uncomfortable. She never asked me anything awkward, not even inadvertently. No questions that flattened me like Vinny’s had done.

“You smell good,” she says softly after a few quiet minutes. “Dashiel always said you smelled of flowers.”

I blush, glad she can’t see. He never told me he noticed that.

“It’s nice.” She smiles.

Dashiel always smelled of caramel and vanilla. It was the body cream he used. Sometimes I think about buying a tube of it, to remember, but I think it might make me too sad. The sensible part of my brain thinks maybe it’s a bit weird too, trying to hold on so tightly to something that’s already slipped away. It’s like my stupid wishing for Dashiel’s name to be the one that lights up my phone. Only it’s not my phone anymore. It’s the phone I gave to Micky.

But however sensibly I think about these things, it doesn’t stop me wishing.

WE REACH
Donna’s block. She shares a sublet two-bedroomed flat with four other girls on the seventh floor.

“Thanks for walking me home. No one wants to be out here alone now, you know,” she whispers.

I nod—I do know.

“Come up,” she says.

I shake my head. I have stuff to do, sharks to hunt, my own bed to find.

“Please come up for a bit.” She doesn’t look at me when speaks.

I chew my lip, perplexed that she’s asked me twice. “Why?” The question just comes out.

Donna doesn’t say anything for a while. She strokes the worn white plastic of her coat sleeve. I’m surprised to see she bites her nails too, like Micky.

“Come in out of the rain and I’ll tell you.”

She tugs my arm and I follow her inside.

We walk through the too-bright entranceway to stand under the stairs, out of the sweep of the security camera.

She slips her shoes off. They’ve seen better days. It occurs to me that’s why she takes them off and carries them all the time—she doesn’t want to ruin them further. They’re so neat and delicate it makes me cringe at my heavy boots.

“I know we don’t know each other that well,” she says in an intense whisper. She looks at me, and then she looks away. A door bangs somewhere far above us. “But you were Dashiel’s best friend. He really cared about you. You know what he’d do when he was sad or low?” My throat feels tight. I close my eyes. “He’d call you. Or he’d go see you. He needed you. He was a sweet guy. He had a lot of friends, and I know I was one of them, but you meant something else to him. I’m not even going to speculate what it was, you know, but it must have been something fucking huge. And it only feels right that someone should be there for you. He’d want someone to be there for you. It hurts, I know it hurts, but I want you to know you don’t have to get through this on your own.”