Samson
It’s fitting, I think, that River and I arrange to meet at the dockyard where it all went wrong, where she was shot and taken away on the boat, and I ran away and left her. After we had sex, I told Anna that I was going to see River, to end it all once and for all. I told her to be safe, and led her to the safe room in the basement of the house. A vault just like the one at Point Lookout. I also gave her the numbers of Jack and some of my other contacts, men who I trust. She didn’t want me to leave, I could tell, but she accepted it. Because she knows there’s no other choice, I think. It’s this or wait for River to strike first, and if River strikes first, there may not be a second time.
It’s late afternoon, but clouds have moved across the sun and everything is grey. I stand on a balcony on the far side of the dockyard, on the balcony of an abandoned warehouse. We arranged to meet below where I stand now, near the water. But I won’t be a fool and wait precisely where we arranged. I don’t know River anymore. Maybe she only arranged this meeting to kill me. Maybe she only wants revenge for me leaving her. But I thought she was dead! Yes, but that won’t mean much to her, will it?
I clear my mind, find my center, and watch the clearing below me. In my hand I hold my pistol, scoped and silenced. I know what I have to do. If I can’t talk her out of it, she’ll have to die. Regretful, maybe, but necessary. I won’t let her hurt Anna. That’s something I’d die before I let happen. I won’t let Anna be the victim of my mistakes. I have one mission now, and that’s to protect Anna, protect the woman I—
‘Love?’ Richard laughs. ‘Were you going to say love, Samson? Do you really love this woman? How can you? You don’t even know her!’
But Black Knight is wrong. I do know her. She’s kind and loves animals and has nightmares about Eric and her father and she’s passionate and, most of all, she understands me. Understands me in a way even Uncle Richard didn’t. Understands that I’m not just a killer.
I shake my head, shaking away the thoughts. I need to focus.
I wait for an hour, watching, but River doesn’t appear.
Suddenly, panic grips me. What if this meeting is a ruse? What if, even now, she’s on her way to the mansion to hurt Anna? Maybe the servants aren’t as loyal as I told Anna. Maybe something . . . I grit my teeth, anger lancing through my jaw. Images fill my mind, twisted images of River causing Anna pain.
I’m about to turn around, leave the balcony and walk down the stairs and get back into my car, when somebody bursts through the door behind me. I swivel—too late.
River presses the barrel of her gun against my spine and wraps her arm around my neck.
“Samson,” she says. “It’s good to see you again.”
###
She presses the barrel of the gun firmly into my back and squeezes my shoulder with her hand. I half-turn, as much as her grip will allow me, and manage to catch a glimpse of her face. Her hair is no longer dyed pink; now it’s a dull brown, cropped military-style close to her head. Her face is more haggard than when I knew her, and there’s a strange look in her eyes, almost like a mixture between hate and regret.
“River,” I say. “You don’t have to be so aggressive, you know.”
“Oh, no? Really?” She giggles softly. “Then why are you up here, looking down on our meeting place? And what’s that pesky little thing in your hand? It wouldn’t be a gun, would it? Give it here, please.”
I sigh and hand her the pistol. She snatches it from me with the hand that was resting on my shoulder and stuffs it into her waistband. “Really, Samson, what happened to you? I never would’ve been able to sneak up on your like that back in the day. Has this cute new piece you’ve replaced me with muddled your brain?”
“Are you going to kill me, River?” I ask. There’s no fear in my voice, and little fear in my chest. There’s a sense of apprehension, but that’s for Anna. If River kills me here, she’ll be free to go after Anna. Too late, I realize it was a mistake coming here.
“Maybe,” she says. “I haven’t decided yet. I should, though.” She twists the gun, and the barrel presses even harder against my skin. “Yes, I should. Would you like to know what happened after you deserted me?”
“You were shot, River. How the hell was I supposed to know you survived? Up until a few days ago, I thought you were dead—”
“Quiet!” she screams. A flock of birds that are perched on a power cable near the balcony squawk and flutter into the air, flapping madly. “Don’t lecture me again, please,” she goes on, her voice calmer. “You deserted me, Samson. That’s all. Plain and simple. You didn’t even try and come after me, did you?”
“No,” I admit. “No, I didn’t, because you had a goddamn bullet in your chest.”
“Missed everything important, you’ll be glad to know, lover boy.”
“I am glad you’re alive, River, of course I am.”
“So what’s with the bitch?”
“Don’t call her that,” I growl, before I can stop myself.
“You see!” she cries. “Don’t act like you’re glad I’m back and then get all defensive over that whore.”
“River,” I say, voice shaky. “Don’t provoke me. It won’t end well.”
“For who? Me?” She laughs. “I think you’re forgetting who’s holding the gun, Samson. But that’s not important. I was telling a story. Okay, so listen closely. I want you to know what you did to me before you die. What you made happen.”
I make to contradict her, but she prods me with the gun.
“Uh-uh,” she grunts. “If you talk one more time without my permission I’m going to kneecap you.”
She says this matter-of-factly. There’s no doubt in my mind that she really would shoot me in the knee just for interrupting her. I bite down, fighting away my words, and ready myself for an attack. I don’t know when it will come, but it will, and I’ll be ready. I relax my muscles, like a hunter before pouncing. She thinks she has me, she thinks there’s nothing I can do, and that’s a weakness. She’ll drop her guard and I’ll make her pay. But for now, I’m forced to listen to her.
“You remember the tall Chinese man, I bet. How could you forget him? He’s a dangerous man, Samson. A very dangerous man. A sadist. When we were far out in the water he lifted me up and made to throw me overboard, thinking I was dead. But when I started begging for my life—as we all do, when it comes down to it, as you will in a few minutes—he sat me down and tended to my wound. I thought, maybe, he was doing it for my good. I was wrong, Samson, I was very, very wrong. He only tended to my wounds so that he could make me his plaything, and he did just that, oh yes, in the worst possible ways you can imagine. He took me to an apartment somewhere. I was groggy, half-conscious, and I had no clue where I was.
“And for two years, Samson, he tortured me. At first it was cutting. He would take me out of dark dank room where he kept me, tied me to a table, and cut for me hours on end. He only spoke broken English, but even so I kept asking him, over and over and over, what he wanted. I asked until my voice was hoarse, but he never understood me. He just cut and cut and cut.”
She laughs shortly, more of a cough, and then goes on: “After a month or two—time was difficult to tell in that place—he got bored of cutting. He began experimenting on me, you know, seeing how far he could push me. Pretty soon he got—sexual, if you can even call it that.” I heard her swallow, a big lump in her throat. “He reached down and he—he—and he did this many, many times, over and over, just with his fingers at first.”
“I don’t need to hear this, River,” I say.
She smacks me over the back of the head with the butt of the pistol. I stumble forward, head pounding, and grip the railing of the balcony. Then she shoves the gun against my spine again.
“You will hear it,” she says. “You’ll hear anything I want you to hear.”
Blood sticks to my hair and drips down the back of my neck. My head is trembling. It feels like there’s something pressing against my skull. I stand up straight, forcing my legs to be still.
“It went on like that for a long time, Samson. It went on and on and on. He raped me, tortured me, did everything to me a person can do. I was broken by the end of it. But all through it, I thought of you. I thought of you leaving me and I got angrier and angrier. I got insanely angry until the rage broke through my numbness and fixed something in me my torturer had broken. I used the rage, Samson, used it like a weapon. He had become lax, thought I was finished, and so one day when he unlocked the door and came in to retrieve his toy, I jumped at him, buried my teeth in his neck and tore as hard as I could. He died, and I fled. Do you know where I was? New York, all that time, in a rundown neighborhood in Queens.
“I watched you for a long time, years, as you went about your work, as you got rich and started becoming picky about your jobs. I watched and as I watched I started to wonder how I felt. I wasn’t sure if it was hate or if there was a little bit of love left. I’m still not sure.” She sighs the last words, and something changes in her. She sounds vulnerable, and for a moment I feel sorry for her.
But that feeling doesn’t last long. Her emotions have made her slack; the gun isn’t as firm on my spine.
With one quick movement, I spin, head-butt her, and snatch the gun from her grip. My head pounds as her nose crunches against my forehead, pain spiking, but I ignore it. As she falls back, I leap at her, reach into her waistband, and retrieve my pistol. I aim both guns at her, grimacing.
“It didn’t have to come to this, River,” I say.
She lays curled up on the balcony, her face buried in her arms.
My fingers stroke the triggers. I will myself to fire, end it all here. But then her body starts to tremble. She’s sobbing, I realize with shock. River Mendoza, cold-hearted killer, is sobbing.
‘Fire, fire, fire!’ Black Knight, willing me on. A good man to me, but I know he wouldn’t hesitate if he was where I am now. He would shoot without a second thought, kill her, and push it from his mind.
But there is something horribly pitiful in the way she lays there, like a kicked animal, her body wrenching with sobs.
She looks up at me with puffy red eyes. “Do it, Samson,” she says quietly. “Just do it. I moved the body. I got your little friend involved in all this. Just do it. Put me out of my misery.”
“What happened to you?” I hear myself say. “Where’s your fight gone?”
“It died the first time that bastard cut me,” River says.
But that isn’t true, she fought him and won.
My hands are shaking, my fingers stroking the triggers. “You’ve spied on me, spied on Anna, you’ve disrupted her life and you’ve disrupted mine. If I don’t kill you now, you won’t stop.”
“All true,” she sobs. “All true, so do it.”
I will myself to fire. But her face is too wretched. I feel something twist in my belly. ‘Guilt?’ Uncle Richard roars, his voice deafening in my mind. ‘Is that guilt?’
I try to deny it, but I can’t. It’s guilt, red-hot guilt, guilt twisting my insides. She’s right. Despite everything she’s done, she’s right. I left her. We were partners on a job and I left her. It doesn’t matter that I never loved her, never wanted her in the same way she wanted me. When you get down to the facts, I left her to be tortured and raped.
I kneel down next to her curled-up body, press the silencer of my pistol against her forehead. She doesn’t flinch, doesn’t try and push the gun away. Her hands rest limply on her chest. She looks up at me expectantly, waiting. “I won’t stop,” she says. “I’ll never stop. Just do it. Do it!” she screams at me, and the reverberations move up the silencer through the pistol and into my hand, shaking.
I don’t know what’s wrong with me, don’t know what’s inside of me that’s stopping me from firing. It’s never happened before, not with any mark. I don’t think on a job, I just do. I try to find my killer’s center and fail. It’s not there. I’m alone, lost and alone with a choice before me I have no desire to make. I think of Anna, sweet Anna, Anna who deserves none of this, and yet I can’t fire.
I shake my head. “I can’t,” I say quietly. “Goddamn, I can’t kill you. You have to stop, River. Just promise me you’ll stop.”
“I won’t,” she says. “Don’t be a coward. I won’t stop.”
Fuck, I think, furious with myself. Fuck, fuck, fuck.
I lift the gun, aim, and smack River across the jaw. Her head slumps and her eyes close, but she’s still breathing.
Then I stand up, slide the guns into my waistband, and step over her.
I run down the stairs of the warehouse, desperate to get to Anna. I’ve just made things far more complicated than they had to be, I know.
Anna, I think, as I run. Anna, forgive me.