Samson
Her apartment is much smaller than mine, but it seems bigger because it’s less cluttered. I walk into the hallway-cum-living room and then around a bend to the adjoined kitchen. The living room is a simple television, a couch, and a coffee table. A bookshelf sits off to the left, the books neatly aligned. Everything is clean and orderly, tidy, if not quite sparkling. The bookshelf holds some novels, but mostly books about animals. The kitchen is the same: every knife in place; the surface wiped clean.
I place the pizza and the wine on the counter and wonder if perhaps I’ve made a bit of a prick of myself. My plan was to charm her, to transfix her with my smile and then jaunt in here as though we were best friends. I underestimated her, I realize. She’s not the usual girl, the surface-level girl. No, Anna sees. Being who I am, that thought doesn’t exactly fill me with butterflies. My job relies on not being seen, after all.
“Where’s the wine opener?” I ask, as she walks into the kitchen.
She hasn’t changed; she hasn’t even put on a bra. I can see the outline of her small nipples clearly. I suppress a throaty growl. She’s too damn sexy. Her face is soft and her eyes are dark brown, almost black, giving her a slightly odd look, but good-odd, freaky, alluring, dangerous, weird, attractive, and a hundred other words which all come down to the same thing. Different, Anna is different, and I’m shocked by the response that grips me.
I close my eyes for a half-second, tell myself to get a hold, and then open them.
She smiles at me, a small, confused smile. “In that drawer,” she says, gesturing.
I take the corkscrew and begin opening the bottle. The light for the kitchen area is not turned on, only the living room light is. We stand in half-darkness, and for a moment I imagine stepping forward and grabbing one of her breasts. I thrust the thought away. Focus, I tell myself.
“Glasses?” I say, once the cork is pinned by the screw.
She leans up and opens one of the cupboards. Her t-shirt rides up and I catch a sliver of her belly, muscular, honed by hours and hours of training, just as my body is honed by hours and hours of killing.
I take the glasses from her, our hands touch briefly, and I’m sure something passes across her face. She walks away from me too quickly, almost like she’s fleeing to the other end of the kitchen. I pour the drinks and hand her one, and she’s forced to walk back down the length of the kitchen and take it from me. Our hands touch again, though there’s no reason for them to. I hold the glass at the bottom. She could easily grip it at the top. But instead she purposefully glides her hand over mine, and then takes the glass. I look into her face, questioning, and the corners of her lips tug, an almost-smile, and then she retreats.
“This is not a normal situation,” she says, sipping the blood-red wine. Wine which reminds me of the dozens of men I’ve killed over the years, wine which spikes into my mind and fragments, each fragment triggering a new memory, but all of them the same, really. Blood, flowing blood, cascading blood, and then the money, huge stacks of money. All of it bringing me into this kitchen, at this moment, with this woman.
“Are you okay?” she asks. “You look a bit . . . shaken.”
“I’m fine.”
‘Are you?’ Uncle Richard asks in my mind. He was a more brutal killer than I ever was.
“You’re an amazing dancer.” I say to change the subject.
The compliment catches her off-guard. “Thank you,” she says. “But dancing isn’t my passion, not really. I want to be a vet. I’m in college. I was reading a book on it before you interrupted me.”
There’s no malice in her voice. She peers over the rim of her wine glass at me, but not just at me, at all of me. Her eyes roam over me just as mine do over her. She traces the curvature of my shoulders and my arms and I do the same with her: her breasts and her legs. We stand there for an absurd amount of time, silent, staring. I’m horny, make no mistake, but there’s something else there. I’m horny for all of this woman, not just her body. It’s not like the others.
Get a grip! Get a goddamn grip! I yell at myself.
I place the glass on the counter.
“Uh-oh, time for business,” she grins. Her cheeks are flushed from the wine.
“Afraid so,” I say.
“I don’t even know your name,” she comments.
“It’s Samson. Samson Black.”
“And you already know mine.”
“I do.”
“Okay, Samson Black, what exactly do you want from me?”
That’s a complicated question, isn’t it, Samson? You had one reason for coming over here, didn’t you? Get information and see if Anna is in danger. She doesn’t seem to be in danger, so all you need to do is get the information. Scout the area. And leave if everything is clear. But when she asks me what I want from her, I can’t help but imagine her on her back, that t-shirt torn away, her breasts bare and bouncing. And maybe I’m mad but it looks to me like she has the same feeling in her eyes. She knows I’m staring at her breasts, but she doesn’t excuse herself, change her clothes.
I shake my head.
“Are you sure you’re okay?” she asks.
“Fine,” I grunt. “Okay, Anna, what I’m about to ask is going to seem damn strange coming from a man you never met before. But it’s important that you tell me the truth. I know this sounds dramatic, but it’s the truth. It could mean the difference between life or death.”
“Whose?” she says, her voice sharp. “Yours?”
I gulp. This is the part I’ve dreaded ever since I left my apartment. “Both of ours,” I say.
She takes a step back, dropping her glass of wine. It shatters in a shower of crimson and sparkling glass on the floor, the shards spreading all over the kitchen.
“What? What do you mean?” The words are drawn-out. I imagine that it’s a big effort just for her to speak them. “Why would I be in danger?”
“Don’t step in the glass,” I warn.
“I won’t,” she says. “Just . . . tell me.”
“First, you need to tell me. Did you see who put Eric’s body in your car?”
“You can’t come in here and ask me questions and not expect me to ask what the hell is going on!” She looks down at the shattered glass and then up at me. “What the hell am I doing, letting you in like this?” she mutters, more to herself than to me. “You could be anyone, you could be a . . .”
Her face twists and behind her eyes I see the pieces slotting together: this strange man at the game, her ex’s sudden appearance, his death. Her mouth falls open slowly. “You’re Eric’s killer,” she says.
“I’m Eric’s killer,” I agree.
Her expression, so easy for me to read moments before, clouds over. She turns inward and I can’t see what she’s feeling. Her face is passive, almost empty. Is she judging me? Is she calculating the distance between where she stands and her cellphone? Is she going to turn me in? These are considerations I would normally make coldly. If they run, end them. If they scream, end them. If they fight, end them. But I know before searching myself that I could not harm this woman. I don’t know why that is, it just is.
“I know all about your marriage,” I say, trying to get through to her. “He beat you, didn’t he, Anna? Over and over. And he stopped you from following your dreams. How many times did he beat you? Can you remember?”
“Too many,” she whispers. “Way too many.”
“But that’s not all.”
“What do you mean?” She speaks mechanically, not even the barest hint of emotion behind her words.
“The reason I was hired is because Eric planned to kill you tonight, Anna. My client—” your father, Anna, your messed-up man of a father “—has contacts in prison. All Eric has talked about since he was locked up is killing you. All day, all night, to whoever will listen. He talked about it in detail. I won’t tell you what he said—”
“No,” she says. “No, I want to know.”
“There’s no need,” I mutter. “It’s just talk.”
“I want to know.” She stares at me defiantly.
“Fine,” I sigh. “He said that he would lock you in a dungeon and train you to be the good whore you should’ve been before he slits your throat. That was a lie, though. At least, it wasn’t his final plan. He was going to kill you when you left the arena, on the way to your car. I got to him first.”
“How did you do it?” she asks.
“Poison,” I say. “Why do you want to know?”
“And did it hurt?” Her voice trembles. “Tell me it hurt.”
The poison isn’t painful. At least, not for long. It induces a heart attack and kills in under a minute most times.
“Yes,” I say, and she nods with grim satisfaction. “I won’t apologize for killing him, Anna. Truth is, I’m a killer.”
Her forehead creases. “A serial killer?”
“No, I kill for money.”
“A hitman?”
“I guess that’s the term for it, yeah. But I just use killer.”
She should run now, or at least take a step back, or scream at me. But she does none of these things. She just stands there, forehead creasing more and more, thinking. I wait, and after around a minute she offers me a shaky smile. “I’m glad he’s dead,” she says. “I know I shouldn’t say that, but I am. Is that wrong?”
“No,” I tell her. “It’s not wrong. Men like Eric don’t deserve to breathe. Woman-beaters . . . I hate them. Hate them with a passion. I remember when one of my friends—” I remember when one of my friends hit his wife in front of me and he wasn’t my friend anymore and I killed the bastard right there with a wine opener not much different to the one you offered me tonight.
I cut short, stopping before telling her the story. What is the matter with me? Business, business.
I rush on before she can ask me what I meant. “Whoever put Eric in the car put him there as a message to me, an open declaration. There was perhaps thirty seconds between when Eric died and when people appeared in the parking lot. Which means I was being watched, probably for days, maybe even for weeks. And to watch me for weeks you have to be slick. I’m not easily tailed. Whoever did this is well-trained, or at the least determined beyond any normal person’s capabilities. Just imagine the steel nerve it must’ve taken to move that body, all the while you can hear footsteps approaching.”
“Yeah,” Anna says, with the air of someone who’s not really there. “Sorry, I just . . . this is a lot to take in, Samson. I’m trying to work out why I haven’t asked you to leave. My life hasn’t been calm, by any means, but this—talking to a hitman in my kitchen—this is strange.”
I walk toward her, glass crunching under my boots. Standing close to her, I can feel the heat emanating from her body, a welcoming heat, a heat like home.
“Let’s sit down, eh?” I say. “We can talk this thing through.”
She nods shortly. “Okay.”