Samson
I call Jack out of Anna’s earshot. It’s not that I don’t trust her—strangely, I do, way more than I should—but Jack can be skittish with strangers, and I don’t want to spook him. He’s damn good at what he does, but he’ll bolt like a startled racehorse if I don’t keep his name out of it. After all, he still has to work here. And so will I, after this.
Maybe, a voice whispers, and I glance over at Anna, at her dark eyes, at her small smile. Maybe. But I haven’t got time to work out what that means right now.
I arrange for Jack to pick us up, and then return to Anna. She stands next to her apartment door, looking up and down the street. “Are we being watched now?” she asks.
“No,” I say. The street is almost empty. Three cars are parked curbside and two more drift on by. The drivers of the moving cars don’t glance at us; none of them are River. And nobody hides behind the parked cars. I can sense it without having to look.
Anna nods. It seems she trusts me as much as I trust her. An odd sensation, being trusted by someone as precious as Anna. I feel responsible, as though a great load has just been placed upon my shoulders. If Anna were to get hurt, I think, I would never forgive myself.
“Where are we going to go?” she says.
“Point Lookout, most likely,” I reply, keeping my voice low just in case. “I have safe houses all over. Better safe than sorry and all that.”
We stand in silence for a short while, and then a tinted-window black sedan pulls up in front of us. I recognize the car at once. It’s the same car that has carted me around New York to and from jobs more times than I can count. Anna flinches and I step forward and put myself between her and the car. Silly, I know it’s safe, but it’s instinctive and only after I’ve done it I realize what I’ve done.
I laugh. “This is my driver,” I say. “Come on.”
I lift up her bag, open the back door, and wave her in. She swallows and looks at the open door, at the open door which leads to an entirely different future. One moment she’s a dancer, now she’s a fugitive. I sympathize with her. It can’t be easy. It’s difficult for me to imagine what it must be like, because running and fighting has been my life almost as long as I can remember.
“I promise you,” I say, “that I’ll protect you, no matter what. I’ll never let anybody hurt you.”
“I know,” she says, stepping forward. “I believe you. I trust you.”
‘Don’t you dare betray that trust, boy,’ Uncle Richard growls, but I know it’s really my own voice I hear. Richard would never have said that. ‘Don’t you dare hurt her.’
She climbs into the car and I climb in after her. A black screen divides Jack from the backseat. Anna looks at me questioningly. I just shake my head. I think she gets the message: Don’t ask.
Jack taps against the glass, twice, our age-old sign which means, where are we going?
I open my mouth, but Anna jumps in before I have the chance.
“I need to go to the clinic,” she says. “I need to take proper leave, give notice, you know. I can’t leave them in the lurch like this. Plus . . .” She blushes.
“What is it?” I urge.
“There’s a rabbit I want to check on.”
I can’t help it. The statement comes from nowhere and it’s so at odds with what’s happening. A killer is after us—an ex-girlfriend killer, a dangerous-as-hell killer—and she wants to check on a rabbit. I let out a laugh before I can stop myself.
She turns to me, eyes narrowed. “Don’t laugh,” she says softly. “I’m not asking for the world, Samson. You’ve stolen me away, disrupted my entire life. I think it’s the least you can do.”
She looks at me sincerely, and the laugh dies on my lips. “Okay,” I sigh. I can’t deny her. She wants it too much. And I want to make her happy. “What’s the address?”
She tells us, and Jack pulls away.
###
“Wait here,” I say.
I step from the car into the autumn half-sunlight: thin shafts sometimes breaking through the sheet of gray clouds. The center is surrounded by a shoulder-high fence, painted blue, spiked at the top. Within the fence are flowerbeds and trees, a graveled path leading to the door. The building itself is squat, redbrick, with artsy photographs of animals hanging from the walls beneath small eaves to protect them from the rain. I make a quick circuit of the building, checking the street around it and the space which immediately surrounds the center. I don’t fear for Anna, back there on her own; Jack is tough and loyal and he won’t let anything happen to her. I finish the scout, see nobody threatening, and return to the car.
“Come on, then,” I say, poking my head in.
Anna smiles up at me. Her smile is magical. It casts a spell on me. When she turns it on me, it’s like I’m not a killer, not the son of a psychopath and the nephew of Black Knight. It’s like we’re a young couple with no worries.
“We can’t stay long,” I say.
She nods, and together we approach the center.
We come to the reception area, with a waiting area adjoined on the side. Inside, the clinic is alive with sounds: a puppy barks, a parrot squawks, a cat meows, and half a dozen other animals call out until their noises become one long musical note. I stand just behind Anna, watching, on my guard. Anna has a quick talk with the receptionist, a slight girl of perhaps eighteen with blue-tinted hair, chewing gum, and then she waves me through. We head down a hallway to the left, away from the waiting area, past examination rooms and to a large office at the back of the building.
The golden plaque on the office door reads, Annabelle King.
“This is my boss,” she says. “I’ll have to go and talk with her.”
“Okay. I can’t really see into the office.” The office has no window, and even the door is thick; the sound of typing which filters through the wood is muffled. I know that the likelihood of River waiting in Anna’s boss’s chair is infinitesimal, but so was her surviving that gunshot, and yet she did. “I’ll have to come in, just in case.”
Anna studies me for a moment, maybe judging how serious I am, and then nods shortly. I get the sensation that she can read me well, much easier than she should be able to, considering we only met yesterday. It’s as if she can look past my eyes and into my mind. It unnerves me, and yet it excites me, too. I have never been understood by a woman. Even River, who wanted more from me, never understood me.
Anna knocks on the door, the typing stops, and her boss calls, “Come in!”
Annabelle King is a tall woman, brown hair in a neat bob, thin-framed glasses perched on her beak-like nose. I’d guess she’s around fifty, judging from the crow’s feet around her eyes, but she’s taken care of herself. Her body is thin, and she wears a white shirt with a business skirt and tights. I see her outfit as she kicks her wheeled chair away from the table. She smiles when she sees Anna, and then frowns as her gaze moves over Anna’s shoulder and she sees me.
“Anna . . .”
“Miss King,” Anna says.
“Who is your friend?”
And there it is, the look I know so well, the look which is so different to how Anna looks at me. There’s none of the understanding in Miss King’s face, none of the real emotion. Just an animal instinct, a perking up, like a lioness in the wild whose tail stands erect when a lion lumbers toward her. I know, just by looking at her, that this woman would come to bed with me without us exchanging so many as a dozen words.
“I’m her boyfriend,” I say, before Anna can answer. The look falls from her face, and I allow myself a small smile. The kind of look she trained on me doesn’t seem valuable anymore, not when I have Anna. Have her, I think in wonder. Have this woman I barely know—and yet know extremely well.
“He’s here because there’s been a family emergency,” Anna says, and Miss King’s gaze swings back to Anna.
“A family emergency? Is somebody ill?”
“Yes,” Anna says, without flinching.
Her voice stays solid. She’s handling this well, I think.
“Oh, oh, that certainly isn’t nice, is it?” Miss King murmurs. “Serious?”
“We hope not, but . . .” Anna lets her words drift into silence, and Miss King fills in the blanks for herself.
“You need to take some leave, then?”
Anna nods. “Only a few days. I hope that’s okay.”
Miss King chews her lip. “And you’ll work all the harder when you return, I’m sure?”
“Of course,” Anna says. “I’ll make up for it.”
“Okay, then,” Miss King says. “Take what time you need, Anna.”
“Do you think I could check on Red Paw before I go?”
Miss King allows herself a small smile. “Yes, yes, of course you can. I know you’re very fond of him.”
Anna and I leave, and when Anna’s back is turned, once again Miss King gives me that look. Even now, after years of it, I find it difficult to fully understand. Here’s a respectable woman, a lady, ten years my senior, and she stares at me like she wants to strip naked and get to rutting right here, right now. I ignore the look and follow Anna into the hallway.
“Did you see the way she was looking at you?” Anna whispers.
“Yes,” I reply, as we walk down the hallway, turn left, and walk down another hallway toward a double-doored room.
“Strange,” Anna mutters. “She was so open about it.”
“Are you jealous?” I say it jokingly, but Anna doesn’t laugh; she considers it for a few moments.
“Maybe,” she says quietly. “That’s odd, isn’t it? Me being jealous?”
“Well, I don’t know,” I admit. “I’ve never been in a serious relationship before.”
“Is that what this is?” Anna asks.
I shrug. “I don’t know.”
Anna grins, ear-to-ear. “You’re not used to stuff like this, are you, Samson?”
“Not at all.”
Anna pushes open the door and the smell of animal washes over us, fur and droppings and underneath it all a chemical scent of disinfectant. Cages line the walls, filled with rodents, rats and white mice and squirrels and at the end, a rabbit. The room is white, bright white, like a hospital ward, and everything is wiped so clean I can see my reflection in the surface of the table, even in the tiled floor. We walk to the rabbit in the corner, and Anna looks down at it as a mother looks down at her child.
Then she unlatches the cage, reaches in, and takes the rabbit out. The animal climbs eagerly into her cupped palms. Anna lifts it gently out of the cage and lifts it to her face, talking in quick baby-speak to it.
“You love animals,” I state. I didn’t expect to have any reaction to seeing her with the rabbit. I’m not a sentimental man. But watching her, I can’t help but feel something. A warmth in my chest. She pours her love into the rabbit without pause, without shame.
“I do,” she says, stroking the rabbit’s ears.
I look at its paws. “Why—”
“Why is he called Red Paw?”
“Yeah.”
“When we found him, he was bleeding from his paw. He’d stepped in some glass, and his paw was covered in it. It looked like somebody had painted its paw red. Rabbits don’t have pads on their paws, like cats and dogs, so they have to use their claws to grip. One of its claws was splintered, and it was limping.”
“And it’s getting better?”
“Yes. Would you like to hold him?”
“I’m okay,” I say. “We don’t have much time, and I want you to enjoy it.”
Anna tickles it under the chin.
“I remember when I was twelve,” Anna says. She stops abruptly. “Don’t worry. You don’t want to hear it.”
“I do,” I say, and I’m surprised by the force of my words. “I want to know.”
“I remember when I was twelve—or thirteen. A young teenager, at any rate. You know I had a bit of a wild phase growing up. One Saturday I came home around midday. I’d stayed out all night at a house party. When I got in, Dad was drunk, sitting in his armchair with an empty bottle of whisky in his lap. He was singing to himself, and I tried to sneak past him. But he called me in.” Her voice trembles, but she goes on. “He called me in and used all the regular insults on me. Slut, whore, bitch. I’d been out all night and that meant only one thing: I’d been doing dark dirty things which I deserved to be punished for. In truth, I’d hardly drunk a thing, not that night, and no boy had touched me. But Dad didn’t know that.”
And this is the man who hired me, I think. This is the man who paid me. This is the man who wanted Eric dead. I think about whether that would make Anna happier or sadder, but I honestly don’t know.
“I ran away from him, back outside. I was walking up and down our street for around an hour when I saw a rabbit at the side of the road. Half its body was squashed. It was only just breathing. I made to run back to the house, to call someone – I didn’t have a cellphone back then, Dad wouldn’t let me have one. But then the rabbit wheezed, and died. I sat with it for a while, looking down at it. And then I burst into tears.”
She laughs, a soft laugh. “I don’t know why I told you that,” she says.
I place my hand on her shoulder, give it a squeeze. You are the gentlest, most loving woman I’ve ever been in the presence of, I think. But I don’t say it.
I’m used to treating women—willing women—like toys, eager toys, rutting, panting, falling apart and then coming together for more. But this . . .
“I’ll hold it,” I say. “If the offer’s still open.”
Wordlessly, Anna hands me Red Paw.