The Game

Shadows hide the body in the alley, where it cools, and decomposes, and stinks to high heaven.  The blood beneath the corpse is coagulating, not quite dry, no longer flowing.  There hasn’t been breath for fifteen minutes.  The three bullet wounds, one in the face, two in the chest, create a perfect isosceles triangle, which points due east, to where the full, spherical moon hangs low in the sky.  You can see it straight down the alley, as though it’s tethered to the body.

I walk toward the moon.  The gun in my hand is cold, my finger itching, my blood hot.  The city smells fresh and crisp and dangerous, which is partly wrong.  I feel out of place.  I don’t know how to live in a city.

At the end of the alley is a rectangular door made of metal, colored gunmetal gray, but it’s thin and battered and dimpled and rusted.  By the ways of doors, it’s not really very much at all, and the lock’s already been smashed open.

Stairs inside.  Descending into pitch dark.  Neither moon nor streetlight penetrates, and there’s nothing inside to lead the way.  The door opens soundlessly, but the corrugated floor is also metal and every my every footfall echoes.

Somewhere down there, I hear machine shop noises, heavy machinery pounding and clanging and striking.  I imagine sparks arcing from sheets of metal being driven through behemothic tools operated by sweaty men in blue shirts.

At the bottom of the staircase, the path continues dead east, and though doors line either side I take none of them.  I’m surprised when the passage ends abruptly at a dead-end, giving me two choice but no direction.  I review what I’d already seen.  The body.  The alley.  The gunshot wounds.  What can I be missing?

Either hall leads to lighted rooms, or lighted corridors.  There are no answers here.  I’ve missed something.  The metal door?  There’d been a window above it.  I went down.  There had been patterns on the door, clues I hadn’t noticed.  I’m not as young as I was, or as spry of mind.  I turn to retrace my steps, but my opponent has already discovered me.  She stands in the dark, so that her dark hair melds into the shadow, and the black dress she wears hides her perfect body perfectly.  I can see no curve of her, neither hips nor lips nor neckline, but I can feel the gun trained on me, and I know she stands dead center.

“Lower the gun,” she says.  I comply.

“Kick it to me,” she says.  I kick it to her.

“Kneel,” she says.  I hesitate, but finally settle on my knees.  The corrugated flooring presses painfully into my skin.

She smiles.  I can almost see her straight white teeth through the gloom.  But she doesn’t say anything more, so I do.  “I’m not alone,” I tell her.

“I don’t care.”

“I have backup,” I tell her.

“I don’t care.”

“Who was the man in the alley,” I tell her.

She says it again: “I don’t care.”

“You didn’t kill him.”

I imagine she shrugs.  She does that sometimes.  But no matter how well my eyes adjust, I cannot see where there is absolutely no light.  When she shrugs, the V of her neckline must move, and the teardrop diamonds dangling from her ears must sway.  She must be barefoot, carrying her heels in one hand, else how could she have come so silently behind me?

After some time passes in silence, I tell her, “You can kill me now.”

She moves close.  I can’t see her, or hear, but I feel the vibrations of her movement in the floor.  She comes close enough that I can see the vague outline of her.  She kneels in front of me, gun still pointed.  Her dress must have a long slit on one side for her to arrange her legs that way.  “I don’t care to.”

We look at each other, peering through darkness, searching for something in the abyss.  Her eyes are almond-shaped, a little too narrow, but set wide apart.  She shoves the cold barrel of the gun into my chest.

“If you kill me,” I tell her, “you lose your shadow.  No one else will ever catch you.  No one else can read your telltale signs.”

“You’re a madman,” she says.

“But an honest madman.”

“You’re a fool,” she says.

“And you’re a ghost,” I tell her.

She smiles.  And she kisses me.  It’s not insubstantial.  And it’s shapeless.

And then she’s gone.  Her sweet lips, the cinnamon scent of her skin, the hard iron barrel of her gun.  The floor bounces as she retreats.  I find my gun before I pursue her.  But already, the back-up is here, the police, men and women in uniforms and armed with regulation-issue police weapons.  They flood the stairs with light.  Laughing, she runs right through them.  She doesn’t care.

And I follow.  The police are perplexed.  They always are.  They see nothing and no one.  They feel my feet pounding on the metal flooring, and they see the door fly open before my hands.  They smell the potential of my gunpowder.  And they find their murderer, hiding, cowering in what had been the dark, though they may never find the gun he used.

“You didn’t see them,” the murderer insists, but I don’t stay to hear what else he might say.  It doesn’t matter.  She’s standing at the far end of the alley, backlit, her perfectly curved body forming a perfect silhouette.  She points her gun at me.  I raise mine, but too late.  She fires.  The gunshot is like thunder, so the police come running.  The bullet is like lightning, piercing my chest.  It creates a straight line that draws me to her, but also leads me away.

She’s already gone before I drop to my knees.  It’s hard to breathe.  My heart palpitates and my hands sweat and I drop my precious gun.  I’ll need that later.  I close my eyes and whisper her name, a promise, a curse, an admission of defeat, a vow of vengeance.  I hit the ground hard.  It’s a long time before I open my eyes again.  Days, perhaps weeks.  There’s another corpse in the alley facedown, five bullet wounds this time, all in the back.  The body’s cooling, and the spilt blood is tacky and drying.  The wounds form a perfect pentagon, and when I can determine a reference point, I will know which direction to begin my pursuit.  She’ll be hundreds of miles away by now.  Maybe this round will be mine.

My gun lies on the ground beside me.  It’s not insubstantial.  I lift it, test its weight, and I follow the line created by the bullet wounds and the barrel of my gun.  It leads directly east, toward the low-hanging sickle moon.  At the end of the alley, there’s a door, dimpled and rusted metal, and a window above it.