Blood Sisters_ Vampire Stories by Women - Paula Guran Page 0,91

send her to hell and then kill her. I can see how it would look, the way her body would be moving, how her flesh would jounce flabby—

But I won’t. I can’t look at a woman without the flash-movie kicking in, but it’s only a movie, you know. This is Company, they got something else for me.

“Do you feel like working?” Villanueva asks. He’s caught it just now, what I was thinking about, he knows, because I told him how it was when I gave him my statement after I got caught.

“Sure,” I say, “what else have I got to do?”

He nods to Steener, who passes me a little slip of paper. The name and address. “It’s nothing you haven’t done before,” he says. “There are two of them. You do as you like, but you must follow the procedure as it has been described to you—”

I give a great big nod. “I know how to do it. I’ve studied on it, got it all right up here.” I tap my head. “Second nature to me now.”

“I don’t want to hear the word ‘nature’ out of you,” Steener sneers. “You’ve got nothing to do with nature.”

“That’s right,” I agree. I’m mild-mannered because it’s just come to me what is Steener’s problem here. It is that he is like me. He enjoys doing to me what he does the way I enjoy doing what I do, and the fact that he’s wearing a white hat and I’m not is just a watchamacallit, a technicality. Deep down at heart, it’s the same fuckin-feeling and he’s going between loving it and refusing to admit he’s like me, boing-boing, boing-boing. And if he ever gets stuck on the loving-it side, well, son-of-a-bitch will there be trouble.

I look over at Villanueva and point at the woman, raising my eyebrows. I don’t know exactly what words to use for a question about her and anything I say is gonna upset everybody.

“This person is with us as an observer,” Villanueva says quietly, which means I can just mind my own fuckin business and don’t ask questions unless it’s about the job. I look back at the woman and she looks me right in the face. The hand clenched high up on her coat relaxes just a little and I see the purple-black bruises on the side of her neck before she clutches up again real fast. She’s still holding herself the same way, but it’s like she spoke to me. The lines of communication, like the shrinks say, are open, which is not the safest thing to do with me. She’s gotta be a nurse or a teacher or a social worker, I think, because those are the ones that can’t help opening up to someone. It’s what they’re trained to do, reach out. Or hell, maybe she’s just somebody’s mother. She don’t look too motherly, but that don’t mean dick these days.

“When?” I say to Steener.

“As soon as you can pack your stuff and get to the airport. There’s a cab downstairs and your ticket is waiting at the airline counter, in your name.”

“You mean the Soames name,” I say, because Soames is not my name for real.

“Just get ready, get going, get it done, and get back here,” Steener says. “No side-trips, or it’s finished. Don’t even attempt a side-trip or it’s finished.” He starts to turn toward the door and then stops. “And you know that if you’re caught in or after the act—”

“Yeah, yeah, I’m on my own and you don’t know dick about squat, and nobody ever hearda me, case closed.” I keep myself from smiling; he watched too much Mission Impossible when he was a kid. Like everyone else in his outfit. I think it’s where they got the idea, kind of, some of it anyway.

Villanueva tosses me a fat roll of bills in a rubber band just as he’s following Steener and the woman out the door. “Expenses,” he says. “You have a rental car on the other end, which you’ll have to use cash for. Buy whatever else you need, don’t get mugged and robbed, you know the drill.”

“Drill?” I say, acting perked-up, like I’m thinking, Wow, what a good idea.

Villanueva refuses to turn green for me, but he shuts the door behind him a little too hard.

I don’t waste no time; I go to the closet and pull out my traveling bag. Everything’s in it, but I always take a little inventory anyway, just to be on the