1.
They called me a femme fatale in the media, back when that Jesse Black fiasco went down. Most people have no idea what it really means. Most people think it means badass with tits, but that’s not it at all. A real femme fatale is a villain, and I always thought of myself as a hero. At least I tried to be.
Turned out they were right.
* * *
May, 2011.
I found out I was pregnant on my way to kill Vukasin.
I’d been stalking him, online and in real life. I followed him everywhere, obsessively studying his daily habits. Letting him think he was hunting me, when I was really hunting him.
I started fucking his urologist about three weeks ago. Dr. Albert Balian was a sweet guy but utterly clueless when it came to women. Middle aged, unattractive, unhappily married. An easy mark. It was no sweat to convince him how hot it would be for me to dress up like one of his nurses and blow him under the desk in his cluttered office during business hours. At first, he’d been resistant to the idea of me wearing the boring unisex scrubs his real nurses wear and wanted me in some kind of skimpy stripper fantasy getup made out of red and white vinyl. I wore him down, claiming it would be so much sexier for me if I could imagine he was my real boss and that I might lose my job if I didn’t do what he wanted. I’d done it just often enough for the rest of his long-suffering staff to get used to seeing me wearing scrubs around the office, but not enough for him to get bored with the whole idea.
When I stepped onto the elevator that day, I was locked and loaded. Pulse racing as I fought to slow my breathing and steady my hands. I had a capped syringe tucked into the pocket of my borrowed scrub pants, filled with enough potassium chloride to stop an elephant’s heart. I was sweating under my expensive blonde wig. The tunnel vision of my aching hatred made me feel righteous and invincible. Nothing else mattered.
It was 2:20 PM as I stood alone in the elevator, waiting for the doors to close. Vukasin’s appointment was for 2:30, so I still had time to get in through the back door and meet him in the one place his security goons didn’t follow. He didn’t want any of his men to see that hunk of badly reconstructed meat that dangled between his legs.
That’s my fault, by the way. I didn’t technically do it, but I was the catalyst that made it happen. If you just walked in on the middle of this low-budget action movie that my life has become, all you need to know for now is that he did shit to me and to people I love that I can’t forgive. Not fucking ever. Hence, the mutual vendetta.
The doors on the elevator had started to slide closed when they suddenly bounced back open to admit a pregnant woman with a baby strapped into one of those carrier harnesses that make you look like you have a stunted and partially absorbed Siamese twin growing out of your chest.
The woman was flushed and cheerful with the same fluffy, strawberry blond hair as her equally pink-faced baby. She was dressed in roomy, colorful sweats and had a fancy designer diaper bag slung over one shoulder. The baby was wailing and hiccupping in ascending scales like a soprano warming up for a difficult aria.
“Whoo,” the woman said, panting and leaning heavily against the left side of
the elevator as she pressed the same glowing button that I had obviously already pressed. “Can’t move so quick anymore.”
I didn’t answer. Just stared straight ahead at the closing doors.
“Is this your first?” she asked, lightly bouncing her fussing baby.
I turned to her with a baffled frown.
“This is my fourth,” she said without waiting for my answer. The baby was starting to gasp and spit like it might blow a head gasket. “A little boy, finally, after three girls! I promise it gets so much easier after the first one. When are you due?”
The baby’s high-pitched wailing was fraying my last nerve and making my fists curl and itch, but that woman’s sweaty pink face was so mild and sweet, completely oblivious to the battle currently raging inside me. I was about to say something cruel to shut her the fuck up but didn’t. I forced a smile that I hoped didn’t seem too condescending.
“I’m not pregnant,” I said, raising my voice to be heard over the crying baby and smoothing my scrubs over my admittedly bigger-than-I-might-have-liked belly. “I’m just fat.”
She laughed and shook her head, like we were sharing some wonderful private joke. Her baby was still crying but starting to wind down as she continued with the bouncing and cooing.
“I know, right?” she said. “When my sister-in-law was pregnant with my nephew, she looked like an ad for prenatal yoga, all toned and glowing with this perfect round tummy. Me, I always look like I just escaped from Sea World.”
She rooted around for a second in the outer pocket of the diaper bag, and I figured she was looking for some kind of pacifier or toy to help shut the baby up. Instead, she took out a small packet of tissues and held them out to me.
“They make pads,” she said. “You should get some. At least while you’re still working.”
They make pads. That sentence was so far outside anything I expected from the conversation that for a moment I thought I misheard her.
“Pads?” I repeated, frown deepening.
Again, that light, happy laugh, like there was nothing wrong with the world. Like I wasn’t about to go kill the man who had killed or helped kill pretty much everyone I ever cared about.
“Bra pads,” she said, pressing the packet of tissues into my hand. “I didn’t need them when I was pregnant with Olivia, my oldest. She had the hardest time latching and I ended up having to hire a lactation consultant just to get the taps running, but this time around I’m already a total colostrum fountain, just like you!
Anyway, for now you can use these to absorb any excess and hopefully one of your coworkers will have a spare top they can lend you.”
I looked down at my navy-blue scrub top. There were two small, damp blotches on the front, one over each nipple. I couldn’t have been more horrified if I’d just realized I was covered in blood.
2.
The elevator doors opened, and the pregnant woman waddled off towards the OB/GYN down the hall from Dr. Balian, waving to me and saying something cheery and meaningless that I couldn’t hear over the roaring inside my head.
I leaned against the wall of the elevator, feeling faint and sick and panicky. There had to be some other explanation for the blotches. Infection? Cancer? After all, I’m over 40 and always use condoms. I battled multiple bouts of pelvic inflammatory disease during my early years in the porn business and I had been told that I had reduced my chances of successful baby-making to somewhere between slim and none. I didn’t care. I never wanted actual kid-kids anyway, and the girls I used to manage were all the daughters I ever needed.
I started scrolling back over every single recent sexual encounter since my last period. All with Dr. Balian and all with protection. Had there been a slip, an imperceptibly tiny rupture that could have allowed some wayward and ambitious sperm to breach the perimeter?
When was that latest spotty, half-assed period anyway? Was that two weeks ago? Three? Time had been collapsing in on itself as I fell deeper and deeper into my all-consuming stalker waltz with Vukasin.
The doors started to slide shut and I was forced to launch myself through before they closed on me. Standing in the long bland hallway, I took a moment to get my shit back together. I didn’t have time for any of this. I was on a mission. So what if I was pregnant or dying from breast cancer or what fucking ever? I could always go get an abortion or a mastectomy after Vukasin was dead. For now, I needed to stay calm, stay focused and do what needed to be done.
I headed down the hallway to the staff entrance of Dr. Balian’s office.
I punched in the code to open the door. Mrs. Balian’s birthday. So sweet. Once inside, I spotted a petite Armenian nurse, Ani I think her name was, coming down the hall in my direction with her eyes on a patient’s chart. I quickly crossed my arms over my damp scrub top as she looked up and spotted me, not even bothering to try and hide her scathing disapproval.
I tried to see myself through her eyes for a moment, that trashy blonde slut with too much bronzer, electric blue contacts and fat red lips drawn way outside their natural shape. I wanted her to remember me that way, as a laundry list of exaggerated characteristics that she would later use to describe me to detectives, none of which have anything to do with the way I actually look. I smiled at her, and she turned away, ignoring me like I was a bad smell that she was too polite to acknowledge. She went into one of the exam rooms and closed the door while I ducked into the staff lounge.
The lounge was an odd little extra room with a stubby L shape. Table and chairs. Kitchenette. A cute little red couch, tucked into the short leg of the L. I blew Dr. Balian on that couch once, so I knew the door locked.
Once I locked it,
I peeled off my damp scrub top. My sports bra was also stained but I knew I’d probably have to run after the deed was done and didn’t want my possibly infected boobs flopping painfully up and down while I did it.
I took a quick peek under the spandex to see what was going on, nipplewise. They definitely seemed darker and stiffer than normal, sore to the touch. Was that new? How long had they been like that? The one on the left seemed a little crusty and when I prodded it with the tip of my finger, it oozed several tiny, pearlescent droplets. That had definitely never happened before. Another wave of dizzy, drowning anxiety threatened to close over my head.
I needed to pull myself together, to make myself breathe slow and clear my crazy head. I thought of a guy I used to know, of the way revenge can twist you up inside and make you forget who you’d always assumed you were. I had no idea who I was anymore or who I would be after this was over, but there was no time to worry about that now.
I folded two of the pregnant woman’s tissues into squares, tucked them into my bra, and opened the closet door. Behind a few sad, forgotten jackets was a single spare scrub top. It was a bit tight over my tits and belly, but workable, and I tossed the stained one into the trash. My fingers reached for the capped syringe in my pants pocket like it was a rosary, but I was all out of prayers.
I checked my watch. Showtime.
3.
Vukasin wasn’t in the first exam room. It was instead occupied by a tiny old man who beamed like he just won the lottery when I opened the door. He was visibly crestfallen when I told him I had the wrong room.
The next one was the right room.
When I saw Vukasin, I felt that hot surge of intense and complex emotion not unlike the way you feel when you spot your high school crush in the lunchroom. I’d been watching him for months through windows, binoculars, cameras or online, but this was the first time that we were actually in the same room together. First time since Vegas.
He’d been steadily losing weight that he couldn’t spare. His angular face was haggard and unshaven, harshly lit from below by the glow of his phone. His thin white legs stuck out of the paper gown, knobby and restless like a child’s. He seemed so small and defenseless, his body hunched and slightly embarrassed and just wanting to get this over with. Just a middle-aged guy at the doctor, like any other guy. Only he wasn’t just any guy. He was the one, my anti-soulmate, as obsessed with killing me as I was with killing him. Our whole lives had been leading up to this intimate moment together.
“How are we today?” I asked, pitching my voice high and sweet like a preschool teacher as I slipped into a pair of nitrile gloves.
His eyes flicked up from the phone screen for a fraction of a second and I held my breath, sure that he would see right through my half-assed disguise. Like he would be able to smell me, to recognize me as his homicidal mate on some deep, primal level. But he dismissed me as irrelevant almost instantly, attention returning to his phone.
“Fine,” he said, not because he was actually fine, but because that’s just what you say when someone who doesn’t matter asks how you are.
Emboldened by his thoughtless dismissal, I came forward and took his right wrist in my hand, pretending to check his pulse while I thumbed the cap off the syringe inside my pocket. He shifted the phone to his left hand and continued reading whatever it was he was reading. I could smell his breath, that sharp and horribly familiar scent of the peppermint gum he always chewed. Whenever I met someone else who chewed that same gum, the smell gave me this hot pulse of Pavlovian nausea. Ironic, since that particular brand is marketed primarily to lovers who want to taste good when they make out.
My hand was shaking when I raised it to place two fingers just below his right ear. I swallowed hard against the nausea and felt my vision narrow down to a dark, whirling tunnel centered around his carotid artery.
“Turn your head to the left, please,” I said, hating the thin mousy squeak that had replaced my voice.
He did what I asked with a small, exasperated sigh, like I was a mildly annoying inconvenience. His eyes stayed glued to his phone.
This was it. Flipping the switch in my head and deciding to stop running and start hunting had been the only thing that kept me going. Everything I’d been through, the strange and lonely hell the last six months had been, it was all leading up to this. Nothing else mattered. I raised the syringe and held it poised a bare millimeter from that vein in his neck while I leaned in close to his ear.
“It’s me,” I said. “Angel.”
Then I slid the needle into the vein. That’s when the shooting started. ...
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