Page 28 of Serial Killer Games

“What do you think, a foot for Billy? Will Johnny be jealous?” she asks.

She sits cross-legged in the middle of Grant’s floor in my robe, wearing a pair of yellow dish gloves to safeguard against fingerprints, her hair in a messy knot on top of her head, her sparkly earrings catching the light. She’s trash at wrapping gifts, in spite of her brag at the hardware store. I let her boss me around, and I steal glances at her, like I always do, whileshe works and swigs from a bottle of Grant’s wine like a pirate.

She’s mine for a few more hours.

She ties one last sloppy bow, stands, stretches, tosses her gloves on the bed, and plucks her dress off the floor.

“I need to get dressed,” she says, and I take the garbage bags full of Christmas presents to the front door. But—there’s a pair of shoes—and classical music wafts from the kitchen—“The Flight of the Bumblebee”—frantic, frenzied—

“Jake!”

No.

“Grant,” I say through my teeth.

“Jaaaake,” Grant says pleasantly. I never heard him arrive. He still has his coat on as he pulls a half-full bottle of white from the fridge and pours himself a glass, bouncing a little to the music. “What are you up to tonight?” he asks, as if we never had that conversation on the phone. “Just a regular night in?”

In my head Dolores is a blinking red dot in the floor plan of the apartment. She’s moving around in Grant’s room, while two dots pulse in the kitchen. I try to visualize an out for her—the window—an air vent—

“Yes.”

“You’re a creature of habit, Jake. You need to get out more. You need tomeetpeople.”

He’s revved up. Expansive. He’s going to start talking about taking over the world any minute. Maybe he’ll have a nosebleed, or maybe this is pure Grant tonight. The music whips up, faster and faster, whining, keening.

“What you need, Jake, is to dotherapy. It’s not normal to be so cut off from the world.”

“Yes.”

“I know a good therapist. She wears pencil skirts. Not every woman can wear a pencil skirt, you know. She pretended not to likethatcompliment when I gave it to her.”

“Yes.”

“Although”—he frowns—“I don’t know about her. She wasn’t happy to hear about Verity. She’s a very jealous woman. Women arejealous, Jake.”

“Yes.”

“It’s unprofessional of her to allow feelings like that to interfere with her doing her job,” Grant says, jumping rapidly from thought to thought, faster than a violinist’s fingers or a swarm of bees. “There’s a code of conduct, you know. There’s a board I could report her to.”

“Yes.”

“I should report her—I’mgoingto report her. Tomorrow. It’s so hard to find a good therapist, Jake. Which is terrible, becauseeveryoneneeds to do therapy. I’d be out of business if people looked after their mental health. By the timeIsee them, they’ve gone off the deep end.”

“Yes.”

“Look at me: I take my mental health seriously. I’mveryconcerned about my mental health.”

I nod. “We’re all very concerned about your mental health.”

Grant smiles, flattered, and opens his mouth to reply, but no sound comes out. He’s frozen in place, staring over my shoulder. The back of my head down to my tailbone prickles and turns cold.No.

The music shuts off and, “Hello,” Dolores says from the entryway to the kitchen.

I swivel to look, and my stomach drops out onto the floor between my shoes. She’s poised with one finger on the power button of Grant’s expensive speakers, and she’s not wearingher red dress. She’s not wearing the bathrobe, either. For a split second I think she’s not wearing anything, but then I realize she got into Grant’s wardrobe, full of designer dresses and shoes and everything else a spoiled sex doll could want. She wears a formfitting long-sleeved dress the exact color of her skin tone, a dress that looks like tensor bandages stitched neatly together, or maybe strips of leather harvested from someone who was good about rubbing lotion on their skin, and a pair of painfully high nude heels to match. She looks like a Barbie, all her creases and hollows smoothed out, legs a mile long, everything airbrushed tan. Grant’s eyes slide all over her, tasting her, leaving invisible slime trails.

No. No, no, no.

“Hello,” Grant says, his voice slightly lower and slower than normal. “Grant Velazquez.”

---