Page 20 of There Are No Saints

I slap myself in the face, hard enough to make my ears ring.

“Seriously,” I mutter. “Fuck off.”

There’s a pleasant interlude in which I hear only my own ragged breath and the night breeze rustling the trees.

Then, in that sickly-soft tone, always so reasonable even as the words coming out of her mouth are the very definition of insanity, she says,It’s probably for the best. It was only a matter of time for a girl like you . . .

“FUCK OFF!” I roar, startling a bird so it rockets up out of an aspen tree, disappearing into the dark sky, flapping like a bat.

My heart batters painfully against my chest. The beats are not steady. It clenches hard three times and then seems to skip several beats while I gasp and reel in place.

The black spots are everywhere now. They don’t disappear while I blink.

She’s right—I dress like a whore. I’ve never taken care of myself. I probably will come to a bad end.

But there’s another thing my mother always said about me:

I’m a stubborn motherfucker.

And I don’t take advice from anybody, least of all her.

For the last time, I start to run.

The sound I hear next is faint but unmistakable: a swift rushing that swells and recedes at sixty miles an hour. A car on the road ahead.

The path widens out, sloping steeply down. I can no longer feel anything beneath my feet. I can barely tell when the path connects with an actual highway.

I come out on the smooth black tarmac, striped down the middle with a single yellow line.

I stand on that line, watching for headlights coming from either direction.

I’m panting and reeling, my heart now skipping every second beat. Each time it does, I feel a pressure on my chest, the black dots swelling and expanding across my vision.

I hear a distant engine. A white light rushes toward me, gradually separating into two headlights.

I stand right in front of the car, waving my arms, praying to god that it stops before it hits me.

* * *

5

Cole

Iwatch the local headlines for several weeks, waiting for news of a girl’s body found in the woods, or any further developments with Carl Danvers.

He’s got no family locally, and a vast amount of police effort is driven by nagging. The cops are spread thin from the protests breaking out all over the city. Without any invested parties prodding for an answer, it appears the SFPD are happy to let the file on some minor art critic’s disappearance languish at the bottom of the pile.

Getting away with murder is pretty fucking easy.

Only 63 percent of homicides are solved under the best of circumstances—and that includes the cases where the idiot criminal is literally holding the smoking gun. There are precious few genius detectives, despite what network television would have you believe.

I’ve killed fourteen people and I’ve yet to receive a single knock on my door.

A pretty young girl is a different story—the media loves to sensationalize Alastor’s work. They call him the Beast of the Bay for the way he batters his victims and even bites chunks out of their flesh.

He draws too much attention to himself.

If the girl was found, her case would be linked to the seven he’s killed over the last three years. He leaves them out in the open, proclaiming what he’s done.

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