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A fortune teller leads to another fortune teller leads to another one, Helena dragging Sarah and the other cops through hideout after hideout. Stick figures on all the walls. Eventually the cops have to split up to cover all the coordinates, which Sarah knows – knows – is what Helena wanted. She is by herself, she is holding the gun with shaking hands, she is following the latest set of numbers.
She’d volunteered for the ones hidden under the drawing of two women holding hands. She shouldn’t have, probably, but the thought of anyone else taking it had sent something jagged and pained twisting around the inside of her chest – so, with eager clumsy fingers, she’d picked it. This one’s mine and it could be, if Sarah wanted it.
Another basement. Helena doesn’t want to kill her, that’s what she’d said, that’s what Sarah keeps reminding herself as she takes the steps down. All of these places have smelled exactly the same – the church basement, the apartment, the room in the boarding house, the empty storage locker. They’ve all smelled like decay and not at all like death no matter how hard Sarah breathes in.
This one smells, also, like shit. Not literal shit, thank god – dried blood and something like milk gone sour. Sarah knows how to shoot a gun by now. She keeps reminding herself she knows how to shoot a gun.
The stairs end too soon and Sarah is left in a room with two girls holding hands. Many, many two girls holding hands; they watch her with eyeless faces from every part of every wall.
Helena is kneeling in the center of the room, on a mattress. Her eyes are closed, her face and hands turned up and open towards a flickering fluorescent bulb. She doesn’t open her eyes when Sarah walks in. “Hello again, Detective Childs,” she says.
“You didn’t know it was me,” Sarah says – she can keep either her hands or her voice from shaking, so she goes with her hands. Her voice trembles. “Could’ve been anyone.”
“I knew it was you,” Helena says, sounding warmly amused. Her eyes open. She shifts positions, sits on the mattress. She pats the mattress next to her. It’s stained with something dark. “Sit,” she says.
“No, think I’ll stand,” Sarah says.
Helena hums. She stares at Sarah, eyes like mouths full of white teeth and black iris-throat.
“Bit of a shithole,” Sarah says, looking around. “They’re all shitholes, actually. You want to tell me why you led me through, what, eight of ‘em?”
“Are you scared?” Helena says.
“No.”
“You don’t have to lie to me,” Helena says. She leans back onto her hands, sprawled easy like a big cat on the mattress. Her tanktop is stained with blood over her stomach; Sarah doesn’t know if that’s because Helena is still bleeding, or because she only has one tanktop. Which is worse?
“I want to be honest with you,” Helena says. “If you will be honest with me.”
“How about you be honest first.”
“I like you,” Helena says easily. “I want us to be friends. I want to be your friend and hold your hand and have dinner with you and talk about your day.”
God.
“That’s not how friendship works,” Sarah says, mouth moving on autopilot, brain still stuck in a quagmire of dull horror over that entire last sentence. “If you want to be friends you – get to know someone, you don’t try to kill them twice and make them bloody fortune tellers and get them into your bloody basement and ask them to sit on your bloody mattress, Helena.”
Helena’s face has been getting stormier and stormier while Sarah has said this. “It could be,” she says. “It could be how friendship works, we could be friends—”
“We’re not friends,” Sarah says, and lifts up the gun. Helena, insultingly, does not even flinch on the mattress.
“I know,” she says sadly. “I keep trying but I don’t know the way to do it.” She tilts her head to the side. “You can put the gun down, silly not-cop. We both know you aren’t going to shoot me.”
Sarah steps closer. Her hands are the only steady thing of her. One pull and Helena would be nothing but a body in a basement, and Sarah could slip back into Beth’s voice and Beth’s life and leave the body there. Yeah, she’d say, dead end, the killer’s playing games with us, there wasn’t even any blood this time, waste of energy huh? The fortune teller would rip under her fingers. They would hunt the killer and the killer would be gone. Helena rotting down here in this basement, surrounded by the two of them holding hands.
The muzzle of the gun is against Helena’s forehead now. Helena’s face is blank, politely curious. She reaches out and wraps her hand around Sarah’s hand, shoves her fingers between Sarah’s. Then she grins, satisfied. “See?” she says. “Not so hard.”
God damn her: they’re holding hands. Sarah can’t shake Helena off without letting go of the gun, so she doesn’t. Helena’s hands are warm and sweaty and not as unfamiliar as they should be. “Leave me alone,” Sarah says, but it just sounds token. Her brain is filled up to the brim with Helena’s sad small body, left dumped here at the bottom of the stairs. She blinks and Helena is alive again, every time, and every time it keeps feeling like a miracle.
“No,” Helena says. “Never. Not ever.”
“Get out of my head,” Sarah says, and Helena’s face lights up.
“I don’t want to,” she says. “I think I like it there.”
Sarah lets go of the gun, abruptly, so Helena is just holding it; it’s pointed at her own forehead and she leaves it there, for a moment, before letting it go and spinning it around in her fingers. She points it at Sarah. “Bang,” she says, pointing at Sarah’s forehead. She moves it to Sarah’s heart. “Bang,” she says again, looking delighted. “Bang bang bang bang bang.” She waves the gun around wildly, pointing at the different parts of Sarah’s body, and then she giggles to herself and spins the gun around her finger again. The grip points at Sarah. Sarah reaches out, slowly, takes it.
“What the hell happened to you,” she says.
The delight crumples and goes. Helena leans backwards and goes whumph across the mattress. Lying down, she considers Sarah. “How do I do this,” she says. “If you don’t want to come visit. If I can’t come visit you. If you don’t like it when we hold hands. How do I do this the right way.”
“You – stop killing people,” Sarah says wildly, wiping her sweating hands on her trousers before pointing the gun back at Helena again. “Turn over a new bloody leaf, I don’t know.”
“Isn’t a new bloody leaf just as bad as an old bloody leaf?” Helena says. “What is difference.” She blows out air and then tilts her head back and forth on the mattress. “Okay,” she says. “I will think about this. If we can be friends. I don’t know. Maybe.”
Sarah stares at Helena, for a moment, but she doesn’t say anything else. The concept is a boulder Sarah’s mind can’t roll anywhere; she doesn’t know what to do with it. Helena dropping the gun, easy and cheerful, eating a hamburger, asking curiously how Sarah spent her day. No, says her brain, just let her be a gun, it’s easier. It is. Easier. Sarah feels bad about it, but it is.
Helena stares at her with lidded eyes. “That means you should go,” she says. “While I am thinking about it.”
“What?”
“You know where to find me,” Helena says. “I know where to find you. If I want to be your friend, I will come find you. If I don’t,” (she grins) “I will come find you anyways.”
It would be so easy. One bullet. Body on the mattress, decaying and then gone.
Sarah’s heart hurts. Her whole body does, like she’s just been punched. She wants to curl up in Beth’s awful sterile bed, which smells like nothing except loneliness; she wants to sleep until all her problems go away. She is understanding Beth more and more all the time, which is its own awful sort of irony.
She takes a step back. Helena doesn’t move. She takes another step back, and another, and heads for the stairs. She’s almost to them when she stops, and reaches out to touch the stick figures on the wall.
They’re dry – no wet paint, no bleeding marker. Sarah doesn’t know what she expected. She holsters the gun in her belt, and then she’s up the stairs and gone.