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“You didn’t do anything wrong,” he tells her when he first sees the motionless, bloodied form of Wesley Hammond slumped on her kitchen floor, eyes open and empty, staring into the middle distance without any hint of life.
He keeps telling her that, cupping her jaw in his large, warm hand, when he tells her to turn her phone off and tells her to change out of her torn, sodden clothes, when he tells her to take a hot shower and pour bleach down the drain after, when he doesn’t ask any questions, none at all. If he’s surprised by the body in her apartment, he doesn’t deign to let it show on his face.
“You didn’t do anything wrong,” he says, because he was there that first night that Wesley Hammond was a patient in their emergency room. Not the second night, or the third, but skipping stones along the way—fifth, ninth, seventeenth, the twentieth. “You didn’t do anything wrong,” because he encouraged her to report him to HR, to the police, to arm herself with an alarm and pepper spray. “You didn’t do anything wrong,” he consoles her, because he told Robby that the TPO would just make it worse, would give Wesley Hammond her home address, would just convince him that Samira Mohan was simply playing hard to get. “You didn’t do anything wrong,” he confirms, finding the gun tucked into Hammond’s waistband, unloading it without a second glance to her, dismantling the firearm into pieces on her kitchen counter.
“You didn’t do anything wrong,” Jack Abbot murmurs, pressing his lips to her forehead, before disappearing back down to the parking lot of her apartment complex. “I’ll be back in an hour. I’ll buzz three times when I’m back—I’m gonna leave my cell at home. Three times, alright? Three times, and only three times.”
Samira nods.
“Three times.”
Her kitchen knife is lodged in Wesley Hammond’s left eye, his corpse sprawled at hard angles on her floor, and Jack Abbot has not called the police. Sixty-seven minutes later, someone pushes on the buzzer downstairs in three staccato bursts; she lets him up without question.
“I’m only going to ask this once,” he says without preamble.
Abbot returns to her apartment wearing all black clothes. He snaps nitrile gloves onto his hands just the same as he’s done a thousand times in the Pitt. He’s changed into all black clothes, and has brought a plastic tote full of items Samira Mohan does not want to think about—big black trash bags, gallons of bleach, a boning knife, a six-pack of sponges. A box of gloves, a length of rope, bottles of drain clog remover.
“What?” she asks, barely audible.
As requested, she’s showered, scrubbing Wesley Hammond’s blood off her under the steaming spray. Hair coiled into a tight knot, she’s changed into a t-shirt and a pair of leggings she suspects will end up in a vat of bleach, or burnt to cinders somewhere far outside the city limits. Under them she wears an ugly pair of panties, stained with period blood, and a sports bra she’s been meaning to throw out the last two times she’s put it through the wash. Rocking back and forth between her feet, queasy at the sight of a dead body for the first time in her life, Samira hugs herself tightly.
“Were you sexually assaulted? I can get you PReP, I have Plan B, I have a suture kit and anything else we might need to get you patched up,” Abbot asks, getting down onto his knees. He looks painfully earnest, even as he manipulates a corpse that is rapidly setting into rigor. “We don’t have to go to a hospital. We can handle things here. Nobody has to know.”
“He didn’t—” Her voice betrays her, cutting thick with emotion. Starting again, she squeezes out the tears burning at her waterline. “He didn’t get the chance. He—he tried. He wanted to. He wanted to rape me. He had me cornered. But he didn’t—he didn’t think I would hurt him. He’s been—I think he’s been watching me for months. I think he’s been inside my apartment before, and I didn’t notice. I didn’t—how didn’t I notice? He had a key. The knife was in the sink, but he didn’t think I would hurt him, he kept saying that he knew I wanted to help him—”
There is a surge of affection on Abbot’s face that she doesn’t know what to do with.
“Good girl.”
Abbot makes the three trips down to his car alone. Three trash bags stuffed full—one with actual trash, detritus from his efforts, something verging into craft that he explains away with lip service to a childhood spent hunting out in the woods. The second and third bags are all body parts, soaked in lye inside the plastic tote he hauled inside, left to disintegrate until any distinguishable features were worn away, and then placed in a tied-off grocery bag a piece before being tidied into the contractor bags. The trunk of him is separated into quarters, careful as a butcher spatchcocking a chicken, organs removed and then washed clean of blood and shit and bile in the sink.
Samira wants to ask, she feels a rising need to ask, but there are some things Jack Abbot does not want to teach her.
“You don’t have to come,” he says, after his last trip. “But you can.”
“Where are we going?” she asks, tucked into the corner of her couch, eyes routing along the path Wesley Hammond, the man whose stalking charges Pittsburgh PD dismissed earlier this month, took upon his entry to her apartment.
She killed him.
And instead of calling the police, she called—
“It’s better if you don’t know,” Abbot says, kneeling down in front of her. “The less you know, the less you’ll worry about in that big brain of yours.”
Gentle, he rests a hand over her bare foot, thumb stroking over delicate, intricate bones. After cadaver labs and after surgical rotations, neither of them had much of a response to the sound of Abbot separating Wesley Hammond (age thirty-seven, ex-cop and current corrections officer, blood type A-negative) into a pile of skin and bone, jamming his knife into his joints until they popped and gave way.
He drained the blood out of him in her tub, first. A-negative. His CBC always came back clear, nothing of concern, nothing to note, every damn time. A-negative blood. Right down the drain. Neat incisions to all the major arteries and veins, limbs arranged and held high so nothing would pool in an extremity. Jack Abbot grew up hunting for sustenance. It’s not that different from field dressing a deer.
And now, he’s scrubbed everything clean, heady bleach fumes making her vision blur.
Medical personnel are non-combatants. They do not engage in hostilities. If captured, they are given considerations not extended to prisoners of war. But she’s seen the pictures of Abbot in uniform, seen the ranger tab on his jacket, seen the RASP scroll on his sleeve. Special forces, ranger, airborne.
This is not his first time making someone disappear.
“Do you trust me?” he asks, leaning his cheek against the outside of her knee. “Darling, look at me.”
She blinks at him, almost confused. It jolts her out of her haze, and she unfurls her arms, holds his cheek in her hand, pets at his hair. “Of course I do.”
“Everything,” Abbot says, turning his face to nuzzle into her palm. “Everything will be okay. I’m going to take care of this, right? I’m going to make it go away. It’ll be like it never happened. It’ll shock you—by tomorrow morning—how much it never happened.”
His lips are rough against the skin of her hand, chapped and dry, but it’s still a kiss she will cherish.
It’s not his Jeep down in her parking space, the extra one for visitors she never uses but is included in her rent, but an old beater truck with West Virginia plates. He keeps it in his garage. It’s titled to one of his sisters, registered to a plot of family land tied to an old farm that’s spent the past fifteen years or so falling down into a state of mildew and decay.
They drive through the dark of the night for two hours, the plastic of the black trash bags crinkling in bed. It’s warm out; Abbot keeps the back window open. He drives carefully, keeping the truck at precisely the speed limit, and doesn’t miss a single turn signal. They drive past a sign welcoming them to West Virginia, and drive another hour after that.
“I should feel worse,” she whispers, pressing the heels of her palms into her eyes until she sees bright bursts of color. “I should feel so much worse.”
“Why?” Abbot asks, voice reed thin. “This is what he would have done to you. You won, Mohan. You lived.”
“I’m a doctor. And you’re a doctor, and I—”
Killed someone. There’s an oath, she took an oath, to first, do no harm and then she killed a man. She killed a man, and she didn’t try to help him, didn’t perform CPR, didn’t call for an ambulance. No, she scuttled backwards, caught awkwardly under his weight, and pressed herself up against the cold door of her refrigerator. She screwed her eyes shut. Trembling, air wheezing in and out of her lungs, she reached for her phone. And some loud, unquestioning instinct in her told her to do one thing: call Jack Abbot.
“I’m also a soldier,” he says, firmer than she’s ever heard him, maneuvering the truck down onto a second dirt road. The suspension whines and protests; Abbot eases his foot off the gas. They must be getting close to their destination. “I’ve done far worse than make a problem go away for the woman I—I care far more about your life than his death. You will save thousands of lives over the course of the next, what? Thirty, thirty-five years? Maybe forty? It’s simple arithmetic. Your life has value. His did not.” Staring straight ahead, he cuts the headlights. “Sometimes the universe levels out the scales. Sometimes things go the way they’re supposed to go. This is the way it was supposed to go.”
A knot tightens at the back of her throat.
When was the last time she was glad to be alive? When was the last time she spent a day doing anything more but trying ever-so-desperately that she has a right to keep breathing? To keep taking up space? To keep shuffling along, shift to shift to shift?
A whimper punches out of her chest. “Jack—”
“What?” he asks, eyes flickering over towards her before taking them down a long gravel drive leading towards a decrepit farmhouse. There are no nearby neighbors, just the warped trunks and branches of trees long abandoned to nature. There are no leaves. They all have fallen. “You did nothing wrong. I’ll say it for the rest of my life.” He pulls in close to the house, adjacent to a cellar door. He puts the truck in park, and stares straight ahead through the windshield. “I’m gonna get out of the truck now. You can stay in here, or—”
Every cell in her body protests, head whipping towards him.
“No. I don’t want to be alone.”
“Okay,” he says, releasing his grip on the wheel. Taking a deep breath, he reaches across her for the glove compartment, frees the latch, and pulls out a pair of black leather gloves. Sliding them onto his hands, he stares at her, intent. “But no touching. Do not touch anything, not even me, do you understand? Not unless I give you permission.”
Every contact leaves a trace.
“I understand,” she replies, nodding jerkily.
Abbot softens, almost imperceptibly. “Just until we’re back in the truck.”
Wesley Hammond’s final resting place is at the bottom of a cistern in the cellar of an abandoned farmhouse that belonged to Jack Abbot’s maternal grandparents. The land and the house on it have languished in probate. They died without a will, and their only child—Abbot’s late mother, Josephine Flaherty—predeceased them by decades.
Abbot dumps the last bottle of Draino into the dark cistern. Shrugging at questions of the chemicals leaching into the groundwater, he slides the heavy metal lid back onto the deep dark hole that will entomb the man who has spent more than half a year stalking Samira Mohan at her place of work, at the grocery store, at the gym, and lastly—at her own home.
“What now?” she whispers.
“My sisters don’t ask questions,” he replies, a little low, a little too steady. “As far as they’re concerned, I can do no wrong. Privilege of being the baby, I guess. They won’t—we take care of our own. They understand that.”
The gloves come off as soon as the cellar door slams shut, as soon as the chain is looped back through the handles, as soon as the lock clicks into place. The sun will be coming up soon; she’s already told Robby that she’s sick, that she’s having trouble standing up, that she’s running a fever and gets dizzy every time she staggers to her feet to refill her water bottle.
Abbot’s words reverberate in her mind.
We take care of our own.
“You don’t have to,” he says, hands coming to rest on her hips when she straddles him in the truck. “There’s not a price—this isn’t why I—Samira, honey, you don’t owe me anything.”
“I know.” Samira presses the words into his mouth. “I know, I do. I want to. I need to.”
He doesn’t ask her about birth control, or STI panels, or any of it. Just lets her unbutton the fly of his jeans, lifting herself off his lap so he can slide his pants and boxers down below his ass in one solid push, and reaches for her shirt to pull it up over her head.
“I’m so fucking proud of you,” he breathes into her skin.
Traces the bruises, kisses the abrasions left from the struggle in her kitchen, peels open her fingers to run his tongue over the welted contusions in her palm. Killing a man is brutal work. Her hands have held a scalpel, her hands have held a knife.
“So fucking proud, Samira.” He weaves his hands into her hair, freeing the curls from the tight bun, runs his fingers through damp strands. “I don’t know what I would have fucking done—fuck, if I’d walked into work tonight and found out that—I would have killed him. I would have hunted him down like the animal he is, and killed him. It would have happened anyway. He’d be dead, no matter what. You just got there first. I’m so proud of you, sweetheart.”
The predator inside her, hazy and exhausted and worn, preens.
“You came,” she whispers, pushing their foreheads together, pushing their mouths together. “You came.”
Moaning, Abbot delves a hand into her leggings, under her panties, finds her slick and wanting. Finds that she wants him. Hips jerking, he pushes a finger up inside her without warning, and it makes her grab at his shoulders, howling in relief. Growling, he bites at the side of her throat, holds her close, gives her no reprieve.
What would he have done if she had come this close back at her shitty apartment, her dim one bedroom abode? Would he have lifted her on the kitchen counter? Would he have fucked her with the body cooling nearby? Would he have crowded her into her shower, onto her bed, made her neighbors regret their decision not to call the police, not to alert the authorities to her earlier screams? Would he have thumbed her nipples like this, licked at her neck, set his teeth at her trapezius?
“You came.”
No one. No one—
“You called,” he rasps.
“Fuck.”
His cock is thick, almost too big for comfort, but when she wrestles one leg out of her leggings she lets him pull the gusset of her underwear to the side, sinking down onto him in one go. There’s a stretch and a burn, and it claws her brain back into her body, seats her into reality. Grunting, she rides him, digging her knees into the worn nylon of the truck seats, curls her nails into his shoulders, forces herself down onto him again and again and again. She doesn’t feel sexy, or like a creature of want. She’s hungry, desperate, someone fighting to stay alive.
The adrenaline surge that encapsulated her senses rises again, floods her veins, sharpens her senses. She first felt it when Hammond fit the copy he made of her keys into the lock on her front door, when he broke the chain, when he threw his weight against the wood until it gave way and he was inside. Her phone was on her bed, wrapped in her duvet, and she screamed.
No one came.
“Make me feel it,” she gasps against his lips. “Please, I need to feel it. Abbot—”
“Jack,” he corrects her, nipping at her collarbone. Bite me, she wants to say. Claim me. Change me. Fear, terror, the certainty of death, it all still trembles through her, lurching her forward, flashing her nervous system hot and cold and horny and desperate to feel alive. “Fucking just—honey, please call me Jack.”
“I need to feel it, Jack,” she whines, tugging at the silvery curls at the nape of his neck. “I need to feel you. I need--"
I need you, she almost says, because it’s true, because it's real, because for the rest of their lives this is going to tie them together.
They will always have this secret, this terrible thing, this immense measure of devotion. The bodies are buried, the bodies are gone, the bones and sinew and the sound of the bone saw, his hands both tender and merciless, now closing in on her body. He could kill her, she could kill him, and isn’t that the trick of it all? Everything they’ve learned to save a life, how to take one. I need you, she almost says, because there is nothing to be forgiven. When she opened the door, tremulous and uncertain, he took one look at her and asked who he needed to kill. Who did he need to hurt. What was needed to make the violence done to her even. She didn’t do anything wrong, he didn’t do anything wrong, they were just making it go away. I need you to tell me for the rest of my life, every day, every morning and every night, no one has ever said it before and meant it—
“Shit.” A tortured sound wrestles its way out of his chest. “Shit, okay. I’ve got you. I’ve got you, baby. Samira, I’ve got you.”
“I know, I know, I know—”
The words escape her in a chant, rolled out of her, tripping off her tongue with every cantor of her hips down into his.
“I wanna touch you,” he says, bracing his feet on the floor of the cab, punching up into her with his hips. “Where do you need me to touch you? I wanna—let me make you come first, for the love of god, you need to come first—”
She puts his thumb in her mouth, sucking on his fingertip, ignores the riding tide of emotion in her, ignores the threat of overwhelm. Coating him in her saliva, she urges his hand down past her tits and her belly, down into her panties, puts the flat of his thumb against her clit. Jack looks at her, really looks at her, pupils blown dark and wide with lust, hands clean, hands miraculously clean, rutting up into her so that all she has to do is hold herself above him, brace herself on the back of the bench seat, moaning out her pleasure as he gives it to her, hand over fist, so generous, so kind, so free with it that it makes her cry.
Tears tracking down her face, she writhes above him, clutches his face to her breasts. Shouts exultantly as he sets his teeth on a nipple, working it to a tight bud, giving her that hint of pain needed to pull her back down into her body to feel her release.
“That’s it,” he says, grunting wildly, fingers clenching into her hip so hard she hopes he leaves bruises. She wants to look in the mirror tomorrow and know which are his. She wants to know he’s left something on her body. She wants to feel like she belongs to him. “That’s it, honey. Such a good girl, so good at following directions, so smart, you knew to call me, you knew I’d take care of you.”
Rocking back and forth, eyes shut, brows furrowed, she manages a nod.
He pulses up into her, and she feels the warmth of his spill before his head snaps back, before his grip tightens, before he groans. Softening inside her, he rubs soft lines up and down her back, adjusts their cooling bodies until her face is pressed into his throat. His cum drips down out of her, onto him, the mess of it all finally making sense to her.
There’s not a spec of blood in her apartment.
There’s Jack Abbot all over her.
One hand on the wheel, the other resting on her thigh, Jack drives them back to Pittsburgh with the sun rising behind them. His face is serious and plain when he glances away from the highway and says, “If you want, if you need, this night never happened.”
Wesley Hammond, aged thirty-seven, blood type A-negative, former cop. Current corrections officer. Not a Pittsburgh native. Two ex-wives, no kids. Mother lives in Winter Haven, Florida. Washed out of the US Marine Corps while still going through basic training on Parris Island.
Pathetic, on a first glance, physically unobtrusive. First presented in the emergency department seven months ago complaining of upper right quadrant pain. Hers was the first face he saw after he staggered past security, noticed her as she was triaging patients. Hers was the first face he saw. Hers was the face he remembered. Hers was the face he saw, exsanguinating on her kitchen floor. He was as good as dead—she put the knife through his eye anyway, lodged the blade into the frontal lobe of his brain. In their line of work, they can’t afford to be squeamish. She cuts into bodies every day. She’s held brain matter in her hand, cupped viscera as it’s slopped out of an abdominal cavity. Intestines burst, eyes flop out of their sockets, dangling by the optic nerve sheath. These things happen in their line of work. Wesley Hammond was already dead. She just made sure of it. Emergency department physicians do that every day.
Perfectionism, if there was something to blame.
She could have called the police. She could have subjected herself to the interrogations, the examinations, turning her apartment into a crime scene. The scrutiny, the mark put on her license, the morning news. She could have explained to her mother, to HR, to the super. She could have called the police.
She didn’t. She didn’t want to.
“Attagirl,” Jack says. He feels no regrets. He’s done worse, she suspects, than disposing of human remains. He’s done worse, and he wants better for her. “As he fuckin’ deserved.”
She’s a good person. A good physician.
That has not changed.
Samira nods, swallowing hard. “I didn’t do anything wrong.”
The state of Pennsylvania has spousal privilege. Samira double checks, Samira reads the entries on ProPublica, Samira cites her sources and specific case law.
They’re first in line at the Department of Vital Records when it opens at 8:30 in the morning. There’s a three day waiting period. They’re certain they can come up with a story palatable for their family and friends by the time it ends.