Mine to Bury

The sign in the window said CLOSED in two languages, but the door had given under Mara's hand, and that was the whole of the mistake — a door that should have been locked and wasn't, on a street she'd only walked because the app said the pharmacy on the corner stayed open until midnight and her sister's prescription would not fill itself.

She was three steps inside before she understood the room was dark. Chairs up on tables, their legs black against the streetlight bleeding through the blinds. The smell of cold grease and floor cleaner. A till drawer standing open and empty like a mouth. She had time to think wrong place, to feel the specific small embarrassment of having barged into somewhere she didn't belong, and to turn back toward the door.

Then the light came on in the back.

Not the main lights. A single bulb over a swinging kitchen door, and through the round window in that door she saw them the way you see a photograph — all at once, complete, before you've decided to look. Three men standing. A fourth in a chair, wrists zip-tied to the arms, his head hanging, a bruise closing one eye. And a fifth man, unhurried, screwing something long and black onto the end of a pistol.

Mara did not move. Some animal part of her, older than thought, understood that motion was the thing that got you seen, and pressed her flat against the coat rack by the door where the shadow was deepest, and told the rest of her to stop breathing so loudly.

The man in the chair said something. She couldn't hear the words, only the shape of them — the rising note of a man bargaining. The fifth man listened the way you'd listen to weather. He didn't answer. He raised the pistol, almost gently, the way you'd lift a glass you didn't want to spill, and he put it against the bound man's forehead, and the room made a sound like a heavy book dropped on carpet.

That was all. Not a bang. A cough. The bound man's head went back and then forward and then he was just a shape in a chair, and the fifth man was already turning, already lowering the gun, already saying something to the others in a voice too low to carry, and none of them were hurrying, and that was the part that reached into Mara's chest and closed a fist — that no one hurried. That it was Tuesday to them.

She was at the door. She didn't remember deciding. Her hand found the handle and the handle turned and the little bell above it — the little brass bell she hadn't noticed on the way in — rang bright and clear into the dark.

Every head in the back room turned.

Mara ran. She got the door open and one shoulder through it into the cold and she was already picturing the corner, the pharmacy light, people, a counter she could put between herself and this, when a hand closed on the back of her coat and took her off her feet and back inside as easily as reeling in a coat that had blown off a hook.

She did not scream. Later she would turn that over and not understand it — that in the moment the scream was right there and something colder overrode it, some flat clear voice in her that said screaming buys you nothing and costs you air. She got her feet under her. She did not claw. She let herself be turned around, and she looked up into the face of the man who had done it, because looking away felt like the thing that would kill her.

It was the fifth man. Up close he was younger than she'd have guessed and completely without expression, and his eyes moved over her face once, fast and total, the way a man reads a document he's been handed and will have to account for later. He had a hand fisted in her coat and the pistol hanging from the other, muzzle down, and he was not out of breath.

"Please," she said, and hated how it came out, and made herself stop. Begging was noise. She swallowed the rest of it.

Behind him the others had spread out. One had a phone to his ear. One had come to the kitchen door and stood in it with his arms folded, looking at her the way you look at a spill. The dead man was still in the chair. She did not let her eyes go to him. She kept them on the man who had her, because he was the one who would decide, and she wanted him to have to do it to a face.

"Wrong door," she said. Her voice came out steadier than the first time. "I was looking for the pharmacy. I don't — I didn't see anything I could tell anyone. I don't know any of you. I don't know where I am."

He didn't answer. He was listening — not to her, she realized, but past her, to the man with the phone, who had stopped talking and was now holding the phone out at arm's length, screen up, as though whatever was on it should be shared with the room.

End of sample. The story continues in the full edition.

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