Cole and I have made our plan.
We’ve run over it again and again in the safety of his living room.
Cole said he would prepare me for our confrontation with Shaw. At the time, I stupidly thought that meant that he would train me, like a fighting montage in a movie.
Now I realize how foolish I was.
I have no hope in an actual fight with Shaw. I might as well try to wrestle a grizzly bear. No training Cole could give me in months or even years could ever compensate for the biological imbalance in reach and mass.
Cole has no intention of me ever touching Shaw. But he’s intensely aware of the danger I’ll be in all the same. He knows what a killer can do. He knows Shaw’s violence because he knows his own.
So he drills me again and again and again, even though my only role is to be the mouse running from the cat.
Cole needs that one single moment of distraction to put a knife in the side of Shaw’s neck.
I’ll lure Shaw.
I’ll be the bait.
The real preparation was watching the tape.
Cole made me watch Randall die, because I had never seen someone killed before. Especially not someone I knew personally.
Cole knew I’d have to desensitize myself to blood, to screams, to the impulses of pity that might cause me to deviate from the plan. Cole knows the terror of violence, the physical effect it has on a person. He knows how it breaks apart your mind, causing you to act on instinct in all the wrong ways.
He drills me over and over and over, so that in the heat of the battle with Shaw, I’ll stick to our agreement.
“If worse comes to worse,” Cole says, fixing me with his dark stare. “If things are going wrong … you run, Mara. You don’t try to help me. You don’t try to stay. You fucking run. Because he’ll be right behind you—and if I’m gone, there’s no one left to save you.”
“That’s not going to happen. He’ll be dead before he even knows what’s happening.”
“That’s the plan,” Cole agrees.
That would comfort me, except I remember the old quote, “No plan survives contact with the enemy.”
Another complication is the continued surveillance of Officer Hawks.
Cole complained to the SFPD. He has enough connections in city government that Hawks has been told to back off. Hawks ignored this order, still trailing Cole on his own off-hours, showing up to every event where they’ll let him in the door, and visiting Clay Street more than the artists that keep studio space in Cole’s building.
Hawks takes his opportunity to intercept me when Cole is at Corona Heights Park, overseeing the final stages of construction on his monumental sculpture. Probably freezing his ass off, because a frigid wind is blowing in from the bay.
Officer Hawks steps in front of me before I can touch the heavy glass doors of the Alta Plaza building.
The wind whips our hair into our faces—his as well as mine, because Hawks hasn’t had it cut in a while. In fact, his entire person looks ill-groomed. All these after-hours stakeouts are taking their toll on him. He’s unshaven, eyes bloodshot.
“Doesn’t it bother you?” he demands, “Sleeping with the man who killed your roommate?”
I round on him, equally as indignant.
“I told you who killed Erin,” I hiss. “I have to see him at every fucking party I attend. Shaw is the Beast, not Cole. Why don’t you do your fucking job and arrest him?”
Hawks lets out a bitter laugh.
“He’s really got you fooled, doesn’t he?”
“Cole isn’t trying to fool me, and I’m not trying to fool him. We’ve seen each other’s scars. You think you’re a good man? I bet there’s something you’re ashamed of. Something you’ve never told anyone. Cole’s told it all to me. ALL of it. I’m not saying he’s a saint. But he is honest.”
“An honest killer?” Hawks sneers.
“You’ve never shot anyone?” I sneer right back at him.
“I’m a cop. It’s my job to catch criminals.”
“Yeah? I bet you only shot them when you had to, right? I bet every time you pulled your gun out, you absolutely had to do it, there was no other way. No part of you made a judgment on that person. No part of you thought they deserved to die.”
Hawks stares at me through the smudged lenses of his glasses.
My time with Cole has taught me to look for signals: the motions on the face that the mind can’t control.
For Hawks, it’s a twitch of his right eyelid, blinking over his iris like a camera shutter.
He doesn’t even know he’s doing it.
But he can’t escape the confirmation in my face. We both know that he sees a killer in Cole because he sees something familiar: a man who crosses the line when he feels it’s necessary. When he thinks he’s justified.
“I’m going to put him in prison for a hundred years,” Hawks hisses, his nose inches from mine. “Help me to do it, or I swear to god, I’ll book you as an accomplice. I’ll make sure you see prison time along with him. You’ll be splashed across every fucking paper: the Karla Homolka to his Paul Bernardo.”
Hawks has no idea how accurate that may soon become. But not in the way he thinks.
As I try to push past him, Hawks seizes my upper arm. I don’t shake him off, not even when his fingers dig into my flesh.
“You live in his house now. You could let me inside. Let me search the place. I’ll do it when he’s not home. He doesn’t even have to know.”
Hawks is unaware that Cole has cameras all over the house. Regardless, there’s no evidence to be found. Cole’s not that fucking stupid.
He’s only left evidence out in the open one time: inside Fragile Ego. I’ve begged Cole to buy the sculpture back and destroy it, but he doesn’t want to. He says it’s too beautiful.
This is the one point on which he is utterly irrational. Cole loves his art. He’d no sooner destroy it than he’d destroy me.
I almost want to let Hawks search the house just to show him how fucking stupid he’s being.
On the other hand, he’s not completely wrong. Cole is a murderer, just not the one he’s looking for.
The only way to deal with Hawks is to keep him at bay until we can deliver Shaw gift-wrapped. Just in time for Christmas.
Calmly, I remove Hawks’ fingers from my arm, grabbing his pinky and bending it back until he lets go.
“You’re wrong,” I tell him, flatly. “You’ll see it for yourself soon enough.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“The Beast of the Bay kills three times. Have you noticed that?”
Hawks goes still, eyes glinting behind his glasses. “Last time was four.”
My stomach lurches.
Can’t think about that. Picturing Erin drowned on my bed doesn’t fucking help her.
“The point is, he started a new cycle. Why don’t you try tailing Shaw on your off-hours? Either you’ll catch him in the act … or you’ll save a girl from becoming his next victim.”
To his credit, Hawks actually considers this idea. But then his eyes narrow and he hisses, “Sounds like you want to clear the way for your boyfriend’s nocturnal activities.”
I’m losing my patience.
“If that’s what you think, then there’s no point continuing this conversation. I would NEVER help a man hurt another woman. I’m a ladies’ lady and always will be.”
Shaking off Hawks, I storm into the building.
Sonia is already hurrying over, having seen the whole thing through the window. She looks ready to rip Hawks a new asshole if he hadn’t let go of me.
Sonia is also a ladies’ lady.
When she sees that I’m fucking fuming, she puts her arm around my shoulders
“You want me to call his boss?” she says. “Or better yet—I’ll call Cole.”
“No need. I told him off myself.”
“I’ll bet you did,” Sonia grins approvingly. “You’re turning into quite the little hellcat.”
I let out a laugh, thinking that Cole calls me a pleasure kitty, and Sonia a hellcat. I really don’t mind either of those descriptors. In fact, they suit me perfectly.
“I don’t want to claw his eyes out. But I will if I have to.”
Sonia snorts. “Now you sound like Cole. Must be a hazard of working here. We all become a little more … utilitarian.”
Sonia and I part ways at the stairs, her attending to the monumental labor of running Cole’s empire, and me heading upstairs to work on my newest series.
Sonia is right. Cole is rubbing off on me, and so is she. We always become like the people that surround us. No human is an island. We’re more like rocks in a tumbler, knocking each other’s rough edges, polishing and refining one another as we pass.
These days, I have no problem with the company I keep.
