Chapter 7

CHAPTER 7

“Hiya, girlfriend!” Bethany says in her incessantly chirpy voice as I open the door to let her in.

“Hello, Bethany,” I sigh, resigned to my fate.

“Look, I think we’re going to have to get something out of the way before we go any further,” she says, about as seriously as anything she’s said since I met her this morning, which catches me somewhat off guard.

“All right. Shoot.”

“I know you’re not exactly thrilled about having to work with someone else on this project,” she begins, beating right through the bush instead of around it, “and I sense you’re not too thrilled about the fact that I’m the one you’ll be working with, either.”

So she’s not as stupid as I thought. Doesn’t make her any less annoying.

“But, for the sake of the assignment, I think it will be best if we put any feelings of animosity aside and pretend to be friendly. We will have to be working together over the next six months—both as teachers and on our assignment—and we can’t afford to let any personal problems get in the way of our work.”

“Yes, I know,” I tell her, feeling somewhat guilty for being so stand-offish. Just a little, though. “Trust me. I’m a professional when it comes to the job.”

“Good. When it’s just you and me, feel free to call me a no-good, horse-loving, Canadian, trumpet strumpet.”

Despite myself, I laugh and say, “Fair enough.”

“Yay! Now let’s get down to the brass tacks,” she says, pulling up a chair at my dining room table and sitting down as she finds her case file and lays it out across the table.

I order pizza delivery, and while we wait, we sit and start to talk about the case; Derek Johnson and his Goth Gang, the Goth Gang’s enemies, the teachers and faculty at the school, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. For the most part, I let her do the talking so that A) I don’t lead her along and just feed her all the right answers, and B) I can get a feel for her sense of how the job works.

Much to my surprise, Bethany is spot on with almost every point she brings up about the case. She even brings up several points and ideas that I missed. Zeke’s words from earlier this morning, “I wouldn’t judge a killer by the mask they wear, sweetheart,” ring throughout my head as she rattles on about the case.

When we get to the end of the packet—and the last slice of pizza—we turn our discussion to our exit strategy—and this is the one instance where I take control over the conversation.

“For our exit plan,” I begin to say delicately, treading lightly because I’m not sure how she’ll take what I’m about to break to her, “I was thinking about it earlier, and . . . well, the only way I think we’ll be able to pull it off is if we kill you off.”

For a second, Bethany’s expression is unreadable, and then she breaks into an enormous, shit-eating grin. “Really? That’s fantastic! Oh, this is going to be so fun. I get to fake my own death. I can’t wait. Wait . . . will I be able to go to my own funeral?”

“Probably not,” I say, grinning myself. “Unless you plan on flying back to L.A. to get your makeover undone beforehand and flying back. If you can talk Zeke into paying for the extra airfare and fake ID’s, go for it, but don’t hold your breath. It’s going to be complicated enough getting you back to L.A. once without anyone who knows Bethany seeing you, not to mention twice.”

“Oh, shucks,” she says with a slight pouty face.

Goddammit. Despite every ounce of common sense and self-preservation in my body, I am actually finding myself starting to like this Tweety Bird of a woman. This is not good. As a rule, I do not like people. It’s in my job description and everything.

“Okay, so what will be our personal story?” she asks. “You know, between Bethany and Jennifer?”

“Well,” I say, thoughtfully, “it will probably be best if we don’t pretend like we’ve known each other before now.”

“Makes sense. That would come off as too much of a coincidence. Plus, we’d have to know a lot more about each other’s characters if we’ve known each other for a while. It will be easier to keep things straight if we’ve just met.”

“Exactly. Since I’m not allowed to drive,” I say, unable to hide the resentment in my voice, “we’ll say that we decided to carpool together, in order to get to know each other better, since we’ll be working as teacher and student teacher. Shouldn’t be too hard to pass off that story.”

The majority of our plans settled for the time being, we decide to relax a bit and I open the bottle of wine from my gift basket from the school, and we spend the rest of the evening drinking and sharing stories—but not the usual stories that I imagine bonding girls share.

“My first time was in college,” Bethany slurred, several glasses into the wine. “Really cute guy. His name was . . . gosh, what was his name? Rodrick? Robert? No, Jason. It was Jason. Yeah, Jason. Anyway, we’d been dating for, like, I dunno . . . two months . . . three months . . . no, wait, it was a year. Yeah, that’s right. It was a year. Anyway, I found out he was cheating on me, with our psych professor, and as it transpires I have something of a short fuse when it comes to fidelity. Rod—I mean Charles—no, Jason never saw it coming. Neither did his skanky little slut puppy. Walked in on them doing the sordid samba—I was tipped off by a mutual friend who told me where the tramp lived. They were both dead within five minutes.”

“Oooh, a double! Nicely done,” I say appraisingly. “How’d you do it?”

“What you mean?”

“I mean, what did you use? A knife? Machete? Wiffle bat?”

“Hehe. Wiffle,” she snorts. I mean actually snorts. Wilbur the Pig kinda snort. “No, nothing fancy like that. I got kinda caught up in my rage of the moment, and didn’t have anything handy to work with. Turns out those Jiu Jitsu lessons I took in high school came in handy after all.”

“So, what, you killed them with your bare hands?”

“Yep.”

“No! Both of them? I mean, both your boyfriend and psych prof, not both your hands.”

“Yep. Well . . . not completely. I did have the assistance of the bed sheets. I beat and kicked them until they were mostly unconscious, and then finished the job with the bed sheets.”

“Cheating bastard strangled to death with mistress’s bed sheets. Nice. Very poetic.”

“Quite.”

“How did you get away with it?” I asked, knowing that she had to have gotten away if THEM had recruited her. THEM doesn’t recruit people who get caught.

“Oh, that was easy enough. Since there wasn’t any blood, I didn’t have any cleanup to do. The tramp lived alone in a house, and she had a closed garage that connected and opened into the house, so I was able to drag their bodies from the bedroom to the whore’s car without being seen by any neighbors. I then drove down to the pier—we lived in Seattle, and my daddy was a fisherman, so I grew up on the water. I . . . ahem ‘borrowed’ daddy’s boat, weighed the bodies down with a spare anchor, and tossed their cheating corpses into the Puget Sound. I then took her car and left it in the Sea-Tac airport parking lot and took a taxi back to the tart’s house, where I retrieved my car and drove off into the night.

“Once they were noticed missing, I played up the heartbroken innocent sweetheart bit to my fullest. Her car was found at Sea-Tac and the police decided they must have run off together. No one ever suspected that sweet, little, innocent me had gone crazy and killed them. The rest, as they say, is history.”

I hate to admit it, but I’m seriously impressed. If that was just her first kill—well first two kills, because just killing one person the first time around wasn’t good enough for Tinker Bell, Warrior Princess here—it’s no wonder Zeke recruited her.

“How many people did you kill before THEM recruited you?” I ask, reaching for my glass to take another sip of wine.

“Oh, let’s see . . . ” she says, contemplating for a moment. “I think it was . . . twenty-two or twenty-three.”

You know those bits in comedy movies and sitcoms, where someone says something unbelievable and someone else who just so happened to be taking a drink at that moment ends up spitting their drink all over the room or in the face of the person who said the unbelievable thing in the first place? Well, cynical little me always just assumed that was something concocted for cheap laughs and that it never really happened in real life.

I was wrong.

“Twenty-three?” I shriek in indignation.

“It might have been twenty-two,” she says, nonchalantly.

“How on Earth did you kill twenty-two people—”

“Or twenty-three.”

“—or twenty-three people without getting caught???”

“It’s easy when you look like you couldn’t hurt a fly. People have this unfortunate tendency to assume someone who looks innocent won’t hurt a no-good cheating son-of-a-bitch douche bag and his whoring sex puppet tart cake.”

Bethany’s uncharacteristic display of profanity forces me to, once again, prove the spit gag does in fact happen outside of the movies and sitcoms.

“Flies can’t help that they eat shit,” she continues, “it’s not their fault. Men on the other hand . . . Granted, not all of those were my boyfriends and their tramps. I don’t get around that much. Plus, I don’t think even I could have kept the cops off my back long if too many of my boyfriends and their girlfriends kept disappearing.

“After killing whatever-his-name-was and Psych-Slut, I realized I had a purpose—a mission—on behalf of women everywhere to get rid of cheating bastards and their home wrecking tramps. In the beginning, it started with going after guys who cheated on my girlfriends, but it quickly progressed to killing anyone I found out was unfaithful to their significant other—which obviously helped me escape detection since there wasn’t always a connection between me and the victims.

“But that’s enough about me. What about your first time, sweetie?” she asks, pouring herself another glass of wine.

“Oh, no . . . I can’t,” I say, feeling the buzz of alcohol disappearing faster than an ant on a gas lit stove burner.

“Go on, I told you mine. Tell me yours.”

“Oh, all right,” I sigh. “My first just so happened to also be my first boyfriend, Ted. The douche was a typical seventeen year-old horny fuck-rag male, who got fed up with my not being ready to do all the things seventeen year-old horny fuck-rag males want to do, and so he tried to force himself on me. He didn’t succeed. I like to imagine after I flushed his penis down the toilet it was eaten by one of those mythological alligators in the sewer. The rest of his body I cut up and left in the bushes of various parks and remote hiking paths all across L.A. County. By the time they found enough of the pieces to identify him, Ted had been classified as a teenage runaway for over two years.”

Just to be clear, Ted was not my first. No matter how much I have warmed up to the blond word-vomit-fountain sitting at my dining room table, I have not warmed up enough to tell her about my real first time.

“After Ted,” I continue, “I realized that I rather enjoyed killing, especially men. I did try a woman once, but it just wasn’t as fun. There’s just something incredibly satisfying about plunging the cold, merciless blade of a knife into the soft, moist gut of a man.”

“Not me, I love going both ways,” Bethany giggled, not an ounce of suspicion that I hadn’t been entirely honest with her. “I suppose it’s because my first time was a double, so it brings back special sentimental nostalgia whenever I kill a woman. Plus, cheating women piss me off just as much as cheating men.

“I never really fell in love with the knife, either. Too messy. Too much to clean up after yourself. I like strangulation, personally. Much tidier. Of course, disposing of the bodies is a bit more difficult if you can’t spread them out like you did with Ted, but having access to my daddy’s boat helped greatly in my early years of murdering. There are almost as many bodies at the bottom of the Puget Sound as China has orphans.”

We both start giggling uncontrollably at this point. What the hell has happened to me? I am not a giggler. It has to be the fucking wine. I should not be letting her in like this. I’ve learned before this is a dangerous road to be travelling down.

But the wine has waylaid my inhibitions far too much for me to regain control of myself. The best I can manage is to gradually turn down the giggling and say, “We should call it a night. We have to be high school teachers come morning, and we’ll need to be sober and rested for that.”

“Sweetheart, I don’t know about your high school teachers, but half of mine came to class drunk or stoned, or both,” she giggles. I refrain from joining her this time.

“No, seriously. Remember, it’s our first day at a new job. Bethany and Jennifer would not show up on their first day and make a bad impression.”

“Oh, all right, ya party pooper,” she sighs, resignedly pulling herself up.

“You gonna be okay to drive?” I ask.

“Sweetie, please. My grandparents were German immigrants; alcohol is like water to us. We have to be there at seven, so shall I pick you up at six thirty?”

“Ugh. That’s always the worst part about Zoo Projects, the early wake-up call,” I say with a groan. “Yeah, six thirty it is.”

“See you then, girlfriend!” she quickly plants a kiss on my cheek, and then skips out the door, leaving me a little confused, but mostly irritated at myself for letting my guard down.

I cannot let that happen again.