Right Behind You Read online

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  No train waited at the platform, but the first rumble of an approach sounded. Waiting for the train’s arrival was the longest thirty seconds of Leta’s young life. She was trapped now. If he came for her here, on the platform, she couldn’t escape him. The crowd was too thin, and there was only one way in.

  Save across the tracks. If worse came to worse, she could cross the tracks and escape by way of the far platform.

  Or throw myself in front of the train, she thought. It’ll be here. Any moment.

  But that would take me right to him, wouldn’t it?

  The train arrived and screeched to a halt. The doors opened with a pneumatic hiss. Leta scanned the thin crowd on the platform. Still no sign of him.

  Leta hurried on board and positioned herself near the rear of a car in the center of the train where she could hide easily but still keep an eye on the stairs leading down to the platform.

  The train sat idle for an impossibly long time. Leta kept her eyes on the entryway to the platform. For a moment, she sensed a strange, black blur threading a path through the late arrivals hurrying toward the train; a fleet shadow, moving of its own accord.

  Then a moment later she blinked, and the flitting darkness was gone. The doors hissed shut, the brakes released, and the train went rumbling on into the dark passages beneath Madrid.

  She was on the Ventas line. Bodies filled every available seat and stood in loose ranks, arms raised to the handstraps or rails above to steady themselves. The whole herd swayed with the gentle rocking of the hurtling train.

  Ventas meant the Plaza de Toros. The Plaza de Toros meant a fine, dense crowd. It was the festival of San Isidro, after all. Each day throughout the month of May, six bulls were slaughtered, and always the stands of the bullring were full.

  Always.

  Perfect. If Leta had indeed escaped her pursuer, there was no way on earth he could follow her, or find her, in the massive throng that would fill the plaza before a corrida during San Isidro. She was free.

  The door at the rear of the car opened. Leta spun, drawing breath, but saw that it was only a sturdy old Basque woman and her grandson, carting with them a red sack, no doubt full of wares to hawk on the sidestreets and alleys. Leta let them slide by and steadied herself with one of the overhead handrails. As the door slid shut behind her, a sudden draft caressed the nape of her neck. She shuddered and froze, a frightened animal. Someone blew breath into her ear.

  His voice followed, a whisper.

  “It would never have happened if you had simply let it go,” he said.

  Leta fought every instinct: run, scream, cry rape, turn and strike. Instead, she simply stood, eyes forward, one hand on the rail, the other on the appointment book in her pocket.

  Again, the young man in the black leather coat spoke. “I don’t care how many pockets you’ve picked, or how you make your living, or what the Madrileños think of you, Leta.”

  He knew her name?

  “I just need the book. My wallet and whatever you found in it don’t make a bit of difference to me.”

  Leta started to draw out the book, then paused. Something wasn’t right. He’d chased them, driven Betani right under the wheels of a car, and seemingly tracked her. But now, he asked for his property back?

  “Why don’t you take it, if you want it so badly?”

  He sighed heavily, impatient, even a little ashamed. “Because it’s not your time,” he said.

  The voice of the book purred in Leta’s brain. Your name is nowhere in my pages. He can’t make appointments, you see. That’s what I do. He goes where I lead.

  “What is it?” Leta asked in a whisper. “What is that book?”

  He sighed. “It’s my appointment book,” he said. “And I think, by now, you’ve figured out what sort of work I do and what appointments I must keep. Sometimes, the appointments change, such as this afternoon. If you hadn’t taken the book, Betani would still be here.”

  “But I did,” Leta said. “And she isn’t.”

  “Touché,” he replied. She couldn’t see his face, but she assumed he was smirking.

  The train neared the next station. As the brakes squealed the whole car lurched forward. Leta swayed into the man in front of her, begged his pardon in Spanish, and regained her footing. The young man in the black leather coat still hovered behind her, his lips right next to her ear.

  “What will you give me for it?” Leta asked, now wearing a crooked smile of her own.

  “Give it to me,” he said slowly. “You don’t understand… it can’t have any use for you—”

  “You don’t know that,” she said. “Maybe it wanted me. Maybe it wasn’t satisfied with you.”

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said.

  Leta turned. They stood face to face—the thin, worn gitano girl and the handsome, pale young American in the black leather coat. There wasn’t a handbreadth between them. Their bodies lurched back and forth in unison as the train carried on, accelerating.

  “I know that if someone values a thing, they guard it. If this book means so much to you, why didn’t you keep it nearer? In an inner pocket? In a moneybelt? On a chain?”

  “Don’t try to justify your thievery,” the man said through clenched teeth.

  “Sloppy,” she taunted. “Very sloppy.”

  “Fine,” he hissed. “The book is new to me. I’ve only had it for a few months and I’m still learning all that it can do—and all that I can do with it.”

  Leta felt a surge of hope. All that I can do with it. Whatever power it endowed him with, that power was diminished when the book left his hands.

  Was it passing to her, then? Could it?

  “Listen,” he said, voice smoothing over again, honeyed, yet ever-desperate, “if there’s something I can do for you—anything at all—just let me know. We can work something out.”

  Leta flashed a mischievous smile—a smile she knew would enrage and shame him—then turned away and drew the book from her pocket.

  He tried to lean in for it. His movement was controlled but slow—he didn’t want to arouse suspicions.

  That’s when she realized: he was diminishing. His strange speed, his fleeting shadow, all were diminishing. Moment by moment, he was less a terrible, mysterious stranger and evermore a common and awkwardly dressed American tourist.

  The train lurched again, slowing. Leta used the lurch to carry her forward a few steps. She opened the book.

  A new name was scrawled at the top of the first page. Ryan Allan Stanhope.

  That name hadn’t been there before. Not even under Betani’s.

  But it had a familiar ring to it. As if it put her in mind of an old friend. As if the book itself now whispered and drew pictures in her mind to fill the mnemonic gaps around the name and its associations.

  Ryan Allan Stanhope.

  A pale, quietly handsome face formed in her mind, followed by the association of a deep-if-a-little-strained, voice.

  And a black leather coat. A favorite leather coat worn since his senior year in high school.

  The leather coat he wore on the night a young, strange girl from a rival high school drew him into a closet at a party and gave him his first taste of anonymous sex.

  The same coat he was wearing the night he met the woman whose picture he carried in his wallet.

  The same coat he wore the night he left his weekend bartending job, flipping through a strange little appointment book found among the lost-and-founds and never reclaimed. That same night, driving home, he peeled an old black woman off the street with the front end of his Ford Probe. When he rushed out of the car to check on her, tears stinging his eyes, his heart strangled by grief and terror in his chest, he drew the book from his pocket instead of his cell phone, as intended. The book fell open and he scanned the first name within.

  Instantly, he knew it to be his victim’s name. And when he looked into her hemorrhaging eyes, he knew that she knew it as well.

/>   She spoke through a mouth flooded with blood, great, red bubbles forming on her dark lips as she reached out and clamped her cold hands on the back of his neck and drew him toward her, like a lover desperate for a last embrace.

  “Here,” she gurgled, drawing him in for a bloodied kiss. “Here’s where you take it from.”

  He didn’t know what she was talking about, convinced himself for just a moment that everything—the book, the dying woman, the dents and blood-spatters on the hood of his old Ford Probe—were just figments of a tired imagination.

  Then he lost his grapple, and dipped toward her, and felt her thick, bloodied lips close on his, and the warmth of her last breath was blown into his mouth. He drew away, terrified, wiping the blood from his lips. Her eyes were already fogged in death. A thin tendril of white smoke twisted up from her gaping mouth.

  Much like the tendril of smoke tumbling out of his own open mouth. He’d never smoked—cigarettes made him sick—but breathing her last breath was like breathing a strange, sweet perfume. He drew in the last idle feather of smoke and held that breath for a long instant. Something new coursed through him. Something terrible and powerful and alien.

  He glanced at the first page of the appointment book. Her name was gone.

  Then the book spoke to him in a low whisper, like an untrustworthy but ever-seductive lover.

  Don’t be afraid, it said softly, a honeyed voice in the center of his brain. We’ve appointments to keep, and I’ll not have you wreaking havoc on my schedule.

  Rise and walk. I’ll tell you where each step will lead you.

  Ryan Allen Stanhope did as he was told. He marched down the dark street, passing through pools of sodium arclight, and came at last to a four-way stop. The book ordered him right, and he turned right. As he rounded the corner, he found himself in a balmy, tropical afternoon in Rwanda, approaching a strewn heap of machete-hacked, club-broken corpses.

  His next appointment—his next kiss—lay buried alive beneath.

  All this flooded Leta’s psyche in a terrible, white-hot instant. In that instant, her new mark’s circumstance appeared in her mind, became an addendum to her own collected memories, and she understood precisely why he would never leave the Ventas Metro, and why she must.

  The brakes squealed as the train hurtled toward its stop at the Ventas station.

  Leta laid a hand on the back of Ryan Stanhope’s neck and gazed for a moment into his puzzled eyes. He understood, opened his mouth to protest, shifted his weight to move away. She thrust herself toward the young man in the long leather coat, pitying and praising him all at once. His ineptness and stupidity would undo him, but they had set her free.

  She set her lips on his and kissed him, long and deep, working her tongue in his mouth, filling his nostrils with her unwashed, cigarette-and-coffee-colored-sweat scent, and placed one hand on his forearm, squeezing as a lover might to silently settle their partner.

  He submitted to the kiss for a moment—though there had been many kisses, it was a lonely calling he now departed—then, he seemed to regain himself and tried to draw away. As he did, Leta inhaled deeply. His breath left him and filled her mouth, sweet and intoxicating. Before her, he sputtered, smoke rising in a thin swale from his gaping mouth.

  Leta inhaled the smoke trails rising from her lips through her nostrils, drawing every last bit of him down into her lungs. And as she exhaled, he was no more.

  She was away and out of the car before the first passenger noted how the young man grunted, bled from his nose, then pitched forward. There were murmurs and even a choked scream. Someone whispered a prayer.

  But already Leta was away, threading the slow-moving crowd, a fleet ghost among them. The taste of the young man’s soul faded from her tongue. Leta marched on, a new spring in her step, a new swagger in her narrow hips.

  She opened the book. It told her that she had a last appointment to keep in Madrid before departing.

  Duricio Séba, in Barrio Lavapiés.

  Call that a gift, the appointment book purred. A signing bonus of sorts.

  Leta felt warm; eager; satisfied. The world opened before her now, a lover’s arms, a harlot’s legs, a child’s eyes. It opened wide and it beckoned her forward, beckoned to show her all its wonders, and promised to feed her newfound desire.

  You’ll go far, her new companion whispered. Ryan tried, I know he tried, but he was never prepared, never up to the challenge. Too serious. Too literal. Too clumsy.

  It takes a light touch for this sort of work, Leta.

  And what fleet, supple fingers you have…