The Caretaker

Content warning: dismemberment, descriptions of brutal assault

The ad was for a caretaker.

I’ve been taking care of things my whole life, but I’ve never been called a caretaker before, and that isn’t why I applied for the job.

I’m a soldier, a bleeder, a henchman. I was the henchman for a man everyone’s heard of, but never want to meet. And I was good at my job.

Maybe a little too good. When you know where all the bodies are buried—and I don’t mean metaphorically—you work for life. It’s a good deal until you meet a nice woman who doesn’t like to see the blood on your hands, so you ask your boss—who you’ve known since you were kids—to let you out, and he says, “No one ever leaves the life,” and some goon who used to be your friend cracks you on the back of the skull with a pistol and you wake up in a basement you’ve been in before, but never like this, and know that when the new recruits are done using you for a punching bag, they won’t even need to waste a bullet on your sorry ass, and they’ll send your ear to your mama so she won’t worry when you don’t come home and you’ll feed the fish at the bottom of Lake Erie like the goddamn circle of life completed.

But my boss wasn’t counting on a goon that was actually still my friend loosening my chains just enough that I could dislocate my thumbs and pull myself free. After a night in the sewers crawling to freedom, I made it to the surface and dragged my bleeding carcass to an alley where my face fell on the wanted ads of yesterday’s newspaper. And there, in letters so bold even my swollen eyes could read them: CARETAKER.

I wasn’t thinking about a new job. Hell, I was barely alive. What I needed was a hospital, not new employment, but the ad said medical care was included and I couldn’t trust any of the old places, so I got my hands on a cell phone—I’ll spare you the gory details of how—and I called. I probably should’ve asked more questions of the man who answered. The only one that mattered was if he could see me tomorrow, and he said he could. Then, in my only real turn of luck, I found an old VW some hippie chick left running in a parking lot and headed into the mountains to the address I punched into that stolen phone with my broken, bloody fingers.

The navigation voice telling me where to go and the keychain—a massive hunk of tinkling bells and crystals—knocking into a knife slice on the side of my knee, kept me conscious through the night. I’m probably going to die, and that’s OK—but not yet. Not until I make them pay.

I’ve been driving for hours, stopping only to vomit and scour the car for aspirin that I don’t find, and smoke the weed that I do, when navigation tells me I’ve reached my destination. I squint through the slits between bulging purple eyelids, and barely make out the six, six, nine on the sign—numbers that I’ve branded on my rattled noggin—and drive up a beaten path that ends on a partial clearing in front of a house that shouldn’t be there. It’s barely morning. Not much light makes it through the trees, and I wonder if I’m imagining the whole thing—the mansion with the green roof, the snakes curling down the walls, the ghost coming out the front door. I step out of the car—or try to. My foot hits the ground and I forget that some lackey in training took the last two toes on my left foot until white hot pain shoots up my leg and I land on my face in the dirt. The last thing I remember is the wind whistling through the hole in my head where my right ear used to be before the world goes black.

I’m definitely dying. The ones I’ve watched go slowly always talk about the cold, and I am freezing. There’s something sour in my mouth. Chunks of…something. My guts are being pummeled again. No—not pummeled. Through the slits in my eyes I see the ground moving beneath me, black shoes, a black shirt, a barbed wire tattoo on a muscular bicep. I’m being carried over a shoulder and the pressure on my cracked ribs and shredded guts pushes puke up my throat—more chunks that dribble out my mouth and down the man’s back. He cusses and I think he’s going to drop me. Another voice nearby says, “Can it, Ralph. It’s all part of the job.”

The next thing I know, I’m on my back, and something sharp jabs my neck. I’ve been stabbed before, so I recognize the intrusion of a blade in my skin. I try pulling away, but my body doesn’t listen. A voice I’ve heard before tells me to hold still. I peel my eyes open on a white form leaning over me—a ghost?—with a needle in his hands. My neck burns like it’s on fire and I choke on the smell of charred flesh. What the fuck did he do to me? What the fu—

I’m dead. I know I’m dead because a ghost has been visiting my rotting corpse. He wears a sweater-vest and has tufts of white hair above his eyes and ears, and he looks disapprovingly at me. I’m not sure, but I think I ask the ghost about hell and the hard line of his mouth cracks, and he tells me I’m not dead and to stop whining. Flecks of his spittle spray my face and I find that I can move my arms and legs, and beyond a dull, bone-deep ache, they don’t hurt as much as they should. The ghost tells me a story about how I collapsed, and they had to carry me in—I vaguely remember puking down a man’s back and a barbed wire tattoo—and that I’m lucky I got here when I did. Another hour or two and I really would be dead. Blood poisoning is a quick killer.

Blood poisoning. He keeps prattling, spittle keeps spraying on my face, but my attention snags on the words. When I crawled out of that hellhole of a basement pit and into the adjoining sewers, there wasn’t an unmarred bone or a patch of skin that wasn’t bloodied and broken. I knew I was dying, and that the sewer water soaking into broken flesh only sped up the process. It’s why I made the call to this place. Why I fought through the nausea and dizziness and shooting pains when I couldn’t see the road in front of me and forced every last mile out of a rotting body and that old VW to find the house in the woods that offered medical care in exchange for a job.

I should be dead. The ghost is actually a man—the same one who stabbed me in the neck with a needle. My arm is heavy, but I lift it to my jugular. His mouth narrows again, and he says he did what he had to do and if he didn’t, I’d be fish food by now.

Fish food. A chuckle rumbles up my chest. He sounds like my old boss. I’m not sure if that means I’ve come to the right place…or absolutely the wrong one.

The ghost man lets me sleep and when I wake again, I have to take a piss. There’s a metal bucket beside the bed for this purpose and I work life into my stiff muscles to get the job done. I notice that the gashes on my arms from the punk who practiced his knife work on my biceps have closed, leaving behind raised pink lines in my skin. That’s not right. Those gashes were clear to the bone, and weeping blood and puss when I arrived. I finish peeing and realize my thumbs, that I had dislocated to shake off the chains, move freely with only faint traces of pain. I bend over, an act that should’ve sent agonizing ripples through my broken ribs but doesn’t, and look down at my feet to check on the two missing toes—

What the fuck?

It’s not possible. I know that. I know that some things don’t grow back when they’re lobbed off a man, yet I’m staring through eyes that are no longer swollen at two new toes—pinker and fresher-looking than the rest—and I’m wiggling the damn things, and I know—I KNOW—that asshole with the wire cutters snipped the little suckers off because I can still feel the final POP of the bone, and I watched him toss them to my boss’s rottweiler like bits of kibble, and heard the whole room laugh while hot blood poured from the wounds and I knew—I KNEW—I was going to die.

But here they are. Toes. Regrown. Remembering the ear that was probably already on its way to my mama, I lift my hand to carefully explore what should be serrated skin dangling from the side of my head.

It’s a new fucking ear. A new—

I feel for the stolen phone that should be in my pocket, but it’s gone. My pants are gone. I’m in someone else’s clothes that smell like they’ve been packed in a suitcase for about twenty years. I pat down my tender but healing ribs through the loose-fitting shirt, knowing I should be wrapped in a full-body cast, pressing the button for a steady morphine drip. I definitely should not be standing up and stumbling for the door that opens before I reach it. The ghost man plows in, and I fall back on a creaky mattress that bounces underneath my weight. I’m too startled to even raise my fists at the man as he leans over me, frowning. He asks if I’ve forgotten who he is. Did I ever actually know? His frown deepens and he introduces himself as Ivan before grabbing at my chin, lifting my eyelids, poking at my ribs, and turning my arms over in his cold, white fingers.

What happened to me, I ask. He doesn’t answer—doesn’t comment on the regrown toes I’m wiggling like I still can’t believe they’re attached to my feet or mention blood poisoning again—just motions for me to follow him.

“My toes!” I scream. “Look at MY TOES. And my ear. My goddamn ear grew back.”

His lips turn up in a sneer and he says, “You’re welcome.”

Ivan leaves me gaping-mouthed on the flimsy twin bed tucked in the corner of what I now see is a bedroom. He’s left the door open like he wants me to follow him, and I don’t know what else to do, so I get up and head out into a dark, narrow hall lit by flickering oil lamps. Where the fuck am I? I don’t remember this hallway. Limping on my new toes, I chase the shuffling moonbeam into a shadowed foyer that smells like dirt and wood smoke, around what would’ve been a grand staircase if it weren’t crossed in spiderwebs so thick and intricate a man would need a chainsaw to cut through them to get to the top.

We enter a room on the other side of the staircase. A parlor, of sorts, with antique couches, high-backed chairs, sturdy wooden tables, and a fireplace on the far wall. No TV or radio or anything modern. I remember my own cellphone then, and the lackey who smashed it with a hammer to show me what he was going to do to my right wrist.

A wrist that twists easily at my side, no longer a limp, useless noodle filled with shattered bones.

Ivan stops in the middle of the parlor and appraises me as I appraise him. I don’t know if this is friend or foe, but this man jabbed a needle in my neck when I was dying, and now I’m either very much alive or trapped in a very strange dream. Getting a good look at the man, I can’t decide if he’s a well-kept centenarian or a poorly-tended thirty-something or…something else. His face is free of wrinkles and void of color, his mouth either permanently pulled down in a frown or he’s angry with me for some unknown offense. Without warning, he grabs my left arm and squeezes up and down as if testing the muscle underneath. This isn’t the first time I’ve been assessed for my strength, and though I want to swat his surprisingly strong fingers away, I grit my teeth until he’s done. He asks if I can lift a hundred and fifty pounds, and I think back to one of my last jobs when a scrawny bird that was ready to sing needed his wings clipped before taking the stand, and he couldn’t have weighed more than one fifty. Easy enough, I tell Ivan. I can deadlift at least a hundred and fifty pounds.

He asks if I have a strong continence, because the last fellow’s weak stomach ruined a perfectly good Persian rug. I don’t have to tell him I crawled through a sewer to get here—he changed my clothes, so he already knows—I just tell him smells aren’t a problem.

He says it isn’t smells that he’s concerned about.

He asks about discretion, my mobility (when I’m not on death’s door), if I have trouble with dark spaces…also my height, age, next of kin.

I stumble on that last part. Next of kin. I’ve been too close to death to think of anything else, but now my fiancé Lisa’s lifeless body flashes before my eyes as if I’d been there to see it. In the basement, some of the goons made a sport of sharing the details of her death, but the same friend that loosened my chains assured me he made it quick. I can’t find it in me to be grateful for that small mercy because no matter how I slice it, she’s dead and I’m alive—not only alive but healed in ways that never should’ve happened. I wish I was still writhing in pain with broken bones and torn flesh because I deserve to suffer for what was done to her all because she loved me.

I’m shaking my head, swallowing the stinging rage at the back of my throat, when something jingles across the room. Ivan’s eyes flick to a bell attached to the wall with a cord. He excuses himself in a big damn hurry and tells me to stay put. I sit on a dusty sofa and try slowing my heart down before I do something stupid, like plow that stolen VW through my old boss’s front door in a blaze of bullets that would get me killed before I got anywhere near him.

Fuck. I grip the sides of my head to hold myself together and keep suicidal ideas from taking root. There will be time for revenge later, I promise myself. In the meantime, I need to be smart. I don’t know shit about this place, and I don’t understand how it was possible, but Ivan saved my life. In my world, that’s no small thing. The man in the basement who loosened my chains—the friend who gave Lisa a quick death—only did it because a few years ago I pulled his youngest daughter from the clutches of a rival mob boss. He owed me, and I didn’t need to remind him that.

Now I owe Ivan for whatever was in that syringe.

Even if I didn’t owe a debt here, I can’t go back to the city. If I tried gathering the scraps of my old life to build a new one, I’d be dead before I got started. I shouldn’t have survived my wounds, but I know my boss won’t rest until my body washes up somewhere. This place is isolated and not connected to anything or anyone back home. He’ll never find me here. I’m safe while I figure out my next move.

As long as Ivan gives me the job I came here for.

When he returns, I’ve made up my mind. I tell him I’m ready to start right now. He narrows his eyes and cocks his head like he’s confused.

The ad was for a caretaker, right? I ask. Well, I’m the man who takes care of things.

He grunts and I follow him out of the parlor. As we pass the staircase, I mumble that the ad should’ve been for a maid, and he says that they don’t use the second floor.

They. I gathered by the ringing bell that there was someone else in the house. My patchy memory sparks on the black shirt and barbed wire tattoo of the man who carried me when I arrived. I ask Ivan about him, and he tells me that it was another applicant that didn’t work out. I wonder if he was the puss that puked on the Persian rug.

Ivan leads me across the foyer to a kitchen lit by a single oil lamp in the middle of a large center island. He opens a cabinet and sets two glasses and a bottle of whiskey on the butcher block countertop and pours us a drink while he lays out the terms of my employment. Late nights, living on site, answering every bell…I’ve done this all before. I ask who’s doing the ringing and he says, “Angel.”

Angel. The name glides like a sharp blade over untouched skin off the pale man’s tongue and his eyes fill with reverence.

This is her house, I learn. Everything we do is for her safety, her health, her life. I ask about pay, and Ivan chuffs. What Angel offers is far more valuable than monetary compensation. He points to where he stuck the needle in my neck. My hand moves to my jugular, and he asks me what I was running from when I arrived.

“Nothing,” I assure him. “Nothing that can follow me here.”

We finish our whiskey, and he leads me back to the foyer. I notice another bell hanging from a cord on the wall, and a door underneath the staircase with about twenty locks on it that Ivan warns me never to open. Then we turn down the dark, windowless hallway we started from, and Ivan points out his quarters as the first door on the right. A few doors down and on the left, we return to mine. It’s smaller than my prison cell when I did a nickel upstate a few years back, and just as sparse. I note the bell above the bed, and the single window with black curtains drawn tight.

How long have I been here? I ask Ivan, and he says two days. Two days and my body is almost fully repaired.

Across from my quarters is a shared bathroom, and at the end of the hall is a door that opens into a backyard.

It's late afternoon—or I think so. What little light makes it through the canopy of trees is almost too bright for my eyes that have adjusted to the oil lamps, and I understand why Ivan’s skin is almost translucent.

Behind me, the decrepit old mansion looms like a relic reclaimed by the woods around it. What I remember being snakes slithering down the walls are actually vines. Underneath the vines, a layer of moss has crept down around the second story windows from the roof, making the house completely camouflaged from above. I get the feeling again that this place shouldn’t be here. Maybe I shouldn’t be here either. Gears from my old life start turning and I wonder what the hell Ivan and Angel are trying to hide. What are they growing or making or doing that requires this level of concealment?

Ivan nudges me out of my head and over to a shed the color and texture of tree bark with a metal smokestack coming out the top, tucked into the trees on the right. I figure this is the source of the burning smell I’ve noticed since Ivan plunged that needle in my neck. Beside the shed is a stack of wood taller than me, and an ax stuck in a chopping block waiting for the next log to split.

Ivan asks if I’ve ever wielded an ax. Instead of telling him about the Manetti twins and how many pieces I left them in, I tell him I’m very comfortable with axes, and make a crack about him expecting a long winter. When he doesn’t laugh, I know we aren’t going to be best pals once my sense of humor fully comes back from the dead.

The fire burns at all times, he says. It’s part of the job.

An irritated Ivan takes me around the to the back of the shed and shows me the handle for the chute where we stoke the fire, pulling it open with a whiny, metal groan. The chute itself is about two feet wide, a foot, or so, high, and endless. I can’t see very far into it, but I feel the heat of the continuous fire smoldering at the bottom. Ivan orders me to grab a few blocks of wood and toss them in, so I do. When he closes the chute, I don’t hear the blocks reach the bottom over the groaning metal.

We’re headed back to the house when I notice tire tracks behind the shed that disappear into the woods. I ask Ivan what’s at the end of the trail, and he says it’s above my pay grade—which is nothing I haven’t heard before, but I don’t like it. It’s finally starting to register that I’ve been stripped of everything that’s mine, and even if I wanted to leave—which I don’t—I couldn’t. I’m tromping around barefoot, for Christ sakes, without a stitch of my own clothes, no phone, no car keys. I tell Ivan I want to get something out of the VW I drove here, and his lips curl over his teeth like he’s caught me in a lie, and I guess he has because he says: There’s nothing inside but your blood that belongs to you.

Well, shit. I don’t know how he knows the car is stolen, unless he found the registration in the glove box and saw a woman’s name on it. I want to call him out for snooping like he’s called me out for stealing, but I’m walking on two new toes, hearing the birds with a brand new ear, and decide Ivan gets a pass for now.

Before we go inside, Ivan stops in front of what looks like a metal window with a pulley beside it on the back wall of the house. He pulls the cord and a metal grate opens.

It’s a dumbwaiter. And inside is a black plastic bag that Ivan tells me to collect.

I hesitate because I know they don’t use the upstairs, so the bag I’m looking at came from the basement…and the last basement I entered was the kind of place a person only left in a bag just like this one.

Ivan nudges me with a pointy elbow and says this is part of the job too—hauling trash from the dumbwaiter to the chute for burning. I grab the knot holding the bag shut. It’s surprisingly heavy and he reminds me that I said I could carry at least one hundred and fifty pounds. I want to remind the pale man that I was very nearly dead a few days ago and to cut me some slack, but that wouldn’t have gone over well with the old boss—men had lost fingernails and teeth for less—so I heft the bag over my back and carry it to the chute. It feels…squishy. I think maybe I haven’t left my old job after all, just been demoted to one of the worker bees with their rubber gloves and bleach and heavily compensated discretion. It almost makes me laugh, until Ivan interrupts my thoughts with a warning.

Never open the bags. Trust me, it’s a mess you won’t want to clean up.

“Sure,” I chuckle. What the fuck have I gotten myself into?

I yank the chute door open, toss the bag inside with a wet thump, and let the damn thing go. It disappears into the darkness with a hot breath of air.

It’s all…it’s all too familiar. I mean, I wasn’t in charge of this part of disposal, but did I just chuck a body into an underground furnace? Did I actually die, and this is hell, and my punishment for many years of loyal servitude to my last boss means an eternity of grunt work—hauling bodies and such—for the man downstairs?

I’m smiling. It isn’t a happy smile, but a wry one, and Ivan asks what’s funny. Nothing, I say. I’m just a little out of it, and that’s the truth. Two days ago I was dying. Now I’m either dead or very much alive and I can’t decide which one it is.

Or which one is worse.

The days—or I should say, the nights—pass. It’s taken a beat but I’m now on the preferred schedule of waking at seven p.m., working a slow routine of chopping wood, stoking the shed, checking the dumbwaiter, stoking the shed again, and sharing household chores with Ivan, who spends more and more time in what I learn is the basement, behind the door underneath the staircase. When I hear the twenty locks start clicking, I know I’ve got anywhere from five minutes to three hours on my own to knock around the first floor of this old mansion. In the kitchen I find a toolbox and piece together a basic lock-picking kit since my old one never made it out of my old boss’s basement. There are more locked doors than anything else here. Ivan doesn’t bother to tell me what’s in them or warn me to stay out of them because he doesn’t know my skillset gets me into pretty much any room of my choosing.

The first lock I pick is to Ivan’s quarters. The room is similar to mine—dark, sparse, and impersonal, except for the picture on the wall. It’s an oil painting of a knock-out brunette with big brown eyes and the fullest, reddest lips I’ve ever seen. I get lost in her for a minute, my mouth watering and my knees getting weak like some horny teenager that’s never seen a woman before—and I haven’t. Not like this. I think this can’t be a portrait of a real person because that kind beauty doesn’t exist—and if it does, I’ve never seen it. I run a finger through the dust on the gold plate at the bottom of the frame and stumble away from the portrait into Ivan’s bed behind me.

It can’t mean what I think it means, but I don’t know what to make of it.

It says: Angel, 1908.

It can’t be that Angel, my mysterious employer who lives below ground, spending her days ringing bells in the dark, sending black plastic bags up the dumbwaiter for disposal. That would make her, what? If she was in her twenties in the painting, then she’d be about hundred and forty years old. People don’t live long in my business, but they don’t live that long anywhere else, either.

My brain is spinning on numbers that don’t add up when I hear the click of the basement locks echoing as everything seems to echo in this house, and I hurry out of Ivan’s room. He finds me in the back hallway and demands to know why I’m not chopping wood.

I tell him I had to take a shit, and he says if I can’t follow simple orders, this isn’t going to work out. It’s not the words that bother me, but the acid they’re laced with. I know that tone. I’ve delivered it before. I have a sickening feeling that Ivan can take life as quickly as he can give it. Thinking about taking lives, for a heartbeat I consider putting my hands around his neck and giving it a squeeze. That’s what I would’ve done a few days ago when it was my job to keep people in line, keep the “yeses” coming, keep my boss happy. I don’t because I don’t think Ivan is the one I should be worried about, but Angel in the basement.

Whatever danger lurks within the mansion’s moldy walls, I’m safe from everything outside of it. The longer I stay, the more I feel my old life squeezing from my bones. It’s not a bad thing. Aside from a buzzing in my veins that might have nothing to do with the low-level lackeys still scouring the sewers for my corpse, I can relax knowing no one from my past is going to find me here. This is the perfect place to disappear.

Or be disappeared. When my old boss used the word, he meant at the bottom of Lake Erie. But a place like this? That would work too.

Now that I’m living, I’d like to keep it that way. I ask Ivan for more clothes and shoes since I’m still running around barefoot like a heathen, and a couple loose shirts and pants show up outside the door of my quarters the next day. No shoes. In that tone that ends arguments, Ivan insists I don’t need them. Fine, I can live without shoes for a while. It actually makes me stealthier, which is good because I sneak into Ivan’s room any chance I get.  

I don’t pretend it isn’t to see her. I can’t get her out of my head. Angel, the woman in the oil painting, finds me no matter where I am or what menial job I happen to be doing. I’ve never been a sleepwalker, but more than once I’ve woken up turning the locked knob on the basement door. She’s down there. I can feel it. I can feel her. I think I can get through all the bolts keeping me out, but it would take some time, and I’d have to do it when Ivan is sleeping. Even then, it’s risky. I don’t know what Ivan will do if he catches me.

And I don’t really know if I want to know what I’ll find in that basement. Somehow I doubt it’s the Angel from 1908.

I manage to keep my wits in one of my visits to the portrait in Ivan’s room, and jimmy open the drawer of his bedside table. Inside I find a bottle sleeping pills. I suspected Ivan laces my nightly whiskey with something to help me sleep through the days while my body adjusts to a new rhythm, and I don’t hate him for it. Other than the sleepwalking, I’ve had the best sleep of my life here.

No, the pills don’t bother me, but the name on the bottle sets off an itch in my brain.

Ralph Simpson.

The date of the prescription is from a few weeks ago. In the week, or so, since I started my employment, there hasn’t been another person in this house except for the man who carried me in from the driveway—the other candidate that didn’t work out. So who the hell is Ralph Simpson, and how the hell did Ivan get his pills?

The nights start bleeding together. I bide my time with daily chores until Ivan descends the basement steps and I can visit Angel in his bedroom. She’s taking up more and more space in my head, squeezing Lisa out. It’s a mercy, really, since I haven’t figured out how I’m going to avenge her death. There’s Angel and vengeance, vengeance and Angel. And when the sun comes up, Ivan pushes a sandwich and a glass of whiskey through a slot in my door, and I sleep. If a bell rings—any bell at any time of day or night—I stop whatever I’m doing and meet Ivan in the entryway for instructions. Usually that’s when he heads down to the basement again.

I’ve been here for about a month when I break into the locked door across from Ivan’s bedroom.

Inside, men’s jackets and shirts hang from racks along the walls, some of it far too big to fit Ivan. Below the clothing, lined neatly on the floor, are shoes and boots in sizes ranging from seven to fourteen. Tucked within the clothes I find a locked dresser that I crack open. In the top drawer are eyeglasses in all shapes and prescriptions. In the middle are dozens of sets of car keys on keychains as varied as the boot sizes. I’m about to work on the last drawer when something sparkly catches my eye. A crystal.

A whole mess of crystals. The keychain tinkles like tiny bells in my hand when I lift it out of the drawer, and I remember the way it knocked against my leg on the drive here, and the VW I haven’t seen since I came back from the brink of death.

But there must be dozens of other sets of keys here. Maybe hundreds. And I haven’t seen a single car since I arrived. I’ve done my share of disappearing vehicles. Ivan wouldn’t want to torch them because the smoke from the gasoline and tires burned hot and black and would draw too much attention, even if the flames didn’t set the forest ablaze. Sinking them in a lake only worked for a while. Some asshole fishing or some poor kids swimming always found those eventually, and I haven’t seen any water around here.

The path behind the shed with the tire tracks. I bet there was a used car lot at the end.

But what about all the fucking drivers?

I feel time squeezing away so I pick the lock on the bottom drawer and find…a fortune.

My mind starts running numbers as soon as I see what’s inside. I can’t help it. What my old boss would do to get his hands on this stash. He’d open every bottle himself, test every pill just to be sure. Toss a bunch in a bowl and pass them out at parties and revel in the chaos that unfolds. Even in our best scores, I had never seen more prescription pill bottles in one place. Anti-depressants, anti-psychotics, muscle relaxers, opioids. The goddamn motherload of loot. I could swipe the lot, take my keys, hope like hell the VW I drove here is parked somewhere at the end of that road, and build a new life. I could—

How did you get in here?

I freeze. It’s Ivan. I’ve been losing my head over these damn pills, and I didn’t even hear him come up behind me. A low level lackey in my old job would’ve lost at least a finger for this kind of infraction. I don’t know what Ivan will do. I haven’t stolen anything, but I have broken into this room. Slowly, I turn from the drawer. I know, in this kind of situation, lying doesn’t work. It’s better to turn it on its head.

What are you doing with all these pills? I ask.

Ivan’s mouth tightens around the words, Your employment is hereby terminated.

He turns to leave, and I call him back.

Now wait a minute, I say. You’re sitting on a gold mine. You know that, right? Instead of a drawer full of pills, you could have a safe full of cash. He stops in the hall, his back to me, and I pause before saying, If you knew the right people.

And I suppose you do? He asks quietly over his shoulder.

As a matter of fact…

He doesn’t move, like he’s thinking it over. Then asks me if I’ve checked the outside dumbwaiter. He scoffs when I tell him I haven’t.

Meet me in the parlor when you’re finished, Ivan says, leaving me in the dark hall to do the job I came here for. I don’t want to leave the pills now that I’ve found them, but Ivan doesn’t seem to be in a hurry to lock them back up again. He heads toward the parlor, and I head the other way, swiping an oil lantern from a hall table beside the back door, and out to the dumbwaiter where a lumpy plastic bag waits for disposal. I heft the bag over my shoulder and let the lantern lead the way through the dark before I hang it above the chute.

But I don’t throw the bag down. I sense that I’m not going to like what happens when I get to the parlor. Ivan now knows I can pick locks. He knows I’ve broken at least one rule. What’s one more?

The plastic is thick—the good stuff. The stuff my old boss uses. I can’t tear through it with my fingers, so I untie the knot at the top. The smell hits me first—like copper and old meat. I wish I wasn’t familiar with it. I almost laugh as I cover my nose and the bag opens on a beefy bicep and a barbed wire tattoo.

I suddenly know why the name Ralph Simpson on the pill bottle in Ivan’s bedroom bothered me so much.

Ralph. I remember Ivan cursing it when the man with the barbed wire tattoo carried me through the house. And now I know what happens to the caretakers who aren’t fit for the job.

What is going to happen to me.

I hold the top of the bag closed and send it down the chute to the fire that’s always burning. It’s a clever design. More permanent than melting off fingerprints, removing teeth, and sending bodies to the bottom of the river tied to a cinderblock.

I swipe cold sweat from my brow. I should’ve seen this coming. I should’ve had the foresight to plan. If I wasn’t so damned consumed by that fucking oil painting, I might’ve picked the lock on the room with all the clothes and keys sooner. I could’ve put together a savvy go-bag just in case. Now, when I probably should run like hell, I have no car, no money, no phone, no ID, no shoes, and nowhere on this earth to go that I’ll be safe for long. The only thing scarier than all that is ending up in pieces that someone hauls up from the basement in that dumbwaiter—

Angel.

My veins tingle at her name. Since I’ve been here, two things have occupied my mind through every menial task Ivan set in front of me: the look in her eyes in that fucking painting, and revenge for Lisa and the life that was taken from me. I already left one basement in pieces. I decide right then and there that it wasn’t going to happen again.

I find Ivan standing in the middle of the parlor with a drink in his hand.

Who is Angel? I demand. He’s not surprised by my question. Swirling his own drink, he motions to another glass on a table beside the highbacked sofa.

I know what you’re doing here, I tell him.

He shakes his head and in a low voice I’ve yet to hear him use, he says, You have no idea, kid.

Kid. I wonder how old he is, and not for the first time. In this light, there’s something ancient in his eyes that makes me think I’m so far out of my depth I don’t even know I’m already in that basement, already in tiny pieces awaiting disposal. Right now, he isn’t hunched over and stumbling like the ornery, hapless caretaker answering to the ringing of bells. He’s tall and imposing, with the righteous indignation of a worldly man speaking to an insolent child.

But I’ve known men like this my whole life—I used to be one of them. I tell him, in my most imposing voice, that I just threw pieces of Ralph’s body down the chute, and I want to know why.

Ivan takes a sip of his whiskey before barking, because he was a petulant little prick just like you.

Do you know who you’re talking to? I ask. I’m Leon fucking Graves. You might’ve heard of me. They used to call me the Gravedigger.

I let this sink in. Ivan blinks once, his only indication that he knows the name.

If you know me, I say, then you know my old boss. And if you know my old boss, then you also know that what you’re doing here is nothing I haven’t seen before.

What do you want, Leon the Gravedigger? Ivan asks finally.

In.

In. I don’t realize that’s what I want until the word flies out of my mouth and sucks all the air out of the room. It’s true. I do. I want in.

You need a guy like me. One that takes care of things. You have a well-oiled operation here, but I have the skills to make it better. I have the connections to make money off those pills, the chop shops to take care of the cars wherever they are, and access to the kinds of low-level assholes that can do the dismembering for you. With my help, we can build Angel an army—

He ends what I think is a brilliant sale’s pitch by throwing his glass against the wall behind me.

You think you can come in here and tell me what Angel needs? You think you know her, do you? It takes everything I have to keep her alive. You’re not dreaming about her because you’ve seen some damn portrait. Her blood runs in your veins, Leon Graves. You belong to her.

You belong to her. As his words settle, I find it hard to stand so I drop to the couch and let my head fall into my hands for a few beats.

Ivan’s still talking. What I catch isn’t pleasant. He reminds me that I have no friends. Asks if the members of this so-called army were the same ones who beat me within an inch of my life. That even if they weren’t, even if I had connections I could trust to help with the hard bits of his business, if word ever got out about Angel…

My head snaps up. He’s right about everything and he’s also given me the answer to his last concern.

“Give them her blood.”

It’s Ivan’s turn to stop mid-sentence and listen.

I say, “Give them her blood. Blood is stronger than any oath to some other boss that gives them just enough money to keep showing up. Give them her blood, like me, so they’ll belong to her.”

I don’t know if I’ve actually solved a problem because I don’t really know who or what Angel is, and what belonging to her really means, but I feel her lifeforce buzzing in my veins and that has to mean something. Ivan doesn’t say anything for a while. I’m asking him to rewrite his life much like I’ve been rewriting mine, and it’s not something a man doesn’t think about first. I reach for the whiskey on the table beside me, and before I get it to my lips, Ivan swats it away, the glass thumping across the carpet, and the whiskey ruining another expensive rug.

He shakes his head and I understand that whatever was in that glass would’ve ended me. I should strangle him, or at the very least punch his lights out, but I don’t. I laugh—and so does he, and it’s a crackly, unnatural sound. He pours me a fresh drink in a clean glass and sits beside me on the couch, and asks, What do you want out of all this? What’s in it for you?

I let the whiskey coat my tongue before I say simply, “Revenge.”

Ivan says he’s not agreeing to anything yet. That we’ll talk more about the details later. But right now he wants to know if they’ll come all this way if I call. I chuckle and say they’d trip over each other to collect the price on my head. He tells me to invite them over…

Because Angel needs to eat.

He smiles and it’s an evil sort of thing. I respond with one to match. I guess it’s true, what they say. You really can’t leave the life. And I haven’t.

I used to be soldier, a bleeder, a henchman. Today I’m a caretaker for a woman no one has heard of and never wants to meet.

And I suspect I’m going to be very good at my job.