Free Dressed to Kill by Campbell Black Page A

dredged up from a deep place inside yourself, your own theater of the absurd, your own auditorium of menace.
    But why was the pain so fucking real?
    Why did she hear herself scream so loudly?
    I was looking for my ring, that was it. The wedding ring. And I couldn’t find it, no matter where I looked.
    Blood ran in her eyes. She put a hand up to her face. The blade fell again, slashing across her fingers. She felt herself slide down against the wall, blinded, pain piercing her with the intensity of a laser. She covered her head with her hands but the pain had moved elsewhere. She crossed her legs. She was bleeding down there, bleeding from the crotch. She tried to rise. She tried to push the blade away but she couldn’t, it just kept falling and falling. She tasted her own blood. She tried to wake up, to force herself out of the nightmare—but there was no end to it. She imagined she heard the name “Elliott,” but suddenly there was a great and terrifying distance between herself and the world; it was like some harsh tide that, as it ebbed back to the horizon, carried her away to a dark place, a dark sun, a black sky. And still, fainter now, she could feel the slicing of the blade.
    She had the absurd thought: I’m dying.
    But that couldn’t be right.
    That just couldn’t be right.
    Even as the lights faded and the sound of the blade became no more than a breeze blowing in a spider’s web, she knew it couldn’t be right.
    5
    Liz watched the door close, saw Ted’s hand uplifted in a coy little wave, and then she was alone in the corridor, passing under the lamps to the elevator. He was okay, she thought—what you’d call a nice ineffectual guy, probably house trained and henpecked by a wife and shabbily treated by a boss. You could read the story of his life in his sex act—shyness, reluctance, a certain softness. He’d probably saved up to get laid and his wife was back in a place like Syracuse or Quincey, thinking he was on a business trip. Maybe, she thought, the thing that glues relationships together isn’t love or affection, but some emotional sleight of hand, a trickery of the heart, a collection of tiny deceits and minuscule treacheries. There was something depressing in that.
    She stopped at the elevator and pressed the call button. As she waited she looked along the empty corridor at the wall lamps. Sometimes apartment buildings were spooky, like all the inhabitants had upped and left. You could imagine opening all the doors and stepping inside rooms filled with furniture covered over by dust sheets. She listened, hearing the motion of the elevator in the shaft.
    She was dogged by tiredness again; she should have taken the day off—but somewhere her internal calendar was telling her about time passing, a message that became increasingly urgent. Two years: would she look back later and say they’d been worth it? The decision back then had been cold and deliberate, reached out of an understanding that the world was a hard place to be without bread and that the most saleable commodity you possessed was your own body. She yawned, leaned against the wall, heard the sound of the elevator growing louder.
    The lights on the panel blinked. The elevator came. The doors slid open.
    Later she would try to remember what she felt, she would try to remember what she saw, and at the core of the memory there would be confusion, panic, terror, and the strange constricted echo of her own scream.

THREE
    1
    S ometimes it seemed to Marino that the world was nothing but the sum of grief, that suffering was the major part of that entity called the human condition. The only answer maybe was to immunize yourself against it, the way some of the older cops had done, going the hard-bitten route, refusing to be surprised by anything, refusing to be disgusted by anything, hiding under a veneer of easy cynicism. It wasn’t his way, even if he had tried it: he couldn’t wear cynicism like it was a badge you got in return for