Page 31 of If Looks Could Kill

Jack sits in the dining room at his boardinghouse, unable to stomach the pork chop and potato his landlady sets before him. The hideous voyage is over. Terra firma and the familiar cacophony of Manhattan streets welcome him home. But he feels no welcome at all.

The London detective followed him here. He’s on the street corner, in fact, right now, watching the house where Jack chose to lodge.

Jack is furious, livid. Incensed and insulted.

Fit to kill, and he would, oh, how he would, but he can’t with this bobby stuck to him like a limpet.

All his stealth at the dock, his speed in hailing a cab, his lavish payment to the driver if he would thwart any attempt at pursuit—all for nothing.

It galls him like acid in the gut. He’s trapped.

He can’t leave this house. He can barely pay his landlady enough not to let anybody in.

At least the demonic girl is gone. She didn’t follow him ashore.

He made sure of that, though not with the blade; God, no.

The multi-decked La Bretagne was a canoe for all the privacy it gave him.

Tempting though it was, that ship was too risky a place to bring a permanent solution to the servant girl problem.

So he sprang a trap for her as one would for a rat in the cellar dairy.

It was, as always, so simple: a dose of powder dissolved into a bottle of Veuve Clicquot rosé champagne, something no Frenchwoman could resist. The bottle cost more than this girl earned in a month.

He left it where she would find it during her last visit to his room, chilling in a pail of ice.

She came, as expected, and after stunning him—this time in an easy chair; he’d planned ahead—she treated herself to a celebratory flute.

Et voilà. How he laughed when he woke to find her snoring in his bed.

And now who’s putting whom to sleep? Take that, you little slut.

Let her use her satanic powers. A man of science will outfox a girl of witchcraft any day. A female acts on impulse. He, Jack, can lie in wait.

The sight of her young form, tumbled together with the pillows and sheets, took him back to another scene. Nearly a month ago now. The one the papers labeled Mary Jane. It brought the heat back upon him. His fingers itched to put his surgical knives to their proper use.

But, no. Let them find the ship’s maid and think she was there for passion, or for the passion that is sold by the hour.

Let them find her unharmed. Let him be a Romeo, a Casanova.

Anything but a Jack. Let that image of the drowsy French lover erode the profile they have formed of him as the Whitechapel fiend.

She will wake up in his stateroom and land herself in trouble with her supervisor, accused of drinking on the job. She’s someone else’s problem now.

His problem now is the beefy blond British detective. And the reporters who are bound to follow. Where there are detectives, reporters are not far behind. He is not a drinking man, but if ever a throat itched for a brandy, his does. Anything to dull this mounting sense of dread.

The reporters are the greater danger. If the detective could arrest him, he would have done so. Reporters will prove that word has skipped across the Atlantic to implicate him here. His one asset, his reputation, will lie in tatters in tomorrow’s papers.

And wouldn’t that just flatter the superiority of these smug New Yorkers, to think that the planet’s most celebrated murderer would flee to their dirty city to take sanctuary here?

That they are rich and cosmopolitan enough to import even the Whitechapel killer on a silver platter if it pleases them?

New Yorkers: the quickest to declare themselves streetwise, and the easiest to fleece.

He forces himself to take a bite of potato. It won’t do to look too nervous, and he’ll need to keep up his strength for the days ahead.

Yes, the papers will make hash of him, but his reputation has taken its knocks before.

Over and over, in fact. So long as they can’t clap him in irons, he’ll live to weather this storm.

But can they arrest him? This cloud of suspicion is too close for comfort.

Too close. Once the hubbub dies down, he will do what he always does: publish a pamphlet touting his fabricated accomplishments, singing his praises, and vociferously denying all his sins by attacking—“eviscerating” would be the better word, he thinks, then smiles at his own joke—his foes.

Americans will believe anything so long as it is stamped with ink upon some rag of paper.

He forces down another bite of potato. He is just an ordinary traveling man, and such men eat their potatoes. They do not fear clustering reporters. They do not notice pudgy policemen.

He remembers the lessons he learned from neutralizing that girl on the boat. Steady, Jack. Don’t get rattled. Bide your time. Fearful fools give themselves away.

Wait, Jack. Wait.