Page 21 of Violent Possession

“You’re one sick son of a bitch, aren’t you?”

I don’t know who I’m talking to. The camera doesn’t answer either. I take a step back, but I can’t turn away. I just stand there, staring. Waiting for the glass to tell me its name, or anything.

I almost hit the screen. Almost. This thing isn’t going to answer me, and even I know that.

But I keep waiting, hoping that, at some point, a face will appear inside.

I didn’t noticemy own exhaustion and didn’t realize I was about to pass out until I woke up. My own bed doesn’t smell like this. This is the smell of a well-adjusted person’s laundry. Something floral. Something that suggests a 401(k) and a healthy relationship with one’s mother. My brain screams in high alert before I even open my eyes: this room is not mine.

Everything is untouched, and even the bedsheets don’t seem to be stained with blood from my bandage. The bandage itself is clean.Clean. It wasn’t when I fell asleep—the red was starting to bleed through the gauze and show through the wraps. Someone came in here while I was sleeping, someonetouchedme without me even noticing.

But the real message is there, on the beige leather armchair next to the bed.

My prosthesis, once thrown on the locker room floor at Marcus’s feet, now rests on a white towel—immaculate, without a drop of blood, without a speck of sweat or grime. The titaniumsocket shines as if it were new. Someone sanded down the scratches, removed the human residue, cleaned it, polished it, left it ready for use.

The only thing out of place is my cell phone, left on the nightstand. I don’t remember putting it there. I don’t even remember bringing it. It’s plugged in, 100% charged, the screen lighting up with dozens of notifications.

I finally get up. I pick up my phone and look at the messages.

47 missed calls from Leech.

112 messages from Leech.

It’s Marcus’s contact. I laugh. The guy was always like this. I open the first message, and it’s already in all caps:

GRIFFIN FOR THE LOVE OF GOD ANSWER

I scroll down through the messages, all variations of the same desperation: “wake up”, “what the fuck happened last night”, “call me”, “are you dead?”, “they’re gonna come after me”.

I decide to call. The screen barely registers the touch before Marcus answers on the first ring.

“Griffin?! Holy shit, you’re alive! I thought they’d thrown you in a meat grinder! I called and called, no one answered, I thought I was next, that the offer was a trap to get me too!”

“What offer, Marcus?”

“THE FUCKING OFFER! They called again! That investor guy! He wants another fight for you! Griffin, you don’t understand, they... they offered double again! DOUBLE!”

I stare at my reflection in the dark glass of the hotel room window. Double the double.

“This is disappear-off-the-map money!” he yells through the phone.

“You said the same thing last fight, Marcus. ‘We’ll disappear from Sacramento, Stumpy.’ Where are the women without STDs?”

“Fuck, this time it’s different! This is real money! But what if it’s a trap? What if the next guy is a bear with a machine gun?!”

“We’ll worry about the machine gun when it shows up, Marcus.”

“But... what do I tell them?! They want an answer!”

“Say yes,” I say, and the words leave my mouth before I even think them. Because, in the end, what else can I do? “Say fucking yes.”

Double. That would be forty thousand for the winner, twenty thousand as an appearance fee. That’s a lot. I hear a noise on the other end, a choke, a scream. I don’t know. Marcus is experiencing a wave of relieved ecstasy, one moment heading to the gallows and the next having his death sentence canceled with a twenty-thousand-dollar bonus.

“By the way, where did that guy take you? I went to the?—”

I hang up before he can say anything else.

My train of thought is surprisingly clear: the new offer came through Marcus, but the hotel and the creepy limb-polishing service clearly came from the ghost investor. The two aren’t talking. Or one of them is playing very, very dumb.