The story so far: A serial killer known as “The Begrudger” has assassinated a number of billionaire CEOs, triggering a wave of unrest in the city.
City homicide detective Ronnie Hurtler has succeeded in decoding an encrypted document on a USB stick left at the site of the killer’s latest crime - but it looks as if the USB stick is a deadly trap, as its metadata points to Ronnie’s own laptop.
He heads over to the home of Veronika, a trans woman who’s been helping him track down the keycode to a vast cryto-wallet fortune and who he now is in love with.
It looks as though the identity of the killer is about to be discovered…
CONTENT WARNING FOR THIS CHAPTER -
Self-harm, sexual kink
“Are you my manic pixie dream girl, Vron? C’mon, talk quirky to me, babe. Blast my weak-ass shit with your charming whimsy.”
“Ugh, is that where we’re at? Well, Mister Aging Gen-Xer, maybe you are the manic pixie dirty cop, have you ever considered that?”
The tension hasn’t really evaporated post-hookup, despite all the banter and strained funhouse giggles. This is all an improv performance, a jolly farce entitled ‘Ronnie and Vronnie: Take One’, built around the prompt fun pillow talk between a corrupt cop running for his life and a serial vigilante killer who’s just a kooky gal at heart.
One might imagine this to be a tough call for an improv team, given all that’s now transpired between them, but these particular hardened practitioners are yes-anding their way to some kind of understanding of where they’ve now found themselves. Amateur night it is not.
“Huh! Manic pixie dream girl my ass! Manic pixie nightmare, more like. I’m a world of trouble, and you know it, Detective Hurtler.”
“No, but seriously, V, how did you get into this... this?”
He gestures to the home-studio setup that he just saw for the first time this evening, but at another level had always known was there: lighting rigs, laptop perched on a stand, the webcam he’d disconnected that pointed towards the bed where they lay.
“How’d I get into online sex work, Mr Prude? Easy enough in this world. You might even say it’s practically the default option for people like me…?”
“No, I mean…” he gestures to the trail of blooddrops staining the bedsheets.
“Oh my god!” Veronika rolls her eyes to heaven in a theatrical show of displeasure. “I should be asking you that, hon. You’re the one who started this.”
Ronnie takes a solemn turn, all the fun gone out of his eyes. “Come on. I’m just a man. Of course I crave violence.”
“You don’t believe that,” she says. And when he goes dimmer, sinking into his own shame, Veronika props herself up on one elbow to look down at him and says, “Do you believe in coincidence, Ron? Destiny? A trail of clues scattered on the ground by chance that leads to some secret sacred grove where the succession is handed off?”
Long exhale through his nose. “Not when it comes to you, Vron. With you I can only believe in some grand incomprehensible design.”
“You’re learning fast, Ronnie-baby.”
When Veronika first opened the door to Ronnie an hour before, she felt that anything could happen. He might shoot her down; he might shoot himself. He might start weeping and then handcuff her, haul her in to be processed for multiple homicides. He might stand there and rage with his face crimson and his heart splitting. It was a moment when all the collective decisions and chance occurrences of one’s life compress themselves down into a point, hardened to a single diamond moment of decision.
She could have taken measures to defend herself. She could have run away. She did neither, but decided instead to roll the iron dice and let them fall as they may.
He stood in the doorway, haggard, panting either from emotion or from the hike up the stairs to her fourth-floor flat. The elevator was out.
It was the point at which a hallway dialogue of sorts might have developed, a long-drawn-out why-did-you / oh-but-why-did-you in which everything is questioned and nothing is explained. Instead she stood to one side, inviting him in. He took two steps forward, still breathing hard, and she closed the apartment door behind him.
He didn’t take his gun out until they were safe within the confines of her bedroom and even then he held it half-heartedly at his hip. He wasn’t going to hurt her, she decided. Not any more than either of them wanted. There were conflicting emotions dueling for control over his haggard face, rising and falling the way they do when a man is old and repressed. And, like a man, anger was vying for dominance and he was doing his best to swallow it down.
Veronika sat on the edge of her bed and waited. In the end, he spoke through the anger, quelling it with a sigh.
“Were you going to tell me?”
She smiled, congenially. “Not originally, no.”
“So you’re going to tell me now.”
She tilted her head. “Why would I tell you what you already know?”
Ronnie loosened, exasperated. “I’m not recording this, V. You of all people should understand why I can’t work with the other cops right now.”
Outside the city was loud and violent but here it was reduced to a muffle through the thick tension crowding the space between these two opposing forces. Veronika could sense the way that the direction of their vectors might shift slightly. They could continue ramming into one another until something broke, or they could turn, combine, become one unstoppable force moving without any friction at all.
“Don’t make this more difficult than it needs to be, Ronnie baby,” she levelled. “I could explain it all to you. I could break it down day by day. The way my life and the lives of millions of people like me have been crushed by the weight of the 1%. The day I realized that the freak who was showing up to all my livestreams was a city detective. How I planned on using him for information and framing his piggy ass all along.”
The gun twitched at his side and she raised a placating hand. He eyed the sharpened red fingernails adorning her careful hands. “I could tell you all about the evidence I planted on his laptop, and all the other evidence leading toward him that he hasn’t even discovered yet. And I’d tell you that I did it all long before I started to understand him–to understand that I was wrong about him because I was wrong about myself.”
Ronnie breathed slowly. His decision would not be impulsive or hasty. It would be thought out and calculated as planning a murder. “Wrong how?” He asked.
Veronika peered up at him through thick lashes. “You tried to tell me, Ronnie.” She used a talon to draw the hem of her skirt up to her thigh. “You tried to tell me we’re the same, but I didn’t wanna see it. I didn’t wanna be like you. But it’s not that I’m like you.” She pressed a nail into the soft flesh of her thigh, did not wince as it pierced the skin, drawing dewy beads of blood to the surface. “You’re like me.”
She held the blood-tipped nail out and beckoned him forward. He calculated, carefully. Then he stepped forward. Drawing the sleeve of his shirt up his arm, he offered Veronika the bare skin of his wrist. When he cast his gaze down on her, it was not nervous or angry or afraid, but anticipatory. The face of a man waiting his whole life just to feel something real.
It was difficult for Veronika to identify what she was feeling in the moment. She was something close to calm inside the deepest, darkest blue. Safe.
With all the tenderness of a lover, she pressed her nail into his skin and felt the warmth inside him surge through this new exit. Ronnie exhaled, long and gentle. He sat next to her, on her bed in the middle of this collapsing city–a collapse that Veronika had expedited with three simple, easy murders–and she brought his wrist to her thigh and their blood ran in converging rivers across their skin.
Their vectors joined. All wrongdoings–and there were many wrongs done–all washed away in the crimson tide. Their eyes met in congruence. Together they smiled, sheepishly, sexy. Longtime lovers growing that old spark again.
Slowly, but without apprehension, she reached across his lap where the blood swelled inside him and took the gun from his hand. He relinquished it. The metal was warm, damp with his sweat.
Veronika put her finger to the trigger, the circular barrel to Ronnie’s head. They blinked, breath hot on one another’s faces. Ronnie’s lap never once stopped throbbing with anticipation. This was not a striptease over webcam. She could really hurt him–kill him. He could hurt her right back. Veronika does not want to kill Ronnie. She slipped forward on the red current and kissed him.
Iron on their tongues. Iron in the chamber which she pressed still to his forehead. Iron dripping down her legs. On the inhale, Ronnie knocked the gun from her hand and threw his weight atop Veronika, pressing her down into the bed, their pelvises hard on one another, her arms pinned above her head.
Ronnie hovered over her with a contorted, ugly look across his face. He brought his face close to hers and whispered, “You really did it, didn’t you? You killed three people, V.”
The blood from his wrist pitter pattered down onto hers. She grinned. “They killed millions with their greed, Ron. I’d do it again. And again and again. There’s always more greed to wring out. Turns out I’m pretty good at it.”
Ronnie writhed against her, face flushing further red. “Why? Why do I…still fucking want you?”
She laughed hotly against his mouth. “Don’t make me say it again, baby.”
“I’m…like you.”
“That’s right.”
“I was lying before. At the coffee place. I don’t want a normal thing with you. I want…whatever the fuck this is. I want you, Veronika.”
Her tongue darted out to tease his lips. “Even though I tried to frame you for the murder of three billionaires?” The touch on his lips was all, familiar and new.
“I would’ve killed them too,” he whispered, surprised to hear the words fall from his mouth. “If you’d asked. I mean, I should’ve done it before. By myself.”
He shook his head as if to shake away his confusions: “I mean: I’m glad they’re dead.”
“I’m gonna take your clothes off, Ron.”
“I’m gonna eat you alive, Veronika.”
In the bed now, draped in sheets and sweat and pinkish streaks of blood. Unbothered. What’s that word the policemen used in the diner? Insouciant, yeah. Meaning: nonchalant in the face of all the world’s menace. Meaning: together with each other.
“How long did you know?” Ronnie asks.
She smirks sideways. “Oh, the moment you asked me about the blockchain shit, babe. The bluff was written all over your face.” Glass shatters out on the street. Someone yells out down there. She asks: “Where is it?”
Ronnie flushes. “My wallet.”
She shakes her head. “Most expensive crypto wallet in the world and you kept the private key in your back pocket? Honey, no wonder you needed my help.”
He drapes his leg over hers, embarrassed but refusing to pull away. “Well, I grabbed it right off his body at the crime scene, it was the easiest place to tuck it and I didn’t wanna move it and risk someone else seeing it. I was just gonna sit on it till I could flush the account without any suspicion.”
“There’s gonna be suspicion.”
Ronnie rubs his forehead. “Well, evidence does suddenly point toward me being Caroon’s killer. But that’s not exactly my fault, now is it?”
She laughs and flutters a kiss across the base of his throat. “Glory to you, the great CEO slayer.”
He wonders how much time he’s got. Here, wrapped up with Veronika, it’s both all the time in the world and not nearly enough. Gunshots ring out up and down the street below. So much of Veronika’s grand plan lives still in the shadows. It wouldn’t help to ask now, it wouldn’t change the chaos out in the streets–like she’d told him before, this was inevitable. All she did was speed the process up a bit, give it direction. The fuse had been set. Veronika lit it. What a beautiful thing.
“The blockchain stuff,” he says. “That’s how you decided I’m like you.”
“Mhm. You stole that key right off the body of the man I killed, instantly connecting the two of us. Feels cosmic, doesn’t it?”
He grins. “Cosmic even though it was by your design?”
The sound of her laughter fills the room and fills Ronnie’s old shriveled heart. Veronika leaps to her knees, takes Ronnie’s face in her hands and kisses him hard on the mouth. “Baby, I am cosmic! I’m a fucking goddess!”
“You are,” he says. “Veronika the goddess. My goddess of good fortune.”
Before the knock at the door, before the obligatory revelations and steamy crimson contortions, even before this day, prior to the first bullet fired in a hotel lobby, on the day that Veronika discovered a city homicide detective lurking in the depths of her chats where he was seeking oblivion, whether he knew it or not – on that day, she called her mother.
The woman was on her way out of her own head. Ever since she discovered the man she’d married swinging from the ceiling like a metronome, the slippage had begun. As though that dormant gene had been waiting for exactly the sweetest time to activate and begin its degrading work, and what better timing than a traumatic occurrence. What better time to let your memories slip away than after something horrible like that.
It’s not as though she ever loved Veronika the right way. Even if her mind had been all there, she never would have built up the heart to say her name, the right name. She’s a rather wretched woman, always has been. Just as, if not more complicit in the evil done to Veronika than her father. Her father’s violence was at least discernible, obvious, physical. Her mother was the watcher, the prison guard, the enforcer of gender rules and performance. She too was a victim of course, both of her husband and of her own strictures of how a person is supposed to navigate this world. To see her husband choked and purpled liked that, well it’s understandable to be broken by that. To let your life slip from the grooves of your grey matter.
So in spite of the evil, or maybe because of it, Veronika’s mother was the first person she called as her plan began to attain its scaffolding. Because she could not keep the ideas all to herself and because, well, her mother would not remember the conversation in a few minutes. So Veronika told her everything, even the bits a mother should never hear, about what she does on camera, and what she’s going to do to topple the city and how she’d pin it all on a cop, watch the opposing forces tear themselves apart and she, the conductor of it all would slip away, invisible in the night.
Her mother listened to it all, either uncomprehending or stunned into silence. And she was quiet for a good while after Veronika was done so she wondered if she’d killed the woman with the truth. And then, finally, her voice came tiny and afraid from the other end of the line. She said, “Why you?”
And Veronika hadn’t expected it. Admonition or nonsensical rambling but not this, not so direct a question. The answer is one she’d considered but how to explain it to her mother who did not, could not see her for all she is.
“Because I’ve already done it,” she explained after a moment. “This thing is inevitable, mom. Maybe not these exact men in this exact order but there is a reckoning coming. And when it happens, whether it’s me or some malnourished incel rising from the depths of the depraved internet, no matter who pulls the trigger, do you know who they’ll blame?”
Her mother’s voice quivered. “No.”
“Me. My people. The ones with my gendered affliction. It happens every day that we are blamed for crimes we did not commit, had no affiliation with. Oh, it’s not us exactly, but it’s our agenda they’ll say. It’s smart mom, it infuriates me how smart it is. Because the whole world believes it. That we the transsexuals and genderfucked are so riddled with mental disease we would do anything to purge ourselves of it. We are beaten and killed and disenfranchised by the people who attribute these crimes to us. So of course we would want to rise up against them. We’ve got nothing else to lose.”
The only sign that her mother was still listening was her quavering breath.
“And it’s true,” Veronika said. “I’ve got nothing to lose. I either die an impoverished prostitute burdened by an agenda that was decided for me before I was born. Or I can do what they want me to do. I can be the violent wretch, the sick-minded fuck out to tear our society up at the roots. I want that, mom. I want to start it all over. If not for me, then for whoever comes after me. Even if I’m killed for it. I’m good as dead anyway.”
Her mother sighed and the sigh mutated into a cough and she hacked into her elbow for a while as Veronika sat still and patient, like a good child. Then her mother’s mouth came back to the receiver and the quivering from her voice was gone and she said, “When is my son coming home? He never comes to visit me anymore, his poor mother is so alone”.
And Veronika nodded to herself and she said, “I’ll see you soon, mom. One way or another.”
END OF CHAPTER 10 - reveals -
Amateur continues here…
Credits/Music
Image from The Visitor (2024), dir. Bruce LaBruce
Cameron Winter - “Nausicaä (Love will be revealed)”
The Kinks - “Lola”
THIS IS FUCKED I love it. What are these two gonna do together aghhhhhh
You two are so good at making this not only beautiful but real and it’s making me dizzy…also because blood makes me dizzy