Chapter 8: The Dorian Collective
Public Notice
“It’s been awhile since we last spoke, hasn’t it?”
The shapes in Annette’s irises shifted like points of daggers. Everything about her terrified Harvey, down to the oak-colored leather loafers half-slipped onto her feet.
“Why’d you do it?” Harvey asked. “Why’d you kill him?”
Agatha stepped forward, hands crossed at her chest. It was as if nothing about her had changed. She towered over him, her open denim jacket revealing a little too much of her collarbone.
“I think you know the answer to that question, Harvey. You’re just pissed we had to do something about it,” she answered.
It was Annette’s turn to shuffle closer. Her bedazzled wristlet dangled from her left arm, even more out of place than the loafers.
“And now we have to deal with you.”
If Harvey could have found the strength to pry his knees from the sidewalk and run, he certainly would have, but the dizzying sway of his headache grew worse, despite already reaching unbearable levels of pain.
“I thought you were stronger than this,” Agatha scoffed. “It’s really hitting you, isn’t it?”
Passersby marched along on either side of Harvey’s doubled-over frame, glancing down at him with apathetic or, even worse, fearful eyes. Harvey separated his lips into a slit to speak the few vulgar words he could think of, but rethought the decision at the first sign of nausea.
“Goddamn Americans,” continued Annette. “No tolerance.”
She turned to Agatha, pointing at the pocket of her denim jacket.
“Level out on the switch, Ag. Give him a second to breathe.”
A twitch from the inside of Agatha’s jacket pocket calmed the torrid seas in Harvey’s gut enough to straighten his back. For the first time, he noticed the crackle in his knees from the weight of his own torso.
“What was that?” Harvey asked. “What did you do to me?”
He gasped for air as he spoke, gulping each inhale as though it were water.
“I don’t want to kill you, Harvey,” Agatha answered, “but now you know. I will if I have to.”
Annette adjusted the straps of her dress from under the stale cardigan. It hung over her shoulders like a blanket as she ushered the closest of pedestrians away from the scene. She assured the more concerned passersby with a slew of no-teeth smiles so that Agatha wouldn’t have to.
Nothing to see here, her smile said. Keep walking.
Agatha bent to a knee and met Harvey at his level, one of her hands cupped to his shoulder. The strength of her grip tensed the muscles in his back.
“Listen to me carefully, Harvey. This is your one way out of this. The answer to the question I’m about to ask will decide whether you walk away or die here on the concrete.”
Harvey lifted his eyes to show he wasn’t scared, but the sunlight did him no favors. He managed to narrow his squint into a stare, but still felt lost in the chaos of it all.
“You’re not going to kill me,” Harvey growled, “not in front of all these people.”
Agatha shrugged while tightening her grasp on the meat of his shoulder.
“The coroner will label it,” she whispered, “or an aneurysm. Either way, I can assure you there’ll be no trail back to us. We’re just the poor girls who stopped to make sure you were okay.”
The way Agatha caught his stare forced a shiver down his shoulders. It migrated to his lower back where it festered. He wanted, more than anything, to turn away from her—to pick himself up and walk away—but hers was a different kind of seduction entirely. It cut deep into the mess of the moment.
“Harvey,” she redirected, “this is your only chance. Do you understand me?”
He didn’t know whether to nod or snarl, so instead, he relaxed his breathing and kept his stare rooted to hers.
“What does 1112 mean?”
Annette leaned forward in the way that curious minds do.
The pair of women waited for Harvey’s answer, but it never came. Only the subtle twitch in his upper lip offered any sort of emotion.
“Answer,” Agatha whispered. “Now.”
Impatience intensified her grip. He could feel the muscle of his shoulder start to rip from the bone underneath.
“Even if I knew, I would never betray Dom like that,” he said.
“You’d rather die?”
“You’ve murdered enough people,” he answered. “What’s one more?”
Agatha glanced over her shoulder, shaking her head quietly toward Annette, who sighed a little too violently.
“Not what you wanted to hear?” he asked.
Harvey pulled hard to separate from Agatha in a moment of distraction, but her hold on him had never felt stronger.
“I’ve lived a long time, Harvey,” Agatha whispered. “Never have I seen a mind like yours.”
As if the words weren’t creepy enough, the whisper crept through him like a threat wrapped in a love letter. It was a redirect he had certainly not expected.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” he asked.
She pulled him closer, peering into his eyes.
“It means,” she continued, “you’re way out of your league with this one.”
She pulled him to his feet with ease, then flattened the lapels of his suit jacket with the palms of her hands.
“I don’t get it,” Harvey growled. “You said I’m a liability, right? You said you’d kill me if I didn’t give you what you needed, so why am I still breathing?”
Annette crept forward, adjusting for the pull of her dress with each step.
“Believe me, Sweetie, if they wanted you dead, you’d be at the bottom of a hole with a bullet in your skull,” she answered.
Her voice hung like a weight on Harvey’s shoulders.
“If it were up to Annette you’d be swimming with Dom in the Hudson,” Agatha said, “but it’s not up to her. The truth is—you have more to offer us...and we don’t give up on information that easily.”
A click of the plastic dial in her pocket sent another painful barrage of cramps to his gut. He doubled over this time, hands wrapped across his waist.
“Just tell me what you want!” he yelled.
The panic in Harvey’s voice pinned an unscripted smirk to Agatha’s thin lips. He hadn’t meant to explode, but the pain—and Agatha’s willingness to crank it into gear—revved something primal within him, a kind of anger he couldn’t control.
She inched forward, her hand set to the dial, so close now he could feel her breath against his ear.
“Look past Dom, Harvey. Look past me. Look past everything that makes you uncomfortable,” she whispered, “only then will you realize your true self.”
Click.
Newfound nausea slipped him into vertigo—a dizzying mess of shapes, colors, and moving bodies jostling in rigid movements around him.
“Just leave me alone,” he begged. “Please.”
Agatha winced. She sensed the shooing-away in his voice.
“1112,” she said. “You want to know what we need from you? We need what Dom knew. And we need it now.”
Click.
The controller in her pocket stiffened. She held it taut against her torso.
“That can’t feel good,” she said. “Just tell us what we want to know and it all goes away.”
Pockets of sweat formed across Harvey’s hairline as he stumbled to find balance.
“I told you. I don’t know,” he said. “Dom was on his own for a long time. If he was onto something, I wasn’t a part of it.”
Agatha reached out with a set of fingertips and lifted his chin. As their eyes met, Harvey noticed an unsettling calm in the way she stared into him. Subconsciously he knew what a look like that meant.
“How beautiful the world could be if you just learned to let go.”
She reached into the fold of her jacket pocket and, for a final time, wrapped her fingers around the device.
“If this is how it must be,” she said, “so be it. Goodbye, Harvey. I’m afraid our time’s run out.”
Agatha twisted the dial until he could no longer feel his legs. Every muscle from the waist down buckled as he dropped belly-first to the sidewalk.
“Please,” Harvey groaned, violent twitches riddling his frame. “Whatever this is...please...stop.”
But as his vision faded, a shadowed figure in a black sedan pulled to the curb and rolled down its passenger side window.
“Enough of this shit, Ag. Shut it down and move on.”
It was a male voice—scraggly and tired, but powerful. Agatha peeled herself away from Harvey to throw a disgusted snarl in the direction of the car.
“You know why this is important,” she barked, “and yet here you are. Goddamnit, Demar! Leave me alone.”
Another click of the dial sent bolts of pain into the stem of his neck, tickling the base of his brain.
“Jesus, Agatha. How twisted can you be? Shut it down and get in. The others are waiting.”
It felt like an eternity before Agatha made the decision to surrender. The sun found its way to the pinnacle of the sky, no longer hidden behind the array of buildings standing proudly across the street. Its light pressed down on them now, reflecting from the sedan’s tinted windows into prisms of vibrant colors across the asphalt, rainbows splashing where rainbows shouldn’t be.
“You live to fight another day,” said Agatha. “Don’t waste it this time.”
“Agatha,” said Annette. “Let’s go. We can’t take any chances. Not this time.”
Agatha stilled as she unwillingly pulled back. The pulsing of her jaw muscle seemed to lessen with it. The strange whirring sound deepened until it vanished from Harvey’s ears altogether, leaving only the sounds of city bustle in its wake.
“It’s time to do some soul searching, Harvey,” she said. “We’ll be in touch.”
Harvey managed to find his feet without aid—balancing precariously between right and left—ignoring the trembling of his knees and the intense tightening of the muscles in the back of his legs. He breathed as slowly as his lungs would allow, enough to keep himself from collapsing. As much as he wanted to tell Agatha to screw off, he’d run out of the energy to push the words from his diaphragm.
“Agatha!” Annette called. Worry now consumed her face. “We can’t play this game again. Let’s go.”
“Yeah Agatha,” Harvey managed. “Go.”
The sarcasm drew a heavy scoff—intentionally loud, intentionally clear.
“1112. Don’t forget,” she repeated. “I’ll find you and, when I do, I want answers.”
She ran her hand across his jaw in a pseudo-romantic gesture, forcing Harvey to turn away. His backward lurch to avoid her touch returned a swell of dizziness that took a moment to clear from his vision and, by the time he regained focus, Agatha had already backpedaled through the streams of meandering pedestrians and into the backseat of the sedan.
He stumbled to the curb in a clumsy chase as her car door slammed shut, but he was too late. He watched as the car accelerated through the intersection and disappeared behind glints of city traffic like a ghost in a sea of light.