delicate weapon
- Eddies
- 466
One hour ago
It didn't take a chemist to make the concoction. Night City was lousy with drugs, from the hardcore stuff junkies on the street used to the more designer, boutique, specialized nose-candy that catered to the nightclubs of various types across the city. The little white tablets that Lizaveta Isakova held precariously between her fingertips were of the even more convenient type: prescribed by a doctor to the person who would soon be ingesting them. The onetime dancer studied the pills minutely, letting them roll down her slender fingers into her palm where she jostled them until one of them showed right-side-up. The stamp was right. The bottle said to avoid mixing the medication with alcohol and to avoid operating heavy machinery while under their influence. Grigori Abramov took the second admonition more seriously than the first, which he routinely flouted. The little pills -- whose name Lizaveta couldn't begin to pronounce -- helped Grigori to sleep, and he often threw them back with a glass of vodka just before bed. It gave him enough time and vigor to enjoy his mistress before succumbing to a deep, sleep.
In the event that he didn't make it to bed in twenty minutes or so, Grigori tended to be unsteady on his feet. Lizaveta couldn't count how often she had helped him to their bed, and he'd had no recollection of it the next morning. It was potent. It could be lethal.
She carried the pills out of the bathroom and into the living room, where she deposited them in a thick-bottomed crystal rocks glass. The good stuff, nothing synthetic. She exerted the slightest pressure on the pills between her thumb and forefinger and watched as the powder settled in the bottom of the glass.
Forty minutes ago
Right on schedule -- it was just after eight -- Lizaveta met Grigori at the door. They shared a customary kiss; he complimented her kimono-esque dressing gown -- pale ivory satin. The good stuff, nothing synthetic. Lizaveta took his coat, hung it in the hall closet. Fixed him his drink, watching carefully as the vodka dissolved the powder. Perfect. He took the glass from her and took a drink. Lizaveta fixed herself a drink, too. The searing heat burned her throat, and she shivered, but after that -- her hands were steady at last. Lizaveta listened to Grigori complain about his day, about the Organitskaya breathing down his neck, about the goddamned traffic in this city. She took off his shoes and listened, like she always did.
After a few minutes she settled on his knees -- he'd always liked that -- and let him toy with the sash of her dressing gown. He pulled it loose, gave that charming smile -- the smile of a shark scenting prey. Lizaveta stood, drained her glass, challenged him to do the same, then breezed out onto the balcony, with its plate glass railing. Leaned against the reinforced metal beam. He followed her, already unsteady on his feet. She made all the right faces -- amusement first, then concern. Reaching for him.
Thirty six minutes ago
Lizaveta was a performer, it was true, but she was not an actress. She communicated big ideas, iconic scenes, with the movements of her bodies. But she didn't need to be an actress. All she had to do was to remember the pain and anguish, the fury and rage of that night. The horror at seeing shards of her bone through her ruined knee, the despair as her crimson essence sprayed from it. She remembered it all, she felt it all, and she screamed like she had never screamed before.
She didn't know if Grigori had died when he collapsed through the glass or if he had lived long enough, in drunken terror, to plummet thirty-something stories to his death. He would certainly be dead upon arriving at the pavement. But there was so much blood -- he had crashed through the plate glass in a violent, drunken stumble, and a shard had torn through his sleeve and, Lizaveta guessed, the flesh and muscle and a deep vein in his arm. The blood was still warm on her bare leg, crimson soaking into the satin of her dressing gown where it ended a few inches above her knee, pooling on the flagstone of the balcony patio.
It was thicker than it looked on TV.
She kept screaming, so that her voice was hoarse by the time she had stumbled back into the living room and seized her phone from where it was on the arm of the chair Grigori had been sitting in. Lizaveta dialed the emergency number, agreed to the by-the-minute charge, and then sobbed her hysteria into the line, pleading for help.
Nineteen minutes ago
Trauma Team arrived before NCPD; they knew moments before Lizaveta had called dispatch that their patient had flatlined and dispatched a team. Their report would state that although prescription drugs and alcohol were present in his system, this was a daily occurrence and within normal parameters. Lizaveta examined herself in the full-length mirror by the door. There was nothing obscene about what she wore, but it left little to the imagination. After some consideration she decided to leave it as is; she was hysterical, after all, and it would have been ridiculous to get ahold of herself and change after such a devastating accident. Her mascara left ugly tracks of gunk down her alabaster cheeks, her eyes red and puffy. She had a slash of Grigori's blood on her left hand, corresponding with a smear on her left knee where she had instinctively touched it in her surprise.
Eight minutes ago
The tears had been real, as real as the empty hollow in her chest and stomach. Grigori Abramov had been her lover for six years -- her first and so far her only. He had been the conduit through which her life had run since she was little more than a child. He had brought her to every decision she had made, everything that brought her to this point. There was genuine loss there, grief that mixed with anxiety in a lethal cocktail as she listened to the old, Soviet-style wall clock just inside tick loudly through the minutes. What Lizaveta did not feel was regret or remorse. Grigori had burned any empathy he would have for her when he raised the hammer and ended her life some years ago. She was free of him now.
It was an uncertain future, to be sure, but it would be hers.
Now
The buzzer went. Lizaveta looked up from where she had been sitting, on a low, concrete bench just outside on the patio balcony. Far enough away from the railing to avoid cutting herself or getting bloodier. Far enough from the carpet and furnishings that she wouldn't get blood on them. She swallowed audibly and stood. The buzzer went again, and she crossed the living room to the entry, where she peered through the peephole. Light reflected off the fleshy dome of one of the pair of officers that stood outside in the hallway. She undid the handful of locks that kept the city outside and pulled the door open, silently beckoning the badges inside. Shutting the door behind them, she regarded the two badges. One of them looked vaguely familiar, and it nagged at the back of her head until she recognized him. One of the officers at the First National kerfuffle, she recalled when she spied his name badge, the little fabric patch in light grey lettering: J. KOWALSKI.
"Kovalski," Lizaveta murmured in her native tongue -- quietly, almost as if to herself, though close enough that the officer was likely to have heard. "Vy deystvitel'no polyak?" A real Pole? As opposed, she thought, to one of those loud Americans descendant from the Poles and other eastern Europeans who had settled the middle west of North America -- Chicago and Detroit. "Apologies," she said finally, a tired grimace crossing her pretty features. Her voice lilting with her accent. "This is my first time. Do you need to see where he -- " gossamer brows crumpled here, poetry " -- where it happened?" Gesturing with her blood-smeared hand toward the glass window-wall, still open to the balcony.
