Page 95 of Serial Killer Games

Her. It’s always been her.Dolores dela Cruzat the top of my list.

“What are your plans for Christmas dinner?” I ask.

“None of your business.”

“Wearemarried.”

“You’re really hung up on that detail.”

“Not to brag, but I have a turkey,” I say. “And a tree.”

“Well, look at this overachiever. Must be a really nice little cardboard box under the overpass.”

“It’s a house.”

“I’m not coming over,” she says flatly.

She’s completely wrong about that. She’s coming over if I have to toss her over my shoulder and carry Cat under one arm like a piece of luggage. I’m here on her doorstep channeling a higher power: Christmas spirit. It’s Baby Jesus’s birthday wish. It’s Mall Satan’s will that we spend the holiday together.

I should have brought bolt cutters for the chain.

There’s a pause, and then she speaks in a scratchy voice I’ve never heard before. “I can’t. A completeassholeslid into me at an intersection on the way home. I had to get my car towed.”

She shuts the door in my face abruptly, and I stand there, staring at it. But then it reopens, chain dropped.

“Here,” Dodi says, thrusting my bag at me. “You could have warned me there was two hundred thousand dollars cash in there. I could have been fucking robbed. Andby the way,” she says, her scratchy voice pitching higher, “I just got a cryptic email from Cynthia about how she’s putting my name forward for a promotion over that list, and I still have no fucking idea what it is.”

Her little fingers are biting into the edge of the door, the tips white from the pressure. I reach up and touch them with my own. She doesn’t pull away. The door swings wider by an inch, and another. One more.

“I’ll tell you over Christmas dinner.”

I push through the gap, a burglar insinuating himself inside. It takes me a second to make sense of what I’ve stumbled into. A dilapidated fake Christmas tree with one measly string of lights and no ornaments leans drunkenly in one corner, but that’s about it for Christmas decor. A life-sized skeleton sits in one armchair, and bats dangle from the light fixtures. There’s a ghost hanging in one corner, lit up with green light, and plastic pumpkins flickering with fake candlelight are perched on the side tables. Stretched out in every nook and corner conceivable, fake cobwebs. Fake cobwebseverywhere.

Dodi twitches and crosses and uncrosses her arms beside me.

“I still had the Halloween decorations.”

Scattered on the floor is a jumble of ratty, half-used wrapping paper tubes and a pile of presents needing to be wrapped, an open bottle of wine and a half-full glass, scissors, and—

“No tape,” I point out. Dodi crosses her arms again and stares stonily at the floor.

“Tell me about this Christmas dinner,” she says quietly,majestically, her normal voice restored. She tips her chin and manages to stare down at me despite being half a foot shorter. “Where is it? What time?”

“Now,” I say.

“Now?”

“Pack an overnight bag. Everything is ready.”

“What do you mean?”

“You hate Christmas. You said so. I took care of it.”

She blinks at me and waits for more of an explanation, but we stand there in a stalemate because that’s all I’m telling her. She has to see the rest in person.

And maybe she recalls a serial killer date, and a night in Las Vegas, and the magical transformation of a disgraceful termination into a promotion. Maybe she trusts me just a little, because after a minute, without saying anything, she uncoils her crossed arms and pads off to her bedroom to pack.

The beat-up bankers boxes labeledHalloween Decorationsare stacked in one corner. In it all goes—pumpkins, ghost, bats. Down come the cobwebs, the spiders. It’s faster coming down than going up, is what I’ve learned tonight. I stack the full boxes by the door. The unwrapped gifts and the wrapping paper, too. It’s all coming with us.

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