The Killing Game. J. Kerley A.

movie,” David Letterman was saying to the popular movie actor. “Great cast …”

      Gregory leaned toward the foot-square mirror propped against the DVD player beside the television. The actor was performing the most complex series of faces Gregory had ever attempted. He reset the DVD to seconds before the faces began, when David Letterman asked his guest – who had a wife and three small children – about a rumored affair with his latest co-star.

      “I guess I’d be remiss in my hostly duties if I didn’t ask about your relationship with your lovely co-star, Maria Glassier. You guys shared, uh, a love scene or two, right?”

      The audience gasped, tittered, awaited the reply. Gregory pressed Play on the machine. The actor’s faces began …

      Face one: the actor’s eyes popped wide. Gregory replicated the face in the mirror set atop the player. But this was a simple face he called Sudden Surprise #3 and employed dozens of times a week.

      Face number two started, eyes moving side to side, rising at the corners as if swinging on pendulums, the mouth dropping open. Gregory tapped Pause. It was a difficult move, the eyes wanting to stutter instead of glide. And moving eyes couldn’t be followed in the mirror. But he’d practiced into a video camera until satisfied, so he trusted the face.

      The last face was the toughest: four separate actions, but Gregory had deconstructed the components and mastered each. Today was about flow. Gregory felt his intestines squirming and reached to the floor for the bottle of Pepto-Bismol. He drank and restarted the player. The actor’s lips tightened, eyes rolling heavenward, eyebrows flicking, the head cocking to a thirty-degree angle.

      Gregory’s first attempts felt ragged; the head-cock started before the lip-tightening, or he forgot the eyebrow lift after the eye-roll. Gregory’s jaw tightened in exasperation. The food in his guts turned into cramps and sour, flatulent gas. He smelled the ugly vapor from his bowels and began to shake in his chair, angered by failure …

      Do Relaxed Face #1, he told himself. Then do Quiet Face.

      Gregory took a deep breath and performed faces that relaxed him. His guts settled down. After a minute of visualizing, Gregory re-performed face three, nailing it five times in a row. Satisfied, he pressed Play.

      The difficult faces were over. The actor’s smile widened until it eclipsed every other feature on his face.

      “I’m afraid we’re just good friends, Dave,” the actor said.

      The audience laughed and applauded. Gregory put his hand over the actor’s lower face. Without the distraction of the tooth-bright smile and uplifted cheeks, the actor’s eyes were points of angry fire. Gregory knew the actor wanted to grab Letterman’s throat and rip it from his body, holding the wet and dangling esophagus aloft like a prize. The actor had ached to do this since Letterman asked the moronic question, but instead projected a meticulous series of facial expressions ending in a glittering smile.

      He fooled everyone.

      And one day, Gregory thought, if the actor is a careful planner, he can track down and kill Letterman, and no one will ever know.

      He turned off the DVD player. Gregory’s cell phone rang in his pocket and he pulled it out with irritation, saw the name EMA on the screen, her third call today. He stuck the phone back in his pocket and practiced facial moves as he left the room, its walls plastered with faces from magazine ads. Beneath each was a descriptor: Happy #4, Not Pleased With Someone’s Answer, New Car, Hurray!, I Love You #3 and over two hundred others. He rested his finger on the light switch and turned his eyes to his faces.

      He showed them I’m Glad You’re Here and flicked out the light.

       Chapter 2

      The coins in the cash-register drawer jingled as I slammed it shut. The bleached-blond iron-pumper on the customer side of the counter started to turn away, but spun back to the lottery tickets beside the register, his guayabera shirt open to display a stunning collection of gold chains around a ham-thick neck. I’d just rung up his purchase of a pack of Marlboros, a half-case of Miller Lite and a three-pack of Trojan condoms. The beer was selling briskly tonight, thanks to a display of discounted twelve-packs fronting the nearest aisle. Condoms weren’t doing too bad either, but then it was Saturday night.

      Ham Neck tapped the ticket dispenser. “Gimme four Hot Odds scratch-offs and a dozen Super Lottos.”

      “You couldn’t think of that before I rang you up?”

      His lamp-tanned face twisted into a snarl. “Here’s how it works, moron: I’m the customer, you’re the clerk. I want something, you shut up and get it for me.”

      “Stay calm, Carson,” said a voice in my head as I bit my tongue and peeled tickets from the dispenser. I glanced up and barely registered a skinny guy in a grubby denim jacket turning down the first aisle. Outside, a teen kid who’d just bought condoms and two Dr Peppers climbed into what had to be Daddy’s white Yukon. The kid was grinning ear to ear, the girl looked uncertain.

      Though it was forty minutes past midnight, outside the store it was as bright as high noon in the Sahara, a zillion watts lighting a dozen gasoline pumps on a half-acre of concrete. It was even brighter inside and on my first day I’d wondered if I needed sunscreen. There was an experienced manager on the shift – the three-hundred-sixty-pound Melvin Dobbs – but it was Mel’s break and he’d booked to a nearby Waffle House to give his diabetes something to think about.

      “C’mon, hurry up with those tickets,” Ham Neck said. “I ain’t got all night.”

      A shag-haired, net-hosed hooker by the coolers held up two forties of malt liquor.

      “This all you got left of the Colt 45?”

      “If that’s what you see,” I said, “that’s what we got.”

      She shook her head. “How ’bout y’all stock this joint once inna while?”

      I took Ham Neck’s money for the lottery tickets. He expressed appreciation by telling me the floors were filthy and did I know how a mop worked?

      “Easy, Carson,” the voice said in my head.

      Monitors from the security cameras sat to the right of the clerk station, two cameras inside, two outside. One was panning past the coolers and I saw the hooker opening her outsized purse, ready to drop a forty into it.

      “Don’t even think about it, lady,” I yelled. She scowled and set the bottle back in the cooler. A seventyish black man in a blue porkpie hat was at the grill station, nodding at wrinkled brown hot dogs spinning on heated rollers.

      “How long these weenies been cookin’?” he said.

      I feigned uncertainty. “What year was the Crimean War?”

      “The hell’s that mean?”

      “Carson,” said the voice in my head. “Be nice.”

      “About four hours,” I said.

      “Can I get a discount cuz they’re so old?”

      It was my second Saturday as a clerk working the midnight-to-morning shift. In the past six weeks there had been three Saturday-night convenience-store robberies, two ending in deaths. The third clerk was comatose, likely to remain that way. The C-stores had been just off I-10 on Mobile’s southwest side. This was the only one in the quadrant that hadn’t been robbed. My partner, Harry Nautilus, and I had judged it ripe for a hit.

      “What about these weenies?” the porkpie-hat guy bayed. “They too old to be full price.”

      I checked the outside monitors, seeing a gray van slide into the rear of the lot and disappear until it was picked up on the second outside camera. It rolled into the shadows beside the dumpster.