Ben

The corner store on West 34th had been open since 1987.

That was the sign above the door — hand painted, slightly faded, the numbers uneven in the way of something done by someone who wasn't a sign painter but wanted it done right regardless. Ben Kowalski had repainted it twice in the fourteen years he'd worked there, matching the original as closely as he could, because some things deserved to stay the way they were.

He was forty one. He'd worked the night shift at the store for fourteen years because the night shift paid slightly better and because he was a night person by nature — his brain worked better after dark, always had, something his mother had diagnosed as a character flaw and he'd come to think of as just the way he was built. He knew the regulars by name. He knew what they bought and approximately when they'd come in and whether they wanted to talk or just wanted their thing and out. He was good at reading people. Fourteen years of night shifts made you good at reading people.

He was reading the man who came in at nine forty seven on a Friday night approximately three seconds after the door opened.

He came in slowly.

That was the first thing. People came into corner stores with purpose — they knew what they wanted, they moved toward it, they were in and out. This one came in slowly, the door swinging shut behind him, and stood just inside the entrance and looked at the store the way you looked at a map. Taking inventory. Working something out.

Dark canvas jacket, heavy, hood up. Ben couldn't see the face properly — the hood was pulled forward and the angle of the light in the entrance did the rest. Just a shape. Just a large shape standing inside his door doing the inventory thing.

"Help you find something?" Ben said.

The shape moved. Walked forward into the store, down the first aisle, past the snacks and the cleaning products, moving slowly, looking at things without picking them up. Ben tracked him from behind the counter — not obviously, just the peripheral awareness he'd developed over fourteen years of night shifts, the low level monitoring that ran underneath everything else.

The shape stopped at the end of the aisle.

There was a display case along the back wall — locked glass, the kind that separated the customer side from the counter side, bolted to the wall and running the length of the back of the store. Behind it the things that required a counter transaction. Tobacco, lottery, the small electronics that walked if you left them out. And on the bottom shelf, the knives. Hunting knives, pocket knives, a couple of multi-tools. Nothing exotic. The kind of thing a hardware store would carry, that a corner store in this neighbourhood carried because there was a demand and demand was demand.

The shape was looking at the knives.

"Those are behind the counter," Ben said. "Need a licence for the hunting ones. What are you after?"

The shape didn't answer.

Ben put his hand under the counter. Not for anything specific — just the habit, the proximity to the panic button that he'd installed three years ago after a robbery two blocks over. Just having his hand there.

"Sir," he said. "Can I help you with something."

The shape looked up.

The hood fell back slightly and Ben saw the mask for the first time — rough fabric, hand stitched, two dark gaps where eyes should be — and his hand found the panic button and pressed it and in the same moment the shape moved.

Fast. Faster than something that large should move. It crossed the distance to the display case in two steps and drove its elbow into the glass and the glass didn't break the first time — tempered, good quality, he'd paid for good quality — but the second hit cracked it and the third went through and the shape reached through the broken glass and grabbed the edge of the case and pulled.

The whole unit came away from the wall.

Ben was already moving, already coming around the counter, because fourteen years of night shifts had given him the particular reflex of someone who has thought about this scenario enough times that when it arrives the body moves before the brain catches up. He got around the counter and the shape turned and grabbed him — one hand, just one, on the front of his jacket — and the strength of it was wrong, was not the strength of a person, was something else entirely.

Ben's feet left the floor.

He went backward into the snack aisle and the shelving came with him, both of them going down in a crash of displaced product — crisps and chocolate and tinned things hitting the floor around him — and he lay on his back in the wreckage of the aisle and looked up at the shape standing over him and felt the particular clarity of someone whose body has just received very bad information and is deciding what to do with it.

He should get up. He knew he should get up. His hand was somewhere in the debris, still technically near the counter, the panic button already pressed — help was coming, fourteen years of night shifts and he'd finally pressed the thing, help was coming.

He needed to stay conscious until help came.

The shape turned back to the display case.

Ben got to one knee.

The shape crouched over the broken case and looked at the knives on the bottom shelf. It picked one up. Looked at it. Put it back. Picked up another. Put it back. Moving through them with the unhurried focus of someone who had a specific requirement and wasn't going to compromise on it.

Ben got to his feet.

His ribs were saying something he didn't have time to listen to. He looked at the counter — the phone, the door, the distance between where he was and where help was going to come from.

The shape stood up.

It was holding something. Not a knife — he'd been looking at the knives but it wasn't a knife, it was something from the lower shelf that Ben had forgotten was there, a small axe, the kind sold for camping, for splitting kindling, for people who went places where that was a thing you needed. He'd had it in stock for two months and sold exactly none.

The shape looked at it the way it had looked at the knives. Then it looked at Ben.

Ben looked back.

He thought about fourteen years of night shifts. He thought about the sign above the door that he'd repainted twice. He thought about his wife asleep at home right now who was a light sleeper and would hear his key in the lock at six in the morning when his shift ended and would not go back to sleep until he'd told her about his night the way they'd done for fourteen years.

He thought about all of that in approximately one second.

Then the shape crossed the store toward him and Ben did the thing his body decided to do which was back up until the counter was behind him and then stop because there was nowhere left to go.

"Please," he said.

The shape reached out and grabbed him by the collar of his shirt and Ben's feet left the floor again and this time the counter came up to meet the back of his knees and he went down over it and hit the floor behind the counter hard, the back of his head connecting with the edge of the shelf, and the world went white and then grey and then started to come back in pieces.

He was on the floor behind his counter. He could see the underside of it above him. He could see his own hands on the floor beside him. He could hear his own breathing, ragged and uneven, and beneath it the particular ringing silence that followed impact.

He tried to move.

The shape stepped over the counter.

It stood over him and looked down at him and in the two dark eye gaps of the mask there was nothing — no anger, no excitement, no hesitation — just the blank patience of something completing a task.

Ben looked up at it.

"Please," he said again. Quieter this time.

The shape lifted one boot.

Ben closed his eyes.

The boot came down on his throat with the full weight of the shape behind it and the sound it made was the last thing Ben Kowalski heard and it was not a sound he would have chosen and then there was no more sound at all.

The shape stood over him for a moment.

Then it picked up the axe from where it had set it on the counter. It weighed it in one hand. It was good weight. Balanced. The kind of tool that had been made for a purpose and would serve a different one just as well.

The shape looked at Ben Kowalski on the floor behind his counter.

Then it turned and walked out of the store and the door swung shut behind it and the store was quiet and the sign above the door said open since 1987 and the orange light of the streetlamp came through the window and lay across the floor and the city outside went on doing what the city did.

Two minutes later the first police car arrived.

By then the shape was gone. Just the Friday night street, just the moving crowds, just another large figure in a dark jacket moving through the city that didn't look at anyone and expected the same courtesy in return.

The axe was under the jacket.

Jacob Cain walked north and the city parted for him and closed behind him and left no trace and he walked with the patience of someone who had somewhere to be and was not in any hurry to get there because hurry implied the possibility of failure and failure was not something he was entertaining.

He had waited five years.

He could wait a little longer.

Indigo found out about Ben Kowalski on Saturday morning.

She was on the fire escape with her first cigarette when Rebecca texted her a link — no message, just the link, which was Rebecca's way of saying I saw this and I think you need to see it too and I don't know what to say about it.

She opened it.

Corner store worker killed in Manhattan. Jacob Kowalski, 41. Night shift. The police were describing it as a robbery gone wrong — the display case smashed, a camping axe missing from the inventory, the register untouched which didn't fit the robbery narrative but was the narrative they had.

She read it twice.

Then she sat on the fire escape in the cold morning and smoked her cigarette down to nothing and looked at the city below her and felt the thing she'd been holding at arm's length since Tuesday arriving properly. Not as a possibility. Not as a pattern her brain was making out of dark jackets and ordinary fear.

As a fact.

He was here. He was in her city. He had walked into a corner store and killed a man for an axe and the axe was somewhere in New York right now and so was he and he knew where she lived because she had seen him at the end of her street looking at her with those two dark eye gaps that absorbed the light and gave nothing back.

She sat with that for a long moment.

Then she went inside and stood in the hallway of her apartment and looked at the locked door and the two bolts she'd had fitted when she moved in that Lucas had always thought were slightly excessive and breathed.

In. Out.

Lucas was still asleep. She could hear him — the deep even breathing she knew better than her own.

She looked at the door.

She thought about Ben Kowalski who had worked the night shift for fourteen years and had a sign above his door that he'd repainted twice and who was dead now because Jacob Cain needed an axe and had no money and no patience for the normal way of acquiring things.

She thought about the axe.

She thought about what Jacob Cain intended to do with it.

She went to the kitchen and put the kettle on and stood at the window looking out at the Saturday morning street and waited for the water to boil and thought about what she was going to do next.

Outside the city went on. Ordinary and indifferent and full of people who didn't know that something was moving through it that had come a long way to be here and was not going to leave until it had finished what it came to do.

The kettle boiled.

Indigo stood at the window and looked at the street and felt something she recognised from five years ago beginning to move in her — quiet and cold and focused, beneath the fear, beneath the grief for a man she'd never met whose name she now knew because he'd died in the path of something meant for her.

She wasn't going to run this time.

She didn't know yet what she was going to do instead.

But she wasn't going to run.