Grigor froze. His hand stopped mid-motion, foam dripping from the brush onto his hazmat boots.
He hadn't unlocked the door. The police tape was still up—he'd checked, because he always checked, because procedure was the only religion he respected. The building super had a key, but supers didn't visit at eleven PM.
Not in this neighborhood. Not to apartments where the previous tenant had been turned into modern art.
'Calculation. Distance to door: four meters. Distance to window: six. Exit options: two, if the fire escape holds. Weapon: scrubbing brush.'
The door swung inward. The hinges needed oil—Henderson hadn't been the maintenance type, apparently—and the sound stretched out like a scream in slow motion.
He stood slowly. The foam dripped louder than it should have. Pink droplets against yellow rubber.
'Heart rate: elevated. Adrenaline response: active. Think. THINK.'
"Excuse me," Grigor said, his voice muffled by the respirator. "This is a bio-hazard zone. You can't be—"
He turned.
The man in the doorway was not a cop.
He was a shape—that was Grigor's first impression. Something dressed in a raincoat that drank the light from the hallway behind him, turning the sick yellow fluorescent into something brown and dying.
The coat was too large or the man was too small; the proportions were wrong somehow, like a photograph that had been stretched.
The face beneath the hood was pale and forgettable—the kind of face that disappeared into crowds, that witnesses would later describe as "average" or "I don't remember."
But the eyes were different.
The eyes were bright and wet and focused on Grigor's pocket with an intensity that had nothing to do with curiosity.
He held a keyring. Four keys, brass, the kind that opened old locks.
The keys were wet, someone was already killed.
'Not wet. Dripping. Fresh. Red.'
Someone else had met this man tonight. Someone who had given up their blood more recently than Mr. Henderson.
"Henderson was wearing the cat when I hit him," the shape said. His voice was thin, reedy, the voice of a man who hadn't spoken in days. "I thought it went down the drain. But it didn't, did it?"
Grigor's brain didn't scream. It didn't feel fear.
It calculated.
'Distance: four meters. Closing rate: normal walking pace, approximately one point three meters per second. Time to contact: three seconds. Weapon: brass keys, blunt force capable, range advantage nil. My weapon: scrubbing brush, nineteen-inch handle, polymer bristles, approximately one point two kilograms.'
'Survival probability: less than five percent.'
The numbers were bad. The numbers were always bad when a professional met an amateur in a confined space.
Not because professionals were better fighters—Grigor certainly wasn't—but because professionals didn't hesitate. They didn't posture. They didn't wait for their target to finish speaking.
This man had already killed Henderson. He'd killed whoever owned the blood on those keys. He would kill Grigor with the same mechanical indifference.
'Unless I move first.'
"You're the one from the building," Grigor said, keeping his voice steady. Stall. Buy time. Find an angle. "Marcus Webb. The accountant."
The police report had mentioned a "person of interest"—a friend of Henderson's who owed money, who had access to the apartment, who had vanished three days before the body was found.
The shape—Marcus—smiled. His teeth were small and even, like a child's.
"I prefer 'collector,'" he said. "Everyone collects something. Henderson collected antiquities. You collect..." His eyes flicked to Grigor's pocket. "...evidence?"
'He saw me take it.'
Of course he did. He'd been watching. Waiting. Probably from the fire escape, or from the apartment across the hall whose tenant had "gone on vacation" three days ago. Grigor should have checked. Should have swept the perimeter. Should have—
'Doesn't matter now. Focus.'
"I'm a cleaner," Grigor said. "I clean."
"That's good." The smile widened. "Someone has to."
Marcus lunged.
Grigor's body moved before his mind caught up. He swung the scrubbing brush in a tight arc, aiming for the temple—'maximum soft tissue damage, minimum energy expenditure'—but the shape was faster than it looked. Faster than any accountant had the right to be.
Keys. Into his face. Into the orbital bone above his left eye.
The impact was dull, heavy, and loud. Like a steak slapping wet tile.
Grigor felt the bone crunch—felt it give way with a sickening grinding sensation that traveled through his skull like a subway train through a tunnel—and then he was falling.
'Interesting', some detached part of his brain observed. 'The orbital wall is only point five millimeters thick at the medial aspect. Should have remembered that.'
He hit the ground. The floor he had just scrubbed rushed up to meet him, and the wetness of the cleaning chemicals soaked into his cheek, cold and sharp with the smell of artificial lavender.
Marcus stood over him. The keys dripped. Three drops—one, two, three—landed on Grigor's cheek, warm and wrong.
"The cat," Marcus said. His voice seemed to come from very far away. "Where did you put it?"
Grigor's mouth opened. No words came out. His tongue felt thick, copper-coated, disconnected from the language centers of a brain that was rapidly losing its grip on coherent thought.
'He's going to search me. He's going to find it. He's going to—'
The boot came down on his chest. Not hard—Marcus wasn't sadistic, just practical. He was checking if his target was still dangerous. If there was any fight left.
There wasn't.
Grigor felt the man's hand slide into his pocket. Felt the weight of the silver cat lift away. Felt, absurdly, a sense of loss that had nothing to do with self-preservation.
'My souvenir. My anchor. Mine.'
The world didn't fade to black.
It flashed white.
Blinding, sterile white.
Grigor lay there, his body refusing to respond to commands, and felt his thoughts begin to scatter like roaches when you flipped a light switch. The silver cat was gone now—taken, stolen, lost like everything else—but the shape of it remained. A phantom weight. A ghost impression seared into his palm.
'Ironic', he thought, his synapses firing their final chaotic patterns. 'Now someone has to clean me up.'
He waited for the void. He waited for the switch to flip to OFF. He waited for the beautiful, chemical nothingness he had worshipped his entire life—the absolute zero of nonexistence, the perfect entropy of a closed system.
He had cleaned so many death scenes. He had catalogued the precise moment when biology gave way to chemistry, when the person became the stain. He had made peace with the notion that consciousness was merely electrical activity, and when the electricity stopped, so did everything else.
The end. The comfortable end. The clean end.
But the switch didn't flip.
And the void was not clean.