THE TESTER

Chapter 1

The young woman woke up into an unknown bed. She frowned, narrowing her eyes against the morning sunbeams hitting her face from outside the wide window. She raked her fingers through her dark hair and turned her head to the slightly snoring woman by her side.

That slow, baritone, regular noise made her smile a little. But nothing more than a little. Immediately after, the young woman exhaled a long sigh and proceeded to get out of the bed.

She reached for her jeans on the floor, then for the untidily abandoned buttoned shirt. She got dressed in silence, throwing a glance at the sleeping girl on the bed from time to time.

She extracted her high-tech cell phone from her pants, flipped it open and pushed the “silent” profile on the small keyboard. She took a picture of the girl, saved it and flipped the phone closed.

Then she grabbed her blazer from the couch, in the living room, and soundlessly opened the front door.

Outside the building, the young woman wore her sunglasses and lit a smoke. She took a long drag and put a chewing gum into her mouth. She walked across the street like a cat would do: smoothly, almost liquidly, in a purely feline easiness and self-conscience.

She entered a bar and sat in a deserted corner. When the waitress approached her with her best morning smile, she ordered a double espresso talking as little as possible.

The bar was packed and it was another ordinary weekday. Mugs clinging, voices talking, a TV speaking in the background. The woman didn’t seem bothered at all. She just flipped her phone open, again, and attached the picture she had previously taken to a MMS.

She wrote just a few words.

”Come over and see me ASAP. Settlement of bill needed. See attachment for details. S.”

When the waitress placed a steaming mug on the table, the young woman looked up and smiled that polite grin she always reserved to clients, suppliers and strangers. A beautiful, white smile that never reached her green eyes.

The waitress – an approximately forty-year old woman with bleached hair and huge blue eyes – seemed puzzled for a second. Flattered, maybe. That smile always seemed to affect people that way. That smile seemed to say: you’re the one. But it never meant it.