Threads: A Thriller

by T. R. Ultra

I mustered my energy to heave the pistol from the ground. The Glock seemed heavier, my quivering hands struggling to raise it from the blood puddle.

  Paulo Pinto noticed my intention, he knew I would draw the gun and aim it at him. But he was stuck trying to get into the car. To come inside, he had to squeeze himself through the crack between the sliding doors. His left shoulder came in first, next his head, I raised the Glock, he tried to reach for his gun, but it was tucked into his hip still outside the car.

  He didn’t make any sounds. From his throat only the gurgling of fear came out. He rammed himself through the door, metal rattling, and attempted to set his body free from that momentary prison. His shrunken retinas stared at me as my arm borrowed blood from other limbs so as to steady its fibers.

  The G17 came to the point of firing. Its barrel swayed sideways as I tried to lock target on Paulo Pinto. And suddenly his size diminished. He was not a menacing man anymore. Wiggling through the crack of the door, his swollen belly clogging up the passage, he resembled a harmless seal who had been entangled in fishing nets, unable to set itself free, moaning and writhing underwater until its lungs got drowned by the cold sea.

  Except that a seal’s death would be a pity.

  There was no time for words. At the tip of the Glock barrel I witnessed Paulo Pinto outstretching his hand towards me, his body stuck at the door, forcing its way through. He faced his death, and that put him in a state of despair which I thought a beast like him would never enter. But that didn’t matter, not for me.

  I’m not an asset. I pulled the trigger.

  Instead of the hissing of a bullet gashing the air, the explosion of a concealed hammer, the sliding of a barrel, what I heard was a click. A click.

  I squeezed it once again, but the trigger locked back, empty rounds in the magazine. Since I picked up the pistol the first time, I assumed its magazine had been fully loaded. Since then, I shot it seven or eight times at most, but now it was empty. Seventeen bullets gone from the cartridge. Unless it was not full to begin with. Was it?

  So I dropped the gun back to the blood puddle. Paulo Pinto went back using his throat, bellowing in Portuguese, his eyes reddened in a bulge that evoked anger. Other cops hurried toward him, rifles pointed at me from outside the car, as some of them helped pluck the man out from the door.

  And then my trip to Rio was over. A trip without a single sheet of paper written, where instead of getting stained with ink I got my clothes tarnished with blood, and instead of non-lethal weapons all I encountered was death.

  The policeman pushed the sliding door open, certainly breaking some inner gears. Paulo Pinto, down to his knees, hand dipped in the red of the floor, got heaved up. Boots banged against the steel floor, rippling waves around as the steel plank deformed under the weight of the uniformed bandits.

  Next I was face down against thick blood, a knee pressing my cheek against the floor, another hammering at my ribs as coarse hands turned my arms around to cuff my wrists. And now all I wanted was to faint, to sleep away, to be taken aback from the moment where unfairness and sheer violence prevailed. I closed my eyes, my body a sack of bones being pushed around, my nostrils smelling the iron from the floor, the iron from the blood, the iron from those hands and those guns, as I tried to pass away from that nightmare into the softer reality of dreams.

  But I failed, because even though I wanted to preserve my mind from taking in the cowardice, the fraud of my surroundings, my nerves wanted me fully awake to react against potential threats, even though react I could no more. All because nerves can’t see the cuffs in the wrists, the threadbareness of limbs.

  They carried my body out of the cable car. Four fully armed police officers hoisted my body across the cable car platform to the outskirts of Gloria Santa. My eyes depicted the scene in sparse frames, connected to each other through winks. The turnstile at the entrance of the platform. The crowd staring at me with curious yet oblivious eyes. The popcorn cart being fed with new materials for later events. The gas station.

  The policeman brought me back to the gas station, because it seemed to be the only appropriate place to park an ambulance. My end, after all, would come by way of its beginning. Through the gas station, at the foot of Gloria Santa.

  And at that moment, the lethargic state of my mind receded to give way to something sharper. Because opposite the ambulance across the gas station parlor I noticed a big, black van, with the United States flag stamped on it. That black van was only a needle tip amid Rio, but a God blessed hopeful one.

  I tried to speak but failed. So I only outstretched my arms towards the van, my fingers wavering in the air, as the police officers pushed me into the back of an ambulance.

  People in white hunched over me. They wanted to stretch my body out, administer medicines to keep me alive, for I was only an asset while breathing. A syringe needle slid into my skin, a man appeared at the door. He wore a suit, flashing a badge to the police, which after examined allowed him to pass. He came into the ambulance and brought a woman along with him.

  That woman was Joanne, my boss. She looked pretty, much brighter, much younger than I could remember.

  But before I opened my mouth, the medicines acted and my eyelids shut, bringing on a much welcomed deep sleep.

  Chapter 37

  All white defined my surroundings when I woke. Soft mattresses and clean bedsheets, fabrics that carried a faint Angel’s Touch of flavor with them, even though the softness of hotel clothes is always greater than reality.

  The constant beep coming from the monitor on my side announced what was already obvious: I was lying on a hospital bed. My mind was a blend of crispy nightmare images and blurred recollections of real life.

  I could remember with eerie clarity the dreams that assailed my slumber—Rio, corruption, favela, blood—, yet I was unable to recover the events which led me to that hospital bed. What I did remember was taking an Uber ride to Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport in Atlanta. In the backseat of the car, thumbing through messages on my phone, I prepared myself for a week-long stay in Rio. Then nothing else. Nothing apart from that nightmare where pictures already began to fade away.

  I rolled my eyes, trying to set them free from the restraints that made them so heavy to hoist. I sensed the world quivering, the walls bending, the tables and chair bouncing on the floor. My mind was sluggish.

  Sounds bounced off surfaces. Noises that seemed to stretch infinitely, ricocheting in an eternal loop against the white walls. The sound of scratching nails, of gnawing rats, of . . . was something beneath my bed?

  The beep rhythm improved, heartbeat rising. A light bulb on the ceiling, another sheer white bright, hacked at my sensible eyes. I closed my eyelids, only to filter that pain through thin skin. Then another sound, was it outside? And the figure of that man appeared before me. The plump officer stuck in the trolley door.

  Scene of a nightmare. A terrible one. I was already awake, but nightmare images kept returning to haunt my real life. My mind had been functioning in improper ways, probably due to the medicine used to mend and patch the wounds from the accident.

  I could tell that I had suffered a car accident on my way to Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport. The shy throbbing in the back of my head, the soreness of my body, emboldened this perspective. A car accident would also explain the losing of my recent memory.

  But it would not explain my need of finding Marlon. I had promised myself I would never forgive his cheating on me. But lying on that bed made me miss him. I wanted him before me, a known face, someone I could rely on. Not as a lover, not as a husband, but as a friend whose smile would pulverize bad dreams.

  I was also cold. A draft cast from the air conditioner chilled the room, penetrated the cover of my bedsheets, the skin and my flesh, and reached down to my very bones. As though cold came from inside out. My body wanted to tell me something. A message of warning, conveying the idea that I should leave this white room as fast as possible.

  Otherwise,
they would find me. They would find me here.

  I skimmed my eyes over my body and noticed a small red button within reach. Emergency, it said. I clicked it.

  A new sound rang, an old telephone ringtone. The gnawing under my bed stopped, but I knew the beast was still beneath it. And now I had sounded the alarm, it would crawl out from its shelter and climb onto my bed, claws going deep into the flesh, screams coming out from my throat. It would feast on me before help arrived.

  But the beast was not daunting enough, because when the door got pushed open and the woman came in through it, the beast from beneath went completely silent.

  The silence that precedes the bellow.

  The woman was a nurse, clad in white, black rimmed glasses over face mask. But the other woman, the one who came in her wake, was in regular clothes.

  Joanne.

  I gave a faint smile. My face muscles weren’t available for me. Joanne gazed at me in earnest after exchanging looks with the nurse. When the other woman walked out from the room, Joanne came to sit by my side.

  I tried to reach out to her, but my arm didn´t obey me. I was in need of warmth. Instead I received the seriousness of Joanne and the rattling of steel in my ears. The sound was an echo of my latest dreams, the fading away recollection of the trolley and its support cables, wasn’t it? All condemned to be eternally forgotten once I fully recovered from the car accident.

  Joanne looked coldly at me.

  “How are you feeling?” she asked.

  Hearing her voice stunned me. It was pure English words spoken by a voice I knew. How distressing can a nightmare be?

  “Oh my God, Joanne. How long have I been here? I feel weak and ragged and . . .”

  “It’s been a while,” she said. “You were brought here in bad shape, Emily. You’ll still need to convalesce for a while, but seeing you awake is a good thing.”

  She might have said so, but her face didn’t deliver the same message. I wanted news. Suddenly, all I worried about was my position in Johnson & Brothers Co.

  “How’s the firm doing? Did you send anyone to attend Rio Firearms Expo in my place?”

  Joanne frowned. But then relinquished her grave expression.

  “Of course not. I believe you should rest a little longer. I’ll come back later.”

  Her uneasiness bothered me. We were used to talking plainly, and besides my boss, I’ve always considered her a friend. But now she seemed hard and distant. Was it the hospital room?

  “Why don’t you stay a bit longer? I feel like it’s been a lifetime since I last spoke to someone friendly.”

  Joanne stared at me.

  “I’m sorry, Emily. I have lots of work to do. My affairs at Johnson & Brothers Co. have been put on hold since you . . . since all this shit happened. You have good people taking care of you. You’ll be fine.”

  Joanne nodded, got up from the chair, and left the room. She also lied.

  Because Joanne didn’t really believe I would be fine. If she did, she would say so looking straight into my eyes, instead of wavering her eyeballs around and turning her face to the floor.

  I outstretched my arm, trying to grab her, to stop her from leaving. Her face had thawed some of the cold inside, but there were many ice patches yet to dissolve. She was already out of reach. My movements felt limited. My body squeaked as though made of rusty iron when I tried to raise an arm.

  “Please, Joanne, don’t leave. I . . . I feel strange. How long do I have to stay here? What do the doctors say about me?” I said.

  Joanne stopped walking and looked back at me.

  “You might leave the hospital in a few days.”

  “Oh, great. I can’t wait to go back home. How did Mom handle this all? Is she ok?”

  “Your mom doesn’t know what happened to you, Emily. We thought it would be better not to worry her.”

  I wished Mom knew what I had been through. She had always been beside me. Always ready to dab wet gauze on a knee scratch, ever so zealous about my fevers. I can still smell the nutritious hot soups she fed me with whenever I caught a cold as a child. But I grew up, Mom’s mental health degraded, and now it was my turn to protect her.

  Joanne trying to leave the room made me feel impotent. A strange sense of fear had dawned upon me. The sense of willing to get the hell out of that place but not being able to. The sense of being shackled to that damn bed.

  It was pure fear. Fear of putting my feet on the cold floor, right beside the entrance to the cave, under the bed, where that treacherous, noisy beast hid itself. In the darkness beneath beds where all terrors become true.

  But I was not a child anymore, and I would not surrender my grown up thoughts to the fantasies of a young brain.

  The room started to go back to its whiteness and normality, where everything was cold. Joanne stopped by the door before going outside only to land a quick, last glimpse on me. The air chilled.

  The chill resonated to my bones. And it came in the form of letters put on a small sign which had been embroidered to the outer face of the door. I knew those letters. But not the way they had been arranged in: “Quarto 206.”

  Chapter 38

  “Where am I, Joanne? What happened to me?” I said.

  I tried to raise my body to sit on the bed. Tried to take those frozen bedsheets from over my body, but my hands didn’t obey.

  Joanne gazed at me from under the door frame.

  “Emily, you need to calm down. I know that you’ve been through terrible things. But you need to stay calm.”

  “Where am I? What do you mean?”

  “We’re at a hospital in Rio. You’ve been held captive for a month inside a slum. Now you’re safe. Just calm down.”

  I wasn’t calming down.

  I twisted my body, strained my arms, but they didn’t leave the cover of the bedsheets. The only sound that escaped from under it was metal rattling.

  “That was a nightmare. I’m not in Rio . . . I’m not. I thought it had only been a nightmare, Joanne.” That sign on the door didn’t lie. My eyes welled up, but I couldn’t wipe them.

  “Don’t move like that,” Joanne said. “You’ve been handcuffed for your own safety. You may get hurt if you continue acting like this.”

  Tears streamed down my face. Joanne remained cold as steel.

  “Why am I handcuffed? I’m the victim, Joanne. They wanted to kill me, they wanted to hand me over to drug lords, to Flavio Beirario’s faction—and Renato—Renato gave his life to save mine,” I mumbled.

  “Emily, please.” Joanne looked outside into the corridor, beckoned someone to come. “They’ll give you something to help you relax.”

  I looked around at those white walls, my mind wandering through the scenes of the past, the stains of blood. Had I gained some weight since I had been put on that bed? Had Marlon come to protect me?

  It had been the corruption, those threads that grew bigger and bigger around me, that squeezed my breath out, choked me to death. They had put the shackles on my body, set up a ploy to turn me into a suspect.

  But Joanne didn’t seem to understand. It was obvious she didn’t know the truth. She didn’t know.

  “Joanne, you can’t trust them . . . Don’t trust what the police say. I had to run for my life, they had our phones hacked.” I felt sweat on my palms.

  Joanne’s eyes had a dull shine, as though insensitive to the terrors I had been through. The terrors I was going through.

  “Please, Emily. You need to keep it together,” she said.

  I thought we were friends.

  The nurse came back into the room. She brought two other guys with her. One had syringes in his hands. The other one had palms of rock that shoved my body into the mattress.

  “Please,” I said, my eyes capturing the whiteness of the ceiling. “Please, Joanne.”

  The pressure on my shoulders released.

  I felt a sudden calm coming up my forearm, born at the point where that syringe had bitten me. The faces of the nurses stepped
away from the bed. Joanne’s took their places.

  “Am I going back to sleep?” I said, drowsy.

  “It’s only to calm you down. You’ve slept for a long time already,” Joanne replied. She put her hand over my forehead, a touch of affection that shattered the previous seriousness. I saw a lonely tear roll down her cheeks.

  “What happened? Tell me, Joanne.”

  “You’ve been lied to, Emily. I know that, in a normal situation, you’d never be able to do what you’ve done.”

  “It’s all been a lie?” I asked. A sense of peace took over the room, all nurses gone.

  Joanne went on. “Flávio Beirario doesn’t exist. He is a character in a story meant to deceive you.”

  “No, Flávio Beirario wanted to capture me. I saw the killings inside Gloria Santa. Drug soldiers tortured Renato in front of me—he protected me.”

  “Renato is a killer, Emily. A psychopath. He killed Carlos, the driver we had booked for your arrival in Rio. Renato wanted to use you in his scheme. And for that he tracked your phone and managed to gain your trust.”

  I stared at Joanne, speechless. I could feel the steel on my wrists, but it didn’t seem cold. Was it really the truth?

  Since the beginning, Renato forbid the use of phones. Perhaps he was afraid I’d search for information online, especially about Flávio Beirario.

  But, no, she was wrong. I’d seen too much evidence to believe it was a ploy.

  “He took me to his grandma’s house, Joanne. He took care of me . . . And got shot when protecting me from corrupt cops.”

  Joanne looked over me, thinking deeply.

  “The police went to Norma’s house. She really is his grandma. And it was at her house they found the outline of his plan. It was all on note cards: the fake story of Flávio Beirario, the young American tourist, how to gain her trust and bring her into Gloria Santa. Also, a diplomatic incident between the US and Brazil. In the end he would walk out of the slum alongside the tourist as the man who saved her from the drug lords.”