Chump Change

by G. M. Ford

  By the time I got my eyes back over to the threesome on the ground, the party was pretty much over. Boyd was bug-eyed and purple as a plum, trying to whoop some air back into his empty lungs. Keith had rolled Ginny out of the pile and scooped her up in his arms. She had her face buried in his shoulder and was sobbing for all she was worth. Irene ran to her side and stood there, stroking her daughter’s hair and whispering.

  Took the cop contingent about ten seconds to manacle Boyd up like King Kong. He vomited onto his shoes as they dragged him upright, and was still gasping for breath when they hauled him bent-legged and bleeding up the alley and out of sight.

  Wilder looked back at me. “Kid saved my life,” he said.

  I nodded. “I believe he did.”

  By the time the adrenaline buzz cleared from the air, and all the cops, EMTs, and rubberneckers had gone back to where they came from, I’d finally worked up enough energy to move myself.

  Keith and Irene had gone with Ginny in the aid car, so all I could think of was that I’d drop by the hospital, see how Ginny was doing, maybe talk to Sarah Jane while I was there. Tell her I’d had enough and was going the hell home. Maybe even admit it had been a crappy idea from the beginning. I hated that part.

  I knew now that Chief Wilder had been right when he said we’d never lay any of this or anything else at Roland Moon’s door. I thought about my old man and how, for thirty years, the powers that be had used the full apparatus of law enforcement in an attempt to bring him to bay, and how they’d never even gotten close. How they spent over three million bucks trying to put my trust fund back into the public coffers, only to find that, even in death, he was way too slick for them. Now I knew how they felt.

  Roland Moon was sort of the rural equivalent of Big Bill Waterman. Too many fingers in too many pies to be brought down by any one of them going bad. A man with his ducks in a row, who knew enough to always be somewhere else when the shooting started, and probably had a little hidey-hole someplace, with enough money to start over, should that ever become necessary.

  I still had a nagging curiosity about what had happened to Gordy, but that wasn’t gonna happen. Wilder and Morgan had made it plain that those answers were part of an ongoing police investigation. No matter what you see Jim Rockford doing on TV, real cops don’t tolerate amateurs mucking about in their business. Not for one second. You want to find yourself swapping lies in the county lockup, you just stick your nose into a current case.

  When I looked at it that way, when I saw Moon and my old man as moral equivalents, it gave me pause to consider how my light had been spent. What I might have accomplished in life if that pot of gold hadn’t always been dangling there in front of me. If I hadn’t spent the past twenty-five years trotting along like the donkey chasing the carrot. I was still chewing on that bitter root when I swung up into the front seat of the Blazer and buckled up for safety.

  I knew the voice right away. Tyler Bain.

  “You do anything cept what I tell you, I’ll blow your fucking kidneys through the dashboard,” he said.

  I checked the mirror, but he wasn’t anywhere in sight. Must be scrunched down behind me, I thought.

  “Unlock the damn doors,” Bain said.

  I reached over onto my armrest and pushed the button.

  The driver’s door popped open. Rockland Moon was standing there.

  That’s when Bain jammed the needle into the space between my neck and my shoulder and pushed the plunger. I grabbed his wrist. He laughed at me. A great rush of blood suddenly filled my head to bursting. The edges of my field of vision began to contract to a single point. I opened my mouth, but nothing came out.

  I was naked. Don’t know why that was the first thing my senses detected, but it was. Seemed like they would have noticed how much my nipples hurt, or that my hands were shackled behind my back, or that there was something stuffed in my mouth, that my tongue couldn’t dislodge, but none of that seemed to matter to my central nervous system as much as did my lack of clothing.

  That and the dark. Dark like the inside of a stone. I tried to calm myself, to push back at the rising tide of panic that threatened to overwhelm me. Whatever was jammed in my mouth made it hard to breathe. I could feel a river of drool running down over my chin as I tried to stand and discovered I was connected to a wooden chair in several places. I don’t know how long I sat there. Fact is, at one point, I think I may have passed out for a while. Next moment I recall is when a bright, white light snapped on and turned the interstellar blackness to searing, solar white.

  Took my eyes several minutes to adjust. No windows. A halogen-bright lantern on the table by my elbow was the only light source. Corrugated walls, like the inside of a storage container. Several of them connected to each other, maybe. Tables, chairs, boxes of electronic equipment. A blank computer screen. I could make out the throbbing sound of a generator, running in another room.

  The far wall was covered with posters. I squinted. Guy in a yellow raincoat pointing. SERVING YOU, it said. IN TIME OF EMERGENCY. Next to that one with a great mushroom cloud rising into the sky over a shattered city. YOU CAN PROTECT YOURSELF FROM RADIOACTIVE FALLOUT. GET THE FACTS!

  I was in a bomb shelter. Which probably meant I was underground. My stomach churned at the thought. Suddenly I felt a great weight pressing in on me. Seemed like it was harder to breathe. Like the air was noticeably thicker. Something about being buried beneath the earth opened my Pandora’s box of fears and allowed a lifetime of imagined menace to fly free.

  The sound of footsteps pulled me back from my imaginary terrors to the horror at hand. Tyler Bain, Dexter, and Rockland Moon filed into the room. Bain walked right over and put his face close to mine.

  “I warned you, boy,” he said.

  I could see the source of my chest’s discomfort now. A pair of alligator clips were attached to my nipples. Two wires—one red, one yellow—ran to an army-green box sitting on the floor beside my chair.

  “Okay,” Bain said. “Here’s how it’s gonna be.” He pulled a sheaf of papers from his inside jacket pocket and slapped them down on the table. “What you’re gonna do is sign your option on the Hardvigsen property over to The Keeler Group.” He held up a cautionary finger. “Ain’t no sense even talkin about it, cause you gonna do it,” he said. “Just a matter of how long it takes and how much of you is gonna be left when we get done.” He smacked me in the side of the head with an open hand. “You hear me, boy?”

  I turned my face away.

  “That’s what I figured,” Bain said, obviously pleased. “Just so’s you know we ain’t kidding, I’m gonna give ya a little encouragement.”

  Rockland stepped in the circle of light and picked up the army box.

  From the other side of the chair, Dexter appeared, carrying a five-gallon bucket filled to the top with water. He tilted my chair way back with one hand and slid the bucket beneath my feet with the other. When he tilted the chair back to earth, my feet were deep in the water.

  “What we got here,” Bain said, nodding at Rockland, “. . . is a genuine German Model Thirty-three Wehrmacht field telephone.”

  I looked down at my feet in the water. He caught me.

  “Improved conductivity,” he said with a wink.

  “We gonna help you make a good decision here. Lord knows you ain’t made many of those lately, so we gonna help you out with a visual aid.” He grinned at himself for remembering what they used to call it in school.

  When I didn’t say anything he went on.

  “Only one of two things gonna happen here. Either you gonna show some sense and sign those papers, or I’m gonna let Dexter and Sonny Boy have a go at ya,” he said. “Ya see, when Dexter was a boy his papa come home from the war a different man than the one that went away. Real scared and angry. Couldn’t sleep. Couldn’t nothin. Just frustrated the hell out of him. Used to take it out on Dexter and his mama. Liked to cut green willow switches and beat the hell out of them. Beat em till the damn switch just fell apa
rt, and then find him a new one and start over.”

  He glanced over at Dexter, whose face was as blank and bland as a cabbage. “The whole thing kinda warped him, you know,” he confided, in a fatherly tone. “Kinda skewed his sense of what was fun, if you catch my drift.” He jerked a thumb in Rockland’s direction. “And Sonny Boy here . . . just imagine what it must have been like having Roland Moon as a father. Always a disappointment. Never quite bein able to live up to expectations,” he said. “Feelin like a failure from the minute you wake up, till the time you go to bed.” His eyes were hard as gravel. “Made Sonny Boy mad as hell and meaner than a snake,” he said with a smile.

  He looked over at Dexter. “Which movie you want to show him?” he asked.

  “The bitch,” Dexter said right away.

  Bain nodded. “Not gonna lie to ya,” he said to me. “The only thing you gonna choose here today is how you gonna leave this world.” He gave it a moment. Making sure I understood that it wasn’t a question of whether I was going to die; it was only a question of how.

  “You do like we say, you can go quick and easy,” he promised. “I’ll put one behind your ear, and your troubles here on this earth will be over.” He shrugged. “You don’t . . . it’s gonna look like this.”

  The screen blinked to life. This room. Blonde woman hanging by her arms from the ceiling. Naked. I blinked.

  “And case you should think about closing your eyes or lookin away, I’m gonna have Sonny Boy here give you a little wakeup call, every time you do.”

  Rockland began to crank the handle on the field telephone.

  My world turned red. When it stopped, I slumped over with my chin on my chest.

  “Quite a jolt, ain’t it?” Bain said. He grabbed me by the hair and aimed my face at the monitor. “You watch now, boy,” he said.

  As my vision began to clear, I could see the strung-up woman again. When the camera moved closer, I got my first real look at her face. Missy Allen! And although I had no great love for the woman, or what she’d done to Gordy, I couldn’t, for a second, wish upon her what I knew was about to happen.

  Dexter walked into the frame, carrying a thin bamboo cane. He started with the soles of her feet, then worked the back of her into one giant welt . . . then the front. By the time he finished, she’d screamed herself voiceless, and was wiggling like a fish on the line.

  He stepped aside, and Rockland Moon came out from behind the camera. He wasn’t wearing pants. I watched in horror as he bellied up behind Missy Allen. I dropped my eyes.

  They lit me up again.

  “Crazy little bitch didn’t understand she was nothin but hired help, thought she could hold us up for a share,” Bain said.

  Back to Dexter onscreen. Holding a thicker rod this time. Looked like a store-bought hardwood dowel, maybe an inch thick. Dexter started on her all over again. I screamed my outrage and looked away. Rockland cranked the handle. The jolt left me vibrating like a tuning fork and pissing all over myself.

  She died sometime during the fourth go-round. By that time, she’d emptied her shopping cart, and there was nothing left of her but the bag she came in. You could almost see the life force flit from her and fly away. Didn’t seem to bother Rockland Moon one bit. Dead or alive, he was getting his last turn. He was still hunched up behind her as the screen flickered out.

  “Sonny Boy do like his bungholes,” Bain said. “Don’t you, boy?”

  Moon didn’t answer.

  “We find em new playmates, once in a while,” Bain offered. “Helps keep em from gettin too tense. Kinda like givin a dog a treat.”

  That’s what the other victims must have been, I thought. Playthings for perverts.

  Bain reached behind himself, grabbed a handful of something, and fanned them out over the table. Gordy’s postmortem photos.

  “This what you come here for?” he asked. “You tryin to find out what happened to old Gordy?”

  I didn’t answer. He smirked.

  “The Boys kept that sorry son of a bitch alive for a month.”

  “Five weeks,” said Dexter. “Five weeks and three days.”

  “Fore somebody got sloppy and let him get away,” Bain added.

  “We fixed it, didn’t we?” Rockland bleated.

  “We? Did you say we, Sonny Boy? Your daddy cleaned up your mess, just like he’s had to do for your whole damn life. Unlike your sorry ass, Junior, your daddy’s smart enough not to leave loose ends hanging out.”

  He stepped to my side. Looked down at me.

  “Well. What’s it gonna be, boy? You gonna go out with a little bitta dignity, or you wanna be shittin and cryin like that stupid bitch there?”

  I nodded. “Dig-ny,” I said. As close as I could get.

  “What I figured,” Bain said.

  Moon freed my right hand from the handcuff. Dexter slipped a pen between my fingers. Bain took his gun from his pocket and aimed it at my head, then slid the papers in front of me. “Need ya to sign on the yellow and initial on the red,” he said. “Nice neat signatures, so’s there ain’t no question bout who signed em.”

  I leaned forward in the chair.

  I had no illusions. There wasn’t going to be a better chance for me. This was it. Sitting there, chained to a chair with my feet in a bucket of water and a gun to my head, was as good as it was going to get. Which sure wasn’t saying very damn much, as far as I was concerned.

  I adjusted the pen in my hand, rolling the back of it downward until it rested against the palm of my hand, with the business end sticking out between my index and middle fingers. Dexter reached out to help me.

  Using every bit of strength I had left, I jammed the pen into Dexter’s left eye so hard I felt it hit the back of his skull. He bellowed like a gored animal and twirled in a circle, knocking Bain’s gun from his hand, as he fell, stone dead, onto the floor. When I looked up, Rockland Moon had collected his meager wits and was flying my way from the far side of the room.

  I ripped the alligator clips from my chest. Roaring from the pain, I jerked my feet from the bucket and stood up. I reached over, grabbed the light, and threw it into the bucket. A waterfall of sparks showered the room. The lights went out. I swung the chair around my body in a wide circle, like an Olympic hammer thrower.

  I heard Moon grunt from the impact of the chair, so I kept it swinging and made contact for a second time. Then I picked up the chair and took off running.

  I used my free hand to guide me, running my fingertips along the corrugated corridor as I moved along in the darkness. I heard Bain curse and a keening sound of agony that set my teeth on edge.

  I fell. Used the chair to get back up and keep shuffling forward. I kept moving, trying to get as far away from the noise as I could, when suddenly my hand found thin air. I stopped. No doubt about it. There was another storage container on my left, and the air coming from that direction was a whole lot fresher than what I was breathing. I found the opening and moved through it, holding the remains of the chair before me like an offering.

  Kept going until I tripped over something and fell on my face. I felt around. Stairs. Concrete stairs. I groped my way upward, one step at a time. The air got better and better as I climbed. My head made contact with something hard. I reached up and felt metal. I pushed. It moved, so I pushed some more. Stepped up and out.

  The cool night air washed across my sweaty skin. I looked back over my shoulder. A narrow set of stairs led directly down into the ground, like a stairway to hell. A pair of old-fashioned cellar doors lay flapped wide on either side of the opening.

  I knelt on the ground and bludgeoned the remains of the chair to pieces against the nearest concrete stair. Once free of the chair, I closed the cellar doors and wedged a piece of the seat between the handles.

  I staggered forward a couple of steps and looked around. I was somewhere in the Lewiston Valley. I knew that because I recognized the silhouettes of the mountains. I tried to triangulate in my head. To recall which peaks were in which direction
. To find a sense of which side of town I was on. But my mind wouldn’t hold a thought long enough to put it together, and so I began to walk.

  I cursed as my foot came down on something sharp and reminded me I wasn’t wearing shoes. I checked the inky sky. There may have been a moon up there somewhere, but it sure wasn’t shedding any light on me.

  Bang. Somebody was trying to open the cellar doors. I heard a curse from down below. Bang. I looked around.

  Over to my left, way out in the distance, I could see the lights of a house. Instinctively, I lurched half a dozen steps in that direction, before I came to my senses and realized I had no idea where I was, and that, for all I knew, those lights might be my pursuers. I stopped. Gave my eyes a chance to acclimate to the darkness and then began to jog in the opposite direction.

  I kept my eyes glued to the ground as I loped along. Breaking an ankle at this point would surely be the end of me. The handcuffs dangling from my left wrist kept swinging up and hitting my forearm, so I swung the loose end up into my manacled hand and hung on to it as I ran.

  I began to count my strides inside my head. Looking for a pace I could keep up all night, looking to make the noise inside my head so loud the pain couldn’t get in. Letting bits of old songs blare in my ears like anesthetic anthems as I pumped along over the uneven ground. I could hear Otis Taylor roaring his outrage as I wove my way through the prairie grass and mesquite, and then the channel abruptly changed, and Townes Van Zandt was making me wish I had some of those damn flyin shoes.

  Seemed like I’d counted all the way to a million. Spotted two irrigation ditches and managed not to fall in. By the time I crested the far side of the second ditch, my legs were getting loose and floppy; my breath was streaming in and out of me like a squall.