DeMarco gripped his cup with both hands. His mouth felt sticky and sour. He spoke in a whisper. “Don’t talk about my family,” he said.
Bowen stood and scooped up the white tablets. He crossed to DeMarco. Took the coffee cup from his hands, pressed the tablets into his palm, closed DeMarco’s hand around the pills. He stood very close, his fingers still clenched around DeMarco’s.
“Go home, Ryan. If there’s any news between now and morning, I’ll send a trooper to drag your ass out of bed. That’s not a suggestion; it’s an order. And this time, you’re going to fucking listen to me.”
For some reason, DeMarco could not bring himself to look Bowen in the eye. For some reason, all he wanted was to go to sleep now. He wanted to sleep a hundred years, no dreams, no night sweats, no thoughts of another day.
He leaned slightly forward, reached behind himself, and gripped the doorknob. With a sliding, turning motion, he faced the door and pulled it open and said as he stepped into the hallway, “Make sure you scrub my mug out when you’re done fondling it.”
Fifty-Six
The long, cool shadows of afternoon. On the edge of his back porch, DeMarco stood for a while and looked at his unfinished brick path. Streaks of soft yellow sunlight slanted in low across his yard. He remembered that Laraine had told him once that photographers and painters call this hour of such clear, soft sunshine the hour of magic light. He wondered what a painter would make of the scene from his back porch. Dandelions and crabgrass had grown up between the bricks and out of the bare soil. The grass in his yard was four inches high and hadn’t been mowed for over a month. At the far end of the yard, the windows in the unfinished apartment in the small barn looked back at him like cartoon eyes, black and unblinking.
For just an instant, he thought he saw himself looking back from one of those black windows, but then the image was gone. Must have been the me that never was, he thought. Never was or will be.
He wanted a drink, but Bowen’s white pills were in his pocket and he knew he should not mix them with alcohol. He told himself he should heat up a can of soup. He should eat some soup and maybe a can of fruit cocktail. Eat something sensible, then take the pills and sleep for twelve hours, then wake up refreshed and ready to kick some tail again.
It was a good, simple plan. He was glad he had thought of it. To celebrate, he went inside and took a bottle of Corona out of the refrigerator and drank it down in four gulps. He drank another one while studying the eight cans of food in the cupboard. There was one can each of sliced beets, whole potatoes, mushroom pieces and stems, and five cans of tuna. He drank another beer while standing at the back door and looking out through the screen. Beer is okay, he told himself. Beer is mostly water. Water is supposed to be good for you.
To keep the first three beers company, he carried a fourth beer into the living room and swallowed the white pills and turned on the TV. With the beer in one hand and the TV remote in the other, he surfed channels for a while before finally settling on a cooking show. He watched a slender, pretty woman demonstrate how to prepare a chicken breast with caramelized onions and mushrooms and a sauce made with white wine, capers, and the juice of one lemon. The pretty woman told him that the sauce could also be used with shrimp and that it was wonderful for poaching salmon.
“That’s wonderful to know,” he told her. He imagined that if he lifted the hair off the back of her neck, she would smell like moonlight with a hint of lemon. He watched her until his eyes grew heavy, then he closed his eyes and listened to her voice become a murmur, and when she leaned close to whisper to him, he could feel her breath on his cheek and the clean, cool scent of her body filled him with the soft, unhurried heaviness of magic light.
“That’s wonderful,” he told her, and he let the empty bottle slip from his hand and onto the floor.
Fifty-Seven
The remote slid upward past DeMarco’s fingers. He thought about tightening his hand around it, but he was in a gray, soft place and could not summon sufficient interest to hold on. He heard the television click off and the silence that followed, and he wondered about that too but from a long distance away.
After what seemed a long time, the thought registered that somebody other than himself must have lifted the remote from his hand and shut off the television. He tried to force his eyes open, but they were enormously heavy, so he surrendered to the heaviness and went back into the grayness.
After a while the grayness lifted again, and again the thought registered that someone else must be in the living room with him. He hoped it was the pretty woman with capers and the juice of one lemon, but when he looked back at the grayness from just outside the edge of it, he saw that it was separating into rising wisps like fog over water. He did not want it to go, but it was quickly becoming too thin to take him in again, too thin to cover and hold him.
A while later he reasoned that Bowen had sent a trooper to wake him. He did not wonder how the trooper had gotten inside or which trooper it was. After all, he had left his back door open. Maybe he had left his cupboard open too. Maybe the refrigerator as well. None of that mattered. All that mattered was that the white pills were a wonderful thing and the gray nothing had been wonderful too and also the sweet indifference that came with it.
What finally intruded upon the indifference and spoiled it was the scent of cigarette smoke. It began distantly, like a memory that nagged but would not quite materialize. Had the scent been sweeter, as of leaf smoke on an autumn evening, he might have used it to deepen the indifference, a boost to the white pills’ sedation. But the stink of cigarette smoke was unmistakable. And as the scent increased in his consciousness, the wonderful indifference gave way to annoyance.
The scent buzzed and pricked at him. DeMarco wanted to return to the gray nothing, but the scent would not allow it, and before long, he was hearing his own thoughts again, and he knew he had to listen.
His instincts told him to remain still while his stumbling thoughts found their footing, and when they did his pulse began to hammer and his breath grew quick and shallow. The last time he had experienced that scent was in Bonnie’s house. But he had never seen Bonnie smoking nor had he smelled the scent on her. And he finally put a name to the scent and the prickling sensation that accompanied it.
He kept his eyes closed and wondered how close Carl Inman was to him, on which side of the recliner. He listened for Inman’s breathing and tried to sense the heat from Inman’s body and decided that the man was on his left and very close. Probably he was sitting on the sofa and watching DeMarco, had been there long enough for his eyes to adjust to the darkness. Probably he was holding a knife, though maybe also the handgun he had used to threaten Huston. DeMarco wondered what fraction of a second would be needed for him to vault up out of the chair and dive for cover and, with luck, race into the bedroom where his service weapon in its holster hung from the chair.
Not time enough, he told himself. He was still groggy from the white pills. He was still struggling to piece his thoughts together, to fit them into a linearity. Whereas Inman was wide awake and alert.
You don’t stand a chance, he thought.
He opened his eyes and slowly turned his head toward the sofa. In the darkness, Inman was little more than a hulking shadow. The only light in the room came from the blue digital readout on the DVD player atop the television and from the dull glow of the streetlamp against the Persian blinds and drawn sheer curtains. He remembered the day he had hung those blinds. Remembered Laraine as his cheerful assistant, her hand on the small of his back as he drilled the pilot holes. You’re so sexy with a power tool in your hand, she had teased. She was young and beautiful and clear-eyed in his memory. The man drilling the holes was middle-aged and tired beyond his years, and he knew he was soon going to die.
To the silhouette, DeMarco said, “Nothing you do to me is going to change your fate, Carl. There’s already an alert out for you and Bonnie. You�
��ve got nowhere to go.”
“Then I guess this will just have to be for the fun of it.”
Yet Inman did not move. He was seated on the edge of the sofa seat but slouched back with his head and shoulders resting against the top of the cushion. He said, “You’re a sound sleeper for a cop.”
“You caught me on a good night.”
“So you think this is a good one, do you?”
DeMarco turned away from him. The digital readout on the DVD player said 3:27. DeMarco told him, “I’ve been asleep for almost nine hours. That’s more sleep than I’ve had all week.”
Inman’s laugh was a single grunt.
“So fuck you,” DeMarco said. He let his hand fall toward the wooden lever on the side of the recliner, then felt his pinkie finger graze something cool and smooth. He gripped the empty Corona bottle around the neck and lifted it off the floor. Now he moved his hand to the wooden lever on the recliner. He took in a slow, deep breath and held it.
Then he yanked the lever up. As the footrest banged down, he threw himself sideways over the armrest and landed on his knees with the recliner between him and Inman.
He heard Inman stand, but the man did not rush toward him. Calmly, Inman said, “Seems to me like you’re the one with nowhere to go.”
So no gun, DeMarco thought, or he would have shot me already. A knife is more fun. He wants to play awhile.
DeMarco climbed to his feet and faced him. He held the beer bottle behind his leg. “Anybody ever tell you that you stink?” he asked. “Literally. You smell like a fucking ashtray.”
Inman grunted again and strode around the back of the recliner.
DeMarco swung at the hips, brought the bottle up in a wide arc toward the side of Inman’s head. But Inman leaned back from the waist and the momentum of DeMarco’s swing pulled him off balance and he fell into the recliner again, his back against one armrest, legs one atop the other. Inman moved quickly then, stabbed a hand around DeMarco’s throat, yanked him forward off the front of the recliner, hammered his head onto the carpeted floor.
DeMarco raised his arm so as to smash the bottle against Inman’s body, but every movement felt glacial, heavy and drugged and slow, and before the bottle could make contact, DeMarco’s arm was pushed to the floor and pinned under Inman’s knee. DeMarco tried to drive his free hand upward through the heavy air, push his fingers through the heavy darkness and into Inman’s eyes, but Inman blocked it with his elbow, then yanked DeMarco up off the floor and smashed his head down again, and for just a moment, the room flared red, then blinked into darkness and sucked DeMarco all the way down to the black basement far below the sweet nothing.
Fifty-Eight
A distant sound of breaking glass. No, not glass, too sustained. More like bells, jingle bells. Christmas? The ice cream man?
Whatever the sound it was getting closer, louder, or else DeMarco was getting closer to it, coming up out of the blackness, the hole that had sucked him down. He tried to move, lift his head, open his eyes, but his brain throbbed with every pulsebeat now, felt too big for his skull, Christ the pain of it. And that jingling sound only made it worse, so fucking loud now. And there was something wrong with his arms, his body—he couldn’t even get his mouth to open. What the fuck is the matter? Why can’t I move?
Second by second, the darkness grew thinner, and DeMarco pushed up through it toward a diffuse glow that he thought might be the sun. He thought he might be underwater and pushing toward the surface, but he realized then that he was breathing through his nose, that the air was warm. The light was not the sun. He was sitting—no, lying on his back. The jingling sound near his head now, metallic. Something cold touched his ear and he jerked away from it. The weight of the darkness was evaporating, and he could open his eyes now, saw nothing but light and smelled the stink of cigarette smoke in his face and realized then that he had been unconscious, and now he knew where he was and he knew that he was fucked.
He was lying beneath the floor lamp in the corner of the room. Inman leaning close, smiling, jingling a key ring against DeMarco’s ear. DeMarco leaned away from him. Looked down the length of his body. Wrists bound with duct tape, arms bound tightly to his sides. Ankles bound too. A strip of tape pulling hard and tight across his mouth.
“Good morning, sunshine,” Inman said.
DeMarco looked across the room. The blue digital readout said 3:42. Only a few minutes, DeMarco thought. Long enough to be thoroughly screwed.
“Here’s what we’re going to do,” Inman said. “You following this?”
DeMarco turned his head. Inman on his knees, face too close, stink all through him. Inman dragging on a cigarette. Smoke stinging DeMarco’s bad eye, fouling up the house.
“I got your keys here,” Inman told him, and jingled the key ring in his face. “Thanks for leaving them on the counter. So I thought maybe you and me could take us a ride in that sorry-ass car you got parked out back. Go up to Niagara Falls maybe? Scoot into Canada for a while? I saw you got a police radio in your car, so we’ll have some entertainment along the way. What do you think? You up for a road trip?”
DeMarco’s heart and brain hammered in syncopation. Both eyes stung from the smoke, the left eye watered. He was breathing hard, quick rasps of air through his nose. His answer was a furious, inarticulate mumble behind the tape. “I’ll fucking kill you, you worthless fucking piece of shit.”
“Excellent,” Inman said. He stood, held the cigarette in his mouth, leaned down, and seized DeMarco under both arms and yanked him to his feet. They stood face to face. Inman took the cigarette from between his lips, blew out the smoke. With his free hand, he drew a long, heavy-handled knife from the leather sheath strapped to his belt, and he laid the side of the blade against DeMarco’s cheek, the point near the corner of his good eye.
Inman said, “There’s a couple places up along the border where I’m pretty sure we can slip through. We do, I just might let you go. We don’t…” He grinned and took another drag from the cigarette. Then, “We clear on this?”
DeMarco squinted his eyes and said nothing. You’re fucking dead, he thought.
“So everything’s cool,” Inman said. “Hold this for me, will you?” He took a last drag from the cigarette then dropped the butt into DeMarco’s shirt pocket. Then he stepped behind DeMarco, laid the knife blade against the side of DeMarco’s neck. Immediately a pinpoint of heat stabbed DeMarco’s left breast, then the heat blossomed and spread, and he smelled his shirt burning.
Inman chuckled while DeMarco squirmed. Finally Inman stretched an arm over DeMarco’s shoulder and slammed his palm against the burning cigarette, hard enough to jolt the air from DeMarco’s lungs. Inman said, “Don’t say I never did nothing for you.” He shoved him toward the kitchen.
DeMarco moved with small, stuttering steps, taking as much time as he dared, breathing deeply through his nose. Thanks to the adrenaline and the blow to his chest, all grogginess was gone now and his head was clear. He thought about dropping low, leaning back, and driving his skull up into Inman’s chin. He thought about spinning away, hooking his foot against Inman’s, and bringing him down. He thought about diving forward while bringing his right heel up into Inman’s crotch.
But he was also clearheaded enough to know that none of those moves would work. Inman was keeping himself an arm’s length away, only close enough to hold the blade against DeMarco’s jugular. Inman was stronger and younger and quicker.
I’ll have to take my chances in the car, DeMarco told himself. Maybe send us both into a ravine somewhere. If I’m going to die, this shitbag is going with me.
Just inside the kitchen door, Inman grabbed DeMarco by the collar and brought him to a halt. He turned the knife slightly so that the blade bit into the skin. Softly, Inman told him, “Your neighbors are sound asleep. There’s not a single light burning on either side of this house. You can’t run, you can’t call out
, there’s not a thing you can do to change that. You understand?”
DeMarco gazed through the screen door into the blackness of his yard. There should be a lamppost out there. A beautiful brick path lined with solar lights. A child’s swing. A place to play catch.
Inman slid the blade off DeMarco’s neck, jabbed the point into his spine. “You understand, pig?” he said.
DeMarco nodded.
“Then move it.”
So many thoughts on the way to the barn. A slow tumbling of emotions. He realized that a part of him had always hoped that everything could be set right somehow, Ryan and Laraine and all the dark, sodden nights, a dozen years lived in error. And he realized too what a foolish hope that had been. There could be no erasure of mistakes engraved in time, no cleansing. One careless night, three wasted lives. Done is done. Dead is dead.
His shoes were wet with dew from the high grass, his ankles were wet, his cuffs were heavy. He smelled the dew, and its scent filled him with sadness. The sadness was heavy and wet and cool on his feet. He smelled winter in the night air, the coming of the end. And he knew suddenly that this was where he wanted to die, not in Canada or anywhere in between but here at the end of a path he would never finish building.
He saw that Inman had already opened the barn door and backed the car most of the way inside, and when they reached the front of the car, he saw that the trunk lid was open. That’s where I’m going. Except that I’m not. He knew that Inman planned to stuff him into the trunk under concealment of the barn, had even removed the bulb from the trunk light. He would keep DeMarco where he could cause no trouble, arrive at the border around dawn. DeMarco was insurance, nothing more. When the insurance was no longer needed, the policy would be canceled. No refunds, no dividends.
The other possibility was that Inman would shove DeMarco into the trunk, slit his throat, close the lid, and leave him there to stink up the garage. The story about driving DeMarco’s car to Canada merely a ruse to get DeMarco to the car. After all, Inman must have a car of his own parked nearby.
Two Days Gone Page 26
