by The Behrg
“Bwake?”
“Coming,” he said, his heart palpitations rising. His throat seemed to be shrinking—he could barely breathe as he lowered the knife to his side.
It was too obvious. Joje would see it. The humidity in the room had doubled. Blake held the knife, trying to determine where to store it. After wiping the sweat from his face, he plugged it back into the hole in the block.
He couldn’t do it. It would go wrong, backfire, and send him back to the crate.
With the knife back in the block, he felt his breathing ease. It did nothing for the dull throb behind his eyes.
Passing through the glass partition, he stepped down onto the mahogany carpet that clashed so well with the rust-colored wallpaper. A small box TV sprouting antennas rested atop a beveled table, a patterned beige couch against the far wall. Stacks of old magazines littered the edges of the room, some almost as high as the ceiling. Most had tumbled long ago, their journey down still evident by the scattered heaps they had formed. Blake detected an odd odor to the room, like mildewed rags breathing fresh air for the first time in a long time.
“Where’s the dog?” Blake asked.
“Back patio,” Joje said. “Unless she threw herself over, in which case she’s probably dead twenty feet below. Now if she is still there, she’s gonna need some . . . convincing.”
Adam looked uncomfortable, glancing around the walls of the room.
“Did you bring a leash?” Blake asked.
Joje smiled. “We couldn’t get it on her. She’s a fighter, this one.”
“I must be missing something,” Blake said.
“I told you you were asking the wong questions,” Joje said. “You never asked her name.”
“The dog?”
“The bitch,” Joje said.
A cold cord wrapped itself around Blake’s intestines, squeezing, tightening. “Is Jenna out there? Is she hurt?”
“Now you’re getting warm, but Adam wanted her to be a little younger. Takes after his old man.”
“Who is it? Who’s out there!”
“Wucy.” As Joje’s smile expanded, a trickle of blood leaked from one swollen nostril. “And we wuv Wucy.”
Chapter Eleven
Day Six Continued
1
The small, wiry man standing behind the desk had more bags under his eyes than seemed possible. The bags had bags. His gaunt face and tired eyes suggested he fought a battle every day much more taxing than his job. A battle he was losing. Drew wondered how long it had been since the little guy’s last whiff of the stuff that made your teeth shiny.
“Please, have a seat.” The doctor gestured to the two chairs in front of his desk.
Drew remained standing.
The office was small and sterile, hanging plaques from ambiguous universities, token frame with wife and two kids, all smiles. The man obviously didn’t spend much time here.
As he realized Drew wasn’t going to sit, the doctor’s beady eyes darted around the room. “Your, uh, wife, yes?”
“Yes.”
“Well we have some positive news, her head injury was superficial, lot of blood and tissue, which is typical, a lot more blood vessels in the head than anywhere else on the body, but no cerebral damage. Her skull’s intact and readings look, uh, normal. So that’s, yes, like I said, very positive.”
“Can I see her?”
“No, no, not yet. Her, uh, condition. Well, let me ask you, her legs? How long ago did she sustain those injuries?”
Here it comes, Drew thought, glancing at the door. Security or police were probably on their way. No wonder the man was nervous.
“The, uh, severity of the burns, well, it’s sent her body into a hypermetabolic response, her circulation levels of catabolic hormones increasing dramatically, catecholamines, cortisol . . . in essence, her body’s requiring an immense increase of energy just to meet basic functions, cannibalizing the proteins found in the muscles in her legs. How did she sustain her injuries?”
“A fire,” Drew said.
The doctor slowly nodded as he realized Drew was done explaining. “Ah, I see. Um, is there a reason she wasn’t brought in for care sooner? She had to be in incredible pain.”
Drew found himself wishing Joje were here, he was always better at thinking on his feet. Drew had always used his fists to do most of his convincing.
“Is she going to be okay?” he asked.
“Yes. And, uh, and no.” The doctor took a seat, his chair tilting back farther than he had intended, almost sending him sprawling. He recovered without much grace. “The degree of her burns are, as I said, uh, very severe. I’m not good at delivering bad news, but . . . we think we can save her left leg.”
“And her right?”
“Yes, we, uh, refer to it as tissue death. The blood vessels, nerve tissue”—he began shaking his head—“it’s irrecoverable. I’m sorry. Had she, um, been brought in earlier, there, well, we might have had some options.”
“Okay,” Drew said.
“Right, we’ll be needing your authorization, of course.” He brought out a piece of paper from a drawer in his desk. “The nurses already took your insurance information?”
“It won’t be a problem,” Drew said, finally sitting, turning the paper around. He signed Blake’s name once, twice, three different times, initialing in another half dozen places. It didn’t matter that it would never match. “How long will it take?”
“The surgery?”
“Recovery.”
“A lifetime?” The doctor sat forward in his chair pinching his bottom lip with one hand, unaware. “Losing one’s limb, both physically and mentally can require—”
“How long till I can take her home? Move her?”
“We’ll want her here at least a week, maybe longer. As I said, depression can be—”
“Just do it already,” Drew said, the doctor’s babbling getting on his nerves.
When he left the cramped office, there wasn’t a security guard or police officer in sight. He really didn’t need Joje after all.
2
Blake closed the door to the balcony behind him, a sense of vertigo driving him to the thin metal rail overlooking the drop below. He spotted brush and rocks, a child’s blue Windbreaker caught on some branches, and more trash than Blake would have guessed. What he didn’t find was Lucy’s bent and broken body, cast from the balcony that felt about as stable as the rest of the house.
He found her at the opposite end, cowering beneath a patio table, its chairs and table top covered with enough dust to cast it in a moldy shade of brown. She was bound, legs and hands, with plastic ties looped close to her skin. A thick cloth wrapped between her teeth.
She had been stripped to her underwear, black lace panties, matching bra, a tattoo of Japanese letters running down the side of her left arm. Blake recognized one of them. Bravery. Her head was bent forward, hair falling over her eyes like a waterfall caught in a picture, standing still when meant to be moving, flowing. In another setting it would have been seductive; with the bruises already forming on her arms and shoulder, it was anything but.
“What have they done?” he asked before realizing he had lumped Adam in with Joje. Had his son played a role in her kidnapping? How far had Joje made him go?
Not nearly as far as he’s driven me, he thought.
He walked toward her slowly, his hands held out in front of him. Considering the state of his own body, he wasn’t sure it was a calming gesture. “I’m sorry you’ve been . . . dragged into this.”
His eyes moved to her pale flesh, rippled with goose bumps. She had to be freezing. Her hands instinctively rose to cover her breasts. Blake looked away, not wanting her to get the wrong idea. Then again he had been staring.
He lowered himself to the deck, sitting with his legs crossed beneath him. With effort he was able to keep his eyes on her face. “They came six days ago. Kidnapping my family and me . . . we’ve been living in a hell ever since. If you fight it, them, it o
nly makes it worse.”
Lucy’s large eyes peered out at him behind a trail of dark hair.
“I won’t hurt you.”
He leaned in to remove the cloth wrapped tightly in her mouth. As he reached behind her, Lucy swung her two hands clasped into fists, catching him on the side of the head completely unprepared.
He fell back, off balance, into the leg of the table, dragging it with him a few inches. His vision blotted, and he closed his eyes, leaning his head against the plastic matting of a chair.
He really didn’t have any fight left. Lucy, on the other hand, had been preparing herself for this attack for the past hour or more.
Her legs bucked forward, hammering into the cavity just below his sternum—a strangled sound burst from his mouth, and the chair that his head was resting upon slid back, his head falling straight to the deck floor.
When he could open his eyes again, Lucy was crouched on top of him; her arms, still tied together, were bent over him, one twisting his head in a choke hold, the other pressing something sharp and ridged against the side of his throat. He felt the weight of her chest shift against his back, her bare skin cool to the touch. Her gag was no longer in place as she said, “You’re gonna get me out of here.”
“You’ve got the wrong guy.”
“I learned a long time ago. They’re all wrong guys.”
Blake thought of how ironic it would be if after all their struggles, she would be the one to end his life. “You can’t fight it,” he said. Partly to Lucy, mostly to himself.
“When the others come out? We make a trade. Your life for mine.”
They didn’t have to wait long. Unfortunately, Joje wasn’t interested in a trade.
“This could make for a good joke,” Joje said after following Adam out. “What does a girl whose arms and legs are bound hold you hostage with? A screw! Get it?” His smile lit up his face. “No seriously, Bwake, were you so busy staring at her boobs you didn’t see her coming? Or did you just think she was faking it?” He laughed out loud, grabbing hold of the rail at the deck’s edge.
“This isn’t a joke—I’ll do it!” Lucy said for probably the fourth or fifth time. Even with her intensity, Blake recognized the diminishing power of her words with each go.
“So do it, by all means,” Joje said. “Rake that screw across his throat and let the warm blood seep over your arms and legs. Bathe in it. And when you’re done, whether you kill him or not, you’re coming with us. But the better you behave, the easier this will be, I promise.” Her head fell against Blake’s shoulder, hair tickling his face, as she began to weep. A brown rusty screw dropped from her hand, tinkling to the deck floor. Blake felt her sobs in her entire body, pressed flush to his. Despite the pain he felt, despite the contempt for what was happening, his body reacted as is often the case when an almost-naked woman clings to you. He was so aware of it, so repulsed by his reaction, that it only made the urge stronger.
At Joje’s command, Adam came to help Blake up, lifting Lucy’s arms over Blake’s neck and pulling him to his feet. His slacks bent around the tent sticking out from between his legs. Embarrassed, he pressed his fists against it, closing his eyes. Had Joje known? Ordering Adam at that very moment? Either way, his son was painfully aware, stepping back from Blake as if he didn’t know him.
“Believe me now?” Joje said to Adam. He rested a hand on Blake’s shoulder. “You’re a little early, Bwakey, but don’t worry, we’re getting there.”
3
It was Adam’s idea that enabled them to return to the house by car. He dialed nine-one-one from Lucy’s cell, giving the dispatch operator a story about his drunk friends darting in front of cars, playing chicken on the PCH. She asked him where they were, and he told her a couple miles north of the Chart House, a seafood restaurant south of their estate. His performance was flawless, breaking into tears, whispering into the phone, telling her his friends couldn’t find out he called or they’d kill him. Even his disconnect was timed, with Joje yelling at him across the driveway.
His plan, while not brilliant, did the trick. At that hour, it was easier to send the parked van outside their home to check on the disturbance versus dispatching another vehicle. When the van pulled out, the Mercedes pulled in.
A staunch odor met them in the garage; the body in Blake’s trunk was growing accustomed to its new state of decomposition. Joje had pulled the unfamiliar SUV into the spot where Jenna’s Escalade should have been. So many should-have-beens, Blake thought. And then a foreign thought, a voice that wasn’t his own broke through the swirling cloud of noise in his head.
Don’t let this be another one.
It was Jenna’s voice, Jenna’s thought coming to him when he needed her most, like a radio signal squawking through the middle of a storm in a momentary lapse of clouds.
I need you, Blake thought. Need your strength, your will!
Need or not, she was gone. Radio silence.
The house felt unfamiliar, like he was visiting for the first time. As Blake looked around the family room and down the hall to the stairs, he finally realized what it was: every mark in the home that proved people lived here had been created by Joje or Drew. The groove in the hardwood floor, the still-present aroma of bleach and ammonia flitting in from the bathroom, the broken latch to the back door, pots and unwashed dishes, dried and crusted food on the counters, trash spilling over from behind the kitchen island, the new TV, the one replaced still leaning against the wall beneath it, Conrad’s crate, one handcuff still latched to its door, the other dangling.
And if they continued farther into the house?
Blake’s destroyed office, blood on the white carpet in the living room, furniture overturned, white piano slathered with red, chandelier down in the foyer like a helicopter struck midflight. Blake had seen glimpses of what Drew had done with the sword upstairs when he had passed through the hall this morning, frames and vases torn from walls, pillows cut into shreds, fluff and glass littering the hall.
And in the backyard?
Two fresh graves so far. How many more might be added tonight?
The house is theirs, he thought. It always was. We were the intruders, we the ones not meant to be here.
“Home, sweet home,” Joje said, as if in echo of Blake’s thoughts. “We’re going to retire to bed early tonight. There was a performance I was promised, and we’re quite frankly running out of time. Now I don’t know if we’re going to be under surveillance tonight. That van might come back? It might not. But I’m low on patience, so the only screaming better be in the throes of ecstasy.”
Suddenly Joje had Blake’s full attention. “What?”
Lucy sat quietly on the couch. If she had understood Joje like Blake had, she wasn’t making it known. Yet.
“This shouldn’t come as a surprise, Bwake. In fact it should look familiar. A wife in the hospital and you home with another woman in your bed.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“While your son sleeps, unaware of you adulterating in the next room,” Joje said.
Blake felt his jaw clamp tight.
“Only this time he’ll be fully aware. Won’t he.”
“Adam, I need your help,” Blake said.
“Do you love your son, Bwake?”
Blake continued, “We have him outnumbered, and without Drew, we can take him.”
“Bwake, do you love your son?” Joje asked again.
Adam still hung back by Lucy on the far side of the couch.
“But we have to work together. Adam?” Blake said.
Joje shrugged his arms into the air, looking at Adam. “Maybe you were right.”
“Of course I love my son!”
“Are you honest with him?”
“Always.” The distance between him and Joje was five feet. In Blake’s current state he was more apt to keel over than drive into him like he had before. Joje was playing those odds.
“So if he asked a question, you would give him an hones
t answer. Tell him the truth, no matter what?” Joje asked.
Blake swallowed, sensing where Joje was leading him but not knowing how to change that course. “I would,” he said. “I’ll always tell you the truth, Adam. Always.”
Adam looked so much older, as if this week had aged him not in days but years. His hair still unkempt, his face with that boyish youthfulness, but his eyes had a hardness that hadn’t been there a week ago. Or maybe it had, like a rash beneath the skin, waiting to be scratched at in order to spread. Blake may have lost Adam the same day he lost his daughter, he just hadn’t known it until now.
“Go ahead, Adam. Ask him,” Joje said.
“Did you . . . did you kill Rachel? My real mom?”
“What?”
“Did you kill her?” Adam asked again.
Blake’s eyes lost their focus, memories sweeping over the current landscape like a rolling fog erasing a city street and the shops on either side. But these memories had been rehearsed, lines rewritten, relearned until their delivery felt more honest than the truth. Actors playing roles, a forced tear at the side of a hospital bed, music crescendoing to that point where an audience wept not from emotion but from the idea of emotion—an intuitive knowledge that here was where they were supposed to feel . . . something. The fabrication of emotion, such an elaborate lie that it could feel better than the truth. And sometimes, if you allowed yourself to believe the lie, it became easier the next time, those tears so quick to roll, those scenes so much crisper and neater and fuller than the real thing. But as the layers peeled away to the raw scene beneath, Blake recognized the truth he had never allowed himself to believe. The truth he had purposely kept not just from his son, but from himself.
“Yes,” he said. “I did. I killed her.”
4
The emotions stirring beneath the surface were so unfamiliar Adam wasn’t sure what he felt. Vindication? Betrayal? A concoction of contempt and disdain mixed with a strange empathy, just another lost soul.
