Stripped

by Brian Freeman

Borden shook his head. “The husband, maybe. He was a decent man, hardworking, lower middle class. They had been married for five years. Desperate for a child. His wife, Bonnie, she was very eager. I thought they would do fine as parents. I simply missed the signs. Based on what I know now, I’m sure Bonnie herself had an abusive parent. She picked up right where they left off. Although, if the boy was telling me the truth, Bonnie was singularly cruel.”

  “Don’t you do follow-up visits?” Walling asked.

  “Of course. Everything looked fine. You have to understand, Mr. Walling, I’m not talking about physical abuse. Beatings. Violence. I’m talking about sexual abuse. Bonnie Burton was intimate with her adopted son from a very young age.”

  Serena felt as if the ceiling were getting lower, as if it would begin pressing her into the floor. She had a flashback of her own mother and Blue Dog, over her on the bed. Her body became bathed in sweat.

  “It wasn’t just sex,” Borden continued. “She terrorized the boy in order to dominate him. She had complete control over his psyche. When he resisted, she would do unspeakable things.”

  “Such as?” Walling asked.

  Serena really didn’t want to hear the details.

  “The boy told me that Bonnie would sometimes lock him in the bathroom, naked, in the dark. Then she would release-things-under the door.”

  “Things?”

  “Cockroaches mostly.”

  “Shit,” Serena said involuntarily. “You didn’t know any of this at the time? The husband didn’t know?”

  “No, I didn’t know a thing. Our contact with the family ends at an early age, and the husband-if he knew, he didn’t stop it. I hope he didn’t know.”

  “How did you find out?” Serena asked.

  Borden’s face twitched. The crowd in front of the television laughed again. “It wasn’t until years later. The boy broke into my home while I was sleeping. He tied me up. I had no idea who he was at first. I thought he was going to rob me. Then he sat down by the bed, after I was tied up, and explained who he was. He wanted to find his mother.”

  “So he was obsessed with her even then,” Serena said.

  “Oh, yes. In his mind, his birth mother was a victim, like he was. Through the abuse, he had built an imaginary bond with her. He told me that she came to him and whispered to him sometimes. Told him everything would be fine. Told him to find her.”

  It’s okay, baby, Serena thought, and felt the room spin again. She was angry at herself, letting her own past creep into the present. It was infecting her.

  “He told you about the abuse while you were tied up?” Walling asked.

  Borden nodded. “In detail. If you’re wondering whether he made it up, I assure you, he didn’t. I’ve interviewed thousands of children. I know lies and fantasies, and this wasn’t either of them. Whatever he’s done since, whoever he’s become, the boy suffered indescribable torture in that house.”

  “What was he like?” Serena asked. “Was he violent?”

  “Violent, yes,” Borden replied, “but it wasn’t an uncontrolled violence. He wasn’t angry or confrontational. He was simply calm and cruel. I don’t even think it was deliberate cruelty. He had dealt with suffering by shutting himself off from pain and decoupling his emotions from what was happening around him. He was-I know this sounds strange-very focused. Very professional. For his age, he was quite mature. Violence was just a tool to get what he wanted.”

  “And what he wanted was his real mother,” Serena said. She thought about Blake as a boy and realized she understood how he had reacted. He had become a kind of Barbed Wire, as she had. Frozen himself. Gone inside.

  “Exactly. Unfortunately for me, I couldn’t give her to him.”

  Waiting’s eyes narrowed. “What did he do to you?”

  Borden unbuttoned his pajama top and calmly pulled aside the fabric. His wizened chest bore the zipperlike scar of open-heart surgery. There were other scars, too, dozens of them across his chest, circular disfigurements like pencil erasers. “He started asking me questions about the adoption, what records were kept, where he could find them. I told him lies at first, that we didn’t have records from back then, that records had been lost in a move. He knew I was lying. He was smoking a cigarette while he questioned me, and with each wrong answer, he used the end of the cigarette to brand me. I can’t even describe the agony of it. He didn’t take any pleasure in hurting me, though. It was clinical. Inflicting pain to get what he wanted. Answers.”

  “You told him the truth?” Serena asked.

  “Very quickly. It took a long time for him to believe that there were no records on his adoption, that I didn’t know anything about his birth mother. I described the man who brought the baby as best as I could remember, but sixteen years later, that wasn’t going to help him. I told him what I had always suspected, that it smelled like the mob, but a sixteen-year-old runaway in Nevada wasn’t going to crack the wall of silence among the casino bosses.”

  “So you don’t think he found out about Amira back then?” Serena asked.

  “I don’t see how. I still don’t know how he found out I didn’t know myself until you people told me.”

  “Well, let’s assume he found out somehow. Why do you think he’s doing this? What’s his plan?”

  Borden stared down at the sketch in his hand. He didn’t say anything for a long time, and Serena realized that a tear had slipped out of his eye. He wiped it away. She wondered if it was for himself or for his sister or for the boy he had accidentally sentenced to a tormented life. Maybe all three.

  “Part of it is certainly vengeance. Not just on his behalf but on his mother’s. He’s getting justice for her.”

  “But why family members?” Walling asked. “Why not just off the people he thinks played a role in Amira’s death?”

  “In his mind, it hurts more to lose a family member,” Borden said. “That’s his own pain. It’s something he can relate to. He wants the people who took away his mother to know what it’s like to lose your family. Like he did. Like Amira did, too.”

  “From what we hear, Amira was happy to be rid of the kid,” Serena said.

  “Maybe so, but he doesn’t know that. I’m sure he wouldn’t believe it anyway.”

  “You didn’t kill Amira,” Walling pointed out “Why start with you?”

  Borden shook his head. “It’s not just the people who killed her. It’s everyone who betrayed her. In his mind, I was the first. I split up mother and child. That was obvious when he first came to me. He blamed me for taking him-and for placing him with the Burtons, too.”

  “We should talk to the Burtons,” Serena said to Walling. A part of her hated the idea of coming face to face with another abusive mother, and a part of her wanted to lash out at the woman.

  “That will be difficult,” Borden said, interrupting them. “When the boy came to see me that night, he was running away, leaving the city. Before he left, he burned down the Burtons ’ home. With them in it.”

  THIRTY-ONE

  Blake remembered vividly the first time he learned the truth about Amira.

  It was an accident. A miracle, some people might call it. There were a million reasons why he should never have known, but he was there, and the magazine was there, and he felt the truth shudder through him like acid burning in his veins. Life hangs on a slender thread.

  Several months ago, he had been in the waiting room of a dentist in Cancún, whose specialty was not root canals or cavities but connecting American tourists with hits of cocaine. The dentist had made the serious mistake of skimming cash from people higher up the supply chain, people who didn’t tolerate theft. Blake’s job was simple. Separate the dentist from two of his incisors.

  While he waited for the man’s last patient to leave, Blake found that the dentist had another passion. Gambling. That was probably why he needed to take an extra slice off the top. His waiting room was filled with magazines from Las Vegas, Mississippi, and Monte Carlo, including a recent issue of L
V. It happened to be the issue with Rex Terrell’s article about Amira Luz and the Sheherezade.

  A slender thread.

  He opened the magazine, and there, staring out from a forty-year-old photograph, was his mother. There wasn’t a shred of doubt in his mind. To him, looking at Amira was like looking in the mirror and seeing his own eyes. He didn’t need anyone to tell him. He didn’t need DNA. He knew. The connection between them seemed to leap off the page and into his bones.

  When he read the article, the pieces fell into place, confirming what he saw in the photo. The missing time in her life, when Amira was supposedly dancing in Paris, was the same stretch of months in which Blake had been born. But you weren’t in Paris, were you? You were in Reno, a lost girl having a baby.

  Even the mob connection was there, just as the man from the adoption agency had warned him.

  Boni Fisso.

  Right there in the office, his mother called him back home to Nevada, where he had once vowed never to set foot again. She cried out for justice.

  Blake left the Cancún dentist on the floor, passed out from pain, his face bathing in the puddle of blood that streamed from his mouth. He washed the teeth and kept them in his pocket as good luck charms. Reminders of the day his old quest ended and his new quest began. He was already developing the list of people who needed to pay for their sins. Sins against Amira and her son.

  He slipped back into the United States across the Mexican border in Texas. It wasn’t hard. He had spent most of his life finding ways across borders, in countries like Colombia, Afghanistan, Nigeria, and Iraq. He had adopted dozens of identities, all of which came naturally to him, because he felt he had no true identity of his own. His own past stopped in Reno, when he had tied up his adoptive parents and doused them and the house in gasoline. Then, outside, he lit the match and watched the house of horrors erupt explosively into flame, and heard their last pitiful screams as the fire streaked up the stairs to find them, like a bloodhound on a strong scent. He took a deep breath, smelling the air as their flesh cooked, and then he ran.

  A new life. Almost twenty-five years of running.

  He had been shattered when the search for his mother turned into a dead end. The man from the adoption agency had begged him, in tears, his chest scalded, to believe that Blake had been a Mafia baby who came from nowhere. Ultimately Blake did believe it. A part of him even liked the mystery that came with it. It felt appropriate, being a nowhere man, someone literally with no past. The desire for the truth never went away, though, just like his mother never went away. Inside, in his head, she still talked to him. Guided him. There was still an umbilical cord that connected them and never went away.

  Blake didn’t linger in the U.S. He was sixteen but could pass for early twenties. When Reagan invaded Grenada, he went down there with a few other mercenaries from Louisiana who smelled money. He found that there were always people ready to pay for someone to do a job. He didn’t need an identity, because no one wanted him to have one. He was smart, ruthless, and anonymous. That was all they asked, and they paid well.

  From Grenada he went to Nicaragua, then to Africa. He circled the globe, moving in the shadows. For most of the past decade, he had been in the Middle East, where the risks were infinitely higher, but so were the rewards. He enjoyed the challenge, but eventually he tired of working with fanatics and suffering the desert heat. He relocated to Mexico, hooked up with the cartels when he needed cash, and found himself enjoying the gulf breezes and bronzed women that came to the coast.

  He thought of himself as semiretired. There was plenty of money in an offshore bank. He only took jobs from time to time, and usually only jobs that kept him on the coast. For someone who had always been homeless, he felt at home in the sun and by the water. A parade of anonymous young women, some tourists, some locals, kept his sex drive fully satisfied. He bought a house. He taught himself to cook and fish, and he drank Corona and played poker with dockworkers and waiters on Wednesday nights.

  But the empty black corner of his soul stayed dark. The light never shined there. Things moved invisibly, rustling and clicking. And always, from the darkness, he heard her voice. His mother, whispering to him and telling him of unfinished business. He realized he had become lazy and content. He was in danger of losing his edge, and he couldn’t afford that, not yet. After a summer not working, drinking too much and fucking a different woman every night, he stood on the beach outside his home and realized he wasn’t ready to retire. Something egged him on, and later he realized it was a hand somewhere, guiding him. Unfinished business.

  A few months later, he found himself in the dentist’s office, staring at his mother’s face. If he had stopped working, he never would have found her. When he read the article, and felt his rage growing, he knew that he had been led to that place and that moment. It was meant to be. He was going home.

  In Las Vegas, Blake found a cheap apartment in a sorry neighborhood on the wrong side of a crumbling stone wall that separated the lower class from well-funded Cashman Field. He could have afforded better, but he wanted a hideaway where the person next door never remembered your face, and no one talked to the cops.

  There was a code in the mean streets. Keep your eyes to yourself. Mind your own business.

  He devoured everything he could find about Amira Luz. He spent hours reading about her. He surfed the Web and found a pirated film on eBay with a grainy record of one of Amira’s performances in Flame. Blake reran the film over and over, watching transfixed as his mother stripped off her clothes in front of the leering crowd. She seduced him, along with everyone else. He memorized every detail of the performance and even began to recognize other people lurking in the showroom and other dancers onstage. It was like watching the magazine story come alive.

  Helena Troy. There was a look she gave Amira at one point, a nasty glimmer that came and went. Sheer jealousy and hatred were written on her face.

  Moose Dargon. Drunk onstage between the dances. His eyebrows furling and unfurling like black sails. Making nasty jokes. When God made Amira, he didn’t rest on the seventh day. He jerked off.

  Walker Lane. Just the top of his head, taller than the others around him in the front row, but Blake could feel him panting when Amira came onstage. Lust was like that. You could see it in how a man cocked his head.

  Leo Rucci. Hovering stage right, like a wolf. Blake could feel his hunger, too, in the way he eyed the girls. A man with a neck like a redwood tree. He had been the one to strip Blake out of Amira’s arms.

  He began to feel as if he knew them all. As if he could crawl through the screen and find himself in the showroom, smelling perfume, brilliantine, and smoke. As if he could mingle with them, wearing a tux that made him stand a little straighter and strut a little cooler than the rest. As if he could swoop Amira off the stage and drive with her into the desert in a Coronet convertible, her raven hair flying in the wind. As if the whole world were a black-and-white movie.

  The more he buried himself in the past, the easier it was to map out the game in the present. There was a bonus, too. David Kamen was in town, the marksman from Kabul who had his fingers in every black market in the Afghan theater. Blake had done plenty of wet work for Kamen, and the man owed him. Soon, Blake had a job that gave him access to the very people he wanted to reach out and touch.

  Piece by piece, it all fell into place.

  The night before he went to Reno, he sat in the dark, watching the film of Flame again. He kept the dentist’s teeth, his lucky charms, in a box on top of the television, but he took them out and juggled them in his hand as he watched. He was restless and anxious to get started. As he watched the film, he thought about himself, a baby, already in the vicious hands of Bonnie Burton while Amira was onstage. Blake didn’t feel any anger now. The next day, he would begin to even the scales.

  He knew he wouldn’t sleep that night. His nerves were on edge, and he needed to calm them, to deaden himself for what lay ahead. The long drive to Reno. The f
ew seconds of violence at Alice Ford’s home. He left his apartment and went out for a drink and a smoke at a club he had already visited several times before. The Limelight.

  It was hard to believe, weeks later, that the game was almost over.

  He sat in his car, a nondescript brown sedan, in a parking lot one block north of a popular strip club near the Stratosphere. It was night, but neon lit up the street. He could see the other car, the convertible, in his rearview mirror, parked behind the club. Ninety minutes had passed, and Blake figured it wouldn’t be long before the man would reemerge. He kept a close eye on the customers who came and went.

  His window was open. He was smoking. Every few minutes a hooker drifted by, leaned her tits into the car, and tried to pick him up. Blake just blew smoke in her face and stared at her until she backed away, nervous and scared. He wondered if any of them recognized him from the sketch on television. In the shadows of the car, he doubted it. He also didn’t think any of the girls would be rushing to find a cop.

  At eleven thirty, the man came out of the club. He was impossible to miss. Young and fat, his belly hanging over his gray slacks. A white shirt and a bright tie loosened so far it dripped between his legs. He was tall, dwarfing a tiny blond girl who clung to his arm. Her assets were squeezed into a pink form-fitting dress. Both of them walked as if they were drunk, but that didn’t stop them from climbing into the convertible.

  Blake saw a bodyguard, who had been holding up the wall of the club while the man was inside, take a gander up and down the street. He was inexperienced and stupid and didn’t even pause to study the sedan. Blake could have walked up to the convertible with a crossbow and this guy would have kept chewing his gum.

  Blake pulled out of the lot and into the Strip traffic in the right lane. Behind him, he saw the fat man and the blonde peel out in the convertible. The bodyguard climbed into an SUV, but he was slow. Blake let the convertible roar past him, then accelerated and kept them in sight. A minute later, the bodyguard’s truck flew past him, too. Blake stayed a few car lengths back.