World's Scariest Places: Volume Two

by Bates, Jeremy

  I backed away. Elizaveta cupped her hand on my shoulder. I was aware of her doing this. I was aware of María standing against the wall, staring at the bloody knife in her hand. I was aware of Rosa peeking out of the bedroom.

  I was aware of all this but none of it. I was trying to comprehend what I did, waiting for myself to react to the horror of it.

  Then Jesus’s shoulders began to shake as he sobbed. A moment later he reeled on me, wiping tears from his eyes, a clenched expression on his face. “She’s dead, Jack! You killed her! You fucking killed her!”

  This isn’t happening, I thought. It’s wrong. It can’t be happening. But it’s done. It’s been done.

  I opened my mouth but had nothing to say. The right words weren’t there.

  “She was going to kill me,” Elizaveta said.

  “Bullshit!” Jesus snarled.

  “She was!” Rosa cried. “I saw her!”

  “You did this,” Jesus wailed at me. “You killed her.”

  “You did!” I said, directing my anger and anguish at him. “You were going to shoot us! You fucking caused all this.”

  “You bastard!” He grabbed the sickle.

  I pointed the pistol at him. “Calm down.”

  “Calm down? You shot my sister!”

  “Calm down!”

  Jesus got to his feet. I did too.

  “Get back down, Jesus,” I said.

  “Fuck you.”

  “Get down!”

  He started backing toward the front door.

  “Stop!”

  “Shoot me, Jack. Shoot me like you shot Pita, you fucking piece of shit.”

  I took up the slack in the trigger.

  “Jack…” Elizaveta said.

  And I knew I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t shoot him.

  I lowered the pistol.

  Jesus opened the door and disappeared into the breaking dawn.

  Elizaveta

  1

  It took some time, but they eventually woke Pepper, coaxed him out of bed, and told him to drink water until he had enough strength to stand. Then they moved Nitro’s body inside so the animals on the island wouldn’t get to it. They set it next to Pita’s body, covering both with the sheet from Pepper’s bed. Finally they went to Lucinda’s room, to attempt to rouse her as well. A sour, yeasty smell permeated the air. The woman’s skin was dire, her face possessed with an unnatural stillness, and Elizaveta feared the worst before Jack confirmed it a moment later.

  “She’s dead,” he said.

  2

  They collected their packs—Jack carried Pepper’s camera bag also—and they made their way to the pier. The sky was overcast, smudged with anvil-headed clouds. The air held that trapped-breath quality that often follows storms. A gloomy stillness hung over everything like a funeral shroud. Numerous plants were uprooted or broken, while severed branches littered the ground. Amazingly, however, most of the dolls remained dangling from the dripping trees just as they’d been the day before, only now rinsed clean of some of their grime and spider webs, their ragtag clothes soggy.

  When they passed the hut with the shrine, Jack led María inside to the portrait of the Mexican man with the mustache and poncho hanging on the wall. “Do you know him?” he asked.

  Her eyes shone. “That’s my dad. He went to the market to get me a doll.”

  3

  Unsurprisingly the canoe was gone. Jesus had taken it; he would likely be halfway back to Xochimilco by now. So they settled down on the pier and waited for the boatman to come.

  4

  At one point María wandered off into the woods without a word. They let her go. She’d survived on her own until now. The police could find her later.

  Jack

  1

  The sky remained dreary for much of the morning, but gradually the sun burned away the depressing clouds. The cawing and screeching of birds greeted the new day. Then the flies and mosquitos returned, buzzing and biting, followed by the drone of the cicadas. I began to have my doubts that the boatman would come after all, but we had no option but to continue to wait and hope. For much of this time my mind was like a wheel caught in a muddy rut. It spun relentlessly on everything Pita, replaying the happy times we’d shared together. Nevertheless, this didn’t lift my mood. Instead, it made me incredibly sad. Part of this was due to nostalgia, the sense that what was would never be again. But the other part, the big part, was because my thoughts kept coming back to her lying on the cabin floor, a bullet hole in her chest, dead.

  I wanted to weep for her, to experience some sort of catharsis, but I couldn’t. My eyes remained stone dry. I chalked this up to shock. When it abated, the floodgates would open, and the grief and darkness would come in torrents. But not now.

  Occasionally I glanced at the dolls hanging from the surrounding trees, the dolls that had miraculously remained fixed in place during what had no doubt been hurricane-force winds and rain. Their eyes stared knowingly at me, their smiles as enigmatic as ever.

  Watching and laughing, I thought. And then: If it were up to me, I would burn the fucking island to the ground.

  2

  I wondered about María. I had so many questions. Was she born with her intellectual disability? Or had her mind deteriorated over the years while she was held prisoner on the island? Had Solano treated her well, or had he abused her? She obviously harbored a strong affection toward him, but that was textbook Stockholm syndrome, wasn’t it? And after he passed away, how had she survived on her own? She seemed capable physically. The vegetables in the root cellar came from a garden somewhere on the island. So had she simply lived off the land? And how had she avoided whoever discovered Solano’s body, and the police who would have come to investigate? Had she hidden from them when they searched the island? Or had they not even bothered to do that? Had they known Solano lived alone, collected his body, and called it a day? And why had she “stopped” Miguel from hurting Lucinda? Given Miguel was naked, and Lucinda was too, my suspicion was that Miguel was not hurting Lucinda at all; more than likely they were having sex. María saw them, misinterpreted what was happening, and stabbed Miguel in the back. As for Lucinda, she was stabbed herself when she tried to stop María and fled in fear.

  It seemed to fit. But then again, who knew?

  “What’s going to happen to her?” Elizaveta asked abruptly.

  “Huh?” I said, blinking.

  “María.” Elizaveta sat with her knees pulled to her chest, her arms wrapped around them. Her makeup was cracked, her eyeliner curdled. Her hair stuck up all over the place, as if someone had taken a leaf blower to it. She’d stopped rolling her shoulder, so I assumed the sting wasn’t bothering her anymore.

  I wished I could say that about the stab wound in my side. It still hurt like a son-of-a-bitch, and I had the sense I’d incurred some serious internal damage. Even so, I was alive. I wasn’t going to complain about that.

  “María?” I said, and shrugged.

  “From everything you’ve told me,” Pepper said, “I don’t think she’ll be going to prison.”

  “I hope not,” Rosa said. “She was sort of nice.”

  As opposed to Elizaveta—and no doubt myself—Pepper and Rosa appeared none the worse for wear. Pepper wore his purple blazer draped over his shoulders again, and now that his bug was marching a hasty retreat, he almost seemed refreshed. He complained of being weak and tired, but you couldn’t tell this by looking at him. And Rosa was, well, Rosa. She had the glow and resilience of youth. Her brother was dead, and she’d just survived a night of hell, but she seemed as though she could spring up and run a marathon, or bake a cake, at a moment’s notice.

  “I hope not too,” Elizaveta said. “But she killed two people.”

  “She won’t go to prison,” I said, thinking even if it turned out she had indeed committed a double murder, forensic mental health professionals would almost certainly deem her mentally unfit to stand trial. “They’ll make her plead guilty but insane,” I added. “She
’ll end up in an asylum somewhere.”

  “I don’t think those exist anymore,” Elizaveta said.

  “In Mexico they do,” Pepper said. “I researched them for one of my shows—”

  “You guys are as dumb as that retard bitch.”

  We all turned as one to see Jesus standing some ten feet away.

  He gripped the pistol in his hand, which I’d left on the bank on top of our bags, and he was aiming it directly at me.

  3

  We stood very quickly. Jesus was bare-chested and scowling and watchful. He’d sliced up his white button-down shirt and used the material to bandage up his shoulder. His hair was greasy and messy, his once-fashionable stubble now slovenly beard shadow. He looked like a refugee that had escaped some third-world disaster.

  “You didn’t leave the island,” I said.

  “And leave behind witnesses to contradict my version of events?”

  “Where’s the canoe?” Elizaveta asked.

  “In the reeds. Sunk in shallow water.”

  “You pull that trigger, Jesus,” I said, “it’s murder.”

  “You murdered Pita!”

  “She was going to kill Eliza.”

  He shook his head. “I’m not here to talk, Jack. I’m here to kill you.”

  “You’re not God!” Rosa said. “You’re the devil!”

  “The devil doesn’t exist, cariño,” he said. “Haven’t you learned anything?” He returned his attention to me. “I’d tell you to say hi to Nitro for me, Jack. But fortunately for you, I don’t think hell exists either.”

  He squeezed the trigger.

  4

  The pistol clicked. Jesus’s eyes widened. He squeezed the trigger again and again.

  I stuck my hand in the pocket of my shorts and produced the cartridges I’d removed from the pistol’s magazine earlier. I tossed them into the canal.

  “Figured there was a chance you might have stuck around, Jesus,” I said. “You know, to clean up your mess. And what better lure than a gun left serendipitously in the open.”

  His surprise metastasized into hatred. “You motherfucker!”

  Elizaveta passed me the string she’d scavenged from some of the hanging dolls, and I walked toward Jesus. “We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” I told him, “and I’m sort of hoping you choose the hard way.”

  2010

  Seated in a Starbucks on Central Avenue in Los Angeles, I was sipping an espresso macchiato and reading the sports section of the LA Times.

  It was early December, pleasantly cool. The forecast predicated light showers later in the afternoon. Elizaveta and I were staying at the Sheraton a couple of blocks away. We came to LA to see of all things a twenty-two-foot fiberglass sculpture called Chicken Boy. Elizaveta became obsessed with these so-called Muffler Men after I took her on a road trip along Route 66 a while back. I don’t know what her fascination with them is, but we’ve traveled all over the country so she can snap pictures of herself with them. Some of her favorites so far include Paul Bunyan in Phoenix, The Casino Dude in Montana, The Gemini Giant in Illinois, and The Friendly Green Giant in Minnesota.

  Elizaveta entered the United States on a fiancé visa almost ten years ago now. Two days after crossing the border we married in an Elvis-themed wedding chapel in Vegas, and she subsequently applied for a green card. Five years later she was granted citizenship, and all I can say is since then she’s taken to the US with gusto. She asked me to install an American flag atop a pole in the front of our Tucson home, for instance. She knows every storyline and every devious subplot of every soap on daytime television. She’s become the Phoenix Suns number one fan (we have tickets to a Suns-Clippers game at the Staples Center tomorrow evening). And perhaps most telling of all: the bumper sticker on her Audi reads “God Bless America.” Sometimes her enthusiasm for her adopted country was a bit much, but I was happy she was happy.

  So, yeah, things were pretty great between us. We rarely spoke about the night we spent on the Island of the Dolls. It was an experience both of us would like to forget, a horror story largely of our own creation in which we allowed our imaginations and fear of the unknown to overwhelm our better reason. Even so, although we might not speak about what happened, I still reflected on it every now and then, and when I did it seemed as though it all occurred only yesterday, and I suspect that’s how it will always be.

  The police had been waiting for us at the docks of Cuemanco. We’d called them in advance when our phones regained reception. Pepper, Elizaveta, and Rosa were taken to the local police station, while Jesus and I were taken to a hospital. As soon as the doctor fixed up the stab wound in my side, detectives were in and out of my room to question me. None were very friendly. They kept trying to get me to confess to an alternate version of reality—Jesus’s version of reality—which led me to believe they were taking orders from someone deep in Jesus’s pocket. The scenario went like this: when I discovered Pita was cheating on me with Nitro, I flew into a jealous rage, slit Nitro’s throat, and shot Pita. The detectives told me Elizaveta and Rosa and Pepper had all confessed as much. I knew this was bullshit and pretty much told them to go fuck themselves. To be honest, though, for a day or two I had been worried they were somehow going to make the apocryphal accusations stick. But then the media caught wind of the story, and it became a national talking point that couldn’t be contained or manipulated regardless of Jesus’s money or connections. Consequently, he was arrested while still in his hospital bed and charged with the first-degree murder of Nitro, while I was allowed to walk free because Pita’s death was ultimately considered a justifiable homicide as it prevented greater harm to innocents, namely Elizaveta.

  I didn’t attend Pita’s funeral. I wanted to, but I couldn’t. Her extended family and network of friends would have torn me apart. According to the rants they embarked on whenever a reporter put a microphone in front of them, I was the anti-Christ, a lying gringo, a spited lover hell bent on ruining Pita’s reputation and framing Jesus for a crime he didn’t commit.

  I did, however, visit Pita’s gravesite a few days after she was interred. That’s when the floodgates opened and I finally grieved, crying until it hurt. I had loved Pita. We had a pretty amazing run until the last few months or so. She wasn’t evil. I didn’t blame her for the eleventh-hour betrayal. Jesus had manipulated her, just as he’d attempted to manipulate all of us.

  Although I never saw Pepper or Rosa again, Elizaveta and I started spending a lot of time together. She was promptly fired from her position of governess—“No respectable family can continue to employ someone of your newfound notoriety,” the Russian oligarch had explained to her—so I invited her to move into my place…and the intimacy that had developed between us that night on the island grew into something real and sustainable. At first I felt guilty courting her. But I told myself I wasn’t doing anything wrong. Pita might have been Elizaveta’s friend, but Pita was dead now. I couldn’t change that. There was no reason her memory should stand between our happiness.

  And the other side of the coin, the fact Elizaveta was Jesus’s ex? Well, fuck that. I couldn’t have cared less about his feelings. The guy would have happily put a bullet between my eyes if he had his way. He could rot in prison—which, incidentally, was exactly what he was doing. His trial had lasted one week. Given our testimony, along with the forensic evidence the police gathered from the cabin and Jesus’s clothing, the eventual verdict of guilty had never really been in question. The judge fined him $300,000 and sentenced him to life in Altiplano, a maximum-security federal prison that housed some of the most infamous drug lords and murderers in Mexico.

  For my part, after Elizaveta and I were married, and we bought the place in Tucson, I cut back on drinking. I didn’t go cold turkey. I didn’t think I could do that, or wanted to do that. But I became what I guess you would call a moderate drinker, preferring wine over spirits, eventually garnering a taste for some of the older nutty vintages. Moreover, during that first year back
in the States, my migraines cleared up, I got back out on the track, and it wasn’t long before I returned to top form.

  Jump to the present, and I’d just capped the 2010 season with my fifth Cup series championship, and my overall numbers now stood at 68 wins, 301 Top 10s, and 25 pole positions.

  Not too shabby for a guy whose career was supposed to be over before it really got started.

  And this was why I didn’t feel too bad about calling it quits at the end of next season. This wasn’t a result of age or lassitude. I didn’t think I would ever grow tired of racing. But I wanted to spend more time with my seven-year-old daughter, Alexa. She wasn’t my biological child. Elizaveta and I tried to conceive for a while but eventually discovered we were infertile. That’s when Elizaveta suggested adopting a foreign-born child, specifically one from Russia. This was not for nationalistic reasons. She simply knew what the conditions were like in Russian orphanages, and she wanted to give a Russian child the life and opportunities that had never been afforded to her.

  So we went through the long adoption process, visited Moscow twice, and finally brought home Alexa two years ago—and she was proving to be everything we could have asked for and more.

  I finished the LA Times story I was reading about the Clippers owner heckling his own player from his courtside seats, then looked away from the newspaper to give my eyes a break. The Starbucks had emptied out a little in the hour or so I’d been there. Across the café an attractive woman dressed in a pastel sweater, metallic mini skirt, and sneakers was seated at a round table, staring at me. I lowered my eyes to the paper again. I wasn’t Nic Cage or anything. A race car driver was like the drummer in a rock ’n’ roll band: people might know your name, but not your face, and you could walk down the street in complete anonymity. Having said that, every so often someone recognized you. It’s happened to me on several occasions off the track, or away from the typical driver hangouts, and I always loathed it. Not that I minded signing an autograph. But when other people saw me doing this, they came over too. They’d ask me what movie I was in or something along those lines, I’d tell them I raced cars, and more often than not they’d be suitably unimpressed and wander off, cracking a joke or mumbling a derogatory remark to their friend.