by Roger Smith
She’d disappeared.
Wiping blood from his face he scanned the fence.
Had she found a hole that she’d squeezed through like a rabbit, even now flying through the veld toward the road?
He found himself running for the HiAce, driven less by the desire to hunt her down than a desperate urge to flee.
Then, as he passed the empty swimming pool, he caught a smear of color on the broken coping that encircled the pool like cracked icing on a stale cake.
Blood.
Turner looked into the pool.
He saw a mound of junk.
He saw a headless doll.
He saw a child’s tricycle, the front wheel missing, the fork disappearing into a shallow, scummy puddle of water left from recent rains.
And he saw the girl, huddled in the trash, biting on her bleeding fist to silence her sobs, her eyes squeezed closed as if that would make her invisible.
Turner stood a moment, collecting himself, calming his breath, the funk of his body like a rotting thing and then he stepped into the shallow end of the pool and walked down the slope to where the girl crouched in greenish black scum.
He stood over her and her eyes stayed closed and he heard her mumbling what he recognized as the Lord’s Prayer.
“Come,” he said.
She finished the prayer, covering her face with her hands.
“Come,” he said again.
One eye, like a doe’s, opened and regarded him. A tear broke free and rolled down her face, dangling on the edge of her jaw before it fell like a gemstone into the scum and was gone.
He reached down and took her beneath the arms and even though he was exhausted and sick with fear and terror she seemed to weigh nothing.
Carrying her as if she were an infant he walked from the pool and across the sand to the front of the house, setting her down on the stinking carpet while he locked the gate and the door.
She lay sobbing soundlessly, all fight gone now.
He lifted her again and took her through to the bedroom where he gently placed her on the mattress.
Looking through into the bathroom he saw the sink listing and realized she’d torn a metal bracket from the wall and used it to force open the bedroom door before lying in wait at the entrance to brain him.
“Is it really your period?” he asked.
She shook her head, gazing at him.
“Okay. You know I’m going to have to tie you up?”
She nodded.
Turner crouched and wound tape around her ankles.
He was about to secure her bleeding hands and then figured she wasn’t going anywhere.
“If you don’t give me anymore trouble I’ll leave your hands free,” he said.
“Thank you,” she said.
He fetched a bottle of water from the stack against the wall and opened it.
“Wash yourself,” he said, standing, looking down at her.
She was staring at the hot orange light leaking in through the high barred window.
He left the room and lifted the half full bottle of mezcal from the floor and emptied it in one long draft.
It conspired with the residue of meth to wash away the panic and the pain and by the time he had selected the correct cell on which to call Bekker he was calm enough to dial, though his hands still shook, his dirty nails tapping an S.O.S. on the face of the phone.
The cell grumbled in his ear forever before he heard Bekker say, “Yes?”
“Get here,” Turner said. “Get here now. We have a fucking problem.”
10
Tanya, her mad eyes unblinking, stilled the bawling motor of the circular saw and rested her elbow on the kitchen counter, lining up the jagged silver blade with Turner’s ring finger.
“Wait Tanya,” Turner said, fighting in vain to free himself from Tard’s grip, his voice little more than a croak lost in the howl of the DeWalt as his wife hit the trigger again.
“Fuck you,” Tanya said.
Tanya bore down with the saw, the blade tugging at the flesh of Turner’s finger just below the joint, opening the skin, the spurting blood a shocking red against the white of the counter top.
The scream of the power tool became Turner’s scream as Tanya threw her weight behind the DeWalt and the blade bit into his finger bone, throwing out a spray of blood and meat, some of which ended up clinging to his face and hair like confetti.
Pain.
Loud, searing, bile-colored pain.
Turner tried to fight free of Tard’s grip but the giant kept him locked in place as the finger was severed, blood surging from his hand.
Turner, who could see only blurs through the tears of agony, tried to shout but his mouth was filled with hot puke that almost choked him.
“Bring him over here,” Bone said, igniting one of the plates of the gas stove, a blue-orange flame dancing over the coil.
Turner moaned and writhed but Tard moved him effortlessly, forcing the hemorrhaging stump of Turner’s ring finger onto the molten metal.
His skin and flesh blackened and burned, smoke rising in little puffs like the fumes from a lidded Weber at a backyard barbecue, the seared nerve endings sending meltdown messages to his brain.
Turner did the only sensible thing: he passed out and as the world began to spin free of its axis and he tipped head first into nothingness he heard Tanya say, “I hope that fat cow was fucking worth it.”
11
Turner floated back to consciousness like a swimmer rising lazily through warm, dark water, paddling toward the sun patterning the surface with daubs of golden light.
Unlike his usual mode of waking—terror’s jackboot in the solar plexus kicking him alert—this was a gentle redocking with his long, softening body that sprawled naked and hairy across the hotel bed.
Turner stayed still, his eyes slits, taking stock.
He was alone, the stew of bedding pungent with stale perfume and sex.
The curtains were closed but a single ray of late sunlight pierced a chink and reached into the room, tracing an orange trail across the carpet, finding Grace’s black dress where it lay discarded like a soiled and wrinkled toss cloth; finding his pants on the back of a chair, one leg folded in on itself at the knee and, as it dribbled to nothing, the sun fingered the milky condom that lay in the shape of a question mark on the comforter.
A sweet ache radiated outward from Turner’s chafed, slack penis to the rest of his body and when he ran a hand over his belly, across the small furrows where layers of desiccated semen had tightened his skin, his fingers found a crust of scab and he remembered Grace’s nails tearing into his flesh as she rode him to an orgasm so intense that his mouth had filled with the salt of his blood from biting his tongue.
As the aftershock of the orgasm had shaken Turner for what seemed like minutes he had lain thick, heavy, rooted inside Grace, until she had started moving on him again and they had fucked on with a desperation that was almost heroic.
The memory had him stiffening and when the toilet flushed and Grace emerged from the bathroom all wide hips, swaying breasts and rounded belly, he reached for her and drew her onto the bed and kissed her bruised lips and opened her legs onto the black thicket that made a lie of her bird’s nest of blonde hair, hearing the suck of her inhalation as he filled her.
It was dark when he woke again and he located Grace at the vanity by the glow of her cigarette.
When he clicked on the bedside lamp he saw that she was wrapped in a fluffy white towel and that she was crying.
She didn’t turn her face away, just sat there smoking, mascara turning the rivulets of tears black as they trickled down her cheeks.
“What’s wrong?” he said.
“Nothing.”
“Then why are you crying?”
“Because I’m happy.”
“You’re happy?”
“Yes.”
“Well, thank Christ for that.”
She laughed and stubbed out the cigarette saying, “And
I’m hungry.”
Grace called room service and ordered Porterhouse steaks rare, with baked potato and fries, and beer for her and club soda for him and they sat naked on the bed and feasted, feeding each other forkfuls of red flesh, the room thick with the smell of meat and their unwashed bodies.
When they were done and the plates had been dumped in the corridor, Grace crossed her legs and leaned against the padded headboard and said, “John, can I tell you something?”
“Sure.”
“I had a twin.”
He looked at her.
“A girl?”
“Yes.”
“Identical?”
“Yes. Monozygotic.”
“What happened to her?”
“She died.”
Grace lit a cigarette.
“She died?” Turner said.
“Yes.”
“How?”
She smoked and stared at the wall before she spoke.
“When we were six years old we were riding our bikes on the lawn of our house. The grass was green and freshly cut because it was summer. I raced out into the street and Nancy—her name was Nancy—came after me. I was laughing and looking back when I heard brakes and I saw a station wagon and heard a kind of sickening sound and then the car was parked, the engine still running, and our neighbor, Mrs. Banning, was shouting for help and looking down at the blacktop where there was a lot of blood beneath the tire of the car.”
Grace closed her eyes. Smoked. Opened her eyes.
“My mother and father came out of the house and my father just stood there and stared and said ‘Oh sweet Christ’ and my mother fell down on her knees in the blood and screamed. My father lifted me and buried my face in his shirt. He smelled of sweat and tobacco and he ran me inside and all the while my mother was on her knees in the blood screaming.”
Grace stubbed out her cigarette.
“She screamed until the ambulance came and somebody gave her a shot.”
“Fuck,” Turner said.
“Yeah.”
She drained her longneck dry.
“I was with Megan for five years and I never told her any of this.”
“Why not?”
“She would’ve Dr. Phil’d me to death about why I started dying my hair blonde like hers.”
“Would she have been right?”
“Shit, maybe. I’d never been with a woman before her, so there must’ve been some old stuff mixed up in there.”
“Why do you keep it blonde?”
“Don’t you like it?”
“I do like it. But why?”
“Because if I go back to dark I look like her again.”
“Your twin?”
“No. The one who didn’t die. A boatload of survivor’s guilt, I guess.”
“I’m sorry.”
She shrugged one shoulder. “We all have our sad tales to tell.”
“Yes,” he said, “we do.”
She looked at him.
“So tell me yours.”
Softened by sex and this unaccustomed intimacy he was tempted for a mad moment to tell what happened ten years ago in Johannesburg.
To tell her everything.
But he didn’t.
He told her, instead, about his mother and sister being sucked into the earth.
She listened, her lips parted a little on her teeth, her cigarette burning down in the fork of her fingers.
“Jesus. That’s intense.”
“Yes.”
“Is that what got you into the substances?
He shrugged. “Maybe. But I was born to get wasted.”
They lay a while and she stroked his arm.
“Want to hear something funny?” he said.
“I don’t know if I can stand any more hilarity.”
“Well, this would fall more in the category of the tragically bizarre.’
“I’m listening.”
“It wasn’t only my mother and sister who were swallowed by the ground that morning.”
“No?”
“No. A black woman, a maid who lived in a nasty little room in the backyard, died too. Thing was, this being apartheid South Africa, no mention was made of her. I doubt her family, living out in some rural hell, were even told what happened. She just disappeared.”
“Jesus.”
“I mean, I know my mother and sister vanished, but they at least were acknowledged. An ugly little memorial was even put up in their honor, near the hole. But the black woman? Nothing. I don’t even remember her name.”
Grace lit a cigarette.
“Why did you and your family leave South Africa?”
Turner shrugged and took a while to say, “We were the victims of a crime.”
She looked at him. “You don’t want to talk about it?”
“Not really.”
“Sorry.”
“It’s okay.”
He wasn’t being honest. He would talk about the crime—that crime, at least, the carjacking—but, lying naked beside her, he didn’t want to acknowledge Tanya and Lucy, to feel trapped again after these hours of freedom.
Grace sensed the shift in his mood and left the bed and walked naked to the window, looking out at the Strip.
“This has been good,” she said.
“Yes, it has.”
“Too good.”
“Can anything be too good?”
“Yeah. This thing. This thing we’ve had has been too good.”
“How so?”
“It’d be downhill from here if we were dumb enough to let it continue.”
“You think?”
“Yes.”
“So?”
“So can we not leave this room until it’s time for our flight Monday?”
“Okay.”
“And when we check out, can we go back to being just two people who work together?”
“That’s what you want?”
“Yes, that’s what I want.”
“Okay,” he said. “We can do that.”
And maybe he even believed it.
12
Turner was yanked from his swoon by the throbbing pain in his left hand.
Some instinct for self-preservation made him keep his eyes closed and he lay unmoving, taking stock.
He felt an uncomfortable tackiness between his butt cheeks and thighs and realized he’d fouled himself.
Jesus.
He relived Tanya, like a lunatic home improver, taking his ring finger and the two demons from hell forcing his bleeding stump into the gas fire, the flame searing and blackening his flesh.
Cautery.
He recalled the term from a documentary on Civil War battlefield amputations he’d watched lying on his bed in Jo’burg, the booze and mood enhancers he’d swallowed allowing him to feel a vicarious pleasure at the torment of those poor bastards who’d had only a few slugs of rotgut as an anesthetic before the sawbones had done their worst, closing gaping wounds and blood vessels by applying hot cauterizing irons.
He hadn’t even had the help of rotgut.
Turner opened one eye a slit and saw that he lay on the floor of the kitchen amongst blood smears and splatters.
When he spied his finger, flesh pale, ragged and bloody, lying like a discarded French fry on the tiles, he gagged and the pain in his hand amped in volume.
Once he got past the agony he felt a tightness at his ankles. His legs were bound.
He heard the soft drum of voices and was able to see, out the extreme of his peripheral vision, his wife sitting beside Tard on the couch, the fat freak occupying the space of two people, his colossal arm flung along the back of the davenport behind Tanya’s head in an attitude at once casual and terrifying.
Lukas Bone slumped in a chair facing them, arms folded across his belly, legs out in front of him, crossed at the ankle.
A man at his ease.
Turner couldn’t hear what they were saying but when he saw Tanya nod and sit forward to listen to Bone he suspected that he was witne
ssing the speediest case of Stockholm Syndrome on record and understood the two crazies had co-opted his wife as part of their lunatic game, ready to wreak havoc and mayhem for shits and grins.
Turner, overheated, feverish, lying with his head close to the pantry door, hearing his daughter’s heartbreaking gasps of anguish, knew that he had conjured these men like furies; that what he’d done in South Africa a decade ago had attracted them, drawing them from the shades into his life.
“Lucy,” he whispered.
“Daddy, help me. Please, Daddy.”
“Kiddo, I need you to be quiet, okay? For just a little while longer.”
“It’s dark, Daddy.”
“I know, kiddo.”
“I’m scared.”
“I know you’re scared.”
“Why were you screaming?”
“I’m okay now, Luce.”
“And Mom?”
“She’s okay, too.”
“Who are those men?”
“Just bad men.”
“What do they want?”
“Money. We’ll give it to them and they’ll go.”
A pause. A sob. A snicker.
“Will they go?”
“Yes, they’ll go.”
“I’ve peed my pants.”
“That’s okay, baby,” Turner said, feeling the fecal paste between his legs. “You hang in there. I’m going to get you out.”
“You swear?”
“I swear, kiddo. Hush now.”
Turner, sickened by what he’d set in motion, trapped in a head-on collision between belief and desire, childishly fantasized that he had Bekker’s gun in his hand, aiming it at the two madmen.
The weapon that was still holstered at Bekker’s hip.
Unfired.
Six bullets in the magazine and one in the chamber.
The automatic was invisible to Turner, hidden by the folds of the dead man’s black windbreaker, but he could visualize the stubby snout tucked into the waistband of Bekker’s jeans, pressed against flesh that was already stiffening with rigor, the handle with its rubberized grip trapped between his spine and the polished blond wood of the sitting room floor.
Turner focused so intently on this image of the gun, like Uri Geller willing a fork to bend, that, in a mad moment, he believed he could transport it into his grasp.
