by Robert White
I saw the backpack ahead lying in some tall grass in a vacant lot. A two-story building with flaking paint rose up just beyond that, a beverage shop. She was crawling on her knees through the scrub. Her bad hand was jammed tight into her side to staunch the blood flow. I could see white bone sticking out. She was about ten feet from the driveway of the building. I circled ahead and let her crawl toward me. When she noticed my legs in front of her, she stopped like a dumb animal. Her bloody hand was dangling at her side, worsened by the exertions of her escape.
She gurgled something in her throat.
“I can’t hear you, Marija,” I said. “You’ll have to speak up.”
Her frilled blouse was in tatters and exposed her breast flesh. Her hair was disheveled and had bits of moss and twigs; her face was ghostly white. The place where she had tried to hold her wound to her side was a red sopping mess. Only her eyes retained that marvelous collage of color.
I grabbed her hair and lifted her head.
“Look at me,” I said.
“H-help me,” she whispered.
I used the edge of my blade to cut the remnants of her dress and blouse free. I jerked the lacy ruff of her blouse so that the last buttons popped and flew.
“You want me to help you,” I said.
“Help- help me,” she said. The skin of her face had a doughy pallor.
“Know-you-help m-me,” she said.
I stood up and looked around. There were people walking not more than forty yards from where I stood in the weeds. I couldn’t hear them, but I was visible to them if they wanted to see me. Maybe I looked like a man walking his dog in a field. She was like a big dog with weak hips. I could have picked her up and turned her around and told her to go the other way. Surreal.
“Where is he, Marija?”
“House,” she managed.
“Say it again,” I said.
She murmured softly, “H-Help me, please.” She tried to look up at me, but it was difficult for her. She shook her head from side to side like a jungle creature sipping at the water’s edge leery of some big reptile exploding out of the water.
I put the blade on her lower lip and opened her mouth with it. It cut her lips when she tried to shake it out. Her eyes were losing their luster.
“Marija,” I said. “Can you hear me?”
“Mmmmmmuh,” she mumbled.
“Marija, listen to me. Don’t faint.”
She collapsed to the ground. The front of her was wet with fresh blood and her swaying breasts were painted with it.
“Don’t pass out,” I said. “I’ll help you.”
She tried to push me away with her useless hand. I saw the white bone beneath the flap of skin.
“Marija,” I said. “Look at me!” I grabbed her cheeks in one hand and squeezed until her eyes bulged. “Where is Calderone?”
She made swallowing sounds. I shook her head hard. “Tell me!”
“Say again, Marija.”
She spat blood with the fricatives: “Your wife... houf... her house.”
Sarah’s house-
“That’s a good girl,” I said. “Help is coming.”
I sliced one corner of her mouth and then the other, which gave her a wide clown mouth. I wiped the handle of the blade around a piece of her torn skirt. I pressed the knife into her good hand. I made her look at me. I think she heard me.
“You’re ugly now, Marija. Use this.”
I was aware of a voice in the distance. Someone was walking toward me across the field. He stopped short and his eyes bulged when he saw her lying on her side clutching a knife and moaning. I turned away just as she evacuated her bowels noisily. More people were gathering on the sidewalk.
I picked up the backpack. I walked through the manager’s cabin, past his dead body, and out the door. I was on the sidewalk. I heard shouting and I could see people speaking into cell phones.
I checked my watch. It was twenty-eight minutes since Bones had dropped me off and was waiting for me at the Oak Room. If I didn’t show in a half-hour, I said, have a brew on me and go home. The street was picking up the excitement; people were running from across the street to join the commotion. I heard a young girl’s falsetto scream. I kept walking.
Bones was on the hood of his cab reading a paperback edition of Steppenwolf. I threw the backpack in the back seat and climbed inside. I sat on my hands to keep the shaking down, although I knew my driver well enough to know that I was well within the range of normal to attract concern. His eyes took me in with a single glance and his face wore his reading expression.
“How was your friend?” he asked me.
“She was fine,” I said. I stifled a sob with a coughing sound.
The amenities over, he said, “Hesse, man. He’s all fucked up.”
I couldn’t tell if he meant that as a compliment. “Bones, I’ve got one more place to go and I need you to get me there fast.”
“Where we goin’ and how much you payin’?”
I gave him directions.
“We just came from there, man,” Bones said.
“I’m aware of that.”
“Same rules? Off the clock and you pay the tickets?”
When we passed the scene, a huge crowd had materialized from nowhere. A dozen people had their cell phones out. More were arriving from across the street, all drawn by the spell of a morbid rumor, which would turn out to be true. I saw some holding up their videophones and tablets to film it – she, the blood-soaked woman on the ground.
Ambulances and police cars were lining up. I lowered myself in the seat because Pippin’s Navigator flew around the curve; we passed so close I could see he’d shaved haphazardly that day. I don’t know why I suddenly had a powerful urge to talk. I gabbled nonsense about drinking beers out there with my wife when we were first married.
“Beer is for pigs,” Bones said. He hit the gas once we left the resort town behind.
I was lost in synaptic misfirings of the brain, unable to think, unable to come to grips with the brute inside who had done what I had just done to a beautiful woman I once desired. I heard Bones ask what the excitement was back at Jefferson-on-the-Lake.
“God knows,” I said. “God knows.”
Friday, September 10
9:05 p.m.
#38
There’s nothing really safe in the world. Evil stops here and there for a while, but it’s always on the move and able to come to you wherever you are. It’s when you stand still too long that you make the best target.
I saw my wife’s head through the kitchen window. She was doing the supper dishes. Behind me a mile out from the breakwall, deck lights from a thousand-footer, a massive ore carrier, glowed in the blackness like a string of Japanese lanterns. Waves flashed white where they broke over the bow and rolled along against the side of the hull amidships before they disappeared. Sine, cosine, tangent – all the angles of life were at play out there in the water buffeting the steel.
Sarah would go into the living room soon and watch television after the dishes. It’s what she always did. My teeth chattered, but it wasn’t from chilled air sucked across the open lake water. I had spent the last several hours lurking in my garage behind plastic drop cloths.
The lights in the houses went out and porch lights came on. The blue phosphorescent glow of television sets in living rooms up and down the neighborhood shone through half-drawn curtains and windows. Sarah watched the news before going to bed. Her boyfriend’s truck was parked behind her car in the driveway. I had not seen him appear in any windows yet. Something else I would have missed if I had turned my head a mere second later. A dark shape left the back seat just as the driver pulled up to the curb three houses down. This shape was a man who ran to an oak tree and then disappeared at a fast trot down the driveway of an older couple who manicured their lawns. The shape wasn’t just a man; it was a large man who ran like a panther, and only one name to attach to the vision: Gess Hoo himself coming to visit.
I couldn’t se
e him clearly because of the darkness, but I had my eyes fixed on a spot near the far end where he’d have to come out. He’d want to circle this way. I was sure that the slightest shift in the black would tell me when he made a move.
That’s when I heard the garage door swing on its rail. I had my hand inside my pants for the automatic, but his beam blinded me. Sarah’s boyfriend didn’t shout; he wasn’t going to scare me that way. What did was his other hand on the trigger of a twenty-gauge that was poking through the garage doors at my chest.
“Don’t fucking move a muscle,” he said through his teeth.
“It’s Trichaud,” I said. “Listen, I’m not here to-”
“Shut up.”
“You need to hear me, please,” I begged.
“Shut your mouth, asshole. I’ve got you now,” he gloated.
“Listen, Sarah’s in danger. You’re in danger. There’s a man-”
His voice was raspy, and I didn’t want to provoke him in case he was one of those stand-your-ground types. At this range, I’d have the wadding embedded in my spine along with any pellets that didn’t punch through me on their way out my back.
He muscled himself through the doors to get all the way in. I couldn’t watch. I closed my eyes at the expected blast from his finger accidentally squeezing the trigger.
“I won’t move. Please don’t put the light on,” I said. “There’s someone out there who-”
“You brought someone?”
He tossed the flashlight aside and held the twenty-gauge tighter against his shoulder.
“Don’t turn on the light.”
“And you’re carrying a gun, you crazy fuck? You brought a fucking gun here?”
He shoved the tip of the barrel at me so hard I fell back against a tool cabinet.
“You move, you die,” he said.
I hoped I could talk him round to the greater danger out in the dark who had to be listening to this exchange. When he lowered the barrel to take the gun out of my belt I had a chance, but I let it go. He shoved it into his back pocket and stepped back.
Worse always comes to worse: he hit the light switch.
I tried once more. “Look, Sarah will tell you-”
“You’re stalking her, Trichaud,” he said.
“No, listen to me. There’s a very, very bad individual out there who’s watching us right now and he has a gun-”
“Move!”
I got up and held my hands in the air. He put the barrel into my right shoulder blade and marched me outside.
“This is good, Trichaud,” he said; “you’re going to prison for a long time. I could shoot you right here and the law would pin a medal on me.”
I knew at least one FBI agent who would have vied with him for that honor. My thoughts were bent in one direction: to get indoors where wood and brick might save me from the wolf.
“Call the cops,” I said.
“Shut the fuck up, Trichaud. What did she ever see in an asshole like you?”
“Let’s go inside and I’ll tell you everything.”
My heart was thumping like a bellows. Calderone wasn’t going to wait for the cops to come.
“You’re in a big hurry to get to prison, huh?” He nudged me off the back steps with his shotgun.
It was too long a walk down the dark driveway. I looked at the vehicles and saw big trouble. I took a huge chance and stopped. “Just listen to me for one second,” I pleaded.
He clipped me across the jaw with the barrel.
When I reached the gap between the vehicles, I was going to make a move no matter what. I was too late. I didn’t hear the whistle of the bat descending in an arc on his skull, but the crack registered obviously enough.
I didn’t wait for the next swing. I was off and running in an all-out sprint. I flew past the rose trellis at the corner of the house like a downhill skier. Even in the dusk, I knew to the inch how wide to take the corner-
But I stopped all my forward momentum when I saw the second shotgun.
“Waitin’ for you, Jack,” the man holding it said. “Let’s go in. Someone wants to meet you.”
Lights were beginning to come on in some of the houses. Life was behaving normally as day was replaced by night in my once-calm neighborhood.
He walked me back the way I had just come, my rabbit’s heart pounding in my throat, and saw Sarah’s boyfriend lying at the edge of the driveway where he had dropped like a manhole cover. He was on his back but his knees were buckled as if he had fallen backward. His rolled-up white eyeballs were all I needed to know.
The light was murky as last night’s dishwater; yard spiders’ webs glowed like patches of dirty cotton candy in the green grass. We walked through the porch into the kitchen. The drawers were full of knives within hand’s reach and a galaxy away. I could see my father shaking his head mournfully: Bringing a knife to a gunfight, Jackie? That’s not smart.
“Nothing I’ve done yet has been,” I said as we moved through to the sitting room.
“Don’t talk, motherfucker,” he said. “Randy says if you run, I can blow your knee caps off.”
I lost what little composure I had left. I weaved into an octagon table sticking out from the couch and sent glass candle holders flying onto the carpet. He pushed me with his shotgun toward the stairway banister. I stumbled up, a straggler on the Bataan Death March. He stayed a foot behind me with a hard prod to the kidneys if I didn’t go fast enough.
Big, mean Randall Calderone stood at the top of the stairs. “I been waitin’ on you,” he said. No glee, no malice, just a psychopath’s greeting. He wore the black leather vest he had on the first time I saw him. The bulked-up arms and prison tatts, the pointy goatee and the bald head. All the same as if no time at all had passed.
Calderone took a quick stride toward me. He bit off the edge of some duct tape he had been wrapping his hand in and punched me on the jaw. It wasn’t meant to be a knockout, just a way of showing me his power. I knew he had more interesting plans for me than a mere beating to death with his fists.
Like so many other experiences from my two-week sojourn through hell, it was one more circle of the inferno to discover. He dragged me into the bedroom. I heard sniffling and whimpering coming from the opposite corner; she was gagged, nude, lying on the bed and imploring me with her eyes. I had no explanation to give her for the question I read so easily: Why? Why was this happening?
Calderone and his partner were talking loudly through the doorway. Calderone wanted to begin dicing me up like my brother. The other man wanted to get the money, as Calderone had apparently promised him. They kept calling each other “bro.” Biker brothers, Aryan brotherhood, whatever it was, I wasn’t going to be asked for my opinion.
“He ain’t got it here, bro,” Calderone said. “You’d a seen it in the garage.”
The other man said, “Fuckin’ newspaper said bills was found out there with her, man. Couple hundred bucks lying around in the field where they found her.”
“Maybe some motherfucker picked it up before the cops came,” Calderone said.
“You don’t know that for sure, Randall. Bitch wakes up, it’ll be in a prison hospital and she ain’t gonna remember shit.”
Marija alive.
“Man, you start cutting him up...” He stopped pacing between the two rooms, looking down at me nervously. When he noticed me awake, listening, they moved off into the other room. It felt as if a ball of ice had been thrust into my rib cage, replacing my heart. Nothing quite like hearing your own murder being discussed in front of you.
Sarah looked at me. Her eyes told me she took in every word of their talk as well.
We heard footsteps coming down the hallway. Calderone appeared in front of me staring down; his hands on his hips and he had that grin I remembered from the first day. He jerked me upright to a sitting position. Then he reared back and kicked me in the face so hard I flew backwards into the bed.
“You fucking fuck,” he said. “This was so fucking simple. We had the fu
cking money, and all you had to do was follow the plan.” His grin was an icy leer. “I’m gonna do ten times worse to that bitch what you did to Marija.”
He dropped a newspaper in front of me and left. I had to twist my head to read it.
An unidentified woman in her mid-twenties was found partially nude in a field with severe wounds, including an amputated hand, in a deserted lot at Jefferson-on-the-Lake. The small resort town is located midway between Cleveland and Erie, PA...
I couldn’t read the bottom half of it because part of my face was swelling up. The middle portion was clear enough to make out:
Police also found the manager of Pineywood Log Cabins, Buck Frontenatta, aged forty-three, shot to death in his office. Frontenatta was once a leader of the Cleveland chapter of the Hell’s Angels back in the early nineteen-nineties. His body was sent to Cuyahoga County Medical Examiner’s office where pathologist Elizabeth Bhargrava is performing the autopsy. The woman, whose left hand was almost completely severed, was flown by emergency helicopter evacuation to St. Elizabeth’s hospital in Youngstown. A police spokesman said they are currently investigating leads but have no comment at this time. FBI Agent Forzell Pippin-
Footsteps were approaching. Calderone and his partner came back. He picked up the paper and frowned. He pointed a thick finger at the article’s column. He read like a child whose fate was always to be in the last group stigmatized for its stupidity:
“‘Forzell Pippin had no comment at this time but said the’ – said the – ‘multi-agency task force is investigating all leads.’”
“That means the cops are heading here soon,” I said. “You and your friend should leave now.”
I thought he was about to kick me in the face again. “I’ve got the money,” I said; “it’s very close by – maybe a mile. Almost the full nine hundred thous-”
This time he did kick me. I deflected most of its force by twisting my head. I fought for air for what seemed an eternity of minutes that stretched into hours and days that produced no oxygen in my burning lungs.
