Nowhere Land: A Stephan Raszer Investigation

by A. W. Hill

  “I doubt it,” said Raszer. “But it’s a nice thought—unless you mean dead.”

  Harry Wolfe cocked his head and turned, taking a detour en route to his station to exchange a few words with Layla. Raszer began to feel like the apex of a triangle.

  As MC Hakim resumed spinning and intoned, “Let’s go to Goa, party people,” into his microphone, Raszer allowed himself an extended glance at the exotic animal seated across the strobe-lit dance floor. To no real surprise, she was waiting for his eyes. Raszer didn’t flinch, except internally. Her beauty was of the bruising sort, and he couldn’t help but feel that, somehow, she was being proffered by the DJ. Maybe it was a tender sort of pimping. Maybe she was a “lonely girl” who came downstairs to dance and mate under the protective eye of her platter-spinning patron. Or maybe he was trying to get a monkey off his back and onto Raszer’s. In any case, the transparency of the setup did not seem sufficient reason to forgo a dance, or to wave off an encounter that might yield such potent information. It was clear from the DJ’s rap that Layla Faj-Ta’wil might be, in some sense, a direct link to Katy Endicott’s abductors.

  While Raszer’s mind mapped out a rationalization for crossing the dance floor, his body was already there. She sat with her chin languidly propped on her palm, bejeweled fingers curling back around the fine line of her cheek, dusk-colored nails tapping softly on the cheekbone. Left leg was crossed over right, the drape of her gauzy skirt falling to the side, and the open toe of her spiked sandal aimed in his direction. Her hair was parted on the side, pinned back from one eye and falling over the other, and at the part it went midnight blue. Something disturbingly erotic occurred when Eastern women adopted Western dress and body language. Something that implied the most recondite of secrets. And that was the crux of it, after all—the secrets.

  Layla rose from her chair after four bars of Massive Attack’s “Teardrop,” artfully meshed with some gris-gris, trip-hop version of “Sympathy for the Devil.” She rose weightlessly and came to where she’d danced before, her body moving like kelp in a gentle current. She did not grant Raszer even a sidelong glance, and it made him feel momentarily invisible, as if to exist, he had to join her. Slowly, he stood up, strode onto the dance floor, and didn’t whisper, “Would you like a partner?” until he’d curled his fingers gently around her waist.

  Layla turned fluidly, the silk fabric slipping beneath his fingers like oiled glass, the muscles in her belly tightening just slightly. Her only assent was to allow his hands to remain on her hips.

  Raszer saw MC Hakim smiling softly, eyes half-closed, nodding off to the hypnotic rhythm. Enjoying his work. The rolling motion of his head and shoulders mirrored Layla’s own swell. Her lips curled at the corners, watching him watch her.

  Raszer smiled. “I’d like to know you,” he said. “There’s a Moroccan place up the strip that serves fresh mint tea. Can I treat?”

  Her eyes narrowed. “You want . . . to know me?” she repeated, as if hearing the word for the first time.

  Raszer nodded, and while he sunk into her blue-black eyes, thinking to himself that he’d moved her with the notion that a man might want to do something other than fuck her, her right hand fluttered down his thigh, and suddenly all nobler intentions fled and he wanted only to be inside. Her right hip pressed his left, and with the skill of a thief, she slipped two fingers into a tiny pocket in the folds of her skirt and curled them around a silver-plated atomizer the size of a lipstick case.

  Moving with him, seeming to find the off-beats between the strobe light’s pulses where she would become momentarily invisible, she lifted the hand that had rested on his right shoulder and brought it to his cheek. It was cool against his flushed skin. The other hand, with the atomizer curled in its ring finger, ran up the inside of his thigh to just below his groin. She looked into his eyes and said: “Then you will know me, ragoli.”

  Her hand left his thigh and rode firmly over the stiffening ridge in his trousers. Thus diverted, he didn’t see her bring the nozzle of her little silver atomizer to just below his left nostril. Psst. Psst. He cocked an ear, thinking she’d whispered something, then felt his center of balance lurch forward and went up on his toes, with only her body to break his momentum. He was numbly aware of her hands against the small of his back as he dropped his head onto her shoulder, crushing his nose against her perfumed neck.

  He could walk, but without feeling the floor. He could see, but only as through a prism. The strobe’s pulses slowed to a throb, and in the spaces between, there was only blackness. Harry Wolfe appeared and disappeared like a coin trick, spinning platters that emitted a low rumble but seemed to be utterly stationary, and when Raszer looked to him, slack-jawed, for aid, he saw the DJ smile, lift one hand from the turntable, and wave bye-bye, as if to a small child. Oddly, the hand was detached from the wrist.

  The sense most completely disabled was Raszer’s hearing. What he did hear was very much like what someone deafened by mortar fire would hear: the soft, shussing decay of sound, but none of its initial attack. For this reason, he was not aware they had entered a stairwell until they began to climb. With every other step, she incanted, “Okay,” alternating with, “Goood.”

  “Okay . . . goood . . . okay . . . goood . . . okay . . . good. Kwaeyyees.”

  But counting was beyond him. Self-awareness was beyond him. He had no body, and if he did, it was a sealed box and he was trapped inside. Only echoes of sensation remained, and if his circuits did fleetingly crackle back on, it was only to stream fear to his blunted extremities. When they reached her door, he went down like a rag doll.

  Sszzzzt. There was light, and the smell of sulfur from a kitchen match. Raszer’s eyes opened; his pupils contracted brutally, sending pain to the rear of his skull. In the match light, he recognized her face, a thing of frightening beauty. She held a little silver spoon, the kind given to newborn babies as a keepsake. Layla had taken off her dress and wrapped herself loosely in a robe of deep purple silk. In the pulsing candlelight, the arc of her breasts and her round belly flickered like magic lantern projections, but his desire to touch her remained, for the moment, as dead as the feeling in his limbs.

  She had lit the match to heat the underside of the spoon, and its contents began to sizzle softly and release a narrow plume of fragrant smoke. She brought the spoon to his nostrils, but Raszer kept his eyes on her, just as hers were on him, dropping them just long enough to see that what was vaporizing in the well of the spoon was a resinous little black ball, now partially dissolved.

  Almost at once, Raszer was infused with a contentment so unbounded and com-plete that he heard himself sigh, and only then knew that his senses had been restored. Beginning with his groin, feeling streamed back into his limbs like rivulets of warm oil. Layla had unpinned her blue-black hair, and it half-curtained her face. The other half reflected amber, and he realized there must be another source of illumination.

  In sequence, he took note of the candle burning on a rough-hewn dining table eight feet away, of the four posts of the bed he’d been laid on, of the pillow behind his head, and of the fact that he had been stripped down to his shorts and was bound to the bed with two lengths of nylon climber’s rope in a very distinctive manner. Each rope looped around an upper thigh, biting gently into his groin, and was then firmly tied to diagonally opposing bedposts, putting his midsection more or less at the crosspoint of a large X. His arms and legs were free, but even had he been inclined to try, he could not have shifted his center far enough to untie the knots. He completed his survey and returned his eyes to her. The spoon was back under his nose. It would have been pointless to hold his breath. He drew in the vapor and became aware of her cool hand on his belly and her long fingernails just inside the elastic band of his shorts.

  He glanced from side to side at the ropes binding his wrists. “What are your intentions, Layla?”

  “I intend to play with you,” she said.

  “What’d you dope me with downstairs?”


  “Just a little Special K,” she replied. “I do not have patience for seductions.”

  “Ketamine?” he said. “Bad girl. You could have stopped my heart, and then how much fun would I be to play with?”

  “No, Mr. Raszer,” she said. “I know my drugs. Now be quiet, or you will find yourself having no fun at all.” Her nails bit into his groin, just below the scrotum.

  “I think I understand,” said Raszer. “Was it your handiwork that made Henry Lee a capon?” She didn’t answer. It might have been the opium, or it might have been some vague faith in the goodwill of the DJ spinning records downstairs, but Raszer chose to believe this girl would not cause him harm—at least, not the irreparable kind.

  Layla slipped the robe off and began to touch her breasts as a man might want to. She traced the nipples, then moistened her finger with her tongue, slipped the finger between her legs and proceeded to prime herself for the main event.

  “Why don’t you untie me, Layla . . . and let me do that?”

  She smiled cruelly. “No,” she said. “Enough talking.” She swung her leg over his knees, drew his shorts firmly down to the ropes, and added, “It is fucking time.”

  “I see it is,” said Raszer. “Next time, skip the pig tranquilizer and go straight to the opium. You won’t have to work so hard on me.”

  Layla took firm hold of his wrists and brought her mouth down to his lazily stiffening cock. As she did, she took brief note of the old scars and looked up at him.

  “I told you,” she said, and flicked her tongue out. “I know my drugs. It will take longer, but it will last longer, too.” She took him fully into her mouth, then pulled back roughly. “I will make you hard. I will make you so hard you can stab my heart.”

  By the time they had finished, the music downstairs had stopped. When the blood finally left his brain and surged into his groin with orgasm, Raszer briefly lost consciousness. That had never happened before. He guessed it was the ketamine cocktail, or maybe the ropes against pressure points. Either way, he must have been out for a few minutes, because when he came around, Layla was smoking a clove cigarette and Harry Wolfe was standing over the bed with a grin on his rubbery British face. Raszer looked down and was happy to see that the girl had had the decency to pull up his shorts.

  “How was he?” Wolfe asked her, though his eyes remained on Raszer.

  “Not bad,” Layla answered, and exhaled a long, straight plume of smoke. “He seemed to like . . . being tied up.” She was still naked, but unabashed.

  “Ah-yeah,” said Harry. “We all long to serve la Belle Dame Sans Merci.”

  “And you, Hakim,” said Raszer, sitting up with some difficulty. He was still bound like a steer. “How do you serve? Directing customers upstairs?”

  “Oh, no,” the DJ replied. “You were a special case.” He drew over a chair, sat down, and propped his legs on the bedstead. “You see, Mr. Raszer, we’re going to ask a favor of you, and we thought it was only right to offer you some hospitality first. Layla has taught me a great deal about hospitality. It’s the Arab way.”

  “I appreciate that,” said Raszer. “But, in that case, how about taking the ropes off? I’d like to get my cigarettes.”

  “Not just yet,” said Wolfe, and scooped Raszer’s trousers off the floor. “I’ll get them for you.” He fished out the American Spirits and lit one for Raszer, then sat back and sighed. “Things have cooled down a bit since that night. The cops have stopped coming around, and so—for the moment—have Layla’s old friends. The boys are dead and the girl is gone, and for some bloody reason, ev’rybody seems okay with that. It may not be right, but it’s okay with us, too, because—believe me—there were a few months there when I didn’t ever think I’d make it through the night. My crime was to play a gig and let a frightened lady come home with me, but in the beginning, you’d have thought I’d captured fucking Helen of Troy. I found daggers pinned to my door, had to replace my DJ rig twice, and I even started drinking again.”

  “I got angry, then bloody paranoid, but I never, ever told the law that Layla was involved with these guys, because you see, Stephan, the girl asked me to protect her, and after a while, I made it my vocation. Stupid, maybe, but I’m my father’s son and he was a stubborn wanker. Anyhow, finally, things got quiet. Your investigation is going to end all that.”

  The emotion in his voice was raw and real, and by Raszer’s reckoning, Harry Wolfe was probably as close to sincere as anyone living in Los Angeles got nowadays. He glanced at Layla, curious to see if she was visibly moved by her knight’s testimony. Her face wore a kind of sullen gravity, which he accepted as being close enough to gratitude for the moment. Still, there were kinks in the story, not the least of which was that he’d been doped, tied up, and ravished by the tender damsel Harry Wolfe had sworn to protect. One look at the well-developed musculature in her legs and upper arms suggested that Layla Faj-Ta’wil was far from helpless.

  There were a dozen questions about the nature of their relationship, but Raszer put them off in favor of a more pressing line of inquiry.

  “Which guys?” he asked Wolfe.

  “What?”

  “You said you didn’t tell the police that Layla had been tied up with ‘these guys.’ I need to be clear—are we talking about the same guys who, according to the eyewitness, killed the three boys and kidnapped Katy Endicott? The guys in the Lincoln?”

  “Yes,” said Layla, exhaling a lazy plume of clove smoke.

  “Mind you,” Harry broke in, “we were in the dance hall. There were no witnesses, other than—”

  “That poor, crazy boy, Emmett . . . ” She’d finished his sentence. Perfectly.

  “Who came wild-eyed and howling into the hall afterwards,” said Harry.

  “But it was them,” said Layla, shaking her finger. “I know it,” she spat, taking hold of the black tuft of hair between her legs, “like I know this.”

  “Them,” said Raszer. “The same men who, ah, introduced you to Johnny?”

  “Traded her to Johnny,” said Harry.

  “Traded you,” said Raszer, his eyes still on Layla. “For what?”

  “For the girl,” Layla replied sulkily. “What did you think?”

  “They traded you,” said Raszer, “for Katy Endicott.”

  “Yes,” she replied, shooting Wolfe a quick glance.

  “And then killed their trading partners,” said Raszer, catching the look. “Nice.”

  She crushed out her cigarette and crossed her arms over her breasts. “And the main reason they haven’t killed me is that they have what they want. Still, I have not left this building in over a year. I sleep here, I dance downstairs. Harry brings me groceries, things I need. They are not fools. They only take you when you are in the open—when no one is looking. When you go outside with no coat on.”

  “Who the hell are they?” asked Raszer.

  “They are . . . ” She turned to Harry for the right word.

  “Operatives,” said Wolfe.

  “Operatives for who? For what? A sex and drug cartel, or something else?”

  Raszer shifted his glance from Harry to Layla, then back to Harry again.

  Harry shrugged. “Don’t ask, don’t tell. It’s when you know who they are and what they’re about that they have to hurt you. And that’s the sad story of Johnny Horn and his posse. I happen not to want it to be my story. Johnny wanted in. Johnny—”

  “Johnny had no clue,” said Layla, with what seemed like both contempt and pity and maybe—just maybe—some remorse. “I can tell you this much, and no more.” She dropped one bare knee onto the bed and leaned forward, her body within his reach, her breath in his nostrils. She smelled of black opium, Turkish tobacco and sex, rendered aromatic by a fourth scent. Something new. An oil—anise or peppermint? Raszer found himself aroused again.

  “The drugs and the sex,” she continued, in a soft, dusky tone. “These are used as weapons. Tools. Just as good as gold or daggers when you wish to bring down a man,
or a state.” She shook the curtain of hair from her eye and crept in closer. “Look how much damage one girl on her knees did to an American president.” She put her finger under his chin. “Think how much harm I could do to you if I chose to.”

  “I don’t doubt it, Layla,” Raszer said. “Even as sweet-natured as you are.”

  She drew back a little and said, “But I will not. Because I like you.”

  “From what I gather,” Harry said with a caustic laugh, “and I don’t care to gather much—these chaps never lose a match. The only way you win is to walk away. Far, far away. That’s where the favor comes in. Might turn out to be a favor for you as well, mate.”

  “And is granting the favor the condition of my release?”

  “Nah,” said Harry. “We’re gonna let you go. We just wanted a captive audience.” He leaned forward. “Granting the favor is the condition of your survival, because if you put these guys onto us, you can bet we’ll put them right back onto you.”