by Chelsea Cain
“I want to come with you,” Susan said. Henry and Claire had called in the crime techs to go over Jeremy’s room. Susan was on her own. But she didn’t know where to start.
Leo hesitated.
“Archie’s my friend,” Susan said. “He saved my life. That makes him my responsibility.”
Susan could see him sizing her up, his face blue from the glow of the dash lights. “Okay,” he said. He hit a button on his door and she heard the car unlock. She ran behind the car to the passenger side and got in.
“Where are we going?” she asked.
“It’s time to rely on the kindness of lesser elements,” Leo said.
Susan looked at him blankly.
He shrugged. “I’ve got friends in low places.”
I bet you do, thought Susan.
C H A P T E R 47
It’s called the ‘Superman position,’ ” Jeremy explained. “It’s the least painful. And I thought it was fitting. Archie Sheridan. Superhero cop.”
If this was the least painful, Archie was glad he wasn’t being introduced to any of the alternatives. His head was killing him, probably from the enthusiastic Tasering. But his muscles, which were also reeling from the massive dose of electric current, had at least relaxed a little. He couldn’t lift his head far enough to see much in the room, so he hung there and looked at the floor. And he tried to keep Jeremy talking.
“They have names for all of the suspensions,” Jeremy continued. “You can hang flat, facing up, with the hooks in your chest and legs. That’s called the ‘Coma.’ Like from the movie. You know, that scene where they find all the people hanging from the ceiling? Or you can suspend yourself from your shoulder blades so you’re hanging upright—they call that one the ‘Suicide,’ because if you do it right it looks like you’ve hung yourself.”
He untied his robe and let it hang open. He was naked underneath,
his crotch at Archie’s eye level. He’d shaved his pubic area and his scrotum was cuffed in a metal ring, stretched a good ten inches. It made Archie’s solar plexus hurt just to look at it.
Jeremy let the robe drop to the floor and put a hand under his testicles, lifting them for Archie to see.
“It started my first night home,” he explained. “I wanted to feel the pain. So I tied my balls to my bedpost and bent over backward. Later, I saw some pictures on the Internet, and I started experimenting with stretching. Ropes, then with a wooden block, and finally metal rings.” He motioned to the one currently encircling his scrotum. “I wear this one all the time,” he said.
“It’s not your fault,” Archie said. “Surviving. You couldn’t have done anything to save your sister.”
“It’s important to warm up before any session,” Jeremy said. “To relax.” He picked up a tub of Vaseline off the floor and scooped some out with his fingers and began to rub it on his balls and up the shaft of his penis. Archie looked away. “I’m showing you this because I think it will help you understand,” Jeremy explained. “Please watch me.”
Archie lifted his head again. Jeremy was partially aroused. There was a sturdy-looking pipe overhead. Two ropes dangled from it. Jeremy stepped on a child’s plastic step stool, attached the ring around his testicles to a hook at the end of one rope, took the other rope in his hands to control the weight, and then kicked back, so that he was dangling from his genitals. His testicles stretched eight inches and Jeremy slowly leaned back, letting go of the safety rope. He dangled there, hung from his groin, red-faced, his back arched so that his head and feet were at the same level.
“There are easier ways to punish yourself, Jeremy.”
After a few minutes, Jeremy reached up and took hold of the rope he was hanging from, and used it to sit up enough to grab onto the safe rope. He swung his feet back down to the step stool,
unhooked his testicles, sank to the floor, curled on his side, and started masturbating. He did not seem to be aware of Archie anymore, did not seem to care that he was there. He was neither performing for him, nor being exactly discreet.
When he came, his body shuddered and the ejaculate shot several feet forward, before it landed, a milky glop on the concrete floor.
This kid was more fucked-up than Archie thought.
Jeremy laughed. “You should try it,” he said. He rolled onto his back and wiped his hands on his bare thighs. “You’ve never felt anything like it.”
Gretchen had done a number on Archie. But she’d outdone herself with Jeremy Reynolds.
“When did you start to remember?” Archie asked him.
Jeremy stared up at the ceiling. “When she took you,” he said. He waved a hand in the air. “All the press. It brought back memories. Flashes at first. But they filled in.”
“That must have been horrible,” Archie said.
Jeremy rolled his head over and looked at Archie. “You understand, right?”
He did understand. At least he was in a unique position to imagine. But then again, Archie thought, you don’t see me hanging by my scrotum.
“She killed your sister,” Archie said. “You need help. There are people who can help you. I’ve been helped.”
Jeremy stood up and lifted the robe back over his shoulders. “You can help me,” he said. “And I can help you. Because we know, don’t we?” He put his lips next to Archie’s ear. “We know her. We know pain and pleasure. The whole universe is just an immense, inexorable torture-garden. Blood everywhere.”
“O-kay,” Archie said.
Jeremy gave Archie a little push, and he swung forward and back. “How do you feel?” Jeremy asked.
“Like a marionette,” said Archie.
Jeremy reached above him and pulled the rigging, wrenching Archie upward.
Archie steeled himself, balling his fists against the pain. And then it settled.
“Exhale,” Jeremy said.
And Archie did.
Jeremy moved his mouth to Archie’s ear again. “Do you know what I think about?” he asked. “When I’m hanging there and my balls feel like they’re going to explode?”
Archie had the feeling it was a rhetorical question.
“I think about you fucking her,” Jeremy said. “I think about her hurting you, making you do things, and then I think about you on top of her forcing her, fucking the shit out of her, so that when you come, it’s so hot and hard it’s like a fist inside her.”
Jeremy’s eyes were closed. It was all fantasy. He couldn’t possibly know that Archie and Gretchen had had an affair.
“Doesn’t being upside down like that make the blood rush to your head?” Archie asked, changing the subject.
“You get used to it,” Jeremy said.
C H A P T E R 48
Leo Reynolds pulled his Volvo into the parking lot of a club called George’s Dancin’ Bare, directly across from a thirty-one-foot-tall painted plaster statue of Paul Bunyan in the Kenton neighborhood of North Portland.
The statue had been erected in 1959 to greet visitors to the Oregon Centennial Exposition and International Trade Fair. He was dressed in belted and cuffed dungarees, six-foot-tall black boots, and a black and red checkered shirt, and he was leaning on a giant axe.
The sun was coming up and the peach sky made the Dancin’ Bare’s plain tan façade look especially forlorn. Paul Bunyan leered at them from across the street.
Archie was with Jeremy and she was going to a titty bar.
Susan looked skeptically at her phone. It was 5
A.M. No bar was open this late.
“Private party,” Leo said, getting out of the car and heading for the club’s front door.
Susan followed him. An orange and black plastic sign very
clearly announced that the club was closed. Susan was just about to say something like “See? I told you so,” when Leo pulled out his BlackBerry and punched in a number.
“It’s me,” he said. “I’m outside.”
The door opened almost immediately and a man stepped halfway out, his hand on the insi
de door handle. He was huge and bearded and wore a checkered flannel shirt. Susan turned around and glanced back at Paul Bunyan. Then back at the man.
“I get that a lot,” the man said to Susan. He smiled, revealing a gold front tooth, then put a meaty hand on Leo’s shoulder. “How ya doing, Leo?” he said, and he opened the door and gestured them inside.
The door opened onto a narrow wood-paneled entryway. Posters for amateur night and offers to meet this girl or that girl “up close” plastered the walls. Paul Bunyan stayed behind, taking a seat next to the door and going back to reading a library copy of The Sheltering Sky.
Like every strip club Susan had ever been to, it smelled like sweat and cigarettes and beer. The carpet was a ratty brown. The walls were stained with decades of cigarette smoke. There were only a few patrons—two middle-aged guys in sweatshirts at the bar, and two more at a small stage, where a woman danced in a pair of black flouncy underpants. She had massive breasts and huge wine-colored nipples. Her nipples were bigger than Susan’s entire breasts. They lunged and swayed as she moved. Susan was fascinated. The song “Milkshake” was blasting over the speakers. A busted subwoofer made the bass notes tremble. No one seemed very happy. For a private party, it didn’t seem to be a very festive event.
Leo didn’t stop. He took her hand and led her past the bar, past several tables, to another part of the club. This was where the real action was, apparently. There was a big stage, complete with a brass
pole and a fully naked woman. Several men sat smoking at the stage’s rack. A waitress in short-shorts and a yellow T-shirt leaned up against a wall.
She smiled when she saw Leo.
Just beyond the big stage was a third stage, near the back of the bar. This one had a rack all the way around it, but only one patron, a twentysomething black man who sat, looking gangsta, with a stack of bills and a beer in front of him.
The dancer on this stage was completely naked. Her breasts were of a more normal proportion, her body was lean and firm, and she’d been fully and effectively waxed. The hair on top of her head was so blond and so long and lush and gently curled that Susan thought it might be a wig. There was a brass pole at the center of the stage, and the dancer leaped, straddling it four feet off the ground, and spun, back arched, one knee bent, painted toes pointed, her hair flying out behind her, her breasts sitting at attention on her chest. Ha, Susan thought. Implants.
“You’re staring,” Leo said.
Susan colored. “I like her hair,” she said.
Leo led Susan over to the stage. She tried to stand up straight, so that she’d seem taller, and arched her back so her 34As would poke out a bit. When they got to the rack, Leo dropped her hand and tapped the gangsta kid on the shoulder.
He glanced up at Leo and widened his bleary eyes. “Hey, man,” he said. “What gives?”
Upon closer look, Susan realized that he wasn’t very gangsta at all. More like a college kid trying to look gangsta. Big pants. Athletic jacket. Blazers basketball jersey. But his affect wasn’t urban. This kid hadn’t grown up in Detroit or Compton or even North Portland. This kid probably played basketball for Lake Oswego High. Susan would have bet her life on it.
The dancer leaped up and did another spin on the pole. She
had a tattoo of a star on the top of her pubic bone. She was so close to them that Susan had to step back to avoid getting a face full of her hair as she twirled by them.
“Can I have a word?” Leo said.
The black guy frowned and then shrugged. “Sure, cuz,” he said. He got up, adjusted his pants, then remembered his beer and turned and got it.
The dancer sank into jazz splits in front of them and tossed her hair. She was pretty. Susan had hoped she would be ugly. It would have been more fair if she’d had a hot body and a pockmarked, hollow face.
“Hi, Leo,” the dancer said.
“Hi, Star,” Leo said.
Susan searched Star for imperfections. She had a tiny bit of cellulite under her butt cheeks. It would have to do.
Susan and the not-very-gangsta gangster followed Leo over to a table between the two stages and sat down. Susan lit a cigarette, took a drag, and set it in the black plastic Camel-logo ashtray in the middle of the table.
“This is Susan,” Leo said to the black man. The music was loud, and he had to speak forcefully to be heard, but he somehow made it seem like he wasn’t raising his voice. “She’s a reporter for the Herald.” He turned to Susan. “You can call him ‘Cousin,’ ” Leo said.
“You’re cousins?” Susan said.
“I’m adopted,” the black man said.
Leo picked the cigarette up out of the ashtray and took a drag of it. “This is off the record.” He looked at Susan. “Right, Susan?”
She nodded. She had no idea what he was up to. “Deep background,” she said. “Anonymous sources. Totally.”
Cousin looked at them both like they were out of their minds. He took a sip of beer and set the glass on the table.
“I’m looking for some people,” Leo continued. “Jeremy’s caught
up in something. I want to find him. And I want to find the people he’s with. This will be in the news tomorrow. The cops are releasing his picture, and the girl’s picture, and sketches of the rest of them.”
Cousin blinked at him. “You want me to help the cops find your brother?”
“Susan,” Leo said, “describe Jeremy’s friends to my associate here.”
Susan dug in her bag and got out her reporter’s notebook. “I’ll write it down for you,” she said, and she described the pointy-teethed guy and the masked piercer and the two big dudes, taking notes as she talked. Then she tore the page off the spiral notebook and handed it to Cousin.
“Sound familiar?” Leo asked.
Cousin took the paper and looked at it. “They junkies?”
Leo took another drag off Susan’s cigarette. “I’m guessing they move in that circle.”
Susan set the tip of her pen on the fresh page of her notebook and leaned forward. “Are you a drug dealer?” she asked Cousin.
He backed up an inch. “ ‘Deep background,’ you said. ‘Anonymous sources.’ ”
Susan shrugged and closed the notebook. “I’m curious.”
Cousin slugged his last sip of beer and motioned to the waitress, who was still leaning against the wall. “Middle management,” he said.
“What do you deal?” Susan asked.
Leo sighed and dropped his head in his hands.
Cousin smiled. “Cocaine,” he said with a shrug. “Hard, not soft. I used to move soft, but man, everyone starts calling you when the bars close and you never get any sleep.” He put his finger in the air for emphasis. “Crackheads are in bed by eleven.”
He reached into the pocket of his Adidas warm-up jacket and
took out a Baggie and dumped some white powder on the table. “You want some?” he asked.
Susan tried to look blasé. “No,” she said.
Cousin was busy cutting himself a fat line. “Leo?” he said, not looking up.
“No,” Leo said.
“Your call, cuz,” Cousin said. He had a green plastic straw that had been cut about the length of a pinkie finger, and he snorted the line and then put his head back for a second and plugged his nose.
When he put his head back down, his eyes were wet and he had a big grin on his face. He wiggled the straw at Susan. “You sure?”
“Fuck it,” Susan said. She hadn’t done coke since college. She was tired. She wasn’t going to be going to bed anytime soon.
She took the straw from him, and he laughed and cut a line.
“You sure you want to do that?” Leo asked.
Susan bent over the table, held a nostril closed and inhaled. It burned and she squeezed her eyes shut and wrinkled her face. Her sinuses felt like they were on fire, like she’d just snorted Clorox. The back of her throat filled with a sludge of foul, bitter mucus. It took her a moment to identify the taste—gasoline. She
forced herself to swallow a couple of times and pressed her nostrils closed. “Ow,” she said.
“It’s pretty pure,” Leo said softly.
When she opened her eyes, Cousin was still rocking back and forth in his chair. She felt a surge of energy. The burning stopped. The bad taste in her mouth subsided. Her face and arms tingled.
It was better than what she remembered from college.
“Is that what crack’s like?” Susan asked him.
Cousin stopped laughing. “You think I’ve used crack?” he said. “Shit, girl. I don’t touch the stuff. You go near that, your life is ruined.”
Leo put out Susan’s cigarette in the Camel ashtray. “Find these
