Cornered

by Brandon Massey

  But she thought he said, Eat.

  I’m not hungry, she said, tears filling her eyes. I want to go home!

  He pointed at the can of beans. Eat.

  The little dog on her lap thrust its snout into the can. Shaggy Man said something and bent to pick up the dog, but it scrambled away, knocking over the can and spilling beans across the table.

  Jada had the cell phone in her pocket; she had not lost it. She slipped it out and showed it to him.

  I need to call for help, she said. I need to call my Daddy.

  Scratching his head, Shaggy Man stared at the phone, as if trying to figure out what it was. Then his eyes flashed with recognition, and his face turned red. His mouth widened into what looked to be a shout.

  They. . something, she thought he said. He was yelling, shaking his head wildly, eyes frantic.

  Frightened, she shrank back in the chair. For some reason, the phone made him angry. She didn’t understand. It was just a phone!

  She put it back in her pocket.

  The redness drained out of his face. He patted her on the head and smiled.

  But her heart raced. If she wanted to call Daddy, she would have to get away from this disturbed man first. That was what he was-disturbed. Only a disturbed person would ignore her words, let himself get so dirty, live in a filthy house like this with all of these dogs, and be afraid of phones.

  Shaggy Man left the table and lumbered back to the cabinet.

  He took out a can of peas, opened it, and returned to her with another fork.

  69

  Corey’s cheek rested against the cold hardwood, Simone’s shoes inches away from his head. His bound right hand tingled; the rest of his body was an orchestra of pain from the beating he had taken from Leon.

  He was unable to see Simone’s face from where he lay, but he heard her heavy, pained breathing. He wondered if she was mad at him. If he were her, he would have been. She had every right to be furious at him for how things had turned out.

  Plain and simple, he had fucked up.

  He twisted around and looked at her over his shoulder, the movement stirring a rash of pain along his abdomen and ribs. Simone lay flat on her back, gazing at the ceiling.

  “Simone,” he said.

  She looked up and met his gaze. In the lamplight, he got a closer look at the purple bruises on her jaw. The weary eyes veined with red. The cracked lips.

  She didn’t look angry, just exhausted and battered, as if she had been put, literally, through a wringer. Guilt pinched him. He had let this happen to her.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, painfully aware of the inadequacy of an apology. “I’m sorry. . for everything.”

  Sighing, she rested her head on the floor again. “At least you figured out my clue about where you could find us.”

  “Too late to be of any use.” He wriggled the fingers of his cuffed hand and studied the restraint, thinking. “I have my Leatherman in my pocket, on my keychain.”

  “The little thingy with all the attachments, like a Swiss Army knife?”

  “You gave it to me for Christmas a few years back, remember? If we can get it out of my pocket, I can try to pick the locks.”

  “You know all about picking a lock, huh?”

  She didn’t look at him when she said it, and she didn’t have to in order to make her point. He knew exactly what she was talking about.

  “I went to a lock-picking seminar a couple of years ago-for our business,” he said. “Can’t build a better mousetrap unless you know how the mouse is scheming to get the cheese. I remember a few pointers. A handcuff isn’t like a door lock, but the general idea is the same.”

  “Anything sounds better than lying here waiting for that bastard to find Jada.” She sat up with a groan. “Let’s do it.”

  “My keys are in my right front pocket,” he said. “I think I can dig them out, but I’ll need you to move your leg with my arm.”

  “On the count of three, then. But move slowly. I’m in a world of pain, and I’m pretty sure you are, too.”

  He counted: “One. . two. . three.”

  Slowly and carefully, he slid his hand down his side, Simone moving her right leg with him, bending it at the knee. He rolled over onto his left shoulder, hot agony marching along the length of his midsection, drawing sweat to his brow.

  His squeezed his fingers into his pocket, snagged the key ring, and dragged it out, keys clinking. He gasped. “Got it. Now I’m going to turn over and sit up.”

  “Okay. I’m with you.”

  He rolled until he was on his back. Then he sat up, Simone’s chained leg lying across his lap. She scooted closer, to lessen the strain of the awkward angle on her joints.

  Hunched over, Corey opened up all of the Leatherman’s attached tools-scissors, clip-point knife, tweezers, nail file, bottle opener, ruler, three screwdrivers of various sizes. He examined the locking mechanism on the handcuffs, checked his available tools.

  “In the movies, people pick cuffs with bobby pins,” Simone said.

  “No bobby pin here.” He picked the smallest screwdriver. “But I think this might work.”

  The seminar he’d attended covered mostly how burglars bypassed pin tumbler locks, commonly used to secure doors. The handcuffs were totally different-there were no pin tumblers. But if you understood how to analyze a lock’s design, he’d learned, you could figure out its weaknesses.

  Rivulets of sweat streaming in to his eyes, Corey noticed that on each cuff, the locking arm moved back and forth slightly, from the locked position to an even tighter clasp. In Leon’s haste to hunt for Jada, he hadn’t engaged the double lock that would have prevented the locking arm from moving in each direction, and probably would have made the cuffs harder to pick.

  He slid the screwdriver’s tip into the ratchet around Simone’s ankle and worked at lifting the teeth.

  As he worked, he felt Simone’s gaze on him, but she stared at his face, not his hands. He braced himself. He’d been married to her long enough to know that a storm was rolling in, and nothing was going to stop it. Nor should anything-he deserved whatever she could rain down on him, and then some.

  “You said you were sorry for everything,” she said. “What do you mean by everything?”

  “Some of this situation’s my fault,” he said.

  “Some of it?”

  “All of it. All of it’s my fault. I did something, a long time ago, and I never made it right.”

  “Leon said you killed a man.”

  Chest tightening, he looked up at her. Her eyes were hard as stones.

  “Leon killed a man,” Corey said. “His name was Mr. Rowland. Phillip Rowland. He was my high school English teacher. But I was there. I saw him do it. I didn’t stop him. When it was over, I didn’t go to the police.”

  He suffered her silence and searing gaze.

  Finally, she said, “I knew you didn’t kill anyone. He told me that story, but I couldn’t make myself believe it.”

  “I’ve never killed anyone, never physically attacked anyone. But Leon. . he’s a cold-blooded killer. It’s. . it’s almost like a sick game to him.”

  “He’s a violent psychopath,” she said. “Textbook. First one I’ve ever run in to face-to-face.”

  “You’ve seen the chrome cigarette lighter he carries around?”

  “Yeah.”

  “He took that from Rowland after he killed him. Carries it everywhere with him like a good luck charm. Takes it out to taunt me.”

  She looked pained. “For God’s sake, why didn’t you ever go to the police?”

  “I was scared.”

  “Scared?”

  “I was scared to go to prison for accessory to murder. I was eighteen, I thought my life would be over if I snitched. I’ve been scared of it for sixteen years.”

  She was quiet for a few heartbeats. “He said you two used to ‘rock and roll’ back in the day.”

  “Leon and I. . we used to break in to houses.”

  �
��How many?”

  “At least a dozen.”

  “A dozen break-ins.”

  “At least that many, yeah.”

  Her lips twisted in disgust. “Why?”

  “I’ve asked myself that question a million times over the years. Peer pressure, maybe? I’d let Leon manipulate me, tell me what to do. He has a strong personality, and I had self-esteem issues, I guess, and looked up to him. I would just go along with whatever he said.”

  “Breaking into houses and stealing other people’s stuff.”

  “Most of the guys I knew back then got into trouble. I didn’t exactly grow up in Bel Air.”

  “So that’s your excuse? Growing up in the hood, nothing better to do than rob honest, hardworking people? ’Cause everyone else did it? That’s bullshit, Corey, and you know it.”

  “Listen, I’m not making excuses. It was wrong, and I admit it. But you asked me why, and I told you.”

  “Hmph. Wish you’d told me ten years ago.”

  “So do I,” he said bitterly. “I should have told you everything.”

  She closed her eyes, tilted her face to the ceiling. He wiped sweat from his forehead with the back of his free hand and resumed working on the cuff.

  But his fingers were oily, and the tension between him and Simone made it hard to focus.

  Her eyes snapped open again. “You ever consider confessing your part in what happened?”

  “Not until tonight.”

  “You have to. Or I will.”

  “I’ll do it, Simone.”

  “Justice deferred is still justice. I know that dead man’s family would say so.”

  “They deserve justice, and they’ll get it. I promise you. I’m not running from it any more.”

  She hesitated. “Is there anything else I need to know about you?”

  “Wasn’t all of this enough?”

  A sour laugh escaped her. “Yeah.”

  “That’s everything.”

  “One more thing.”

  He paused, not knowing what to expect. “Okay.”

  “Did Leon kill his mother?”

  He stared at her. “What?”

  “He told me he killed his mother when he was eighteen, that he gave her bad heroin and she died of an overdose.”

  Corey could only shake his head. “Leon hardly knew his mother. He and I had basically the same family situation, which is probably part of why we bonded.”

  She looked shell-shocked. “You’re kidding.”

  “When he lived across the street from us, he lived with one of his aunts. And trust me, he didn’t call her mom. What did he tell you?”

  “Nothing that was true, apparently. Only proves that you can’t bullshit a bullshitter.”

  Corey smiled thinly.

  “He killed his partner.” She indicated the darkened area behind them. “That big man? Leon shot him in the head, after I’d wounded him.”

  “You wounded that huge guy? That giant?”

  “A lot’s happened here.”

  “No shit.”

  He concentrated on the restraint. After a couple of intense minutes, he felt an easing of pressure in the ratchet. He’d shimmed the ratchet teeth clear of the pawl. The cuff popped open with a soft snick.

  “Free at last,” Simone said, rubbing her chafed ankle. “Thank you.”

  “Now for mine,” Corey said. “We can move around as is, but I’d feel better with it off.”

  “Hurry,” she said.

  He switched the screwdriver to his left hand, and went to work on the cuff binding his wrist.

  70

  After chaining together the star-crossed lovers, Leon had gone upstairs to the room where they’d been holding the little deaf munchkin, curious to know how she’d escaped. He’d found a hatch in the closet that opened into a crawl space so deep it had to feed into other closets on the second floor, and he instantly put two and two together.

  Smart little bitch. He hadn’t even known the crawl space existed.

  He did a cursory check of the other upper level rooms, and then hurried outside to find her.

  The Todder was on his way, too. Leon had called him, and the gambler said he wasn’t far, that he’d anticipated this might happen, and he’d be at the house lickety-split to help Leon take care of things and arrive at a win-win solution.

  Leon scowled. A fucking win-win solution. As if that were possible. Their entire master plan had gone to shit. The Feds were lurking around. The fifty large was gone. His partner was dead. Corey knew the deal.

  Leon was of half a mind to just say fuck it, and to bounce. But the Todder had promised him a handsome payoff, and he needed to get something for all his troubles before he went back on the road, wasn’t going to put in all this hard work and risk his cover only to leave with diddly-squat, fuck that.

  Meanwhile, he was left to track down the little deaf bitch on his own. Doing the dirty work yet again.

  If Billy were alive, at least Leon could have sent him out into the great wet and muddy outdoors to find her. But Billy had gone bye-bye forever, too bad, so sad.

  With his flashlight, Leon checked the neighboring houses for signs of the little munchkin. He looked inside the Oldsmobile his homeboy had arrived in and parked at the corner.

  A Cutlass Supreme. Like his old ride. Too funny.

  But the munchkin wasn’t in there, either.

  She was only nine years old and deaf as Helen Keller. How far away could she have run on those itty-bitty legs?

  He circled back to the safe house.

  There was enough forestland beyond the lot to serve as the setting for a National Geographic program. Could the little one have gone back there?

  Why not take a look see?

  He crashed into the forest, knocking aside twigs and batting away shrubs, heedless of the commotion he was causing. The bitch was deaf. What difference did it make how much noise he made?

  He swung the beam across the undergrowth.

  In a fall of weeds, not far from the house, he found a tiny pink house slipper.

  He rang up the Todder.

  “What’s up?” Todd asked. “I’m maybe five, ten minutes from there.”

  “If you wanna know where I am, I’ll be doing my wilderness tracker act,” Leon said, scanning the trees ahead. “The little bitch’s out here in the woods.”

  71

  Bent forward, Corey worked at picking the ratchet around his wrist. It was a bit more awkward since he had to use his left hand and he was right-handed, but with the experience he’d gained from opening the other cuff, it shouldn’t take him long to get free.

  Simone had gone to the bedroom door, tried the knob, found it locked. She pounded it with a muttered curse. “How’re we going to get out of here?”

  “One thing at a time. Give me a minute.”

  Sweat dripped into his eyes. She came to him and, using a napkin she dug out of a bag, blotted the perspiration from his brow, a tender gesture that surprised him considering the shameful stuff he’d told her.

  “Thanks,” he said. He added, “Thanks for being you, I know you’re angry-”

  “You have no idea how pissed off I am, Corey,” she said, jaw rigid. “No damn clue. So don’t go there, all right?”

  He lowered his gaze to the cuff, and the screwdriver.

  She touched his arm. In a softer voice, she said, “But. . I’m not leaving you. I’m not going to throw away the best ten years of my life. You’re my husband, the father of my child. I have to find it in myself to forgive you.”

  He looked up at her, emotion squeezing his throat. “Thank you. That means everything to me. Somehow, I’ll make it up to you.”

  Her eyes glistened. “I’ll make peace with this, Corey. I’ll do that. But you have to forgive yourself, too, if you really want to grow past this. I know how hard you can be on yourself.”

  He thought about the advice Otis had given him. Sometimes, we must forgive ourselves for our sinful acts before we are capable of accepting abso
lution from others.

  “That might be the toughest part,” Corey said.

  “We’ll work through it all,” she said. “We’ll go to the police together. We’ll tell them the truth, about everything.”

  “And if I have to serve time?”

  “I don’t want to think about it.” She exhaled through clenched teeth. “But if it comes to that, I’ll be there for you. So will Jada. You know she’ll love you no matter what. You’ll always be Daddy.”

  Tears fluttered in his eyes. He had never in his life wished so strongly that he had made different decisions. He might earn a twenty-year prison sentence, but how many more years would pass before he could truly forgive himself for his errors? Before he could come to terms with the pain that he had caused his family and so many others?

  He didn’t know, but he only hoped that he got the chance to do better, to make up for all his wrongs.

  He took the napkin from Simone and used it to dry his eyes. Teeth gritted in concentration, he worked the screwdriver against the ratchet. In a minute or so, he finally, got the teeth up. Felt that wonderful soaring release as the cuff fell open.

  He tossed the handcuffs aside. Simone helped him to his feet.

  “We’ve got more work cut out for us.” He nodded toward the door. “There’s a thick piece of wood braced across the other side.”

  Together, they approached the doorway. He hammered the door with his fist. It rattled slightly in the jamb.

  “Think we can break it down?” Simone asked.

  “Since the door’s set up to open outward, I’m pretty sure Leon hung it himself. I don’t think he knew what the hell he was doing. He’s no contractor.”

  “I kicked at it earlier. See?” She pointed out the scuff marks near the center. “It didn’t give, obviously.”

  “I wasn’t here to help you then. I’ve kicked down a door before.”

  He saw a question in her eyes.

  “I locked myself out of my apartment once,” he said quickly. “Kicking down the door was the only way I could get in.”

  She blushed. “Sorry. Stupid assumption.”

  “The door is weakest around the lock,” he said, indicating the spot. “I’ll boost you up on my back. Then you can use both your feet to hammer away. A few times should break it, and then we can both ram against it to knock away that board on the other side. It’s resting against just a few bent nails.”