by E. Z. Rinsky
I squeeze my thigh under the table to confirm it’s still there. I’m sure that forty-eight number he asked for was no accident—he figured out that that was the maximum Sampson would be able to get for him. So it’s certainly plausible that Sampson has another four lying around.
The black pupils of Oliver’s eyes go still, trained on me. I toss the user manual onto the table.
“I have the other four million in certificates. I took them from Sampson. Here’s one of the investor materials included when he bought them. Explains the legal limits of unregistered stocks, rights and so on, including how illegal it is to transfer or sell them. And there’s a place where Sampson had to sign for reading all this info on page twenty. Clearly shows that he purchased the full eight million.”
His eyes narrow. I slide the manual toward him: Take a look.
“Obviously I didn’t bring the four million with me,” I say, trying to stop my voice from wavering. “I’m not that much of a bonehead.”
Becky interrupts, bursting through the swinging doors, bearing a heavy tray that I can’t believe her wispy frame can support.
I welcome the distraction, but Oliver doesn’t look away from me as she unloads a charred steak, an extremely healthy side of sour cream, and a refill of greasy fries.
Oliver doesn’t touch the papers. Instead unrolls his green cloth napkin and tucks it into the collar of his paisley shirt, and smiles at Becky.
“It looks delicious, thank you,” he says. “I love you.”
Becky smiles and then bends over and pecks his cheek.
“I love you too,” she whispers.
My stomach roils as he reaches up and strokes her wispy white hair.
“Did you forget something?” he asks.
“The ice water,” she says softly. “Sorry.”
“No problem, but hurry. It was hot out there. Especially when you’re wearing as many layers as I was,” he laughs.
Becky gives a cursory smile, then trudges back to the kitchen.
“Well, Frank,” he says, as he takes a dollop of sour cream and swabs it over the top of his French fries. “Guilty as charged. I’d love nothing more than another four million dollars.” He takes a nibble of steak, then a few more fries. “So?” he asks, as he repeatedly dunks a single french fry, until it’s little more than a delivery mechanism for a huge glop of sour cream. “How am I going to get this money?”
“You let the three of us go. I’ll go get the money and bring it back to you.”
He rolls his eyes.
“That sounds a little dubious.”
I force myself to stay silent. Wait for him to make a counteroffer.
Oliver focuses on his steak for a moment, cutting off a blackened bite, stabbing it with his fork, and rubbing it in gravy.
“Is it true?” he asks. I nearly lose control of my bladder. “Do you really play backgammon?”’
“I’m sorry?”
“When you were in my office on Wednesday, you said you were a backgammon player. Is that true?”
“Yes,” I say. “I play.”
“Me too,” he says. “What I like so much about the game, unlike other gambling games like poker, is that there are no secrets. There are no hole cards. No informational disparity. Both players can see precisely what’s happening. The skill is in how you perceive what’s right in front of you.” He cocks his head at me. “I’m a very good backgammon player,” he says, and smiles. “And I’m not entirely sure I believe you.”
My stomach goes cold.
“It wasn’t hard to get them,” I say, heart screaming. “I was staying in his house. He had them in his office.”
“Mmmhmm . . .” He crams a handful of fries into his mouth and chews thoughtfully. “Yeah, I just can’t shake the feeling that you’re wasting my time here, Frank. I think we might be done here.”
“I’m telling the truth,” I say. And point over his shoulder to the homemade collars hanging on the coat rack. “Put one of those collars on me and send me out to get the money. I’ll have to come back here for you to unlock me.”
He raises a bushy eyebrow in surprise.
“Interesting,” he says. Mulls this for a second. I hope he’s thinking that he has nothing to lose. That I’m even dumber than he thought.
Maybe I am.
“Alright,” he says.
He stands up from the booth and turns his back to me. He’s wearing jean cutoffs under his unbuttoned robe. I search for the outline of a set of keys in his back pockets as he walks to the coat rack near the diner “entrance”–in this recreation the glass door leads only to the warm evening. Don’t see any bulge in his pants. Off the rack, he picks up one of his homemade collars.
Returns to the table and plunks it down. It’s a variant without the heretic’s fork, but the lock mechanism appears to be the same as the ones Courtney and Mindy are wearing: those two holes on either side of the collar.
“There’s no prongs,” he explains. “Wouldn’t want you to accidentally kill yourself before you get the money.”
“And if somehow I don’t get the money, Courtney and Mindy will end up like Rico?”
Oliver pauses for a moment, then shakes his head slowly.
“No, no, no . . .” he says. “They should be so lucky. What I did for Rico, that was an honor for him. He did more or less what I wanted. I immortalized Rico. He’ll live on forever, on the twenty-second floor of this tower. Those people downstairs . . . their deaths will be strictly sacrificial. To show the one we once called God how delicate his creations are. To show that, without my great kindness—” He’s starting to sound upset. “Without my love for you, death is a finality that the one we once called God cannot prevent.” He licks some grease off his lips. “Put the collar on and go. You should hurry. It’s only a matter of time before they simply won’t be able to stop themselves from falling asleep, or their neck muscles spasm and give way. I’d give the girl another three or four hours.”
I take a deep breath, maybe the last one for a while.
“Alright.”
“Mmm . . .” he says. He does something with his mouth. Makes a weird kind of tic that attracts my eyes, and I realize the collar has been opened, and I missed how he did it. But he’s holding the open collar in his delicate hands, and there are no keys in sight. Did he somehow put them back in his cloak already? Some sleight of hand?
“Here Frank,” he says, offering the collar to me like a gift. “Put it on yourself.”
The way he’s holding it, in those tender little drawing hands of his, I see it. The pinky on his left hand is a little crooked. There are no keys. Those two holes are for his uniquely shaped, particularly small fifth fingers.
I take the collar, and hold it up to the harsh fluorescent light. Pretend to be deliberating.
I need his fingers. I don’t need the rest of him.
“Frank?” he says gently. “Go ahead and put it on. It’s alright.”
I drop the collar and snatch up my Glock. Fire three times, straight at his forehead. All three miss to the left, shatter the window at the far end of the dining room. His face is untouched. Warm air gushes in through the hole in the glass.
He smiles strangely at me, like he feels a little sorry for me.
Blood pounding in my ears.
What I just saw is impossible. It must be some kind of illusion. He’s using mirrors . . .
Hand trembling, I empty the chamber. Two more shots aimed straight at his chest. Both open up holes in the green upholstery of the faux-leather booth. Little puffs of insulation. He stares at me. The whites of his eyes are like so pure, so shiny. Like an untouched snow.
“So there’s no money?” he says.
I drop the empty gun.
“How . . . ?” I say, struggling to find my voice.
“I did nothing,” he says. “Maybe the gun is miscalibrated. Or, more likely, you subconsciously don’t actually want to kill me. All I know is that I’ve seen the prophecy. And that’s not how I die, no matte
r how hard you try.”
He’s messing with my head, somehow. Provoke him. Make him careless.
“My money is on a pill overdose,” I say. “After misreading the instructions.” I gesture to the papers on the table. “This is the user manual for the sink in the kitchen. I recommend Hooked on Phonics.”
His face goes beet red, and in a snap second he’s out of the booth. I swipe at him with the metal collar, but his speed is astounding for his roly-poly build. Before I can raise the collar for another parry he has both hands curled around my neck. He hurls me out of my seat and the shiny white tile rises to meet my cheek, jarring a tooth loose. I instinctively roll over onto my back so I can protect myself with my legs. He removes a dagger from the inside pocket of his cloak and holds it blade-down. I shove backwards just as he swipes at my groin. He misses the goods, but connects with my right thigh, tearing a strip out of the khaki pants and leaving a bright red gash. I don’t feel the cut. Too much adrenaline. He stabs downward again. I catch his wrist with my right hand, and he kicks me in the head.
My vision goes black for a half second, but I keep my grip on his wrist. He kicks again, connecting with my temple, and then he abandons the knife, throws off his cloak—like it’s time to get serious—and flips me over onto my stomach.
The white tile under my head smells of bleach. I hear a snap somewhere above me. Vicks has ripped his leather belt out of his jean shorts and fastened it around my neck. My face is pressed into the floor. I try to flip over and he kicks me in the back of the head while he tightens, choking the life out of me. I hear him grunting, both with exertion and satisfaction.
My vision goes bright, and then entirely white. I feel my limbs spasming of their own volition, flapping helplessly against the floor. Feels like my chest is being crushed by a piano, then like I’m at the bottom of the ocean.
The whole world is shrinking. Black creeping into the edges. A very nasty gurgling sound that I’m vaguely aware is coming from my own mouth. Can’t feel anything past my elbows—
A sharp clank and the belt around my neck goes slack.
I flop over onto my back, wheezing, trying to gulp down air, can’t get it down fast enough.
Oliver Vicks is on his knees beside me, stunned, Becky standing over both of us clutching an empty cast-iron pot.
The air I manage to suck in is so sweet that I gasp for more—breathe in too quickly—and start to retch. Oliver recovers, shoots to his feet, and throws Becky to the floor.
“You whore!” he screams. “You goddamn whore!”
He kicks her in the gut and she whines.
“After all I’ve done for you!”
Knives in the kitchen.
I roll toward the kitchen on my belly like a writhing maggot, leaving a trail of blood from my thigh, laboring for breath. I’m just inside the swinging doors when he catches up with me. Grabs me from behind by my hair and throws me forward into a metal cabinet. Some sharp corner catches me in the side.
I fall forward onto my stomach, face-to-face with a drain in the middle of the kitchen floor.
He grabs my hair again, this time pulling me up, and then slamming me onto one of the prep tables, pushing my cheek into steel. A cutting board. In my peripheral I see him select a Chinese chef knife. See the glint of its edge. He pushes my skull in harder, to expose the back of my neck more. I’m a turkey on the log.
I flail, and kick backwards, catching something soft. His grip on my head loosens enough for me to flip around. For a moment we’re eye to eye, his blade high over his shoulder, coming down, poised to embed itself in my sternum. I push off the table, move in closer to him to avoid the blade, and wrap my foot around his ankle to trip him backwards. The only move I remember from elementary school Judo. As his balance shifts away from me, I move into a half embrace, flip him around, and shove him forward, submerging his face in the oil in the deep fryer.
A massive sizzle, and flecks fly up and slap against my face. The hand holding down the back of his head is burning just from proximity to the grease.
There’s a horrible smell, burning hair mixed with falafel. His body convulses. My hand is burning so badly from the heat that I can’t keep it there, and I have to release.
I stumble backwards as Oliver’s hunched form rises from the fryer.
I behold him from behind as he emits a gurgle that’s worse than any scream. He flails blindly and turns to face me. His shirt is quickly eroding, and his face and chest look like they’re covered in purple boils the size of plump cherries. I see that burning flesh has congealed over his eyes. His words are stifled by a mouth nearly sealed shut.
“I can’t see,” he says.
I take another step back, out of the range of his groping hands. His face is slick with the oil that’s still consuming his flesh. His lips are swollen and look like slabs of pink rubber.
He whines a sound that I think is “Becky.”
She’s here, at the swinging doors, watching. She emits a gasp of horror.
At the sound of her voice, Oliver Vicks goes into a frenzy, swinging his hands like he’s swatting away a horde of invisible flies. He staggers toward Becky, navigating with something like sonar.
“My queen,” he groans, through a mouth half-sealed by melted flesh. And then he reaches her and locks her in an embrace. Pushes her into the wall and grabs at her breast. “My queen . . .” I think he’s sobbing.
I’ve lost a lot of blood from my thigh. I can hardly feel my hands, and my first attempt to push myself off the freezer, toward him, fails badly.
“Becky, my queen,” he cries—his voice warbled and tremulous. He’s pushing into her, like he’s trying to absorb her into him. “Bind me! Bind me!”
I find my footing. I make the mistake of glancing down at my thigh wound. It’s much worse than I initially thought.
“The last two books . . . They’re for us Becky.” His head is between her breasts, he’s screaming into her chest. She’s paralyzed by shock, as he grips varying parts of her with increasingly fervent desperation, like he knows it’s the last time. “Bound together, forever on the top floors.”
I cross the length of the kitchen, more tripping than running, propelling myself just by leaning forward, only pure rage keeping me on my feet.
I fall on Oliver from behind, grab his half-burned scalp and take him to the floor with me. I have him in a headlock with one arm. His face, deformed and shiny with oil, is like a nest of pink larvae, or sludge that will someday congeal into lunch meat. He doesn’t resist as I tighten the chokehold, and he gradually, quietly, stops moving.
I drop his head and shove his body off of me. Staring up at the ceiling, trying to breathe. My hands are soaked in stuff I don’t even want to think about.
Becky crouches next to his body, as if in disbelief. I’m so light-headed.
Can’t go to sleep.
I need to unlock Courtney and Mindy, and get myself to a hospital.
“Becky,” I groan. “Help me.”
She wraps her tiny hands around my chest and tries to pull me up.
I take the help, gripping her boney shoulder to stand up. I glance down at what used to be Oliver Vicks and wish I hadn’t. There’s messes and there’s messes. Someone is gonna conduct the post-mortem from hell tonight.
“I need the sharpest knife in the kitchen,” I tell her. “A cheese knife maybe. And ice.” She hands me a cleaver. Even better. I kneel at the mess and—pretty damn near desensitized to gore at this point—chop off both his pinkies. Fold them into a bag of ice and push myself back to my feet.
The wound on my leg is deep and increasingly worrisome. I’m losing a lot of blood and am way past woozy. I pull off my shirt, and wrap it around the wound tightly to stop the blood loss and maybe help it start to clot.
“The stairs,” I groan. “I can’t make it down those stairs.”
She shakes her head.
“There’s an elevator.” She takes my hand, and leads me through a door in the back of the kitchen, wh
at in the original layout would have probably have led outside. This one, however, opens into a birdcage elevator. Twenty-four unmarked buttons. I hit the one on the bottom and nothing happens. Becky points to two circular holes beneath the panel of numbers.
I put the icepack on the elevator floor, unfold it and remove the fingers. She takes them from me—I guess she’s seen how these work—straightens them out and plugs them into the two holes simultaneously. She’s about to hit button for the ground floor—
“Wait,” I say. Stumble back through the kitchen, past what’s left of Sophnot, through the swinging doors into the dining room. Snatch the silk bag with the books off the bar, sling it over my shoulder, and return to the elevator.
“We might all be able to retire off of these babies,” I say. “Let’s go.”
She hits the bottom button and we begin our grinding descent.
My throat is bruised, and my thigh is throbbing as the adrenaline reserves bottom out. The dry night air as we pass through the unfinished floors feels good. I blink down at my lower body and hardly recognize it beneath the biblical quantities of blood. I think at least the bleeding has slowed under the pressure of the makeshift bandage. Becky folds the fingers back into the icepack. Everything smells like grease.
There’s a thud, which takes me a moment to realize is the elevator coming to a halt. I’m lying on the floor of the cage. I just want to sleep.
“Come on.” Becky’s ghostly face glows in the purple light. She’s holding Oliver’s white hooded robe and wax mask. She took them down with her. “Put these on. Come on.”
She tries, feebly, to lift me to my feet. The blind leading the blind.
I crawl up the grated wall of the cage and let Becky slip the white robe on over my bare chest.
She opens the elevator door and takes my hand, leading me under the canopy of red and blue pipes. She has no trouble traversing the disorienting terrain, pulling me along like a sled dog. The space seems so much more ordinary than it did before. I wonder idly if I’d imagined the groaning, the stone pool . . .
At the exit, Becky slips something cold and stiff onto my face and secures it with an elastic band. The mask. She slings my arm around her shoulder to support me—a knobby walking stick—and then guides me out onto the platform.
