Cal remained silent. Carver looked at him for a moment.
“So you’re telling me, Cal, the one person who knew is dead.”
“Yes.”
“Something this important to Lebell, and he only told one person?”
Cal nodded.
Another pause, Carver studying his friend’s face.
It was Cal who broke this silence.
“What are you doing?” he said. “With these people? What are you doing?”
“What I have to do. To get myself out of the hole I’m in. The hole I got put in when the town wouldn’t let me tear this fucking place down. Let’s just say ‘these people,’ as you call them, know how to reward a favor. They came to me, told me about Lebell, what he used to do, that he was a fugitive, said they’d help me if I helped them. I figured there were certain men in town who’d be pretty pleased when they learned I got rid of our cock-happy friend. The kind of men who could open certain doors for me, you know. So it was a win-win all around. Who could walk away from a deal like that?”
Carver leaned back in his seat, looked at Cal for a moment more, then said, “I know he was like a big brother to you, Cal. I know he was like getting back the brother you lost. But don’t forget who took you in when your real brother was killed. Don’t forget who gave you a job and a place to live when you needed it, when you had nothing and no one. I think I deserve a little loyalty, too, don’t you? Help me help them, and we all win. Don’t you understand that? There’s still a way for you to walk away from this.”
“I’m telling you, the one person who knew is dead. You guys win.”
“You’re certain Lebell didn’t tell anyone else?”
“I only know what he told me. He said she was the only one who knew. He had a lawyer retained, but Angel was the only one who knew.”
Carver nodded, then stood up and said, “Is that good enough?”
Cal realized quickly that his boss wasn’t talking to him but rather someone else, someone standing behind the chair.
Another light came on, a bare bulb overhead. Yet more pain for Cal’s eyes. Looking around, he saw the chair Messing had been bound to. It was an office chair, just like the one he was in. The detective, though, wasn’t anywhere to be seen.
Then, on the floor nearby, Cal saw a body wrapped up in a clear plastic tarp.
Through the plastic, blurred by its layers, was Messing’s battered face.
Staring, dead.
Cal looked away. Tierno was standing beside him.
“Maybe he’s lying, maybe he isn’t,” he said to Carver. “We’ll know either way in a little bit.”
Carver nodded, looked down at Cal, and said, “I’m sorry, Cal. I really am. I tried to help you.” He took a breath, let it out. “Man, this is going to suck for you,” he concluded. “Bad.”
“I need something to eat,” Tierno said. “C’mon, let’s go.”
Tierno was climbing the stairs, hadn’t even looked at Cal. Carver turned finally and followed the FBI agent. The door was closed, but the lock didn’t turn, and the lights remained on.
Cal tried to squirm free, but this motion, desperate and futile, only served to set his broken hand on fire, and he gave up.
There was nothing to do now but wait.
Eve was sitting on the edge of the bed, looking toward the window, when she heard footsteps coming down the hallway.
Janssen’s footsteps, she’d know them anywhere. He opened the door. A little bit of light spilled in from the hallway, laying an oblong shape across the floor.
“How do you feel?” Janssen said.
She looked at him, smiled, and nodded. Fine.
“It’s time,” he said.
She stood and picked up her mechanic’s bag. She felt nausea, needed to concentrate to maintain her balance, but hid this from him. “What do we need to know?”
“If everything he has told us is true.”
“And after?” she said.
“No loose ends.”
So, a torture and a kill.
“We in the clear?”
Janssen nodded. “It looks that way.”
“So this is it?”
“If he’s told us the truth, yeah.”
So, her last torture and kill.
“Where will we go first?”
They would, he’d promised, be free to make use of his wealth when all this was done. Free to travel, free to live. No more hiding, no more jobs, no reason for them to ever be apart again.
“Wherever you want to go,” Janssen said.
“I’m thinking Amsterdam.”
“You’ll like it there.”
“I want to smoke hashish for days. Just forget everything. Erase it all and start with a clean slate.”
“Then let’s take care of this,” he said.
She nodded, smiled. “Okay, let’s.”
Following him down the long hallway, Eve lost the vision in her left eye. Suddenly, as if she had closed it. But by the time she reached the ornate stairs it was back.
In the kitchen, Tierno and the other man, Carver—the man who owned this building, had stocked her room for her and provided the Ford sedan—were waiting.
Carver looked at Eve, his eyes quickly moving down to the canvas bag in her hand. “I think I might wait outside,” he said.
“Why don’t you go and get us something to eat,” Tierno said to him. His tone was casual.
“Yeah, all right,” Carver said.
“Any good pizza out here?”
“Depends. What’s good to you?”
“Greek.”
“Yeah, there’s a place in Bridgehampton, actually—”
Janssen told them to shut up, that they weren’t out of this yet, and that no one left till it was done. The men instantly went silent, though, Eve noticed, the FBI agent’s demeanor didn’t change.
No respect for the work, Eve thought. She’d gotten that sense from him the first time they had met. A man interested only in shortcuts, arrogant and devoid of patience. She felt sorry for his wife, had even indulged herself, as she had waited for days in her room upstairs, in fantasies of going to work on him.
Janssen led Eve past them and to the basement door.
He opened it for her, and she looked down the stairs, wincing at the bright light.
Hiding from all these men the effort required, she took the first step downward.
Thirteen
He heard her at first, moving down the stairs, and then, as she approached the bottom step, he began to see her.
Feet and legs—boots, black jeans—and then the rest of her, dark sweater tight on a long torso. It was a gradual unveiling during which his heart began to race and, despite the cold around him, he began to sweat.
She was, when he finally was able to see her face, exactly what Lebell had said she would be: beautiful. Stunning, regal—even the bandage on the side of her head couldn’t take away from that.
Walking toward Cal, slowly, she looked to him like a woman who had just emerged from a deep sleep. Her mouth was turned up by half-smile—a contented smile—and there was a twinkle in her eyes.
She was carrying a green canvas bag, which, once she reached him, she placed on the cement floor. Pushing aside the chair Carver had sat in, she stood over Cal, looking down at him, saying nothing.
Finally, she got down on both knees, just a foot from him, and unzipped and opened the bag. She was, as she did this, still looking at him, maintaining a kind of lover’s eye contact. Lingering, intense, intimate.
“It’s Cal, right?” she said.
He heard the same accent he’d heard on the phone two nights ago. Her voice was low and calm, like before, but her tone was more friendly now, more casual.
Cal said nothing.
She took in a breath, through her nose, slow and deep, and waited for a response to her question. When it became obvious that she wasn’t going to get one—this realization only took a few seconds—she let the breath out, then, her smile growing just a litt
le bit more, nodded decisively and said, “Okay. So let’s get started, then.”
He watched as she laid out a hand towel and began to place the contents of the canvas bag upon it one by one.
A revolver was first. Pulling the release pin located under the thick barrel, she pushed the hinged cylinder from the frame, confirming that the weapon was loaded. Replacing the cylinder with an expert flip of her wrist, she laid the gun down.
Next was a pair of large scissors, and, after that, vise-grip pliers.
The last item she removed from the bag was a cell phone, and Cal recognized it immediately.
Heather’s old phone. With her new number stored in its memory. One of the few numbers, in fact.
This phone was his only means of contacting her, since he didn’t know what motel she and her sister had run to. More than that, though, it would be a way for Janssen to contact her as well, should he for some reason decide to do so.
Cal wanted to step on the thing, felt an overwhelming urge to smash it to pieces with his bare foot.
Like his arms, though, his ankles were held by duct tape to the chair, so there was no chance of getting at the phone.
“It’s amazing,” the woman said then, “the history of inflicting pain on a person.” Her voice was like a coo. “There have been so many elaborate ways over the years, so many machines constructed for that purpose, and yet it is the simple methods that remain the best. In the Dark Ages torturers used to focus on the hands and the feet, not only because our extremities are made up of small, easily broken bones and nerve clusters, but because without the use of them, you simply couldn’t survive. With beaten feet, you couldn’t walk, had to crawl, and with mangled hands, you couldn’t feed yourself, never mind apply your trade, tend crops. The best torment is always a combination of physical and psychological. I came across in my studies a method that really intrigued me. It involved binding a person’s fingers together tightly and forcing arrowheads between them. Genius, really, because all you need is some twine or strips of leather and a single arrow. Easy enough to come by back when this technique was devised, right? And you could do it all day and the subject wouldn’t even come close to dying. Apply some pressure to those cuts and they would close, so you could control the blood loss. And then, if you wanted, you could start over again, make new cuts or just open up the old ones.”
She paused, then continued. “So, you have the physical pain but also the psychological element of knowing that, with each finger that is mutilated, your day-to-day life will only get more and more difficult. Who wouldn’t confess to stop that, right?”
Cal said nothing. His heart was pounding so hard he almost couldn’t breathe.
“Today,” she said, “we’re going to be working on your hand. I understand one is already broken, so we’ll focus on that to start, see where that gets us.”
Still kneeling, she reached for the oversized scissors, did so without severing eye contact. Her half-smile didn’t for an instant diminish.
She saw the look on his face when she picked up the scissors.
“Cutting off pieces of you is a last resort,” she assured him. “I’m pretty certain we’ll know whether you’re telling the truth or not before it gets to that, though. These I use for something else.”
She began to cut his jeans, from the cuff of the right leg up to his thigh, and from there, carefully, all the way to the waistband. Then she did the same with the left leg, again all the way up to the waistband. With a bit of doing, she pulled his jeans off him, then cut his underwear, removing that, too.
His shirt was next—one cut up the center, then one up each sleeve. She cut with care, but when it came time to remove the shredded garments, she wasn’t shy about manhandling him.
Strong hands, powerful arms flexing. Within a minute, he was naked.
Kneeling still, she moved closer to him, to the point where her shoulders were squarely between his knees. She was just inches from his groin now. Laying the scissors back down on the towel, she picked up the pliers. During this her eyes shifted once, and she looked at his manhood. A quick glance, and then, her smile unbroken, she looked at his eyes again.
Sitting back on her heels, she rested her elbows on his thighs, holding the pliers with both hands as though it were a wishbone.
She wanted him to see it, get a good look at it. She wanted, no doubt, to call attention to his utter vulnerability—her position between his knees, his exposed genitals just inches away.
“It works better if I tell you first what I’m going to do,” she said. “Normally, I’d start by crushing the first joint of your little finger, then move on to the next finger, and then the next one, and so on. After that I’d go back to your little finger again and work on the second joint, move on from there. That’s eight fingers and two thumbs, two joints in the fingers and one in the thumbs. And when I say crush, I mean it. I grind each joint to splinters. The little ones I have actually turned to dust. But, like I said, since your hand is already broken, I’ll just go ahead and make use of that. For starters, anyway.”
She placed the pliers in her back pocket, then put her palms on his thighs and pushed herself up. Rising to her feet, she stood up straight but seemed, suddenly, to lose her balance. Closing her eyes, she held still for a moment, or tried to, ended up, despite her efforts, wavering just a little.
Cal watched her. After a moment, she opened her eyes again, took a breath, then another, eventually regaining her composure.
Whatever that spell had been exactly, it was behind her now.
Looking down at him again, displaying that same almost loving smile, she bent forward without warning and pressed her palm on top of his hand, leaning all her weight upon it, crushing it against the wooden arm of the chair.
He screamed and flailed against the restraints but got nowhere. She held the pressure for several seconds, then let it up just a bit, only to press down again, even harder than before. She repeated that procedure about half a dozen times—pressure, relief, then more pressure—before actually stopping.
“That hurt, didn’t it?” she said. She made no effort to hide the fact that she was pleased with his reaction so far. “And to think, we’ve only just begun.”
“Please,” Cal said.
“Did you tell us the truth?”
“Yes.”
She went at it again, this time grinding her thumb into one of the broken bones itself, twisting back and forth as she drove into it with all her strength.
Another scream broke from Cal, tearing his dry throat as it rose to his mouth. He flailed again against his restraints, jumped as if a current of electricity were moving through him. His muscles flexed, every one, but no matter how hard he tried he couldn’t get away from the pain.
As before, she pressed down, then released, only to press down again, harder. Many more times, though, this time. He lost count when they got up to around a dozen. After that, all he could do was flail and twitch, wait for it to end, if it was ever going to end.
Then, finally, it was over.
She stood up straight and looked down at him, giving him a moment. A glance at his genitals, then back to his eyes.
“One man actually got an erection during his session. Can you believe that?”
Cal said nothing. Slumped in the chair, he tried to breathe. Tears had welled in his eyes. There was nothing he could do about that.
She was quickly becoming a blur towering over him.
“Have you told us the truth, Cal?” she said.
“Yes. I’ve told you everything I know. I don’t know anything more.”
She reached for her back pocket then, removed the pliers, folded her arms across her stomach.
“Have you told us the truth?” she repeated.
This time, however, she slurred her words.
There was no pretending that didn’t happen. Blinking his eyes, Cal looked up at her. Something was wrong, he could see that. Her eyes fluttered, and she wavered again.
“Have you
—” She stopped short; the slurring had become worse.
Leaning down before he could even respond, she drove the blunt ends of the metal pliers handles into the same already broken bone.
Two points of pain this time, and no fake relief, just a steady application of pressure.
He was screaming now through gritted teeth, expected them at any moment to shatter under the pressure of his clenched jaw—somehow, through the chaos and fear and pain, this thought existed. She let this session go on for the longest time yet, maybe a good half minute.
Agony with no promise of an end, and an endless supply of screams interrupted only by a few gasping pleas for her to stop.
She ended this assault, at last, as suddenly as she had started it.
Pausing, she watched him, then decided quickly, “This just isn’t painful enough, I guess.”
No slurring this time, but she still sounded strange, her words drawn out and monotone, as though she were a deaf person trying to speak.
Cal blinked the tears from his eyes, or tried to; he could still, for the most part, only see a blur of a woman above him. He watched as she knelt down again, fitting her shoulders between his knees once more.
She touched the little finger of his broken hand, and even the slight movement her contact caused set off a spasm of sharp pain.
“How will you work,” she said, “with hands that don’t?”
There was definitely something wrong. Her voice sounded even stranger than it had sounded seconds ago. Again, Cal blinked his eyes, tried to clear his vision. After several attempts he was able to see her face with a degree of clarity, and what he saw made no sense at all.
One side was drooping, the corner of her mouth looking like it was being tugged downward by an invisible string.
His eyes quickly went to the bandage on her temple. From his wrestling years he knew enough about the dangers of head injuries, and the potential aftermath of any kind of brain trauma, to realize what was happening.
She was stroking out.
Struggling to maintain her focus, she took hold of his little finger, brought the pliers to it, and was lining up the first knuckle between its ridged jaws when her hand went limp and the tool dropped to the floor.
[2010] The Violet Hour Page 21
