Darcy had been woken by a voice whispering in her ear, so close the lips grazed the earring that had been hanging from her lobe for longer than she could remember. She’d been dreaming of lips, but not these.
“Wake up, miss. Don’t say a word. Time to go.”
She could feel and hear Rufus fumbling with the chain that connected her handcuffs to the mystery anchor in the center of the room. She felt a sudden slackening and inhaled deeply.
She whispered, “What about the handcuffs?”
“I don’t have the key, and the guy that does won’t be interested in handing ’em over.”
“My eyes—”
“The goggles stay on for now. No more talking or I’ll change my mind.”
A large hand gripping both of hers. The crickets told her it was night. The lack of other sounds told her they were the only two awake.
He pulled her behind him. The floorboards were silent beneath his feet but piano keys beneath hers; he seemed to know the lucky spots, but in her blindness she was missing them. Twice her feet struck low notes and Rufus stopped, tensing to hear if anyone might stir at the sound. Then onward. It felt so strange to move forward, this linear trajectory so unlike the circles she had orbited around her anchor these many days. Her heels seemed curved from her detention, her body stubbornly listing fore and aft.
“Stairs,” he warned in a whisper. She was disconcerted at how off balance she felt. Blind and bound, she could feel the universe shifting and spinning, gravity pulling at more directions than made sense, and she feared she was on the verge of falling. She thought of all the things Jason had escaped from and told herself that surely some of his magic had rubbed off on her.
Once they reached the first floor, Rufus seemed to feel a surge of confidence, or perhaps desperation. Her hands were yanked farther from her body and she raced to catch up. She heard the muted sifting of air through a screen door and suddenly she was outside. The creaking of a porch, but this time he didn’t stiffen or stop, and instead forgot to warn her of more stairs. Her right foot swung up into the void, the heel landing too hard on a lower step. Rufus! She wanted to yell at him but her jaw snapped shut when it hit against something, his shoulder perhaps, and before she could fall to the ground she felt hands clamping at her sides. The palms and fingertips seemed to linger at her waist as he righted her.
Rufus hadn’t told her freedom was coming, though she, of course, had hoped for it. Confused and half-asleep, she was responding to it as best she could.
She heard an engine purr to life. A door quietly announced itself as the driver emerged, the molars of a gravel driveway grinding against one another as he walked toward them.
“All right,” Rufus’s nameless conspirator said. “Point her and let’s go.”
Rufus’s hands were on her shoulders now, and they rotated her to the right.
“When I let go, miss, you start walking forward. Once you hear us driving away, you can take off the goggles.”
“But not before then,” Nameless reiterated in a more threatening tone.
“Rufus, you can’t expect me to—”
“Lady,” Nameless interrupted, “we’ve put ourselves out for you far enough. Any lip and we’ll tie you to the porch for the other guys to find.”
“You’ll be okay, miss,” Rufus said, seemingly regretting his partner’s tone. “We’re going one way, and you’re going another. You just have to walk a few hundred yards to the road.”
Darcy breathed for a moment. After days of yearning for freedom, the idea of being separated from Rufus and his calm, sweetly stupid voice was, of all things, terrifying.
“And, uh, I’d appreciate you putting in a good word for me with Jason and Whit.”
“I don’t even know your name.” She almost laughed.
He gently squeezed one of her hands in lieu of a farewell. Then the gravel munching again, and two car doors closing so quietly it seemed the vehicle itself was holding its breath.
Darcy felt paralyzed, the removal of one cage leading only to the imposition of a more psychological one. The sudden availability of options befuddled her.
The car pulled away. Go, she told herself. Hesitantly she stepped one foot forward, then the next. The sky did not collapse upon her. Alarms did not sound. She did not wake on the chaise bathed in sweat. So, more steps, and faster. The dizziness she’d felt on the stairway was magnified, the frightening emptiness around her combining with her blindness. She let the fear power her forward, and soon she was running.
She had never been terribly agile, and days of inactivity had turned her leg muscles to tar. She was breathing heavily and already her chest burned—so many insufficient meals had left her half-starved and listless. She wanted to lie down. The earth felt so soft beneath her feet.
No—run, faster. Her gait was awkward with her cuffed hands, not to mention her narrow dress. Thank God she’d worn flat shoes, though they were nearly slipping from her heels. Mosquitoes pinched at her ankles and calves, a swarm of them. Or was that dry grass?
The car was gone now—she could remove the goggles. Hallelujah. The width of her handcuffs was less than that of her skull, so she needed to attend to one side of the goggles at a time. She slid her fingers beneath the elastic on the left and pulled up, pain flooding the softness above her ear as the vise was released. She did the same with the other side, dropped the goggles and blinked.
Nothing. Why couldn’t she see? Darkness, nighttime, or perhaps only fuzziness, residual loss of sight that would take hours to blink away. She rubbed at her eyes, which hurt. But it seemed to help, a little. Was she crying? For God’s sake, not now, not until you’re safe.
She walked quickly. Her knees twitched and her fingers shook. The palsy of freedom, the terror of choices. Then she fell. She stayed on the ground for a moment, feeling the dryness around her. She seemed to be in a furrow, where once the earth had produced something other than this spiny scrub grass. Mosquitoes continued to have their way with her.
A sound, jarring her. How long had she been lying here? Had she fallen asleep? She realized the sound had been a gunshot only when she heard more of them. Too many to be counted, that crazed rat-a-tat-tat of so much violence in so little time. Finally, she saw light.
So loud and so bright, yet so tiny. Her mind was having trouble decoding messages. Bursts of brightness from a house in the distance, like lightning, as if that one building contained its own weather system, powerful and angry yet dwarfed by the vastness of the dark sky above.
Could they see her from here? Were the shots flares to snuff her out? No, they were too chaotic. They had found Rufus and his friend, perhaps, and were doling our punishment. Or, Lord, they were fighting with one another; they had discovered her absence and were distributing blame. Which meant they soon would be searching for her. The shots ceased.
Darcy stood up and ran, almost wishing the shots would return to illuminate her path. Rufus had said there was a road not far from here, hadn’t he? Had she veered off the intended trail? She ran until her body was shaking again. She would have sprinted for hours, she would have flown into the air, if only such things were possible. How deathly simple the world was. How uninspired. She was going to pass out again.
But first a form before her. Scraps and slivers of the darkness seemed to thicken and solidify into three dimensions. She walked forward and the darkness shifted before her, but that thing was still there in the middle. She touched it: an automobile. Cold in the thick air. Darcy circumnavigated the car but found no road. The car had been abandoned in the middle of the field, as lost and forlorn as herself.
She tried to control her breathing and listened. No sounds of pursuers.
And if she had possessed the capacity for rational thought—Lord, that had passed days ago—perhaps she would not have opened the car door and slumped inside. Perhaps she would not have closed the door as loudly as she did. Perhaps she would have kept running. But she could feel wakefulness fleeing her. She needed only to lie dow
n, just for a moment, on the cool upholstery, and feel the way it crumpled beneath the awesome weight of her heavy, heavy head.
They had come so close to escaping from this life, she and Jason. Surely every thief or shyster or flimflam man entertained notions of escape or retirement or living the good life. Such ideas were likely half-baked and ridiculous, but surely Jason was different. She’d always figured he had some master plan.
He had hid in Darcy’s apartment for two weeks back in April, staying inside all day and most nights. They passed hours reading the papers as they lay in bed. They read about Dillinger’s and Baby Face Nelson’s miraculous escape from a surrounded lodge up in Wisconsin, Clyde Barrow being riddled by bullets from a former Texas Ranger in Louisiana, and of course the miscellaneous villainy attributed to Jason and Whit. As a result of all the attention, the gang had temporarily split up, Jason told her, and he was weighing his options.
“Maybe it’s time to stop,” she said.
“Stop what?”
“This, everything. The banks and the accomplices and the endeavors.”
“Stop us, too?”
She jolted as if slapped. “Darling, no. Everything but that.” She slid an arm through his, put her hand on his waist. “The point of stopping all the rest is so we can hold on to each other.”
“What would you do?” he asked her.
“What do you mean, what would I do? I would be with you.”
“Just like that? You’re used to a certain lifestyle, Darcy, and if—”
“I’ve told you I don’t care about money. I left money, and happily so. Why do you have so much trouble understanding that?”
“Okay. But you’ve always seen me as the guy calling the shots. If I were to leave the one thing I know, it’d be different.”
“Jason, it was never your being a thief or ringleader that won me.”
“But imagine me digging ditches or turning screws. Would you still see this great unnameable something in me if I was following someone else’s orders, coming home angry every night?”
“Yes. You’d be a good deal sweatier, of course, but yes. Emphatically yes.”
She kissed him. It was a good kiss. It meant what it said. Why didn’t he seem to believe her?
Then she tilted her eyes at him and pinched his side. “So, Mr. Fireson, what would you do if you settled down? Do you have a plan?”
“Move to California, open a restaurant. Plant a vineyard. Watch the sunset.”
“It would be wonderful to be a restaurant owner’s wife.” She hugged him tighter. “I would greet the guests at the door, and pour the wine…. But who would cook?”
“I’d hire someone eventually, but at first it’d be me.”
She was unable to suppress a laugh.
“What?”
“Nothing, I’m just … surprised.”
“Does it seem too … common a career option after robbing banks?”
“I’ve never said I’m against being common.”
“Can you be common?”
“Never.” She laughed. “A common career sounds wonderful. A common wife, however—that would be dreadful. You wouldn’t want that.”
“No.”
“Jason Fireson, you are”—and she kissed him—“exceptional.”
This time it was coughing that woke her. She had been dreaming about Jason; they had just lain down in one of their many bedrooms. But he hadn’t really been there, for this was a car seat she was waking on, not a bed.
She opened her eyes. They seemed to be working better. Sunlight was glowing against the top of the seat, so much brilliance that the excess spilled down, illuminating the steering wheel by her head and the floorboards below. Almost blinding, yet barely dawn.
More coughs. She sat up and squinted, staring through the windshield and straight into a sunrise that could not possibly be that bright. As if the sun were no farther away than the next state, melting its way through the Midwest. In minutes she would be consumed. She shielded her eyes and saw a silhouette stumbling toward her, a stencil of blackness carved from the night and accidentally abandoned to the dawn, its movements frantic. Then he was opening the passenger door.
He was hatless, which was a shame, because this was a face best kept in shadow. The nose as fat and scalloped as a cocktail glass. The green eyes sinking into his shiny cheeks, which seemed to inflate with each inhalation. Though his dark jacket matched his trousers, he wore only an undershirt beneath it. The undershirt was white in places and red in others. He was holding a silver automatic in his right hand.
“Hello there, kitten.” He sat beside her, panting. “Sorry to disturb you.”
Darcy accepted the fact that her dream had vanished. She accepted the world that was presented to her, currently starring Brickbat Sanders as the man in shotgun.
“I wouldn’t call you disturbing, exactly. More annoying, irritating.”
“Well, I hope to graduate to disturbing one day.”
“It would be your first graduation, no doubt.”
He looked exhausted and he breathed in impatient gulps, as if the world could not satiate him. “Got any keys?”
“I wouldn’t be sitting here if I did.” She wondered if he was tired or injured enough for her to wrest the gun from his grip. Brickbat’s hands were freakishly large—thick mitts with wide, stubby fingers, barely prehensile. She once had found herself staring at them, wondering how the man tied his shoes. “I’m not surprised to see you’re behind this.”
“I wouldn’t say I’m behind it. You’d get a real kick out of it if you found out who is.”
This was one of the longest conversations she’d had with him. He had been an unfortunate part of Jason’s gang for two months, perhaps three. He had ogled her with craven obviousness since the day they met. He seemed rather disinterested in her rank, unshowered body at this moment, however.
“You seem a bit worse for wear,” she observed. “Did you have a fight with your gentlemen friends?”
“Not mine. Yours.”
“I’m sorry?”
Still panting, he managed to purse his lips enough to grin. “You know, I didn’t believe those stories myself, but turns out they were true. Don’t know how Jason and Whit pulled it off, but there they were last night, very much alive. And now they’re very much dead.”
“What … what are you talking about?”
“Don’t go all Niagara on me, kitten. You should be over that by now.”
She straightened up. She hadn’t had enough sleep or food to generate panic. She repeated herself, but much more quietly this time. “What are you talking about?”
“They came for you last night. Raised a fair amount of hell doing it. Let’s just say I’ll be getting a much bigger percentage of the ransom money now.” He chuckled, but it seemed to pain him and he recoiled. “I told that son of a bitch Whit that one day I’d put one between his eyes, and I did. Jason took a little longer to go, though.”
She turned from him and looked out the driver’s window. The sun was just the slightest bit higher now and she could see the world before her, the fields tan and dry and helpless.
“They aren’t the ones who freed me last night. Your own cohorts did, and—”
“Yeah, I’ve figured that much out by now, thanks.” He inspected the glove box. “But then your boys came in. They shot the place up, but I rubbed them myself. Watched your boy sputter and moan right in front of me. For maybe an hour, until he was done. That was time I shoulda been spending looking for you, kitten, but I couldn’t help myself. Just had to see it with my own eyes. And it turns out I found you after all.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Fine. I don’t care.” Then he reached into his jacket pocket and removed a flask. He took a snort and put it back. “People die terribly, kitten. They cough out all this stuff that’s supposed to be inside them, like they’re being turned inside out. They move and twitch in ways you’d never imagine. Couldn’t imitate it if I tried.”
&n
bsp; “You will one day.”
He chuckled again. “Yeah, guess I will. But not as soon as you’d like. Brickbat ain’t as bad off as he looks, and he knows a doc in these parts can help him out.” He opened his door. “Gonna fiddle with the engine. Try to run and I’ll shoot your knees.”
Darcy hugged herself. Surely Brickbat was only taunting her, trying to level her into shock, keep her docile. Surely Rufus hadn’t released her only moments before Jason and Whit arrived for her. She was so tired and sore, her neck stiff, her ankles aching from myriad scrapes and insect bites, the skin of her wrists torn by the cuffs. She wasn’t thinking straight. She needed only to be free of this man, and then in a real bed, and she would make sense of this.
The light on her world turned less harsh as Brickbat raised the hood. A minute later the engine kicked into life, and she jumped. With the engine on, all she needed to do was floor the gas and run her captor over. But before she’d completed this thought the hood fell with a whoosh and a slam and there was Brickbat aiming his automatic at her through the windshield.
“I’d hate to mess that pretty face, kitten.” He grinned at her and she was, regrettably, motionless as he walked to the side of the Ford and got back in shotgun. He moved gingerly, or what passed for gingerly in a man of his size. His jacket concealed the source of all that blood; it bore no bullet holes, but it was possible he’d been shot before putting it on. Unless it was someone else’s blood and he was only grunting from exhaustion.
“The road’s straight ahead a ways,” he told her. “Drive.”
“I can’t shift in handcuffs.”
“Good point. Stick ’em out.” She hesitantly held her hands up in front of her. He unholstered his pistol, and she was too stunned to say anything or even move her hands as he reached, the gun perfectly level, until the barrel touched the chain between the cuffs. Then he fired. It was the loudest thing she’d ever heard. The bullet escaped through the open window and the casing ricocheted off the ceiling, landing in her lap. Her hands fell there, too, and they flicked away the casing as if it could still hurt her. Brickbat chuckled.
The Many Deaths of the Firefly Brothers: A Novel Page 29
