“And where was this?” the officer asked.
Gus gave him the coordinates, the name of the boat, and information about the truck and trailer making the delivery. The boat was practically out of his range already and the truck had pulled out of the drop spot, the trailer moving in a jerky fashion as the driver tried to back up.
Gas also gave his name and number.
“Do you want me to wait here?” he asked.
“Is the boat still in sight?”
It wasn’t. So the dispatcher said he might as well go home and wait for an officer to show up and take down his story.
“Might have saved four lives today,” the fellow said. “Who knows what those men had in mind for those girls. They probably picked them up in Toronto or Montreal. They could end up anywhere in the States.” He paused. “Leave it to us, Mr. Rios. We’ll get the guys who did this.”
“Five,” Gas corrected him. “There were five girls.”
“Right. You probably saved five lives today.”
Gas debated going home to tell Loretta. But it would take more than an hour so he called his friend instead. He’d called him once or twice over the last few months, mostly to thank him for a few deposits he made when the river was frozen and there were no fish to be had. When Gas had let the man’s money put food on their table.
“That was real nice. You didn’t have to do that.”
“What do you usually do for cash in the winter?” Mr. Trota has asked him.
“Plow snow for people I know. Chop wood for some shut-ins. Doesn’t pay much but it covers my oil deliveries.” Except this year when I got lazy, he thought, but didn’t say.
He’d resisted calling Mr. Trota last month when no deposit turned up. How long could he expect such an arrangement to last? How could he hold his hand out again?
Today, he expected he’d be warmly thanked. Surely this would put the crew of the boat behind bars. Mr. Pinto’s goose would be cooked. His friend wouldn’t have to worry about taking a dive off that boat ever again.
“Hello,” he said, recognizing Louie’s voice but not wanting to chance using his name. Maybe he wasn’t supposed to know any of these guys. “It’s Gaspar Rios. Is Mr. Trota in?” Then his excitement broke through. “Guess what, I saw that boat today. You know, The Clytemnestra.” He wasn’t certain if he’d pronounced it correctly. “Know the one I mean?”
“Yeah, sure,” Louis said. “Funny thing you should call. I think he forgot all about how you were out there looking for it. But it’s okay ’cause he’s out on the boat himself. Weird, huh?”
“What?”
“Yeah, he bought the boat about a month ago from Mario Pinto. Decided a nice little boat with a crackerjack crew might come in handy. He decided to turn his enemies into friends for some deal he had goin’.” When Gas didn’t respond, Louie added, “His business sometimes works like that.” He laughed. “But more often, its vice-versa. Friends turn into enemies.”
Gas had never felt worse in his life. More than anything, he wanted to ask Louie not to tell Mr. Trota he called. But instead, he hung up quietly, sat thinking for a minute, and then got some of the California brochures his wife kept forcing on him out of the hold. As he slipped the rubber band off, he wondered if the car was too old to make a cross-country trip. Or if he and Loretta were. He guessed they’d find out.
“Lie thou there; for here comes the trout
that must be caught with tickling.”
-William Shakespeare
Doe in Headlights
Exit MI 53 at Cass City, and then hook a left on the gravel road across from a yellow Caddy.
Doe looked around. The question she’d been asking herself for three hours—how could Feck know the car would be parked there—was answered when she saw a sun-bleached Cadillac up on blocks. She wouldn’t have known the color if the directions hadn’t said yellow. The house behind it was mostly bare wood. Just strips of an undeterminable color remained. How much time had passed since the last paint job?
She shivered and turned up the heat. November in Michigan, right. Just one hundred and fifty miles northwest of Detroit, but she was in another zone. This area—and she could easily picture its position on the hand Michiganders held up to point to a spot—was a popular summer destination. But on a gray, late autumn day, there was no sign of mini-golf, tee shirt shops, fudge or kayaks. Where was the lake anyway? She made the turn, paper map in her mouth, and crept along looking for:
A banged-up pre-fab boathouse.
There it was, and “banged-up” was putting a good spin on it. It looked glued together—like the popsicle-stick log cabins she made as a kid. She took the next right and the gravel gave way to dry, sandy dirt covered with pine needles and decaying leaves plucked from the trees towering above. It was just like the setting in that goofy horror movie—the one Feck tried to explain when they were high on something.
She’d been working for Feck for nearly two years, starting immediately after Ruthie took a flyer and moved to Vegas.
“She’s got the legs for it, Doe,” Feck said, throwing Ruthie’s scrawled note on the table. “Showgirl gams.”
“She’s cleaning hotel rooms,” Doe told him. “Or toting a tray. She may have the legs, but she doesn’t have the feet.” Ruthie was the most graceless person she knew.
Up until Ruthie’s surprise flight, Doe’s name had been Delores, and it took her a minute to realize she’d been renamed.
“How do you spell that?” she asked him. “How do you spell Doe?”
He spelled it for her, and that was that. They had sex for the first time that night—like an initiation or something. She could still smell Ruthie on his sheets. And it wasn’t perfume, since Ruthie didn’t wear any. Ruthie on the Sheets, as she thought of that scent, was soon replaced.
Doe waitressed at a bunch of dumps outside Detroit before Feck took her on. She supposed her job with him wasn’t much better, but there was more variety. He was good at mixing things up, even if he wasn’t anything special in bed. He had to be nearly forty, so what could she expect? He’d probably memorized his moves twenty-five years ago and saw no reason to change them now.
Feck paid her to clean and cook, deliver and pick up an assortment of packages, pretend to be various people, have sex with him about twice a week, answer his phone, make bank deposits, place bets at the track, make phone calls using her knack for accents, and take care of his fish, although she could hardly count that chore because she’d killed them within a week. His mother, her next charge, fared better.
Mrs. Feck had one of those diseases—Doe couldn’t remember the name—where she could hardly lift her head. So for the last six months of her life, Doe took charge—wiping her ass, feeding her oatmeal and scrambled eggs, even holding a tissue to her nose, and changing her Depends. She learned how to inject insulin, and bathe her without soaking the sheets. She even—and this was the worst of it— inserted suppositories. The two of them watched television about sixteen hours a day. The old woman couldn’t speak in more than grunts so figuring out what she wanted—and it was mostly about shows on TV— was frustrating. She’d been particularly incensed when the network cancelled her favorite soap.
“Work out a system,” Feck told her when she complained. “Maybe she can tap things out, like with Morse Code. Or blink her eyes, yes and no.” For his part, he saw his mother as seldom as possible. “She wasn’t exactly a mother-of-the-year,” he said. “I was never sure she could tell my brother and me apart.”
“Are you twins?”
“No, and he has six inches on me.”
Doe duct-taped a pencil to Mrs. Feck’s palsied hand once, but the old woman shook it off, nearly hitting Doe in the eye. Despite these minor issues, she grew fond of the old lady. Having someone depend on her turned her on. Like she was Mrs. Feck’s mother in some sense. She wasn’t clear on the reason for it.
“I think I might want to have a baby some day,” she told Feck after his mother passed. “Or maybe a puppy.”
“Good luck with that,” he told her. “As long as you’re not thinking I’ll be the daddy.”
Actually, she’d already ruled Feck out as father material. But he paid her a better salary than she made at the Weekday Café or Tudge’s Pub, so as employer material, he’d do. Once in a while, she caught the whiff of something bad going down, an event giving her pause. One too many Serbian or Bosnian girls turned up on their porch last spring, for instance. And there was the time she heard a man screaming with pain on Feck’s cell.
The thing Doe did most often was wait. Wait for a phone call, for a car to show up, for the bank to open, for food at a drive-in, for a clerk at the post office, for Feck to call her, for him to finish up in bed. Wait. She’d become very good at waiting.
She’d no idea what was in the cards today. Feck said he’d call at two and fill her in. Looking at her watch, she saw it wasn’t even noon. The next marker on her map was:
Look for a big-ass sign saying Todd’s Cabins.
She found it a minute or two later. A Closed for the Season sign hung in front. Skiing would begin in a month, but Todd’s was not the sort of place skiers stayed. She doubted hunters would find their way here either. Todd’s Cabins probably closed for the season after Labor Day—as soon as old Todd needed heat to keep warm, as soon as he cleared winter beer money.
There were eleven cabins—a number that made her nervous until she realized that one was Todd’s office so it didn’t count. Odd numbered things always seemed like a jinx. She looked for number four. Four was the only one whose windows weren’t boarded. She put the key in the lock and pushed the sticking door open.
Something had died inside. But other than the smell, it wasn’t a bad place—two tiny bedrooms and a main room with a kitchenette at one end. A bathroom that was reasonably clean. Todd or Mrs. Todd had made the place kind of homey with plaid slipcovers and curtains, a lacy tablecloth, although it turned out to be plastic. A couple of prints of the northern woods. She could picture spending a week here with your kids in the summer. Kids—that thought kept returning. Had her parents ever stopped fighting long enough to take her sister and her to a place like this? She couldn’t remember a single vacation. Bible school was the furthest she got from home. The ladies who ran the Bible school knew they were babysitting Sheila and Delores and made them memorize Bible verses while the other kids got to color Joseph’s coat.
A dead mouse was in the bathroom, and another in the drawer of the stove. Using fireplace tongs, she threw both outside. Several dead wasps lay curled up on the windowsills, but other than that it was okay. Smelled like mildew, suntan lotion, insect repellent, and burnt onions once the odor of death was removed. Someone had been by recently because there was fresh food in the cabinets and more in the fridge. It wasn’t like Feck to think of things like this, which made her suspicious. There was a space heater in each room that she immediately fired up. Maybe enough stuff onhand for a long weekend. It’d better be enough because she hadn’t passed a store for miles—maybe not since Lexington. Even the house with the Caddy was four or five miles back.
Cabin four was the furthest from the road and Feck told her to park her car in the back even though there was no road there. As she looked out the window, she began to get worried. Obviously, he didn’t want anyone spotting her car and nosing around. What was she doing here anyway? What did he have in mind? It couldn’t just be a drug pickup. Someone must be coming up here for a few days, and she was going to stay too because Feck had made her pack a bag. She hoped she wasn’t expected to sleep with whoever it was. Probably not, or Feck would’ve had her pack differently.
“Just some jeans, tee shirts, and underwear,” Feck said. “You won’t be goin’ out on the town.” He looked at her face and said in a wheedling tone, “Nothing’s open ’round there now anyway.”
“What will I be doing?”
He hated it when she asked him things like that—preferring not to let her in on the details unless he had to, and only then when it was unavoidable.
A good example—she hadn’t known she’d be caring for Mrs. Feck until the night before.
“Her nurse took off,” Feck had said. “Do me a favor and stay with her till I can find another minder.”
Ha!
“Just wait for my call,” he’d said this morning. “Things are a little fluid.” Still in bed, he’d run a nervous hand through the hair on his chest. “Better get going, honey.”
So she did, used to doing whatever she was told.
There was a small TV in the cabin, but no cable. She was only able to tune in one channel, so she watched Family Feud and some dopey talk show. Hungry then, she heated up a can of tomato soup using half water and half milk, ate some crackers, and made a pot of coffee.
Two o’clock came and went. She found a Robert Parker book on a shelf in a bedroom closet and began to read. She’d become more of a reader now that she cooled her heels so often.
At three thirty, she heard a car pull up and ran to the bedroom window. It wasn’t Feck’s Tahoe but a non-descript Dodge. It sat there for a few minutes, and then a man she’d never seen before got out, opened the rear door, and lifted out a sleeping kid. The boy was maybe about eight or ten, she decided, as the man tossed him over his shoulder like a sack of flour. Had this guy rented one of the other cabins? The man was younger than Feck, maybe thirty or so, and big. He was bearded, but it was neatly trimmed. He wore a hunter’s getup with big black boots.
She figured he might be here for deer season, but then he headed straight for cabin four and kicked the door open. Why hadn’t she locked the damned thing, up here all alone? She had a feeling a lock wouldn’t have stopped him for more than a second or two anyway. Inside, he looked even bigger.
“You in here?” he whispered. “Doe, right?” When she didn’t answer, he added, “Feck said you’d be here.”
She walked out of the bedroom.
“He never filled you in, did he? Damn limey.” He walked into the second bedroom and placed the kid on the bed.
“That kid isn’t dead, is he?” Doe asked, her voice shaking.
“Of course he’s not dead. Boy, Feck really did keep you in the dark. Kid’s our little honey pot, and we’re going to take real good care of him.” He looked at her. “Or you are anyway. Feck said you were like a nurse.”
She stared at him. “I’m not a nurse. What’s your name anyway?”
He shook his head. “I’m just here to drop off the kid along with some stuff he’ll need. You don’t need to know my name.” He headed for the door. “I’ll get the rest of it.”
“I can’t take care of him. What’s wrong with him?” The kid still hadn’t moved.
The guy turned around and shook his head. “Damn, Feck didn’t tell you squat. Kid’s knocked out, and you’ll have to keep him like that for a day or two. Till his parents pay up.”
A funnel of cold air swept from her throat to her stomach. “What do you mean keep him like that?”
“Keep him unconscious. Just wait till I get the rest of it.” The man trudged back to the car, opened the trunk, and removed an attaché case along with the kind of box that paper comes in. She watched, trying to decide quickly what this all meant. Trying to get a jump on things. Her brain was dead though. Terror did that.
“Okay,” he said, returning, “the box has some stuff you might need—kid’s clothes mostly—in case he pisses his pants, I guess. But the attaché has the important thing.” He opened it and took out what looked like a medical kit. “This kit has about a half-dozen or so prepared shots in it.” He counted them slowly and aloud. “Eight of ’em.”
“What…”
“You know syringes—I guess.” He glanced at her. “Hypodermics. You should know, bein’ a nurse and all.”
“I’m not a nurse,” she almost shouted, but then lowered her voice. “I am…nothing.”
He shrugged. “Well, whatever you are, you gotta give him one of these injections about every six hours.” He paused dramatically. “’Cause if you don’t, the kid’s gonna wake up, and then where will we be?”
“You mean he’s kidnapped, don’t you?”
“Well, duh! Think I brought him here to go to the water park?”
She was speechless.
“Oh, and Feck sent a mask along.” He opened the box and removed it. It was rubber or latex and looked like Snow White’s face. “If the kid wakes up for some reason, you should put this on. So he can’t ID you later.” When she didn’t say anything, he continued. “He’s old enough to be able to do it too.” He looked her over closely. “You look ordinary to me. But you never know.”
“Whose kid is he?”
“Some fat cat works at GM, I think. Feck didn’t tell me much. We’re at the bottom of the food chain, you and me.”
“Not even a name?” she asked. “The kid’s name, I mean.”
The guy let out an exaggerated sigh. “Look, you don’t want to be talking to the kid, Doe Re Mi. Get it? You want him out cold till his daddy pays up. Don’t be thinking you’re gonna have cookies with him or something.” He looked at the syringes in the kit, putting a hesitant finger on one. “You know how to do this, right?”
“I guess.” What was the point in denying it?
She was trying to understand why Feck thought she’d be up for such a thing. Nothing she’d done could touch this. She’d show him. She’d be out of this cabin as soon as the hairy joker left. She could be in Canada in a couple of hours. Or did you need a passport for that now? Damn 9/11.
He must’ve sensed her line of thought. “You know Feck’s got all kinds of stuff on you, right? Keeps a file on all of us. If you think ole Ruthie’s living the life out in Vegas, you don’t understand him at all.”
For a minute, she couldn’t remember who Ruthie was. “What do you mean a file?”
I Bring Sorrow_And Other Stories of Transgression Page 9
