Selena

by Greg Barth

  “Any illegal activity going on inside this cab tonight?” I recognized the voice. It was Harvey’s brother, Wayne.

  “No sir,” the driver said.

  “What about in the back seat? You sure those girls aren’t smoking marijuana?”

  “I’m not sure what they are smoking, sir.”

  “You being smart with me? Because I can take you in. No way you’d keep your license if I did that.”

  “Look,” I said, leaning forward from the back seat. “Leave him alone. There’s no reason for you to bother this guy. We know you’re here to harass us.”

  He turned the flashlight to my face. “Did I fucking talk to you?”

  I looked above the beam of light to the spot that I guessed would be his eyes. I put on a stern look. “Stop acting stupid,” I said.

  “You ever heard of contributing to the delinquency of a minor?”

  “She’s 19 years old. You know that. She’s not a minor.”

  “She’s under 21,” he said.

  “She’s not drinking,” I said.

  “Don’t fucking lie to me.”

  “Look. Sheriff. What do you want?”

  “Both of you ladies in the back seat need to get out of the cab.”

  We gathered our things and exited.

  I heard him address the driver. “You go on now. I’ll take care of these degenerates.”

  “Sir,” the driver said. “I think there’s some kind of mistake. They’re good girls.”

  “Do I need to take you in too?”

  “No sir.”

  “Get the fuck out of here.”

  “Yes sir.”

  The cab pulled away. I stood on the dusty edge of the road watching the tail lights fade into the night.

  “Get up against the car,” he said.

  “Wayne, really?” I said.

  “The fuck did you just call me?”

  “Sorry, Sheriff.”

  This was getting us nowhere. I looked at Emily and nodded. We moved over to the police car and leaned against it, hands on the roof.

  He put his hands on me. He put his hands all over me. I’m sure he would call it frisking, but he left nothing to the imagination. When he was finished with me, he gave Emily the same treatment. How thorough? He found the money in her underwear.

  He cuffed us both and put us in the backseat of his cruiser. He got in the front and pulled the car forward onto the road.

  “Going to read us our rights?” Emily said.

  “The fuck would I do that for?” Sheriff Wayne said. “You got no fucking rights.”

  We sat in silence. It wasn’t my first time in cuffs in the back of a police car, but this was a different experience. It was my first time not being totally stoned or drunk. And this time I was afraid.

  He took us along the road past the motel and made a left turn onto a dirt road. He drove back through some fields and into the woods. There was a long building that looked like a large shed or barn.

  “Doesn’t look like the county justice center,” I said.

  He laughed. “Honey, you’d be surprised. This is the place where real justice happens.”

  The barn was built of rough lumber. It was gray in the night, covered with a tin roof and two large, padlocked doors in front.

  He pulled the cruiser up to the double door and got out. I watched him in the headlights as he unlocked the doors and pulled them open. I couldn’t make out anything inside, just a long, shadowed darkness.

  He got back into the car and drove us inside the barn.

  “Bring all your dates here?” I said.

  He parked the car and turned off the engine. He got out, closed the doors, and turned on a dim, overhead light hanging by a long cord in the center of the room.

  I looked around carefully.

  “Holy god,” Emily said.

  I knew what this place was. It was a torture chamber.

  The room contained a series of posts along the center spaced apart about twenty feet in between them. Each of the posts had crossbeams attached. Two pairs of handcuffs were affixed to every cross beam, one pair on either side of the cross. An empty cuff hung from a chain from both sides of each beam, hungry for bony wrists.

  “Don’t panic,” I said.

  He came over and opened the back door. “Get out,” he said.

  It wasn’t easy to climb from the back of a car with my hands cuffed behind my back, but we both managed. He directed us to a couple of metal folding chairs next to a long, wooden workbench. The workbench was cluttered with various metal items, mostly carpentry tools—hammers, saws, levels and the like. The table had a vice on one corner and an electric grinder on another. The room was dim with only the one light on. The floor was packed dirt covered with sawdust.

  Emily and I each took a seat in the folding chairs.

  Wayne walked into the darkness and came back carrying a metal toolbox. He set it on the bench and opened it. He took out a pair of safety glasses and put them on. He reached back into the box and took out a dark, heavy machete. He held it up and tested the edge of the blade with his thumb. He shook his head and walked over to the corner of the table.

  He turned the grinder on and gave it a few seconds to get up to speed. He pressed the edge of the blade against the rotating stone. The metal against the turning stone produced a loud, grinding sound. He pushed the blade down and moved the length of it back and forth against the stone. Orange sparks shot across the table as the heated metal flaked away.

  He did this with both sides of the blade.

  After a moment he turned the grinder off and tested the blade against his thumb. He made a show of wincing, and he put the tip of his thumb into his mouth and sucked at it.

  He stepped up closer to us and held out his hairy left forearm. He pressed the blade against the flesh of his arm and scraped at it. I could both see and hear the sharp blade of the machete shave away the hair on his arm. He pulled the blade away. He then leaned forward and blew a puff of air onto his arm, blowing away the loose hair to reveal the bald spot that he had just shaved.

  “Sharp, huh?” he said.

  Neither of us responded.

  He turned, raised the machete over his head, and brought it down with enough force to sink it into the rough wooden surface of the workbench with a loud thunk. Emily was startled at this. She jumped in her chair. He left it suspended there, the tip buried into the wood.

  “I want to show you something,” he said.

  He reached back into the metal box and brought out various sharp tools. They looked like wooden-handled punches or ice picks with sharp tips. The points of them were stained black.

  He set them to the side, reached back into the box, and took out a stack of Polaroid photographs. He shuffled through them and selected some.

  He held one up for us to see.

  My mouth went dry.

  “Oh my god,” Emily said.

  The photo was of a man that had been severely beaten and tortured. His face swollen and purple with bruises. His eyes were glazed over. He was obviously dead.

  He selected a few others and showed them to us. Each contained an image of a different corpse, some male, others female. All of them had been severely beaten prior to their deaths.

  I didn’t say a word. This cast our situation in a whole new light.

  Emily’s voice trembled. “What are you going to do to us?”

  “Probably something like you see in these pictures,” he said. “Unless you do exactly what I tell you.”

  “What do you want?” I said.

  “Well for one thing, you need to get it through your heads that you work for Harvey and nobody else.”

  “We’re not working for anybody right now,” I said.

  “Oh no? Are you taking direction from Harvey, or are you doing something of your own? Are you kicking up to him, or are you keeping it all to yourselves? If you’re working at all and it’s not under his direction, then you are not working for Harvey.”

  “How
the hell do you know what we’re doing?” I said.

  “Because I’m not the dumbass you think I am,” he said. “There’s no freelancing done around here. Either of you girls think about going out and selling your snatch just for kicks and giggles without being directed to do so by Harvey, then you just think about what you saw in those photos I showed you, okay?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “We get it. You kill people when they’re chained up and defenseless.”

  “Now I’m going to release you from the handcuffs and send you on your way. You’ll find the motel just through the copse of trees out front here and across the field. It’s a good hike at night, especially in those high heels you’re wearing, so you best be going now. You can take the dirt road we came in on. It’s an easier walk, but it’s a hell of a lot longer. My advice is to go across country. The fields ain’t so bad.”

  He unlocked the handcuffs and ushered us out the door. He raised his arm and extended his finger. “You see that light there? That’s your motel. You get going through those trees and that field, you’ll be there no time.” He smacked me on the bottom. “Get your skinny ass moving, girl.”

  We got to walking. A quarter mile across country was rough in high heels and short skirts, but we kept our eyes on the light in the distance and made the hike back to our rooms in one piece.

  The woods weren’t too thick with undergrowth and the hay of the field was in that end-of-season stage, after the second cut, where it was stubble, soft loam, and cover grass. We made it, her and me, holding hands and taking careful steps. It was after dark, so I wasn’t concerned about snakes.

  I was, however, a pissed off little bitch.

  EIGHT

  A sound at the door woke me. I checked the time on the digital clock by the bed. It was 5:00 in the morning. A white, business-sized envelope had been shoved under the door.

  I got out of bed. I slipped on a long t-shirt and went to the door. I checked the peephole and saw no one. I opened the door and looked out at the motel parking lot. The dim, yellow lighting didn’t reveal much, but there was no one there, and nothing looked suspicious. Most of the rooms were dark that time of night and only a few cars were in the lot.

  I closed the door, locked it, and picked up the envelope.

  It was sealed and nothing was printed on the outside. I tore it open and pulled out the paper inside.

  On one side someone had handwritten, “Front Office. 11PM tonight. Bring your friend.”

  I put the note on the table and went back to bed.

  I lay there in silence, staring up at the ceiling. I turned the TV on just to have some white noise to break the silence. I knew I wouldn’t be able to get back to sleep.

  ***

  I met Emily for breakfast at the diner later that morning.

  The restaurant was a barbecue and hamburger joint that fried up breakfast before they shifted over to lunch. It was small and clean and divided into two separate rooms—no smoking in both. We chose a table in a back corner of the room with the fewest people.

  Emily’s face was clean of make-up, her hair was still damp, and she smelled like Ivory soap and lavender shampoo. She wore a pink cotton pullover shirt and short denim shorts that had white, frayed spots in the front.

  I had coffee with cream and a few strips of bacon. Emily had Coke along with waffles covered in strawberries and whipped cream.

  “So what are we going to do,” she said.

  I sipped my coffee. “We go see what he wants.”

  “It’s not like we have a choice,” Emily said. “Those pictures. Last night...”

  “Actually, I’ve been thinking about that. We do have some choice. They don’t have any dirt on you, do they? Like they do me? Anything they can hold over you?”

  She shook her head.

  “Then we need to take back some control. I’m going to insist that they not involve you in this.”

  “No. I’m with you. We’re in this together.”

  I stirred more cream in my coffee with a spoon. “Listen, Emily. You don’t need to get mixed up in this any further than you already are. I think I can get us out of it and on our way, hopefully soon. But if they’ve got control over both of us, it’ll only make things that much harder.”

  Emily shook her head again. “I don’t see it that way. It gives us an advantage if we’re together. We can help each other.” She paused. “I can help you.”

  I sipped my coffee. I looked around. No one was nearby except the waitress who was bussing a table in the opposite corner. I leaned close. “You know the things I’ve had to do recently? Trust me. You do not want to have to do something like that. But I will. I’ll do it if I have to. I just don’t want that for you.”

  “Maybe it won’t come to that,” she said.

  “These are dangerous men,” I said.

  “No shit.”

  I decided to try a different approach. “Have you ever made pineapple upside-down cupcakes?”

  “What the fuck kind of question is that?”

  “The kind you need to think about.”

  “Hell no,” she said.

  “They’re good. You put a pineapple ring and a cherry at the bottom of your cupcake pan.”

  “I don’t bake.”

  “Never? Not even with your mom?”

  “No. My mom didn’t bake.”

  “My mom did. I mean, she did a lot of things. She drank. A lot. But she also baked. And she baked with me. You know, when I was little. Before she...”

  “Again, Selena. Relevance? Hello?”

  “Look at it like this,” I said. “More than anything, I have always wanted to be a mother. Not...now, you know? But...someday. If I could.”

  “Good for you.” She looked back down at her waffles.

  “I can’t be.”

  She looked back up at me. “What? Why not?”

  “Because of the violence I’ve suffered. It’s not possible now. It’s something that was taken away from me and can’t be gotten back.”

  “That’s sad,” she said and took my hand. “I’m sorry.”

  “I’ll be okay.”

  “You can adopt,” she said and looked at me with hopeful-but-sad eyes.

  I chuckled. “Really? Somebody’s going to give me a child? Honey, if I can’t make my own, it ain’t happening.”

  “It’ll work out,” she said.

  I shook my head. “The point is, these are violent men. You don’t need to get mixed up with them if you don’t have to. It could cost you more than you know. The decisions we make today are going to have some serious consequences. We need to be careful.”

  “Right now, Selena,” she said. “You’re everything to me.” She squeezed my hand. “I want to be with you.”

  “I understand, but we can’t get in any deeper with these guys. They have a ton that they’re holding over me. They’ve got nothing on you. I have to find the right way out for me. You shouldn’t get more involved.”

  “I’m already involved,” she said. “They won’t let me walk away. Not after what we saw last night.”

  She had a point. “Eat,” I told her. “We’ll see what Harvey has to say tonight. No sense getting worked up over it until we know.”

  She cut into her waffles, and I sat staring at my rasher of bacon, wishing I had a cigarette.

  NINE

  The motel office was furnished like a living room—a long vinyl sofa along one wall, a recliner in a corner, wood-grain paneling walls. A straight-backed chair and a computer desk sat along the wall opposite the sofa. An old TV set was in the corner and a coffee table sat in the middle of the room. Pictures of pin-up models and covers from old Field and Stream magazines thumbtacked to the brown walls. A calendar, three years out of date, hung above the computer monitor.

  Emily and I sat on the sofa. Harvey was in the chair facing us, and his brother Wayne sat in the office chair with his back turned to the desk.

  Harvey was dressed in his typical blue-checkered flannel shirt and jeans. Wayn
e was in his Sheriff’s uniform. The larger brother, Buck, wasn’t in attendance.

  They offered us each a beer. We both declined. Hard to decline because they were drinking Shock Top, but I wouldn’t accept any pretense that these were kind men.

  Harvey smoked a cigarette. He tapped the long ash in the ceramic ashtray on the coffee table. “It’s time for us to discuss the details of our agreement,” he said. “Here’s how this is going to work. I’m going to use your talents to get some dirt on a competitor of mine. A guy named Jack Jefferson. A real scumbag. He’s going to get a little late-night surprise visit from you ladies. He gets those sometimes, so it’s not entirely unexpected. He has a colleague that runs a skin joint on the other side of the county who sends him some entertainment regularly. He’ll think you’re a gift.” He took a draw on the cigarette. When his cheeks sunk in as he sucked on the filter, his gaunt face looked skeletal.

  I shook my head again. “What’s the point of this whole thing?”

  “The point is, we’re going to capture this whole encounter on video.”

  “Whatever you have schemed up, it won’t work,” I said. “We’ll be unannounced. He’ll be on guard.”

  “Trust me. We can get around that real easy,” Harvey said.

  “Doesn’t make sense. If he does this kind of thing on a regular basis, how is this going to help any? Where’s the angle?”

  “He always has these safe encounters. There’s no risk to him. I’m not trying to blackmail him with pictures to show his wife. I’m looking for something to show the whole world just who he is. You see, Jack Jefferson isn’t just a competitor, he’s also planning to run against Wayne here for Sheriff. And that ain’t gonna happen.”

  “Sounds like a lot of people already have dirt on him,” I said.

  “No. Trust me. The stupid cunts that come over to his place, uh…no offense to either of you two ladies, but these girls will probably end up voting for him. They ain’t as smart as the rest of us, you see.”

  “So you film him screwing me,” I said.

  Harvey smiled. He crushed out his cigarette in the ashtray. “You catch on quick, don’tcha?”

  “Fine,” I said. “I’ll do it. But Emily stays here, and then we’re done.”