by Jan Brogan
Ayers cackled. Stepping in front of me, he leaned his back against the wall, beside Reuben, who had let his gun drop to his side. Reuben looked away, but Ayers’s eyes glinted with anticipation. As if this was the fun part, as if he couldn’t wait to see what the Parka would do next.
“Lots of places to look,” the Parka said, lowering his voice to a whisper. His breath smelled of raw onion. With his left arm, he put me in a neck lock. Then he reached around me and stuck his right hand into my front pants pocket, his thick fingers stabbing the skin just above my crotch.
I tried to pull away, but he held me in his grip. “Where the fuck is it?” he asked, jamming his hand so deep into the pocket that I felt the fabric tear.
“It’s not there!” I shouted.
He took his hand out of my pocket and slowly pulled it up my body, an inch at a time, spreading his fingers as he traveled from my waist to my breast. He was sweating heavily and his body had that same onion smell. He let his hand linger on my breast, drawing another dry laugh from Ayers.
Then suddenly, the hand was cupping my right ear. His fingers grasped the stud of my half-moon earring and twisted it sharply. “Nice jewelry. You think this is worth anything?”
Reuben shook his head. “Silver. Is shit.”
“Junk,” Ayers said.
With one jerk, the Parka ripped the stud through my earlobe. A bolt flashed behind my eyes. Pain seared through my ear and into my temple. I put my hand to my earlobe and felt a quarter inch of skin hanging from a thread. My fingers were wet with blood.
Ayers chuckled this time. Encouraged, the Parka jammed one hand into my back pocket now, pulling the jeans away from my body. “Let’s take these off,” he said to Ayers. “Don’t worry, I know where I’ll find it.”
I stared at the blood on my hand. “It’s not on me!”
The walls began to swerve. When I inhaled, I was overwhelmed with the onion smell, which was now behind my eyes. I was going to be sick. I was going to puke out the contents of an empty stomach. Then the throbbing in my ear turned into a pounding and I realized that Gregory Ayers was pounding on the table.
“You idiot. Look at all the blood!” His cardigan sweater had splatters of red all over it. And then to Reuben: “Get a paper towel or something from the kitchen, she’s bleeding all over my sweater.”
“And my cell phone,” the Parka noted.
“Do something, clean her up!” Ayers ordered.
Reuben came back from the kitchen with a stack of Dunkin’ Donuts napkins, which he shoved in my hand. I sat on the folding chair and wrapped a paper napkin around my severed earlobe, trying to push the skin back together. I winced with new pain.
The Parka removed his cell phone from his belt and began cleaning it with a paper napkin. Ayers walked to the kitchen sink, turned on the water, and dabbed at the blood. “This sweater is ruined. Completely ruined,” he moaned.
Returning to the room, he averted his eyes from the bloody napkin I held to my ear. “You should have just given me the real tape. Why? Why would you want to make this so hard on yourself?” Deliberately, he looked from me to the Parka and Reuben and back again, as if he, himself, wouldn’t want to spend too much time with them.
I had to think fast, turn fear and nerve impulses into a plan, into some kind of escape. Words sputtered out. “It was in my jacket pocket. I threw it off when he was chasing me.” I gestured to the Parka, who was still cleaning his cell phone. “You know. To lose him.”
Ayers looked at him and he explained that I’d been wearing this bright-yellow jacket and that the jacket had disappeared and he’d lost sight of me in the crowd.
“Where did you throw the jacket?” Reuben asked.
“In the river.” I heard my own voice waver. Ayers’s face brightened, and I realized that if he thought the tape was destroyed, the evidence gone, he would be free to kill me. The only reason to keep me alive was to find the tape. If I offered to guide them to it, maybe I could get the hell out of here. Maybe I’d have a chance to get away. “I… I… took the tape out of the pocket first and threw it into the bushes. Near the footbridge. We could go back there. I could find it for you.”
The Parka’s eyes began darting, scanning his memory, trying to remember bushes. Were there bushes along the path? By the wall? I wasn’t completely sure.
“Do you know what she’s talking about?” Ayers asked him.
“Maybe I saw a few bushes,” he said, slowly. “Along that wall.”
My stomach was tight. I had to convince them to take me back. Get me out of this horrible room. “I could show you exactly where I threw it.”
Ayers gestured to Reuben and the three men walked past the kitchen and toward the shadowed hallway. They stopped in front of a door, heads together in conference. I couldn’t make out what they were saying, but Ayers’s voice kept rising in pitch until finally the Parka kicked his foot into the wall in frustration. Then Reuben said something to the Parka in whatever language they spoke. Ayers interrupted and there was more argument.
The Parka had left his cell phone amid the clutter of my knapsack contents on the table. I might be able to pull it onto my lap without them noticing. I leaned across the table and slowly reached for the phone, which was beside one of my notebooks. I managed to sweep it into my lap.
Punching in 911, I waited what seemed like forever until I heard a distant official-sounding female voice. Then I called out down the hall. “Don’t hurt me… please… If you take me back to WaterPlace Park, I promise, I can find the tape.”
All three of them shut up at once. My fingers froze on the phone. All three men turned and stared at me. “I know if I retrace my steps…,” I offered.
Reuben started walking toward me and my hands shook in my lap. I was terrified he’d notice that the cell phone was gone from the table, but he stopped midway and turned back to Ayers. “How I keep gun on her with peoples there?” he asked in his halting English.
“The tourists will be gone in another hour or two,” I said.
“Oh fuck, we’re not going back there, are we?” the Parka asked.
I held the end button down long enough on the cell phone to make sure the service was turned off and cops couldn’t call back. Then I snapped it shut. As if he heard, the Parka emerged from the shadows, walking toward me. He stopped and stared at me long and hard to let me know he considered this all my fault. My throat tightened, a vein in my neck feeding new blood into my fear. I waited for a suspicious glance at the table, a sudden move toward me and the cell phone on my lap.
But instead, he scratched his crotch and announced that he had to take a leak. Ayers pointed him to the bathroom. When the Parka turned away, I slipped the cell phone back on the table.
Hope beat in my chest for about thirty seconds.
Ayers returned to the table, scrutinizing my ear. “She’s bleeding too much,” he said. He waited until the Parka walked out of the bathroom, and then began barking new orders. “You’ll go alone—when the tourists have cleared. We’ll wait here.”
I prayed for an argument. Or at least a demand that Reuben go with him. I might stand a chance against Ayers alone. But the Parka only glared at me with his lopsided eyes, as if he’d like to rip the other earring off.
Ayers found some duct tape in a drawer in the kitchen and taped my hands together in front of me, twisting it tight enough so that my wrists burned. He taped my sore ankle to the other one in the same way and used his belt to secure my waist to the chair. Then he handed Reuben the tape and ordered him to tape up my earlobe so he didn’t have to look at the bloody napkins.
Reuben wound a piece of duct tape over my ear before grabbing a beer from the refrigerator in the kitchen. Then he relaxed on the floor with some sort of foreign-language magazine.
Ayers dragged the other folding chair across the room, putting it next to Reuben, and sat down. Minutes passed in silence. My temples throbbed in pain. The duct tape fell off my earlobe and drops of blood began to spatter my shoulder. I
twisted my wrists in my lap, trying to loosen the tape, but only managed to rub the skin raw. The blood spatters began to dry on my shoulder, and finally the Parka left to search for the tape I had thrown into the bushes.
After what seemed like hours, my head jerked up at the sound of a door slamming. Reuben and Ayers had risen to their feet and the Parka was standing in the doorway. “I couldn’t fucking find it anywhere,” he said, glaring at me. “There aren’t any fucking bushes.”
“Right outside the footbridge? Right by the stairs, where I told you?” I tried to sound surprised.
The Parka exploded in frustration, shaking his hand at Ayers, bellowing with fury. “Fuck the tape. I don’t give a shit. Let’s just fucking get rid of her!”
I held my breath waiting for Ayers’s reply. He walked to the streaked window and snapped the shade completely open. Outside, it was still night, but judging by the shade of gray, maybe only another hour or two of darkness remained. He turned back to us. “I can’t take the risk that someone else stumbles across it,” he said to the Parka. “Go find a Band-Aid or something to put on that ear and take her back to the river. If she can’t find the tape, you can do whatever you want to her.”
The night sky held thick clouds that made it hard to believe there would ever be a sunrise. My wrists and ankles were raw from where Reuben had ripped off the tape, my ear throbbed and my ankle was weak, but I didn’t care. Even flanked by both Reuben and the Parka, with a gun pointed to my ribs, I felt better now that I was out of that horrible apartment. At least outside, there was air to breathe. And a chance.
A chance that the dispatcher had figured out I needed help. A chance that the police would come. A chance that I could get away.
It was a bitter November night. I had no jacket, but the Parka had me clenched in his arm with a gun now pointed at my abdomen. Reuben was close behind us. The onion-tainted body heat was like a furnace. Within minutes, I felt like I was suffocating again.
As we came out of the tunnel into the park, I scanned the terrain, trying to peer through the dim street light and shadows. It had been many hours since my phone call, but surely the cops wouldn’t have given up already. Surely they’d still be patrolling the park, looking for anyone suspicious.
Ayers had stayed behind, but he’d demanded to be updated by cell phone. He wanted to know the minute the tape was secured and had called once already while we were still in the parking lot. That had started Reuben and the Parka grumbling in their native tongue.
We took a right and followed the river, toward the first footbridge. Most of the river was black at this hour, the extinguished braziers creating unattractive lumps in the darkness, but there were lights above and under the bridges. I searched desperately, hoping for a cop to emerge from the shadow into the light.
Contained by the river on one side and a stone wall on the other, the path was painfully narrow. I eyed the stone wall, which was ten to twelve feet high and made of blocks that created natural footholds. But even if I could get out of the Parka’s grip, there wasn’t enough distance. Even if I got to the wall, he’d shoot me like a fish in a barrel.
“Can we slow down?” I asked, shifting my weight and exaggerating my limp. “I can’t keep up.”
“After you find the fucking tape, we’ll slow down,” the Parka responded.
Emerging from the second footbridge, the path widened, with enough room for a few trees along the river and near the wall. The Parka gripped me tighter as we passed the stairway to Memorial Drive, hurrying me past my chance for escape, but ahead, at the Steeple Street bridge, there was another stairway, another street exit.
I peered up at the footbridges for a sign of a uniform. Even a maintenance man cleaning up the last of the WaterFire litter. Anyone to call for help. But there was no one.
“Somewhere in there,” I said, pointing to ground cover just beyond where I’d actually tossed the tape in the narrow ribbon of green along the river.
“Those aren’t fucking bushes. That’s fucking ivy,” the Parka said.
But he must have seen my darting eyes. He told Reuben to wait at the entrance to the stairway. My heart fell. There was no way to get past him. The Parka stood over me, the gun pointed as I bent to my knees, only a few feet from the river’s edge. I glanced up again, trying to will a cop to appear on the bridge. But no one came. I groped through the ivy, flailing through the foliage, knowing I’d dropped the Altoids box at least five feet away.
I glanced at the bridge. Anyone, a jogger, a bum, someone I could call for help. But it was still too early. At least twenty minutes or more until dawn. My fingers dug at the earth, around roots, futilely. No one came. No one was going to come. I moved a few feet forward, closer to the stairway. “Maybe up this way,” I said, pointing to another clump of ivy.
The Parka remained standing over me, watching me forage. Wordlessly, I moved on to the next clump and the next. Finally, he began to tire. He kept his gun pointed at me, but backed up across the path to where Reuben was now sitting on the bench.
As I moved past a tree to a clump of ivy at the river’s edge, my gaze caught a piece of wood floating in the murky, brown water. It looked like a log from last night’s WaterFire that must have fallen off a fuel boat or broken free from the burning pile at the brazier. I considered trying to grab it as a weapon. But then I had another thought.
The river was less than thirty feet wide, with a gondola platform diagonally across from me, on the other side. Directly in front of me, about halfway across the river, there was one of the braziers from WaterFire. I’d swum in high school and my lungs were in good shape from running. If I took a long, shallow dive, I might be able to stay underwater until I could hide behind the brazier. The water was dark and I’d be hard to see. There was a chance I could make it.
I made a decision: I was not going to go back with these men. I was not getting back in the Cadillac no matter what. I’d rather get shot here trying to escape than let the Parka take me back to Bootsie’s Roast Beef, where he could rape me first, where it would take weeks for anyone to find my rotting corpse.
It must have been like the process of drowning, the part where you stop flailing wildly and gulping for air, because the last of my fear dissipated. I no longer felt the pain in my ankle or in my ear. I didn’t care how cold the night was, or how cold the water might be.
I noticed that the Parka was no longer actually aiming the gun at me. He was sitting on the bench next to Reuben with the gun hanging from his hand as he watched me. I took a breath and moved to the clump of ivy closest to the water. The Parka stretched his legs in front of him and leaned toward Reuben, saying something.
And then I heard the cell phone ring: Ayers calling for an update. The distraction I needed. My chance. When the Parka reached for the phone on his belt, I pushed off my good ankle and dove into the river.
A shock of water, so cold it was like diving into slush. My chest tightened. I opened my eyes underwater, but couldn’t see anything. I had to hope like hell I was going in the right direction, hope I was swimming in a straight line, hope I could hold my breath long enough to make it to the brazier.
I heard someone shouting and then, through the water, a gunshot. I swam like mad through the cold, brown water. My hand whacked something thick and globular that felt like a jellyfish. Only no kind of fish could survive in this river. I couldn’t think about what it might actually be. I was running out of air. Had to find the brazier. Had to surface.
I knocked into something hard and lifted my head. I heard another gunshot and a splash of water. I’d. hit another log, a floating piece of cedar. I couldn’t see the brazier anywhere. And then I realized that I must have bypassed it—and had swum toward the gondola platform because it was now only a couple of feet away.
I heard another splash and looked back. Shit, Reuben was coming after me. My arms were cold, frozen under me as I pulled myself onto the gondola platform. I had no choice but to make a run for it on my bad ankle. I had no choice but
to hope the Parka was a really shitty shot.
Pain began to spiral from my ankle to my hip. It was getting harder to ignore it. It was getting hard to take each step. I reached a stairway that led to the Citizens Bank building and heard another gunshot. Something burned into the back of my calf and my ankle buckled. My knee hit the cement. I tried to push myself up, but my leg was too weak and my arms were shivering with cold. I heard the sound of a car somewhere in the distance; I looked up and saw a police cruiser in the parking lot. Two cops jumped out.
I screamed for help. Within a minute, someone was lifting me up by the arms. “You’re bleeding,” the cop said. “She’s been shot!” he called to someone else. And then the black river began to stream behind my eyes, and my body wavered as if swimming through some new medium. The first light of sunrise dissolved and the sky was darker than ever.
* * *
I must have passed out, because I woke up on an examination bed in the emergency room at Rhode Island Hospital, covered in blankets, my leg burning.
My wet jeans had been cut off and thrown on a chair. I was wearing a johnny and a nurse was cleaning up the back of my calf. “Saline first. Then a little Betadine,” she said.
I winced. The pain of my leg cut through the momentary confusion. I’d been shot.
“The bullet just grazed you. The doctor says you’ll only need about eight stitches in your leg and probably four in your earlobe.”
I put my hand to my ear and fingered the bandage. My fingers smelled of something dark and sour. River water.
“You lost quite a bit of blood last night. You need to replenish your fluids,” the nurse continued. She gestured to a tall plastic cup on a table beside the bed.
I took a sip. Apple juice. I closed my eyes, savoring its ordinariness. It was all over. I was in the hospital, safe.
When I opened my eyes, I saw Matt Cavanaugh standing in the doorway. His eyes were especially dark and ringed, as if he was worried. And then I realized, he was worried about me.
