by Saul Black
Yet.
Someone was moving. His shifting weight registered through the floor. Sound of latches snapping. The coffin lid yawned and the light cut her eyes.
‘You woke me up,’ the dark-haired man (‘Xander’ she remembered) said to her, quietly.
‘I can’t drive any more,’ the other guy’s voice said from up front. ‘Seriously, my fucking leg is killing me.’
Claudia hadn’t been aware that she was sobbing, until now. Snot rattled in her nose. The warmth from where she’d wet herself made itself felt, an absurd little flower of detail.
‘You pissed yourself,’ Xander said. ‘Guess that means we’re too late for a toilet stop.’
Claudia screamed. The gag made it nothing. Her throat burned.
‘OK,’ Xander said. ‘You better listen to me very carefully. Are you listening?’
The gag was sour. Somewhere far under the terror her body was pounding with dehydration. The ties on her wrists and ankles might as well have been cheese wire. Frantic calculations: how long? Ryan would have called. Hours? Days? Missing. They wait twenty-four hours. Forty-eight. The police wait – don’t they? Carlos. Not till Monday. Stephanie. Would assume she’d stayed over. Her phone. Dropped in the struggle? Someone finds it. Someone—
‘You need to do anything else?’ Xander said, indicating the wet patch in her jeans. ‘Nod your head if you need to do anything else. I don’t want you making a mess and stinking up the place.’
You get out and somehow get them to untie your legs and then no matter what you run. You fucking run.
She nodded her head.
‘Well, that may or may not be true,’ Xander said. ‘But if you’ve got any ideas about getting away, forget it.’ He reached around into the back of his jeans and pulled out an automatic handgun. Let her see it. Let her eyes track it as he lowered it slowly to her crotch and pressed it against her. Involuntarily her knees came up. She tried to twist away – but of course she couldn’t. He leaned in and held her legs under his forearm. Wedged the gun in harder.
‘Be still,’ he said. ‘Hey. Be still.’
She couldn’t swallow. The gun hurt. She forced herself to stop struggling. Forcing herself to stop was like breaking her own heart.
‘That’s better. Wriggling like that isn’t going to help you. It just isn’t going to help you. Understand?’
She was sobbing again, though she was aware of it only as if she were spectating on someone else’s distress. Beyond his head she could see the RV’s snug domestic fittings. An electric kettle. A microwave. The last things you see. There was room in her for precise griefs: that she would never have tea and hot buttered toast with Alison in the family kitchen again. Nor hear her father’s distinctive rattlecrash of the newspaper, as if he were trying to shake the truth out of it.
‘All right,’ Xander said, withdrawing the gun and tucking it back into his jeans. ‘Let’s get you up.’
The manhandling forced intimacy. Every touch – his lifting her, helping her stand, his hands on her hips then transferred to her neck and the waistband of her jeans – stamped him on her body like a brand. The box she’d been in was the base of one of the vehicle’s bed-seats. The bright orange cushions were on the floor behind him.
‘Stand up straight,’ he said.
The blood unpacking itself in her legs made her unsteady. Her limbs were too full of sensation. All the sensation she didn’t want. Death bulged and beat against her. Every second of life now testified to death.
He reached over to one of the kitchen drawers and brought out a large knife. Viciously serrated. Handgrip-moulded black heavy-duty rubber handle. It looked military. Over his shoulder Claudia could see the red-haired guy turned around in the driver’s seat, watching everything. His mouth was open, his thin face damp and tense. Beyond him the windscreen showed a headlit patch of scrub dissolving into darkness. No visible road. No sound of traffic, either. The middle of nowhere. She died in the middle of nowhere. She remembered Alison saying once: I don’t mind how I die as long as it’s not a lonely death.
Xander bent and cut the ankle ties. They were the cheap plastic ones the police sometimes used instead of steel cuffs. The blood pushed back into her numb feet.
‘Walk,’ he said.
Four steps to what turned out to be the vehicle’s bathroom. No windows. A round fluorescent light, flickering slightly. In spite of everything it reminded Claudia of the way your eyelid twitched when you were short of sleep. He grabbed her wrists and slashed through the ties.
She had her arms and legs free.
And they were no help.
‘You’ve got two minutes,’ he said. ‘Don’t bother trying to make a racket. There’s no one out there to hear you. You touch that gag and I’ll cut your tongue out.’
It surprised her that he closed the door. There was no lock on it. Of course. She stood in the tiny space, shaking, choked by her own tears. The joy of having her limbs free. The uselessness of it. Her body was crammed with impulses with nowhere to go. Though she scanned every inch the bathroom offered her nothing. White moulded plastic, the sleep-deprived fluorescent, a chemical toilet, a shower head, a sink barely big enough for both hands. No escape. No weapon. Nothing. She just stood there, feeling the moments haemorrhaging away. The need to remove the gag was overwhelming – but she didn’t. I’ll cut your tongue out. He expected her to use the toilet. At the thought of unzipping and pulling down her jeans the touch of his hands came back on her flesh. There was a little mirror over the sink. When she looked in it the sight hurt her. Her face wet with sweat and snot. Her left eye bruised. Blood crusted under each nostril. And the central horror of the gag. Her face – her – gagged. The love of her family – her mother and father, Alison – thousands of miles away and her, here, now, with this happening. She thought of them seeing her like this. Her father broken, her mother’s gentle face made ugly by grief, Alison curled up on her bed, groaning like a wounded animal. Never see them again. Never—
The door opened. She realised a part of her had been thinking about breaking the mirror, a shard of glass… But it was reflective plastic, not glass, and he would have heard her do it and by the time those calculations were made she was out of time and there he was.
‘Done or not,’ Xander said. ‘Out. We got a way to go yet.’
THIRTY-SIX
It was still dark when they stopped and took her out of the box.
‘Go open up,’ Xander said to the other guy.
More manhandling to get her out of the RV. His hands under her arms, her heels whacking the steps down, scoring the dust when he dragged her towards the house.
She saw open dark land, an overgrown field, a sky full of stars. A dirt yard. Three low buildings and two old cars, one with its wheels missing, standing on cinder blocks. Silence. The emptiness said no neighbours. A farm? It didn’t smell like California. The air was cold and dry and mineral. The sweat began to cool on her skin. The outside space was precious and brought the reality of her dying here big and close. She felt the thousands of miles between her and home, the warp of the time difference, her family’s lives going on with no idea of what was happening to her.
Xander dragged her over the open doorway’s threshold. Derelict. But still, apparently, with power. In the low-wattage light from a bare ceiling bulb Claudia saw a big kitchen of dirty tiles and archaic fittings. A cupboard door open: canned goods and bottled water. A big, stained Belfast sink with a chunk cracked out of it and a dripping tap. Damp patches on the walls. Two doors off the kitchen, one open on a dark corridor.
‘Home sweet home,’ the other guy said.
From the corridor, a door, wooden stairs, down.
They were taking her down. Below ground. Panic rushed her again.
‘Paulie, get her feet for Christ’s sake.’
The reflex to struggle was unstoppable.
Xander let go of her and her head whacked the sharp edge of a step. The knife was at her throat.
‘Keep that up,�
� he said, ‘if you want this in you. Do you want this in you?’
Claudia felt the skin on her neck open. A fine line of fire. Wetness. Blood. Her blood. She had an image of the laminated poster from biology lessons at school, showing a man reduced to his circulatory system. Capillaries, veins, arteries. They used to call him Skinless Jim. She stopped struggling. The knife was the only reality. The knife was the only thing that meant anything. If it went into her all the blood would come out. Nothing – nothing superseded that fact.
‘That’s better,’ Xander said. ‘But that’s your last warning. You make another move and I’ll open you up. Understand?’
They carried her down the stairs. The basement was big and low-ceilinged, lit by three more bare bulbs. Through the warm blur of the wound on her neck Claudia registered broken crates, a furnace, a busted armchair with half its stuffing out like ectoplasm, empty beer bottles. In several places floorboards were missing. No windows. The walls showed patches of baizy mould. Her heart cried out for the open space she’d been given a few cruel seconds of between the RV and the house. Open space she’d never appreciated. Open space her body screamed to be running through right now. Running fast, away from them, into the concealing darkness and the clean night air. But the basement was a neutral intelligence that simply stated: That was the last clean air you’ll ever breathe. This place, these bare walls, this low ceiling, is the only place you’ll know from now on. For the minutes or hours or days you have left until they kill you.
Between them they carried her to an alcove by the furnace and, to her astonishment, cut the ties on her hands and feet and yanked the gag down out of her mouth. She couldn’t speak. She put her hand up to her throat, felt it wet with blood – but the cut wasn’t deep.
Paulie went to the other side of the room, then came back with a bucket in one hand and a two-litre bottle of water in the other. He set them down next to her. Then both men stepped back, staring at her.
‘Please,’ she gasped. ‘Let me go. If you let me go I won’t say anything. I swear I won’t say anything. Just let me go.’ The sound of her own voice was terrible to her. It confirmed that all this was real. She was really here. It was really her.
Paulie smiled. Lit a cigarette with a copper Zippo. Xander reached up above his head, where the end of a steel cable dangled. He grabbed it and pulled.
A flexible metal security grille – like the ones stores used – descended with a loud rattle. A padlock that went through a corresponding metal hoop bolted to the floor.
She was sealed off from the rest of the room.
In a cage.
THIRTY-SEVEN
I’ll come by and see you later. Don’t say anything. Just don’t answer the door if you don’t want to.
Back at her apartment, Valerie tried to imagine not answering the door. She tried to imagine hearing the doorbell and ignoring it, the seconds and minutes that would have to pass before she’d know he’d given up and gone away. She tried to imagine the strength required for waiting that out, all the while knowing that if she hit the buzzer, let him into the building, unlocked her apartment door and stood in her living room it would be a matter of moments before he was with her, his arms around her, the warm fit of their bodies, the blur and surrender that would take them from kissing to hurrying each other’s clothes off (the priceless friction of fabric leaving skin, the little ticks of static, the first tender shock of flesh on flesh) to the bedroom, the bed, the giving in, the certainty, the homecoming of fucking and the knowledge that there was nothing, nothing, nothing better than love. She tried to imagine what it would feel like to know all that was there, that life was ready to burn brightly again – and refusing it. She tried to imagine all this and failed. The failure itself was a kind of sweetness.
But in the shower (her body, for so long nothing to her, now reasserting its sexual self through her breasts and midriff and neck and thighs, through the livening between her legs) other truths jabbed at and cut into the fantasy. That she would have to tell him. Everything. Before anything else happened. And if she did tell him it was almost certain that nothing else would happen.
I was pregnant, Nick. But I didn’t know if it was yours. And I never told you.
I want not to do anyone any harm.
Too late for that. She’d already done him harm. Was doing him harm now, with these erotic preparations.
It didn’t stop her. There was a momentum at work in her whether she liked it or not. She shaved her legs and underarms, washed and conditioned her hair, brushed her teeth. Put on a skirt for the first time in years. No perfume. He never wanted her to wear perfume. He wanted, he’d said, just the smell of her skin. It had been a shocking introduction to what love could do that she’d believed him. If they were going out he’d watch her getting ready. She’d be half naked at the dressing table putting on her make-up and catch him observing her in the mirror. Haven’t you got anything better to do? she’d said, the first time this had happened. He’d said: Nothing better than this, no. And because she’d known he wasn’t lying her flush of narcissistic pleasure had been innocent. It was the first time in her life she’d known she was desired and loved for exactly who and what she was.
Dressed, she looked at the clock. It was after eleven. She mixed herself a vodka and tonic. Just one. A large one – but just one. Sip, slowly. For courage.
An hour passed.
Two.
Her apartment’s tension started to tell her he wasn’t coming.
The downed vodka added: Because he’s thought better of it. Because he knows there’s something you’re not telling him. Because he’ll never love you the way he did. And if he does, what do you think you’ll do with the love? What did you do the last time?
She poured herself another.
By one a.m. she wasn’t drunk, but the vodka had grown in candour.
Nothing’s changed. He’s not coming because you were right the first time: You don’t deserve it. Eight dead women (and one dead baby) and here you are with a fucking skirt on waiting for love. By what right? By what right?
She drank another.
You had love and you shat on it. That’s what you did. That’s what you’ll do. He knows that. He’s not stupid.
With bitter satisfaction she went back to her desk.
That’s right. Work, not love. There’s only work for you, now, so do it.
She went through every case file, over and over again, until the uncooperative facts were a snowstorm in her head, with a backdrop that was a mish-mash of human remains and the obstinately unrelated objects. The objects. There had been a phase early in the investigation when she’d gone down the psych route of their symbolic meanings – if they had any. It had got her nowhere. Not least because there was no consensus on what any given object symbolised. The Internet had taken her into a labyrinth of contradictions. The hammer was everything from a destroyer to a defender, from an inverted cross to a cycle of death and rebirth. Apples were sin and death, but also beauty (when he’d stood behind her and wrapped his arms around her and said You’re beautiful, she’d believed him), immortality, the cosmos, breasts, knowledge… It was pointless. Asking the Internet was like asking God; how could the answer not contradict itself and go on for ever? And this was to say nothing of the crackpot stuff. One source apparently obsessed with rescuing the symbol of the goose from its associations with silliness. The goose was bravery, loyalty, navigation, teamwork, protection… She’d given up. Wild fucking goose chase. Like love. (Hey? What? I love you.)
She unrolled the murder map (a copy of the one from the incident room) looking for something – anything – that would narrow the geography down or reduce it to any kind of logic. She found nothing. The red lines were an impenetrable cat’s cradle. For a little while she revisited the theory that it was a group, a homicidal cabal of killers working together. It wasn’t impossible. It wasn’t impossible – but it only made the situation worse. To make the connections between suspects you needed suspects – and there w
eren’t any. The half-dozen they’d had in the frame at one time or another were – as far as their confiscated communications technology revealed – utterly unconnected to each other; and the alibis that had eventually ruled them out remained. The investigation had scrutinised correspondence from serial killers already incarcerated, the Hollywoodish conceit of someone locked up directing an acolyte or fan club from behind bars. It had yielded nothing plausible. (A depressing amount of convicted wackos’ letters were to and from women who were infatuated with them, wanted to marry them, get fucked by them, save them, have their children. If we have a kid, we’ll let it stay up late sometimes for no good reason. Once or twice a year we’ll go into its school and say there’s an emergency and take it out of class and just blow off the day at the park.)
She spent an hour calling around the enforcement agencies in the states the zoo footage had gone out to. Nothing. Or rather a dozen alleged sightings that had so far come to nothing. She called Reno for progress on ID’ing the alarm clock victim, but of course the process had only just begun. It would mean every Nevada missing person case in the last… what, two? three? four years? Contacting the families. Dental records. And that was assuming the victim had even been reported missing. That was assuming she had people to whom she was missing. Low-rent hooker? Drug addict? A lot of the women in either category (and sometimes both) simply didn’t have anyone who’d give a shit whether they disappeared or not. They didn’t have anyone who’d notice. Add to that that if this was the serial duo, chances were the victim wasn’t from Nevada anyway. Valerie looked at the map and felt the entire country like a swirling liquid, particles drifting from one state into another, untrackable, untraceable, defying procedure. (The road trip to Mexico in their first year together, the hours of warm windshield sunlight on her bare legs, his hand there, the shared truancy, the way delighted calm female ownership of him had pierced her when she’d come out of a gas station toilet and seen him talking with the pump attendant. Love ambushed you with these humble revelations, stamped itself on you through the oblique and the mundane.)
