by Saul Black
She stopped the car.
Another hundred yards down the track a scatter of low buildings.
Vehicles parked outside. A Honda. An old Ford on blocks.
An RV.
SEVENTY-TWO
Had he heard the car? Had she stopped far enough away?
You fucking sit tight.
Easy to say. Not easy to do. Not when every second might be Claudia Grey’s last. Claudia Grey didn’t have time for her to sit tight.
Valerie climbed over the low wooden fence. It was old, silvered by the weather. Its last coat of preserver might have been a decade ago. She could probably have pushed it over with a hard shove.
Cover.
There was no cover.
Barely any cover. A scatter of stunted gorse bushes dotting the overgrown scrub grass between her and the buildings. A farmhouse. Derelict, as predicted by Will. Two clapboard outbuildings with corrugated roofs. She had an image of Leon watching her from one of the upper windows. She had an image of him raising a rifle. Tracking her in the cross-hairs. The gorse bushes looked tiny. And all that open space between.
She went low, Glock out. The wind simmered in the grass. First bush. Second. Third. The imagined cross-hairs burned like a third eye in her forehead or over her heart.
Forty yards to go. The last twenty with no more gorse.
Her death buzzed through the adrenalin. Her death was the source of the adrenalin. Her death brought her life vivid and teeming and close. Random details assaulted her: the shadow of a high cloud on the land; a thin snail shell by her foot, its pretty nautilus whorls; the smell of the track’s pale dust; the sounds of her clothes when she moved. There was no past and no future, just this expanding present. There wasn’t even the decision to do what she was doing. Only the fact that she was doing it.
Last twenty yards. Completely exposed. She thought: If I die, has my life been OK? The answer was a blur. All the approximations and regrets. But the richness of her childhood and, later, the giant force of love. It surprised her that she found herself thinking: It’s been enough. It’s been full. But of course that thought brought a twinge of sadness. If she died now she would never get to say goodbye to the people she loved, the people who loved her.
Neither would Claudia Grey.
She faced the last twenty yards. She would make for the nearest of the outbuildings and work her way around it to the side of the house. In the broad light she felt absurdly (comically, if not for what was at stake) visible, the only moving thing in the otherwise still landscape. She couldn’t help thinking that even if Leon wasn’t watching her, some change in the atmosphere, some tremor or jolt passing through the farmhouse walls, would alert him. She imagined him tensing, like a dog catching a thrilling scent. Lifting his head. Turning. Coming towards her.
Fine. If it got him away from Claudia Grey.
Crouched low, she raced to the outbuilding.
It felt good to get her back to the wall. It calmed her, the cold solidity between her and the inhabitants of the house. Inhabitants. Plural. (Optimistically assume Claudia Grey was one of them. Optimistically assume she was still one of the living.) Leon, yes – but the beta, too. Two guys. How many rooms? And how long for the St George blues to get here?
The first outbuilding was nothing more than an empty shed. A bare floor of red dirt, maybe thirty feet by twenty. A sweetish smell of dry, ancient dung. Cattle, once, obviously. It stood at a forty-five-degree angle to the house. Behind it, parallel to the house, was a second, smaller building, one storey, with two low windows of filthy glass and a padlocked wooden door on an overhead runner.
In there?
She didn’t think so. A single passing glance through the window would reveal whatever was inside. He’d have her in the house. He’d go to the kitchen for a beer or a piece of cold chicken between sessions.
Sessions. Suzie Fallon had been tortured for days. The guy who’d done it would have had meals during that time, would have stood at the open refrigerator contemplating his options, deliberating over a microwaveable pizza or leftover Chinese takeout. The horror of horror was that it trundled along arm-in-arm with the mundane. That was what had fucked her up. That was what had made her believe she wasn’t entitled to the mundane, to breakfasts and walks in Golden Gate Park and waking up with Nick. That was what had made her believe she wasn’t entitled to love.
Hugging the wall, she made her way around the back of the outbuilding. The wind lifted her hair, slashed it across her face. She found a scrunchie in her pocket and tied it back. Switched her phone to silent. There was a clearer view of the house from here, which was, as far as she could tell, the shape of a squat T. Two storeys. From where she was positioned she could see the whole of the front face, three windows on the ground floor, four smaller ones above, and a wooden front door of flaking baby-blue paint. A side entrance up two mossy little steps, probably to the kitchen. One window there. She was blind to the back and far side. Which was unacceptable. She had to get the exits in her head.
Without giving herself time to think, Valerie darted from the shed to the second outbuilding, and from there to the house’s kitchen wall. Keep low. Flush to the good, solid, whitewashed stone. She thought of the house standing here for decades. She imagined a family, years back, conversations, meals, arguments, laughter, a woman in a plain sundress in the kitchen doorway, watching the sun go down, a teenaged girl bravely brushing her teeth though she was upset about something, a guy getting up early, making coffee in the kitchen before it was light outside.
All that gone. Now the house was home to this.
Inch by inch she raised herself to peer in through the window nearest the side door.
Kitchen. Correct. Cobwebs. Antiquated plumbing and bruises of damp. A cupboard door hanging on its hinges.
Empty room.
She thought of the simple fact that she would have to go in. It was impossible and inevitable. She was in the flow, now. The flow hurried you forward into the unknown. It was what you dreaded and what you lived for. If you were a cop.
It took her less than a minute, hugging the exterior, to make a full circuit of the farmhouse. She needed two more police. One for the front door (locked) and one for the door (also locked) on the opposite side of the building.
Herself for the kitchen entrance, which door she hadn’t tried yet.
The breeze moved against the bare parts of her: face, wrists, throat. The land smelled clean and stony. Her hands were shaking.
SEVENTY-THREE
Xander, carrying the shopping bags, opened the basement door and descended the stairs. He’d bought the kite, the jug, the lemon, the monkey, the orange, the ring, the net, the umbrella and – fucking incredible how much these things cost – the violin and the xylophone. The xylophone had given him a goddamned headache. It took him a while to get the bitch in the music store to understand what he was asking for. Ninety fucking dollars!
The girl was, of course, as he’d left her, though she’d managed to wriggle closer to the furnace. He’d leave the ball-gag in. He didn’t like to hear them talk. It was always the same – please, please, please – but the words had been annoying him more of late. The words and the way they looked at him, those seconds or minutes before they stopped seeing anything, before they went deep inside themselves. When they looked at him like that it was as if they were trying to see something secret, as if they were trying to search something out in him. It was as if they really believed something was in there in him and they were trying to get him to see it. It was an irritation. It gave him a feeling of time passing, emptily. Like when he was watching the carousel’s painted horses going round and round, more and more time of him not being up there and his mother and Jimmy drinking more and more beer and the time going, going, going.
He dumped the bags by the stack of boxes and tried to clear his head. He wanted to go back upstairs and get into bed, pull the covers up to his chin. When he was Leon in Mama Jean’s house he used to tuck the bottom of the covers
under his feet and the top of the covers under his chin and it felt good. He used to rub his bare feet together and that felt good too. It was a private good thing, the pleasure of rubbing his feet together like that. He would do it for what felt like hours, in the basement darkness, until he fell asleep.
He took the jug out of one of the shopping bags. The kite too. And the monkey and the lemon and the violin. No, that was wrong: the violin was a long way off. He should go get the chart from upstairs. The violin… The violin was further away, he knew, though in his head it drifted close to the front. There had been violin music playing in the music store. The rat-faced bitch behind the counter had looked at him funny. She’d been glad the tattooed guy working in the guitar section was there. She’d been glad she wasn’t in the store on her own. Xander had been able to see that in people his whole life; as soon as they were alone with him they started hoping someone else would show up. It was in their eyes. It was another exhausting thing, year after year. He was so tired the whole time.
She saw you and she got away. Ran all the way through the woods. You didn’t even know she was there. You fucked it up.
He didn’t remember any little girl. He’d been through the whole house. There was no—
The little room across from the boy’s. Half painted.
Mama Jean had said: A fucking three-year-old can do this. You ever get to school, all them little girls are going to laugh their asses off at you. Is that what you want? All them pretty little misses laughing their asses off at the big dumb baby in the corner?
The jug. He was sure it was the jug next.
But the jug should’ve been for the cunt in Colorado. Should he use the jug here, now? Or the kite? But wasn’t that… You couldn’t… The monkey…
It was no good. The things kept swapping places. He’d get this bitch set up here then go upstairs and bring down the chart.
‘I’ll get you ready,’ he said. He wasn’t looking at the girl in the cage. He said it to give himself something else to think about. The ropes and the knife. He liked them on their backs with their arms behind their heads and their legs spread. He liked the way they kept trying and trying no matter what to get their legs together even though they knew – they had to know – it was impossible, once he’d tied them down. He liked the way their whole bodies kept trying to find a way for it not to be happening. But he was completely in control of what was happening. He was completely in control of all of it. He was what was happening. There wasn’t anything else. At those times everything else dropped away, the walls, the room, the house, all of it. It was as if he were alone with them in endless warm soft buoyant space where there was nothing – absolutely nothing else. It was as if there had never been anything else, just him, full and rich and perfect, with all the time in the world.
You fucked it up.
The weird thing was he knew Paulie wasn’t lying. It added to his exhaustion that he knew Paulie wasn’t lying. It was a curse, to be able to tell. But he always could. No one had ever got away with a lie to him in his whole life. He should have been on TV with it. A talent, like the guy who could bend spoons and stop watches with his mind. While he got the ropes ready (there was a lead pipe running along the base of the opposite wall where the wrist ropes went and an iron bar he’d bolted to the floor ten feet from it for the leg ties) he had a little fantasy of himself on a show where people had to tell him things and he had to say whether it was a lie or not. Some of the women from Real Housewives were on stage with him, and the studio audience was like the audience in the infomercial, delighted and amazed. And he was right, every time.
The jug.
The monkey.
The lemon.
The kite.
He stood with his forehead resting against the basement wall. It was cool and damp and soothing. His head felt big and hot again. There was a wasps’ nest in the backyard at Mama Jean’s and a heat came off it. You could feel it if you dared to put your hand close enough. If he used the kite now he could go back… He could go back and… But they’d have found her by now. Should’ve buried her. Why had he just driven away like that?
Because of fucking Paulie. Paulie had diverted him. And then there hadn’t been a jug. He remembered getting the splinter when he’d been running his hand over the kitchen cabinets. It was like an insult on top of everything else wrong. And why? Because Paulie had said he wanted to do one of his own, and he, Xander, in a moment of total fucking stupidity, had said OK. Surprise surprise, when it came down to it, Paulie had backed away like a cringing fucking cat, trying to grin, trying to make a joke of his failure, and Xander had had to do it himself.
The girl’s breathing through her nose was annoying him. He wished he could go upstairs and lie down again, but the things in the shopping bags were a gossiping crowd in his head. It would only get louder. He had an image of the girl’s bare breast and sinking his teeth into it as hard as he could, the good feel of all his weight on her and her soft throat’s straining scream under his hand. She’d go deep inside herself and he’d stop and wait until she came back. Then he’d start again. It fascinated him, the way they went and came back and went and came back. It was like a dial you could turn. They never wanted to come back. It was agony for them to come back. But if you stopped what you were doing for long enough they always did. It was one of the things you could count on.
The kite was next.
No, the jug.
You fucked it up.
He couldn’t stand it any more. His jaws hurt from his teeth clamped together. He wanted to scream. He spun away from the wall and went to the grille. The girl made an annoying noise behind the gag. The girl struggled. The ties had broken the skin on her wrists and ankles. Her hands and feet were bloody. She was trying to get into a sitting position.
Xander unlocked the grille and dragged her out.
He’d just got her tied down and was about to begin cutting off her clothes when he heard a sound from the floor above.
SEVENTY-FOUR
The house was innocently committed to giving Valerie away. Floorboards ticked and groaned. Every step detonated a new sound. Her grip around the Glock was wet. Her breathing stirred the stillness. The kitchen windows were so filthy they cut half the light, but there was enough to show the signs of minimal habitation: canned food in the open cupboard; an overflowing garbage pail; unwashed glasses and cups; empty beer bottles; a pair of sneakers.
Beyond the kitchen, a dark corridor. Stairs going up on the right. Two doorways on the left. A closed door leading outside at the far end. Another door in the stairs’ flank – surely down to the basement.
The basement.
Valerie put her left hand on the wall to steady herself. She had to keep reminding herself there were most likely two men in here. Which meant going room by room.
But the basement.
The seconds. The minutes. The time.
The basement.
She crept to the door and pressed her ear against it.
Nothing.
Very carefully, she tried the handle.
Locked.
Upstairs, a floorboard creaked.
She backed from the door. Her mouth was dry. A rogue shiver – a stubborn symptom that wouldn’t quit – went through her.
Someone upstairs.
But check the downstairs rooms first.
She eased the handle on the door on her left, gun steadied and raised. The door wasn’t locked. She opened it fast.
She was looking at a sitting room, heavy floral curtains, closed. A bulky fireplace with a pale ceramic surround. Dense gloom and an unused atmosphere. But for an incongruous wicker couch and a deck chair, it was empty.
She stepped back into the corridor. The next door on the left was ajar. Curtains closed. A duplicate fireplace. An elephantine dark vinyl armchair. Alcoves with empty shelves. A hole the size of a watermelon in the corner of the floor. Torn remnants of broad-striped wallpaper. Again, empty.
Kitchen and downstairs rooms clear.
But the basement was locked. Which meant shooting the lock. Which meant the end of stealth. Not yet. Upstairs, first. Quickly. Or as quickly as whoever was up there would allow.
The stairs made a further farce of concealment, for all her tiptoeing. Halfway up, one of them gave out a report like a branch snapping. At the top she turned back on herself onto a landing. A bathroom over the kitchen. Two rooms on the left. A third above what would be the front hall downstairs. The bathroom was exposed plumbing and a watermarked tub with its side panel missing, one wall bare stone, a toilet with a shit smear in its dark-watered bowl. It smelled of cramped masculinity up here, stale singlets and sweaty socks, a meat-heavy diet, burped beer, ashtrays. Every second the sense that they were right here – feet away – rested heavier on her. The air around her bristled. Her scalp shrank, loosened, shrank. Her heartbeat would be, she thought, visible.
But the bedrooms, though obviously lived-in, were empty. One of them had a television on, with the sound muted. The Apprentice. Donald Trump with that idiotic croissant of a wig. Of course they watched television. Of course they ate, drank, moved their bowels, bought cigarettes, took showers. Of course they did. They were men. They were people.
Hypotheses formed and dissolved. Leon had seen her. Had alerted the beta and the two of them had got out the hallway door. Or only Leon was here. Or he was in the basement. Or they both were. Waiting for her.
She got back out onto the upstairs landing and looked up. There was a hatch in the ceiling – but it was padlocked from the outside.
They were in the basement or they were gone.
There was only one room in the house she hadn’t looked in.
SEVENTY-FIVE
Xander cold-cocked the girl with a swipe – a flick, practically – of the shotgun’s butt, then waited until he heard whoever the fuck it was going upstairs. His body was fluttery and confused. The objects were a self-repeating explosion in his head. Someone was in the house. It was impossible. Someone was… Who was in the house? How could someone be in the house?
