by Dale Bailey
Drained by thirty seconds of mindless spasm, Nick had fallen abruptly back into himself—into dread and self-loathing—there in the living room. There had been blood, not much, but blood still, the stain somehow shocking against Sue’s pale thighs. She would not meet his eyes or speak to him as she threw on her clothes. She shut off the television and the light on her way out. He listened to her make her way to the second floor, reminding him of that other time he had waited here while she mounted those stairs, that other abandonment.
Now, in the dark living room, the sound of her voice—
—it hurts Nicky it hurts it—
—came back to him, and below that, just barely audible, another voice, wheedling and enticing—the voice of the tape, like a riptide on a sunny Delta afternoon, always threatening to suck you down. Just thinking of it, he felt something uncoil in his loins.
Water ran for a long time upstairs. Afterward, the apartment fell still. Nick sat on the sofa in his boxers and stared into the dark, wondering what to do, whether to follow her upstairs or to slip into the night and find his way home.
But he did not want her to be alone. Not now.
She didn’t stir when he came into the bedroom, when he lay himself beside her.
Finally, into the dark, he said, “We have to talk about it.”
Nothing. So he waited, soothed by her presence anyway, the music of her respiration, lulled finally into something that was not quite sleep, a reverie of blessed unawareness.
Sue’s voice buoyed him back into his life. The dead guy lolled in his arms. Casey Barrett sobbed inside his head. He felt once again the gut-wrenching excitement of his climax.
“I don’t want to talk about anything.”
“Sue, listen to me, please—”
“I don’t want to talk about anything, Nick! Not the tape, not that fucking policeman, not—not—”
Her voice broke. After a moment, he stole a hand across the comforter, found her hand, a fist, and pried it open.
He could feel pressure building in his chest. “We have to, Sue.”
“Why? Why?”
“Because—” His voice quiet. “—I hurt you.”
She said nothing.
“I hurt you and I couldn’t—I didn’t want to stop. I—I—hurt you.”
Nick felt her weight shift beside him, found himself staring into her face, edged platinum by the streetlight.
“Is that what you think?” Her eyes glittered. “Is that what you really think, Nick?”
“I don’t know.”
“I liked it. I liked what you did to me, when you hit me, when you … I wanted you to.”
Nick felt something crumble inside of him. “I liked it, too.” He drew a long breath. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to hurt you.” And then: “I meant to, but I didn’t want to.”
“It frightens me,” she said, and Nick said nothing. It frightened him, too. It terrified him. But rising above the fright, he could hear the voice of the tape, malicious and enticing, a beacon, a siren song.
“What are we going to do?” he said.
“Tuck’s right. We have to destroy it. We have to forget any of this ever happened.”
“How can we forget it? Every time I close my eyes I see that girl. I can’t get her voice out of my head. If the tape is gone, it’s like she never existed.” He paused, and when he spoke again, his voice rang in his ears like a confession. “I keep thinking about that guy Barrett waiting up nights, hoping to hear from her. I keep thinking he could find out who did it to her. A guy with money like that …”
“Is that what you want? The reward?”
Every muscle in his body went rigid, but Sue didn’t move away. She lay her hand over his belly, her breath wine-sweet at his throat.
“Is that what you think?”
“I’m just asking.”
They were silent for a long moment.
“What about the guy on the road?” she asked. “It’s like he never existed either.”
“What are you saying, Sue?”
“If you can forget about him, you can forget her, too.”
“But I can’t. I can’t forget him. I had to drag him into the woods. Do you have any idea what that was like?”
Sue was quiet for a moment, a woman in the midst of a minefield. Finally, she said, “Finney was driving.”
“It doesn’t matter—”
“I’m not accusing you, okay?”
Her hand slid higher, across his chest to his shoulder, teasing poison from the knotted muscles there.
“I can’t get him out of my head either,” he said. “How he might come back to haunt us.”
“The tape could come back to haunt us, too.”
“I know. We should give it up, and not for the money either. But if we do, we have to explain. The accident, the locker, everything. And if we destroy it …”
She finished for him. “We don’t have it anymore.”
Nick didn’t answer and Sue didn’t seem to want to make an issue of it. She continued to knead his shoulder for a few minutes, and then her hand relaxed. Nick was pretty sure she had fallen asleep, and maybe he slept, too, for it seemed to him that he woke a little while later from restless dreams of the Gulf, fathomless water and those leathery shadows darting through the depths, a green beacon pulsing on the far horizon, just beyond his reach.
He lay still until his heart stopped hammering, his head filled with images of the dead guy and the murdered girl and the other girl, Spoon, hungry for something she couldn’t even name. She was probably dead too, murdered, or leastways dead inside, lost in some city she had only half imagined, trading ten-dollar blow jobs in the front seats of strangers’ cars.
Sue shifted restlessly, whimpering. He glanced down at her, her copper hair spilling across his chest like blood, and he thought about Casey Barrett and small-town Spoon. It could happen to Sue, too. Fate could snatch her away, she was that fragile. Everyone was, and Nick had never really thought about that before. That moment in the kitchen came flooding back to him, the lifeline of words he had thought to fling to Sue, and now, in the dark, with her hair like blood on his chest, it seemed more important than ever at least to make the attempt.
“I love you, Sue,” he whispered.
But she didn’t answer.
The thing was, Sue was right about the tape—and about the money, too. In odd moments, Nick found himself just picturing it in his head, the clean smell of it, and the crisp feel it had, and most of all its look. He wondered whose sick-funny idea it had been to slap Franklin’s face on the hundred dollar bill. Someone who had been poor once, he figured, because right then Nick felt pretty much like old Ben himself must have felt when he sent his kite bobbing up into that Philadelphia thunderstorm: like a man who had stuck his finger into God’s fuse box and gotten a stiff jolt of the stuff that drove the very universe. Like a man who had caught lightning in a bottle.
During the meal Nick had twice excused himself to go to the bathroom, but really he had slipped back into the foyer to check the contents of his jacket pocket—the tape, the roll of cash. Later, when he dug the tape out, he let his fingers slide over the folded bills with just the same tension he might have used to caress Sue’s back as she moved over him, impaled by need. And he got the same jolt of excitement, too, the rush of heat in his groin, that sense of unimagined possibilities suddenly made real.
That was why he had gone to the library—not to track down information about Casey Nicole Barrett, but to lay out for himself a constellation of possibilities, a map to the lives the money could make possible. It just so happened the two things intersected. As it turned out, Finney had been right: A. R. Barrett could afford the ransom the flyer promised. He could pay it five times over and still make his annual contribution to the Republican National Committee without breaking a sweat. He came from money, old money like Finney and Sue, a lot of it. It had started with tobacco farms, a whole string of them across the South, but Barrett had been smart enough to see
the writing on the wall, and had diversified in the eighties. When Phillip Morris came crashing down at last, A. R. Barrett would still be standing tall.
Until recently, he had been just about as fortunate in his personal life. He had married an Atlanta lawyer named Lydia Coleman in the late seventies, and the couple made frequent appearances in the Atlanta society columns over the next few years. Casey had been born in 1981, and aside from occasional notices in the Constitution, the Barretts retired from public life. That changed late in 1995, with a messy divorce—charges of infidelity, a private investigator with compromising photos of Lydia Barrett—and a more public professional profile for Barrett. Casey disappeared six months later. When Nick pulled the headline up on screen and saw the panel of photographs below—the girl in a school uniform, her smile as posed as that of a freshly embalmed corpse—he felt suddenly weightless, like a crestfallen Wile E. Coyote suspended over the abyss, gravity on a ten-second delay:
Local Lobbyist’s Daughter Disappears
Atlanta, Nov. 18—According to a police spokesman, the daughter of noted Atlanta lobbyist Arnold Barrett has been missing since mid-November. Sergeant David Zimmerman said the matter first came to police attention on November 13th, when Barrett’s lawyer, Daniel Bellman, called to report that Casey Nicole Barrett, 15, might have been kidnapped.
Subsequent investigation revealed that the younger Barrett more likely ran away. Zimmerman said that teachers and friends reported that Casey had not adjusted well to the high-profile divorce of her parents last year. She talked often about wanting to escape and her behavior had been increasingly erratic in recent days.
The article went on to describe ongoing investigations, public and private, concluding with notice of a reward, and a statement from Daniel Bellman. “Both Mr. Barrett and the girl’s mother are simply broken hearted,” he said. “Wherever Casey is, whatever kind of trouble she’s in, they want her to know they love her. They want her to come home.”
After he finished the article, Nick continued to stare into the screen, Casey’s school photo and the file shot of her father—a dark-headed, blandly handsome man in a suit—dissolving into random pixels. He could feel the weight of the dead guy in his arms, and now he wondered how they had crossed paths, Casey and the dead Aryan. What bizarre conjunction of events had led A. R. Barrett’s daughter to her doom in that characterless concrete bunker? And why? Had it been kidnapping after all? Had the cops screwed up somehow? He couldn’t imagine that, and later, scanning through two or three follow-up articles, he found no further reference to kidnapping, no mention of ransom demands or suspects. A witness had tentatively identified Casey Barrett getting off a bus in Nashville, according to Zimmerman, but after that she had simply dropped off the face of the planet.
But the thing that really haunted Nick was the way he felt about that. He kept hearing her voice—he could almost see her anonymous grave, the first spadeful of dirt falling into her frozen china gaze—but somehow the money kept sweeping all that out of his mind. It was like a tidal wave, sweeping him away from everything he had ever hated about his life—from the ripe, oily stench that blew in from the Gulf, from the burn in his muscles after a ten-hour shift in the warehouse, from Glory and the curse of a dead-end future like his father’s.
Before he left the library, Nick paused to glance through the bound periodicals for a ’96 profile of Barrett in Atlanta magazine. HE’S BACK!, the headline announced, the subhead—After a decade of seclusion, A. R. Barrett makes a splash on the local scene—apparently keyed to the facing photograph, a full-page shot of Barrett hipshot against the ladder of a swimming pool, his jacket flung carelessly over his shoulder and his sleeves rolled back for the hard work ahead. But what really caught Nick’s eye was the photo on the next page, an aerial shot of “the palatial Barrett estate outside Atlanta.” For once, the breathless copy had it just right. Barrett’s home was palatial, an enormous manor that might have sprung whole-cloth from some fevered dream of the Old South: a sprawling three-story mansion of white brick, thrice-columned, set in the midst of a lawn that extended as far as the eye could see. A pool—perhaps the very one where A. R. Barrett had posed—glimmered beyond the house, there in the midst of all that shaven green.
He stared down into that picture for the longest time, but all he could think about was the bright blue flyer Tuck had slapped onto the table at Donner’s: that fuzzy photograph of Casey Barrett in some lost moment of joy, the big, black letters stamped above it—
—REWARD—
—and the phone number printed neatly below.
And then, with trembling fingers, he tore the photo out.
The phone woke him.
Nick sat up, sheathed in perspiration. A nightmare sheared apart around him, half-remembered shards of Casey Barrett’s bloodied face, the smaller of the two men looking up to meet his eyes, a hand reaching up to tear the bondage mask aside and reveal the face beneath—
His face.
Nick swallowed, remembering. Sue curled beside him, fathoms-deep in sleep, a strand of saliva suspended between her lips and the pillow.
The phone went off again, like an air-raid siren. Like a bomb.
Nick fumbled for the receiver.
“Get over here,” Finney said.
“What? What’s going on?”
“Now, Nicky. We don’t have time to waste.”
“Finney—”
The phone went dead in his hand. Nick threw back the covers, and walked across the room. The bedroom was chill, heavy with early-morning stillness, but as he cracked the shades and peeked out into the street, the goose bumps shivering erect the fine hair along his arms had nothing to do with temperature.
A behemoth, black Cadillac was parked outside Finney’s apartment.
“What’s going on?” Sue said.
And suddenly he was wide awake.
Tuesday, 4:57 to 5:45 AM
High above the street, a thin crescent moon cradled the old moon in its arms. The air was crystalline, chill. A whisper would have shattered the night like glass. Outside Finney’s townhouse the enormous caddy waited like death, black quarter panels cancerous with Bondo and rust. Something about the plates—white with black lettering, a ripe Georgia peach poised over the word Fulton—tugged at Nick’s memory, but before he could catch the thought, a wedge of light fell across his face. Finney stood in the doorway.
“What took you so long?” he said.
Nick stepped inside. Finney was right there, his breath rank with sleep, his voice a whisper.
“We’re in deep shit. It’s a detective, Nicky.”
“A cop?” Sue whispered at Nick’s shoulder.
“A fucking private eye.”
Nick swallowed, a sense of doomed certainty stealing into his heart. “You didn’t leave Tuck alone in there, did you?”
“Don’t worry about Tuck.” Finney tapped Nick’s chest. “Don’t even tell me that’s the tape, Nicky.”
“What the fuck was I supposed to do with it?”
“You were supposed to get rid of it.”
“Well, I didn’t. And I’m not about to leave it lying around.”
“Christ.”
“Where’s Tuck?” Sue asked.
“Tuck was up drinking half the night. He’s out cold.” He stepped past Nick, opened the bathroom door, adding in an off-hand way, like his mind was somewhere else, “Don’t worry about Tuck.”
He turned to Nick. “Here, give me the tape.”
Nick hesitated, thinking of Casey, scarlet blood and white, white flesh—
“Now!” Finney hissed, not angry, just urgent. And almost without thought Nick was reaching for it, fumbling it out of his jacket and into Finney’s hands.
For half a second he regretted surrendering it, then Sue cleared her throat.
Nick turned, half-aware of the tape clattering onto the bathroom vanity, and then Finney was at his shoulder, the door closed behind him. A man stood at the far end of the hall, silhouetted against the b
right aperture leading into the living room. His hand was half-inside his jacket, and when he spoke, his voice came out high-pitched, laden with this shit-kicking hillbilly accent.
“Well, then,” he said, “since you kids were kind enough to drop by, why don’t you come in and join me for a drink?”
“Thing you don’t wanna do,” the detective said, “is fuck with me.”
His name was Pomeroy—“Ernie Pomeroy,” he had announced when Nick stepped into Finney’s ivory-toned living room—and he stood maybe five-five in a pair of spit-shined snakeskin boots with almost an inch of heel.
But he wasn’t standing now.
He sat in the neutral, overstuffed chair, cradling a glass of Tucker’s Evan Williams, those boots propped carelessly on the glass coffee table. Watching him make the drink—deft and economical, a double shot mixed with the ice-melt in Tuck’s leftover glass—Nick had marveled at the detective’s outfit: a suede Stetson the color of creamed milk, an unstructured, tan sport coat, a white shirt with a bolo tie, hip-hugging, pre-faded Wranglers creased sharp enough to slice bread.
“Know what I’m sayin?” Pomeroy said. “People got a way of underestimating a little guy. It could get you hurt.”
He eyed them over the rim of his glass.
Finney, pacing, seemed only half-aware of them, Pomeroy in the chair, Nick and Sue on the sofa. He seemed alert, restless, and when he turned to face Pomeroy, Nick wasn’t surprised. He had seen Finney like this in class—pure alpha male, aggressive under pressure, relying on instinct to see him through. Like he was channeling the Senator.
“Look,” he said. “I don’t even know what you’re talking about. I’m not going to listen to you threaten us. You have two more minutes and I’m calling the cops.”
“You wanna call the cops, go head. We’ll wait for em together.”
“Is that a threat?” Finney said.
Pomeroy glanced at Nick. “You wanna talk some sense into your friend, son?”
Nick lifted his hands. “Hey, let’s just talk abou—”
