by Dale Bailey
He sipped his drink. Nick glanced at Finney. Their nominal spokesman, the Senator’s golden-tongued progeny, had at last fallen silent. He slumped in the armchair like a waif, a lost expression on his face, his dark hair in sweaty ringlets across his forehead.
Gutman said, “As you can see, I am a man who has lived with distress and worry, with pain, in the past. And yet, never, in all my years of suffering unpleasantness, never in all my years in this business which too often requires me to do things I would not ordinarily want to do, have I faced any problem quite like that you present me with. Whatever am I to do with you?” He sighed dramatically, puffed thoughtfully on his cigar. “I suppose I could let you go. I’ve no particular use for you, except perhaps for the girl. We could find something to do with her, could we not, Lawrence?”
Sue groaned.
Gutman’s cold eyes fell on Nick. “What if I allow you two to go?” He nodded at Finney. “In exchange for the girl. An even trade.”
Nick met Gutman’s eyes, then glanced away, saying nothing. None of us, he thought, none of us are going to walk away.
“No,” Sue said, “please. I’ll never tell anyone—”
Gutman smiled quizzically. “Whatever is there to tell, dear? You and your friends have killed two men. We—we have done nothing.”
“The woman at that store,” Sue whispered. “He killed her. He killed Tucker.”
“Well, there is that. And see how swiftly you betrayed our confidence? No, I fear we cannot risk releasing you, can we, Lawrence?”
“I don’t think so, Mr. Gutman.”
“She is rather attractive in her way. A redhead might provide some novelty.” A single panicked sob burst from Sue. She leaned against Nick, slopping ice water across his thigh. Nick put his arm around her and stared back at Gutman, that monstrous smile, trying to hide the stark terror he felt in his heart. Gutman said, “As for you gentlemen, I suppose Lawrence will have to kill you. You might ask him to do it painlessly, though I rather doubt he would honor such a request. You have been so much trouble, after all.”
Evans smiled thinly.
And now Finney did speak. He hunched forward, his lean face intense, his eyes feverish. “My Dad, Senator—”
“Ahh, yes. Senator Durant.”
“He has money, he can get money—”
“We all have money,” Sue whispered, and Nick felt a rotten sac burst inside him, spilling Glory’s familiar shame through his guts. That desolate moment in the bus station cut through him like a scalpel, that old sense of their little clique splintering along fault lines of money, the old habit of privilege. “Our parents, they would pay anything. Anything, you hear me—”
“Anything,” Finney said. “Anything …”
Gutman smiled mockingly, dashed ashes into a tray on his desk. “You have nothing I want, surely you see that.”
The statement burned into Nick’s mind, bright and unavoidable. Gutman didn’t know. Not about the bus station locker, not about the tape. As far as Gutman knew, they were just kids who had inadvertently killed one man and then purposely killed another to cover up the first one. They were problematic in that the identities of their victims drew him unwanted attention, but that was all.
Or so Gutman thought.
The truth was, they did have something Gutman would want: the video, sole record of the rape and murder of a girl who had turned out to be more than another victim, more than another small-town runaway—
—like Carrie Witherspoon—
—hungry for big-city wonder.
Nick could see the tape there in the bright eye of his imagination, salvation, a black plastic rectangle on the vanity in Finney’s downstairs bathroom. He squeezed Sue’s shoulder and eased away from her. As he leaned toward Gutman, his mind whirled with half-realized hopes, cancelled dreams: the chance that somehow he might find a way to save them; that he might salvage that alone from all the things which he had dreamed of: grad school and the money, that green orgastic light burning on a distant shore, beyond the imprisoning gray reach of the Gulf.
Maybe he could save Sue.
Maybe he could save them all.
Nick’s fingers shook when he reached into his jacket pocket. When he dropped the thick roll of cash on the desk, it was like relinquishing a piece of his heart.
For a long moment, no one said anything.
The room tore itself free of the planet, thrown into a new orbit by the pull of the money, this bright, new sun.
Gutman sipped his scotch and eyed Nick across the rim of the glass, his hulking head and shoulders gaining solidity from the ghostly halo of the video screens. He placed the cigar in its ash tray and picked up Nick’s offering. He slid the rubber band off and counted the money. When he finished, he snapped the rubber band around the roll once again and dropped it into a desk drawer.
Somebody slammed a window in Nick’s heart.
“That is very generous of you, Mr.—” He glanced at Evans.
“Laymon.”
“Yes. The unfortunate Mr. Tucker could not join us. And—” He nodded. “Mr. Durant has of course acquainted me with his identity.” He looked at Nick. “But as I said, money has little power over me. I have plenty of money.”
“I took it from the blond man. Aubrey.”
“Yes, he stole it from me. I would have thought he was smarter than to carry it with him, but Aubrey was never known for his intellect. He had other skills which made him useful to a man like me.”
“That’s not all he had.”
The blue eyes flickered with interest. “Then he was even dumber than I thought.”
“He had a key. To a bus station locker. We found a video tape in the locker.”
“Indeed?” Gutman crossed his arms on the desk, lacing his tumorous fingers with his normal ones. Those Jekyll and Hyde hands charmed Nick, entranced him.
Nick tore his eyes away. “Your voice is on the video. And two other men.”
Evans wheeled to face Nick, those piggy eyes narrowing.
Gutman lifted his left hand, the bad one. It seemed to flicker in that undersea light, like a motion picture just out of focus, liquid with potential metamorphosis. Nick’s mind lurched into that boyhood fever dream, his own hands swollen to the size of parade balloons. A knot of terror pushed into his throat. He swallowed hard.
“Pace, Lawrence. Let the young man have his say.”
“A girl dies on the video. Her name is Casey Barrett. Her father is rich, the kind of man who could destroy an operation like this. It’s the kind of thing you can’t have floating around.”
Gutman chuckled ruefully. “So resourceful, this one, Lawrence. And yet so stupid.” Gutman’s good hand toyed with the cigar trimmer. “You understand, the tape is a specialty product—a one of a kind item in a series produced at the request of a most select client—your father probably knows him, Mr. Durant. This client is a man with … specialized tastes. One of the perks of power and privilege, the indulgence of such tastes. As for the girl and her father—those facts merely enhance the tape’s value. My client knows Mr. Barrett, you see. Has visited Mr. Barrett’s estate, met his daughter face to face. He chose her, you might say.”
Nick swallowed. “You took her, didn’t you?”
“There are holes in the world, Mr. Laymon. People fall through them. As you have.” Gutman smiled. “And now you wish to use the tape for yourself. You want to climb out of your hole. A word to the wise: Let that poor fool Aubrey be a lesson to you. Had he come to me with his complaints, we might have negotiated his salary demands like reasonable men. Instead, he chose Mr. Pomeroy, with whom you are of course acquainted. Who knows? Perhaps he could have worked a deal with Mr. Barrett’s diminutive private investiga tor had he remembered his mother’s first lesson: Look both ways before you cross the street. As it was, he was lucky. He died suddenly, painlessly. Had I caught up with him—and I would have, indeed I was about to, Lawrence here was in close pursuit—poor Aubrey’s denouement would have been, shall we sa
y, protracted. You would be well advised to keep that in mind, Mr. Laymon, as you deal with me. Lest you suffer a needlessly painful demise yourself.” Gutman laughed again. “So please, honor me with your proposal. I await it with bated breath.”
Nick looked first at Finney—his eyes full of that emptiness, that vacuum where his confidence used to be—and then at Sue. “A trade. You can have the tape, but we walk. All of us.”
“Straight into the local precinct house, no doubt—though I wouldn’t recommend a Knoxville office. What is to prevent you from betraying us into the hands of our enemies? What of that, Mr.Laymon?”
“We won’t say a word.” Nick hesitated. “I promise.”
“You promise?” Gutman threw back his head in delight. Laughter chased tremors of joy through his pendulous sags of flesh. “Mr. Laymon, please! You’ve seen too many movies. Surely you must realize, one hardly attains a position of such eminence by accepting … promises.”
Gutman paused for a long moment, musing. Then he leaned forward. “But let us negotiate in good faith. I am a reasonable man. Let me propose an alternative plan: Lawrence here—” He nodded at Evans. “Lawrence here will hold you down while I remove your fingers.” He lifted the cigar cutter, snapped closed its blade, and smiled. The wicked little snick it made seemed to linger in the silent room. “Lawrence likes to wager on these things. Lawrence, how many fingers do you suppose Mr. Laymon would surrender before he revealed the tape’s location?”
“One.”
“Oh, I give Mr. Laymon more credit than that. I would guess three fingers. A hundred dollars, Lawrence?”
“Two hundred.”
“Even better. If you will bring me the patient, we shall commence surgery.”
Evans started around the desk. Sue swallowed audibly.
“Wait—”
“You have a counter proposal, Mr. Laymon?”
Nick licked his lips. “The tape is in a safe deposit box. You need us to get it.”
“I see.” Gutman leaned back in his chair and laced those hands over the tub of his belly. “You have the key with you, I would imagine?”
“It’s at Finney’s apartment. In Ransom.”
“Of course. What do you think, Lawrence?”
“He’s lying.”
“No doubt, but how interesting he is! Alas, Mr. Laymon, we did not meet as friends. We might have done great things together, but now …” He shrugged.
“Forget it, Nick,” Finney said, his voice empty of everything, an echo from a dry cistern or an empty well. “You’ll never convince them. They’ll find out when the Senator opens that box.”
Nick turned to stare at him. His heart lurched into a sharper rhythm—
—what the hell is he doing?—
—as Finney spoke again.
“It’s over,” Finney said. And now something had come into his tone: hatred, or despair. “They’re going to kill us, but the tape—it’s going to kill them, the Senator will see to that. My only regret is that we won’t be around to see it happen.”
Finney cut his eyes toward Nick—a flicker of movement so subtle that Nick almost missed it. Nick felt a circuit close between them, an almost electric jolt, and an image from the night he had met Finney sprang suddenly into his mind: the Torkelsons’ kitchen as Finney regaled the party with the Lord’s Prayer, the Latin phrases flowing from his tongue like water. Nick had felt an instant of that same effortless unity in that reeling drunken moment, Finney’s gray eyes seeking his own across the crowded room, catching at him with knowing little hooks, conscripting him in an unspoken conspiracy of superiority. You and I are two of a kind, those eyes seemed to say. You know in your bones what they will never understand: That I am mocking them.
Nick felt bottomless relief well up within him, felt himself surrender control of the situation as Finney slipped back into himself, the Senator’s son in his natural element, the role he had been raised to play. Nick had baited the hook. Now Finney would make sure it set. If they could get away, out of this industrial park, they might have a chance. If they could take Evans …
If, he thought. If.
Nick took Sue’s hand, squeezed.
Gutman said, “I suspect we are being hustled, Lawrence. And yet what are we to do? I suppose we shall have to check their story.”
Nick’s heart leaped inside his breast.
Then Vergil Gutman grinned. “But first,” he said. “Bring me the girl.”
Lawrence Evans was a man made out of masks, a puppet hammered together from piano wire and bone.
Grinning like a loathsome Geppetto, Gutman said, “Bring me the girl,” and Evans started herky-jerky around the desk like a terrible marionette, his masks—psycho mask and normal mask—shucking away like dead leaves to reveal the starving emptiness beneath. In a moment of rending terror, Nick saw what Gutman must have recognized long ago: that Evans was hunger, only hunger, and that such hunger could be turned to a stronger man’s will, if only he was careful to keep it fed.
Sue must have seen it too.
Whimpering, she shrank into the protection of Nick’s arms. The glass slipped from her hand. Water spilled across Nick’s crotch in a chill wave. The glass thumped against the carpet, rolling harmlessly under the loveseat.
Almost gently, Evans took her from Nick, his spadelike hands hooked beneath her arms. She went without protest, dead weight, her shoes dragging.
Gutman stood to meet them, taller than Nick would have imagined. “On the desk,” he said, and Evans heaved her atop the polished mahogany. Her blouse had come untucked. It rode up, revealing a triangle of flat stomach, a hint of lacy panties beneath her jeans; some fastidious fragment of Nick wanted to reach out, straighten her, if only he could move.
But he could not. The moment weighed upon him like the Gulf, fathoms deep from sunlight.
Gutman leaned over and brushed a wisp of hair from the china curl of her ear.
Sue screamed. She wrenched herself free and scrambled across the slick desktop. Her foot shot out, spilling the humidor at Finney’s feet. Her fingers closed white-knuckled over the edge of the desk, so close that Nick could have touched them. Then Evans had her again, his left arm around her neck as he dragged her across the desk, upsetting the telephone, scattering loose papers into the air like dainty kites. “Be still, little filly,” he whispered, gentle as a lover.
And then his right hand came glittering into view, a length of burnished steel licking like a serpent’s tongue from a bone-handled switchblade.
Nick gasped like a man gut-punched as the knife touched off a glimpse from the past, the blade aglitter at Casey Barrett’s narrow throat. His gaze shifted in horror from the knife to Sue’s terrified eyes, and then to the big man who held her captive. And it seemed to him that Evans wore still another mask.
A bondage mask.
“Oh, Nicky,” Finney whispered.
Sue swallowed, her eyes shiny and panicked, like the deer’s eyes in that clearing all those years ago. Nick felt the need tremulous in his bones before he came to a conscious decision to move, to try and save her, and maybe Evans saw it too.
He twisted the knife at Sue’s neck. The blade glimmered in that strange, swimming light; the blood that boiled from the vein looked almost black against her opalescent flesh. “You even think about movin, college boy,” he said, “I’ll gut her like a fish.”
And Nick subsided.
Gutman leaned down and racked the phone, a voice Nick had not known he had been hearing—
—if you would like to make a call—
—abruptly silenced.
“Now you wanna do just as the Pachyderm says, little filly,” Evans hissed, and Gutman loured over her, his flesh oiled looking and gray in the wash of television light, not seeming to mind the nickname a bit.
Seeming to revel in it.
“Hold out your hand,” he whispered, a man speaking to a panicked woodland creature, a wounded fawn, its eyes nervous with terror. “Your right hand.”
Sue extended her arm, her fingers black against the flickering screens. Gutman wrapped the Hyde hand around her wrist. The Jekyll hand slid the cigar trimmer neatly over her trembling pinky.
Sue gasped. “No, please. I’ll do anything, anything you want. I’ll do anything you want for you, please—”
“Shhhh.” With one hand, Evans smoothed hair from her perspiring forehead. “Be still, Missy.”
Gutman fixed Nick in his gaze. “I want that tape. If you fail to produce it within three hours, I will start taking the girl’s fingers. One finger for every hour you are overdue. Do we have an understanding?”
Nick nodded, unable to tear his eyes from Sue, her face like a pale window into terror, her eyes entreating him.
“Please, Nicky,” she gasped. “Promise me.”
He lifted a hand to his heart, nodded solemnly.
“Mr. Durant?”
“We’ll be on time, Mr. Gutman.”
Gutman nodded. “Promptness is a virtue. Lest you fail to take me seriously let me provide you a token of my intentions.”
His lips pressed into a thin line, and the cigar cutter snapped shut. Nick saw the pinky shear away and tumble to the desk, an ooze of black blood where the finger used to be.
Sue bucked in the state trooper’s arms. She screamed and screamed.
Nick Laymon closed his eyes.
Tuesday, 11:13 to 11:55 AM
For Nick, the ride back to Ransom was like a nightmarish hallucination, each passing second—
—time is everything—
—everything is time—
—demarcated in his mind by the precise little snick of the clock inside his head, its furious second hand sweeping him inexorably into the future.
His brain hummed with a thin, high whine, the terrified keening that had risen from Sue’s heaving breast as she gazed down in shock at her severed pinky, twitching on Gutman’s blotter. She had twisted free of Evans’s grasp, curling fetal on the desk, clutching the wounded hand against her breasts. Irregular sobs shuddered through her, strange, little hitches of sound just like the ones Casey Barrett had made after her bondage-masked assailant—
