by Dale Bailey
—Evans, my God, it’s Evans—
—started to cut her.
Nick had tried to move, but everything inside him seemed frozen. Sue wailed and Nick stared at her in horror, every joint in his body locked, every sinew uselessly constricted. Then Finney pushed past him and gathered Sue into his arms. That unfroze him, that image—
—Finney’s arched back, Sue’s wide-flung legs—
—pouring over him in a molten flood, dissolving the icy terror that bound him.
He moved then, thrusting Finney aside and dragging Sue into his arms. She resisted—Nick felt her stiffen, felt her turning toward Finney like a flower following the sun—then she collapsed against him, sobs pouring through her in wracking seizures. “Hey,” he said, “hey,” but there were no words. How could he comfort her?
His fingers moved through her hair, calming her; when her breathing eased a little, he tilted her chin back so he could look into her face. But she did not know him. Her face was vacant, empty, her eyes staring holes like the eyes of the bear cub at the Smokin Mountain, hollow pits opening into the black, cold reaches between the stars.
“Come back to me sweetie,” he whispered. He caught a hint of his mother’s voice in the phrase, her sweet bayou cadence echoing from some half-forgotten past.
But Sue responded. The emptiness filled up a little. Her eyes steadied on his own, took hold. “Hurry, Nicky,” she whispered.
“Time’s a wastin,” Evans said, wearing his good ole boy mask once again, that hunger sated. For now, anyway.
Nick stood, and that’s when he had heard it for the first time, the perfect little click as another second crashed past, disappearing into the void of time. That flame-bright second hand swept through his mind, scattering thought piecemeal before it.
Remembering that moment, Nick moaned. He glanced at Finney, white-faced, his gray eyes expressionless. He saw Finney reach Sue first, saw Sue falling into his embrace, and his empty stomach twisted inside him.
Click!
“Hey.” Nick leaned forward, curled his fingers through the cage. “Hey!”
Evans said nothing.
A narrow street unwound beyond the windshield, the weary neighborhood bordering the industrial park somehow familiar to Nick as it slipped past the windows of the cruiser: small frame houses sagging with exhaustion, white paint eroded to the leathery gray of an elephant’s flesh. The detritus of the season filled the cramped plots of yellow grass and December mud: plastic magi and shepherds, expectation long faded from their weathered features, arranged in prayerful crescents around empty mangers; here and there, a hobgoblin Santa Claus peeped between plastic sheep or sat merrily beside the Blessed Mother herself; and always, above almost every house, shone the star, feeble-looking, faded in the sunlight. Poverty was everywhere the same: welfare checks and food stamps, starved women desperate for children who would metamorphose before their eyes into hungry mouths to feed. Welcome home, a voice mocked Nick. Welcome to Glory, Louisiana, land of a thousand cancelled dreams.
Nick shook the cage like a deranged man.
“Hey, motherfucker, I’m talking to you! You deaf or something?”
Evans braked for a stop sign. The cruiser idled like a sleeping animal, a bear, a lion. Evans turned around and grinned, a fresh toothpick wedged like a bone between the yellow shards of his teeth. Nick could see his own distorted reflection staring doubled back at him from the mirrored shades: two caged men, their eyes like windows upon the abyss in the agonized blurs of their faces.
“You want to calm down, college boy. I’m an officer of the law, sworn to serve and protect. I just can’t go flyin through the streets. Kids could be playin here. So calm down.”
Nick pressed his face so close to the cage that he could feel the metal joints tattooing his flesh. He could smell Evans’s breath, faintly scented with peppermint; he realized that the ubiquitous toothpicks were flavored. The maniac cop worried about halitosis. Nick’s guts cramped at the thought. “Please—”
Evans touched the gas, inching into the intersection. Mocking him.
Nick shook the cage. “Listen here, you son of a—”
A hand closed over his mouth. Finney dragged him away, cradled him against his chest. Nick could feel the weave of the other boy’s sweater, thick wales soft against his cheek. Hot shameful sobs ripped through him.
Finney rocked him gently. “Keep it together, Nicky,” he whispered. “We’re going to nail this son of a bitch to the wall yet, but we got to keep it together, you hear me? We got to keep it together for Sue.”
Nick got sick on a narrow stretch of highway running through the mountains along the Tennessee-North Carolina border. For what seemed like hours he fought it, swallowing bile and ignoring the cramps that flashed intermittently through his guts. But images of Sue’s finger kept floating to the surface of his mind, inescapable as Pomeroy’s gas-bloated body, bobbing atop the water in the back seat of the half-sunken caddy, gray face upturned beneath the stained vinyl sky.
The car swayed as it lumbered through the curves, lulling him into a kind of febrile sleep. As in some half-conscious dream, Sue’s perfectly manicured pinky tumbled through the silver-metal light of the video screens, bouncing in slow motion on Gutman’s blotter. The finger had lain there, twitching, and then—in a moment Nick knew he would never forget, not even if he lived a thousand years—Evans had leaned down and snatched it up. He examined it by that flickering light for a moment, and then he turned to look at Nick, standing by the desk, Sue cradled in his arms. A mocking voice, pompous and self-important, spoke up in Nick’s mind—
—describe Conrad’s notion of the hollow man, Miss Thompson—
—as he watched Evans tuck the finger into the breast pocket of his uniform. Almost immediately, a rusty stain appeared on the tan fabric.
“We best get on the road, kids,” Evans had said. “Else I’ll be fillin my pockets with fingers.”
Nick’s guts cramped once again, a sharp stab of pain like someone twisting a knife in his bowels. He moaned and scrambled to the floor of the cruiser. He puked yellow bile onto the floor between Finney’s feet. He closed his eyes as spasms rocked him, his stomach knotting, but he had nothing else to throw up.
The car wrenched hard to the right. The sense of movement ceased and the engine died. A door opened, slammed heavily. Then another door. Icy air flooded the backseat.
“Shit,” Finney said as he scrambled out. A thick hand closed over Nick’s neck. Another knotted itself in the collar of his jacket. Evans yanked him out of the car like a bouncer giving the heave to a rowdy drunk. Nick stumbled to his hands and knees, asphalt biting his palms. Evans snorted in disgust and walked around the front of the car.
Nick spat bile and looked up. Evans had stopped at a scenic overlook, the cruiser skewed drunkenly across three parking spaces. A bowl of mountains cupped them, bare trees jutting from their barren flanks like fleshless fingers. Just beyond the car, a low wall of sandstone rocks arched into empty space, the mountain falling away beyond it. At one end of the wall stood a row of coin-operated telescopes, dispassionate soldiers standing sentry. A breeze combed the weeds along the roadside. The sky was heartless and blue, the sun a fading lump of coal ninety-three million miles from Earth.
Finney hunkered down beside him, his face concerned. “You okay, Nick?”
It hit him then, the full burden of the dead man’s weight bearing down on him once again. Evans had found the same scenic overlook they’d turned around in two nights ago—just after they’d run over the Aryan, just after they’d decided to go back. The horror of the coincidence rocked him, the world suddenly as small as a tidal basin shrinking in the afternoon sun, constricting about him until he thought he might scream, the world so small and time so goddamn big. Nick groaned and said, “I don’t know, Finney, I don’t know …”
The cruiser’s trunk opened with a metallic creak. Finney shot a glance over Nick’s shoulder as Evans’s heavy steps approached. When he looked ba
ck, his eyes were shiny, panicked.
“We got to get it together, Nick. This guy’s gone over the top, he’s—”
He stood abruptly, then backed away as the footsteps paused. Something dropped to the ground by Nick’s right hand. Nick turned his head.
A towel.
“You got some cleanin up to do, ole son.”
Nick took a deep breath. Click! Another second slipped by. In his mind’s eye, he saw Sue’s pinky shear away, tumbling toward Gutman’s blotter. “No, please, I’m sorry. We have to go, we have to go—”
Evans buried a boot in his guts. Nick collapsed, gasping as another wave of dry heaves shuddered through him.
“Don’t mouth me, son! I said you’re gonna clean my car and I meant it! No one pukes in my car, you hear me? No one fucks with me the way you fucks have been fuckin with me, and no one fucks with my car! I don’t wanna hear any lip—”
His foot lashed out again. Nick rolled, taking the blow on his hip.
“—so you just get right up, MisterBigShotCollegeBoy—”
Evans shuffled around him for a better angle. The next kick, a savage blow, caught Nick lower, square in the balls. White heat burst through his groin. Suddenly it was hard to breathe.
“—andstartscrubbin—”
“Stop it!” Finney cried. When he spoke again, his voice had discovered a new quality, unfearful, almost mocking. “You think you’re such a man, shooting some fat old woman, kicking someone when he’s down.”
Evans grunted, as if someone had punched him in the gut.
Then Finney again, his voice stronger: “Yeah, you’re such a man. Why don’t you pick on—”
He broke off, his breath hitching.
Despite the agony in his crotch, Nick lifted his head, at first certain that the sound he had heard—
—click!—
—was nothing more than another second crashing into eternity. Too late he understood what it really was: Evans unsnapping his holster.
“Yeah, use your fucking gun—because that’s all you are, a fucking gun—”
Evans moved as quickly as Nick had ever seen a human move, all leonine grace and strength. With his right hand—
—his gun hand—
—he caught Finney by the throat and dragged him over the cruiser’s hood and across the small, asphalt lot. Evans stopped at the low, sandstone wall, said something to Finney that Nick couldn’t make out. Then, still clutching him by the throat, he pushed Finney into empty space. Evans held him there, dangling over the precipice, Finney’s hands wrapped around those thick forearms, his eyes bulging, his tongue thrusting from between his lips. The toes of his Bass loafers scrabbled at the lip of the wall. The sound was unnaturally loud, like someone dragging heavy rocks along the fissures of Nick’s skull. Finney’s foot caught the wall—tiny bits of sandstone falling silently over the edge—and he levered himself toward Evans. Then the foot lost its purchase, the Bass loafer slipping off and disappearing into the void.
The trooper looked back at Nick and grinned. “Your call, college boy.”
“Don’t—” Nick’s throat constricted. Pain flared through his body.
Evans chuckled and eased his grip. Finney drew in a ragged breath, his feet still scratching weakly at the wall.
“Now, look here, college boy. You gotta do better than that, you gotta say please fore I bring him back. C’mon, let’s see you beg a little.”
Nick opened his mouth—but before he could speak, his mind filled with the image of Finney reaching Sue first, the way she’d fallen so readily into his arms. Another, more terrible image succeeded it, the image that had haunted him for all these months: the two of them naked, laboring together, Sue’s eyes glazed, her cunt full and aching with Finney Durant. And suddenly all the pain flooded through him once again, poisonous as the rot of an aching tooth.
Nick turned away.
“Fuck you,” Finney said to Evans, his voice raspy. “You’re nothing, and that’s all you’ll ever be. Fucking nothing.”
Evans screamed.
“No,” Nick cried, starting to his feet, ready now to beg. The word bounced back to him again and again, the mountains mocking him.
Too late, too late.
He watched in helpless horror as Evans drew back and hurled Finney over the edge. Finney screamed, a hopeless wail cut mercifully short.
Evans remained at the wall, gazing into the abyss like a man searching out an answer he didn’t much expect to find.
Tuesday, 11:56 AM to 12:47 PM
Just before he reached the sandstone wall Nick stumbled, catching himself on one of the iron telescope posts. He knelt there, aware of Evans beside him, fury—
—madness—
—radiating from him like heat. Nick pressed his face against the wall, relishing the cold bite of the stone against his cheeks and forehead, if only because it made him feel.
No, he thought. Not Finney.
Not wanting to but knowing he had no choice, he peered over the wall. He found not an abyss, not the dark portal into Hell he had imagined, but a steep grade falling rapidly through a sparse wood of winter-stripped trees. Here and there granite boulders burst through the earth like the fists of angry giants.
The mountain briefly leveled out a couple hundred yards down, the wind and grit of a million years carving out a small shelf. From behind an assortment of almost perfectly round boulders protruded Finney’s legs.
Finney, he thought. Oh, Finney.
Beyond the shelf, the mountain dropped steeply into North Carolina. Far down there, nestled in a valley between the rising hills, lay the town, Ransom, the college visible on its far edge, a cluster of brick buildings hemmed in by evergreens. It looked as quiet and idyllic as a painting—and far less real.
The legs had not moved.
A car slipped past on the road. Nick looked up to find Evans staring down at him. Nick hadn’t heard him unholster the gun, the sound masked by the passing car, Nick’s tumbling thoughts. But there it was. And nothing could disguise the way it felt, burning cold, when Evans lifted the barrel and pressed it to Nick’s Adam’s apple.
“I’ve had about all I can take from you kids. Wasn’t for the Pachyderm, I’d kill you right here and wash my hands of the whole matter. But nothin says I gotta hurry, college boy, so if you ever wanna hold hands with that sweet redheaded filly of yours again, you want to get to your feet and start scrubbin your gutsplash off my floormats. I’m about at the end of my rope. Another word out of you, I’m gonna take my chances with the Pachyderm and blow your fool head off. Less I decide to do it some other way, and make it last. So what’s it gonna be?”
Nick sighed as bleak certainty dawned inside him: now or later it would end the same way. Evans would kill him, either because that starving emptiness lashed out in hunger once again or because Nick simply no longer mattered. All that stood between him and certain death was the video. When he surrendered the tape, Evans would surely kill him on the spot. So why not just give it up now?
Why not die?
And then he remembered the look on Sue’s face, the way her eyes had caught hold of his, the faint flickering ember of hope he had seen flare way down at the bottom of her hollow gaze. Hurry, Nicky, she had whispered.
Hurry.
Nick closed his eyes and allowed himself for a single moment to grieve. Then he put them out of his mind—Tucker and Finney and poor lost Casey Nicole Barrett, even Sue herself—and turned to the matter at hand. There would be time to grieve tomorrow, or the day after. If he lived that long.
He reached for the towel.
Nick finished scrubbing away the last of the vomit as the second hand inside his head went rolling past yet again, sweeping him farther still from Sue. He backed out of the cruiser with the towel still in his hands, moist, stinking of bile. Evans leaned against the front fender, sucking at a toothpick, his legs crossed at the ankle. He glanced at Nick.
“We ain’t done by a long shot, college boy.”
“Ple
ase …”
“Don’t sass me now. Ain’t healthful.” Evans grinned and shot Nick with his index finger. He adjusted his Smokey Bear hat so that the shadow of the brim fell across his face in a stark line. “You just do as I say and we’ll get on the road again.”
Nick nodded.
“Seems like we been leavin bodies scattered all over the southland this morning. The Pachyderm won’t like that, and you’ve seen how he can get when he’s mad, so I don’t reckon we ought to tax him further. What you’re gonna do is go down and drag your pal back up here and stow him in the trunk. Soon as you’re done, we’ll hit the blue highway. Ask me nice I might even step up the pace a hair.” He paused. “Then again, I might not.”
Nick simply stood there.
Evans made an inviting gesture with his hands, a maître d’ inviting a lucky diner to sit down for the meal of his life. “Step to.”
Nick opened his mouth to say something but no words would form, his tongue loose and molten in the cavity of his mouth. Forcing himself, he said, “I c-c-can’t—”
Evans leaned forward, smiling. “You don’t got a whole lot a choice, son. Less you want to join your friend down there.”
Nick flung the towel to the ground and trudged across the lot to the wall. He looked back once; Evans stood beside the cruiser, arms akimbo, a colossus surveying his realm. Below, Finney’s feet were stiff and unmoving; farther down, Ransom lay like an impossible promise. Nick took a deep breath. Holding on to one of the telescopes, he stepped over the wall and onto the mountainside.
Pebbles skittered down the embankment. The slope was steeper than it had looked on the other side of the wall. Nick clutched the telescope, watching Finney’s unmoving legs. He took another deep breath, icy air needling his lungs. A series of seconds crashed past, popping loud as firecrackers.
