by Dale Bailey
Nick leveled the .45 at him. “Where is she? Where’s Sue?”
Gutman studied Nick, his hands folded in front of him on the desk, the smaller hand—
—the sane one—
—engulfed by the malformed one, thickened with spongy tumors. Lying in the center of the desk was a silver pistol; it gleamed wickedly in the pool of light. Gutman made no move for it. Instead, he watched Nick with what might have been a smile playing across his tortured lips. Next to the gun lay the cigar cutter. Nick saw it and looked quickly away, his heart stalling, his blood running cold. The blade was clotted with something thick and brown.
With blood.
Sue.
He glanced at Finney’s watch again. Still—as it always would be-4:41.
Gutman sighed. “I fear that your solo appearance bodes ill for my dear Lawrence. And yet I cannot help but notice also the absence of Mr. Durant. An eye for an eye, Mr. Laymon, is that—”
“Shut up! Shut the fuck up!” Nick grasped the butt of Evans’s .45 with both hands and pointed the barrel at Gutman’s massive head, centering the sight on the whorl of marbled flesh. “Where is Sue? Tell me now or—”
“Or you’ll what Mr. Laymon? You’ve proven yourself terribly resourceful—but not foolish, certainly not that. Surely you realize the precariousness of your situation.” Gutman paused, tilting back in his chair. He shifted slightly—the leather making a terse farting sound, the chair groaning beneath his weight—and searched for a thought. “A person of your—how should we say?—resilience? Yes. And imagination. I think that captures you precisely. Surely a person of your resilience and imagination must comprehend how precarious a situation you find yourself in.” Gutman spoke each word fastidiously, forcing each precisely enunciated syllable through his malformed lips. An image bloomed in Nick’s mind: Vergil Gutman posed before a mirror, his eyes boring into his reflection as he worked his way through the dictionary, pronouncing each word a thousand times—until it was perfect, until it flowed precisely from his mouth.
“A man of your constitution,” Gutman continued, “could be of use in an operation such as mine. After all, you’ve proved yourself to be a man of … flexible … morals—”
Nick stepped forward and pressed the gun to Gutman’s forehead.
The Pachyderm smiled, a grotesque constriction of his facial muscles. The smile never reached his eyes.
“If you shoot me, Mr. Laymon, you’ll never see Miss Thompson again. That would be a shame. She is quite … lovely.” His tone thickened with the word, as if the Jekyll-self had stumbled; then the voice rediscovered its measured cadence. “We had a deal, remember?”
Nick remembered. He glanced over Gutman’s bald dome at the wall of video monitors. Half of them had gone black, the satellite and network feeds, the entire pack of yammering heads—Oprah and John Edwards and Jerry Springer—banished, leaving him utterly alone. Three of the others had been shattered, and Nick had a fleeting internal glimpse of Gutman sitting calmly at his desk as the bullets whizzed around him—a man utterly without fear of death, seeking it maybe, the blessing and benediction he yearned for but was too stubbornly iron-willed after all these years of illness to grant himself. As Nick looked on, transfixed by this inner vision, one of the screens spat a shower of sparks, fizzed loudly, and died, emitting a thin streamer of smoke.
Most of the internal screens, the surveillance camera feeds, had survived: shadowy hallways and store rooms; the security fence, its gate lying mangled on the asphalt. Nick’s eyes settled on the one he’d been searching for: the concrete bunker, the room where Casey Barrett had died her unspeakable death. It stood empty. Something like relief claimed Nick. He allowed himself an emotion he only then realized he had been suppressing from the moment he had stepped into the cruiser so many hours ago.
Nick Laymon began to hope.
He looked back at Gutman. Keeping the gun trained at the fat man’s massive head, Nick reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out the video tape. A folded slip of paper fluttered to the desk. His eyes never leaving Nick’s, Gutman picked it up and unfolded it. It separated into two pieces: Casey Barrett’s reward flier and the picture of the Barrett estate, the one he’d torn from Atlanta magazine.
Gutman’s face split into a huge grin, his teeth catching the light like tiny jewels. His eyes danced with mirth.
“Oh indeed, Mr. Laymon,” he said. “A dreamer, are you? I quite admire that. How thoughtless of me to destroy your plans, your dreams. All shattered, all gone. And only because you were in a wrong place at a wrong time.” The Pachyderm’s smile broadened and he made a tiny, clucking sound inside his mouth. “Only because you stepped into one of the world’s holes.”
Nick felt his face redden.
He dropped the tape on the desk. “Here’s my end of the deal. Now give me Sue.”
Gutman’s grin faded and his eyes became colder. Neither moved for a full minute, then Gutman dropped the sheets he held before him. They drifted to the desk top, a wave lapping a beachhead. Nick flicked his eyes downward to watch them settle—
—that green light, glimmering, then gone—
—and realized too late that he had made a mistake.
All he saw was a blur, a motion so fast, so sure, that it was finished before Nick registered that it had happened: an unseen serpent striking, a gleam of quicksilver light.
Gutman’s voice, measured, precise: “And here’s my end.”
The gun spat bright-orange flame, twice, followed instantly by explosions more like loud coughs, so quick that they were only one sound. In the same moment, Nick threw himself to one side, scuttling toward shadows. He heard another shot, felt a bullet zip past him, so close that it shivered erect the fine hairs at the back of his neck. He rolled into some kind of cabinet, tape cartridges and lenses spilling around him. He squeezed off a couple of blind shots behind him.
The recoil of the shots jarred his gun-arm, releasing bright hot currents of pain. He looked down. The shoulder of his jacket had been torn apart, chewed leather turning black in the slow seep of blood. Pain broke over him, fire and ground glass and razors gnashing at his shoulder. He tucked a hand under his jacket and discovered a ragged hole in his left shoulder. His shirt and jacket hung heavy with blood. So much blood. Goddamn, so much blood. He breathed, slow, steady, and gradually something like calm reasserted itself.
Somewhere far away, the Pachyderm talked, garbled phrases piercing the wall of pain: “… my dear lad … should have learned … listened …”
Nick lifted his bad arm, thankful that it still worked. He squeezed off a shot in the direction of the voice as he clambered to his feet. Stumbling over the overturned cabinet, he flattened himself against the wall. An image of Pomeroy hobbling down the highway like an escaped scarecrow came to him. The room reeled. Metal shavings ground at his shoulder. Steadying himself with his good hand and rolling his shoulders, Nick turned slowly to face the room, leaving a bloody palm-print on the wall, four crimson trails tracking toward the floor.
Gutman’s office had taken on the distorted dimensions of a funhouse, the man himself a mountainous shadow backlit by the flickering monitors, his arms crossed over his immense girth, the silver gun lying between the humidor and the cigar trimmer. And still he talked.
Nick looked down, surprised to see Evans’s .45 still clutched in his hand. He lifted the gun—it was amazingly heavy, as though someone had weighted his hand with an anvil—and aimed it at Gutman, talking, talking, talking.
“—you could be a valuable asset, my dear Mr. Laymon. Why not set aside your weapon? We could be an amazing team, you and—”
Nick squeezed the trigger, every fiber in his body contracting. The gun barked and one of the video monitors—the one that showed a stark, silent room of chains and cinderblocks—exploded. A shower of sparks and a gout of flame leapt out of the shattered screen.
Gutman never flinched. He turned to study the dead screen and then looked back at Nick. He shook his head. “So that’
s the way it has to be,” he said, leaning over the desk. Nick tensed, expecting Gutman to pick up the gun. Instead, he opened the humidor and brought out a cigar. He passed it leisurely under his nose and said something Nick couldn’t make out. He picked up the cigar clipper and snipped off the butt of the stogie, the snick bouncing around the office like a rifle shot.
“Where’s Sue?” Nick said.
The Pachyderm smiled. “I propose another deal, Mr. Laymon: let me keep the girl and you can go. Fly away, be free.”
Nick didn’t answer. Inching along the wall, he brushed into something, heard it fall to the carpet. A stool. He stood in the angle between the wall and a bar—the shadowy corner where Evans had conjured up their drinks. He glanced at Gutman, now silent, a lighter flickering in the Jekyll hand as he ignited the cigar. Nick pushed himself away from the wall and began to move along the length of the bar. Fish hooks of pain embedded themselves in the bad shoulder.
He thought of Sue—the way her head tilted when she asked a question; the way her hips swayed as she walked; the way her features collapsed every time Dr. Gillespie called her name. He thought of the long, cool grasp of her slender fingers and moved ahead, groping the bar for purchase. He could no longer hear Gutman.
A gap appeared in the countertop. Blundering through, Nick turned to study Gutman, watching as he blew out a thick cloud of smoke and placed the cigar in an ashtray. Then he picked up the pistol.
Nick slid behind the bar, catching shadowy glimpses of a small refrigerator, a stainless steel basin, its faucet rising like a charmed cobra, liquor bottles standing in shiny and attentive rows. He heard the concussion of a shot. A bottle of Glenfiddich exploded, showering liquor over him, broken needles gouging at his wounded shoulder.
Oh God, oh God. Sue.
He fumbled at the .45, released the clip. Two shots. Two fucking shots. He couldn’t afford to waste them. He had to find a spot to make his stand, catch Gutman by surprise, make the last two chances count.
Another shot. A bottle of gin blew apart. Nick’s eyes found a doorway cloaked by a silken black curtain, a line of brightness underneath it. He caught the curtain and hauled himself through, shoulder shrieking. On the other side he discovered another room, this one smaller, brighter, a light surgical, glaring.
A sickening sense of déjà vu flushed through him. The room was cold and gray—the color of the Gulf in deep autumn—as lifeless as its image in the bank of monitors, as dank as he’d imagined it as he watched Casey Nicole Barrett squirm within it, her fear amplified by the monotonous walls. Nick pressed his face to one of the precisely fitted cinderblocks.
Cool. So cool.
“Sue,” he called, his voice a husk, a whisper.
Chains lay coiled on the floor. The drain sparkled in the dim light. It was a room of angles and planes, a symphony of calculations and agendas, orchestrated by a mad conductor. An assortment of whips and prods and dildoes hung on the opposite wall, arranged according to size. Beneath them dangled two bondage masks, limp, deflated of meaning. The room’s neatness was an obscenity.
Another mask.
A wave of agony rolled through Nick. He gritted his teeth and squeezed his eyes shut until tears ran down his face. His arms were too heavy to lift, his feet too heavy to move. He glanced back at the curtain, hanging straight and still.
Where’s Gutman?
The thought drifted away when he saw the second door, dead-bolted and sturdy, next to the bondage gear.
Sue.
Nick pushed himself from the wall, the room riding away on a breaker of pain before returning, slowly, slowly. He staggered across the concrete floor, glancing back once at the curtained doorway, empty, Gutman’s office still on the other side.
What the fuck’s he doing out there?
He leaned against the door and fumbled at the deadbolt, levering back the lock’s tongue. Simultaneously, something hurled itself at the other side. The door shook against his cheek. He stepped back. The door knob twitched, once, twice, and was still.
Moving in slow motion, a man caught in a nightmare, he reached out and turned it. The door drifted open an inch or two, the darkness beyond impenetrable. From inside came a feral groan. An image of the blind bear cub possessed him, its snout prodding at the cold air. Nowhere to go, nothing to hope for, forever trapped in a ramshackle sty. “Hey,” he whispered. “Sue?”
And then something stormed out of the darkness like a jack-in-the-box. The door slammed against the cinderblock wall with a resounding whack, and a figure reeled past Nick. Hunched nearly in half, its arms tucked into the bend of its body, the figure—
—a woman—
—spun and faced Nick, wailing. “Nnnuuhhh!” it screeched at him, a sound cobbled together of a thousand different pains. He caught a glimpse of half-familiar features, copper hair falling in disarray around thin shoulders, eyes a bright emerald green and empty of everything but terror, a terror so deep and cold that he could never fully plumb it.
Then she was on him.
Nick shrank against the wall, thrusting her away, his shoulder screaming.
“Keeeee!”
The woman—
—Sue! SUE!—
—came at him again, one hand hooked into a bloody talon, the other blunt and heavy, a club swaddled in clumsy, rust-stained bandages.
“Sue,” he cried, “it’s me, it’s—”
She scrabbled at him, mad to flee, to run headlong into somewhere else. He wrapped his arms around her and still she flailed, her face contorted, her hair whipping, her body bucking.
And all the while she screamed: “Nnnuuhhh! Keeee!” That horrible keening, a sound that ripped the world, which gnawed at the final threads of Nick Laymon’s sanity.
“Nuuuhh-keee!”
Only then did he realize: she was calling him, shrieking his name over and over, holding him to the bond he’d given her scant hours ago.
The bond he’d broken.
For the second time in less than an hour Nick gave himself over to the siren song, let the madness take him. He surrendered.
Of its own accord his hand rose and swung, smiting Sue Thompson, imprinting the angry marks of his fingers across the pale plain of her cheek. His head filled with the image of Sue bent before him, his cock thrusting hungrily, angrily into her—
—it hurts, she had said, oh Nicky it hurts—
—before pouring all his desires and fears into her in a single mindless spasm. And then as quickly: he saw again the stranger’s hand raised, saw again the blow come down upon the stripper and the curtain yanked closed, felt again the ugly thrill that took him.
Sue gasped and fell back—and her eyes cleared, became Sue’s eyes again, the madness and terror taking a small, sidewise step. With them, Nick felt his own madness ebb, felt the fog in his head dissipate. It was, he thought, as if a mask had been peeled from his face.
Sue collapsed into his arms, sobbing.
“Oh, Nicky, oh Nicky—”
Words tumbled out of Nick, a string of disjointed syllables, a meaningless cooing, a sound that might have been soothing in another time, another place, but here, now it meant nothing, the words worse than meaningless, a mockery of comfort—
And all he could think was: Time is everything. The Pachyderm had kept his end of the deal. Everything is time.
Goddamn him, Nick thought. God DAMN him.
Sue had stopped talking. She wove unsteadily before him, one hand, its pinky and ring finger sheared away, a clot of tissue and dried blood at the nubs—
—her good hand oh God her good hand—
—at her face, the other, bandaged and bloody, cradled below her breasts like something wounded, broken. Nick’s breath caught in his throat, an image caught in his mind like a bone in the throat—
—Sue rising over him like a night-flowering plant—
—time seeming to have stopped altogether, could have for all he cared, time now so meaningless, so useless.
Careful of her hands, his should
er, he wrapped his good arm around her and leaned against the wall. Pain flared from his wounded shoulder, coursed through him in electric jolts.
It was over.
Gutman had remained faithful to his end of the deal, a finger for every hour. They had bargained and Nick had returned the tape. Now the Pachyderm had to let them go. He had to. It was the deal. He breathed into Sue’s ear, “Okay now, baby, okay …”
He sensed rather than heard Vergil Gutman enter the bunker—the slow draft of displaced air, the subtle drop in temperature, as though an enormous shadow had fallen over them.
Sue’s body stiffened against his. She screamed—a harrowing shriek that chilled his blood—and pushed away from him, her wrist slipping from his grasp. Her shoulder knocked painfully against him, throwing him off balance. He grabbed for her, felt her copper tresses slip through his fingers as she slid away, her back to the dank wall.
Gutman stepped out of the curtained doorway.
Strength at long last abandoned him and Nick slid to the floor, the scrape of the cinderblock against his jacket as harsh as Gutman’s laughter. He tried to lift Evans’s .45 and could not, his arm—
—his good arm—
—as useless as his father’s legs.
Gutman grinned.
“Patience, my dear Mr. Laymon, is a virtue. And an essential in this sort of business, I fear. Take marksmanship, for example; it’s all about patience. You must take the proper stance—like so.” He spread his massive legs, rested his weight comfortably atop them. He pointed the gun at Nick’s heart. “Hold your weapon in both hands, your elbows slightly bent and your muscles relaxed, and then squeeze the trigger—”
“Please, no, don’t kill him—” Sue, the words barely coherent, a rush of anguished sobs.
“Be still, Ms. Thompson. I’ll get to you soon enough.”
“No, please, I’ll do any—”
“Shhhh,” Gutman said. “Any last words, Mr. Laymon?”
Nick swallowed. He said nothing, his eyes focused only on Gutman’s thick finger, wedged between the trigger guard and the trigger.
