The Missing Hours

by Julia Dahl

  Lesley wasted no time, and as she unhooked her bonus, Claudia got the envelope of cash from the duffle bag.

  “Where are you headed?” she asked Lesley as she handed over the money.

  “I figure it’s best to get out of the city for a little bit,” said Lesley. “Perfect time for a vacation.”

  “What about your job?”

  “Hooters? My boss is cool. There’s a million girls that can cover my shifts.”

  They agreed to delete each other from their phones and said goodbye.

  “Be careful,” said Lesley as she left.

  “You, too.”

  This time Claudia didn’t slam the door. She closed it quietly and paused looking at the extra bolt. She didn’t need to keep danger out, it was already inside. If anything, she’d need an easy exit. Her first idea had been to do something Chad would consider sexually humiliating. Maybe take a picture of his flaccid dick and tag it with his name so that whenever you Googled “Chad Drake,” that was what popped up; or make a video of him getting blown by a male prostitute. But none of that seemed exactly right. She never seriously entertained the idea of killing him. What would that even look like? Gone Girl? Then run screaming down the hotel hallway: He raped me! He raped me! Who would she run to? She wasn’t a murderer. But it was time for Chad to be a victim. Finally, scrolling through her phone last night, unable to sleep, Claudia saw the words that made it click: Another Victim: Slasher attacks from behind. That’s it, she thought: I’ll cut him.

  In the morning she went in search of an instrument. There were steak knives in the kitchenette but when she ran them along her fingertips they were dull. She knew she’d have to do it quickly; she couldn’t trust that whatever Lesley dropped in Chad’s drink would last through much dithering. The news said the Slasher was probably using a box cutter, so she walked down to Fourteenth Street and found one at the Home Depot. The clerk barely looked at her. Back in the room, she Googled “How to tell if your knife is sharp,” and tested the blade on a piece of the hotel stationary. It slid straight through.

  Claudia took the box cutter out of her bag. She peered over Chad, just lying there, breathing. She studied his face; his gaping pores and puffy nose. He still bit his fingernails, she could see. She imagined him grinning, chewing at a hand, sending the video to group chat after group chat, accompanied, perhaps, by some crude gif. Or maybe just what he’d written to Trevor: Claudia Castro is a slut. Chad Drake was a monster and it was time everyone knew that.

  She slid the box cutter’s blade up.

  “If you can hear me,” she said, leaning over him, “I hope this hurts.”

  She took a shallow breath and drew the edge along his cheekbone. He stirred and she jumped back. The blood ran down both sides of his face, neck to ear, and onto his lips. He jerked up, sputtered, then slumped back. She looked down at her hands: They were clean. They were steady. Chad began to moan. He put his hand to his face and the blood ran through his fingers, tucked into his raggedy cuticles. Their eyes met and she flipped him off.

  If Chad said anything, Claudia didn’t hear it. She put the box cutter into a plastic bag she’d prepped in the duffle, left the room and walked out of the hotel toward the Port Authority.

  Claudia moved through Midtown easily, weaving between groups of pedestrians, judging the speed of approaching vehicles as she came upon an intersection, navigating outdoor dining setups and orange construction cones and falafel carts as if she were the human character in some virtual chase game. How fast can you get the girl from the hotel to the bus station through the after-theater rush? She liked that Chad had seen her. She liked that she was moving forward, literally speeding away from him, and his nightmare was just beginning.

  LARS

  Before he got out of the car, Ridley Drake texted Lars the photo of Trevor Barber. Jeremy said he thought the kid was in his dorm, so Lars took off work and for the next two days he hung out on the corner of Fourteenth Street and Broadway, watching the three revolving entrance doors. Thank God for the bathroom in Starbucks. At first it felt like an impossible task: He had one photo of a brown-haired kid with no terribly distinguishing features. But after just a few minutes he realized that white males were few and far between. It was mostly Asians and women. He smirked when he realized it. Of course his brother and Trevor were the minorities at schools like NYU. He wondered what remarkable thing Trevor had done to get in. Or maybe his parents were alums. Finally, just as Lars was starting to think about getting a gyro from a corner cart for dinner on day two, Trevor emerged.

  Lars followed him west, then north, ten blocks, twenty, thirty, and eventually up the walkway to a Holiday Inn on Fifty-Seventh Street. The lobby was crowded with guests but Trevor weaved straight through them to the elevators. Lars had to make a quick decision: Get on with him? He decided yes. They’d never met and the chances of Trevor seeing a resemblance with Jeremy, from a passing glance, were negligible. He got on, along with a white-haired woman who smelled strongly of lipstick and a couple in matching windbreakers, speaking a language he didn’t understand. Russian? French? Lars followed Trevor off at the eighth floor, his phone out, ready to claim he was lost if necessary. He stayed several steps behind, but Trevor didn’t look back once before knocking on a door at the end of the hall. Lars heard a girl’s voice: “What are you doing here?”

  It had to be Claudia. But he wasn’t going to get her phone with this kid—and whoever else was in the room—protecting her. Eventually she’d leave. And when she did he’d be in the lobby. He took the elevator back down and found a spot to wait.

  Twenty minutes later Trevor emerged looking despondent, moving slowly toward the exit. Maybe she dumped him, Lars thought. Crazy bitch. He’s better off. Lars leaned against a four-foot ceramic pot holding bamboo shoots for an hour. Eventually, he moved to the bar on the other side of the lobby, taking the last remaining seat between a woman with dreadlocks wearing a cheap job-search pants suit, and a couple starting to get handsy. The guy looked vaguely familiar, but Lars had seen so many faces working bars over the years that he just figured he’d served him once. From his stool he could see the elevators.

  “Double bourbon and a Bud back,” he told the bartender.

  “Start a tab?”

  “No,” he said. “I’ll probably be headed out soon. Just waiting on a text.”

  The bartender brought the drinks and Lars gave him one of the hundred-dollar bills from Ridley’s envelope. One thousand dollars of what the slick attorney had called “good faith” money. He slammed the bourbon, and the beer didn’t last as long as he’d hoped, so he ordered another.

  He was on his third when Claudia came out of the elevator and nearly ran across the lobby. He left his beer and the change and went after her, his heart racing. It was like chasing a bag of money: Do not let it out of your sight, he thought. He followed her into the swarm of voices and horns and lights on Fifty-Seventh. She crossed Eighth and turned south, walking fast, an enormous Louis Vuitton bag slung over her shoulder. That bag probably cost five thousand dollars. That bag could pay Jen the back child support he owed. He’d actually bought his ex the $300 starter model when they first hooked up. She liked it so much she started shoplifting bigger ones from Roosevelt Field mall.

  “You created a monster!” she’d joked as she showed off her loot back at her mom’s house. She was always in a great mood after she got one and she always wanted to fuck.

  They were both living with their parents when they hooked up. Both about to start at Stony Brook, planning to major in business. Her dad was an accountant and, according to Jen, squeezed her mom and her out of what they deserved when he left to make another family.

  “Jeni inherited his head for numbers,” her mom, Karen, told him the first time they met. They were at a pizza parlor where sirens rang to announce a customer’s birthday. “And they’re both Leos. So you can see what I’m up against.”

  Lars had no idea what she meant, but he didn’t say that. He was nineteen then a
nd knew enough to know that it was important to get in good with your girl’s mom. Not too good, though; Karen was the kind who would make a pass at you. He’d fielded several in high school. His mom was not that kind of mom. His mom was older, fragile, sexless, with her prematurely gray hair always in a braid, her flat dancer’s chest, her big feet. Lars loved that Jen dressed up sexy for him—well, for a while it was for him. He’d bought her that stupid purse to encourage her, and to telegraph that he saw himself as someone who could one day afford to buy her lots of things like that. Because he knew that’s what she wanted. Wasn’t it what they all wanted? And he did expect to have money, vaguely. He’d started bar-backing at a local steak house at eighteen and was writing the cocktail menu by twenty-two. The loose plan was to keep on tending bar, get to know the distributors, start working sales, then maybe open his own place with seed money from some of his rich high school buddies by the time he was thirty.

  But that hadn’t happened. He got his associate’s, and an entry level job at Seagram’s, but the combination of a job involving alcohol and an increasingly volatile romantic relationship was toxic. He started missing morning appointments. Jen put him through the ringer. She was a talker. Every little thing, every disagreement, they had to have it out. Round after round all night long in her bedroom, or on the back porch in the dark, or in one of their cars. Pleading and accusing and apologizing, over and over and over. Then a couple days of silence, of wondering if it was finally the end, then a text and a tender-dirty fuck and they were back on.

  So, at twenty-four it was back to bartending; by twenty-seven he’d missed out on investing in two different bars because he couldn’t come up with the ten grand when it came time. How did anybody save ten thousand dollars working behind a bar? If his mom hadn’t gotten cancer he might have asked his parents for the money, but she had, and then Jen got pregnant, and he drank more, and now at twenty-eight he was back in his old bedroom in Port Jeff, working nights at the bar and days at the fucking Verizon store to pay child support just to keep out of jail. His son cried when he came to take him for their afternoons together, his former classmates posted Instagram photos of their sky-high Manhattan apartments, and every year seemed to be a new lesson in the shittiness of white male life.

  And now Claudia Castro thought she could fuck with him, too. As she crossed Fiftieth Street he wondered, Should I just tackle her?

  Times Square was so bright it felt like noon. Fat tourists clogged the sidewalks, staring up, recording videos of the lights. People performed for spare change in filthy costumes. Would that be him someday? So desperate for money he’d do anything? Beg? When Jeremy won that contest, Lars had allowed himself to think that his brother’s success would be his safety net. Jeremy and Rock would record a hit record and there would be more than enough money to go around. He and his brother would go in on a bar, maybe something like the Hard Rock but owned by an actual musician. Claudia Castro stole that. She stole his brother’s future and with it his future; she stole any chance his dad had at a comfortable retirement. And for what? She got drunk and got fucked like a million other girls, but this bitch thought she was special.

  Lars kept walking behind her, hoping an opportunity would present itself. She took the stairs down at Forty-Second Street, but instead of swiping into the subway she followed the passageway toward Port Authority. Underground the energy was darker. It was oddly quiet; people dragged their luggage slowly and drank paper-bag beers alone. Claudia went to a kiosk and bought a ticket, though Lars couldn’t see to where. He was standing ten feet behind her. She looked up to the timetable and then turned around. His heart dropped. But her eyes moved right past him to the restaurant behind. TGI Fridays. The Knicks game was on.

  She sat down at the bar and put her bag on the stool next to her. The fucking feminists made such a big deal of “manspreading” that the MTA did a whole ad campaign with his tax dollars. He needed to come up with a catchy phrase to describe the way women piled all their shit around them in bars. He could make up a mug that read: “JUST SAY NO TO BITCHES’ BAGGAGE.” It didn’t exactly flow.

  Lars sat down on the stool next to her duffle. The bag was zipped shut.

  “What can I get you?” the bartender asked Claudia.

  “Double vodka and soda, please,” she said. Her voice was soft. Lars had Googled her after Jeremy told him they hooked up last fall. Online, Claudia Castro seemed like someone he’d want to fuck, too. Petite, long dark hair, nice tits, big smile. But the girl at the bar looked nothing like the girl he’d seen online. The girl at the bar looked brittle, like a little witch.

  “And you?”

  The bartender was talking to him.

  “Uh, Budweiser, bottle.”

  Claudia took her phone out of her pocket. His throat closed up. He could see the money. Forty thousand dollars, three feet away, in her small hands. Forty thousand dollars meant nothing to Claudia Castro. Claudia Castro ate forty thousand dollars for breakfast. The way he saw it, Claudia Castro owed him way more than forty thousand dollars. But it was a start.

  The bartender came back with their drinks. Lars held his beer and watched Claudia in the slices of mirror behind the bottles along the back of the bar. She leaned forward, tucked into herself, and sucked the drink through the cocktail straw. When she’d drained it, she motioned for another, then pulled the ticket she’d bought from her purse.

  “Do you know where this gate is?” she asked the bartender when he came back with her drink.

  He leaned over. “Woods Hole? That’s two levels down.”

  “Thanks.” She tucked the ticket back into her duffle. “Could you watch this for just a minute?”

  “Sure, hon,” said the bartender.

  Claudia slid off the barstool. She was going to the bathroom. It was now or never.

  The restrooms were in a vestibule off the dining area. Lars stood just around the corner that she would have to turn to come back to the bar. Two minutes later she did just that, and he threw his shoulder into her.

  It couldn’t have worked better. Wham. She fell forward on the carpet. Her phone at her feet.

  “Oh my God are you okay?” he said, kneeling, slipping the phone into his back pocket.

  “Jesus!” she said, up in a nanosecond. “What the fuck?”

  “I’m so sorry, I wasn’t looking…”

  “Where’s my phone?”

  “Your phone?”

  “You took my phone!” Her voice was suddenly very loud.

  “I didn’t take your phone. Look, I’m sorry I accidentally…”

  “Give me that!” She lunged at him and he jumped back.

  “What the fuck!” he exclaimed.

  “Everything okay over here?” It was the bartender. The people at the tables around them were looking.

  “No,” said Claudia. “He tripped me and now he has my phone.”

  “Is that true?”

  “No,” said Lars. “It was an accident. We bumped into each other.”

  “Tell him to give me my phone back.”

  “Sir, do you have her phone?”

  “No!” His voice cracked a little.

  “He’s lying,” she said. “Check his pocket.”

  “Miss…” said the bartender.

  She looked at Lars. “Let him check your pockets,” she demanded.

  “Or what?” He hadn’t thought this through.

  The bartender put his hand on Lars’s chest. “Everybody calm down.”

  “Don’t touch me,” said Lars, stepping back. “She’s the one freaking out.”

  “Check his pockets,” Claudia said again.

  “Sir?”

  Lars put his hands up. “I don’t have her fucking phone.”

  “Great, then can you please just show us your pockets so we can refocus this young lady’s attention?”

  “You don’t believe me?”

  “I don’t know you, man!”

  “Fuck you both.” Lars started to walk away, but Claudia grabbed his
shirt.

  “What the fuck!” he yelled.

  “You’re the one making this hard,” said the bartender. “Just show her what’s in your pockets.”

  Lars pushed the bartender and tried to run but the asshole must have had a black belt in something. He grabbed Lars easily, neck and arms, turned him around and took the phone out of his back pocket.

  “Is this yours?”

  Claudia snatched it. “Yes. Thank you.”

  “Do you want to press charges?” asked the bartender.

  She hesitated. “No.”

  “Are you sure?” asked the bartender, still holding Lars’s arms.

  She started crying. Fucking bitch.

  The bartender tightened his grip on Lars.

  “Go get your bus, hon,” he said. “I’m really sorry. We’ll take care of this asshole.”

  Claudia looked at Lars. Her hair was a mess. Was that blood on her cheek? And then out of nowhere, she opened her mouth and screamed. It was wet and repulsive, inches from his face. He closed his eyes against her breath. She was tiny. He could crush her. He should crush her. He would crush her. Or if not her, her fucking family. Somebody was going to pay.

  PART 4

  EDIE

  The man at the door wanted to come in.

  “How do you know Claudia?” asked Gabe.

  From the sofa, maybe twenty feet away, Edie didn’t recognize him. Twenties, probably. White. Mets cap, hoodie.

  “I don’t want to talk out here,” he said.

  “I don’t know who you are,” said Gabe. “I’m not just going to…”

  The man shoved her father. Gabe tripped backward and the man closed the door behind him. Nathan jumped up and moved like he was going to grab him, but the man stepped back and raised his hands.

  “I just want to have a conversation,” he said. “Is Claudia here?”

  “No,” said Edie.

  “She’s still hiding?”

  “Hiding? Hiding where?” asked Michelle.