Misisipi

by Michael Reilly

  Quietly, I rise and write a hasty note—Stay put. Have faith. Wait for us—which I leave on my pillow before climbing back out through the broken window. As I drive away, I expect to see Monica rush into the street after me but only the empty houses watch me depart.

  I need one item to pull this off, something very specific. It takes me most of the day and my remaining cash to secure it. By nightfall, everything is ready. As midnight approaches, I take my place back at the Radisson and send a text, from the cell Monica was given to the men who gave it.

  RADISSON KENNER #814. I’M WAITING. TANYA—UNHARMED!—FOR ME. TELL HENRY WE CAN BUILD ANOTHER ROCKET FOR JEAN.

  The white pickup prowls to the rear of the hotel an hour later and parks at the loading dock. Denny and Dewey take the service elevator to the 8th floor and find the door of my room unlocked. As they enter, I close my eyes. I fear something unspeakable may happen here before we even begin our journey to Henry. I’m ok with that. I summon recollections of the coping mechanisms of people about to experience a loss of choice and control. Whatever I allow to happen, I console myself with the fact that there is a young girl’s life at stake and no trauma is too great a price to pay. To that end now, I disassociate myself from the woman in 814 and what might befall her. She is not me.

  What actually happens is that Dewey and Den are too pissed with my earlier evasion to try any little tenderness. They are on a clock and the woman in 814 has barely stood before Denny smashes his fist into her face. She collapses to the floor. They tape her hands, mouth, and eyes and then carry her to the pickup, toss her in the back seat, and speed away.

  Groggy, blind, and blind-terrified, she can only sense the changing terrain. The urban din gives way to suburban repose, then to vacant silence. They are leaving the city, only the tire noise marking progress now. She groans, senses the bonds, and starts to struggle. A fist lashes out, hard enough to quieten her. She can taste blood and tape gum. Her tongue meets a loosened tooth, and when she presses against it, the nerves of her shredded lip shrill in protest.

  The distinct whoosh of an elevated road, punctuated by symmetrically-spaced Thumps: the signature sound of the Lake bridges. Which one? North? East? Either way, they will soon be in remote parts. She has no notion of time. Minutes or hours have already passed. She wonders which will measure the rest of her life tonight.

  Sometime later, the ride loses it smoothness as the truck rolls and pitches on a heavily potholed track. The wheels scrunch onto a gravelly drive and stop, engine off, end of the road.

  They fetch her from the truck, and as they rough her toward the house, she pleads through the gag for an improbable mercy. Halfway, she loses her footing and sprawls on the loose stone. One of them kicks her in the ass, his boot toe practically into her butthole. From a pain she has never known before, or maybe as a last act of preservation, she clenches the ground and begs it to hold firm. In the sticky dry still night, she hears only her own cries. Even the crickets go silent, waiting to see what happens next.

  Someone hoists her up by her belt strap and carries her the rest of the way, like luggage. Delivered limp onto the living room floor, she still holds the useless earth in her fists and sobs.

  Her abductors’ ungainly footsteps withdraw behind her. A different gait, lighter and assured, descends an unseen staircase and approaches from the front. She shields her face, blindly steeling herself for a kick or certain worse. But when the newcomer reaches her he pauses, and though the blow does not come, the murder is waiting. Unexpectedly gentle hands envelop her bound wrists. She rises to their guide, still holding the soil. When he sees this, a chuckle escapes him.

  “Dirt you be and dirt you return to,” he speaks. “It fit, no?”

  She nods, opens her hands. He rubs the clay between his own fingers.

  “Good to be home?” he asks as he presses a dirty mark to her forehead. “You always been from this and it always been you.”

  She hears a switchblade snap and flinches.

  “Non, easy,” he coos. “You with family. You choose come free. Now you be free.” He slices the wrist binds and carefully peels the tape from her mouth and eyes. Harsh light spikes her vision from the bare bulb above them and there he is.

  Henry is dressed in a once dapper black suit, now faded and crumpled from a succession of wet washes. High standards are poorly met when you’re slumming it, but at least he tried, for me no less. Part of me concedes that he was never not a charming monster. He looks worn and withered now and though he may be blind behind the dark glasses, he has a knife. I remind myself of what passed the last time I saw him with one.

  The memory of it snaps me back to myself. As I study him, I don’t realize I have forgotten to breathe.

  “You frightened, child?” he asks.

  “Please don’t hurt me. This weren’t no parta the arrangement.”

  “You spectin I hold my end, let the lil black thing go? That’s gonna cost someone.”

  “I was just told to fuck the guy.”

  Henry frowns. “What guy? Them guys what brought you?”

  “Her husband. She said she just wanted to show him a good time.”

  Perplexed, Henry’s face freezes. “Who? Huh?”

  “The broad on Bourbon Street. She didn’t say nothing about no kinky shit.”

  Henry’s arm shoots out like a cobra. Blind or no, the flat side of the blade finds the soft base of her jaw, and pressing up, he brings her to a terrified tip-toe on its point.

  My own feet twitch where I’ve been standing on the edge of the yard outside, observing all this through the window. The notion that Henry’s going to kill her, that I’m going to get this innocent stranger murdered, almost causes me to break cover. That wasn’t part of the plan. I waver on the edge of the light thrown from the house, stopping when I see that Henry stays his hand. His lips are moving. I can’t hear what’s being said inside. For sure, he’s about to figure out what’s really going on. I’m immovable though. I have to see what he does when that happens.

  “What broad?” Henry snaps, “What you talking bout, Juliana?”

  “Who the fuck is Juliana? I’m Shreena.”

  Dewey mouths a silent What Da Fuck? and shrinks in his skin.

  “We got the right room, Henry,” Denny barks. “She was waiting just like her text said!”

  Henry raises the point of the blade a notch. “Speak, bitch. You dancing on the head of a solemn pin so speak true, ya hear?”

  “I swear. It’s true. I weren’t looking for no trouble. Just working my patch up by the Hustler club. Lady comes by and offers me a straight grand for one trick, cash! Half now. Just go by her hotel and wait for her old man, show him a good time. Said he’d have the rest. Said the room was paid up through Monday. They was getting out next day and I could wait out the storm there after they gone.”

  “You a hooker?” Henry spits distastefully.

  “I’m an entertainer. That’s what I do. She wouldn’t be the first broad to give her man a free pass while they was down here. Everyone’s gone storm-crazy. I wasn’t gonna pucker my ass when some crazy bitch is waving ten fat ones under my nose.”

  “Supposing I don’t believe you?” Henry twists the knife and a warm trickle of blood flows onto the blade. “You her—big lie on me. You not her—big lie on us. Either way bad for you.”

  “In my bra,” she gasps. “Cash she gave me.”

  Henry grabs her breast through her shirt, raking his fingers into the fabric. He violently rips the front open and pulls the bra cup down, extracting a fold of paper nestled inside.

  “What’s this?” he bellows, testing the bundle by touch. “Boys? Don’t feel like no currency I know.”

  “It’s half bills, Henry,” says Dewey. “Someone tore em up.”

  “Yeah,” she croaks against the knife point. “Right in front of me, she ripped em in half. Said her man was gonna have the rest. Said she weren’t stupid and didn’t want me taking the cash and just splitting. Insurance, she said.”r />
  Henry tosses the notes. “What did she look like, this cautious woman? My, my.” He almost smiles.

  “Like a broad. Classy. Like any of them what come down here. Long hair, smelled nice, smooth skin. Kinda my height. She left this ‘Gap’ shit on the bed and a note saying to change into it. Said she wanted her husband to find a slut in her things. Please. It’s the truth, I swear, I just”—the hooker starts crying again—“I just waited and no one showed. I started popping bottles from the minibar, did some blow. I don’t remember nothing else, til they showed up and he hit me. Ain’t right. I get extra for that shit.”

  Henry starts to laugh, a wire-thin guffaw. “Now I know you’re just a dimebag whore. Whoa, we both got screwed. Oh, Juliana, you put it to me good!”

  I watch Henry withdraw the knife and close the blade. Throughout the tense exchange, the only motion I could make was to constantly check that the gun is still in my jacket. Since crawling out from under the rear tarp of Denny’s truck, I’ve been paranoid that it might have jolted loose on the bruising ride up here. But I still have it, along with the aches from my bouncing around in back. When I observe the situation in the house calming, a momentary relief pushes the pain down. But my predicament remains. There are three men in the room. Storming in would be suicide. Tanya has to be here, probably upstairs where I watched Henry appear from. I need them to fall for my other ruse, so badly I’m hissing the wish aloud. “C’mon Henry, take the bait. Find the note and cut those dogs loose. Then it’s just you and me.”

  What happens next is sudden and shocking. The hooker mouths something to Henry. He freezes. With a yell loud enough that I hear even at this remove, Henry leaps forward and wraps his hands around her throat. Though they disappear from view as they tumble to the floor, the sounds leave me no question. The Twock of her head on the floorboards carries on even after her brief screams have ended. It finishes when someone screams, “Fuck! Henry, enough!”

  “Fuck,” is about all I can manage too. It’s coming apart. I back farther into the shadows and consider my options. At the rear of the house, three vehicles are parked facing the river—Denny’s truck, a black Trans-Am sports car, and Henry’s red sedan. If I can start one of them, surely the two goons will come running. Then I guess we’ll see how my marksmanship holds up.

  I sneak around to them and check the ignitions. All keyless. The porch lights on this side leave me exposed so I hunker down by the front grille of the sedan and strategize. Bullshit! I cower, clueless. I just got a woman killed. Tanya will be next, or worse, any second. And I don’t have the guts to go in and see it through. I should have just done myself when it felt right. I don’t even feel that now. I’ll just squat here and wait for something else to shift me. After 25 years, the fates can spare me a few minutes more.

  The brothers emerge onto the porch. As I peer back through the sedan’s windshield, I finally appreciate that they are twins, but I don’t have time to ponder that now. Because they found it! I see one of them brandishing the note which I tucked in the pocket of the pants I insisted the hooker wear.

  I’m grinning, wondering where this guile in me came from. Acquire a gun from the cesspool scum of a city I hardly know? Not on your typical kindergarten teacher’s resumé. Dupe my would-be captors with a doppelganger and hide myself for the ride to Henry’s unknown whereabouts? I didn’t learn that in Wellesley. Above all, to plant a note on my Trojan Juliana to divide my foes? That’s not desperation, like the other plays. It’s deliberation of a colder calling. And I did it unthinkingly, some darker part of me certain it was needed.

  And it’s actually working. The note reads J! I’M AT THIBEAUX’S 3881 BIENVILLE. LEAVE SOON AS YOU GET HERE. BE SAFE. MONICA. The address of Tanya’s friend, Leticia Thibeaux. Monica told me about the spying on the kids. I drove over during my prep earlier today. The family have already evacuated. But the ruse is a plausible arrangement, if they’ve been watching Monica for as long as she maintains. I’m—no, the awakened schemer in me—is counting on frustrated anger to make them bite, to think I got lazy and they got lucky.

  Henry joins the twins and a heated disagreement breaks out between him and Denny. Denny crumples the note and flings it across the porch. For a moment I fear they aren’t going for it, but Denny comes off the porch and storms toward his truck, barking as he goes. “Load em the fuck up, Dewey! Take em up to the shed in McNeill and I’ll bring the other bitches.”

  He has half-climbed into his cab when Henry shouts, “Denny! It don’t make sense. We stay together. We got the girl.”

  Denny steps out, enraged, an aluminum baseball bat in his fist. He marches half-way back, stabbing the bat furiously in Henry’s direction. “I am done taking fucking orders from you ol has-been! And now I been fucked over, by a tourist! Big man in town? What a fucking joke. You see me laughing? Didn’t think so. Get movin, retards!” He strides back to the truck and he’s barely in the seat before it’s tearing out of the clearing and back to New Orleans. One down at least.

  After leading Henry inside, Dewey reappears with two cases. He walks to the Trans-Am, lifts the half-glass hatch, and tosses them in the trunk. I rise from behind the front fender of Henry’s sedan and train the gun at the open hatch. Through its glass center, I see Dewey leaned in, arranging the luggage. I need him to stand away. I barely have the nerve for one shot and I need a clean one to be sure.

  An upstairs window judders open with a screech. I look to see Henry leaning out and I’m so sure he’s made me, I freeze.

  “Dewey,” he calls down.

  Dewey straightens from the trunk, turns the other way to locate Henry, misses me completely. I’m standing in the open, gun to the back of my target, a blind man our only witness.

  Take the shot. Now!

  “Yeah Pop?”

  “I bring the girl down. We take your car, no?”

  Dammit! Tanya is up there. Henry will hear the shot and have the jump on her before I can intervene. I train the gun to Henry instead. It’s an impossible distance. Jesus!

  “Just loading er now.”

  “Bon! I go untie her. You move the stuff over from my trunk. Then we all vamoose!”

  “Sweet! Get your gas on.”

  I duck back down behind the sedan. I can’t take Dewey physically. As I hear him now snap the sedan’s trunk open, I forage for anything on the ground: a rock, a branch. Nothing!

  I hear him fumbling behind me in Henry’s trunk and I look up. No glass cover on this one, just shitbox solid old steel. And my new best bad buddy takes over. I leap onto the hood and throw myself across the roof. Dewey startles and tries to pull clear. Pain shoots from where my shoulder connects with the trunk and ripples around my skull, but it’s worth it for the solid slam into him I feel it make beneath me. I pummel my entire body against the lid again. Dewey collapses and slides halfway from the trunk, his knees resting on the grass, his jaw snagging on the lower catch. I spill off the edge and over his limp form, my aches awakened. As I stand over him, his foot twitches. I want this fucker dead but I’ll settle for as-good-as. I don’t flinch as I drive the trunk lid onto Dewey’s head two more times and I hear his skull fracture at both ends.

  An adrenaline rush helps me hoist his comatose carcass into the trunk, but the instant I slam it shut, the effect overdoses me. I stagger to the porch and through the kitchen in a woozy spin. I don’t think I can even shoot level, let alone straight. I stop caring the instant I see the body of the hooker on the living room floor; face down, her head haloed by a circle of blood so shimmering red it seems alive. Wearing my clothes, she could be me. She should have been me.

  From upstairs, Tanya’s cries and Henry’s curses as he grapples with her break my daze. My shaking hands can barely keep a gun grip. I can’t have Tanya in a clumsy line of fire. I need Henry alone. And this new side of me knows how to get him. I drop beside the corpse and slam my hand to the floor.

  “Aaaoooww! Help me! Please!” I moan loudly. “Don’t leave me here!”

  Up
stairs goes quiet. A door slams, a key turns, and footsteps descend. As I stand, a queer peace comes over. I feel my co-conspirator depart. She has played her part: the planner. Only the execution remains and it is my performance alone.

  Henry enters, this time cautious, the knife already out. “Dewey?” he hisses. “You here? You take care of her?”

  I step noisily to the left. Henry raises the knife in my direction. “Child? You hurt? Y’ought not try to move.”

  I drawl how I remember she spoke when I hired this girl on Bourbon Street. “Wassa matter, Mista? Cint you kill a bitch right? Ya’s losing your touch, Mista Henry.” I scuff another step left.

  Henry circles to match, the body between us. “Was just a mistanding.” The knife is shaking. “Lemme call Dewey. We get that seen to, no?”

  “Maybe you oughta stick to cutting kids. Better suits your proclivities.”

  His eyes widen. “No! No possible!”

  I shuffle backward. “Trés possible, motherfucker! Come and test the wound.”

  Henry steps forward; his foot snags on the body and he spills at my feet, losing the knife. I kick it away and take his fine hair in my hand.

  “Come. Sit.” I drag him to the couch and toss him onto it. I am me again. “Let’s set your sin down, Mister Henry. Cast off those burdens of yours.”

  An epiphany comes over his face. “Juliana? No. How? Dewey?”

  “Your standard in scumbags is falling. Dewey got his severance package.”

  He chortles. I don’t like that. I rip the cheap dark glasses from his face and shove the gun against one of his dead eyes.

  “Oh-ho!” he whoops. “Fire in your belly and your hand. Maybe I need to hire you.”

  “I don’t rate your business prospects. I’ll pass.”

  “What you spect? I got fucked over by your Daddy. Big house to shit house in same day. You got his flair though. You born to this. Is in your blood. And you got benefits. You got a cunt. He just one.”