by J. D. Barker
“The girls you bring in from other countries. You make them promises, too, don’t you? A better life? A place to stay? A future?”
Visconti shook his head. “Naw, I buy them. Sometimes I trade them for drugs or guns. Everything’s got a price, everything is a negotiation. What’s your price?”
“Prostitution, drugs, weapons…do you think it’s okay to talk about such things with me? What if I’m a cop?”
“You’re no cop, you’re a whore. Too young for much of anything else.” He tugged at the ropes again. “You’ve wasted enough of my time. I’ve got shit to do. Untie these.” He kicked his legs, but the ropes held fast.
“My people, they used arbor knots,” Stella told him. “The more you struggle, the tighter they’ll get.”
“Your people?”
“I don’t know anyone named Cortez or Coslow. The men who rendered you unconscious outside your home in Squirrel Hill, the ones who brought you here, they work for me. They brought you to me.”
“No way they got past my men to do that. This is some bullshit prank.” He turned toward the door. “Cortez, let me the fuck out of here!”
“The three men tasked with guarding you, the ones who were in the car with you, they’re all dead. I imagine your memory is fuzzy due to the bump on your head, but it will come back to you. If it doesn’t, I suppose you’ll have to take my word for it,” Stella said. “My men killed them, took you, and brought you here. Brought you to me.”
Visconti glanced back up at the camera, then around the room, then at the ropes securing him to the chair. “Where is ‘here?’”
Stella ignored the question. She continued to circle his chair. “You, Mr. Raymond Visconti of 83 Nob Hill Road, among other residences, are one of the worst human traffickers in the country. You’ve plucked runaways off the street, kidnapped, recruited, or otherwise coerced hundreds of women and children just in the past year. More in the last six months than the previous three years combined. Over the course of your career, you are responsible for the deaths of one hundred and sixty-three people either directly at your hand, your order, or as the result of ‘business’ practices.’”
Visconti frowned up at her. “Are you a cop? How do you know all that?”
“I’m not a cop.”
“You want money? Is that it? I can get you money. Whatever you want.”
“Do you recognize the name Manuela Seiden?”
Visconti shook his head.
“She was one of your girls, your…whores.”
“I don’t know their names. Cortez handles the girls.”
“She wanted to come to America, try and build a better life for herself and the baby she carried. Your people in Belize promised her that better life, for her and her unborn child. Your people took the equivalent of ten thousand American dollars from her before loading her into a crate with three bottles of water and no food and attempting to ship her here aboard a container ship.”
“I don’t know nothing about any of that.”
“She died less than two days into the journey. After the water ran out. From the heat and lack of air. Her baby with her, of course.”
“I don’t know nothing about any of that,” Visconti repeated. A bead of sweat trickled down from behind his right ear.
Stella let out a breath, still circling, drawing closer. “The girls in the other crates…the other nineteen crates, they died, too. All but one, actually. The last one died at the dock—after you heard what happened, after you decided you didn’t want any witnesses, you had one of your men strangle that one, that last one. While she begged for her life, barely alive after such a horrendous journey, you had her killed to protect yourself.”
Visconti took this all in and said nothing. His eyes had grown narrow, his face pale.
“Can you imagine the pain they must have felt? The uncertainty that came with each moment after they ran out of water? When nobody answered their screams and the air began to thin? Did you bother to look at the inside of those crates before you burned them? At the scratch-marks in the wood? The blood? Traces of fingernails and bits of skin?”
“What do you want from me?”
Stella stopped circling. She knelt down in front of him. “I want you to understand their pain. I want you to feel all the pain you inflicted not only on them, but their families, their loved ones, all the people touched by their short lives. You stole these lives with the ease of a child stealing candy from the corner store.”
Stella reached up, and with the flick of her wrist, her right pointer finger brushed the man’s cheek. A quick touch, no more than an instant.
Visconti’s body tensed, his eyes popped wide. “What the fuck!” he shouted, his head jerking away from her hand.
I leaned in closer to the television monitor. A dark smudge appeared on Visconti’s cheek where she had touched him, a smear of black. At first, I thought it was my imagination, but the smear appeared to be growing.
Ms. Oliver stared at me, a subtle grin at her lips.
I turned back to the monitor.
Visconti grimaced and attempted to wipe at his cheek with his shoulder, his bindings holding him down.
Stella leaned back on her heels.
The smudge grew to about two inches long before stopping, the skin dark and crusty beneath. The sweat at his brow thickened, rolling down the side of his face.
“Do you know what life is?”
“I know exactly what I’m going to do with yours the second I get out of these ropes,” Visconti said.
“Life is a force, an energy. It never really goes away, not even when something dies. That life force just transfers from one entity to the next. A flower may die while a dozen just like it spring up at its feet. A river runs dry, the fish die, and a whale is born half a world away. When a person dies, a mother and her unborn child, for instance, their collective life force returns to that place in the universe where all life began, ready to be redistributed. There is a finite amount, always moving, always shifting. A careful balance, crafted, measured, maintained. Some give life, others take it away. You, Mr. Visconti, were never meant to take life. That is not your place, it is not your reason for being. That task is meant for others, and through your actions, you’ve upset the balance.”
Visconti’s eyes narrowed. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
Stella rose to her feet and stepped behind him. His fingers were working at the ropes. He had managed to loosen the one around his right wrist. She reached out and took his hand in hers, her fingers wrapping around his.
Visconti’s face grew paper white, and he screamed. He screamed unlike any man I had ever heard scream. She touched him only for a brief second, and I watched in horror as his fingers turned black, then the back of his hand. The blackness spread up and over his wrist before finally stopping just before the cuff of his leather jacket. His fingers stopped working the ropes, they stopped moving altogether.
I thought he’d pass out. A sheen of sweat covered his face, and his mouth twitched with some involuntary muscle spasm, his tongue protruding through slightly parted lips. His chest rose and fell with the urgency of a jackhammer, each breath drawing in with a gasp, then out again with a wheeze.
Stella looked up at the camera. Somehow, through that lens, through the monitor I watched, our eyes met. “Please, Jack, don’t watch. Don’t watch this,” she mouthed.
Ms. Oliver pressed a button on the wall, an intercom of some sort. “Finish this, Stella.”
Stella’s head jerked to the left, to a speaker outside my view, Oliver’s grating voice reaching her.
“Whatever this is,” I said, “stop it.”
Oliver nodded at the man in white. “Hold him. Make him watch.”
The man grabbed at my arms, twisted them behind my back. I tried to turn away from him, and he kicked at the back of my leg, beneath the knee, and I dropped to the floor. The woman beside him pulled her rifle out from under her long, white coat and pointed the weapon at me. “Don’t.”<
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“Watch,” Ms. Oliver said, nodding at the television monitor.
Stella stood, circling the man again.
He was crying now. He didn’t want to, he tried to hold back, but the tears came anyway. Sobs caught between breaths. “Please stop,” Visconti said, the words barely audible.
Stella paused in front of him and reached for his face, her fingers hovering so close.
He tried to shrink away but could only move so far. “No…please…”
“Nobody heard Manuela Seiden’s final pleas. She died alone in that box. Death is too good for you, but it’s all I have to give.”
Stella leaned forward then and pressed her lips to his, one hand behind his head, pulling him close, pulling him into her kiss. The man’s body tensed, and he no doubt screamed one final time, but I didn’t hear it. I lunged backward against the man holding me, I shoved him back with all the strength I could muster. The woman beside him reversed the grip on her rifle, spinning it in her hands. She brought the stock down on the side of my head, and the world went black.
The dream.
Tied down in my car seat, unable to move.
Chocolate milk spilled everywhere, my clothes soaked with it. Sticky.
A white SUV so close in front of us. The driver’s seat looks like it was part of Mommy and Daddy’s seat.
Our car and that car, now one car.
Smoke.
Burning.
“Daddy?”
Nothing.
“Momma?”
Nothing.
A body in the white SUV, half in, half out, hanging over the steering wheel.
A dead thing.
A dead thing wearing a white coat stained with deep spots of red, watching us.
“Daddy?”
“Jack?” from the front seat. “Are you okay, buddy?”
A groan. Momma. “I smell gas. We need to get out.”
“Are you okay? Please tell me you’re okay.”
A door opening.
The scrape of metal on metal.
“Eddie?”
“Yeah?”
“The other SUV. They’re coming.”
“Get Jack out.”
My eyes opened on the hallway of my apartment building.
The buzzing of the fluorescent bulb above me.
I was on the floor, my back up against the wall.
My dirty clothes from the diner, piled in my lap.
Mr. Triano, the building superintendent, hovering over me. “You been drinking, kid?” Beside him stood a second Mr. Triano, this one blurry.
I looked up at him, tried to summon words. My mouth empty, tasting of dirty cotton.
“Your aunt’s in a bad way. You got no business being out partying.”
I reached for my head, my hand finding the tender spot where the woman had hit me with the rifle butt. It hurt like hell.
The Triano on the right reached for me with a calloused hand. “Stand up, before someone else sees you.”
I took his hand and let him haul me to my feet.
The world spun a little, tilted, then found center.
I drew in a deep breath. Both Trianos became one Triano.
“How long have I been here?” I managed to say. I expected to find blood on my fingertips, but they came away from my head clean.
“How the hell would I know? I ain’t your babysitter. You can’t sleep it off in the hallway, though. Get in your place. Chug a tall glass of ice water with some aspirin and find a comfortable spot on the couch. That usually works for me. Oranges are good, too, if you have one. Don’t ask me why.”
I looked up and down the hallway. “Did you see them bring me in here?”
Triano glanced toward the stairs at the end of the hallway. “Salvatore in 108 said someone in a white truck dropped you off outside. You managed to drag yourself up here. He bet me one dollar you’d find your apartment within thirty minutes. He said, ‘Even the drunkest of drunks can find their way home.’ Said, ‘Teenagers have a special kind of stamina.’ You assed out in the hallway, though, only a few feet from the finish line. He owes me a buck. Come on, I’ll help ya.”
Triano wrapped an arm around me and helped me cross the hall to my door. I felt like I was walking on stilts, someone else’s legs, not my own.
My door was unlocked. I twisted the knob, and we went inside.
Auntie Jo was sound asleep in her chair, snoring loud enough to vibrate the window.
I dropped my filthy clothes inside the doorway. Triano helped me to the couch and fetched a glass of water from the kitchen.
I drank all of it, and he set the glass down on the coffee table.
“Get some sleep, kid, tomorrow’s another day.”
With that, he was gone.
I closed my eyes and leaned back into the cushions, the throbbing at the side of my head fading away.
A toilet flushed.
Dunk came out of the bathroom with a bag of frozen peas pressed to his face. “When’d you get home? What the hell are you wearing? You look like a waiter.”
Thirty minutes later, and I told him everything. He told me about the man who punched him.
“Complete sucker punch,” Dunk said. “Another half second, and I would have laid him out.”
“And he left the money?”
Dunk nodded. “Five hundred in an envelope on your bed. I counted it.”
“I think he broke your nose. You need to have that looked at.”
“Complete sucker punch,” Dunk repeated. “I’ll get him next month, though. I’m gonna camp out in front of your door with a nice sawed-off, and maybe a few of my boys. We’ll sit him down right here on your comfortable yet stylish couch, and he’s gonna tell us what’s going on. I’ve had enough of this bullshit.”
“I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
“You don’t get a vote.”
“This is my apartment. He comes here for me.”
“He broke my nose. That officially made him my problem. People are going to ask me what happened. I can’t let something like this go. That would be weak. I don’t do weak.” Dunk lowered the frozen peas. “The bleeding stopped. How bad does it look?”
“If you don’t go to the hospital, it’ll heal crooked. Your right eye is going black, too.”
Dunk swore and replaced the peas.
Auntie Jo snorted in her sleep, and then her rhythm went steady again.
“You need to let this girl go.”
“I can’t.”
“You said she killed a man.”
“I didn’t say that. I don’t know what I saw.”
“You said she killed a man just by touching him—which is not possible, by the way.”
“Well, then she couldn’t have killed him. I’m completely full of shit, and all is well.”
Dunk lowered the peas again and tentatively touched the tip of his nose, grimaced, and felt around his eye. “What was his name again?”
“Raymond Visconti.”
Dunk said nothing.
I leaned forward. “You know his name, don’t you?”
“I’ve heard of him, yeah.”
“Is it true? What she said he did?”
Dunk sighed. “If this is the Visconti I’m thinking about, then yeah, it probably is. He’s a bad dude. Was a bad dude. Or is, depending on what your girlfriend did to him. Christ, this hurts.” He replaced the peas and leaned back in the chair.
“I think she killed him.”
“With a touch?”
“With a touch, then a kiss.”
“Dude, do you have any idea how fucked this all sounds right now?”
“Death is too good for you, but it’s all I have to give.” I leaned back into the soft cushions of the couch. “That was the last thing I heard her say to him.”
Dunk removed the peas from his swollen nose and lowered the bag to his lap. When he turned to me, his face was white. “The flowers.”
I remembered the flowers, too.
I didn’t want to t
hink about the flowers.
“That was what, five? Six years ago?”
“Five.”
“You told me she picked up the flowers and they died in her hand. Just shriveled up, dried, and fell apart when she touched them without her gloves on. You said the old woman made her go back to the bench and forced her to pick them up without gloves on. The old woman made her do it, and she wanted you to watch, like tonight. The old woman—”
“Oliver. Latrese Oliver.”
“—Oliver, right. This Oliver woman wanted you to see that way back then, she wanted to scare you off. That didn’t work, so now she’s showing you this. Whatever this is.”
“When Stella touched Visconti, on the cheek, at first I thought she burned him. That’s what it looked like, some kind of dark burn, but I don’t think that’s what happened at all. She kept talking about life force—she said there was a finite amount, a carefully maintained balance. When one thing dies, the life force doesn’t die with it but moves on to something else. Shifts, transfers, some kind of balance of power. I think her touch somehow took the life from that spot. The black spot was death. It only took a second.”
“And what? She can’t control it? That’s why she wears gloves? The longer she touches someone or some living thing, the worse…”
I nodded.
“Fuck.”
“Yeah.”
“She can’t touch anyone.”
“I don’t think so,” I said. “Not without hurting them. Or worse.”
I hadn’t told him about the pool. I couldn’t. I was still trying to sort that out myself.
“You need to stay away from her,” Dunk said again.
“She doesn’t want to be there. They’re making her do this.”
Dunk blew out a breath. “If this is all true, nobody is making her do anything. This girl could walk out of there any time she wants. Nobody is going to try and stop her.”
I leaned forward. “I think that’s what all the guns are for. I always thought those people in white were some kind of guard, security, protection. What if they’re really there to keep her under control? She might get past one or two of them, but they’re everywhere. I saw a couple dozen, probably more.”
Dunk frowned. “You think they’d shoot her to keep her from getting out?”