The Unwilling

by John Hart

  There were curtains but no windows.

  At the bedroom door, she listened but heard nothing.

  He would be on the other side.

  He had to be.

  Moving quickly, Sara checked under the bed and beneath the vanity. The dresser drawers were filled with old-fashioned undergarments; the clothes in the closet were equally dated. Dressing numbly, she saw herself in the mirror, hollowed out and pale as soap, a strange woman in a pencil skirt and fitted blouse.

  “Not me,” she said. “Not like Tyra.”

  She opened the door, and stepped into a hallway with a pink bathroom on one side and a second bedroom on the other. The hallway ended at a kitchen.

  Still, no windows.

  Crying openly, she staggered into the next room, and stumbled against a rolltop desk. The room was small, but there was a door and an umbrella stand. That meant, exit, outside, escape. Sara ran for the door, and tore at the lock, metal giving as she jerked at the knob, and the chain snapped tight.

  “Shit! Shit!”

  She fumbled at the slide, tore skin. The chain dropped, and she heaved at the door. Beyond it was a second one made of steel. No handle or lock. Not even hinges.

  “No! No! No!”

  Sara pounded metal until her hands ached.

  “No, please…”

  She slid to the floor.

  “Not like Tyra.”

  28

  The guards came midmorning, this time Jordan and Kudravetz. They took Jason to the subbasement, and there was no question of X’s intent. Stripped down to fighting shorts, he stood barefoot on swept stone, the glint in his eyes cold, critical, and eager.

  When the guards left, X leveled those eyes at Jason. “I assume we still understand each other?”

  “You made your point perfectly clear. Nothing has changed.”

  “Do you require time to prepare?”

  But Jason was already in the cold place, the killing place. He raised his hands, and watched X circle, looking for the feint, the feint within the feint. Hands. Feet. The flick of an eye. Sometimes the feints were words designed to distract or disarm. It was a favorite strategy.

  Unsettle the mind; destroy the balance.

  Destroy the balance; obliterate the man.

  But Jason was prepared for that, his shadow on the wall as they circled, X’s feet a whisper on the stone, his hands up as Jason made the first move, a flurry of blows and kicks, a feint of his own before drawing first blood with a jab so fast and sharp it split skin like the rind of a melon.

  X showed no sign of pain or surprise, the only change a single blink as blood dripped into an eye. “I understand your father came to visit you. Strange that he never did so before.”

  Jason said nothing.

  Circling.

  “Has he changed, do you suppose? Or does he sense some change in you, some reason for hope where none existed when last you were here?”

  “Are we fighting or talking?”

  “In the past, we’ve done both.”

  X’s words were like a shrug, but what followed was the most perfect display of controlled violence that Jason had ever seen, an explosion of movement and contact that left him staggered and stunned. X drew blood twice, then backed away, looking displeased.

  “Again,” he said; and came for Jason with the same relentless speed. This time Jason did better, blocking a string of blows before landing four good jabs and a punch to the ribs brutal enough to drop most any man alive. X just grunted, and came again, hard strikes to the face, a kick that numbed Jason’s leg from the hip down. He took a single step, and the leg folded.

  “Enough!” X turned away, angry. “Did I imagine the man you were two months ago? Have I misremembered, somehow?” Jason spit blood, and X looked down his nose. “This is pitiful. Stand up.”

  Jason straightened slowly, but X came fast, knocking him down twice more, then spitting once, and showing his back to underscore the contempt. After that, his attacks were clinical, strategic, perfectly executed. But the more strikes he landed, the more frustrated he became, lashing out harder and faster until he’d backed Jason into a corner, words grating from his throat with every blow.

  Never … been … so … disappointed …

  But Jason was in the corner for a reason, absorbing the blows until X hit him a final time, still flush with disgust. “Stand up, for God’s sake.”

  He lowered his guard, and that was all Jason needed, a quarter second to strike out backhanded, the knuckles of his fingers and palm making simultaneous strikes on a pressure point at the center of X’s eyebrow and the facial nerve below his left cheekbone. Done perfectly, the blow would cause excruciating pain and a near-instant blackout. But X twitched at the last moment, just enough to stay on his feet. Still, he was stunned; and that, too, was all Jason needed. He struck out stiff-fingered, caught X in the throat, then followed with a blur of jabs and a right cross big enough to fold X at the knees. Jason met him on the way down, twisting through the hips with an uppercut that might have killed a lesser man. Even X seemed half-dead when he hit concrete, eyes down to slits as he coughed out blood and bits of teeth.

  Jason straightened, breathing hard. It had been a near thing. Another minute, and he’d have had no fight left.

  Destroy the balance.

  Obliterate the man.

  That was the midnight decision: to make X angry, to build the anger into rage, and the rage into disdain. It was the only path Jason had left, so he’d taken the hits, the pain, and done it for what?

  A quarter second.

  The blink of an eye.

  Jason dragged out a chair, found a bottle of wine, and waited to see if X would drown in his own vomit before color rolled back into his eyes. He considered helping the man along—ten full seconds of that fucking close.

  When X could focus, he found Jason in the chair, the bottle half-empty. “I knew it,” he said. “I was right…”

  “About what?”

  But X didn’t answer. He was too busy bleeding, and nodding, and weeping tears that looked like joy.

  * * *

  For Warden Wilson, the world had long ago ceased to make sense. His office? What did it matter? His responsibilities? The future? How long since his wife had touched his hand or smiled? Or since his sons had called him father?

  Could X actually die?

  Of course, he could be physically killed, but what provisions had he made? The man was insane, vicious, and richer than sin. He had lawyers, mercenaries, God alone knew what. And only God knew what would happen if X died prematurely.

  “Excuse me, sir?” The warden’s secretary appeared in the open door. “Visitor processing still needs an answer, and the doctor called again. I really think you should go.”

  “Very well.”

  The warden rose from the desk yet seemed to weigh a thousand pounds. His secretary had ideas about X—many did—but only a few understood the monster in the basement: those who’d paid the price, and lived afraid. Buttoning his coat, Warden Wilson made his way to the subbasement under death row. Two guards stood at the bottom of the stairs. “Status?” he asked.

  “He’s with the doctor. He’s alert.”

  “Mood?”

  The same guard looked at the other, then shrugged. “I’d say he looks happy.”

  That made no sense to the warden. X had never lost a fight, not like this. “Stay here,” he said. “No one in or out unless I say.”

  Three days until he dies …

  It was little enough, but Bruce Wilson had never been a courageous man. When his wife had first been assaulted, he’d planned to flee with his family, and pray to God he never saw X again. He’d been careful about it, too, buying tickets with cash and in secrecy, prepared to abandon everything but the people he loved.

  Yet somehow, X had known.

  As I recall, he’d said, you are from elsewhere in the South.

  Mississippi. The Delta.

  And your family has been there for some time?
<
br />   As far back as memory goes.

  I assume, then, that you are familiar with the brutal and once-common practice of hobbling recaptured slaves?

  You mean…?

  Broken ankles and shattered knees, severed tendons and amputated feet, all very gothic and antebellum …

  I don’t understand.

  I feel certain that you do.

  Then X had placed a copy of the warden’s itinerary on the table.

  Charlotte to Atlanta.

  Atlanta to Sydney.

  The warden remembered little after that but the hard run home and the sound of his smallest son screaming. They’d been in the kitchen—his entire family—and thinking back, he remembered the oddest things: the linoleum floor, curled in the corner, an open bottle of wine, and the smell of burning food. Try as he might, he could recall nothing of his wife’s face or of his older son, though both had been there. What had broken his heart then, and haunted him to exhaustion every day since, was the sight of his baby boy, but really just his legs, the narrow limbs with the scabbed knees, and how they bent at such impossible angles.

  Choking on the memory, Warden Wilson moved down the corridor to the cell where the prison doctor stood above a bed, bending low to stitch a cut above X’s eye. Pretending calm, the warden asked, “How is he?”

  The doctor grunted once, still working. “A mild concussion and maybe forty stitches. Go on, show him your teeth.”

  “Tie off the stitch and get out.” If X was in pain, he didn’t show it. Shifting on the bed, he rose against the pillow, and laced his fingers on his chest. “How’s your family?”

  The warden felt a wild panic, and tried to conceal it, pretending to watch the doctor as he gathered his things and left. “They’re fine,” he said.

  “And your youngest?” X continued. “Trevor, I believe. How is young Trevor?”

  The warden thought, Three days, that’s it, but couldn’t hide the anger. “The limp still troubles him. The pain is never distant.”

  “You think me needlessly cruel.”

  The warden straightened his spine, a moment of rare strength. “I do.”

  “And if I wished to express some feeling of gratitude or remorse? If I told you that, would you believe me?”

  “I don’t understand the question.”

  “I’m saying that in spite of our difficult start, you’ve been both fair and responsive. I’d like to reward that behavior.” X kept his gaze impassive. “How about three million dollars each for you, your wife, and your oldest son? Plus another five for Trevor, to compensate for the limp.”

  The warden gaped; he couldn’t help it. “Fourteen million dollars?”

  “Let’s make it twenty.”

  The idea of such wealth made the warden feel faint. It meant a fresh start for him and his wife, better therapy for Trevor …

  “I will require one last thing,” X said.

  The warden swallowed the last morsels of pride and honor. “Tell me what you need.”

  X did just that. He was very specific. “I assume you can manage the details?”

  The warden said he could, and why not? After all the things he’d broken, all the men and lives and laws …

  “I almost forgot,” he said. “Jason French has a visitor, his younger brother. Shall I turn him away?”

  “Why would you do that?” X showed the broken teeth at last. “After all, there is nothing more important than family.”

  * * *

  That had once been true for X. As a child, he’d adored his parents. Even the younger sister made a fond memory, with her plump, round face and the way she’d liked to giggle. Those early years were like a dream: the mansions and travel, the great yachts and the fine chefs. His family’s special nature had been obvious from the beginning, clear in the respect men had for his father, the way they did as they were told, but stole glances at the beautiful, young wife. She would read stories to X of princes in faraway lands, and X was supposed to love those tales—he saw it in his mother’s eyes—but none of those make-believe princes lived a better life than X. The world was a kingdom, his father a king.

  When X was eight years old, he burned his finger on a birthday candle, and the fascination with fire began. At first, it was a small thing: matches and cardboard and melted plastic. By his next birthday, though, the dreams he had were not of candles but of conflagration. He used his father’s gold lighter to start his first real fire, a blaze that took ten acres of woodland from the Charleston estate. The second fire was a neighbor’s car. Fifty thousand dollars, they said, a collectible; and he’d done it with a single match.

  Conflagration.

  Control.

  His third fire took a house and two dogs trapped inside. Someone saw him, though, so the cops came, and money changed hands, and X—instead of juvenile detention—went away for six months of intensive therapy, a half year of false remorse and deception while the doctors made notes and encouraging sounds, all while X hid his painful erections and his thoughts of the dogs, and how their screams, as they’d burned, had sounded almost human.

  If X had learned one lesson from his time in therapy, it was that fires were messy and hard to conceal. Plus, his dreams were no longer of fire but of screaming dogs, and the animals that came next: first a mouse or two, then the rabbits and squirrels, until his dreams were filled with red meat, and his days with expectation. X spent those days with his traps and his secret places. And though his parents kept a wary distance, things changed for real on the day he used a garden hose to freeze his sister’s cat to a winter tree. Afterward, his parents traveled more often, and when they did, they took the sister, only. On those rare occasions they came home, X’s mother seemed less lovely each time, a near stranger who sent servants at night to tuck in the covers of her only son. Even X’s father said, Better a handshake than a hug, and tried to make a joke of it.

  X was thirteen when his father was given hard proof of tortured animals, first from a gamekeeper at the mountain preserve, a small, nimble man who’d discovered a mallard, still alive, with its wings nailed to a tree, and—days later—a young bobcat staked to the ground with both eyes removed and its stomach unzipped.

  The looks from his parents grew more worried, but no one asked him about it.

  No one said much of anything.

  A month later, a foal disappeared from the stable of the equestrian estate in Wellington. It was a special foal, his sister’s. X killed it quick and messy, and left it imminently findable. Why? Because anything was better than the whispers and suspicion, or the quiet, cotton silence that filled up a room each time he entered. Part of him thought that if they’d only confront him, he might stop. If someone would say, Son, this is wrong. Or, Son, why do you have such emptiness in your soul?

  When no one spoke a word, he took another foal, and hobbled it, and left it alive to scream like the dogs had screamed. After that, they sent X away, first to other doctors, then to the most expensive boarding schools in Switzerland. He’d hated them for that, and nursed the hatred, feeding on it for five years of solitude and denial, of unanswered letters and canceled visits, a lifetime of aching to belong, and knowing he could not, and rocking himself to sleep in the dark of every single night. They were so weak! Too weak to accept or love or answer the phone on Christmas Eve. That was too much to accept, so X took a cab to the airport in Geneva, cleared customs on a forged passport, and made his way to the winter estate, where he used the holiday quiet to kill them all.

  X could remember their deaths without emotion, though their weakness still disgusted him, the way they’d whimpered and writhed, and sworn their love for him had never died. Only their softness was unconditional. So different from Jason, X thought: Jason, who was capable and quick, but also profound of thought and strong and utterly unafraid of his own capacity for violence. Were X to make a list, it would require pages to describe all the things he admired about Jason French: his courage and conviction, his awareness of self. Even his recklessness was absol
ute, but only when he chose abandon. Of course, Jason had a streak of self-denial that X found mildly irritating. Beyond that, he was the one thing X had sought his whole life. He was an equal; he was worthy.

  Maybe it was a short list, after all.

  29

  The waiting room at Lanesworth Prison smelled like old sweat and stale air. When the guard came for me, I left my friends on a hard bench, and followed him to a blank room with a table and two chairs. A minute later, Jason entered the room, shuffle stepping in full restraints. He eyed me unhappily. The stitches. The bruises. “What are you doing here? I told Dad to keep you away.”

  “I’m not really listening to Dad these days.”

  Jason sat, chains clattering. “It’s dangerous for you to be here, to be seen here. Do you understand what I’m saying? People will hurt you to get to me.”

  “It looks as if they’re getting to you just fine.”

  “My face? That’s just prison. What’s your excuse?”

  “Hells Angels. The Carriage Room.” I shrugged like it was nothing. “They didn’t like the questions I was asking.”

  “Questions about me?”

  “You. Tyra.”

  “Damn it…”

  “You did have a fight there. It did have to do with Tyra.”

  “That was about guns.”

  “But she was part of it.”

  “Not so much it got her killed. I had a deal with the Pagans, protection and cash in exchange for exclusive access to military-grade weapons. Some, they kept. Some, we sold together. Tyra thought I should sell to the Angels, too. She wanted a cut, and tried to broker a deal. It was business. The Angels never cared about Tyra.”

  “Business.” I said it coldly, but Jason was unmoved.

  “I’ve never pretended to be the good guy. I needed money, pure and simple. I told you my reasons.”

  “You must have some idea who killed her.”

  “Look, little brother, Tyra was fun, but had a closetful of demons. You saw how she was. The girl could drive a saint to murder.”

  “All I need is a place to start.”