Moving Day: A Thriller

by Jonathan Stone

  He unwraps his clenched fingers from around the scissors slowly, aware that his fingers will initially be cramped and useless.

  He almost drops the scissors anyway, his fingers are so unused to moving after being clenched for so long.

  He exercises his fingers a little individually, limbers them, tries the scissors motion, prepares. Because once he starts, there is no going back. Anyone will see that the duct tape has been cut. The secret will be revealed.

  Nail scissors. A little tool of civilization. We trim our nails in respect for one another, to greet one another civilly, to touch one another gently. A tool to keep us from growing the claws of animals. Nail scissors—a representation of civilization, and maybe his one chance to return to that civilization.

  Can he even cut the tape at all, with these little nail scissors?

  He works the sharp tips into the tape between his wrists carefully. This gives him a starting point. He begins to slice outward from there, working against the tape’s interior edges with the inside edge of the chrome blade. Holding the scissors in his right hand, he closes the blades, helping the little scissors by tilting them slightly as he goes, letting the scissors tear at the tape as well as cut it.

  He feels the tear in the top layers of tape. He feels the top layers begin to give way, layer by layer.

  It’s too slow.

  His heart pumps. He tries to remain calm, but he must work fast.

  The radio plays. Sends out a pulsing, tinny cacophony. The mean laughter, the brusque eruptions from the kitchen, continue. He is acutely aware of them, but at the same time not aware of them at all, as he works the tape with the scissors, small snip by small snip, layer by layer.

  Suddenly, his hands are free. It’s a surprise to him. It feels odd, like a mistake.

  The suddenness of it so alarms him, he drops the scissors.

  But they fall directly beneath him, under the chair, and, hands now free, he quickly scoops them up and, not pausing, begins to use one blade to rip at the bands of duct tape around his waist.

  It is no longer snipping. He is slashing fiercely with the little scissors, slashing at the many layers of wrapping across his waist and thighs, across the knees and shins. For some of it, where there are not as many layers, he needs only one neat, sharp cut, like a mad surgeon making a single seam, opening the patient up. But most of it takes more than that—slashing, jabbing, poking, ripping, tearing. If he were to pull the tape quickly, the loud, hollow rips and zips might be heard, even over the pulsing radio. And peeling off the many layers slowly, quietly, would take too long. He must work between these two extremes. He is still limited to the blades of the little scissors and his maniacal silent surgery.

  His waist is done.

  His thighs are done. He has reached his knees.

  “I mean, fuck, I ain’t takin’ that shit; I don’t care who it is . . .” The voice rising above the manic jungle thump of the radio, perhaps even driven by it, then settling down again . . . The voices in the kitchen go more muffled once more.

  It’s taking too long.

  He’s running out of time.

  Faster, faster. He is not thinking anything.

  And then, incredibly, his knees, his feet, are free.

  He sits in the chair a moment, briefly uncomprehending, momentarily startled that this has worked . . .

  The sudden physical freedom causes a sensation of floating, after hours, days, pinned to the chair . . .

  And then, as he has imagined a hundred times before, as he has calculated and repeated incessantly to himself so that he would not forget when the time came, he takes the three long, quick steps to the back door, grabs what is left of the roll of duct tape that wrapped him, grabs what he knows from his previous visit is the key ring with the barn key, hanging there on the hook, steps out onto the rickety wooden back landing, closes the door quietly but firmly, and stumbles directly into the night.

  “Hey, Lee, that you, you shithead?” Called out in a moment from the kitchen.

  The big, beefy, tattooed skinhead comes around the corner when there’s no response.

  The big skinhead looks at the broken tape, at the empty chair.

  And grins.

  The old Jew has escaped.

  Now he can go ahead and kill him. Now it’ll be OK.

  The packing is not as careful this time. As Rose expected. The possessions that have less value are rushed into the truck, loose. But it is still as thorough, she notices. It is still everything. As if to make a point. Not so the thief has it, but so the Pekes don’t. She hopes it’s a point the thief wants to make to her husband, not just to her, or only to himself.

  Her heart still pounds tensely, slightly painful. It has pounded like this—she’s been aware of it—all day. It didn’t increase when Estelle Simon approached or relent when she finally wandered away. She watches through the kitchen window. The crew has loaded the last of the possessions and closed the gate of the truck, but they have not yet locked it.

  From the kitchen window, she can just see the rear gate of the truck in the gathering twilight. She roughly calculates—they’ll drive all night. Arrive by morning.

  She’ll have the embarrassment of reporting it again. Dealing once more with the police. Telling them that she had no choice, that her husband was held hostage. The insurance companies will not be so understanding this time. They could deny the claim completely, insisting that she should have called the police. But what does any of that matter? It is all mere aftermath, when her husband is back beside her.

  If her husband is back beside her.

  The thief still stands next to her in the kitchen. His three men are now all in the doorway. Childishly, she counts them. Just to be sure. Ridiculous. She knows it’s the four of them together. She’s watched them all day, and here they are, all four.

  “Counting us up?” asks the thief. “Worried there are more of us?”

  She’s startled. He’s seen her counting—unconsciously nodding at each one. “You think there’s gonna be someone staying and hiding in the closet?” He smiles archly at her.

  She pretends to ignore it. “You have what you came for,” she says. “Now it’s yours. When do you return what belongs to me?” Pointedly, defiantly, from a position of weakness, but as if from a position of strength.

  Nick says quietly, “We’ll see.” As if to a demanding child.

  A stab of pain goes through her. The fact that there is no completion. That she doesn’t yet know.

  The truck pulls out. She has held up. Held it all in. Now she falls apart. Cracks completely. Crumples to the floor, her sobs pyramiding into wails, chaotic, patternless, echoing in the newly empty room.

  She crawls to the telephone in the center of the empty room, the only object still in it, curls up next to it, to do all she can do.

  Wait.

  Wait for a call.

  Just as the Colonel and the skinheads were waiting for a call.

  But, of course, they are no longer waiting.

  Let’s take the dogs! They’ll smell him!” Excited voices on the back-porch landing, the harsh porch light sending sharp, slanted shadows stabbing into the night.

  “Get him! Get him!” they command, their excitement uncontainable, and it is enough. The dogs understand. They hear the extremity of tone in the commanding voices, the fever pitch, and they understand from merely that. The dogs take off barking, paws splaying comically, cartoonish, as they seek traction in the dust. Twin black bullets of aggression. An animal translation of the bloodlust the skinheads feel.

  Night. Running. Dogs. The beams of flashlight lanterns dancing in the leaves.

  He has come full circle.

  But he is not an agile, feral seven-year-old. He is more than sixty years older, much slower. In good shape, yes, in good health for a man in his seventies, only a little bit arthritic, after all. But he is no agile child.

  Fortunately, he has cased it. He has been here before. Sitting in the chair with the scissors tucke
d into his palms, eyeing the prefab barn’s keys on the nail on the wall, he has been picturing it all. Remembering it from his aimless wandering of the grounds as his own men loaded their truck. The barn—its bays empty of his belongings for the moment. He has been picturing, remembering it all.

  He is no agile, feral child. But he has a plan.

  The pond is glassy black in the cloudy, moonless night. A black, eerie liquid surface one comes upon suddenly. When he reaches it, he stares for a moment at its pellucid, frightening beauty. Then removes his shoes, as if in a rushed ceremony. He wades slowly, silently, into it. No splashing. No sound. He feels the cold, clammy water climb his body, envelop him in its chill, devour him in its darkness and mud. He thinks of the crystalline pool off the back deck in Santa Barbara where he does his morning laps, the water so clear you see through it beneath you to the immaculate bottom. It’s hard to believe they’re both called water. There should be different subsets of such a variable substance. It’s like the descriptive inefficiency of calling a twenty-two-year-old Montana skinhead and a seventy-two-year-old Jewish war survivor the same species. He feels oddly, momentarily calm, in the water.

  They are not trained dogs. They may smell him initially, but his scent will disappear at the edge of the pond, and they will not know where he has emerged. They won’t know his exit point. Untrained dogs, they may not be able to pick up his trail again at all, crossed as it will be with deer, muskrat, rabbit, the wildlife that certainly comes to drink at the far side of this pond. And that will buy him some time. Anything to buy some time.

  It’s not that the knowledge is coming back to him. It’s that it never left. It is still somehow in him, in the quick of his being, from the time he was seven, and something in him so long practically qualifies as instinct.

  The pond, it turns out, is shallow enough to walk across. It never reaches higher than his chest. He is able to hold the shoes up, wade across through the muck, pebbles, rocks, weeds, frogs, and snakes to the other side. Better not to have to swim. Better to conserve his strength.

  He works his way through the night around to the barn. Comes at it from the far side, to minimize the chance they will see any movement in the charcoal dark.

  He can’t outrun the dogs. It is open land right here, low scrub, so he has to keep moving. While he might make it to the woods, might even make it through the woods to a road, might get a ride, the odds are good that they will eventually find him, by alerting the rest of their crazy militia to keep an eye out for him, by using his escape as a chance to awaken the bloodthirst of a hundred waiting soldiers. Whereas if he stays within the compound, he has to deal only with them. Within the compound, he is their problem to solve. An enemy now known to him. And there is a lot of acreage.

  He remembers lying in open fields, sleeping in them, but there is no option of that here. They are too close to him already. They know he is here, and they are looking.

  Lying in open fields, in cold, in fear. Feelings, memories, he has pushed away. Now he will not merely remember it all. Now he will relive it.

  There were barns then, too. That winter—huddling into the stenchy warmth of the sheep. With Abel, only two years older than Peke, sneaking into a barn when the lights of the farmhouse went out, leaving it at the first crowing of the roosters, their strutting alarm clock hustling Abel and him back out into the cold fields before the farmer arrived. Once, exhausted, he and Abel overslept. The farmer came in before dawn, before the rooster’s crowing. Peke opened his eyes to see the farmer staring at them. And then the farmer turned away wordlessly and went about his work as if he had never seen them.

  He and Abel came in the next night, and in the morning, the same thing happened. The farmer stared, then turned away and went about his work. This time even leaving the barn before Peke and Abel did.

  This went on, might have gone on indefinitely, until one morning Abel asked, with an overweening politeness and deference—a nine-year-old’s best effort at formality—if there was something, anything, for them to eat or drink.

  The farmer began screaming, cursing, throwing hay at them. As if his fury had been building, and yet he did not lash out in any physical way, and once he had finished his round of furious cursing, he turned to his chores once again, just as before. And as for the hay he’d thrown—they had to suppress their laughter.

  They discussed whether they should continue to sleep in the barn. The farmer, for all his cursing, had not hurt them, after all. But Abel with his caution prevailed, arguing that despite the bitter cold, despite sacrificing the warmth of the barn and the docile sheep’s thick winter coats, they should sleep at the edge of the field. The seven-year-old Peke had protested violently. Even hardened to it as they were, the cold was almost unbearable at that time of year. But Abel remained firm.

  In the morning they awoke to a military truck pulling up to the barn, and voices. They could just see, over the tops of the protective weeds, three uniformed soldiers and the farmer, talking, gesticulating.

  Their small, skimming lives were lived dodging, skirting, alert for those big, uniformed, hulking, gleaming presences. Their shiny belts and boots, their ruddy faces, their big, gruff voices, their sheer size, their pure power. A seven-year-old boy and his barely older protector, always watching them. Gauging their every mood, their every movement, reading their gesticulations, their tone. A necessary preoccupation, for the purpose of survival.

  They’re the champs, the winners, thought the seven-year-old boy. He wanted to join them, be part of them somehow, but Abel said he couldn’t.

  The soldiers made some final gestures of annoyance to the farmer and got back into their truck.

  Peke and Abel would have been finished. But Abel saved them.

  And when the time came, Peke could not do the same for Abel.

  Peke knew barns. A barn could be sanctuary, salvation. A barn could be a trap, a cemetery.

  In the dark, he slips the key into the padlock. He unclips the padlock, quickly works off the metal strap beneath, pulls the heavy door open, slips behind it and into the darkness. He pulls the door closed and feels around on the door’s inside to see if there is a hook to clip the padlock to and lock the door from inside. Yes. Good. They’ll have to work it off, bend the lock, maybe destroy the door’s hardware. It will give him another minute or two. Maybe more.

  He remembers there is a path, an unobstructed aisle, down the center of the barn. He feels his way along that, knocks his foot on an object or two, but it doesn’t stop him. Nothing will.

  It is unfortunate his own possessions are gone. He knows where particular things might be. Tools. Wire. But there must be much else to choose from here. Barn implements. The possessions of other victims. If he could just see. Because it is pitch black. The cloudiness, the moonlessness, is an advantage in being unseen, a disadvantage in seeing.

  Before, while he waited here in the barn for the truck to arrive, to load his things, he saw the generator at the back. Rusty orange. Substantial. Survivalists, off the grid, he remembers thinking on seeing it. A generator—of course. The lights undoubtedly connect directly to it. If he turns on the generator, though, they’ll come running when they see the lights. But it would give him a chance to find things. A minute or so. Maybe less. To cobble together some kind of defense. Locate some kind of weapon. He has no idea what he’ll find. But this is a barn, after all. He will be prepared to think fast—to improvise, to think ahead—in that minute or so of light.

  He stumbles along the aisle to where he remembers the primitive generator. Feeling the objects, trying to see anything, as he makes his way along.

  He reaches where he remembers the generator being. Tucked at the bottom of a ladder leading to a small loft. He reaches out blindly to where he saw the generator, and his hands soon find its cold metal surfaces.

  He takes a breath in preparation. It will be a moment of light. A moment of illumination that—ironically—will summon the Nazis. That will bring the dogs. That will bring an unknown
outcome charging toward him.

  He feels around the generator’s bulky shape to find its start cord. He grips it, pulls hard. Nothing. He feels a wave of panic rise in him like liquid. He struggles to quell it, to push it down. The night isn’t cold. It should start. He pulls hard again. The generator rumbles on. The overhead lights flicker, then glare. The light visible, he knows, through the high slats at the crease of the barn’s roof.

  He hears the barking immediately. A bloodthirsty chorus. Next to the generator, leaned against the ladder, there is a rusty old spade. A pile of old tire chains. A sledgehammer.

  Some coils of rope a few yards away. He hustles over to them, throws them over his shoulder, hustles back to the generator.

  The dogs are coming closer. It sounds like only a couple hundred yards now. The fragile, rusty inside lock will not keep them out for long. But maybe long enough.

  In the light, he can see the generator’s little choke. He pulls it, and the generator momentarily runs on high, spewing smoke and fumes into the barn. He lets go of the little choke lever in order to trace the path of the wire that runs from the generator to the wall—obviously the wire for the lights—and at the point where the wire reaches the wall and begins its climb up the side of the barn, he slams the spade’s blade several times into it, until the wire severs. He is plunged into the safety of darkness. He leaves the generator running. In the dark now, he feels for the little choke again, pulls it to spew more smoke, more fumes, more noise into the barn. This time, he wedges a little piece of wood from the barn floor against the choke lever, to keep the choke on high. To keep the smoke, the fumes, the noise, spewing maximally into the closed barn.

  Pork finds the barn’s side door wedged shut. He struggles with it uselessly. “Fuck.” The old Colonel, the three skinheads—all awake now, all together, all invigorated by the chase—walk once with their flashlights around the barn, a building they don’t know, have never been to, and determine that the side door is the best possible entrance.