The Girl In The Sand

by L. T. Vargus

  The girl bobbed her head once.

  “OK.”

  Darger drove on to the next hotel in almost total silence. The awkwardness she’d felt earlier in the evening had returned tenfold. The quiet after the engine cut out only heightened things.

  Nicole slid out of the car, then turned back, pausing with her hand on the door.

  “It’ll be about an hour this time.”

  The pointed look that accompanied this statement almost made Darger squirm.

  “My ass is glued to the driver’s seat,” she said, trying to joke, but Nicole didn’t laugh.

  The door thumped shut, and Darger was left alone to stew in her own self-reproach.

  Chapter 30

  No light came from the crack under Loshak’s hotel room door, so Darger moved on to her own room without knocking.

  The door closed behind her with a whoosh and a click. She kicked off her boots and went into the bathroom to wash her face. Maybe she could rinse away a little of her disappointment, too.

  Man, she’d fucked that up. Royally.

  Splashing a little cool water on her face was refreshing at least, but the hotel towel felt rough against her cheeks. She figured they made them crappy on purpose so people wouldn’t be tempted to steal them.

  The babble of a TV in the room next door filtered through the thin walls as she crossed the darkened room to flip on a lamp.

  She’d missed a call from Owen while she was out, so after changing into her pajamas, she sent a video chat request. The app blipped and blooped, and then Owen’s face appeared on the screen, bowl of cereal in hand.

  “How’d it go?” Owen asked, mouth full.

  Darger covered her face with her hands.

  “Out-fucking-standing.”

  “What happened?”

  She summarized the evening for him, reliving her failure.

  “You convinced her to stay with you, though,” he said, crunching in between words. “She didn’t ditch you for an Uber, I mean. That’s something.”

  “Except when I dropped her off, I asked if we were on for tomorrow night. She said she had to think about it.”

  Darger had wanted to push Nicole on it, but she sensed that pleading and getting desperate would only make things worse.

  Owen pointed a spoon laden with Froot Loops at her. “But she didn’t say no.”

  “Stop being such an optimist. I suck, OK? End of story.”

  A frown invaded Owen’s face. It wasn’t an expression she was used to seeing on him. Smirking like a devil, yes. Mischievous glint in the eye, sure. But frowning?

  “What?”

  He blinked a few times, shaking the dour look from his face, and took another bite of cereal.

  “Nothing.”

  “You’re being shady again.”

  The focus of his gaze fixed on the camera, which had the effect of him looking into her eyes on the screen.

  “I just… want you to be careful. I worry about you.”

  “I appreciate that. But I’m fine. I mean, aside from screwing everything up tonight. Peachy.”

  “Promise me you won’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”

  Darger snorted. “I’m not sure that’s the best advice considering I haven’t figured out anything you wouldn’t do yet. Speaking of which, how’s your stint as Ace Ventura, Pet Detective going?”

  “I wouldn’t dangle my bare ass above a shark tank,” he said, ignoring her teasing.

  “Good to know. And while I have yet to find myself in that particular situation, I think I could safely say I wouldn’t either.”

  Owen slurped the last of the milk from his cereal bowl and set it aside. It clanked against the table.

  “You sure you’re not doing that right now?”

  Darger made a show of glancing around the room, paying special attention to her own rear end.

  “Well, I’m definitely not bare-assed. I don’t see any sharks either, so…”

  For the second time that evening, Darger’s joke fell flat. Owen was being uncharacteristically serious again.

  “I’m not kidding around, Violet. And neither is Leonard Stump. That letter was a baited hook.”

  “I’m confused… am I the shark in this scenario now?”

  “You’ll be the chum if you don’t watch yourself.”

  Darger grit her molars together.

  “He sent that letter to get under my skin. To scare me. So far it seems to have worked on everyone but me.”

  “That’s exactly my point. If you’re not scared, you’re an idiot.”

  “So now I’m an idiot.”

  “You’re a stubborn, impossible mule of a woman who won’t listen when the entire world is trying to tell her there’s danger ahead.” He stopped, squeezing his eyelids shut. “What I’m trying to say is that maybe it wouldn’t be so bad if you were off the ride-along detail.”

  Darger scoffed.

  “This is my job, Owen. You should understand that as well as anyone. Everyone keeps acting like I’m a delicate piece of china that needs to be put on some out-of-the-way shelf. I won’t do that. And I won’t let anyone tell me to do that.”

  She sighed, the air rushing out of her lungs like a punctured party balloon.

  “It’s late. I should go.”

  “Violet, wait…”

  “Maybe we’ll talk tomorrow.”

  She broke the connection and tossed her phone to the foot of the bed.

  Chapter 31

  Emily’s fingers work at the screws that attach the leg to the desk. Stinging. Bleeding. Flesh torn. Shredded and pink like hamburger.

  So far she has made no progress. The screw feels like it will move, like it could move, but so far nothing.

  She opens her eyes. Her fingers are fine, of course. No hamburger to be seen. Not one drop of blood.

  But the pain is real. It jolts down the length of the bones in her hand, radiates in her wrist, tendrils surging into the meat of her forearm.

  It makes her want to quit.

  Every time she thinks the hurt can’t get worse, it gets worse. A bottomless hole of agony. Like a wasp’s stinger jabbing deeper and deeper into her fingertips. Injecting more and more of its venom.

  It reminds her of getting her blood drawn as a kid. A nursing student had wielded the needle like a pickaxe, digging at the soft flesh inside of her elbow like the veins were some precious metal that had to be mined out of her.

  Images flutter into her head then. Dream pictures that open like flowers and lurch into motion.

  She sees a beach. Sand puckered with endless footprints, but there is no one here now. No one but her.

  Choppy waves lurch out near the horizon. White crests rolling atop the rest of the blue.

  And closer, the water laps up onto the banking earth. Here the sand is darker. Wetter where all the footprints have been washed away.

  She walks toward the water, and the wind blows in. Cold and dry and salty. She holds her arms out to her sides and feels the air everywhere.

  A bead of sweat trails past the corner of her eye, and the wet itchiness of it brings her back to reality, back to the room in the cabin. Back to the blistered feeling in the tips of her digits.

  It feels like the skin must be gone. Stringy muscle tissue must be touching this screw. The piece of metal jamming sharp edges into the yellowed wad of nerve endings. But there’s still no blood to corroborate this line of thinking. She can see a little redness, a little irritation, but the skin is otherwise unmarked.

  The ebb and flow of the sting makes her lips move, makes them widen out to the sides, going flat and exposing her teeth during the worst of it. She tries to imagine what this expression looks like and can only picture a pug dog in a bewildered moment.

  New pictures arrive to take her away. Her breath hitches in her throat, and the images flood her head, projecting themselves over the top of reality, blocking it out.

  This time it’s her son, Austin. He’s on the rickety swing set behind their apartment buildi
ng in Palo Alto.

  His tiny, mittened hands wrap around rusty chains. Arms and torso flexing, his body sprawling and contracting to propel himself forward and back, like a pendulum gaining momentum. Going higher, higher, higher.

  It’s cold, at least by California standards. She can see the steam of his breath. Little clouds that spiral from his mouth and nostrils, congeal into swirls of vapor, and vanish almost at once.

  She watches him from the little cement slab patio. A charcoal grill sits at her left elbow. The sliding glass doors into their apartment shimmer reflections to her right.

  Now Austin swings high enough that the chains buckle a little at the height of the arc. The tension is momentarily broken, he seems to float for a beat, and there’s a stiff jerk as he falls back under the purview of the rusted metal links, back into the steady tempo of forward and back.

  She knows by the slate gray winter coat swaddling his torso that he is four years old in this memory. Neither of them know that this will be their last year in Palo Alto, that everything is about to go wrong. Fall apart.

  He smiles at her. Little red beanie pulled down over his eyebrows, encroaching on his actual eyes in such a way that he has to lean his head back to see her, his chin all jutted out.

  The wooden support beam squawks like a seagull on every backswing. A throaty sound.

  And now the grill to her left is gone, and it’s Sadie instead. The little two-year-old girl with the lips and brow that curl into a resting serious face. Like she’s always weighing something existential rather than what kind of cookies she wants for her snack.

  But this isn’t right. She shouldn’t be there. Not with Austin at this age. She should be an infant still.

  And the weight of the illusion diminishes. It can no longer breathe the way it did. She can longer believe in it.

  These are distracting pictures, she realizes. A defense mechanism. Her imagination conjuring anything to take her away from the awful truth, the pain and despair and utter hopelessness of a reality that finds her trapped in a kill room.

  “Focus,” Gabby says. “Focus on what needs to be done.”

  The pictures fade, the children’s faces turn translucent and wispy, and reality appears there before her again.

  The desk. The metal leg. That little screw pinched between her thumb and index finger. She grips it and spins it the best she can. Over and over.

  And the room is quiet. The whole world is quiet. Still. Empty. Nothing is real except for that image before her.

  The screw.

  Her fingers.

  The feel of the rounded steel. Hard. Totally unforgiving. She squeezes and twists, but it will not budge. No matter how many times she changes her grip. No matter which hand she uses.

  The metal has gone warm. Its cold long ago vanquished by her body heat and the friction. It’s a little tacky from the oil of her flesh.

  The sharp edge of the Phillips indentation cuts at her. Tiny little stabs and slashes carved into the whorls of her fingerprints.

  And she breathes. The air gliding in and out. Cold and dry. She feels it on some barely conscious level. Filling her and emptying her over and over.

  Her fingers rotate. Adjust. Rotate. Adjust. The attempts fall into a throb of a rhythm. Hypnotic.

  And the screw moves. Twists. A tiny fraction of a rotation.

  She feels it give. Relent.

  At first the movement is so infinitesimal that she thinks it’s her imagination. Her mind breaking away from reality to create what she wants to happen. What she needs to happen.

  But she keeps working, and it keeps spinning. It fights her for a while yet. Makes her work for each degree of rotation.

  And then the grip releases. Gives up. The screw spins without hesitation. Wobbling like a loose tooth.

  Her heart thunders in her chest, and the adrenaline rush is more euphoric than fearful this time. A tingle roiling over her scalp in pulses. All of her skin going sensitive. Tight. Every pore slicked with sweat. Every nerve ending feeling giddy, light, pleasant.

  There is a noise — almost a sucking sound — as the screw finally exits the hole. The warm nugget of metal squirts out of her fingers. Clatters to the floor.

  She hesitates for a second. Watches that empty socket where the threads spiral into the dark screw hole. Her fingers pinch air in little convulsive twitches like crab claws.

  And then she gets back to work.

  The second screw comes easier. Faster, she thinks. Maybe it’s the confidence of having done it. Maybe she has entered some kind of zone. Achieved a Zen-like state of transcendent focus and concentration.

  Time stretches out into something almost meaningless to her. She exists in her head. In the dream part of her brain that allows her to function without fully accepting the physical reality she finds herself in.

  All the world whittles down to this second screw slowly loosening between her fingers like it’s a game. Turn the screw to win. It’s the only thing that matters.

  And it’s free. The leg is free.

  The metal rod tilts away from the desk. Pulls away from the tabletop. Clatters to the tile floor and clangs around a while. Quivering there like some newborn creature.

  The heat flushes Emily’s face, her scalp, her neck and chest. It must have been there the whole time. The temperature building in her blood. The result of her effort, of her focus. But she blocked it out. Blocked everything out until she had what she needed, so it hits her all at once.

  And she swoons. Head dipping. Arms and legs going weak.

  The heat is too much. Filling her skull. Melting thoughts together into something tangled and sticky.

  She’s alert enough to get her hands between her and the floor. Her arms fold up as she descends, perhaps absorbing some of the blow.

  She lifts her head, and in the blur she sees a shape. A human form. One that she thinks must be her friend. A smudged blob on the other side of the room. But when she blinks, the sweat and tears roll away, and it’s gone.

  She is alone.

  Chapter 32

  The first Pabst Blue Ribbon tasted like moldy bread. It always did. It went down fast and easy, though. He could pour half a tall boy down his gullet on the first drink, hesitate a few seconds to let the foam settle in his gut, and then kill the rest of the can on drink number two.

  And after the first one? Well, it tasted pretty goddamn good from there on out. Less mold. More bread.

  Mark Morgan sucked ‘em down after work, standing at the kitchen counter with his head tipped back, his body already angled halfway toward the refrigerator door, poised to grab the next one. Usually it was just three or five, but tonight there were twelve tall cans in the fridge, and he planned to kiss every one of them full on the mouth.

  It’d been a weird time for him and Claire. All of this Leonard Stump talk. The grisly stories on TV. Law enforcement parading through his kitchen, lounging on his furniture, invading his space. They showed Claire pictures of crisped bodies and everything. Gave her nightmares.

  So yeah. He deserved this. A good, clean drunk. No moderation tonight, thank you very much.

  He cracked the second can, the high-pitched metallic click echoing funny off the linoleum. The sound brought the house’s emptiness — its stillness — into sharp focus. He liked it. An almost religious quietude.

  His lips parted, snuffled like a vacuum hose at the little bit of runoff and suds caught in the lip of the can. Then he opened his throat and poured most of it down.

  He closed his eyes as he guzzled. The empty kitchen around him disappearing, even the absolute stillness of the house falling away until the only thing that was real was the golden fluid cascading over his gorge like a waterfall.

  Claire wouldn’t be home for a bit yet, so he could bask in it without interruption for the moment — an experience he savored over most anything else in life.

  Pabst had an acidity to it that the other cheap beers didn’t have. He thought that and the price were what made it his go-to b
everage, that little chemical zing he felt on his tongue and the lining of his cheeks.

  He paced down the hall and back, can number two hovering before him, poised in his hand for the next round of chugging.

  Claire didn’t like it when he drank this much. In fact, she hated it. She had her reasons, he knew.

  Well, maybe she should have thought of that before she got a little mouthy with him that morning. She should have known better.

  He’d put his hand on her back. That was all. And she’d bit his head off for it. Jerked away from him. Recoiling from his touch. Nose all wrinkled up. Words spitting out through clenched teeth. From there, she gave him the stink-eye silent treatment until he left for work.

  Why’d she have to do that? Put his balls through the wringer with all of this other stuff going on. All of this stress and strain and tension that kept him — kept both of them — up at night.

  By the time Mark pulled the tab on his fourth can, a goodly amount of alcohol had seeped into his bloodstream. When he drank this fast, especially on an empty stomach, it hit him quickly. The booze soaked in through the walls of his stomach almost immediately, a euphoric rush that only built as he guzzled down more. It was a different brand of drunkenness entirely, almost the equivalent of injecting the stuff intravenously. His favorite buzz of all.

  He’d take it slow after the first handful or so, though. Savor ‘em. Drink ‘em deep into the evening, into the night.

  When he was younger, he never limited himself. He’d drink until he couldn’t remember, until he passed out, until he found himself puking in the backyard of his parents’ house before he snuck in through the garage window. Four or five nights a week. Those were good times, aside from the puking. Fun times. Times when anything felt possible. Not like now.

  The memories flared and faded rapidly, and his thoughts circled back to the topic of the day: These cops that kept poking their noses into their business. Clomping around his fucking house.

  This Fed, Loshak, was a particular pain in the nads. Talking to Claire. His woman. Getting her all riled up about things best forgotten. Ancient history, as far as he was concerned. The two of them looking at each other with sad eyes like a pair of abandoned puppies.