by Saul Black
He put on music, saying: “Don’t ask me what any of this shit is. My nephew just sends it to me. He’s cool, so I play it.”
Champagne and more coke. He said: “So do you want a simple barter system, or do you want to pay me for the coke when I give you the cash?”
It halted her for a moment, though she was in the middle of laughing at something, at nothing.
He studied her, straight-faced, earnest—then burst out laughing himself. “You should see your face,” he said. “Jesus, I’m kidding. You’ve been spending too much time with assholes, obviously. Marching powder’s on the house, angel. Wait here.”
When he returned, he handed her five crisp hundreds. “Okay?” he said.
“Okay.”
She felt good, better than she had in a long time. Something dragged at her, a killjoy spirit, but she shrugged it off.
While he took a shower, she swam naked in the pool. The water was soft and cool under the warm desert night. She floated on her back and looked up at the stars.
Afterward he made her lie in the sun lounger and gave her a long, slow foot massage with scented oil. It wasn’t news to her. Worship was just another thing. She ought, she knew, to be adopting the tone and demeanor of a haughty and spoiled princess (it was what he was angling for) but the coke got in the way. They talked. He used to be in the music business, now didn’t do anything much, didn’t need to. Restlessness, he said, was a problem.
In the spotless bedroom she lay facedown on crisp white sheets that smelled freshly laundered. The massage and the talk continued, as he eased his fingers around her shoulder blades, up and down either side of her spine. It was impossible for her to let go completely. Caution was a small, permanently glowing red light, like the standby indicator on a TV, but she was as relaxed as she had ever been with a client. His kisses had returned repeatedly to her feet and anus. It was a slight weariness to her that in all likelihood she would soon have to inhabit some version of the dominatrix role, say the things, express the controlled contempt with conviction—crucially without laughing, despite the coke’s continual good-natured prompting.
“Feel like a princess?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“Good.”
He grabbed her by her hair and yanked her head back so hard it almost snapped her neck.
* * *
At some point she passed out.
Flashes came in the darkness. She smelled the night. Then the Audi’s pine air freshener and cold leather.
She vomited. Went back into darkness.
Hit the ground and tasted dust on her tongue.
Joanna’s voice said: Well, you wanted me dead, didn’t you?
* * *
When she woke it was to the smell of antiseptic. A white ceiling and the hum of technology. Hospital.
She turned her head.
A guy she’d never seen before sat with his chin on his chest in the chair next to her bed. His dark hair was tousled and there was faint stubble on what looked as if it would at all other times be a meticulously clean-shaven chin. Boyish and slim. Twenty-five or thereabouts. Long eyelashes. White shirt and black pants. City shoes.
She opened her mouth and tried to speak, but only air came out. She cleared her throat—and immediately her body fired up in a protest of pain.
He opened his eyes.
“You’re awake,” he said. “Hold on, I’ll get someone.”
He got to his feet and went out. His black jacket hung on the back of the chair. She was in a room by herself. Windowless. There was a drip attached to her left wrist and a weight on her chest which she discovered was her right arm, in a sling and plaster.
When he returned a few moments later it was with a doctor, a tall, freckled woman with a froth of dark curly hair pulled back in a ponytail.
“I’m Dr. Manion,” the woman said, taking hold of Abigail’s wrist and checking her pulse. “You’re at the Valley Hospital Medical Center. Can you tell me your name?”
Abigail swallowed—and winced. Her throat ached.
“Wait a second,” Dr. Manion said. She took a cup with a straw from the table by the bed and gently raised Abigail’s head. “Here. Drink some water.”
Abigail drank. It was one of the sweetest physical sensations she’d ever experienced. Can you tell me your name? The familiar anxiety massed. She’d spent so long avoiding or scamming officialdom it was as if she’d been asked for an incriminating secret. Sophia? Abigail? Abigail wasn’t even her first name. It was her middle name (after her grandmother) but it was what Joanna had always called her. It seemed extraordinary, suddenly. Her given first name was like a ghost that walked ahead of her, ignored except for the occasional form-filling or school report. The name on her fake ID was Samantha Holmes, but her ID was in her purse and she doubted she’d made it out of the house with that. She had a memory of Karl buttoning her bloodstained shirt and jamming her shoes onto her feet. Through the pain it had felt like a brutal version of her infancy, being dressed for kindergarten hurriedly by her grandmother.
“Samantha Holmes,” she said. She needed to sound alert, capable, well enough to get out of here. She had no medical insurance. As the doctor dropped her wrist, Abigail thought of the hundreds—probably thousands—of dollars she must have already racked up. The meter was running even now, just by her lying in this bed. She had to get out.
“I’m fine,” she said. “I need to get home.”
“Please don’t worry about anything,” the guy said, as if he’d read her mind. “It’s taken care of.”
“You’re not fine,” Dr. Manion said, albeit with a slight impatience, the suggestion that there were other (legitimate) people she should be attending, people far less fine than Abigail. “You have three broken ribs and a broken ulna. It’s a miracle your spleen isn’t ruptured. Do you want to tell me what happened?”
“Car hit me,” she said.
Dr. Manion looked at her, shook her head. Too tired to bother exposing the fiction. She’d seen it all before.
“For future reference,” she said, “large amounts of cocaine and alcohol get your liver to produce cocaethylene, with which the body has a very good chance of killing itself. Something you might want to consider.”
“I need to get home,” Abigail repeated.
“That’s against my advice,” Dr. Manion said. “But we can’t keep you here if you want out.”
An odd little atmosphere of unsaid things between the three of them. Then the doctor turned on her heel and left.
Abigail was flailing, mentally, trying to reconstruct. She was surprised to be alive. But at the cost, it seemed, of this subtraction of time.
The guy was standing next to her bed. There was a quiet intensity to him. He looked as if he didn’t know what to do with his hands.
“Who are you?” she said.
* * *
His name was Adam Grant, and it was a curious relationship.
It wasn’t going to be a relationship, as far as Abigail was concerned.
“I don’t understand,” she said. He was driving her home from the hospital. She was fuzzy with codeine and disproportionately confused by the fact of her arm in its sling. She had never broken a bone before. Amidst the churning thoughts it was a delicate novelty, an intimate signature of the violence she’d suffered and a terrible, distinct affirmation of her mortality. Adam had tried to talk her into remaining in the hospital, but she had stood there, with her legs’ gravity all wrong, saying no, repeatedly. The only thing she wanted was to get out from under the scrutiny of authority, even an authority with her own well-being as its goal. Dr. Manion had made her sign a notice of voluntary discharge against medical advice and told her to ice the ribs regularly. Beyond that it was obvious she regarded Abigail (Sophia, Samantha) as time wasted, a lost cause.
“What’s to understand?” he said. “I saw you lying on the side of the road. I stopped. I called an ambulance. It’s nothing. It’s ordinary.”
She couldn’t work him out. He see
med happy about something entirely private. She didn’t know if it was her intuition or just come-down paranoia. The sunlit city went by outside the car windows and refused cheerfully to settle into her comprehension. It was as if she’d lost not hours but days, months. She had no apparatus to bring to what he’d done, except that she assumed he found her desirable.
“Is it a walk-up?” he said, when they pulled up outside her dismal apartment building.
“I can manage.”
“Don’t be crazy,” he said. “Let me help you.”
She was light-headed, partly from having to shallow-breathe around her ribs. There was no-nonsense pain there if she dropped her guard. The thought of climbing even the four steps of the front stoop made her feel sick. Genuinely nauseated. She opened the passenger door and swung her legs out, but for a moment she could only sit like that, wondering if she was going to vomit on the sidewalk.
He came around the car and squatted down on his haunches in front of her.
“I wish you’d stayed in the hospital,” he said. “You’re really not well.”
The word “hospital” brought back the reality of cost and money. He had paid. He must have paid. It was an awful betrayal to her, as if the ground beneath her feet was no longer solid.
Suddenly, out of this image, she realized that her keys were in the purse that hadn’t made it out of Karl’s house. She couldn’t get into her apartment.
Something extraordinary happened. She found herself in tears.
“What is it? What’s the matter?”
She couldn’t get a word out. Her apartment was a tiny, bleak, functional thing and at that moment it was all she wanted. To lie down on the bed and hold her ribs and close her eyes. And yet there was a great space behind this simple need that terrified her with a kind of demand. It was as if the world had, without warning, decided to want something from her after all.
* * *
The time they spent waiting in the car for the building manager was very difficult for her. Something had caught up with her. She didn’t know what, only that she was afraid. Meanwhile he was giantly normal, as if this were the sort of thing that happened every day. She was aware of him not asking her what had really happened, beyond a token inquiry about whether she got a look at the car that had hit her. He seemed utterly unruffled by the obviousness of her lie. He was clerking for a judge in San Francisco, he said, had come to Vegas for a college friend’s wedding, was staying on for a week.
In the middle of it she heard herself say: “What do you want?”
“What do you mean?”
Anger kept offering itself to her, impotent in the face of her fear. “Jesus Christ,” she said. “What do you want?”
He waited a long time before answering. Whatever aftershave or deodorant he’d been wearing the day before had thinned. Now he smelled of tired skin, hospital coffee on his breath. Aside from his black jacket draped over her shoulders, she was in the stained skirt and blouse of the night before. One of the nurses had discreetly given her a pair of disposable underpants. Her own, like her purse, hadn’t made it out of Karl’s house. She had an image of Karl sitting naked on the bed, with the bloody underwear hanging from his fingertips. There was a swelling on her left cheekbone where he’d hit her.
“Nothing,” Adam said. “Just to make sure you’re okay.”
“I’m fine,” she said. “I can wait on the stoop.”
It wasn’t the first time she’d said that. But still, here she was. It was frightening to her, that she hadn’t been able to get out of the car.
* * *
He came to see her every day. She couldn’t, obviously, work. Without the codeine she would have been in real trouble. Four days passed without cocaine. It wasn’t good, but she was practically broke. He took her to restaurants but she had no appetite. She picked at salads, melon, ice cream. She told him she was a telemarketer. Which was the cover job, a few hours a week, the paltry legitimacy. She knew he knew she was lying. It infuriated her, but always, underneath and far bigger than the anger, was fear.
His family, far back, had made its money in eastern steel. Seven generations later it had become microelectronics. The Grants had followed their money west, had been in California since his grandfather’s time. The whole thing was a story to her, as remote from her experience as Snow White or Aladdin. She wondered why he worked, since he didn’t have to. He had gone to Berkeley. Law. He was, she thought, sad when he talked about it.
The week passed and he didn’t leave.
Very gradually, her strength came back.
One night they had dinner at his hotel and she stayed with him. All her instincts had told her to get rid of him, but she was at the mercy of some other force that made her a stranger to herself. They lay in bed together side by side, holding hands. He hadn’t, yet, even kissed her. To her it was like a TV show that didn’t make sense but which she couldn’t stop watching. She had no intimation of her mother, though she reached for it, mentally. Her past was a shoreline she’d lost sight of. There was just open dark water in every direction. In a spirit of sheer blind experiment, she turned toward him in the bed. He hesitated, then kissed her.
“Be careful,” he said, meaning her injuries. The soreness from Karl’s abuse had abated, but her tender parts were firmly closed on themselves in determined, self-healing sleep. It occurred to her that she had never had sex with anyone except when she’d been forced or had forced herself, for money. For her that was all sex was. The thought that it could be anything else filled her with hopelessness.
* * *
In the small hours she woke to see him standing by the window, looking out through a gap in the curtains at the city’s neons.
“What is it?” she said quietly.
It startled him. He came back to bed, didn’t touch her. They lay for a while in silence. A gentle panic was in her limbs, as if they were only now coming back to her from their trauma, shocked at their own survival.
“You know what I do, don’t you?” she said. The words were out before she’d really known what she was going to say.
“Yeah,” he said. “I know.”
“And?”
He lay in silence for a few moments, not blinking. To her it seemed as if some long calculation on which his brain had been working was coming to its conclusion.
“And it seems to me you don’t want to do it anymore,” he said.
PART
THREE
34
September 15, 2017
“We can stop looking for Dwight Jenner,” Will said to Valerie, entering the office with the coroner’s report. “DNA confirms it. It’s him.”
News of the discovered body had come through five days ago from Reno, where it had been sent because none of the three towns—Mina, Luning, and Gabbs—closest to where it had been found had the facilities to deal with it. (Mina, for example, had a population of a whopping 155 souls.) Valerie had plugged Dwight Jenner into NCIS two weeks back, since notwithstanding the APB he was still a missing person, and Reno (God bless their beleaguered diligence) had made the match. Valerie had interviewed Pete Jardine, the poor bastard who’d found the remains, heard the story of the dog, the coyotes—and, redundantly, the sad tale of Pete Jardine’s broken marriage and subsequent existential road trip. Finding the body, Valerie thought, had probably done him good. Put his own losses into perspective.
“You’re going to want to see the pictures,” Will added, dropping the file onto Valerie’s desk. “It’s wonderful shit.”
“Good or bad?” Valerie asked.
“Probably bad,” Will said. “I’m going to Ashan’s. What do you want?”
“Two chicken tikka samosas. And one of those fancy lemonades.”
“Christ, for breakfast?”
She couldn’t lay off Indian food. You may notice cravings for particular foods, or aversion to others, as well as to certain odors. She’d started skipping Nick’s breakfasts at home so she could eat what she really wanted. And she still
hadn’t told him. She knew she wouldn’t get through faking another period. That, in her perverse or outright insane system, was the date she’d set for breaking the news. She’d bought herself just under two weeks. Her conscience wouldn’t stand any more than that.
“Don’t be so conventional,” she said to Will, trying not to look guilty. “Where’s your spirit of anarchy?”
“Anarchy’s for teenagers. I’m having an egg on a roll with ham and cheese.”
She looked down at the file. “This going to gross me out?”
“Not with your constitution. Talk to Rayner and Sadie.”
“Why?”
“You’ll see.”
She didn’t, at first, see—but there was plenty to occupy her. Chiefly that the body was missing its hands and feet. They had been amputated (not professionally, according to the coroner) and the amputation sites ravaged by oxygen bleach, royally fucking up the chances of finding lasting DNA from the perp. Cause of death three gunshot wounds: head, abdomen, chest. Toxicology clean. No other signs of physical trauma except for several carefully inscribed linear flesh wounds on the chest, probably (the symmetry implied) a symbol of some kind. Between them, forensic entomology and climatology put time of death at four to six weeks prior to discovery on September 6, and their reports were riddled with caveats courtesy of the desert’s geo-bio-peculiarities. There was no conclusive evidence for a primary scene elsewhere, though the entomologist’s studies suggested it wasn’t, quite, where the body was discovered. Valerie didn’t require conclusive evidence to draw her own conclusion: oxygen bleach to cauterize the stumps and wipe out DNA, traces of oxygen bleach found by the lake at the Grants’ house in Campbellville. Dwight Jenner had his hands and feet cut off up there by the water before being driven out to the desert and buried. By whom, for God’s sake?