Bottled Abyss

by Benjamin Kane Ethridge

  Davis and the bald man spoke to a nurse at the far end of the station. She pointed to Ramirez’s room. All heads turned as she pointed. Janet fell back behind the curtain.

  She tapped her teeth and peered out the other side of the curtain in hopes to catch another glimpse before they came in. Davis and the man walked around the bend of the nurse’s station. Janet could see them coming closer and the more they did, the less she knew what to do. Her bladder felt about to give. She was going to piss herself, right there, on the floor, in the hospital. Davis and the bald man spoke together casually, as though on the way to lunch. They didn’t know what waited for them in this room. Or who.

  The lobby door opened swiftly and two contract guards rushed in. One was the young guard from earlier, another radio on his hip, and his companion was a larger, thick-necked man pushing fifty.

  “Detectives,” hollered the older guard.

  Davis and her companion turned around. The white haired man took his briefcase’s handle in both hands, looking anxious. All backs turned, he shielded her from view. Janet took the opportunity, slipping outside the curtain. She walked down the other side of the loop around the nurse’s station. They were so close she could hear their voices.

  “There’s no post? What’re we paying you guys for?”

  “I’m so sorry, but I got food poisoning—I’m better now.”

  “So very glad to hear it. And why didn’t you radio for a man change?”

  “Well, I went downstairs for that, sir.”

  “Good grief, I don’t have time for this kind of stuff today.”

  Janet kept walking, keeping a normal pace and holding her purse against her hip. The bottle hardly made a sound and that made her both grateful and suspicious. She reached the electronic door and pushed through it. The lobby, which she’d earlier dreaded, suddenly became a haven, each chair and gloomy face a welcomed sight. She kept going, face down, hopefully not being filmed by a hidden camera. She made it to the elevators and as much as she wanted to head right for the stairs, she decided it might prompt someone to remember the lady in the revealing black dress, especially when five others stood waiting.

  Janet waited with the others, keeping an eye on the lobby. She expected Davis or that detective friend of hers to come barging through, gun drawn like in the movies. The elevator doors opened though and she got onto the elevator without any dramatic action scene playing out.

  Goodbye Josue. Next stop, Vincent Baker.

  There was no ground level option on this elevator, so she picked floor two. Everybody else got out on floor three, and Janet was alone again.

  Floor Two was mostly abandoned, as it had been when she and Stacy walked through. Janet kept toward the main corridor. Three security guards rushed down a perpendicular hall, the sounds of their equipment thumping and jangling even at a great distance. It dawned on her that leaving right now, though enticing, might not be the smartest thing to do if there were security cameras outside.

  Besides, there was already a place to hide out for a while.

  “There you are!” cried Stacy, hair beads clicking as she moved. “What on earth happened to you?”

  “I went down an employee hall or something. I tried to turn back but all the halls looked the same, and this floor is so dead! I couldn’t find anybody to help me. I think something’s up. There were security guards running all over the place.”

  “Uh-oh,” said Stacy, looking somewhat unconcerned.

  “Glad I made here.”

  Janet tried to sound normally vexed, not I’m a murderer on the run vexed. Everything in her mind questioned her tone, her stance, her possible complexion. How had she been so lucky? I got into the ward. The guard left his post. The cops turned their backs on me at just the right moment.

  The bottle bubbled in response.

  “Hungry?” Stacy raised her eyebrows.

  Janet patted her stomach. “Indigestion.”

  “There’s Rolaids in the vending machines.”

  “I’ll be all right.”

  “Come on in, I’ll show you around. My mentor’s not here anymore. She had to go home for lunch.”

  “Oh, darn it.”

  “There’s a bunch of cute, cuddly kids though.”

  “Good, they’re much better than mentors.”

  “I think so,” Stacy said with a chipper grin.

  The room was wall-to-wall toys and children’s books. It was a chaotic arrangement at best; the temporary nature of the LearningCenter’s location was all too apparent with the stacks of Dr. Seuss books against the walls and the plastic crates of toys throughout. Next to a dusty chalkboard, a group of five kids sat in a circle on a play carpet and studied the two women. Janet noted they were around three or four years old.

  “Hi!”

  “Say, ‘Hi Janet!’” Stacy instructed.

  “Hi Janet,” the group said softly.

  Stacy turned to her. “You want to read them a story?”

  A lump twisted in Janet’s throat. “Yeah, sure. Yes, I… I would really enjoy that actually.”

  “Great.” Stacy patted her on the shoulder. “Want to pick the book?”

  “You go ahead.”

  Janet made her way over to the children and said hello again.

  “Are you going to read us the train story?” asked a little boy. His flesh was damp and pale, his hairline receded.

  “I don’t know,” answered Janet truthfully. She pulled up the front of her blouse to cover her cleavage and then chose a little chair from one of the tables and sat it before them. She set her purse close to her feet. As she waited for Stacy to sort through a column of books at the other end of the room, Janet folded her hands in her lap and regarded each child. “What are your names?”

  They all started talking and Janet cut them off. She pointed to the boy at the far right and went from there. Nathan. Gloria. Jennifer. Francine. Johnny.

  “Nice to meet you, kids.”

  The children looked at each other with perplexed smiles. They all had the pallor of the severely sick. She didn’t know if they had cancer or leukemia or what, and frankly, she really didn’t want to think about it.

  Stacy approached with a Thomas the Train book. “They like this one.”

  “The train book!” yelled Nathan.

  Janet took the book, opened it and began to read, her voice immediately getting into story time mode, formed from her days as an instructional aide. The children were a wonderful audience, not speaking to each other or misbehaving. They appreciated the small bits of happiness afforded to them.

  Just halfway through the book, Stacy tapped Janet on the shoulder and whispered in her ear, “Sorry, I just need to run to the restroom next door and then get the food cart. Want whatever snack they’re having?”

  “I’m good, thanks.”

  Stacy went off to a door midway through the room that Janet hadn’t noticed before. A round faced lady sat at a nearby desk, writing something onto a notepad. She hadn’t made a comment to anybody since Janet’s arrival and she didn’t look to be coming out of her work-related trance any time soon.

  As much as she hadn’t wanted to think about the five deadly ailments sitting before her, Janet could not tear her mind away from it for even a second. She set down the book and several of the children frowned.

  “Do you like magic tricks kids? Have you seen the coin out of the ear trick? This is the coin out of the mouth trick!”

  She reached into her Mary Poppins bag and put on her gloves. She glanced over her shoulder. The woman at the desk hadn’t lifted her rheumy eyes off her note-taking.

  Janet brought out the bottle.

  Brought out the coin purse.

  “Wow!” said Gloria. Johnny and Jennifer clapped like organ grinder monkeys.

  “Yes,” Janet answered with a smile. “Wow is right.”

  4

  Vincent Baker leaned back in his chair and inventoried the wireless access points for various gas stations. He’d gone in 80-20 with a k
nucklehead out of DakotaCity he’d met through an online role playing game. The guy’s handle was Noob666 and he turned out to be far better at breaking weak encryption codes than leading his virtual Ogre armies against Vincent. So far he’d taken down three hundred and seventy-two codes for many wireless points throughout Southern California. Only a handful had discovered the security breach so far.

  This was less fun than bank-jacking, but this venture was also filling Vincent’s ghost accounts quite attractively. In his spreadsheet this morning, he totaled every account and it came to be something close to 2.1 million dollars. With that and the several million he had tied up in medical investments now, Vincent was several bright shades of happy.

  Turned on, even.

  He got up, nodding to his old poster of Donald Trump, so deserving in his smugness, and then to the opposite wall where a smiling Steve Forbes acknowledged him, face acne pitted and permanently blushed. Fine example of two ugly men doing beautiful things with their lives.

  Vincent grabbed a condom from a pile on his CD tower. He ripped through the top, fished out the cold, greasy ring and tossed the wrapper in the waste can. He walked back to his bedroom, expertly unzipping his pants with one hand and retrieving his growing penis. The condom slipped on like a slow, glacial blowjob. He shivered and approached the bed where the whore awaited him.

  Having been there a few days now, the whore no longer resisted against her restraints or tried to scream through her ball-gag. Instead, she put her head down on the pillow, closed her eyes and lifted her ass into the air, like some kind of sexual morning glory that bloomed every time he walked into the room. She did it often now and it cracked him up every time.

  Without violence, Vincent entered her and pumped methodically, devaluing her with every internal stroke. After a few minutes he was ready to climax. He withdrew from the whore and hurried over to the other side of the bed where the whore’s john was tied up. The older man pressed his eyes closed and grimaced through his own ball gag. Vincent pulled off the condom and jerked off into his face.

  As the last of his seed dripped out, Vincent blew through his teeth, making a whistling sound. “That was a pretty good one.” He poked the old rich man’s cheek with the head of his penis and rubbed circles over his right eyelid.

  With a snort, Vincent put himself back in his pants and reached over to switch off his video camera. At his prodding, the device bowed on its tripod. Piece of crap, he thought. It did the trick though. He’d been taking home-movies of all his exploits and had taught some of his stupid little minions how to conceive a nice stationary shot as well. He uploaded his and their videos to StruggleCum.com. It’d been a great success. Vincent almost didn’t have to resort to stealing anymore. Porn paid out in healthy sums. The take-home from subscriptions was well worth his while, even considering taxes and security fees.

  Everything was a commodity. That was what was great about being human.

  “Ya know… you’re worth a lot compared to some,” he said to the old man. “And you’re worth nothing,” he said to the woman. “But you’re both afraid of dying and once you do, you’re both going to the same place. Isn’t that strange? It seems like a rich man deserves something better than a whore’s destination. I mean, don’t take me for a fool—I understand money isn’t everything. But there isn’t a doubt to me that people will cry over you, rich man. Nobody’s crying over you, dear. For a whore? Nah. No tears will fall.”

  The two people on his bed blinked helplessly at him. The rich man and the skank.

  “Regular Pretty Woman scenario we have here,” he told them, and then looked into the whore’s tired freckled face, “except you’re no Julia.”

  Their pained glances made him feel somewhat cruel. “Don’t worry. I’m not going to kill either of you. I want our time together to last in your memories, to appreciate over the course of your lives. This is like a 401K.”

  This wasn’t Vincent’s first time doing something like this and he knew it wouldn’t be his last. Too much fun to ever skip again. He’d even been generous enough to show some of his gang friends at a bachelor party how to squeeze the last bit of pride from an integrity-free human being. Those guys were idiots though. They thought it was about the body, about giving your cock an experience. He couldn’t teach the distinguishing difference to them, not without cultivating them more.

  And how would that be? To create an army of wealth-finders such as himself? Draining banks and draining people—could Vincent go global with his philosophy? Enough money, surely he could become one of those motivational dickheads.

  Vincent scratched at his goatee, appreciating the silent whimpers of the whore and the sad silence of the rich man. Raping the body was for amateurs; raping the soul was so much more of an investment. It was priceless really…the only thing money couldn’t buy. Because, great songs aside, love was easy to achieve with cash—for the truth of love was that it was no more than a warmer, fuzzier version of irrational exuberance. He had a string of ex-girlfriends that had all been the “one” at some time, until he realized that the “one” was “one of many” and when he figured out he could cut ties with his investments in these people, he moved on. As all should.

  After everything that had gone wrong with the last bank bust, Vincent had begun to think about something new to make him happy and rich. The impulse was pure desperation and he’d since resolved not to completely quit banks; Vincent was a wreck after what happened to Josue and he needed reassurance that he could still play the game, even if it meant going another route.

  So he shifted his investment, for the time being, to the wonderful new bedroom career he’d discovered. After reaching that decision, his radar starting beeping, and that’s how he came to find the rich man.

  The man wore Gravati shoes and maybe if he’d bought John Lobbs or Berluti or some other brand, Vincent might have kept walking to his car and let the old fucker have his whore in peace. But this was too fascinating to pass up. Rather than attending a meeting of powerful minds, this man was just wearing Gravatis for a casual stroll down whore alley; that registered with Vincent as the kind of existence most mortals didn’t deserve.

  Inside those shoes was a promise for the future and Vincent wouldn’t deny their inspiration. He didn’t fit into the loafers, nor would he have ever wasted his money on such extravagance, but they were in his closet and not a speck of dust would ever fall on them; he’d make sure of that.

  He wasn’t shoe obsessed though. The old man had cash and credit cards and a bank account, all of which had already been plundered. The whore was just cheap fun at this point. Based on what she said she charged for sex, both vaginal and anal, Vincent had stolen about eleven grand from her, by his estimate. That wasn’t bad at all. To think, just some chloroform, a dishrag, and three busted knuckles and Vincent had made out great from this transaction. He’d also drilled the old man for investment advice, but hadn’t learned much he didn’t already know. That reconfirmed how most of these men of means didn’t deserve the silver spoons they grew up with. This motherfucker probably has people making decisions with his money he doesn’t even know about.

  To an extent, Vincent respected the use of hired help. After all, he had several connections that would take care of the whore and rich man after he was finished, so he wasn’t sweating that too much. The North Jackals and Highland-8 had done a great job eliminating Josue Ramirez’s potential leakers and making it all seem gang related in the process. It did bug Vincent, however, how much he had to rely on the gangs lately. It made him slightly regret his latest hostage-taking event. He was too close now to screw everything up over an impulsive need to peek inside everybody’s moneymakers.

  He left the two to their ball-gagged solitude and returned to his computer.

  The next hour Vincent spent reading world news, checking his stocks, studying a few aerial shots of banks, and making several high value moves on Words with Friends. It was nice to be this calm. Sometimes it bothered him when he thought about
the future. He couldn’t think of anything he’d really want to spend his money on except investments. He was supposed to have dreams too. Wasn’t he? The journey seemed the only important thing left for him. There was no destination as far as he was concerned.

  Vincent thought about that for a second. What had he wanted as a child? Everything had been so out of reach in those days. Lesser adults had made it that way. So he would escape into fantasy books about gold grubbing dragons and myths about powerful gods who raped their followers, taking or giving power as they saw fit, creating immortal children. Vincent hadn’t ever wanted to be the underdog hero. He wanted the respect that the dragon warranted, that those gods demanded. Nothing had really changed in his desires since then, except his fantasies about becoming more had been fulfilled. Sometimes the urge to show all those adults who had once doubted him became overwhelming.

  A triple knock at the door startled him from his thoughts.

  Vincent went out and crossed his living room, looked through the peep hole. It was his associate Carlos Madras. He went back and shut his bedroom door.

  Another triple knock.

  “Coming,” he barked.

  Vincent opened the door and Carlos shuffled in carrying a navy-blue duffel bag with a large zipper at the top and a golden bank emblem on the side. After closing the door and chaining it, Vincent helped Carlos with one side of the bag and they carried it over to the couch.

  Carlos tried to catch his breath. His curly black hair was sweaty underneath his Los Angeles Clippers hat. “Heavy bitches to carry up the stairs.”

  Vincent took out his plug and play ultrasound device and pushed it into the USB drive on his computer. “You opened it at all?”

  “Nah. But Manny Riggs said that this bank branch has an ink bomb in every other bag. He knew a guy who used to do the armored transport there.”

  Vincent yawned. He really wished he’d chosen someone else to work with. Josue never went off and did his own thing without first consulting him. Vincent thought since Carlos had grown up with Josue that they’d be similar people. Not so much.