Deal to Die For

by Les Standiford

  The car spun into a tight curve, the force slinging her across the slippery seats against the far door. She felt a jolt of pain as her shoulder crunched against some protruding chunk of metal. Bright lights were pinging behind her eyes as she clutched in vain for the door handle, the arm cushion, anything to anchor her. Then, abruptly, the car righted itself, and she lurched over backward, tumbling onto the floorboards.

  “Gabriel!” she cried again, but the car hurtled on. She was struggling to pull herself up when Gabriel mashed the brakes, sending the car to a skidding halt. She knew what was coming before it happened, but there was nothing she could do about it. It was like bouncing around the inside of a cage in a carnival ride, no belt, no safety bar, no hope of appeal to the operator. She flew forward, her cheek cracking off the frame of the Plexiglas divider, felt a bright explosion in her head that sent her tumbling through cool dark space.

  She seemed to fall endlessly, spinning and turning as weightlessly as an astronaut, the soft jolt of landing almost unnoticeable. She opened her eyes, blinking at the strange, upside-down images that swam through her vision: the door of the limo opening, Gabriel standing there, looking impassively down at her. Warm air from outside rushed in upon her, so full of humidity and the scent of rotting sea things that she had the sense that she was drowning in it. She opened her mouth to question him, to ask what terrible accident had sent them hurtling to this deserted place, but though she tried, the questions would not come.

  Gabriel was shaking his head now, saying something, words that seemed to float down to her in a distorted fashion, as if they were making their way through water. “Better…not…to…know…” Each word tolling like a bell.

  And then Gabriel had reached into his pocket for something, was holding it up toward the sky, was doing something with his hands…

  …a syringe, she realized, her heart starting to pound—he was holding a syringe up to the dim light of the sky and he was filling it from a tiny bottle…

  …she heard whimpers in her throat as she willed her body to respond…pick yourself up, Paige, if you ever did anything in your life, do this one thing now…

  …she saw him toss the bottle aside, depress the plunger of the syringe, felt droplets of something spatter onto her cheek…

  …she gathered all her strength and felt her legs respond at last, was able to twist about, lever one arm onto the seat, lunge for the opposite door.

  Her fingers found the cool metal of the handle, and she yanked down. Then pulled again, and again. Locked, her brain was telling her. The goddamned door goddamned fucking locked. Her fingers clawed at the handle, scrambling madly for some button, some lever, then thank God found it, and she pulled, and threw herself forward at the same time, and the door flew open like the gateway to heaven.

  She struggled wildly across the leather seats, wriggling snakelike toward the far side of the car when a hand fell heavily upon her ankle. She lashed out with her other foot and felt the satisfaction of her heel thudding solidly into soft flesh—his face, she hoped, let it hurt him, let it hurt him please…

  She heard a strange cry of pain—some curse in a language she could only guess at—and felt his grip loosen. She kicked again, finding nothing but air this time, but far more important, at last her leg was free.

  She was on her hands and knees now, scrambling in a frenzy, was halfway out the opposite door—a glimpse of something out there at the mangrove-shrouded shoreline: An airplane?? How could there be an airplane?? But there it was, just as impossible as this thing that was happening to her: a seaplane bobbing up and down, tiny red and yellow running lights glowing as bright as the promise of Christmas, maybe someone inside there who could help her—please let there be help, she was thinking, when she felt the stunning blow between her shoulder blades.

  The force of it sent her breath from her, sent her down upon the cushion of the seats, paralyzed and gasping. She felt a hand take her by the waistband of her skirt, drag her back. Her eyes were open, unblinking, her mouth opening and closing, her hands vibrating with pain.

  She’d read a poem in acting class once: “The Fish.” A woman who’d once been to Florida, she seemed to remember, had seen a big one reeled in and was so struck by what she’d seen that she’d had to write something, take up for the victim’s point of view. Paige had read it well, she thought, had imbued her performance with honest feeling for the gasping fish and its last moments of life. But she knew now that she’d never understood it quite so fully as she’d thought she had.

  She felt herself being drawn inexorably backward, the fabric of her skirt bunching up under her, felt her shins crack down over the rocker panels of the door, felt her feet and knees thud into the mucky ground. She was half in, half out of the car now, her chin propped up on the seat, her arms outflung like a supplicant’s…

  …oh please, she thought, with an urgency that she had only known in nightmares: put a weapon in my hands, a knife, a gun, something sharp and heavy, anything to right this outrage…

  …but Gabriel’s hands were at the band of her panties now. There was a jerking motion, and something gave. There was the sound of tearing fabric, then a hand on one of her buttocks. She felt shame and rage, she felt tears of helplessness and anger gather in her eyes, and finally, she felt the needle plunging home.

  Chapter 30

  In the dream that she knew was not really a dream, Paige saw herself perched on the edge of the bathtub of their family’s home in North Miami, her five-year-old little girl’s legs swinging back and forth, heels banging time on the tub to some rhythm that only she could hear. Her father stood at the mirror nearby, lathering his face with his shaving brush, smiling when he picked up his razor, reassuring her that this would not hurt, his hand reaching out to stroke her cheek, and she seemed to notice for the first time that he was not wearing clothes, that something in the way he looked at her was…

  …as odd as his breath hot and ragged upon the back of her neck when moments before he’d been telling her a bedtime story, though she sensed she was getting old for those, already eight, in third grade now, and she felt him moving strangely behind her, a muffled cry, and a hand squeezing her shoulder so hard that it…

  …doesn’t hurt, it doesn’t hurt, you’re Daddy’s little girl, his voice crooning in her ear, but she was staring up at the ceiling of her room where little stick-on stars glowed in the dark in perfect order, just like she’d placed them to mirror the constellations that she studied in geography, and it did hurt, and she wasn’t Daddy’s little girl anymore, she was twelve and in middle school…

  …and she was goddamned old enough now to know better, had picked up a pair of shears from the basket where the costume she was fashioning lay on her sewing table, she would have the part of Laura in The Glass Menagerie, the senior play, she had a dinner-theater job promised for the summer, she had somewhere else to go at last, and if he took one more step into her room, she would by God cut his drunken throat wide open…and he had stood there staring unsteadily at her and turned and lurched back down the hallway and out of her life.

  Six months later paramedics had pried his car from around a pillar that held the newly constructed turnpike extension aloft above his normal route home from the dealership. The car had burned and they’d had to cut their way into the charred hulk to find what was left of him. Her only sadness was that she hadn’t been there to see the impact when it happened.

  She lay in the back of the plane, still groggy, the tears leaking hotly from her eyes as the memories, loosed by whatever drug she’d been injected with, flooded back upon her. She had no idea how long she’d been unconscious, nor how long she’d lain there, half-aware, the terrible series of images from her childhood, if you could call it a childhood, sweeping back upon her, unchecked.

  The knowledge of what her father had done was always there, of course, like some monster thunderstorm that lurks just out of sight, rumbling and threatening and never quite arriving. But she had
done such a fine job over the years of forcing the specifics away. Oh yes, awful things had happened, but they were to be put away and forgotten, not to be revisited. She had left all that behind. Her father had been dead for years. Her life had moved on, hadn’t it?

  She squeezed her eyes shut, clenching her body against the pain of memory that rolled through her with a physical force. She’d read a spate of articles recently, pieces that focused on the parents of children who’d been abused, the parents railing about what they called “false memory syndrome.” It was all a hoax, these belated charges of sexual assault filed by long-grown children, the parents—and some therapists—claimed. Bogus accusations planted by suggestion by psychotherapists eager to cash in on their patients’ misery. No one could have endured such shocking treatment without remembering it each and every day, went the arguments.

  That was rich, Paige thought, biting at the inside of her lip to distract herself from her misery. If she had thought about such things every day of her life, she would not have been able to bear it. She would not have been able to live. Even when she’d read the articles, she had not allowed herself to remember the things that she had gone through, not truly. She’d shaken her head at the absurdity of the parents’ position, glanced over her shoulder at the awful unseen storm that was always brooding there, and flipped on through the paper to the entertainment reviews.

  Now she lay marveling at the ability of her own mind to erect such barriers, aware how, even as she thought these things, at this very moment, something inside her had gone to work, some indomitable antlike part of her will already busy, lugging the tumbled bricks that sealed off that part of her memory back into place, little antlike thoughts nipping at her…Yes, yes, it was terrible, but you’re a big girl now and what’s to be done about something that happened so long ago? You’ve got more pressing problems, young lady, forget what your father did and what your mother must have countenanced—oh dear God, don’t bring that up—and see about the mess you’re in this moment…

  She listened to her mind run on that way until she felt she had passed in and out of some trancelike state, to find herself back on the cool rubber matting again, a person who was the same, and yet who’d been transformed somehow, back into the wakefulness that was life.

  The quiet rocking of the plane told her they were back at rest on the water again, but she was certain that they had been traveling. Her body still tingled from the vibration of the engines and her arms and legs ached from the unaccustomed position in which she had been bound. The sky outside was gathering light, and there was a different tang in the air, a bite that told her they’d left the sheltered waters of the South Florida coast behind and were now on open waters somewhere.

  She heard the whine of an electric motor or pump from outside the plane, then muffled noises and thumps that echoed along the fuselage, along with the scent of gasoline that seeped into her nostrils from somewhere.

  A voice drifted up from below, a nasal whine that sawed through the suddenly quiet air as the pump shut off: “…ain’t carryin’ any of that wacky tabacky, are you, boys?”

  A laugh then—impossible to tell if it could have been Gabriel’s—some more conversation, too muffled to hear, and an answering whinny of a laugh from the same person who’d wondered about their cargo. He must have been refueling the plane, she thought, and she strained to raise herself on her elbows, to rub her cheek against the sidewall of the seaplane’s frame, dislodge the tape that bound her lips shut, but her arms were wrapped tightly and she could barely raise her head.

  She tried to manufacture a scream or groan that might carry outside, but the sounds she made seemed puny even in her own ears. She had given up, and was trying to send a signal by banging her head against the matted floor, when she heard boat engines start up outside. She heard the sucking sound of a fuselage door opening and suddenly a bright beam of light erupted in her eyes.

  “Far too early,” she heard Gabriel’s voice from somewhere above her. “Very much too soon to wake up.” Crooning, affecting concern. She tried to twist away from the flashlight beam, but he caught her head in his big hand, lifted her eyelids by turns with his thumb, the light nearly blinding her as he checked her over.

  He let her go abruptly and her head dropped back with a thump. She heard the metal latches of some kind of case snapping open, along with the sound of the boat motors receding in the distance.

  “Beautiful lady,” Gabriel’s voice crooned. “Need a lot of beauty sleep,” he said, bending over her. She heard the effort of his breathing close to her ear, felt the sting of the needle in her shoulder this time, heard the far-off whine of the boat motors, and soon it was dark again.

  ***

  The dreams were disconnected this time, as if the drug had multiplied its effects. There was Paul, sitting alongside her father, both of them sprawled in lawn chairs in the backyard of the North Miami house, nodding agreement as Gabriel bound her round and round with strips of tape until she looked like a mummy.

  She fought to raise her chin out of the wet St. Augustine grass, saw her mother’s feet as she strode past her unconcerned, bearing a tray of drinks for the men. There was a barred window at the back of the house, where Barbara’s pale face appeared. Her hands clutched at the bars and her sorrowful gaze was locked on Paige’s with the look of a fellow victim who knows her time has come, too.

  The vision struck her with a force that seemed beyond what was possible for dreaming. She knew the last of it then, why her sister had resented her so. It wasn’t just about leaving her family behind, rising too far, and too fast. It was about leaving your little sister behind in the clutches of a wretched man who’d ruined all their lives.

  Oh Barbara, she thought, he did the same things to you too, and neither one of us had the courage to speak up. We could have confronted our mother, forced her to deal with what went on. Instead we buried our shame, let her do the same, and we spent a lifetime taking it out upon ourselves and each other. The madness of it all. Me sending blood money home, as if cash was what you needed—our guilt-ridden mother able to refuse the money, but never ever to say why. Dear God. If we’d only had the courage to speak. We might have saved something. We might have saved your life.

  She wept in her dream, and knew that when she awoke, she would be soaked with those same tears. Paige knew why Barbara had taken her life now. And Paige also knew why she wanted so desperately to believe Barbara’s bitter words, never mind how they were spoken, nor that they came at her mother’s deathbed. The thought that she had been adopted offered Paige a kind of reprieve. She did not know how to explain it, but the possibility that it had not been her father who’d done those things, nor her mother who had let them happen, such a possibility gave her an unreasoning surge of hope.

  No sooner had these things occurred to her than the dream turned then, and she saw herself talking earnestly to John Deal outside her sister’s house. This time, she knew what was inside that cottage, and she was trying to hold him back, though he wasn’t listening, was pushing past her toward the awful scene, and no sooner had he brushed by than time hurtled forward in a blink and they were standing outside his apartment building and she had the feeling that though terrible things had happened, she could explain everything to him, and if he understood, then maybe, just maybe, the world could be set right after all. But he was shaking his head, holding up his hand in a gesture of peace, a gesture that also told her that her words would do no good…and as she watched, his image and his building began to recede, slowly at first, then more rapidly, until it whooshed away into a blackness that engulfed her in sadness altogether.

  “Welcome home, Ms. Nobleman.” She felt a hand shaking her shoulder, heard the voice in her ear, felt a momentary rush of hope that she might wake to find herself in an airliner with a kindly steward at her side…

  …and then she blinked groggily into consciousness, a desert landscape congealing before her crusted eyes, a debilitating sight that rushed up
toward her through the windows of the small plane she’d been in all along. She saw distant peaks, the sky purple behind them, and wondered vaguely if it were night becoming day or the other way around. Her head was splitting and her tongue felt as though it were made of carpeting.

  She closed her eyes, then opened them again. It must have been Gabriel who’d awakened her, she thought, realizing as well that she’d been taken off the floor matting and strapped into a seat for their landing. He sat just ahead of her now, buckled in beside the pilot, who stared ahead, silent and intent, as they made their descent: There was a blur of barren peaks, dotted with greasewood and gnarled cacti, a dim Jeep trail, a ridge that rushed up at them fast enough to take her breath away, then a flash of blue that was a vast expanse of desert lake spreading out beneath them.

  What she saw might have seemed reassuring, might even have filled her with hope under different circumstances. As it was, the sight only deepened her dread and despair:

  There was a dock capped by a familiar boathouse jutting out into the water; there was a similarly familiar car waiting at the end of that dock; and as the plane circled and dipped back toward the calm water, she saw the very worst. It stood on a promontory that overlooked the lake, what Paige knew to be the only habitation for miles and miles, one secluded outpost on thousands and thousands of acres of lonely range and ranchland that stretched south toward Mexico. Fifty miles to the north, beyond those jagged peaks in the distance, lay Palm Springs and the other desert communities, with their swarms of well-tended winter residents golfing and tanning and milling through the artificial splendor. But here there was only the house.

  It had been done in mission style, a rambling adobe structure that Rudolph Valentino had commissioned and that Fatty Arbuckle had briefly occupied, twenty-seven rooms and nearly as many baths, tennis courts, pool and stables though there had been no horses for many years, and a mineral hot spring in an outcropping of rock above the lake that Rhonda Gardner had always sworn by as the reason she kept this white elephant, the “desert house.”