The Hanged Man

by T. J. MacGregor

  Rae stepped forward, away from her futon cushion, the wet wind licking her back. Lightning flashed against the walls, illuminating Hal’s drawings of her, dozens upon dozens of drawings. Rae in her car. Rae at the mall. Rae with her son. That other Rae, living a lie. It disgusted her.

  She knelt beside him, staring at his head. Her heart slammed around like a tennis ball in her chest. Then she folded back the sheet, exposing the curve of his spine, a country of skin, and stretched out alongside him.

  Hal dreamed of the spook that he and Steele had worked with for a while, an aging fart with hard eyes and difficult targets. Then he felt her hands, Rae’s hands, on his back, and they drove the dream out of him and brought him fully awake.

  He didn’t move, barely breathed. She fitted her body to his, molding her legs to fit the shape of his, spoons in a drawer. She drew her nails lightly through the hair at the nape of his neck. He was simultaneously aware of the lightness of her touch, of the persistence of the rain drumming against the roof.

  Hal rolled onto his back and she loomed above him, her silken hair falling at the sides of his face. Transformed, she became Kathleen Turner in Body Heat, Uma Thurman in her best moments in Pulp Fiction, Grecian in her beauty, everything about her larger and more magnificent than anything he had ever imagined.

  “I didn’t thank you for saving my life,” she said.

  It smacked of Heathcliff, the moors, Scarlett to Rhett, a music that made his throat go dry, a narcotic that infused him with passion and hope. Hal slipped his fingers back through her hair, something he had always wanted to do. It felt surprisingly cool and thick and a little wild. He drew her head toward his own and when his mouth found hers, he reached.

  A thick fuzziness, a delicious warmth. He felt as though he drifted in some sweet, magical sea, that he was about to become the man he had imagined he might one day be. Her inner voice was soft, surprised. I like this…

  Her arms slid around his bare back, his hands explored the mystery of her flesh, her bones. Curves. Angles. The sharp points of her ribs, lined up like a series of exclamation marks. They rolled, legs scissoring together, Rae now on her back. He could just make out the mole next to her breast, staring up at him like a small, perfect eye.

  He lowered his mouth to that breast and reached harder, deeper. But instead of her voice, he found the voice of Manacas on the phone this afternoon, informing him of a short piece in the local paper about a coral snake found in a penthouse suite at Pier 66. No injuries.

  Lucky Fletcher.

  Keep doing that… Rae’s voice now, soft and seductive, curling through him like tendrils of smoke. Yes, like that. Andy won’t lick them. He thinks it’s dirty or something.

  He drew his tongue in sharp, tight circles around the nipple, then nibbled at it like a tiny fish. Her skin tasted warm and damp and sweet, like sweating fruit. She gasped, he liked the sound of it, liked that he made her feel this way.

  …top, I want to be on top, Andy won’t do it like that, do everything to me he doesn’t like…

  Hal rolled, taking her with him, and she lifted up, straddling him, hands stroking him, her mouth touching his face here, there, her hair caressing his skin. His hands slipped over her buttocks

  …make me come like this…

  and he drew his fingers between her thighs, teasing, promising,

  …inside me…

  and her tongue twisted against his, she moaned into him, breathed into him. His fingers were inside of her, her hips thrust against the pressure

  …ohgodohgodoh…

  Suddenly she lifted her hips slightly and guided him inside of her. He died, he went to goddamn heaven, he was gone. She reared up, her chest slick with sweat and rain, her skin glistening in the explosion of lightning.

  …harder, faster, there, wait, hold it, oh oh

  And he came, just like that he came and she didn’t, she tottered at the hot, electric edge

  …No, Christ, no…

  Hal rolled again, they were on their sides, her chest heaving, and he coaxed her onto her back and pulled out of her and kissed his way down her body.

  …Don’t stop don’t stop…

  He licked at her skin, circling a hip, inscribing a secret language against the top of her thighs. He parted her with his fingers and fastened his mouth to her. The sweet, secret taste of her was forbidden knowledge, what had gotten Adam and Eve expelled from the garden. It seemed he had yearned for it his entire adult life.

  But he had reached so deeply inside of her the border between them got swallowed up, he felt devoured, subsumed. It had never happened to him before and it terrified him.

  He thrust himself inside of her and rolled again so she was on top. Their bodies slapped together, sharp, wet sounds that echoed against the darkness, against the flashes of lightning. She raised up, he gripped her hips and…

  …please…

  when he came it was a small death. He was flung away from her, hurled out into the blackness of the lagoon, hurled upward through the hole in the branches. He shot toward the sky, the hidden moon.

  The storm shook the chickee like a dog with a bone. Wind knocked the shutters closed and whistled under the eaves. Water slapped the wooden pilings. Rae wanted desperately to shut her eyes and drift in the sounds, but she couldn’t. Not now, not yet.

  “Are you doing it now?” she asked.

  “Doing what?”

  They lay on their sides, facing each other. His fingers, lost in her hair, smoothed strands away from her face, smoothed until she thought she would scream with the repetition. The border between pleasure and pain had blurred for her; her skin felt so sensitized her nerve endings seemed exposed, raw.

  “Doing whatever it is that Andy was so interested in.”

  “He called it reaching. And no, I wasn’t doing it.”

  “But you were doing it earlier.”

  “Yes.”

  I should feel violated. But she didn’t. How could she? If Andy could do this, perhaps their marriage would not be what it was now. What she felt most of all was a strange and thrilling curiosity about his talent. “It works just like that?” She snapped her fingers.

  “Sometimes it doesn’t work at all, sometimes it works better than it does at other times. In the beginning, when Dr. Steele started with the photos, it was unpredictable. There was all kinds of interference. Like static. He taught me how to turn down the static, how to focus.”

  “Have you ever reached into him?”

  “I never got past the static. There’re others like that, people I just can’t get into. They’re locked up tight.”

  “Did you reach into me when we were on the compound?”

  “What do you think?”

  That he had. “There were times when I’d be sitting alone in my office and I’d have the sudden feeling that I wasn’t alone.” She thought of that day the two of them were in her office and her head had started to pound and the pain had peaked into a migraine. She’d been too turned on earlier to notice what the reaching felt like. Now she needed to know if there was any sensation when he did it, if she felt any differently. “Do it now, Hal. Reach into me.”

  “Think of something,” he said.

  She conjured memories of the two weeks she, Andy, and Carl had spent in Barbados last winter. The hot sun. The turquoise waters. The sea urchins in rainbow colors. The dock where they had dived for sand dollars.

  Then she felt it, a small, dull ache at the back of her skull, as though she had eaten something that hadn’t agreed with her and any second now her stomach would revolt. A wave of heat washed through her, the pressure at the back of her head deepened for fifteen or twenty seconds.

  “An island,” he said.

  “What else?”

  “Dollars.” He laughed softly. “And urchins. I kept seeing street urchins. The street urchins asking for dollars?”

  Not quite, but close enough.

  “Did you feel anything?” h
e asked.

  “Not really,” she lied. “Tell me more about these photos that Andy gave you. What did you do with them, exactly?”

  “The photos were just part of the whole thing, Rae, and we used them only in the very beginning.”

  “What’d you do after that? Give me an example.”

  “An example,” he repeated, mulling it over. And then he started talking, as if unburdening himself.

  Her mind went numb. She couldn’t think of anything to say even after he’d finished.

  “No comments at all?” he said.

  Yes. That she suddenly detested the man she’d been married to for fourteen years. “What did you get in return for doing this work?”

  “When I was still in, I got privileges. The guards never hassled me, there were never any surprise searches of my room, I became a trustee. Once a week, Superintendent Russo signed me out for work on an outside ground crew and we went over to one of the trailers in the employee park and I had several hours alone with a woman.”

  Fascinating. She’d spent four years at Manatee and had known none of this. “Who was the woman?”

  “This lady from Miami who wrote me out of the blue and we started exchanging letters.”

  Lightning flashed, followed some time later by a distant roll of thunder; the storm was on the move again. The wind had cooled and Rae drew the sheet up over them. “Where is she now?”

  “Dead.”

  “Dead? How?”

  “They killed her.”

  “Who killed her?”

  “The people in charge of Delphi.”

  “Andy? Is that what you’re saying? That he killed her?”

  “No, not him. He knew about it, he knew about all of it. But he didn’t kill her. That wasn’t his role. My guess is that Lenora Fletcher had the woman killed because she was afraid I might have told her what was going on. She was the fed in charge of Delphi.”

  “And Andy knows about this.”

  “You’re not getting it, Rae. He and Fletcher worked this project together. And later, your husband and a CIA spook named Richard Evans worked with me, without Fletcher knowing about it. Some team they were,” he added, and talked again.

  I’m his confessor, Rae thought. A week ago she wouldn’t have believed this story. “What happened when you got out?”

  “Fletcher was waiting for me. She drove to this upscale neighborhood in Coral Gables and stopped in front of this Spanish-style house. There was a sports car in the driveway, a black lab pup in the yard, clothes my size in the closet.

  “She told me I had the place rent free and that the feds would be paying me about seventy grand a year to gather information for them. That was just how she put it: ‘gather information.’” He laughed. “Like it was that harmless. But hell, I didn’t have any better offers. By then, your husband was pretty much out of the picture.”

  “How long did you work for them?”

  “Too damn long.” His voice sounded resigned, as if he’d made his peace with his failings long ago. “If you count the time at Manatee, it was close to thirteen years. I should’ve split before I did, but Fletcher and I were sleeping together, I had a lot of freedom, and I didn’t mind the work. Toward the end, I was fixing this place up, getting ready.”

  Lightning flashed again, throwing neon blue against the walls.

  “With Fletcher, I always felt like a butterfly under glass, one of those poor suckers pinned to a piece of velvet, marginally alive, an exotic curiosity.”

  “What happened when you vanished?”

  “Nothing. I just left.”

  “But were the feds looking for you?”

  “Sure. They still are, but not in any official capacity. This was a covert project and there are three of us missing and still free.”

  “So you’re in touch with the other two.”

  “Yes.” He was stroking her hair, combing it with his fingers, and it felt good, it aroused her. She suddenly wanted him again, wanted him to reach into her again, unearthing more of that dark sensuality, the dangerous pleasures, that had never existed in her marriage.

  Hal began to touch her once more and Rae shut her eyes, surrendering to her body’s treachery.

  Part IV

  IMPOSSIBLE THINGS

  “I’ve often believed six impossible things before breakfast.”

  —Lewis Carroll

  “Consciousness is the creative element in the universe. Without it, nothing would appear.”

  —Fred Alan Wolf,

  Taking the Quantum Leap

  Chapter 24

  The sharp, incessant ringing pierced her eardrums like barbed arrows. Mira groped blindly for the receiver. I’ll hurt you…

  She bolted out of the dream, her heart racing. The doorbell. Real world. The digital clock read three a.m. Nadine? Not at this hour. It seemed unlikely that someone who intended to harm her would ring the bell, but Steele’s killer had done it. She ran into the closet for Tom’s gun.

  He’d bought the Cobra .357 after he’d received a threatening note from a former disgruntled client. It had seemed extreme to her at the time, a gun so powerful that even a psychopath wouldn’t argue with it. Now she felt grateful that it wasn’t a puny .22 and that she’d learned how to shoot it.

  Safety off. She slipped silently to the door, where the cats sniffed around, and peered through the peephole. Despite the dimness of the outside light, she recognized him by his height and unlocked the door. Sheppard looked like he was coming off a four-week drunk Damp, stained clothes. No shoes. Scrapes and cuts on his body.

  “You look like hell, Shep.”

  “Nice touch.” He motioned at the gun. “I hope to hell you know how to shoot it.”

  “I do.”

  “I thought you didn’t lock your doors.”

  “I didn’t until I met you. C’mon in.”

  He slouched against the wall and only then did she realize he was hurt. She took hold of his arm, helped him inside. He pressed his left arm tightly against his body even when he sank to the couch.

  “Frankly, Shep, I’m afraid to ask.”

  “Cab’s out there. I lost my wallet. May I borrow the fare from you? I’ll pay you back tomorrow.”

  “How much?”

  “Sixty-eight and change.”

  “Jesus, where’d you come from?”

  “Boynton Beach.”

  Up the coast a good piece. “Go sit down. I’ll pay him.”

  “I’ll take the gun,” he said.

  The gun. She’d forgotten about the gun. She handed it to him and he leaned back into the shadows. Mira hurried into the bedroom, pulled on a pair of gym shorts under her T-shirt, counted the money in her wallet. $52.76. She stuffed the bills in her pocket, then went into Annie’s room to scrounge up the difference.

  The tin box on her toy shelf held her allowance money, which she’d been saving for the Crystal Skull CD. Mira felt guilty scooping out a wad of bills and a handful of quarters. Outside, the rain had stopped, the air felt chilled, water dripped from the trees and plants. The cab stood silently at the curb, engine and lights off, the young Cuban driver leaning against the door, smoking. He waited patiently while she counted money into his hand.

  It pissed her off that Sheppard had put her in this position. That she’d allowed him to do so. She’d known the man less than a week and he was already borrowing money from her and doing it in the middle of the night.

  In Spanish, she told the cabbie to keep the change, the equivalent of a ten buck tip. “And make up an address, okay?” Just in case Fletcher checked with the cab companies.

  “No problema. Gracias, señora.”

  She returned to the house, threw the dead bolt, turned on a lamp. Sheppard’s head rested against the back of the couch. His eyes had shut, he still hugged his arm to his side. Mira didn’t see any blood, but her own ribs began to throb in sympathy.

  “Shep, do you need a doctor?”

&nb
sp; “No.” His eyes opened. “Gauze. I think I screwed up a couple of ribs.”

  Mira shut down so she wouldn’t feel his pain.

  “I’ve never borrowed money from a woman, Mira. I’m sorry you had to be the first.”

  She needed to hear the words, but it didn’t change the resentment she felt right this second. “So am I.”

  “I’ll repay you tomorrow.”

  “That’s not the point, Shep.”

  “Yeah,” he said softly. “I know it’s not.”

  “I’ll be back in a minute.”

  When she returned with an Ace bandage and scissors, he held a mini cassette recorder and a tape. He fiddled with one, then the other. “The recorder’s shot. But maybe the tape’s not.”

  “A hair dryer might work.”

  She returned to the bathroom, jerked the hair dryer off the bathroom counter, marched back into the living room, and dropped it in his lap. “I told you from the start that I didn’t want to be involved in this, Sheppard. But at every step of the way you’ve pulled me in deeper and—

  “You’re absolutely right. I’m a selfish fuck.”

  The rest of her little speech evaporated. She dropped to her knees, pressed her face to his chest. He stroked her hair, rested his chin on the top of her head, and started talking. The man named Vic, his plunge from the bridge, Delphi, Fletcher, and the name of her husband’s killer.

  Hal Bennet. She said the name to herself, broke it down into syllables, shuffled the letters around to form other words, put it together again. A name personalized it.

  Hal, whose buddy Vic had snitched on him, and another buddy named Ed. Maybe the same Ed who had come to the store the other night for a reading? Is that too crazy? She pulled back; Sheppard turned on the hair dryer and aimed it at the tape.