by Tony O'Neill
There was a Carl’s Jr. bag at Pat’s feet. It contained onion rings. Pat reached into the bag absentmindedly without taking his eyes off the building across the street. The windows of the car were rolled down, and the air outside was murky, heavy with the scent of juniper and the chirps of crickets.
“I don’t know how you can eat that shit,” Trina said without looking up from her nails.
“These onion rings are superior in every way to the onion rings from Jack in the Box,” Pat said.
“What about Fatburger?”
“Fatburger has good onion rings. But I don’t like their French fries.”
He took a bite.
“Anyways I don’t mean THAT,” Trina said, looking admiringly at her nails and putting the nail file back in her purse, next to the duct tape. “I just mean I don’t know how you can eat anything. I’m too nervous.”
“Nuthin’ to be nervous about, girl. He don’t got a gun, right?”
“He’s got a gun. I told you that. He don’t got bullets. He’s got a gun that he bought someplace, but he just takes it out when he’s trying to impress boys. Even if he did have bullets, he wouldn’t know how to use it.”
“He don’t keep it on him.”
“Right.”
“Then that’s what I mean. There’s nothing to be nervous about. Here . . .”
He reached into the bag and handed an onion ring to Trina. She took it, looking unsure. Pat grinned at her. After smoking meth earlier her stomach felt disembodied, obsolete. She couldn’t remember what hunger felt like. Her nerves were on edge in a way that was both unbearable and delicious. It felt like she was about to score drugs. She took a bite anyway and then quickly shook her head, dropping the rest of the ring into Pat’s outstretched hand.
“I prefer In-N-Out’s,” she said.
Pat shushed her. A shadowy figure emerged from the building dragging a suitcase behind him.
“That’s him, right? His buddy?”
“Uh-huh. Sure is.”
They watched as Spider fumbled with his keys, cursed, wrenched open the door of the car, and tossed the case inside. Then he got behind the wheel and looked at his reflection in the rearview mirror.
With a squeal of tires, Spider tore off down the road, signifying that Tyler was home alone.
——————
When the knocks came, Tyler assumed that it was Spider trying to haggle more drugs from him. “Son of a BITCH,” he said, getting up from the couch. He put his eye to the peephole and saw Trina standing there, alone. She was biting her nails and fidgeting from foot to foot. She looked like she was working her nerve up to something. Great. Another fucking mooch. This was turning out to be a fucked-up kind of a night.
“Bitch,” Tyler started yelling to her as he pulled back the four dead bolts one after the other. “You’d better not be looking for handouts. I’ve had about all I can take tonight. I’m getting sick of you cunts treating this place like it’s—”
He was going to say “Bank of America,” but before he could get the words out, the door—which he had started to pull open—was violently kicked from the other side. It smashed into his face, making the world go gray for a moment. He staggered back a couple of steps before his legs buckled underneath him. There was movement all around him. Suddenly a pair of strong hands grabbed Tyler by his eighty-dollar vintage Joan Jett T-shirt and hauled him to his feet. Tyler was staring into a mouth full of yellow, ground-down teeth.
· · ·
“Who ya callin’ a bitch, pretty boy? Huh? Who you callin’ a bitch?” the mouth screamed at him.
“Uh? Uh?” Tyler grunted. He was roughly shoved against the wall, knocking the wind out of him again. Pat punched him in the gut.
Tyler groaned and retched.
He heard Trina scraping the dead bolts back into place, locking them all inside.
More punches landed, thudding against his face, knocking his vision out of whack.
THUNKTHUNKTHUNK
One blow connected squarely with his left ear, and everything went quiet for a moment
before the world ERUPTED with the screaming of a thousand unearthly alarm bells.
Tyler looked up, confused.
He didn’t recognize the face in front of him.
“The money and the drugs, faggot. Where are they?” the face was demanding. “If you get stupid with me, so help me fucking God I’ll kill you. . . .”
Pat grabbed Tyler by the balls. He gripped them hard. He held Tyler up by the throat with the other hand. He started to twist Tyler’s balls violently. Tyler wept and keened in a terrified, agonized way.
· · ·
“I will fuck your pansy ass up if you don’t start talking. You got me?”
Tyler struggled some more. Pat gave the nuts a further twist. It felt as if he were trying to tear them off. The agony made Tyler double up, but as he did so, Pat choked him and forced him upright again.
“GOT ME?”
“Yes!” Tyler screeched. Pat let him go, and Tyler collapsed into a pile on the floor, breathing ragged huffs.
As Tyler lay there trembling, Pat threw something round and shiny over to Trina. “It’s gonna get noisy in here,” he said. “Crank the volume on this. Track seven.”
As Trina scurried off to fiddle with Tyler’s stereo, Pat stood over Tyler with a stony expression.
“Look, man,” Tyler started, “I don’t want any—UGH!”
Pat had kicked Tyler in the guts, hard. “You speak when you’re spoken to, cream puff.”
“Got it!” Trina said. “Against All Odds” blared out of the speaker system. “Louder!” Pat demanded. Trina cranked the volume. Pat crouched down and grabbed Tyler’s face, twisting it around.
“You know something about this song?” Pat said. “Phil Collins recorded this for Face Value, his first solo album. It didn’t make the cut. He didn’t think it was good enough. He ended up giving it away for the soundtrack of some two-bit piece of shit movie. And you know something? He won the fucking Grammy for it. Knocked “Footloose” off the number-one spot. Probably one of old Phil’s most successful, best-loved songs. And he almost ditched it altogether. What does that tell you?”
· · ·
Tyler shook his head, confused. Pat grabbed him by the hair and slammed his skull against the floor.
“I SAID, WHAT DOES THAT TELL YOU, PRINCESS?”
“Uh . . . uh . . . Jesus Christ . . . ah—that . . . that you never . . . can tell?”
Pat laughed. He looked over to Trina and said, “You heard this dumb motherfucker? Can you believe this prick?”
Pat looked back at Tyler with a look that further chilled his blood.
“I’ll spell it out for ya, cupcake. It tells you that your life can get fucked up by one bad decision. Phil Collins got lucky, because someone gave that song a second chance. Me, I don’t give second chances. So you’d better make sure that whatever decision you make here today is the RIGHT fucking decision. I’m gonna ask you some fucking questions and I’d better get some straight fucking answers outta you, okay?”
He punctuated this by slamming Tyler’s skull against the floor a few more times. Then Pat stood.
“Bring that chair over here,” Pat said to Trina, pointing to the middle of the floor. She did as she was told. She didn’t look at Tyler. He was just a shapeless mass on the floor. If she didn’t look at him, then he couldn’t look at her. She didn’t want him to look at her.
Even when they both lifted Tyler by the armpits off the floor and onto the chair, she didn’t look into his face. Tyler couldn’t raise his head, anyway. He was oozing blood and snot from his mouth and his nose. He just slumped there.
· · ·
“Tape,” Pat said.
Trina retrieved the duct tape from her purse and handed it to Pat. He used the whole roll. The silver tape covered Tyler’s arms and his legs in a cocoon, bonding him to the seat. His head was still slumped down, so Pat slapped his face a little.
“Wake up, p
retty boy,” Pat crooned.
Trina left and started rummaging through Tyler’s bedroom, while Pat began to extract information from his victim. Immediately, she found a pile of meth on the nightstand. She cut herself a line and snorted it. It burned. Her eyes watered. Goddamnit. Then she started opening drawers, cupboards, looking under beds with a renewed vigor. In the next room she could hear the music blaring, not quite drowning out the other noises: thumps and staccato, high-pitched squeals like one of those toy dogs from Chinatown that barks and flips over. She didn’t feel regret. She didn’t feel anything. She felt excitement, she guessed. She mentally placed herself in Pat’s car; both of them with the money and the drugs, heading off down the highway to a new life. No more Crazy Girls, no more Hollywood. Maybe they really would go to San Francisco just like Pat said. Maybe for once someone would keep a promise they’d made her.
When she got back in the room, there was a lot of blood on Tyler. He had a rag shoved in his mouth, and it had been duct-taped in place. The rag was deep crimson. Pat was on the other side of the room, arms folded, looking at Tyler impassively. Phil was now singing “You Can’t Hurry Love.”
“He don’t wanna talk,” Pat said.
“Oh. What do we do?”
“We make him talk.”
Pat stood up suddenly and walked toward the kitchen.
“I wanna beer,” he yelled over to Trina. “You want anything?”
“No. There’s go fast in the bedroom.”
“How much?”
“Just a little.”
“Fuck it. I got my own.”
Pat walked away.
When they were alone for a moment, Tyler started shaking his head, calling Trina over. She approached him cautiously, careful not to get too close. With a shaky hand, she reached out and unpeeled the duct tape from his mouth. Tyler spat the bloody rag out.
“Trina. Trina. Help me,” Tyler whispered, as his glance darted between her and the door to the kitchen.
“It’s too late for that,” she replied, with something like regret in her voice. “Where’s the money?”
Tyler glared at her. He was going to have this bitch hunted down and killed, he thought. That was the only comforting thought he could conjure right now. He would have her killed. They would find her in a garbage Dumpster. And he would make sure that the last thing she would do before they killed her was beg for mercy. And then she would be dead. Then Tyler looked miserably at his bound feet.
“Fucking Mexican beer!” Pat called from the kitchen. “What is it with these fucking hipsters and Mexican beer? What’s wrong with Budweiser?”
“If you don’t tell him,” Trina said, “he’ll kill you. I mean it. He’ll kill you.”
· · ·
Pat strode back into the room, halfway down on a bottle of Modello. He looked at Tyler, at the bloody rag on the floor, and then at Trina.
“Is he talking yet?”
Trina shook her head, and walked away from Tyler.
Pat sighed. He came over, lifted Tyler’s chin, and glared at him. He slapped Tyler across the nose.
“Where is it?” he said softly.
Tyler sniffled. Pat punched him suddenly, twisting Tyler around with a grunt. The chair, and Tyler still tied to it, went crashing to the floor. Pat roughly shoved the rag back into Tyler’s mouth, sealed it back in place with duct tape, and then stepped back, admiring his handiwork. Tyler was looking at Trina’s feet and crying. From somewhere in the room, Phil Collins was singing that “love don’t come easy . . .”
Trina crouched down. One wide eye stared at her with uncomprehending fury.
“T, he’ll kill you. I’m serious. He’s crazy. He’ll fucking kill you.”
Something about the way she said “he’s crazy” scared Tyler. She said it with awe in her voice. She said it the same way that someone might point out that her boyfriend owned a Fortune 500 company.
“Just tell us where the shit is, and you’ll never see us again.”
“You fucking bitch,” Tyler mumbled through the bloody rag. He felt one of his teeth rattling around in his mouth, and he swallowed it with an involuntary gulp.
Pat grabbed Tyler and sat him up again.
· · ·
“Give me your purse,” Pat said. Trina hesitated for a moment, and then handed it over. She knew what was coming next. Tyler looked toward Pat for a clue. Pat went through the pantomime of looking into the bag and gasping in surprise at what he found there. Then he looked at Tyler and a long, cold grin spread across his face. He reached in and removed a pair of steel pliers.
“Well, look what I got here,” Pat said.
Tyler started to scream, and even through the rag and the duct tape it was pretty loud. Pat ripped Tyler’s T-shirt in two, exposing his chest. He sat down on Tyler’s lap, facing him.
“Now, don’t get too excited, faggot,” Pat said. “I’m just sitting here to hold ya steady. If I feel anything start to grow down there, know this: I will cut it off and make you eat it. Do you understand?”
“Wait a second—” Trina said. “I gotta go pee. Wait till I’m gone.”
She left the room, locked the bathroom door, and sat on the toilet, covering her ears with her hands. In the other room Pat said to Tyler, “Just you and me now, huh?”
He brought the pliers up to Tyler’s chest. He pressed the cold metal against Tyler’s left nipple. He squeezed it slightly, and a white-hot sensation burned through Tyler. ILLTALK-ILLTALK-ILLTALK. Tyler was screaming it through the rag. ILLTALK-ILLTALK-ILLTALK.
Pat heard. He didn’t want the kid to think he was fucking around, so he went ahead anyway and squeezed the nipple as hard as he could with the pliers. A scream came up from deep inside Tyler as the flesh split and the blood started to come. Then with one vicious twist, most of the nipple was ripped away from his chest altogether. As Tyler thrashed and vibrated, Pat held up the little piece of useless flesh still hanging from the jaws of the pliers.
“That’s your titty,” Pat said. “It could be your teeth. Or your dick. Or your nose. It could be anything that can fit between these fucking pinchers, an’ that I can rip off of you. I’m gonna remove your gag now. I don’t wanna hear shit from you, except for where the money is and where the drugs are.”
Pat ripped the tape from Tyler’s mouth and pulled the bloody rag from him. Tyler gasped. He hung his head and made a noise that sounded like it should come from a dying animal.
“The safe. The safe. It’s behind the Scarface poster. The combination is 42068. Please stop. Please stop. Please.”
“Good boy,” Pat said, getting off of him. “You see? That’s all you had to say.”
There was a knocking on the bathroom door. “You can come out now,” Pat cooed. “We’re all done here.”
A few moments later Pat emerged from the bedroom victorious, with Trina trailing after him like a puppy dog. He had the briefcase in his hand. The case contained almost ten thousand dollars in cash, the useless handgun, and a lot of drugs. A lot of fucking drugs. Tyler sniffled and stared at Trina balefully. She was looking anywhere but at him. The hole where his nipple used to be burned with an icy kind of fire. He could feel the blood congealing, still trickling down his chest in places. Trina’s eyes were glued to Pat. The bitch was going to die. The fucking conniving, greedy, junkie bitch was going to die. There was a moment of silence before the next song, “Sussudio,” kicked in. Pat silenced it by retrieving his CD from the stereo.
“Okay, let’s go,” Trina said, taking Pat’s arm. Tyler felt himself slipping into unconsciousness. The pain was not receding but he was getting used to it now. He felt tired. Terribly, terribly tired. He watched them walk toward the door with heavy, out-of-focus eyes. They stopped, Pat’s firm hand on Trina’s shoulder. They whispered, frenziedly. Pat shot a glance toward Tyler, as hard as stone. Trina looked like a guilty child. She was sniffing a little, moving anxiously from foot to foot. Pat was whispering meaty, wet words into her ear. She nodded slowly, as if feigning underst
anding of a complex mathematical problem. She looked at Tyler with something approximating sadness, and then turned her back to him. Smelling death, Tyler began to thrash about madly.
Pat crouched down and removed the knife from the sheath concealed in his boot, straightened up, and walked over to Tyler. She did not look. She sensed the two of them behind her. She heard the bangs of the chair’s legs against the floor, and Tyler’s frantic grunts as he tried futilely to escape. She sensed the sudden movement of the knife. And then a sound, like piss splashing against porcelain. The thrashing intensified, and the grunting and groaning also. The rhythm slowed, slowed, and then a moment of silence. Pat’s feet made a schlupping sound against the bloody floor. She felt his hand on her shoulder.
“Let’s go,” he said. She almost turned to see for herself, but Pat stopped her with his firm hand. “Don’t look. Just walk away.” She did as she was told.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Trina was silent as she and Pat grimly walked back outside. They had barely gotten in the car when Trina said, “Why did you have to do that, Pat?” She was breathing funny, sounded like she was on the verge of some kind of panic attack. “Seriously—why did you do that? You didn’t say you were going to do that!”
“You wanna do time?” Pat said, glaring at her. “ ’Cos I don’t think you wanna do time.”
“Pat—you fuckin’ killed him! You shouldn’t have done that, man! He already told you where the shit was and you killed him! I mean, Tyler was an asshole, but—FUCK, Pat—”
Without another word, Pat backhanded Trina across the face. The sudden blow silenced her. She cowered away from him, holding her hand to her burning cheek and shaking in terror. Pat was staring at her with eyes like black holes.
“I’m gonna write that one up to you bein’ in shock or some shit. You ever talk back to me like that again, bitch, and you ain’t gonna like what you’ll get.”
“Pat, I’m sorry! I’m sorry, Daddy!”
“Don’t be getting overfamiliar with me, girl. Nobody talks to me like that. Not you, not nobody!”