Man Down

by Roger Smith

  When his hand remained empty Turner, using only his elbows, found himself inching forward in a kind of leopard crawl, dragging his bound legs along the besmirched tiles, intent on getting closer to the dead man and that gun.

  13

  Heading through to the kitchen Grace decided it was time for a big girl drink and took a bottle of Jack Daniels from the cupboard above the sink, splashing a generous tot into a tumbler and adding just a kiss of Coke.

  As she brought the glass to her mouth the pungent tang of the booze had her stomach somersaulting and she had to breathe her nausea away before she dared take a sip.

  But the alcohol, once it burned its way down to her empty gut, entered her bloodstream mercifully quickly and she felt a calmness and resolve that she knew was an entirely artificial byproduct of the hooch.

  “What the fuck,” she said, “if it’s courage I’ll take it.”

  She threw the whiskey back and poured another and drank it in two slugs.

  Grace set the empty glass down on the counter and walked through her bedroom into the bathroom. She washed her hands with warm water and soap and before she could talk herself out of it she ripped opened the box of the pregnancy test and removed the little stick.

  “Do it, Grace,” she said to her reflection. “Just do it.”

  Placing the stick on the edge of the sink she unzipped her jeans, pulled her panties to her knees and sat down on the toilet, gripping the stick.

  She couldn’t pee.

  Jesus.

  She hummed and closed her eyes and thought of waterfalls and burbling brooks and finally a dribble broke free and when she heard it clatter into the bowl she shoved the absorbent end of the stick into her stream of piss and turned it so that the display window faced upward.

  When she was done she set the stick on the basin, wiped and flushed and stood staring at the gadget’s blank little face.

  She knew it would take a couple of minutes so she went back through to the kitchen and poured herself another drink—more Coke than Jack this time—and took it to the living room and forced herself to sip it as slowly as she could as she watched the cars below.

  When the glass was empty she set it down beside the couch and went back to the bathroom and found herself looking everywhere but at the test kit.

  Looking at the ugly floral shower curtain.

  Looking at the Arizona Cardinals sticker applied to a wall tile by a previous occupant.

  Looking at a water mark on the ceiling that brought to mind an A-bomb mushroom cloud.

  Then, finally, looking at the stick lying on the sink, the word “pregnant” spelled out loud and clear in the dinky display window.

  Grace closed her eyes and when she opened them nothing had changed.

  She was still pregnant.

  She dumped the stick in the trash and went through to the living room and reached for the cordless phone.

  She called John’s cell.

  It went straight to voice mail.

  She called his landline and almost hurled the phone at the wall when she heard Tanya Turner’s clipped, superior, British-sounding voice ordering her to leave a message.

  In desperation she tried her own cell again, sinking down onto the couch, tucking her legs under her as she heard it ring and ring and ring.

  14

  Turner stopped crawling when Tanya, like a dinner party hostess of a mind to mingle, detached herself from the two mutants still relaxing on the living room couch and came across to the kitchen and squatted, staring down at him, his dried blood a spray of freckles across her nose and cheeks.

  “So, Johnny, I guess this is goodbye.”

  “Tanya . . .”

  “If you say you’re sorry I swear I will cut out your tongue.”

  Turner knew this was no idle threat and waited for her breathing to slow before he spoke again.

  “What’s going to happen now?”

  “Not what you’d planned to happen.”

  “No.”

  “I’m walking out of here. You’re not.”

  “You’re going with them?”

  “Yes.”

  “Jesus.”

  “I’m taking the chance they’ve offered me.”

  “Just like that?”

  “Yes.”

  Tanya glanced across at Lukas Bone and Tard who looked on indulgently, then turned back to him.

  “I suppose I should thank you,” she said.

  “Thank me for what?”

  “For this. For what you’ve done. For freeing me.”

  “And what about Lucy?”

  She twitched a shoulder.

  “I’ll make sure it’s quick. Sorry, I can’t promise the same for you.”

  “Christ, Tanya, she’s your daughter.”

  Tanya shook her head.

  “Not any more. I lost her years ago. She’s one of them now.”

  He stared into the terrifying blankness of her eyes.

  “You can live with doing that to her?”

  “I’m your wife, Johnny, and you were ready to have Bekker kill me. And live with it.” She laughed. “Oh, you’re going to tell me that’s different? That I should be guided by some maternal imperative?”

  He said nothing.

  “Truth is, she’s become everything I loathe. She’s like a taunt to me every day of my fucking life and I’m fucked if I’m going to get on my knees and present my neck for the kill shot. There’s one seat on the bus out of here and I’m taking it.”

  “There’s another way,” Turner said, dropping his voice to a whisper.

  “Another way?”

  “Help us, Tanya.”

  “Help you?’

  “Yes. Help us to all get out.”

  “How?”

  “Pretend that you’re going along with them and then get hold of a weapon.”

  “What? Play the Trojan Horse?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’d never work, but even if it did what the fuck would I be left with? Nothing. You and Lucy would be gone, anyway.”

  “I’ve ended it with Grace.”

  “Bullshit. That was just a smokescreen. I wouldn’t’ve even been cold and you would’ve had your cock inside her.”

  “I swear, I won’t see her again. It’ll be as it was before.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes.”

  “And I’m meant to swoon at that? Our sham of a marriage?”

  “You’d rather take off with those fucking in-bred swamp things?”

  “Isn’t that just a teensy bit hypocritical, Johnny? After all, you let them in here.”

  He couldn’t argue with that.

  “You and your little flunky brought them into our home, a place they’d normally avoid like the plague. Men like them don’t do the suburbs, Johnny, they cruise the interstates preying on drifters and hookers, the throwaway people nobody cares about. But I suppose that Bekker thought he could control them, bend them to his will?”

  “Yes, I guess he did.”

  “That arrogant little fucking poseur. Well, you’ve let the genie out the bottle, Johnny. Deal with the consequences.”

  “What do you think’s going to happen to you, Tanya?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You really believe they’ll keep you alive?”

  “For a while at least. I amuse them.”

  “And what? You’ll become something out of a Doors song? A serial killer in training, shooting torture porn on your iPhone?”

  She shrugged.

  “Christ, Tanya. You killed Bekker in self-defense. You took my finger in a rage. You really think you’re going to be able to go out there and maim and slaughter some poor useless bastards you’ve never even seen before?”

  She shrugged again. “I can’t answer that.”

  He stared at her.

  “All I know is that I’ll walk out of here alive. And I’ll do that very American thing: hit the open road and drive off into a brand new life.”

  She narrowe
d her eyes.

  “Tell me, Johnny, are you pleased with all you’ve wrought?”

  “No, I’m not pleased.”

  “No?”

  “No. I’m sorry.”

  “I warned you not to say that.”

  “It had to be said.”

  “Sorry that it didn’t work out? Or sorry that you made it happen?”

  “Sorry that you couldn’t have just let me go, Tanya.”

  She laughed. “Jesus, you’re a spineless little shit.”

  Tanya stared him in the eye.

  “Want to hear the good news?”

  “What?”

  “I am letting you go, Johnny. I am letting you go.”

  The sound of a car and the wheeze of brakes had her standing.

  Lukas Bone moved fast, heading to the window by the front door.

  “Jesus, this house has more traffic than a fuckin McD’s drive-thru.”

  Tard sat forward on the couch, cocking his huge head like a retriever.

  “That’s a Mazda 2,” he said. “Few years old. Exhaust is shot.”

  “Goddamit, Tard, you’re good,” Bone said, peering out the window. “Now will somebody kindly identify the big blonde bitch walkin her ass up the pathway?”

  Tanya, crossing to his side, glanced outside and said, “That’s his whore.”

  Bone laughed. “You’re shittin me?”

  Tanya shook her head. “I am not.”

  “Well,” Bone said, “in the words of my dear sweet mama: ‘When the flower blooms, the bees come uninvited.’”

  15

  In the days after they returned from Las Vegas, Turner and Grace made no mention of what had happened during that lost weekend.

  If his eyes met hers over their computer monitors while they worked at their desks he looked away.

  At noon each day Grace took her bagged lunch—a sub, an apple and a bottle of water—out to the pool, where she sat eating on a lounger in the shade of an umbrella. Turner stayed at his desk, picking at the leftovers he brought in from the house.

  Every evening at five p.m. Grace gathered her things while her computer shut down with a bright little trill, smiled, said “goodbye” and went home. Turner didn’t offer drinks and she didn’t loiter.

  Then one afternoon they were together in his car after a meeting and, stopped at a light on Oracle Road, Turner’s eyes were drawn to Grace’s left hand as it lay in her lap, the sun catching her varnished nails, and he saw she had been chewing them again.

  When the light changed he drove for maybe thirty seconds before he swung the Lexus into a motel, killed the engine and sat looking through the windshield at the mute neon sign.

  Grace leaned back against the headrest and closed her eyes behind her sunglasses.

  “Where are we going with this?” she asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “No fine lies from the adulterer’s almanac?”

  “No.”

  “Well, at least there’s that.”

  She unclicked her seat belt and it furled with a sound like fabric ripping. Opening the car door she stood up against a sky as bleached as her hair.

  Grace waited outside the motel office while John paid, smoking, her right elbow cupped in her left palm. She watched a red-tailed hawk ride a thermal, drifting lazily overhead until John emerged from the office with a key suspended by string from a soiled brown cardboard tag.

  She followed him into the anonymous room, stubbed out her cigarette in the scarred red Coors ashtray on the bedside table and lifted her dress over her head while she was still exhaling smoke.

  They fucked until neon pimpled the lilac sky outside their window.

  Afterward Grace sat in the dark, leaning against the headboard, her face orange for a moment as she lit a cigarette.

  “John?”

  “Yes?” he said, sprawled beside her.

  “I lied to you,” she said, “back in Vegas.”

  “What? You never dealt cards in your underwear?”

  She shook her head and the headboard rattled against the wall like coins in a blind man’s begging bowl.

  “No, not that. I lied about my twin sister. About Nancy. She didn’t die when we were six years old.”

  “She’s still alive?”

  “No, she’s dead. But she died when we were fifteen.”

  “So why did you lie?”

  “Because she was murdered.”

  John said nothing but she could feel his eyes on her face.

  “A man called Henry Saul Simmons picked her up in his car and took her to an empty old house outside of town and tortured her and raped her and killed her.”

  “Jesus.”

  “She was on her way home from the library. She was the good sister, the straight-A student. I was the one more likely to get into a strange man’s car.”

  “Or maybe not.”

  Grace nodded in the dark and the headboard rattled again.

  “Yeah, maybe not.” She drew on the cigarette and felt the heat of the smoke in her lungs. “He was a Bible salesman. I mean, who the fuck does that? Rides around the country selling Bibles?”

  “It’s like something out of Flannery O’ Conner.”

  “I’ve never read him.”

  “Her.”

  “Sorry, I’m illiterate.”

  “No, you’re not. I’ve seen you reading.”

  “You have?”

  “Uh huh. Vogue and Cosmopolitan.”

  “And don’t forget Vanity Fair. That’s pretty high toned.”

  Grace clicked on the lamp, blinking as she opened the drawer at her side and lifted out the Gideon’s Bible.

  “There it is.” She weighed it in her hand. “The good book.”

  “I found the pages pretty good for rolling joints, back in the day,” John said.

  Grace replaced the Bible and closed the drawer and killed the light.

  “Part of me would’ve liked to have known you back then,” she said.

  “Which part?”

  John’s hand was on her belly, traveling south but he removed it when she said, “He was executed. Henry Saul Simmons. Ten years later. Lethal injection, up in Huntsville, Texas. He’d killed seventeen girls. Seventeen that he could recall, he said. How could you forget something like that?”

  “Beats me.”

  “I attended it.”

  “The execution?”

  “Yeah. My parents were dead by then, so I went.”

  “Alone?”

  “Yes, alone.”

  “Fuck.”

  “It lasted over two hours. He screamed and cursed, struggling and gasping and choking and they kept on opening and shutting the curtains like it was some kind of a play. You know what I felt afterwards?”

  “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Nothing?”

  “Not a thing. They could’ve pumped him full of Drano for all I cared, but as I sat and watched this stranger die I couldn’t connect him to Nancy. Couldn’t make any sense of it at all. So I went home and I partied too hard. Drifted. Bumped into Megan in some bar and fell in love with her and dyed my hair blonde and put on a pretend wedding ring and that’s where the next five years of my life went.”

  “And now you’re here with me,” John said, and his hand was back on her belly.

  “And now I’m here with you.”

  Grace touched him and felt that he was hard again.

  She stubbed out her cigarette, straddled him and took his penis and put it inside her, grunting softly as it docked.

  “Don’t worry John,” she said, riding him slowly, “I won’t fall in love with you.”

  But she did.

  16

  When Tard loomed over him wielding a gut hook knife Turner was already bracing himself for the blade opening him from throat to pubes, but the creature merely hacked through the duct tape that bound his ankles and pulled him to his feet.

  Bone, standing by the door, gun in hand, said, “Come greet your sweetheart
.”

  Turner, hearing the sound of Grace’s shoes on the gravel walk, didn’t move.

  “If you don’t do my bidding,” Bone said, “Tard will open the pantry and take his pleasure with your child.”

  Tard lurched toward the pantry and Turner, knowing it would require no effort for the creature to lift the door free of its track and reveal Lucy cowering in the dark, went over to Bone.

  Tanya, standing away from the entrance, arms hanging limp at her sides, watched him, expressionless.

  Crossing the room Turner glimpsed his reflection in the glass of the sliding door. His hair was dark with sweat, his eyes hollow in his skull, his nose, shirt and chinos bloody; his gait that of a much older man, a man who took small, tentative steps upon an earth he had learned to mistrust.

  Bone leaned in close and whispered in his ear, “You invite her in, hear? Get her to join our revels.”

  Turner waited for the knock at the door and reached for the handle with his left hand, saw the blackened stump of his index finger and sent the hand to his side, switching to his right.

  Turner opened the door, the porch light catching Grace as she took a long nervous drag on a cigarette, exhaling smoke through flared nostrils.

  Her face was scrubbed free of make up, her hair drawn back in a pony tail. She wore a white man’s shirt over a pair of blue jeans.

  She had never looked more beautiful to him.

  “I’m sorry, I think I left my phone in the office.” She broke off, staring at him. “John, are you okay?”

  He nodded and searched for his voice.

  “John?”

  Lukas Bone nudged him in the side with the barrel of his gun and Turner said, “Yes, sure, I was trying to fix a faucet and it kinda got away from me.”

  “A faucet?”

  “Yeah, I’m the handyman from hell,” he tried a smile that didn’t take. “I have your phone. It’s inside. Why don’t you come in?”

  She shook her head. “No, I see you have company. If you could just bring me the phone.”

  “They’re only workmen,” he said.

  He saw her eyes narrow.

  “Plumbers straightening out my mess,” he said. “Tanya and Lucy aren’t here and I really would like you to come inside. I want to talk to you.”