Predator's Waltz

by Jay Brandon

  He put the tip of the screwdriver’s blade into the man’s ear. The man closed his eyes. Daniel pushed the blade a little deeper.

  “How long before I hit something that can’t be re­paired?” he asked, and Thien translated. Daniel's voice had softened. Thien’s was the same quiet tone it had been from the beginning.

  When the screwdriver met resistance Daniel just held it there. He couldn’t bring himself to push it farther. He tried again to think of Carol, but that was too theoretical to justify this. He thought he could bring himself to kill them if he saw them hurting her, but this was too dirty.

  He pulled the screwdriver out, reversed it, and thumped the man’s forehead with the handle. The cow­boy’s eyes opened.

  “Think about this,” Daniel said. The man’s eyes remained locked with his. Thien was translating, but the man watched Daniel as if he could understand English. Intelligence gleamed in the man’s eyes, which made Daniel hopeful.

  “There are two of you here. One of you will tell me where Khai lives.” There was that same flicker at the mention of the name. Daniel talked on. “When you do, I’ll let you go. You can go wherever you want. Out of the state. Out of the country. Khai will never find you. The other one, the one who doesn’t tell me—I’ll take him with me when I go to Khai’s. Tied up in my car, like he came along to give me directions. Whatever happens to me after that, Khai will have him. Understand?” He looked over at the first Vietnamese, who had rolled on his side and was listening. “If you talk, you’re free. If you don’t talk, Khai will think you did.”

  He stood up. He hoped he was keeping his face stony, but inside he was melting. Take this deal, he begged silently. It makes sense.

  The two men looked at each other. The shorter one, the one who had gone down on the back of his head earlier, spoke quietly and jerked his head at Thien. The other answered shortly. Daniel stepped between them. “It’s a race now,” he said. “This offer is only good for one of you. The other one gets fucked.”

  This was supposed to be a torture session, he thought, and instead I’m bargaining with them. He was still disgusted with himself. He couldn’t win.

  The taller cowboy licked his lips, but that was as close as either of them came to speech. What the hell has this Khai done to them? Daniel wondered.

  The shorter one had an ugly expression. He was talking to Thien. Daniel looked at the boy for the first time. He had been sitting so quietly in the comer that Daniel had begun to think of him as a disembodied voice. He saw Thien listening to the cowboy, running his hands uncomfortably along the tops of his thighs. Abruptly Daniel was mad again. He was furious.

  “All right, God damn it! I’m just gonna kill this one. Then I’ll talk to you!”

  His words were aimed at the taller man, the one who seemed to be in charge. Daniel couldn’t even hear if Thien translated. Blood roared in his ears. He hauled the other cowboy to his feet and drove his fist into his stomach. The man doubled over, almost falling on his face with his feet hobbled and his hands tied behind his back, but Daniel hauled him upright again and smashed his fist against the side of his face. This time Daniel let him fall to the concrete floor. He took two short steps and kicked him hard in the stomach. The man’s mouth was open, he was probably making some sound, but Daniel couldn’t hear. He pulled the little bastard half off the ground by his shirt front and punched him again.

  Outside the wind had risen. The cold front was rushing upon them like a monster. The sky would have darkened by now and the air turned heavy. There was a dim crack of thunder far in the distance.

  Daniel bent over the man he was beating. This was the man who had been dazed by the fall on his head, but he looked alert now.

  “You’re dead,” Daniel told him. “You’re just going to be an example for him.”

  There was no responsive murmur of translation. He looked around and saw that Thien was gone. He didn’t blame him. He didn’t need him now anyway. The two Vietnamese knew what he wanted. They could write the address on the concrete floor in dust or blood. He suspected that at least one of them understood English anyway.

  “Understand?” he screamed at the fearful man below him. “It’s too late for you!”

  He punched him in the side of the face again and the cowboy’s head slapped satisfyingly against the cold con­crete. Scream, Daniel thought. Do me the favor of screaming.

  He rolled the Vietnamese over onto his face and grabbed his bound hands. They were white and limp, but the man gasped when Daniel grabbed them. Daniel pulled the hands up toward the man’s shoulder blades. There was a faint tearing sound that could have been clothing. A moment later the sound was lost as the man did scream. Daniel lifted him by his arms, bouncing the man’s forehead on the concrete. He went on screaming, high-pitched, miserable. Outside the wind roared like an angry giant coming to the rescue of its child. Daniel was grinning fiercely. He grabbed two of the man’s fingers and twisted them around each other. The scream changed pitch and took on a sobbing quality. It was perfect. He couldn’t have hired an actor to make more fearful sounds. Daniel glanced at the taller Vietnamese out of the comer of his eye.

  The man was watching him with academic interest. His eyes were open but not wide. He didn’t flinch. No sweat stained his face.

  Daniel abruptly ran out of steam. He didn’t change expression but he suddenly felt hollow. He was a bad actor in a play he knew was lousy.

  He turned the cowboy over onto his back. The man was still sobbing but now that sounded fake too. “The address!” Daniel screamed into his face. The man stared at him stupidly.

  Daniel turned him back over and clawed and jerked at the ropes, untying his hands. The rope parted. The man’s hands moved limply. Daniel stood up, kicked the man back over onto his back, and strode back to his work­bench. He picked up a hacksaw. The teeth looked tiny and vicious. There were rust stains on the blade.

  Daniel went back and stood over the cowboy, one foot on each side of the man’s waist. The cowboy was rubbing his hands together. He looked up at the saw and past it to Daniel’s face. He froze. Even his eyes didn’t move. They looked like brown marbles in his head.

  “Khai’s address,” Daniel said softly. “Last chance.”

  There was no response. The man looked up at him absolutely idiotic with fright, but it was as if Daniel hadn’t even spoken. They were not communicating, and that wasn’t simply a matter of Daniel’s having lost his translator. They might have been from different planets.

  Daniel reached down and grabbed one of the man’s hands. It was moving feebly but the man offered little resistance. His arms were probably numb from the rope. Daniel gripped the arm between his knees and pulled one finger free of the rest. The index finger.

  “One finger at a time,” he said. “Until you talk or bleed to death.”

  He held the index finger as tightly as he could with his left hand. He was anticipating the resistance, but the man still almost jerked free when Daniel touched the saw blade to the base of the finger. But Daniel held on. He stared down into the man’s eyes as if trying to hypnotize him. Again he brought the blade into contact with the finger. This time the man’s whole arm stiffened, but he couldn’t pull free. His mouth was wide open but he wasn’t screaming, at least not in a tone Daniel could hear. The man’s head flopped back and forth in frantic negation. Daniel gritted his teeth and sawed.

  One of them screamed but he didn’t know which. Maybe both. The wind was too wild outside for the sound to carry, but it filled the garage.

  Daniel tried to think of Carol, but that only made it worse. It was as if he had joined in the conspiracy of torture that included her as a victim as well. They would retaliate against her for whatever he did. Besides, no matter what was happening to Carol, she would be horrified if she could witness this scene. She might never touch him again.

  When he struck bone he quit. He couldn’t make himself go on. The blade wasn’t even a quarter of an inch into the finger, but it took all the strength Danie
l had left to pull it free. Blood and gristle clung to it. Daniel dropped the saw on the man’s chest. Blood was flowing freely, but the damage was minimal. The man had stopped screaming and was whimpering instead. He sucked on the finger like an injured child.

  In the cool of the garage Daniel felt tears on his cheeks. He couldn’t bring himself to look at the other Vietnam­ese. He knew he’d still be watching him with that look of detached curiosity. He knew the man would watch without changing that expression while Daniel sawed off every one of his partner’s fingers and fed them to him. Empathy was a concept neither of the Vietnamese could grasp. Damage to one was only a TV show to the other. As for the one Daniel had been torturing, he knew for a certainty the man would never tell him anything. He was terrified of what Daniel might do to him, but he didn’t even seem to understand how to stop it. Khai had an unshakable grip on him so fundamental death wouldn’t unlock it. Daniel could saw him to pieces and he would die with that same puzzled, fearful expression on his face. But without opening his mouth.

  I’m sorry, Carol. At the thought of her, rage stirred in him again. He would go back to work on the men. He’d kill them if he must. But the feeling of hopelessness had emptied him.

  He finally looked at the second man, the relatively undamaged one. Time to work on him. He had an intelligent look Daniel hoped would mean heightened self-interest. It was a tiny hope.

  Daniel looked at the man, who was still lying on his back, humped upward because he was lying on his bound arms. The man’s eyes glittered. For the first time his expression had changed. As Daniel watched the man’s tongue peeked from his mouth like a worm fearful of birds, and wet his lips.

  The man didn’t even notice Daniel. He was staring into the corner, where Thien had returned to his post on the overturned bucket. Daniel hadn’t heard him leave and he hadn’t heard him come back in. Thien was sitting there not looking at anyone, concentrating on what he held in his hands. In one was a butcher knife he must have gotten from the kitchen. In the other was a croquet stick, one of the stakes Daniel had used to anchor the garden-hose trap in the backyard. Black dirt still clung to the stake where Thien had pulled it from the ground. The croquet stick was brightly painted with bands the colors of the croquet balls, orange, black, green, yellow. One end of it was a blunt point that Thien had sharpened with the knife. The fresh wood exposed by the sharpening gleamed palely in contrast to the rest of the dirty stake. Thien was working on the other end now, sharpening it to a point as well. It was this sharpening process the second Vietnamese was watching with such interest. Thien didn’t return his stare. He turned the stick over in his small hands—a solid length of wood a foot and a half in length and maybe three-fourths of an inch in diameter, now with a gleaming skewer on each end—and began sharpening the other end again. Both ends of the stick looked wickedly sharp.

  Thien glanced up at the Vietnamese watching him and said something that caused the cowboy to draw his legs up a little. Daniel had no idea what the boy had said, but he felt a tightening in the pit of his own stomach in response.

  “Thien? I thought you’d gone. What are you doing?”

  The boy didn’t look at him. Neither did his audience. The other Vietnamese, Daniel’s victim, was craning his neck to look around Daniel’s legs and see what Thien was doing. His half-severed finger was forgotten. His expres­sion looked almost hopeful, as if Thien had something he wanted. He was half in shock, his responses inappropri­ate.

  “We will need more rope,” Thien said.

  Daniel stood staring at him. Thien’s voice was flat and not at all childlike. His voice had deepened slightly, but that wasn’t what made it adult. It was the hardness and the clipped words, the unwillingness to waste speech. It was the way a dying man would speak if he had some­thing important to say.

  He looked up at Daniel, who hurried to find rope. Thien’s eyes were old as well.

  “First tie that one’s hands behind him again,” he said when Daniel had the rope. “Tight. We have to lift him by them.”

  Daniel didn’t know what that meant, but he obeyed. The cowboy offered no resistance to having his hands retied. His finger had almost stopped bleeding. When Daniel pulled the rope tight a large blister of blood oozed sluggishly out.

  Thien was still sharpening the stake, slowly. The pieces of wood he was whittling off the point now were no bigger than splinters. The point held the fascinated stares of the two Vietnamese until Thien spoke again, when their eyes moved to his face. He spoke in Vietnamese but Daniel nonetheless strained to hear. Thien lifted his eyes but he was staring into space at a point between the two

  Saigon cowboys. His attention seemed to be fixed on something else. He seemed to be in a trance state.

  The man below Daniel started shaking his head again. Thien’s stare suddenly shifted to the other’s face. Daniel had been wrong about the trance state. Thien’s eyes had a grip. The taller Vietnamese licked his lips again. His forehead was oily. Thien spat one last syllable at him and he flinched.

  He lifted the stake and with the butcher knife clipped off the very tip. The stake still came to a point, but a duller one. The unhurt Vietnamese started saying some­thing. Thien ignored him. He spoke over the supine cowboy’s voice. It was a moment before Daniel realized Thien was speaking English. The boy explained what they were going to do. Daniel glanced upward at the open rafters of the garage, wondering if they would support a man’s weight. That was the only question in his mind. He didn’t question Thien’s instructions.

  The garage door shook in a gust of wind. No one paid it any attention. Daniel set about following Thien’s directions, which took only a matter of two minutes. He threw one end of the rope in his hands up over a beam. The image was very Western. It lacked only a noose on the end of the rope.

  The taller Vietnamese began speaking. Daniel glanced at him, but the man was obviously talking to Thien. Though he spoke Vietnamese he kept his voice low. Thien was not looking at him. He was studying the points on his croquet stake. The man’s voice grew in confidence. Daniel glanced at Thien. Color was growing in the boy’s cheeks.

  Daniel returned his attention to the man whose hands he had just retied behind his back. He pulled the man’s bound feet up behind him as well and tied them to his hands, so the cowboy was bent like a bow. The man started babbling when Daniel tied the knots, but Daniel knew it was just pleading, it wasn’t the information they wanted. Daniel felt almost cheerful. No, that wasn’t it. He didn’t feel anything. He was just an employee, a man going about a task that had little to do with him. He tied the end of the rope hanging over the beam to the rope binding the man’s hands and feet, working with emo­tionless efficiency.

  The other man was still speaking. His tone was angry now. He was lecturing Thien like a parent. Thien was standing over him holding the sharpened stake. The cowboy’s voice faltered and stopped as the point of the stake touched his nose. Thien suddenly moved with blinding speed, pulling the stick back and swinging it down like a golf club. He swatted the side of the man’s face once, leaving a red line from his ear to his chin. Thien’s face worked furiously as he barked at the man in Vietnamese. It was the first emotion the boy had shown. The man on the ground kept his eyes closed and his face turned away from him. He didn’t speak again.

  The other cowboy gasped when Daniel hauled on the rope. The beam overhead creaked. It worked like a pulley, but with more drag on the line. The prisoner skidded across the floor until he was directly under the beam, then Daniel put his back into it and the Vietnam­ese rose off the ground. He went up backward, face down toward the ground. Words spilled out of him. Daniel put the rope over his shoulder and walked away one slow step at a time, lifting the Vietnamese higher. The man couldn’t have weighed more than a hundred and fifty pounds, he wasn’t that much of a burden. Daniel stopped and turned back. The man was about four feet off the ground, still babbling. There was a louder crack from the beam above.

  A piece of two-by-four jutted out of the gara
ge wall next to where Daniel stood. He had nailed it there to hold coiled garden hoses, but it was empty now. Daniel wrapped the rope around it a couple of turns and it held. The Vietnamese dangled like a piñata. Daniel bent at the waist to look him in the face and grinned.

  “You know, I don’t even care if this works or not. The fun is in the doing.”

  Thien had picked up the other man’s feet and was trying to pull him. The cowboy was kicking at him. Thien dropped the feet, picked up the stake, and held its point against the man’s throat. He pushed it until the man gagged. When Thien picked up his feet again the man didn’t resist.

  Daniel didn’t offer the boy any help. It was Thien’s show. Thien dragged the Vietnamese along the floor until the man was beneath his partner. Daniel almost laughed as the picture made him think of preparations for some elaborate sex act. The two Vietnamese were face to face for a moment three or four feet apart, but the dangling one was spinning slightly and they fell out of alignment. The one on the ground was still lying on his bound arms, so he was bowed slightly upward, as if offering his stomach for sacrifice. The one above was bowed down­ward. They were mirror images.

  Thien leaned over the one on the ground and pulled open his jacket and shirt. Buttons popped and rolled on the concrete. The man’s stomach was very bare. He looked pot-bellied, like a child. Thien had dragged him through a small patch of oil, which had somehow re­leased its smell. The air smelled oily and sweaty, like an auto repair shop. There were bits of grass in the man’s disordered hair.

  Thien held up the stake, close to both men’s faces, but he didn’t seem to notice that. He was examining both points. He found the one he had dulled slightly and held it against the belly of the man on the ground, an inch above his navel. Soon he would have two. The man tried to squirm out from under the point, but he couldn’t move without pressing it harder into his stomach. Thien held it there, gripping the stake with his fist like a child about to choose which side got first bats in a baseball game.