Transgressions

by Ian Rankin (ed)

  Where's your husband? he said. His voice was calm, close to bored, the way people get after doing the same job for awhile.

  I don't ask him, Bobbi J said. She was having trouble breathing.

  A peacekeeper, the man with the cigar said. Then he said, Okay, peacekeeper, tell hubby we want our business concluded by nine. He's two days late. If we don't get what's ours by nine, we'll see you and the kids at nine-thirty.

  Nicholas was home an hour later and Bobbi J started throwing dishes at him and screaming. The twins were upstairs in the bed, still fussy and sobbing. Now they were calling for Bobbi J.

  I must be crazy, Bobbi J said. She knew Ernest and Eric were crying but couldn't stop herself to comfort them. She was too angry, too frightened. Bobbi J felt she was speeding down a hill and couldn't find the brake. She said, It's like I'm a drug addict. I got the beautiful home with the pool. I got the fancy-shmancy car. I got enough fur in my closet to start a zoo. And I forget. No, no, not forget. I ignore, okay? I sweep what you do under a rug.

  Hey, c'mon, relax, Nicholas said. His left arm was angled sideways in front of his face to bat away the in-coming dishes. He ducked and batted, ducked and batted. Dishes were shattering all around him. Nicholas was saying, Can you relax? Can you do that? C'mon, Bobbi, honey. Can you relax for a minute?

  Bobbi J hadn't quit screaming. She said, I tell myself it's government work. My husband, the spy. I actually think that. That's how crazy I am. That's how much I want my house and my things. She said, But you're not a spy. You're nothing, Nicky. You're a thief. You're a stupid, stupid thief.

  He managed to get her quiet, Nicholas the therapist. He was sitting spread-legged behind her, his arms wrapped about hers to keep her from slapping him or throwing more dishes.

  Okay, shhh, shhh, Nicholas whispered. Bobbi J had started to cry. Between her and the kids, it was a real cry fest. She told him about the man with the mustache and the man with the cigar. Nicholas said, That's done. I forgot to do what I needed to do, that's all.

  We have the boys now, Bobbi J said.

  I'll get a real job, Nicholas said. He cocked his head down and kissed her cheek. He said, You know I love you. Things'll be different.

  Promise me, Bobbi J said and sniffed.

  Sure, absolutely, he said.

  * * * *

  Nicholas has just walked into Ms G's apartment. He wears his white jumpsuit. fifty-fifth street plumbing is stenciled on the back in black gothic letters. He has done his research on Ms G and feels confident. Nicholas will tell you there are four types of thieves, the Opportunist, the Smasher, the Prowler, and the Pro. He considers himself a Pro. A Pro can be either a Sniper or a Locust. The Sniper goes after one item. The Locust cleans out the house. Nicholas has done both and prefers Sniper work. Tonight, though, he is a Locust but a Locust who won't get greedy. Two or three items only, and he prefers jewelry.

  His timing must be just so, timing is everything. The maid leaves at four-thirty; Ms G arrives at five-thirty. It's a forty minute window, if he wants a cushion.

  The entry has been easy. Nicholas isn't a Smasher, Nicholas doesn't force doors or use crowbars or break locks. He is a class act. Take this morning, for example. Derek the doorman calls Nicholas and tells him an attorney on the third floor needs a garbage disposal installed. The job comes with Derek's pass key. Did he steal from the lawyer? No, Nicholas isn't an Opportunist, either. Just because it's there to steal doesn't mean you steal it. The installation took twenty minutes and the elevator ride from the third floor to Ms G's on the fifth floor took three minutes.

  Four of the rooms in her apartment are bedrooms. Along with these are a dining room, a kitchen, a walk-in pantry, a laundry room, staff quarters, and more bathrooms than anyone would ever need. A yellow, rose, and white oriental rug covers most of the polished dark wood floor of the living room. The ceiling, the mantel, and the lacquered walls are all subdued yellow. Above the fireplace is a painting of a mother and child. Nicholas doesn't recognize them. Two ornate red velvet chairs are on either side of the fireplace. The wall behind the chairs has built-in shelves filled with books, their bindings arranged in groups of umber and yellow. It's a warm but formal room, tasteful but obsessive, not unlike the owner.

  Men used to follow me because they wanted sex, she says. Now they just want my money.

  She poses at the archway of the foyer, leaning against it, arms folded to her chest, looking into the living room. The woman is wearing baggy gray silk pants, white and gray loafers, and a white silk blouse. She's seventy-one now, still tall, slim, her hair shoulder-length and straight.

  You've been following me for awhile, she says. It's a European accent, though nothing Nicholas can attach to a country. She says, But today I don't see you at all. And I think to myself, the day's not over.

  As the woman enters the living room, more like drifting into it, she is unhooking a diamond bracelet and gold watch from her left wrist. She tosses them to Nicholas while lowering herself into one of the red velvet chairs and crossing her legs at the knee. From the foyer to the chair is a singular fluid motion.

  You haven't called the police, Nicholas says. It's a statement.

  The night's early, she says.

  Nicholas figures he is holding seventy-five thousand dollars worth of jewelry, not that he'd get that much. He might end up with thirty, maybe thirty-five. Selling someone else's jewelry is expensive.

  I adore thieves, Ms G says. She glances down at her long thin fingers. The nails are manicured and dark red. She says, The movie business is full of thieves. They used to call me a thief, you know. If a woman negotiates well, movie people think she's either a thief or a lesbian. If you do it very well, they think you're both.

  Nicholas slips the diamond bracelet and the gold watch into the breast pocket of his jumpsuit. His stomach has started tightening. This happens when he feels uneasy. He isn't sure where her talk is going. Maybe she's lonely or only being friendly. Maybe she has already called the police. How do you tell? She is still an actress.

  I'll leave you alone, Nicholas says.

  I never said that, she says. ‘I vont to be alone.’ Isn't that how it's done? Like I'm a vaudeville comedian. What I said was, ‘I want to be left alone.’ But only by people who bore me.

  I didn't mean it that way, Nicholas says. I just have to go.

  Stealing from a willing mark is unnerving enough without having to chat with the person. Nicholas feels like a hooker who has to listen to a john after sex. Free talk is bad business. His stomach won't quit bothering him.

  I thought we might exchange stories, she says. One thief to another.

  You think you're like me? Nicholas says. He can't believe this shit. He tells her, I lost my family. I lost everything.

  I think we're both negotiators, she says and rubs away something from the white top of her gray and white shoe. Do you know what makes a good negotiator?

  * * * *

  Nicholas is driving back to Jersey in his rented white Chevy Econoline. He's tired and doesn't want to think about what makes a good negotiator. Ms G is lonely, that's all, too lonely and too old. The conversation had droned on forever. Her monologue. All she wanted was him as an audience; he'd barely listened to the woman.

  Nicholas thinks he should drive to Trenton and see if Bobbi J and the twins are staying with Bobbi J's mother and crazy Granny Lott. Even if Bobbi J isn't there, maybe one of them knows something. He takes exit 7a toward Trenton. Headlights glide around him. They flash his rearview mirror like bright silent explosions. Nicholas wants to tell Bobbi J the truth. He wants to tell her that she is his wife and he loves her but stealing is an old girlfriend who calls him up at three in the morning and talks dirty.

  * * * *

  A good negotiator is possessed. Ms G says this in a European accent that has lost its origin. She is seated on one of the two red velvet chairs that frame the fireplace, her legs crossed at the knee. Tonight Ms G is dressed in a white silk blouse and gray silk slacks and gray a
nd white shoes. Seventy-one years old and Nicholas can still see her beauty. He also has seen her movies and knows what the camera saw in the 1920s and the 1930s. Then she says to him, We will give up everything for the deal. Isn't that what a good negotiator is willing to do? We will walk away from all of it.

  Nicholas says nothing. He takes the diamond bracelet and the gold watch from the breast pocket of his jumpsuit and lays the jewelry on the red velvet ottoman next to Ms G. He is thinking how selling someone else's jewelry is expensive. He is thinking of the quieter, less traveled streets and the empty galleries.

  Copyright © 2007 Ron Savage

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  DOGWOOD by Susan Overcash Walker

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  * * * *

  Originally an engineer from Houston, Texas, Susan Overcash Walker is currently pursuing a second life as a writer and a Master of Fine Arts degree in Creative Writing from the University of North Carolina-Greensboro. She now lives in Clayton, North Carolina, with her husband and two dogs.

  * * * *

  The wreckers squatted in the dirt, in the space between the tow trucks, flipping a coin to see who would pull my submerged Buick out of the Everson town lake. There were three truckers in the tri-county area that had crane and wrench equipment capable of traversing the fifty feet of water to where the car had fetched up, after I'd driven it off a boat dock with seventeen-year-old Lily Trevino shivering in the passenger seat. I had held her, her small body jerking against me, as the brackish water rose up over the hood and the windows. It was a lot like watching an aquarium fill up from the inside, I'd decided, just before the door seals completely eroded and the pressure reached maximum force, busting the windows and sending a tidal wave of water and glass into the front seat. She was gone now, but I was still here, perched in a dogwood tree along the edge of the lake, watching the action and chattering like a monkey with the blue jays and mockingbirds on the branches.

  * * * *

  It had taken the sheriff and Lily's parents a week to figure out what happened. At first the cops thought Lily had taken off to New York or LA; by the time they found her car abandoned out on Route 751, we were both dead. The sheriff put out an Amber Alert, sent her picture to all the network stations and organized a search operation in the woods with the volunteer community watch group. They didn't get it, though, the sheriff or the state troopers or the neighbors or her parents, until the groundskeeper at the summer house I'd been camping at finally found the duct tape and the tire tracks and Lily's high-heel sandal near the boat house. After that, it didn't take long for Sheriff Benton to get the idea. I was sitting on the Trevinos’ counter when the sheriff broke the news that they might have a lead on where she was—not where she was, but where her body was—and that they were calling in the state divers for assistance. Her mother had screamed and fallen onto the linoleum floor. Her father had cried.

  A wrecker in a stained work shirt won the toss. He shook hands with the other two and walked over to the sheriff and the two divers standing on the boat dock, staring into the sullen brown water.

  "Ready?” he asked. The sheriff nodded.

  "Damn shame,” one of the divers said, shaking his head. “It's a damn shame."

  The divers had found the Buick earlier in the morning, a breezy Thursday morning in early March, with the dogwoods blooming and nodding like oversized cotton balls from the lake front. Sheriff Benton had called them in from the state on Tuesday, but it took a day or two to round up the appropriate personnel, and hell, it was pretty straightforward that she was dead as soon as the sheriff put two-and-two together. If I could get any of them to see or hear me I might even tell them about it myself, about how she had cried when I held her down and then after I was through with her, tied her hands and took the duct tape off her mouth. None of the town folk could hear her yelling as far out across the lake as we were, and March in the Carolinas was still too chilly for any of the summer folk to have made it back up yet. It was just her and me and the Buick and the night.

  The funny thing was, she hadn't screamed when I took the tape off her mouth. She cried and whimpered at first, but then she just stared at me, the whites of her eyes swallowing the black of her pupils. I tied her up against a tree trunk and pulled out a pack of cigarettes, thinking about the cold feeling of the water rushing up over us. We were fifty feet from the dock, back behind the boat house underneath a couple of the dogwood trees. The light from the Buick's open trunk cast a mellow glow across her skinny frame.

  "What now?” she asked finally, her hands twisting against the nylon rope behind her. She was trying to untie herself, but it was useless; too many years of practice had taught me the rights and wrongs of tying a woman up. Above us, the moon cast silver hieroglyphs on the lake beyond the boat dock.

  I shrugged. “We'll see,” I told her, and grinned a little. Her bone-white forehead glistened. “You can stop now,” I told her, nodding at her wriggling. “You can't untie it. I made sure."

  Her pupils dilated for a moment, and her back stiffened. Her skirt was still all screwed up around her waist, and she twisted her legs away from me in a shallow attempt at modesty. She had kicked off one of her shoes in the struggle. Had it been a different day, I would have made sure the shoe and the duct tape all got put away, in the wheel well of the car or maybe down into the lake with her. But it was a special day for both of us.

  "So what, then?” she asked. “You're going to kill me?"

  I pulled my second-to-last cigarette out of the pack and lit it, inhaling deeply. “Wouldn't be the first time,” I told her, blowing smoke into the breeze. The trees rustled above us, a few white blossoms from the dogwoods drifting down onto my shoulders.

  She stared at me, stopping the struggling. She was a marble statue, sitting there in the moonlight, all pale skin and ash blonde hair. She might have made it in LA or New York, if not for me. It was heady stuff, the power I had over her. I could kill her at any time. I could make her scream again. But then that voice, that goddamn voice in my head started up again: wrongwrongwrongbadwrong. I ashed my cigarette and stood up, walked over to the Buick and leaned up against the bumper.

  "You're going to kill me,” she said, tilting her head back against the tree.

  "Why's that?"

  "Because I'm looking at you. You would hide your face otherwise."

  I shrugged. “Maybe,” I told her. “It's a good point.” I took another puff of my cigarette. Nut-grass tufted up through the hard-packed dirt at my feet.

  "Who are you?” she asked. “You should at least tell me that.” I could see all the bad murder-mysteries she had ever read crawl across her face. “I'm Lily,” she said.

  I smiled. “Yes, you are,” I said.

  "You know me?” she asked. When I didn't answer, she started again, her voice tinny against the evening breeze. “I have a family, you know. If you know who I am, then you know that,” she said. “A brother. My parents. They'll be freaking out when they find out I'm gone. They'll find my car. They're probably looking for me right now."

  I smiled wider. “Probably,” I said. It had barely been an hour since we had left her car on the side of the road. I reached over and patted her on the head. She twisted away from me, almost falling over in her haste to get away. I pulled my hand back and shoved it in my pocket. Dirtywrong. But it felt so good.

  "They'll find you, if you kill me,” she said. “But you can still let me go. It's not too late. You can let me go and I'll never say anything. Nobody would ever know."

  "Oh for God's sake,” I said. A red haze was creeping up behind my eyes. The sound of her voice grated on my nerves like a knife being sharpened. Part of me wanted to kill her just to shut her up. “You can quit the bullshit,” I said. “You think I don't know what I'm doing is wrong?” Her eyes widened. Behind her, the moon-shadow of the summer house engulfed the yard. It crept toward us, toward the boat house and the dock and the car, as the moon continued to rise. The voices were coming on again, with the wi
nd and the darkness.

  "You want to know the kicker?” I asked her. “I know it's wrong. All I ever hear anymore are these voices in my head telling me it's wrong. And what I want is for all the goddamn voices in my head telling me how wrong it is to stop. Can you get that?"

  She shook her head, tears gathering in the corners of her eyes. “N-no."

  "Then fucking shut up, Lily.” I spat her name out. “Okay? Just shut up.” She nodded, crying a little. “Okay.” I took the last puff of my second-to-last cigarette and dropped it on the ground.

  * * * *

  Watching the divers wade into the water with the pulley trailing behind them, I thought about her again—not about how she felt the first time, between my body and the ground—but how she felt in the car, when I had held her before we died. She had been so small, but hard, her body a bundle of muscle and sinew as she tried to buck out of my grip. She had been screaming when we hit the water, her voice echoing in the cavernous front seat of the Buick, but once the water started to rise around us, she had grown quiet, her eyes eating up her pretty face. For a second, she had been still, so still that I thought she might have passed out, and then she bucked once more, harder than before and I almost lost my grasp. She flailed at me, bit my shoulder, screamed again, and it was all I could do to hold on to her as the water rose around us in a blue and black blanket.

  Before that, though, God, she had wanted to talk. It took her a few minutes to get her courage back up after I told her to shut up the first time, but she really thought she could talk me out of it. I should have known; when I first saw her at the Shell station out on Route 751, I had to wait a solid five minutes for her to finish chatting with the store clerk before she came back out to her car. I used a bubble light to pull her over a few miles down the road. It was always the most dangerous part. One minute to get her out of her car. One minute to get her in my trunk—that was the worst part, all quick movements with adrenaline pumping, watching for cars or passers-by coming down the road. One minute to put a white plastic bag in her window, to show she had broken down. And then the heady feeling of power, of control, and the whisper of the voices in the background: badwrong. But I couldn't stop.