South by Southeast

by Blair Underwood

  I hate to break a promise, but I dialed the number I’d sworn never to dial again. Once, we’d worked together to find a missing child because it felt like the right thing to do. But we’d lost track of right and wrong.

  I expected to leave a message or have to wait for a return call. Instead, she picked up in the middle of the first ring. She had been waiting for me.

  “Where you been, baby?”

  Her voice was like tickling fingernails, unearthing buried images of her skin. I hesitated to call her Marsha out loud; her name was another of her lies. I had no name for her—no polite ones, anyway. I glanced around me to make sure no one was listening.

  “He has April,” I said.

  Marsha didn’t waste my time asking who had April. Working with Marsha was the closest I’d come to sharing a mind. “He made contact?”

  “A note under her welcome mat. Says I have to exchange a life for a life. Police aren’t an option. I got a note before the madam died, but I hadn’t put it together. It says to meet him at the tar pits at midnight. No cops.”

  The shop manager came with the cup of coffee I’d asked for absently when I first skulked in. I waved him thanks.

  “Why is this my business?” Marsha said.

  “I said it’s April.”

  “I heard you, precious. But L.A.’s nowhere in my job description.”

  I’d seen Marsha run two illegal domestic operations, so that excuse was feeble. My emotions were too dead for anger. I rested my head on my hand, blocking my face from the woman making her way toward the rear restroom. I pinched the room’s light from my eyes. “I need help with this one,” I said. “I wouldn’t call if I had any other way.”

  Marsha didn’t answer. I was lucky she hadn’t hung up on me, considering the names I’d called her the last time we’d been in a room together. Her long silence made me nervous.

  “What do you want from me?” I said. “Name it.”

  “The next time I call you, pick up the damn phone,” Marsha said.

  When I last worked with Marsha, she’d asked me to seduce a Hong Kong businessman’s wife, learn family secrets in bed, and report everything I saw and heard. A woman had fallen in love with me, and her husband had hired a gang to kill me. I’d promised myself I would never owe Marsha another favor. But it was a brave new world.

  “Tell me the truth,” I said. “Do you think she’s dead?”

  I dreaded the answer, but I had to hear someone tell me, one way or the other.

  “I’m not a profiler,” Marsha said, “but I doubt it. Your madam ran prostitutes, so she’s a bonus. Your dad . . . well, you know better than I do.” So much for condolences.

  Reluctantly, I took my mind back to the Fontainebleu’s stairwell. Escobar had lost time when he stopped running to tell me he hadn’t wanted to kill Dad. Almost an apology.

  “He didn’t seem to get off on it,” I said.

  “Killing civilians probably offends his self-image. April’s not what he’s looking for. From what I’ve seen, it goes back to his sister. The mother dies on the journey, his sister turns to prostitution, shames her parents’ memory. Yada yada. He’s not killing prostitutes just because they’re convenient—he has a vendetta. They violate some kind of code. He has more leverage over you if April is alive, or you think she is. My money says she’s probably not dead. Yet.”

  Marsha had been studying Escobar, apparently. Maybe that was what she had called to tell me. It sounded too good to believe, but if Marsha was stringing me along, I’d asked for it. My shirt stopped squeezing my chest.

  “I need this,” I said. “I love her.”

  I could almost see Marsha rolling her eyes.

  “You stepped in it deep this time, Ten,” she said. “Sometimes the cavalry doesn’t ride in, lover. Sorry about your father. “

  Hearing Marsha say she was sorry made Dad’s death fresh, and I felt dizzy with images of Dad’s bloodstained shirt, the faces of the women Escobar had killed in terror and pain, April’s dimpled smile. Even if April wasn’t dead, she was suffering. I remembered Escobar yanking Brittany’s hair on the set, and I held the edge of my tabletop, resisting an urge to smash my coffee mug against the wall. If Marsha couldn’t help me, April might be as good as dead. She had to know that, too.

  “He’s going to kill her, and he wants me to see it,” I said, just in case she didn’t understand. “He’ll make me watch. Then he’ll do his best to kill me, too.”

  Prostitution angle aside, Esocbar had killed Mother to get to me, not to punish her. Would it matter to Escobar that April had never sold her body?

  “Not tonight, Ten. Some professional advice?” Marsha said. “I hope you’re not set on dying for this girl. Needless to say, that would be a tragic waste. So think it over.”

  “There’s nothing to think over.”

  “Get to your mail, and I’ll send you files on your guy. That’s all I can do. Keep that phone with you, and keep it charged.” We conducted business through an encrypted email server. My phone was cheap. Since I couldn’t go home or to April’s, I would need an internet café with a computer to read her email.

  “Files and phones don’t help me,” I said. “This is about to go down, and I need someone I can trust at my back.”

  During Marsha’s pause, I thought I’d changed her mind.

  “I’ll send prayers,” Marsha said.

  “Prayers?” Talk of prayers was so unlike Marsha that I wondered if she was twisting the knife. Or speaking in code.

  “Don’t scratch up that pretty face,” Marsha said, and clicked away.

  The sudden silence emptied me, until thoughts of April’s suffering filled me again.

  I tried dialing April’s cell-phone number. Again, it didn’t ring before going to voice mail. She might have dropped her phone somewhere, or Escobar might have taken it. April might never hear her message, but I had to talk to her. Escobar might let her hear my voice.

  “April, I’m coming, baby,” I said. I closed my eyes, imagining the two of us on the summit of Table Mountain in Cape Town, staring down at the beautiful basin. I imagined holding her hands. I tried to paint our sanctuary with my voice. “Just hang on a while longer. I’m coming. I’m so sorry I wasn’t there. But I’m coming now. I’ll be there soon.”

  I wanted to say more, but I hadn’t called only to talk to April. I breathed fast as the silent phone waited for my message to Escobar. My teeth hurt at the idea of him listening.

  “Don’t hurt her,” I said. “I’m doing what you asked. I’m coming alone.”

  I had run out of lies.

  I left too much money on the table and rose to my feet.

  I walked into the cool night.

  GUSTAVO ESCOBAR COMPOSED himself, hands tight on his van’s steering wheel. Anger had clouded his judgment, and he had almost killed the girl too soon. He had seen himself kill her, swinging his sledgehammer to her face once, twice, three times, a tantrum of killing.

  Useless. Crude. Childish.

  Thank goodness he had come to his senses before he pulled his van over to grab the hammer that lay across the seat beside him. His fingertips vibrated from the hammer’s imaginary blows. He blew out his breath in slow, even streams to bring the night back into focus. He drove calmly past the predictable sequence of traffic lights. Stop, go, slow.

  His plan was still intact. His perfect night awaited him.

  The actor had not called in the police. At first, Escobar blamed himself for the police at the actor’s house. The old whore runner’s death so soon after the actor’s visit had been bound to cast suspicion on him, and he had not corrected her when she called out Tennyson’s name on tape. Ah, well. A small price to pay.

  But when he heard the girl’s address in the chatter on his police scanner, witnessed the sudden arrival of more police cars, Escobar had been certain the actor had disobeyed him. Ignored him. His anger had crested, and he’d looked for a side street so he could pull over, open the cage, and crush her poisoned skull. He
would have rolled her faceless corpse into the street within a block of her front door, a bloody testament to how badly the actor had failed her.

  But that waste had been averted.

  The actor had been desperate enough to run from police custody. Escobar had seen the foot chase with his own eyes as he watched, invisible, from his van only yards behind them.

  Escobar had bought the van for cash in New Orleans during the cross-country drive he’d spent eating gas-station food and listening to radio reports about his monstrosity. Escobar had painted the cartoon poodle with a happily lolling red tongue and a logo for a fake company called Pet Hotel so garish that no one noticed him. He dared the world to see him, and yet no one did. A van wasn’t quite as useful as his Rosa, not nearly secluded enough. Still, a van did the job.

  Escobar craned his ears. Had the girl moaned? For four hours, her head had been covered in a pillowcase, and she had been bound and gagged in the oversized livestock cage he had been saving for her.

  No—for the whore, Chela. He actually had been saving the cage for Tennyson’s teenage slut.

  “Are you awake now?” he called to her, just loudly enough to be heard over the engine as they secretly glided on the streets. She had been sleeping, so this was his first chance to explain her circumstances. She deserved to understand.

  Some of the women he had dreamed with were screamers and weepers who soaked through their gags. Others were stone silent. Still others veered between states of loud and quiet, frantic and frozen. This new one was mostly silent except for an occasional soft moan, as if she had awakened in slight pain. She was polite even in her captivity.

  Politeness had made her so easy.

  So easy for him to roll his wheelchair and follow her to the grocery store’s coffee counter to stage his accidental “spill” when they bumped together. When he wouldn’t take money for dry cleaning, she’d given him that lovely smile. So polite. She hadn’t wanted to let him buy her a latte, but she’d agreed when he insisted. Upon prodding, she had even let him roll with her cup across the room to add a dash of cream and sugar from the condiments tray.

  And he’d added a dash of the other thing, too, from his pocket. Night-night.

  To her, he had been harmless, a charming old man who told stories of old Hollywood and pet owners who pampered their dogs to death. As in all good conversations, five minutes became ten, ten became twenty. They had still been talking when she followed him to his van, which was parked beside her car. The bright pink stood out from across the parking lot. What a coincidence, to both be moving in the same direction.

  Then the gun. The look on her face. The rest was more or less the same with them all.

  The girl stirred slightly, a tiny clank against the steel bars.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” he said. “How can this have happened to you? You never expected it. You’re still dizzy from it. That’s how I felt when my mother drowned.”

  She made the moaning sound again, more softly. She was waking and afraid.

  “I will not hurt you unnecessarily,” he said. “That’s a promise. But you must die.”

  The girl’s moaning and her sounds of motion ceased. She was one of the stoic ones. But she would not stay reasonable. She would wait for her moment and then try to scream to raise the dead. Her script would be the same, eventually. No. Please. Stop.

  “Perhaps you think this is a terrible dream, no?” he went on. “But the dream is mine, not yours. You’re a passing face. We weren’t supposed to meet here, this way. We could have exchanged thoughts on so many subjects. But what’s done is done.”

  Her silence seemed to deepen. He could barely hear her breathing.

  “I understand,” he said. “You’re gathering your wits. Trying to learn. That’s a very smart thing to do. You’re braver than most, so rare. I wish it could make a difference for you. But you won’t survive this night. Tennyson should see that in your face—that his presence means nothing. He should see in your eyes how he left you alone, April. He left you for me.”

  She stirred with a nearly imperceptible whimper, valiantly fighting to keep her tears silent. She didn’t want him to know she was crying.

  “Bueno,” he said. “Release it. For you, it’s a tragedy of misplaced trust. He kept his daughter close to him, but you he sent away. I’ll tell your story one day, on film, how the unspoiled suffer. But as I promised, I won’t celebrate your pain. I only ask that when your time comes to die, don’t look at me with betrayed eyes like you did in the parking lot. Don’t pretend I never told you what I would do.”

  That time, she couldn’t hide the sound of her sob.

  He visualized the scene to her music of misery. The actor arrives, helpless to save his true love. When she drowns, the actor begs him to spare the life of his daughter, only to be told that she will be next. And then the actor will die—slowly, so slowly. Flayed? Toothless? Castrated? Escobar would improvise on how to dispose of the man who had destroyed his life.

  The daughter, Chela, would be a sweeter prize, but he would not come for her right away. He would savor the wait. Give her months, even years, of depraved dreams. Then he would climb out of those nightmares to take her. He would punish Chela and the actor both for the death of this innocent crying in his van.

  “This may sound strange to you, but I’m very sorry for this, April,” he said. “It is, as people say, a necessary evil.”

  The actor had stolen his life, but the Escobar name would live forever.

  The memory of fear had followed April Forrest into the darkness, but then she had found a peaceful tunnel. She might have heard the engine’s purr, felt the lulling starting and stopping of the vehicle, but she wasn’t curious about anything during her deep, calm sleep.

  Until she began to wonder: Where am I?

  The question awakened a barrage of terrible realizations, and cascading terror built in her. She had lost consciousness. She felt groggy and confused. How? When?

  She could not speak, even if she had the energy to try. Her mouth was snugly gagged with a bland fabric that stuck to her dry tongue. She fought the instincts to bite it or her throat’s pulsing desire to expel it. The gag made her feel sick.

  But it was worse than only that.

  April pitched back to sleep, but a nagging feeling of urgency woke her quickly.

  She was gagged in the dark. A chloroform-scented fabric lay draped lightly across her face, dense enough to warm her face from her breath. April spent long seconds telling herself to breathe and relax so she would not panic. It would be too easy to believe she couldn’t breathe.

  But she could. In, out. In. Out.

  But she could not move, she realized. She was lying on her side on a hard surface barely softened by some kind of cushion, her wrists bound behind her, feet bare. The binds were tight. April heard herself moan. When she moved, she felt hard, ordered barriers against her arm. Tiny bars from a cage? Sweet Jesus, please help me. Deliver me, Jesus. Deliver me.

  Praying and breathing helped her fight the panic. Ten thought it was easier to face the world with deep breaths; he meditated like a statue for twenty minutes each morning when he woke. Breathing. In, out. Breathing was a kind of prayer.

  “Are you awake now?”

  A man’s voice. The clarity of the voice clawed through her confusion, helping her pinpoint his distance, something tangible she could hold on to. The voice might be six feet from her. They were both in a vehicle, she realized. Moving.

  She’d been at the supermarket, she remembered. The funny old man in the wheelchair had thrust a gun into her stomach, nudging deeply, and hard. He had hurt her.

  “I know what you’re thinking . . .” the man’s voice went on, but she lost her focus as she wondered who would do this to her. Why?

  “. . . when my mother drowned,” the man went on, as if they were old friends talking, and April knew it was Gustavo Escobar. Ten had been right. Escobar was alive! The realization awed her, dimming her hearing. Escobar seemed t
o murmur.

  “. . . But you must die.” Escobar’s voice came back, as if from a nightmare.

  April’s heart forgot its rhythms, pounding too fast, too hard.

  “. . . He should see in your eyes how he left you alone, April. To me.”

  Jesus Lord, please please please hear me.

  April’s sob surprised her. She cursed herself, because she couldn’t hear Escobar when she was crying. What if a show of fear would trigger him? But she couldn’t stop the next sob, either, which wrenched her stomach. Ten hadn’t been able to stop Escobar in time, and she had walked into his trap. They had let each other down so badly.

  Escobar soothed her with his lying voice, and April clamped her mouth tight. Maybe he would keep driving if she were quiet; at least then she could catch a thought. Her body trembled as if she were packed in ice, but April kept as quiet as she could.

  “I hope you believe my sorrow for you is sincere,” Escobar said.

  If not for her gag, April would have told Escobar that if he were sorry, he should let her go. It wasn’t too late, she would have said. April trembled so much that her cage clanked against the side of the vehicle with her shivers.

  “Don’t waste your strength on knots and bars,” Escobar said. “I’ve done this a time or two. My advice is to stay calm. You’ll only be sleeping.”

  More ice water flushed April as she remembered how many women he had killed. Killing was a sport to him, a compulsion, and it came easily. The darkness paled. Was she slipping back to sleep again?

  “You have a phone message,” Escobar said, snapping her to alertness. “Both of us, actually. It’s only fair that you hear it, since the first part is for you.”

  In the next instant, she heard Tennyson’s recorded voice on her speaker phone over the engine’s hum. “April, I’m coming, baby,” he said. Tennyson’s calm words and voice helped to slow her wild heart. His voice reminded her how much she loved him, and he loved her. His voice became her world. His voice and words rocking her like an infant in his arms. “I’m coming. I’m so sorry I wasn’t there. But I’m coming now. I’ll be there soon.”