Devil's Redhead

by David Corbett

  Abatangelo closed distance behind. Frank tumbled down the stairs onto the sidewalk, struggled up crook-kneed. Abatangelo caught him, snapped him up into a headlock, grabbed his hair, drove his face hard against the Dart’s window twice, dazing him, then lifted him by the scruff with one hand, the other digging in his pocket for his keys. He opened the trunk, lifted Frank and threw him inside.

  He drove one-eyed, hyperventilating, not really clear on which turns he made, how fast he took them, who was ahead or behind. What the hell was that, he wondered. His pulse throbbed as his keys chimed faintly against the steering column. Behind him, the constant muffled pounding and shouts from the trunk intensified.

  Some time later, how much he wasn’t exactly sure, he was on his feet again, beside the car. Behind him stretched an empty pier in the shadow of a looming skyway. Warehouses, locked up for the weekend, defiled for blocks in each direction. He caught his breath, listening to the shrieks of the seagulls overhead and the fading cries from his trunk, the dull thud of shoes and hands against metal.

  He settled down onto the pier to sit, facing the water and dabbing at the cut near his eye. Midday haze obscured the distance, even the bridge dissolved from view. Nearby, the seagulls rose up slowly and then settled down again on the rotting pier. Tenderly, he inspected the places where Frank had bit his face, feeling puffed skin.

  Get him to talk to you, he reminded himself. Scare him if you have to, use what force you have to, but get him talking. Keep him talking till he tells the truth.

  He rose to his feet, returned to the car and removed his keys from his pant pocket. Frank had fallen quiet inside the trunk, as though gathering up his strength for the next round. In one movement, Abatangelo inserted the key, popped the trunk, and with his right hand stiff like a blade dug deep into Frank’s midriff beneath the sternum cartilage. He drove his left thumb beneath the trapezius, paralyzing Frank’s right shoulder and arm. Frank did not scream. His face turned white and the popping eyes displayed their veins.

  “You know who I am, right?”

  “No,” Frank whispered. Then: “Yeah. Don’t. I didn’t do anything. I can help.”

  “Help what.”

  “Find her.”

  “Oh yeah? Find her how.”

  “I know who’s got her.”

  “You don’t have her?”

  “Me? No, no.”

  “The Mexicans.”

  “Yes.”

  “Where?”

  “I’ll tell you. First—”

  Abatangelo dug his thumb deeper into Frank’s shoulder. “You love her?” Abatangelo whispered. “Come on, cocksucker, you don’t have to think about it. Do you care what happens to her?”

  Frank said, “Yes.”

  The word made Abatangelo want to spit.

  “There’s an envelope in my pocket. Take it out.”

  Frank’s left hand, shaking, managed to tug the packet of photographs out. Images of Shel, bruised, scratched and bloody, tumbled across his chest and face.

  “Take a good, long look,” Abatangelo said.

  Frank began to cry.

  “Look at them,” Abatangelo shouted. “Or I’ll kill you right here.”

  Frank tried to finger the print nearest his face but his hand shook too badly. He stammered, “I’ll help you, anything, don’t—”

  Abatangelo released his grip finally and stood back a little. When Frank continued sobbing, Abatangelo said quietly, “Stop it.” His eye fastened on one of the prints of Shel, the one showing the bruises down her back where Frank had beaten her with the stock of the shotgun. The next thing he knew he had his left hand around Frank’s throat as the right hand battered his face. He was shouting, “Shut … the fuck … up,” until Frank curled up into a ball, head shielded by his arms. His cries died down to a whimper.

  Abatangelo stood back again. He inspected his hand, laced with blood. The fury drained from him and left behind a residue of dread.

  You’ve changed, he thought. You used to be smarter.

  CHAPTER

  19

  Shel had been alone in the whitewashed room for about an hour, listening to the rats scuttling inside the walls of the empty house. More faintly, from outside, she heard the squatter children shrieking as they played and tormented one another, or the nearby windmills groaning like a rusted metal choir. Now it was a new sound that rousted her, the approach of a car crushing gravel outside.

  Cesar had promised to bring her fresh water, and some medicine for the pain. When she heard the hurricane doors swing open, however, she noticed that it was two sets of footsteps descending the wood plank stairs, not one.

  As the door from the root cellar swung open, a plump, tidy, middle-aged Latino ducked through the opening. He smelled of cologne, his hair so flawlessly combed it suggested a mother’s touch. He wore a double-breasted Armani suit, a crisp white shirt and a staid silk tie and Giorgio Brutini loafers. He could not have seemed more out of place had he sprouted a tail.

  One of the large ones followed, Humberto or Pepe, she still didn’t know who was which. He was garbed in the same gray suit as before. The tidy one carried a flashlight and a small black medical bag. Somehow he had managed to cross the muck of the root cellar without soiling himself. She pictured him hopping stone to stone. The large one closed the door behind.

  The tidy one smiled, handed his flashlight to his companion, then turned back and bowed slightly at the waist. “Cesar informed me that you asked for some relief from your pain,” he said.

  His English belonged to an educated man, his voice melodious and cultured. Shel looked at the small black bag in his hand. She recalled the needle and syringe lying inside the shroud of stiff clear plastic wrapped around Snuff Akers’s body.

  “It’s all right,” she said. “I’m better.”

  The man looked about the room, as though for a chair. Seeing none, he said something to the other man in Spanish. The only word Shel caught was, “Humberto.” That settles that, she thought; Pepe’s the other guy. Humberto left the room and the plump one turned back to her, wearing exactly the same smile as before.

  “Cesar appears to have taken quite an interest in you,” he said.

  That’s it, Shel realized. He won’t be coming back. I’m going to be killed here, now, by this fat little fella. Doctor Death.

  “Romantic young man, Cesar,” the man continued. “They held a dinner a few weeks ago, at the hotel, for the staff. The maids, the kitchen, the security team, everyone. There’s an operator there, a girl from a village in the south. Cesar has an insufferable crush on her. He can’t even be near her without stammering.”

  Humberto returned, carrying a campaign chair and a thermos. With a flick of his arm he unfolded the campaign chair. The tidy one, the doctor, pulled up his trouser legs and sat. Humberto handed him the thermos. As the doctor unscrewed the lid, he continued, “As I was saying, Cesar, he’s really quite lovestruck. It’s not uncommon, of course, for unattractive men to develop profound attachments. The night of the staff dinner was apparently the worst. As it’s been told to me, he planned to draw this operator away sometime during the evening, speak to her alone. Confide his heart. But his nerve failed. He just sat there during the meal, like a stump. Later on, however, in his dreams, poor Cesario could not be silenced.”

  He turned to Humberto, mumbled something in Spanish, and the larger man cackled. Pressing his hands to his heart, he sang in a moaning voice, “Angel mio …” Shel recognized the voice. It had been the one singing “Vaya con Dios” at the ranch house as Rowena and Duval were murdered.

  “It’s an unfortunate trait, for someone on the security team, to talk in his sleep,” the doctor concluded.

  Security team, Shel thought. The euphemism reminded her of watching newscasts from Vietnam as a girl. Damage assessments. Tactical repositionings. Advantageous weather. The doctor had the thermos lid removed. He poured a clear fluid into the cap and offered it to Shel.

  “Water,” he said.

&nbs
p; “I’m not thirsty,” she told him.

  The doctor sighed, as if she’d hurt his feelings. “If it was anyone’s plan to kill you, you’d already be dead.”

  It was the first crack in the courtly veneer. His eyes were hard. As though to bring his point home, he glanced about the room. Blood spatters smeared the floor and wall where Dayball’s interrogation had grown especially rough. One stain in particular looked like he’d tried to drag himself away from the ball bat coming down.

  The doctor held out the cup again. The man has a point, Shel realized. These guys aren’t the sort to waste time when it comes to death. She took the cup, sniffed, and drank. Something inside her melted. She downed the full amount to slake her thirst and reached out with the cup and he refilled it and she drank again. Closing her eyes, she waited for the first signs of cramping nausea to hit.

  “You see,” the doctor said after a moment. “Water.”

  He placed the thermos on the floor beside him. Resting his hands on his knees, he said, “I would like to examine you briefly, if I may.”

  Shel flashed on Danny rousting her throughout the night, checking for concussion. No hospitals, she’d said. People die in hospitals. She remembered, too, the dream she’d had on waking, the abandoned foundry, the sense that It was about to happen, and saw in a glance how everything in this room had been foretold.

  “What for,” Shel said, still holding the cup. “If I keel over and retch or flat out die on you, what possible difference could that make given what’s in store for me?”

  “It will not take long,” he said, reaching down to unsnap the small black bag. “And how do you know what’s in store for you?”

  “I’m a quick study.”

  “Did Cesar say anything to you?”

  “I don’t need Cesar to figure this thing out. Come on. Be serious.”

  “I could not possibly,” the doctor responded, “be more serious.”

  He pulled from the small black bag a zippered leather case the size of a book. Her hands started shaking so badly she dropped the cup. As she reached down to pick it up a thunderbolt slashed through her head and she pulled back her hand. Tears ran down her face from behind her closed eyelids. God help me, she thought.

  “The pain,” the doctor asked, “which side is it on?”

  She scuttled back from him on the mattress, churning with her legs, but there was nowhere to go. She pressed herself against the wall.

  “Come now,” he said. “This is childish.”

  “I don’t like doctors,” she said. It sounded childish.

  The doctor sighed, turned to Humberto, and nodded. Humberto lumbered over and grabbed Shel by the arm. She struggled, but lacked strength to do anything more than make him laugh. He dragged her within arm’s reach of the doctor, who licked the back of his hand and held it up to her mouth. “Exhale, please,” he said.

  She averted her face, shook her head. Humberto grabbed her hair and forced her face front again. She exhaled.

  “Very good,” the doctor said.

  Next he fingered her jaw and throat and forehead. His fingers were soft and warm. Lifting her chin, he said, “Open both your eyes at once please.” He glanced quickly from one side of her face to the other.

  “Your pupils,” he said, “they’re both the same size. That’s good.”

  “If they weren’t?”

  “It might indicate stroke.”

  He searched her nostrils and ears, remarking, “No blood, no cerebral fluid.” He felt for her carotid pulse, counted, felt for the pulse in each wrist, counted.

  “Your saliva,” he asked. “Does it taste sweet to you?”

  “No.”

  “Be truthful, please.”

  “No,” she said again.

  He sat back, folded his hands. “What examination I can conduct here is limited, obviously. But you have a concussion, I believe. Basically, you need to rest. Allow the bruising of your brain to heal.” He gestured with his hand to his head, rotating the open palm slowly about his ear. Healing. “And I understand you tried to commit suicide. With pills. Is that correct?”

  “I don’t see where that much matters.”

  “Do you remember which pills?”

  Shel rattled off the names of the medications she could remember swallowing.

  “No narcotics or barbiturates?”

  “You tell me,” Shel said.

  He smiled again, a little less kindly. “You’re absolutely certain that Cesar said nothing to you.”

  “We watched the squatter kids pelting each other with acorns,” she said. “We talked about oak trees.”

  The doctor nodded, looked to Humberto and offered a little shrug. Turning back to Shel, he said, “Let’s take care of the pain, shall we?”

  He reached for the leather-bound case and unzipped it. Inside lay a collection of medical instruments, including a syringe, a vial of alcohol, cotton balls, a sterile needle. Reaching down into his case, he retrieved a small medicine vial filled with clear fluid.

  It was all just a setup, Shel thought. Quiet you down. They were going to kill you all along.

  She tried to swat the medicinal bottle out his hand but missed. The force of the lunge toppled her over onto her side. “Humberto,” the doctor said, his voice now betraying disgust and impatience. In one movement Humberto flipped Shel onto her stomach, put his knee in the small of her back and with one hard jerk pulled her jeans down below her hips. She kicked and flailed and screamed like a four-year-old but the needle broke skin and shortly a debilitating warmth spread through her, like drowsy smoke. Resistance faded. She felt utterly, rapturously wonderful until the sudden heaving of her stomach forced her to her knees. Humberto pulled her by the hair again, this time to the side of the mattress where she vomited a stew of bile and water onto the concrete floor. Humberto let go of her hair. Her face struck the concrete.

  Humberto and the doctor murmured things to each other in Spanish as they collected the campaign chair and the small black bag, disappearing in a rainbow through the low wood door.

  Abatangelo sat on a wooden chair in Waxman’s kitchen, watching as the reporter stood at the stove, nursing soup. Waxman’s cats, snub-tailed and obese, purred angrily, sniffing the air and slithering about his calves. Frank was in the bathroom alone. Abatangelo had left him there for a moment, after gathering everything sharp and checking that the window was painted shut.

  “You might as well have just killed him at the table,” Waxman said. “Sat down and asked for a menu.”

  “I apologize for leaving you there like that.”

  Waxman laughed. “You apologize?”

  “For the trouble.”

  “The trouble,” Waxman said, nodding. “Just so you’re clear, I doled out tips and ass-kissing bullshit to every person who bothered to confront me. And although I welcome your apology, I don’t believe you’ve quite gotten the drift of my objections here.” One of his cats jumped up onto the top of the stove. Waxman gently picked it up and returned it to the floor. “You’ve made me a party to a kidnapping and assault.”

  “He wants to talk to you,” Abatangelo said.

  Waxman rubbed the back of his neck. “Lovely. A coerced confession. Made for television.”

  “No, Wax. Remember, he was the one who ran.”

  “Don’t insult me.”

  “Look, Wax. I admit, yes, things went haywire. But all I intended to do was show up, sit down.”

  Waxman laughed. “Oh, really? That hardly explains the expression on your face as you came toward the table.”

  Abatangelo guessed this was so. “Okay, whatever. I came on too hard. He ran. I reacted. The whole thing took on a life of its own. I’m not proud of that. But then Frank and me, we had a meeting of the minds, okay? I drove him to this pier south of the city, I don’t know what I was thinking. Showed him the pictures of Shel. He squirmed and whined, I flipped. It was … not good. And yeah, I hit him.” He looked up into Waxman’s eyes. “But guess what happened then. Come on, Wa
x, guess.” He chuckled grimly, waited, his nostrils twitching at the smell of the canned soup reaching a boil. “I said I was sorry.”

  Waxman averted his eyes. Stirring with one hand, he reached down blindly with the other, nudging one of the cats away.

  “You understand, Wax? I told Frank Maas—the guy who almost killed the woman I love—I told him I was sorry.”

  “Yes, well—”

  “I’m not saying my motives are pure. I need him, sure, right, he’s the only link back to Shel I’ve got now. And he’s scared, Wax. He’s tired of running. He wants to come clean. So I brought him here.”

  Waxman turned back to face him. “Look, not so long ago I’d have had no worries on the matter. The paper would have backed me up. But no more green eyeshades. We’ve got suits running the editorial board. They’re facile types who mouth platitudes and watch their asses. They’re particularly fond of this new buzzword, ‘Public Journalism,’ whatever the hell that means. And don’t ask them today if you want the same answer tomorrow.”

  “The story, Wax. That’s your protection.”

  “Not anymore.” He turned off the heat and removed the saucepan from the burner. “When the police come around the press room to bitch, when they pound the table and accuse me of harboring a fugitive or abetting a kidnap after the fact or whatever other iniquity they concoct on the spot, the suits won’t so much as blink. They’re going to say, ‘Here, take him.’ Ecce homo. To the tune of a fife and drum they’ll run me up a flagpole and leave me there to hang.”

  The door to the bathroom opened. Frank appeared, tottering in the doorway. Gathering his bearings, he guided himself with one hand along the wall while the other hand pressed a washcloth to his face. His skin was mottled with cuts and bruises and flush from the cleansing Abatangelo had given the wounds with Listerine. Abatangelo had nursed his own wounds, too. Scratches ran down his arms. Black and blue eruptions of puffy flesh, detectable as bite marks up close, dotted his face, resembling the ravages of acne from a distance.

  Frank shambled into the kitchen, resting his weight on the door frame and looking from one man to the other. “I guess I’m ready,” he whispered. His eyes were glassy. Abatangelo got up from his chair, took Frank’s arm and guided him into the dining room. Waxman ladled out vegetables and broth, dug two slices of wheat bread from a cellophane bag and dropped them onto a saucer.