by Otto Penzler
The music was too loud to hear voices in the room, the walls of which seemed to be shaking with the violent strobe light, and it took me a moment to recognize Allie and Billy at a table near a low wooden platform out of which rose a greasy metal pole. The Americans were laughing, bent doubled over as if in pain, and the two men they’d been talking with were smiling and smoking, holding out what must have been joints as the kids straightened up. There were half a dozen other tables, only one of which was occupied, by a single man in a long trench coat, a baseball cap pulled low over his face. I sat at the table nearest the stairs, turning my chair so I could see if someone came down behind me. A tiny, shriveled woman stepped from the shadows, her old body grotesquely squeezed into a leather bra and panties, her loose, cellulite thighs quivering as she stepped beside me and glared until I ordered a beer. Watching her slink back to the bar in the corner, I noticed a wall covered with leather straps, whips, and a long, thin machete.
I jumped when the music suddenly went silent, just long enough to hear Allie say, “Exactly. That’s exactly what I’m—” and then the music erupted again, a crashing heavy metal that felt as if it were scraping the inside of my eyes. A silvery cloud drifted along the low ceiling, filling the room with the overripe stink of marijuana.
At the far end of the wooden stage a heavy black curtain was pushed aside and a young woman came out unsteadily on high silver stilettos and nothing else, her small, high breasts not moving even when she tottered into the bright puddle of a spotlight. She stopped in the middle of the stage and stood smiling shyly, her skin shining blue with sweat, or oil. She stared straight ahead, blinking heavily in the spotlight, smiling. One of the men at Allie and Billy’s table stood up, stretching his arms over his head, leaning down to whisper something to Allie, who laughed and nodded. Slowly, as if everyone weren’t watching, the man walked to the wall beside the bar and took down a short-handled black leather whip with three strands that sagged at the ends. Hefting it to test the weight, he walked back to his table, made another joke, and then, as the music rose to an even more frantic pitch, stepped onto the stage beside the woman.
I stared at my beer, but I could hear the wet, heavy snap of the whip and once I heard, through the din of the music, a single cry of pain. Only when the music shifted between songs and I heard a woman’s voice—“No, I’m serious”—did I look up.
Allie was being pushed toward the stage by one of the other men, his mouth open, teeth flashing with laughter. Allie tried to turn, but the man grabbed her arms and spun her around to face the stage on which the naked girl was bent over, her face hidden by a fall of hair. Allie shook her head, but the man on the stage leaned down, grabbed her wrist, and jerked her onto the stage. Billy, I noticed, was staring at his hands in his lap, as if about to go to sleep. The man on the stage held the whip out toward Allie. She turned to step down, but the man grabbed her arm and pulled her back and thrust the whip into her hand. I couldn’t tell, with the flashing light, with the blue haze, with the pounding music, but I thought she might be crying as she looked down at the whip in her hand, but I know that as she stepped up beside the kneeling girl she looked up, back at me, as if she’d known all along I was there. I put my hand on my gun, out of fear I guess, but also because I felt sure at that moment that I was in danger, that after she was done with the girl, she’d come for me. Then the fear left her face and Allie twirled the whip around her head and gyrated her hips. Beneath the music I could hear the men cheering as I scrambled out of my seat, knocking over the untouched beer on my table, and ran up the stairs, slipping so I hit my knee painfully, so that I limped through the door after knocking wildly until it was opened.
Outside the bar I got lost immediately but kept hobbling until I found a larger street, lined with auto-body shops, against the fences of which snarling black dogs hurled themselves. I walked along the side of the road, tucking the gun back into the holster, my briefcase in the other hand, glancing back until I spotted a cab and flagged it down.
Now it’s nearly morning. Allie and Billy are surely dead, raped and tortured and robbed, all because they thought life was a game. In a few hours the men from the mining company will come for me. We’re having breakfast here before heading to the office. It’s all there on my itinerary. The phone in my room is still dead. My cell phone still has no service and of course there’s no Internet, so I can’t check on Joyce, can’t make sure Susan arrived, that they’re all still safe.
There’s nothing more to write. But I can’t stop thinking about what must’ve happened to Allie. I can’t stop thinking there must have been something I could have done to save her, to keep her safe.
In a few weeks her mother will start to worry. In a month she’ll call the embassy and her daughter’s degenerate friends to see if they’ve heard anything. She’ll sit up for hours, staring into the brittle, suburban dark, unable to even begin to imagine what might have happened, or what the world that swallowed her daughter was like. With no answers, there’ll be nothing she can do but wait and hope for some final word, for anything other than the silence.
GINA PAOLI
Dog on a Cow
FROM Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine
OUTSIDE, THE DOWNPOUR continued unabated, each raindrop intensifying the stale, humid dreariness of the confining motel room. Trussed in the corner with a piece of cord from the cheap Venetian blinds, Dan rubbed the throbbing side of his head against the wall in the corner farthest from the door of the tiny room. It was sometime past two in the morning. The little one, Brucie, had just slugged him with his ring-encrusted fist: Dan’s wedding ring was on that fist now; his money and credit card were in Brucie’s pocket. Brucie reclined in the dingy stuffed chair beside the bed, digging at his fingernails with a flat, blunt carpenter’s pencil.
The big one, Jane, rested on the sagging bed, back against the water-stained wooden headboard, her tremendous arms crossed over her equally massive chest. Her hair, red streaked with black, had been fashioned into an improbable pageboy cut, an unfortunate choice that further accentuated the fleshy features on her round face. Part of a tattoo on her right bicep peeked out below the sleeve of her faded yellow T-shirt. It looked like the forepaw of a dog, and for some reason Dan imagined the dog was a frisky, bright-eyed poodle. Tiny bottles of nail polish, cylinders of mascara and eye shadow, tubes of lipstick, and several compacts of face powder lay scattered on the bed before her. She slowly bent forward and wagged a stubby finger at the gaudy containers as if selecting the right one would solve an important problem.
Dan’s courage had weakened a little after that last punch from Brucie, but he still managed to convince himself that he could wait them out. He’d probably already suffered the worst of it. Hell, if he just got a chance, he could talk his way out of this. They only wanted a little traveling money, and since he had given them all he had, they’d soon grow bored with their little game and let him go. Still, he should try to do something. Maybe the story, maybe he could reduce the tension by telling them the story.
The story, which had come to him just a few hours before, had been forming in his mind even as he’d been sitting there tied up. It had an urgency of its own, and despite the discomfort and pain from his numb hands and the scuffs on his face, its tenuous threads began to knit themselves into a ragged tapestry and suddenly he could see the outline of it and knew enough to begin the telling. He had nothing to lose, and maybe it would help somehow. So he worked up a few drops of saliva and prepared his swollen tongue to make words.
They’d been sitting in silence since Brucie pounded on the TV to remove some static from the sound, resulting in a blank screen and no sound at all. That had been an hour or more ago. He’d been told to be quiet and he knew that Brucie had a short fuse, but Dan had faith in his own skills as a storyteller.
“It’s raining like hell out there, like it’s never going to stop,” he said tentatively. There was no reaction to these first few words, so he continued. “It reminds me of a story I
heard about a flood. It happened about twenty years ago, right here in eastern Colorado, though I’m not sure if it was up north on the South Platte or down on the Arkansas. Both rivers flood sometimes in the late spring when the snowmelt has already filled the river and a rainy spell sets in.
“So the rains came and swelled the river over its banks and into the pasture of this farm that was usually a half-mile from the river. The farmer had his cows penned up by his barn, but the river was rising steadily, so he let them out and herded them up onto the prairie sandhills above his farm. He struggled through the mucky soil, but he and his dog got them out and up into the hills with only one of the cows running off. When he was sure the others were safe, he and the dog took off to find the lone cow, a young milker who had always been a little skittish.
“Let me tell you about this dog. It wasn’t the kind of dog the farmer would have picked for a work dog. It had come wandering into the farmyard a couple of years earlier, and after a week of tossing rocks and shouting at it, the dog was still skulking around. Against his better judgment, the farmer began to leave food scraps in an old Ford hubcap behind the barn, and soon the dog began to follow him around as he did his chores. He soon found that the dog had a touchy and unpredictable nature. The farmer sometimes caught a gleam in the dog’s eye that seemed like a challenge, as if it would as soon go for you as listen to what you had to say. But the dog learned to handle the cows, so the farmer put up with it and let it live in the barn.
“The dog’s mongrel collie coat hid the splashes of mud that stained it as he roamed about, searching for the cow. They worked well together, covering a lot of ground. The signs they found pointed to the brainless cow heading right down into the flooded cottonwoods that bordered the swollen river.
“When they came to the edge of the flood, the farmer waded into the slow-moving, muddy water. He looked back and saw that the dog had hesitated. He cursed it and commanded it to come, but it only paced at the water’s edge. Finally he went back and picked up the unwilling animal and carried it with him. When he was fifty yards from the edge and still only up to his ankles, he dropped the dog. It looked back anxiously to the muddy land but moved on as the farmer did, staying by his side.
“It was too close to dark for the farmer to search for very long, as he didn’t know when the flood crest would hit the area. For all he knew, it would reach clear to his farmhouse, but he was stubborn and single-minded, and as the gray sky turned to black he kept up his search, slogging along in his rubber work boots, already fighting his way through waves of uprooted plants and small trees and drowned varmints. He had no luck spotting the cow, and only turned back when it was dark enough that he needed the yard lights up by the house to guide him home.
“He didn’t notice the loss of the dog until he waded onto the bog that had been his alfalfa field. The animal had been alternately swimming and scrambling onto branches and raised clumps of grass as they wended their way through the flooded cottonwood forest. The farmer remembered the dog being near him only ten or fifteen minutes before, as he heard its whine when it traversed a long log and didn’t want to jump into the water again, and he had cussed it and chided it along. He looked back at the huge dark expanse of the murmuring flood and whistled a couple of times and then trudged up to his house. What a mess the day had turned into. He told himself that if the cow and the dog survived until morning, he’d find them then.”
“What the hell does this have to do with anything? Who gives a damn about a lost dog or cow?” Brucie said. He stood up and put the carpenter’s pencil behind his left ear. He was small and thin, maybe five-four and 140 pounds, and he wore dirty jeans with holes in the knees and a red flannel shirt over a black T-shirt. His hair was black and thick and he needed a shave. He had a mean kick and hard, fast fists.
“I think it’s a good story,” said the big woman, Jane. Dan had heard Brucie call her Jane several times, usually with a nasty descriptor in front of Jane, like Lard-Ass or Two-Ton. “You know I love dogs. I don’t think I ever been closer to a cow than a hamburger or a glass of milk, though.” She laughed heartily, shaking the whole bed so that the headboard banged against the wall.
“How do you know it’s a good story? You ain’t even heard the whole thing.”
“Well, let him finish it, then.”
“Nah. I’m tired of hearing him talk. Besides, if he has something to say, I want it to be that he remembers the number for the cash machine so we don’t have to wait for the goddamn bank to open.”
“He said he didn’t remember. Even when you hit him,” she said. Then she lowered her voice. “When are you going to learn that hitting never helps?”
Brucie didn’t say anything for a minute, just cocked his ear toward her like he was waiting for another stupid remark. Then he slowly turned his head and looked across at her, his blue eyes turning to slits so all that showed was a venomous, milky gray. She tried to evade his stare but wasn’t able to: the smile behind that hearty laugh disappeared and her heavy shoulders descended lower and lower until she sagged into a sad, rounded lump.
Brucie had her intimidated all right. Dan had noticed how quiet she was in the car, but it hadn’t meant much to him then. He generally never picked up hitchhikers, especially when he had a full slate of appointments and an order book with too many blank pages, but today he’d been bored and out there. Out there, where the wind and the rain put him. He could go for weeks without doing a stupid, crazy thing, and then along would come a blow and suddenly he would decide to take a 200-mile detour to find some ribs cooked just the way he liked them, or that he needed a rest and he would end up spending three days in a motel room, drinking whiskey all night, crying to every sad song on the radio.
He knew something was going to happen when he realized he had driven for two hours with his radio off, racing out of western Kansas and into Colorado in an eerie trance. He had his eyes hard to the road, following the flashes of lightning like the dazzle from a hypnotist’s watch. The wind carried the rain across the road, billowing it in waves that nearly flooded the highway before they gusted away. It was like driving along a stormy California beach.
Then he saw them, in a lightning flash, the little one huddled against the big one on a stretch of nowhere 60 miles into Colorado. So he pulled over and picked them up, thinking he was just being humane, but knowing it was really the wind and the rain and being out there. They didn’t say much, only making small talk, revealing themselves in little ways, and after a hundred miles he thought that he was going to be all right, that just having the company was pulling him back, was calming him down. Then the seed of a story began to sprout, something about a flood, about a lost cow and a dog, lost to the storm and the flood.
The motel squatted in the far corner of a lonely crossroads on the two-lane, 10 miles away from a stagnant and dying farm town of a few thousand people and 20 miles from the interstate, where cars rocketed along oblivious to its existence. There was just the one motel and the filling station with the lunch counter across the highway. The café wouldn’t even open until 6 a.m., when the farmers and truckers and other traveling souls might stop in for breakfast. He abruptly decided to pull in, because the story was coming too fast and he wanted to let it grow at its own pace. He would spend the night at the motel, and in the morning go across to the diner and tell the story to the locals, judging its success by smiles and nodding heads and a coffee cup that was always full; or become embarrassed by turned backs and snickers and the loud clanking of silverware against thick ceramic plates.
The occasional praise from these small audiences made his long trips on the road bearable. He spent his days driving hundreds of mind-numbing miles back and forth across the prairie and fields of eastern Colorado, western Kansas, and Nebraska, pestering service-station owners into buying the latest equipment to service the latest, increasingly complicated cars. Or failing to convince them, as had been the recent trend. No, he didn’t mind, because he still had adventures in his head, and he l
oved the chance to meet and entertain new people with his stories.
There was an overhanging awning and a bench in front of the diner, and the big woman said they would be all right there until it opened, that they were dry now, thanks very much for the ride. He felt a little bad leaving them there, but at least he’d gotten them out of the rain.
Across the road, he had to wake up the motel clerk, who groggily fumbled with his pen when Dan checked in, and it seemed to take forever, but he was a nice enough fellow and Dan thought he might share the story with him tomorrow when it was polished and ready to tell. He had the trunk of his Toyota open and he was fumbling around with his bag when the dim light from the buzzing motel sign suddenly became even dimmer. A shadow flashed across his hand on the bag and when he looked over his shoulder, the woman hovered over him. For a moment he imagined she might have a question to ask, or have come to ask for a little food money, but then he felt the jab in his back and he flexed upright, banging his head against the lid of the trunk. A blow behind the ear quickly followed.
“Don’t move like that again, buddy,” said the voice behind him, “or you’ll get more than a slap upside the head.” This time the jab was stronger and sharper, and he realized it was a knife at his back. He should have been surprised, but wasn’t, chastising himself that he hadn’t noticed that they were the kind of grungy hitchhikers who showed you a smile as you passed and then cursed you and gave you the finger if you passed them by. He hadn’t noticed, he’d been out there, and then the story had come and he’d become distracted and careless.
Now Jane got up from cowering on the bed and went to the window. She pulled aside the curtain and looked out into the darkness. The side of her face, he could see, was illuminated by the pink neon from the motel sign, and there were shiny trails of tears running down from her eyes.