by Ian Ballard
The fact I loved them redeems nothing. It doesn't matter that they gave my life the only bit of meaning it ever had. The only things that can have meaning are things that are, not things that were. It's a perversion to find solace in something beautiful that's gone. And all they are is gone.
My tragedy is played out, but without the natural consummation of death. What remains is consciousness grinding onward, without purpose and without end. Life striving to ingest itself, like an ulcerated stomach.
57
Colorado
I didn't see the man who grabbed me.
His hands were on my face. I was breathing something in. Chloroform maybe. And then I woke up here. In the trunk of a car.
You don't have to be a fortune teller to sense this doesn’t bode well.
We've been driving for maybe an hour. The rumble of the engine and the sound of the tires on the road. The road is wet. When he hits the gas, I can smell the exhaust coming up from below. I’m lying on my side with my knees drawn into my chest. Can't see and can hardly breathe. I'm blindfolded and there's a piece of duct tape covering my mouth. My hands are tied in back with rope. I wonder if it’s the kind Jessica had on her wrists that day. The kind Bloom said both Luke and Tad used on their victims.
I didn't see his face, but who else could it be but Tad? I wish to God there were other suspects, but that’s what common sense has it down to. Sometime down the road, when they put all the facts together, what's happening tonight will probably seem obvious. Of course he would go after her. The girl who sent his brother to jail. Maybe my mom and stepdad will file a lawsuit against the state of Colorado or the FBI for not doing anything to stop this. Not because they think it will bring me back, but just because they want to do something.
Strike that last comment. Any scenario where I imagine myself dead is off limits. That's the rule. If you want to survive something like this, you have to believe in the impossibility of your own death, or at least the possibility of your survival.
But much of my brain is not on board with this hopeful outlook. It understands that this is Ropes we're talking about. A fact that makes nasty inroads in the odds I’ll get out of this alive. So my brain is getting a head start on the whole life-flashing-before-your-eyes thing.
And so a million-picture slide show is clicking through my mind. Thinking about my mom, my brother, my study abroad in England, my plays, and Alex—my first boyfriend. And a few of the bad things too, like Gunnison and Jessica and what it feels like to lose a finger.
But throughout this little montage, my mind keeps circling back to that night when they caught Chris—though I guess Luke is his real name. Of course, it's not important now. It doesn't deserve more than a few seconds in the Nicole Copeland highlight film. And yet it keeps hogging the spotlight.
That night six months ago.
I was crumpled up on the floor. He stood over me. Just frozen there. And I looked up right before he turned away. And I saw something in his eyes that I won't ever forget. Not the look you'd expect to see from a guy who killed twelve girls. Something helpless and tender and terrified. And what he did to me a moment before, I believe he did not out of callousness or cruelty, but out of desperation. Out of an inability to cope with what was happening inside him.
Who knows? Maybe I'm the desperate one, trying to twist the facts, to make something sick into a love story. Of all the stuff there is to fear, the most terrifying thing is that maybe none of this was real.
But no—there were tears in his eyes that day. I swear to God, something glistened. Something dripped. But after six months, a tear drop is a pretty tentative thing.
My psychiatrist thinks I’ve coached myself to remember it that way. Because I needed to see something good in him. So there’d be more than randomness to explain why I'm alive. In other words, a purpose might take away the guilt I feel for being spared. The only catch is that this teary-eyed Chris might be nothing but a cuddly figment of my imagination. Dr. Taylor’s words, not mine.
But rehashing all this now is ridiculous. Someone may be shoveling dirt on top of me in a few hours. It doesn't make a damn bit of difference what the status of his tear ducts was.
The road is quieter now. Fewer cars. Like we're outside the city. A stream of cold air filters in from a crack somewhere and hits me in the face. There's still the sound of moisture. Kicking back as the tires move through it. I guess it could be rain. But somehow, I know it's melting snow.
The engine revs hard as if the road were steep. A few minutes back I felt my ears pop.
I think he’s taking me up into the mountains.
My mind wants to think about Luke, so it doesn't have to think about Tad. I wonder, if he were here, would he protect me? Or would he just watch it happen?
Feeling claustrophobic now. Like I'll die if I don't get this tape off my mouth and these ropes off my hands. I thrash around, bumping into a jack by my feet and turning it over. Clank.
Eventually the panic passes. I stop flailing and lay on my back. Panting and with tears in my eyes.
This is really happening. These may be the last few moments of unclouded clarity, before there’s too much pain to think about anything else. This may be the last chance to be grateful for my time in this wonderful, off-kilter little world.
And the truth is, I wouldn't trade it for anything.
Maybe it wasn’t the kind of life for people who hate roller coasters or who can't stand the sight of blood. But even with all those crazy ups and downs, it was mine. My own and only life. And every moment, even the most sick and unendurable, is still part of who I am. To regret anything is to regret myself. For if I plucked out these painful pieces, I’d be someone else, living another life. And you see, I’m quite attached to the one I’ve got.
Yet, if it has to end tonight, I’ve promised myself I won’t be feeling bitter or shortchanged. Its brevity may have made it all the sweeter. If someone said we could ride the ride again, from the first heartbeat to the last breath, of course I would. I’d be jumping over the railings and cutting to the front of the line. But even if there is no second trip, that’s okay too. No Tad can ever take away what this first one meant.
Joy leaves scars, and beauty, residues you can’t erase.
There, that’s my epilogue. Carve it in the dirt above my unmarked grave.
The tempo of the driving has changed. We’re going slower now. The road is bumpier. It might be a dirt road. The stream of air through the crack is colder. I’m shivering and have been for a while. The car makes a turn to the left and not long after, a turn to the right. Finally, we come to a stop and the engine cuts off.
My heart's racing. Perhaps nearing a moment of truth.
Hear the car door open. Footsteps on gravel. A key opening the trunk. The sound as it rises on its hinges.
A wave of cold bites at my cheeks. Can't see through the blindfold, but I picture Tad standing above me, looking down. An expression of lustful anticipation on his lips.
I flail around, kicking with my feet and twisting my wrists against the rope. I doubt the ropes are going to snap or that I'll suddenly have a chance to run away, but I'm still going to try. It's important that I try.
One of his arms slips beneath my legs. Then he brings his other arm under my back and hoists me out of the trunk. The way you'd carry a child. I feel the fabric of his jacket. Hear him breathing. I keep thrashing about, but it doesn't amount to much more than the fluttering of my feet.
His shoes crunch on the ground. Heavy like boots.
There’s a few pinpricks of cold on my face. They're snowflakes, I realize. Somehow that comforts me.
After we've gone a few dozen strides, he sets me down carefully on the ground. But it's not the gravel I expect. It's hard and even. A sidewalk or something made of concrete.
A key sliding into a lock. A door handle rattling.
Hoisted up again. My feet brush against something hard. The edge of the doorway. Again, he lowers me down. This time what's under me i
s soft. Springs creek. A bed. He positions me upright, so my back is against something hard. The headboard, I think.
Warmer now. Am I in his home? Is this where he brings all of us? Far away, so no one can hear. He’s moving around, shifting things around. Feet on a wooden floor. He probably has a suitcase full of neatly-ordered knives. One of the hardest things to think about is that the very last moments will end in pain. How do you reconcile yourself to that?
I'm not ready for this. Not ready at all. Tears in the corner of my eyes, dampening the blindfold.
Quentin Bloom told me all about it. What he does to the victims. The ones they find in the desert. I wish I didn't know.
Body's shaking. Feeling of coldness on my hands and feet.
I'm so glad my mom doesn't have to watch this.
Is the blade the first thing I'll feel? Will he just stab me without warning? Or will he start with a little prick and work his way up? He'll do whatever he's going to do, and it won't matter how I scream or how I fight or how I pull away. All I can do is take my mind to another place. Pretend the screams are someone else's. That I'm just listening to a tape of someone's death.
The pain—whatever that's like, is nothing compared to what comes after. Being gone. And the pain would be enough. But it's the sudden silence that comes after that will break my heart.
And yet. And yet. And yet.
And yet, I want to fight and hope, till the last dab of blood trickles from my body. I want to persevere like the woman who crawled all the way out of the dune. That's how I want death to come for me. Not begging for him to cut things short, but resisting, till it drags me kicking and screaming into that lightless tunnel.
Speaking of death. He’s hovering near me now, or at least his second in command. Can feel his presence. His heat. Motionless. Watching me.
The sound of my quick breathing through my nose.
Then, suddenly, a sharp pain on my face.
A ripping sound.
He’s pulling the electrical tape off my mouth.
My lips part and I draw several grasping breaths.
Now he’s reaching behind me. I try to stand, to get to my feet, but there's a hand on my shoulder stopping me before I've started.
His fingers are moving behind me. Touching my hands. Touching the ropes.
“What are you doing?” I scream. “What are you doing to me?”
58
Colorado
Night warden Alex Carver withdrew his baton from a loop on his utility belt and held it at his side. He placed his free hand on the handle of the thick metal door in front of him.
The door made a buzzing sound as a guard several rooms away in a monitoring station disengaged the lock. Alex pulled the door open and stepped across the threshold into Cell Block H-5.
It was 5:30 a.m.
Time to get ’em up.
Alex flipped on the overhead lights. The corridor leading to the five holding cells flickered in fluorescent hesitation. The light was cadaver-blue. Like the dead toes that stuck out on gurneys headed for the B-wing morgue. An in-between color, too fresh to bury, too stale for a hospital bed. Alex hated that color.
Up ahead, beds creaked as the prisoners roused and began to rustle about. A few of the cell’s occupants, the newbies, made sleepy groans, protesting the early hour.
The five cells in the H-5 Block each housed a single prisoner. Problem Children. Pretrial inmates who were considered a danger to themselves or others, who had prior escape attempts on their record, or who were charged with high-profile or particularly heinous offenses. All five cells in H-5 were full at the moment.
Cells two and four were on suicide watch. A meth head and a paranoid schizophrenic. They were both brand new.
Cell five was a former UFC fighter who kept kicking everyone’s ass in his other block.
Cells one and three were both high profile, which generally meant longer term. Often through the duration of trial.
Cell one was Omar Ramirez. He’d been in two months now. Pedophile. Eleven counts of sexual assault on a child. The case had a fair amount of news coverage, so the guards were told to handle him carefully—baby-rapers didn’t usually fare too well in the gen pop. They often ended up dead with large objects mysteriously inserted into their rectums. That fate could be more discreetly visited on Ramirez after sentencing. When he was locked up in SuperMax and the media had forgotten about him.
Then there was Cell Four.
That was the big enchilada.
Luke Glattmann. The Handyman killer.
One murder in Colorado, one in Texas, and nine more in the Northwest US. He’d been in six months and his trial was coming up in three weeks.
He was basically a national celebrity at this point, which, of course, meant special treatment. If you were just a terrible person, the system shit on you. But if you were off-the-charts psycho, you became a prima donna.
That’s what Glattmann was. It was surprising no one had given him a bell to ring when he wanted his ass wiped with rose petals.
But Alex had to admit, after being around him for six months, he didn't mind the guy. Kind of a model prisoner. Well behaved, polite. Pretty funny too. While he certainly didn’t make a habit of consorting with inmates, every so often, you’d come across one that was a cut above. One you didn’t mind shooting the shit with.
Yeah, Glattmann was the nicest serial killer you'd ever care to meet. And the guy looked like a movie star, too. Why someone who could pull wool with a wink and a smile would opt to go at a chick with a knife was a mystery to him. It’s too bad Glattmann couldn’t lend out those pretty-boy looks, since he wasn’t using them at the moment. Alex would have put them to good use.
Anyway, who knew? Maybe if Alex got to know Glattmann well enough, he’d even make some cash with an exclusive interview. If he were long winded enough, maybe he could even finagle a book deal out of it. Stranger things have happened.
Alex wrapped his baton on the bars of the first cell.
“Up and at 'em, Ramirez,” Alex said.
“I’m up,” mumbled the lanky Mexican, rubbing his eyes.
Alex continued on to the next cell.
“Top of the morning to you, Morris,” Alex said, greeting the occupant of Cell two.
A fat, middle-aged man gave a handwave.
Alex took a few steps forward and peered into Cell three. A sleeping form lay motionless, wrapped in a blanket. Luke’s head was concealed beneath the cover, but a shock of his black hair was visible on the pillow.
“On your feet, Glattmann. No lollygagging.”
No answer. No movement.
“Glattmann, wake up!” Alex shouted.
Again, no answer. Alex cocked his head to the side and peered into the dimly lit cell.
A queer feeling began to make itself known in the pit of his stomach.
When Luke Glattmann failed to respond a third time, Alex pulled a ring of keys from his belt and fumbled for the one to open Cell three. Seconds later he pushed the heavy sliding door to the side and entered the cell.
“Glattmann! You all right?” Alex reached out and shook the shape on the bed about where he thought Luke’s shoulder would be. His fingers touched something hard. Not the body of the human being that should have been there.
“What the fuck?” Alex shouted as he threw back the covers.
All that lay beneath the blanket was the two dozen law books Glattmann had been given to help with his legal defense. They had been stacked to resemble a sleeping man.
“No fucking way. . . .” Alex drew his gun instinctively and looked around him, as if Glattmann might be crouched in some impossible place or camouflaged on the wall like a chameleon.
He looked back at the bed.
A mass of black hair lay on the pillow. It looked like Glattmann’s own. He must have sheared it off somehow—to add a touch of realism to this bare-bones decoy.
Alex looked around at every inch of the room, and finally straight above him at the tall ceiling overhead
. He half-expected Glattmann to pounce down on him like Batman descending on his criminal prey.
But that didn’t happen.
What he saw instead was a hole.
A square black hole cut directly into the silver metal of a heating duct. Just large enough for a man to pass through.
A length of cloth of some sort—maybe a piece of twisted sheet—dangled from the opening. Knotted at one end.
How Glattmann had gotten up there or managed to cut through the metal surface of the duct, Alex had no fucking clue.
The only thing he knew for sure was that Luke Glattmann was gone. And it had happened on his watch.
59
Colorado
He's behind me. Untying the ropes on my hands.
He doesn’t tell me not to move. He doesn’t say anything at all.
There's a scent in the air that's half familiar.
Now he's in front of me. Fiddling with the knot on the blindfold.
I feel the ends coming undone. It's loose and now it’s peeled away. Light floods into my uncovered eyes.
A dove-colored whiteness fills the room. At first he’s just a shapely glare, wanting to resolve itself. To become a face.
At last I see him.
Jesus, it's him. My heart beats like some mad African drum.
“It’s you,” I whisper, sounding overwhelmed. Like one witnessing a miracle on some forlorn and lonely mountainside.
It’s him. Not Tad.
Luke.
My Luke.
This is how his name forms in my mind. Possessively.
The moment of shock passes and things well up in me.
Too much at once. “How? How. . . .” I trail off.
Shivering. Delicate earthquake tremors. Through every inch of me. Like an ice skater dragged from a frozen lake.
And the shaking should be from terror. But it's not. And it's not from hate or disgust or fear or from anything like that.
In fact, all the doubtful and hideous things I should be thinking have become impossible. As if the heat of this feeling had burned up everything bad within me. All my little demons, seared into ashen outlines. Fried like moths in a bug zapper.