The Red Hunter

by Lisa Unger

“Zoey is getting too grown up, man,” Paul said with a shake of his head.

  “Don’t I know it.”

  “Good thing her uncle Paul taught her how to fight,” he said. “I feel bad for the mope who messes with your girl.”

  His girl. Few things worried him more than Zoey. How do I provide for you? Protect you from the ugliness in this world? Make sure you know how to protect yourself after I’m gone?

  “What is it?” asked Paul, squinting with concern. “What’s on your mind?”

  “You hungry?”

  Paul’s frown deepened. “Sure,” he said. “I never met a burger or a beer that I didn’t like.”

  • • •

  IT WAS NEARLY NINE, SO Burgers and Brew was quiet, just an hour from closing. It was Wednesday, a big game that night at the high school. It would be over now, folks heading back to their houses to finish up homework, get ready for the looming workday. Every good, law-abiding, family-centered person would be where he belonged—in front of the television or helping with homework, cleaning up after dinner. Heather, he knew, would be lying on Zoey’s bed reading while Zoey studied for her algebra exam tomorrow. Or they’d be watching something together on the television in the master bedroom. After a certain hour, only the singles, the cops, and other night-shift workers, and the thugs were still out.

  He and Paul took a booth toward the back.

  “You’ve been on the job a long time,” he said. “Like me.”

  “Sure,” Paul said. “Yeah.”

  “Does it ever bother you?”

  Peg, the waitress came and took their order—pale ale and a couple of towering, gooey cheeseburgers, fries. He’d have to lie to Heather; his cholesterol was through the roof. Paul didn’t answer to anyone, never married, no kids, a New York City beat cop now for fifteen years. Neither of them ever wanted to be anything else, just like the old man. Well, not just like him.

  “Does what bother me?”

  “The unfairness of it all,” Chad said. “The inequity.”

  “How so?”

  He leaned in. “How some people have so much and other people so little. How the good guys struggle to make ends meet, but the thugs are driving Hummers?”

  Paul flattened his big palm against the wood of the table, looked down at his hand.

  “You sound like your dad.”

  “He was right.”

  “Okay,” said Paul. “What if he was? Is it news that the world is an unfair place?”

  Peg brought their beer. “There you go, boys. Enjoy.”

  They clinked glasses, each drank a swallow. It was cold and light, hops tingling and flavorful. The wash of it was a relief; he felt some of the day’s tension washing away.

  “I’m just saying,” he said. “What if you had a chance to even the score just a little?”

  Paul pinned him in an icy blue stare, took another swallow of his beer. “I don’t know what that means.”

  “Well,” he said. “I’m about to tell you.”

  No one ever really talked about debt, the weight of it, what it did to you. They never told you how it started small. For them, it was the engagement ring. It was too much, he knew that. She was a teacher and he was a cop. They were never going to be rich. Never. And it was never what they wanted. But the lady in the jewelry shop, she kept showing him ever bigger rings. It’s the purchase of a lifetime. Every time she looks at it, she’ll know how much you love her. One day it will go to the daughter you have together, or maybe your future grandson’s fiancée years from now. What seems like a lot right now won’t seem like much five years from now. We have a convenient financing plan.

  He’d never bought on credit before. His father had taught him better. The old man wasn’t up for any best-father awards, but he’d been frugal as hell, managing to pay for both his and Paul’s educations, never borrowing a dime.

  Then it was the mortgage, the new car. When Zoey came, the private preschool where Heather taught. They got a discount, but still it was a small fortune every year. Then Heather wanted to stay home with Zoey, wanted to try for another baby, and he wanted that, too. We’ll make it work. We’ll cut way back. The bills mounted slowly. The cruise they really couldn’t afford, that trip to Disney. As a father, he wanted to give his girl the things the other kids had—those certain jeans, that backpack, the computer.

  It just took a couple of months of charging and not paying off the balance. It crept up and up and up.

  Until one day, when he sat down to add it all up, he realized that they were buried. It wasn’t that much. But in comparison to what he made? It might as well have been a million dollars. Day to day, it didn’t matter very much. But it was as if there were this weight strapped on his back, invisible to everyone else but making everything he did harder.

  But that’s not what he wanted to talk to Paul about. It was something else. When he was done, Paul hung his head, folded his hands in front of him.

  “What you’re saying,” said Paul. He paused. “What you’re thinking. It’s wrong.”

  “Wrong?” Chad said. “But it’s right to deal drugs, make a fortune off of other people’s addiction, misery, and death and then have so much cash that you need to bury it in a field outside of town?”

  “How do you even know about this?”

  “I have a confidential informant on the inside.”

  “A CI? You trust this person?”

  “As much as you can trust a meth head, yeah. He’s not lying.”

  “Why doesn’t he steal it himself?”

  “Because it’s guarded,” Chad said. “And he’s a fucking coward.”

  Paul rubbed at the bridge of his nose. “This is just a theoretical conversation, right? Philosophical? Because I know you’re not really thinking about doing this.”

  “Sure,” Chad said. He was a little disappointed, because part of him thought Paul might be, might be interested in what he had to say. Because he hadn’t always been Mister Let’s Play by the Rules. It was a low-risk, high-yield proposition. And Chad didn’t know a cop who didn’t—now and then—choke on how unfair it all seemed. “Theoretically, if you were going to do it, how would you go about it?”

  Paul dipped his head, drained the last of his beer, signaled to Peg for two more.

  fifteen

  He threw me to the floor in front of my father’s feet. Blood, warm and sticky, sluiced down my neck.

  “Daddy?” The word was a wretch, a wail in my throat.

  “Zoey.”

  He started to thrash, the chair he was bound to rocking, his head tossing. It was mind-bending. A horror movie.

  “There’s no money here—there just isn’t,” he said. I’d never heard him sound like that, voice wobbling with fear. “You’ve made a terrible mistake. Please. Just let my family go. They don’t know who you are and neither do I.”

  The world warped and pulled into nightmarish unreality. My blood was smeared on the floor, my back screaming. The man, the one who’d pulled me through the window had an iron grip, was on his knees holding my arms behind my back as I thrashed. The knife, I kept thinking. The knife is in his pocket. If I can get to it, I can save us. But my arms were butterfly wings, useless, pinned. The other man stood over my father.

  “This can be over,” said the other man. He glanced in my direction. He wasn’t big. My father was bigger. But the muscles on his arms strained against his shirt, and his neck was thick and his thighs looked like jackhammers. “You just have to tell us where it is and we can go. No hard feelings, right?”

  My mother moaned on the floor, shifted, blood pooling. I watched the black-red puddle spread, and I think part of me went to another place. That was the first time I went to the place of the watcher. I had no choice. What small amount of power I had as a person had been stripped from me. A part of me rose up, an impartial observer, and drifted above the scene. I was blissfully separate for a moment.

  “Mom.”

  “Shh,” she said, her voice gurgling and strange. She was about
two feet from me. “Shh, baby.”

  “Your wife is going to die,” said the standing man. Through the balaclava, I could only see his lips and the dark stubble around them, two flat dark eyes. I started to thrash. “If you tell us where it is, we’ll go. You can still save her.”

  “Dad,” I begged, my voice a whisper, no air in my lungs. “Tell them.”

  “I swear to Christ,” he said. He was weeping now. “There’s nothing in this house. I would give you anything I owned. You can have our wallets. Take me to an ATM; I will give you everything I have in my accounts. My wife’s rings, all her jewelry. Take it.”

  “That’s not what we’re talking about, Officer,” said the man on top of me. “And you. Fucking. Know it. You’re beat, okay. You’re not going to save your family and get away with that money. Tell us where it is.”

  My father bowed his head, released a broken sob. “There’s—no—money.”

  In the watcher mind, I saw it all: my mother was dying, the blood slowly spilling from her, motionless now, silent, my father was helpless. What they thought he had, he obviously did not have. The men here, the boy shaking by the door, they were killers, criminals. They were going to kill us all.

  “I know where it is,” I said.

  The standing man lifted his hands. “Finally,” he said. “Someone in this family with half a fucking brain.”

  He strode over to me, leaned down close. His breath stank of cigarettes. “Okay, sweetie, tell the nice men. Where the fuck is it?”

  “It’s in the basement.”

  “Zoey,” said my father. “What are you doing? She’s lying. Don’t you touch her.”

  That’s when the man on top of me dragged me into the basement, down the steps, pulling me by arms. Air in my lungs again, I screamed and screamed, my limbs knocking against the stairs, the wall, the hard concrete ground, my arms feeling like he might pull them right out of the sockets. Then a cold, hard crack to the jaw.

  “Shut up,” he growled, his voice taut with anger and frustration. “For fuck’s sake, just shut up.”

  I lay there among a field of stars, my ears ringing. I couldn’t move from the pain, from the shock. On my side I curled up, waiting for breath, for strength, for some idea that would save us. The other man dragged my father down next, threw him to the ground, his arms bound. They tied my arms behind my back, pulled at me savagely.

  “Okay,” said the older man. That voice, gravel and glass, it imprinted itself in my psyche. For the rest of my life I would hear it in my dreams. “Little girl, where is it?”

  “It’s back there,” I said, nodding toward the far corner. “All the way in the back, in a trunk.”

  “Zoey,” said my father. “What are you doing?”

  The smaller man went off in the direction I’d indicated. The other man sat astride me. That’s when he started touching me, the face, my throat, my breast. I thrashed and bucked, but he must have weighed a thousand pounds. I couldn’t get away from him, couldn’t move. That feeling of powerlessness, being helpless. Never let them pin you. Never let it be a match of strength alone.

  “What do you see?” he called. “What’s back there?”

  “There’s nothing back here.” The voice was muffled. He was right. There was nothing back there. I had no idea what they were looking for. I was stalling, buying time.

  The man on top of me took out the hunting knife.

  “Hey.” It was the boy, standing on the stairs now. He was thin and pale, standing masked in the shadows. “Don’t hurt her anymore. Please.”

  “Shut up, kid,” said the man on top. “Go upstairs and do your job.”

  I knew that the blade on that knife was sharp as a razor.

  “Where is it?” said the standing man, his voice low and cool, his lips pulled in a grim smile. “Somebody better start talking.”

  And then the knife was on my skin and I was alone in the world with the pain of my flesh slicing open, my screams seeming to rocket through my father’s body causing him to arc on the ground. His voice drowned out all other sounds. That knife, what happened next, most of it is not accessible. The psyche splits, my shrink said, or can in trauma. It does what it must to survive. Again that rising of myself above to watch a man cut and beat a helpless young girl with her father wailing bound and immobilized just feet away, her mother dying upstairs. Until. Until. How long did it go on? It couldn’t have been more than an hour. Somewhere in the far distance, a high-pitched wail. A siren.

  I didn’t hear the shots. The one that killed my father. The one that was supposed to kill me. They didn’t need to shoot my mother. She bled to death upstairs.

  sixteen

  The problem, the real problem was that Raven just felt so floaty all the time. Disconnected from the people around her, even her parents. She’d be standing there—at school, or even sometimes with her friends, and she’d feel herself just lift away. She would start thinking about something else, or the ambient noise around her would become distracting. She’d notice a thing about the other person—like how silky was her hair, or how big were her eyes, or how pretty were her clothes. And then she’d think about that person’s parents, and it would get her thinking about her own origins. And then she’d start drifting toward that dark place, that shadowy region. Once she was there, that’s when she did or said the kind of things she regretted later.

  Raven never felt like that with Troy. He grounded her somehow, kept her in the moment. He had her tightly by the hand and they were striding—he was striding because he had long legs and an engine inside that caused him to practically run everywhere and she was half-jogging to keep up with him—down Avenue A toward the club where Andrew Cutter’s band Trash and Angels was playing. She was wearing a tight black dress, which she would never be allowed to wear if either of her parents were around. She had taken a pair of thigh-high black boots from Ella’s stash of clothes in her father’s closet, and this kind of distressed denim cropped jacket. She blew her hair flat, made her eyes smoky in shades of brown. In the mirror, the girl she saw was the polar opposite of her mother—dark to light, soft features to fine. There was something in her mouth—its fullness, its upturned corners. Something in the apples of her cheeks that evoked Claudia. But there was nothing of Ayers. Not a shade or a shadow that she could see.

  When she came out into the living room, Troy looked at her funny and didn’t look away.

  “What?” she asked. She found her bag and crossed the long strap across her body.

  “Aren’t you—” he started. He took off his glasses and looked away, wiped the lenses on his shirt. The color had come up in his cheeks. What was his problem? “Aren’t you going to be cold?”

  “We’ll take a cab.”

  She was cold. The wind had picked up, and she’d opted out of a heavier jacket over her outfit. She didn’t want to disrupt the look and have to worry about a coat all night. But traffic was ridiculous, and they finally just got out of the cab that was crawling and costing them a fortune, deciding to walk the last ten blocks. Trash and Angels went on at eleven, and it was already quarter to the hour.

  At the door, the line was stupid long, stretching up the street and wrapping around. It was kind of the “it” indie band venue of the moment, Downtown Beirut, named after an old East Village dive bar that had closed long ago. Now, supposedly there was some burgeoning music scene in Beirut and hence the name of the hole in the wall.

  Troy stopped at the end of the line. But Raven kept going, and he followed. They were not going to have to wait in line. They were hot and well-dressed, and young—twenty-two-year-olds that looked like sixteen-year-olds. No one was going to know that they were sixteen-year-olds trying to pass for twenty-two. The bulldozer-sized bouncer at the door—complete with shaved, tattooed head—and his slender, leather-clad hostess, lithe with dark skin and bleached white hair, never said a word. She just lifted the rope and shined that light on their fake IDs. They must have been good—like the kind of IDs that would get you in trouble
if you got caught carrying them. They must have been the real deal, illegally obtained, and that was a serious crime. The hostess didn’t look twice at the cards in her hand, there wasn’t that tense moment when you wondered if you were going to get kicked out. She just handed them back to Troy and gave him a hungry smile. Troy flushed again. Raven grabbed his hand and pulled him inside.

  “How do you always do that?” he yelled over the din.

  “Do what?”

  “Just walk in like you own the place.” There was that goofy look again.

  “I do own it,” she said. “In my mind.”

  They both laughed at that, and he dropped an arm around her. At the bar, they just ordered Cokes, neither of them big drinkers. The crowd was pretty edgy—lots of ear gauges and tattoos, black leather. But it was the usual New York City mix—some people looked like they just got off work—loose ties and jackets hung over seats, silk blouses and pencil skirts. Some people were grunge, hair hanging and dirty looking, jeans ripped. Other people looked like they stopped by on their way home from the gym. One guy could have passed for homeless. In New York City, you fit. Even if you didn’t fit in anywhere else, you could find a place for yourself there. Not like the place her mother had dragged her. There you were one thing—blonde, pretty, tight-bodied, and rich—or you were a freak, an outsider. Not even a freak. You were nothing.

  They found a spot by the stage, sipped their Cokes, and looked around. There was a throb, a deep pulse to the music playing over the speakers. Some of the band members were on stage, milling about, setting up equipment. She watched for him, Andrew Cutter, son of a rapist, her possible half brother. But she didn’t see him up there. In his photos he looked like an anime warrior, a mop of black hair, jet eyes, pale skin with an upturned nose and a cupid’s bow mouth. He had a mellow, easy voice and was a master on the guitar. There were some riffs from offstage, the drummer beat out a quick rhythm. The music on the speakers started to stutter, and then the rest of Trash and Angels burst onto the stage and immediately launched into one of their hard-rock jams.