by E. Z. Rinsky
“Oh Christ,” I whisper. “Courtney . . .”
“What?” he says, preoccupied with snapping pictures of the flaccid sac that was once Rico from every angle.
“Stop that a second.”
He obliges, lowers the camera.
“Mindy was confused today, in the aquarium,” I say, trying to keep my voice even, but I’m feeling the beginning of a dry heave. “Because the book she had was newly bound. In leather.”
Courtney cocks his head, sees the hide I’m displaying, and then the implications of it seep down his face: His high forehead crinkles first, his eyes go wide, his lips pucker into a grimace of the most profound sort of disgust. The hanging skin, the basins of fluids . . .
“This is a tannery,” he whispers in horror.
“And look,” I say, pulling the shelves open one by one. Each contains a similar sample, with a different photo and number attached. There are twenty-four shelves. All occupied except the top three. The three from the top holds only a passport-sized photo of Rico, and the square for today’s date ripped out of a calendar.
Courtney’s hands are trembling. He frowns, opens the fourth drawer down, that contains the first skin. He stares at the picture of the boy for a second. Tears are welling in his eyes.
He swallows his emotion, and gets to work. Jerks open each drawer in turn, snaps a picture of each passport-sized photo. The numbers are squares cut from a calendar. Courtney kneels to open the lower drawers. He works through them methodically until the very bottom drawer. A little hiss of air leaks from his nostrils.
“Look, Frank,” he whispers.
The picture paperclipped is of a young boy, along with a little square that says twenty-four in big letters, October in small ones. 1997. Twenty years ago.
“This is the first one,” Courtney says. “The brother of the waitress that Oliver killed. His body was never found.”
I have to look away. Take a step back and survey the whole grisly scene. Courtney closes the last drawer and turns his back on the cabinet, crouching. His skin is ashen. He looks like he’s going to be sick.
“So Oliver Vicks isn’t in prison?” I say, half to myself.
“I . . .” Courtney trails off, shakes his head helplessly. “It sure seems like he was here. But I don’t see how he would have gotten out of prison without us knowing.”
I grit my teeth.
“Say he’s not in prison,” I say. “Would he do this to Rico just because he needed number twenty-two?”
“I don’t know,” Courtney says.
I approach Rico’s hanging skin. Force myself to get close, look down at the neck and chest area. As I’d expected, there’s a ring of raw pink skin around his neck. He’d been locked up in the other room a while.
And that explains the turtleneck—
“Frank! Here’s the bag!”
I jerk up. I rush to join Courtney at the back of the room. The pink duffel is tucked between a couple closed barrels of what might be brine.
I grab the straps and my heart sinks immediately.
“Too light,” I say. “Money’s not in there.”
I open the zipper, and recognize Rico’s puffy black parka. Pull it out and set it on the ground.
Indeed, there are no bonds. Just the rest of Rico’s possessions: The blue jeans he was wearing, the turtleneck, both folded. Turn the bag upside down and shake. Wallet and keys clatter to the bronze floor and that’s it.
“Shit,” I say. “Shit, shit, shit.”
I drop my head into my hands. The room is spinning. I feel like I’m in a nightmare.
No money. No books.
Courtney stares at turtleneck and jeans and wrings his hands, as if he still can’t believe there’s no money.
“We need to get out of here,” I whisper, taking another look around. The hanging carcass, the brine, the file cabinet, the workbench, the nauseating pattern on the ceiling. “We can’t be found here. With this body . . .”
“Agreed,” he said. “Although . . .”
He picks up the pink bag, and probes through the stitching until finding the GPS chip he embedded yesterday.
“Oliver will come back for this skin,” he says. “And he’ll probably take it to wherever he has the books stashed.”
I can’t even watch as Courtney sews the tiny chip into some unspeakable part of what used to be Rico.
“Done.”
Courtney snatches one of the collars off the corkboard and follows me back through the tapestry into the first chamber.
Something doesn’t make sense. Rico brought back Oliver the books and the money, and this is his reward?
And it sounded like Rico was worried this would happen, so why didn’t he ask for help on the phone?
If that was even Rico on the phone . . .
“Where was his phone?” I ask Courtney, as he pulls open the blast door leading back into the red hallway. “His wallet and keys were there, but not his phone.”
Courtney stops.
“You’re right. And we know he had a phone, because he was texting you.”
I pull the iPhone out of my pocket. 142 missed calls from Sampson, and text messages scrolling down the locked screen forever.
I unlock the phone and go to text messages. 219 text messages from Sampson, two from the same number that texted me in the aquarium, sent at 8:02 pm. Around the time we were renting the car.
left Boks wher they belong, where Soph never goes. Ya
Dstry them b4 he finds them. God hlp us.
Courtney has been very still since we got back in the Accord. I drove for just a few minutes, then had to pull over onto the shoulder, my hands were shaking so badly. Courtney’s eyes are black and wet. He’s usually got a pretty good stomach for crime scenes and, more importantly, doesn’t dwell on them. What’s done is done—all that matters are how the details can help him figure out what happened. When he worked for the DEA, overdoses and butchered drug mules were pretty much par for the course.
But he’s obviously bothered now.
“Twenty-two people . . .” he says softly. “How could that have happened? He’s supposed to be in prison.”
I don’t respond. Outside the car, fields of grain extend forever. The air is so clean, the earth so flat, that the moon and stars really light everything up.
“How could a person do that to a kid?” Courtney says, almost pleading, like he wants me to reassure him in some way. To tell him that what we saw was some kind of mistake. “He was fourteen.”
“He’s an animal,” I say, although really that’s being a bit hard on animals; creatures of all kinds kill each other. That’s natural. But mutilation, playing with the bodies long after any rage has worn off, treating them like toys . . .
“It seems likely that somehow Oliver Vicks is slaughtering people,” Courtney says slowly, gaze hardened with a sort of rage I’m not sure I’ve ever seen on him before. “And getting away with it because everybody thinks he’s in prison.”
“If he escaped why wasn’t it in the papers?” I ask.
“It’s been twenty years . . . I guess it’s possible he got parole a few years ago and nobody cared enough to write about it.”
I pinch my nose. Trying to get my brain to think clearly is like trying to start a fire by snapping your fingers.
“God man,” I say. “I’m so drained.”
Courtney winces.
Bad choice of words.
“A boy . . .” I massage my temples. “Why is he doing this? Just for binding material?”
“I don’t know.”
“Okay, let’s just think this through,” I say, speaking softly. “Rico had been chained up there for a while. Then he was released to do the swap with us. When he saw it wasn’t going to go through, when those guys were distracted, he made a run for it, along with the books.”
Courtney cocks his head and purses his lips, grants me the slightest nod of agreement without looking in my direction.
“So . . .” I continue. “He knew
if he was caught with the books he was as good as dead. So he outran them enough to hide the books somewhere, presumably to use as leverage, to barter his freedom.”
Courtney’s head rocks side to side, as he weighs my logic.
“Okay. I’m with you,” he says. “But apparently that negotiation didn’t go well.”
I scratch my cheek.
“I think Rico realized the situation was hopeless at some point. If I’m Oliver, I would chain him up until he told me where they are, then kill him. So he texted us, ditched his phone so nobody could see the text, then decided he might as well get it over with.” I exhale slowly. “If we don’t get those books for Sampson, fast . . . I mean forget about canceling my passport. The guy is a US Senator. He could make our lives really bad.”
Courtney finally turns to me. There’s a faint glow in his eyes. I know there’s a part of him that, despite the horrid things we’ve seen tonight, craves this intellectual exercise.
“So where will Sophnot never go?” he asks.
I shake my head slowly.
“We need to first see what the deal is at the prison. He’s probably still there, right? And people are just doing crazy things in a house he designed.”
“Mmmhmm,” Courtney says, a nice selection from his menu of patronizing sounds. “But it seems more likely that he got parole and Sampson didn’t know about it. And that’s why those men—his men–wanted the swap to go through, with us thinking we were just dealing with Rico. Sampson gives him back the books, and bam. Oliver Vicks steals forty-eight million dollars, and Sampson doesn’t even know he’s been robbed.”
I chew on that for a second. My stomach gurgles, but I can’t tell if it’s from hunger or nausea.
“You know,” Courtney says. “This is not the first documented case of anthropodermic bibliology.”
“Huh?”
“Anthropodermic bibliology is the medieval ‘art’ of binding books with—” Courtney coughs. “Human skin.”
“I can’t believe a term for that already exists.”
Courtney gives me a courtesy nod. He’s thinking hard, lips moving slightly like he’s mumbling incantations to himself.
“What’s he been doing, Frank?” Courtney mutters, mostly to himself. “What does Oliver Vicks want? Why did he turn himself in and go to prison? Why does he want all this money? Why did he write these books? Why does he have things like this?”
Courtney digs something out from the glove compartment with a hand still gloved in latex. It’s the collar he took. It’s like the two in the antechamber, except mounted on the front of this one is a double-pronged fork.
“What is that?” I ask.
“It’s called a heretic’s fork,” says Courtney, holding the device by the tips of his fingers like it’s radioactive. “I saw one in a museum once. It’s a medieval torture device. Two prongs point upwards to rest upon the sinner’s jugular, two against the sternum. If the victim lets his chin drop, he bleeds out in minutes. Most prisoners make it two days before succumbing to exhaustion.”
“Heretic’s fork? So they put that on nonbelievers?”
Courtney puts it back in the glove compartment.
“Yes. And I think this is handmade, Frank. Someone—perhaps Oliver Vicks–put an outrageous amount of time into making these things.”
“Because he’s crazy. And had a shitload of time on his hands in prison.”
“No, no no.” Courtney shakes his head seriously. The little fire burns stronger in his eyes. The fire of the hunt. “No, he’s not crazy at all. If this is Oliver Vicks, well. Megalomaniacal, delusional perhaps, but he’s methodical. I think he planned this all twenty years in advance. And it worked. He has just stolen forty-eight million dollars, and gotten away with yet another murder. He’s—I hate to say it—but he might be a genius.”
I start up the car. I think I’m ravenously hungry, but can’t be sure. Toward the extremes, hunger and nausea can become indistinguishable.
“What was it you said?” I say. “‘Come with me to Colorado, Frank. Got an easy job. Should only take a day or two . . .’”
Courtney’s face wilts like a flower in vinegar.
“Frank, I’m so—”
“I was kidding, sorry. Don’t feel bad about it,” I say. “It’s my own fucking fault. I should have stuck with law school.”
Two in the morning. Four hours and change since leaving the red house. We’re in a booth at a Wendy’s in Denver proper, been sitting here for at least an hour. Only other customers are some drunk high school kids. I really am starving—haven’t eaten anything since fruit at Sampson’s guesthouse, but have long since given up trying to force down my salad of sour iceberg lettuce and beefsteak tomato. What a cruel trick that anxiety is linked to your digestive system . . . I’d take a headache over a stomachache anyways.
Just wait. That comes later.
The iPhone is between us on the table. I texted Mindy at eleven on the dot:
Nothing. Talk in the AM.
That initially provoked a flurry of responses demanding clarification, but she seems to have finally fizzled out. Anyways, Sampson is doing more than enough to keep the phone busy. Every couple minutes it buzzes again with his number. Eighty-three more missed calls since we left the red house.
Court is zoned out. His eyes keep swiveling back and forth, like he’s mentally popping back into that grisly chamber to check if we missed anything.
I sip on my third Wendy’s coffee of the evening, which I generously infused with a bottle of Jack I bought across the street. This combo is the only thing I’ve been able to get down the gullet. Not sure what I expect it to be doing—soothing me? I’ve never been so simultaneously wired and fatigued in my life. I can feel my pulse pounding behind my eyes, and my stomach feels like it’s filled with fighting fish. Haven’t slept since three in the morning, after walking in on Sampson.
“What do we do?” I say to the tabletop. “We can’t keep ignoring Sampson.”
I look out the window. Colfax Boulevard is pretty dead this time of night. Across the street glows an empty 7-Eleven. A juvenile delinquenty-looking crew sits on a curb laughing and smoking cigarettes. Envision myself storming over to them, plucking the cigs from their mouths, stamping them out, and telling them it’s a fucking school night.
Courtney’s eyes are droopy, and his pale face looks ghostly under the harsh light. He keeps blinking in confusion at his own untouched salad, as if the limp lettuce holds the power to clarify everything we’ve seen tonight. As the shock from the chamber fades slightly, the grim reality of our current situation takes its place. No books. No money. In just two days here we’ve spiraled down and crash landed in the middle of an incomprehensible swamp of shit, and it’s not going to be easy to climb out.
“The way I see it, the job we were hired for is over,” I say.
“In a sense.” Courtney chews on his thumbnail. “Failed, but over.”
The phone buzzes again. Courtney and I lock eyes.
“Maybe I should pick up and tell Sampson the truth,” I say. “We fucked up. Forget our fee, sorry it didn’t work out, but thanks very much for the opportunity. And if there’s any way he could still give me that passport, that would be lovely.”
Courtney prods his dead salad with his plastic fork. The phone keeps insistently buzzing, like an angry bee.
“That sounds foolproof,” he says, despite his exhaustion, managing to summon enough strength for a snotty little smirk.
“What else can we do?” I say. Phone goes silent for the moment. “Huh? What’s your genius idea?”
“Call the authorities. Show them the chamber, explain everything.”
I actually laugh.
“First of all, I’m on the Interpol list. Second, you’re suggesting that we bring the cops to a murder scene and tell them that Oliver Vicks did it. Well, what if they go to prison, and somehow he’s still there, Court? You think about that? Then who’s the prime suspect? Probably the last people who ever spoke to Ri
co—with hundreds of aquarium goers to testify to that.”
The phone starts ringing again. Can almost hear the frustration in every desperate vibration.
“We’ll ignore it,” he says. “Until we decide what we’re going to say.”
Courtney reaches for the phone to silence it, and his eyebrows shoot to the ceiling.
“Frank,” he says, almost choking. “It’s not Sampson. It’s the number we spoke to before . . . at the guesthouse. What we thought was Rico.”
I snatch it from him. My throat tightens. There’s no mistaking that string of digits.
“Should I answer?” I ask.
“No!” squeaks Courtney. “Er. Actually. I don’t know. Wait.”
He strokes his cheeks furiously.
“Answer or not?” I demand.
“I’m thinking!”
And then the call stops. We both stare at the now silent phone. For just a moment I understand what Courtney hates about these things: the cold inhumanity, the flashing lights which only represent—but are not truly–other people.
It starts buzzing again. Same number.
“I think we gotta answer,” Courtney whispers. “It’s worse if we don’t.”
I plug my headphones into the phone, and we each stick in one earbud. I close my eyes, think a silent, wordless prayer: just an ethereal wish to keep Courtney and I alive.
“Hello?” I say, as innocuously as I can manage. But my heart is in my throat, and knees shaking frantically under the booth.
“I’d like my books.”
It’s the Darth Vader voice again. I feel like the booth just disappeared from underneath me, and I’m suddenly accelerating downward. The head of my plastic fork snaps off; apparently I’d been squeezing it for quite a while.
Before I can think, I say: “I’m sorry, you must have the wrong number.”
Courtney attempts to fit an entire fist in his mouth. The robot voice laughs.
“No, I’m quite sure this is the right number. Is this Frank Lamb? Or Courtney Lavagnino?”
Courtney looks back at me with the frozen eyes of a cow discovering for the first time what hamburgers are made of. His fingers dig into the table like he’s scared of falling off.