by A. R. Torre
Simultaneous explosions.
Lights blare on, more than humanly possible, the glare and intensity of them staggering.
A sea of exposure blinding him, causing his hands to raise, his eyes to squint, and that is when his mind has the delayed sense to register a hiss.
Pop.
Hiss.
Pop.
Hiss.
Pop.
Hiss.
The pops increase in speed, the hisses multiply, and his legs flinch as hard items roll and hit the door behind him, the leather of his shoes. One jumps and catches the delicate bone of his shin.
The gas hits his senses. Covering his eyes, pressing hard into eye sockets, trying to prevent penetration, not realizing that his hands, his fingers, are already covered, his inhalations and gasping breaths taking in the fog, a fog which instantly disorients, his brain taking a dip into acid town, nausea and pain gripping his mind and shoving it into a blender of fuck you. He drops to his knees, the light covered for one grateful moment, and he cracks an eye to see the reason for the reprieve. Blinks, despite the pain it creates, opening his eye wider for a painful moment as he endures the agony for one last grip at his sanity.
But it is too late. He has lost it. Must be crazy. An angel of death. Dressed in tight black, her head that of an elephant, disproportionately large, the long trunk winding down and around. She moves closer and points. His body collapses when the first jolt of electricity hits.
CHAPTER 87
TOOTHPICKDICK WASN’T JOKING. Three cans would have been more than enough for my apartment. As it was, I used ten. Puncturing the tenth can, the front door already a bright white cloud, I pulled at the gas mask, paranoid that some of the vapors would get through, my bare spots of skin tingling from it, the urge to take a shower strong. What if my mask is faulty? What if it’s too big? From the sounds of the man before me, his moans, ones that scrape a happy trail through my consciousness, the cans of whatever the hell I bought are doing their job. Doing it well.
I arm the Taser, step forward, clouds of chemicals parting slightly, and aim, at a distance that cannot be missed. Then, I pull. Fire. Smile with satisfaction when he crumples at my feet. I feel capable. Organized. Superior. My hands shake with excitement.
This will be fun.
CHAPTER 88
I USE ZIP ties, not trusting my ability to tie knots, and having seen too many prisoners cut through duct tape with a conveniently found piece of glass. Thank you, Spike TV. Plus, he had them on him, in his pants pocket, my body pat discovering them early on, along with a syringe that I keep for the pure hell of it. Also found: ski mask, knife, keys, and enough condoms to piss me the hell off. Looks like the man had planned for years of fucking. I keep the Taser ready, the tins still attached, a new blast of current shooting through him every time he even thinks about moving.
The gas is still here, showing no sign of dissipation, and I start wondering why I took ToothpickDick’s knowledge vomit without even a cursory verification through Google. What if this shit takes days? How do I eat, shower, talk on the phone, with a gas mask on? Should I open the window? Let the toxic air float through the city, causing sore throats and blurred vision at every turn? At least it is working. More than working. I zip-tie his hands together, at his back, the act a struggle, his hands fighting me for a spell before I get the loop in place and yank. His eyes are shut tightly and he’s blubbering. This man, twenty years my senior, armed with elements of destruction, an infidel knife—impressive—and expensive trappings, is blubbering. Rivers of tears down his face, nonsense hiccupping in big gushy teenagechickattheendofTitanic sobs.
I am crouched at his feet, my hands too small to fully wrap around his ankles, when he shoots a foot up and catches the underside of my chin. Hard. Hard enough to knock me back, the back of my head slamming against the floor. The impact causes tears to spring, a gasp coming from my mouth. Panic sets in when sudden heat sears my eyes, acid from the room creeping underneath my dislodged mask. I reach up, yanking the mask back into place at the same time that the sharp tip of his shoe finds me a second time, this kick connecting at my thigh.
Motherfucker. I wheeze, my eyes blinking rapidly as I roll out of reach, my throat burning as I grab at my thigh, rubbing the spot where I can already feel a knot forming. Anger erupts, my hand grabbing along the floor until I locate the Taser and sit upright, sending a long volley of jolts into this bitch of a man that I may just lose control over and kill.
I wait for a minute before moving, let my rage simmer and eyes recover, hating the rapid pant of my breath. I must remember my size, my limitations. Need to squash my confidence a bit.
I give him another jolt of juice and crawl forward, straddle his shins for more leverage, and zip-tie his ankles, moving as quickly as I can, breathing easier once his feet are under wraps. Then I duct tape his mouth shut and turn off the lights. Sit in the misty dark for a moment and let my heartbeat slow. My eyes readjust, following the line of his prone body, stretched out on the floor, his chest heaving, cries muffled by duct tape, his instruments of attack moved to the kitchen counter. My breath is hot in the mask and I exhale slowly, evenly, trying to get my body under control, trying to tame the madness to a point that it will be productive. I have done it. I have subdued him. He is tied up. My objective attained. Now, I just have to control myself. Gain information. Find out why he is here. Find out why he hurt Mike. For the hell of it, ask where my motherfucking money is. Have fun. Yes, in the midst of fact discovery, I will have one hell of a good time. My own personal present to myself.
CHAPTER 89
JAMIE PUSHES MIKE’S chair through the glass doors, the frigid air hitting them both at the same time. Good lord. He needs to move to Florida. Somewhere where the girls have real tans, somewhere you can open your windows and enjoy fresh air without a parka. Somewhere the sun lights up more than dingy slush and worn faces. She slips slightly on ice and the chair jerks a bit as she catches herself with the handles. “I don’t need you to push me,” he mutters, rubbing his arms and wishing that one of them had had the foresight to bring jackets.
“Shut up. You don’t need to be using your hand or your shoulder.”
“They’re fine.” Not really. With stitches, wound dressing, and gauze, he feels like a fiddler crab, one arm dressed to twice its normal size. But at least he isn’t in pain. The cocktail of meds has helped, along with the injections that make half of his body numb. He feels high, a woozy, sleepy state that barely allows brain function. “What time is it?”
“Eleven.”
Eleven. So this is what the city looks like at eleven at night. Pretty fucking boring. Dark streets, every fifth streetlight out, the city’s budget too tight to allow something as economically wasteful as new bulbs. “Where’s my phone?”
“I told you, it’s at the house. And you’ve already bitched me out about that twice, so shut it. We’ll be back there in ten minutes. I’m sorry that, in the midst of freeing you from your bed and carrying your jingle-bell-ringing ass to the car so you didn’t bleed to death, I didn’t think about your precious cell phone.”
“You found me tied up—that doesn’t seem like an odd situation—one that I might need my cell phone to get out of?”
“I got you out of it… the in-shock, wasn’t-in-shape-to-talk-on-the-phone-anyways person that you were. And no, you should have mentioned that. After telling me not to call the cops. Or after telling me to call that bitch. At that point in time, you should have said ‘And, should we leave this house, bring my phone.’ ”
“She’s not a bitch.”
She yanks the chair to a stop next to her car, a motion that is twice as abrupt as it needs to be. “Oh, she’s a bitch.”
“She’s probably just pissed about her money.” He watches her open the back doors to her Mazda. A car not equipped to carry a wheelchair, but they didn’t have many options. Mike’s big van, the one parked at his house, hasn’t been driven in years, the battery dead, the tires rotten. His parents
thought it would make him more independent. Nothing is as independent as staying home, in a place where everything is easy, where no one stares, and where mountains can be moved and new people created in a few hours with his computer.
“Yeah.” She shoots him a sideways glance. “She mentioned something about wanting her money back. You need help getting in?”
“No.” He pushes himself to the edge of the wheelchair. Uses his arms to support his weight, swinging himself into the low enclosure, bringing his legs along once his butt is in. “You got the chair?”
She nods, flipping clasps and dismantling it. “Yeah.”
“Then let’s get back home. I need to call her.”
He shuts the door with his good hand and leans back, his head against the headrest. By the time she finishes with the chair and climbs into the driver’s seat, he is asleep.
Deanna’s not answering. She’s not answering and he doesn’t know if it’s because she is pissed or dead. He has four missed calls, calls that accrued during their stint at the hospital. Calls that occurred while Jamie was launching into a detailed explanation to a nurse who didn’t care, an unnecessarily elaborate story about a masked intruder who stabbed him and then took off. The nurse nodded, looked busy, scribbled, then whisked him away to surgery while lecturing him on his poor state of nutrition. Calls that rang to voice mail while he was pumped full of antibiotics, fluids, and painkillers. While they repeated the whole song and dance to a pair of uniforms, who nodded respectfully and avoided eye contact. His condition makes people nervous. And they can’t imagine a cripple would lie. No messages were left by Deanna, his voice mail still full from his two days of imprisonment. Jamie also left that important task undone while scrambling around with her head cut off.
His head droops, eyes closing involuntarily, and he catches the action, jerking his forehead back and meeting Jamie’s irritated eyes. She snaps her fingers. Points. Like he’s a well-behaved dog. “Get in bed. I’ll try her again soon.”
He reaches out, snagging her hand and pulls it to his lips, pressing a soft kiss on it. “Thank you,” he says. “For saving me. For everything. For putting up with me.”
She blinks rapidly, her eyes swelling with moisture. “I’m just glad you’re okay.”
He squeezes her hand and drops it, trying to think through the cloud of medication. Should he call the cops? Deanna might be like he was. Trussed up, bleeding to death on the edge of insanity. Waiting in hopes that her lover boy may show. Lover boy might be out of town. Or fucking around. Or dead. Something tugs at him, like an important to-do item that he has forgotten to cross off. The other possibility is that Deanna is dead. He tries to think, tries to backtrack and remember what just occurred to him. Tries to have a rational thought, one that she will approve of, but his eyes close and he nods off. He barely notices when Jamie drags him into bed. Doesn’t notice the fresh sheets she has put down. Doesn’t feel the blanket she pulls over his body. Doesn’t see her sit in the chair, his cell on her lap, and watch, with worried eyes, as he sleeps.
CHAPTER 90
I DID A poor job of shopping. I missed the good stuff: A drill, wire cutters, a hammer. Everyday items that could cause excruciating amounts of pain. I had shopped like a fucking Girl Scout, buying items of restraint as opposed to pain. Thinking that I had weapons at the house, that no more were needed. But my weapons were boring when compared to all of the torture possibilities that could have existed before me. I guess I didn’t expect to torture someone, never thought that would be a viable possibility in my future, never shopped with that scenario in mind. My fantasies have never been about inflicting pain without extinguishing a life. I look at the contents of my safe and listen to the whimper of my visitor, my extended zap of Taser combining with the gas to take the fight completely out of this monster. FingerCutter has become a pussy before my eyes, having a bout of hysteria after the Taser, his panic reducing to whimpers in the last twenty minutes of silence. He needs to calm the fuck down. He needs to man up a little, find the backboned individual that kicked the shit out of my chin. I can’t question him like this.
I stand, walk over to the window and open it. Send a silent apology to everyone in the surrounding blocks as I let the poisonous fog out. I can’t take any more of this mask.
The room clears quickly, the cool blast of air sweeping in and sucking it out. Hopefully that will cause him to stop. Between the wheezing and sniffling and sobs, I’m on the razor edge of killing him just so my apartment will be quiet again.
My cell rings.
CHAPTER 91
JAMIE ISN’T EVEN sure she should call the girl, but Mike had been so insistent over it, had been so irritated over the lack of his cell when he had finally stopped his jingle belling and came back to sanity. Jamie dials the number and waits, breathing a sigh of relief when the girl doesn’t answer, a cheery voice mail coming on that sounds nothing like the bitch from earlier. She hangs up.
Less than a minute later, the cell rings, “Deanna” showing up on the screen.
Jamie fights the urge to do a Hail Mary. “Hello?”
“You called?”
“We just got back from the hospital. Do you want to talk to Mike?”
“Yes.”
She crosses to him, shaking his shoulder gently, watching his eyes and speaking as soon as they open. “Mike. It’s Deanna. Did you want to talk to her?”
He blinks, his eyes looking around, then finding hers, and she waits for him to come to, starts to repeat the question but he nods. Pushes himself to a more upright position and holds out his hand.
“Hey.”
Jamie can’t understand the response, but can hear the snap-fire volley of words through the earpiece. “I don’t know who he is.” Jamie watches closely, her mind trying to put the pieces together but coming up short. “He didn’t mention anything about that…” His eyes close and she steps forward, thinking he is asleep, reaching for the phone, but is surprised when his voice comes, shaky in its message. “I told him who you are. Where you are. You need to get out of there. Now. He’s got to be on his way, but he doesn’t know.” His eyes open and he glances over, his eyes opening a bit as if surprised to see her there. He covers the mouthpiece. “Can you give me a minute?”
Jamie can feel the set of her jaw and knows how it must look. Like she is stubborn. She tries to relax it, attempts a gracious smile, and nods, backing up and reaching for the knob, stepping into the hall and shutting the door. Then she leans forward, presses her ear against the wood, but can’t hear anything.
CHAPTER 92
“HE DOESN’T KNOW what?” I pace the hallway, a jacket thrown on over my tight black sweats, the gas mask hanging from my hand. I couldn’t answer the cell with the mask on, so I stepped out of 6E and called his cell back.
“He doesn’t know that you… are… whatever you are. Capable of things.”
“What does he know?” I crack the door slightly, peek through to make sure FingerCutter is still prone and behaving. The bit of acidic air makes my eyes water, and I close the door, light-headed for a moment.
“Your address. Everything’s kind of hazy, I was in a lot of pain, but I know I gave him that. And your name.”
“And at what point did you decide to spend a million of my dollars to send over an unhelpful warning?” I don’t fight the hard edge that comes into my voice.
“I’m sorry, Dee. He stabbed me in the fucking shoulder. I had to give him something… thought that that would distract him, convince him that I was telling the truth. It worked, till he saw a photo of you. Then he—” his voice cracks a little. “He started to cut my fingers off. I broke—I couldn’t…”
A piece of me inside, a piece that I thought died in my family’s kitchen, rolls over in my heart. I clear my throat and go for a hard tone. One that doesn’t give away the sentimental tug inside of me. “Next time give him your own money. And from what your guard dog told me, it was more like part of a finger. Unnecessary skin. You need to man up. He was prob
ably just fucking with you. It’s a finger, Mike. You have nine more.” My words come out level and in control. They hide the heartache that I’m experiencing at hearing the break in Mike’s voice. He sounds like a stranger, some broken and scared kid. Not my Mike, my sarcastic rock, the virtual badass who can accomplish anything I desire, the cocky sexual demon who flirts out of one side of his mouth while keeping my ego in check through the other.
His voice hardens, a bit of the man I know coming back. “You aren’t taking this seriously. You need to run as far away from your apartment as you can get. This guy is scary. He was not ‘fucking’ with me. He came here for you, was pissed to find me. I have a hole in my shoulder big enough to kill me. He’s got a hard-on for you, he’s—”
“Could this be about Ralph?” I interrupt. “You think that’s what this is about?”
“Are you listening?!” Mike’s voice is at a level I have never heard from him, and I have to smile at the shake in it. No joke, the man is scared. Really scared. Pissing himself, and it’s all over the sniffling, droolingalloverhimself wimp that is on my floor.
Honestly, after hearing the tremor in his voice, I’m surprised he didn’t hand over my Cayman account funds also. “Can you get my money back?”
“I could, but I’m not touching that shit. That psychopath let me live. Hopefully he will forget my name and move along on his merry way. I’m not doing something to bring him back here. I’m sorry, Dee, but I can’t.”
“Don’t worry,” I snap. “He’s not coming back. But you’re saying you don’t need any information from him in order to get the money back?”
“Not if it’s been left where I put it.” He sighs, his voice dropping off slightly, as if he has moved the phone away from his mouth. “If it’s been moved around, if someone did the smart thing, subdivided it and hopscotched it around, sent it offshore, put in a few trans—”