The Salt Line

by Holly Goddard Jones

  “Connected,” the screen flashed.

  And then, there he was. It was probably around 1:00 p.m., and she hadn’t been sure where they would catch him—out for a martini lunch at Lupo’s, or maybe in Patrick’s filthy office over the flagship garage location. At Jane’s. But he was at his home office, the one attached to their bedroom, tie knotted, hands folded across his desktop. As if he had known she would call. Where was his shock, his confusion? How could it be that he seemed, as ever, unsurprised, even in control?

  “Thank God, Marta. I’ve been worried sick. I hoped I would hear from you.”

  He didn’t look sick. Or even ruffled. But she accepted the concern with a nod. “Thanks. Thanks for answering.” She chanced a glance toward Andy but couldn’t make out his form in the darkness beyond the bright left wing of the display. “Why have you been worried? Why did you think you’d hear from me?”

  There was a shuffling behind her. Something hard pressed against her side, and she stiffened, though she’d expected as much.

  David’s mouth tilted almost imperceptibly—a flash of mirth across his mask of solemnity. “Well, I don’t know what you know. What you’re supposed to know. But you can tell your captors that I got the message they left at the Lenoir substation.”

  “What message?” Marta dared to ask, and the screen suddenly darkened, and the hard pressure against her side became a painful jab.

  “Get on script,” Joe hissed. “You get one warning here. This is it. This is the one.”

  “What message is he talking about?” Marta asked again. She wasn’t sure why she pressed Joe, except that there was a petty pleasure for her in it. The pettiest. Four people were dead, after all. If she hadn’t been able to wholly believe it before, she couldn’t deny it now.

  “Do as Joe says,” June said from behind her. There was a dangerous flatness to her tone. Marta, afraid to say anything at all, simply bobbed her head.

  After a moment, the screen relit, David’s face coming back into sharp focus.

  “Ah,” he said. “There you are. Are you OK?”

  “I’m OK,” she said. “I’m not hurt. I’ve been treated . . .” She searched for a word. “Fairly.”

  “Am I allowed to ask who has you?”

  She read from the script: “I’ve been the guest of one of your valued business partners. Due to recent events, your partners wanted to reach out to you and reassure you of their commitment to supplying you with a quality product. They would like you to know that they’re ready to have a conversation with you about your offer of a onetime buyout of Salt.”

  David leaned back in his chair. “Oh. How thoughtful of them.” He fiddled with something out of range of the camera, then pulled a cigar to his mouth. He struck the flint on a silver-plated lighter fixed with a single small ruby in the cap. Marta had given the lighter to him early in their marriage, a significant expense to her then though nothing of great value now, and she’d never imagined he still possessed it or used it. She found herself unexpectedly touched.

  He brought the flame to the end of the cigar, took a puff, exhaled. “Though, I must say: this is a strange way to accept my offer. I could have come up with some nicer ones. They have Feingold, too, I have to assume. Unless they killed him.” He seemed to be thinking about this. “That would probably have been the smartest play, actually.”

  Marta consulted the script, wishing she could know what was happening behind her. “Wes Feingold is also a guest. He is getting to know the operations at your partners’ camp, and he’s excited about shifting his Pocketz business from SecondSkins to Salt, if such a deal goes through.”

  “What makes them think I’m still interested in buying them out?”

  Marta scanned the script for an appropriate response. There was a rustling to her right, and new text expanded on the screen, dominating her field of vision, almost too large to read without moving her head left and right. The language was first person now, the pretense of dinner-party cool stripped away, and Marta read it awkwardly, stumbling over the typos and the missing words. “They” had become “we.” As if Marta were one of them.

  “What we’re pro-proposing would be only good for you. All we ask is be—to be—left alone. Feingold returns to zone with seeds, some plants, and our formulations. Both rec-recreational Salt and medical. Medicinal. We can continue to run production for you, we have the . . .” She took a breath and backed up, reading the comma as a period. “We have the infrastructure. Nobody could do it cheaper.”

  “I could have had that deal years ago if I wanted it,” David said.

  A new sentence materialized on screen, and this one sent a chill along Marta’s spine: “We didn’t have Feingold years ago, or your wife.”

  “Feingold was still shitting his britches then,” David said. “As for my wife”—this was strange, as if Marta herself had become an automaton, or the speaker at a fast-food drive-through—“are you planning to keep her there forever? What do you think will happen if you send her back? Or kill her?”

  Even after all this time—after all she’d learned about her husband—his casual tone wounded her.

  More furious typing.

  “We are asking so little. You’ll lose nothing by letting us be.”

  “I don’t gain anything, either,” David said.

  No typing now. Marta waited, darting her eyes over the existing script, wondering what was expected of her. She risked a look to her right and could make out in the dimness beyond the screen Andy, his hands poised over the keyboard, back hunched.

  “I wonder,” David said, drawing Marta’s gaze back to the display. “I wonder if Feingold knows about the drug’s side effect.”

  “What side effect?” Marta risked asking. No one bothered to nudge her with a gun this time.

  “Infertility,” David said. “That, and a bunch of other problems. Birth defects. Ovarian cancer. What my mother would have called ‘female troubles.’ Yes, I know all about it. I’ve known for a long time. If I thought I could get the drug past the FDA and on the market, I’d have done it already. But there’s no way. Not even for me. Not for what I’m willing to invest. I’ve set my sights elsewhere. I don’t need your drug.”

  Another endless pause. Marta looked around, scanning the faces—Andy’s, Joe’s, June’s, even Randall’s—for some clue about how to proceed. Finally, June whispered in Andy’s ear, and he started typing again. Marta read: “That’s not certain. Drug still—is still valuable. Can be tested and refined. Rec-recreational Salt is still lucrative business.”

  David shrugged. “It’s OK business. But there are lots of ways to get high. Lots of ways to make money off people getting high. You haven’t cornered the market.”

  More typing.

  “Hope of a cure could be good for your political prospects.”

  David put the cigar into an ashtray and folded his hands on the tabletop. Something in his eyes shifted, and he was seeing her again, not just seeing through her. “You’ve been talking, Marta.” He made a tsking sound. “But no, that’s OK. You did what you had to do. I’ll do what I have to do.” She didn’t like the sound of that. Not at all. “Besides, listen. I’ve learned some things this last year. I’ve been educating myself. And you want to know what I’ve figured out? Fear sells better than hope. In business and in politics. So yes, again, thanks but no thanks. No deal. Not now. Not ever. So. Where does that leave us?”

  Typing. Marta, voice shaking, read the words. “Can you mount a political campaign while trying to explain how your wife died west of the Wall?”

  There was a murmur, a shuffling, and then Marta felt the barrel of a gun against her temple. She pinched her eyes shut against the image of David’s calm face, his dark, empty eyes. Her mouth started to move, shaping the words of a prayer that she was hardly conscious of making.

  “You think that touches me? Scares me?” she heard her husba
nd say. “As far as all of the documentation shows, Marta traveled to London with our sons. If anything happens to her, it happens over there. An accident, or an incident of random street violence. There are a lot of different ways to make it look right. All of them would only help me if I ran for office.”

  “The boys would never go along with that,” Marta blurted out.

  “You have no idea what the boys would do for me,” David said.

  She was saved from contemplating that by a sudden, ear-splitting crack, and a heavy thud to her left. A smell wafted up in the wake of this double boom: acrid, but also coolly ozone.

  Marta, surreally aware that she still had a head, still had a brain, opened her eyes. She was left staring at not even the waterfall animation or the app icons but three ordinary panes of smoke-colored glass. A nickel-sized hole in the left pane marked the center of a spider’s web that expanded across the width of the display, but the trifold shape still somehow held. Marta froze, hands vibrating against each other, afraid to turn around.

  “Violet?” June’s voice. “Honey, what on earth is this?”

  Marta risked a look behind her.

  Violet had her rifle trained on Andy, who was still seated in front of the laptop, hands up in the air. Edie also had a gun—a handgun, the one Violet had said she would try to bring along—and she was pointing it at Randall, who had his palms raised halfheartedly in front of his chest. Berto, Wes, and Ken were standing but unmoving, their wrists no longer bound by zip ties. Joe was slumped on the floor beside Marta.

  “Big guy,” Violet said, not taking her eyes off Andy. “Get Joe’s gun.”

  Berto did as he was told.

  “Point it at June.”

  He did that, too. He looked, in fact, like he wanted nothing so much as to pull the trigger.

  “Andy,” Violet said, “I want you to take off your gun by the strap. Just the strap. Move slow. I’ll shoot you, too, if I have to.”

  Andy snagged the strap in the web of flesh between his forefinger and thumb, lifted it, and wove his head out from the loop. The gun dangled at the end of it.

  “Lay it on the ground. Slowly.”

  Slowly, he did.

  “OK, that one’s yours, Feingold.”

  Looking almost embarrassed, Wes took it, drawing the strap over his own head and shoulder.

  “Point it at Andy.”

  Wes did.

  “What are you doing?” June asked again. “Talk to me, Violet. Look at me.”

  “Randall, your turn. Just like Andy did it. Move slow and put the gun on the floor.”

  “Violet, for God’s sake. I’m your mother.”

  Randall dropped the gun roughly to the carpet and kicked it out of reach, making Marta wince.

  “That’s mine?” Ken asked, and Randall snickered.

  “It is,” said Violet. “You’re going to point it at Randall. Randall knows you’re probably not as good a shot as I am, but he also knows you’re a lot more scared than I am, and that makes a sudden move very risky. Right, Randall?”

  “Violet. Violet! Why won’t you talk to me? Why are you doing this to me? I don’t understand any of this.” There was real anguish in June’s voice, and Marta couldn’t help feeling a reluctant kinship with her. “I love you. Roz loves you. We’ve done everything we know to do for you. What do you want? Why are you doing this?”

  “OK. Now you, Marta,” Violet said.

  She jumped in her seat a little.

  “June’s gun. You take it.” Marta spotted it on the couch cushion by June’s hip. She darted forward quickly, grabbed it, and shouldered the strap, disturbed by the rifle’s cool, heavy weight against her chest.

  “There’s a bedroom in the back corner that has one window. Go and make sure the door is unlocked.”

  “Now?” Marta asked.

  “Yes.”

  The room was dark and close, the couches and chairs arranged around a scattering of pieces of electronic equipment and snarls of cords. June, Andy, and Randall were all closer to Marta than any of the others; she would have to squeeze between Andy and Joe’s dead body to get to the doorway to the back part of the house. She moved carefully, choosing her footing, and still she caught her toe on something and plunged forward, barely catching herself before she fell onto Joe’s body, and she couldn’t stop herself before expelling a disgusted sob. Why Joe? she wondered. He was the one who’d listened to her the day she asked to speak to June. Randall, she knew, probably wouldn’t have. It might have been odd for her to care about this man’s fate—this man who had done nothing but harass her from the safe side of a weapon, who might have shot her had Violet not intervened—but she did. The smell of his blood filled the air, warm and flat, and her eyes fixed on a grayish piece of tissue—bone or brain matter, something that had been inside him only moments before—snagged on a loop of the green carpet.

  And then, beside that: a tick.

  “Oh my God,” she said. “There’s a tick in here. On the floor.”

  “Check the back room, like I said!” Violet barked.

  “I don’t think we packed a single Stamp,” Randall said with false remorse. “That’s too bad.”

  In a fog that she registered, from somewhere outside herself, as protective, as saving her from an all-out panic, she found the corner room. The door was cracked, and Marta pushed it open the rest of the way. The room was empty, save a scrim of dust on the hardwood floors. “It’s unlocked,” she called.

  “Drag three chairs in there from the kitchen. Be quick.”

  She made two trips, dragging the chairs by their back rungs and banging the hell out of the walls along the way. She deposited them all into the middle of the room and returned to the where the others still stood, with their raised hands and raised guns.

  “I don’t know why we don’t just shoot them like you did the one guy and leave,” Berto said. “She killed my wife.”

  “If you shoot her, I’ll shoot you,” Violet said. “You don’t touch her.”

  “Violet—” June tried again.

  “Shut up!” Violet yelled at her. Sorrowful, petulant—Marta remembered this tone of voice from her sons when they were teenagers, when their passions and furies hadn’t yet found subtler modes of expression.

  June pressed her lips together. Her eyes were bright and damp.

  “Big guy, you’re going to watch her while we take care of Andy and Randall. You aren’t to hurt her. Can I trust you?”

  “Yeah,” Berto said dully.

  “You two.” She swung the end of her gun between Andy and Randall. “To the bedroom, slow. Sit in a chair when you get there. Put your hands behind you.”

  The two men, paced by Violet, Edie, Wes, and Ken, with Marta bringing up the rear, walked slowly to the bedroom. Randall pointed to a chair and made an exaggerated shrugging gesture, lifting his eyebrows as if to say: This one? He still had that amused light in his eyes, as if he knew something Violet and the others didn’t; he’d pressed a secret call button, stashed a secret weapon. Marta was almost certain this wasn’t possible, but it made her even more uneasy.

  “Just sit,” Violet said. “I wish you’d have been the one with the gun on Marta. I wouldn’t have felt a bit bad about taking that shot.”

  “It’s not too late,” Randall said.

  “That’s a fact.” Violet drew a bundle of zip ties from her pocket. “Andy, take the other chair.”

  “Can I speak?” he asked.

  “You can say whatever you want,” Violet said. “Marta, tie their wrists. Pull them really tight. Don’t worry about hurting them. Really dig in there.”

  Randall’s arms were thick and pale and fringed with coarse black hair. He made fists as she pushed his hands into position, the tendons on his forearms popping. She wasn’t even sure the tie would span his wrists.

  “I have a proposal,
” Andy said.

  Violet poked her gun into Randall’s shoulder. “Relax your goddamn arms.”

  Marta got the tie around and managed to thread the end through the loop on the fourth try. She pulled two rungs, three, four. Straining, she managed to get the loop past a fifth rung. Violet came over and yanked to test.

  “Good job,” she said.

  “Do you want to hear it?” Andy asked.

  “What?” she hissed, finally looking at him.

  “You want to get across the Wall? You’re going to need me.”

  “We don’t need shit from you.”

  “Wrong,” Andy said.

  “Do you want me to go ahead with the tie?” Marta asked Violet.

  “Yes,” Violet said.

  “And that’s cool, that’s fine,” Andy said, thrusting his arms out helpfully behind him. “Tie me up. Leave me tied up. Just take me along.” Marta bound his wrists, remembering his hands on her own wrists back at camp, the way he’d yanked the tie, the way he’d looked at her: as if she were contemptible, worse than contemptible. It felt good to do this. She muscled an extra rung through the loop.

  “Look,” Violet said, “just stop. If you don’t try anything, you’ll be able to go with my—with June back to Ruby City. I shot Joe because I had to. I’m not looking to shoot you. I don’t have a problem with you.”

  “I don’t want to go back to Ruby City,” Andy said. “I want to go home to my kids.”

  “Too bad,” Violet said. “We don’t have room in the car for you.”

  “You’re going to all get yourself shot like the others,” Andy said.

  “I think we should listen to him.” Edie had lowered the revolver halfway.

  “Big guy!” Violet called toward the living room. “Bring June in here.”

  “Maybe we should hear him out,” Wes said.

  June stumbled into the room, Berto following closely behind her. She went to the third chair without Violet’s asking and put her arms behind her. Marta tied her. The skin on June’s arms was translucent, banded with raised bluish veins. One of her fingernails was missing, long gone, and the others were neatly trimmed.