Seven Suspects

by Renee James

“If you yell or scream, I’ll knock your teeth out. Understand?” He brandishes the weight, a ten-pound plate. I can feel it slamming into my mouth, my teeth shattering from the blow, the pain, the blood.

  I nod my head, yes.

  He removes the gag. “What?” he says.

  “I need to use the bathroom,” I say. “And could you let me move my arms? I ache.”

  “Why would I do that?” he sneers.

  “I’m no threat to you, Albert. I just want to get the blood flowing in my arms and shoulders again, and wipe myself. So you don’t have to touch me.”

  He smiles. His malicious smile. He runs his hand down to my crotch and rubs my labia. No gloves, I think to myself. “You don’t like me touching your pussy?” he taunts.

  I steel my mind. “I love it, Albert. I thought you didn’t like it.” I try to smile coquettishly at him. I try to be the sex-starved woman I fantasized about as a testosterone-driven adolescent male. “But right now, my stomach hurts and I have to go to the bathroom. I think I have diarrhea.” The lie comes to me out of the blue, a great one.

  Albert rests on his haunches, examining me from a little distance. “My dad said you liked getting it in the ass.” He says it matter-of-factly.

  “Variety is the spice of life.” I try to sound eager, hoping that Albert will let his guard down. Maybe it buys me another hour of life. Maybe Phil and a squadron of Chicago cops will burst in here and save me. Or maybe a loving, interactive God will intercede and for some reason save me while thousands die from war and pestilence.

  I smile and make sure my posture is correct, merchandising my breasts.

  Albert stands and the scene unfolds like a slow-motion replay on television. I watch him raise his huge hand in a wide backswing. I watch as it hurtles toward me in a powerful arc like the head of a baseball bat, gaining velocity as it closes in on my face. The blow lands with a sound like a water balloon bursting. I hear it as I fly sideways. I slam into the bed as the pain spreads over my face like a raging fire. My expensive, surgically modified face feels like it’s exploding. I cry, helpless and beaten. I can feel the side of my face swell up where the blow landed. I hope I’m bleeding on his goddamn sheets.

  “My dad told me. He told me about you. You’re the one who crippled him. You had some guy do that to him. Fucking skank whore!”

  He lets me cry for a minute, then jerks me to my feet and commands me to stand there. I glance at the sofa bed. No blood. He goes into the utility area and returns with a tool that looks like a long-handled pruner. He shakes the tool in my face. “If you try anything, I’ll cut out your teeth, one by one.” He nods. I nod back. Message received. He cuts the plastic shackles on my wrists.

  I yelp. Searing pain shoots through my body as my arms rotate in the shoulder sockets and horribly strained muscles and tendons screech in agony. Then comes relief. I take a deep breath and feel the blood flow in my arms and shoulders again. “Thank you, Albert.” I sigh. “You’re a good man.” I try to sound sincere.

  “Just get your ass in the bathroom,” he says.

  He doesn’t watch me this time. When I peek out, he’s reracking his weights. I open the door under the sink cabinet and search for a weapon. The cabinet is as organized as a spreadsheet and spotlessly clean. Cleaning supplies are on one side, hygiene on the other. Disappointment. No razor. Albert is an electric shaver man. A Remington, with a cord. Old fashioned. Everyone I know uses cordless today, but it spawns an idea. I look for a power outlet. There’s one just between the mirror and the sink.

  A small box in the cabinet contains more hygiene items. I pluck a small nail-cutting scissors from the collection, a plan forming.

  I hear Albert’s heavy footfall. I palm the scissors, close the cabinet door, and slide back on the toilet. When he fills the doorway, my face is contorted with effort.

  “I don’t think you want to be here for this,” I warn Albert.

  “I thought you had to go so bad,” he says.

  “It’s unnerving, having someone watch,” I say. I try the coquettish look again. “Unless it turns you on . . .”

  Albert’s face folds into a look of disgust and he backs away.

  “I’ll flush as I go to keep the smell down,” I call after him.

  He doesn’t answer. I peek out. He’s setting up the barbell for dead lifts. I flush and get the shaver out of the cabinet and start working on the cord with the nail scissors. It’s harder to cut the cord than I thought. The scissors are small, the cord is thick, the metal in the cord resists cutting, and the strength I once had has been gone for years. I fight back panic. I hear Albert again and quickly flush the toilet.

  “Have you ever been sucked off in the bathroom, Albert?” I call to him. I can’t see him, but I can picture the sour look on his face. I think maybe all women disgust him, but I know for sure I do.

  “Shut up and get your business done,” he says. “Two more minutes, then I’m coming in to get you and you won’t like it.”

  I flush again and work on the cord. “There’s no anatomical difference between a transsexual woman’s blow job and a genetic woman’s,” I call out. It’s a risk. I hope the disgust he feels keeps him out of here long enough for me to cut the cord. But it might bring him in here to splatter my face around the room.

  The cord severs just as Albert starts for the bathroom again. I throw the shaver and cord behind the toilet as best I can, then flush, then gather a great wad of toilet paper in my hand and hide the scissors inside it. His face pops in the doorway.

  “I don’t smell anything.” He looks at me accusingly.

  “Good,” I say. “See how I think of you? I’m almost done.”

  He stares at me with disgust. “Do you really think I’d ever want you to touch me?” His voice is incredulous, like he was talking to a troll.

  I pretend to be hurt by his rejection, making a sad face and lowering my eyes to the floor. I hate this phony bimbo act, but he must see me as a defenseless wretch who is no threat to fight back. Whatever slim chance I have of surviving depends on him underestimating me.

  He shakes his head in wonder, like he’s looking at the most pathetic thing he’s ever seen. “You don’t get it, do you? I don’t want to fuck you. I don’t want to touch you. I want to kill you slowly, give you a taste of what my dad went through.”

  This is hardly a revelation, but hearing him say it sends a shiver through my body. I stare stupidly at him.

  “We haven’t even gotten started,” he says, that horrible smile spreading across his face again. “Soon as I get done with my workout, I’m going to work on that face of yours.”

  “What?” It’s the only word I can spit out. The menace in his tone chills me to the core.

  “I know all about the surgery. My dad had a picture of you from back in the day. You don’t look anything like you did then, when you were trying to get him to fuck you.”

  “Is that what he told you, Albert?” My mind finally works. “That I was his lover?”

  “That you were a tranny whore. That you begged him to screw you, then claimed you were raped.”

  “I was raped, Albert.” I look him in the eye. “Your father was a hood and a pervert. He beat up people for money and he raped me just for fun.”

  Albert steps into the bathroom and slams me with a backhanded blow that knocks me against the wall. I wobble on the toilet, fighting for balance, my vision shutting down, blackness creeping in, first from the sides, then top and bottom. I can barely see Albert in the tiny shard of light that still gets through. I clutch the wad of toilet paper hiding the scissors, trying to will myself to hang on to it when I pass out. Sweat breaks out on my face and body. I’m going under. I wonder if I’m dead. Just before the world goes black, I feel Albert catch me. Good old Albert.

  29

  MY HEAD’S ON fire. I don’t know where I am but my hair feels like it’s burning. The pain rages across my scalp, bringing me back to consciousness. My face is inches above the floor, my knees are dragging
on the ground. Albert is hauling me by my hair out of the bathroom.

  He dumps me beside the sofa bed and walks to his weights without looking back. I whimper and rub my head, trying to soothe the ruptured nerve endings in my scalp. My hands are still free. I feel my face. It is swollen on both sides and so tender the lightest touch hurts. I wonder what more he will do to it. Knife cuts? Break bones? Rip off flesh?

  I descend into mourning and self-pity, the clank of Albert’s weights in the background. Until the thought grabs me, the thought that if I’m going to die, I should take a piece of Albert with me. Maybe I’ll get lucky and cripple the bastard for life. Maybe I can get real lucky and kill him.

  I dig deep into my core, searching out that burning ember of anger. I find it in an image of Albert’s malicious smile. I see him gloat as he prods my genitals with a foreign object, enjoying my humiliation. The ember grows to hatred as I relive him touching me, then homicidal rage. I will kill Albert if I get a chance. I will kill him any way I can. He is an animal and a pervert and a twisted, evil being. I will find a way to kill him.

  I struggle to sit up on the sofa bed. Albert glances my way, then ignores me. In his life, I’m a mere insect that can no longer sting.

  I need a weapon. Anything. Something. My hands are free. I can make something happen if I have a weapon. I look about for the wad of toilet paper I used to hide the scissors. It’s not by the sofa bed and not in the path to the bathroom. I must have dropped it when he slugged me. I can’t see inside the bathroom from here, so I try to calculate where the toilet paper and the scissors are. Albert, the neatnik, may have tossed the wad in the little garbage can beside the toilet, not noticing the scissors. Or he might have left the wad lying where I dropped it, not noticing it at the time, and not having been back to the bathroom since. I can’t think of any other possibility.

  I need to get into the bathroom, find the scissors, and shove them into Albert’s fat gut, or maybe go for a kill shot to the throat. One way or another, I’ll use them to fend off Albert long enough to find the shaver cord, plug it in, and plant the hot end somewhere in Albert’s anatomy.

  A hand would be best, as I remember from a junior high science lesson on electricity—the only thing I remember from junior high science—maybe because Melinda Lacey wasn’t there that day so I wasn’t staring at her thick black hair and budding breasts and wishing I could kiss her or be her, either one. The teacher, I don’t remember his name, he was a nerdy guy with black-framed glasses and a thin face, a nice guy, very enthusiastic, always complementing the science part with anecdotes that kids our age found fascinating. This one was about how concrete is a great conductor of electricity and a bad place to be standing if you got a jolt of AC/DC. And he said the worst is when the jolt hits someone’s hand because the nervous system can make the hand clamp down harder on the live wire and turn the victim into toast.

  Watching Albert fry has a lot of appeal right now. Not very civilized of me, I know, but there’ll be time enough for manners if I survive, and if I don’t, what’s the difference? The trick will be to avoid touching him while he’s burning. I don’t know how powerful the current would be coming through him into me, and I don’t want to find out.

  I wait until he finishes his set of dead lifts.

  “You’re very strong, Albert.” I say it like a worshipful groupie.

  His glance is filled with disgust. He looks away.

  “I have to tinkle again.” I say it like a child who’s being punished for being bad. “I don’t need to bother you. Just let me crawl over to the bathroom. Okay?”

  He sneers at me, no noise, just the curled lip and lowered eyelids of contempt. He gestures with his head toward the bathroom, telling me to go ahead, not using words because I’m not worth words anymore.

  I labor to the bathroom, reaching ahead with my hands and forearms, then pulling my knees forward. They are scraped and bruised, but I hardly feel them. My heart pounds. My breathing is tense. I’m mapping out my movements, getting ready. It will all be over in a few minutes.

  The wad of toilet paper is in the garbage can. I snatch it as I sit on the toilet. I remove the scissors and palm them in my right hand. I drop the toilet paper in the toilet and look outside. Albert is still out of sight. I lean over and grasp the shaver cord, still lying just behind the toilet. As soon as I have it, I stand, find the plug end, and insert it in the outlet above the sink. It’s a tight fit. I have to struggle to get it in. I hear Albert and whirl back on the toilet. He’s just outside the door, watching me with the cruel eyes of a predator. He saw me standing, but I pull toilet paper from the roll, like nothing had happened.

  “What are you up to, skank?” He says it low, under his breath, and he says it as he comes for me. He’s seething, his lips set in a straight line, his eyes blazing, his body almost vibrating with suppressed wrath. He’s going to kill me now. My mind freezes. My body goes rigid. I hold my breath and wait for the kill shot.

  He hits me with a backhand slap. A slap, not a power shot. It stings, but it doesn’t send me reeling or knock me out. A stupid, arrogant mistake. It rekindles the rage inside me. I lunge at Albert and shove the nail scissors into his fat ugly gut with all my strength. He howls and steps back, his eyes wide in revulsion, his mouth open. The scissors stick out of his belly like a blood-coated leech clinging to a body—a shocking sight, but not fatal. I only got a couple inches of penetration. But Albert has frozen from the sight of blood from his own body.

  It’s my chance. I grab the power cord, find the hot end, and stick it in Albert’s gut. My thrust snaps him into action. He reaches for my hand, and I stab the hot end into one of his palms. He grabs it, a reflex. He looks at the severed cord, then looks at me, his face a vacuous question mark.

  Nothing happens.

  I’m as struck dumb as he is. There’s no power coming through the cord. Albert’s not frying. I never thought of this possibility, that I could get this far, get the cord flush on his flesh, and have it not work. Now, I’m trapped in a tiny bathroom by a monster who wants to mangle my face and kill me slowly.

  “Shit.” It’s all I get out before Albert swings at me. He leads with his right. Even tottering on bound feet, I duck under the blow with ease and lunge at him, using the palm of my right hand to jam the scissors deeper into his middle.

  He yelps, but brushes my hand away and grabs me by the throat. He lifts me to my tiptoes with one hand, his eyes wild and crazy, his other arm reaching back for leverage. His fist whistles out of the confusion like a bullet. I flinch at the last millisecond and angle my face away from the blow a fraction of an inch. It strikes me on the side of my forehead, smashing my face into the mirror above the sink. Glass shatters. I scream. Blood splatters everywhere, walls, floor, Albert’s face and top, my naked body.

  For a second, everything stops. Albert sees the blood on his body and freezes, a look of horror and disbelief on his face. He looks at me like a child who has just met the devil, thunderstruck, unbelieving. My hands go to my face, probing the open cuts, desperate to stop the bleeding, me, sure I’m dying.

  Albert bellows in rage and hurls a powerful right hook that lands on my jaw and knocks me backward, off my feet, sliding on broken glass, landing on my back with a thud. I can feel small fragments of glass sticking into the skin of my back. I lose focus on Albert and reach behind to brush away the shards. When I look at Albert again, he’s readying a kick, the kick that will splatter my face all over the room. I roll to one side, and cower into a fetal position, trying to protect my face. The kick lands on my buttocks. He raises a foot for a heel stomp on my torso. I roll on my back, no longer in control of my actions, possessed by something much baser than intellect. As his foot reaches the apex of its climb, just as he begins slamming it down on me, I kick up with my bound feet. I wanted to knock his testicles into his throat, but I can’t reach that high. Still, my legs knock his kick to the side and throw him off balance. He topples into the wall, catching himself, shrieking, his face a d
emonic red, lines of stress popping out of his flesh like gaping wounds.

  I try to scramble to my feet, but the floor is awash in blood and glass. I keep slipping and cutting my hands on the shards. I get to a squatting position just as he charges. His bull rush sends me careening into the wall and then to the floor again, Albert falling on top of me. I try to push him off and squirm free, but he’s huge and stronger than Atlas and I’m hopelessly pinned.

  Albert erupts like a volcano, spewing a mindless chain of curses and obscenities. He tries to push himself up from the glass-covered floor, the scissors still in his abdomen, a little deeper from his fall on me. He screeches and holds up his right hand, a shard of glass stuck in it like a knife. The sight of his own blood shocks him. He pulls out the glass and flings it away, his face as horror-stricken as if he’d handled a tapeworm.

  I feel around on the floor with both hands, trying to find a piece of glass large enough to slash him with. A wrist, his throat, a femoral artery. He rises on his knees and readies a punch, another right. My father would have told him leading with your right will get you in trouble. But Dad’s not here. I grab a small piece of glass with my right hand. Before he delivers his punch, I roll toward him and slash at his left wrist. It barely breaks the skin, but it makes him stiffen in shock. I position the glass in my hand for a better edge, then slash again. This time blood pours out. Albert howls like a werewolf and cradles his left arm with his right. I shove my piece of glass into his leg, cutting myself worse than him, but I’m used to this and he isn’t. He grasps his wounded leg and howls some more. His blood is as thick as mine in the gore that surrounds us.

  I roll back, bring my knees to my chest, and deliver a powerful kick to Albert’s face. It hits flush and strong, and the blow knocks him into the far wall. I sit up and search for another weapon. All the glass is covered in blood and too small to strike a fatal blow. I’m getting woozy. Too many blows to the head. Too little sleep. Nothing to eat. Blood loss. I shake my head to get back in the here and now.