by A. W. Gray
Less than a half hour later a cab pulled off of I-30 into the parking lot of Pappadeaux Cajun Seafood, a blue-and-white Plymouth with a sign across the trunk advertising all-day oldies on 98.7, KLUV. Money exited carrying the suitcase, paid the fare— leaving just the right-sized tip so that the driver wouldn’t be resentful, but at the same time wouldn’t be thinking, Hey, the big spender from the East—and hefted more than nine million dollars over to his rented Ford and locked the money in the trunk. As he entered the eastbound interstate, headed for downtown Dallas, he remembered the taxicab sign and punched up 98.7 on the radio. The Monotones were doo-wopping “Book of Love.” Christ, Money thought, from back when I was in high school, Buffalo, New York, freezing my cods off. He flattened his palm and beat time to the music on the dashboard. One down, he thought, three more to go. Just business, absolutely nothing personal about it. Too many cooks fuck up the broth, Randolph Money thought.
29
The intersection of Ross Avenue and Fitzhugh Street was in East Dallas, just a mile from the state fairgrounds, and Basil Gershwin found the corner without any trouble. Without much trouble, to be exact, driving up and down narrow two-way streets, homes with sagging porches and roofs on both sides, the city map that Randolph Money had given him draped across the steering wheel. Money had marked the intersection with a big red “X,” as if Basil was too stupid to find the shithouse without somebody pointing the way. Basil was sick of the guy’s attitude. Money acted as if he was the only one in the world with a hint of fucking brains. Once this deal was history Basil was going back to Los Angeles, to his friends in the Eighth Street gin mills, people who looked up to him and thought Basil Gershwin was a special guy. Basil thought that if he ever saw Randolph Money again, it wasn’t going to be soon enough. Or maybe it was going to be too soon. Basil wasn’t so good at remembering what the fuck the saying was supposed to be.
He parked in a slant-in space in front of a Domino’s Pizza, walked the half block to the corner of Ross and Fitzhugh, and then just hung around being inconspicuous. He wore pressed Bermuda shorts, a sleeveless mesh shirt, and a blue Dallas Cowboys Super Bowl XXVIII baseball cap, tufts of unruly hair sticking out around his ears. He’d bought the cap at DFW Airport, thinking that the Cowboy logo would make him blend in with the locals. It hurt Basil’s feelings, Randolph Money’s remark that the hat was ridiculous. There Basil stood, hands in his pockets, first on one foot and then the other, watching two women—a chubby Hispanic, eighteen or so, and a gray-haired black lady in her sixties or seventies—wash their clothes in the laundromat across the street. He whistled a silent tune as old Chevys and Dodges paraded up and down Ross Avenue, some of them pulling into the beer bar a block away. Basil checked his watch over and over. At four on the dot, the pay phone jangled.
He moseyed over and picked up the receiver. “Yeah, Basil.”
“Yeah, Money,” Randolph Money’s damnyankee accent said. “The eagle’s flown, my friend.”
Basil’s forehead wrinkled in anger. “Shit. You didn’t get it.”
“I did get it. The eagle’s flown. Landed. I’ve got the money, Basil.”
“Why didn’t you say so? All that eagle shit, that’s confusing.”
Money’s tone became serious. “Well, maybe this won’t confuse you. You know what to do now? I’ll have your ticket at the gate. Shouldn’t take you over a couple of hours.”
“What we talked about?” Basil said.
“Yes, what we talked about. For you to go and get it over with.”
“You want me to off the broad.”
“It’s what we discussed. You having a problem with that?”
“Naw, she did something that pissed me off, anyway. What you want me to do with all that food?”
“All that…?”
“There ain’t that much. Think there’s maybe still some lasagna, but most of it’s that Birdseye shit. Guess I ought to throw it all away, huh?”
There were fifteen seconds of silence. “Basil, you,” Money began, then cleared his throat and said, “you’re the eighth wonder of the world, Mr. Gershwin. You know that?”
• • •
Randolph Money shook his head in bewilderment, and even in some admiration, as he replaced the receiver in its cradle and strolled out of the diner at the corner of Ross and Haskell avenues, eight blocks southwest of the spot where Basil Gershwin simultaneously hung up the pay phone and lumbered away toward his rental car. There were two customers in the diner, teenaged black kids in No Fear T’s, dawdling over greasy cheeseburgers and scratching their noses.
Money kicked a pebble into the gutter as he shook his head some more, thinking, Christ, the ultimate killing machine. Rates doing the woman in the same category with cleaning out the refrigerator—no conscience, no hesitation, no remorse. Will no doubt achieve sexual gratification in the process, but will never lose sight of the goal line. The perfect chess piece for the perfect move, choreographed by the ultimate planner, Randolph Money, Esquire.
Money felt uncomfortable in his blazer and Dockers as black guys with mottled beards, their eyes hidden in the shadow of greasy baseball caps, shuffled past eyeing his clothes. So he hustled down to the end of the block, got in his Ford, and thunked the door locks into place. Then he pressed the stem on his digital watch until the lap timer appeared, activated the timer, and sat mesmerized as the seconds flashed by. In exactly four minutes and thirty seconds he pressed the stem once more. The glowing red numbers froze in place. Money looked to the northeast, up Ross Avenue, and grinned. Right on time, Basil Gershwin’s Honda rolled by, Basil hunched over the wheel, his gaze straight ahead, his Neanderthal features impassive beneath the brim of the silly Dallas Cowboys hat.
Christ, Money thought, better than Robocop. He started his engine, checked his clearance, and backed slowly out into the southwest-bound lane to follow the Honda. Since Money knew the Honda’s destination, keeping the other vehicle in sight wasn’t that important. Nonetheless he gave his Ford a little extra gas, speeding up so as not to lose his view of the back of Basil Gershwin’s head. Christ, Money loved it just watching the guy.
Meg was certain that she was alone in the house for the first time in…God—three days? Four? She’d lost track.
She was absolutely sure that no one else was in the house, though she couldn’t have explained how that she knew in a thousand years. She’d been caged in the bathroom ever since she’d been a captive, and—except for the time when she’d made the recording, and the times when the disgusting, squatty man had brought her meals—she’d never actually seen anyone or anything beyond the doorway. But always there had been a presence, someone out there in the darkness watching her, and whatever sixth sense it was that caused her to be aware of the presence now told her that the presence was no longer there. Poof. Gone.
She’d been alone, in fact, for quite some time and had spent the past half hour or so wondering what in God’s name she was going to do about it. Probably nothing, she realized, but rational thought was the only thing that kept her from going into screaming fits and tearing her hair. Rational Rhoda to the rescue, Meg thought.
The rose, its petals now a wilted brown, lay where it had fallen when she’d poked it through the wire. Since then she hadn’t received a bite of food—she could only assume that the Quasimodo character was miffed because she’d rejected his present; and she hoped that he was miffed, the freaking suck—and the grumblings in the pit of her stomach told her that the rose had been on the floor for at least twelve hours, maybe more. In her current circumstance, hunger didn’t come knocking very often.
She wondered why the kidnappers had disappeared all of a sudden. It’s possible, she thought, that Daddy—God bless him, God, God bless him—has forked over the ransom, and that the bad guys have called up the good guys to tell them where I am, and that any minute the
U.S. Cavalry will come charging in. The idea gave Meg a rush of adrenaline. S
ure, that was it, she was…Locked inside a cage somewhere in East Jesus, Meg thought, and until she saw the cavalry in person she had to assume they weren’t coming. Not ever. Until freedom was a reality, she must direct every effort toward survival. Such as survival was.
She got up and moved around, the tiles cool to her bare feet, the cotton shorts soft against her outer thighs. From within the stall came the steady drip-drip from the shower, the sound that had been soothing during her early time in the cage, but that now was merely familiar background. She went over and stood inside the partition surrounding the toilet. Her gaze fell on the toilet brush, resting on its bristled end with its plastic handle leaned against the wall. She picked up the brush and looked it over.
Her commode was clean, all right. She’d brushed it spotless, it seemed to Meg, about twenty times a day to fight the boredom, the result being that she’d created the absolute pristine crapper to beat all. The modern flushing toilet was invented by Thomas Crapper. Ho, ho, ho, big joke in college, until Meg had looked it up in the encyclopedia to learn that the guy who’d invented the toilet really was named Thomas Crapper, which at the time had made the joke even funnier. Old Thomas has sure sent his name down in history, Meg thought. Maybe his competition was someone named Bernard Shitter, you think? Meg giggled. Where was old man Crapper when a girl needed him?
She had an idea. She put the bristle end of the brush inside the toilet bowl, closed the lid, sat down, and pried the handle upward with all her might. Her wiry biceps stood out and her neck corded from exertion. Her cheeks and throat turned a bright red as blood coursed through her veins. Kidnap me, will you? Meg thought. Lock me up, eh? Well, I’ll show you, you freaking jerks, I’ll sit right here on Thomas Crapper’s old crapper and I’ll break your freaking toilet brush, cost you another buck twenty-nine to replace the freaking thing. Break, damn you, Meg thought. Break in two. Break in two, you freaking…The handle snapped an inch from the edge of the toilet seat. The sudden cessation of pressure sent Meg lurching backward. She painfully banged her shoulders on the tank. The back of her head slammed into the wall. For an instant she saw stars.
She shook it off, touching the back of her head and gingerly massaging the brand-new lump. Now, what did I go and do that for? Meg thought. She held up the broken handle and looked at it in a daze. The snapped-off end had a jagged edge, slanted into a crude point.
Reeling, more than a little bit dizzy, Meg carried the handle over to the bed and hid it under the mattress. It was certainly no billy club, but it was the only weapon she had.
Basil Gershwin parked behind the lake house, put his gloves on, and trudged inside. He didn’t glance at the shining water, the condo roofs, or the boats anchored to the dock across the way. He had two things to do, and paused just inside the darkened entry to make up his mind which came first. Clean the kitchen or kill the woman. The thought of killing the woman didn’t bother him, but the idea of cleaning the kitchen made him wrinkle his nose. Basil Albert Gershwin didn’t sign up to be no fucking custodian. In offing the broad he was going to take his time, teach her a lesson or two about screaming at guys and throwing presents away, the guy just trying to do something nice for her. Basil made his decision. First he’d do the dirty work, then get on to the good stuff.
He turned to his right just past a short entry corridor, and muscled open the kitchen door to step in on plastic tile. He flicked the switch, sudden artificial light illuminating the sink, the gas stove, the microwave oven on the counter, and the small standup refrigerator. The light flooded through the doorway and made a parallelogram on the worn carpet outside. In the past Basil had been careful to close the door before turning the light on, and to be as quiet as possible while moving around in the kitchen. Some kind of psychological bullshit, Randolph Money’s idea, keeping the broad in the dark as to what was going on in the house while she sat back in the cage. Basil thought that a little noise now and then might scare the pants off the woman, which was exactly what he had in mind.
He yanked a plastic garbage bag from a box on the counter and opened the refrigerator, first thudding a half-full bottle of milk and a carton of eggs into the bottom of the bag, then rummaging around in the freezer. One box of Stouffer’s lasagna and three cartons of vegetables—one broccoli, one box of green beans, one peas mixed with carrots—remained. He dumped the lasagna on top of the milk and eggs, dropped the broccoli and the veggie mix in as well, then held the green beans at arm’s length. A puzzled look crossed his face.
Basil was suddenly filled with rage. He bashed the frozen box against the counter once, then twice, then looked at it again. Jesus, what’s wrong with me? he thought, then sheepishly dropped the carton into the bag. For just a second there, he’d imagined that the box of beans was the woman’s head. Funny what came over a guy sometimes.
When the outside door opened and then closed, Meg had her first glimpse of daylight since she’d been imprisoned. It was the briefest of flashes, a sudden illumination of the sitting room—an easy chair and one end of a sofa with curved arms—and the light vanished so quickly that it took a few seconds for it to register on her exactly what she’d seen. She was rooted in her tracks near the food slot in the cage. Three heavy footfalls vibrated the floor, then there was silence. Meg strained to listen. Out there in the darkness, someone breathed. Then the footfalls resumed, retreating away from her. There was a creak of hinges, then a banging noise, and suddenly more light. The illumination was fainter than before, and Meg expected total darkness any second, but the weak light continued to shine somewhere in the far reaches of the house. There was a muted rustling and a series of sloughing, rattly noises, like someone loading a plastic bag.
Meg peered into the outer room. Once again there was the easy chair, the entire sofa now visible to her, and an arched doorway leading out into a hall. Out in the hall to her right was a closed door. Thank God for small favors, Meg thought; she felt some comfort in seeing something—any freaking thing—outside her prison. As she retreated, sat on the bed and hugged herself, there were two violent, faraway thuds. Meg gasped. Any comfort she’d felt was immediately replaced by throat-clutching fear.
Basil looked around the kitchen to be certain he wasn’t leaving anything. The box of garbage bags went into the sack, followed by the knives and forks from the drawer beside the sink. He paused while dropping the utensils in and studied a ten-inch carving knife with a serrated blade. He tested the blade with his latex-covered thumb, then jammed the knife, handle first, into his back pocket. Finally he twirled the bag around to cinch up the neck, and secured the entire mess with a twist-tie. He glanced toward the doorway, his features tightening in anticipation. On the way out of the kitchen, he turned off the light.
His pulse quickening, Basil strode through the entry hall, pulled open the door, and went out in springtime sunshine. Wavelets lapped the shore, and somewhere nearby a crappie jumped and splashed. He opened the Honda’s trunk, stuffed the bag inside, and slammed the lid. He lifted the knife partway out of his pocket, then snuggled the handle back down. As he looked around to check out the landscape, Basil drew a short breath in through his nose. He could wait no longer. Without another second’s hesitation, he went back in to kill the woman.
Meg’s eyelids twitched as the outside door opened, bathing the sitting room in muted light, but otherwise she didn’t move. The heavy footfalls sounded out in the hallway, drawing nearer and nearer. Please, God, she thought, let them just be bringing me another meal. Let it be the police, someone coming to…The squatty man came around the door jamb and stopped outside the cage. All hope that Meg had held faded instantly away.
He wasn’t wearing his mask. God, she thought, he doesn’t care if I see him. They’ve decided to…She searched his face, his thick shaggy brows, the broad forehead, the wide humped nose, tufts of unruly hair sprouting over his ears. No pity in his look, nothing. Eyes like dead gray coals.
He raised the padlock with one gloved hand, fishe
d in his pocket, inserted and twisted a key. The lock sprang open with a deafening click. He rattled the wire, pulled open the swinging door. His nostrils flared. He looked at her.
Meg jumped to her feet and, her heart sinking into the pit of her stomach, tried to dodge around him and run. He grabbed her hair. She clutched and clawed at his wrist. He took a long, powerful stride, yanked so hard that she thought her hair would come out by the roots, and threw her bodily across the mattress.
Now he straddled her, thick legs on either side, hot garlic breath rushing up her nose. She lay unmoving. He grinned at her, and from his pocket pulled the biggest knife that Meg had ever seen. He gently inserted the blade under the neck of her T-shirt and began to cut downward with a sawing motion.
Meg moved more by reaction than by will, her hand going up over her head and groping beneath the mattress. Her fingers closed around slick plastic. With the last ounce of strength left in her, she brought the broken brush handle up and stabbed at his face.
She got lucky. The pointed end of the handle gouged his eye, sliced into the lid. A quick red stream flowed down his cheek. Her second thrust missed the eye and cut his forehead. He screamed and covered his face, the knife bouncing from the mattress and clattering to the floor.