Deathgrip

by Brian Hodge

  “Oh man, I’m driving home alone, I just know it.” Ramon shook his head. “What’ll you say to her if she’s in there and catches you, huh?”

  Mike flashed a rogue’s smile, devilish eyes twinkling. “I’ll ask if she’s out of bed for the day, or what?”

  “Oh, would you be serious?” More weary head-shaking. “I’ll do your eulogy back home, all right? I’ll do a good job, poor Mike, we knew him well, we all knew his pecker’d get him killed one way or another.”

  “I love it, don’t change a word,” Mike grinned, and took off. That Ramon, really, he was better than a mother sometimes.

  Mike kept to the trees, flanking right until he could emerge on the blind far side of the house. He held a crouch while sprinting for the house with a noticeable limp, finally straightening when reaching the wall, pressed flat. Leg aching already, every pulse nudging bone marrow. Mike eased back around toward the front door, ducking low and crab-walking beneath ground-floor windows.

  The front door. He was almost expecting the disappointment of finding it locked, of course, couldn’t be that easy.

  He backtracked around the side, kept going until he reached the rear of the house. Pausing at the corner of the foundation, kneeling and taking time to spot trouble, potential or overt. Gardens, weedy and ill-tended. A tarped-over swimming pool. Farther out, a dog pen; hell, lucky he wasn’t made already. Then again, most people regarded their own barking dogs with about as much concern as a two-pack-a-day smoker tuning out the surgeon general. Present company included. He would risk it.

  Mike got to the back porch and ascended its steps, slipping through the outer screen door without a peep from the mutts. Maybe Donny wasn’t paying them enough. Pressed against the house, Mike wrapped a hand around the doorknob, gave a gentle twist. Success. Either Donny was getting lax these days, or forgetful, or just didn’t worry anymore. Now watch eighteen alarms go blaring. He inched the door open just enough to squeeze through, then shut it.

  He was in a short narrow passage, mud closet or something. One lonely pair of rubber boots atop layers of yellowed newspapers. Shelves with cleaning supplies — Spic and Span, rags, furniture polish, the usual. At the far end, Mike gritted his teeth and opened the inner door a crack, just enough to peek, no idea what lived on the door side. Gabriel Matthews and his collection of axes and cutlery came to mind.

  Easing the door open by fractions, an ever-widening slice of what was proving to be a large kitchen. One of the many reaches of this house he’d thought he would have time to explore last visit. In the center stood a huge butcher block work station. Its top ringed with pegs, pots and pans and skillets hanging like piñatas. One wall held a spice rack big enough to rival a supermarket’s.

  Beyond the kitchen, a small nook overlooked the backyard, table for one this morning, and he stared at a woman in a robe, making noisy and clumsy attempts at feeding herself a bowl of cereal. Grazing her cheek with one spoonful before finding her mouth, and as she ate, she stared longingly out the window. Nerve rush — outside, he’d crept directly beneath her line of vision.

  So Amanda Dawson had come through it alive, good for her. She didn’t look much more formidable now than in mid-coma. He kept his face pressed into the few inches of open door and stared. Captivated, in an odd sense, feeling less a voyeur than someone privileged to witness a unique metamorphosis, Amanda emerging unsteadily but surely from the chrysalis.

  He was content to study as eating occupied her concentration. Her spoon’s handle was nearly as thick as a broomstick, clamped in her fist like a child first learning to feed herself. One side of her bowl curled over into a lip at the top, easier for her to scoop against.

  What drive she must have possessed. She’d had to start all over again, relearning the basics of daily life.

  He knew what had to be done next, and it would prove a stroke of genius or sheer catastrophe. Options were few, however. At least he could wait until her breakfast was finished, save her the embarrassment of interruption in mid-slurp.

  Five more minutes, and she let the spoon clatter against the bowl with a weary resignation.

  Now, time for panic. Anybody else in the house? No Donny, no cars out front. Gabe? It was a calculated risk. Mike squelched down the dry ball of nerves bunched in his throat, took a breath, and walked on in. Hands out of pockets in plain sight, where she could see them. As if that took away all the worry of a complete stranger wandering in after breakfast.

  Amanda jumped as if given an electric jolt. Backpedaling with her left leg, scooting the chair around and away from the table and toward the far wall. Fumbling at the same time with both hands to bring up a stainless steel cane, four stubby legs at its base. She held it like a spear ready for the thrust, her eyes those of a cornered animal. Frightened, yes, but not like a deer’s. A deer wouldn’t fight. Mike had a feeling she would, and do a furious job of it, too. He stopped.

  “Welcome back among the living,” he said, and smiled.

  It caught her good and hard. Clearly she understood at once that he wasn’t some random perpetrator ignorant of this house’s well-kept secret. She kept a solid grip on the cane, all the same.

  “Who…?” No threats, no cries for help. “What do you want?”

  Mike told her his name, confessed that he worked for a Florida newspaper. Assured her that he meant no harm. None of which brought a response either way, which was all the invitation he wanted to step it up and dazzle her with how much he was privy to.

  “On Thursday, June twentieth, you took a tumble down the main staircase and hit your head on the banister and went into a coma. Instead of risking public embarrassment, your husband arranged, through a Doctor Irving Preston, for private nurses to treat you around the clock. He spun a pretty good cover story to get you out of the country to alibi your absence as long as it was needed.” He sounded ridiculous to himself, like a cop — here’s the facts, ma’am. “How am I doing so far?”

  Amanda’s pale face bleached even paler, and she lowered the cane several degrees. “How do you know all this?”

  He took a seat on the kitchen floor, the least threatening pose he could come up with. The Smith and Wesson shifted, and he repositioned it as if massaging a back spasm. She never knew.

  “One of your nurses got a guilty conscience over the fraud she was helping to pull off. And I never believed you were in El Salvador to begin with, so she helped validate it. I was here just over a month and a half ago, I can prove that.” He slapped a jacket pocket. “I took pictures.”

  “Could I see them? Just to be sure? Slide them across the floor.”

  Mike produced the envelope, nineteen shots taken before Gabe Matthews’ interruption. He set it down on the tiled floor, gave it a flick, and it skittered to a halt before her slippered feet. Finally easing down the cane, she bent to retrieve the pictures with her left hand.

  Confrontation, shock therapy courtesy of her own wasted visage, and he was quite the crusader, wasn’t he? Muckraker, yellow journalist, dragging her back through everything she was trying to surmount. When she dropped them aside after looking at the fourth one, it was three too many, and he felt only relief.

  “I don’t want to see those.” Her voice wavered with disgust. “Why did you take those pictures?”

  How much honesty could she withstand this morning? The situation cried for tender loving care from all sides. “I’d thought I’d do an expose on whatever was really going on here. But for what it’s worth, I kind of lost heart once I got up there and actually … saw you.”

  Close to angry tears. “Oh sure. You’re a real humanitarian.”

  “I deserve that.”

  Amanda wiped at her nose and eyes, sitting there careworn, contemplating life out of control, and somehow managing to do it with the utmost dignity. This Mike knew: She may have aided and abetted Donny in his scams, but he still did not deserve her. Or she, at least, deserved better.

  “Does my husband know you’re aware of all this?”

  Mi
ke shook his head. “Not a clue.”

  “I believe that.” She gestured toward the chair across the table from her. “You might as well sit a little closer.”

  He accepted, getting his first good close look at her face. Smoothly translucent, her eyes faintly ringed with dark circles. Clearly taking this as it came, as best she could, how to play this bizarre new hand fate had just dealt. And just as much a hit-and-run victim of this ministry speeding out of control as anyone.

  “So what is it you want?” she repeated. “Now, I mean?”

  “Well, that’s the tricky part, anymore.” There was no finesse in blurting out the truth as he saw it, which might alienate her. Disparage Donny, and she could well rise up in his defense, reflex action. Schoolyard honor: You can bad-mouth your mom all you want, but let some other kid try it and he eats knuckles. So. Let her bury Donny on her own, with as little help from him as possible. “Are you happy with the way Donny handled your injury?”

  Amanda took her time, resistance flaking away a bit at a time. Saying little, actually, not much beyond an admission that she’d never been made to feel more in anyone’s way in her life. But the vital nerve had been struck, all the quirks of her voice and face and posture cueing him in that this woman was perched atop a powder keg of resentment, and her husband had struck the fuse. He’d seen it before, and would have bet that with Amanda it went back earlier than her fall.

  “I just want to know what’s going on here, behind the scenes,” Mike said, finally approaching her question. “Something really shook the ministry up this summer, I think. I don’t know what, but I don’t think it’s in a very positive direction.”

  Like what was important enough to kill for? Couldn’t club her with too much at once, though.

  “Donny, he’s…” Her voice dwindled, searching. “I know he’s been preoccupied, with … something. But we just don’t communicate anymore. We may as well be on two different planets now.”

  “How much do you trust Gabriel Matthews?”

  A tiny flash, eyes narrowing for an instant. “I have no reason not to … but…”

  “But you don’t.”

  “No. Not much.”

  Yet she was trusting him, an intruder, even more. Perhaps recognizing an ally against a common enemy, an enemy she may not have consciously admitted she had. Or perhaps she was horribly lonely, walled away from her world with no one left to confide in. When storms were rough, sometimes any port would do. This he knew from experience, no longer proud of it, having ingratiated himself to too many women in pain, for too short a time.

  A real humanitarian.

  “Something’s wrong around here,” Amanda said quietly. “And I think it might be revolving around this new employee Donny hired. But he’s an innocent in all this, he’s not …” She shook her head. “I’ve spoken with him a few times, he can’t be involved the way they are. Don’t ask me how I know, just believe me.”

  New guy? Mike remembered the fresh face on the show. Gut feelings said one and the same.

  “I don’t want to see anything happen to him,” she went on. “Paul. His name’s Paul. He’s got a girlfriend here, one of the singers. I tried calling her about him a couple days ago, and she said she was worried too, she hadn’t seen him, his room was always locked.”

  Mike watched wars of conflicting loyalty rage across her face, within her eyes. At war with herself, what a doomed prospect, always the loser, never the victor. He was wondering how to steer her away from this rocky ground when she pulled the plug.

  “My life and my marriage are falling apart and I don’t know WHY!” Imploding with the kind of rage that could wither your soul, warp your outlook on life forever. Then her voice softened as she looked up at him. “Leave. Please leave. Would you?”

  Mike nodded, could gain no more, not now, not like this. He stood, gave her shoulder a pat and thought it a triumph that she didn’t fight it. The revelation about Gabe would have to come later, if ever. Something like that would be overload.

  He fished a scrap of paper from one pocket, already neatly printed with the name of their motel, phone and room numbers. He set it beside her hand.

  “I’m sorry to put you through this, I really am. But … I don’t want to see anyone else getting hurt.” There, subtlety, let her wonder about that one. He started backing toward the mud closet door, pointing to his note. “You can reach me there if you need to. Do you think we can talk again?”

  I don’t know, she mouthed.

  He didn’t press the issue, merely thanked her, said goodbye. At least she took the note, folding instead of tearing it. Slipping it into her robe’s pocket.

  Use it, he thought. Please.

  Not for his sake, but for her own.

  Chapter 38

  “I think this denotes our caste here better than anything else,” Paul told Laurel. Pointing at cameras and microphones and the dozens of live people both before and behind them. And the directors fretting over the positions of everything. “We’re pins on a map.” He chuckled. “Pinheads.”

  They’d all gathered in the chapel for a Saturday morning run-through, the live TV debut twenty-four hours away. Mandatory rehearsals of everything going out over the airwaves tomorrow, so the floor director and his stopwatch could chart precise timings, facilitate camera switches. Donny was here, plodding around like a zombie with a script in his hand, a sermon pared down to sixteen minutes — how would he ever stand it? He delivered it with all the warmth of a dead fish, none of his usual live service enthusiasm, however Vegas-style, anywhere in sight.

  So here it was, behind the scenes, on a grand scale. The search for God reduced to a daily grind with the promise of a paycheck. He wondered if any of these TV techs would get time-and-a-half union scale for weekend work.

  They weren’t bothering to rehearse healings, because there was no one to heal. The only true improvisational part of tomorrows telecast, they would get into it forty or forty-five minutes into the show and let it fill the rest of the hour. A handy margin for error with everything else.

  As a result, Paul felt essentially useless here, without purpose. Everyone else getting bossed around, while he was left alone. Even Dougie Durbin had his purpose, cable puller for camera two; probably taxing his mental faculties to the limits.

  Paul watched from center auditorium, in a movie house sprawl with both legs draped over the seat in front of him. Laurel at his right, joining him after singing her song instead of slipping back up into the choir. One of the few, the privileged, One Who Knows Paul. Even though the choir was running through a post-sermon number, to lead into the healings. Soundtrack for an influx of bacteria, malignancy, and disabilities.

  “Let’s—” he said, so abruptly he surprised even himself. “Let’s leave here next week.” Shaking his head, look at things, look at us, what we are, how we live. “This place. This place. If we stay here? It’s going to eat us, you know that.”

  Laurel’s hand found his along the armrest. He held it without fear, sometimes a touch is just a touch. “I’m a lot stronger now than when I came here. So … okay.”

  “Let’s find you a band to sing in, and live in poverty. Nobody’ll know us, or want anything from us, and we can bitch to some scummy landlord about all the roaches. Please?”

  She let her head roll against his shoulder, laughed softly.

  “I miss the real world out there.” Even surrounded by the trappings of their current lives, Paul felt cast adrift from it all, an island, just himself and the one linked to his hand.

  This was the first genuine time he’d spent with her in days, having avoided her at all costs, afraid of something — what she might want of him, what he would do to her. It finally came to a head early this morning, Laurel beating on his door before he awoke, demanding to see him, that he talk to her, she wouldn’t go away until he unlocked the door. Then Paul, on his floor, begging her not to have him do those things to her anymore, it wasn’t right, wasn’t a thing a healthy mind could tolerate for l
ong, and she had held him and said okay. Just like that, okay, and despite its ease, he had felt no relief. Let them fall between the sheets, play the beast with two backs, stoke the passion and then see how easy it would be to keep sex from slipping into the morbid, the insane.

  “A couple nights ago?” he said. “It’s the first time ever that I didn’t do anything for Halloween.”

  Laurel squeezed his hand, as if sensing a need for nostalgia, connections with a past that was safer. “What’d you do last year?”

  “Just went barhopping with some people I worked with.” Smile, shutting his eyes, leaning his head back over the seat. “I won a costume contest at one place. I had on a black and white robe, and this furry Mongol-type cap, and rosary beads, and I carried this fake scimitar. Put on a Fu Manchu moustache. Guess who I was.”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Attila the Nun.” Shoulders quivering in silent laughter, but sad, those days were gone forever. “That’s the real world to me.”

  “We’ll go,” she whispered. “We’ll go find it somewhere.”

  He stared at the blurred ceiling, wanting to believe her, for this to be anything but a hopeful lie told out of pity. Easy words, make them come true, then he shook his head. “No we won’t. We’ll just look. You’ll be okay, you’ll fit…

  “I won’t.”

  And then Laurel had him by the shoulders, dragging him up and pulling his head around to face her, look at me, look at me. Fingers tight, digging into his arms, and he was glad of it, it was sensation, he was feeling something.

  “That was you this week, wasn’t it?” Laurel kept her face right in his, steady and solid. Desperate. “On the news, those two guys they found different nights, don’t lie to me, it was you.”

  So quiet he barely heard himself: “Yes.”

  “And you never would have told me on your own?”

  “No.”

  “And that’s what this is all about? Leaving, and you not seeing me for days, not talking, the way your eyes look lately?”