Under Water

by Casey Barrett

  Again, a thump, thump. Something upstairs, hitting a wall.

  I stopped by the foot of the stairs. Charlie turned to face me, unable to deny the sound. Thump, thump . . . Marks, I thought. He has the fucker captive up there. Our eyes met, and Charlie came at me. Again, the aikido instinct returned, somehow. I caught him with a hip throw defense and brought him down to his polished hardwood floor, released his wrist, then drove my elbow down hard into his nose. Blood splashed, and Charlie cried out. I leapt over him as his hands went to his face and then charged up the stairs to find Marks. The thumping was harder now, louder as I got closer. It was a head banging against a headboard . . . behind the door at the end of the hall.

  I raced toward the sound, flung open the bedroom door, and flipped on the lights. It wasn’t Marks.

  Madeline McKay was bound to a king-size bed. She wore a men’s white oxford shirt that hung to her upper thighs. Her legs were bare and spread, tied to the bedposts by her ankles. Her wrists were fastened over her head and knotted to a brass bedframe. A red necktie was stretched in her mouth and tied around her head. She looked at me with wide-eyed terror, writhed against her captivity. I rushed to her. A hypodermic needle and several small vials rested on the nightstand. I pulled at her ties, yanked at the knots. Her eyes grew wider, pleading. Then she blinked rapidly and stared in horror over my shoulder.

  I turned in time to see her brother rushing at me. I readied for his onslaught. Charlie stopped, raised a small black device in his right hand, and fired. Two electrical probes caught me in the neck. Fifty thousand volts coursed through me.

  Down I went.

  Chapter 31

  I was wading in warm, waist-deep surf. Something big and dark brushed past my thigh. A fin broke the surface and disappeared again. A girl paddled by on a surfboard. I tried to call out to her but couldn’t form words. She looked back at me, and she had the face of Madeline. A hard look was broken by an innocent smile. She turned back to the surf and started paddling and pushed her board down and dove under a rising wave. I tried to swim after her, but the wave broke, and I was swallowed by the churning white water.

  When I surfaced, I gasped for air, sure that if I went under again I’d never come up. But I was somewhere else now, in a rain forest with steam rising from the green forest floor. Thick snakes dipped down from low branches, eyeing me, wondering if I was worth the struggle. Monkeys swooped and cackled above my head. Piercing calls of tropical birds filled the suffocating air. Again I saw Madeline up ahead. She was hiking fast through the bush, waving a machete to clear a path. I tried calling out again, and nothing came out. She did not turn around.

  As I ran after her, the rain forest began to fall away until I found myself on a dark city street. I raced through the center, past honking cabs and swerving bikes, ignored the angry calls in my wake. I saw her up ahead, entering a courtyard of projects somewhere down by the East River. I looked down to find myself running over syringes and used condoms and broken vials and shattered bottles. Neglected babies wailed overhead. Madeline turned and waited and waved me inside a building.

  The inside was lit only by the red glow of the emergency exit sign. There were bodies strewn across the floor, propped half up against the walls. Lighters sparked in the darkness, and the room filled with the sickly sweet smell of burning crack. Then coughing turned to laughter turned to silent bliss in the filth. I felt Madeline grab my hand. She pulled me into an elevator, and the doors closed and it began to descend. I felt us sinking, clinging to her damp hand, until a stinging splash of cold water brought me back.

  I blinked back to reality to find myself strapped to a chair in another dark bedroom. I’d been stripped down to my boxers, my arms tied behind my back, my ankles fastened to the legs of the chair by surgical tubing. The room was lit only by streetlight, filtering through cracks in the blinds. Charlie stood before me holding a steel bucket at his side. His nose was swollen, misshapen. Blood crusted around the nostrils where I’d elbowed him. A large leather bag sat by his feet. He slapped me hard against my wet bandaged cheek.

  “Wake up,” he said. “Time to talk.”

  I felt a trickle down the inside of my arm and looked to see a thin rivulet of blood running from a puncture wound, where Charlie had injected me.

  “Morphine,” he said. “You needed to settle down.”

  “Nice dreams.”

  “You were far too worked up earlier. That was no way to behave in someone’s home.”

  Across the dark room there was a mattress on the floor; a body lay lifeless across it. Charlie followed my eyes. He went to a standing lamp by the bed and turned it on.

  “That better?” he asked.

  I wished he’d left it off. The room glowed with sick bright death. Marks was on the mattress. A gash had opened up his skull. His head rested in a halo of red.

  “He came in here much like you,” said Charlie. “Full of bluster, making demands, trying to push me around.” He laughed at the dual memories. “Did you two really think you could push me around?” He came to me again and gave me another slap against the cheek. I felt Anna’s bite wound open and begin to seep through the stitches. “Those were some fancy moves you pulled on me. What was that, judo? I do admit you’re not as useless as I thought.”

  “You throw a hell of a party, Charlie,” I said. “No one here gets out alive, is that it?”

  He glanced over at Marks. “You should know me better than that by now. You know partying’s never been my thing. I’m all about getting shit done, always have been.”

  “Is that what you’ve been doing here? Taking care of shit? What have you done to your sister, Charlie?”

  He didn’t reply. He turned off the light and strolled to the window. He opened a Venetian blind and peered out. He put his hands on his hips, chin held high, the same way he’d posed so many times atop so many podiums. Through the windows, the sounds of the city filtered up from the street: traffic and sidewalk voices, the faint sounds of someone playing “Gimme Shelter.” Eight million lives out there in this naked city, and eight million ways to die. A line I’d always loved and now remembered like last words. And somewhere, in an expensive and tasteless home, there were two bound prisoners and one dead man, part of a horror I had failed to fully contemplate. I wondered how I had missed his madness.

  Charlie stood before the window for some time, perhaps formulating his next move, some way to dispose of the mess he’d created. Finally he shook his head and walked back toward me. I watched as he knelt before his leather bag, unzipped it, and removed a slim laptop. He laid it aside with great care, then began to remove instruments of violence, one after the next. Blades and metals gleamed through the darkness. When the bag was emptied, he tossed it aside and stood and examined his collection with satisfaction.

  “Cops know you’re here?” he asked.

  “Maybe.”

  “Maybe,” he repeated. “Or maybe you lost them on the way over. You’ve never been too keen on the boys in blue, have you, buddy?” He glanced over his shoulder, back at the window. “I guess we’ll see. Shouldn’t be a big deal either way. I’ll tell them you came by, drunk, which is true, and that you left sometime later. You’re probably suffering from PTSD, your head’s all messed up, especially with all that booze. Who knows where you might have staggered off to?”

  “And Coach? Your sister? What are you going to say about them?”

  He smiled, a cocky smile of complete confidence. “All in good time, my man. First, we should chat,” he said. “I need to find out exactly how much you know or, more to the point, how much you’ve told anyone else.” He looked down at his weapons. “These should help you tell the truth.”

  “I’ve got no reason to lie,” I told him.

  “We’ll see,” he said. “I would recommend against it. So, tell me, Duck, what do you think is going on here? I’d love to hear your thoughts.”

  “I thought Marks was the sick one,” I said. “But turns out he’s got nothing on you.”
<
br />   “You’re partly right,” he said. “The old man was a sick bastard, and he got what was coming to him. It was long overdue, really. The blackmail was just the first step. I never expected . . .” He paused at a memory too painful to consider.

  “She’s your sister, Charlie.”

  “Oh Duck, she’s much more than that.”

  “I can see that,” I said.

  “She is my love, the only thing in my life that has ever mattered to me. My gold medals, my millions, all meaningless. It’s Madeline who moves my world. I would do anything for her.”

  “Is that why you have her strapped to your bed down the hall?”

  “Exactly where she must be,” he said. “She needed to slow down, she was out of control. She’s always been so reckless, but she always comes around. She’ll understand.”

  “Help me understand,” I said.

  His face darkened. He stepped forward and hit me with an open hand upside the head. “Don’t patronize me, Duck. You can’t understand. No one can. We’ve long since made our peace with that.”

  “We?”

  “Madeline and I.” He sighed. “Star-crossed as it comes, I’m afraid.”

  “Your sister is not at peace, Charlie. She’s an addict, a broken soul. It was you that made her that way.”

  Charlie leaned back down and scanned his instruments. He chose an X-Acto knife, examined it; touched the sharp blade with the tip of his finger. Then he straightened up and stepped toward me with it hanging loose by his side.

  “You know, I used to think I wanted to be a doctor,” he said. “Before I found out that they didn’t make shit. Ha. But the work always did fascinate me. Opening a body, administering drugs and cuts that can determine life or death. It really is like playing God. If there was one, that is. I guess doctors, some of them anyway, are about as close as it comes. But the lifestyle, alas, it wasn’t for me. I needed to make real money. I always have been obsessed by the gold.” He smiled at his own cleverness, his self-evident success. “But I never lost my fascination with medicine. I suppose I became a bit of a hobbyist.”

  “That how you won all those gold medals?” I asked. “Shooting yourself with dope?”

  He smiled. A quick twitch of the head, a few rapid blinks of the eye—he lacked his mother’s lifted poker face. He glanced over at Marks. “It would kill Coach if he ever found out,” he said.

  “No more secrets in this room,” I said.

  Charlie raised the knife and pointed the sharp tip a centimeter from my left eye. He turned his wrist, considered the angle of entry. One thrust forward and my eyeball would be a blinded exploded membrane. After a long, sick moment he lowered it an inch. Before I could exhale, he pressed forward with the blade. It broke skin high on my cheek. He traced a path down the right side of my face to the corner of my mouth. Now both sides were disfigured—one by bites, the other more surgically. He examined his incision, the blood clinging to the razor.

  “Not bad,” he said. “Not bad at all. I could have been a plastic surgeon. Would have saved mom a bunch of money.” He laughed, reached out and carved another quick parallel line down my face.

  I felt little pain. The morphine must have still been working its magic. I tasted blood seeping into the corner of my mouth, a metallic, almost comforting taste. Charlie watched it drip with a detached excitement like a boy in the woods happening upon an animal carcass. It seemed to thrill him. He turned and set down the X-Acto precisely where he’d found it. Then he selected a new toy, this time a telescoping black baton. With a flick of his wrist the baton shot out to full size. He waved it in slow crosses like a blunt sword between us.

  “I suppose there is a certain kismet to your presence here in the end,” he said. “My first rival, and my last, in a sense. I’ll admit, Duck, as difficult as you’ve been, I do admire your hardheadedness. You’re tougher than I imagined, maybe a bit smarter too.” He tapped the baton in the palm of his hand, nodded with a certain demented respect. “Those barbarian Lisko brothers certainly underestimated you, didn’t they? Ha. Well played there, Darley, I must say. As for Anna, she was the brains of that clan, wasn’t she? And a hell of a lay, wouldn’t you agree?”

  He strolled toward me like a ballplayer approaching the batter’s box, all swagger and big stick confidence. “Just think,” he said. “If you’d been a little softer, you might have survived all this.”

  He stiffened in his stance, eyed my knee like a fat hanging curveball.

  “Duck, are you aware of my sister’s performances online?”

  “Fallen Angels,” I said. “Cass found them.”

  With a quick step forward, he unleashed a home run swing that connected with a bone-crunching crack. I cried out, tried to stifle the pain. The morphine couldn’t help much with that.

  “I don’t believe you,” he said. “Are you sure you didn’t find them some other way?”

  “You mean jerking off? No, Charlie. How about you, is that how you discovered your sister doing porn?”

  Charlie resumed his baseball stance, this time in front of the other knee.

  “It is, isn’t it?” I asked.

  He replied with a wild swing of the baton. It missed the knee mark, but connected with my left shin. There was the sharp sound of bone breaking. I gasped, felt the tears intermingling with the blood on my face. He leaned in close. “You have no idea how that felt,” he said. “No idea. To find your own sister, like that, at that moment.”

  “Bet it happens all the time,” I wheezed. “To plenty of guys, all worked up, and then there’s sis or mom.”

  I was beginning to wish for quick death, wondered how much I needed to provoke him for Charlie to finish me off. “I’ll bet it turned you on even more,” I said.

  “You want me to kill you right now?” he shouted. “Is that what you’d like?”

  “Yes,” I answered truthfully.

  He jabbed me in the stomach with the baton, then flung it across the room. “Oh, you’ll get your wish,” he said. “When I’m through with you.”

  Charlie went to the laptop lying next to his instruments. He raised the screen and sat before it and typed with concentration. What he saw seemed to bring physical pain. His jaw clenched, his hands shook over the keyboard. Then he stood and presented me with the screen.

  “I want you to watch something,” he said. “Please tell me what you see. And do not spare details. I would like to hear them.”

  He clicked the play button on a video and maximized the window. An image of Marks’s poolside office glowed on the full screen. Marks sat at his desk, facing out, with an excited, smug smile spread beneath his mustache. His legs were open in a wide stance; there was a visible bulge beneath his khaki shorts. Madeline walked into the frame wearing only a racing suit. Her legs were long and toned, and she stood with the posture of a woman in touch with her carnal side. She turned and glanced at the camera, a wicked smile playing on her lips. Her lips, those wide, fishy lips . . . I remembered her previous videos. Madeline turned back to her coach and positioned his chair to face her. She peeled her suit slowly off of her shoulders and down her body. Then she sank to her knees before Marks.

  “Duck,” said Charlie. “I asked you to describe what you see. Please don’t be shy.”

  I shook my head, watched as Marks’s shorts were undone and dropped to his ankles. Watched as Madeline stroked him. The laptop shook in Charlie’s hands as he looked down and watched her inhale. Her head began to move up and down between his legs.

  “What is she doing, Duck?” asked Charlie, trembling. “I can’t hear you.”

  “She’s blowing him,” I said. “You were right, Charlie.”

  “No!” he shouted suddenly. He slammed the laptop shut and flung it like a titanium Frisbee in Marks’s direction. It struck his lifeless body and crashed to the floor. “No. What she is doing is killing him. She is guaranteeing his death.”

  “Where did you find that?” I asked.

  He pointed toward the offending laptop, sh
outed, “That was her computer! She filmed it—in secret. She wanted me to see it. The slut, how could she do this to me?”

  I thought he was going to break down, but he channeled his anguish back to anger in a hurry. “She said it was for revenge,” he seethed.

  “For Lucy.”

  Charlie glared at me. “How did you know that?”

  “She told us,” I said. “After she was released from the hospital, Lucy sought out my partner. She said your sister promised her that she’d get revenge for what Marks did to her.”

  “Did to Lucy?”

  “That’s who he was screwing, Charlie. Not your sister. Not until she decided to make that thing. My guess is, she was planning to ruin him with it.”

  For once it appeared I had the upper hand on the intel. I decided to push it. “You poor fuck, you thought she did that to hurt you, didn’t you?”

  The comment seemed to deflate him. “That’s why Lucy tried to kill herself last week, isn’t it?” he asked.

  “What do you think?”

  He looked over at Marks, gave a sudden mad laugh. “I think I helped her out on that score. Ruined, he is!”

  “It was at the house in Rhinebeck, wasn’t it, Charlie?” I asked. “That’s where you saw it. She showed it to you, didn’t she? I found the cord.”

  He gave a slight nod, lost as he pieced together his sister’s motives. He returned to the window, stared out, and began to speak in a quieter voice.

  “She was up in her bedroom,” he said. “I didn’t knock. I was thrilled to see my girl. I’ll never forget the look she gave me. That sick smile. She was so high, so far gone. It looked like she hadn’t slept in days. She was sitting cross-legged on her bed in front of her laptop. It was attached to a camera, like a Go Pro but smaller, some kind of spy gear. I heard moans coming from it, in a familiar voice. She turned it around for me to see. I thought it was more of her porn videos, more of that Fallen Angels filth. Then I saw who it was. I tried to grab it from her. We fought. I managed to steal the computer and camera away from her. The cord must have been flung away in the struggle. I wondered where it went. She ran off, laughing like a crazy person. I didn’t go after her; I couldn’t move. When I heard the front door open and shut, I reopened the laptop and took a closer look. I wanted to die. I swear, I almost killed myself right there.”