Violet Darger_Book 3_The Girl In The Sand

by L. T. Vargus

  But he only grunted and reached for her. Grabbed a handful of her hair at the top of her head and slammed the back of her skull into the floor.

  Bright white flashed in her head. She blinked. Opened her eyes as he dashed her head against the hard plank floor again.

  She had one thought before everything went black.

  It was a trap.

  Chapter 50

  Emily brushes at the underside of the lid again. Presses it with the palm of her hand. Some part of her half expects it to yield to her touch — to open — but it doesn’t.

  When Gabby speaks again, her voice sounds different. Softer. More serious.

  “You remember when you told me about Dan?”

  Emily chews at her lip. She remembers, but she wishes she didn’t.

  “I remember,” she says after a beat.

  “New Year’s Eve. We were in the back of my Impala. When we finished our shift, we celebrated with a bottle of Glenlivet. You’d never had scotch before. Is that right?”

  Emily nods.

  “It was the only time we ever drank together.”

  “Yeah, I’m not much for the stuff, but New Year’s Eve is New Year’s Eve,” Gabby says. “I’m not an animal. But yeah, I remember it was real late and just cold enough that the windows built up a layer of frost from our breath after a while. Maybe it was just where we were parked, but the city felt so empty that night. It’s weird to feel alone like that in Vegas. On New Year’s Eve of all nights.

  “And maybe we’d told all of our regular stories. The amusing anecdotes. Embarrassing moments. Slips and falls. All the light stuff you’d tell anybody. We’d told all of that stuff, so you told me about Dan. About how he turned everything in your life into a nightmare.”

  Emily swallows, feels a strange lump bob in her throat.

  “You two had gotten married young, right?”

  “I was nineteen. About to finish my freshman year in college. He was a year older.”

  “And he was the perfect guy. The man of your dreams. Smart. Funny. Good looking. From a well-to-do family in the— what line of business was it? Something in technology.”

  “Data security.”

  “That’s right. So yeah, everything is a goddamn dream come true for a while. Newlyweds going to school together, their future wide open in front of them. Living in a nice apartment off campus in a building his parents owned. You guys have a son a year later. A daughter a few years after that. Somewhere in there you graduate college and he goes to work in his family’s firm. Would that be appropriate? To call it a firm?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Things with you and him had been on the decline for a long time. Not terrible. Just not the ideal version you’d imagined. But it still blindsided you when it happened. You’d been fighting all afternoon. Over dumb stuff. Over practically nothing. The little annoying things that always seemed big in the moment. The ones you can’t even remember two hours later.”

  While Gabby talks, Emily’s breath rasps in and out of her chest. A steady beat.

  “But maybe the fight was always about something else. Some subtext that underlay the relationship in the long term. Some tension that persisted. Let’s just say he had issues.”

  Emily’s hand is still pressed against the lid of the box, and she imagines the wood grain leaving an impression on her palm. Whorls and knots and wiggly lines.

  “He burst into the bathroom out of nowhere. Hit you. Not so much a punch as he clubbed you with his fist. The way a toddler hits. A weird looping of his arm, semi-overhand, hitting you on the downward stroke. Anyway, it knocked you down. Knocked you flat on your ass. You pulled a couple of hand towels down with you, grabbing them to try to keep your feet and ripping them off the wooden dowel they hung on.”

  It plays in Emily’s head like a movie. It feels like something that happened to someone else. She is merely an observer.

  “And you were confused. You were frozen there on the bathroom floor. You’d seen flashes of his temper, but he’d never gotten physical before that. Never put his hands on you that way.”

  Emily turns her head away, knowing what comes next. Trying to avoid it.

  “And then he pissed on you. Before you had a clue what was happening, he had it out, standing over you, and he pissed in your face. With your kids in the next room eating hot dogs and macaroni and cheese for lunch. Hitting you wasn’t enough, see. The humiliation needed to go further. Needed to cross some line of decency. A hurt worse than physical pain. That was his intent.”

  There is a hard edge in Gabby’s voice. Anger seeping through to color the words red.

  “For weeks after, you sleepwalked through your days. In a daze. Eyes out of focus. Mumbling when you spoke. You couldn’t process it. Couldn’t accept that it really happened. Couldn’t fit this awful, jagged piece into the mosaic in your head that comprised his personality.

  “How could he be all of those characteristics you’d always known — smart, funny, attractive, generous — and also be the person who did this to you, did this to his wife, to the mother of his children? How could you bridge that psychological gap? Find a way to make peace with it in your psyche and figure out how to deal with it? You couldn’t.”

  Gabby pauses just long enough for Emily to blink twice and then continues.

  “Until it happened again. The same as before.”

  The silence is a nothingness all around them. A sucking vacuum of blackness. Impossibly huge and empty. There is no noise at all for miles and miles.

  “Except this time, after he pissed on you, he raped you.”

  Emily retracts into the mindscape some, her consciousness retreating to the deeper spaces inside. Anything to get away from these words Gabby is speaking.

  “Emily,” Gabby says, her voice all soft and smooth, speaking right next to Emily’s ear.

  Emily opens her eyes. Tries to focus on the eggshell strip of white ceiling up there. It’s the only thing that’s real.

  “Emily, talk to me.”

  “You’re dead. You’re not even real. Gabby is dead.”

  “Is that what you think?”

  “Yes. I don’t know. Maybe.”

  A little swallowing sound fills the box. Emily can’t decide if it was her or Gabby.

  She adjusts a little. Stretches. The sand gritting at her back.

  “You tried to tell people. About Dan, I mean. Friends. Family. But everyone had a way of shutting you down. Like they could sense where you were going, what you were going to tell them, and they didn’t want to hear it, wouldn’t hear it.”

  Her eyelids flutter, and the little slit in the lid of the box flashes in and out of existence.

  “His family had roots running all underneath that town. Wealth going back generations. They had ties to everyone and everything. Control over everything without even trying. Like what they wanted just mattered more than what everyone else did, you know? People catered to it automatically. They didn’t even have to ask.”

  Emily swallows.

  “And you knew you had to leave. Had to get away from him. And you knew he’d never allow that. Because you were his possession. But also because you were a threat to him. What you knew made your very existence a threat to him. When the private investigators started following you, you knew you had to go. You had to get out. So you took the kids and you ran. You ran to Las Vegas, where the girls go to disappear.”

  Emily’s mind wanders back to these old places, these old dreams, these old versions of herself. To all the old wounds reopened. And in a way, it’s not so bad to confront them from this strange vantage point. To see with great clarity that she never had a choice. That none of it was her fault.

  She acted to survive, to protect herself and her children. That was all.

  She closes her eyes. Lets go of the tension in her neck and shoulders.

  Drifts away.

  A sound brings her back to the moment — a grind and then a click.

  She flutters her eyelids. Checks on the
eggshell ceiling. It’s still there, hung way up above her, above the box.

  There are no other signs of life or movement outside, at least not in the little slice of the world she can view.

  And then she sees it. The source of the noise.

  The cherry of Gabby’s cigarette burns bright orange to her left. Beyond the wall of the box. In the dark. In the nowhere.

  It flares when she inhales. Glows brighter. And then it dims. Collects a dark spot of ash on the tip until Gabby flicks it away.

  It’s nice to have some company, Emily thinks, even if she’s not really there.

  Chapter 51

  Loshak shifted his weight from foot to foot, felt the linoleum sag with his movements.

  Instead of confused, he now felt determined. He knew all about guys like Mark, knew them inside and out.

  All batterers were the same. They felt powerless. Deeply, deeply insecure. They desired not just control of their situation but a sick, fetishized version of control. Domination expressed through exaltations of violence.

  For some of these guys, the wife could submit entirely, give in, give the batterer everything he wanted, and it wouldn’t be enough to sate him. The beating itself became the ritual. The violence almost religious — the only way a man so small could feel good about himself, feel like he’s worth anything at all.

  Loshak recognized all the signs and symptoms in Mark’s behavior, and now he had ideas for how to proceed. Above all, he needed to make Mark feel in control.

  The gunman grinned like a jackal. He’d taken to babbling off and on, seemingly stuck in some loop of pacing the kitchen and puffing himself up.

  “Think you can just trample people. Stomp around their houses. Like the whole world stops and starts when you tell it to. No fuckin’ way, Jack. Not today.”

  How long had they been in this kitchen? Minutes? An hour? Longer? Loshak couldn’t say. He supposed it didn’t matter.

  It occurred to him that Mark had mentioned his house a bunch of times. Defensively. The Stump investigation was a violation of space — his space, his home. That was how he saw it.

  When the agent spoke now, he did so in a quiet, even tone, the words trickling out slowly. A little sleepy sounding, perhaps. Bringing the volume of the conversation down was the first step.

  “You think no one is listening?” Loshak said. “Well, I’m listening. I understand where you’re coming from.”

  “You don’t understand shit,” Mark said.

  “You make some interesting points is all I’m trying to say. Us folks working in law enforcement, we sometimes get tunnel vision, sometimes get so focused on catching the bad guy, we don’t realize how we’re disrespecting innocent people in the process.”

  “Goddamn right you are.”

  Mark stopped pacing, his eyes wide. Loshak had his attention, and a hush had fallen over the room. No more pounding footsteps. No more ranting and raving. Mark had to be quiet now. Had to listen.

  “I get it, OK?” Loshak said. “There’s all this Leonard Stump shit swirling around — a tsunami’s worth — and a heaping pile of it gets dumped on your doorstep.”

  “Through no fault of my own,” Mark said.

  He nodded as he spoke, an exaggerated gesture that reminded Loshak of a toddler. The gun now dangled at his side, no longer gesticulating along with his every word and thought. For the first time in this conversation, the pistol was not Mark’s primary form of expression.

  “That’s right. Through no fault of your own. You’re innocent in this thing. The victim,” Loshak said. “I can understand — we can all understand — how something like that would get under a guy’s skin. Hell, you wouldn’t be much of a man if this kind of thing didn’t stick in your craw a little bit. Truth is, we see stuff like this all the time, and it’s not a big deal. We see you. We understand. So why don’t you put down the gun, and-”

  The gun snapped back to attention. Muzzle leveled at Loshak’s head.

  And those wide eyes narrowed on Mark’s face, squinted to slits with angry puckers all around them.

  “Don’t you walk into my house and fucking profile me, you piece of shit. Don’t try to get in my head and twist me around. I’m not some textbook case study bullshit. I’m just the guy with the gun, OK? The fucking guy with the fucking gun.”

  Mark resumed pacing, and the atmosphere in the room shifted from something bordering on nap time back to that tension of being near a hostile creature, locked inside the beast’s cage.

  Loshak blinked a few times. He replayed the words in his head — the fucking guy with the fucking gun. Yes, of course. The gun was what gave Mark power here, the thing that put him in control, and someone had asked him to give it up. A direct threat. Loshak had practically issued a command, the way Mark saw it, and he was almost saying as much out loud, reassuring himself that he was the one with the gun.

  Loshak realized that he’d already made this mistake once already. Asking him to give up the gun was what set him off the first time, when he’d fired a round into the ceiling.

  If Mark was going to part with the weapon, he’d need to feel like it was his idea, not Loshak’s.

  OK. Time to pivot.

  Again, Loshak lowered his voice, hitting that hushed volume just above a mumble, striving for a matter of fact tone.

  “Look at this thing from my point of view, Mark. I’m in a bad spot. I’m up to my ass in Leonard Stump paperwork as it is, and now I’ve got this situation here with you. I get where you’re coming from. Totally understand it. But on paper, it could look like a whole different deal, you know? Guy waving a gun around, threatening an FBI agent. That’s what it’ll read like on the page when all of this is over. That’s how the FBI does all of its business, you know? The written reports — the paperwork — that becomes the permanent record, and I’m worried people could get the wrong idea. They could think all of this was your fault, when you and I know it’s not.”

  “That’s bullshit.”

  “That’s exactly what I’m saying. It won’t be the truth, but imagine how it will look. I’m not sure how we get around that, unless you have any ideas.”

  Mark’s eyebrows tilted up in the middle. It looked, Loshak thought, like he wanted to be angry, wanted to dismiss this, but was having a hard time following through on it.

  Every desperate act was driven by fatalism, and fatalism made a person live in the moment. To counteract that, Loshak needed to make the gunman look ahead, to think about consequences, to consider the days, weeks, months, and years that would unfold after this moment had passed. The life that would go on.

  Loshak pressed him a little harder.

  “Look, this Stump thing is a pain in the balls for everyone involved. You think I want to be driving out to your place to play twenty questions a couple times a week? No fuckin’ way. I could be home right now, feet up on the coffee table, smoking a cigar, sucking down a six-pack of Miller High Life. There’s probably a bowl game on right this minute. One of the early, crappy games with two teams no one’s ever heard of. But still.”

  Mark’s tongue flicked out twice, wetting the corners of his mouth. He looked more tired than fierce now. Eyes a little glazed over from listening to Loshak talk.

  “Look, the real problem here is the gun, OK? I come over here and we get in a disagreement? No one bats an eyelash at something like that in a report. Just two guys arguing a little bit. Happens all the time, man. Typical stuff. But you add a gun to that picture, and the whole thing just looks bad. Real bad. That’s all I’m trying to say.”

  Mark’s eyelids wanted to close. Loshak could see that standing across the room from him. They looked heavy. Folded puffs of flesh.

  “So you’re saying…” Mark said. His voice sounded thick, his cadence slowed to a confused crawl as he sought after words. He’d lowered his voice to match Loshak’s muted tones.

  Loshak suspected the man holding him hostage was hitting that critical backstretch in a drunken evening where he would either need to d
rink more to catch a second wind, or he was going to pass out, and it looked for all the world like he was headed toward the latter.

  “I mean, what you’re saying is… if it weren’t for the gun….”

  The room fell to silence whenever Mark trailed off. A peaceful kind of quiet that would have seemed impossible just a few minutes earlier. The dripping sink provided the only noise, that tick-tock of water in the background.

  Loshak felt all the follicles on his head tingling as he anticipated Mark’s next words. He was so close. So close.

  Mark’s lips parted, twitched, just on the edge of speaking.

  Loshak’s phone chirped from his inside jacket pocket, vibrating against his chest. A text message notification.

  It came at the worst possible moment.

  Everyone in the room jumped a little when the phone went off. Startled. Throttled back into motion after the extended lull.

  Claire sucked in an audible breath, clutched at her chest with both hands. She hunched her back in a way that made Loshak think of a raccoon.

  Loshak’s shoulders jerked hard enough to knock him off balance, and he staggered back a step. The soles of his shoes slid around as he fought to regain his footing, skimming over the linoleum with little scuffing noises. When he steadied himself at last, he wound up in something close to a karate stance.

  And Mark woke right up, his face tightening into a mess of hateful wrinkles. His lip curled, and he snorted twice like an angry dog, his posture going rigid all at once. He didn’t hesitate.

  He charged.

  Lunged at Loshak.

  Swung the butt of the gun at him in an awkward right hook.

  Loshak dodged the blow, bobbing and weaving away from Mark’s advance. Staying just out of the flailing arm’s reach. He couldn’t tell if the lunatic was trying to pistol whip him or punch him, but he didn’t intend to let either happen.

  “More bullshit,” Mark said through clenched teeth. “Put your fucking hands up.”

  Now he stopped chasing after the agent and trained the gun on him again. His ribcage heaved, and he bared his teeth.

  Loshak complied, hands drifting up in slow motion. What choice did he have?