Damaged Goods

by Heather Sharfeddin

  “Tell her!”

  Silvie winced.

  “In the freezer,” Kyrellis said.

  Jacob snapped his head to the side, ordering her to retrieve them. She scrambled into the kitchen, her hands shaking. She fumbled through the contents of Kyrellis’s freezer, finally dragging everything out onto the counter before finding the icy metal box underneath two large bags of frozen blackberries. She brought it to the living room, her fingers aching, and tried to open it, but it was locked.

  “Where’s the key?” she said, breathless, trying to appear helpful to Jacob. His ally.

  “Are you going to kill me?” Kyrellis asked. His eyes glistened, and Silvie could hear his fear. For an instant, she pitied him.

  “What do you think, you stupid fool,” Jacob said.

  Hershel parked in front of the garage, deciding that he’d tell Silvie there was a coyote prowling around the auction barn. It would prevent any idea of walking over there, as well as explain his need to take his gun. He’d take the rifle as well as his pistol.

  The sun had brightened everything, but instead of giving him a new sense of purpose, as it usually did, it only sharpened his headache. When this was over—when he’d killed Jacob Castor and was rid of Kyrellis, too—he would suggest that they move somewhere new. Idaho, maybe. Or Colorado. A mountain state, with a rugged landscape and more days of sun. They didn’t have to stay here. A new start would be good for both of them. He had no choice in what he was about to do, but his future—their future—could be different. And maybe then these damn headaches would finally go away.

  As he stepped down he noticed that the doors to the garage were slightly open, not the way he thought he’d left them. He didn’t want Silvie trying to start the car and discovering that it ran. She thought she could outsmart Kyrellis, but she was wrong. Look what had come of her efforts. He didn’t blame her for Carl’s death, but neither could he trust her judgment on this. He should never have given Silvie a key to the Porsche. Another example of his abysmal capacity for thinking ahead, anticipating what problems might arise. But as he pushed the door closed the empty space inside registered. The car was gone.

  Hershel sprinted to the house, bursting inside, calling Silvie’s name as he took the stairs two at a time. He went directly to his bedroom and gathered his pistol from the nightstand. He skidded back down the wooden steps on one foot, thumping against the wall at the bottom and knocking his sister’s oil painting to the floor. He stepped over it and went to the kitchen, still calling after her in vain, knowing that she wasn’t there. What kind of crazy idea had she gotten in her head to do?

  He rustled through his utility drawer, looking for ammunition, scooping up one box for his pistol and another for his rifle. In the mudroom he took his rifle and was peeling down the driveway in seconds, his arsenal flung out on the seat next to him, heading for Kyrellis’s.

  Kyrellis dropped to his knees, begging. “Please. You don’t have to do this. I’ll give you my gun collection. I have beautiful guns. Guns like you’ve never seen before. You can take them. Take them all. But, please, don’t kill me.”

  “Tell her where the key is,” Jacob said again, his lips tight with impatience. The knuckles on his right hand had purpled.

  “Under the yellow rosebush on the patio,” Kyrellis said, relenting.

  Silvie hustled from the room after it. When she found it, she wondered if Jacob would make her watch him kill Kyrellis. He might consider that punishment for running off with his pictures. As terrible as the idea was, she doubted that would be the extent of her reprimand. She returned to the living room with the key and struggled with the frozen lock, finally springing it and pulling the lid back. She dumped the contents of the box onto the coffee table and began counting the photos.

  “He’s going to kill you, too, Silvie,” Kyrellis said, trying to win her over. “You told me so yourself.”

  She locked eyes with him for an instant. He was terrified, and it was familiar to her. But she would not sacrifice herself for this man.

  “Ask him where those other girls are. Do you think, even for a minute, that he didn’t kill them?”

  Her eyes darted to Castor before she could stop herself.

  “Don’t listen to him,” Castor said. “You know how much I love you.”

  She smiled weakly; she wanted to believe him.

  “Ask him,” Kyrellis urged.

  “Shut up!” Castor said, stepping toward him. He turned to Silvie. “Are they all there?”

  “I—I think so.”

  “Lay them out so I can see them.”

  She obeyed, making a disturbing sexual collage across the coffee table. He glanced over them, but she refused to look. The faces of those mysterious girls only deepened her doubt.

  “He bound you, he beat you, he threatened to kill you,” Kyrellis said, just loud enough to get to her.

  She stared back at him, incredulous. “You would have done the same. You were going to do the same.”

  Castor placed the gun against Kyrellis’s forehead. Then he held the other gun out to Silvie. “Take it,” he said.

  She walked slowly to Castor’s side. He gestured toward the gun with his chin. Her hand shook as she reached for it, the metal warm against her frozen fingers.

  “Put it to his head.”

  “I—I can’t.”

  “Do it,” Castor said, his tone harsh and unbending.

  She pressed the metal barrel against Kyrellis’s temple. It wobbled and bucked in her trembling grip.

  “Does it feel good to hold a gun to this man’s head?”

  She couldn’t answer. Couldn’t find words or solidify her thoughts.

  “Maybe I’ll let you do the honors. But first,” Castor said. “Who is the other man?”

  Her breath caught in her throat. “I don’t know who you mean.”

  He studied her.

  “Really, Jacob. This is the only man.”

  He turned to Kyrellis. “Then you tell me the name of the other man, the man who wants you dead.”

  “What’s in it for me?” Kyrellis rasped.

  “Do you hate him as much as he hates you? Do you want him dead, too?”

  Silvie’s stomach rolled. Hershel, she thought. Her Good Samaritan, her savior. His kiss was still fresh on her forehead. I love you, he’d said. I love you.

  Kyrellis opened his mouth to speak, and Silvie squeezed the trigger. The sharp explosion erupted in her ears, and she saw Kyrellis’s head blow back. Blood sprayed across the leather armchair. She shrieked and dropped the gun.

  Castor stood over Kyrellis’s limp body, a hard, angry scowl on his face.

  Hershel slowed as he passed Kyrellis’s house. The Porsche sat in the driveway. His chest went tight. He pulled into the delivery entrance and eased the pickup between the rows of greenhouses. When he reached the service road that ran between the propagation house and the back of the property, he saw the other pickup. A big Ford 4×4. Early nineties. Tan and white, with a crew cab. Wyoming plates.

  He swung a wide U-turn, heading toward the equipment sheds behind Kyrellis’s house. He pulled the truck inside a gaping pole barn that housed a tractor with a scoop and a forklift. Quietly shutting the door, pulling the rifle with him, Hershel surveyed the area. His truck was well hidden from the back of the house and Castor’s pickup. He looked around, scouting for a position from which he could see the pathway between the back patio door and the waiting vehicle. Castor wouldn’t kill Silvie here. He’d take her with him. Hershel’s best chance was to lie in wait and shoot the man as he got into his truck. He took a practice aim, using the scope and imagining his bullet zinging through the back window and into Castor’s head. The hunk of metal beneath him, he finally noticed, was Floyd.

  Hershel focused on the patio door, then scanned the back of Kyrellis’s house, searching for alternative routes. They would have to come through the patio door or walk around from the front. He guessed they wouldn’t do that; the front was exposed to the highway.
Either way, he’d have Castor when the man got to his truck.

  Floyd was warm beneath him, the black tarp soaking up the winter sun like a thirsty sponge. The car felt almost alive. He wondered what they were doing inside, and for an instant he considered going down to the house. What if Castor did kill Silvie here? Hershel would never forgive himself if he allowed that to happen. He let the gun drop an inch or two and looked more closely, trying to catch any glimpse of movement through the windows.

  The patio door slid open, and Silvie stepped out. Her skin grayish, her gait stiff and halting. She looked around, as if sensing his eyes on her. But upon seeing Castor’s truck she started for it at a fast clip. Hershel stood, and she caught sight of him, wincing.

  “Silvie,” he called in a hoarse whisper. She was about fifty yards away, and he instantly worried that the sound of his voice had traveled into the house.

  She looked startled, then glanced over her shoulder at the patio door.

  “Thank God you’re okay. Where’s Castor?”

  “Hershel, get out of here.” Her face was set hard. Her backpack swayed at her knee. “He’s going to kill you.”

  “Come with me.” He held a hand out to her as she approached, preparing to pull her to safety—to ensconce her in the armor of his truck.

  “No!”

  The resolution in her voice startled him.

  “Just go,” she snapped, reminding him of someone chasing off an unwanted animal. “Kyrellis is dead.” A look of anguish crossed her face, making him wonder if she’d witnessed it. “I shot him.”

  “You what?”

  “I shot him,” she said fiercely. “Before he could give Jacob your name.”

  “Silvie,” he said. “It will be okay. Just come with me. I’ll protect you.”

  “I can’t.” She looked furtively at the house. “Jacob is coming. I have to go.”

  “Please, just get behind the car,” he said, gesturing toward Floyd. “I’m going to finish this.”

  “No!” Her blue eyes sent icy daggers at him.

  “Get behind the car,” he demanded. “I’m going to kill that fucker.”

  “You can’t do that,” she said through tears. “I … I love him.” She headed toward Castor’s truck. When she reached the passenger door she turned and looked back at him, her brows pressed together with worry. Then she climbed inside. A moment later Castor came through the patio door, carrying the small metal box that had consumed Hershel’s days since he’d met Silvie.

  Hershel crouched and sighted the man with his rifle scope. He followed him along the pathway to his pickup, an easy target. One that he could hit in his sleep. He fingered the trigger, Silvie’s words swelling in his head.

  “Now,” he whispered. But his finger would not obey his command. “Now,” he said again.

  Castor started the engine, the back of his head squarely in the crosshairs of Hershel’s rifle scope. “Now.”

  The truck pulled forward, and Castor made the same arcing U-turn that Hershel had. He sighted the man’s face as he came back in this direction. “Now.”

  The truck turned down the lane between the greenhouses. Hershel laid the rifle across Floyd’s buckled hood and drew a breath.

  30

  Hershel lay on his sofa, his head aching in its familiar, maddening way. His muscles echoed the pain, now a day after he’d retrieved the Porsche and returned it to its dusty tomb. He’d paused to sit in it after backing it into the garage, running his fingers over the steering wheel. Its name had revealed itself as Silvie. The car would never be of use to him now. It would only remind him of their all too brief encounter and its tragic end. The haunted eyes of that little girl, and the sweetness of the woman she’d become. He thought he might sell the car. But something about the idea warned him that it would only add to his list of regrets.

  He’d made two trips back to Kyrellis’s yesterday. Both with the flatbed truck that he kept at his auction barn, which he used to bring Floyd home. It was where the Charger should always have been. The work had served to keep him busy and postpone the promised emptiness ahead. After running the flatbed to the sale barn and hiking through the orchard for the second time that day, he’d stood in the driveway and bravely unsheathed the ruined car. Its windshield gaped at him in the cool evening sunshine. The brightness of the afternoon—its out-of-the-ordinariness—had already lent a surreal feeling to the events of the day. He went back over what had happened. Had he been able to carry out his plan, he’d be just hours from meeting Castor in the orchard. And, likely, hours away from death. The car reminded him that he’d been there before, wandering the line between this world and the next. He tried the trunk, but the bent frame had sealed it tight. What secrets Floyd harbored would remain secrets for now.

  Hershel hadn’t gone inside Kyrellis’s house on either of his trips. He knew that someone would find the body in time. A driver looking for a shipment of roses, perhaps. A friend, if Kyrellis had any. Hershel reasoned that he hadn’t actually killed the man—not directly. He told himself that he had nothing to fear from the law. If questioned, he would simply explain that he’d been at Kyrellis’s to collect the Charger. A buy-back. He’d taken the time to draw up a false receipt in case he needed to prove it. But, even as he prepared his story, the truth that he’d hastened the man’s death couldn’t be avoided.

  As he listened to the tick of the kitchen clock in the empty house, he parsed Silvie’s declaration that she had killed Kyrellis. Had he misunderstood her? Had she said that Castor shot him, and somehow the shock of her leaving with the same man who had enslaved her caused Hershel to get it wrong? He’d gotten so many things wrong; it could be just one more item on that long list. And yet her voice, taut with emotion, rang so clear, even a day later.

  One thing had become clear to Hershel, though. As he’d stood looking at Floyd, running his fingers over the crushed-in roof, he knew that he had not killed Albert Darling. Like the oily sheen of those things lost to him, there was also a void—a wide, empty space inside his brain—that by its very presence confirmed that some things never were. Whatever Kyrellis had convinced him of, however Darling’s body had come to him for disposing, a true killer would have pulled the trigger and killed Castor. He was not a killer. He had never been a killer.

  On Monday morning, after another difficult night of unrest, Hershel went to the auction barn. The day was as dark as his mood, a heavy rain pelting his skin through the leafless tree branches. Its icy sting was punishing, but he neither put on the hat he carried in his hand nor turned back for his pickup. At the doorstep he sifted through his keys, calling out each one in his mind: truck, house, storage, post office, warehouse. How could he remember these unimportant keys now and not the other details of his past life? How had he broken his mother’s heart? How had Albert Darling departed this world?

  Inside, he found the furniture that Stuart had received on Friday stored haphazardly. A china hutch and a bedroom set were both turned to face the wall. “I should fire that stupid son of a bitch,” he muttered. “How will anyone know what they’re bidding on if they can’t even see the damn things?”

  Carl would have known that. He would have taken the time to think about the arrangement, placing it for maximum bidding potential. He would have put the dining set together—table, chairs, sideboard, hutch—so that a woman yet to arrive would see it and instantly fall in love. Carl had understood that auctions were an emotional affair. And his absence here was bitingly real for Hershel. They would never again work together in that comfortable side-by-side silence.

  Hershel wandered into the concession stand, which stood quiet, everything washed and put away just as the girl had left it last week. By now Carl would have eaten the leftover hot dogs and started on the fresh ones. The cooker would be greasy and in need of another cleaning before the upcoming sale. The coffeemaker would be covered with brown splatters and used grounds. It was the only benefit Hershel offered—all you can eat and drink. And still he’d found the capac
ity to resent Carl for taking too much.

  The idea was so absurd that Hershel almost laughed at his own meanness. Was anyone that stingy? It was funny, and it was sick. The epiphany that he’d valued all the wrong things in his life shamed him. And the nagging question that had pestered him all morning only grew in intensity. Why was he here today? Why was he here at all? How could he imagine that life would just go on, as if nothing had happened?

  He slid his hand into his pocket and ran a finger over Carl’s worn knife. It had become his constant companion. As he pondered whether to close his business forever—one last liquidation sale and be finished—someone knocked at the front door.

  “C’min,” he called.

  Two young Mexican men peered in through the door. “ ’Ello?” Behind them the rain was furiously hitting the ground, filling the parking lot with puddles and bringing them to life with motion.

  “Can I help you?”

  “Our mother,” one of the men called above the roar of pounding rain. “She sent us. You asked us to come?”

  Yolanda’s sons; he’d forgotten his request of the woman in the migrant camp. He worried about how she was getting along and motioned the men inside. They introduced themselves in broken English. Manuel and Eduardo. They both stood barely five and a half feet tall, with wide, muscular shoulders and worn, calloused hands. Eduardo, the younger and darker of the two, wore his hair long and tied back in a ponytail. Manuel’s was cropped short in a crew cut, and he sported a gold front tooth.

  “About Carl Abernathy,” Hershel said.

  “Sí.” They both nodded. “Carlos.”

  “She said you were looking for the person who … who killed him.”

  “Sí.” He took care of our mother,” Manuel said. “He was a good friend to her.”

  “His killer—” Hershel stopped. As far as he knew, he reminded himself, he didn’t know if Carl Abernathy was dead or just on a long vacation. He didn’t know that Kyrellis wasn’t at his nursery propagating roses as they spoke. He had never known about any photos, or the name of a Wyoming sheriff. He knew nothing.