by Chuck Dixon
Back in the warmth of the QuikTrip he unfolded the wad. A hundred bucks in crumpled bills.
Levon paid for a car wash. He fed bills into the pay box on a stanchion before the entrance of the wash shed. He pulled in and waited in the steaming dark. The windows cleared, thin rivulets of water freezing over on the glass as the cold crept back in.
He remained parked when the wash was over and the light turned green. He ignored the invitation and remained in the dark. No one else would be wanting a car wash in this downpour. Open panels along the walls of the shed offered a clear view of the southbound ramp off the highway. Anyone coming off would have to slow for a light at the end of the ramp. He’d see them when they came back looking for him.
A thirty-mile round trip from the next exit north back to here. He used the time to get burgers and a Coke at a McDonald’s just off the ramp before pulling into the car wash. He ate a burger and watched the ramp. Truck traffic rumbled by on the interstate, rushing past unseen on the floor of the trough.
Just under the half-hour mark the Yukon exited the highway and came to a stop at the light at the top of the ramp. Levon watched it make a right onto the surface road. He gave it time to get out of sight before pulling out of the wash to follow.
The Yukon was rolling slow past businesses lining the roadway. Levon pulled into the lot before a shuttered ice cream stand and cut his lights. The Yukon picked up speed once it was past the stores. He waited until the Yukon was out of sight in the gloom. He followed with lights out.
Houses were set well off the road either side. They sat on wooded lots. The trees thinned as the road rose between snow-covered fields lying fallow off the shoulders. Far off on the horizon he could see the top of a grain silo. Other than that and the sagging barbed wire fence running along the roadway, there were no other visible signs of humanity. The sky was low over the horizon as night came early. The rain was turning to a fine sleet that pelted the windshield. The beads of ice hammered on the uninsulated cab roof over his head.
He topped the crest of the hill to find the Yukon parked on the shoulder off the oncoming lane, lights blinking. It had made a U-turn somewhere ahead.
Levon stomped the accelerator and jerked the wheel left. He locked the brakes and the truck hydroplaned sideways. He steered into it bringing the Tacoma to a hard stop against the side of the Yukon. A shower of safety glass flew in at him from his door window. He raised the Sig and fired three rounds through the jagged opening. All three took the passenger in the torso and head. The man flopped against the far door in a crimson spray.
Rolling out of the cab on the passenger side, Levon moved fast around the vehicles with the pistol raised in his fists. Nuggets of ice crunched under his boots. He swept the front seat of the Yukon with eyes over the front sights. The man in the passenger seat was unmoving. Jerry Safar leaned forward in the shoulder straps. Steam rose from the splash of gore spread over the dash.
He brought the Sig up to cover the dead fields. A man hobbled away over fallow prairie grass. Broad shoulders working, legs pumping, he leapt humps of frozen prairie grass. Levon raised sights and set his shoulders. He trained the front tangs center mass on the figure charging away into the graying dusk.
A click and squeal behind him. Levon turned at a motion from the Yukon. A man, a third man, was sitting up on the rear seat. A shotgun in his fists.
Levon felt an impact on his chest that slammed his lungs empty. He stumbled back toward the fence posts. His feet went out from under him, his legs suddenly numb. Then everything was numb. The early winter twilight turned into a night of absolute black.
33
“You have a lot of books,” Merry said, running her fingers along the spines of volumes lined neatly on a wall of shelves in the cabin’s great room.
“I do at that,” Gunny said from the broad kitchen table where he was making peanut butter and raisin sandwiches for them both.
“Are they in braille?” she asked, pulling one down.
“A few. Most aren’t.” He held the jar of Skippy and dipped the butter knife into it.
“How do you read them?”
“Oh, Joyce reads them to me if I ask her. I used to get audiobooks but I like Joyce’s voice better.”
Merry thought about that a moment before walking to the table where she watched Gunny glide the knife across the bread making a perfectly even smear of peanut butter across each slice.
"Do you have a lot of books because you were a teacher?" she asked.
“Now who told you I was a teacher?”
“Joyce said you taught my daddy. She said you were a teacher at a very special school.”
“I was,” he said, sprinkling raisins to stick fast to the tacky smear of nut butter. “But nothing I taught Levon is in any of those books. Well, not all of it.”
“Then where is it? What you taught my daddy?”
Gunny tapped a finger to his head and smiled at her.
“I don’t understand,” Merry said.
"You see, what I taught Levon, and other men taught him too, was the wealth of our experience. In the Marines we called it ‘lessons learned.' You know what that means?"
Merry shook her head then remembered and said, "Unh-uh."
“Like when you stick your hand in a fire and get burned. That’s a lesson learned. Fire burns. It hurts. You don’t ever forget that. Someone could tell you over and over not to stick your hand in the fire but until you do it yourself you haven’t really taken it to heart. Well, in the Marines we’d make mistakes and men would get hurt. Each time that was a lesson learned. Learned hard. Learned at a price. And so that other Marines didn’t make the same mistake we’d share our experience with them.”
“What kind of school was it?”
“It was called SERE.”
“Sear?”
“It’s letters that stand for Survival, Escape, Resistance, and Evasion. It was made to teach men like your father how to make it through tough times and tough situations. How to beat the odds.”
“Did he do good in school?” she asked.
“Honey, your daddy was the best I ever saw. No matter how tough, how damned near impossible we made the tests, he passed every one. By the end he was teaching us. I never saw anyone like your daddy and that is the God’s honest truth.”
“What were the tests like?”
“That’s something you better ask your daddy.”
“Joyce told me you’d say that,” Merry said.
“Well, she’s right, honey. Now get the milk out of the fridge and pour us both a glass.” Gunny slid her a plate with her sandwich, cut into four equal quarters, across the table to her.
Gunny Leffertz said:
“Before they went three and oh with the Germans, the French were the badasses of Europe. The baddest of all those French badasses was Marshal Ney. He was Napoleon’s favorite general. When the invasion of Russia turned into a clusterfuck, Ney volunteered to cover the retreat. My man was the last Frenchman out of Moscow. And I mean the last one. Months went by without a word from Ney as the French army froze and bled and died on their way out of Russia. Old Napoleon figured his boy was dead. Then one day Ney shows up at Napoleon’s tent, covered head to toe in blood. And you know what he says to the little corporal? ‘Don’t worry. None of this blood is mine.’”
34
He smelled blood as he came around. His nostrils were full of the stink.
Levon opened his eyes to see Jerry Safar’s face inches from his. What was left of his face. One eye stared at him, swollen with blood from an eight-ball hemorrhage, lips pulled taut over yellow teeth. The right side of his head was open in an obscene bloom of bone and tissue created by the exit wound.
The floor shuddered under him. He was in the rear cargo area of the Yukon. Knees up to his chest in a fetal position. He tried to move and couldn't. His hands were secured tight behind him. Plastic straps that cut into the skin. Tie-wraps. His feet were bare; ankles bound the same way. They'd taken his coat, shirt and b
elt. He was in a Henley shirt and jeans. His chest hurt with each breath. He shifted himself, bringing fresh pain. He wasn't bleeding. As far as he could tell, his ribs were bruised but intact. All the blood was from the corpse, drying sticky in the grooves of the plastic floor mat.
A voice was coming from somewhere up front. One half of a conversation. Someone on a phone.
“I don’t know how he’ll handle it. It’s his nephew, you know? It’s all fucked up.”
Pause.
“If you say so, boss. If you could handle it for us. Tell us what to do.”
Pause.
“Yeah. We’re an hour away. You want us to go straight there?”
Pause.
“Uh huh. Jamil bean-bagged him. Fucked him up good.”
Pause.
“I don’t know who the fuck he is. A white guy. He bought new eye-dee off of Danny Safar. Good stuff. Jerry said it cost twenty kay. The guy paid in cut diamonds. That’s why we were dogging him.”
Pause.
“He didn’t have any stones on him. Only cash.”
Pause.
“A hundred kay abouts. Fifties. Hundreds.”
Pause.
“Okay. Okay. We’ll bring him there. Thanks, boss.”
Levon heard the muted beep as the connection was broken.
“Are we fucked?” A new voice. Raspy. Laconic. Closer to Levon. The speaker was in the back seat. The man with the shotgun. The man he’d missed.
“I don’t think so. Stan says we’re cool. Says Danny didn’t have much use for Jerry anyway.”
“They say that now.”
“Stan wouldn’t fuck us.”
“You think that?” A gurgling chuckle.
“He gets half what we took off this guy. Gives half of that to Safar. That smooths things over.”
“What do we do with the guy?”
“He goes to the red house. Stan’ll decide what to do with him.”
“And Jerry?”
“Stan says that’s our problem.”
“Shit.”
"You can say 'shit,' but it's my car that's fucked. And half of fifty kay doesn't cover me for that."
They kept talking. Levon pressed the soles of his feet to the wall and pushed to help him sit up. The pain in his chest lanced deeper. The man in the back seat had hit him with a beanbag round fired from a shotgun. Blunt force delivered at ballistic speed. Only his thick clothing saved him from caved-in ribs.
His feet were getting numb, pins and needles. His fingers too. His arms pinned under him. He had to get his weight off of them. He levered himself up for a better view out the rear window. He flexed feet and hands to restore circulation.
Freezing rain crept across the tinted windows in fractal patterns. The lights of trucks glared through the wet glass making kaleidoscope reflections. The Yukon was on the highway heading back to Kansas City. The speaker said they were an hour out.
Levon bunched and worked his muscles, forcing blood into them. He shifted his bound hands under him. There was some give but not much. He might be able to get them under his rump and work them down his legs to get his hands in front of him. It would hurt but he could manage it if he kept flexible, worked at it slow and steady.
He shifted his weight and the tie-wrap on his wrist scraped against a channel in the floor mat, popping against the plastic lip of the groove.
A face appeared over the back seat. Gaunt and drawn. Dead eyes that narrowed when they met his. The man made a clucking sound, scolding Levon like a child.
The man reached over the seat. An iridescent blue blaze in his eyes and the sharp rasp in his ears of a stun gun. Those were Levon’s last sensations.
35
Sonata slept most of the time. The other girls talked or watched the television in the big room they shared. Sonata sought the escape of sleep and only woke for meals.
She dreamed of sunny days and walks in the park in Riga. She was a little girl in the dreams. She held her grandmother's hand until they reached the big field in the middle of the park. Then her grandmother would release her hand and she would run over the grass pretending she was a wild pony or maybe a fairy soaring low over the buttercups and clover. Always in the dreams, she was a little girl, a child in the days before she knew the world as she knew it now.
They told the girls that they would be moving soon. That soon they would go to rich American husbands. Sonata did not believe that. She did not think any of the girls did. Even the ones who said they did believe it.
It could not be true. She knew though she said nothing to the others. If it were true, then they would be preparing them for their new husbands. Most of the girls were still in the same filthy clothes they'd come here in. Some needed to see dentists. One girl had a severe cough that got worse every day. Sonata saw blood in the sputum the girl left on the floor.
They lied to themselves and talked to one another about their futures in America. The first few days they watched the television in wonder. They could not understand a word of what they heard but what they saw was a rich country where even the poor were fat and everyone had big houses and cars.
A favorite channel of the girls had shows where young couples looked for a house to live in. The couples never seemed to go to work and would act like princes and princesses while the hosts practically begged them to spend their money on houses that were always beautiful. The show would end with a party in which the young couple would have their friends over to see their new home. They lived lives without worries or cares and never anything to fear.
The men who worked in the house regarded the girls the way they might rabbits in a cage. Three men watched over the house. They had guns they wore on belts under their shirts. There was always two of them here. Only one at a time would leave on one errand or another. Usually, it was to bring back greasy prepared food for the girls. Sandwiches and sodas. Sometimes pizza or pasta. Cheap food. Nothing fresh.
One man would leave and another would make certain the door was locked behind him. The windows were locked and barred and covered in heavy drapes. Some of the panes were painted with a thin coat of paint that let in only muted light.
In the upstairs bedroom she shared with five other girls, Sonata scraped a tiny circle in the paint through which she looked out through the bars to see sunlight. The view was limited. The bare branches of trees growing close. Cars moving on a faraway street beyond the trees. During the day the sun flashed off windshields. At night the headlights were points of drifting radiance. She imagined they were boats moving on a canal.
There was a fourth man who came to the house sometimes. His name was Kola. He smiled all the time and liked talking to the girls. For this reason Sonata feared him. She preferred to be ignored. She did everything to make herself seem small when Kola was around. She did not speak. She moved, trying not to seem as though she intended to, to be as far from Kola as she could.
Kola would make jokes and the girls would laugh. He knew enough languages to make himself understood to most of them. Latvian. Serb. Ukrainian. He had sex with some of the girls. They went outside with him sometimes. Some were eager to do so in the hope that he would favor them in some way. Others were less willing but went with him anyway. They had been broken long before. Drugged and raped on the boat that had brought them here. Their will was not their own. Kola would take a girl’s hand and lead her out into the cold air. The girl would smile. Sonata would see their eyes. They were the eyes of a doll. The smile of a doll. All life gone.
Some of the women came back with stories of having sex in the back of Kola’s car. They would come back with gifts of candy and cigarettes. They would tell the others of Kola’s big car. White upholstery with heated seats. A big American car like on the television.
There were other girls who came back less giddy at being chosen. One girl, a Serb with a mane of red hair, came back in the house bleeding from the mouth. An angry bruise encircled one of her wrists. The next day the side of her face puffed up, purple flesh stretched over br
oken skin. Her eyes were black all around with a smeared veil of mascara. The girls asked what she had done to deserve such treatment. The redhead said nothing.
The next day, one of the men found her on the bathroom floor. She’d slit her arms with a piece of broken mirror. They told all the girls to go to their rooms. Sonata watched through her peephole in the glass while two of the men carried the redhead away wrapped in a shower curtain. The plastic leaked a scarlet trail on the snow all the way to a car parked out front. They stuffed her in the trunk and one of them drove the car away.
“You want to go outside?” Vanya said. She was one of the girls who shared the room with Sonata.
“What?” Sonata said, dropping the heavy drape back in place.
“You are always looking outside. I see you,” Vanya said.
“Don’t you want to go outside?”
“I do go out. With Kola. He takes me to his car.” Vanya was one of the girls who accepted Kola’s invitations with keenness. She would walk to the door beaming like Cinderella, celebrating the moment as if he might not have chosen any of the others over her. And on most occasions did.
“I don’t want to do that. I do not like Kola.”
“You don’t have to like him, little one.” Vanya laughed. “You just go to his car and suck his cock. He gives you gifts for it. Maybe he would let you go for a walk in the snow. Hm?”
“Leave me alone,” Sonata said and turned away to the wall.
“Go to sleep then, little one. When you wake up it will still be the same shitty world.” Vanya huffed and left the room.
Sleeping so much distorted Sonata's sense of time. Often she would be sleepless at night, lying wide awake listening to the sounds of the house. The girls gently breathing in the other beds. The muted sound of the television downstairs, their guards watching their own programs.
Very late one night, Sonata heard the sounds of tires on snow. She slipped from bed and stooped to spy through the scrape in the paint, the drapes closed behind her.