Closing Costs

by Bracken MacLeod

  Stop it! It takes as long as it takes. Evan didn’t nip off for some tryst while I was in the shower. He wasn’t gone that long. Long enough to drive up and get eggs and prosecco. The way he texted her and posted pictures online, she had a pretty steady accounting for nearly every hour of his day. If he was keeping secrets—or was somehow having a relationship with someone else—he had a talent for deception that would’ve made Patricia Highsmith gasp. No. She trusted Evan as powerfully as she loved him, so she pushed down her resentment for his absence that morning. Ruminating on what might have been was as useless a meditation as imagining herself flying away on a magic carpet. No matter how many conceivable realities there might be, this was the one she inhabited. This was the world in which the consequences of their choices were playing out. And it was the one in which she had to try to survive, because there wasn’t another waiting behind a veil of obscurity. She did it because she loved him, and because the only way the two of them were getting out of this house was together.

  Nelle stared at the floor while the man typed into her phone. She didn’t want to look at him, but the view out the window only reminded her how helpless she was. The curtains were wide open, and he made no effort to close them because no one could see them. So she stared at the floor. The memories of eating takeout, getting drunk, and making love there on their first night in the house were better.

  Out of the corner of her eye, she saw it. A glimmer of hope. Her purse.

  It rested on the floor next to the sofa, under the end table. Inside, she didn’t have a can of pepper spray or one of those collapsible baton thingies. She didn’t even have keys in there she could slip between her fingers—those were hanging on the hook by the front door. But sticking up out of the inside pocket she saw the orange flip top of the cylinder that held her EpiPen.

  Lifesaving medication.

  She slid a little to the side on the sofa. Not much. An inch or two.

  “You want to live through this?” the man said.

  She froze. It was a stupid question. Insulting. Of course she did, and he knew it. He was counting on it. Nelle nodded anyway.

  The feeling that she knew him nagged at her again. Something recognizable in the tone of this word, or the familiarity of that look. If she didn’t know him, at least she’d seen him before. Talked to him. Through the fog of disorientation and fear, she couldn’t think where that might’ve been. Everything about him was upsetting, but something in particular, something she couldn’t put her finger on, stuck a little farther out.

  A hint of a subtle movement behind him caught her eye. A fleeting shadow, a small wrongly bent ankle that disappeared into the darkness of the coat closet by the front door. She thought she heard the echo of a child’s voice. I’m going crazy. Her eyes traveled to the alarm system control panel on the wall behind him. The panic button on the keypad glowed a faint green. It wouldn’t summon anyone, no matter how urgently she pressed it. SERVICE NOT AVAILABLE. Though she needed to keep her eyes on the man, the keypad drew her attention as if it held some insight into her predicament. The fucking seller’s agent told us we didn’t need an alarm out here, and we believed him.

  That fucking keypad.

  She felt the blood rush out of her face. She knew him. He’d been clean-shaven then and wearing glasses. It was a Clark Kent kind of disguise, but it had fooled her. A face looked different with a pair of glasses on it, without a beard, in bright sunlight instead of lit by a shitty fluorescent spotlight bulb in a dark basement. Now, standing in the front room, he looked both different and the same. She remembered, and that seemed worse. So much worse. He’d been to their house before. He’d come to her door . . . to sell her a security system.

  She started to say, “What do you wa—” and then the loud pop made her swallow her words and flinch. She cried out. She couldn’t help it. The sound just came out of her like someone else in her body was vocalizing for her. A primitive bark of fear and anticipated pain.

  The man’s arm shot out straight, the bore of the gun settling on her face. She flinched again and shut her eyes, waiting for the punch through her skull. The feeling of a bullet slamming into her forehead and then, nothing.

  But there was no shot. No oblivion. Just her and the man.

  “The fuck was that?” he shouted. He stomped away from her.

  Your chance! This is it!

  She opened her eyes and lunged to the side, toward her purse.

  32

  The bang in the kitchen startled him; he jumped and raised the gun, thinking that somehow the woman had gotten ahold of something. But no, the sound had come from the other side of the wall behind her.

  He lurched toward the archway, wondering how her husband had gotten free. How he’d been able to sneak into the kitchen without being seen. He could shoot the fucker now if he wanted. The guy wasn’t necessary for the plan. He was only keeping the husband alive because he figured as soon as he killed him, the bitch would come unhinged and be useless. Women were like that, he thought. Admittedly, killing her husband would be a big thing, but still, it would shut her down, and he’d be left with a sobbing, hysterical mess unable to wipe the snot off of her own lip let alone make a single fucking phone call. If he killed one, he might as well do them both at the same time.

  Leading with the gun, he ducked around the corner, trying to keep an eye on the front room and the kitchen. He paused in the archway. He couldn’t leave the woman alone—she’d try something; she had already shown him she was always going to do that. Bitch was going to bite me. She tried to kick me down the stairs. But he couldn’t ignore the sound either. When he didn’t see anything, he slipped back into the front room. The woman was sprawled out flat on the couch.

  “Get the fuck up! The fuck are you doing?”

  She said some gibberish, and he grabbed a handful of her hair and yanked her off the sofa, twisting her around. He shoved her ahead of him into the kitchen, his gun aimed over her shoulder. “Motherfucker! Come get some.” There was no reply. Not one he could hear over her whimpering, anyway. “Shut the fuck up, bitch,” he insisted. She didn’t shut up. Just kept on sobbing and saying some shit he didn’t want to hear. The buzzing in his head was too loud, like flies, and he told her to shut up again.

  “The freezer,” she said a third time, her words finally penetrating his haze. He glanced at the fridge, not wanting to take her bait. Bitch. Witch. Bitch. Witch, cycled through his head. The two of them with their fucking goth occult shit. She was bewitching him.

  That’s why he hadn’t gotten hard downstairs. Fucking witchery. He’d show her. She can’t bite with her asshole.

  A clear fluid leaked out of the freezer drawer at the bottom of the appliance. He blinked at it a couple of times. She wasn’t lying. Something was wrong with the fridge. It’d popped the line that led to the water dispenser on the front or something. Except it wasn’t water, and there was a smell. A sweet smell like . . .

  Grapes.

  “It’s prosecco,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Like champagne.”

  “I know what fucking prosecco is,” he said through clenched teeth. There wasn’t a thing about these people or this house that didn’t make him want to set fire to it with both of them inside. The couch in the “Prince Room” was “architectural” and hard cushioned like it wasn’t ever meant to be used. It made him angry. The painting on the wall above it, with its broad brushstrokes, looked like something a first grader might do after he came in from recess, except he knew that it had to have cost a fortune from some pretentious faggot gallery. That made him angry. There were shelves and shelves of books, and he wondered who had the time to read so goddamn much? He hated every last one of them. Real people worked for a living, all day, and then they came home and had more shit to do. Repairing things that needed fixing and then the lawn on the weekends, and maybe if he was lucky, he got to watch some of the game. But these two weren’t sports fans. He could tell from their fancy fucking paintings and th
e furniture that looked like torture equipment and the racks of wine. And that made him even angrier. Racks. One in the kitchen and another in the cellar. And more on the counter and in the fridge. He wanted to break a bottle over the bitch’s head and watch the red—wine and her blood—pour down and listen to her cry about the upholstery. And then he wanted to fuck her in the face to shut her up about it. His stomach clenched at the memory of his first attempt to do just that. Some instinct had saved his ass, he reckoned. Not his ass. She was a biter, and his dick knew it. That was it. Nothing wrong with him. He knew something about her deep down, and it’d saved him from getting bit. Still, it was upsetting. He tried to push it out of his head, but it sat there. Limp now as then.

  He wanted to shoot her in the fucking face.

  But not before she did what he wanted. As much as he hated to accept it, he needed her. For the moment, anyway. Once he was sure he was set to get what he really wanted, he’d waste her and her pussy husband, and really get down to what he wanted to do. It sure as shit wasn’t these two. He had to admit there was something thrilling about watching them think it was about them. They were so self-absorbed, they thought everything was about them, when no one in the world gave a shit about Evan and Eleonora Pereira, rhymes with barbera. Fuck you! He’d had to look up “barbera,” and when he found out it was a kind of wine, he’d almost thrown his phone across the room. It was bad enough she corrected him, but that she had to show how much smarter and more cultured she was when she did it pissed him off even more.

  He glared down at her and thought about pulling the trigger. If only he didn’t need her. Do I really?

  He pulled on her hair, jerking her back so he could see better. She yelped and stumbled, falling to her knees. He staggered a step to the side, not letting go of her hair. “My husband put a bottle in the freezer.” She was crying.

  It made sense. The faggot put a bottle of champagne in the freezer, too stupid to know if he forgot about it and it froze, it might explode. He hadn’t snuck past. The idiot was still tied up in the cellar. Trying like hell to get out of that tape, I bet. He had to work faster. He couldn’t leave the guy downstairs unattended for too long or else he’d be dealing with the very situation he thought he had on his hands a second ago.

  “Get up.” He yanked her hair to get her to stand. She blurted out in pain and stayed on her knees. He pulled again, harder, and she stood. He led her back into the front room and shoved her onto the sofa again. She flopped on it and gave him one of those looks. The kind that made him want to hurt her more. The same kind his wife gave him. Those looks were going to be the end of both those bitches. He’d make sure of it.

  33

  Nelle landed on the sofa on top of the EpiPen case she’d dropped when he grabbed her hair. She turned and sat, careful to keep the autoinjector behind her. She tried to put her hands on it without looking like she was grasping at something, but felt certain she looked as guilty as she felt. Guilty. It was an odd feeling to have, but that was it. She was trying to get away with something and didn’t want to be caught. She knew the feeling well. It was far from unfamiliar, but this was the most intensely she’d ever felt it. Because the ramifications of being caught now were instant and irreversible. She wasn’t sure how she’d get the injector out of the case and use it without him seeing what she was doing, but she would find a way.

  The man stared at her. The small muscles at the back of his jaw flexed as he clenched and unclenched his teeth. He held his pistol at his side, his hand wrapped around the frame, not the grip. The barrel pointed at her. His hand was turning white around the gun. He was hitting the side of his thigh with it, as if he was trying to make up his mind what to do.

  He took a deep breath and let it out. “Time to make a call.”

  “I don’t . . . understand. Please just let us go. We don’t know who you are. You can have anything you want, and I . . . we can’t tell anyone. We don’t know who you are.”

  He gripped the gun tighter. He put his finger inside the trigger guard. A small part of her wished he’d just get it over with. What could either of them give him that he couldn’t just take? The money, that was all. And then they were dead. That was the cost of stealing it. Even though he was going to kill them as soon as he had it, she wanted to offer it again and again until he listened to her and agreed to let them go.

  “Look, we have money. You can have it all. Please, just don’t hurt us.” Of course, he was going to hurt them. He was going to kill them both. But she couldn’t keep from uttering the words. They were as automatic as not wanting to die. “You can have it all,” she said. “We’ll transfer it. I’ll get you the account numbers. Just let us go.”

  “I DON’T WANT YOUR FUCKING MONEY!” The man’s face stretched into a red rictus. He raised the gun and aimed it at her. Nelle’s breath caught. She tried to inhale but was unable to take in any air. She could feel her heart pounding in her chest, in her pulse in the sides of her neck. The man’s knuckles turned white as he squeezed the pistol grip. “I want what’s mine,” he said through clenched teeth.

  The sight of him stole the air from her lungs, and she had to work to push the words out without being able to put a breath behind them. “I don’t know . . . what . . . what you . . . want from us.”

  “I want you to talk to my wife.” He held her cell phone in front of her face.

  Her lips moved for a moment, soundlessly searching for what to say. “Wh-what?”

  “You’re going to tell her that something doesn’t work and you need her to come over to help you figure out how to fix it.”

  “Tell who?”

  “My wife. Fuckin’ bitch.”

  She couldn’t tell whether he meant her, his wife, or both of them. Nelle suspected he applied the sobriquet to all women. “I don’t . . . understand. I don’t know your wife. I don’t know who you—”

  “Shut up. You know.”

  She tried to keep her voice calm when she spoke to him, though she couldn’t control the quaver that crept through. “I don’t. I swear.”

  “DON’T TELL ME YOU DON’T KNOW WHO I AM! YOU’RE SITTING IN MY FUCKING HOUSE!”

  Nelle tried to blink away her confusion, but nothing resolved into any greater clarity. The man stared at her, brow furrowed as if she’d done him wrong and not the other way around. No part of this made sense to her. He stared as if expecting an answer, some kind of rationalization or continued bargaining, but she couldn’t find the right words.

  “This is our house. We bought it from . . .”

  You.

  He smiled at what had to be the fluid shift in her face from confusion to realization to fear. He saw what she knew, and it amused him to see it terrify her in a completely new way. Her terror seemed to please him.

  While he and his wife hadn’t been at the open house, the walk-through, or the closing, he’d come to her door to sell her the security system. He wasn’t a stranger who’d been stalking them for their money. While she’d known him by name only, the revealed link between them was somehow more frightening. Everything shifted—his motives, her strategies for survival. She was starting over with new information. It wasn’t the money. It was . . . personal. Whatever it was he was after, she feared it was something she couldn’t give him even if she wanted to. She had to think of something to say, but couldn’t.

  She recalled her attorney telling her about the divorce. She’s leaving him, but he’s contesting it. He wanted her to talk to a woman who’d left him, who wouldn’t talk to him herself, likely for reasons related to exactly what Nelle was going through at that moment. His anger, unreasonable demands, irrationality. What could she say to a woman who knew him like an ex-wife did? She wanted to say that she wasn’t about to lure someone to the house for him to tie up and murder along with her and Evan. Instead, what came out was, “What if she . . . she tells me h-how to . . . fix it over the phone? Why would she c-come over to help?”

  “Play stupid. All you cunts do that. Make her believe you’r
e too stupid to figure it out and you need her to show you.”

  “And then wh-what?”

  “I want her to listen to me. And if she’s here, in our house, she’ll listen. I need to show her something. And then . . . I’ll let you go.”

  Nelle knew something else about him: his lies were effortless. She wondered if he was going to shoot her after she made the call, or wait to do it after his wife rang the bell. The question was pure speculation, because Nelle knew his ex would never come over, no matter how convincing she was on the phone. There was only a slim chance the wife was going to answer a call from an unfamiliar number to start, and even less possibility, if she did, that she’d rush right over on a sunny holiday weekend to show a stranger how to work something that wasn’t her problem anymore. Nelle knew it wouldn’t work, because if she’d already escaped this man, there was no chance she’d ever get anywhere near anything associated with him ever again.