Closing Costs

by Bracken MacLeod

  She knows. It’s obvious I’m not right.

  She took the seat next to her husband and reached down to hold his hand. Evan tried to focus on the feeling of her fingers entwined with his. A strong root in this world. He wanted to send her strength, but at that moment, the flow was running the opposite direction. She squeezed, and he could feel her trying to reassure him. She was giving him her energy, her hope, because his had fled.

  “Your name is Evan Pereira, yes?” Despite his ears still ringing from the gunshot, the man’s voice carried. It was as clear as any detail in this nightmare.

  Evan nodded. “What do you want?”

  “Don’t be in such a hurry, Mr. Pereira.” The man looked at Nelle. “You are Eleonora Pereira, mortician at Tremblay Funeral Home. Nelle to your friends. This is correct?”

  “Yes,” she said. Evan heard a tone in her voice he knew well. Resignation. He squeezed her hand, wanting to silently tell her, No darkness; only light. But there was only darkness here. They’d closed the door on the light.

  “Good. Now that we know we’re talking to the right people, we can talk about what we want. To begin, we can discuss the matter of money.”

  All of Evan’s fears coalesced around the word. Money. The money they’d taken, that they’d used to buy the house and bottles of spilled wine and all the little things here and there that they thought were beyond notice. But it wasn’t a pinot noir or a nice shoulder bag that had doomed them. It was this house. Haunted as it was, not by ghosts or devils, but by money taken from terrible men who’d done, and were willing to always do, unimaginably terrible things. Hundreds—no, thousands—of children who’d paid for this home with their bodies, their pain and innocence, alive though they most likely were all across the globe, they haunted the house. Evan and Nelle had invited the profit of their pain to come live with them. And it was their ghosts who’d led these men here. None of them were innocent, and they deserved what was about to happen.

  Nelle said, “You can have it all. Just please let us go.”

  The man smiled with half his mouth. It was not an unattractive smile. But it was made ugly by the cruel denial behind it. He didn’t have to lie or make threats. The smile was threat enough.

  “If you’re just going to kill us anyway,” Evan said. “Why would we give you anything?”

  “There is a Russian saying. ‘Life is hard but, fortunately, also short.’ Your life can be hard and short, or it can be slightly longer, and . . .” The man shrugged and held out his hands as if he were a bureaucrat apologizing for the unreasonableness of an arbitrary policy instead of a mobster threatening to torture them. “We are offering you mercy—a thing you do not deserve, incidentally. There is no bargaining. You accept what we give you or not. We will leave here soon with the money or . . . later, also with the money. He looked at his partner and then back at Evan. “It’s not at all surprising how people change their minds after Stas convinces them.”

  The man with the gun, Stas, made a movement with his mouth, not a smile, not a sneer, but some kind of contortion that looked like acknowledgment, somehow. While he’d yelled at them in another language, he seemed to understand English well enough to follow his partner’s cues.

  Stas took a step toward Nelle. Her hand tightened around Evan’s painfully.

  “Stop,” Evan pleaded. He said it to the man with the gun, but his wife recoiled as if he’d barked at her. He squeezed her hand, trying to keep her with him, though he had no idea where he was leading them.

  Stas took another step, undeterred by Evan’s command, and reached out with his free hand, grasping a handful of Nelle’s hair in his fist. He wrenched her head around so she was looking up into his face. She grimaced and let out a cry of pain.

  “You can have it all! We’ll give you anything you want,” Evan cried. “Just . . . don’t. Please!”

  Stas turned his attention to Evan. His face reformed into a very recognizable expression: disappointment. Evan’s prior impression that these two weren’t madmen who loved hurting people proved wrong. Whatever the other man’s interests might’ve been, Stas had been looking forward to convincing them.

  But then, their predecessor had already softened Evan and Nelle up. These monsters’ work was almost completely done for them before they ever arrived.

  “Where is the money?” the unarmed man asked.

  “It’s in a Swiss account. We have to go upstairs. Use the computer in the office. I can transfer it to you. Easy.” That last word was a plea for mercy as much as it was a description of how tough Evan thought giving them what they wanted would be.

  The man looked at his watch as if he was surprised they’d broken so soon. He said something to Stas that Evan couldn’t even begin to comprehend. He spoke fast in a language that, maybe, in another setting, he thought Nelle might’ve found lyrical or beautiful, flowing like something that hummed with the same resonance as one of the world’s great novels. But to Evan, it sounded like death, a looming resonance.

  Stas let go of Nelle. “Da.”

  The man who spoke English pulled a pistol out of the back of his pants and held it pointed toward the floor, as if he didn’t have to aim it at Evan to get him to comply. He was right. “Let’s go,” he said. He didn’t ask where anything was. Evan understood what he was expected to do, and there was no amount of feigned or sincere ignorance that would extend his time or buy them reprieve.

  Evan squeezed Nelle’s hand one more time and opened his fingers. She reluctantly let go.

  “I love you,” she said. No sass. No snark. Just three words, spoken with sad resignation.

  “I love you too.”

  A heaviness settled in his stomach, and he felt like gravity wouldn’t allow him to stand if he tried. But he forced himself to rise from the chair because the weight of staying still would crush him. The men in front of him parted. The unnamed one gestured toward the stairs. Evan walked between them and stepped onto the first riser. He paused and looked back at his wife. In myth, he’d turn to salt or watch her fall into the netherworld for daring this glance, but he couldn’t help it. She sat in the chair where he’d left her, watching him go with eyes that had only ever beheld him with love or humor, never sadness, like now. In that moment, he understood Orphic despair, as the life he’d thought of as mostly comedy, sometimes farce, and often romance, became undeniable tragedy. The presence of the man at his back urged him forward, and he moved, feeling more certain with each step that the last time in his life he’d ever see his wife had passed. Evan ascended, leaving Nelle below.

  47

  At the top of the stairs, Evan turned quickly to the left toward the guest room he and Nelle had reappointed as an office. In the action of trying to get free, get away, it was hard to pinpoint the sound from below the floorboards, but he was pretty sure things had gone south in the front room. Though he couldn’t see well without his glasses, he didn’t want to see the aftermath of what happened in there. He didn’t want to see a dead body, whether or not it belonged to a man who’d slashed his face and tried to sexually assault his wife. So he made a sharp turn and started down the hall away from horror.

  The man following kept in step, close behind. Evan imagined if he stopped abruptly, the man might run into him. Not that it would do him any good. He could use the momentary physical disorientation to try to wrestle for the gun. Or maybe he’d just be shot by a man who wasn’t stupid enough to fall for a self-defense maneuver based on a slapstick prank. He walked on.

  “This is it,” he said, as if taking the man on the nickel tour of their house. And over here are the downstairs bedrooms. Ours is on the second floor, so this one is for guests, and the other we turned into my office. He pushed open the door and flipped on the light. It wasn’t much, yet. A modular desk stood in the middle of the room with a shabby bookcase behind it and half-size metal filing cabinet with the inkjet printer on top; they’d thought someday they’d get nicer things and turn the room into a proper den or something you could call a st
udy. In the middle of his desk sat the laptop, cover closed. He moved around behind the desk, opened the computer, and pushed the power button.

  “Keep your hands where I can see them.” The man continued to hold the gun down beside his thigh. While he was more than threatening enough without it aimed directly at Evan, the second it would take to raise it felt like time that was on Evan’s side if he got the chance to fight back.

  There was a long uncomfortable silence as the computer started up. Eventually, the log-in screen appeared, and Evan entered the code to finish the process. The screen was blurry. He was pretty sure he had a spare set of glasses in one of the drawers in his desk. He hadn’t bothered to pack the contents of those when they’d moved, instead, merely taking them out of the desk and wrapping them in moving plastic. The prescription in those wasn’t strong enough, but it was better than looking at the screen with his uncorrected astigmatism. He also knew that if he went digging through his drawers looking, he was going to get shot. Evan resigned himself to squinting and leaning close to the screen.

  He said, “Do you have a SWIFT number you want the money transferred to?” when the Windows desktop finally appeared.

  The man shook his head. “I’m not a banker. You will confirm that the money is in the account, and then you will give me the relevant information. I’ll take it back to my people to effect the transfer.”

  You want your money, but you’re not even prepared to take it?

  “Okay.” Evan sighed and took a step out from behind the desk. The man’s gun hand lashed out with a speed that didn’t register in Evan’s mind until the barrel of the gun was already slamming into his already cut cheek. The room went white, and he fell sideways into the wall. The bookshelf behind him rattled and swayed forward, threatening to topple over. A couple of small fragile tchotchkes Nelle had stacked on the upper shelves rained down on him and broke on the floor, but the bookcase remained upright. When Evan’s vision cleared, the man was standing over him, pistol back at his side.

  He didn’t move or even flinch. He stood as solidly as a statue, and said, “What are you doing? I told you to bring up the account information.”

  Evan touched his cheek with a trembling hand. His fingers came away freshly wet with blood. His face was hot and swelling, though, mercifully, mostly numb. He swallowed and tasted blood. His tongue probed at his upper molars. A couple felt loose. Speaking hurt. “The . . . uh . . . account information . . . is in a safe in the closet over there.”

  The unnamed man leaned over and pressed the barrel of his gun to Evan’s kneecap. “What you need is in the safe. Along with your pistol, yes?”

  Evan shook his head. “I don’t own a gun.” A sharp jolt of pain moved through his skull. He winced. A chill shuddered through his body. He couldn’t beat this man. Not on his best day, with his glasses, without having been tortured. He was outmatched, and he would die.

  “You did not think to mention this before?”

  “I’m not . . . thinking clearly. It’s been—” What was there to say that wasn’t a profound understatement? It’s been a stressful day. I’m feeling distracted. “I’m doing my best. Considering the circumstances.”

  “Consider the circumstances.” The man shoved the end of the gun against Evan’s kneecap, emphasizing his point. It hurt, but not as bad as anything he’d already gone through. Still, the promised agony was very present in the gesture. “If you are thinking of doing something stupid, you will pay a price for it.”

  I’m sure I will either way.

  48

  Nelle tried not to appear like she was cowering from the man standing in front of her, though her body badly wanted to quail. Held in place only by fear, she imagined getting up from the chair and running. She wanted to fight back, swing the chair, batter the thug, and find her husband before these men could accomplish what they’d come to do, and she and Evan were no more use except as a lesson to anyone else who’d dare transgress against them. The man had a kind of terrible presence that kept her ass rooted to the chair, wordlessly compelling her obedience.

  She tried to keep her hands still, but they crept up to her waistband, feeling for the needle she’d secreted away to use on Roarke. Though there were two EpiPens in her purse, she’d only taken the one. And she wasn’t even sure that would do the job.

  The thought of talking her way out of this flitted through her mind, teasing with the fiction that he might be swayed if he understood her humanity. If she could talk to him . . . But she knew better. Though she had plenty of her own tattoos, the marks on his skin told her that he could not be swayed, could not be reasoned into seeing her as anything other than . . . a thing.

  His knuckles sported tattoos of black rings with crowns at the tops and the numbers 1 9 8 9 below. If that’s the year he was born, he’s younger than me. The tattoo of the dagger piercing behind and reemerging on the other side of his Adam’s apple frightened her most. Ink on hands and necks were what tattoo artists called job killers. These just made him look like a killer. Those and the gun he pointed at her.

  She listened as the footsteps upstairs receded and then stopped altogether. They were in the office. And once Evan transferred the money, what then? The man in front of her would pull the trigger with one of those tattooed fingers, and that would be the end of it. She hoped that would be the end of it. A quick death. From what she knew about men, especially men who felt like something they were entitled to had been denied them, it wouldn’t be as easy as that. Nothing ever was.

  Nelle slipped the autoinjector out of her waistband, hiding it in her hands. She tried to pry the safety-release cap off the end without being obvious. It was soft plastic and slid off without a sound. Once removed, she had nowhere to put it. If she let go of the cap, it’d make a small clatter on the concrete floor for sure. She let it drop between her thighs, and slowly parted her knees so it might fall the rest of the way to the seat. She felt it slip along the skin inside her thighs and then disappear. She closed her knees again, hoping he hadn’t seen the bright blue cap fall. The other end, hidden under her hand, was bright orange. The devices were designed to be obvious so people could find and use them quickly. She worried he’d see. He didn’t seem to, though.

  Upstairs, Evan cried out and there a heavy thud followed by a kind of rumble. Nelle flinched at the sounds. The man in front of her calmly turned his head to look toward the staircase. She could see a vein in his thick neck. Right where she wanted to jam the device. But he was so far away, and the gun was still pointed at her.

  Her heart felt like it might explode, and she was dizzy. She tried to keep herself from panting.

  The man—Stas—turned his face toward her again, and his look stole Nelle’s breath. There was the barest hint of a smile at the corner of his mouth. It was the scariest thing she’d ever seen.

  49

  Evan sat on the floor waiting for the man to move so he could stand and walk to get the password book out of the small fireproof safe they’d stuffed in the back of the closet. He refused to crawl. It was one thing to be murdered after getting knocked on his ass, but he would not die on his knees if he could help it. The man took a step back when Evan gestured toward the safe. “You unlock the safe, I will pull what you want out of it.”

  Evan nodded. Despite having a combination wheel and a pop-out tubular lock on the front, he only ever used the key to secure it. The thing was hard to open by design, and neither he nor his wife could ever remember the combination or how to enter it (was it one full rotation around after the first number or two?). That was written down on a sheet of paper stuffed in a folder marked Home Loan in the file cabinet in the corner. Evan realized that the key to pop out the button lock on the safe was hidden in a ring box in his sock drawer upstairs. Security masterminds they weren’t, but the only things in the safe were their passports, birth certificates, and the password book with their Netflix account information and the means to access millions of dollars in stolen blood money.

  He opened his
mouth to say that they needed to go upstairs to retrieve the key, but couldn’t find the words when he saw movement behind the man. The dark part of his mind reckoned that the man he’d called Stas had quietly killed Nelle and was coming to rejoin his partner. Despondency shuddered through him like a winter chill, freezing his resolve to do anything but stay on the floor and give up.

  The gunshot in the hallway was deafeningly loud and resounded in the small office with the force of a thunderclap. Evan’s ears deadened, and his eyes shut involuntarily at the sound. Somewhere, far away, he heard a shout, and the grunts and pounding of hurried violence, as if a struggle was happening outside in the yard. But it wasn’t outside. His ears were dead, and it was happening here. He forced himself to open his eyes and saw the man who’d brought him up from below disappear into the darkness of the hallway, a blur of black suit and red blood. The framed pictures on the wall in the office juddered, and one fell, its glass smashing on the floor.

  Who the fuck is he fighting with? Nelle?

  Evan got to his feet and lurched out into the hall to help his wife. How she’d gotten the better of Stas, he didn’t know, but two against one meant they might live through this after all. He pitched through the door to help his wife.

  It wasn’t Nelle. The man was fighting with someone else. Another man. It was hard to see in the dim hallway, but it wasn’t Stas. There was only one other person it could be.

  Evan turned and ran. He heard another gunshot and the heavy sound of a body collapsing on the floor. He didn’t look back. It didn’t matter who’d won. Unless he somehow got the upper hand, both he and Nelle would lose.