“How do you know?”
“The men talk.” She was undulating on him, her shoulder blocking the camera above. “So you did?”
It was taking all sorts of focus and nonfocus for Evan to maintain the ploy. “Yes.”
“That’s what you do? Wait in this little room dreaming up ways to kill your way out of here?”
“Yes.”
Her skin carried the fragrance of jasmine. She leaned forward, pressing the softness of her stomach to his. The tips of their noses nearly touched. Her hips worked and worked some more, her eyes watching him appraisingly the whole time. “How would you kill me?”
“I’d put the chopstick on the nightstand through your carotid artery.”
Her eyes flared. “What an ugly thing. To know something just like that.”
“Yes,” he said.
She rolled off him, threw an arm across her forehead, ostensibly worn out. He slid the rest of the way out of the lens’s purview. She let her head fall to the side so she was facing him. “That’s why they told me I had to take the chopstick when I left. It was an experiment. To see if you’d fuck me or kill me.” Sadness touched her eyes. “You did neither.”
She waited for him to say something, but he had nothing to say.
“That’s what I am now,” she said. “A lamb staked to the ground to test the predators.”
She got up abruptly, slipping off the bed. She was sure to get the chopstick on her way out. When the door opened, Evan heard multiple sets of footsteps outside. It closed, dead bolts clanking into place, one after the other. He barely had time to consider what had just happened when he heard a familiar hissing from above.
“Fuck,” he said.
Gas flooded down on him.
19
Somewhere Much, Much Worse
A hint of cherry blossom laces the air. In other circumstances it might be lovely.
But beneath it is the earthy stink of damp concrete and the coppery tang of blood.
Jack stands stooped, one hand clutching the ball of his shoulder to no avail. Blood sprays through his fingers. His blue flannel shirt saturated. His eyes accusing.
Darkness prevails. There is the spotlight of Jack and nothing else. Evan watches from somewhere in the gloom, spellbound.
They are in Parking Level 3. Or somewhere much, much worse.
Jack’s mouth pulses, his lips locked shut, but Evan can hear his thoughts.
What have you done?
Little boy who I loved as my own, what have you done to me?
Jack’s mouth opens, but instead of words there is only blood, black as oil, loosed as if from a faucet. It sheets over his lower teeth, pours across his chin, streams down his legs. It pools on the floor and spreads and spreads, filling the spotlit circle and oozing outward.
Evan is helpless, trapped in the darkness. He tries to open his own mouth, but he cannot. When he reaches to see why, bristling sutures poke his tender palm.
His lips have been stitched shut.
Jack’s blood seeps through Evan’s shoes, warm and tacky. It waterlogs his socks, claims his ankles, his calves. He tries to cry out, to no avail. He is a mute witness to what he has wrought.
The warmth is at his waist now. His pants sodden. His shirt grows heavy, clings to his flesh. The blood rises past his clavicles, fills the hollow of his neck. And then he is under, his eyes wide and comprehending, the world below vast and empty.
The universe strained through a crimson filter.
20
No End Point
Young voices lit up the parlor. David was being David — making trick shots on the billiard table, mixing drinks behind the bar, licking salt off a young woman’s gazelle-like neck before throwing back another amber shot and sinking his immaculate teeth into the embrace of a lime. The other girl slumped on the couch, propping up her forehead with one hand and sloppily texting with a thumb. Her iPhone in its sparkly case slipped from her manicured grip. The young men were doing young men things — pounding pints, warring over the foosball table, enacting elaborate handshakes and high-fives.
There was free-flowing top-shelf booze, and there were Viennese chocolates and Cohiba Robustos. Platters of short-rib sliders and sashimi. Kale salad with bacon — blue cheese vinaigrette and fresh oysters on spoons. Invisible as stagehands, the least sinister of René’s rented men circulated and cleared, dressed in servantwear with mandarin collars, the better to hide the menacing tattoos. The more colorful of the men — and certainly Dex — were best kept from view.
Pretending to leaf through a Wall Street Journal, René observed from a divan at an avuncular remove. This was his place, the perennial outsider lingering just past the reaches of the social glow. Or as he preferred to think of it, Oz behind the green curtain. Aside from the occasional appreciative nod to their host and benefactor, the kids ignored him.
The boy with the soul patch and the tribal earrings — Joshua — had graduated to drinking Johnnie Walker Blue out of the bottle. That could prove problematic.
René didn’t want him too dehydrated.
He was a burly kid, broad-shouldered and thick-thighed, young enough that his muscle propped up the fat, held it firm. He’d already sweated through his guayabera. Inexplicably, he’d decided to plug into a bling-bling set of cushy headphones and was dancing with his reflection in the tall windows, a sort of airplane flight pattern that involved tilting his arms this way and that, a landing approach with no end point.
The laughter reached a manic pitch, warmed with booze and friction. David pressed the girl with the slender neck up against the bar. With an expert flip of his hand, he popped the top buttons of her jeans and wiggled his hand inside. She threw back her head in a manner that suggested more rehearsal than spontaneity. The other boy was on top of the girl on the couch, trying to snap a selfie, and she was cackling, pushing at the balls of his shoulders, her fingers splayed. It was self-conscious without the benefit of shame, as if they were enacting a scene they’d all studied, a commercial for unlimited cell-phone minutes.
That was the problem with young people nowadays. Give them their very own Pleasure Island and they all reach for a script.
Youth is wasted on the young, sure. But it needn’t be.
René let the top of the newspaper crinkle down. Across the parlor, low-lidded and clearly bored, David looked back at him over the girl’s shoulder. She hooked her arms around his neck, swaying with the action of his hidden hand, whimpering. She had one of those names that didn’t use to be a name — Kendall or Cammy.
Her movements grew more sluggish. Her blinks became longer. As her legs buckled, David clasped her around her waist and lowered her to the floor.
Over by the windows, Joshua now lay on the rug where he’d fallen, the Beats headphones shoved down around his neck giving off tinny hip-hop. The tangled couple on the couch had passed out mid-selfie. All that faux youthful abandon, fading down into a Rohypnol stupor.
René rose.
One of his narco-butlers had already fetched Dr. Franklin, who entered now loose-limbed and unshaven. As he surveyed the tableau, his eyes attained a surgeon’s clarity behind round rimless lenses. He straightened out of his slouch. Instant sobriety. Despite his habits he was a man who could find the foundation in a hurry when he had to.
Two of the men rolled the girls onto stretchers. Dex entered. With a faint whistle of breath, he hoisted Joshua up off the floor and flopped him over his shoulder. David took hold of the other boy’s biker boots and dragged him along after the others as if pulling a wheelbarrow. René watched them pass, the kid’s arms windshield-wipering the floor behind him.