A Time of Torment (11 page)

Only recently had Burnel started carrying a weapon, after a couple of guys he knew had been targeted and robbed, one so violently that he now had a plate in his head and could only talk out of the left side of his mouth. The pistol made Burnel feel more ill at ease than any quantity of diamonds secreted about his person. He hated the weight and shape of it. He was always uncomfortable carrying it in the holster on his belt, even though the little Ruger weighed less than a pound and could pretty much fit in the palm of his hand. He had practiced drawing it from its leather holster in front of the bathroom mirror, but it made him feel slightly ridiculous, as though he were playing at being a gunfighter. At first, the gun had fit too snugly in the holster, which he’d chosen because the dealer said that leather was better for concealed carry. Unfortunately, a concealed weapon wouldn’t be much use to him if he couldn’t get it out of the holster, but Owen Larraby, who knew about guns, told him to wet the holster, put the gun in a Ziploc bag, and place the bagged gun in the holster overnight. That had helped some, but Burnel had still been forced to buy some Mitch Rosen Leather Lightning in order to loosen the sheath enough for an easy draw.

All of which assumed that, if the worst happened, Burnel would have time to arm himself, and then be able to shoot any prospective thief, neither of which seemed very likely to him. He just couldn’t see himself killing another man, not even to save a pouch of diamonds. He’d paid a couple of visits to the local range to gain the minimum proficiency required for his permit, but he’d felt uncomfortable with some of the company he was keeping. He wasn’t a gun nut, and there were men – and two women – beside him on the first visit with enough weapons to take on Islamic State. Later, when he returned with the Ruger, he told the guy in charge why he’d bought the revolver, and the guy had shuffled him off to the edge of the range, and brought the silhouette target right up close.

‘Just get used to firing at the shape of a man,’ was the advice Burnel received. ‘Aim for the torso. Nothing fancy.’

Burnel had fired and reloaded, fired and reloaded, until his ears rang, the grip of the gun was slick with sweat, and the center of the man-shaped target was torn apart. He hadn’t removed the gun from its holster since, not even to clean it. It sat on his belt and dug into his belly. He hadn’t told his wife about it. He couldn’t have said why, except that he had an inkling of how Norah would respond to the sight of him with a gun on his belt. There would be laughter: maybe not the mocking kind, for he had long ago learned to identify her varying tones of disapproval and strained amusement at her husband’s ways, but simply a spontaneous reaction to the improbability of what she was seeing. He was, he had come to realize, a disappointment to his wife in so many ways, just as she was a disappointment to him.

That was one of the reasons why, when the gas station appeared before him, he decided to pull in for a coffee. He was less than an hour from Portland, and home, and didn’t even particularly need a coffee or a rest stop, but increasingly he was happier alone than he was in his own house, and was spending more time on the road than ever before. He’d even begun hunting for new accounts as far north as Presque Isle and Fort Kent, just to give him an excuse to spend an extra night or two in a motel, and was branching out into one-off pieces by local crafters in an effort to expand his range, which offered him further opportunities to travel. Norah didn’t seem to mind. They both knew that the time was approaching when they’d have to discuss a separation, and divorce. Maybe things might have been different if they’d had a child, but perhaps not. They were just wrong for each other, and kids would merely have made an unpleasant situation sadder and more complicated.

He wondered if Norah was having an affair. He didn’t think so, but he was surprised at how little he was troubled by the possibility. As for himself, he wasn’t the kind, not that any women were currently throwing themselves at him, demanding that he take them in interesting ways. If – or when – he and Norah divorced, he’d try again, but until then he’d just do without significant female comfort, whether physical or emotional. He didn’t believe he could handle the stress of his troubled home life and a second, secret existence as an adulterer. He’d give himself a heart attack.

The gas station was a comparative rarity, which was why he’d chosen it for his respite: a mom-and-pop operation, with none of the brash, impersonal neon of the big providers. The building itself was painted red and white, so that it looked more like a small coastal diner than anything else. A mural of two dogs had been added to the wall at the far right, and beneath it was a water bowl and a second container filled with dog treats. Inside, the registers were to the left, and to the right was a seating area with pine tables and stools, and a ledge that looked out over the forecourt. Burnel had stopped there for gas on a few occasions, but never stayed any longer than was necessary to fill up and pay. He recalled that a sign beside the coffeepot identified all muffins and pastries as homemade, and they sat on wooden shelves, resting on the paper on which they’d been baked instead of sweating inside plastic wrap.

Burnel parked at the side of the gas station. The dampness in the air hit him as soon as he stepped from the car, and by the time he stepped inside the first drops had begun to patter on the ground. The interior was warm, and smelled of fresh coffee, with a faint underpinning of gasoline. Music was playing: some light jazz that wouldn’t frighten the horses. From behind the counter, a man in his late sixties and a girl in her twenties who resembled him so much that she could only have been his daughter were engaged in conversation with an elderly woman who was leaning against the empty newspaper stand, holding a cigarette pack in one hand and an unlit cigarette in the other, which she was using to emphasize a particular point and guide the argument, like a conductor wielding a baton before an orchestra. The older woman was wearing mismatched carpet slippers and a raccoon-fur stole that looked like the contributing raccoons had departed this life many decades earlier, but put up a good fight before they went. All three greeted Burnel as he entered, then returned to their discussion, which centered on the price of heating oil, always an issue in Maine as winter loomed.

The older woman’s name was Kezia, judging by how often the man behind the counter was being forced to say ‘Now look, Kezia’ and ‘Don’t go all wrathy on me, Kezia’ in response to her diatribe. Kezia, in turn, referred to him as Bryce, and seemed to be appealing to his daughter as a voice of reason, as in ‘Paige, you tell your father Bryce here …’, as though the older man were suffering from some form of selective deafness, or had forgotten his station in life. It was all pretty good-natured, though, and both of the old-timers struck Burnel as serious wigs.

The coffee was hot and smelled of vanilla. He filled a paper cup and selected a muffin from the shelf. It wasn’t warm to the touch, but he could tell that it was still pretty fresh. It didn’t have the cold, unpleasantly moist texture of a pastry that had been defrosted for consumption. He’d become expert in such matters during his years on the road. He went to the counter, paid for his food, and took a seat at the window. He had brought his satchel with him – the briefcase, complete with its worthless stones, remained in the car – but he left his laptop untouched, even though he still had some work to do. It would give him an excuse to avoid Norah when he got home. She always left him alone when he was working. If nothing else, she knew the value of a dollar, and Burnel brought many more of them into the house than she did. Norah owned fifty-one percent of a vintage clothing store in South Portland, and was also the manager. Burnel was far from being a fashionisto, but even he could tell that most of what his wife sold had been tasteless crap back in the seventies, eighties, and nineties, and was still tasteless crap now, which was why so much of it stayed on the racks gathering dust. Norah’s partner, Judie, had a better eye, and it was she who found the premium items capable of supporting the kind of mark-ups that kept the store in business.

So, instead of checking e-mails and collating orders, Burnel removed a copy of
The Count of Monte Cristo
from his bag and picked up where he’d left off earlier in the day. The book was a monster, and he only ever got to read it when he was traveling, or when Norah was out. If she saw him with a book in his hand, she took it as a sign that he was free to be disturbed. Norah didn’t read. She didn’t watch TV either, except for fashion and makeover shows. Mostly she just smoked and talked to her friends on her cell phone, or stared into space imagining other existences that fate had so far denied her.

Burnel heard two vehicles pull into the gas station’s lot. He glanced up in time to see the lights of a gray van die, a dark sedan beside it, followed by the appearance of two men who walked slowly toward the building in which he sat, seemingly untroubled by the rain. Initially Burnel thought that some distortion of the glass, combined with the patterns of the rain, had conspired to alter the appearance of the taller of the two, but as they entered he saw that the new arrival was unnaturally thin, his fingers twisted by what was probably early onset arthritis. His heavy eyelids might have suggested someone trapped between sleeping and waking were it not for the spiderlike gleam of his dark eyes. When they flicked toward Burnel, he felt as though small, sharp legs were crawling across the skin of his face, and he could not help but try to brush them away.

The gray van looked familiar to Burnel, but he couldn’t quite place it. He thought that he’d seen it earlier that evening. It wasn’t distinctive, exactly, just memorable for the wrong reasons, like a bad party or a poor meal.

The shorter of the two men went directly to the counter and asked for a pack of cigarettes. While he did so, the taller man turned to the door and twisted the lock, securing the door.

‘Hey,’ said Kezia. ‘Chupta?’, the five words of the question flowing neatly into one.

When she received no reply, she shouted to Bryce, ‘Hey, Bryce! This fella’s gone and locked the door.’

The tall man twisted and punched her hard in the face. The blow sent Kezia to her knees, and left her attacker shaking his twisted hand in pain. By then, his companion had pulled a gun and was pointing it at Bryce and his daughter.

‘No alarms,’ he said. ‘No screams. Kill the lights outside. Dim the ones in here.’

He kept the gun on Bryce as he moved to a set of switches on the wall beside the registers. Meanwhile, his partner advanced on Burnel and pulled him from his stool, sending him sprawling to the floor. The lights outside were extinguished, and seconds later only a handful at the back of the store remained lit.

‘The registers are near empty,’ said Bryce. ‘My daughter went to the bank this afternoon.’

‘Shut up,’ said the gunman. ‘Get to the back, down by the sodas.’

He gestured with the gun, and Bryce and Paige started to move. Burnel noticed that Paige hadn’t said a word since the men entered. She had gone gray at the first sight of the gun. Some atavistic sense had told her that this could not, would not, end well. Later, with the blood still fresh on her, she would tell the police that she had watched the expression on the gunman’s face as he looked at her, and in his eyes she had seen an image of herself despoiled and then gutted like a fish.

‘You!’ The gunman looked toward Burnel. ‘Help the old woman up.’

Burnel, who had stayed down, stood slowly. Monitored by the tall man, he went over to where Kezia lay slumped amid fallen packs of bubble gum. He noticed that she was still holding on to her cigarette, although it had snapped when she fell. She was bleeding from the mouth, but conscious, and the look on her face was profoundly hostile as she glared at the man who had hit her.

‘Fucker,’ she said, as Burnel assisted her in standing up, and the tall man responded by displaying his very white, very even teeth. They clicked as the two rows met, then clicked again, and again, and Burnel knew that, in his mind, this scarecrow was already biting down on flesh.

‘Hush, now,’ said Burnel, and she was smart enough to heed him and stay quiet until they both reached the back of the store. Paige and Bryce were already seated against the wall by the side of the coolers. To their left was a closed door protected by a combination lock.

‘Is anybody back there?’ the gunman asked Bryce.

‘No, it’s just us.’

‘If you’re lying—’

‘I’m not. Please, take what you want, but don’t hurt anyone’ – he looked over at Kezia, whom Burnel was easing into a comfortable position – ‘any more than you already have.’

‘Are you telling me what to do?’ The gunman’s tone was very even, but Bryce was too smart to be lulled by it.

‘No, I’m asking. Begging, if you like.’

The gunman nodded.

‘That’s better. Cell phones out and on the floor. Now.’

Kezia’s had fallen from her pocket as she fell, and the tall man added it to the rest. Bryce’s was on his belt, Paige’s in the back pocket of her jeans. Both tossed them at the gunman’s feet, but Burnel had already beaten them to it with his own. He, too, had a holder on his belt for his phone. It was on the opposite side from his gun, and he very much did not want to give these men a reason to search him, because not only might they find the revolver, but also the gems in their pouch. In fact, he was surprised that the men hadn’t bothered searching their captives to begin with, but perhaps they believed themselves to be better judges of character than they were.

‘What’s the combination for the door lock?’ the gunman asked Bryce.

‘Five-zero-zero-five-six.’

‘What’s in there?’

‘Storage. An employee restroom. The office.’

‘The recording system for your security cameras?’

A pause.

‘Yes.’

‘A gun?’

‘No.’

‘You sure?’

‘Yes.’

The gunman exchanged a look with the monstrous other. Burnel saw that his right hand was not as gnarled as his left. It now reached beneath his overlong jacket, and Burnel heard the sound of metal on leather. When the hand reappeared, it was holding a short machete.