Empire of Lies (28 page)

"And the rest of the story you told me? Out at the swamp. That's how it happened."

She dug the heel of her palm in one eye then the other, trying to stanch the tears. The tears kept coming. "They just killed him. They just fucking, like, cut his throat. It was so horrible."

"But not you."

"What?"

"They didn't kill you."

"Jamal wouldn't let them."

"Because he thought you were sleeping..."

"Because he loves me. He says he loves me, anyway."

Right, right. Love. There's a word for you. It's the only action people think they can take without actually doing anything. All right, so he loved her—or wanted her, or whatever it was. And he figured he could control her, that she would keep quiet, do whatever he said. Which she did for the most part. But after she witnessed what happened to Casey, the guilt ate at her. She thought if she kept drinking, kept partying, she could make it stop. Then, when I took her out of The Den that night, when I took her home and she spent that morning with me, the truth came out of her—a version of the truth, anyway. She told it to Daddy to get it off her chest. But when I threatened to take her to the cops, she got scared, she bolted. She went back to her man.

"What happened tonight?" I asked her. "You got in an argument with him?"

"Yeah. I mean, he treats me like shit sometimes." She said this as if she were trying to explain herself, justify herself, as if I were going to blame her for getting beaten up. "And he's just always with his friends. Like they're this secret club. Whispering. Their big plans. Always closing the door on me. He doesn't tell me anything. And he sends me out of the room like I'm a child or something. It's, like, he snaps his fingers and I'm supposed to do whatever he says."

"But you knew they were planning something."

She went on rubbing at her eyes. I gently pulled her hands away from them. The sockets were starting to look as red as raw meat. "Big criminal masterminds," she said bitterly. "His friends are such assholes."

"So is that why he hit you tonight? Did you try to get him to tell you what they were going to do?"

"No-o," she whined, again as if I'd accused her—as if I might take Jamal's side. "I don't give a shit about their big ... fucking thing, whatever it is. Their big ideas. Like they're some important ... y'know, big thing. I just wanted him to spend some time with me, that's all. He can't just treat me like 'Do this, do that.' I'm a person, too. I fucking told him that, too." She drank her 7UP defiantly. "I did."

I bowed my head against my hand, rubbed my forehead. "Oh, Lord, Serena," I murmured.

"What?" she said.

Those whispers in me were spreading, echoing, louder now. I felt the urgency rising out of my belly into my throat. I had to call the cops—not tomorrow—tonight, now. But again—again—I hesitated. I felt a sickening certainty they wouldn't believe me. They hadn't believed Casey. They hadn't believed Piersall. I needed more information to bring to them. I needed to hear everything Serena had to say, everything I could get out of her.

"Serena," I said slowly, lowering my hand, pressing my two hands together in front of me. "Serena, you must know something, you must've heard something. About what they're planning. When they sent you out of the room, you must've been curious—angry—you must've tried to listen in sometimes."

She made a sad little gesture: a wave, a shrug. "I just know it was supposed to be some big deal. Some 'major victory' or something. Like it was so important."

"But you don't know what or where?"

She sniffled, shook her head. She'd managed to stop crying now. "I think it's tomorrow, though." I forced down a curse. "What else?"

"Nothing."

"You're sure?"

"Yes!"

"All right," I said. I tried to bring her back to her story. "So tonight. You told him you wanted him to pay attention to you—"

"I just want him to be nice to me sometimes."

"And that made him angry. He yelled at you."

She made a childishly mocking face, a childishly taunting voice, imitating Jamal. "'You don't understand. You're just a stupid girl. It's so important! It's so important!' Blah-de-blah. I was, like: 'Fuck you, y'know? I don't care how important you are. I'm important, too.' And he was, like—" that taunting voice again—" 'You're nothing. You're just a stupid female. I'm the master of the universe.' And I'm, like: 'Whatever.' I'm, like: 'You dumb fucking Arabs treat girls like shit, y'know that?' And so then he, like, just hits me, like, with his fist." She moved her fist as if it were a hammer. "I mean, he's such a little wimp, it's not like he's strong or anything. And I'm, like, 'Yeah, well, you and your big plans are all bullshit anyway because I told Jason and he's investigating everything now and he's gonna tell the whole story to the police.'"

It was a second before I registered what she was telling me, before I could bridge the gap between her childlike tone, her childlike inner world, and the terrible meaning of what she said.

"You told him about me? You told him you were coming here?"

She gave me a sort of sidelong glance, a sort of conspiratorial smirk. She was trying to please me, flatter me, enlist me to her side of the fight against her boyfriend. "I told him you were my real father. I said, like, you were this rich, important guy from,
like, the Midwest or something, and you were, like, totally in with the police and you were really pissed off that he was bossing me around and giving me shit all the time. I was, like: 'I told Jason all about what happened in the swamp and now he has the police investigating the whole thing and if I get hurt he's gonna find out about it and come after you.' I was, like: 'You're not so important after all, are you?'"

"My God," I whispered.

She just went on, frowning again, near tears again. "And he was, like, choking me. Motherfucker. I fell down. He, like, threw me down. I think I hurt my back. I did! I think I, like, sprained it or something. And then he said, 'You're going to see how important I am.' And he starts calling his stupid friends."

I stood up quickly, my heart beating hard.

"He was, like, so into it, he never even saw me sneak out," she went on proudly. "Like I was just gonna lie there and do whatever he said. Like, bullshit. Where are you going?"

My cell phone was still in the television room. I went to the phone on the kitchen wall. I snapped up the headset. I started to dial 911.

But it was too late. The teakettle whistle of the alarm warning began again.

They were already in the house.

There were four of them. One had a gun. Two broke through a back door, two broke through the front. They swarmed into the kitchen from both directions.

The second the alarm started singing, I knew they were on their way. I dropped the phone on the counter.

"Come on!" I shouted.

I lunged across the little room. I grabbed Serena by the wrist. I pulled her to her feet. She worked her way out from behind the table even as she protested.

"What's the—"

Then they were on us. Four dark-skinned young men in dark blue sweatsuits, the hoods pulled over their heads. Two out of the living room, two out of the front hall. Swarming us, shouting at the top of their lungs, the alarm whistling under them.

"Get on the ground! Get on the ground! Put up your hands or I'll kill you! Get down on the floor now! Now!"

They were all shouting at once, their angry faces closing in on us, their teeth bared, their eyes wild underneath their cowls. A chaos of rough noise swelled to the walls, to the ceiling of my mother's kitchen. I felt fear and confusion wash through the place like a flood. The gun was trained on my face. The bore of the barrel became the black focus of everything, like a drain down which the whole world swirled.

All this in an instant. Then Serena started shrieking, too, hoarse, ugly, tearful shouts.

"Jamal, you fucker, you fucker! Get out of here!"

She hit the young man with the gun. She pounded his shoulder with a small useless fist. Snarling and shouting with rage, he put his forearm into her face and shoved her away from him roughly. She stumbled against one of the others and the second man grabbed her arms. Then Jamal bore down on me, his gun stuck out in front of him, his hooded face blurred and enormous behind the black barrel. He was still shouting and they were all shouting and the alarm was whistling and Serena was screaming, struggling, in tears.

"Get on the ground!" Jamal roared, sticking the gun at me.

I punched him in the throat.

Strangely enough, through all this, I was thinking very clearly. The onslaught was so loud, so violent, so furious, that it swamped me in an instant. It was meant, I think, to throw me into confusion, to bear me down beneath the sheer weight and force of its initial blow. And yet my mind seemed to have gone into that crisis state of silence and slow motion. There seemed plenty of time to think and to react. I thought that in the next count of one-one thousand, everything would be decided. I thought: If I gave in to the power of their rush and to the noise and the shouting and the gun—if I lay down on the floor—if I surrendered to them—they would kill me. I thought: They would kill me and they would take Serena. I thought:
Do something, Jason. Fight back.

So I ducked inside the gun barrel and pistoned an uppercut into Jamal's Adam's apple.

The bastard gagged and doubled over, crumpling backward into the table. I tried to grab the gun but it flew from his hand, spun through a little arc of air and skittered and twirled on the
fake bricks of the kitchen's linoleum floor. The other men were still shouting, attacking. One had Serena by the elbows. She was struggling against him, cursing and screaming. There was a moment—part of a moment—when none of them—no one but me—fully realized what had happened to Jamal and to the gun. In that moment, with a quick, panicky movement, I kicked the weapon under the stove. You know that narrow space under the stove that's impossible to get to when you want to clean? I kicked the gun there. It was a slim, elegant automatic, and it slid right through the gap.

Then two of the hooded men slammed into me. One punched me in the head, twice, hard, quickly. The other one grabbed my hair and kicked me in the calf. The next thing I knew I was on the floor, the thugs carrying me down like an iron wave, hammering at me with fists, kicking me as I fell. Those blows, those first two blows to my head especially, sent me deep into a dangerous stillness, far from the tumult above. The men's shouts became muffled and far away. The whistle of the alarm warning disappeared completely. I saw the screaming faces over me and the wild eyes, and my arms went up to try to fend off the rain of blows but it was as if the arms belonged to someone else, as if the falling blows were a circumstance beyond my comprehension. Through the tumble of bodies, I caught glimpses of my mother's kitchen: the breakfast nook, the yellow walls, the silver sink, the window above it through which she used to gaze out at me dreamily as I played in the backyard. I saw Jamal in the nook where my family would eat our breakfast before we broke apart for work and school. My father would read the
Journal
there and my brother and I would bicker and complain and my mother would hummingbird from place to place, cosseting and reproving us and bringing us bowls of cereal or glasses of juice. Jamal was propped against the edge of the table we ate around, his mouth open, his tongue out. He
was clutching his throat with one hand while the other reached out to his henchmen, trying to tell them something, trying to direct them.

And there was Serena in my mother's kitchen, too—there against the sink where my mother used to stand while she washed the dishes. I used to play on the floor by her feet when I was little, snapping together wooden men that were made to stand on each other's shoulders like acrobats so you could make pyramids and buildings out of them. They still made some toys out of good-quality wood back then. Later, they were made of plastic, and then they stopped making them altogether. Now, there was Serena, struggling wildly and helplessly in the grip of that shouting man in the cowled hood. I saw her face twisted and red and ugly in her rage and her mouth with flecks of spit on the corners of it, flecks of spit flying from it, the lips forming words that young ladies really, it occurred to me in my foggy state, shouldn't say.

The man on top of me was close and horrible, his stink in my nostrils as he tried to punch my face through my raised arm or snuck in punches to my sides and belly. Another man somewhere was trying to get a clean kick at me, kicking my rib cage hard, then trying to kick at my head. The teakettle whistle of the alarm seeped back into my consciousness, as if I had forgotten it and was just remembering it now. I thought in a sort of distant, disinterested way that time seemed to be passing very slowly, that the sixty seconds it would take before the alarm actually went off were going to last a long, long time. I thought by the time the thing really let loose and started ringing, by the time it alerted the security firm and the police, I would probably be unconscious, possibly dead. That deep fall into myself after the first blows to my head, all these impressions that had gone through my mind—all of it had taken no more than maybe a second, maybe two or three. And it was all getting slower and quieter and farther away.

I struggled up toward the world. I knew they would kill me if I didn't. They would kill me and take Serena, so I struggled up and, all at once, I burst to the surface. The shouting and confusion and the pain of the blows became loud and immediate as time sped up in a great sudden rush. A frenzied strength of panic went through me.

With a grunt, I lifted up on one side, spilling the man on top of me onto the floor. I got a weak punch in on him before the other son of a bitch stopped kicking me in the back and jumped on me and grabbed my arm. I reached back around with my other arm and grabbed his hair, pulled his face to me, and sank my teeth into his cheek. He screamed and pushed off my chest and tore himself away, leaving blood and flesh in my mouth. The other guy tried to get back on top of me, clawing at my face, but I elbowed him in the ear, knocking him away.