Man Down (21 page)

15

In the days after they returned from Las Vegas, Turner and Grace made no mention of what had happened during that lost weekend.

If his eyes met hers over their computer monitors while they worked at their desks he looked away.

At noon each day Grace took her bagged lunch—a sub, an apple and a bottle of water—out to the pool, where she sat eating on a lounger in the shade of an umbrella. Turner stayed at his desk, picking at the leftovers he brought in from the house.

Every evening at five p.m. Grace gathered her things while her computer shut down with a bright little trill, smiled, said “goodbye” and went home. Turner didn’t offer drinks and she didn’t loiter.

Then one afternoon they were together in his car after a meeting and, stopped at a light on Oracle Road, Turner’s eyes were drawn to Grace’s left hand as it lay in her lap, the sun catching her varnished nails, and he saw she had been chewing them again.

When the light changed he drove for maybe thirty seconds before he swung the Lexus into a motel, killed the engine and sat looking through the windshield at the mute neon sign.

Grace leaned back against the headrest and closed her eyes behind her sunglasses.

“Where are we going with this?” she asked.

“I don’t know.”

“No fine lies from the adulterer’s almanac?”

“No.”

“Well, at least there’s that.”

She unclicked her seat belt and it furled with a sound like fabric ripping. Opening the car door she stood up against a sky as bleached as her hair.

Grace waited outside the motel office while John paid, smoking, her right elbow cupped in her left palm. She watched a red-tailed hawk ride a thermal, drifting lazily overhead until John emerged from the office with a key suspended by string from a soiled brown cardboard tag.

She followed him into the anonymous room, stubbed out her cigarette in the scarred red Coors ashtray on the bedside table and lifted her dress over her head while she was still exhaling smoke.

They fucked until neon pimpled the lilac sky outside their window.

Afterward Grace sat in the dark, leaning against the headboard, her face orange for a moment as she lit a cigarette.

“John?”

“Yes?” he said, sprawled beside her.

“I lied to you,” she said, “back in Vegas.”

“What? You never dealt cards in your underwear?”

She shook her head and the headboard rattled against the wall like coins in a blind man’s begging bowl.

“No, not that. I lied about my twin sister. About Nancy. She didn’t die when we were six years old.”

“She’s still alive?”

“No, she’s dead. But she died when we were fifteen.”

“So why did you lie?”

“Because she was murdered.”

John said nothing but she could feel his eyes on her face.

“A man called Henry Saul Simmons picked her up in his car and took her to an empty old house outside of town and tortured her and raped her and killed her.”

“Jesus.”

“She was on her way home from the library. She was the good sister, the straight-A student. I was the one more likely to get into a strange man’s car.”

“Or maybe not.”

Grace nodded in the dark and the headboard rattled again.

“Yeah, maybe not.” She drew on the cigarette and felt the heat of the smoke in her lungs. “He was a Bible salesman. I mean, who the fuck does that? Rides around the country selling Bibles?”

“It’s like something out of Flannery O’ Conner.”

“I’ve never read him.”

“Her.”

“Sorry, I’m illiterate.”

“No, you’re not. I’ve seen you reading.”

“You have?”

“Uh huh.
Vogue
and
Cosmopolitan
.”

“And don’t forget
Vanity Fair
. That’s pretty high toned.”

Grace clicked on the lamp, blinking as she opened the drawer at her side and lifted out the Gideon’s Bible.

“There it is.” She weighed it in her hand. “The good book.”

“I found the pages pretty good for rolling joints, back in the day,” John said.

Grace replaced the Bible and closed the drawer and killed the light.

“Part of me would’ve liked to have known you back then,” she said.

“Which part?”

John’s hand was on her belly, traveling south but he removed it when she said, “He was executed. Henry Saul Simmons. Ten years later. Lethal injection, up in Huntsville, Texas. He’d killed seventeen girls. Seventeen that he could recall, he said. How could you forget something like that?”

“Beats me.”

“I attended it.”

“The execution?”

“Yeah. My parents were dead by then, so I went.”

“Alone?”

“Yes, alone.”

“Fuck.”

“It lasted over two hours. He screamed and cursed, struggling and gasping and choking and they kept on opening and shutting the curtains like it was some kind of a play. You know what I felt afterwards?”

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing?”

“Not a thing. They could’ve pumped him full of Drano for all I cared, but as I sat and watched this stranger die I couldn’t connect him to Nancy. Couldn’t make any sense of it at all. So I went home and I partied too hard. Drifted. Bumped into Megan in some bar and fell in love with her and dyed my hair blonde and put on a pretend wedding ring and that’s where the next five years of my life went.”

“And now you’re here with me,” John said, and his hand was back on her belly.

“And now I’m here with you.”

Grace touched him and felt that he was hard again.

She stubbed out her cigarette, straddled him and took his penis and put it inside her, grunting softly as it docked.

“Don’t worry John,” she said, riding him slowly, “I won’t fall in love with you.”

But she did.

16

When Tard loomed over him wielding a gut hook knife Turner was already bracing himself for the blade opening him from throat to pubes, but the creature merely hacked through the duct tape that bound his ankles and pulled him to his feet.

Bone, standing by the door, gun in hand, said, “Come greet your sweetheart.”

Turner, hearing the sound of Grace’s shoes on the gravel walk, didn’t move.

“If you don’t do my bidding,” Bone said, “Tard will open the pantry and take his pleasure with your child.”

Tard lurched toward the pantry and Turner, knowing it would require no effort for the creature to lift the door free of its track and reveal Lucy cowering in the dark, went over to Bone.

Tanya, standing away from the entrance, arms hanging limp at her sides, watched him, expressionless.

Crossing the room Turner glimpsed his reflection in the glass of the sliding door. His hair was dark with sweat, his eyes hollow in his skull, his nose, shirt and chinos bloody; his gait that of a much older man, a man who took small, tentative steps upon an earth he had learned to mistrust.

Bone leaned in close and whispered in his ear, “You invite her in, hear? Get her to join our revels.”

Turner waited for the knock at the door and reached for the handle with his left hand, saw the blackened stump of his index finger and sent the hand to his side, switching to his right.

Turner opened the door, the porch light catching Grace as she took a long nervous drag on a cigarette, exhaling smoke through flared nostrils.

Her face was scrubbed free of make up, her hair drawn back in a pony tail. She wore a white man’s shirt over a pair of blue jeans.

She had never looked more beautiful to him.

“I’m sorry, I think I left my phone in the office.” She broke off, staring at him. “John, are you okay?”

He nodded and searched for his voice.

“John?”

Lukas Bone nudged him in the side with the barrel of his gun and Turner said, “Yes, sure, I was trying to fix a faucet and it kinda got away from me.”

“A faucet?”

“Yeah, I’m the handyman from hell,” he tried a smile that didn’t take. “I have your phone. It’s inside. Why don’t you come in?”

She shook her head. “No, I see you have company. If you could just bring me the phone.”

“They’re only workmen,” he said.

He saw her eyes narrow.

“Plumbers straightening out my mess,” he said. “Tanya and Lucy aren’t here and I really would like you to come inside. I want to talk to you.”

“Tanya’s car’s in the driveway.”

“She went with friends.”

“I shouldn’t have come here, John. Just fetch my phone.”

“Please Grace.”

She hesitated.

“Okay, just for a minute,” Grace said as she stepped toward him.

And Turner, seeing her wide blue eyes, was back in all those motel rooms, feeling for a vivid moment the wash of her warm breath on his face as she’d lean in to kiss him, hearing the throttled moans when she’d climax and whisper forbidden words of love, reached out and shoved her away, shouting, “Run, Grace. For fuck’s sake, run!” slamming the door on her.

He took a blow to the head and fell, dazed, as Bone wrenched the door open and flew into the night, chasing Grace down like a predator taking its kill, slamming her to the ground and punching her in the gut. 

Bone grabbed her by her feet, her rubber flip flops left lying in the gravel, and dragged her into the house, Grace moaning as the step by the door struck her head, knocking her out cold.

Part Five

Every guilty person is his own hangman.

―
Seneca

1

“Grace? Grace, can you hear me?”

A man’s voice coming in soft and muffled, like an old-time radio show reaching her from a faraway childhood room.

“Grace?”

A pinprick of light pierced the blackness, a flickering beacon on a distant shore and she saw the blurred outline of John Turner looming over her, clicking his fingers in front of her face like a carny hypnotist, blinking as wildly if he were experiencing an epileptic episode.

Alert now, Grace opened her eyes wide on a sight so hellish that she convinced herself that she’d never left her apartment and was asleep in her lonely bed, caught up in about the worst goddam nightmare she’d ever known.

Now, Grace was no dreamer—at least not while sleeping.

No, she seemed way better at cluttering her dumb bottle blonde head with fantasies during her waking hours, daydreams about love and happiness and all that sad bullshit.

The best she could do when it came to the nocturnal variety was to snatch at a blurred fragment while surfacing in the morning, a fragment that always seemed to evaporate like breath on a mirror.

So this, for her, was a nightmare of astonishing vividness.

She dreamed she lay flung up against the lifeless form of a thickset, bald man whose throat had been cut so deep and wide she could see bone in the gaping wound. She smelled the coppery odor of his blood (blood that was thrown out from his body like a cape, dried to a shellac tackiness, sticky to her hands, arms and the side of her face resting on the wooden floor) and the stench of his loosened bowel was thick in her nostrils.

Grace closed her eyes again and decided she was having one of those flying dreams she’d read about but never experienced, for her body was lifted and spun and propelled at speed.

When she hit the floor again (a tiled floor now) her eyes were jolted open and she knew this was no dream.

A massive man kneeled over her, his rancid breath seething in her ear, the choking stench of his unclean flesh rising through a cattle-dip deodorant. His eyes, darting little shadowy fish swimming in an ocean of wrinkles, flickered over her face and body, leaving her feeling violated and unclean.

A jolt of terror took her low in her innards and her bladder released a few drops of piss into her panties—lacy little sin-black underthings purpose-bought for her trysts with John. Raw panic seized her and she tried to lift herself but the terrifying man pinned her to the floor with a hand as wide as a soup plate.

Grace tried to frame a question but her tongue lay heavy and inert in her mouth.

She moved her head and saw John standing in the kitchen with his hands dangling at his sides, watching her.

Tanya, her sinewy arms crossed, her mouth a thin gash, leaned against the kitchen island, looking on. Despite her bloody shirt, the Band-Aid on her cheek and the makeshift splint binding her left hand, her demeanor was that of a housewife about to watch an appliance demonstration.

Another man, blond, smaller than the creature who straddled her like a reeking elephant seal (though still big and in his own way more intimidating because something akin to malevolent intelligence animated his watery blue eyes) entered Grace’s field of vision.

“Tard, I’ll mind the whore. Why don’t you bring the child to join our party?”

Wheezing, grunting, clearing his throat with a phlegmy rattle, the monster gained his feet in a series of hoists and jerks and lurched off toward the closed door of the pantry, dragging behind him a leg that was shorter and skinnier than its mate.

Seizing the pantry door—a solid slab of fissured, distressed ironwood—he hoisted it from its track as easily as if it were papier-mâché. Tossing the door aside, allowing it to shatter the row of cobalt blue glass bottles that decorated the counter before it thudded to the floor, the man reached down into the darkness of the pantry and emerged with Lucy Turner, the child kicking and crying, looking as small as a tot in his grip.

He helicoptered the girl over to where Grace lay and set her down, the child squinting at the bright light, her cheeks patterned with tears.

The sight of the terrified girl spurred Grace to her feet, filled with the desperate, mindless urge to grab Lucy and flee.

With blinding speed the blond man swung a leg as solid as a steel girder, catching Grace in her midriff, sending her smashing against the drawers, a block of kitchen knives clattering to the floor around her. 

Grace, winded, grabbed for one of the knives, her fingers touching the bone handle when the man’s work boot caught her in the mouth, whiplashing her head backward.

For a moment she was on the merry-go-round in the park her mother used to take her and Nancy to when they were kids, her twin’s head thrown back, hair fanning out, mouth wide open, face infused with rapture, and the awful symmetry of their fates had Grace panting and blinking, spitting blood and something solid onto the floor of the Turner’s kitchen.

When she looked down she saw her left incisor lying in the red pool that patterned the white Formica tile. 

The blond man squatted in front of her and grabbed her face in his thick hand.

“Aw, whyn’t you put that under your pillow for the tooth fairy you adulterous little harlot?” he said, slapping her hard enough to get her sprawled on her back.

Looking up through a pain-filled vortex as he stood, Grace wormed into the fetal position, bracing herself for another kick.