A Small Fortune (4 page)

The circulation in my arms and legs feels sluggish, my feet and hands painful and dead at the same time. My ankles have swelled against the bindings. The damp, sticky feel where the bindings cut cools every time the air moves in the room, which is seldom. It’s hot. Eighty, ninety degrees. A faint citrus perfume floats through the window and quickly disappears. Benicio has apparently fallen asleep.

I read somewhere that the first twelve hours of a kidnapping are crucial. If the victim isn’t found within that time, the outlook is grim. I have no idea how long I’ve been here.

My hands, my legs, my whole body shivers as if I’m immersed in ice. I can’t hold still, even as some corner of my mind tries to soothe me with mundane thoughts of home. Sweeping the patio, ordering new topsoil for the garden. It’s spring, and by the time we get back the lilacs and daffodils will be in bloom. The garden will be bursting with color. By the time we get home.

“Benicio,” I whisper. His head hangs against his chest. “Benicio.” He doesn’t move.

I’m barely forty, and the fact that I haven’t woken up naked, strapped spread-eagle to a bed, my veins saturated with heroin makes me think it isn’t likely a sex ring. Then again, what do I know about sex rings? Is
sex ring
what they even call it? Maybe these people are revolutionaries. But I don’t see any propaganda, no posters of who and what they’re fighting for. The only other reason I can come up with is that they’re part of a drug cartel. But what would they want with a copyeditor from Portland, Oregon? Ransom. Cash to fund some lost crop, pay off enemies, who knows? I’ve seen on the news how ruthless these people have become. Lopping off heads and displaying the bloody stumps on iron fence posts in the middle of city squares. I picture my own head plastered in the news around the world, and another wave of nausea passes through me. What kind of life can Oliver ever hope to have if this is his mother’s legacy?

I shake so hard my teeth clatter.

They must have already known Jonathon is the president of a bank. They must have had us picked out before we even arrived. Benicio. He works at the condo. He could have gotten a hold of personal information.

My lips are dry and cracked. Thirst fills my insides with sand, fills my ankles, my wrists, the lining of my throat, the surface of my eyes. I haven’t had anything to drink after my run. Let alone anything in the hours since they tied me to the chair. My body continues to tremble. The sensation of crying fills my eyes, but not a single tear can form.

If I’d just said no to this vacation. If I’d just stayed at the condo and read a magazine and made breakfast. If I’d not stopped for a swim or said hello to Benicio at the pool yesterday. So easy to pick out a seemingly insignificant move that could have made all the difference. Stopping to look through a man’s binoculars, deciding not to swim in the ocean, tying a shoe faster, slower, tripping over a lace not tied at all.

“Benicio!” I whisper loudly. Why the hell is he tied up, too? He doesn’t move, and I begin to think he’s been drugged.

I hiss like a snake and he mumbles something in Spanish. He lifts his head and then drops it again, dozing in and out. It’s only then that I realize I’ve been doing the same thing when I see the angle of the sunlight on the window ledge change and then change again in what feels like a matter of minutes but must be longer for the sun to travel that far.

The man with the wolf tattoo hasn’t been in the room for some time. I hear him speaking now with a woman in another part of the house. The woman keeps saying, “
Sí, Leon. Sí
.” Every now and then they appear to be arguing, but who can tell? The first time I visited Germany, I was convinced that every conversation I overheard was a fight.

The woman laughs. Her voice sounds young, clear. Either they’ve just made up or I’m wrong about the arguing.

“Benicio. Wake up,” I whisper. “Please.”

His head suddenly flies back, and he sucks in a breath as if he’s just woken from a nightmare.

“Hey,” I say. “Why are we here? What do they want?”

Benicio looks confused, groggy. He bobs his head in the direction of the doorway and then at me. He shakes his head no.

“Who are these people?”

He winces as if pained by the question.

Just then a woman bursts into the room with a glass of water. She’s wearing camouflage shorts and a black tank top and flip-flops. She can’t be more than twenty years old. Just a kid, really. Not much older than Oliver. She’s pretty, her long hair a few shades lighter than black. Her cheekbones are wide, and her eyes large and amber like Benicio’s.

She lifts the glass to my lips and tells me to drink. Her accent is thicker than the men’s.

I gulp so quickly that much of it spills down my chin and shirt. The cold feels good against my sweaty skin. My stomach immediately cramps. Is there something in the water? Or are my insides just so twisted with fear?

“Isabel,” Benicio says.

The woman doesn’t look at him, but the expression on her face makes it clear he shouldn’t speak to her.

I finish the water and the woman lowers the glass.

“Can you please untie my hands?” I ask, hoping for some female empathy. “I’ve been like this for hours. It hurts. Please. You can lock the door or something. I just need to move for a second.”

The woman slaps my face so hard my head shoots to the side.

“Holy shit!”

“Shut up,” Isabel says.

“Isabel!” Benicio screams. I see a flash of resemblance between them. Brother and sister? Is the car Benicio drove really his cousin’s? Is Leon his cousin?

Benicio speaks to Isabel in Spanish. She doesn’t look in his direction, not even when his voice begins to strain. “
Por favor
!” That much I understand. The empty glass in Isabel’s hand trembles.

A toddler crawls into the shadowy doorway. Isabel turns at the gurgling sound he makes, and just as quickly she turns back and flings the glass against the opposite wall where it shatters. The boy sits back onto his diaper. He puts the alphabet block in his mouth, peers into the room, and begins to cry before a set of hands scoops him away and slams the door.

Isabel pulls a pistol from the back of her shorts and points it at Benicio. Until then he’s continued to plead.

The gun wobbles in her shaky hand.

“
No hablan
!” she says to Benicio. He’s silent.

Then she points the gun at me. “No speak. Understand,
chica
?”

I nod. My life doesn’t flash before me. I don’t beg for mercy. I don’t even think of my loved ones. Instead, I’m completely unfazed by the implications of a bullet aimed at my forehead. All I want to know is why they’ve taken me. Did they already know my husband’s president of a bank? Does my being an American give them some kind of leverage? Is it just bad luck? Wrong place, wrong time? It must be more than that. They know who I am, where I went to college; apparently they even know my grade point average. That brings the story right back to Benicio. He could have gotten a hold of this information from our address, credit card numbers,
something
. But if he’s part of all this, then why is he tied up, too?

I’m sure now that something has been mixed with the water. I feel drunk and even a little relieved, but more than anything I feel as if my marrow has been replaced with lead. The room seems to gel around me and slowly close in. It’s as if the deepest part of night has arrived in the middle of the afternoon and the only thing to do now is sleep.

When I wake again it really is night. The window is so black that at first I think someone has covered it with a cloth. Then I see the bulbous outline of the bananas and figure it must be two, maybe three in the morning. This far south, the sun is already beginning to rise around five thirty. I’m guessing they took me nearly twenty-four hours ago. Maybe more.

Leon enters the room and begins untying me. “Shh,” he says, smelling of coffee and cigarettes. I don’t dare open my mouth. Maybe he’s making the transfer now. Handing me over for whatever he’s getting in return. I imagine Jonathon at the end of some sandy deserted road with a briefcase full of cash. I’d give anything to see Jonathon in those ridiculous sandals. To watch Oliver shut me out behind sunglasses and music pounding in his ears.

Leon hands me a piece of dense bread. My mouth is tacky, but I don’t ask for water. I eat quickly, forcing the lumps down my parched throat. I can sense his impatience.

“Get up.” He pulls me to my feet, and my knees give beneath me. Every muscle in my body aches, my vision spins. My feet have been asleep for hours. They’re useless stubs on the ends of my legs.

I try to look in the corner for Benicio, but Leon jerks me toward him and forces me to stand. When I show the first sign of balance, he pulls me into the hallway and from there into a small bathroom. Sand coats the cold stone floor, and the tiny granules feel like glass in my feet. He goes in with me and shuts the door. We stand only inches apart in the dark. The cold toilet bowl touches the backs of my legs. The room reeks of sulfur from the drain.

“Pee,” he says.

I don’t move.

“Now.”

I lower my pants and sit on the toilet. Barely a drop drains from my dehydrated body. I wipe myself and pull my shorts up as I stand.

“No,” he says. “Take off your clothes.”

I don’t move.

“Now,” he says.

I begin to cry.

He yanks my shorts and bikini bottoms down my legs. He tears my shirt over my head, and I cry out even as I try not to. He slaps me in the face, though not as hard as Isabel. “Shut your mouth,” he says. He pulls the string on my bikini top and in one swoop it’s lying on the floor. My whole body trembles. I can’t stop crying.

“Quiet!” he whispers loudly. And then he just stands there. More mind games. Let me sweat. Get the full picture of what’s coming next.

“
Muy linda
,” he says with a grin.

We’re crammed between the door and toilet. I shudder so badly my breasts brush his shirt.

He runs his finger from my temple down my cheek and neck and across my collarbone. It may as well be a poisonous snake for all the terror it sends through me. He grabs my arm and spins me toward the shower. With his free hand he flips the faucet on and shoves me beneath an icy cold stream. He smacks my bare ass with a single whack like I’m a cow being prodded into a slaughterhouse.

I stifle a cry into a sickening moan.

“You make one more sound and I will shoot you.”

Somewhere in the house, a scuffle, and then a thud as if someone has hit a wall. A man screams in pain. I stuff my cries back down and pray. I’ve never wanted anything more in my life than for that scream to be coming from someone other than Jonathon or, God forbid, Oliver.

“Get the soap and clean yourself,” Leon says.

My hand trembles across my body. The soap stings my raw wrists and ankles. It doesn’t give much lather, and I hope Leon can see it’s the soap, not me. I’m trying.

He shuts the water off before I’ve fully rinsed my skin. He pulls me out and hands me a towel. As I dry myself nervously, awkwardly in the cramped space, he lifts a pile of clothes from a shelf I haven’t seen until now. “Put these on.”

They’re my own clothes from my suitcase. Underwear, bra, shorts, and a white sleeveless blouse Jonathon has always loved on me. I open my mouth to cry, to beg for an explanation. But the horror of possibilities keeps me silent. I do what I’m told, relieved and terrified by the familiar scent of my lavender laundry soap.

Leon shoves me back into the room, but this time he doesn’t tie me up. He goes out and shuts the door and pushes the locks in place.

A rooster crows in the distance. The sun has broken the horizon and fills the room with a milky orange light.

“Benicio?”

I step into the corner and see the empty chair. “Benicio?” I’m alone. They’ve taken him away, and I understand now that he’s the man I heard scream.

I curl onto the bed and cover myself with the blanket. I shiver as if in the throes of a seizure. It’s shock. A character in a Joella Lundstrum novel survives an earthquake only to find her only child has been crushed to death right next to her beneath a beam. The woman thinks she’ll never stop shaking. She’ll never again be still.

I gaze at the beams on the ceiling and swear if they let me go I’ll change everything about my life. I’ll never again raise my voice to Oliver. He’s just a boy trapped in the complex pangs of adolescence. I’ll never let a day go by where I don’t tell Jonathon that I love him, because I really do love him even if it isn’t the kind of love that makes my heart race. I’ll initiate more sex. I’ll keep a cleaner house. I’ll volunteer for some charity, spend more time thinking of ways to give back to the world instead of seeing what more I can take.

I nod off into another round of trancelike sleep, my brain half in, half out of consciousness. I’m at the pool. Benicio laughs with the little blond dog. This time I go for a swim. Benicio watches as I dive into the deep blue water, down to the tiles on the bottom. I caress them with my fingertips as I glide by, their centers slippery smooth, their corners pointed and crushing one against the other between the grout. And then for some reason I don’t know how to swim. I don’t think I’ve ever known how to swim and am furious with myself for having jumped in.

There are voices. They can help me. Then quiet, the only sound my own gasping breath. I’m unsure which is the dream. The pool, or sitting on the bed.

I glance at the window. The bananas, the room exactly the same, though I’m seeing it now from the opposite side. The chair I was bound to remains empty, the ties and blindfold strewn across the seat and floor. Benicio’s chair is still empty in the corner.

The voices are real. Several men, a woman, maybe two.

The door flies open and Benicio stumbles inside. A set of thick arms slide a food tray across the floor behind him. There are pastries and two cups of coffee, most of which splashes over the sides. The door shuts and locks.

Benicio’s cheek is swollen and red, his nose bleeding from one side. Blood trickles down his chin onto his shirt. He’s still so strikingly attractive it’s as if he’s posing instead of standing in the center of the room—an actor playing the part of a warrior who’s just lost a fight.

He works his jaw from side to side and touches his cheek.

My mouth has fallen open. I’m still getting past the thought that Benicio has been beaten instead of Jonathon or Oliver. I swallow my guilty relief and cross the room to take his arm and lower him to the mattress next to me.

He sits and feels around his head as if for lumps.

I lift the edge of the blanket and wipe the blood from his chin. “Are you all right?”

He stares across the room at the chairs, and I wonder if he has a concussion.

“They untied us,” I say. “And made me shower. Does that mean they’re going to let us go?”

Benicio laughs and his fingers shoot to his nose. It’s bleeding again. He tilts his head back, exposing his smooth throat beneath the flecks of whiskers. “No,” he says. “They aren’t going to let us go.”

I wipe the blood again. His Adam’s apple dips and settles at my touch.

“Tell me what they want with us,” I say, though if Benicio had answered in that moment I’d have never heard the distinct sound of Jonathon’s voice coming from another room. I’m so ecstatic, so overwhelmed with relief that I nearly miss the fact that Jonathon is speaking Spanish.