A Time of Torment (7 page)

Henry parked beside a large gray van bearing muddied New Hampshire plates, and something about the sight of it gave Corrie the shivers. It made no logical sense – it was just a van – but Corrie had been engaged in these minor acts of predation for long enough to be able to tell when a situation felt wrong, and she now realized that she’d made a dreadful mistake in targeting Henry.

She rubbed her face, then covered her mouth.

‘You okay?’ asked Henry.

‘I’m really sorry, but I don’t feel well.’

‘Come inside. I’ll get you a glass of water.’

Corrie shook her head.

‘No, I have to go. I’d be grateful if you could take me back to town, or I can just call a cab to come pick me up.’

She took her cell phone from her purse. She kept a couple of cab companies on her list of contacts, along with a handful of individual drivers who were particularly trustworthy or simply knew how to turn a blind eye, but they were mostly for show. The emergency number was listed ‘
CN
’ – Come Now.

Henry’s left hand closed over hers, and his right plucked the cell phone from her grasp.

‘What are you doing?’ she asked. ‘Give me back my phone.’

‘We’re going to have a drink and a talk,’ said Henry, ‘just like we agreed. I don’t know what you’re getting all excited about.’

‘I told you: I don’t feel so good.’

Henry returned the phone to her.

‘Go ahead,’ he said. ‘Call a cab. I’m done driving for the night.’

Corrie was surprised, but she had no intention of calling a taxi, and never had. The others would be close, and she wanted them to know that they had to move fast. They could go ahead with it if they wished, but she didn’t intend to spend any longer alone with Henry than was necessary, and she sure as hell wasn’t about to step into that house with him, no matter what he said. Her right thumb hovered over the
CN
listing.

The front door opened, revealing the silhouette of a man. She couldn’t see his face, but he was tall – much taller than Henry. His frame was stooped, as of one who had spent too many years connecting painfully with a world created by and for those who were shorter than him, and now warily anticipated contact. She couldn’t be certain, but he seemed to be wearing a shower cap.

‘Who’s that?’ she said.

‘I forgot to mention that I have a roommate too,’ said Henry. ‘You ought to meet him.’

That was it for Corrie. She was about to hit the call button when a hammer blow from Henry’s right fist impacted on the bridge of her nose, breaking it instantly.

The second punch knocked her out cold.

H
is name was Todd Peltz, but he hated it, and preferred to be known as TP. Sometimes he thought TP sounded like a kid’s name, and at others that it made him sound like a rapper. He wasn’t too happy about either possibility, but the third option – that he might remain Todd fucking Peltz – was the worst of all.

He was about to turn twenty-five, and had known the inside of a couple of county jails for minor assault stuff, and one dumb OUI, but that was all in the past. TP had a temper – would never have denied it – but he’d worked hard at learning to control it, and he’d curbed his alcohol consumption, recognizing that one fed the other. It was his curse to be just slightly too intelligent to settle for honest, menial work, or at least not for any length of time, yet not disciplined enough to be able to commit himself to long-term self-improvement. He was the kind of man who liked to boast that he had never hit a woman, and never would, as though this were a claim worthy of note, and one that somehow separated him from the masses. TP looked hard – six feet tall and rangy, with the long-muscled limbs of a climber or a middle-distance runner – but there was also a kind of gentleness to him. He loved Corrie Wyatt, and she loved him in return, enough to lure luckless men into situations where they would be vulnerable to TP’s particular brand of pressure. His eyes were soft, but when threats or acts of violence became necessary they assumed a glassy emptiness, as though the better part of TP chose to absent itself at those moments and turn its gaze elsewhere.

Sitting beside TP in the passenger seat of their junk-cluttered Dodge was Barry Brown, the BB to Todd Peltz’s TP, had Brown consented to such a diminution of his given name, which he most assuredly would not. Brown was of similar height to his friend, but broader and fleshier. He was smarter than TP, even though he assumed the subservient role, but that was Brown’s nature: he was a natural manipulator, and he found it easier to operate from behind the scenes than on the stage. When they studied
Othello
in high school, he was the only kid in his class who empathized immediately and intimately with Iago. In another age, and with better opportunities, Brown might have made a fine, ambitious courtier, a Cromwell or a Walsingham. He didn’t want to be the titular godfather after watching the first two Coppola movies: he wanted to be a cleverer Tom Hayden, the
consigliere
, the fixer. He wore spectacles instead of contact lenses because he liked the way they made him look, and had trained himself to speak only when necessary. It had turned out to be a useful skill. He discovered that silence made a lot of people uneasy, and they would often say something to break it, thus revealing themselves in the process.

It had been Brown’s idea to use Corrie as the worm on the hook, although he had been careful not to suggest it to TP in those terms, instead working slowly to insinuate the notion into TP’s head so that his friend believed the plan to be entirely his own. Corrie had been a harder sell, but TP wasn’t above a little manipulation himself, and had convinced her that she would never be in any real danger. Brown got on well enough with Corrie, but he knew that she would have preferred if it were just her and TP making their own way in the world. Brown thought that Corrie would have been perfectly content to work in a coffee shop or a bar, and support her boyfriend while he played computer games, or tinkered with cars, and came up with big schemes for getting rich that would never reach fruition because he didn’t have the energy or drive to pursue them. Eventually, Brown knew, she would have grown frustrated and left him, maybe with a child in her arms that she’d then have to raise alone. In a way, Brown thought, he was keeping them together by instilling a degree of ambition in TP that would otherwise have been absent.

So far, their scheme had gone entirely to plan. The first man targeted was a married, fifty-something conventioneer in Boston. It had been almost too easy: a couple of drinks, some flirtation, a little chat about how he reminded Corrie of her favorite uncle, one on whom she’d always secretly had a crush, then back to his hotel room. When the knock came on the door – which Corrie made sure she answered, permitting the two masked men to enter – the mark was already down to his boxers, with a hard-on from which he could have hung a flag. Corrie was in a similar state of undress, and stayed that way while BB showed the conventioneer the gun, and explained how it was going to go down. They photographed his driver’s license, which he kept in his wallet alongside pictures of his wife, kids, and first grandchild. They noted his address before, at gunpoint, taking pictures of him in a series of suitably compromising positions with Corrie. Finally, they got him to reveal the PINs for his debit and credit cards, after which Corrie got dressed and withdrew cash to the daily limit on each card, then went and had a cup of coffee until just after midnight, so she could take a second run at them. When she returned, they gave the conventioneer back his wallet, debit card, and one of his credit cards, and told him not to report the second card missing until a further twenty-four hours had elapsed. They assured him that his bank would cover any losses, and it wasn’t like they could do too much damage anyway with a $5,000 credit limit. If they encountered any problems using the card, then his wife would find out just what he’d been doing on his free night in Beantown. No violence had proved necessary, which was just the way they liked it, and they’d netted a total of $3,000, and a number of laptop computers bought on the second card, which they’d sold for twenty-five cents on the dollar.

Afterward, Corrie ditched her cheap wig, and they pulled the scam twice more in Boston and its environs before heading slowly north: Portsmouth, Concord, and now Portland. Brown hadn’t wanted to net that night’s sucker, though. He felt that it was time to give the operation a rest and lie low for a while. They had enough cash to get them comfortably through the winter, and he was convinced the last mark – a salesman in Portsmouth, who’d required a tap on the head to curb his indignation – might take the risk of not remaining silent about what had happened. It was TP who had argued for one last effort, and Corrie had agreed, just because it was TP who was asking.

But Brown and Corrie had recently spoken together at length for the first time in weeks – maybe even the first time ever – without TP present, and it was clear to Brown that Corrie was growing increasingly uneasy about their business enterprise. Brown wasn’t surprised. She was the one taking the major risk. True, he and TP were always on her heels, and they made sure to let only the minimum amount of time go by between Corrie and the mark entering the hotel, and their knock sounding on the door. But suppose they were stopped by security, or their car broke down, or they just screwed up, none of which was beyond the bounds of possibility? Then, my friends, Corrie would most assuredly be on her own, and the big ‘r’ word – rape – was never far from her mind.

Corrie and TP were staying in one room of a motel out by The Maine Mall, and Brown was across the hall. It meant that he couldn’t hear them screwing, which was a relief on a lot of levels. He’d been forced to listen to them when they’d all shared a small one-bedroom apartment down in Quincy, Brown already struggling with sleep thanks to the sadistic springs on the sleeper couch without TP’s grunts and Corrie’s cheerleading as a soundtrack. When they’d first been on the road, and watching their cash, he’d taken the second bed in the motel rooms, or sometimes just slept on the floor, and TP would gesture to the door when he wanted some quality time with Corrie, leaving Brown to wander until they were done, or smoke and read a book while sitting on a plastic chair, maybe catch a movie if there was a theater nearby. Brown hated having to do that. It made him feel about nine years old, and an inch tall.

Brown was in love with Corrie. It had taken him a while to realize this, and attempt unsuccessfully to come to terms with it. He was self-aware enough to speculate if one of the reasons why he’d suggested using her as bait was to punish her for sleeping with TP and not him, but now that they were deep in the whole mess, Brown was starting to regret ever involving her. He could see the strain it placed on her. She was more jittery than before, and he knew that she was having trouble sleeping. He’d tried pointing all this out to TP, but TP was enjoying the money, and, as he pointed out to Brown, it wasn’t like they were whoring Corrie out.

Except they were. That was the truth of it, but TP either wouldn’t, or couldn’t, recognize it. Just because he and Brown intervened before the main show had to commence didn’t make it any less demeaning and dangerous for Corrie. And so, after talking with her that evening, Brown was determined to find another way for them to make a little easy money. He knew some guys up in Bangor, and he and TP now had enough ready cash to be able to buy a decent quantity of blow. Screw weed: the economy looked like it was improving some, and to Brown that meant the demand for coke would increase. You just had to hang out in the right bars, and make the right connections with the Friday night asshole set, the young men in suits who started drinking straight out of the office, and were already whooping it up by eight p.m. Brown had begun laying the groundwork with TP as they waited for Corrie and the mark to emerge, and he thought that he’d made headway.

Then Brown saw the guy with Corrie, and alarm bells began ringing in his head.

‘Hey,’ he said to TP.

‘What is it?’

‘I don’t like what I’m feeling here.’

‘Not again. Come on, I told you: I’ll think about the coke thing, and we already agreed this would be the last one for a while.’

‘Seriously, man: that dude is wrong.’

‘Everybody’s wrong to you.’

‘He’s not drunk.’

‘He looks drunk to me.’

It was true that the mark was walking a little unsteadily, but Brown wasn’t convinced. He’d caught a glimpse of the guy’s eyes as he passed their car, and they’d resembled pools of polluted mud. And the way he’d looked at Corrie, like one of those slaughterhouse workers who enjoy torturing the pigs before they die …

‘I say we call it off,’ said Brown.

‘You’ve got to be kidding. They’re at his car.’

‘We drive up, we call out to Corrie, and we offer her a ride,’ said Brown. It was something they’d come up with at the start. Corrie always wore a scarf. If they saw her take it from her neck and put it in her bag, it was a sign that something was wrong, and she wanted to bail. So far she’d done that only once, with a company executive who’d whispered in her ear about what he was going to do to her once he got her back to his hotel room, and it wasn’t anything that Corrie wanted done to her, not even by TP.

Scarf into bag; TP and Brown rolling up alongside, shouting out ‘Hey, Linda!’ – the name she was using that night, because she never used the same one twice – ‘What you doing? Want to hang with us?’; Corrie apologizing to the executive, because she had to go with her friends; the executive objecting; TP getting out of the car, the executive still mouthing off; TP just about keeping his temper in check, knowing that it could be bad news if they attracted the attention of a passing cop; Corrie getting in their car; driving away; Corrie telling them what the guy said to her; TP insisting on going back and giving the executive a beating he wouldn’t forget, and only the best combined efforts of Corrie and Brown convincing him that it would land them all in jail.

‘She hasn’t taken off her scarf,’ said TP.