Chump Change (23 page)

By the time I got my eyes back over to the threesome on the ground, the party was pretty much over. Boyd was bug-eyed and purple as a plum, trying to whoop some air back into his empty lungs. Keith had rolled Ginny out of the pile and scooped her up in his arms. She had her face buried in his shoulder and was sobbing for all she was worth. Irene ran to her side and stood there, stroking her daughter’s hair and whispering.

Took the cop contingent about ten seconds to manacle Boyd up like King Kong. He vomited onto his shoes as they dragged him upright, and was still gasping for breath when they hauled him bent-legged and bleeding up the alley and out of sight.

Wilder looked back at me. “Kid saved my life,” he said.

I nodded. “I believe he did.”

By the time the adrenaline buzz cleared from the air, and all the cops, EMTs, and rubberneckers had gone back to where they came from, I’d finally worked up enough energy to move myself.

Keith and Irene had gone with Ginny in the aid car, so all I could think of was that I’d drop by the hospital, see how Ginny was doing, maybe talk to Sarah Jane while I was there. Tell her I’d had enough and was going the hell home. Maybe even admit it had been a crappy idea from the beginning. I hated that part.

I knew now that Chief Wilder had been right when he said we’d never lay any of this or anything else at Roland Moon’s door. I thought about my old man and how, for thirty years, the powers that be had used the full apparatus of law enforcement in an attempt to bring him to bay, and how they’d never even gotten close. How they spent over three million bucks trying to put my trust fund back into the public coffers, only to find that, even in death, he was way too slick for them. Now I knew how they felt.

Roland Moon was sort of the rural equivalent of Big Bill Waterman. Too many fingers in too many pies to be brought down by any one of them going bad. A man with his ducks in a row, who knew enough to always be somewhere else when the shooting started, and probably had a little hidey-hole someplace, with enough money to start over, should that ever become necessary.

I still had a nagging curiosity about what had happened to Gordy, but that wasn’t gonna happen. Wilder and Morgan had made it plain that those answers were part of an ongoing police investigation. No matter what you see Jim Rockford doing on TV, real cops don’t tolerate amateurs mucking about in their business. Not for one second. You want to find yourself swapping lies in the county lockup, you just stick your nose into a current case.

When I looked at it that way, when I saw Moon and my old man as moral equivalents, it gave me pause to consider how
my
light had been spent. What I might have accomplished in life if that pot of gold hadn’t always been dangling there in front of me. If I hadn’t spent the past twenty-five years trotting along like the donkey chasing the carrot. I was still chewing on that bitter root when I swung up into the front seat of the Blazer and buckled up for safety.

I knew the voice right away. Tyler Bain.

“You do anything cept what I tell you, I’ll blow your fucking kidneys through the dashboard,” he said.

I checked the mirror, but he wasn’t anywhere in sight. Must be scrunched down behind me, I thought.

“Unlock the damn doors,” Bain said.

I reached over onto my armrest and pushed the button.

The driver’s door popped open. Rockland Moon was standing there.

That’s when Bain jammed the needle into the space between my neck and my shoulder and pushed the plunger. I grabbed his wrist. He laughed at me. A great rush of blood suddenly filled my head to bursting. The edges of my field of vision began to contract to a single point. I opened my mouth, but nothing came out.

I was naked. Don’t know why that was the first thing my senses detected, but it was. Seemed like they would have noticed how much my nipples hurt, or that my hands were shackled behind my back, or that there was something stuffed in my mouth, that my tongue couldn’t dislodge, but none of that seemed to matter to my central nervous system as much as did my lack of clothing.

That and the dark. Dark like the inside of a stone. I tried to calm myself, to push back at the rising tide of panic that threatened to overwhelm me. Whatever was jammed in my mouth made it hard to breathe. I could feel a river of drool running down over my chin as I tried to stand and discovered I was connected to a wooden chair in several places. I don’t know how long I sat there. Fact is, at one point, I think I may have passed out for a while. Next moment I recall is when a bright, white light snapped on and turned the interstellar blackness to searing, solar white.

Took my eyes several minutes to adjust. No windows. A halogen-bright lantern on the table by my elbow was the only light source. Corrugated walls, like the inside of a storage container. Several of them connected to each other, maybe. Tables, chairs, boxes of electronic equipment. A blank computer screen. I could make out the throbbing sound of a generator, running in another room.

The far wall was covered with posters. I squinted. Guy in a yellow raincoat pointing.
SERVING YOU
, it said.
IN TIME OF EMERGENCY
. Next to that one with a great mushroom cloud rising into the sky over a shattered city.
YOU CAN PROTECT YOURSELF FROM RADIOACTIVE FALLOUT. GET THE FACTS!

I was in a bomb shelter. Which probably meant I was underground. My stomach churned at the thought. Suddenly I felt a great weight pressing in on me. Seemed like it was harder to breathe. Like the air was noticeably thicker. Something about being buried beneath the earth opened my Pandora’s box of fears and allowed a lifetime of imagined menace to fly free.

The sound of footsteps pulled me back from my imaginary terrors to the horror at hand. Tyler Bain, Dexter, and Rockland Moon filed into the room. Bain walked right over and put his face close to mine.

“I warned you, boy,” he said.

I could see the source of my chest’s discomfort now. A pair of alligator clips were attached to my nipples. Two wires—one red, one yellow—ran to an army-green box sitting on the floor beside my chair.

“Okay,” Bain said. “Here’s how it’s gonna be.” He pulled a sheaf of papers from his inside jacket pocket and slapped them down on the table. “What you’re gonna do is sign your option on the Hardvigsen property over to The Keeler Group.” He held up a cautionary finger. “Ain’t no sense even talkin about it, cause you gonna do it,” he said. “Just a matter of how long it takes and how much of you is gonna be left when we get done.” He smacked me in the side of the head with an open hand. “You hear me, boy?”

I turned my face away.

“That’s what I figured,” Bain said, obviously pleased. “Just so’s you know we ain’t kidding, I’m gonna give ya a little encouragement.”

Rockland stepped in the circle of light and picked up the army box.

From the other side of the chair, Dexter appeared, carrying a five-gallon bucket filled to the top with water. He tilted my chair way back with one hand and slid the bucket beneath my feet with the other. When he tilted the chair back to earth, my feet were deep in the water.

“What we got here,” Bain said, nodding at Rockland, “. . . is a genuine German Model Thirty-three Wehrmacht field telephone.”

I looked down at my feet in the water. He caught me.

“Improved conductivity,” he said with a wink.

“We gonna help you make a good decision here. Lord knows you ain’t made many of those lately, so we gonna help you out with a
visual aid
.” He grinned at himself for remembering what they used to call it in school.

When I didn’t say anything he went on.

“Only one of two things gonna happen here. Either you gonna show some sense and sign those papers, or I’m gonna let Dexter and Sonny Boy have a go at ya,” he said. “Ya see, when Dexter was a boy his papa come home from the war a different man than the one that went away. Real scared and angry. Couldn’t sleep. Couldn’t nothin. Just frustrated the hell out of him. Used to take it out on Dexter and his mama. Liked to cut green willow switches and beat the hell out of them. Beat em till the damn switch just fell apart, and then find him a new one and start over.”

He glanced over at Dexter, whose face was as blank and bland as a cabbage. “The whole thing kinda warped him, you know,” he confided, in a fatherly tone. “Kinda skewed his sense of what was fun, if you catch my drift.” He jerked a thumb in Rockland’s direction. “And Sonny Boy here . . . just imagine what it must have been like having Roland Moon as a father. Always a disappointment. Never quite bein able to live up to expectations,” he said. “Feelin like a failure from the minute you wake up, till the time you go to bed.” His eyes were hard as gravel. “Made Sonny Boy mad as hell and meaner than a snake,” he said with a smile.

He looked over at Dexter. “Which movie you want to show him?” he asked.

“The bitch,” Dexter said right away.

Bain nodded. “Not gonna lie to ya,” he said to me. “The only thing
you
gonna choose here today is how you gonna leave this world.” He gave it a moment. Making sure I understood that it wasn’t a question of whether I was going to die; it was only a question of how.

“You do like we say, you can go quick and easy,” he promised. “I’ll put one behind your ear, and your troubles here on this earth will be over.” He shrugged. “You don’t . . . it’s gonna look like this.”

The screen blinked to life. This room. Blonde woman hanging by her arms from the ceiling. Naked. I blinked.

“And case you should think about closing your eyes or lookin away, I’m gonna have Sonny Boy here give you a little wakeup call, every time you do.”

Rockland began to crank the handle on the field telephone.

My world turned red. When it stopped, I slumped over with my chin on my chest.

“Quite a jolt, ain’t it?” Bain said. He grabbed me by the hair and aimed my face at the monitor. “You watch now, boy,” he said.

As my vision began to clear, I could see the strung-up woman again. When the camera moved closer, I got my first real look at her face. Missy Allen! And although I had no great love for the woman, or what she’d done to Gordy, I couldn’t, for a second, wish upon her what I knew was about to happen.

Dexter walked into the frame, carrying a thin bamboo cane. He started with the soles of her feet, then worked the back of her into one giant welt . . . then the front. By the time he finished, she’d screamed herself voiceless, and was wiggling like a fish on the line.

He stepped aside, and Rockland Moon came out from behind the camera. He wasn’t wearing pants. I watched in horror as he bellied up behind Missy Allen. I dropped my eyes.

They lit me up again.

“Crazy little bitch didn’t understand she was nothin but hired help, thought she could hold us up for a share,” Bain said.

Back to Dexter onscreen. Holding a thicker rod this time. Looked like a store-bought hardwood dowel, maybe an inch thick. Dexter started on her all over again. I screamed my outrage and looked away. Rockland cranked the handle. The jolt left me vibrating like a tuning fork and pissing all over myself.

She died sometime during the fourth go-round. By that time, she’d emptied her shopping cart, and there was nothing left of her but the bag she came in. You could almost see the life force flit from her and fly away. Didn’t seem to bother Rockland Moon one bit. Dead or alive, he was getting his last turn. He was still hunched up behind her as the screen flickered out.

“Sonny Boy do like his bungholes,” Bain said. “Don’t you, boy?”

Moon didn’t answer.

“We find em new playmates, once in a while,” Bain offered. “Helps keep em from gettin too tense. Kinda like givin a dog a treat.”

That’s what the other victims must have been, I thought. Playthings for perverts.

Bain reached behind himself, grabbed a handful of something, and fanned them out over the table. Gordy’s postmortem photos.

“This what you come here for?” he asked. “You tryin to find out what happened to old Gordy?”

I didn’t answer. He smirked.