Close Reach (11 page)

“Which fucking sucked,” David said. He was balancing a small rock on the backs of his fingers, flipping it toward Kelly’s face but grabbing it from the air with the same hand before it hit her.

He was quick; she could tell that much.

The rock was in his hand again, and he turned it in his fingers, studying its sharp edges. Behind him, Dean was thrashing his legs, trying to support his weight on his feet and sucking deep, shocked breaths when his shinbones ground against each other.

But David didn’t look back.

His eyes moved from the rock to Kelly, then to Lena cowering behind her. Kelly watched his eyes follow the huddled shape of their bodies under the blanket. He bit his lower lip, and the left corner of his mouth twitched up in a half smile.

He flicked the rock at Kelly again, then snatched it back an inch from the cage wall.

“One minute I was partying on the East Coast, like, three girlfriends at the same time, if you can picture that. And then we’re all back in Chile, you know, going from one safe house to another, up in the mountains. Living like peasants. I mean, some of these places don’t even have electricity.”

The man behind David’s shoulder gave another strong heave, and this time Dean came all the way off the ground for the first time. He gasped in pain and then stifled himself. The rope creaked, and years of dust drifted from the dry rafter beams. One of Dean’s shoulders dislocated with a loud pop, and he screamed. The man hoisted him until he was two feet off the floor and then backed up with the rope toward one of the center posts that supported the middle of the roof. He wrapped the rope around the post and tied it off. Then he tossed off a rapid-fire Spanish question to the kid, who answered with a nod. The man looked at Dean a moment, then at Lena, and then he left the building. Kelly could hear the crunch of his footsteps around the back wall of the building, then banging as he sorted through gear that must have been stacked there.

David threw the rock at Kelly again, but this time he didn’t try to grab it. It flew into the cage and struck her cheek. Her fingers went to the fresh wound, covering it.

David smiled at her, showing all his teeth.

She pulled her hand away from the small nick where the rock had grazed her, the blood warm on her cheek and on her fingertips.

David kept talking.

“At first I didn’t want to stay. I mean, there was no price on my head—just the Colonel’s, some uncles. But then all our accounts got frozen, and what was I supposed to do? That was three years ago, before I saw the album. I found it in the Colonel’s trunk and was looking through it. He was still walking then, and he came up on me and saw me with it. I thought he’d be mad, but he wasn’t. Not at all. He sat down with me, and we went through every page. He wanted me to see his work, to know why he was so famous.”

David picked up another rock and began to turn it in his fingers.

“What do you want from us?”

“Everything. With the three of you and the other stuff we’ve got, we’ll be ready. Grandfather will have everything he needs. He’ll be able to come back. But you’re not paying attention. See, he was really good at what he did. He was in charge of everything.
La Venda Sexy?
That was all him. He showed me the pictures of
la parrilla,
showed me how you’d do it. For the women, it helped, you know, if they’d been with a man. As in recently. To get them ready. So he had pictures of that part and then pictures after they were tied onto the bedsprings.”

Dean’s other shoulder dislocated with a wet crunch. He fell six inches lower as his arms stretched out. David didn’t even turn around. Kelly could hear Dean breathing, trying to control things. She couldn’t see his face but could tell from the strength of his breath that he was still conscious. He’d want to scream, but he wouldn’t want to give them the pleasure of hearing it. So he’d be controlling things any way he could. Measuring his breathing, balling his fists.

“The Colonel, he said at first they’d just put the negative electrode onto the bedspring. That way the current would run out of the woman through wherever her skin was touching the steel, and it would burn her all over. Then you could put the positive electrode wherever you wanted. You know, her nipples or her thighs, stuff like that. So it would burn in both places. But then Grandfather came up with—I guess you’d call it like an innovation. He’d clamp the negative electrode onto a piece of steel wool with an alligator clip, and you know, put it up inside her.”

He pressed his thumb against three of his fingers to grip an unseen alligator clip, and he shoved his hand upward.

“Then it worked much better. They’d tell anything at all. Names, addresses, whatever. It didn’t matter—they’d give up their husbands, their boyfriends. Their own children. But to get the steel wool in, that was why they had to fuck them first. Like I said, to get them ready.”

Lena squeezed Kelly hard around the middle and started to cry, a low and quiet sobbing. Kelly pressed Lena’s hand and then met David’s eyes.

“Just tell me what you want.”

David smiled, finally moving out of his crouch and just sitting on the dirt and rock floor with his legs crossed. He dropped the rock, picked through the rubble on the floor, and found a rusty iron bolt. He began tossing it back and forth.

“You can tell Lena not to worry. We don’t have any steel wool. I checked.”

“David, just tell me what you want me to do. Please.”

“You can tell me this. You got any on your boat? Because it’ll be here in about five hours, your boat. We talked to our guy on the radio a little while ago. He doesn’t know shit about sailboats except that he hates them. And he’s pissed about his foot. You know, how you sliced his ankle in half with a fish knife? So he’d be glad to find the steel wool if you tell me where he should look for it.”

The other man came back into the building. He was carrying a five-gallon jerry can of diesel and a steel cook pot.

“Never mind. You probably don’t have any steel wool. No one keeps it on nice yachts, right? The little bits break away and make rusty spots you can’t get off. Whatever.”

He turned and spoke in Spanish with the other man. Scarface put the cook pot on the ground under Dean’s feet, then set down the jerry can and slowly went about screwing the nozzle in place. When he was done, he poured pink diesel into the pot until it spilled over the brim. Then he replaced the nozzle with the cap and carried the jerry can to the far side of the building. He came back to David and handed him a book of paper matches. David palmed the matches and dug into his pants pocket. His hand came out holding a new-looking Iridium satellite phone and a few sheets of folded notepaper. In his other pocket he found a ballpoint pen.

“But seriously, here’s the thing. The deal. We zeroed your bank accounts and liquidated your portfolios, and that was great. You guys’ve been doing fantastic—just about tripled our net worth. But your biggest asset is your house, the land it’s on. You own that free and clear, and it’s in your name.
All
in your name. You didn’t know that, did you?”

He stopped and looked at her, but she made no response. He went on.

“Dean put the whole thing in your name when you got married. Told us he just wanted to make it easier down the road, like make probate easier. After all, he’s older than you. But this is irrelevant. What matters is you’re the only one who can fix this. You’ve gotta make the call.”

“What call?”

“Your lawyer. Annie Kersch? She represented you four years ago. She filed your complaint to divorce Dean—but it looks like she never served it. It got dismissed for lack of service. So maybe you changed your mind after she filed and Dean never even knew about it?”

David turned and looked up at Dean.

“Hey, Dean? I mean, you didn’t know until just now. Right?”

Dean didn’t answer. His chin was against his chest, and he was still working on his breathing. The rope was swinging short and tight arcs now, and the rafter creaked with his weight each time he passed under it.

David turned back to Kelly.

“That part’s not in the Connecticut public records online. Like, whether he knew or not. The rest is, though. It’s easy to get, even out here.”

Dean hadn’t known. For that matter, she hadn’t known about the house being in her name. But she had to keep up with David and make sense of what he was saying no matter how many curves he threw.

“You want me to call my lawyer and say what?”

“Whatever you need to tell her so she puts the house on the market. She can sell it for a discount, I don’t care. You know its tax-assessed value? Ten million—for the house, the guesthouse, the two docks, and the fifteen acres. So it’s probably worth twice that. But we’d settle for fifteen, and it’d sell a lot faster at ten. Right?”

He took the matchbook from his palm and pulled out one of the matches. Then he folded the cover of the packet around and held the match head between the cover and the strip of sandpaper. He pulled the match out, and it popped as it sparked alight. He held up the flame. Kelly’s heart exploded, and she reached again for the bars of the cage, the blanket falling off her.

“No, please!”

“You’ll talk to her. On speaker so I can hear both sides. It goes well, I let Dean down and we’ll bring you all some dinner. You fuck it up, I throw a match. We watch Dean burn, and then I go tell my guys to bring a couple heavy-duty batteries off the boats. And while they’re doing that, I’ll get Lena ready.”

“I’ll talk to her. But let Dean down first. Please.”

“Not happening that way,” he said, but he brought the match to his lips and blew it out. For a while he just sat and watched the smoke curl in the still air. The air already smelled of match smoke. That was the island itself, smoldering underneath them. Kelly noticed for the first time that the ground beneath her was warm. She’d stopped shivering.

She brought the blanket back over her shoulders to hide her body.

David pulled back his sleeve and looked at his watch. It was a TAG Heuer; she’d given it to Dean ten years ago, before they were married. So far as she knew, he’d never taken it off since then.

“It’s 4 p.m. in Connecticut right now. So you better hope she didn’t knock off early for the day. When she answers, you’ll tell her what you want and why. You want to liquidate it because you and Dean want to move somewhere else. I don’t care where. Sydney, Aruba. I really don’t give a fuck. You understand?”

“Yes.”

“Better tell Lena to stop crying. And you should calm down. Stop breathing so hard. Close your eyes and count to ten or something.”

“After I make the call and you let Dean down, then what?”

David shrugged. “Then we wait. I guess the house will take a while to sell. We’ll need you for that. After, we’ll see.”

“You’ll let us go, the three of us?”

David smiled. His teeth were small and sharp.

“Hey, there’s a thought. We could let you go. Would you like that? Like, maybe we could put you back on your boat and shake hands, and you’d tell us not to worry, you wouldn’t file any reports? And then you sail off and we stand on the beach and wave, and everybody lives happily ever after? We could exchange cards at Christmas. That might work.”

She’d broken another of her rules: never ask a question if she already knew the answer. Lena collapsed against her and started to cry again, silently this time, so that Kelly was aware of it only because of the tremors of her body.

“Let’s just take it one thing at a time, how about that?” David said. “First, you gotta make a phone call or it’s about to get a lot warmer in here.”

David was holding the satellite phone close to the wall of the cage, and Kelly was leaning down with the side of her face against the wires, listening to a phone ringing eight thousand miles to the north. She knew the phone, knew the room in which it rang. She’d sat in the leather couch opposite the receptionist’s desk four years ago, a month after she’d started making stops on her way home from the hospital.

She could picture it perfectly: the firm’s name in brass letters on the oak wall behind the reception desk, the two potted ferns on waist-high Doric columns, the receptionist baking her fingernail polish under an ultraviolet light while reading
Us
magazine on her computer screen. Another wall was lined with leather-bound casebooks that probably hadn’t left their shelves since the dawn of the Internet age. Four years ago she’d sat on that couch with her legs crossed and with a guilty warmth still inside her, a leftover from the afternoon that pushed her forward so that she’d signed the papers Annie drafted.

Papers meant to finish the job of knocking down everything that had been good about her life.

“Law offices of Kersch, Wright & Wade. This is Sharon; may I help you?”

Kelly closed her eyes and pressed closer to the phone’s mouthpiece.

“I need to talk to Annie Kersch. She in?”

“Sure, and may I say who’s calling?”

“It’s Kelly. Kelly Pratihari-Reid.”

“One moment.”

The receptionist switched her over to hold. Kelly opened her eyes and looked past David at Dean. His rope had twisted so that he was facing her, but she couldn’t see his eyes. His head hung too low. The law firm had Christmas music on its hold line. She’d come in halfway through a choral rendition of “Silent Night.”