Dark Rooms (15 page)

“Tell me what's going on,” I say.

“I'll tell you later.”

When I don't move, he exhales heavily, releases the handle. “Luis Ramos was FTA yesterday.” Off my blank look: “FTA, Failure to Appear.”

“Which one's Luis?”

“Buy-and-bust. Second offense. The judge issued a bench warrant for his arrest this morning.”

“And you're supposed to, what, recover him? How do you know where he is?”

“See that.” Damon points to the corner store, Save-A-Lot Xpress. “It belongs to his mom. She's the one who came to Max. Put up her mortgage as collateral. If Luis skips bail, she loses too. Could wind up losing her house.”

“I thought he already skipped?”

“Yeah, but Max said if I bring him in quick and without too much trouble, he'll issue a Resumption of Liability, help secure a new court date.”

“Why would he do that?”

Damon shrugs. “Liked the mom, I guess. Feels bad for her. Plus, she's helping him out, making his job easier. She called the office earlier
today. Told him Luis would be in the store after it closed at midnight. Said she'd leave the back door unlocked. Speaking of unlocked doors.” He reaches for the handle again.

I ignore him. “So you're just going to walk through the unlocked door? Then what?”

“Then I'm going to ask Luis nicely to turn himself in.”

“And if he says no?”

“Then I'll ask him not nicely.”

“What does that mean?”

Damon sighs, lifts his sweatshirt. Tucked in the waistband of his jeans is an object that's small and compact and so black it's almost blue: a gun.

“See,” he says, “you can relax. Everything's under control.”

I don't respond. Don't stop staring, either. The gun transfixes me, the cold, hard, steel fact of it. And as I stare, I notice the muscles in Damon's abdomen, their rectangular shape, the way they're neatly cubed and stacked; it makes his body seem machinelike, too, an extension of his weapon. A thin seam of black hair snakes between the muscles, disappears into the elastic of his boxers.

“Can I?” I say, my hand hovering an inch or so from the butt.

I'm surprised when he nods.

I take out the gun and weigh it in my palm, bounce it gently up and down. “A .22?” I say, in as casual a tone as I can muster.

“A .45.”

The feeling of relief I experience at hearing this is cut short by a thought:
It doesn't mean he didn't shoot Nica, just that he didn't shoot her with this gun.
I clench up again.

“Am I allowed to go now?” Damon says, snatching back the gun, returning it to his waistband. “Do I have permission?”

I unlock his door. As I listen to him struggle with his brace, I think about how scary this situation is, and how if Nica were here, she
wouldn't be scared, or, if she were scared, she wouldn't let it stop her. Pushing past my reluctance, I open my door.

“What are you doing?” he says, when he sees me walking around to the front of the car.

“I won't come inside the store with you. I'll just wait outside. That way, if something goes wrong, I'll be the first to know. I can call your uncle or 911.”

“Nothing's going to go wrong.”

“I'll just wait then. Look, if you make me get back in the car, I'm driving away in it. You'll have to find another ride home.”

For ten seconds or so we stand there, tight, facing each other. Then his eyelid twitches and he turns around, starts walking toward Save-A-Lot Xpress.

After hitting the Lock button on my fob for a second time, I follow.

The alley behind the store is empty except for a Dumpster, a couple of cardboard boxes with the words
DEL MONTE QUALITY
stamped on the side. The pavement is damp and smells like urine. The wall is a scorched-looking brick, in it a door. Damon stands in front of this door, looking at me, his eyes huge and inky black. His hand lightly touches the gun in his waistband. My hand does the same with the stun gun in my bag. He nods at me. I nod back, glad that I don't have to speak.

Damon reaches for the knob. It won't turn, though. He grips it tighter, shaking the whole door as he twists and pulls.

“Locked,” I say, trying to keep the relief out of my voice.

He lets his head fall forward, rest against the sooty brick. “Shit. She screwed us.”

“Is there another back door?”

Glaring at me, “Do you see another back door?”

“No, but maybe—” I feel the cell in my pocket vibrate. I pull it out, glance at the caller ID. Dad. Wondering where the hell I am at one in the morning, no doubt. “I should take this,” I say.

“Fine. I'm going to check the windows.”

I nod. Wanting privacy, I hold off until he rounds the corner, then quickly run through the excuse I prepared earlier: I was hanging out with Maddie in her room, it got late, we fell asleep. An old standby of Nica's. Bringing the phone to my face, I press the Answer button. The call's already gone to voice mail, though. I start to hit Return, then pause. It occurs to me that Dad might not be calling to find out where I am at all, has no idea I'm not at the house. He might be calling to let me know why
he's
not at the house. Could be he's stuck at work doing inventory or is having car troubles (he's had that station wagon for ten years now and it was secondhand to begin with) and is worried that I'm worried—if, on the off chance, I'm even awake to worry. In fact, this strikes me as the likelier scenario. I'll bet he was expecting to leave a message. And if he wasn't, well, he'll just have to wait until I get home to be lied to.

I close the phone and slip it into my pocket, a weight lifted from my shoulders now that I no longer have to talk to him. I'm about to join Damon when I hear a noise. I turn and look. The knob. Too shocked to run, too shocked to even move, I just stand there and watch as it rotates slowly counterclockwise, listen as its tongue slips out of the groove with a soft metallic click. Suddenly the door swings open, light pouring out so that my eyes are dazed and I can't see who or what is in front of me.

And then my eyes adjust.

He's propped against the doorframe, arms folded, legs crossed at the ankle. His jeans hang low on his hipbones, and he's wearing a shirt that's completely unbuttoned, exposing a flat stomach, a boyishly smooth chest. His face, though, is not boyish at all. It's dark and craggy
and pitted with scars and forty at least. When he sees me staring, his lips peel back in a smile. One of his teeth is gold.

“Was you the little mouse scratching at my door?” he says.

I feel his eyes moving over me, and all at once I'm conscious of my arms and legs, practically bare in a short skirt and T-shirt. I open my mouth to speak, but nothing comes out.

He laughs softly. “What's the matter, mouse? Cat got your tongue?”

Again I open my mouth and nothing comes out. I shrug my helplessness at him.

More of that soft laughter. “My name is Luis,” he says.

Without thinking, I hold out my hand to him, like we've been formally introduced, like he's a friend's parent I'm meeting for the first time, a college interviewer. He closes his hand around mine and tugs, tipping me off balance, so I have no choice but to step toward him. We look at each other. A heat starts to gather between our skins, and I can feel the rough calluses on the pads of his fingers. I try to take back my hand, but he doesn't let me, tightens his grip instead, tightens and tightens until I wince. He smiles at me when I do, and I return the smile even though I'm in pain now, and terrified, mesmerized by the menace of him and that gold tooth.

Finally, he releases me. “You got a name, mouse?”

A beat passes. My hand's throbbing, and my heart's going so fast it's making me dizzy.

“That's okay,” he says, “you don't have to tell me. Pleased to make your acquaintance, whoever you are.” He brings his hand up to my face, rests it lightly on my cheek. He's not holding on to me now, is only barely touching me, and I want to run, but I can't. Want to reach for the stun gun in my bag, but I can't do that, either. Can't even call out. The bulk and heat and pressure of him, the beating of my heart, the glint of that tooth make me stand there limply. The smell on his fingers is strong and complicated: the sweet, rotten scent of marijuana
on top; underneath, the fainter scents of fried food and ketchup and something like sweat yet not sweat, tarter than sweat, and ranker.

Tears well up in my eyes as he drags his hand across my mouth, wrenching my lips apart. I grit my teeth. I need to breathe through my nose so that his fingers can't get into my mouth. But the hot reek of him is thickening the air, clogging it, and taking it in through anything as narrow as nostrils becomes impossible; I don't even try. Seconds pass. My lungs start to burn. And I realize that I'm not going to be able to go without oxygen much longer, that I'm going to have to open up, let him inside me. The only sound I can hear is the pounding of the blood in my ears.

And then I can hear other sounds, too: Damon's voice shouting from inside the store, and footsteps, draggy but fast-moving. Moments later, he flies through the door, tackles Luis. I almost go down with them but manage to grab hold of the edge of the Dumpster and stay upright. As I gulp air, they roll around on the pavement. Damon comes out on top, straddling Luis and pinning him. When he cocks back his arm, I close my eyes. My ears aren't closed, though, so what I'm not watching, I'm listening to: a fist doing its work. After a while, the quality of the blows changes. At first it's like something hard and with bones in it is being struck. Then it's like something soft and heavy and wetly fleshy is being struck.

And after that, nothing.

Reluctantly, I open my eyes. The first thing I see is Luis's face. It's pulp, basically, and gore, his nose a smear of spongy tissue spread across his cheek, his mouth so caved in and bloody the gold tooth's no longer visible. Maybe he swallowed it. He is breathing, though, a fine mist tinting the air red whenever he exhales.

I start to scream, scream and scream, and then Damon's arms are around me. They're pulling me to him roughly, my cheek slamming against his chest. I hear his heart; it's beating inside his rib cage so loud and so hard it seems to throb right through his body and into mine.

“It was the front door,” he says. “It was the front door that she left unlocked.”

Damon and I are sitting on the curb in front of Save-A-Lot Xpress when a black-and-white pulls up. Two officers get out. Damon flashes something at them—his bail bond investigator badge, I think, I assume—tells them Luis is handcuffed to a drainpipe inside. Says he'll be right back.

“What about his mom's house?” I say, as he walks me to my car. “Won't she lose it now?”

The night air is close, but I'm shivering. Before I understand what's happening, Damon's unlocked the car with my fob, taken Nica's jacket out of the backseat and wrapped it around my shoulders. The smell hits my stomach before my nose: Nica's smell, her perfume—the stinging citrus, the cloying vanilla—cigarette smoke on top. Does Damon recognize it? I wonder. If not the smell then the jacket? I look over at him but his head is bent, so I can't see his expression.

“Tough,” he says.

“And Luis's face?”

“What about Luis's face?”

“How are you going to explain it to the police?”

He raises his head. “I was apprehending a jumper,” he says, eyes hard, like black marbles. “He resisted. Nothing to explain.”

“Oh.”

Damon plots out the quickest route home, then makes me repeat it twice. It's obvious he wishes he could go with me, but he has to stick around for the official surrender. As I turn the key in the ignition, he says, “And Grace?”

I look at him.

“Drive safely.”

I don't, though. I drive recklessly. I drive fast. I drive like I'm the victim of a crime fleeing the scene, too scared to stop or think or do anything but run. Yet no crime was committed. Not against me, at least. Luis didn't hurt me or threaten me. All he did was put his fingers on my mouth. And, besides, it's not the recollection of his behavior that I find so upsetting, it's the recollection of my own: tongue-tied and smiley-faced, blushing in a manner that mimed flirtation and pleasure. If Damon hadn't burst through that door when he did, I can't even imagine what would have happened. Not true, I can imagine, the outcome if not the particulars: me, bruised and raw and violated, definitely; damaged beyond repair, probably; diseased, possibly. Nica would never, not in a million years, have acted that way.

And as my tires hum, rolling rapidly over the asphalt, they seem to speak to me, say the same phrase over and over again:
Nica would never, Nica would never, Nica would never
.

I return to Damon's grandmother's. Holding vigil from my car, which has proven to be a pointless exercise, is especially pointless tonight—watching a house he's not even in!—but I don't know where else to go or what else to do.

I park in my customary spot, hunker down in my seat. My sense is that it'll be a while before a squad car drops him off, so after fast-forwarding through a pair of unlistened-to voice mails from Shep, one left several days ago, one left this morning—him wanting to take my emotional temperature, no doubt, to, barf, “check in”—I play Dad's.

“Sweetheart, where are you?” he asks in a mild tone, mildly curious, mildly confused, mildly concerned.

The message goes on, but I've heard enough. I delete it. After tossing my phone in my bag, I pull out my computer, the ancient laptop Nica and I used to share. If I hold it up to the windshield at a certain angle, I can pick up a faint Wi-Fi signal. And, though it takes forever, I'm finally able to get onto the
Hartford Courant
's website. I enter
Nica's name into the paper's search engine and begin to read the articles covering her death, articles I've read before—many, many times before in the last couple weeks—but, hey, another look can't hurt, and at least it's a constructive use of my time.