Intensity (34 page)

Memory, however, always has its way.

The visitors, who’d done business with Zack and Memphis before, had been there to make a drug purchase. The cooler had been filled with packets of hundred-dollar bills. Maybe Zack didn’t have the promised shipment, or maybe he and Memphis just needed more money than they could get from a sale; whatever the reason, they had decided to rip off the two men.

After the gunfire, Chyna had hidden in the barn loft, certain that Memphis would kill them all. When Memphis and Anne found her, she fought them bitterly. But she was only seven years old and no match for them. With owls hooting in alarm and taking flight from the rafters, the women dragged Chyna out of the mice-infested hay and carried her to the house.

Zack had been gone by then, having taken the bodies elsewhere, and Memphis had cleaned up the blood in the kitchen while Anne had forced Chyna to drink a shot of whiskey. Chyna didn’t want the whiskey, sealed her lips against it, but Anne said, “You’re a wreck, for Christ’s sake, you can’t stop blubbering, and one shot isn’t going to hurt you. This is what you need, kiddo, trust Mama, this is what you need. A shot of good whiskey will break a fever, you know, and what you’ve got now is a kind of fever. Come on, you little wuss, it’s not poison. Jesus, you can be a whiny little shit sometimes. Either you drink it quick, or I’ll hold you down and pinch your nose shut, and Memphis will pour it in when you open your mouth to breathe. That how you want it?” So Chyna drank the whiskey, and then took a second shot with a few ounces of milk when her mother decided that she needed it. The booze made her dizzy and strange but did not calm her.

She had appeared calmer to
them
because, good little fisher that she was, she’d caught her fear and reeled it inside, where they could not see it. Even by the age of seven, she had begun to understand that a show of fear was dangerous, because others interpreted it as weakness, and there was no place in this world for the weak.

Later that night, Zack had returned with whiskey on
his
breath too. He was exuberant, in a raucous and celebratory mood. He came straight to Chyna and hugged her, kissed her on the cheek, took her by the hands and tried to make her dance with him. “That bastard Bobby, the last time he was here, I
knew
by the way he couldn’t take his eyes off Chyna that he was hot for little girls, a genuine sicko, so tonight he walks in and his tongue just about uncurls to his knees when he sees her! You could’ve shot the geek half a dozen times, Memphis, before he might’ve noticed!” Bobby had been the man sitting at the kitchen table, talking to Chyna, his beautiful gray eyes fixed intently on her, speaking
directly
to her in a way that few adults ever spoke to kids, asking whether she liked kittens or puppies best and did she want to grow up to be a famous movie star or a nurse or a doctor or what, when Memphis shot him in the head. “The way our Chyna girl was dressed,” Zack said excitedly, “Bobby just about totally forgot anyone else was here.” The night was hot and swamp-humid, and before the visitors arrived, Chyna’s mother made her change out of her shorts and T-shirt into a brief yellow bikini swimsuit: “But only the bottoms because, child, you’re going to get heatstroke in this weather.” Although only seven, Chyna was old enough to feel peculiar about going bare-chested, even if she didn’t quite know why she felt that way. She’d gone bare-chested when she was younger, even just the previous summer, when she was six; and it
was
an awfully hot, sticky night. When Zack said that the way she was dressed had something to do with Bobby’s forgetting that anyone else was in the room, Chyna didn’t understand what he meant. Years later, when she
did
understand, she had confronted her mother with it. Anne had laughed and said, “Oh, baby, don’t get self-righteous on me. We get along by using what we’ve got, and one sure thing we girls have is our bodies. You were the perfect distraction. Anyway, poor dumb old Bobby never touched you, did he? He just got to gawk at you a little, that’s all, while Memphis went for the gun. Don’t forget, sweetie, we were cut in for a piece of that pie and lived well on it for a while.” And Chyna had wanted to say,
But you used me, you put me right there in front of him where I’d see his head come apart, and I was only seven!

All these years later, in Edgler Vess’s study, she could still hear the crash of the shot and see Bobby’s face explode; the memory was as vivid as ever it had been. She didn’t know what gun Memphis used, but the ammunition must have been high-caliber hollow-point lead wadcutters that expanded on impact, because the damage they inflicted had been tremendous.

She lowered her hands from her face and looked at the open file cabinet. Vess had used three formats of folders, with staggered tab placement, so it was easy for Chyna to see all the names along the length of the drawer. Much farther back from the Almes file was one labeled
TEMPLETON
.

She pushed the drawer shut with her foot.

She’d found too much in this study—yet nothing helpful.

Before leaving the second floor, she turned off all the lights. If Vess came home early, before Chyna could get away with Ariel, the lights would warn him that something was amiss. He would be lulled by darkness, however, and as he crossed the threshold, she might have one last chance to kill him.

She hoped it wouldn’t come to that. In spite of her fantasies of pulling the trigger on Vess, Chyna didn’t want to have to confront him again, even if she found a shotgun and loaded it herself and had an opportunity to test fire it before he arrived. She was a survivor, and she was a fighter, but Vess was more than either: as unreachable as stars, something come down from a high darkness. She was no match for him, and she didn’t want another chance to prove it.

One tread at a time, balanced against the handrail, as fast as she dared, Chyna went down to the living room. None of the Dobermans was at the undraped window.

The mantel clock put the time at twenty-two minutes past eight, and suddenly the night seemed to be a sled on a slope of ice, picking up speed.

She extinguished the lamp and shuffled through darkness to the kitchen. There she turned on the fluorescent lights, only to avoid tripping in the debris, falling, and cutting herself on broken glass.

No Dobermans were on the back porch either. At the window, only the night waited.

Entering the windowless laundry room, she shut off the kitchen lights behind her and pulled the door shut.

Down to the cellar, then, to the workbench and cabinets that she had seen earlier.

In the tall metal cabinets with the vent slits in the doors, she found cans of paint and lacquer, paintbrushes, and drop cloths folded as precisely as fine linen sheets. One entire cabinet was filled with thick pads from which dangled black leather straps with chrome-plated buckles; she didn’t have any idea what they were, and she left them undisturbed. In the final cabinet, Vess stored several power tools, including an electric drill.

In one of the drawers on the big wheeled tool chest, she located an extensive collection of drill bits in three clear plastic boxes. She also found a pair of Plexiglas safety goggles.

A power strip with eight outlets was attached to the wall behind the workbench, but a duplex receptacle was also available low on the wall beside the bench. She needed the lower outlet, because it allowed her to sit on the floor.

Although the drill bits weren’t labeled except as to size, Chyna figured that they were all meant for woodworking and would not bore easily—if at all—through steel. She didn’t want to pierce the steel anyway; she wanted only to screw up the lock mechanisms on her leg irons enough to spring them open.

She chose a bit approximately the size of the leg-iron keyway, fitted it into the chuck, and tightened it. When she held the drill in both hands and squeezed the trigger, it issued a shrill whine. The spiral throat of the slender bit spun so fast that it blurred until it seemed as smooth and harmless as the shank.

Chyna released the trigger, set the silent drill aside on the floor, and put on the protective goggles. She was disconcerted by the thought that Vess had worn these goggles. Strangely, she expected that everything she saw through them would be distorted, as if the molecules of the lenses had been transformed by the magnetic power with which Vess drew all the sights of his world to his eyes.

But what she saw through the goggles was no different from what she saw without them, although her field of vision was circumscribed by the frames.

She picked up the drill with both hands again and inserted the tip of the bit into the keyway on the shackle that encircled her left ankle. When she pressed the trigger, steel spun against steel with a hellish shriek. The bit stuttered violently, jumped out of the keyway, and skipped across the two-inch-wide shackle, spitting tiny sparks. If her reflexes hadn’t been good, the whirling auger would have bored through her foot, but she released the trigger and jerked up on the drill just in time to avoid disaster.

The lock might have been damaged. She couldn’t be sure. But it was still engaged, and the shackle was secure.

She inserted the bit into the keyway again. She gripped the drill tighter than before and bore down with more effort to keep the bit from kicking out of the hole. Steel shrieked, shrieked, and blue wisps of foul-smelling smoke rose from the grinding point, and the vibrating shackle pressed painfully into her ankle in spite of the intervening sock. The drill shook in her hands, which were suddenly damp with cold sweat from the strain of controlling it. A spray of metal slivers swirled up from the keyway, spattered her face. The bit snapped, and the broken-off end
zinged
past her head, rang off the concrete-block wall hard enough to take a chip out of it, and clinked like a half-spent bullet across the cellar floor.

Her left cheek stung, and she found a splinter of steel embedded in her flesh. It was about a quarter of an inch long and as thin as a sliver of glass. She was able to grasp it between her fingernails and pluck it free. The tiny puncture was bleeding; she had blood on her fingertips and felt a thin warm trickle making its way down her face to the corner of her mouth.

She freed the shank of the broken bit from the drill and threw it aside. She selected a slightly larger bit and tightened it into the jaws of the chuck.

Again, she drilled the keyway. The shackle around her left ankle popped open. Not more than a minute later, the lock on the other shackle cracked too.

Chyna put the drill aside and rose shakily to her feet, every muscle in her legs trembling. She was shaky not because of her many pains, not because of her hunger and weakness, but because she had freed herself from the shackles after having been in despair only a couple of hours before. She had freed
herself.

She was still handcuffed, however, and she could not hold the drill one-handed while she bored out the lock on each manacle. But she already had an idea about how she might extricate her hands.

Although other challenges faced her in addition to the manacles, although escape was by no means assured, jubilation swelled in Chyna as she climbed the cellar steps. She went tread over tread, not one step at a time as the shackles had required,
bounding
up the stairs in spite of her weakness and the tremors in her muscles, without even using the handrail, to the landing, into the laundry room, past the washer and dryer. And there she abruptly halted with her hands on the knob of the closed door, remembering how she had raced along this same route and into the kitchen this morning, reassured by the
tatta-tatta-tatta
of the vibrating water pipe in the wall, only to be blindsided by Vess.

She stood at the threshold until her breathing quieted, but she was unable to quiet her heart, which had been thundering with excitement and with the steepness of the stairs but now pounded with fear of Edgler Vess. She listened at the door for a while, heard nothing over the thudding in her breast, and turned the knob as stealthily as possible.

The hinges operated smoothly, soundlessly, and the door opened into the kitchen, which was as dark as she had left it. She found the light switch, hesitated, flipped it up—and Vess was not waiting for her.

As long as she lived, would she ever again be able to go through a doorway without flinching?

From a drawer where earlier Chyna had seen a set of cutlery, she extracted a butcher knife with a well-worn walnut handle. She put it on the counter near the sink.

She got a drinking glass from another cabinet, filled it from the cold-water tap, and drank the entire glassful in long swallows before lowering it from her lips. Nothing she had ever drunk had been half as delicious as those eight ounces.

In the refrigerator, she found an unopened coffeecake with white icing, cinnamon, walnuts. She ripped open the wrapper and tore off a chunk of the cake. She stood over the sink, eating voraciously, stuffing her mouth until her cheeks bulged, greedily licking icing from her lips, crumbs and chunks of walnuts dropping into the sink.

She was in an uncommon state of mind as she ate: now moaning with delight, now half choking with laughter, now gagging and on the verge of tears, now laughing again. In a storm of emotions. But that was okay. Storms always passed sooner or later, and they were cleansing.

She had come so far. Yet she had so far to go. That was the nature of the journey.

From the spice rack she removed the bottle of aspirin. She shook two tablets into the palm of her hand, but she didn’t chew them. She drew another glass of water and took the aspirin, then took two more.

She sang, “I did it my way,” from Sinatra’s standard, and then added, “took the fucking aspirin my way.” She laughed and ate more coffeecake, and for a moment she felt crazy with accomplishment.

Dogs out there in the night,
she reminded herself,
Dobermans in the darkness, rotten bastard Nazi dogs with big teeth and eyes black like sharks’ eyes.

At a key organizer next to the spice rack, the keys to the motor home hung from one of the four pegs; the other pegs were empty. Vess would be careful with the keys to the soundproofed cell and would no doubt keep them on him at all times.