Lowland Rider (5 page)

"Thought you was never gonna leave," sneered another voice.

Jesse got to his hands and knees and shook his throbbing head. He looked directly at the largest man, whose hair was oiled in a cock-fighting pompadour and who wore a thin wisp of moustache like an ancient scar. "What do you want?"

"Everything," the man leered. "But first, money. You know?"

"Where's my wife? Donna!" Jesse leaped to his feet and was grabbed immediately by three of the men. The leader, to whom Jesse had spoken, smoothly took a pistol from his jacket pocket and trained its black eye on Jesse's own.

"Your wife's fine. Take a look." He gestured over his shoulder, and in the shadows of the strangers he could see Donna lying on an old davenport, her hands bound behind her, a dirty gag jammed in her mouth. Her eyes were wide with terror. "No harm done, man. Not yet."

Jesse looked around frantically and saw Jennifer, still sleeping serenely in her jury-rigged crib. "Don't you hurt them," he snarled.

"No way," the man with the gun said. "Not as long as you help us out."

Then Jesse remembered Rhoads. "The man. The bald man. Where is he?"

The leader jerked his head upward. "Upstairs."

"Is he . . . did you hurt him?"

"Don't know. I guess we hurt him. Chico." He turned to the boy at his right. "Bring that guy down. Let's see if we hurt him." The boy disappeared into the back, in the direction of the stairway. "
Whyn't
you sit down? Sit down by the lady, huh?" Jesse moved to the davenport and sat, touching
Donna's
head with his hand, smoothing back the hair from her sweating brow. "Sure is a pretty lady. Your wife, huh?" Jesse nodded. "And your kid." He nodded again. "Be a shame anything happen to them."

"Just leave them alone. You take what you want, but you leave them alone."

"All depends on you."

Somewhere in the building there was a rhythmic thumping, as if something hollow were being struck over and over at regular intervals with a stick. Or a bone. Jesse looked around in confusion, but was unable to determine exactly what the thumping was. Then it stopped, and in its place came a swishing noise. The curtains to the back room parted, Chico appeared with a pair of feet and ankles jutting from beneath his arms like some monstrous growth, and Jesse realized that what he had heard was Rhoads's head striking each step as he was dragged down them.

"There he is." The leader smiled. "You think we hurt him?"

Jesse got up and ran over to the prostrate form. Rhoads's bald head looked like a cracked egg with an aborted bloody yoke seeping out. His eyes were opened so that only the whites showed. His mouth was also bloody, and his front teeth were cracked. Jesse listened for the sound of breathing, but it didn't come. "You
killed
him!" He reached for a pulse, found none.

"A little accident. He wouldn't help us out. But you will,
won'tcha
?"

Jesse's gut cramped. He knew beyond doubt that he and his family were in the hands of madmen who were capable of anything. His first response, barely contained, was to attack, to take as many down with him as he could before he died. But that, he knew, would do nothing for Donna and Jennifer, and they were the ones he had to think about, the ones who must
not
end up like Rhoads, poor dead Rhoads who had come with his box of sharpened pencils and legal pads to perform a sane act of toting up in a nest of insanity; oh God bless poor, foolish Rhoads, who was dead and could not be helped, and
that
was what he had to remember.

"What do you want? I'll give you whatever you want."

"The money. All the money the old guy had."

"There's . . . there's no money here. No cash."

"Bullshit, man. The money in the room upstairs. The room this guy"—the leader gestured with his gun to Rhoads on the floor—"wouldn't open."

"Oh Jesus . . ." Jesse rubbed at his mouth nervously. "He
couldn't
open it. He didn't have the
key
."

"Who does?"

"
I
do." He fumbled in his pockets, wondering if he had been there, would Rhoads still be alive. All for the want of a key. He found it and held it out to them. "Here! This is it!" The bright key shone, grail-like.

"Uh-uh.
You
come upstairs and open it for us."

"But there's no money in it, just pictures and some books."

"Don't piss me off. This guy here,
he
pissed me off.
You
piss me off,
they
pay for it." He gave an airy wave of his arm toward Jesse's wife and daughter.

"Leave them out of this," he warned coldly.

"Upstairs then. Manny, Juan, stay down here and watch them."

Jesse and the other four ascended the stairs then, Jesse leading the way. He was glad the stairs were dark, so that he did not have to see the bloody spots where Rhoads's head had bounced, but once he nearly slipped on a small patch of wetness, which he imagined as being only one thing. Soon they were in front of the door. The leader gestured, and Jesse unlocked it, swung it open, and stepped back.

The leader walked in and looked around like a sergeant inspecting raw recruits. He passed his fingertips over the gilded frames as if searching for dust, picked up a few books and thumbed through them, tucking them under his arm. He looked up and down, weighing the situation judicially. In an instant he changed.

Fury took him, and he flung the books at Jesse, who staggered back, angry and confused. "What is this shit!" the leader shouted, spraying spittle with each word. He thrust his pistol under Jesse's chin, pushing it up, making him growl from the pain. "The
money
, motherfucker! Where the money?"

Jesse's arms jerked spastically, wanting to push the gun away, to ease the pain that arced through the veins and glands of his jaw, but knowing that to touch the prodding metal would mean his death. "No money," he gritted out.

The gun came down, giving relief for an instant. Then the barrel cracked along his jaw, and the pain turned his legs watery so that it was an effort to remain standing. As he brought his head back up, he saw in slow procession the leader's studded belt, the gold cross nestled in the hair of his chest like an altar in a jungle, the constellation of too white teeth set in the dark sky of the face.

"One more time. One more. The money."

"You can have all I've got. Or I'll get more. But there's nothing here, I
sw
—"

Jesse was powerless to stop the second blow. The pain of the first had terrified him and taken away any sense of quickness with which he might have reacted. The backhanded metal caught him beneath the cheekbone, smashed his eye closed, ripped a gash from beneath his brow to his hairline. He fell back, the room dancing, and felt himself kicked, poked, half-lifted, half-dragged until the floor fell away and he knew that he was thundering, rolling down the stairs, the same stairs down which Rhoads had been, in comparison, so much more carefully transported. Wooden swords hacked at him from beneath, while on each side the walls bludgeoned him. He tried to cry out in his terror, to ease his pain in words, but he was capable of only a dry hissing.

The cessation of blows told him he had reached the bottom, and then rough hands were on him again. Blood stung his eyes as he strained to see where he was and what was being done to him. His body ached in a hundred places, but through the agony he felt more delicate, refined torments, and, blinking away the blood, isolating the sensations, he knew that he was being bound to a chair. Cords sawed into his wrists and ankles, and another, like a snake, coiled round his neck so that, to breathe, he thrust his head up and back, and expanded his windpipe in a desperate way of which he had not known he was capable. His throat went raw with the effort, but he could breathe, noisily and harshly.

"Looser," someone said, and the pressure on his throat slackened, the rough sound of his breathing grew quieter.

"I told you, asshole. One warning, and that's all."

Jesse's eyes cleared so that he could see the couch on which his wife lay. Knives flashed, and his body tensed, every muscle surged against their bonds, even though he knew he was helpless to intervene. But the knives descended on rope, not flesh, and in the place of the rope dark hands held
Donna's
arms and legs, pulling them apart, spread-eagling her. The knives sparked again, dove and rose like silver gulls, pecking away the surface of seawater to reveal fleshy sand beneath. Her bare limbs trembled, and he could see how desperately she tried to draw them together. But the dark hands were steely, holding her open, obscene in her accessibility.

Jesse cried out in protest, in horror, and in love. But they jammed a cloth into his mouth so that only his eyes screamed as they did to her what he had never done, and he heard, like songs of dying men, the breath pass into her and out of her, through nostrils made huge by hidden hurts.

Humiliation and sorrow and rage all warred within him, and he wished for death rather than the contemplation of the mystery of things to be. But death did not come, not yet. Only the repetitive, eternal abuse of the woman he loved, only the death he read in her eyes.

The leader came over to Jesse, grabbed him by the hair, and swung his head up so that Jesse stared directly into his face. "All right, fucker, you just lost something. You want to lose more? Money worth that much to you?"

"I swear . . ." Jesse grated out, "no money . . ."

"We kill the bitch, man. I'm not
shittin
'."

Jesse began to cry, but as he sobbed the rope dug more tightly into his throat, and he was forced to stop in order to breathe. But the tears still ran down his face.

"That what you want?" The leader pulled his pistol from his waistband and brandished it. "Get
offa
her," he told one of the others.

"I ain't
done
, man!"

"Asshole, I said get
off
!" The boy fell back at the leader's push. His pants, tangled around his ankles, tripped him up, and he sprawled on the floor, knocking over part of the makeshift crib. Jennifer began to scream.

The men laughed, all except the leader. "Shut up," he said, and they obeyed. "I hate kids that scream, man. I got
screamin
' kids around me all the fucking time. It drives me crazy, you know?" He knelt by Jennifer's side and pointed the gun at her face. "Shut up, kid."

"No …" Jesse said. "Oh dear God, no . . ." Jennifer shrieked on, louder now.

"I told you to shut up." The leader's thumb brought the hammer back with a dry
click
.

"Luis, don't."

The leader looked up at the boy who had spoken. He was tall and thin, and looked younger than the others. "Did you say something to me?"

The boy's hand jittered nervously at his side. "Not the kid, Luis, huh? Please?"

"Why not? Tell me why not, Carlos? Tell me why I shouldn't blow
all
these motherfuckers to hell. Go ahead, you tell me."

Carlos's mouth opened, but the sound of the shot drowned out anything he might have said. Everyone but Luis, the leader, jerked as if an electric shock had struck them, and Jesse surged against his ropes, his eyes closing with the effort. When he opened them, his daughter was dead.

"You gotta talk faster than that, Carlos." Luis got to his feet, grabbed an afghan from a chair, and threw it at Carlos: "Cover up that mess."

Jesse was hollow. At that moment he felt as if an icy shovel had dug out his chest, and he wondered weakly if he was in shock, or dreaming, or dying from having the light taken from his life. He only dimly saw Carlos kneel and gently cover his little girl's broken form, heard as if from a far distance Luis's voice saying, "It's war, man. The fortunes of war. Us against them."

Then he remembered Donna. She already looked dead, her eyes opened wide, staring at the ceiling, unable to accept the reality of what had just occurred.

"No money now," Luis said. "I believe you now, man. Shit. What a wasted day. I hate to waste my days." He put the pistol against
Donna's
head and pulled the trigger. Everyone jumped again.

"
Madre
dios
, Luis!" Carlos cried, his hands held out in supplication.

"You want to let them live, you asshole? Identify us? That would be fucking smart, wouldn't it?"

A short, stocky boy stepped forward. "What about the stuff upstairs? Paintings and shit."

"Fuck it." Luis shook his head sharply. "Can't move that shit."

Jesse sat, stunned, no longer aware of the ropes biting into his wrists, his neck. He was shocked beyond tears or screaming. The realization that his family was dead, and that there existed such men in the world who could unhesitatingly perform such an act had
poleaxed
his mind. He had believed, had known there were such people in the abstract, but to actually come face-to-face with them, to have them destroy
your
wife,
your
child, was unfathomable, unbelievable, unbearable. The world had become, all too suddenly, a mass of corruption, a cancer. Jesse Gordon was drained of love, of compassion, of sanity.

"Let me die," he said clearly, seeing nothing but the great abyss before him.