Night Work Page 21

  Nothing.

  The cat kept staring at me. Not a blade of grass in the meadow was moving.

  “Mrs. Gayle,” I said, not nearly as loud as I needed to, assuming she couldn’t hear her own doorbell. “Agnes. Are you in there?”

  I put my face near the glass and peered inside at the furniture. I saw the pendulum moving back and forth on a grandfather clock. I tried turning the doorknob. It was unlocked.

  “Mrs. Gayle,” I said as I pushed the door open. I felt a sudden movement at my feet. It was the cat, slipping between my legs and disappearing down the hallway.

  “Hello,” I said. “Are you here?”

  I walked slowly down the hallway, following the cat. There were pictures on the walls. I recognized Brian’s face. The kid I had lost.

  “Hello,” I said again, my voice sounding small and lost in this big house.

  I got to the end of the hallway, looked to my right. A kitchen. Then left.

  I nearly jumped right out of my own skin.

  She was sitting there at the dining room table, magazines spread out all over the surface. Her arms were folded in front of her. Her eyes were open. She was looking right at me.

  “Do you always walk right into people’s houses, Mr. Trumbull?”

  “You scared the hell out of me,” I said. “Are you okay?”

  “Of course I’m okay. Why wouldn’t I be?”

  “You didn’t answer the door. I was afraid that … I mean …”

  “I didn’t answer the door because I didn’t feel like receiving visitors today.”

  “I’m sorry, Mrs. Gayle. I really am. I have to explain.”

  She looked away from me. She shook her head. Something was different about her today. What was it?

  Her hair. Her hair was down today. Yesterday it had been pinned up. She’d been wearing a scarf, too. Yes, her hair was pinned up in a scarf like she was cleaning or gardening or something. Today it was down on her shoulders. It made her look older somehow.

  “This is going to sound crazy,” I said. “May I sit down?”

  “I’d rather you didn’t.”

  I had to catch myself in midstep, my hand already reaching for the chair directly across from her. “Okay, fair enough. I know I’ve probably startled you. You’re thinking, who is this guy?”

  “I know who you are.”

  “Naturally. But I’m just saying …”

  I stopped. She kept looking at me, her arms still folded.

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “Yesterday, when I first asked you, you said you didn’t remember who I was.”

  She shrugged and opened a magazine.

  “I recognized you immediately,” I said. “Because I came out here what, every week? For the better part of six months? You were here just about every time, as I recall. So how come you didn’t recognize me?”

  “You don’t have a very memorable face, I guess.”

  But you sure as hell do, I thought. I looked at her. With her hair down like that … Damn, I’ve seen her before.

  Yeah, every week when you were coming out to see Brian. Just like you said.

  No, I’ve seen her somewhere else.

  “Mr. Trumbull, I’d like you to leave now.”

  I didn’t move. I kept running through every scene I could think of. At work, all of the people I saw every day. On the streets of Kingston. At the gym. No, not there, of course. You don’t see any women in the gym.

  “You were not invited into my house,” she said. “So I would very much like you to remove yourself immediately.”

  No, it was at the gym, I thought. I’ve seen her at the gym.

  “I’m going to call the police.” Her voice was dead calm. Not a hint of panic. A man walks into a woman’s house like this, she should be afraid. It’s automatic.

  That’s when I noticed the scissors in her right hand. All the magazines on the table … Most of them open. Pictures cut out of them. A large pile of cutout pictures in front of her. People. Animals. Food. Furniture.

  One more look at her face and I knew where I’d seen her.

  Not one hour ago, I was standing outside the Wal-Mart, looking at a tattoo of Ron Ebisch’s face, burned onto his brother’s left arm.

  That’s where I’d seen Agnes Gayle’s face recently. Not in the flesh.

  I’d seen her on the flesh.

  A squeak from somewhere behind me. The unmistakable sound of a heavy foot on a wooden stair. As if I’d conjured him out of thin air just by picturing him in my mind. His right arm, at least. The arm with the tattoo of this woman’s face.

  I barely had time to turn when the door opened. The strange disconnected feeling I had, seeing this man here, this man whose face I saw every day in the gym, now showing up somewhere I’d never in my life expect to see him. Up from the basement steps he came, that same right tattooed arm swinging.

  “Maurice!” I said, still not believing my own eyes. “What are you doing here?” My last words before he started bouncing me all around the kitchen. I tried to cover up, but I had even less chance here than in the ring. He hit me with three body shots in a row, sending me hard into the refrigerator. As I slid to the floor, I noticed her watching us. She hadn’t moved from her seat at the table. She didn’t look any more interested in what we were doing than a woman watching a bad show on television.

  I tried to get up and fight back. I tackled him around the waist and drove him into the stove. He broke free and started punching me again, finally setting himself up for the very same shot that gave me the stitches, a perfect right cross to my unprotected face. Only this time he wasn’t wearing boxing gloves. That’s the last thing I saw before the lights went out.

  SIXTEEN

  Darkness. Heat. Pain.

  That was everything I knew as I awoke. That was the whole world.

  I reached out my hand, feeling nothing but the hot emptiness. I lifted my head, wincing with the effort, hearing the blood pounding in my ears. There was something on my cheek. I wiped at it. Dirt, mixed with something hot and liquid. Blood.

  I shook my head slowly. A very bad idea. I won’t be doing that again, I thought. What the hell. What the goddamned hell.

  As I pushed myself up, I felt the floor under my hand. There was a thin layer of dirt. Below that, something hard. Harder than wood, harder even than concrete. A metal floor with dirt on top? Is that possible? When I breathed in, I caught the stale smell of mold and decay and God knows what else. A stillness in the air that told me I had to be in a confined space, that there were walls on all four sides of me even if I couldn’t see them.

  “Maurice,” I said out loud. I tasted blood on my tongue. “What are you doing? What the hell is going on?”

  I tried to draw myself up to a sitting position, feeling the dirt shift beneath me as I did. I heard my shoe scraping against the metal.

  “Where am I?”

  I winced again as I looked around me. I rubbed my neck, felt a solid knot on the right side and more blood. A vague memory came back to me, of hitting the edge of the kitchen counter and everything starting to spin.

  The kitchen, I thought. That’s where I was … How long ago? I couldn’t even say. Where am I now? Some kind of basement with a metal floor?

  No, I told myself, if you were in the basement it would be cooler. It feels like it’s a hundred and fifty degrees in here.

  I leaned my head forward and let a long line of spit and blood fall. I felt around in my mouth with my tongue, checking for damage. There were no teeth missing, but my jaw felt like it had been moved a few inches to the right. God, he hit me so hard. How can my head not be in a hundred pieces?

  More images coming to me, Maurice’s face inches from mine, Agnes Gayle sitting at her table, as impervious as a tarot card reader, watching him slam me around her kitchen. Then me going down hard, a knee in my back, my head against the hard floor. Then what?

  Motion. I was being dragged somewhere. More impact, more pain in my body.

  I rubbed my knees, trie
d to stretch my legs out straight. God, that hurt.

  A stairway. That’s what happened. I was being dragged down the front steps. Meaning what, that I was taken outside somewhere …

  Okay, I said, time to get up now. Time to find out where you are.

  I got up onto my knees. Another very bad idea. I got one foot under me, leaned onto that side, and kept going, falling all the way over and landing with a deep metallic thud against the wall.

  I ran my hand along the surface. It was warm, and there were vertical ridges every six inches or so. Corrugated metal, I thought. I’m in some kind of metal shed, which must have been sitting in the sun all day. I can hardly breathe, it’s so hot in here. I’m bleeding and I hurt everywhere and I need to drink some water. And the panic will be setting in any second now …

  Easy, Joe. Keep your head on straight or you’ll never get out of here. You’ve got to pull yourself together and figure this out.

  One breath in, then out. Then another.

  Okay, let’s see if we can get up again. Actually find a door or something.

  I pushed myself back up on my hands and knees, waited a moment for the spinning in my head to slow down, and then started crawling forward. I made it about five or six feet before I began to see a faint vertical line of light. The door, I thought. I pressed my hands against it, gave it a slight push. Then harder. It didn’t move. I ran my fingers along its outline, backed up a couple of feet, and tried to put my shoulder into it. Not just another bad idea but maybe the worst idea of my life.

  I spent the next few minutes with my back against the door, rubbing my shoulder and trying to breathe. I could feel the sweat running down my face now. Sweat mixed with blood, tears, whatever I had left.

  The panic coming now, rising in my stomach.

  “Easy, Joe,” I said out loud; my voice oddly muffled in this metal box, where I would have expected a tin echo. Must have been all the dirt on the floor, absorbing the sound. “Just take it easy and you’ll figure this out. You’re gonna be okay.”

  Okay, so Maurice … Obviously not the man you thought he was. Understatement of the century.

  You’ve seen him pretty much every day since he started training at the gym. How long ago was that, anyway? I went back through the months. He was there when Laurel was killed, I remember that much. How much before that?

  Early summer, two years ago … The spring before that … When did he show up? March? April?

  Damn. He showed up what, two or three months before she was killed?

  No. There’s no way. He can’t be there every single day, before that happened and then for two years after that? Leading up to this? How could that be?

  But he’s fast. Great natural speed for a white kid. Words right out of Anderson’s mouth. Hasn’t tapped into all of his power yet, but you can’t teach fast.

  He can outrun you. Easy. He can run you right into the ground.

  Plus, he can probably get into your apartment anytime he wants. Anderson’s got the spare key in his desk. Maurice and Rolando are the only other people in the world who know this …

  “But why?” I said. I banged the back of my head softly against the door. “What’s the connection?”

  I sat there and thought about it. I went through every single word I could ever remember him saying. The more I thought, the more I realized that I had never really gotten to know the man. Most everything he had ever said was about the training. He never talked about himself, about his family, about his history. The only clue was that tattoo on his right arm. “The woman who saved me,” he had said, two or three times in all those months at the gym. “My angel.” Beyond that he was nothing but a cipher to me.

  So apparently that’s Mrs. Gayle, I thought. What the hell is that all about? I mean, she’s what, twenty years older than him? Thirty, maybe? I’d always assumed it was a foster mother or a guardian, somebody who took him in and raised him.

  Okay, whatever. You can figure this out later. Right now, let’s think about something more practical…

  You’re in a metal box. A shed of some sort. The door is locked. There’s probably a padlock on the outside. No way you’re busting it down, even if you weren’t all banged up to hell.

  Your face is a mess, but you probably won’t bleed to death. It’s way too hot in here, so you’ll probably die of thirst before anything else. Unless somebody brings you some water. Damn, they could do that right now and I wouldn’t mind it one bit.

  Then some food. Another couple of hours and you’ll start to get hungry.

  If you don’t go crazy first. If you don’t completely lose your freaking mind.

  I turned around and banged on the door with both fists. With swollen, bloody hands I hit that hard metal door and started yelling.

  “Hey! HEY! Maurice! Anybody! Let me out of here, okay! Will you please let me out of here! HEY! HEY! HEY!”

  I kept yelling until I didn’t have anything left. Then I collapsed with my face in the dirt. I turned my head just enough to breathe and watched the faint line of light grow dimmer and dimmer until it was gone.

  It was dark now, but it was still just as hot.

  I was about to spend my first night in hell.

  I drifted off eventually. It was nothing like sleep. Closer really to death, to a simple depletion, like a run-down battery that sits for a few hours and recovers a tenth of its original charge. It was still dark when I opened my eyes. I couldn’t have said if it was midnight or just before dawn. It was still hot.

  I pushed myself up onto my elbows, felt my throat almost closing from the pure physical thirst. As I tried to swallow, I would have gladly traded all the air in the room for one glass of water.

  With ice in it.

  Or orange juice. Yes, a tall glass of orange juice. I don’t even need a splash of vodka.

  Okay, enough. Don’t torture yourself. Focus on the next minute here, and what you have to do to make it to the one after that.

  Either Maurice comes to get me out of here, or he doesn’t. If he doesn’t, then somebody else has to find me. Preferably while I’m still alive.

  Nobody knows I’m here, is the problem. Howie might be able to figure it out, if he looks at my list and sees where I’ve been these past few days.

  Wait a minute. I only gave him the names of the clients I couldn’t find, so he could try to track those down for me. I didn’t give him the other names. So he has to find my master list…

  Which is sitting on the passenger seat of my car.

  I reached down and felt for my car keys. They were gone, along with my watch and my cell phone. Meaning that Maurice had probably moved my car into the barn, where nobody would see it. So that even if somebody happened to come up the driveway, looking for me …

  “No,” I said, with what was left of my voice. Nothing more than a coarse whisper now. “No, please. Come on.”

  I pounded on the door again until my hands felt numb. Then I slid back down with my back against the door. I drifted in and out of a haze for a few more minutes. Or hours. I opened my eyes when I thought I heard the sound of footsteps.

  There was a thin line of light around the door now. I sat up and put my face close against it, looking for one slight crack where I might get a glimpse of the outside world. I kept listening, but there was nothing more than my own heartbeat.

  “Hello,” I said, my voice like a faraway thing. Something totally alien to me. “Is somebody out there?”

  Nothing.

  “Hello.”

  I sat back down, still listening. As the light grew stronger, I finally started to see the space I was in. The walls gained their features. The ceiling appeared above me. I saw the dirt on the floor, the spiderwebs in the far corners.

  Then, finally, I began to see the writing.

  Scratched into the metal wall across from me, in letters a foot tall … FUCK YOU AND DIE. Then more words above and below that, on the other walls, even on the ceiling. Every obscene word in the language. Every form of violence and
pain imaginable. SUICIDE. KILL ME. CUT OUT THEIR EYES AND FEED THEM TO THE DOGS.

  Then the pictures. The crude drawings of sex and death and torture. Every inch of exposed metal covered with them. These hieroglyphics of madness.

  I ran my finger along one of the letters, feeling where someone had pressed hard and gouged the line with something sharp. A knife, maybe, or a screwdriver.

  Someone else has been here. The first obvious thought. Then the next … Someone else spent a lot of time here, enough time to do all this.

  Brian Gayle. My client. The kid I was trying to set straight. If this was him, then I never had a chance to help him.

  Then the next thoughts, the kind of thoughts you feel all the way down into your guts …

  Who are these people? What kind of place is this?

  And for the love of God, no wonder Brian tried so hard to burn the whole thing down.

  I was still trying to make sense of it when a bright shaft of light burst into the room. I put my hands up against the assault. Squinting and blinking, I made out what looked to be a small door in one of the side walls. I hadn’t seen it before.

  There was a movement, and something obscured the light for a moment. Something silver, coming through the opening. It was a bucket, suspended at the handle by a man’s hand.

  “Maurice,” I said, “is that you?”

  As I moved toward the door, the bucket was lowered to the floor of the shed.

  “Maurice, you’ve gotta let me out of here.”

  The hand withdrew, and for one instant I saw his face in the bright light, backlit like the whole thing was some kind of angelic apparition.

  “Come on,” I said. “Open the other door.”

  His eyes met mine for less than a second. Then he slammed the door shut again. I could hear the click of the padlock on the outside.

  “No, Maurice!” I said, pounding on the small door. “Come on, talk to me!”

  I pressed my ear to the wall and listened.

  “I know you’re still there,” I said. “You have to talk to me, Maurice. Tell me what the hell’s going on here.”

  A long silence.