Sacred: A Novel (27 page)

My first thought, as I swam back to consciousness, was that I was paralyzed.

My arms wouldn’t move. My legs wouldn’t move. And not just the limbs themselves, but the muscles.

I opened my eyes, blinked several times at a dry crust that seemed to have formed over the corneas. Desiree’s face floated past, smiling. Then Julian’s chest. Then a lamp. Then Julian’s chest again. Then Desiree’s face, still smiling.

“Hi,” she said.

The room behind them began to take on shapes, as if everything suddenly flew out of the darkness toward me and stopped abruptly at their backs.

I was in Trevor’s study, in a chair by the front left corner of the desk. I could hear the roar of the sea behind me. And as the effects of my sleep wore off, I could hear a clock ticking on my right. I turned my head and looked at it. Nine o’clock. I’d been out for two hours.

I looked down at my chest and saw nothing but white. My arms were pinned against the side of the chair, my legs against the inside of the chair legs. I’d been bound with an entire sheet strapped over my chest and thighs and another over my lower legs. I couldn’t feel any knots, and I realized both sheets were probably knotted at the back of the chair. And they were knotted tight. I was mummified, essentially, from the neck down, and no ligature marks or rope burns or handcuff abrasions would show on my body when it came time for the autopsy I was sure Desiree intended.

“No marks,” I said. “Very good.”

Julian tipped an imaginary hat to me. “Something I learned in Algeria,” he said. “A long time ago.”

“Well traveled,” I said. “I like that in a Lurch.”

Desiree came over and sat up on the desk, her hands under her thighs, legs swaying forward like a schoolgirl’s.

“Hi,” she said again, all sweetness and light.

“Hi.”

“We’re just waiting for my dad.”

“Ah.” I looked at Julian. “With Lurch here and the Weeble dead, who’s your father’s servant while he’s out on the town?”

“Poor Julian,” she said, “came down with the flu today.”

“Sorry to hear that, Lurch.”

Julian’s lips twitched.

“So, Daddy had to call a private limousine service to take him into the city.”

“Perish the thought,” I said. “What will the neighbors say? My gosh.”

She removed her hands from under her legs, pulled the pack of Dunhills from her pocket and lit one. “You figured it out yet, Patrick?”

I tilted my head and looked up at her. “You shoot Trevor, shoot me, make it look like we shot each other.”

“Something like that.” She brought her left foot up onto the desk, tucked the right under her, watched me through the smoke rings she blew in my direction.

“The cops in Florida will vouch that I had some sort of personal vendetta or weird obsession with your father, paint me as a paranoid or worse.”

“Probably.” She tapped her ash on the floor.

“Jeez, Desiree, it’s all working out for you.”

She gave me a small bow. “It usually does, Patrick. Sooner or later. Price was supposed to be sitting where you are, but then he screwed up and I had to improvise. Then it was supposed to be Jay in that chair, but another couple of screwups and I had to improvise again.” She sighed and ground her cigarette out on the desktop. “That’s okay, though. Improvisation’s one of my specialties.”

She leaned back on the desk and gave me a broad smile.

“I’d clap,” I said, “but I’m sort of incapacitated.”

“It’s the thought that counts,” she said.

“Since we’re sitting here without much to do before you murder your father and me, let me ask you something.”

“Shoot, babe.”

“Price took the money you two stole and hid it. Right?”

“Yes.”

“But why’d you let him do that, Desiree? Why didn’t you just torture the information out of him and kill him?”

“He was a pretty dangerous guy,” she said, her eyebrows arched.

“Yeah, but come on. In the danger department, I bet you made him look like a sissy.”

She leaned forward and looked at me with mild approval. She shifted again and crossed her legs up on the desk, held the ankles with her hands. “Yeah, in the end, I could have got the two million back within an hour if I felt like it. It would have been bloody, though. And Price’s drug deal wasn’t half bad, Patrick. If that ship hadn’t sunk, he would have had a ten-million-dollar payday coming.”

“And you would’ve killed him and taken the money the moment he collected.”

She nodded. “Not bad, eh?”

“But then heroin started floating up on the beaches in Florida…”

“So the whole scam was null and void, yes.” She lit another cigarette. “Then Daddy sent you and Clifton and Cushing down there, and Cushing and Clifton took Jay out of the equation, and I had to improvise once again.”

“But you’re so good at it, Desiree.”

She smiled, her mouth open, the tip of her tongue running lightly under her upper teeth. She lowered her legs to the floor and came off the desk, walked around my chair several times, smoking, and looking down at me with a radiant sheen in her eyes.

She stopped and leaned against the desk again, her jade eyes holding my own.

I’m not sure how long we remained that way, staring into each other’s eyes, waiting for the other to blink. I’d like to say that as I looked long and deep into Desiree’s shimmering green eyes, I understood her. I’d like to say I recognized the nature of her soul, found the common link between the two of us, and therefore, among all human beings. I’d like to say all that, but I can’t.

The longer I looked, the less I saw. Porcelain jade gave way to hints of nothing. And hints of nothing gave way to an essence of nothing. Except, maybe, naked greed, brazen wanting, the polished soul of a machine that knew only how to covet, and very little about anything else.

Desiree stabbed her cigarette out on the desk beside the other one, and dropped to her haunches in front of me. “Patrick, you know what sucks?”

“Besides your heart?” I said.

She smiled. “Besides that. What sucks is I kind of liked you. No man has ever rejected my advances before. Ever. And it turned me on actually. If we’d had the time, I would have gotten to you.”

I shook my head. “Not a chance.”

“Oh, no?” She came forward on her knees and laid her head on my lap. She turned her head onto her left cheek, looked up at me with her right eye. “I get to everyone. Just ask Jay.”

“You got to Jay?” I said.

She nuzzled her cheek against my thighs. “I’d say so.”

“So why were you stupid enough to say
‘Fail-Safe’
to me at the airport?”

She brought her head off my lap. “That’s what tipped you off?”

“I was sitting on the fence about you since we met, Desiree, but that’s what knocked me off it.”

She clucked her tongue. “Well, good for Jay. Good for him. He set me up from the grave, didn’t he?”

“Yes.”

She leaned back on her haunches again. “Oh, well. Lot of good it did him. Or you.” She stretched her torso and ran both hands through her hair. “I’m always prepared for contingencies, Patrick. Always. Something my father taught me. As much as I hate the prick, he taught me that. Always have a backup plan. Three, if necessary.”

“My father taught me the same thing. Much as I hated the prick, as well.”

She cocked her head to the right. “Really?”

“Oh, yeah, Desiree. Really.”

“Is he bluffing, Julian?” She looked back over her shoulder.

Julian’s impassive face twitched. “He’s bluffing, dear.”

“You’re bluffing,” she said to me.

“’Fraid not,” I said. “Dear. Heard from your father’s attorney today?”

Headlights arced through the house as tires crunched the gravel outside.

“That would be your father,” Julian said.

“I know who it would be, Julian.” She was staring at me, her jaw muscles moving almost imperceptibly.

I looked as deeply into her eyes as I’d look into the eyes of a lover. “You kill Trevor and me and make it look like we killed each other, it won’t do you any good without an altered will, Desiree.”

The front door opened.

“Julian!” Trevor Stone bellowed. “Julian! Where are you?”

Tires pulled away on the gravel outside and headed back down the drive toward the front gate.

“Where is he?” Desiree said.

“Who?” I said.

“Julian!” Trevor called

Julian moved toward the door.

“Stay,” Desiree said.

Julian froze.

“Does he roll over and fetch bones and shit?” I said.

“Julian! Jesus Christ, man!” Trevor’s decrepit footfalls drew closer on the marble floor outside.

“Where is Danny Griffin?” Desiree said.

“Not answering your calls, I take it.”

She pulled her gun from underneath her sweater.

“Julian! In the name of God!” The heavy doors burst open and Trevor Stone stood there leaning on his walking stick, dressed in a tuxedo with a white silk scarf, his body trembling against the cane.

Desiree pointed her gun at him, her arm rock-steady as she knelt on the floor.

“Hi, Daddy,” she said. “Long time, no see.”

Trevor Stone carried himself with as much composure as I’ve ever seen in any man who had a gun pointed at him.

He glanced at his daughter as if he’d seen her just yesterday, glanced at the gun as if it were a gift he didn’t much care for but wouldn’t refuse, and walked into the room and headed for his desk.

“Hello, Desiree. The suntan becomes you.”

She flipped her hair and tilted her head toward him. “You think?”

Trevor’s green eyes flicked across Julian’s face, then glanced my way. “And Mr. Kenzie,” he said. “I see you returned from Florida no worse for wear.”

“These sheets binding me to a chair notwithstanding,” I said, “I’m peachy, Trevor.”

He rested his hand on the desk as he came around behind it, then reached for the wheelchair by the windows and sat in it. Desiree pivoted on her knees, following him with the gun.

“So, Julian,” Trevor said, his rich baritone filling the large room, “you’ve chosen to side with youth, I see.”

Julian crossed his hands in front of his waist, tilted his head toward the floor. “It was the most pragmatic option, sir. I’m sure you understand.”

Trevor opened the ebony humidor on his desk and Desiree cocked the pistol.

“Just a cigar, my dear.” He withdrew a Cuban the length of my calf, snipped the end off, and lit it. Small circles of smoke puffed from the fat coal as he sucked in his ruined cheeks repeatedly and got it going, and then a rich, almost oak-leaf smell permeated my nostrils.

“Hands where I can see them, Daddy.”

“I wouldn’t dream of doing otherwise,” he said and leaned back in the chair, puffed a ring into the air above his head. “So, you’ve come to finish the job those three Bulgarians couldn’t manage on the bridge last year.”

“Something like that,” she said.

He tilted his head and looked at her out of the corner of his eye. “No, it’s exactly like that, Desiree. If your speech is nebulous, remember, your mind will appear to be so as well.”

“Trevor Stone’s Rules of Engagement,” she said to me.

“Mr. Kenzie,” he said, back to staring at the rings he exhaled, “have you sampled my daughter?”

“Daddy,” Desiree said. “Really.”

“No,” I said. “Haven’t had the pleasure. Which makes me unique in this room, I think.”

His ruined lips formed their imitation of a smile. “Ah, so Desiree’s fantasy of our having a sexual history persists.”

“You told me yourself, Daddy: If something works, stick with it.”

Trevor winked at me. “I’m not without sin, but I do draw the line at incest.” He turned his head. “And Julian, how did you find my daughter’s technique in the bedroom? Was it satisfactory?”

“Quite,” Julian said, and his face twitched.

“Better than her mother’s?”

Desiree’s head jerked around to look at Julian, then jerked back to Trevor.

“I wouldn’t know about her mother’s, sir.”

“Come now.” Trevor chuckled. “Don’t be modest, Julian. For all we know, you’re this child’s father, not me.”

Julian’s hands tightened, and his feet parted slightly. “You’re imagining things, sir.”

“Am I?” Trevor turned his head and winked at me.

I felt like I was locked in a Noël Coward play that had been rewritten by Sam Shepard.

“You think this is going to work?” Desiree said. She rose off her knees. “Daddy, I am so beyond normal concepts of proper and improper sexual behavior, it’s not even quantifiable.” She stepped past me and came around the desk behind him. She leaned over his shoulders. She placed the muzzle of her gun against the left side of his forehead then drew it across to the right so hard the target sight left a thin line of blood. “If Julian were my biological father, so what?”

Trevor watched as a drop of blood fell from his forehead and landed on his cigar.

“Now, Dad,” she said and nipped his left earlobe, “let’s push you out into the center of the room where we can all be together.”

Trevor puffed on his cigar as she pushed, trying to appear as casual as he had when he entered the room, but I could see that it was beginning to wear on him. Fear had found its way into his proud chest, into the cast of his eyes and the set of his ruined jaw.

Desiree pushed him around to the front of the desk until he was facing me, the two of us sitting in our chairs, wondering if we’d ever stand up again.

“How’s it feel, Mr. Kenzie?” Trevor said. “Bound there, helpless, wondering which breath will be your last?”

“You tell me, Trevor.”

Desiree left us and walked over to Julian and they whispered for a moment, her gun pointed straight at the back of her father’s head.

“You’re the wily type,” Trevor said, leaning forward, his voice lowered. “Any suggestions?”

“Far as I can see, Trevor, you’re fucked.”

He gestured with his cigar. “As are you, boy.”

“A little less so, though.”

He raised his eyebrows at my mummified body. “Really? I think you’re mistaken. But if the two of us put our heads together, why we might—”

“I knew a guy once,” I said, “he molested his son, had his wife killed, caused a gang war in Roxbury and Dorchester which killed sixteen children at least.”

“And?” Trevor said.

“And I liked him more than I like you,” I said. “Not by much, mind you. I mean, he was a scumbag, you’re a scumbag, it’s sort of like having to choose between two types of crotch rot. But still, he was poor, no education, society had shown him in a million different ways how little a fuck it gave about him. But you, Trevor, you’ve had everything a man could want. And it wasn’t enough. You still bought your wife like she was a sow at the county fair. You still took a baby you brought into the world and turned it into a monster. This guy I was talking about? He was responsible for the death of at least twenty people, that I know of. Probably a lot more. And I put him down like a dog. Because that’s what he deserved. But you? With a calculator, I bet you couldn’t add up all the people whose deaths you’ve been responsible for, whose lives you’ve destroyed or made unbearable over the years.”

“So you’d put me down like a dog, Mr. Kenzie?” He smiled.

I shook my head. “No. More like a sand shark you catch when you’re deep-sea fishing. I’d haul you onto the boat, club you until you were stunned. Then I’d open up your belly and toss you back into the water, watch as the bigger sharks came and ate you alive.”

“My, my,” he said. “Wouldn’t that be a sight?”

Desiree crossed back to us. “Having fun, gentlemen?”

“Mr. Kenzie was just explaining to me the subtleties of Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto Number Two in F major. He truly revolutionized my perception of it, darling.”

She slapped his temple. “That’s nice, Daddy.”

“So, what are you planning to do with us?” he said.

“You mean after I kill you?”

“Well, I was wondering about that. I don’t see why you would need to confer with my beloved servant, Mr. Archerson, if all was going according to plan. You’re meticulous, Desiree, because I trained you to be so. If you needed to confer with Mr. Archerson, there must be a proverbial fly in the ointment.” He looked at me. “Would it have something to do with the wily Mr. Kenzie?”

“Wily,” I said. “That’s twice now.”

“It’ll grow on you,” he assured me.

“Patrick,” Desiree said, “you and I do have some things to discuss, don’t we?” She turned her head. “Julian, will you take Mr. Stone to the pantry and lock him in?”

“The pantry!” Trevor cried. “I love the pantry. All those canned goods.”

Julian placed his hands on Trevor’s shoulders. “You know my strength, sir. Don’t make me use it.”

“Wouldn’t think of it,” Trevor said. “To the canned goods, Julian. Posthaste.”

Julian wheeled him out of the room and I heard the wheels squeak on the marble as they made their way past the grand staircase toward the kitchen.

“All those hams!” Trevor cried. “All those leeks!”

Desiree straddled me and placed the gun against my left ear. “Here we are.”

“Isn’t it romantic?”

“About Danny,” she said.

“Yes?”

“Where is he?”

“Where’s my partner?”

She smiled. “In the garden.”

“The garden?” I said.

She nodded. “Buried up to her neck.” She looked out the window. “Gosh, I hope it doesn’t snow tonight.”

“Dig her out,” I said.

“No.”

“Then kiss Danny good-bye.”

Knives danced in her irises. “Let me guess—unless you make a phone call by a certain time, he’s dead, blah, blah, blah.”

I looked at the clock over her shoulder as she shifted her weight on my thighs. “Actually, no. He’ll be getting a bullet in his head in about thirty minutes regardless.”

Her face sagged along the jawline for just a moment and then her hand tightened in my hair and the gun dug into my ear so hard I half expected it to pop out the other side. “Unless you make a phone call,” she said.

“No. A phone call won’t cut it because the guy holding him doesn’t have a phone. I either show up at his door in thirty—no, twenty-nine—minutes, or we have one less lawyer in the world. All in all, who’s going to miss a lawyer?”

“And where’s that leave you if he dies?”

“Dead,” I said. “Which is where I’m going to be anyway.”

“Have you forgotten your partner?” She cocked her head toward the windows.

“Oh, come on, Desiree. You’ve already killed her.”

I looked in her eyes as she answered.

“No, I haven’t.”

“Prove it.”

She laughed and leaned back on my thighs. “Fuck you, buddy.” She wagged a finger in my face. “Your desperation’s showing, Patrick.”

“So’s yours, Desiree. You lose that lawyer, you lose it all. Kill your father, kill me, you’ve still got only two million. And we both know that’s not enough for you.” I tilted my head so the gun slipped from my ear, then nuzzled the slide with my cheekbone. “Twenty-eight minutes,” I said. “After that, you’ll go through the rest of your life knowing how close you were to over one billion dollars. And watching as other people spend it.”

The butt of the gun hit the top of my head so hard the air in the room turned scarlet for a moment and everything spun.

Desiree came off my thighs and slapped me across the face with her open hand. “You think I don’t know you?” she screamed. “Huh? You think I don’t—”

“I think you’re short a lawyer, Desiree. That’s what I think.”

Another slap, this one with nails trailing after it that tore through the flesh over my left cheekbone.

She drew back on the hammer of the gun and placed the muzzle between my eyebrows and screamed in my face, her mouth a gaping hole of furious, disrupted insolence. Spittle boiled at the corners of her mouth, and she screamed again, her index finger turning deep pink as it curled around the trigger. The shock of her screams, the violent residue of them, eddied around my skull and burned my ears.

“You will fucking die,” she said in a wet, ragged voice.

“Twenty-seven minutes,” I said.

Julian came bursting through the doors and she pointed the gun at him.

He held up his hands. “A problem, miss?”

“How fast can you drive to Dorchester?” she said.

“Thirty minutes,” he said.

“You have twenty. We’re going to show Mr. Kenzie his partner in the garden.” She looked down at me. “Then you, Patrick, are going to give us your friend’s address.”

“Julian’ll never get through the door alive.”

She raised the gun over my head, then paused halfway through her strike. “Let Julian worry about that,” she hissed. “The address for a look at your partner. Deal?”

I nodded.

“Untie him.”

“Dear?”

“Don’t ‘dear’ me, Julian.” She bent by the back of my chair. “Untie him.”

Julian said, “This isn’t wise.”

“Julian, by all means tell me what my options are.”

Julian didn’t have an answer for that.

I felt the pressure leave my chest first. Then my legs. The sheets fell away and spread across the floor in front of me.

Desiree knocked me out of the chair by pistol-whipping the back of my skull. She crammed the muzzle into the side of my neck. “Let’s go.”

Julian took a flashlight off the top of a bookcase and pushed the French doors open onto the back lawn. We followed him out as he turned left, the light dancing across the grass ahead of him in a halo.

With Desiree gripping the back of my head and her gun against my neck, I was forced to bend to her height as we stepped off the lawn and followed a short pathway that led around the corner of a shed and an overturned wheelbarrow, broke through a thicket of trees and out into the garden.

It was, in keeping with the rest of the place, enormous—at least the size of a baseball diamond, fringed on three sides by frosted hedges four feet high. We stepped over a plastic tarp rolled up in front of the entrance, and Julian’s flashlight bounced over furrows of iced dirt and the pikes of grass hardy enough to survive the winter. A sudden movement, low and to our right, caught our eyes, and Desiree stopped me with a yank to my head. The halo light jerked right then back to the left and an emaciated hare, its fur spiked by the cold, jumped through the circle of light and then vaulted off into the hedges.

“Shoot it,” I said to Desiree. “It might have some money.”

“Shut up.” She said, “Julian, hurry up.”

“Dear.”

“Don’t call me ‘dear.’”

“We have a problem, dear.”

He stepped back and we looked past him at the circle of light shining into an empty hole about five and a half feet deep and a foot and a half square.

The hole might have been tight and neat once, but someone had made an awful mess coming back out of it. Trails of dirt deeper than rake marks were ripped through the earth, and soil had been spewed in a wide radius around the hole. Someone hadn’t just been desperate pulling herself out of that hole. She’d been angry.

Desiree looked left, then right. “Julian.”

“Yes?” He peered down at the hole.

“How long since you last checked on her?”

Julian consulted his watch. “At least an hour.”

“An hour.”

Julian said, “She could have reached a phone by now.”

Desiree grimaced. “Where? The nearest house is four hundred yards away, and the owners are in Nice for the winter. She’s covered in dirt. She’s—”