Shella (34 page)

“We’ll hold it for you,” he said.

They didn’t say much, but you could feel how tight they were. When the Indian moved in the seat next to me, I could see the little sparks all around him. I thought we’d go to their camp, but we drove all the way back to Chicago, straight on through. The car stopped in front of the apartment house where I stayed before.

When we got upstairs, it looked the same.

“I’ll be back tonight,” the Indian told me. “I’ll tell you everything then.”

I took a shower, changed my clothes. There was food in the refrigerator. I listened to the radio, but there was nothing about what happened in Indiana. Maybe they bury their own dead.

I knew the Indian would come back. Otherwise, they would have just left me after I did the job. Left me right in that compound.

I wondered why they didn’t. Maybe Indians don’t do that.

After a while, I found a nature show on TV.

I heard the Indian let himself in but I didn’t move. The only light was the TV screen, but he came through the apartment like he could see.

He sat down across from me. “You did it perfect,” he said. “Glided in right under their radar.”

“Where is she?” I asked him.

He took some paper out of his pocket. Handed it to me. It was pages from a magazine, black and white. One page was folded back at the corner. A woman was standing there. In the light from the TV, I could see she had high black boots, something in her hand. There was another woman next to her, kneeling on a couch or something.

I turned on the light. The woman standing was blonde. Her hair was long. Her arms and shoulders were heavy. Big. Almost like Murray’s. The woman kneeling next to her had a dog collar around her neck. She was stripped naked. The big woman was holding a leash in one hand.
A little whip with a lot of strings on it in the other.

It wasn’t a real good picture, but I could see enough.

“That’s her?” the Indian asked.

I told him it was.

Later he showed me a lot of other stuff. Mostly pictures. Shella with a girl over her knee, like she was spanking her. Shella whipping a man, his hands tied way above his head. Shella with her hands on her hips, like she was giving orders. He showed me some ads too. Mistress Katrina. Discipline lessons, private. In one picture, Shella had a girl all tied up, clothespins clamped on the tips of her breasts, a gag in her mouth. It was all Shella, even if she looked different every picture.

“We don’t have any close-ups,” the Indian said. “The crazy man said all this stuff was old, at least a couple a years, okay? But if that’s her, we know where she is now.”

“Where?”

“We’ll take you to her,” he said.

The next morning, he was back. “It’ll take a couple a days to set it up, all right? We got a long way to travel, we have to make all the arrangements.”

He had more papers with him. A police sheet with arrests on it, all different names. Girls’ names. He said that was Shella too.

“I wasn’t there every day,” he said after a while.

“Where?”

“In the woods. We figured it out, finally. Where you were going every day. It had to be his house. But he didn’t live there. He went in the same door you did. The front door. Every day. There’s no angle on it, even from the woods, it’s shielded by the other buildings, like in a tunnel. No way to get a shot off. The back, that was easy, but he never went there. The woman, the pregnant one? She would go outside sometimes, but she never got far.”

“Did she …?”

“We didn’t shoot her. She didn’t scream either.”

I didn’t say anything. After a while, he started talking again.

“When we saw you come out with the bandanna on your head, we knew it was done. If you’d gone out the front, you wouldn’t have made it. No way we could cover you. And we couldn’t get a message in. All we could do is wait.”

“It’s okay.”

“He’s dead. I guess you know that. There wasn’t nothing in the papers, but the crazy man, he found out. He said he’s satisfied. That’s when he turned over the information … about your woman.”

“We’re going soon?”

“Day after tomorrow.”

The next day, he gave me an envelope full of money. “We sold your Chevy,” he said. “Everything else too. It’s all gone. You’re starting over. This is all new ID, like he promised. You can buy whatever you need when you decide.”

“Decide what?”

He just shrugged, like I knew what he was talking about.

Three of them came up the morning we left. The Indian stepped to one side. “This is Joseph. This is Amos,” he said. They held out their hands and we shook. I knew them—they were in the front seat of the Jeep when we came through the roadblock. Amos was the driver.

“They’re volunteers,” the Indian said.

Downstairs, we got in another Jeep. A red one. They really liked Jeeps, the Indians. They had all kinds of stuff piled in, even stuff on the roof.

“Hunting trip,” the Indian said to me.

We took off.

“Better to stay off planes,” the Indian said. “I don’t think they know anything, but they might have a picture or something. They won’t look for long—they’re not professionals. For now, this is better.”

We just kept driving, like Amos never got tired. The Indian talked. Sometimes Amos talked. Joseph, he just watched.

By the time they decided to stop, we were someplace in Nebraska.

Amos and Joseph took one room in the motel. I guess they always stayed together. The Indian and me had a room too.

“We got about another day’s drive,” he told me. “Five, six hundred miles. We’ll leave first light, time it so we get there next morning coming.”

“Okay.”

It was quiet in the room. The Indian told me about his tribe. I listened with my eyes closed. When he stopped speaking, I opened my eyes.

“The crazy man kept his word?” I asked him.

“Sure. We’re just taking you to her ourselves to finish—not because we don’t believe him.”

“But you want to see for yourselves?”

He looked across at me, nodded his head.

“What about the rest?”

“The rest?”

“Hiram. Ruth’s brother. Did they transfer him?”

The Indian didn’t say anything. He looked at me for a long time. Then he dropped his eyes, played with a cigarette until he got it going.