The Best American Mystery Stories 2012 (32 page)

“Of course it does!” Allie was shouting now. Everyone was watching us. “Opportunities for the rich who've raped this country for hundreds of years, and for North American corporations. Which I guess is what your job is, right? Grease the fucking gears.”

There was something in her tone that made me think she wasn't just someone who'd stumbled across an article, which had mentioned, now that I thought about it, the presence of international human rights organizations, serving as observers and even human shields for the local communities when the mining company sent in men to burn the villages. Seeing her indignation, I began to wonder if maybe she was one of these. Even brainless Billy could've been an activist.

“I think you're simplifying things. The world isn't that easy,” I said.

“It's not?” she shouted. “What's so complicated? Thieves come down and steal land, property, goods, and call themselves a company. That's how it's always been.” Her face was red and the cords of her neck stood out. A little vein pulsed along her forehead. Billy watched all this with a bemused smile, as though we were speaking a foreign language.

“That's how a child thinks,” I said. “Just because you read something in a magazine doesn't mean you understand anything.”

“What the fuck are you talking about? What fucking magazine? I guess you”—she lunged forward, trying to poke me in the chest, but the table caught her in the stomach—“are just naturally full of fucking wisdom, aren't you?”

Before I could say anything she stood and stomped to the bar, squeezing in between two men. Billy fussed with the label on his bottle, then followed. They whispered together furiously while I finished my beer and gestured for another. Little peaks of their bitching rose into audibility every now and then. When I'd nearly finished my new beer, they went and sat at another table, back near the prostitutes.

Maybe at that point I should've left. But I'd seen the way the men in the bar were looking at the American kids, and though they were strangers, I felt responsible for them. I ordered another beer, told the waitress I was paying for everything the Americans had, and sneaked a look at my cell phone, which was still getting no service. Though the lopsided clock on the wall said it was only six o'clock, dark had fallen. Back home, Joyce would be exhausted, barely able to shuffle to the bathroom, where she'd strain to urinate and then brush her gray teeth. Susan would have to help lift her mother into bed, hook up the tubes, and set the level of the oxygen. These are things I'd done every day for the past year when I was home, and I'd come to think of them as rites no one but me knew how to enact. I hated when reality imposed on this feeling, as it continually did when we had to hire nurses to help while I was abroad. This time Joyce said she didn't want a stranger. She couldn't stand another bored, tired nurse changing her bedpan, lifting her frail shoulders from the sheets to slip her nightgown off before sponging her down, massaging her legs, and slipping a clean gown over her head. I'd written out how to do all this in explicit detail for Susan, but I was worried something would go wrong. Joyce might die, and even though I knew this was inevitable, knew that soon enough she'd be gone, I wasn't ready for it and couldn't accept it. And now I was here, thousands of miles away and out of touch. I wanted to be there, to take care of her, to sit up in bed when I heard her sighing in pain, or just shifting her hips. I was alert in a way I haven't been since Susan was born and for the first few weeks had been able to sleep only nestled between us. All that time I slept thinly, always aware of her delicate body on the mattress. Instead of thrashing around in the sheets as I usually did, I was suddenly calm and careful, and it was how I felt taking care of Joyce, the slight weight of her body as I cradled her in my arms, lifted her up easily, and set her down in the soft seat of her wheelchair. But what was I supposed to do when the man who might've been Steve called? If I'd refused to come down here, they'd have fired me, had nearly already done so because of my “personal conflicts” that were “hindering my accountability,” and if that happened we'd be left without health insurance.

Distracted by these thoughts, I didn't notice the two men join Billy and Allie. The men looked about the same age as the Americans but were of a whole other world. Both men had cowboy hats tipped down over their narrow faces. I'd seen men like this all over the world, charming enough on the surface, but an inch down they were criminals. I could tell from the way they sat in their chairs that beneath their shirts were knives, or guns. The two men laughed, stood up, and gestured to the Americans. Allie and Billy complied. They knocked at a door on the back wall, which opened a crack, then let them in.

By the time I fumbled up out of my seat and across the room, the door was closed. The nearest prostitute grinned at me, tugging down the neck of her blouse.

I knocked and waited. While I did, I reached into my jacket and lifted the gun half an inch out of the holster, let it fall back. In my other hand I gripped my briefcase, full of financial papers and spreadsheets and my laptop computer. When no one answered my knocks, I turned to the bartender, who avoided looking at me.
“Abierto la puerta,”
I said. The bartender smiled at me, then nodded and stepped around the bar and unlocked the door.

“Dancing,” he said, speaking Spanish slowly, as if I were a child. “Good dancing.”

A steep flight of stairs led down into a room that pulsed with blue light and a dense, throbbing music. The stairwell was smothered with water-sodden posters—political ads, deodorant advertisements, and what looked like rock bands, men and women studded with piercings, sticking their tongues out and flicking off the camera as they danced atop blood-red letters that had blistered and burst apart. The door above was slammed, a lock thrown.

The music was too loud to hear voices in the room, the walls of which seemed to be shaking with the violent strobe light, and it took me a moment to recognize Allie and Billy at a table near a low wooden platform out of which rose a greasy metal pole. The Americans were laughing, bent doubled over as if in pain, and the two men they'd been talking with were smiling and smoking, holding out what must have been joints as the kids straightened up. There were half a dozen other tables, only one of which was occupied, by a single man in a long trench coat, a baseball cap pulled low over his face. I sat at the table nearest the stairs, turning my chair so I could see if someone came down behind me. A tiny, shriveled woman stepped from the shadows, her old body grotesquely squeezed into a leather bra and panties, her loose, cellulite thighs quivering as she stepped beside me and glared until I ordered a beer. Watching her slink back to the bar in the corner, I noticed a wall covered with leather straps, whips, and a long, thin machete.

I jumped when the music suddenly went silent, just long enough to hear Allie say, “Exactly. That's exactly what I'm—” and then the music erupted again, a crashing heavy metal that felt as if it were scraping the inside of my eyes. A silvery cloud drifted along the low ceiling, filling the room with the overripe stink of marijuana.

At the far end of the wooden stage a heavy black curtain was pushed aside and a young woman came out unsteadily on high silver stilettos and nothing else, her small, high breasts not moving even when she tottered into the bright puddle of a spotlight. She stopped in the middle of the stage and stood smiling shyly, her skin shining blue with sweat, or oil. She stared straight ahead, blinking heavily in the spotlight, smiling. One of the men at Allie and Billy's table stood up, stretching his arms over his head, leaning down to whisper something to Allie, who laughed and nodded. Slowly, as if everyone weren't watching, the man walked to the wall beside the bar and took down a short-handled black leather whip with three strands that sagged at the ends. Hefting it to test the weight, he walked back to his table, made another joke, and then, as the music rose to an even more frantic pitch, stepped onto the stage beside the woman.

I stared at my beer, but I could hear the wet, heavy snap of the whip and once I heard, through the din of the music, a single cry of pain. Only when the music shifted between songs and I heard a woman's voice—“No, I'm serious”—did I look up.

Allie was being pushed toward the stage by one of the other men, his mouth open, teeth flashing with laughter. Allie tried to turn, but the man grabbed her arms and spun her around to face the stage on which the naked girl was bent over, her face hidden by a fall of hair. Allie shook her head, but the man on the stage leaned down, grabbed her wrist, and jerked her onto the stage. Billy, I noticed, was staring at his hands in his lap, as if about to go to sleep. The man on the stage held the whip out toward Allie. She turned to step down, but the man grabbed her arm and pulled her back and thrust the whip into her hand. I couldn't tell, with the flashing light, with the blue haze, with the pounding music, but I thought she might be crying as she looked down at the whip in her hand, but I know that as she stepped up beside the kneeling girl she looked up, back at me, as if she'd known all along I was there. I put my hand on my gun, out of fear I guess, but also because I felt sure at that moment that I was in danger, that after she was done with the girl, she'd come for me. Then the fear left her face and Allie twirled the whip around her head and gyrated her hips. Beneath the music I could hear the men cheering as I scrambled out of my seat, knocking over the untouched beer on my table, and ran up the stairs, slipping so I hit my knee painfully, so that I limped through the door after knocking wildly until it was opened.

Outside the bar I got lost immediately but kept hobbling until I found a larger street, lined with auto-body shops, against the fences of which snarling black dogs hurled themselves. I walked along the side of the road, tucking the gun back into the holster, my briefcase in the other hand, glancing back until I spotted a cab and flagged it down.

 

Now it's nearly morning. Allie and Billy are surely dead, raped and tortured and robbed, all because they thought life was a game. In a few hours the men from the mining company will come for me. We're having breakfast here before heading to the office. It's all there on my itinerary. The phone in my room is still dead. My cell phone still has no service and of course there's no Internet, so I can't check on Joyce, can't make sure Susan arrived, that they're all still safe.

There's nothing more to write. But I can't stop thinking about what must've happened to Allie. I can't stop thinking there must have been something I could have done to save her, to keep her safe.

In a few weeks her mother will start to worry. In a month she'll call the embassy and her daughter's degenerate friends to see if they've heard anything. She'll sit up for hours, staring into the brittle, suburban dark, unable to even begin to imagine what might have happened, or what the world that swallowed her daughter was like. With no answers, there'll be nothing she can do but wait and hope for some final word, for anything other than the silence.

FROM
Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine

 

O
UTSIDE, THE DOWNPOUR
continued unabated, each raindrop intensifying the stale, humid dreariness of the confining motel room. Trussed in the corner with a piece of cord from the cheap Venetian blinds, Dan rubbed the throbbing side of his head against the wall in the corner farthest from the door of the tiny room. It was sometime past two in the morning. The little one, Brucie, had just slugged him with his ring-encrusted fist: Dan's wedding ring was on that fist now; his money and credit card were in Brucie's pocket. Brucie reclined in the dingy stuffed chair beside the bed, digging at his fingernails with a flat, blunt carpenter's pencil.

The big one, Jane, rested on the sagging bed, back against the water-stained wooden headboard, her tremendous arms crossed over her equally massive chest. Her hair, red streaked with black, had been fashioned into an improbable pageboy cut, an unfortunate choice that further accentuated the fleshy features on her round face. Part of a tattoo on her right bicep peeked out below the sleeve of her faded yellow T-shirt. It looked like the forepaw of a dog, and for some reason Dan imagined the dog was a frisky, bright-eyed poodle. Tiny bottles of nail polish, cylinders of mascara and eye shadow, tubes of lipstick, and several compacts of face powder lay scattered on the bed before her. She slowly bent forward and wagged a stubby finger at the gaudy containers as if selecting the right one would solve an important problem.

Dan's courage had weakened a little after that last punch from Brucie, but he still managed to convince himself that he could wait them out. He'd probably already suffered the worst of it. Hell, if he just got a chance, he could talk his way out of this. They only wanted a little traveling money, and since he had given them all he had, they'd soon grow bored with their little game and let him go. Still, he should try to do something. Maybe the story, maybe he could reduce the tension by telling them the story.

The story, which had come to him just a few hours before, had been forming in his mind even as he'd been sitting there tied up. It had an urgency of its own, and despite the discomfort and pain from his numb hands and the scuffs on his face, its tenuous threads began to knit themselves into a ragged tapestry and suddenly he could see the outline of it and knew enough to begin the telling. He had nothing to lose, and maybe it would help somehow. So he worked up a few drops of saliva and prepared his swollen tongue to make words.

They'd been sitting in silence since Brucie pounded on the TV to remove some static from the sound, resulting in a blank screen and no sound at all. That had been an hour or more ago. He'd been told to be quiet and he knew that Brucie had a short fuse, but Dan had faith in his own skills as a storyteller.