The Survivor (11 page)

To Janie and Cielle, my collective heart.

Janie, I wish you every happiness with Pete. (Pete, please stop reading over her shoulder. This is a suicide note—a little damn privacy, please.) And Cielle. I’ve thought long and hard about what I want to pass on to you. And I guess it’s that there are no guarantees, so don’t waste your time here like I did too much of mine. If you hold on to stuff too hard, you’ll sink with it.

He paused and smirked a bit at himself. Nate Overbay, Armchair Philosopher.

I resent only one thing, sweetheart, and that’s every minute I spent away from you and your mom. I had so many chances to do better, and I couldn’t. But it was never for lack of love. You and your mother were the best part of me.

Were they ever.

To the cop reading this— First, sorry to the guy who had to scrape me out of the Dumpster. Or off the corner of Ninth and Wilshire if I missed. Second, when you serve the death notice to my wife and kid, please be patient and kind. Don’t check your watch. Make eye contact and hug them if they need it. —Nate

P.S. There’s half a ham sandwich in the fridge. Have at it.

Tapping the note to his lips, he sat awhile, thinking about his ill-fated visit to Cielle’s room and running figures in his head. Three more years of high school at twenty grand a pop. Then college at twice that amount. A familiar pressure mounted inside him until he sprang forward, grabbed a pad and pencil from the drawer, and tallied up estimates, weighing his checking-account balance (not much), benefits from Uncle Sam (minimal), and projected income for the few months he’d still be able to work (meager) against upcoming medical costs to sustain him through his decline (colossal). A very large negative number stared up at him from the pad. How dismal to see his worth laid out like this, his life reduced to this sad figure. He was not much use at all to Cielle, but he was more use to her dead now than dead later.

He tossed down the pad, went to the kitchen, came back with ham sandwich in hand, chewing. He clicked on the radio, Lady Gaga still caught in that bad romance. Just because it was a suicide didn’t mean it had to be depressing.

Taking another bite, he paused in the middle of the living room for a final survey. Everything was death. The unread books on the shelf,
Moby-Dick
staring out, unvanquished. The browning fern in the corner that would outlive him. That pillar candle that would be removed, half burned, from the shelf by a cleanup crew hired by his landlord. There was such a horrible self-centeredness to dying. Every detail, filtered through a gray lens. He’d been unable to break out of his own head. Until this morning in the bank when he’d floated past the bullets in a perfect suspended state of who-gives-a-fuck.

Grabbing a bottle of Knob Creek from the cupboard, he sat at the kitchen table, lined up his pill bottles, and took roll. Vicodin and antibiotics from the ER this morning. Xanax for sleep. Gold pearls of vitamin E. And his nemesis, riluzole—oblong tablets that left him alternately weak, fatigued, dizzy, or nauseous. Eleven Xanax, eighteen Vicodin—more than enough to do the trick. He arranged them in a vast smiley face, poured himself a tall shot of bourbon.

The thought of his dead body bloating here sickened him. The stench would seep into the walls, and then some poor person would stumble onto him, maybe the landlord’s wife— No, he couldn’t have that. He thumbed open his cell phone and called the number on the back of Agent Abara’s card. Voice mail. “Hi, it’s Nate. You said to call if … Well, I remembered something that might help in the investigation. I’m out right now, won’t be home for a few hours at least, so if you could come by my place late…?” He hung up. Walked across. Unlocked the front door for Abara. Now. Now he was ready.

Sitting again at the kitchen table, he reached for the bottle of bourbon, but another hand gripped it suddenly from the other side, the fingers caked with blood and sand. Charles sat in the opposite chair, his torso a gruesome scramble. “They say suicide is a coward’s way out.”

Nate pulled the bottle irritably from Charles’s grasp. “I’d like to see
them
stand eleven stories up and look down at the spot their body’s gonna mark with a Rorschach.”

Tendrils of black smoke lifted from the edges of his charred flesh. “Christ, you’re touchy.”

“Look, all I wanted to do is jump off a building.”

“I get it. You got served a shit sandwich. Any way you slice it, you gotta eat the fucker. But still. I don’t think you have to go all Jane Austen.”

“Huh?”

“You know, the
Bell Jar
chick who offed herself.”

“That was Sylvia Plath.”

“Whatever. I’m just saying, look at the bright side. For the first time in your life, you can say and do whatever the hell you want.”

“The
bright side
? I’m dying, I’ve still got PTSD or whatever the hell they’re calling it these days as evidenced by … well,
you.
Plus, I’m one signature away from divorced, and my kid hates me.”

Charles crossed his arms over the hole in his chest and did his best to look bored. “I won’t sit here and listen to you whine. You can do that to a wall.”

“I
am
doing that to a wall.”

Charles shook his head with disappointment. “I’m outta here, then. I’m not sticking around for this.”

“Fine.”

“Fine.”
But Charles remained, looking away like a pouty child.

Nate banged down the bottle. “Look, I have to do this while I’m still up for it. Do you have any idea how pathetic it feels to be too depressed to kill yourself?”

“You’re still sitting there talking to me. Which means you want
something.
” Charles spread his arms, releasing a waft of smoke. “What do you want, Nate?”

Nate stared at the pills arrayed before him. “I want to die well,” he said.

When he finally lifted his eyes, Charles was gone.

Leona Lewis had come on the radio, all soulful runs and sultry beat, a just-audible church organ running beneath the melody like bedrock.

Nate slid the pills neatly off the table into his hand and stared down at them. His heartbeat skipped, his brain spinning, throwing images. Janie’s skin, pale beneath seawater. Cielle’s baby gums, suckling his knuckle. The car-wash polo, her name embroidered at the breast. His daughter’s education—her whole damn future. How could he not make sure he provided for that? His mind landed on the million-dollar life-insurance policy he was about to void with a single swallow. No payout for Janie and Cielle—his beneficiaries—in the event of suicide.

All he had to do to assure his daughter’s future was put down the pills and die horrifically, one agonizing minute at a time.

His daughter’s voice rang in his head:
I don’t want
anything
from you.
He remembered as a child finding his mother’s hair, too much of it to be stray, clumps and clusters like the residue of some violent act, loose on the pillow, twined in the teeth of her comb, lining the inside of that snug terry cap she wore. Cielle again, turning her back:
Die somewhere else.

“Okay,” he said. “Okay.” He palmed the pills into his mouth.

On the radio Leona kept bleeding, she kept, kept bleeding.

The pills melted on his tongue, bitter and toxic.

He reached for the bottle, unscrewed the lid.

He thought of Cielle working at that car wash and its still not being enough.

The bottle was at his lips.

—
You cut me open and I
—

The bourbon pooled in his mouth, smoke and sweetness, the pills swirling.

A million dollars. All he had to do was suffer.

—
keep, keep bleeding
—

He turned his head and spit out the pills onto the cheap linoleum, leaning on the table, coughing.

His cell phone rang.

He said, “Cielle.”

He darted across and snatched it from the counter. “Hello?”

An accented voice said, “Remember me?”

Nate’s insides turned to ice. He looked down at the brown puddle dotted with pills. “Number Six.”

“Go to your bedroom.”

Nate could barely hear his own voice over his thundering heartbeat. “Why?”

“Something you must see.”

Nate reached across and locked his front door again. Keeping the phone pressed to his face, he walked back, his steps slowed with dread. The room was as he’d left it, the bed neatly made, but one pillowcase was, oddly, missing. The striped ticking of the pillow stared up at him nakedly.

He halted in the doorway, gaping.

The voice jarred him. “Now look out the window.”

His legs had turned to water, but he got himself across and parted the curtains. “There’s nothing there.”

“Just wait.”

Something slipped over Nate’s head, blotting out all light. Fabric yanked tight across his face, suffocating him. The last thing he sensed before dropping into a pool of black was that it felt an awful lot like a pillowcase.

Chapter 12

Before consciousness there was pain. In the thick soup of his head; in his feet, cold and numb; in his thighs, bitten lengthwise as if by a band saw. The sockets of his shoulders, tendons screaming. And his wrists, overhead. Oh, his wrists.

Nate’s eyes opened tentatively. Vast, dank room, perhaps a warehouse. Little light. His own biceps crowding his field of vision. His arms, suspended above. His teeth chattered. It was colder than seemed reasonable for indoors, each breath frosting the linings of his lungs.

When he looked down, it seemed that his lower half had disappeared. Incredulous, he realized that his legs were, bizarrely, encased in ice. Claustrophobia crowded in on him, and he tried, stupidly, to lift his feet, to kick, to run, but there was nothing except the cold cast, enveloping him to the thighs.

Quick breaths, panic sweat freezing on his face. When he tried to wipe the beads off his cheek with his sleeve, he saw that his hands above were trapped inside matte black handcuffs and snared on a meat hook. The chain holding the hook rose several feet before vanishing into darkness—the ceiling might be ten feet above, or a hundred. Bands glittered at his wrists where the skin had been rubbed raw. And beneath everything else, pulsing like a heartbeat, was the dull pain of the stab wound in his shoulder, straining the stitches.

He will make you pay in ways you can’t imagine.

He blinked rapidly several times, a trick he’d learned in the army that was supposed to hasten nighttime vision. First the rectangle of ice around his legs came clear—on its side, the size of a refrigerator. Mist rose from its surface, making the air waver as he peered into the darkness. Pallets. Boxes. Scattered tools. A rescue saw, like the one used to cut through the steel of the bank vault.

At the fringe of visibility, he became slowly, chillingly aware of four human forms standing idly apart, studying him with cocked heads. He gave a startled shout and reared back, the lip of ice biting his hamstrings, the meat hook’s chain giving off a rusty abattoir rattle that scratched through the huge space and clawed its way back off the walls.

His vision clarified further, the men’s facial features unsmudging. The tallest he recognized as the face in the crowd outside the bank—the man with the lantern jaw and mashed nose. Broad shoulders like a yoke. Stubble bristled on his bullet-shaped head. Beside him stood a stocky man with a red-and-white-striped
Where’s Waldo?
sweater, frayed at the sleeves and collar. Rather than hanging regularly from his frame, the sweater sloped out a few inches over the shelf of his muscular chest before falling. Nate took in the next, a slender man with sharp features, shiny dark hair secured in a tight stub of ponytail.

And there, stepping forth for a closer look, was Number Six, the crew leader from the bank. Nate recognized his bearing—the short form with wiry muscles and a low center of gravity, built for fighting. He looked younger than Nate might have guessed. Blond hair carefully arrayed in a dated style, something just shy of a seventies bowl cut, and a forehead that, Nate noted with a stab of satisfaction, bore a bloody nick where he had nailed it with the empty gun. The puckish round face with blue eyes called to mind that of a youthful sailor from a Soviet propaganda poster, full of confidence and purpose and yet unnervingly flat, scrubbed of uncertainty.

He approached Nate, drawing disturbingly close, until Nate could feel the man’s breath against his cheeks. Those blue eyes picked across Nate’s face.

“He will stay conscious now,” Number Six declared, the accent sounding more clearly Russian to Nate’s ears.

Nate took it as a bad sign that they had not bothered to wear masks. “Who are you?”

The crew leader returned his focus to Nate. “We are Tyazhiki. Shadow people. We are not here. We do not exist.”

“But you have names.”

“Ah, yes. I did not introduce myself before. I am Misha. You wonder why you are here?”

“No,” Nate said.

“He must collect from you. From your body, perhaps.” Lazily, he touched Nate’s chest with a finger and pushed. The chain creaked above, the ice again bit the back of Nate’s legs, and he couldn’t help but grunt.

He clenched his jaw to stop the chattering. Needles of pain pierced his bloodless arms. What they were going to do to him would no doubt be horrific, but in the end there would be death. He blew out a breath, trying to find that place of fearlessness he’d captured inside the bank. “Will you lower my hands, please?”

The man in the striped sweater spoke up: “Not yet.”

“Look, Waldo, there’s four of you, and I’m wearing ice-block pants,” Nate said. “If I make a move, I think you got me covered.”

The man looked confused. “Waldo?”

“He is called Dima,” Misha said. “With the ponytail, Valerik. And he”—a flick of the hand to the huge guy from outside the bank—“is Yuri.” Despite the accent, his diction was perfect, if formal.

“His hands stay hooked on chain,” Yuri declared. “More pain.”

But Misha leaned close and unhooked Nate’s wrists, their faces inches apart. He smelled of soap. Yuri sucked his teeth and looked away, displeased but unwilling to press the matter. The other two shifted uncomfortably, pretending not to notice Misha’s power play.