TWENTY-NINE
Back Seat Driver
"I am a businessman."
These words wake Miriam.
The voice belongs to Hairless Fucker.
He's not talking to her. He's talking to Ashley.
They're in a car. No – an SUV. Cream leather interior. Uppity; it's got DVD screens in the backs of the seats, and USB jacks, a glowing GPS and back-up camera in the console up front.
Miriam's in the back-back seat. She doesn't know what is covering her mouth, but she wouldn't be surprised to learn it's two strips of black electrical tape in a wide X.
Her hands, zip-tied. Feet, too. She feels groggy. The world swims. This is more than just the Taser. A faint memory flits through her brain – hands holding her, a pinprick, a syringe, a warm and fuzzy undertow. Pine trees pass outside the car. Dark green against a gray sky. They pass fast, they blur. Whatever the drugs were, they're still not out of her system.
Ashley is in the seat ahead of her, facing forward.
Hairless sits next to him.
Way up in the front, Harriet drives. Frankie's in the passenger seat, cleaning his gun. The smell of gun oil – heady, rich, mechanical – fills the vehicle.
"Business," Hairless continues, "is a kind of ecology. It has its hierarchies, its taxonomies. It has a food web, a pecking order. It is a natural thing."
Ashley's mouth is taped shut. Miriam can't see his hands or feet, but the way he struggles tells her he's bound, too. Hands behind back, like her.
"We think of nature in a certain way. We think of it as balanced. We think of it being fair, in its own way. Nature is not fair. It is not balanced. It is weighted in favor of what we would think of as evil. Cruelty is rewarded. You see? Harriet knows."
Harriet speaks. She sounds excited. The monotone is gone. The flavorless cardboard drone has been replaced by a bloodthirsty, giddy tenor rising in pitch, growing in sheer delight.
"Penguin mothers are kind to their children. Wolves are honorable. Chimpanzees are noble and wise. All lies, lies to comfort us. Man wants nature to be noble because it forces him to be noble. Man knows that he is above the beasts, and so if beasts can be noble, then man must be noble, too. Such a moral, honorable benchmark does not exist," Harriet says. Her words drip with nyah-nyah-nyah I told you so contempt. "Animals are vile and cruel. Cats rape each other. Ants enslave other insects, including other ants. Chimps fight in massive gang wars – they kill wantonly, they piss and shit on the corpses of their enemies, they take the babies of their genetic foes and dash them against rocks. They steal the females and force them to breed. They sometimes eat the defeated males."
Harriet looks back at them, and Miriam sees in her eyes a manic gleam.
"Nature is brutal and grotesque. That is the only benchmark. That is the precedent. We are animals, and as part of nature, we too must be brutal and grotesque."
Miriam thinks she sees Harriet's shoulders shake with a tiny paroxysm of pleasure.
The woman returns to driving.
Hairless offers a golf clap. Miriam growls against her tape-gag.
The Hairless Fucker turns to her and extends a long finger against his lips.
"Shh. Your turn will come. For now, let me speak with your friend." He turns back to Ashley, who is pale and sweaty like a bottle of milk left out on a warm counter. He's staring at something Miriam cannot see, something near him on the seat. "This, Mister Gaynes, is how our time together will work. I have two questions for you. If you answer both of my questions honestly and swiftly, I will not kill you."
Hairless fidgets with whatever it is that Miriam cannot see. She hears a metal squeak, the squeak of hinges.
He holds something up.
This, she can see.
A twelve-inch, all-metal hacksaw. Brand new. Still has the sticker on it.
Hairless flicks the blade with his fingernail. Ting, ting, ting.
"I am a businessman, as noted, and to be successful I must be cruel, so forgive me this. My first question is about the girl." Hairless turns and gives her a look. She can't read it. Maybe it's because he can't read her – and that puzzlement shows on his smooth, bone-white face. "Is it true, what she can do? Is it for real?"
Ashley moans against the tape.
"Oh," Hairless says, chuckling. He plucks the tape off Ashley's mouth. Rip.
"I think so," Ashley blurts, gasping for air with a mouth ringed by red, raw skin. "I think it's real. She believes it's real."
Miriam struggles. She wants to boot him in the face. She wants to bite through her gag and scream for him to shut up, it won't matter, don't give in to these assholes. If given half a chance, she'd bite his tongue off. She'd kick him through the window. Something. Anything.
Hairless continues with his questioning.
"Now, my product. My case. My drugs." He pauses, takes a deep breath. "Where are they? What have you done with that which is mine?"
Ashley spills like a drink.
And when he does, Miriam's heart goes cold.
"It's in the truck," Ashley says. "The trucker. Louis. I hid it in his truck."
Next to Miriam sits Louis, Ghost Louis, Xs-for-eyes Louis. He smiles, bites his lower lip like a girl about to be given a pony.
Miriam's head has been like a box full of puzzle pieces rattling. Now the pieces fall into place.
Miriam feels warmth on her cheeks. She realizes she's crying.
Hairless lets out a breath.
"That was so easy," he says, smiling. "I always worry that it will be difficult. And so often, my worries bear fruit. I thank you for your cooperation."
Ashley gasps, laughs a little, nods. But then he sees. His eyes dart back and forth, and he starts to stammer – "No, no, c'mon, no. No!"
Hairless Fucker has the saw. He moves scary-fast.
This is how it happens: Hairless gets atop Ashley, his back against Ashley's chest. He drives his elbow up into Ashley's jaw, smashing it shut and closing the door on any protests Ashley might make. Hairless keeps that elbow there, like a chair under a doorknob.
With his free hand, Hairless hoists Ashley's leg so that the foot is propped up against the headrest of the driver's seat. Harriet doesn't seem to mind.
Hairless tugs back Ashley's pant-leg.
Ashley thrashes, screams, but Hairless is a fucking pro, and he rides the flailing con artist like a rodeo cowboy.
"I told you!" Ashley shrieks through his bloody mouth. The words are sloppy, bubbly, and flecks of blood spit up onto the back of Hairless's bald head. "I told you want you wanted!"
"And I told you," Hairless declares through gritted teeth, "that nature was cruel. Chimpanzees, dolphins, wolves. Red in tooth and claw! They understand revenge. This is that. This is revenge! You hobble my operation–"
Hairless presses the saw blade to the flesh of Ashley's ankle.
"So I hobble you."
Hairless begins to cut. Bearing down, elbow back.
Ashley makes a sound like Miriam's never heard before. It's a high-pitched animal sound, a mammalian dirge.
Harriet drives as jets of blood arc up over her shoulder.
Frankie blanches, turns away. "This is a rental," he says between screams.
The saw moves. It eats with metal teeth.
Miriam can barely parse what's happening. The blurred motion. The splashes of red. Louis's ghost next to her, whistling that faux-innocent, "I knew all along" whistle.
Do something, her brain yells.
Her body lies frozen. Like it's disconnected, gone off-line.
The saw grinds – now against bone. Ashley's eyelids flutter.
Good, part of her thinks. Fuck him. This is all his fault. (This is all your fault, another voice reminds her, a voice that sounds suspiciously like Louis's.) But she knows when Hairless is done with Ashley, it's on to her. What parts of her will he cut off? What parts is she willing to forsake? The hot tears burn streaks down her cheeks, and her mind lights up.
Do something.
Do something!
She does something.
She props her chin on the seat in front of her, uses it to get leverage. Bound feet under her, she pushes up, shoulders herself over into the same seat as Hairless and Ashley. She almost slips off the bloody leather but manages to get her back against the seat, her legs up.
Hairless regards her with nothing but idle curiosity.
"A survivor," he says. "I like that."
She aims her bound feet toward his head. But precise control isn't on the cards when her body's been relegated to the movements of a fat grub or clumsy inchworm.
She kicks Hairless in the chest.
The blade slips from his hand, but not before making one last dig. Ashley's foot swings by a strip of skin and ankle hair that looks like a stretched Band-Aid.
Miriam kicks again, both feet into Hairless's sunken chest.
The door behind them opens. Maybe Ashley opened it on purpose or by accident. Maybe it was never closed properly. Miriam doesn't know and doesn't care.
What she knows is that Ashley tumbles out of the car. His body is a shuddering shape, a shadow, and then it's out the door and gone. The space where he was is now nothing but passing pine trees, dark needles against a steel sky.
Hairless, looking more than a little bemused, leans back, holding onto the oh-shit handle above his head with his bony, almost feminine fingers.
In his other hand, he holds Ashley's severed foot.
He regards it the way a teacher might regard an apple from a student.
Miriam knows she only has seconds to act.
She tries to push back with her legs. If she can get to the opposite door, if she can press her back up against it, her bound hands can grab the handle, pop it open, and she can escape. But the blood – there's too much of it. It's slick. It's like trying to run in a nightmare: feet jogging through wet cement. Grunting, she pushes back again and again, flexing her legs, hoping her feet will offer her some purchase…
It works. Her back hits the Escalade door. Her fingers work like blind worms, feeling for the door handle.
"No," Hairless says, as if by saying it, he commands reality.
"Fhhh mmmuuu," Miriam screams through the tape just as her fingers find the handle.
"Lock the door!" Hairless cries out – but it's too late.
The door flies open, and Miriam flies backward.
She knows it's going to suck. Hitting asphalt? At sixty? It'll be a like a bug jumping on a belt sander. Gravel will eat the back of her skull. It's suicide, probably.
The idea doesn't make her uncomfortable.
But her head doesn't hit the passing blacktop.
A pair of hands has her by the calves. Hairless Her head dangles out the car door, her hair brushing the highway zooming by beneath her. The rush of wind fills her ears. She can smell saltwater, car fumes, pine trees, the cloying chemical curdle that is the state scent of New Jersey. It's freedom she smells and hears, and it isn't long for her world–
–which reverses, like a tape rewinding.
Hairless drags her back into the car. His face floats above her.
She thinks to head-butt it, but it's like he knows what she's thinking, because he presses a blood-slick hand against her forehead.
The other hand pulls a syringe.
Miriam struggles. A bead of clear fluid oozes from the tip of the needle, and caught in the wind from the still-open door, it trembles and dances away toward oblivion.
"We'll talk soon," Hairless says.
He jams the needle into her neck.
"Nnnngh!" she shouts against the tape gag.
The world shudders and breaks apart. Its pieces float toward an uncertain darkness.