I rub my facial hair when I’m thinking. I pace when I’m mad. I do anything to keep busy. I never like to sit for more than a few minutes, and only ever with a purpose: feeding the fire, eating dinner, sleeping.
I tell her how this all started. How some man offered me five grand to find and deliver her to Lower Wacker Drive. I knew nothing about her at the time. I’d seen a photo and for days I followed her around. It wasn’t something I wanted to do. I didn’t know the plan until that night. Until they called me on the phone and told me what I was supposed to do. That’s the way it is; the less I know the better. This wasn’t like the other times. But this was more money than I’d ever been offered. The first time was only for repayment of a loan, I tell her. “So I didn’t get my ass kicked.” After that it was a few hundred dollars, sometimes a grand. I say that Dalmar is only a go-between. The others are all hidden behind a smoke screen. “I don’t have a damn clue who pays the bills,” I say.
“Does that bother you?” she asks.
I shrug. “That’s just the way it is.”
She could hate me for doing this to her. She could hate me for bringing her here. But she’s coming to see that what I did may have saved her life.
My first job was to find a man named Thomas Ferguson. I was supposed to make him cough up a substantial debt. He was some rich, eccentric man. Some technological genius who made it big in the ’90s. He had a fancy for gambling. He’d taken out a reverse mortgage and gambled away nearly all the equity in his home. Then a child’s college fund. Then he moved onto funds his in-laws had left to his wife and him when they died. When his wife found out, she threatened to leave him. He got his hands on more money and headed out to the casino in Joliet to earn it all back. Ironically Thomas Ferguson did make a small fortune at the casino. But he didn’t repay his debt.
Finding Thomas Ferguson was easy.
I remember the way my hands shook when I walked up the steps of the home in Chicago’s Streeterville neighborhood. I just didn’t want to get in trouble. I rang the doorbell. When a teenage girl peeked through the opening, I forced it open. It was after 8:00 p.m. on a fall night and I remember that it was cold. The house was dim. The girl started screaming. Her mother ran into the room and they took cover beneath an old desk when I showed my gun. I told the woman to call for her husband. It took a good five minutes for the coward to show his face. He’d been upstairs hiding. All the necessary precautions had been made: cutting phone lines and blocking the back door. He wasn’t going to get away. And yet Thomas Ferguson waited long enough for me to tie up the wife and girl and stand, with the gun to the wife’s head, when he finally appeared. He said he had no money. Not a penny to his name. But of course that couldn’t be true. Parked outside was a brand-new Cadillac SUV that he’d just given to his wife.
I tell her that I never killed anyone. Not that time, not ever.
We make small talk, to pass the time.
I tell her that she snores when she sleeps. She says, “I wouldn’t know. I can’t remember the last time someone watched me sleep.”
I always wear shoes, even when we know there’s nowhere to go. Even when the temperature plummets into negative degrees and we know we won’t move an inch from the fire.
I leave the water at a trickle in all the faucets. I tell her not to turn it off. If the water freezes, the pipes will burst. She asks me if we’ll freeze to death. I say no, but I’m not so sure.
When I’m really bored I ask if she can show me how to draw. I yank them out page by page because they look like shit. I drop them into the fire. I try to draw a picture of her. She shows me how the eyes go toward the center. “The eyes are generally aligned with the top of the ear, the nose with the bottom,” she says. Then she makes me look at her. She dissects her own face with her hands. She’s a good teacher. I think of the kids, in her school. They must like her. I never liked a single one of my teachers.
I try again. When I’m through she says that she’s a perfect replica of Mrs. Potato Head. I yank it from the spiral notebook, but when I try to torch the page, she takes it from my hands.
“In case you’re famous one day,” she says.
Later, she hides it where I won’t find it. She knows that if I do, it’ll become food for the fire.
Eve
After
He worked on it all weekend, dropping subtle hints here and there, about how fat she would get and about the sinful child who was growing in her womb. He ignored my pleas to stop. Mia has yet to accept the notion that there is life inside her, though I heard her in the bathroom, vomiting, and knew morning sickness had arrived. I knocked on the door to ask if she was okay; James pushed me aside. I caught the door frame so I didn’t fall, staring at him in dismay.