I smile a hungry smile.
“Tell me everything you know about this Russel.”
“O-okay. It’s not much, just—”
“It’s a start.”
I take a pad and paper and sit down on my folding metal chair.
“Talk.”
The details he gives me are not especially significant—only the things an employee would know. Full name, address. He rattles off descriptions of his car, tells me how they met. Dutifully I write it all down then slap the tablet on the tray of torture tools and stand up.
No more potato peeler. I pick up a linoleum knife, a hooked implement used to make drawing cuts, and stalk toward him. He shakes and somehow manages to piss himself again.
There’s piss on my floor. That makes me mad.
“You might have hurt that woman and her children really bad,” I tell him. “If she gets her kids taken away, I’m going to be very put out.”
“I swear I won’t tell anything else, I swear to God I’ll quit.”
“No, you won’t quit. You’ll wait for me to give you instructions. You’ll feed your client the information I want him to have. Is that clear?”
He swallows and clears his throat.
“Let me make sure you understand. If you don’t do this, somebody, not me, somebody you’ve never seen before, will be paying you a visit, Jared. Somebody who knows everything about you. Somebody who taught me everything I know.”
“I’ll do whatever you say. I swear to God.”
“Don’t swear to God. Swear to me.”
He nods.
I love that swear to me line, it always works.
I heft the knife, making a show of it. It’s light in my fingers, alive. The knife is sharp as hell. I could open his belly or his throat with no more effort than swatting away a bug.
He screams as I swing, but I aim high, miss him, and hit the rope. He drops to the floor in a bubbling, sobbing heap and I cut the bonds around his wrists. He falls back and rubs at the raw marks on his arms.
I toss him a pack of wet wipes. “Clean the piss off my floor. Jared.”
When I’m satisfied, I give him a kick in the ribs. Not hard enough to break anything, but it knocks him on his side.
“Get the fuck out of here, and don’t let anybody see you.”
I open the garage door and he shuffles out, whimpering. I still have his driver’s license.
Once he’s gone I pace the room while the connection tediously loads, then eagerly sit down and use the info Jared gave me about Russel to gather every piece of information about Rose’s ex-husband that I can.
It takes me about four hours to pull everything together.
He’s a scumbag. Easiest thing would be to just plug him, dump him, and proceed to get the fuck out of this place and get out of Rose’s life before I make things worse for her.
Fuck, she needs the money he pays her. Alimony and child support and all that. She’s broke, I checked. Call it overzealous but I had a look at her bank accounts. Paycheck to paycheck doesn’t even begin to describe it. If I off her ex-husband she’ll be up shit creek, and I’d be taking the paddles on my way out.
There’s more than that. He’s still those girls’ dad and I can’t just kill him. Christ almighty, is that how far gone I am? My first reaction to a problem is to murder somebody?
My hands start to tremble. I know why I’m so happy at the thought of teaching Russel a sharp lesson. How dare he? How dare he hurt her this way?
After everything is shut off I get up and pace some more. It’s late now, and that goddamn block party is tomorrow. I can’t leave in the middle of that.
Fuck, fuck, fuck.
I don’t think I can leave now at all, not until I’m sure they won’t take Rose’s kids away. God, what am I going to do? I can feel Santiago out there somewhere, like a shark in the deep waters always looking up, up, for prey darkened against the sun.
Everything is piling up on me. What next?
Then there’s the other thing. What’s this thumb drive Dale sent me? There’s nothing about it in the note. I weigh it in my fingers, thinking about it. Something about it sets off my instincts, like it’s squirming in my fingers like a bug. I set it on the desk and pace the room some more.
Fatigue slams into me all at once and I almost stumble. I end up sprawled out on the bed in my clothes until about four in the morning, when I crawl into the shower, wash up, and crawl back into bed.
There must be something I can do.
12
Rose
Damn you, Russel. Damn you, Quentin.
I’m about to take a beer out of the fridge when I change my mind. I feel guilty about it. I start to take a soda and feel guilty about that, touching my stomach. The caffeine probably isn’t doing me any good either. Sighing, I take a bottle of water, trudge upstairs, and flop on the bed.
Not for long. I still need to make dinner for the kids, and I ate the damned leftovers. It’s a boxed meal tonight. I don’t feel like eating, or doing anything really, but I drag myself back off the bed and downstairs.