Honestly Dearest, You're Dead

Forty

A bone in my ankle snapped as I hit the floor, crumpling me forward, to my knees, screaming from the pain.

They laughed, dropped the flaming papers they’d been waving to make the smoke and the fire, and slugged the back of my head, to drop me, unconscious, like a swatted fly.

A wave of glacier water shocked me awake, running frozen between the tape on my mouth and the tape over my eyes, into my nose and my ear. I tried to roll to my side, to sneeze it away, to breathe, but they’d taped my arms and my ankles, too. I couldn’t get the momentum to roll over. I fought panic, focused on breathing through my nose. Air came, but it was ragged and exaggeratedly slow, like gasps from a dying man.

The toe of a shoe nudged at the side of my head. “You awake?” The voice was flat, midwestern.

It was good that he was talking. I made a noise into the tape across my mouth.

“What’s that?” a different voice asked. “You hear that, Butch? Piss-head grunted. Think he expects us to understand?”

“Sure as shit, Sundance. Grunted like a pig.”

Butch and Sundance. They were playing with cowboy names from an old movie. At least it wasn’t Starsky and Hutch. I couldn’t have stood it if it was Starsky and Hutch.

Butch giggled a noise. Then the toe came again, from the direction of his voice. Not hard. Not yet.

“We don’t speak pig,” Sundance said. “We’re going to take the tape off your mouth, so you can answer real polite. Got it?”

I made frightened noises into the tape a second before he ripped at my mouth. It wasn’t a reach.

“Where’s the money?” Butch said.

“There’s a file-”

The toe kicked the front of my ear, snapping my head sideways. “The money, asshole.” The tip of the boot came back, to play with the pain.

I made myself see Maris, trapped inside her Rambling house as the wind howled outside and she fought to not cry.

“Indiana-” I gasped.

He kicked me again, not as bad as the first time.

“We seen the file,” Butch said.

“Then you saw it all. He put the money in a bank in Indiana.”

“How’d he get it?”

“She came to him scared, probably because she found Severs poking around. She said she knew something about a bank robbery, maybe even said something about having the money. Aggert convinced her to appoint him executor of her will, in case something happened. That gave him access to everything she owned. Then he killed her.”

“I told you, Eddie.” Sundance’s voice was shrill. “No way Randall would have killed her, not without knowing where the money was.”

“Shut up, damn it.” Lance Kovacs’s boot came back to my ear. “Go on.”

“Aggert used that legal authority to contact banks until he found out where she parked the money. He withdrew it.”

“And put it in that lockbox in Indiana?”

“The Workman’s Bank, in East Chicago.”

“We’ll kill you if you’re lying.”

“Aggert’s hanging around his law office in Michigan. He’ll leave the money alone until things die down.”

“How come you know this?”

“Aggert was setting me up. He hired me to nose around about the woman’s death, being real public about it, when all the time he’d already killed her. He was going to get me blamed for the murder, then for taking the money-and for killing Severs, too,” I added, as if I believed Aggert had killed the blueberry cop. “I put that file together to give to the cops, show them Aggert’s the one.”

“The money is in East Chicago?”

“I want Aggert dead.”

It was the truest thing I could say. My eyes were wet beneath the tape, from anger, frustration, and from stupidity that went back decades. I saw Maris smile, that first time we walked home together. I saw, too, a life with Amanda that would never be. It was all welling up in my eyes, all the waste.

Sundance’s boot pounded a step or two next to my head. He kicked me, and I blacked out.

Sometime later, perhaps ten minutes, perhaps an hour, I came to. I was on my belly. Something stickier than water was working its way down the side of my head.

I strained to sense any change in the air, any sound in the room that meant they were still there. Outside, a truck with a bad muffler vibrated one of the slit windows. I could hear nothing else.

My arms, taped behind me, were numb. My shoulders throbbed as if they were being pulled from their sockets. I counted to ten as slowly as I could manage and lunged into a roll to my right. My shoulders ripped, and for a second, I thought I would faint. But I teetered, and held, and gradually some of the pain passed as I settled onto my right side.

I worked my left shoulder, up an inch, down an inch. The tape at my wrists tore at my skin, unyielding, but then it moved a little. Then, ludicrously, it came completely off my left wrist. I tore it from my hands, my eyes, my ankles.

My throat caught at the magnificence of it. They’d used my duct tape, the cheap, no-name stuff I’d bought at the Discount Den one day when I’d been killing time, watching Leo agonize over which dumb luau shirt to buy. I’d ended up buying two rolls of the silver tape, to keep the slashes in the Jeep’s side curtains closed. The cuts kept opening anyway. The tape was crap. The adhesive dissolved when exposed to water. Or sweat.

I stood up and hobbled on duckling legs to the slit window. The old sedan was gone. In the east, the sun was coming up.

They would have taken the file, to slap him with.

With luck, I’d just committed murder.

I put my palms on the stone sill, to steady myself as I looked out-and for a time, I cried, like a child, for things I didn’t understand, and for things I did, and for a blond girl with a boy’s name, who would never again see a sunrise.