Peril

STARK

The man in the chair didn’t move or speak, so different from Lockridge, who’d broken immediately. After only one application of the towel, he’d sputtered Henderson’s name, the Paseo del Prado hotel where he was staying, then told how Henderson had taunted Marisol as he’d beaten her, humiliated and degraded and repeatedly strangled her to unconsciousness then revived her for more, until Henderson had finally said, “This bitch won’t die” and cut her throat.

This bitch won’t die.

The last words Marisol had heard on earth.

Stark’s gaze settled on the man in the chair. “Who do you work for?” he asked.

The man remained silent, motionless.

“Who do you work for?”

The man sat rigidly in place.

“Who do you work for?”

The man’s head lowered slightly, as if considering the question, then lifted again in what Stark saw as a gesture of defiance.

It was late in the afternoon now, and Stark knew that the night that lay before him would be grim. The man in the chair was weakening in every way but in his spirit. His body was racked by hunger and exhaustion, and Stark knew that a sense of doom was surely settling in, the certainty that he was going to die.

Death.

His own death beckoned him softly, just as it had several days before, promising an end, but also, as he began to imagine it, a beginning, a return, as he let himself envision it, to the arms of Marisol.

He knew that every religion proclaimed the possibility of such miraculous reunions. Perhaps, he thought, perhaps it could be true. Perhaps only a veil separated one world from another, life’s longing and inadequacy from the ecstatic fulfillment that waited on the other side. If it were true, Stark reasoned, then why had he gone on, since nothing but the slender line of his tiny throbbing pulse kept him from Marisol.

The man groaned slightly, drawing Stark back to earth. He hardened his voice and prepared to reapply the towel.

“Who do you work for?” he said.