Bad Men (2003) (19 page)

It had so many forms, so many derivations: Moloch, Malik, Melech, Molech. It could be found in Ammonite traditions, in Canaanite and Semite. Moloch: the ancient sun god; the bringer of plagues; the god of wealth to the Canaanites. Moloch: the prince of the Land of Tears; Milton’s Molech, besmeared with the blood of human sacrifice. The Israelites surrendered their firstborn to him, burning them in fire. Solomon was reputed to have built a temple to him near the entrance to Gehenna, the gates of hell.

Moloch. What kind of man was called by such a name?

And yet, in the beginning, he had been sweet to her. When you lived in Biloxi, Mississippi, where the permanently moored casinos drew the worst kinds, the ones who couldn’t afford to go to Florida or Vegas, or who didn’t care what their surroundings looked like as long as there was a table, a card shoe, and maybe a cocktail waitress who might be persuaded to offer comfort for a fifty-dollar chip, then any man who didn’t try to grab your ass was practically an ambassador for his sex.

And Moloch
was
different. She was working on the
Biloxi Black Beauty,
an imitation showboat painted—despite its name—so many shades of pink that it made one’s teeth hurt just to look at it. The cocktail waitresses were forced to wear white corsets, like nineteenth-century hookers cleaning up after a john, and bunched skirts that, one hundred years before, would have revealed no more than a flash of shin but were now so high that the lower curves of their buttocks were on permanent display, the ruffles of the skirts like stage curtains that had been raised to reveal the main act. In theory, the men weren’t supposed to touch them anywhere other than on the back or the arm. In reality, the tips were better if you didn’t stick too closely to the letter of the law and allowed them to indulge themselves just a little. If they got too frisky, it was enough to nod at the security guards who dotted the casino in their green blazers, as omnipresent as the artificial potted palms, although the palms were probably more likely to develop as individuals than the
Beauty
’s Deputy Dawgs. They would lean over, one at either side of the drunk (because they were always drunks, the ones who behaved in that way), scooping up his chips and his drink even as he was quickly hustled away from the table, talking to him all the while, calm and quiet, but keeping him moving for, being a drunk, he would find it hard to argue, walk, and keep an eye on his remaining chips all at the same time.

Then he would be gone, his departure ignored by the dealer, and eventually someone else would move to take his place at the table. It didn’t pay to complain too often, though. There were a lot of girls ready and willing to take your place if you got a reputation as a troublemaker or as a woman who couldn’t handle a little attention from the men happily throwing away their savings for a couple of complimentary, watered-down bourbons.

Marianne had been born into a family in the town of Tunica, in the cotton country of northwestern Mississippi, close to the Arkansas border. She was raised almost within sight of Sugar Ditch, where slave descendants had lived beside open sewers a couple of blocks from Main Street. Her father ran a little diner on Magnolia Street, but Tunica was so poor it could barely support this meager enterprise. The bank took over the diner and covered its windows with wooden boards. Her father fell apart, and his family fell apart along with him. He grew depressed, then violent. On the day after he struck Marianne so hard across the head that she was deaf in one ear for a week, her mother packed up their things and moved her two daughters to Biloxi, where her own sister lived. They existed close to penury, but Marianne’s mother could squeeze a nickel until the buffalo shat, and her daughters received schooling and, eventually, found places of their own. Later, she and her husband were reconciled, and he came to live with his wife and her sister for the last three years of his life, a pathetic man destroyed by bad luck, poor judgment, and an inability to stop drinking before the bottle ran dry. He was buried back in Tunica, and two years later his wife was buried alongside him, but by then Tunica had changed. Casinos had brought wealth to what had once been merely a staging post on the way to better things. There was now a carillon clock that played hymns on the hour in a little park downtown, free garbage pickup, even street signs (for in Marianne’s youth Tunica could not afford to extend to visitors the luxury of a formal indicator of their whereabouts, a situation of which the late Harry Rylance would undoubtedly have disapproved). Marianne had been considering moving back there to escape Biloxi, for there would be work in Tunica’s casinos and the quality of life was considerably better there than on Marianne’s stretch of the Gulf Coast, until she met Edward Moloch.

The nature of her father’s disintegration, and the sights that greeted her each evening in the casinos, had made her wary and intolerant of those who drank even moderately, but Moloch didn’t drink liquor. She asked him for an order as soon as he sat down and placed his chips carefully upon the table, but he refused the offer of a cocktail and instead tipped her a ten for every soda she brought him. He played seven-card high-low stud quietly, declaring high and low more frequently than any other player, and at least tying each way three times out of five. His clean white shirt was open at the neck beneath a black linen jacket without a single crease. He was a big man for his height, with broad shoulders tapering to a slim waist, and strong thighs. His hair was dark, with no trace of gray, and his face was very thin, with vertical creases running down from each cheekbone and ending on the same level as his mouth, like old wounds that had healed. His eyes were blue-green, with long, dark lashes. Marianne wouldn’t have called him handsome, exactly, but he had a charisma about him. He smelled good too. He wore the kind of aftershave that made women pause as they passed him, so that it slipped in under their defenses. And he came out ahead, not so far as to draw attention to himself, but sufficiently above the average for the house to breathe a light sigh of relief when he surrendered his chair. Due in no small part to his generosity, Marianne finished her shift that night with $200 in bills tucked into her purse. It almost made up for the drunks and the maulers.

When her shift finished, she decided to walk home in order to stretch her legs and allow for a little time to herself. Marianne was an attractive woman, and had learned to play it up on the casino floor but to tone it down for the streets, so she drew few glances as she headed toward Lameuse Boulevard and Old Biloxi.

The guy came at her from an alleyway beside a boarded-up diner. Even in the brief time that she had to see his face before his left hand closed around her mouth and his right around her throat, she knew him. He’d been thrown out earlier for slipping his hand between her legs, working at her painfully with his fingers, and she hadn’t been able to get away from him, so firm was his grip. Even the dumb-ass security guys had seen how shaken she was, with her mouth pressed so tightly closed that her lips were almost white. She was asked by the pit boss if she wanted to press charges, but she shook her head. That would be the end of her time at the
Biloxi Black Beauty,
and she would have trouble getting work anywhere else too once it came out that she’d asked for the cops to be called and the casino’s name appeared in the police blotter, maybe in the local rags too. No, there would be no charges. When she returned to the tables, the man in the black linen jacket with the soda in front of him said nothing to her, but she was certain that he had witnessed all that had occurred.

Now here was the mauler again, some bruising to his cheek where maybe his mouth had gotten him into a little more trouble than he’d anticipated with casino security, his blond hair matted with sweat, his tan suit wrinkled and torn at the left shoulder. He shifted his grip, pulling her backward into the darkness, whispering in her ear as he did.

“Huh, bitch? Huh, remember me, you fucking bitch?” Over and over. Bitch. Bitch. Bitch.

The alley was L-shaped, an alcove to the right hidden entirely from the street ahead. He spun her around almost gracefully when they reached it and sent her sprawling over a pile of black garbage sacks. Something sharp bit into her thigh. She opened her mouth to scream and he showed her the knife.

“Scream, bitch, and I’ll cut you bad. I’ll cut you so fucking bad. Take them jeans down, now, y’hear?”

He was fumbling at his own trousers as he spoke, trying to release himself from his pants. He moved forward and made a pass at her with the knife, the blade whistling by the tip of her nose.

“You hear me, bitch?” He leaned toward her and she could see the spittle on his chin. “You take them off!”

Now she was crying and she hated herself for crying, even as she worked at the button on her jeans, hating the way it parted from the hole so easily, hating that this thing was going to happen to her at the hands of this man.

Hating, hating, hating.

There was a click, and the guy stopped moving. His eyes moved slowly to his right, his head remaining still, as though he hoped that his eyeballs would continue their passage, rotating through his hair so that he could see the man behind him, the man with a gun now pressed into the back of his head.

The man in the white shirt and the creaseless linen jacket.

“Drop the knife,” he said.

The knife fell to the ground, bouncing once on the tip of its blade before coming to rest in the trash.

“Walk to the wall.”

Her attacker did as he was told. She caught the sharp whiff of ammonia as he passed close to her, and knew that he had wet himself with fear.

And she was pleased.

“Kneel,” said the man with the gun.

The guy didn’t move, so the gunman stepped back and raked the barrel of the gun across the back of his head. Her attacker stumbled forward, then fell to his knees.

“Keep your hands pressed against the wall.”

The man with the gun turned to her.

“You okay?” he asked.

She nodded. She could feel something sour bubbling at the back of her throat. She swallowed it down. He helped her to rise to her feet.

“Go to the end of the alley. Wait for me there.”

She went without question. The would-be rapist remained facing the wall, but she could hear him sobbing. At the end of the alleyway, she bent over against the wall, put her palms on her knees, and leaned down. She sucked great breaths of stale air into her lungs, tasting polluted water and grease. Her whole body was shaking and her legs felt weak. Without the wall to support her, she felt certain that she would have collapsed. Passersby glanced at her but no one expressed any concern. This was a fun town, and people didn’t want their fun spoiled by a sick woman.

Her rescuer—for that was how she already thought of him—followed her a minute or two later. In the interim she heard sounds, like a wet towel slapping against a hard surface. As he walked toward her, he was adjusting the leg of his pants.

“Come on.”

“What did you do to him?”

“Hit him some.”

“We should call the police.”

“Why?” He seemed genuinely curious.

“He may try to do it again.”

“He won’t do it again. You call the cops, you do it only because you need to, because it makes you feel happier. Believe me, he won’t try anything like that again. Now, you want to call them?”

He paused beside her. She thought of the interview she would have to endure, the questions asked at the casino, the face of her boss as he told her that she wouldn’t have to come in Monday, wouldn’t have to come back ever, sorry, you know how it is.

“No,” she said. “Let’s go.”

He walked with her for a block or two, then hailed a cab. He dropped her off at the door of her apartment, but declined her invitation to come up.

“Maybe I’ll see you again?” he said.

She wrote her number on the back of a store receipt and handed it to him.

“Sure, I’d like that. I didn’t get your name?”

“My name is Edward.”

“Thank you, Edward.”

Once she was safely inside, the cab pulled away from the curb. She closed the door, leaned against it, and at last allowed herself to cry.

The guy’s name was Otis Barger. Moloch read it out loud from his driver’s license. Otis was from Anniston, Alabama.

“You’re a long way from home, Otis.”

Barger didn’t answer. He couldn’t answer. His hands and feet were bound with wire taken from the trunk of Moloch’s car, and there was tape over his mouth. One eye was swollen shut, and there was blood on his cheek. His right foot was curled inward at an unnatural angle, broken by the heel of Moloch’s boot to ensure that he didn’t try to crawl away while Moloch took the woman back to her apartment. He was lying on the garbage bags where, only twenty minutes earlier, Marianne had lain as he prepared to rape her.

Moloch drew a photograph from Barger’s wallet. It showed a dark-haired woman—not pretty, not ugly—and a smiling, dark-haired boy.

“Your wife and child?”

Barger nodded.

“You still together?”

Again, Barger nodded.

“She deserves better. I’ve never met her, but that woman would have to be hell’s own whore to deserve you. You think she’ll miss you when you’re gone?”

This time Barger didn’t nod, but his eyes grew wide.

Moloch kicked at the wounded ankle and Barger screamed behind his gag.

“I asked you a question. You think she’ll miss you?”

Barger nodded for the third time. Moloch raised the leg of his pants and drew the pistol from the ankle holster. He looked around, kicking at the garbage until he found a discarded chair cushion. He walked to where Barger lay, then squatted down beside him.

“I don’t believe you,” he said. “What was it you called that lady you tried to rape? Bitch? That was what you called her, wasn’t it?”

He slapped Barger hard across the head.

“
Wasn’t it
?”

Barger nodded for the fourth, and final, time.

“Well,” said Moloch. “She’s my bitch now.”