Empire of Lies (11 page)

For once, she couldn't think of anything to say. No childish taunts, no naïve threats, no ignorant arguments. The whole teen arsenal was shot. Her pale face trembled; her eyes pleaded and grew damp.

"Now sit down, Serena," I said. "I'm not going to tell you again."

She sank slowly, resentfully, back into her chair. I stood above her, looking down at the top of her head. I could see her white scalp through the part in her dark hair. It made her seem very vulnerable somehow. I felt for her.

"Now who got killed?" I asked.

She looked up suddenly, shocked and terrified.

"Last night," I said. "You said you didn't know they would kill him. Who were you talking about?"

She lied in answer without any hope that I'd believe her. She let her head sink again, her gaze on the table. She didn't even bother to meet my eyes. "I didn't say ... I don't remember saying anything like that."

I opened her phone. I laid it down open on the table in front of her, right under her nose. I pressed the numbers. As I pressed
them, they showed up on the readout screen, large and bright. 9.1.1. I held my finger over the
CALL
button.

"Let me explain how this works," I said. "I'm the grown-up. You're the child. When I tell you to do something, you do it. All right? Now let's give it a try. Answer my question, Serena. Who got killed?"

She didn't answer. I heard her swallow.

I pressed the
CALL
button.

Her two hands fluttered out together. They seized the phone and snapped it shut. Her head sunk down, she clutched the phone close to her belly as if she were afraid I'd snatch it away again.

"If you call the police, they'll know," she said softly. "They'll know it was me."

"Who'll know?"

"The people. The people who ... did it. They have guys who listen. To the radios. They can get into the computers, too. They'll know if the police find out. They'll know it was me who told them. There's no one else it could be."

She lifted her face to me then, her little-girl face, helpless and sick and pleading. I looked down at her and my heart just sank—it felt like a stone inside me dropping into a well of fathomless darkness.

I could see it now. I couldn't see it last night, but now in the morning light it was obvious. I could see the resemblance between us. I was certain she was mine.

"If you call the police," she said very quietly, "these people—they'll know. They'll know and they'll kill me, too."

Then, crying, she told me her story.

It happened about a month ago. Serena was still living at home then. She was out on the town one night, the way she was almost every night, doing the clubs just as she was last night when I found her. She was wild and muddy-minded on Ecstasy and booze—same as last night. And same as last night, she ended up dancing in The Den with the fake flames throwing her shadow up among the other dancing shadows on the fake-rock walls.

She was out on the dance floor with a couple of girlfriends. Soon a guy broke in on them and separated her from the pack. She and the boy convulsed in unison to the Morse-code music and the stampede beat. Their hands waved in the air above their heads; their hips pulsed toward each other across an ever-smaller gap of darkness stroked by whirling colored lights. After a while, the music changed. It got sparkly and slow. Serena ended up hanging off the boy's neck like a pendant, her face against his chest. It was cozy dancing that way. She liked how he smelled. She decided she would spend the night with him.

She never found out his name. He told it to her, but she couldn't hear it over the music. He was a white guy, though; she remembered that. Most of the guys she hung out with were some shade of brown or yellow, some mix of bloodlines. But this guy was as white as she was—which was so white, it sometimes seemed to her a kind of racial nakedness. Sometimes she was vaguely embarrassed by her own whiteness. And she looked down on most of
the white boys she met. But tonight, for some reason, the white of the boy against her whiteness struck her as exotic and attractive. She liked it.

The boy was unusual in other ways, too. Tall and narrowly built, he was disheveled and soft. He wasn't gym-rat ripped like a lot of guys she knew with their heroic pecs and washboard abs. He wasn't all skin and bones, either, like some guys who did more meth than food. There was soft extra flesh on him, all of it pale. She could imagine him in his college dorm room drinking non-diet Coke and eating baloney on buttered white bread while he studied. The image made her smile against him as they danced.

What else did she remember about him? He had short blond hair; slow-blinking hazel eyes behind wireless glasses. His shirt didn't hang loose in the going guy fashion, though half the tail had worked free from where he'd tucked it into his khaki slacks. Up top, his shirt was unbuttoned to show a wedge of chest, white and shiny with sweat and as hairless, Serena said, as an Asian guy's. Oh, yeah—and he was wearing something around his neck. She felt it when she put her cheek against him. She reached into his open shirt and took the thing out and looked it over in a drunken, flirtatious way. She might even have asked him what it was, but she couldn't remember what he told her. It looked to her like some kind of nail or a little spike or something hanging on a leather lanyard. It was weird, she said; sort of gothic, sort of violent like a gang symbol or a cult sign or something. (Listening to her, I was pretty sure I knew what it was. I was pretty sure it was one of those "passion nails" some Christians took to wearing after that movie,
The Passion of the Christ,
came out.)

Anyway, Serena and the boy left The Den together. It was around one or two a.m., she thought; she wasn't sure. She was wired from the Ecstasy, but the booze made everything go out
of focus. The boy was drunk, too, and they were both staggering along the sidewalk, his arm around her shoulders.

As they went, a big car pulled up on the cobbled street. It was an old green Cadillac. There were some boys inside. Their arms snaked out of the open windows and their hands slapped the flanks of the car as they shouted and whistled to get her attention. She looked and recognized the boy behind the wheel: Jamal. She hooked up with Jamal sometimes. The other boys were part of his posse. She didn't know any of their last names. They were just guys she knew, guys who hung around with Jamal.

They laughed and banged on the side of the car and invited Serena and her date to get in. They said a friend of theirs was throwing a party at his house upstate. It wasn't just a house, it was a mansion. Their friend was crazy rich, they said. They said there'd be all the drugs in creation there, plus celebrities and caviar and champagne and all that other rich-guy shit. It sounded good to Serena and her drunken white boy, so they crowded into the car with the others.

They drove out of the city on the western parkways. They drove a long, winding way. It was crowded in the car. It was stuffy. There were a lot of guys all scrunched in together—six guys total—and the car was filled with the dense musk of them. After a while, crushed between her white boy and some fidgety, gassed-up brown guy, Serena began to fade. She leaned against her white boy's shoulder and closed her eyes. She felt the rhythmic bumping of the car. The deep, laughing male voices all around her grew distant and intermittent. She remembered only certain moments after that, certain words that broke through to her. For instance, at one point, she remembered one boy saying, "twenty-two, twenty-two, twenty-two," three times like that, urgently. Right afterward, she felt the speed and rhythm of the car changing. She remembered
someone else saying, "The Great Swamp—grea-a-a-at!" dragging out the word until they all started laughing.

She woke up stretched out on the backseat. She was alone in the car. She thought she'd been awakened by the Caddy stopping, but she didn't know how long ago it had stopped.

Slowly, working her dry mouth—rubbing her eyes in the crook of one arm—rubbing her whole face with her two hands—she sat up. With a groan and a sniffle, she looked out the window, blinking heavily.

Where the fuck was she? It looked as if the car was parked on a dirt road in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of endless night. Was it the middle of a swamp, maybe? Or did she just think that because she remembered someone saying the word
swamp?
No. No: She could see a little now. There were trees on every side of her, branchless trunks of trees standing like guardian phantoms at every window. And there was water, too—she could see water glinting in the light of a quarter moon. She could make out tall, weirdly shaped reeds and thick, tangled grasses. And she could hear frogs, about a million frogs all around her. Some of the frogs were incredibly loud. In fact, at first, because she was still half asleep, she thought maybe it was the boys. Maybe the boys had gotten into one of those boy things, like a belching contest or something, and maybe the competition had driven them to the level of Belching Gods. Then, as her mind got clearer, she realized, oh, wait, she'd heard that sound before. Her mother had once dragged her on some overnight to the country at some house one of her boyfriends had and she couldn't sleep all night because of that noise, that same noise, and in the morning her mother's boyfriend told her: That was frogs.

She pressed her forehead to the window, trying to get a better view, trying to see where the guys had gotten to. She looked out past the tall, eerie guardian trees and over the glint of the quarter
moon on the water and the reeds and the high grasses. But where were the boys? She couldn't see them anywhere. She couldn't see anybody or any sign of a house or anything like that. She started to get scared. It wasn't that she thought the guys would just abandon her forever, or anything. She knew they wouldn't do that because eventually they'd have to come back for the car. But what if they'd tried to wake her up and they couldn't? Or what if they saw she was fast asleep and figured, fuck her, they'd just leave her there? They might've parked out here, somewhere near the mansion, and gone on to their rich friend's party without her. And now what if she couldn't find the place? She didn't see any lights anywhere. What if she couldn't find the place, and the party went on all night, and they didn't come back for her until morning or even afternoon? What was she supposed to do until then? Wander around in this swamp looking for them? There could be alligators out there. Or snakes. Or some crazy guy who lived in the forest and took women back to his cabin and tortured them to death. And she couldn't just stay locked up in the car either. She'd have to get out and pee eventually. In fact, she needed to pee already. Where the hell were they? What would she do if those assholes had left her to stay out in this swamp all night alone?

She began to feel the first flutterings of panic—and she really did need to pee, too. So she pushed the door of the car open. The Caddy's toplight came on. That calmed her down a little. It cut through the dark, gave her a view of a couple of feet's worth of dirt road just by the tire. No snakes there that she could see, although she knew there could be one under the car, just coiled there, waiting, licking its fangs with its forked tongue, drooling for the first sight of her heel.

Gingerly, she stepped out. She edged quickly away from the car and whatever snake might be hiding under it. Not too far, though. She kept within arm's length of the open door. She made
sure she could stretch her hand out and brush the side of the door with her fingertips. She wanted the door open for the light, but she was shy about peeing in the light in case the boys came back. But she was even more shy about the darkness where the snakes might be, not to mention the horrible frogs which were even louder now that she was outside, so loud she thought the slimy things must be huge. She couldn't stand the idea of one of those huge slimy things leaping onto her or walking across her foot while she was peeing. Somehow, though, she managed to find a clean, dry slice of shadow between the car and the night. She rearranged her clothes and squatted down and relieved herself.

While she was at it, she kept watch on the darkness with darting eyes. It was warm and still here. The air was unpleasantly thick and damp. Her glance leapt from one moonlit tree-specter to another, then lifted at a sudden noise to scan the branches above. The branches silhouetted against the purple sky looked like grasping hands poised over her. In fact, the whole scene seemed to her so much like something in a horror movie that she became more certain with every moment that a killer with a butcher knife was sneaking up behind her as she squatted there helpless. Her panic started growing. It felt like a big bird inside her—an eagle, maybe—opening and closing its wings, getting ready to take off. She made a little whimpering noise and bit her lip. She felt like crying.

But just then, just as she finished her pee, she caught a glimpse of light up ahead. She felt a burst of hope.

She straightened, pulling up her underpants quickly, smoothing down her party dress. She peered hard into the horror-show tangle of the forest, thinking
please-please-please,
trying to catch sight of that light again. She even pushed the car door back. She didn't shut it because she wanted to be able to jump inside if anything attacked her, but she pushed it toward the car until the light in the Caddy went out so she could see better into the darkness.

There it was again—that light. She got a longer look at it this time. It was the beam of a flashlight. It traced an erratic arc up out of the earth, then over some branches, then across a stretch of dirt road until, for a moment, it was a bright disc shining right at her from—she didn't know—not far, maybe twenty yards away.

Serena lifted her hand and almost shouted out. But quickly, she thought,
Oh, that's real bright, Serena,
because what if this was, in fact, the guy with the butcher knife who tortured women in his cabin? What if, in fact, just like in the horror movies, he'd already killed the boys one by one as they tried to scramble over the ground and get away from him? She knew it probably wasn't really the horror-movie guy—she wasn't stupid—she was just afraid it
might
be him or something else bad. Anyway, why would the regular guys—her guys—be wandering around this swamp with a flashlight? That didn't make any sense either.