Mercy (2 page)

There was a firm knock at the door and she flinched. For a moment she didn’t turn around, but remained, nude, facing the night of greedy lights. It really was too late. She picked up the magnetic card from the foot of the bed as she walked by it on her way to the door. For some reason unclear even to her—she had never done it before—she didn’t open the door, but knelt and slipped the card into the sliver of light as if she were pushing it out into that promised and anxiously anticipated dimension. Then she backed away slowly, listened to the card slide into the slot and click, listened to the double click of the turning door handle, and watched the sliver of light widen into a harsh brightness burning around the silhouette like a blinding white aura. Then the flood narrowed to darkness again, the light returned to a sliver on the floor, and the figure stood somewhere in the dark passage.

She waited with her back to the room again, facing the window, listening to the sounds of a small leather valise yielding up its contents behind her in the dark room. Almost immediately she caught the thick, musky odor of lipstick and oils, followed by the tinny chinking of buckles, the brittle rustling of new tissue paper, the muffled clacking of ebony wood beads, expelled breath, a waft of Je Reviens. She had planned all this, choreographed these smallest details of sounds and smells in their proper sequence. Not only was she trembling because these things accommodated her imagination, but she was delighted that every detail of her design was being followed. By prearrangement, she controlled the events about to happen and she knew they would continue inexorably, no matter how she pleaded for them to stop. But she could not control her trembling. The rain, it seemed, was coming through the glass.

Like a Noh play it took hours, or seemed to, though it was impossible to know. Time quickly had lost its capacity to be measured. And there was talk, an agitated monologue, a hypertensive soliloquy in which she recognized the familiar disquiet of her own restrained arousal. Even though they had talked it through before, every act and scene, every syllable of dialogue, every postured movement of the hand and tongue and pelvis, there were surprises—of intuition and sensation, the mutual, unspoken decision to sustain the prelude of erotic tension.

Eventually she lay on the bottom sheet of the bed, everything else having been stripped away and thrown into a corner, her arms and legs extended, her wrists already secured. She listened to the gabbling, felt her right ankle being secured. Sometimes she understood, sometimes she didn’t, as she struggled against her body’s insistence to hyperventilate, though she knew that it was in the act of her surrendering that she controlled the sequence of the play, and achieved a dimension of experience never before realized. As she felt her left ankle being secured, she took long, deep breaths. Trusting was vital. She remembered: the body was the gateway to the mind. She had never concentrated so hard in her life. When the last buckle was snapped she suddenly felt lighter than air, as if she had been released rather than bound. In that instant she understood that total helplessness, total surrender, was like a black feather, floating, falling into a vast dark emptiness.

The choreography was followed precisely. She cried and writhed and fought the bindings; she begged for it to stop; she pleaded. But it continued, past what she thought she could endure, past the pleasure she thought she would gain from it and into something beyond, as had been promised. She rolled and tossed upon the waves of pleasures she had never imagined, she swooned in the troughs and rode the high rolling curls of sensations she had not dreamed. Sometimes, through it all, to stay in touch with reality she looked to the rain on the window, fixed her eyes on the stippled, fracted, light that formed a complete wall of Brownian motion behind the figure above her. As the tempo increased they approached once again that moment of experiencing each other’s breath, that feather of one’s essence that no one could alter or destroy. And then she was heaved upon a dark tsunami, a long, swelling high from which she looked down into real fear. This was it. She was too high, too far, reality was frighteningly small and still receding. She pleaded for it to stop, but it didn’t. It was worse, much worse, and for a moment she panicked, almost slid into incoherence before she remembered the safe word. “Mercy,” she gasped, and waited to be saved. “Mercy!”

But everything disintegrated in a flare of mandarin red.

The first blow broke her jaw.

And she felt herself being bitten and chewed.

She was stupefied. “Mercy.”

The second blow snapped the cartilage of her nose.

She listened in horror to the gibbering that was faster than comprehension, faster than lips could form words, it seemed, and suddenly she was called by a name she had never heard and was accused of things she had never done.

“Mercy.”

Another blow, and the incredible, dumbfounding sensation of being bitten, the teeth everywhere on her, no place sacred.

She gulped desperately at the blood that poured into her throat from the back of her nose and tried to see through eyes bleary with shock. This was wrong, all wrong. She heard the clicking sound of a buckle and then something slithered under the back of her neck and she felt the naked knees on either side of her chest. The belt was thick, like a high collar, and as it slowly tightened her ears filled with a rushing roar and her heart hammered, rocking her as if it would explode. Then she went deaf and her heart seemed less insistent. She began to drift. She had almost left her body, almost achieved that blessed separation, when she was cruelly brought back through the roar and the hammering and the pain and the unimaginable sorrow of her ordeal.

Then the belt was tightened again.

Time had no meaning apart from her coming and going through these sounds and sensations that filled the verge of consciousness. It all had gone wrong, all of it, this and everything, even the years rolling back over memory. She had granted someone the authority to toy with her life, neither allowing it nor denying it, perversely bringing her back again and again, gabbling faster than comprehension, faster than lips could form words, calling her by a name she had never heard, accusing her of things she had never done.

Only the rain was virtuous, and it was through the rain that she drifted for the last time.

FIRST DAY

1

Monday, May 29

D
etective Carmen Palma stood in the thin shade of a honey locust on a little shag of lawn near the front steps of the Houston Police Department’s administration building. She wore tortoiseshell sunglasses to cut the glare from the hundreds of windshields and thousands of chrome strips on the cars in the parking lots across the street. To her left, within rock-throwing distance of the police station, a backwater loop of Buffalo Bayou wound under the maze of ramps and overpasses of the Gulf Freeway, and the shadow side of the downtown skyscrapers rose against the ten o’clock sun like a massive glass escarpment stretching south beyond the expressways. Ragged ranks of fat, moisture-laden Gulf clouds drifted to the northwest, but within a few hours they would give way to a hot, ink-blue sky. It was the last week in May, and the temperature had already hit the low nineties seven days out of the last fourteen. An unusually wet and mild winter had given Houston’s lush, semitropical landscape a head start on summer, and the city looked and felt like a greenhouse with the humidity, like the temperature, settled into the torturous nineties.

She had been in the crime lab in the next building checking the results of an ejector marks comparison test run on a single cartridge found at the scene of a contract killing. She had been hoping they would match the ejector marks on similar cartridges fired from an AMT .45 automatic long slide which she already had tied to another hit. They hadn’t.

She was just learning this disappointing news when Birley had called from their office across the drive in the homicide division to say they had to make a scene in west Houston. He was on his way to the motor pool to check out a car and would pick her up in front of the administration building as soon as he could get around there. Palma thanked the firearms examiner, grabbed her Styrofoam cup of coffee, slipped the strap of her purse over her right shoulder, and returned down the stark hallways to the front of the building. Outside, the swampy, tepid air and the gritty traffic pounding by on the nearby expressway turned her stomach against the coffee. She tossed it on the asphalt and carried the empty cup in her left hand, absently punching holes in the rim with her thumbnail as she thought about the circumstances of the second hit and made her way around the corner of the administration building.

At five-ten Carmen Palma was taller than average for a Hispanic woman. High-hipped, and a little more buxom than she wanted to be, she worked out regularly to keep her stomach and hips trim, and, she always hoped, to take a little off her bust. It never happened. Her black hair was kept at shoulder length and blunt-cut, long enough to dress up when she wasn’t playing cop yet short enough to be out of her way when she clasped it behind her neck at crime scenes. She never wore lipstick, or much makeup of any kind, a privilege that nature accorded certain types of olive-skinned women whose pigmentation was a lively variety of tint and shade. Her eyebrows were jet and needed no grooming, not even periodic plucking to keep them shaped. She paid cursory attention to liner around her eyes which, as her mother had demonstrated when she was a child by holding a hand-sized chip of wood beside her face in a speckled mirror, were the same color as the sienna heartwood of mesquite.

The morning had started off wrong, even before the bad news from the crime lab, from the moment she had walked into her kitchen half asleep and ripped the previous day’s date off the calendar. She had stood there staring at the new number and the note scrawled beneath it, surprised, offended, resentful, angry with herself. Then she had turned away and started making coffee. She made it too strong. She ruined a pair of panty hose while she was dressing upstairs, and then she dropped and lost the tiny back off an earring. Later, in the kitchen again, she sipped the strong coffee and stared out the window to the bricked courtyard and resolved once more to take it in her stride, as she did most things, having learned from her father that a long stride would get you what you wanted more quickly than a short temper. Still, her thoughts kept coming back to it, even crowding in on the negative results of the ejector comparisons which had just destroyed her last hope for making a guy who had had such a string of good luck that he could have qualified as an actuarial wonder.

By the time Birley pulled up to the curb, Palma had begun to perspire. After eight years as a detective, four of those in homicide, she had learned her lessons about the practical limits of stylish clothes and police work. In the first place the salary she pulled down wouldn’t support the kinds of wardrobes she saw on the leggy career women uptown, and even if it did, the circumstances of the job simply made them impractical. Even the most serviceable and businesslike designer clothes just didn’t cut it in the environment where Palma encountered most of her clients.

But it wasn’t as if she hadn’t tried. During her first year in homicide she had ruined half a dozen of her nicer dresses because she had been determined to dress a little more attractively than was practical, at least occasionally, and had worn them on days when she just “felt” she wouldn’t catch a dirty scene. She had been wrong. The final delusion that this might be possible had passed on a sweltering August afternoon in the far East End when she and Jack Mane, her partner at the time, had been called out to investigate the suspicious disappearance of a neighborhood prostitute. On that afternoon Mane had decided to be uncharacteristically egalitarian and “let” her crawl under the floor of a deteriorating pier and beam house to confirm their suspicions about the source of a distinctly putrescent odor. She kissed the price of the dress goodbye and went in. One lady encountering the bad end of another, neither of them dressed right for the occasion.

The next day had been her day off and she spent most of it in a fabric shop. Poring over the pattern catalogs, she selected a dozen or more classic styles of shirtwaist dresses and skirts and blouses. Then she turned to the fabrics. She methodically studied scores of fabrics before settling on Egyptian cotton as being both utilitarian and stylishly adaptable. She bought partial bolts in every conceivable shade and texture, and took it all to a seamstress in the barrio where her mother still lived. Now she had a closetful of dresses that neither sacrificed her femininity nor caused her too much grief if she ruined them at a scene.

Birley had the air conditioner cranked up on high as Palma got in the passenger side and slid her purse off her shoulder.

“So what did Chuck have to say?” he asked, pulling out of the drive and heading for the freeway. He had already shed his suit coat, which was thrown over the back of the seat, and had loosened his tie.

“It’s no good,” she said. “Apparently it’d been caught under the rear tire of the guy’s car. The asphalt screwed it up. No match.”

“You’ve gotta be joking. Nothing?”

Palma shook her head. She liked working with Birley, though a lot of younger detectives might have chafed at the older man’s professional lassitude.

“What’s happened?” Palma asked, closing the overloaded ashtray under the dash so the air conditioner wouldn’t whip the ashes. “I thought Cushing and Leeland were first out.”

“They are. But they caught something Cush wants us to look at. Said he thought we’d want to see it.”

Palma looked at him. “That’s it?”

Birley grinned. “It’ll be interesting, whatever it is. Cush thinks this is a very nifty thing, getting us out there.”

“Out where?”

“A good address. Just south of the Villages, off Voss.”

Palma took a foil packet from her purse, tore it open and took out a small disposable towelette, and proceeded to wipe the ash-dusted dash. When she had first started riding with Birley he had just quit smoking and hated riding in a car that had been used by a smoker on the previous shift. He would bitch and grumble and empty the ashtrays and wipe the dash with wet paper towels he would bring from the men’s room to the garage just in case. For a while he compulsively cleaned every car they rode in. Gradually, after he got his nicotine dependency under control, he stopped the sanitation exercise and eventually even quit worrying about dumping the ashtrays. Palma could let it slide too, everything but the dash.