Sleeping Policemen (10 page)

“Nicky.” A moan, a razor's edge of not-quite pain.

He yanked her arms higher, mashing her cheek into the table, watching her watch the screen, the two men working the girl over. She drove herself back to meet him, gasping. Nick had eyes for nothing but the screen, window into another world, the strange and dangerous territory beyond the curtain. He lifted his other hand and landed a stinging blow across her buttocks, her cry—

“
Harder
!”

—spurring him on again, again, again.

Breath roaring in his lungs, he paused.

She lay before him, that odd, molten light dancing along the contours of her back, the striking shadows of her ribs like the ribs of some rotting galleon at the bottom of a flickering blue-green sea. And now he knew where this was going, what this had been building toward all along, and maybe she knew too, for she didn't say a word as he pulled himself slowly from her, her wrists shackled in one hand, his cock mindlessly and utterly stiff as he nosed it into the cleft between her buttocks, hovering there at the verge.

There.

He glanced up at the screen, the knife flickering, the blood scarlet against that girlish breast. He lowered his gaze to the girl imprisoned beneath him.

To Sue.

Her back heaved with breath, each vertebrae casting its distinct button of shadow in that shifting undersea light, a stairwell leading down and down into the foul rag and bone shop of the heart. He met her eyes, read the fear in them, and something else. Eagerness.

She wanted him to do it.

He could hear her hunger singing in the air around him.

He nudged himself forward, felt her widen, a clenched fist opening to receive him. Slowly, he pushed himself in an inch, two inches, and paused, clutched in a ring of caressing muscle.

She gasped, bucked underneath him.

A curtain twitched aside in his mind, a grinning face turned to meet his own.

“Careful, Nicky, it hurts …”

On the screen, the knife descended, barely teasing the flesh, opening a vermillion seam.

He drew in a long breath, lifted her arms toward her shoulders, and let his weight fall behind the pin lodged in that ring of muscle.

The girl gasped, writhed.

Something eased inside her. The ring of muscle loosened, and now he could drive himself into her easily, warmth building at his groin.

She cried out—pleasure, pain, he wasn't sure—but he did not pause. He drove himself in and in, flesh giving before him, wrenching the girl's arms higher and still higher, her cheek grinding against the table, her eyes like his eyes fixed on that screen, that curtained doorway into another place with its flicker of half-formed glimpses, the girl on the screen and the scarlet blood at her breast and the girl behind the door staggering back and the girl beneath him—

—
Sue, Sue
—

—somehow merging into one girl, her white buttocks shuddering as he plunged in and in and in—

—
careful Nicky it hurts it hurts it
—

—and nothing had ever felt so good. The girl cried out and abruptly the world turned inside out. He stiffened and plunged himself deeper, the pressure at his groin galvanic, leaping out to sheath him in crackling ecstasy, like nothing he had ever experienced or imagined or even dared to dream.

Tuesday, 12:41 to 4:48 AM

They lay silently in Sue's bedroom, not touching, the streetlight breaking over them like water. Nick stared into the darkness, still more than a little drunk, depressed, most of all alone. Sue might as well have been a thousand miles away.

Drained by thirty seconds of mindless spasm, Nick had fallen abruptly back into himself—into dread and self-loathing—there in the living room. There had been blood, not much, but blood still, the stain somehow shocking against Sue's pale thighs. She would not meet his eyes or speak to him as she threw on her clothes. She shut off the television and the light on her way out. He listened to her make her way to the second floor, reminding him of that other time he had waited here while she mounted those stairs, that other abandonment.

Now, in the dark living room, the sound of her voice—

—
it hurts Nicky it hurts it
—

—came back to him, and below that, just barely audible, another voice, wheedling and enticing—the voice of the tape, like a riptide on a sunny Delta afternoon, always threatening to suck you down. Just thinking of it, he felt something uncoil in his loins.

Water ran for a long time upstairs. Afterward, the apartment fell still. Nick sat on the sofa in his boxers and stared into the dark, wondering what to do, whether to follow her upstairs or to slip into the night and find his way home.

But he did not want her to be alone. Not now.

She didn't stir when he came into the bedroom, when he lay himself beside her.

Finally, into the dark, he said, “We have to talk about it.”

Nothing. So he waited, soothed by her presence anyway, the music of her respiration, lulled finally into something that was not quite sleep, a reverie of blessed unawareness.

Sue's voice buoyed him back into his life. The dead guy lolled in his arms. Casey Barrett sobbed inside his head. He felt once again the gut-wrenching excitement of his climax.

“I don't want to talk about anything.”

“Sue, listen to me, please—”

“I don't want to talk about anything, Nick! Not the tape, not that fucking policeman, not—not—”

Her voice broke. After a moment, he stole a hand across the comforter, found her hand, a fist, and pried it open.

He could feel pressure building in his chest. “We
have
to, Sue.”

“Why?
Why
?”

“Because—” His voice quiet. “—I hurt you.”

She said nothing.

“I hurt you and I couldn't—I didn't want to stop. I—I—
hurt
you.”

Nick felt her weight shift beside him, found himself staring into her face, edged platinum by the streetlight.

“Is that what you think?” Her eyes glittered. “Is that what you really think, Nick?”

“I don't know.”

“I
liked
it. I liked what you did to me, when you hit me, when you … I
wanted
you to.”

Nick felt something crumble inside of him. “I liked it, too.” He drew a long breath. “I'm sorry. I didn't mean to hurt you.” And then: “I meant to, but I didn't want to.”

“It frightens me,” she said, and Nick said nothing. It frightened him, too. It terrified him. But rising above the fright, he could hear the voice of the tape, malicious and enticing, a beacon, a siren song.

“What are we going to do?” he said.

“Tuck's right. We have to destroy it. We have to forget any of this ever happened.”

“How can we forget it? Every time I close my eyes I see that girl. I can't get her voice out of my head. If the tape is gone, it's like she never existed.” He paused, and when he spoke again, his voice rang in his ears like a confession. “I keep thinking about that guy Barrett waiting up nights, hoping to hear from her. I keep thinking he could find out who did it to her. A guy with money like that …”

“Is that what you want? The reward?”

Every muscle in his body went rigid, but Sue didn't move away. She lay her hand over his belly, her breath wine-sweet at his throat.

“Is that what you think?”

“I'm just asking.”

They were silent for a long moment.

“What about the guy on the road?” she asked. “It's like he never existed either.”

“What are you saying, Sue?”

“If you can forget about him, you can forget her, too.”

“But I can't. I can't forget him. I had to drag him into the woods. Do you have any idea what that was like?”

Sue was quiet for a moment, a woman in the midst of a minefield. Finally, she said, “Finney was driving.”

“It doesn't matter—”

“I'm not accusing you, okay?”

Her hand slid higher, across his chest to his shoulder, teasing poison from the knotted muscles there.

“I can't get him out of my head either,” he said. “How he might come back to haunt us.”

“The tape could come back to haunt us, too.”

“I know. We should give it up, and not for the money either. But if we do, we have to explain. The accident, the locker, everything. And if we destroy it …”

She finished for him. “We don't have it anymore.”

Nick didn't answer and Sue didn't seem to want to make an issue of it. She continued to knead his shoulder for a few minutes, and then her hand relaxed. Nick was pretty sure she had fallen asleep, and maybe he slept, too, for it seemed to him that he woke a little while later from restless dreams of the Gulf, fathomless water and those leathery shadows darting through the depths, a green beacon pulsing on the far horizon, just beyond his reach.

He lay still until his heart stopped hammering, his head filled with images of the dead guy and the murdered girl and the other girl, Spoon, hungry for something she couldn't even name. She was probably dead too, murdered, or leastways dead inside, lost in some city she had only half imagined, trading ten-dollar blow jobs in the front seats of strangers' cars.

Sue shifted restlessly, whimpering. He glanced down at her, her copper hair spilling across his chest like blood, and he thought about Casey Barrett and small-town Spoon. It could happen to Sue, too. Fate could snatch her away, she was that fragile. Everyone was, and Nick had never really thought about that before. That moment in the kitchen came flooding back to him, the lifeline of words he had thought to fling to Sue, and now, in the dark, with her hair like blood on his chest, it seemed more important than ever at least to make the attempt.

“I love you, Sue,” he whispered.

But she didn't answer.

The thing was, Sue was right about the tape—and about the money, too. In odd moments, Nick found himself just picturing it in his head, the clean smell of it, and the crisp feel it had, and most of all its look. He wondered whose sick-funny idea it had been to slap Franklin's face on the hundred dollar bill. Someone who had been poor once, he figured, because right then Nick felt pretty much like old Ben himself must have felt when he sent his kite bobbing up into that Philadelphia thunderstorm: like a man who had stuck his finger into God's fuse box and gotten a stiff jolt of the stuff that drove the very universe. Like a man who had caught lightning in a bottle.

During the meal Nick had twice excused himself to go to the bathroom, but really he had slipped back into the foyer to check the contents of his jacket pocket—the tape, the roll of cash. Later, when he dug the tape out, he let his fingers slide over the folded bills with just the same tension he might have used to caress Sue's back as she moved over him, impaled by need. And he got the same jolt of excitement, too, the rush of heat in his groin, that sense of unimagined possibilities suddenly made real.

That was why he had gone to the library—not to track down information about Casey Nicole Barrett, but to lay out for himself a constellation of possibilities, a map to the lives the money could make possible. It just so happened the two things intersected. As it turned out, Finney had been right: A. R. Barrett could afford the ransom the flyer promised. He could pay it five times over and still make his annual contribution to the Republican National Committee without breaking a sweat. He came from money, old money like Finney and Sue, a lot of it. It had started with tobacco farms, a whole string of them across the South, but Barrett had been smart enough to see the writing on the wall, and had diversified in the eighties. When Phillip Morris came crashing down at last, A. R. Barrett would still be standing tall.

Until recently, he had been just about as fortunate in his personal life. He had married an Atlanta lawyer named Lydia Coleman in the late seventies, and the couple made frequent appearances in the Atlanta society columns over the next few years. Casey had been born in 1981, and aside from occasional notices in the
Constitution
, the Barretts retired from public life. That changed late in 1995, with a messy divorce—charges of infidelity, a private investigator with compromising photos of Lydia Barrett—and a more public professional profile for Barrett. Casey disappeared six months later. When Nick pulled the headline up on screen and saw the panel of photographs below—the girl in a school uniform, her smile as posed as that of a freshly embalmed corpse—he felt suddenly weightless, like a crestfallen Wile E. Coyote suspended over the abyss, gravity on a ten-second delay:

Local Lobbyist's Daughter Disappears

Atlanta, Nov. 18—According to a police spokesman, the daughter of noted Atlanta lobbyist Arnold Barrett has been missing since mid-November. Sergeant David Zimmerman said the matter first came to police attention on November 13th, when Barrett's lawyer, Daniel Bellman, called to report that Casey Nicole Barrett, 15, might have been kidnapped.

Subsequent investigation revealed that the younger Barrett more likely ran away. Zimmerman said that teachers and friends reported that Casey had not adjusted well to the high-profile divorce of her parents last year. She talked often about wanting to escape and her behavior had been increasingly erratic in recent days.

The article went on to describe ongoing investigations, public and private, concluding with notice of a reward, and a statement from Daniel Bellman. “Both Mr. Barrett and the girl's mother are simply broken hearted,” he said. “Wherever Casey is, whatever kind of trouble she's in, they want her to know they love her. They want her to come home.”

After he finished the article, Nick continued to stare into the screen, Casey's school photo and the file shot of her father—a dark-headed, blandly handsome man in a suit—dissolving into random pixels. He could feel the weight of the dead guy in his arms, and now he wondered how they had crossed paths, Casey and the dead Aryan. What bizarre conjunction of events had led A. R. Barrett's daughter to her doom in that characterless concrete bunker? And why? Had it been kidnapping after all? Had the cops screwed up somehow? He couldn't imagine that, and later, scanning through two or three follow-up articles, he found no further reference to kidnapping, no mention of ransom demands or suspects. A witness had tentatively identified Casey Barrett getting off a bus in Nashville, according to Zimmerman, but after that she had simply dropped off the face of the planet.