Sleeping Policemen (20 page)

“We won't say a word.” Nick hesitated. “I promise.”

“You
promise
?” Gutman threw back his head in delight. Laughter chased tremors of joy through his pendulous sags of flesh. “Mr. Laymon, please! You've seen too many movies. Surely you must realize, one hardly attains a position of such eminence by accepting …
promises
.”

Gutman paused for a long moment, musing. Then he leaned forward. “But let us negotiate in good faith. I am a reasonable man. Let me propose an alternative plan: Lawrence here—” He nodded at Evans. “Lawrence here will hold you down while I remove your fingers.” He lifted the cigar cutter, snapped closed its blade, and smiled. The wicked little
snick
it made seemed to linger in the silent room. “Lawrence likes to wager on these things. Lawrence, how many fingers do you suppose Mr. Laymon would surrender before he revealed the tape's location?”

“One.”

“Oh, I give Mr. Laymon more credit than that. I would guess three fingers. A hundred dollars, Lawrence?”

“Two hundred.”

“Even better. If you will bring me the patient, we shall commence surgery.”

Evans started around the desk. Sue swallowed audibly.

“Wait—”

“You have a counter proposal, Mr. Laymon?”

Nick licked his lips. “The tape is in a safe deposit box. You need us to get it.”

“I see.” Gutman leaned back in his chair and laced those hands over the tub of his belly. “You have the key with you, I would imagine?”

“It's at Finney's apartment. In Ransom.”

“Of course. What do you think, Lawrence?”

“He's lying.”

“No doubt, but how interesting he is! Alas, Mr. Laymon, we did not meet as friends. We might have done great things together, but now …” He shrugged.

“Forget it, Nick,” Finney said, his voice empty of everything, an echo from a dry cistern or an empty well. “You'll never convince them. They'll find out when the Senator opens that box.”

Nick turned to stare at him. His heart lurched into a sharper rhythm—

—
what the hell is he doing?
—

—as Finney spoke again.

“It's over,” Finney said. And now something had come into his tone: hatred, or despair. “They're going to kill us, but the tape—it's going to kill
them
, the Senator will see to that. My only regret is that we won't be around to see it happen.”

Finney cut his eyes toward Nick—a flicker of movement so subtle that Nick almost missed it. Nick felt a circuit close between them, an almost electric jolt, and an image from the night he had met Finney sprang suddenly into his mind: the Torkelsons' kitchen as Finney regaled the party with the Lord's Prayer, the Latin phrases flowing from his tongue like water. Nick had felt an instant of that same effortless unity in that reeling drunken moment, Finney's gray eyes seeking his own across the crowded room, catching at him with knowing little hooks, conscripting him in an unspoken conspiracy of superiority.
You and I are two of a kind
, those eyes seemed to say.
You know in your bones what they will never understand: That I am mocking them
.

Nick felt bottomless relief well up within him, felt himself surrender control of the situation as Finney slipped back into himself, the Senator's son in his natural element, the role he had been raised to play. Nick had baited the hook. Now Finney would make sure it set. If they could get away, out of this industrial park, they might have a chance. If they could take Evans …

If, he thought.
If
.

Nick took Sue's hand, squeezed.

Gutman said, “I suspect we are being hustled, Lawrence. And yet what are we to do? I suppose we shall have to check their story.”

Nick's heart leaped inside his breast.

Then Vergil Gutman grinned. “But first,” he said. “Bring me the girl.”

Lawrence Evans was a man made out of masks, a puppet hammered together from piano wire and bone.

Grinning like a loathsome Geppetto, Gutman said, “Bring me the girl,” and Evans started herky-jerky around the desk like a terrible marionette, his masks—psycho mask and normal mask—shucking away like dead leaves to reveal the starving emptiness beneath. In a moment of rending terror, Nick saw what Gutman must have recognized long ago: that Evans was hunger, only hunger, and that such hunger could be turned to a stronger man's will, if only he was careful to keep it fed.

Sue must have seen it too.

Whimpering, she shrank into the protection of Nick's arms. The glass slipped from her hand. Water spilled across Nick's crotch in a chill wave. The glass thumped against the carpet, rolling harmlessly under the loveseat.

Almost gently, Evans took her from Nick, his spadelike hands hooked beneath her arms. She went without protest, dead weight, her shoes dragging.

Gutman stood to meet them, taller than Nick would have imagined. “On the desk,” he said, and Evans heaved her atop the polished mahogany. Her blouse had come untucked. It rode up, revealing a triangle of flat stomach, a hint of lacy panties beneath her jeans; some fastidious fragment of Nick wanted to reach out, straighten her, if only he could move.

But he could not. The moment weighed upon him like the Gulf, fathoms deep from sunlight.

Gutman leaned over and brushed a wisp of hair from the china curl of her ear.

Sue screamed. She wrenched herself free and scrambled across the slick desktop. Her foot shot out, spilling the humidor at Finney's feet. Her fingers closed white-knuckled over the edge of the desk, so close that Nick could have touched them. Then Evans had her again, his left arm around her neck as he dragged her across the desk, upsetting the telephone, scattering loose papers into the air like dainty kites. “Be still, little filly,” he whispered, gentle as a lover.

And then his right hand came glittering into view, a length of burnished steel licking like a serpent's tongue from a bone-handled switchblade.

Nick gasped like a man gut-punched as the knife touched off a glimpse from the past, the blade aglitter at Casey Barrett's narrow throat. His gaze shifted in horror from the knife to Sue's terrified eyes, and then to the big man who held her captive. And it seemed to him that Evans wore still another mask.

A bondage mask.

“Oh, Nicky,” Finney whispered.

Sue swallowed, her eyes shiny and panicked, like the deer's eyes in that clearing all those years ago. Nick felt the need tremulous in his bones before he came to a conscious decision to move, to try and save her, and maybe Evans saw it too.

He twisted the knife at Sue's neck. The blade glimmered in that strange, swimming light; the blood that boiled from the vein looked almost black against her opalescent flesh. “You even think about movin, college boy,” he said, “I'll gut her like a fish.”

And Nick subsided.

Gutman leaned down and racked the phone, a voice Nick had not known he had been hearing—

—
if you would like to make a call
—

—abruptly silenced.

“Now you wanna do just as the Pachyderm says, little filly,” Evans hissed, and Gutman loured over her, his flesh oiled looking and gray in the wash of television light, not seeming to mind the nickname a bit.

Seeming to revel in it.

“Hold out your hand,” he whispered, a man speaking to a panicked woodland creature, a wounded fawn, its eyes nervous with terror. “Your right hand.”

Sue extended her arm, her fingers black against the flickering screens. Gutman wrapped the Hyde hand around her wrist. The Jekyll hand slid the cigar trimmer neatly over her trembling pinky.

Sue gasped. “No, please. I'll do anything, anything you want. I'll do anything you want for you, please—”

“Shhhh.” With one hand, Evans smoothed hair from her perspiring forehead. “Be still, Missy.”

Gutman fixed Nick in his gaze. “I want that tape. If you fail to produce it within three hours, I will start taking the girl's fingers. One finger for every hour you are overdue. Do we have an understanding?”

Nick nodded, unable to tear his eyes from Sue, her face like a pale window into terror, her eyes entreating him.

“Please, Nicky,” she gasped. “Promise me.”

He lifted a hand to his heart, nodded solemnly.

“Mr. Durant?”

“We'll be on time, Mr. Gutman.”

Gutman nodded. “Promptness is a virtue. Lest you fail to take me seriously let me provide you a token of my intentions.”

His lips pressed into a thin line, and the cigar cutter snapped shut. Nick saw the pinky shear away and tumble to the desk, an ooze of black blood where the finger used to be.

Sue bucked in the state trooper's arms. She screamed and screamed.

Nick Laymon closed his eyes.

Tuesday, 11:13 to 11:55 AM

For Nick, the ride back to Ransom was like a nightmarish hallucination, each passing second—

—
time is everything
—

—
everything is time
—

—demarcated in his mind by the precise little
snick
of the clock inside his head, its furious second hand sweeping him inexorably into the future.

His brain hummed with a thin, high whine, the terrified keening that had risen from Sue's heaving breast as she gazed down in shock at her severed pinky, twitching on Gutman's blotter. She had twisted free of Evans's grasp, curling fetal on the desk, clutching the wounded hand against her breasts. Irregular sobs shuddered through her, strange, little hitches of sound just like the ones Casey Barrett had made after her bondage-masked assailant—

—
Evans, my God, it's Evans
—

—started to cut her.

Nick had tried to move, but everything inside him seemed frozen. Sue wailed and Nick stared at her in horror, every joint in his body locked, every sinew uselessly constricted. Then Finney pushed past him and gathered Sue into his arms. That unfroze him, that image—

—
Finney's arched back, Sue's wide-flung legs
—

—pouring over him in a molten flood, dissolving the icy terror that bound him.

He moved then, thrusting Finney aside and dragging Sue into his arms. She resisted—Nick felt her stiffen, felt her turning toward Finney like a flower following the sun—then she collapsed against him, sobs pouring through her in wracking seizures. “Hey,” he said, “hey,” but there were no words. How could he comfort her?

His fingers moved through her hair, calming her; when her breathing eased a little, he tilted her chin back so he could look into her face. But she did not know him. Her face was vacant, empty, her eyes staring holes like the eyes of the bear cub at the Smokin Mountain, hollow pits opening into the black, cold reaches between the stars.

“Come back to me sweetie,” he whispered. He caught a hint of his mother's voice in the phrase, her sweet bayou cadence echoing from some half-forgotten past.

But Sue responded. The emptiness filled up a little. Her eyes steadied on his own, took hold. “Hurry, Nicky,” she whispered.

“Time's a wastin,” Evans said, wearing his good ole boy mask once again, that hunger sated. For now, anyway.

Nick stood, and that's when he had heard it for the first time, the perfect little
click
as another second crashed past, disappearing into the void of time. That flame-bright second hand swept through his mind, scattering thought piecemeal before it.

Remembering that moment, Nick moaned. He glanced at Finney, white-faced, his gray eyes expressionless. He saw Finney reach Sue first, saw Sue falling into his embrace, and his empty stomach twisted inside him.

Click
!

“Hey.” Nick leaned forward, curled his fingers through the cage. “Hey!”

Evans said nothing.

A narrow street unwound beyond the windshield, the weary neighborhood bordering the industrial park somehow familiar to Nick as it slipped past the windows of the cruiser: small frame houses sagging with exhaustion, white paint eroded to the leathery gray of an elephant's flesh. The detritus of the season filled the cramped plots of yellow grass and December mud: plastic magi and shepherds, expectation long faded from their weathered features, arranged in prayerful crescents around empty mangers; here and there, a hobgoblin Santa Claus peeped between plastic sheep or sat merrily beside the Blessed Mother herself; and always, above almost every house, shone the star, feeble-looking, faded in the sunlight. Poverty was everywhere the same: welfare checks and food stamps, starved women desperate for children who would metamorphose before their eyes into hungry mouths to feed. Welcome home, a voice mocked Nick. Welcome to Glory, Louisiana, land of a thousand cancelled dreams.

Nick shook the cage like a deranged man.

“Hey,
motherfucker, I'm talking to you! You deaf or something
?”

Evans braked for a stop sign. The cruiser idled like a sleeping animal, a bear, a lion. Evans turned around and grinned, a fresh toothpick wedged like a bone between the yellow shards of his teeth. Nick could see his own distorted reflection staring doubled back at him from the mirrored shades: two caged men, their eyes like windows upon the abyss in the agonized blurs of their faces.

“You want to calm down, college boy. I'm an officer of the law, sworn to serve and protect. I just can't go flyin through the streets. Kids could be playin here. So calm down.”

Nick pressed his face so close to the cage that he could feel the metal joints tattooing his flesh. He could smell Evans's breath, faintly scented with peppermint; he realized that the ubiquitous toothpicks were flavored. The maniac cop worried about halitosis. Nick's guts cramped at the thought. “
Please
—”

Evans touched the gas, inching into the intersection. Mocking him.

Nick shook the cage. “Listen here, you son of a—”

A hand closed over his mouth. Finney dragged him away, cradled him against his chest. Nick could feel the weave of the other boy's sweater, thick wales soft against his cheek. Hot shameful sobs ripped through him.