The Fear Artist (42 page)

Treasure comes slowly into the room dragging one of the spindly chairs that had been drawn up to the dining-room table, and Murphy points to her to bring it to him.

“No,” he says, “what
you
need is a Nazi army, all in a uniform that says ‘bad guy’ from half a mile away, with blood on their teeth and dueling scars. Waste
those
people, you’d sit in front of your TV and applaud. Wave your flag and get all teary-eyed. But women? Children? Some twelve-year-old Muhammad with a suicide vest in his closet?
Ohhhhh, nooooooooo, Mr. Bill
,” he says in a falsetto. “The weepy wailers come out in the papers and on TV, and when the weepy wailers come out, the pussy patrol gets the squits, and you know what happens then?”

Ming Li says, “Pussy patrol is a nice phrase.” She sounds calm, but her eyes haven’t left Murphy’s.

“What happens then,” Murphy says, and his face is suddenly scarlet, “what happens then is that we
lose the fucking war
.” He’s spitting at them as he talks. With his free hand, he snatches the chair from Treasure, who leaps backward and stands at an
unconscious approximation of attention, with her feet together and her arms straight down, tight at her sides. Murphy turns the chair around and sets it in front of himself, leaning on its back. “Because here’s the chain of command,” he says, “here’s how it works. A bunch of guys, and these days maybe a woman, in two-thousand-dollar suits and a uniform or two, sit around a polished table in some air-conditioned room so they won’t have to get too warm or too cold and say things like ‘measured response’ and ‘surges’ and ‘tactical support’ and ‘appropriate force,’ and that’s at one end of the chain, okay?” He holds his hands up, about two feet apart, the revolver pointed at the ceiling, and he moves them, still separated by a couple of feet, left to right in jerky increments, as if measuring something. “And at the
other
end of the chain is some poor asshole on his back in the dirt, swelling up in the sun, with his intestines tied around his neck. So, you know, all well and good,
that
guy’s not going to cut off another head, and his friends will probably think twice about it, too, but then somebody takes a picture, and it gets into the papers, and the weepy wailers start up, and those people who were sitting around that table and sending down the orders in their nice, polite language turn into the pussy patrol, waving their hands and saying, ‘Not us, no, no, not us, we never called for such a thing, we would never condone the indiscriminate use of lethal force against a civilian population.’ And right then and there, they
lose the war
, no matter how many Americans have been shot to death and blown up trying to win it, and lost their arms and legs and dicks—do you know that castration from improvised explosive devices is one of the most common injuries in Iraq?—because these people in their suits and their fucking air-conditioning still haven’t figured out that there’s no such thing as civilians anymore.”

“Let us walk out of here,” Rafferty says. His mouth is so dry he can hear his lips sliding over his teeth, and his voice sounds thin in his ears. “You’ve got your money. You know how to disappear. You’ve done it before.”

“Not that easy,” Murphy says. “Not anywhere near that easy. I’m going to disappear, but you, you’re a loose end.” He sits in the chair, the gun loosely pointed at them. “Treasure.”

Treasure doesn’t move.

“Treasure,” Murphy says again.

The child begins to sway back and forth, her head still down. She leans so far forward that Rafferty steps toward her to break her fall, but Murphy raises the gun so it’s aimed at Rafferty’s chest. Treasure slowly lifts her head until she’s looking at her father.

“You two,” Murphy says. “Pull up your shirts.”

Rafferty does, followed by Ming Lee. Murphy’s eyes drop to the gun at Rafferty’s waist and then go to Ming Li, and he says, “Girl. Turn around.” When her back is to him and the gun is visible at the small of her back, Murphy says, “Stop turning.”

He leans back in the chair, and it creaks. “Both of you. Hands on your head, fingers interlaced, and don’t neither of you move. Treasure. You get those guns.”

“ ‘Don’t neither of you,’ ” Ming Li says, and Rafferty hears her swallow. “I learned English in China, and I speak it better than you do.”

“You’re prettier than I am, too, but that’s not going to help you. Do it, Treasure. And bring them here.”

The child remains still.

“Treasure,” Murphy says. “Come here.”

The girl remains where she is, and Rafferty sees her hands curl into fists.

“She’s showing off for company,” Murphy says. “If you’re not standing in front of me by the count of three, you know what’s going to happen. One … two …”

“Leave her alone,” Rafferty says.

“Three,” Murphy says, and by the time he’s finished the word, she’s standing in front of him. He lifts his free hand and slaps her face. Her head whips to one side and back, but her feet don’t move. Rafferty involuntarily starts forward, but Murphy’s gun returns to him. “Never get between a parent and a child. You just make things worse. Treasure has broken some big rules, and she knows it.
Treasure
,” he says, a little more loudly, and she raises her head halfway, so she seems to be looking at his knees. “Go get the guns and bring them to me.”

She turns, moving disjointedly toward Rafferty, her head still
down as though she’s presenting her bare neck to the blade, her feet sliding over the carpet and her back stiff. She pulls the gun from under his belt without so much as a glance at him, and then she goes to Ming Li and takes hers.

Ming Li says, “Poor baby.”

“On the windowsill,” Murphy says.

The child looks up at Rafferty, and he gives her a tiny nod:
Do as you’re told
. The guns look enormous in her hands. She does that slow, sliding walk, never lifting her feet from the carpet, until she’s at the window. Murphy turns his head slightly to keep her in sight, warily, Rafferty thinks. “Up there,” he says. “Put them right there, on the sill. Now come here.” When she’s reached him, he puts his free arm around her as she squeezes her eyes shut, and he lifts her to his knee.

“We’re going to do a little show for our guests,” Murphy says. “Do you want to, Treasure?” He puts his hand on the back of her neck and squeezes the muscle, and when her mouth opens, he answers in an uncanny imitation of her voice, “Yes.” He relaxes his pressure, and her mouth closes. He squeezes again, one time for each syllable, and the child’s mouth seems to say, “Yes, Daddy, please.” Her eyes are wide now, white showing all the way around her irises. Her gaze goes to Rafferty and bounces away with something like shame, looking everywhere in the room.

“What do I say to people when Daddy’s not here?” Murphy says, and Treasure’s mouth opens and closes again as that high, breathless voice says, “Nothing.”

Ming Li says, “That’s enough, you sick fuck. Just shoot us.”

There’s a movement at the edge of Rafferty’s vision, and he turns to the door to see the small woman from the bedroom, wearing a T-shirt and shorts, the clothes she’d undoubtedly worn in her village, holding a glass of cherry-colored whiskey, and she shrills,
“Baby!”
and throws the glass at Murphy.

It hits him on the left shoulder and splashes on him as Treasure leaps from his lap, and he jumps up, swearing, but Neeni retreats down the hall, saying, “My baby, my baby,” and Treasure grabs the chair he was sitting in by its legs and runs at the train table, swinging the chair over her head and bringing it down on the miniature
world, and tiny trees and bits of buildings fly into the air. She lifts it again, emitting a high, thin, ceiling-scraping scream, and slams it into the train table again, and this time pieces fly several feet in the air.

Ming Li takes two quick steps toward the windowsill with the guns on it, but Murphy says, “Don’t,” and comes toward the ruined miniatures as Treasure, still screaming, raises the chair again. When Murphy’s eyes go to the movement, Rafferty grabs the engine of the train and yanks it off the tracks. The last two or three cars break off and tumble free, but the rest of them remain attached, and when he swings it around, what hits Murphy across the face is the sharp-cornered end of a twenty-pound metal whip.

It rips skin from his forehead and snaps his head back and sends him crashing against the table, his gun arm hanging down, his elbow against the edge of the table, and Rafferty raises his right foot and puts all his weight into forcing his shoe straight through the wrist of Murphy’s gun hand. Hears the change in the intensity of Murphy’s scream and the muffled sound of the elbow snapping backward. The gun falls from Murphy’s hand.

Treasure drops the chair and leans forward at the waist, fists clenched, screaming, “Do it again, do it again, do it again!” and Murphy pushes himself away from the table, his face a mass of blood and torn skin, and lurches toward the guns on the windowsill. But Ming Li is already there, and she fires twice at Murphy’s midsection, and he folds in half with a long shudder of a groan and goes down.

Coming up with the gun Murphy dropped, Rafferty hears nothing but the echo of the shots and then, from the hall, a rapidly repeated prayer in Lao.

Murphy moans and rolls over.

Ming Li steps back, out of his reach, with her gun aimed at his forehead. Her face is pale, but her hand is steady.

“Always had trouble …” Murphy says. He grabs a breath and says, “… shooting the pretty ones.”

Her voice shaking, Ming Li says, “You didn’t even get close, fat man.”

Murphy is losing a lot of blood, the stain spreading rapidly
outward over the carpet. To Poke, Ming Li says, “What should we do?”

“We’re going to let him die,” Rafferty says. “And then I’m going to figure out how to deal with this.” He takes a quick step toward her, puts his arms around her, and squeezes. To the side of his neck, Ming Li says, “Might be a good idea to start that now. Figuring out how to deal with this, I mean.”

He pushes her to arm’s length and looks at her, but she won’t meet his eyes. “Are you okay?”

“I’ll be better when I’m moving.”

Murphy makes a noise that might be a cough, and Ming Li steps back, slipping out of Rafferty’s grasp, and points the gun at Murphy’s midsection.

Rafferty says, “Here you go, then. Get Neeni—that’s the woman who threw the glass—and take her out to the car. Carry her, if you have to. The maid, whatever her name is, can take care of her.”

“Where will she be?”

“In her room, I think, probably in bed. Straight down the hall, the door to the left. Grab some clothes for her. I don’t think she’ll be coming back.”

“And?”

“And then come back in here and get three or four of the briefcases in that closet. Take them to the car. They’re full of money.”

“What about you?”

“I’m going to find Treasure.”

He watches Ming Li go, moving quickly but not hurriedly, and thinks,
Frank taught her well
. His heart is hammering in his temples, and he thinks his knees might go out. So he kneels down beside Murphy and studies him. The man’s breathing is shallow and irregular, and his eyes seem to be watching something projected on the ceiling. His face is white as paper, making the hair on his head and the tufts coming out of his nostrils seem a brighter orange, almost clownish. The smell of blood rises from the carpet around him. Rafferty is slightly surprised to find that he feels no pity for the man. When he stands up, he nudges Murphy’s side with his toe. He gets no reaction.

He leaves the room through the door to the kitchen and sees the double doors at the back of the dining room standing wide, with rain slanting in to puddle on the floor, and he realizes he’s lost track of time. It could have been a minute since Treasure ran out of the train room, or it could have been five.

He does a quick check of at the living room—unoccupied—and decides she’s outside. From what he can see, she more or less lives outside. He takes the distance to the back door at a trot, then slows and steps through it into the night.

There’s rain, but it’s not heavy enough to impair visibility. The yards is as wide as the house, though not particularly deep, backing up fifteen or twenty feet to a white plaster wall that’s got some kind of dense hedge growing in front of it, four or five feet thick. The foliage looks black, although it’s probably dark green. Three trees spread their branches to create a sort of canopy over most of the ground.

The water back here is at least four inches deep. He starts by jogging to his left, his shoulder only a few inches from the wall of the house, slowing when he comes to the living-room windows, which permit a long rectangle of pale light to reflect on the standing water and shine off the trunk of the nearest tree. The hedge
is
a dark green, shiny-leafed, thorny-looking, and dense. At the end of the house there’s a wall that runs straight back to create a corner with the hedged wall at the rear, so unless she’s gone over the wall, this isn’t where she came. He doesn’t see a way over the wall.

Up
, he thinks, and he slogs through the water to the nearest tree, but the trunk is smooth, the bark almost slick to the touch. He checks the branches anyway. No platform, no tree house, no fort. Squinting against the rain, he surveys the other two trees, but no straight lines, no paler shapes, reveal a structure in either of them.

He feels time passing. His anxiety level, the terror he deferred while Murphy had his gun on them, has been rising for the past minute or two, and he wills it down, breathing against the tightness in his chest and working his way back along the edge of the house. The wall here is vertical iron bars, and he can see the light from Murphy’s train room shining in the water. Impossible for Treasure to have slipped between the bars.

Water-covered lawn, three trees, hedge. No Treasure. No place
for
Treasure. He realizes he’s been expecting a structure of some kind, a place she can shut others out of. Someplace where she can be whatever she really is, when her father’s not nearby.

But it’s not here.

So it has to be in the hedge.