Blackout, page 28
She tried to step back, but he held her face firmly, squashing her mouth. He had a strange experience, a little mind-shift, as if a crawlspace in his head had collapsed, and just for a moment he thought she looked more like Monique than Almond. Resemblances everywhere. Hadn’t he sometimes thought that, from a certain angle and in a certain kind of muted light, Almond had faintly resembled his sister? Hadn’t he found in that vague similarity some little nut of pleasure and glee? It was Monique he was sending to strange motel rooms. It was Monique walking the streets for him. Monique spreading her thighs for strangers in beds with gray sheets, or participating in seedy hurried couplings, or quick BJs in the back seats of cars. Then this thought dissipated, and he couldn’t remember how accurate the memory was. Faces rushed at him – this one, that one, he couldn’t keep them apart.
He shut his eyes and opened them again. This girl was Darcy Samsa, definitely. Chemical overspill. Warnings from Brain Central. Truant synapses rushing from classrooms screaming.
‘You’re saying … What are you saying? My father killed somebody?’
‘Yeah, and he’s trying to keep it to himself, but I know. I know the whole fucking story. Oh, he’s up shit creek, little Darcy. He’s well and truly up shit creek.’
‘My father would never kill anybody. You’re out of your mind.’
‘Ask him yourself. Hey, Daddy, you kill a girl called Cecily Suarez?’
‘Cecily Suarez?’
‘Go to the horse’s mouth, babe.’
‘I’ll call him, I’ll do it now.’ She stretched an arm toward the phone.
‘I don’t think this is such a good time,’ he said. He knocked the receiver out of her reach and it fell to the floor.
‘You’re a lying bastard,’ she said.
He slapped her once, hard. She had to learn who was in control here. Her head snapped back. Blood leaked from her nostrils, and he was strangely moved by this sight. He grabbed a tissue from a box on the bedside table and applied it to her nose. She kept her eyes shut tight.
‘Let’s get one thing clear, babe. You’re going nowhere unless I say so.’
She yanked herself free and made a movement toward the door, and he caught her before she’d gone three feet and tossed her down on the bed. He lay on top of her and she turned her face this way and that. I have the power, he thought. He kissed her, found her unyielding, forced the kiss on her, felt the wet warmth of her mouth. This is the way it’s done, Darcy. I explore the contours of your body, all the secret cavities. I go where I like.
He gripped her arms, turned her over and tugged the skirt down her legs. He was hard, hard. She was speaking into the pillow – ‘No no no’ – and she was kicking her legs, thrashing around underneath him. She swiveled somehow, turning on her side, and he tried whispering in her ear, ‘We’ll go away. Your father won’t find us in another city, you’ll change your name. Life is going to be nice, I promise you. Just the two of us. We’ll go to a place where music and moonlight and feeling are one.’
She clawed at his cheek, raked it. He could feel she’d drawn blood. Okay, he’d do this the hard way. He reached over to the coffee table, grabbed his bag and took out the gun. ‘You see this?’ He was feeling quirky hot flashes go through him like fireballs roaring down a tunnel.
She pressed herself against the headboard. How young she looked. How scared.
‘Now. You are a microsecond away from oblivion. Try to get it through your head what we’re here for. Okay?’
She smoothed hair from her face and looked up into his eyes, and he had it again, that flash of Monique. Get the fuck out my brain, Monique, go play with that lumbering bespectacled husband of yours, Austin I-am-a-big-time-money-maker Arganbright.
He was limp all of a sudden. Fucking Monique was still in his head, and he could see her wedding cake decorated with rainbow frosting. She liked goddam rainbows, considered them symbolic of something, he couldn’t remember what. Some New Age guff.
This is the speed at work, buddy. This is years of self-destruction screeching back at you, and you are not silencing it.
The girl was sniffling.
He hated that sound. It reminded him of Monique weeping over her horse – Oh, Daddy, bring him back to life, please. Stamp your feet all you like, sister, the nag is plain fucking dead. Daddy can’t do a Lazarus act for you. Hugh isn’t Christ, despite what he might think.
He got up from the bed and walked up and down the room. A crack of pain shot across his scalp, and he was suddenly plunged back into that nocturnal world where people waited for him outside closed curtains. There were shadows in parking lots, men sitting in motionless cars, phones were tapped. Okay, you could blame the dope, but this felt real. He couldn’t deflate this panicky feeling, this need to move.
He imagined Jimmy Plumm saying to Tom Bigshoes, It might be interesting to know how Lee came into money. What scam does he have going? I want a cut of it. Break a few bones if you need to. He also imagined Samsa coming after him with a posse of his cop buddies and finding him with his daughter in a motel room. He could imagine even Rudy Vass turning against him in some foggy serpentine way.
And cops, there were always cops, black patrols of them, and he pictured them finding the poker he’d hidden in a place he considered altogether appropriate, ironic even. And though he’d wiped it clean, they probably had some kind of hypersensitive equipment that could pick up a fingerprint on Mars, for Chrissakes. All this was a marquee collapsing on him, tons of canvas, a hundred poles, miles of rope, the whole fucking business.
‘We need to get out of here,’ he said. ‘We need to get the fuck out of this city and begin all over again.’
She stared at him. Wet eyes. ‘I don’t understand what you’re saying,’ she said.
‘You don’t have to understand. Nobody’s asking you to understand. We move, that’s all. Too many people know me around here. You see what I’m saying? People know me, I have all kinds of pressures coming down on me.’
He stuffed the gun in his bag and tossed the rig inside and all the rest of his stuff. Lee Boyle is freaking, he thought.
He grabbed her by the hand and stepped into the corridor, dragging her behind him. Halfway toward the elevators he experienced a razor-sharp pain at the back of his eyes, so fierce it sucked all the air out of him and dimmed the lights around him.
Is this it? Is this the legendary Seizureland, that theme park for dying speed-freaks? His heart was charged with explosives.
When the elevator arrived he hustled Darcy inside the mirrored cab, seeing multiplied reflections of his own pale image, sweat bright on his face, eyes feverish. As the elevator descended he had the thought that there were at least six Lee Boyles and Darcy Samsas riding down this shaft to God knows where.
42
Samsa stared out at darkness, hoping he’d see Darcy appear. But the street was silent and dreadful.
‘When did you last see her?’ Eve asked.
‘This morning. No, yesterday morning. God, I’m losing track of time.’
He looked at Eve. She hadn’t said why she’d turned up at the house. She seemed unusually reticent, as if she had some preoccupation beyond Darcy’s troubling absence.
‘You’ve tried her friends?’ she asked.
‘I called a couple of them. Nothing. The only thing I know for sure is that she isn’t with Nick Mancuso.’
‘I heard about that.’
‘You also heard the circumstances.’
Eve nodded. ‘Nick and this girl, yeah. If Darcy’s already learned about that she can’t possibly be handling it very well.’
He thought of Darcy out there on her own, perhaps wandering in a private blue haze. ‘I phoned downtown,’ he said. ‘I gave the guys a description of her, but I don’t know what she was wearing. I looked through her closet, but I can’t tell what’s missing.’
She sat on the stool at the piano, leaning forward a little and looking at the floor. She seemed downhearted. He walked across the room and touched her shoulder, and she edged almost imperceptibly away from him.
‘Something bothering you?’ he asked.
‘Just Darcy.’ She looked at her watch. ‘Does she ever stay out this late?’
‘Not without telling me she’s spending the night with a friend or going to a party,’ he said. He bent down, put his hand under her chin and lifted her face so he could see her eyes. ‘There’s something else on your mind.’
She got up from the stool and moved away from him. ‘No,’ she said. ‘How’s your hand?’
Changing the subject, he thought. Fine. Whatever was on her mind couldn’t be forced out. She’d tell him when she was ready. ‘It’s okay. I bandaged it up again,’ he said.
‘You didn’t do such a great job, did you? It’s like something on a mummy.’
He made some passing reference to the logistical problems of bandaging your own hand, then he returned to the window, the silent street, the lamps that attracted a blizzard of moths.
‘I can’t stand this goddam waiting,’ he said. ‘Maybe I’ll drive around, see if I run into her.’
‘What if she comes back when you’re gone?’
‘I’ll take my phone. I’ll call the house every ten minutes or so.’
Eve said, ‘You want company?’
He told her he’d welcome that. They went outside.
She said, ‘Let’s take my car.’ Her mood was off-center, she’d retreated to a place he couldn’t locate. He thought of Harriet suddenly, but Harriet’s silences were profoundly different, deep and mysterious. With Eve you knew something was simmering just below the surface.
She drove a couple of blocks and Samsa, thinking how uniform the neighborhood was, gazed out at trees and houses. Three a.m. and quiet, nothing moving on the streets. His mind was skipping like a flat stone thrown across water. Where to look? Where to begin? Down through the suburbs and into the city centre. And if she had gone there, why?
Here and there porch lights burned, some yellow, others orange. So many houses, windows, rooms. And all so goddam ordinary to look at. It was in one such ordinary house that Nick Mancuso and Mandy Robbins had been bludgeoned to death. Surfaces told you nothing.
‘Is there any special direction you want me to take?’ Eve asked.
‘Just drive around,’ he said. The pointlessness of this, scanning the night, hoping she’d materialize. He remembered stories of people who’d just vanished off the face of the earth. The department had scores of unsolved cases. Missing persons, people who’d fallen into mysterious cracks and were never seen again. And then he remembered how he and Darcy had mentioned the subject of runaways.
You’d never do that, would you?
Run away from home? Come on. I can’t imagine the circumstances.
He beat the palm of his hand against his thigh. Why wasn’t he receiving signals from that source people called paternal instinct? Why wasn’t there some gut feeling to inform him he was worrying fruitlessly? Instead his mind was filled with shadows and his instincts were persistent little beeps of apprehension.
Eve said, ‘She’s a kid, and sometimes kids forget about time. I used to worry my mother to death.’
‘Darcy’s usually good about these things,’ he said.
‘So this one time she forgot.’
He wondered why he wasn’t convinced by that. ‘Even when she cuts classes she doesn’t hide it,’ he said.
‘She’s open and honest,’ Eve said.
‘Yeah, she is.’
‘But you don’t really know that, do you? I mean, there’s a sense in which we never know other people, isn’t there? We go along thinking we do, then something happens right out of the blue, and all of a sudden your ideas of somebody else get changed around.’
‘Why don’t you just say what’s bugging you, Eve?’
‘Let’s look for Darcy, okay? Let’s concentrate on that.’
‘But there’s something.’
She stared ahead. ‘Let’s try and find your daughter, Greg.’
He fell silent. Okay, her barricades were up and this wasn’t the time to storm the fortress. He looked out, saw a twenty-four-hour convenience market, bright and white. In the darkness of the vicinity it was like a big fluorescent spaceship, just landed.
They traveled in silence for a time through an assortment of neighborhoods that became progressively more mean, more shabby, the closer they got to the edge of downtown. He was trying to bring Darcy’s face into sharp focus, wondering if there was any truth to the idea that if you could visualize a lost thing you could find it – but he supposed that only worked if you were the one who had misplaced it originally. Stupid thoughts, stoked by panic. His feelings were turning bad, his head was spinning. She’s out there somewhere and I’m never going to find her again. I’ll spend the rest of my life looking for a girl whose photograph is inside a missing persons folder that grows more and more musty with every year that passes. But you’d never forget. You’d look for ever. You’d imagine you caught a glimpse of her in a mall, a department store, a passing bus. Your life would be one of checking out reported sightings. You’d live on hope.
He took out his cellular phone and punched in his home number. No answer.
Eve asked, ‘Where now?’
He had no directions to give. ‘Anywhere,’ he said.
‘We might as well go downtown,’ she said.
Somehow it didn’t matter where she drove, the idea was to keep moving and looking. Downtown was a drab mausoleum at this hour. The streets were lifeless, save for a few cars and a couple of drunk pedestrians shuffling along unsteadily.
Eve turned off the main drag a few blocks before City Hall. She drove past the old Rialto Hotel, and Samsa glanced at the awning, the lights in the lobby.
Then she hung a left and they were moving into a neighborhood where he didn’t want to go. He had the urge to tell her, No, not this way, but he didn’t say so, he couldn’t explain that this area was the last place on earth for him. But Eve was driving there anyhow, and suddenly there were ghostly girls and boys lingering on sidewalks, watching the car approach and probably thinking, This might be a customer, some late-night score. There were twenty or so, and they moved toward the curb, desperate to do business, gesticulating, calling out. Eve slowed the car a little, and he wondered why.
Hands reached out from the sidewalk, signs were made. A girl in short tight spangled pants swiveled her pelvis and laughed, another flashed a breast, cupping it in her hand and thrusting it forward as if she had a thirsty infant to feed. A slinky boy in a leather jacket and tight jeans clutched his crotch. Samsa noticed he had platinum-dyed hair.
‘We’re not going to find Darcy in this place,’ he said.
‘Oh, you never know what you’re going to find down here,’ Eve said.
He didn’t like that cutting little note in her voice. He remembered what Joshua Gold had told her: He saw you cruising, Greg. Did she believe Gold? Had something happened to make her imagine Gold was telling the truth? He dismissed the questions. He didn’t have space in his mind for anything but Darcy, finding Darcy, turning this goddam city upside down if he had to.
Eve was moving the car slowly along the edge of the sidewalk. Somebody on the curb reached out and touched the window on Eve’s right, leaving a smear of what looked to Samsa like Vaseline – he couldn’t tell – a greasy streak of something or other. He wished she’d give the goddam car some gas and get out of here. What was she playing at, idling along like this?
He said, ‘Let’s blow this place.’
‘You want a change of scene? Okay, you got it. I’ll give you a change of scene.’ She accelerated away from the sidewalk. She drove without saying anything, taking corners fast, making her tires screech and leave echoes between buildings. She drove like this for several blocks, manic, like she didn’t give a damn.
‘For God’s sake, slow down,’ he said.
‘You want slow? I can do slow.’ She had the car crawling now, fifteen miles an hour.
‘What the hell is your problem, Eve?’
‘I don’t have a problem, Greg.’
‘Pardon me for thinking otherwise,’ he said. ‘Ever since you showed up on my doorstep you’ve been wound like a goddam clock.’
She pulled the car over and laid her face for a moment against the wheel. He touched the back of her neck, even though he understood it involved a risk because he had the feeling she didn’t want to be touched. She stared through the windshield at the dead street ahead. She didn’t look at him.
‘I’m fine, Greg. I’m perfectly okay.’
‘No, you’re not.’ He wanted a cigarette suddenly. He hadn’t smoked in years and now he wanted to light a cigarette he didn’t have. Craving nicotine. He didn’t know what to do with his hands. He punched his home number into his phone and, as before, received no answer.
He tapped in a second number and heard Duff’s voice.
‘Anything happening? Anybody seen my daughter?’
‘Not so far,’ Duff said.
‘Call me at once if you hear anything.’ Samsa cut the connection. He turned to Eve. ‘Look, if you don’t feel like driving, I’ll do it.’
‘I don’t mind,’ she said.
They passed the Greyhound station where a bus from a faraway city was disgorging weary passengers. The light from the terminal building was muted, dreary. A few taxi-cabs idled outside the station. Two uniformed cops were standing close to the doorway, nervy and vigilant. This area was a hang-out for small-time drug dealers, and sometimes there were occasional disputes that turned violent. It was also a place where runaways disembarked. He found himself imagining Cecily Suarez stepping off a bus right here, in a city that was strange to her, a place chosen at random because she didn’t have enough money to get any further away from home. He wished to God she’d had a few more dollars to spare.
‘Say something, Eve. Explain this … this mood. Please.’
‘I have my highs and lows, Greg. I have my expectations and my disappointments, like everyone else.’
