Gloria leaned back. She exhaled loudly, clapped her hands once, and pointed at the stereo. “Turn it on,” she said.
The man in pajamas walked to the stereo and turned it on. The sound of a loud commercial filled the room. Gloria shook her head, and he changed the station. She shook her head again. When he found a station playing hopeful Christian rock, she nodded.
“Turn it up,” she said. He did. “Louder,” she said.
He made it very loud. The music blared from the speakers:
He will walk with you. He will sing with you. He will dance with you. He will battle for you.
Jackie began sobbing quietly.
“Get up,” said Gloria.
Jackie stood up and shook her head. “I told the police. They know I’m here.”
Gloria stood and stepped closer, so that their faces were inches apart. “I told you I was going to break your finger if you talked,” she said. “You’re acting very stupid.” She stared into Jackie’s eyes. “Come on,” she said.
The man with the gun grabbed Jackie by the shoulders. He was stronger than he looked. When they got to the stairs, he guided her down. She didn’t resist. The music blared.
At the bottom of the stairs, the floor became gray concrete. The man pushed Jackie through a doorway into a large, fluorescent-lit basement. Random furniture cluttered the space. Boxes filled with toys and books sat on the floor. The other driver stood near the center of the room, where a metal beam stretched from the floor to the ceiling. A chair had been placed in front of the beam; on the ground, spread under the chair, was a painter’s plastic drop cloth.
The young man held his hand out to the chair. “Please,” he said.
A wave of uncontrollable crying swept over Jackie. She heaved for breath.
“Sit, sit, sit,” said the man with the gun.
She was guided to the chair. The young man took a green garden hose and began wrapping it around her torso. He
yanked on the hose and pulled it tight, then tied it behind her. It forced Jackie to sit straight.
Gloria spoke in Tagalog, and the older driver pulled his belt off. He stepped toward Jackie and used it to tie her head to the beam, so that the back of her skull pressed against the metal.
“Please,” she said. “Please.” The man tied the belt tight.
“I’m going to ask you one time,” said Gloria. “Who you are with?”
“I’m not with anyone,” Jackie said.
Gloria spoke in Tagalog and one of the men walked to the far side of the basement. He disappeared from Jackie’s view. She heard him rummaging around in what sounded like a metal box. Muffled Christian music could be heard from upstairs. When the man reappeared, he carried small pruning shears. He handed them to Gloria. She stepped toward Jackie and snapped the shears open and closed in front of her face. They made an awful metallic cutting noise:
schink-schink-schink.
“No,” said Jackie. “Okay. I’m done playing.”
“She’s done playing,” said Gloria, turning toward the man with the gun. Jackie’s eyes went to him. He looked genuinely scared. Her own fear ratcheted up even further.
Gloria reached toward Jackie’s face with the pruning shears and tapped her gently on the nose. She smiled coldly. “Final chance,” she said.
“I’m on my own,” said Jackie, crying. “I’ve brought in three other men. They work for me. They’re not here, but we’ve been watching you, watching all of you—Shadrack, Raymond Gaspar, everyone. It’s all stupid. So stupid. I’m
sorry. I promise—” She breathed in deeply. “I promise it will never happen again.”
“These are the men you’ve been exchanging text messages with?”
“Yes.”
“And what is it you are looking for?”
“I’m trying to steal your shit,” said Jackie. “It was stupid. I’m sorry.”
“She’s sorry,” said Gloria.
Jackie looked at the man with the gun. He nodded at her, as though in encouragement.
“And how did you come to know about this shit you want to steal?” Gloria said.
“Roberts,” Jackie said, pausing for a moment to cry. “Roberts. He brought me to Miami to help get him into an apartment. He didn’t tell me about you, but I stole his phone. I looked on his computer. It’s me. It’s all me. Seriously, I’ve never done anything this stupid.”
“Ah! Tom Roberts,” said Gloria. “We spoke once on the telephone, didn’t we?”
“Yes,” said Jackie.
“I see,” said Gloria. She nodded, cleaned her top teeth with her tongue. “Roberts. Call him,” she said to one of the young men. “Tell him to come here. Tell him we have an emergency.”
Gloria bent down near Jackie’s face. “See? Honesty and respect, that’s all we ask. We can’t move forward if we don’t learn how to be good to each other. Right?”
Jackie tried to nod.
“Can I get you some water?”
She nodded again, as much as she could.
When the water came, the woman poured it into her mouth. Then she patted her head and left her alone with the man with the gun. He sat down on a heavy armchair, pulled out his cell phone, and began playing a game. The stereo upstairs went silent. Jackie strained her ears, but besides occasional footsteps and muffled voices, there was nothing.
Her eyes grew heavy, and she let them close. The quiet beeping of the man’s phone filled her mind.
At some point the Christian music came back. When she opened her eyes, Gloria was stepping into the basement. She was followed by the two young men and Tom Roberts.
Roberts’s face changed when he saw Jackie: his mouth dropped open, and his head shook. Apparently, he hadn’t expected to find her there.
“No, no, what is this?” he said, turning toward Gloria.
“You tell me,” she said.
“What the fuck is this?” he said again, and then he turned to Jackie and asked the question with more anger. “Jackie, what the fuck have you done?”
“Your friend here has been following me,” Gloria said.
“Oh, no, no, no—I didn’t have anything to do with that,” he said. Jackie stared at him. The man was panicking. His face was deformed and ugly with rage. He pointed at her. “I didn’t know you were—what the fuck have you done? What’d she do?” He turned back to Gloria.
“That’s it,” said Gloria. “That’s all we know.”
Roberts looked back at Jackie. “You stupid bitch, you have no idea how much trouble you’ve gotten yourself into this time. What were you thinking?” He turned away again.
“I don’t know anything about this girl,” he said, raising his hands. He looked around wildly at the other men in the room. “Nothing. You’re on your own on this one, Jackie. Fuck! Do whatever you need to do to her,” he said, looking back at Gloria.
Gloria smiled thinly. She nodded at the younger driver. He stepped toward Roberts and held out a black handgun.
“Take care of it,” said Gloria. “Show us you have nothing to do with it.”
Roberts stood holding the gun for a moment. His shoulders slumped.
“No,” Jackie said. “No, please.” She tried to rock against the hose and belt, but they held tight. “Please,” she said. “I can do so much for you. I can—”
Gloria put her finger to her mouth and hushed her. Jackie felt a strange sense of resolve take hold. She was stuck. This was it. The end.
Roberts’s face looked somehow broken. His mouth frowned unnaturally. He muttered something as he approached her, maybe a prayer. He lifted the gun and pressed it against her temple.
“Oh my God, Jackie, I’m sorry,” he said.
Jackie closed her eyes. A thousand sirens blared in her mind. She heard the sound of a click. Nothing happened. She opened her eyes. Roberts squeezed the trigger again.
Click.
The gun bumped against her head. He squeezed it again.
Click.
“You need to have bullets in your gun,” said Gloria.
The young man next to her held up a single brass bullet between his finger and thumb. The wave of panic that Jackie
had been riding crashed. Language returned. She prayed:
Oh God, if you help me on this one, just this one, I will forever be your servant. Oh, Jesus Christ in heaven. Allah. Jesus. Buddha. Mom. Help me.
The young man beckoned to Roberts with the bullet. Roberts, defeated, went to him. The young man took the gun, turned his back for a second, turned back, and pointed the gun at Roberts’s head. Roberts stood there with his shoulders slumped. His back was to Jackie; she couldn’t see his face.
The young man pulled the trigger. The gun clicked again. Gloria’s men laughed. Roberts’s body quaked.
“I wouldn’t waste a bullet on you,” Gloria said. “You’re an imbecile, but if your disgusting white body was shitting blood on my basement floor you wouldn’t be able to pay me back the money I gave you for your little Miami vacation. Sixty thousand, plus expenses. Look at me.” He turned and looked at her. “You have forty-eight hours to bring that money back to me. Get out. Get the fuck out of here before I change my mind.”
Roberts turned toward Jackie. His face showed pure animal rage, but it was shame, not rage, that he was feeling. He’d tried to kill her and failed. Every moment from his boyhood through right now, all of it, had been a failure. He wasn’t going to go to hell. He was already in it.
“Go,” said Gloria.
Roberts walked upstairs. The two young men followed him. The Christian music grew louder for a moment as they passed through the door.
Gloria walked to Jackie and untied the belt around her head. She brushed the hair out of her face. Then she put a
hand on her shoulder, leaned down, and whispered: “Okay? Just us, now. No more playing around. No more games. You’ve seen me. You know my face. You’ve been following me. You know who I am.” She stood staring at Jackie for a long time. “Tell me, it’s you and four men and no one else?”
“That’s right,” said Jackie.
“And these men don’t know that you’re here with me right now?”
“No.”
“And you hired the men? They work for you?”
“Yes.”
“Do you sleep with the men?”
“No.”
“They’ll follow what you say?”
“Yes.”
“Tell me about these four men,” said Gloria. “Tell me everything about them.”
Two days later, Raymond Gaspar was shot and killed in Hercules.
Gloria’s young driver pulled the trigger. Shadrack shut his eyes when it happened.
He had gotten to the house an hour before anybody else. He carried in 5.6 million dollars in two separate bags, which he hid in the closet of one of the bedrooms. He set the plastic on the floor just like Gloria had instructed. Even as he did it, it hadn’t seemed real. He kept telling himself that there would be some way out of it, that the killing would be called off.
The house didn’t have any furniture. After Shadrack spread out the plastic, he walked around the place, looking at himself in the bathroom mirror and checking the refrigerator. It was empty. He lay down on his back on the living room floor. He stared at the ceiling and waited for everyone else to arrive.
The Filipinos got there first. Two of them came in together, the older one with the pockmarks and the younger driver. They smelled like they’d been smoking cigarettes. The driver had his gun out already and was screwing a silencer on to it. Both men were breathing heavily, like they’d run from the car.
“Where we doing it?” asked the young one. He seemed amped up. Shadrack pointed him toward the back room. He didn’t know the men’s names, and he didn’t want to. They scared him.
John and Raymond arrived a few minutes later, right on schedule. The look on Raymond’s face when he entered the house nearly broke Shadrack’s heart. It was pale, sad, doomed, and weary. He looked like he knew exactly what was coming.
Shadrack had been around death before: he’d seen people stabbed and killed in Eureka; he’d had friends overdose on heroin. But he’d never been this close to it; he’d never been so much a part of bringing it about. The house seemed to shake for a moment when the gun went off.
Dark red blood pumped from the hole in Raymond’s head onto the plastic sheet. His eyes stayed open, one arm bent up near his chest.
“Jesus, Lord forgive us,” said Shadrack. He looked at John, who stood shaking his head. He looked like he was fighting
back tears. The house, quiet as it was, seemed filled with noise.
The young man who’d shot Raymond bent down and poked at his body. “He’s gone,” he said. He checked Raymond’s pockets, pulling out his phone, some money, and his license. He looked at the ID and tossed it to Shadrack. Raymond’s face, in the picture, had a hopeful look. Then the young man found the key and the piece of paper that Gloria had given to Raymond, and held them out to Shadrack, too.
“Here,” he said.
Shadrack was afraid to come close. The man must have sensed it. He straightened up and brought the key and the paper to him.
“The money’s in the other bedroom,” said Shadrack. He looked at the piece of paper. Handwritten on it was an address on Lemon Street, in Vallejo. The unit number had been underlined twice. Shadrack put the note and the key in his pocket.
“There a guard at this place?” he asked.
“Yeah,” said the young man. “He knows you’re coming. Just sign in, show him your license, and go to the unit. Just like always.”
The older man came in and looked at the body. He spoke Tagalog to the younger one. “Are we good?” Shadrack asked. Nobody answered. “You better make sure that body don’t ever get found,” he said. “Unless you want Arthur coming for your ass.”
Nobody said anything. “We good?” he asked again.
“All the money there?” asked the older man.
“Yeah, go on. Count it,” said Shadrack.
In the other room, Gloria’s men—two more had come in after the shooting—were taking the money out of the bags, looking it over, and counting stacks. When they finished they stood up straight, brushing the knees of their pants. The oldest one stepped forward and shook hands with Shadrack, putting a hand on his shoulder like he was comforting him. He shook hands with John, as well.
When they were safely in John’s SUV, Shadrack said, “Man, the apple don’t fall far from the tree with that lot, does it?”
“No, it doesn’t,” said John.
“They are a nasty bunch,” Shadrack said.
“Give me that address,” John said. “I’ll put it in my little map, here.”