“I see,” Nick said.
“You will do the final honors. Any method you like. The procedure will be taped, of course. What arrangements have you made for disposing of the body?”
Nick cleared his throat again. “Ah…”
“I see. You do not have a plan,” Zhoglo said. “Now it is clear why you have not risen high in life. You are a man who thinks with his cock.”
“No,” Nick said. “I have a plan.”
“You are pale,” Zhoglo observed. “You are attached to the girl?”
Nick shrugged. “No. But she is an excellent cook. It seems a waste.”
“You should have thought of that before you brought her here,” Zhoglo chided. “But it is better that the loss be painful for you. One cannot have something for nothing, no? Sacrifice is necessary to obtain something of value. It makes you value it all the more. My trust, my confidence—they have value, Arkady. Incalculable value.”
“Yes, Vor,” he muttered.
“This shall be your sacrifice,” Zhoglo said briskly. “Look upon it as an initiation ceremony. After tonight, you will be one of us.” Zhoglo leaned over, and slapped him heartily on the back. His hand thudded against Nick’s body, jarring him as if he were made out of cement.
“You shall see,” Zhoglo encouraged. “It will be worth it.”
Chapter
9
I f she kept her mind on a narrow wavelength and charged forward in a state of constant activity, she could function.
Drain the marinade. Roll the beef in the peppers and spices. Cut radish roses. Trim yellow bits from the parsley sprigs. Peel and shape the baby carrots into perfect, uniformly smooth bullet shapes—
Wrong turn. No bullets. She pinwheeled in her head, seeking her delicate balance again. Back onto that narrow track. The Task at Hand.
Go, go, go. Cook a fabulous meal while a cold-eyed thug held a gun on her and stared at her body like he wanted to take a bite out of it. Mr. Big was keeping them both company.
In this bizarre context, Marla’s diaphanous peasant top had morphed into a slutty thing that barely covered Becca’s butt cheeks. Her nipples showed right through. So did her pubic hair. She could be wearing a feather boa and tit tassels for all it hid. A clove of garlic fell from her numb fingers, and she stared down at it, unwilling to flash any bare, sensitive bits to retrieve it.
God, how she missed her underwear.
Mr. Big scooped up the garlic for her. Everything he did made a mess and cost her precious time, but she couldn’t think of dismissing him. She would start to gibber and scream if he left her alone. He was the closest thing to an ally that she had in this house of horrors.
She gave him low-risk, busywork jobs to perform, just to keep him close to her. His eyes had that flat, dead look, mouth tight and sealed, the look he’d had before he’d dragged her upstairs and—
No. She wasn’t thinking about that. Stop. Ignore it. All of it. Especially the other man who crouched like a fat spider in the salon, waiting for his dinner.
She was actually quite good at ignoring terrible things. She’d gone through intensive training when she was twelve, when Dad got sick.
Dwelling on that episode of her life was a big screaming no-no, in terms of mood management. But she was miles beyond mood management right now. She was hanging on to sanity by her fingernails.
Just like she had back then. She recognized that sick ache. Grief. Fear. They were hard to tease apart. Hell of a time to be thinking about the bad old days. Maybe her life was flashing before her eyes. She was going to miss her life.
OK, back to the past.
Mom had forgotten that she even had kids, she’d been so focused on taking care of Dad. Becca didn’t blame her for it. She’d been the oldest child, nine years older than three-year-old Josh, ten years older than two-year-old Carrie. She’d taken over cooking, groceries, diapers. She’d kept the little kids bathed, gotten them off to sleep, heated Carrie’s bottles, cut the crusts off Josh’s toast, kept them occupied so they wouldn’t be a bother.
She’d soon discovered that being busy helped. It left no time to think about Dad lying in the bed with the morphine drip, that hollow look in his eyes that told her the morphine wasn’t enough. No time to dwell on bedsores, bedpans, the smell of disinfectant. Mom’s haggard face.
Becca focused instead on getting oatmeal into Carrie’s wriggling body, peanut butter sandwiches and scrambled eggs into Josh’s. Getting the laundry done, the dishes washed, the garbage taken out. Busy, busy, busy. It helped. It really did.
By the time it was over and the stash of funeral casseroles had all been eaten, Becca was too deep into the frantic busyness habit to stop. Just as well, too, because Mom fell apart definitively after Dad’s death. She was used up. There was nothing left for the rest of them.
From then on, it fell to Becca to keep it together. She learned to write checks and pay bills at the age of twelve. When she was thirteen, she learned the dire consequences of forgetting to pay property taxes for two years in a row. She put off creditors, dealt with the bills herself so that the past due notices wouldn’t send Mom off on a crying jag.
Or sink her into an even darker mood, when she would sit on her bed staring at the bottle of morphine capsules. Dad had hoarded a lethal dose of them early in his illness to have a way out if it got too bad. He’d never used them, but it had comforted him that they were there.
It didn’t comfort Becca. She combed the house for them when her mother was out, hoping to flush them down into the sewer where they belonged. In the end, her efforts were in vain. Terrible things happened no matter how prepared you were.
No amount of scurrying and effort could stop them. No mercy.
Dad’s stash hadn’t gone to waste, depending on your point of view. By the time Mom swallowed those pills, Becca had become expert at a lot of things, and seeing things from everybody else’s point of view was one of them.
She understood Mom’s despair. She understood Josh’s fighting, his problems in school. Carrie’s clinginess, bedwetting, nightmares, anxiety attacks. She understood the bank’s regretful necessity to foreclose. Mortgages had to be paid. That was how the merciless world worked.
She understood their relatives, none of whom wanted to deal with the financial and emotional can of worms that was her orphaned family.
She even understood the point of view of the life insurance people, when they’d informed her that the policy was void in the case of suicide.
Well, of course. Any reasonable person could see why. Becca was a reasonable person. She’d been reasonable about giving up going to college, in spite of the scholarship she’d been offered. It was flattering that they’d offered it, but it paid only tuition. Not for a roof over Josh and Carrie’s heads. Not for food for three, pediatricians, school clothes, sneakers, and all the rest.
Yeah, she understood everybody’s point of view but her own. She couldn’t afford a point of view. It was a window she didn’t dare peer out of. She was terrified of what she might see.
Anyway, fuck it. Remembering all that wasn’t going to help her now. Her eyes caught the gun-toting guy leering at her. He licked his lips. Rearranged his testicles.
Oh, God. Her stomach flopped, turned upside down.
No choice but to face it, straight on. Stark reality. As bad as it got. Like the day she found Mom on her bedroom floor.
What had happened upstairs with Mr. Big had leveled her defenses. Neurotic though they might be, they’d been all she had. They were in ruins. Colors were overbright, noises jangly, too loud or else fading out. The faces of the men in the kitchen stood out in high contrast. Carved by shadows sharp as knives, as black as ink. She glimpsed horrible things in the depths of their eyes.
“Keep it together,” Mr. Big whispered, shoving a paper towel into her hand. “Mop up your face. Stop sniveling. Get ready to serve wine and the appetizers.”
Sniveling? Snotty bastard. She dabbed her eyes and pressed the paper towel against her mouth. The anger focused her. And he knew it.
He stuck his hand into his pocket and rummaged till he came up with…her pink lipstick. Of all things.
“Showtime again. Don’t faint on me, for fuck’s sake.” He uncapped the lipstick and held it out to her. She applied it with a shaking hand. It was warm from his body heat.
He looked her over, and tugged her plunging neckline up so that her nipples no longer peeked over the edge of the blouse. She grabbed his hand. “Please, don’t,” she said. “If you do, it shows my—”
“Aw, fuck.” He scowled at the tuft of pubic hair that he had revealed.
“It’s one or the other, you see.” She shook with hysterical giggles.
He muttered something vicious in that unknown language, and put the tray with the decanted wine, wineglasses and the appetizers into her hands.
The glasses rattled. He put his hands over hers to steady them. His hands were so warm. Strong.
He nudged her along in the direction of the dining room. They stopped outside the door. He leaned down, gave her a swift, firm kiss on the cheek.
“Watch out,” he muttered. “And smile, goddamnit.”
He opened the door and gave her a push that made her stumble a little. Becca stretched her pink, shiny mouth, feeling like a plastic doll. Her bare toes gripped the carpet to steady herself. She felt damp with chilled sweat. Stippled with goose bumps, all over her body.
Someone had lit the candles. The tapers glimmered. Her nearsighted eyes swam with tears. She could barely see the two men seated at the table. Tears swirled the points of light into a bright blur. She squeezed her eyes shut, let them flash down her face. She couldn’t wipe them away with a tray in her hands.
The men swam into focus as she approached. Smile, goddamnit.
She could do that. Smiling, acting cheerful while she was actually dying inside was a skill at which she excelled, although she secretly wasn’t sure whether it was a skill she should be proud of. But it was coming in handy now.
The two men stopped talking as she approached the table. She had a brief moment of total vertigo, and a switch was thrown inside her.
She couldn’t call it courage. It felt more like an automatic default mechanism kicking into action. An emergency generator that came on during a power outage. Just enough juice for basic function. No frills.
She set the tray on the sideboard, flashed a brilliant smile at the men seated at the table. She set out their glasses, poured their wine with practiced grace. Automatic gestures, programmed into her from years of waitressing jobs and catering gigs. She caught a glimpse of the Spider’s guest when she poured his wine. He didn’t really notice, being busy checking out her boobs.
He looked like he belonged at her country club. Late forties, handsome, distinguished. Graying temples, white teeth, perfect tan, reeking of privilege.
“And what have you prepared for us, my dear?” the Spider asked.
She smiled, smiled, smiled, as she set out the antipasti. “You’ll start with four different types of bruschetta, and an assortment of fine Italian cheeses and sausages. Then we’ll move on to roasted zucchini dressed with mint and lemon, eggplant gratinée, grilled portobello mushrooms, and roasted stuffed red peppers. Wafer thin slices of Piedmontese capicollo, dressed with flakes of grana, arugula, and the very best Pugliese olive oil, followed by slices of spicy Calabrese sopressata…”
And so on and so forth. Hyped-up foodie blather was second nature to her. Thank God for her years of restaurant work. She had been able to put a feast like this together and buy a little time.
Or maybe not. She noticed the lustful greed smoldering in the Spider’s eyes.
When she retreated to the door, she was uncomfortably aware of the mens’ gaze fixed on her bottom, the undercurve of which hung right out of the loose peasant blouse. It took all her self-control to walk slowly.
The door closed. She sagged against it, gulping in air.
Time wore on, and as dinner progressed it seemed, at least on a superficial level, to get easier. It even took on an air of apparent normality—if she ignored her lack of underwear, the scowling armed guard, and everything else that had happened that day.
Snippets of the conversation floated through the barriers of fear and tension in her brain. The two men didn’t talk of murder, drug trafficking or anything obviously evil or illegal. She tried to remember the headlines she’d glanced at online a day or so ago. Homicidal Sex Fiends Invade Pacific Northwest? Nah. Nothing like that.
The Spider and his guest chatted about world politics, global economics, natural gas, the stock market. But as they consumed more wine, they began looking at her in that unmistakable way that made her body cringe with dread.
She almost dropped a filet of beef right into the Spider’s wineglass when he grabbed her buttock. His hand was moist and hot, his pudgy fingers pulling up the blouse until her bottom was completely exposed.
“Beautiful, hmm?” he commented to his guest. “Look at this. Perfection. So round. Smooth as a rose petal.”
She was motionless, her gorge rising as those humid fingers traced the cleft of her bottom. Poking, prodding.
“Very.” The Spider’s guest let out a manly chuckle. The smug sound of a guy who was not unused to situations like this.