Sacred

“Hands where I can see them, Daddy.”

  “I wouldn’t dream of doing otherwise,” he said and leaned back in the chair, puffed a ring into the air above his head. “So, you’ve come to finish the job those three Bulgarians couldn’t manage on the bridge last year.”

  “Something like that,” she said.

  He tilted his head and looked at her out of the corner of his eye. “No, it’s exactly like that, Desiree. If your speech is nebulous, remember, your mind will appear to be so as well.”

  “Trevor Stone’s Rules of Engagement,” she said to me.

  “Mr. Kenzie,” he said, back to staring at the rings he exhaled, “have you sampled my daughter?”

  “Daddy,” Desiree said. “Really.”

  “No,” I said. “Haven’t had the pleasure. Which makes me unique in this room, I think.”

  His ruined lips formed their imitation of a smile. “Ah, so Desiree’s fantasy of our having a sexual history persists.”

  “You told me yourself, Daddy: If something works, stick with it.”

  Trevor winked at me. “I’m not without sin, but I do draw the line at incest.” He turned his head. “And Julian, how did you find my daughter’s technique in the bedroom? Was it satisfactory?”

  “Quite,” Julian said, and his face twitched.

  “Better than her mother’s?”

  Desiree’s head jerked around to look at Julian, then jerked back to Trevor.

  “I wouldn’t know about her mother’s, sir.”

  “Come now.” Trevor chuckled. “Don’t be modest, Julian. For all we know, you’re this child’s father, not me.”

  Julian’s hands tightened, and his feet parted slightly. “You’re imagining things, sir.”

  “Am I?” Trevor turned his head and winked at me.

  I felt like I was locked in a Noël Coward play that had been rewritten by Sam Shepard.

  “You think this is going to work?” Desiree said. She rose off her knees. “Daddy, I am so beyond normal concepts of proper and improper sexual behavior, it’s not even quantifiable.” She stepped past me and came around the desk behind him. She leaned over his shoulders. She placed the muzzle of her gun against the left side of his forehead then drew it across to the right so hard the target sight left a thin line of blood. “If Julian were my biological father, so what?”

  Trevor watched as a drop of blood fell from his forehead and landed on his cigar.

  “Now, Dad,” she said and nipped his left earlobe, “let’s push you out into the center of the room where we can all be together.”

  Trevor puffed on his cigar as she pushed, trying to appear as casual as he had when he entered the room, but I could see that it was beginning to wear on him. Fear had found its way into his proud chest, into the cast of his eyes and the set of his ruined jaw.

  Desiree pushed him around to the front of the desk until he was facing me, the two of us sitting in our chairs, wondering if we’d ever stand up again.

  “How’s it feel, Mr. Kenzie?” Trevor said. “Bound there, helpless, wondering which breath will be your last?”

  “You tell me, Trevor.”

  Desiree left us and walked over to Julian and they whispered for a moment, her gun pointed straight at the back of her father’s head.

  “You’re the wily type,” Trevor said, leaning forward, his voice lowered. “Any suggestions?”

  “Far as I can see, Trevor, you’re fucked.”

  He gestured with his cigar. “As are you, boy.”

  “A little less so, though.”

  He raised his eyebrows at my mummified body. “Really? I think you’re mistaken. But if the two of us put our heads together, why we might—”

  “I knew a guy once,” I said, “he molested his son, had his wife killed, caused a gang war in Roxbury and Dorchester which killed sixteen children at least.”

  “And?” Trevor said.

  “And I liked him more than I like you,” I said. “Not by much, mind you. I mean, he was a scumbag, you’re a scumbag, it’s sort of like having to choose between two types of crotch rot. But still, he was poor, no education, society had shown him in a million different ways how little a fuck it gave about him. But you, Trevor, you’ve had everything a man could want. And it wasn’t enough. You still bought your wife like she was a sow at the county fair. You still took a baby you brought into the world and turned it into a monster. This guy I was talking about? He was responsible for the death of at least twenty people, that I know of. Probably a lot more. And I put him down like a dog. Because that’s what he deserved. But you? With a calculator, I bet you couldn’t add up all the people whose deaths you’ve been responsible for, whose lives you’ve destroyed or made unbearable over the years.”

  “So you’d put me down like a dog, Mr. Kenzie?” He smiled.

  I shook my head. “No. More like a sand shark you catch when you’re deep-sea fishing. I’d haul you onto the boat, club you until you were stunned. Then I’d open up your belly and toss you back into the water, watch as the bigger sharks came and ate you alive.”

  “My, my,” he said. “Wouldn’t that be a sight?”

  Desiree crossed back to us. “Having fun, gentlemen?”

  “Mr. Kenzie was just explaining to me the subtleties of Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto Number Two in F major. He truly revolutionized my perception of it, darling.”

  She slapped his temple. “That’s nice, Daddy.”

  “So, what are you planning to do with us?” he said.

  “You mean after I kill you?”

  “Well, I was wondering about that. I don’t see why you would need to confer with my beloved servant, Mr. Archerson, if all was going according to plan. You’re meticulous, Desiree, because I trained you to be so. If you needed to confer with Mr. Archerson, there must be a proverbial fly in the ointment.” He looked at me. “Would it have something to do with the wily Mr. Kenzie?”

  “Wily,” I said. “That’s twice now.”

  “It’ll grow on you,” he assured me.

  “Patrick,” Desiree said, “you and I do have some things to discuss, don’t we?” She turned her head. “Julian, will you take Mr. Stone to the pantry and lock him in?”

  “The pantry!” Trevor cried. “I love the pantry. All those canned goods.”

  Julian placed his hands on Trevor’s shoulders. “You know my strength, sir. Don’t make me use it.”

  “Wouldn’t think of it,” Trevor said. “To the canned goods, Julian. Posthaste.”

  Julian wheeled him out of the room and I heard the wheels squeak on the marble as they made their way past the grand staircase toward the kitchen.

  “All those hams!” Trevor cried. “All those leeks!”

  Desiree straddled me and placed the gun against my left ear. “Here we are.”

  “Isn’t it romantic?”

  “About Danny,” she said.

  “Yes?”

  “Where is he?”

  “Where’s my partner?”

  She smiled. “In the garden.”

  “The garden?” I said.

  She nodded. “Buried up to her neck.” She looked out the window. “Gosh, I hope it doesn’t snow tonight.”

  “Dig her out,” I said.

  “No.”

  “Then kiss Danny good-bye.”

  Knives danced in her irises. “Let me guess—unless you make a phone call by a certain time, he’s dead, blah, blah, blah.”

  I looked at the clock over her shoulder as she shifted her weight on my thighs. “Actually, no. He’ll be getting a bullet in his head in about thirty minutes regardless.”

  Her face sagged along the jawline for just a moment and then her hand tightened in my hair and the gun dug into my ear so hard I half expected it to pop out the other side. “Unless you make a phone call,” she said.

  “No. A phone call won’t cut it because the guy holding him doesn’t have a phone. I either show up at his door in thirty—no, twenty-nine—minutes, or we have one less lawyer in the world. Al
l in all, who’s going to miss a lawyer?”

  “And where’s that leave you if he dies?”

  “Dead,” I said. “Which is where I’m going to be anyway.”

  “Have you forgotten your partner?” She cocked her head toward the windows.

  “Oh, come on, Desiree. You’ve already killed her.”

  I looked in her eyes as she answered.

  “No, I haven’t.”

  “Prove it.”

  She laughed and leaned back on my thighs. “Fuck you, buddy.” She wagged a finger in my face. “Your desperation’s showing, Patrick.”

  “So’s yours, Desiree. You lose that lawyer, you lose it all. Kill your father, kill me, you’ve still got only two million. And we both know that’s not enough for you.” I tilted my head so the gun slipped from my ear, then nuzzled the slide with my cheekbone. “Twenty-eight minutes,” I said. “After that, you’ll go through the rest of your life knowing how close you were to over one billion dollars. And watching as other people spend it.”

  The butt of the gun hit the top of my head so hard the air in the room turned scarlet for a moment and everything spun.

  Desiree came off my thighs and slapped me across the face with her open hand. “You think I don’t know you?” she screamed. “Huh? You think I don’t—”

  “I think you’re short a lawyer, Desiree. That’s what I think.”

  Another slap, this one with nails trailing after it that tore through the flesh over my left cheekbone.

  She drew back on the hammer of the gun and placed the muzzle between my eyebrows and screamed in my face, her mouth a gaping hole of furious, disrupted insolence. Spittle boiled at the corners of her mouth, and she screamed again, her index finger turning deep pink as it curled around the trigger. The shock of her screams, the violent residue of them, eddied around my skull and burned my ears.

  “You will fucking die,” she said in a wet, ragged voice.

  “Twenty-seven minutes,” I said.

  Julian came bursting through the doors and she pointed the gun at him.

  He held up his hands. “A problem, miss?”

  “How fast can you drive to Dorchester?” she said.

  “Thirty minutes,” he said.

  “You have twenty. We’re going to show Mr. Kenzie his partner in the garden.” She looked down at me. “Then you, Patrick, are going to give us your friend’s address.”

  “Julian’ll never get through the door alive.”

  She raised the gun over my head, then paused halfway through her strike. “Let Julian worry about that,” she hissed. “The address for a look at your partner. Deal?”

  I nodded.

  “Untie him.”

  “Dear?”

  “Don’t ‘dear’ me, Julian.” She bent by the back of my chair. “Untie him.”

  Julian said, “This isn’t wise.”

  “Julian, by all means tell me what my options are.”

  Julian didn’t have an answer for that.

  I felt the pressure leave my chest first. Then my legs. The sheets fell away and spread across the floor in front of me.

  Desiree knocked me out of the chair by pistol-whipping the back of my skull. She crammed the muzzle into the side of my neck. “Let’s go.”

  Julian took a flashlight off the top of a bookcase and pushed the French doors open onto the back lawn. We followed him out as he turned left, the light dancing across the grass ahead of him in a halo.

  With Desiree gripping the back of my head and her gun against my neck, I was forced to bend to her height as we stepped off the lawn and followed a short pathway that led around the corner of a shed and an overturned wheelbarrow, broke through a thicket of trees and out into the garden.

  It was, in keeping with the rest of the place, enormous—at least the size of a baseball diamond, fringed on three sides by frosted hedges four feet high. We stepped over a plastic tarp rolled up in front of the entrance, and Julian’s flashlight bounced over furrows of iced dirt and the pikes of grass hardy enough to survive the winter. A sudden movement, low and to our right, caught our eyes, and Desiree stopped me with a yank to my head. The halo light jerked right then back to the left and an emaciated hare, its fur spiked by the cold, jumped through the circle of light and then vaulted off into the hedges.

  “Shoot it,” I said to Desiree. “It might have some money.”

  “Shut up.” She said, “Julian, hurry up.”

  “Dear.”

  “Don’t call me ‘dear.’”

  “We have a problem, dear.”

  He stepped back and we looked past him at the circle of light shining into an empty hole about five and a half feet deep and a foot and a half square.

  The hole might have been tight and neat once, but someone had made an awful mess coming back out of it. Trails of dirt deeper than rake marks were ripped through the earth, and soil had been spewed in a wide radius around the hole. Someone hadn’t just been desperate pulling herself out of that hole. She’d been angry.

  Desiree looked left, then right. “Julian.”

  “Yes?” He peered down at the hole.

  “How long since you last checked on her?”

  Julian consulted his watch. “At least an hour.”

  “An hour.”

  Julian said, “She could have reached a phone by now.”

  Desiree grimaced. “Where? The nearest house is four hundred yards away, and the owners are in Nice for the winter. She’s covered in dirt. She’s—”

  “In this house,” Julian hissed, looking back over his shoulder at the mansion. “She could be inside this house.”

  Desiree shook her head. “She’s still out here. I know it. She’s waiting for her boyfriend. Aren’t you?” She called to the darkness, “Aren’t you?”

  Something rustled to our left. The sound might have come from the hedges but it was hard to be sure with the surf raging just twenty yards away on the other side of the garden.

  Julian bent by a row of tall hedges. “I don’t know,” he said slowly.

  Desiree pointed her gun to her left and let go of my hair. “The floodlights. We can turn on the floodlights, Julian.”

  “I really don’t know about this,” Julian said.

  A whisper of wind or surf noise curled against my ear.

  “Goddammit,” Desiree said. “How could she have—?”

  And something made the sort of squishing sound a shoe makes when it steps in a puddle of icy slush.

  “Oh, my,” Julian said and shone the flashlight down on his own chest at the two shiny blades of garden shears that protruded from his sternum.

  “Oh, my,” he said again and stared at the wooden handles of the shears as if waiting for them to explain themselves.

  Then the flashlight dropped and he pitched forward. The blade points popped out through his back and he blinked once, his chin in the dirt, then sighed. Then nothing.

  Desiree turned the gun toward me but it popped out of her hand as the handle of a hoe smashed into her wrist.

  She said, “What?” and turned her head to her left as Angie stepped out of the darkness covered in dirt from head to toe and punched Desiree Stone so hard in the center of her face that I’m sure she was well into dreamland before her body hit the ground.

  41

  I stood by the shower in the downstairs guest bathroom as the water sprayed across Angie’s body and the last of the dirt sluiced down her ankles and swirled into the drain. She ran a bath sponge along her left arm, and the soap dripped down along her elbow and hung there for a moment in long teardrops before falling to the marble basin. Then she went to work on the other arm.

  She must have washed each part of her body four times since we’d come in here, but somehow I was still entranced.

  “You broke her nose,” I said.

  “Yeah? You see any shampoo in here?”

  I used a facecloth to open the medicine cabinet. I wrapped the cloth around a small vial of shampoo and squirted some into my palm, walked
back to the shower.

  “Turn your back to me.”

  She did, and I leaned in and rubbed the shampoo into her hair, felt the wet tangles envelop my fingers, the soap churn up through the roots as my fingers massaged her scalp.

  “Feels very nice,” she said.

  “No kidding.”

  “How bad’s it look?” She leaned forward and I pulled my hands from her hair as she raised her arms and scrubbed her hair with more force than I’d ever use on my own hair if I intended to reach my forties with it still attached to my head.

  I rinsed the shampoo off my hands in the sink. “What?”

  “Her nose.”

  “Bad,” I said. “Like there’s three of them all of a sudden.”

  I came back to the shower as she tilted her head back under the water and the white foamy mixture of soap and water poured between her shoulder blades and cascaded down her back.

  “I love you,” she said, her eyes closed, head tilted back to the spray, her hands wiping the water away from her temples.

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah.” She threw her head forward and reached for the towel as I put it in her hand.

  I leaned in and shut off the water and she wiped her face, blinked her eyes open and found mine. She sniffed at water in her nose and wiped her neck with the towel.

  “When Lurch dug the hole, he dug it too deep. So when he threw me in there, my foot hit a rock sticking out of the wall of dirt on the way down. About six inches above the bottom. And I had to tense every muscle in my body and keep my foot on this little ledge. And it was hard. Because I was looking up at this prick shoveling dirt on me with absolutely no emotion in his face.” She lowered the towel from her breasts toward her waist. “Turn around.”

  I turned around, faced the wall as she dried some more of herself.

  “Twenty minutes. That’s how long it took him to fill the hole. And he made sure I was packed in tight. At least at the shoulders. Didn’t even blink when I spit in his face. Do my back?”

  “Sure.”

  I turned around and she handed me the towel as she stepped out of the shower. I ran the thick terry cloth over her shoulders and then down along the muscles of her back as she twisted her hair in both hands and pulled it up against the back of her head.