He didn’t wait for an answer. He leaned in even closer than before: Five inches, then four, then three, now his lips at her ear—right at her ear—and he could bite it off or even just suck her brain out because he was Billy Dent and maybe he could.
“Because,” he whispered, his breath incongruously warm and soft in her ear, “they want to do the pretty ones, just like I do. They live through me, Connie. They want what I have. What I get. What I take. They don’t have the guts, though. For the blood and the bodies and the rape and the rest. So they just report on it. They tell you the details. And all the time, they wish it had been them. Holding them down. Cutting the clothes from their bodies. Doing all the rest.
“They all want it, Connie,” he said, and leaned away from her, still grinning. “Nice secret, right?”
She remembered then the conversation she’d had. On the phone. The Auto-Tuned voice, goading her, telling her that when Connie died, there’d be no 24/7 memorial on TV. No follow-up reports.
What if it’s just true that your life is genuinely worth less than a white girl’s? the voice had asked.
“Like you said to me on the phone,” she said, the words slipping out before she could stop them. “Some people are worth less than others.” To you, she added mentally but didn’t have the guts to speak aloud.
Billy pursed his lips. “Don’t quite know what was said to you on the phone,” he admitted. “Wasn’t me you were talkin’ to.”
You’re gonna die anyway, Connie. Might as well satisfy your curiosity. “So you have a partner?”
“A partner? In a manner of speakin’, I suppose.”
“Like the Impressionist. And the Hat-Dog Killer.”
“Those peckerheads?” Billy said, heated. “You mockin’ me, girl? The three of them ain’t got two full gonads between ’em. Useful jackasses is all. Tools, like a wrench or a”—he held up the knife, surprised and delighted, as though he’d forgotten it was there—“or a knife!”
Three of them? she thought.
“But now it’s your turn,” Billy said. “Your turn to tell me a secret.”
Connie’s lips parted, but no sound came out. She could not move her tongue, which lay dry and heavy in her mouth, useless. She couldn’t imagine a single secret, all of a sudden. Nothing at all. Certainly nothing that would interest Billy Dent.
It doesn’t matter, anyway. He’s going to kill you no matter what you say.
“Cat got your tongue?” Billy asked.
“I don’t have any secrets,” she managed at last. “I’m sorry.”
“Everyone’s got secrets, darlin’. Everyone. And you and me, hell, we just met. This is our first time talkin’. You got a lot of secrets from me.”
“You know who I am,” she told him. “You know all about me.”
“Secondhand,” Billy said, sniffing at the very idea. He waved it out of the air like stink. “Other folks, tellin’ me what they seen. I want to know you, Connie. From you.” This time, he tapped his teeth with the knife, and for a single, glorious instant, Connie imagined throwing her weight forward, knocking into him, the knife skidding up those teeth, carving open his upper lip, sliding up into his nose, through the sinus cavity, into his brain—
But in the small glitch of time it took for the thought to occur to her, the moment was over.
“Tell me about my boy,” Billy said. “About your first time.”
“First time?” she asked dully. She felt like an idiot. First time what?
Billy smiled, and for a split second, Connie relaxed before she realized that Billy’s smiles were artifacts of his derelict humanity, tools used to put prey at ease.
“Don’t fiddle with me, girl. I been treating you humanely, but that can change real quick. Your first time. With Jasper. Tell me what it was like.”
“We didn’t!” Connie blurted out. “We haven’t!”
Billy’s expression and posture changed not one iota. But Connie knew—instantly—that she’d said the wrong thing.
“I—” she began, but Billy hushed her with a glance.
He moved the knife, lifting it to his eyes, then turned it slowly until every angle of it had fallen beneath his gaze.
“Is this a dagger which I see before me?” he said in a surprisingly accurate British accent. Connie blinked, unsure what to do or say in response, and then Billy darted forward and the blade was at the corner of her eye. She jerked away out of reflex, but Billy slapped his free palm against the side of her head, forcing her to stare directly into the blade.
“Is this the goddamn dagger?” Billy demanded in his familiar drawl. “Am I losing my mind, girl, or is this a knife I got in my hand?”
Connie whimpered.
“Answer me!” Billy yelled, his spittle flecking her cheek.
“It’s a knife!” she yelped. “You have the knife!”
“And do you believe I will cut you and gut you if you lie to me? Do you?”
“I know you will!” she cried. “But I’m telling the truth!”
“I want to know!” Billy roared. “Tell me about your first time with my boy! Tell me, or I’ll rip you open and cut you into little bitty pieces and let you watch yourself die!”
“We haven’t!” Connie pleaded. “We haven’t had sex yet! I swear to God!”
Billy exploded with a wrathful, rageful bellow. His free hand slid to the back of her head, and he grabbed a handful of her braids, yanking her head back. He came around to the front of her, straddling her, and moved the knife to her bare, vulnerable throat, pressing the edge of the blade against her flesh. There was pressure, but no pain.
Not yet.
“To God? You swear to God? You think God was watching or caring when I nailed that silly, crazy girl to the ceiling of that church in Pennsylvania? You think God was payin’ attention when I slipped my knife inside her, when I found all her dark and bloody secrets? You think God gave a good damn when I popped out her eyeballs, easy as you please, and fed ’em to the strays in the alley? Do you? Do you?” He licked his lips. “So if you’re gonna swear to somethin’, little girl, if you’re gonna try to persuade Dear Old Dad, you best swear to something that matters.”
Connie swallowed. What had been dry now went slick. She couldn’t help it. She—she swallowed again. This time, there was pain along with the wetness of her own blood.
“I swear to you!” she whispered, trying to move her throat as little as possible. She was now raw and open there, keenly aware of how thin the skin was between the blade and her windpipe, the blade and her jugular. “I swear, Billy!” Tears dripped down her cheeks, slid over the curve of her jaw, and melded with the slippery blood.
Tears. She was used to a lifetime of tears doing something. Tears slowed down the conversation. Tears made people apologize. Sometimes tears just pissed off the other person, and he or she stomped out of the room.
She wasn’t used to nothing.
For all Billy’s demeanor changed, she might as well have been dry-eyed and not bleeding.
“You think I’m gonna believe that?” he asked. “Fine-lookin’ girl like you? Sweet talker like my Jasper? You think I believe you could hold out? That boy could talk your legs open in no time, make you think it was your idea all along.”
It’s not me; it’s him, she wanted to say. But would he believe that? Could Billy Dent believe the truth?
Billy began sawing the blade back and forth, almost gently. Connie felt her skin part.
“Please,” she said. She didn’t want to say it. She struggled with herself, ordered herself to shut up, to no avail.
Connie didn’t want to beg for her life. She didn’t want to do that. But she would. She knew it. She could feel it crawling up her throat like something that hadn’t quite been dead when she’d eaten it. She would whimper. And cry. Her nose would run streamers of snot. And it would be useless because that was the sort of thing you did to play on someone’s pity, but Billy Dent had no pity. He was born without it, the way some people were born without de
tached earlobes or the ability to curl their tongues. Her tears and her pleas would do nothing to him, and she knew it, but she wouldn’t be able to stop herself. She would beg and wheedle and swear and importune, and in the end, he would do horrible, horrible things to her, anyway.
Suddenly, he stopped with the knife and looked over her, over her head, his eyes marveling.
She realized that he was still holding her by the braids with his knifeless hand. Now he pulled them up and was gazing at them, almost in awe.
“I ain’t never touched a colored girl’s hair before,” he said with a gentleness that both surprised and frightened her.
Touch my hair as much as you want. I don’t care. Just let me live.
With a smooth motion, he removed the blade from her throat and sliced through one of her braids, almost at her scalp, cutting through the knotted hair with a swiftness that offered further proof—along with her bleeding throat—of the sharpness of the knife.
He took a step back and held the knife by its handle in his teeth as he—with quick efficiency and no fumbling—tied the severed braid around his right wrist.
Oh, God. A trophy. His trophy. Oh, Jesus. Oh, Jesus. I don’t know what I did wrong; I was stupid to come here, but stupid’s not a sin. I don’t know what I did to get here, but I promise I’ll never do it again. Please get me out of here, and I will never, ever do anything bad again as long as I live. I will be a good girl for the rest of my life.
Billy took the knife out of his mouth and studied the crimsoned length of the blade for a moment. Connie swallowed again, this time causing a stitch of flame to race along her neck where she was open to the air.
Her mind went blank. She had nothing in her. Nothing to say. Nothing to think. Nothing to pray.
And then she was literally saved by the bell.
The phone rang.
It was, Connie thought, bizarre to see Billy Dent answer the phone.
He’d been built up in her mind as the Boogeyman, the Creature, the Devil Himself. But when the flip phone on the table next to him buzzed, his eyebrows quirked for an instant like anyone else’s, and he picked up the phone and said into it—politely—“Hello?”
Just like a human being.
Bizarre.
“No, you can’t talk to Ugly J.” Beat. “Well, I don’t rightly care. Tell me.”
Saved by the bell, she thought. Saved by the freakin’ bell.
Connie flashed away from the oddly prosaic tableau of Billy Dent on the phone, back to the box she’d unearthed in his old backyard.
A bell. The bell. A bit of Poe surfaced from sophomore English: the tintinnabulation that so musically wells / From the bells, bells, bells, bells, / Bells, bells, bells—
Oh my God, I’m losing it.
Billy listened for a moment. His expression did not change from its studied, frozen neutrality as he said, “And you left him there?” and yet Connie felt as though the temperature in the room had dropped fifteen degrees. She fantasized that she could see her breath.
She tried not to get too excited about her temporary reprieve. Blood still ran down her neck and pooled in the hollow of her clavicle. She didn’t have Jazz’s intimate understanding of the fragility of the human body. How bad was the cut? How much blood had she lost? How much would she lose?
Chill out, Connie. You’re not Howie. If he’d cut your jugular or your carotid, you’d probably be dead or unconscious already.
Then again, maybe that was the Darkene talking. She knew Rohypnol could linger in the body.
“You left him there?” Billy repeated, again without heat, but then he spun the knife—still rubied and glimmering with a wet veneer of her blood—and jabbed it at the table, where it thunked into place, point down and vibrating slightly. Connie knew that would be the sound it would make if it hit her bones.
“You go nowhere,” Billy said now. “Stay where you are, and don’t even think of killing anyone else until I tell you it’s okay.” He paused. “If you want to be a Crow, you’ll rethink arguin’ with me.” Another pause. “That’s what I thought.”
Billy snapped the phone shut and stared at it, small, black, and dead in his palm.
“Stupid son of a bitch,” he said calmly, then dropped the phone to the table, snatched up the knife, and began methodically stabbing the phone, his face expressionless, his eyes fixated on the spot where the point of the knife cracked the plastic of the phone, then broke through, then finally crunched its way to the table again—thunk.
Connie’s blood sloughed off the knife and onto the carcass of the phone; it looked like Billy had stabbed the phone to death.
I’m going to die. This is how I’m going to die, and this is where I’m going to die. Because I did all the stupid things you yell at stupid people for doing in stupid movies.
“Right,” Billy said. “You.”
He was staring at her, as though he’d just remembered she was here. With two steps, he was at her side, and then his fingers pressed against her neck, right where he’d cut her open. Connie hissed in pain and pulled away. Billy thumped the top of her head with the side of his fist.
“Sit still.”
He ran a finger along the gash. Connie sniveled.
“Quit it,” he said coldly. “This is nothing. You ain’t dyin’.” He studied his bloodied fingertips for a moment, then licked one clean. Connie gagged.
“Thought it would taste different,” he remarked, as though to himself.
He wiped his other fingers clean on Connie’s shirt, quick and efficient, not pausing to linger at her breasts, as if she was nothing more than a towel to him.
“Ain’t done with you yet,” he told her. “You still owe me that secret. That memory of my boy. And I aim to collect. But right now, I got something important to do. So you’ll have to sit still for me.”
With no further preamble, Billy produced a handkerchief and shoved it in Connie’s mouth before she could move or protest. Then he grabbed the back of her chair and rocked her onto the back legs. She went dizzy with the sudden movement and the lingering aftereffects of the Darkene. One-handed, Billy hauled her, backward, across the floor, the chair rattling, the legs scraping the hardwood as she went. He opened a door and dragged her in, righting the chair a few feet inside. Connie had only a moment as Billy stepped around her and over the threshold—she desperately fired her vision everywhere she could, even twisting her raw and abused neck to look around. Small room. Some kind of rubberized egg carton–looking stuff was stapled to the walls. The only furniture was a bed, covered with an unruly hump of blankets.
Standing in the doorway—the only source of light—Billy fixed her with a hard stare.
“Now, I got a couple chores on my list. While I’m gone, I want you to think about two things, and two things only: One, I want you to think about what I want to know, about your first time makin’ my kid happy. Second, you think about how persuasive I can be when I need to be. Got it?”
Connie nodded wildly.
Billy held up the wrist on which he wore Connie’s severed braid. “I’m keeping you real close, girl. I’ll be back for you soon.”
And then he closed the door. The room went starkly, immediately black. There was the depressing and unmistakable click of a lock.
From outside, she heard Billy’s footfalls on the floor. Then the apartment door. Then nothing.
Connie waited for her eyes to adjust to the darkness. Billy had turned out the light in the outer room when he left, so there was only a bit of gray murk around the doorframe, light only in comparison to the pitch black around it. She looked down and could barely make out her own sleeves. So that was it, then.
Think, Connie. You have some time. Maybe five minutes, maybe five hours. Who knows. Use it. Now.
She wondered: Could she somehow hop the chair over to the bed she’d seen? Maybe there was a rough edge or an exposed screw or nail that she could use to saw through her ropes. As best she could tell, Billy had tied her by her ankles and wrists to the legs
and arms of the chair, using what felt like coarse, thick rope. It chafed her skin at the wrists. She was bound tightly. She could move her feet a little and waggle her fingers, but that was it. At least she still had some circulation going.
Okay, Connie, enough with the medical exam. He could be right back. Get moving.
She took a deep breath through her nose (thank God the handkerchief was clean—it tasted only of fresh cotton) and pushed against the floor with all her might, hoping to lift the chair an inch or two. At the same time, she flung her weight back, toward the bed.
She teetered for a moment, then fell over backward, her entire body rattling with impact. Her head smacked against the floor, and she whooshed out all her air and a scream into the handkerchief, both muted, then tried to suck in another breath, couldn’t, panicked, and began sucking on the handkerchief for a starry, terrified moment before her reflexes took over and she greedily snorted great wallops of air in through her nose, exhaling noisily, gustily.
Oh, crap. Crap. Now I’m screwed. Damn it.
Her head throbbed and pounded. Something wet ran along her cheek; her still-bleeding neck had squirted a little puddle on the floor, and in her contorted, breathless moments, she’d rolled into it.
Get up, Connie! Get up! Do it! Before he gets back! Figure this out! Now!
Her hammering heart threatened to burst. She forced herself to walk away from her own panic, imagining it as a boulder fallen in her path. Thank God for all that guided imagery and meditation she did. Yoga saves lives, she thought.
Stepped away from her own fear, she began to calm her breathing and bring her heart rate back to normal. She was, she knew, flooded with all kinds of endorphins and fear hormones right now. There was nothing she could do about that. She would have to take the best action she could imagine and hope that it was the right one.
First order of business had to be getting to the bed. It was the only thing in the room. It was the only tool she had.
She struggled for a moment, willing her restricted body to find a way to sit upright again, but it was fruitless. Then again… why sit up? Could she somehow inch along the floor as she was? Thrash around just the right way and make it to the bed?