When he came to, Harry was on his side unable to do anything but squirm. His hands were secured behind his back. His feet were tied together with electrical cord. He could see the plug, still attached to the end of the wire.
“I spent a summer at my uncle’s ranch in California when I was a kid.” Harry recognized the voice as the mayor’s. “It was fucking beautiful out there and I hated it. What an idiot city brat I must have been. My uncle made me learn how to hog-tie. I remember asking him: “When will I ever need to hog-tie? I live in New Jersey? If he was alive, I’d call him up and apologize.”
With great effort and even more pain, Harry rolled on his belly, grinding his face into the concrete until he could see the mayor sitting on the second to the bottom riser of the wooden stairs. The shotgun was cradled on his lap. To his left Helen lay crumpled on the ground, her head tilted at an odd angle. Harry’s head hurt a lot but it wasn’t as uncomfortable as the sensation of having his hands tied behind his back attached by a short cord to his ankles.
“Charlie—”
“Oh, you’re awake,” Charlie said with what sounded like true relief. “Thank God. You know, you’re the first person I have hit in anger since Wally Murphy in the seventh grade.” Charlie chuckled to himself. “I remember he turned his head as I swung at him and I hit him in the back of the neck. It really hurt my hand.” The mayor paused, lost in thought. “Murphy was even nerdier than me. Now that I think of it, we were probably fighting to see who wasn’t at the bottom of the class’s pecking order. Pathetic.”
“Charlie,” Harry said, “why did you kill Big Bill?”
“I didn’t kill Bill. I just told you, I haven’t hit anyone in forty years.” He pointed to Helen. “She did it. Last week she made me clear the thorn bushes away from the front door but I didn’t know why. I only found out about this grave shit yesterday after you searched my house. When your colleagues left, Helen showed me a letter Big Bill sent about this place.”
“I’ve seen it. So why did she kill Bill?”
“Because he did a title search on this house.”
“And that’s it?” Harry asked incredulously.
“You’ve met the bitch. She’s fucking crazy. She called Bill and said a possum was digging up her garden and asked him to show her how to use a shotgun. She obviously already knew. Then she went to Bill’s apartment and erased his computer.”
“Did she kill Sweeney too?”
“Oh yeah,” Charlie said as a matter of fact. “Apparently, you told old Todd that Bill talked to Sweeney. She figured they talked about this house so she set up a meet and shot him too. Honest to fucking god she was proud of herself. She’s nuts; her whole fucking family is. Saying that her grandpappy was pissed as hell at her for leaving the bodies lying around. I heard you had a chat with him today.”
“What?” Harry asked but Charlie ignored him.
“Man, I can’t talk to you like this.” Charlie stood up and came at the bound man with the shotgun in his hand. He walked behind Harry, who stopped struggling when he felt hands under his armpits, dragging him until his back was against the corner of the room. Charlie stood in front of him then took off his jacket, balled it up and put it behind his head as a pillow.
“There, is that better?”
Harry, having braced himself for death, was too shocked to answer. Charlie walked up the stairs, leaving Harry alone. Harry strained at his bonds. It hurt and they didn’t loosen.
Charlie returned with a glass of water and lifted it to Harry’s lips. He drank greedily.
“Thank you,” Harry said when he was done. “You gonna kill me now?”
Charlie walked back to the stairs and again sat down. “I have no idea what to do, Harry. I’ve never killed anybody before. Shit, you have no idea how badly that dragon and her family have fucked up my life.”
“Her family?”
“You guys are pretty shitty detectives. Didn’t anyone look up what Mrs Boyce’s maiden name was?”
“I saw it on some documents: it was Hanover, right?
“That’s her fake maiden name. Harry Cull, meet Helena Kozlov.”
“Kozlov, like the Jersey City Kozlovs?” Harry hardly had to search his memory for the head of Jersey’s most deadly Mob family. “Like Nakita ‘the Goat’ Kozlov?”
Charlie pointed to his unconscious wife. “Meet his granddaughter.”
Harry’s immediate danger left him as a realization of another danger dawned on him. “Fuck, did I just kill Nakita Kozlov’s granddaughter?”
“She ain’t dead yet but you did slam her pretty good into a wall. I wouldn’t advertise that too much if I were you.”
“Wait,” Harry said. “Did you just say I met her grandfather today?”
“Yup, he was here, Grandpa Kozlov himself. You guys certainly kicked up a hornet’s nest. Enough to make the Goat himself come up here.”
“Are you telling me the old guy I spoke to on my lawn was Kozlov?”
“In the flesh. A couple of hours ago, I put him in his car for his trip back to Jersey. He said you were giving up on all this.”
“I was.”
“What happened?”
“I changed my mind.”
“Well, you were lucky you didn’t tell him that. He said he went to your place to shoot you but didn’t because you said you were leaving.”
“Jesus,” Harry whispered thinking about the cup of tea he had had with the nice old man, not knowing that he was seconds from death. How could he have missed that? Thinking back on the whole week he was disappointed with himself for all the stuff he had missed – especially during his interrogations with Charlie. “So you are Mob?”
“No, no no… well, I used to be… kinda. Look, I went to Wharton and got a degree in accounting. I’m one of those sad fucks that’s happy with a shoebox full of receipts and an adding machine. The only girl that ever kissed me was my mother and maybe an old aunt at a family event. I was terminally shy with zero social skills. So one day in my last year, there’s this jobs mixer at school where prospective employers meet with the soon-to-be graduates. I was sitting in the corner nursing a glass of punch when this woman from VMMR comes over to me and says: ‘I was wondering where you were, Mr Boyce. Your transcripts are very impressive and now I see you’re cute too. I’m Mandy’.
“She was so beautiful I almost kissed her hand when she offered it. She took me to dinner in this nice hotel where I don’t even think I said ten words. Then she invited me up to her room and gave me a blow job. Fucking hell! I hadn’t even seen a naked woman before and here I am having the kind of experience you write in a letter to Penthouse magazine. She told me to look her up in Jersey City when I graduated.
“A couple months later, I called. A secretary told me that she had been relocated to Oklahoma City and transferred me to her replacement. Her replacement, Susan, told me that Mandy had told her all about me. Susan turned out to be hotter than Mandy. She took my virginity as well as my details for a job in VMMR’s accounts department.
“They knew exactly what they were doing. Sexually, I was like a 15-year-old. Show me a tit and I’d do anything. So when some of the ledgers came in that surpassed the IRS reporting threshold for overseas money, Susan would pull my dick out of her mouth just long enough to ask nicely if I could cook the books – just this once.
“One day, Susan came in with a huge laundry list of illegal bookkeeping tasks. Even as she ran her hand down my thigh I said I wasn’t comfortable doing this. She pointed out that I had already committed enough money laundering and dodgy accounting that I’d do twenty years minimum if anyone found out. From then on, there was no more carrot in a negligee – it was all stick. They owned me.
“I kept bending numbers for them but it was killing me. I couldn’t sleep, and when I got diagnosed with a peptic ulcer, I told them I wanted out. You know that adage you only leave the Mob in a box? Well, it’s almost true. They threatened to kill me, but I was so down, I said I didn’t care. That’s when Nakita Kozlov came up with a compromise.”
“You know Kozlov?” Harry asked.
“Before this I never set eyes on the man but, apparently, I had once met Helen at a work event and been nice to her. I don’t remember, but I imagine it was true – I was always nice to everybody.
“A deal was brokered. If I married the Goat’s granddaughter I could live up here, with my only duty being to keep guard over the ghost house.”
“It was an arranged marriage?”
“How else were they going to get rid of her? Even her family hates her. Anyway, I got up here and fell in love, not with her, of course, but the mountains. I took a real estate course, mostly to get out of the house, and I found I did have people skills, I just had never used them. I hit the real estate market at the right time and did amazingly well in the housing boom years. I did well enough to open my own agency and, even now, when houses aren’t selling, I still make good revenue from rentals.”
“How many bodies are buried down here?”
“I didn’t even know there were bodies until yesterday. I wasn’t allowed down here, and I didn’t want to know. I was told to make sure people stayed away and didn’t ask questions. Jesus, if Billy had told me he was looking at this place, I would have warned him off. Shit, if I knew he was taking his real-estate license, I would have hired him. I thought he liked being a no-responsibility working stiff.”
“He was inspired by a woman.”
“That stripper?”
Harry nodded.
“Yeah, met her. She didn’t like me, I could tell. But if she had, I can see how she’d be inspirational.”
Harry laughed, despite his predicament. “So what you gonna do, Charlie?”
“Me? I’m outta here. I’ve been planning my escape for a while. I would have been gone a month ago, but then Frank’s land deal came up and I couldn’t resist adding that kind of cash to my escape fund. I should’ve known it was too good to be true. I’m kinda glad it fell through. I’d hate to watch those fracking fuckers tear this place up.”
“I meant, what are you going to do about me?”
“Oh yeah, sorry. Jesus, Harry, I don’t know. What do you think?”
“I think you should let me go.”
Charlie laughed. “Now there’s a surprise.”
Helen started to moan and both men looked to see her trying to lift her head.
“If I let you go, she’s your problem. When she tells Grandpa what you did, he’ll send a guy.”
“I’ll take my chances,” Harry said.
“Shit, she’s my problem too. Knowing sweet Helen, she’ll track me down like a fucking bloodhound. I always thought she looked a bit like a bloodhound.”
Helen had managed to hold her head up, but had yet to open her eyes. Charlie put down the shotgun, stood and casually picked up the shovel. Then with the grunt of a professional tennis player, he swung the shovel into the side of Helen’s head. The shovel rang like a bell, but his wife miraculously didn’t fall over. He stepped forward, obscuring Harry’s view, and swung again. This time she went down. Harry watched as blood and grey matter seeped from under her head. She wasn’t getting up again – ever. Charlie threw down the shovel and then retook his seat on the steps.
After a long sigh he said: “Is it wrong that that felt so good?”
Harry was unable to answer. Eventually he said: “Jesus, Charlie.”
“God, listen to me. This is what that bitch and her family have done to me. I don’t know right from wrong anymore. I just need out. Prison can’t be worse than being married to her.” He took out a cigarette and lit it. “Neither can hell.”
“Kozlov will have you killed in prison.”
Charlie stood. “Yeah, I know that. I’m not going to prison. I’m gonna hightail it out of here now. If I get caught I’ll put a bullet through my head.” He stopped and thought for a moment. “Jesus, I wonder if I really could do that.”
“Where will you go?”
“I’m not going to tell you that,” he said, and Harry sighed in relief. If Charlie had told him then he knew he was about to be killed.
Charlie went over to Helen and pulled the scarf from her neck. He went over to Harry and inspected the buckshot wounds on his leg then wrapped the scarf around it.
Harry yelped in pain.
“Sorry,” Charlie said, “that’s gotta sting. There’s still buckshot in there.” He took a handkerchief out of his pocket and then stuffed it down Harry’s T-shirt where there was a bloodstain at the shoulder.
Charlie then walked over to the other side of the room and rolled the wheelbarrow over his dead wife’s legs and up to Harry. He tilted the bucket down next to Harry’s sitting form.
“Come on,” Charlie grunted as he picked up Harry by the shoulders and laid him in the barrow. The wheelbarrow crashed backwards on its skids, jarring Harry’s neck and back. His hands were still painfully stuck behind him, mercilessly being tightened by the cord. The mayor wheeled him over to the metal locker. Charlie removed the bag of cement from the storage compartment then wheeled Harry parallel to the locker.
Charlie stood over the terrified polygrapher, reached under his neck and said: “Watch your head.” Then he unceremoniously tipped him into the locker.
Despite the warning his head smashed into the back of the metal box making a ring that reminded Harry of the sound in the corridors of his high school before classes began. He was still a bit dazed when he felt Charlie lifting him further inside. Then the mayor slammed the door.
“Charlie,” Harry shouted but received no answer as he heard his captor climb the stairs.
Panic took over. The black that surrounded him began to fog with the kind of milky whiteness that preceded unconsciousness. He strained at his bonds even though the harder he pulled the tighter they became. He was going to die in this box. He threw the only moving appendage, his head, against the door. The whiteness threatened to increase. On his fourth headbutt he hit nothing but air and blinding light enveloped him as he fell out of the opened locker door.
Charlie was there to catch him. “Whoa, whoa, whoa, big fella.” The mayor lifted Harry gently back in to the locker.
“Don’t leave me in there, Charlie,” Harry said, blinking blood and sweat out of his eyes.
“Easy there, Harry, get a grip. Here.” Charlie held a glass of water up to his mouth, and Harry drank it like it was his last.
Charlie waited until his captive’s eyes had shrunk to normal size. “You OK?”
Harry wasn’t sure but nodded.
“Look, I either kill you or lock you up. I got water for you. Scrunch up.” He pushed Harry’s feet and placed a pitcher of water in the corner of the shed. “Now, don’t kick around too much or you’ll knock that over.”
Anger rose in Harry. “How the fuck am I supposed to reach the water, Charlie?”
Charlie searched his pockets, produced a knife and opened the four-inch blade. Harry shut up quick.
“I need a couple of hours to get out of dodge. I’m just looking for a quick getaway.”
“Nobody knows I’m here, Charlie. I’ll die in here.”
“When I’m a proper distance away, I’ll call somebody. Two, three hours, tops. I promise.”
“My hands will drop off before then.”
“Yeah, I know, that’s what the knife is for. You are good and properly hog-tied so that means if I cut just one bit of the tie the whole thing will come loose. I’m going to cut a piece of the cord and then shut you in the locker. If you struggle too soon or try and stop me from closing the door, I’ll stab anything that sticks out. Then I’ll shoot you.” He pointed to the shotgun leaning ready on the stairs. “I don’t want to do that and you don’t want to kick over that water – you’re gonna need that in a couple of hours. Do we understand each other?”
Harry did a quick calculation of his options and said: “I guess we do.”
Charlie leaned in and pushed Harry at the shoulder. Harry stretched to expose his hands then felt the pop as the mayor severed a section of the electrical cord that held his wrists. Then all went dark as Charlie slammed the door.
Terror threatened Harry’s composure again, but the sensation of the cords loosening at his wrist held the panic at bay. “Charlie, promise you won’t let me die in here.”
“Four hours tops, Harry,” the mayor said, then added, “and that’s no lie.”
It wasn’t a lie but that doesn’t mean it’s the way it happened.
* * *
Like the mayor said, after one piece of the cord was cut, the hog-tie unravelled. The pins and needles in his hands and ankles were sweet torment as the blood returned to Harry’s extremities. The locker was narrow and a foot shorter than his six-foot frame. He was able to stand hunched over, a necessary stretch he performed periodically, but it was maddeningly confining.
Two tiny air slits in the metal door and Harry’s digital wristwatch were his only sources of light. After he had expended the little energy he had in proving that he could not escape the locker, all that was left to do was watch the minutes tick by on his timepiece and hope that Charlie – the mayor, the estate agent, the Mob accountant, the murderer – was a man of his word.
He was afraid to sleep. After losing consciousness earlier he worried that he had suffered a concussion and that sleep would be a permanent state. But in this sensory-deprived place, it was often unclear what was reality and what was dreamland.
The thought that he might die in this box threatened to become an all-consuming terror. In order to forestall the panic, Harry tried to occupy his mind. Could he have seen this coming? Was there anything in his investigation that had pointed to Helen? Was there something he had missed?
The mayor’s affair, and Feather’s fingerprints, had distracted him from an obvious and simple piece of detective work, but that was no excuse. A quick look at Helen’s last name would have set off alarm bells for any law enforcement agent within 1,000 miles of New Jersey and beyond. If Harry had heard that name, every cell in his body would have vibrated at a pitch that people standing nearby would probably have heard. The Kozlovs were the ruthless black sheep of the organized crime fraternity that kept enemies and colleagues in line by threatening their wives and even children. They were only tolerated because of their business acumen. Without them, dirty money wouldn’t get cleaned. There were no clues that pointed even a tiny bit to their involvement in Harry’s son’s abduction. But when investigators heard about what happened to Harry, Kozlov was the first name they named.
* * *
Harry was judicious with the water that Charlie had provided, but after two hours he had to urinate. Using what little energy he had, he successfully bulged the bottom of the door enough to jam in a nickel. It meant that when he urinated on the door, most of it trickled out so he didn’t have to sit in his own piss.
Hour four arrived and with it came despair. At first, Harry had believed Charlie when he said he would call someone and tell them where Harry was. But now Harry was putting himself in Charlie’s shoes. The mayor had made his clean getaway and was four hours away from Ice Lake. Why would he blow that lead? Any phone call could be traced. Harry imagined Charlie feeling bad about not making the call, but he had just seen the ruthlessness of the man and he knew he was capable of letting Harry die of thirst in that vertical tin coffin.
He cursed himself for scoffing at the meditation techniques an old hippy girlfriend had tried to teach him. As a condition of the relationship she insisted that Harry daily tried to attain mindlessness. In the end the only thing he thought was mindless was the woman. If she was there he would apologize. She had taught him how to concentrate on his breathing and then mentally place his hands inside his head using them to push away all thoughts. In his box, Harry for the first time tried this in earnest but his thoughts were like mercury and slid through his fingers, poisoning his mind.
By hour six Harry no longer feared sleep. A coma would be preferable to the torment his mind and body were putting him through. His thoughts refused to be anything other than dark. The wished apology to the hippy girlfriend sent his memory on a tour of his entire life’s transgressions. Insults and slights, deliberate and accidental, were chronicled and analysed and, of course, the haunted house at the end of that memory lane was the kidnapping.
How many times in the years had Harry replayed that meal? In his imagination, how many times had he said to the waitress who told him he had a call, “I’ll get it when my wife comes back,” or he had picked up his son and carried him to the phone? How many times in Harry’s mind’s eye had he hung up as soon as the call seemed funky and ran back in time to stop the woman from taking his boy? Long ago Harry had forced himself to stop going over and over these scenarios because doing so was the route to madness. Now madness was the only road he was on. At least that road had a blacktop on it. The next dirt path his psychosis forced him to limp down was – what had happened to his son after he was taken? Was he a slave or a rag doll for a pervert? Was he locked, like Harry, in a box? Harry hoped, instead, that he was dead and then wept at the thought that that was the best of all possible scenarios. Jesus, he thought through a kaleidoscope of tears, maybe he’s buried here in this basement? Things were so bad this idea actually gave Harry comfort.
* * *
At eight hours Harry tried to smash his watch. The water was gone and he couldn’t think of anything worse than watching his life tick away as the battery on his timepiece lasted longer than he did.
He thought he’d been in bad shape before but he was losing it now. He was parched but still sweated profusely. His left shoe was bright red and squelched when he moved it. The handkerchief that Charlie had stuffed under his T-shirt was sodden with blood. He had heard somewhere that slow blood loss was a pleasant way to go. Where was this supposed pleasantness? When he closed his eyes, shapes swirled in the darkness that he was afraid to let form. His body stopped hurting though – this was a comfort and a worry. Was it the beginning of the end? Maybe, but how long would the endgame be? It was a question that terrified him.