He tilts his head downward and looks at her properly. She’s dressed in a black blouse and a long skirt. Her hands are fixed behind her back with a plastic tie, and she has been gagged. She starts to move, as if she has just regained consciousness and is rapidly realizing something bad is happening. Her head jerks up, and she sees him in the chair. Her eyes open wide.
His grin feels like it’s going to split Warner’s head in two. He doesn’t care where the woman’s come from. He just knows that this time the rancid bag of shit on the floor in front of him is going to split properly, and that it will finally lance the wound in his head that has been there since the nights when someone who should have placed no price on their love started coming to him and shoving her vileness in his face, smothering him in the dark, and afterward pinning him down with her sweating bulk, her face inches above his, martini tears running down her face and dropping onto his terrified cheeks as she whispered again and again: I love you, you know that, don’t you? I love you. That’s why I do this. Because I love you so very much.
It’s the face he always sees when the valve opens in his head and the dam breaks—that huge, sniveling face, a face that will be smiling and perfectly normal tomorrow morning, as if what happens in the darkness of her young son’s bedroom in the night is just a dream: and when Warner has done his work, it’s always been the faces of the women that have borne the worst of it, right back to the bar slut in Mexico. The face has to die hardest. That revolting disguise, the lie of love, the bitter mask women are taught to use to shine darkness into the world.
“You don’t have a lot of time,” a voice says from behind him. It’s not Katy’s voice, but it is a woman’s. It sounds businesslike.
“Who’s that?”
“Never mind. Check on the bed.”
Warner turns and sees what’s laid across the counterpane of the king-size bed to the side of his chair. Some knives. Some pliers. A rusty spatula. A hammer. Other toys.
The woman on the sheeting sees Warner pick up the biggest of the knives. She tries to scream, but the gag is tight. She tries to get up, but her ankles are tied.
“This has to happen?” Another voice, a man’s. It sounds familiar.
“It’s writ,” the woman replies. “Now shh.”
Warner isn’t listening. Warner is wrapped in delight. Oh, look at the way she moves. Watch—no, watch properly. The hair, already matted to her face with sweat. The muscles in her legs, twitching, trying to run in every direction at once. See everything that is revealed when a woman isn’t pretending to be graceful, when she’s reduced to an animal full of shit and blood. Warner can smell her.
Oh, thank you, Lord, for putting such things into the world. For putting them there and for blessing me with the knowledge of how they can be enjoyed. I’m sorry I have questioned you occasionally. I apologize for pretending sometimes that this is wrong. It’s not wrong. It is unbelievable. It’s the point of being alive.
“Enjoy,” the woman says. “It’s the last time.”
Warner hears the two people leave the room and close the door. He gathers his will and strength, staggers to his feet. He’s laughing, or crying, he can’t tell which and he doesn’t care. His injured leg gives out and he drops onto one knee beside the woman on the sheet, who is now absolutely still, rigid, terrified, eyes like full moons.
Supporting himself on one quavering arm, Warner leans over until his face is directly over hers, until his tears drop down onto her face.
“This is going to really hurt,” he tells her.
His voice is too slurred for her to make out the words, but he can see in her eyes that she’s understood.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
I parked outside Shore Realty. I had a choice of spaces. Karren’s car wasn’t there, and I couldn’t tell whether I was relieved or not. It gave me time to plaster a grin across my face and pretend everything was okay. I also didn’t have to decide immediately whether to say what had happened to Stephanie when Karren asked about her, which she would. Two hours ago my plan had been to present as business as usual. Now the idea seemed ridiculous.
Janine was inside, sitting at her desk, frowning at her computer. She jumped when I entered.
“Oh,” she said breathlessly. “It’s you.”
“Who did you think it would be, Janine?”
She blinked at me.
“Seriously,” I said. I felt light-headed, angry, and scared. “We get a lot of psychos dropping by? You got a few sharpened stakes hidden ready in your desk drawer?”
“I don’t understand.”
I took a deep breath. “Never mind. Where’s Karren?”
“Well, she didn’t say. But she got a phone call a couple hours ago and went out to meet with someone, so it’s probably . . .”
“. . . a client, yeah, okay.”
I walked past her, wondering if I should just turn around and get on with my real reason for being at The Breakers. With Karren at a meeting for who knew how long, there was no point me being in the office. Without anyone to pretend to, everybody’s life feels dark and strange—the perpetual make-do chaos that exists in our heads—and I didn’t care what Janine thought about anything. So what did I do? Leave? Wouldn’t that look weird? Did I care? Would Janine even notice? As soon as you ask what “acting like normal” involves, the question explodes in your face. I felt arbitrary. I felt lost. I felt like a player in a computer game who’d wandered off track into a subarea from which you could spend the rest of your life trying to escape—but which had never had any bearing on the overall mission. Whatever that was.
“You okay, Bill?”
I’d ground to a halt near my desk, and had apparently been staring at the wall. I glanced round and saw Janine’s concerned, bovine face.
“Yeah,” I said. “Monster headache, is all.”
This was true, and I felt a tiny bit bad when Janine dug in her drawer for some painkillers, and found some, and insisted on getting me a glass of water from the cooler. There was something nightmarish about the length of time she took over this, mangling the first paper cup, filling the second with extreme care but then spilling about a third of it on the way over. Sure, I could sweep past her and push my way out of the office—but if I did that, could I come back? Finally the water was accepted and given thanks for and drunk.
Then something struck me. “Why are you even here on a Friday?”
“Oliver’s taken Kyle out,” she said proudly. “Like, a Dad’s day? And I was at home and I thought, well, there’s so much stuff I still don’t have a clue about on the computer, why not come in and go through it? Friday’s always quiet—could be I might get some stuff done.”
I was surprised. A couple days ago I might even have been impressed. I responded as if I was still that person. “Good for you. By the way—you keep all your e-mails, right?”
“Of course. I mean, I lose a few, but you know.”
“Could you find the one where I asked you to make that reservation at Jonny Bo’s?”
She looked wary. A lot of computer-related things made Janine look wary, or confused. “Well, probably. But why?”
“I want to check a tiny thing. No biggie, just a technical issue. Could you find it, forward it back to me? Actually, to my home e-mail address?”
“Sure. I know how to do that now.”
“Great. Oh, shoot—just remembered something I gotta do. Back in ten, okay?”