Steve answered. “We’re doing it. We’re going on with our lives, just like always. Only better-because this year I’m buying Christmas and Hanukkah presents. Double holidays from now on. Hell, maybe I’ll find out great-grandma was a Buddhist or a Hindu or something, and then we can have those holidays too.”
Shelly looked up from her puzzle and gave him an “Oh, Daddy” look.
“Well, I said I was a Jew,” Steve answered. “I didn’t say I was a good Jew.”
“Speaking of which,” said Peggy. “Tomorrow night we’re having a little celebration.”
A celebration? Karen thought. She didn’t feel much like celebrating, but she knew that’s exactly when you should. And maybe there was something to celebrate. After all, she’d found out about Neal Carey before it was too late.
She lifted her cup and said, “So, long, Neal. Good riddance.”
11
Neal’s hands were cuffed to a ring bolted into the wall of the small bunker. They’d taken his watch, but he figured it was somewhere near morning. He sat shivering on the concrete floor, listening to joe Graham nag at him.
“You should have pulled the trigger, son,” Graham was saying. He also was chained to the wall.
“I know.”
“You should have gone through with it.”
“You’re right.”
“I’ve told you a million times, the job comes first.”
“Let me ask them,” Neal said through clenched teeth. “Maybe they’ll give me the gun back-loaded.”
They sat quietly for a few minutes. Then Neal asked, “Are you scared, Graham?”
“Out of my mind.”
Me too, thought Neal. But so far it just doesn’t seem real. They’ve thrown us into the old prison bunker, chained us to the wall, and just left us in here to freeze. And there’s nothing we can do about it.
“What are we going to do?” he asked Graham.
“Well, when they come in, and they will, they’re going to start working on us. They’ll probably start with one of us first and let the other watch. The guy watching sees what’s happening to his partner and starts thinking, Do I really want them doing that to me? Maybe I can make a deal. So that’s what we do.”
“Make a deal?” Neal asked.
“Sure. You give them the whole story, a little bit at a time, so they’re convinced they’re beating it out of you. You give it to them too early, they think it’s a lie. So take a few lumps and then start to tell them everything. A little bit at a time.”
Neal couldn’t believe he was hearing this. “If we tell them everything they’ll probably kill the boy.
“The boy is dead.”
“I don’t believe that.”
If Graham could have reached Neal he would have grabbed him and shook him. Instead he looked at him long and hard and said, “Son, the boy is dead. You have to face that. We didn’t get to him in time. Maybe there were things we did that we shouldn’t have, or things we didn’t do that we should have. I don’t know. But the boy is dead, Neal.”
“It’s nothing we did. It was me.”
“Who gives a shit?” Graham yelled. “Jesus, will you grow up? Cody McCall is dead, and we’re probably going to join him real soon. The only chance we have is to try to drag this out long enough for Levine to look up from his account books and realize he hasn’t heard from us in awhile and he’d better come looking. And when Ed comes, he’ll arrive with a bad attitude and an army. And I want to live long enough to see that. So drop the it’s-all-my-fault crybaby shit and start thinking about how you can make them torture you for as long as possible.”
You’re right, Dad. The only chance is to talk and drag it out. But you’re wrong about the boy, Graham. I just goddamn know that Cody is alive. And that should be reason enough to hang on.
The door opened and Randy came in carrying two sawhorses. Cal Strekker came in behind him. He had a sledgehammer.
“See, what we did with Harley,” Cal said, “was we laid him on his back on the floor, set one horse under his knees and the other under his ankles. Then we tied his ankles to the second sawhorse. That way Harley’s legs was stretched out nice and tight. Then I swung this hammer down and… whoo.”
Neal felt every nerve in his body jump out from his skin. It was Graham who had the balls to ask, “What did you have against Harley?”
“He wouldn’t give up his boy,” Cal answered. “That got the reverend questioning Harley’s commitment to the cause, which got the reverend praying, and old Yahweh must have told him that Harley was a race traitor. Carter came in here himself to ask Harley the questions. Harley confessed.”
“Before or after you broke his legs?” Graham asked.
Cal grinned. “Long time before that.”
Neal was trying to work up enough voice to ask about Cody, but Graham shut him off with a look and said, “But you kept at him anyway, didn’t you?”
“Yahweh said,” answered Cal. “Or Carter said Yahweh said, which amounted to the same thing. See, Harley had been bonded in blood, so Carter said he was the worse kind of traitor. Said the devil was in him and that we had to make the devil howl. And we did.”
Cal sat down on one of the sawhorses and told them all about it. He enjoyed telling the story, seeing the terror in their eyes, feeling them flinch and sicken, watching them as they came to the realization that the same things were going to happen to them.
So he told them how they’d left Harley chained in the bunker and gone out and got a billy goat and come back in and the reverend told Harley to have sex with Satan’s animal. And how Harley refused, so they brought the boy in, held a gun to his head, and asked Harley again, and this time Harley just couldn’t do it fast enough and Carter said that it proved he was in league with the devil. So they took the boy out, and then they wrapped a rope around the chain on Harley’s cuffs, and ran that through the pulley on the ceiling, and hoisted Harley up and took turns on him with a knotted rope till Harley passed out, so they left him hanging there and the cuffs rubbed his wrists raw and his hands got all swollen because there was no circulation.
Cal told them how they came back later that night and the first thing Harley croaked out of his throat was to ask about his boy, and Carter said that Yahweh would take care of the child and Harley started crying then, just blubbering-like to make you sick-and Carter told Harley to confess that ZOG had sent him and Harley did. They let him down then, cuffed him behind his back, and forced him on his knees, and Carter stuck a broom handle up him and then they left him there like that. And when they came back Harley was bleeding like you wouldn’t believe, and moaning, and Carter said he was talking to Satan but they needed to hear Satan howl. So they broke Harley’s fingers, then his arms. And that was when they did the trick with the sawhorses and the hammer and they thought he was going to die right there, and Randy here was such a pussy he said maybe they should just shoot him then. But Carter said that Satan would take him in his time and Carter went back to California. And Harley was a tough bird and just wouldn’t give up the ghost and he was groaning all the time and letting off such a stench, and that’s when they got to talking about how there really was more than one way to skin a cat. So Cal started taking a knife to him and peeling off big strips-you should have heard Satan howl then-but they didn’t get too far and Harley just finally died.
“But it took what, Randy?” Cal asked. “Couple of weeks?”
“More like three, I think, start to finish.”
“Whatever,” Cal said. He got off the sawhorse, squatted in front of Neal, smiled, and said, “And guess what, Neal buddy? The reverend just finished praying about you. Guess what old Yahweh told him?”
Neal didn’t answer. He wanted to ask about Cody. He tried to. But he was afraid to move as much as a muscle, he was so close to crying, or throwing up, or worse.
Cal saw it, and the psychotic gleam in his eyes flared more brighdy, and he answered his own question. “He said you and the one-armed bandit here was both sent by ZOG. That you’re both in league with Satan. That we need to make you howl.”