In twentyfour hours.
For the manacled young woman in the adjoining interview room her current surroundings were something of a step up. There were no cockroaches in the room, no fleabitten dogs poking around trying to get at the food. There were no abandoned cars and no burstopen plastic sack of garbage with rats fossicking about in them. This young woman did not hail from a mansion in the Hollywood hills. Her home was a beatup RV in a trailer park in Texas. She, too, had come a long way.
But her surroundings left her completely unmoved. She didn’t care. She didn’t care about the cops and she didn’t care about Bruce. She didn’t care where she came from or where she had ended up. Wherever it was, she’d rather be dead. He was gone and she was alone. She’d known him such a short time and now it was all over and she was alone.
Chapter Four
‘All I said was that it’s like trying to find a needle in a haystack.’
If it hadn’t been so serious, a casual observer might have laughed: the almost Gothic nature of the scene was in such stark contrast to the banal conversation that accompanied it.
It was early afternoon on the day of the Oscars, and the captives were being held in a dark and dingy cellar. Toni, a woman in her early twenties, lay on her back across a table, her ankles and wrists chained to its legs. Her boyfriend, Bob, hung from a chain on the wall. His clothes had been cut away, and he looked rather sad dangling there in the tatters of what had once been an Italian suit.
The man who had made the remark about haystacks was called Errol. He and his companion, who answered only to the title of Mr Snuff, were gangsters. They carried enormous pistols wedged under their arms, which must have been very uncomfortable, and their conversation was continually punctuated with the word ‘motherfucker’. Errol and Mr Snuff were of the opinion that Bob was holding out on them in the matter of some missing drugs. Bob denied the suggestion, of course, and a search had been conducted, unsuccessfully, prompting Errol to draw the ageold comparison with the needle in the haystack.
A comparison which irritated Mr Snuff not a little. ‘And I’m saying it’s a dumb thing to say,’ he snapped unkindly. ‘There ain’t no haystacks any more. Leastways, not in the experience of the average individual.’
‘That’s just being pedantic,’ said Errol.
‘Listen, man, if the stonecold truth is pedantic, then I guess that’s what I’m being, because I’ll bet if you was to ask every person within one hundred miles of where we’re standing if they’d ever
Errol spotted the point of confusion. ‘It don’t mean no works,’ he said.
‘Say what?’
‘The needle which is referred to in the expression “a needle in a haystack” does not mean no drug paraphernalia. It means a needle for sewing.’
Mr Snuff seized upon the point like the practised debater he was. ‘It don’t matter what kind of needle we’re talking about here, you dumb motherfucker,’ he explained. ‘The point is that no one is going to lose it in no haystack. You need to bring your metaphors into the twentieth century, man.’
Bob, still hanging from the chain, groaned a little. The two gangsters ignored him.
‘How about if you was to say it’s like trying to find a line of coke in a snowdrift? Now there’s an image a person can understand.’
Now it was Errol’s turn to be contrary. ‘No, man, that’s bullshit,’ he said angrily. ‘The whole point about a needle and a haystack is that they are very different things, and although it would be difficult to locate the former within the latter, it would not be impossible. Cocaine and snow are basically identical. You could never tell one from the other. One concept is improbable, the other is impossible – which is an entirely different thing.’
‘Less you snorted up the entire motherfucker. You could sure tell them apart if you was to stick them up your nose.’
Errol laughed. It was a relief for both men. The discussion had been in danger of turning acrimonious, but now the tension was broken. For the two gangsters, that is; for Toni and Bob things remained stressful.
‘That’s right,’ Errol conceded with a grin. ‘If you snorted up the entire snowdrift, when you got to the stuff that made you talk bullshit at three o’clock in the morning, that would be the cocaine.’
Mr Snuff, having scored such an effective point, was in the mood to be generous. ‘I don’t want to make no Federal case out of this,’ he said kindly. ‘I just think that language ought to reflect the lives of the people who are speaking it. Not some rural bullshit like needles and haystacks or… or… the early bird catches the worm. I don’t want no fucking worm, man. What is more, if I had a horse, which I don’t, I wouldn’t waste no time taking the motherfucker to water when it wasn’t thirsty in the first place.’
Bob groaned again. ‘Let me go. I didn’t rip nothing off, man.’
He might as well have appealed to a couple of concrete gangsters for all the good this was going to do him.
‘Don’t insult me, Bob. You think I can’t count? You think me and Mr Snuff here are so dumb that we can’t count?’
Bob quickly assured Errol that he had intended no such slur.
‘In which case, how come I ain’t supposed to know the difference between one hundred kilos and ninetynine kilos, you sewerrat? A onehundredth part is a substantial differential. Suppose I was to cut off a onehundredth part of you? Do you think you wouldn’t notice?’
It would have taken a more stupid man than Bob to have misunderstood the meaning of Errol’s question, but nevertheless Errol rubbed that meaning in by grabbing at Bob’s crutch. It is said that men who practise the ancient Chinese art of kung fu are capable of retracting their testicles at the first sign of danger. They probably couldn’t do it if the testicles in question were held in the vicelike grip of a large gangster.
‘I gave you what Speedy gave me,’ Bob protested. ‘I didn’t steal nothing. I’m not a thief.’
Errol released Bob’s hundredth part and turned his attention to Toni. So far she had made no contribution to the conversation, and perhaps Errol felt some social pressure to include her. He and Mr Snuff were, after all, in a way the hosts.
‘Toni?’ he enquired. ‘Is your boyfriend a thief?’
‘Listen, Errol,’ Toni said, attempting to sound calm and considering – no easy task when one is lying prostrate and securely bound across a table – ‘we ain’t getting nowhere here.’
‘I know that.’
‘If Bob tells you what you want to hear, you’ll kill him.’
‘I’m going to kill him anyway.’
‘But you can’t kill him till he’s told you where your damn hundredth part is. So he won’t tell you. We’ll be here till Christmas.’
It was a valiant effort. That she could think at all, considering the horror of her situation, was a miracle, but to have put Errol’s problem so clearly was impressive indeed.
‘OK, Bob,’ Errol said, levelling his gun at Toni. ‘If you don’t tell me right now, I’ll shoot her.’
This was a hopeless ploy. Bob was, after all, a heartless drug dealer. The chances of his being moved by appeals to his chivalry were small. Toni knew this too, but before she had time to request that she be left out of it Errol shot her.
It was a powerful gesture: the smell of gunsmoke, the echoing report in such a confined space, the scream, the blood. All this might have moved a lesser – or indeed more honourable – man than Bob to speak up and save Toni further discomfort. But Bob was, of course, not a lesser man; nor was he a more honourable one. Nobody ever is.
‘I didn’t steal your drugs,’ Bob said.
Errol sat down at the table, oblivious of the dying woman who lay across it. He was at his wits’ end. He and Mr
