Ahh. Ain’t ego a funny thing? I thought I was so damned handsome in my black T-shirt and faded jeans that she couldn’t resist. I wondered how much she cost.
“Nope,” I said. “Just a moped. And it doesn’t even have a seat.”
She snorted out her nose. No laugh. She turned her head away and flipped back her hair. I looked at the worn bartender, shrugged, and then back at the blonde. She was smooth and pressed but in another five years she’d be just as hard, battered, and tired.
I pulled her hand from my knee as the bartender plunked down a soggy-looking hamburger and cold fries. The meat looked almost like cardboard. I glanced over at the blonde and gave her a wink.
“Want some fries?” I asked, shoving a couple into my mouth.
“Go fuck yourself,” she said and almost fell as she got off the barstool.
“Be cheaper,” I muttered as I hit the sweet spot on the Heinz bottle.
About ten seconds later, the bartender wandered over and settled her elbows down on the table. She watched the woman walk away with a gentle smile on her lips. The pinging from the slots grew louder in my ears.
“Who runs security around here?” I asked.
“You lookin’ for work?” she asked in a hard, north Mississippi accent.
“Maybe,” I said.
“Black fella named Humes,” she said. “Office is in the lobby.”
A bby’s ride lasted for about an hour, bumping and jostling her all over the oil-soaked rubber mats in the trunk. When the car finally stopped, a man stuck a pillowcase over her head and stabbed a gun into her ribs. She saw patterns of lights and shapes through the cloth as the man moved his calloused hands over her butt and breasts before throwing her onto some cold concrete and slamming the door.
She tore the pillowcase from her head and began beating on the door and screaming for help. She must’ve beaten on that door for a half hour before she dropped to the ground, wiped her face with her hands, and looked around.
The room was about ten by ten and filled with stacks of dusty blackjack tables and slot machines. A craps table and old roulette wheel sat by the door. Concrete walls and ceiling. She couldn’t hear a sound outside and it was hot as hell. No air-conditioning. Almost like a sauna, she thought, as she moved the hair from her face and tucked it behind her ears.
She felt the scrapes on her elbows and spit out a trail of blood from her broken lip onto the dirty floor. She thought about Ellie and that long stretch of woods behind the gas station while she hugged her knees to her chest and began to cry. She could imagine the men grabbing Ellie and shoving her into the molded leaves. They raped her. She could see them straddling Ellie and choking her. Abby tried to block the thoughts from her mind, knowing it was her fault whatever happened to Ellie.
She heard footsteps approach and closed her eyes as tight as she could. She was away from this place. She was back in Oxford and her parents were alive and Maggie was there.
A bolt slid back with a hard clack.
Two men entered the room. One was a thin white guy about her age with slick black hair and the other was an old black man with gray hair. Both carried guns and wore blue blazers and red ties. Radios squawked on their hips.
“C’mon, let’s go,” the black man said. He had freckles and high cheekbones like an Indian. Mean eyes.
“Leave me alone,” Abby yelled. “Where the hell am I? Who the hell are you?”
“C’mon. He wants to see you.”
The black man grabbed the front of her shirt and yanked her to her feet. He twisted her arm behind her back and pushed her into a concrete tunnel. She gritted her teeth in pain – her shoulder screaming loose in the socket – as they marched her through the narrow passageway. The tunnel took several twists through a dozen curves with fluorescent lights beaming overhead.
At the end of another tunnel, the boy opened a side door into an office with dark wood paneling and dimly lit with Tiffany lamps. The shades looked as if they were cut from shards of colorful hard candy.
The black man shoved her onto a brown leather coach.
When she straightened her head, she gazed right into a shadow sitting in a leather chair. He was hard to see. His features were obscured by bright light and smoke from a cigar. She could see the orange glow of the butt and hear his rapid, uneven breath.
“Hello, Miss MacDonald.” His voice country and weathered. Someone who drank too much bourbon and had smoked since he was ten.
She tasted the blood in her mouth and heard the dull sound of locks pinging in the concrete room where they’d kept her. She tried to squint through the hot light.
“You got to be tired,” he said.
Abby could hear her own breath now. Way too fast.
“Haven’t stopped since the death of your parents.”
Abby bit into the side of her cheek and listened.
“Truck stops, cheap-ass motels. Always wondered, why the highway? Why not the beach? Or another country? You like bein’ anonymous? You like blending in?”
Abby felt the blood heating in her chest. This was it. This was it. “What the hell do you want?” she yelled. It was someone else’s voice. Someone stronger.
Above them there was a buzz of laughter and the sound of electronic bells. More laughter. Heavy footsteps.
“We need some help finding something belonging to your father.”
Her duffel bag sat open on his desk and her dirty underwear on the floor. She felt naked and embarrassed.
“You killed them. Didn’t you? You goddamned son of a bitch.”
“Help us find what we need. And let your parents die with grace.”
She saw his hands reach for the bag and pull it from view. The light was so bright that even when she squinted she couldn’t make out his features. A blue halo pulsed in her vision.
“Where does your daddy keep his papers?” he asked.
She shook her head. “You’re just gonna kill me anyway.”
“Nope. I don’t kill little girls. I just make ’em bleed and hurt like hell till they tell me what I want.”
Abby stared down at her hands. She breathed quick, her heart ticking. She began to pray silently again. It was the prayer she’d said the entire way in the car about appreciating every second the Lord gave her.
“Abby?”
She kept her eyes on her hands. She felt the gentle stroke of fingers across the back of her neck.
“Go on,” the man said to someone behind her. “Y’all have your fun.”
Out of the darkness two people walked between her and the man. One was the older black man with freckles. The other was Ellie.
At least it seemed like Ellie. In Abby’s scattered vision, the face and the body were the same. But she looked different and held herself in an unusual way. She even seemed to breathe like another person as she studied Abby with squinting eyes.
“Shall we go get this filthy bitch cleaned up?” Ellie asked.
T he door to the security office was closed and I was about to walk back to the lobby when a black woman dressed in maid coveralls sauntered by and jiggled a set of keys in her pocket. She opened the door.
I followed.
The office was tiny with a cheap desk and seascape prints hanging on the walls. Besides the smell of stale cigarettes, you couldn’t tell if the place was ever used. No loose papers on the desk. No bulletin boards. No appointment calendars.
“You know where I can find Humes?” I asked.
The woman jumped as if touched by a live wire. Her face was round and flat. Reddish brown skin.
“Sorry,” I said, my palms outstretched to show I was cool. Didn’t mean her any harm. “Lookin’ for my old buddy Mr. Humes.”
“Shiiit,” she said. She was very old and very short. Didn’t even come up to my chest. “You up to no
