Кэрол Дуглас - Cat In An Aqua Storm

Her heels clicked across the concrete garage floor as she pawed through her tote’s awesome collection of effluvia searching for her key ring. She hardly heard the footsteps approaching behind her.

They didn’t stop, and they didn’t overtake her. Just followed along. A woman who lives alone gets used to being wary, and her stint with Max had not been lengthy enough to blunt that self-defensive instinct.

Temple turned casually to see just who was behind her. Two men, who noticed her noticing them.

“Where do you think you’re going?” one demanded with the voice of authority.

Temple speeded up. Was there some snafu about her guest parking status? They could discuss it once she was prudently locked inside the Storm, which was just down several vehicles....

Steps pounded behind her, few and hard.

She glanced back, primed to run, and found the men sweeping past, sweeping her up between them, carrying her away in the irresistible current of their force.

Temple felt like a little kid being hustled away by two of the block’s big-boy bullies. Mean preteens, they would whisk her tiny five-year-old self behind an empty garage and make her swear eternal silence—“Don’t you ever blab, baby. Hope to die and tell a lie”—about what they’d done to Mrs. Saletta’s flower garden, or the secret location of their forbidden tree house or...

These real-time big boys—men—whisked her away, all right. Each grabbed an elbow. Between them, Temple’s high-heeled feet barely touched ground as they dragged her around a concrete pillar and pinned her against the wall behind it.

Temple fought to catch her breath, aware that she now occupied a dead-end notch in the parking ramp design, invisible to anyone who wasn’t looking for people to be there.

As the men’s grip on her upper arms relaxed a bit, she realized that their initial grab hadn’t hurt only because it had clamped off the blood supply. Sensation screamed back into her veins, pulsing hotly around the impressions of their fingers in her flesh.

But, unlike childhood bullies, these goons didn’t want her silence, quite the contrary.

“Where is he?” one demanded in a raw whisper.

“Who?”

“Your boyfriend,” came the other’s impatient rasp.

“I... I don’t have a boyfriend. You must—”

Fingers tightened like wrenches. “Don’t be funny. Your boyfriend the magician.”

“Max? You want—?”

“Where is he?” the first man repeated, glancing nervously toward the main area as a car engine wheezed down the exit spiral.

Temple shook her head in confusion, in disbelief. “I don’t know—”

She heard the oncoming car draw near, its tires peeling over the rough concrete like tape being pulled free, the cramped steering wheel squealing as it took the torturous exit curves.

The noise covered her yelp as the first man suddenly twisted her right arm behind her at a shoulder-wrenching angle.

Pain paralyzed her. The tote bag slid off her left arm, hitting the concrete with a solid clunk followed by the brittle shift of its contents.

“Where is he?” The second man’s face leaned down to hers, so that his unwelcome breath warmed her cheeks, her eyes.

“I don’t know,” she began again, trying to figure out what they wanted her to say, why they wanted her to say anything.

She stopped when the second thug’s big hand circled her throat and clamped it to the concrete wall. The dry, piercing pressure on her windpipe made her want to cough.

“We don’t want to hear that,” the first man whispered almost intimately in her right ear. His breath tickled, and smelled of radishes.

“The police don’t even know!” she managed to gag out.

“We know that,” the second man said. “That’s why we’re asking you. You’d better tell us. You were his girlfriend. They always know.”

“No point in being a martyr,” the first riffled into her ear.

Martyr? The man illustrated his remark an instant later. His fist jabbed into her side, jolting her against the concrete wall for a secondary buffeting.

Temple doubled over despite the grip on her throat, pain exploding in her midsection. Before she could absorb the incredible reality of the assault, another fist followed the first, even as the other man’s meaty, salty hand clamped over her nose and mouth. Breathless, she felt pain rising like a sudden tide, pulling her down into the watery dark.

But the men wouldn’t let her sink. Hands slapped her back to startled consciousness. “Where? Tell us . Where is he?”

Her arms pinioned, she began kicking frantically, fighting unconsciousness. Keep afloat, she told herself. Keep moving, don’t let the sharks get a good grip on any part of you.... Temple felt her spike heels graze shins and bounce off bone. Her angry, frightened cries were muted by a palm slimed with her own saliva. She bit into the meager pleats of flesh her teeth could find.

Then her right wrist, elbow, shoulder seemed to be twisting off in another direction. The men hemmed her in, fists pummeling, just hurting her now, not asking anything. She heard their hard, exhausted breaths, glimpsed faces ugly with unreachable violence.

Brakes shrieked.

Someone yelled. A man. An angry man. In Temple’s mind, her assailants had divided like amoebas, had multiplied and invaded the entire universe, inflicting pain, pain, pain in a kind of manic rain.... Blood gurgled in her mouth. At least at the dentist’s they let you lean over into the white bowl and spit it out—no, not done anymore, not for a long time. Now they vacuumed it out.

“Goddammit!” a furious male voice exploded on the other side of the wall. “You nearly ran into me. I just had the goddam car waxed. Watch where you’re going!”

“Listen, you barreled around that corner so fast it’s lucky you didn’t get a new buffing job all along the side.”

“Freaking screw yourself!”

“Same to you, buddy!”

Their deep, raw voices, despite their anger, sounded distant and sleep-inducing, like the murmur of visiting relatives in the kitchen on a rainy Sunday morning.

Temple flailed to pull herself above an enveloping tide of dreamy dark water, away from the crimson stingers of the jellyfish and the bloody white teeth of the circling sharks.

When she finally reached up and her shoulder shouted with pain, she listened and let her arm fall back limply. Something was fading away. Shapes large and not quite seen. The quarreling drivers continued berating each other, their words growing clearer, though no more meaningful for Temple.

She looked around through the blur in her eyes—not tears, because she didn’t think she was crying. She was too shocked to cry.

The world seemed vaguely askew. She took a cautious step forward, away from the wall, clammy despite the Las Vegas heat. The whole world jumped. She looked down, dizzy, and saw the contents of her tote bag scattered at her feet. Inching her back down the wall, her left hand touching it for balance, she finally crouched on the balls of her feet and began sweeping her things back into the bag one by one.

The men still shouted. Now one wanted the other to move his car out of the way. “Over my dead body!” the other vowed.

Their belligerent voices kept her anchored in reality. She leaned past her fallen personal effects and spit out the sour, tangy saltwater in her mouth.

A red blob blossomed on the gray pavement. Sidewalk spit revolted her, something only crude men did, but this was her own, an oddly disassociated lovely red phenomenon, like a blooming rose.

Her fingernails scraped the sandpaper-textured concrete as she shuffled papers, pencils, makeup bag, card case, keys back into her bag. No. Not keys. Would need keys. Her right hand clasped them, an aching gesture shooting up to her shoulder.