Greg Iles - Blood Memory

“Pull in there. Ground’s hard enough. There’s a little clearing up ahead.”

“How do you know that?” I ask, driving over the ground where I parked the Audi on my last visit.

Billy gives me a tight smile. “That’s where I parked when I followed you out here the other day.”

“You chased me into the river?”

“Who the fuck else do you think it was? Jesse Billups? That spade wouldn’t get out on the river in a storm if his life depended on it.”

“Did my grandfather send you to kill me that night?”

Billy stops smiling. “What does it matter? Pull up there and stop.”

A clearing has opened ahead. There’s plenty of room for the Cadillac between the tree trunks, but the forest canopy protects us from the brunt of the rain. Billy reaches over and switches off the motor. Soon there is only the ticking of the engine and the soft drip of water on the hood and roof.

“Nice, huh?” Billy says.

“I thought you were going to kill us on the bridge.”

“You in a hurry?” He points the gun at me. “Turn and face the window. Put your hands behind you.”

“Why?”

He jams the gun barrel under my jawbone. “Do it now.”

“You can’t shoot me. You want it to look like an accident.”

“You’re right, I’d rather not. But I don’t mind popping a cap in your smart-ass maid one bit. Nobody’s going to make a fuss over that dried-up old jig.”

Will he shoot Pearlie? Yes. But if I let him tie my hands, what chance will I have to save us? Some…But if he ties them to the steering wheel, I’m in trouble. Can he do that now? He still has to get the car onto the bridge….

It may be the most foolish act of my life, but I turn on the seat and face the window. I’m expecting rope, which I saw on Pearlie in the trunk, but there’s a soft tinkle of metal, then steel bands close tight around my wrists.

Shit! If I go into the water with handcuffs on, I’m in trouble.

Billy gets out of the car. For a moment I think he’s going to get Pearlie out of the trunk, but then he starts unbuttoning his jeans. I turn away, expecting to hear him urinate, but what I hear instead is a swish of cloth against flesh. Then he leans back into the open door.

“Hey,” he says. “Look here.”

I turn. He’s wearing black bikini briefs, and his eyes are shining.

“What are you doing?” I ask.

“What do you think?” A lurid smile. “I want a taste of what the boss man had.”

He pulls off his underwear and climbs back into the car, pulling at himself as he sits beside me. The gun is still in his other hand. “You got an ass on you, that’s for sure. And you won’t have no more use for it after today. Might as well take it for one last spin, right? Nobody’ll know. We’ll keep it all in the family.”

My heart flutters like a panicked bird beating its wings to pieces. With a pair of handcuffs, Billy Neal has turned me into the helpless little girl I was when my grandfather raped me.

“Straighten your legs out on the seat,” he says. “Let’s get those jeans off.”

I shake my head.

The glaze in his eyes brightens. “I’m gonna get out and pump four bullets into that trunk.”

“You’re going to kill her anyway.”

“True enough. But later’s better than sooner, right?”

I don’t know what to do. My synapses don’t seem to be firing properly.

“It’s human nature, plain and simple,” Billy says, stroking himself to erection. “People will do anything they think will keep ’em alive for five more minutes. The Nazis knew that. Used it all the time to control people. Right up to the moment they slammed the door to the gas chambers.”

“You a big fan of the Nazis?”

He laughs. “Straighten out your fucking legs.”

Billy’s right. I want to live every second I can. Every second of life is another chance at escape. The irony is exquisite. All my life I’ve flirted with suicide, yet here I sit, desperately wanting a few more moments of air and sunlight. I’m only alive now because this man wants to have sex with me. And if I become too much trouble, he’ll shoot me.

Billy’s smile has a manic edge. “There’s another option you may not have thought about. I can shoot you first and fuck you after. You’ll still be plenty warm.”

My mouth goes dry.

“I’d prefer it the other way around, but it’s your choice.”

At least if he shoots me first, I won’t know I’m being raped. I won’t feel it. But suddenly it hits me: I don’t have to feel it anyway. That’s the one magic trick I learned as a child-dissociation. Billy Neal can do what he likes to me, and I can watch it all from the balcony, a disembodied observer.

“Guess you made your choice,” he says, getting out of the car. “The nigger pays for your pride.”

“Wait!” I cry, extending my legs down the length of the front seat.

He leans back into the car, reaches out with one hand, and unsnaps my jeans. Then he unzips them, digs his fingers into the open fly, and yanks brutally until most of my legs are bare.

“Kick ’em off,” he says, breathing hard from the effort.

As if his voice controls my limbs, I obey.

He throws my jeans into the backseat, then points his pistol at my face and tears off my panties.

It’s eerie how quickly I dissociate from what’s happening. I’m already watching myself the way I watch characters in a movie-fascinated but at a critical remove. I’ve actually asked lovers to act out this scenario with me: rape as pleasure. A lot of normal women have probably done the same. I’ve asked men to tie me and choke me and slap me around. And now that the real thing is happening, it’s not much different from the playacting. It should be, I know. It would be for a normal woman.

But it’s not for me.

Would most women endure rape to live a little longer? Or would they fight to the last breath to keep their so-called honor? Fighting isn’t going to stop Billy Neal. It’s just going to make him hurt me more. Besides, what is it for me to be raped once more? It’s happened so many times already that one more violation has no meaning. I see now that I was raped even as an adult. Even when I was saying yes, something beyond my understanding was driving me to repeat the only kind of sexual union I knew.

“I know about girls like you,” Billy says, pulling me across the seat until I’m facing forward like a passenger on a Sunday drive. “Girl’s who got broke in young. They know how to please a man better than a Thai hooker.”

He kneels on the floor in front of me and transfers his gun to his left hand. With his right hand he pumps his penis, causing it to swell and grow red. The sight is bizarre yet familiar: a man I barely know is about to insert himself into me. It’s happened more times than I let myself remember.

“You wet?” he asks, reaching out and checking me like a mechanic checking the oil in an engine. “Shit.” He spits in his palm, then slathers his organ with saliva. Then he spits again and puts his fingers inside me. “There you go,” he murmurs. “Now you’re getting there.”

Numbness spreads through me like a narcotic, masking everything but the sudden fullness of penetration. It’s nothing to me, though. Only a reenactment, a ritual, a role I learned to play before I learned almost anything else.

Only this time it’s different. This man doesn’t want merely to use me. He wants to kill me. Like the men of my father’s unit, the White Tigers, who kidnapped village girls as a reward, then raped them all night and killed them to keep them quiet.

Those girls are my dead sisters.

Something metallic bangs behind me, and for a moment I’m dragged back into the present, my heart aching for the old woman lying terrified in the trunk. But Pearlie Washington must bear her own burden now. In some ways she’s the lucky one.