David Dun - At The Edge

Her right leg was bent at the knee but didn't seem unnaturally contorted. The left leg was almost straight. It was as though her body were a big room and her mind rolled around inside, checking the walls for cracks, looking for leaks in the roof.

"Would you care for a cup of coffee?" someone asked.

Opening her eyes, she tried to focus on the mahogany floor.

"Wait outside, I can take it from here."

"But-"

"I said get some fresh air."

"Shit." The Spaniard left. She heard the door close.

"Can you talk?"

"Yeah."

"I didn't want to hurt you. Really. I just needed to show you. You're going to do what I say?"

"That depends."

"Take off your clothes."

"No. No. No."

"You see, if you would have learned with the others in your life, they, too, would have left you alone. You just wouldn't learn. Now do you think you have learned?"

"Learned what?"

"Take off your clothes."

"No. I have learned."

"I couldn't hear you." "

I have learned."

"Good. Crawl over to that closet." She did as she was told. Hating herself for it.

"Get in."

"Can you hear me?" he asked an hour later.

"Yes."

"I want you to talk to me."

"About what?"

"I want you to tell me about where you grew up. About your father and your mother."

It was two hours before he let her out. For that entire time she talked of her early life. When he was finished asking her questions, he opened the door and took her to the bathroom. While he waited outside, he told her to take a shower. Before she showered, she peed painfully. Then she got dressed. It took almost forty-five minutes because she could barely move. As she was dressing, she slid open the bathroom window an inch. There were several places the Spaniard could be stationed, waiting if she tried to sneak out. Escaping could result in another beating, or worse. She was certain if she did as the man wanted, the worst had passed-at least for now.

They went back to the couch and he brought a tall glass of water. "Drink."

Then he drew her down. She lay with her head in his lap while he stroked her hair. It was disorienting. She felt like a small child.

"You're very good, you know. Nothing can touch you when you're allowed to be clever. When you're not opposing our cause. And when you oppose me, you oppose our cause. You'll lose for Mother Earth if you oppose me. Now we can work together. How do you feel about that?"

"OK."

"I take it, then, you agree that we're a team." His hand rubbed the back of her scalp; while arousing her hatred, it felt good.

"You beat the shit out of me."

"You wanna argue about this?"

"No."

"Good. Now you're not gonna have any of those nosy questions on the phone anymore, are you?"

"No."

"You're gonna hold up your end of the deal?"

"Fucking A, man."

"Don't give me lip."

"Yeah."

"Did you bury Denny in the woods out behind your house? After you shot him in the back of the head?"

"Yes."

"We're gonna dump Denny's body in the ocean with a concrete block tied to his ankles right after we work together on a few more projects. And these are all for the cause."

"What do you want?"

"I want you to tell me exactly what you did with Kim Lee. But first I want to know all about Denny."

Corey hesitated, feeling strangely attracted to this man while hating him. For reasons that came from a deep pit in a closed-over part of her mind, she wanted to please this German-sounding bastard.

"I killed him."

He stroked her forehead. "Good for you." He chuckled.

It was sincere praise. Once again she felt the desire to please and hatred simultaneously. She went on to recite every detail.

"You are an amazing woman."

Then she told him about Kim Lee. Everything.

"You are so brilliant, the way you handle people. If you hadn't scared him to death, he would have told you everything. He would have held nothing back. It is a tribute to your powers of persuasion."

He put a hand on her shoulder, but it felt fatherly, not sexual.

"There was a transmitter in the briefcase you gave us. We talked about that."

The recollection of it and the shock of it helped bring her even further out of her fog.

"I don't know anything about a transmitter. It's like I said."

"You're sure?"

''I should have taken the money and dropped the briefcase. It was stupid."

"So either Maria Fischer and her group put it there or Dan Young and his group."

"Yes," she said.

"Working together, you and I, we will be far too clever to make a mistake like that again."

"Yes," she said, starting to believe it.

"You will get better soon. We were careful not to do any permanent damage." He stroked her head, then bent down and gave her a chaste kiss on the forehead. When he walked out, he shut the door quietly.

She lay there for perhaps two hours, dozing off and on, before she crawled on her hands and knees back to the shower. The thought of standing made her nauseous and dizzy. She managed over the course of about ten minutes to wriggle from her clothes and to once again crawl into the shower where she let the water beat down on her while she tried to survey the bruises that were running together on her torso, turning her a vibrant black and blue. Somewhere she recalled that hot water might make things worse, but she didn't care.

After that, the German called her frequently. Sometimes they would talk for the better part of an hour. There was something about his inner strength and deep voice that drew her. But it also made her restless. She dreamed deep, vivid, wild dreams, and often she was burning her father's body and crying.

Dan stood on the tarmac in the cool dawn, wishing he hadn't been so obvious in attempting to leave Maria behind. But there was nothing he could do now. Taking the best precautions he could, he had explained to Jason, the pilot, that he wanted to avoid the northeast corner of the Highlands Forest. It was the area nearest civilization and the location where Anderson was logging for Otran-right next to the main body of the Highlands in a small isthmus of old growth that protruded from the Highlands like a finger into the second-growth forest.

"Hey," he said with perhaps too much enthusiasm when Maria arrived.

"You seem awfully cheerful for this hour."

"Just anxious to take a look."

"You two can sit in back and talk over an intercom, if you like, with headsets," Jason said. "If you want to talk to me, you can switch the intercom but you need to listen to make sure I'm not talking to air-traffic control."

Dan helped Maria into the Cessna 182. They shoved the passenger-side front seat all the way forward in the small plane to give Dan maximum legroom. The bench seat in back, which was to accommodate Dan and Maria, was fairly roomy in this plane. Maria sat next to Dan directly behind Jason. Because it was a high-wing aircraft, they would have excellent ground visibility.

As Jason went through the checklist strapped to his knee, Dan and Maria put on the headphones and figured out the intercom.

"I doubt we'll see much," Maria said. "We overfly the Highlands a lot."

"Those buildings seemed pretty large."

"The trees crowning above them were pretty big, and those buildings were just modular units that go on wheels, I think."

"I mainly want a picture of that helicopter."

"You don't fool me. You want to look and take pictures because you think you're going back in."

The plane took off and the ground fell away. It would only take minutes to reach the Highlands from the Palmer airport.

"Nothing is happening. The police are doing nothing," Dan said. "It's time to quit losing and make some progress."

"They all seem to buy Amada's story."