Will Baer - Hell's Half Acre

No, I say. They never made me sick.

Jude is waiting for me in the library. She sits high atop one of the shelves, still reading about Jim Hawkins. When I come through the secret door she drops to the floor like a cat.

What is wrong with you? she says.

What do you mean?

You let the kid see your fucking face. And then you hang out with him for over an hour. What were you doing down there?

I shrug. We were watching cartoons and eating animal crackers.

Motherfucker. You were bonding with him.

He’s five, Jude.

Jude begins to pace back and forth.

He’s five, I say. Five.

I know how fucking old he is.

The kid is scared, I say.

I suppose you told him your name, as well.

I shrug. He broke me down.

I’m so glad you were thinking straight.

That’s funny, I say. The only thing worse than a sociopath is a funny sociopath.

Fuck you, Phineas.

And how much do you suppose the kid is worth? I say.

Jude stops, her eyes narrow. A million, easy. Maybe five.

His father is the senator, MacDonald Cody.

Jude shrugs. How did you figure that out?

I’ve seen the kid before.

Where?

One of Miller’s creepy video tapes.

Jude nods. He does enjoy the home video.

What the fuck is going on between you and him? I say.

I told you. I don’t want to talk about Miller.

What makes you think Cody has five million lying around?

He’s a politician. Fat cats pay a thousand dollars a head to have dinner with him. He’s got more dough in his war chest than your average third world country.

I light a cigarette.

Okay, I say. Here’s the way I see it. If I try to fuck this up and return the kid to his family before we collect the ransom, you will…what? You’ll kill me?

Jude shrugs. Maybe.

That’s nice.

Nothing about this is nice, she says.

I shake my head. No shit. Have you read Miller’s script?

No, she says. Not really.

Molly has. She read the first draft, I say.

So what? Jude says.

So, she says the kid dies in the second act. He dies, Jude.

He’s not going to die.

Then he might as well be comfortable, I say.

How comfortable?

Cozy, I say. I’m going to hit Toys-R-Us, get him some action figures to play with. I’m going to make sure he eats once in a while and I’m going to hang out with him in the afternoons, when we’re not shooting this goddamn film.

That sounds like an unhealthy level of attachment, Jude says.

Why don’t you come with me? I’ll buy you something pretty and pink.

Jude smiles, a glimmer of affection in her eyes.

It might be fun, I say.

Miller owns us, baby. Best not to aggravate him.

I grab her hands. Let’s just kill the crazy fucker and get lost.

Jude pulls away, cold. It’s not half that easy.

Why not?

Jude takes the cigarette from me and takes a fierce puff. She crosses her arms, backs away from me, her face so miserable I don’t recognize her.

Because, she says. I’m kind of married to him.

Bullshit. That’s not even funny.

I’m not kidding, she says.

Jude and I sit in silence in the library for almost five minutes. A long time to go flatline with a person who’s got your heart in their fist. Miller’s library is plush as hell, and I could think of worse places to torture myself. There’s a nicely stocked liquor cabinet along one wall, for instance. I pour myself a glass of gin, retreat into a corner and crawl into a leather armchair and smoke one cigarette, then another. Jude’s face is very pale. She drifts around the library a minute and I think she’s looking for something to hit, really. I shake my head. She is so pretty it’s stupid. She climbs the ladder and dives back into Treasure Island. One long leg dangling, a curved blade. I watch her turn the pages. Her hands are amazing, I think. Very strong, and elegant as twin birds of prey. A stray lock of hair keeps falling down over her eyes and she brushes it back with a long finger. I stand up and Jude snaps the book shut.

Explain this to me, I say. When, for instance?

Nine years ago, says Jude. After I left the Army. I met him at a casino in Morocco. He was…well, you’ve seen him. He was powerful, mysterious, he was rich as God. He was the most arrogant man I’d ever met. And he had…certain appetites that appealed to me.

Fucking hell, I say. What are you doing to me?

Back off, she says. You were married once, too. Your wife died under mysterious circumstances and have I ever fucked with you about that?

This shuts me up like a charm. I sip my drink.

Anyway, says Jude. I liked the twisted shit, for a while. And then I got tired of him. I got tired of his lifestyle. Everything was protected by his money. I wanted to get outside and get dirty. I had spent my whole life training to be…what I am. I wanted to work, you know. Miller just wanted me to eat room service and go shopping and be his little psycho playmate, his windup fuck buddy. So, one night when he went to the opera with a client, I got spontaneous and disappeared myself.

WHAT WAS AND WHAT WILL NEVER BE ARE NOTHING TO ME. My head and heart are upside down. Jude is a married woman. She’s married to John Ransom Miller. The way she explained it to me, she got bored with him. She left him but never got around to divorcing him. Why would she bother, she asked. A divorce required paperwork, and paperwork creates a trail. She had simply disappeared, erasing her identity behind her. Jude had been expensively trained by the government to become a fucking shadow in the rain. People generally did not find Jude unless she found them first, and the people she found were generally sorry.

But it’s a small world, and six degrees of separation are like a ticking clock. She had never told me about him, and I suppose that should hurt me somehow. Maybe there’s something wrong with me but everything I feel right now can be gathered into one cupped hand. I feel the fading rush of being surprised, the stupidity of not knowing, which tastes a little like dogshit in my mouth. The most clear and present thing I feel is the residual echo of Jude’s shame and self-hatred. And I am not one to judge. I had been married before I met her too, and I had rarely spoken to her of Lucy. The only difference was that Lucy was dead.

Jude had a sniper’s brain, though. She lived in a world that was defined by mathematical probabilities, and I’m sure that in her mind Miller had been as good as dead. The version of her that had been married to him was therefore dead, too. But still, Miller represented a massive loose end, and Jude did not tolerate loose ends, which made me think she was afraid of him.

The way she told it was flat, unemotional.

She had vanished into the ether and begun freelancing. She had done a few contract hits, but mainly she’d been a hired seeker. If you had wealth and you wanted to recover something that was impossible to find, a stolen Van Gogh, a rare religious artifact, or a military document that didn’t officially exist, you hired Jude. She had done very well, living a shadow existence free of relationships, sleeping in posh hotels, working only when she needed to, or when a job appealed to her. Miller had rarely, if ever, crossed her mind. She knew that her husband worked for the Cody family, but she’d never met any of them, never given them any thought. They were public people whose activities were generally aboveboard, and they weren’t the kind of people who had occasion to employ her. But one day an obscenely rich drug and weapons trafficker in Texas had hired Jude to find a kidney of an uncommon blood type, and that was how she found me and fell into a relationship. The relationship took her to South America on the run, where she had needed to make money. She had been trained as a field surgeon in the army, and she learned early on that there was good money to be had doing procedures that regular doctors would not do, so she set up shop in Mexico City. I knew this story, of course. I was there, holding the bucket. She performed a couple of expensive fetish amputations for rich Americans who recommended her to their friends, and eventually a very disturbed man who looked like a quarterback gone soft had come to us and paid Jude twenty-five grand to cut off his left hand. That man, as it turned out, happened to be MacDonald Cody, and when he saw Jude on the street in New Orleans he was being groomed by his family to make a run at the senate, and it had been only days before Miller found us.