Tom Callaghan - A Summer Revenge

“I need to talk to you, Lin,” I said as politely as I knew how, given that she was holding out on me. “So say goodnight to these two gentlemen, would you?”

With a show of reluctance, Lin picked up her Bullfrog and led me to a relatively quiet part of the bar.

“So you changed your mind about enjoying the best screw of your life?” she asked, pushing out her breasts and pouting in a way I found singularly unerotic.

“I was thinking about having a threesome,” I explained. “You, me and Natasha Sulonbekova.”

“Never heard of her,” Lin immediately replied, always a sign of lying when you’re interrogating someone. “And why waste your money on the rest, when right here you can enjoy the best?”

“Mine to waste,” I said and watched the scowl grow across her face like a blush. She turned to head back to her new boyfriends, but I grabbed her upper arm hard enough to make her realize I was serious. I squeezed and watched a flicker of pain streak across her face like lightning. I wanted her to know I was as serious as death.

“We both know you know who I’m talking about, Lin,” I said. “So far on this trip I’ve been shot at, threatened, found two bodies and watched a woman die. Oh, and I’ve killed someone myself. So I’m not in the mood to be fucked about with.”

“OK, so I know who you mean,” Lin said, pulling her arm away, obviously unimpressed by all my adventures, “and I know why you want to find her.”

“Was that so hard?” I asked, spreading my hands in a vague gesture of appeasement. “I’ll even buy you a Bullfrog to thank you for your cooperation.”

“Cash will do,” she said with a flash of her old spirit, “but a drink’s always acceptable.”

I ordered the drink, watched her discard the straw, drain half of the glass in a single swallow. I had to be impressed; Lin was obviously made of tough stuff. I guess being a Vietnamese working girl will do that to you.

“Let me finish this, and then let’s go somewhere quiet where we can talk. I don’t want to shout my business to half the bar, and I don’t imagine you do either.”

That made sense; no point in telling a room full of drunks and hookers that you were on the hunt for ten million dollars.

Lin drained her glass, set it down on a table already dangerously overcrowded with Corona bottles and half-empty glasses.

“I’ve got to hit the ladies’ room first,” she said and started to make her way toward the door. I took hold of her elbow, applied pressure to the nerve with my thumb and watched the scowl resurface.

“If it’s all right with you, I’ll wait outside the door,” I said. “I wouldn’t want you to have a sudden change of heart.”

“It’s the only way in and out,” she said. “But if you’re the sort of guy that enjoys hanging out around ladies’ toilets, be my guest.”

It’s always struck me that women take five times as long in a public bathroom as men. Maybe they’re more fastidious and scrub their hands afterward, check lipstick and lipgloss, and all that. I stood outside for almost twenty minutes, and was about to go in, ignoring the outrage it would cause, when Lin finally reappeared.

“Long line inside,” she explained and took my arm in hers. I ignored the knowing wink from the security guard, and we walked out into the heat.

“There’s an all-night coffee shop two blocks away,” she said, turning toward our left. “Quicker if we cut through this car park.”

I shrugged and let her lead me through row after row of sedans, trucks, SUVs, clinging to my arm for balance as she teetered on her heels.

“Maybe after we’ve had our little chat, we could have a little fun,” she said, turning her face up to me in a parody of desire. “All work and no play, you know?”

“We’ll see,” I said, forcing an equally insincere smile onto my face. In the glare of the streetlights Lin’s face was a ghastly yellow, shadows transforming it into a death mask that somehow talked, like a ventriloquist’s dummy in a nightmare.

She hugged my arm closer, and that was when Lev stepped out from behind a truck. I sensed rather than saw him, tried to pull my arm free to get to my gun, but Lin clung to me as if we were halfway down the aisle in a shotgun wedding.

I watched Lev’s fist move toward my face in a ponderous, slow-motion arc, then saw the world turn black as his knuckles kissed me, and then saw nothing at all except deep black, velvet darkness.

It might have been the slap across the mouth or the ice-cold water poured over my head that brought me back into the world of the conscious; I was in no state to tell. I tried to breathe through my nose, realized it was blocked with dried blood, switched to mouth breathing instead. I focused on spitting out the sour taste that caked the inside of my cheeks. By my standards not the worst beating I’ve ever had.

An unshaded lightbulb hung above me, swinging slightly in the breeze from the air conditioning. I was tied to a chair, my hands behind my back, the rope looped tight around the chair legs. Lev had obviously done this before. Or maybe Lin was an expert in bondage and humiliation. I certainly felt humiliated by the neat trap and the sucker punch she’d led me into.

I heard footsteps behind me, heels. Lin.

“You called him while you were in the bathroom,” I said. It wasn’t a question. My voice sounded feeble, echoing as if down a long and unlit corridor.

“I’ve known Lev and Jamila a long time,” she said, her voice flat, factual. “They helped me out when I first arrived here, made sure I slipped under the radar, told me where to go and who to avoid. So I owed them.”

In a gesture that seemed almost tender, she wiped the water from my face. I suppose people never stop surprising you.

“They told me about some Kyrgyz guy who fought back when they tried to rob him, and I knew it had to be you. I said I’d help them get payback. I thought they’d hand out the same kind of beating you gave Lev.” She paused, wiped some of the blood from my nose. “For what it’s worth, I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t think it would come to this. But when you hurt a man’s pride in front of his woman…”

She let the sentence trail away, dropped the cloth in her hands to the floor.

“They’re going to kill me,” I said. Another non-question. She shrugged, said she was sorry once more. I even believed her.

I should have felt fear, anger, should have been working on an escape plan. Instead, I felt nothing but bleak resignation. You throw the dice often enough, eventually the odds turn against you. And there’s something blackly ironic about a man who spends his life wading through the squalor and misery of other people’s deaths meeting his own in a shitty room at the hands of two amateurs.

I wondered how they were going to finish me. Quickly would probably be too much to hope for, and I wondered how much pain I would have to endure before the darkness descended.

I’ve been tortured twice, once by having my hand burned on an electric grill plate, once by having a toenail pulled out and the sensitive matrix underneath burned with a cigarette. So I knew what pain felt like, the anticipation, the bladder getting ready to burst, the bowels preparing to spill. And worst of all, the sheer helplessness, a sheep dragged screaming to the slaughter.

“Welcome back, shit head.”

Lev, working up the courage to hurt me by the anger and fear blended in his voice.

“You might as well get it done,” I said, the words thick and clumsy in my mouth. “You won’t be the first or the best person to hurt me, even if you’re the last.”

A savage punch, this time to the side of my head. My ear felt as if a volcano had erupted inside, and as I twisted with the blow, I felt the chair rock and then fall, slamming me onto a bare concrete floor. I wondered if Lev’s punch had damaged my hearing.