Jason Frost - The cutthroat

She opened her eyes, awkwardly adjusting herself to sit up more, afraid she might drift off to sleep. This would be the worst possible time for sleep.

" 'Bud-weiser,' " she sang softly. " 'This Bud's for you.' " She looked at her watch again. It was still a 5:23 A.M. Through the window she could see the morning light starting to freckle the Halo. Abruptly she stopped singing about Budweiser and sang, "Somewherrre, over the Halo." The cane Eric had made for her was stretched out on the bed next to her. She pulled it closer. "Come here, Toto."

She studied her watch again. 5:24. What could be keeping them? The longer they waited, the more danger they were in. Surely, they knew that.

After they'd snatched Angel from her room, Blackjack had convinced Eric to let him take her back to the ship. "I can make her talk there, man," he'd said, his smooth black face shining with sweat. "And talk she will."

Eric had hesitated, but finally agreed. "It would be safer."

The calmness with which they'd discussed what was obviously the torture of Angel chilled Tracy. Despite the gruesome stories Eric had told her about Angel, Tracy had trouble seeing herself as part of a gang of torturers. Especially of a woman. Her feminist instincts reacted against it. Wasn't she just helping men abuse a woman. Okay, silly in a way, but in another way, maybe not so silly.

Even sillier, Tracy found herself a little in awe of Angel. The small slender Vietnamese woman seemed so damn confident, so in control. Even if she was doing evil and cruel things, she was doing what she wanted the way she wanted. For the first time she understood a little of how Blackjack must have felt when he'd decided to become a pirate. Like he was shrugging out of a heavy harness of what others expected of you, of what you expected of yourself. Now you could do anything!

What impressed Tracy most about Angel was that she was not afraid of anything. She crossed all moral boundaries without hesitation. Stealing, mutilation, murder-nothing was too far. Not that Tracy would want to venture in that nether land herself, still it made her jealous that others could so easily.

Even physically, Angel was superior. Goddamned flips and somersaults and handsprings like some circus acrobat. Eric had warned her that Angel was an accomplished gymnast, but Tracy had thought that meant a few pirouettes on the beam or that she could stand on her head for five minutes. She'd had no idea.

Tracy stroked the wood of the cane. Once part of an airplane, it had flown through clouds. This wood had learned the ways of lightness; so had Angel. But Tracy was even more earth-bound than ever. Not only would she never do handsprings like Angel-who was at least four years older, damn it-but she wouldn't even be able to walk lightly anymore. She'd drag her shattered hip around after the rest of her body like a shy and distant relative.

" 'Mmmm mmmm, good,' " Tracy sang, " 'mmmm mmmm, good. That's what Campbell's soup is. Mmmm mmmm, good.' " Where the devil was Eric? When Blackjack had hustled Angel off to The A rgo, Eric had decided to scout around Liar's Cove a bit, see if anybody knew anything about Dirk Fallows.

So the two men had gone off and left the gimpy woman to tend the home fires while one tortured another woman and the other looked for his kidnapped son.

And she sang commercials and wondered if she'd ever see television again. Christ.

A knock on the door made her snap up Eric's loaded crossbow that he'd left with her.

"Coming through," Eric's voice filtered through the door as he entered. He finished chewing something, swallowed, and said, "Hi."

"What're you eating?"

He smiled. "Peanut butter on a Ritz cracker. Some guy is selling them down in the courtyard. Had people lined up around the building like they were buying tickets to the mainland." He offered her one. "Cost me the whole roll of duct tape for three of them."

Tracy took the offered cracker with its thin smear of peanut butter. She could see the chips of peanuts. "Crunchy," she said appreciatively as she waved it under her nose and inhaled deeply. The smell opened the salivary glands at the back of her tongue. She bit a small corner off. Not too much at once. Make it last. The Ritz cracker was a little stale, but it didn't matter. She chewed slowly, nodding her head. "Oh God, it's almost better than sex."

"And more fattening."

Tracy eyed Eric as she finished off the remains of the cracker. "Any luck?"

"Not yet. Somebody thinks they know somebody who has a friend who may know something if I've got something worth trading for the information. They're just jerking my chain." He settled into a plush chair, a 1920s reproduction of a seventeenth-century French chair to match the beds. He looked pensive as he ran his finger along his scar and stared out the window at the orange tentacles of dawn creeping along the Halo.

Tracy thought he looked disappointed, hurt, and for a moment she wondered if she'd done something wrong. Or was he just reacting to lack of news about Fallows and Timmy? Her own heart clenched at the sight of his anguish, and she felt good realizing that her involvement with Eric was an acrobatic feat that Angel would never be able to duplicate-one that required more emotional agility and had more danger than any amount of leaping and tumbling.

Almost as if he knew what she was thinking, Eric stood up, walked over to her, and kissed her on the cheek. Then on the lips. Suddenly Tracy remembered that she, too, knew the ways of lightness, of flying. She kissed him back.

He sat next to her on the edge of the bed. They were both quiet for a few minutes. Tracy hummed the theme to the McDonald's commercial.

"What do you think he's doing to her?" she finally asked.

Eric polished the brass mechanism of his crossbow with the corner of the blanket. "Remind me to find a hunk of wax for the bowstring before we leave this place."

"You're not answering the question. What do you think he's doing to her?"

"Whatever it takes."

"Torture, right?"

He shrugged. "She won't offer the information for free."

"Jesus, Eric, what have we become?"

Eric looked over his shoulder at Tracy, her young face wrinkled with concern and guilt. She was pulling at a piece of skin around her cuticle, studying it as if she were performing brain surgery. Eric spoke in a low, steady voice, lifting her chin up so their eyes were locked. "I told you about Angel. But I spared you some of the details because I thought it better if you didn't know. Maybe I was wrong." He took a deep breath. "You have to remember that she was a self-made woman of great wealth in Vietnam. Nothing stood in her way. I've seen some of the people who tried to resist her, people Angel 'persuaded' to give her information. She personally cut the eyelids off a sixty-eight-year-old woman who wouldn't tell where her son, a business rival of Angel, was hiding. She sewed together the lips of one of her servants because he told his cousin how much she'd spent on a pair of shoes. She didn't like her employees to give anything away about her."

Tracy swallowed. "I'm not sure that justifies us."

"Maybe not. But don't worry, she's tough but not stupid. She knows she has no choice but to tell Blackjack everything."

"I just can't believe Blackjack would do that kind of thing. He's a doctor, for Christ's sake, even if he is playing at being a pirate."

Eric smiled, smoothed a strand of hair from her forehead. "You underestimate him, Trace, like you sometimes underestimate yourself. People can be hard when they have to. Like that home run swing you cracked against Angel's spine when she dashed for the door. Ever thought you could do that?"

"I wasn't thinking at the time."

"Exactly. Your instincts took over when your conscience didn't want to deal with the problem. You're going to find that happening more and more from now on."