Dead Lines Read online

  … because there was no room in the whitesizzle paincrackle infinite Now for thoughts of the body, for thought at all, the body was on its own, nerveless fingers clutching at the rope-bound throat, tendons and muscles wrenching loose in rudderless abandon, bladder voiding to darken the lap of his pants, lungs rupturing under the trapped air pressure, eardrums popping, sealing out the city sounds and sealing in the roar of blood in his brain as his larynx collapsed like a moist cardboard tube, tongue blocking what little scream was left in his throat as his teeth bit it clean through, tip careening to the floor, blood and spittle foaming at his lips…

  … and still he continued to twitch and spin, twitch and spin, feet doing a spastic midair tap dance three feet above a floor they would never feel again, every cell in Jack’s brain screaming NO!NO!NO!NO!NO! as they winked out like embers off a burning building…

  … and still he wasn’t dead, unconscious yes but not dead not gone still trapped in a tortured bag of swinging meat…

  … until gradually the spasms tapered off, and his limbs grew livid with trapped and blackening blood…

  … and finally death came, a suffocating nothingness that rose from all sides up to smother him as his body gave in, gave in to the simple physics of the situation, pain mercifully abating as his nervous system shut down and locked up for the endless night.

  There were no words to convey the surprise, no personality left to be shocked. His awareness had imploded, random bits of memory scattering like the refracted light in a shattered watch crystal. Death froze his discorporated soul in mid-scream like a bug in black amber, sealing it into the atomic structure of the walls, the floor, and the ceiling of the room which had become his tomb.

  The rope held admirably, winding and counter-winding itself under the strain of its burden. Then inertia set in, and the swinging stopped.

  Eventually, the sun went down, and darkness settled into the quiet apartment. Outside, cars honked, and life went on.

  A week later, they found him.

  So much for style.

  ..........AUGUST

  2

  BAYAMO BLOODBATH

  It all started with the Polio con Fuego.

  Okay, Meryl thought. Picture this:

  She sits at her table, overlooking the balcony, the Bayamo Restaurant menu in her hands. The menu, like the table and the rest of the room, is immense and largely blue. Bayamo is special in that it claims to be “the home of Chino-Latino cuisine.” She doesn’t know what this means. She doesn’t care. She would rather be anywhere else in the world, and there is nothing on this menu that she wants.

  “Do you know what you want?” her father inquires.

  Yes, she thinks. I want to explode. I would not feel too badly if you did, too. At the very least, I want to believe that you will not suggest a dish for me. I have no such faith, however. Damned and doomed.

  Her father sits across from her at the table. He’s the picture of elegance, as always. He scrutinizes her from the peak of his imperial nose; through his bifocals, those regal eagle eyes are huge. He is imposing, as always, dressed even on an off day in an expensive summer wool suit, an intricate weave of midnight blue, russet, and gold. He wears no tie, and the top two collar buttons of his ivory shirt are open; a few sprigs of graying hair curl at the hollow of his throat, which is tan and taut as the rest of him, from the vast hairless desert on the top of his head to the cushy-clad soles of his feet. No gold chains; that would be tacky. In fact, no jewelry at all; even the blanched band of skin on his left-hand ring finger is all but tanned away. Life goes on, in the world of Charles M. Daly. Yes, time marches on. Tittee-rump. Tittee-rump.

  He’s so pleased, she thinks. Pleased to buy his little girl a nice lunch. Pleased to come to the rescue, with a helping hand and a word to the wise. Pleased to have the upper hand. Again and again. Forever. Amen.

  She stares at the menu, which is big and multilingual. It makes a great shield, the better to hide behind, thereby buying a few more microseconds of time before having to make a decision. Any decision. It’s a ruse, she knows; and a pointless one; and if Charles M. Daly detests anything more than anything else, it’s a pointless ruse. Very soon now, he will grow impatient and start offering pleasant suggestions: choice items from the menu that—though he’s never had Chino-Latino cuisine; though he is far far away from his Boston Back Bay home; though he has never even set foot in this restaurant in his entire life—will be right up her alley and yummy to boot.

  And when that happens, Meryl Elizabeth Daly will finally go berserk. She can see the Post headlines already:

  KILLER COED SLAYS DAD, OTHERS, IN BAYAMO BLOODBATH.

  Sez “I didn’t want the chicken.” X-Clusive Photos, pg. 9.

  On the table, her salad fork wickedly gleams. She can feel it coming, even before he opens his mouth.

  “Why don’t you go for a nice chicken dish?” he says.

  She feels herself snap then: an audible crunch. Even Charles M. Daly cocks a tremulous ear. Very quickly, the pieces clickslam into place. She meets his big eyes for a moment, then proceeds to read out loud.

  “The chicken,” she says.

  “Yes?”

  “The chicken,” she reasserts. “It all looks so good.”

  Her father nods warily.

  “Mmmmm . . .Polio Barbacoa.”

  “Meryl,” he says.

  “Or Curri de Polio Chino.”

  “Meryl.”

  “Lookie here! Pechugas de Polio Barbacoa con Queso Flameado! Mmmm-mmm. My favorite!”

  “Meryl, that’s enough.” He doesn’t shout. He never shouts, or rants, or raves, or loses his grip in any way. He delivers her name like a blowdart dipped in curare, hushed and numbing and deadly accurate. It pushes buttons in her that she’s spent her whole life trying to deny. Between that voice and those eyes, there is no room for hesitation.

  For one second, meeting those eyes, she falters.

  Long enough.

  “I didn’t come all the way down here to play childish games,” he says. “And I really think it’s time you stopped fighting me tooth-and-nail on this.”

  Meryl stares at the ceiling. Blue Corinthian columns and track lighting everywhere.

  “You drop out of Hempshire College and an excellent program at the end of your junior year, and disappear to Mexico. Fine.”

  Meryl stares at the wall. Big gaudy mural, happy carefree natives in their quaint native garb.

  “You come back destitute and determined,” he gestures, “to experience all this.” His hand dismisses the city en masse. “That’s okay, too.”

  Meryl stares at the menu. More ways to cook chicken.

  Polio con Fuego.

  Chicken on Fire.

  “I will endure all of this because I am your father, because I love you, and because I have no choice. I will even underwrite this, use my connections to help you secure acceptable housing, all because I don’t wish to see my only child adrift in a sea of winos, junkies, and losers as she completes her quest.”

  She thinks about the dreaded fire-chicken: so hot it had been known to fry men’s tongues right out of their heads. A plan takes form, suddenly. She knows what she must do.

  There is a couple being served, some three tables away on the narrow swath of balcony near the windows. A plate of Polio con Fuego hovers perilously before them.

  “But there are some things that I simply will not have,” her father continues. His voice fades out. She no longer listens.

  She looks at her gleaming salad fork.

  It only takes a second to heft it up and sling it headlong at the neck of the waitress. It moors its tines to the flesh and bone beneath the waitress’s long blonde hair. The waitress pitches forward, the flaming chicken soaring off to strike its intended devourer in the face, the woman patrons hair erupting in bicentennial sparks that promptly plume into flame.

  The customer screams. Her male friend dittos, falling back and cracking his head against the table behind him. He slum
ps to the floor. The waitress collapses astride him. The flaming chicken woman catapults to her feet. Blindly, she flails her way toward the stairs. She slams into the venerable Charles M. Daly, who spontaneously bursts into sparkling combustion.

  Meryl is the proud owner of one white virgin marshmallow. She impales it on her butter knife and holds it up to her dear old dad. Alack and alas, he is moving too quickly: like a comet, he streaks to the balcony’s edge and over, then plummets to impale himself on the pointy beer taps below.

  And as flaming death spreads to engulf the home of Chino-Latino cuisine, Meryl picks up her trusty violin …

  “Okay,” her father said. “So you don’t want chicken. It looks like they have some good shrimp dishes…”

  “Dad.” She squeezed the word out from between clenched teeth; all the joy from her fictive conflagration wheezed out with it like the air from a ruptured whoopie cushion. All five-foot-three of her was tight as a rail, clenched white flesh dressed in basic black. Her thin-lipped, bookish features betrayed a fine blush of angry red.

  “So you don’t want to think about food. Okay, fine.” His hand carved an arc of dismissal in the air. “Have some soup and an appetizer. Have a salad. Just have drinks. Whatever you want. You’re all grown up now.”

  “Oh, really.” A halfhearted butterknife slice at the jugular. She blew at the blue-black bangs that dangled down over her brown-black eyes.

  “But you’re not going to get out of this roommate thing that easily. Not while I have any say in the matter.”

  And so, ah-hah. The crushing black heart of the matter had been lobbed back to her at last. She sank under its weight, still rigid.

  “You see how the interviews are going,” she said. “They’re a bunch of geeks.”

  “So you’re surprised? Where did you solicit them?

  Some ads on bulletin boards and the back pages of the Village Voice?”

  Meryl sighed. She’d set herself up, and now it was coming.

  “The fact is,” Charles continued, “that I have some very highly recommended referrals coming over this afternoon, and I have no doubt that someone suitable will turn up.” Meryl made a sour face; Charles continued, undaunted. “Do you know what the client who secured this apartment told me? There are three thousand legitimate bidders for every decent available apartment in Manhattan. By that he means people who have the means to pay the rent, and would be more than happy to.”

  “But I don’t want a roommate! Don’t you see? Jesus!”

  “Don’t swear. I know you want to do it all by yourself. You’re stubborn to a fault; you always have been. But it should be evident by now that you can’t…”

  … do it all by yourself. God, how she hated those words! Had there ever been a phrase more calculated to suck the spirit from your veins? She’d tried to go it alone, to find a studio that cost less than eight hundred dollars a month, as the pressure mounted and the dog days of August baked the city to a crisp. Maybe she shouldn’t have cut so deep into her personal resources, running off to Mexico like she did. Maybe by the time she got back, all the deals were already scarfed up. Maybe this just wasn’t her lucky day. Or month. Or year. She didn’t know.

  All she knew was that she needed to be here in the city now, more than anything.

  And she couldn’t do it alone.

  “You don’t have the money,” her father continued, rubbing it in. “Do you have any idea how much I’m spending on that apartment? Three thousand dollars a month, and the only reason we got it at all is because the building’s owner is a client. I’m willing to underwrite the expense, since you insist upon coming here.”

  Of course you are, Meryl thought. It’s the only way you can retain control. It was a Charles Daly power play of the first order. She stared hard into the menu, and hated him for it.

  “Rent, utilities, books… fine. I expect as much, as an investment in your future. But I will not finance your bad habits, and I will not supply you with spending money. That you can derive from charging your roommate for rent.”

  Meryl glowered.

  “Why are you doing this to me?” she muttered.

  “I’m teaching you a valuable lesson,” Charles replied. “Money is power. It’s something that you direly need to learn.”

  There was a pause of uncomfortable duration as father and daughter dug in.

  “So maybe I’ll find a cheaper apartment.”

  “There simply isn’t a decent apartment for less…”

  “Well, maybe I want an indecent apartment! Maybe I don’t think I warrant a penthouse suite!”

  “Listen, young lady.” His patience was thin. “I know how you like to pretend that you’re one of the poetically long-suffering masses. But in the final analysis, you are still a Daly. You were born into a certain strata of privilege. You have never been without it. You will never be without it. You are in a position my father would have killed for at your age—”

  “Maybe he should have,” she muttered.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Nothing.”

  “The discussion is settled, then.”

  “My ass,” she growled.

  “Maybe you should grow up.”

  “Maybe you should butt out!” she yelled. The conversation stopped dead; they had arrived at the moment of The Unpleasant Scene. And if there was anything Charles Daly detested more than anything else, it was an unpleasant scene. The conversation had nowhere to go but down, a belly landing on all-too-familiar terrain. They had been there so many times before.

  And at that moment of impasse, their waitress arrived at last.

  “Hi,” the girl said. She was the same one that Meryl had fictionally forked earlier. Meryl avoided eye contact, feeling weirdly guilty for a moment. “Can I get y’all something to drink?”

  Meryl peeked up over the edge of the menu; her father’s face was instantly transformed. The merry widower, smiling his best successful-attorney-from-New-England smile, cobalt eyes crinkling warmly, peppercorn-colored mustache tweaking wryly upward as he said, “Just a Perrier, dear, with lime. I have a plane to catch.” He smiled some more and nodded sagely; the waitress smiled and nodded back. “And my daughter will have…”

  “A Devil’s Tail,” Meryl cut in, glancing up. Rum, vodka, apricot brandy, and wine: four great tastes that taste great together. It was the deadliest drink on the menu, with a limit of one per customer. “Actually, make that two. Two Tails, dear,” she said, archly imitating her father’s tone. “I ain’t goin’ nowhere.”

  The waitress glanced back toward Charles, seeming to glean in an instant the web of tension stretched thin as razor ribbon between father and daughter.

  And then she did something remarkable, which was to wink and smile, not at the great Charles M. Daly, but back at merely mortal Meryl.

  “I’ll tell ya, darlin’,” the waitress said, leaning close. “They don’t put a one-drink limit on them things for nothin’. One Devil’s Tail is a whole lot of fun; two of em and I might just want to bring a bucket. But it’s your party.”

  Meryl laughed, a hard bark of surprise aimed less at the statement than the underlying reality. She didn’t defer to him! her mind crowed, exulted. She didn’t defer! It was a first, in her mythology. She checked to see how her father was taking it; he seemed somewhat taken aback, as though he had missed some secret joke.

  “So what do you say we start with one, and see how you feel after that?” the waitress continued. She had a charming voice, with just a little south’rn twang peeking out. She also had a mean wink, offset in her otherwise Miss American features by a semicircular indentation of scar tissue that followed the hollow of her left eye. A conspiratorial gleam flashed between them.

  “That’s fine. Thanks…” Meryl snuck a glance at the name tag on the waitress’ ample bosom. “… Katie?”

  “Katie. Yup.” The waitress winked again, then turned back to address them both. “You all think about what you want to eat; just about everything’s pretty go
od. I’ll be back in a minute.” Then, before Dad could say a word, she turned and whisked away.

  Meryl watched him watch her leave, noting that Katie-girl had what is known in the parlance as a killer bod: not a discernible ounce of flab, and a rear view that was to die for. In some ways, it was painful: she was sweet-faced and blonde and built and was probably a varsity cheerleader in college and an aerobics instructor by night and all the things Meryl never was and never would be. Further, she knew that he would have already logged those and a dozen other details, filing them away for future reference. She watched him track the waitress down the winding stairs that led to the bar, then ducked behind the menu again— “As I was saying, we have four more appointments this afternoon…

  —while a plan took form in her mind.

  3

  THE LOFT

  Katie Conner waited for the doors of the service elevator to fully open before stepping inside. A grizzled old black man was sitting by the controls, like a figure in a slightly decrepit Norman Rockwell print.

  “You checkin’ out Nine?” he asked.

  “Ninth floor. Yep. For a friend.” She stepped inside and smiled at him. Her pulse was pounding.

  “It’s a beautiful place,” he said, clanging the doors shut behind it. “Wish ah could afford it.” He threw the lever.

  Katie felt her stomach lurch as the iron box started its upward slide. She could scarcely believe she was doing this. Not so much because of any problem leaving the restaurant while on break—she did that all the time, to hook over to Tower Records or Shakespeare & Co. and score something for the evening’s diversion. And not even because the invitation itself was so bolt-from-the-blue weird: the father-daughter power-tripping so thick in the air it was like serving food in a field generator, then the girl piping in with an offer that was so obviously an end run around Daddy Bigbucks that it wasn’t even funny.