THUGLIT Issue Seventeen Read online

  He spoke real quiet.

  Sarah and Ella-Mae were looking up at her too, curious about what she meant and how she knew he'd been there.

  "It's just old man Mitchell toured in Vietnam," she said, forcing herself to meet his stare. "He owned the place downstairs before you. He used to tell me about Vietnam. I…I just was wonderin' if you'd ever been there."

  "Never Vietnam," he said, "I work in the oil industry. But that's real interesting—you used to work down in my apartment, as well as here."

  "Only 'til Mr. Mitchell passed," she said.

  He made her feel like he was looking right into her and now she found, for once, she glanced away.

  Tyrell had always said she could out-stare a rattler—but she couldn't meet this guy's baby blue eyes.

  Ella-Mae broke the tension by holding up a small, carved horse.

  "Dianne, look what I've been given."

  Sarah was beaming as she added, "He carved it himself. Just for her."

  He mussed Ella-Mae's hair as she smiled up at him. "I never carved a horse before. Never given a gift like this to any other little girl."

  The man turned to Dianne again as Sarah and Ella-Mae beamed at him.

  Their eyes locked and she felt something she hadn't since the afternoon with Prosser and his boys.

  She left them all chattering and chowing down on the meal she'd cooked, looking like some sitcom family.

  Except Ma was wasting to death in a wheelchair and Pa was…well, at the very least he was a liar.

  But in her bones she knew he was something more than that.

  She ran hard down the communal stairs, needing to get out.

  Sarah and Ella-Mae had waved and happily called farewell as she'd gone. He'd just sat, following her exit with that stare of his and saying nothing.

  She cursed herself for letting slip she knew he'd been to Asia; for letting him know that she'd seen inside his apartment—had been in there when Mitchell was alive.

  He'd looked at her like he'd known she'd held onto the keys. Like he'd known she'd seen the photo of that Asian child holding one of his horses.

  Never given a gift like this to any other little girl.

  Looking right in her eyes as he'd said it. Drawing a line for her to cross. Daring her to say it wasn't so.

  She drove to an internet café a few blocks south. Despite the heat in the air, she was shaking.

  Mitchell had died just over a year back, the guy had moved in after the place had been refurbed.

  He must've come back from overseas about a year ago.

  The time Tammy-Lee Edmonds went missing.

  The memory had been on the edges of Dianne's consciousness, like a car alarm sounding in a distant street—annoying her but not enough to really take notice.

  Tammy-Lee Edmonds had just disappeared one day last year. It'd made state news first, then broadcast coast-to-coast.

  There'd just been no explanation, but all manner of weird theories and dead ends. Dianne recalled one such was a friendly guy who'd spoken with Tammy-Lee and her mom a few times at the girl's horse-riding lessons. Good-looking but, when you got around to describing him, kind of nondescript. Except for his blue eyes.

  Tammy-Lee's mom had assumed he was the dad of another girl there, but that was never verified by the cops.

  It was just one out of many leads that'd gone nowhere. And Dianne hadn't really taken much notice of any of it at the time—but that detail came back to her from somewhere now.

  As did Beth Allen—another Port Arthur girl who'd gone missing six months ago. She was only a year older than Tammy-Lee and just as pretty. But her family was poor and her pa had done some time. The press didn't treat her with the same interest.

  At the internet café she Googled both stories, looked at the locations both girls were seen last.

  She wished she knew where the guy had worked abroad.

  How long…how many?

  There'd been upward of twenty horses in his hidden metal box.

  More dreams.

  Prosser's boys pin her down, take turns with their dirty business.

  Their laughter and shouting mixed in with her screaming and pleading.

  "Your sweet ass is savin' those no-good kin of yours, honey-child," slurs Prosser—the Big Man from Lafayette who Tyrell and Virgil'd angered somehow.

  Then transported to a different place; the guy's bedroom—she hears screams worse than anything real from behind the wardrobe door. Hands shaking, she opens it—afraid to see, afraid to leave it.

  The box of horses stares back at her.

  "They're all yours," she hears the guy say. He's standing right behind her, "Yours'n mine together."

  Dianne woke, covered in sweat that wasn't from the day's humidity.

  She rang all the clients booked for that day and told them she was sick.

  Sarah and Ella-Mae weren't due a call today. She went to their apartment building anyway and watched from across the street.

  She saw them leave the foyer heading for Ella-Mae's school; the little girl first, Sarah following in that motorized chair.

  Dianne took a deep breath. She took the keys to his apartment from her pocket and headed over. She was shaking.

  She knew he worked and must surely be there now. She needed him to be.

  Inside his place, at first, she wondered if she'd imagined it all. Everything was so clean and normal. Just the place of some guy with bad taste and excess money.

  She combed the whole condo with hands that were quick and well-practiced; evaluating anything she touched—for cash value or for secret meanings, then replacing them so they looked like they'd never been touched.

  She found no stash of little girl snuff porn, no cache of ribbons or dollies taken from them as trophies.

  And yet the less she found, the more her doubts receded.

  She knew what he was.

  Somehow she'd known it all along, the first time she'd seen the box of horses.

  She felt a kind of excitement building inside herself that she couldn't quite locate or explain.

  The only similar feeling, ever, was when she found something that revealed to her the secret life of her people.

  But this was so different in scale, so off the grid, that even that comparison didn't hold.

  This wasn't like seeing inside of someone. It was like seeing the world itself through different eyes.

  Her heart pounded.

  She headed into his bedroom. The Asian chick and her child had gone.

  Now a picture of Sarah and Ella-Mae stood framed by his bed—Ella-Mae holding her wooden horse.

  He must've taken the picture sometime the other night after she'd left and printed it on one of the fancy-ass scanners in the other room.

  She opened the fitted wardrobe, hands shaking.

  The box was still there. On her knees, she pulled it from its hiding place, holding it like a reverential object. She looked with fascination at the detail carved on each little horse, every pose and expression so different and unique. But this time there was no doubt, she felt their struggle. Crammed inside the box together, somehow, the horses conveyed a furious sense of movement, of struggle—even in their stillness.

  She was so absorbed she almost didn't hear the condo's front door open.

  Almost.

  Her eyes didn't even need to flit round the room to know she couldn't hide and her cellphone was back in the car.

  When he came into the room, those blue eyes flickered in surprise. Not because she was there—she guessed straight off he'd been waiting, had seen her enter the condo.

  But because of how she was.

  Dianne sat real confident in an armchair in the room's corner, facing the door with the box of horses on the floor in front of her.

  She'd quickly stripped her jeans and sweatshirt, which lay in a small pile by the chair.

  She wore only her bra and panties.

  She forced herself to meet those eyes and even managed to smile. Then said in a v
oice that sounded calmer than she felt, "I've been waitin'."

  She saw some kind of garrote dangling limply from his left hand—which, like his right, was sheathed in a light-brown pigskin glove.

  He'd expected to find her in there. But he'd expected to find her hiding or scared—thought she was just some everyday kind of shakedown artist.

  He hadn't realized that she'd seen him for what he was—so much easier than he'd seen her.

  His puzzlement was all that gave him pause and she knew she had to keep pressing.

  She forced herself to laugh and said, "I wondered how long you'd be."

  He stood watching her, and she could see him thinking how to play this for a few short seconds longer than he should.

  She stood, letting his eyes involuntarily travel down over her skinny, well-muscled body. "Glad to see a girl my age does something for you."

  She crossed to the bed and lay on it, arching her back and posing her body. Then, looking him in the eyes, she offered him all he needed her to be—before he even knew what that was himself.

  "I saw you," she said real quiet, "saw you were somethin' different…someone like me. They all think you're like them and you have to go round in disguise all your life."

  He still stared, saying nothing, but she saw he'd put the garrote down.

  "They just don't know you," she said, "like they ever could. As if some termite crawlin' in its mound could know the mind of God."

  Then he was on her, crossing the room with dizzying speed. Hands pulling at her underwear hungrily—and hers, in kind, helping him remove the old clothes he'd worn to murder her in.

  They explored each other voraciously and silently. Their bodies fit together easy and natural, their movements were a shared, instinctive choreography.

  Rough and painful, then soft and tender in turn.

  She made sure she was the one in control, moving him how she wanted, shaping the experience for herself.

  They didn't talk until after.

  They lay naked together, the high-end air conditioner he'd had put in lessening the humidity.

  "You have to be more careful," she said, "I could've been in here with a bunch of state troopers."

  He laughed and started getting dressed.

  "I knew straight off you weren't one to go to the police," he said, "I thought you were just…just some sneak thief or a shakedown artist. All that 'I Love Lucy' Prom Queen shtick you put on never had me fooled."

  "You're real smart," she said, "but I saw through you too, remember?"

  He was dressed now, looking down at her.

  "I'm one of those that sees it—what you have. Like I said, like looking in the face of God."

  She saw his eyes moisten and he sat heavily on the bed. "I never thought…all these years. I can't tell you Dianne. All these years of feeling so alone. Then you come into my life—and you just saw me."

  She sat up, put her arms around him and held him real close.

  "Hush now," she said. "What you and me can do together—the two of us. I promise you'll never look back."

  She told him how she covered all corners of the city in her work, how she oftentimes worked for families with little girls, girls who had friends the same age. Girls who believed in the person she seemed to be for the same reason they believed in Santa—because they wanted to. They needed to.

  She made him see the hunting grounds that she'd open up to him—made him understand the enormous and beautiful things they would achieve together.

  He knew when she'd finished speaking that their meeting and this moment was something more than chance. It had been written somewhere long ago.

  Then she said, "Ella-Mae, that little girl upstairs. She has my trust and I have an idea. Don't do anything on your own. You promise?"

  He nodded.

  "We can't ever be seen together—we're gonna have a busy time from now on and no one can know we're together."

  She told him the name of a bar on the edge of town in Lake Charles.

  She'd stopped there two years ago on the long drive to her new life in Texas. It was quiet enough and far enough out of Port Arthur that no one would see them together.

  She told him she had some ideas for Ella-Mae, then a lead on a family in Pear Ridge who wanted her to housesit next month. They had a girl about the same age.

  They arranged to meet late that night. She told him to drive there real careful, said to delete his Sat Nav when he got there.

  She told him that after tonight nothing would be the same for them again.

  Back at her high-rise Dianne called the next day's clients—told them she'd still be off sick.

  Then she made another call.

  She sat just staring out at the river traffic for hours until it started to get dark.

  Her mind turned things over and over and over again—her body still tingled from the sex.

  Images of Ella-Mae, holding her hand or showing her some picture she'd drawn, flashed before her eyes.

  She drove out to the bar in Lake Charles, arriving on foot after leaving her car a few blocks away.

  She found a booth in the far corner, like she'd told him.

  After ten minutes she started to fear he wouldn't come and couldn't keep relief from her voice when she looked up and saw him standing over her and staring.

  She said, "You're here—thank the Good Lord."

  She didn't like the way he'd been staring, knew he had a whole heap of doubts all his own.

  But the heartfelt relief in her voice reassured him.

  "Jesus, Dianne," he said, "this place is the back of beyond. I…"

  "I believe in being real careful," she said. She held his stare and, after a few seconds, he nodded.

  They talked—each telling about their childhoods and different roads to where they were right now.

  A lot of the stuff Dianne told him was true.

  Then he said almost shyly, "You…you said you had some ideas for Ella-Mae. Then a girl from a family in Pear Ridge?"

  She outlined her ideas, just like she'd thought them out that afternoon.

  When she'd finished he looked at her wide-eyed—like this time it was him looking into God's face.

  "Sweet Jesus, Dianne," he said, "no one'd ever know if we do it that way. It's just foolproof. You are one clever, twisted, beautiful soul, little lady."

  She giggled like a schoolgirl.

  In the parking lot he turned to her.

  Once more, like earlier, his eyes were moist. He said, "Meeting you Dianne. It's a miracle, a beautiful…"

  He never finished telling just what it was because two big men in ski masks came at him from the darkness of the car park's corner.

  He fought back hard, but it didn't last long. Jailhouse brawn is less pretty, but she knew it beat health club muscle every time.

  In under a minute they had him hog-tied with plastic binds and Virgil—she knew it was him because he was a little shorter—opened the back of the transit.

  They flung him inside, hollering. Their eyes locked momentarily, for the final time. His stare no longer cold, but like it was pleading for something. Not just a reversal of this, but maybe any sign that some of it had ever been real.

  She met his stare to the last second, then smiled as he was swallowed by the darkness of the van's interior.

  She handed Tyrell a parcel—ten thousand dollars as agreed. Then with a nod, their transit pulled away.

  She watched the vehicle recede into nothing. Like it'd never been.

  Then the storm broke and she stood shaking and alone in the rain. She found herself laughing.

  She made one last trip to his apartment.

  She brought the box of horses home with her and, in the darkness of the high rise, covered them carefully in lighter fuel and burned them.

  She watched them as they were consumed, fascinated as she'd ever been.

  She found she was crying—couldn't say why. She didn't know what was wrong with her these days.

  Maybe she c
ried for Tammy-Lee Edmonds or for Beth Allen or for the nameless Asian girl, or all the nameless others.

  Or maybe because she knew Sarah and Ella-Mae would hurt some when they found their Prince Charming had up and gone.

  She cried, she guessed, cause she knew what people like them didn't know. There's no Prince Charmings in this world, nor any guardian angels watching over you neither.

  If this ugly life gives you even so much as an on-the-grift two-faced, screwed-up piece of white trash in your corner, then yes, sir.

  That's as close to a happy ending as you'll ever get.

  A Hundred and Twenty Bucks

  by Matt Andrew

  A guy driving a monster truck dumped his Big Gulp on me—Doctor Pepper, I think—so I had to make another sign from some cardboard out of the nearest dumpster. The sugary syrup made my fingers feel like they were glued together.

  The duct tape that kept my shoe in one piece scuffed the ground while I paced up and down the concrete median. A cordon of steel and smog walled me in between six lanes of commuters who avoided eye contact.

  A car stopped next to me that morning, talk radio up so loud the speakers rattled in the cracked dash. The man's baritone voice said the heat wave had killed four old ladies so far that summer. By afternoon rush hour, my second sign had melted, brown and pulpy in my sweaty, sticky fingers.

  I used an old coffee can lined in dried tobacco spit to collect my alms. By last count, forty-eight dollars and sixty cents. Still about seventy-two dollars to go.

  At the top of every hour, I'd sit against the traffic light post and count the money. After about an hour of standing and baking on that median, my headaches would re-emerge, feeling like two separating continents inside my skull. The leftover shrapnel were the pineapple chunks suspended in the strawberry Jell-O of my brain.

  I still hadn't gotten a call about my discharge physical eval. After being blown up deep inside a tunnel, in a country most American adults couldn't find on a globe, community college math and assembling Big Macs were no longer in my skill set.

  My Tracphone buzzed in my pocket. Incoming text.