Abandon

TWENTY-SIX

L

arry, where are my gold bars?”

“I don’t understand. They should be in there.”

Isaiah shoved Lawrence out of the wardrobe. “Sit down!” he yelled at Abigail. “Not you, Larry.” Isaiah backed Lawrence up against one of the giant windows.

“I’m telling you. They should be there. Maybe someone else—”

“You holding out on me?” Isaiah unsnapped the ankle sheath under his trousers.

“I swear,” Lawrence said. “They should’ve been in there. I don’t know—”

“Maybe that’s the case,” Isaiah said, then suddenly pressed the sharp, thin bone of his forearm into Lawrence’s neck. “But how do I know? Really. Know. You aren’t lying?”

“I swear to you I’m not. Please—”

“Words don’t convince me, Larry, but you know what does? Pain. For instance.” Isaiah gently removed Lawrence’s glasses, dropped them on the floor, crushed them under his boot heel. “I’m gonna cut out your right eye—”

Abigail’s stomach turned. Not happening.

“No, please—”

Isaiah leaned harder into Lawrence’s windpipe, briefly cutting off his air supply.

“—and give you thirty seconds to rethink your answer. If you’re still maintaining you don’t know where they are, I may be more inclined to believe you. Know why?” Lawrence shook his head, eyes bulging. “Because right now you don’t understand what real pain is. You think you do. You don’t. But when I’m holding your warm eyeball in the palm of my hand, you’re gonna have a much better idea. You’ll know that I’m willing and fully capable of taking you apart piece by piece. This is not about torture. It’s about me knowing in my heart that you’re telling the truth.”

“Isaiah, just listen. I need a minute to—”

“Sorry, Larry. This is the only way.”

“Stop it, please,” Abigail begged. “He’s my father. He doesn’t know.”

“Yeah, well, we’re about to find that out for certain.”

Isaiah set the point of the dagger under the lower lid of Lawrence’s right eye.

Lawrence struggled to cover his face.

“Hold still, goddamn it! Want me to accidentally push this into your brain?”

Abigail jumped up and lunged for Isaiah, but someone tackled her from behind.

She tried to fight him off, but he had her by the wrists in no time, his weight pinning her to the floor.

She stared up into that masked face, inches from her own, didn’t smell vodka, reasoned it couldn’t be Stu. What she could see of his eyes seemed strangely comforting, something familiar about them, so deep, burdened. Because you recognize them.

Abigail whispered, “You weren’t killed. That was an act, for our benefit.”

She jerked a wrist free and ripped off the man’s mask, saw the scarred, bearded face of their guide, Jerrod Spicer.

“The fuck, Jerrod?” Isaiah said.

“You’re with them?” Lawrence said, incredulous.

“She recognized my eyes.” Jerrod got up, screamed, “Fuck! How do we walk away now?”

“You knew it might come to this,” Isaiah said. “That was always a poss—”

“It’s already come to a whole helluva lot more than you said it would. Why don’t you take off your—”

Isaiah stepped back from Lawrence, ripped off his mask. “Happy?” Abigail’s headlamp illuminated the face of a thirty-something black man she would’ve thought exceptionally handsome under different circumstances, his smooth-shaven features in perfect proportion—pronounced cheekbones, intense mud-colored eyes, dimples that caved when he let loose his broad and malignant smile.

Jerrod lifted off Stu’s face mask, and the first thing Abigail noticed were the ringlets of Stu’s curly black hair, then the week’s worth of stubble, thin lips, sunken, red-rimmed eyes, saddest she’d ever seen. He’d been handsome once, but whatever monster was eating him inside had also sucked the life from his face, drawing it into an ax-thin blade of emaciation.

Jerrod took Isaiah over to the window. Stu got up and joined them. They whispered. Abigail looked at her father. He still stood against the window, knees shaking, crying, the floor wet under his hiking boots and a dark stream sliding down his cheek and into his beard, as if he wept blood. It took him a moment to muster his voice.

“There’s one more place to look,” Lawrence finally said.

They stopped talking. Isaiah walked over, crowded him up against the glass again.

“Larry, I sincerely pray for your sake you aren’t fucking with me.”