I had to include: a dirty cop, a celebrity, a nuclear wasteland, and stranded/left to die conflict.
JACKSAW
As it happens, the nightmare is real. I wake up in some
shithole skeleton of a building and a dozen kinds of pain. I’d been dragged
from my bed, burlap sacked, drugged, transported to God knows where, and
tortured. But wasn’t there a girl, too? Oh yes, there she is. She’s so dirty
now she’s damn near the same color as the concrete she’s propped against. She’s
my only clue, this girl who almost assuredly doesn’t deserve what she got. This
is all about me.
It’s hotter than Satan’s balls in this shed, or whatever
we’re in. If it was ever livable, it’s been years since, maybe decades. The
windows and doors have been blown out and there’s rotten wood and other unidentifiable
crap all over the dirt floor. I can’t hear anything, not even a breeze or a
drip.
If I can just figure out what we have in common, I can get
us out of here. Not that it has to be an us.
I’m happy to just leave the bitch for dead, but she might be my ticket out of
here. That’s how Sage operates: there’s always a trick. There’s always a way
out if you’re smart enough.
Her left eye is purple and puffy, swollen shut. Her
thousand-dollar blond weave has been torn halfway out and matted back onto her
head with blood. She’s waking up, and when I see her unbashed-in side I
recognize her—America’s Sweetheart—but that won’t help me. She’s looking at me
with such contempt and derision, you’d think I was the one who tried to murder
her. She’s scrappy, though, for a starlet—held her own against the Sage’s guy.
Unbelievable as it is, I actually respect her a little. I smile at her scowl,
not meaning the offense I know she takes.
“What’s so funny?” she sneers from across the room. Her
hands, like mine, are tied behind her back. I’m working on the flimsy twine
with a fingernail and a rock I found while she was still passed out. If the
Sage wanted us to die here, he sure as shit wouldn’t have used twine.
“Nothing’s funny, sweetheart,” I say, “but you can wipe the
murder-look off your face. They hurt me as bad as they hurt you, and now we’re
in this together.” It’s true. I’m pretty sure I’ve got at least three fractured
ribs and, well, there’s the torture burns. Those are his favorites; Sage did
them himself.
“You’re one of his guys! He told me so himself,” she spits,
but her voice trails off. I can tell she’s the talk-first, think-second type.
“No, I was one of
his guys. Not anymore. Why do you think he beat the shit outta me, too? Guess
you don’t have to be smart to be a movie star,” I say, knowing I’m pissing her
off. I can’t really help it; that kinda shit just comes out my mouth sometimes.
Anyway, the twine is almost completely scratched to shreds behind my back.
“So you do know
who I am,” she shrieks. God, her voice is just the worst. It’s the kind that
crawls in your head and sends chills down your spine like pieces of Styrofoam
rubbing together.
“Never said I didn’t,” I snap, and the twine snaps, too. I
show the lady my wrists and flash her another grin.
She’s pissed. Rightfully
so, I suppose. She tries to wriggle out her own wrists, but ends up screaming
in pain instead.
“I suppose I’ll have to help you,” I tell her, and stand up
slowly, pushing against the wall with my back for support. Dried blood flakes
off my hands and gets crushed into the pocked cement, but helps my grip. “I
suppose I’ll have to drag your happy ass all the way out of here.”
“Believe me, my ass is not
happy,” she grumbles, but I barely hear it over my own screaming fucking pain
as I try to get across the shed.
It seems at least three of my left toes are crushed. Funny
how your brain will prioritize pain at a time like this. After the burns, the
crowbar, and the steel-toed boots did their thing, crushed toes came out at the
bottom of the pain list. Who knew? “Here,” I say when I finally get to her,
“roll over and I’ll untie you.”
“I’m not tied up in string, buddy-boy,” she says, and rolls
over to show me. She’s right. Her hands are in a zip-tie.
“Well, fuck,” I say, “I guess you’ll just have to walk all
tied up. Can you walk?”
“I think so,” she grunts, “Help me up?”
“Help me up please,”
I say. It’s hard to stop playing the bad cop, no matter how long I’ve been out
of the game. Even when I was straight, I was always the bad cop. I’m
intimidating even at parties and barbecues. Something about my face, I guess.
Anyway, she looks at me like I can’t be serious, but I am.
She needs to know I’m in charge, even if she is a temporary ally. She
sighs and says, “please?”
“Okay, kid,” I say and pull her up, even though she can’t be
more than ten years younger than me. She’s not a tween star or anything like
that, just a flash-in-the-pan starlet soon to be forgotten. Unless she has some
sort of bizarre death, I guess.
Her left leg is weak and it takes a minute for her to find
her feet, but besides the smashed part of her face she doesn’t look all that
bad. “Alright,” I say, “now that we know we’re both in walking shape, let’s get
the fuck out of here.” I lean fully on the wall and push myself to the doorway
to scan for clues.
“Where are we, anyway?” she asks. “Somewhere in the desert?”
Obviously.
“In my professional opinion, we’re at the site of the
Jalisco Bombing,” I answer.
“In Mexico?” she
shrieks, and her voice is so irritating I want to rip out her vocal cords.
I wince and say, “yeah. In Mexico. Site of the failed fusion
reactor. Nine hundred deaths. Hotbed for radioactivity. So we gotta go before
you start growing tentacles or something, buttercup.”
“How?” she whines and I really am starting to wish I could
knock her back to unconsciousness. It’s mostly because she is absolutely the
last person I’d want to be stuck with when Sage finally came for me, but that
shrill voice isn’t doing her any favors. I knew he would come one of these
days, but I was hoping he’d do me the solid of letting me go it alone. After
how I left? Stupid, wishful thinking. It’s always harder when you have baggage,
let alone high-profile, deadweight baggage with a voice like a dying cat. I
swear, they fix her voice for the movies.
“Well since there isn’t a limo outside, we’re going to have
to walk, but keep an eye out for anything out of the ordinary. This is all a very elaborate, very bloody game,
but he leaves clues. If we make it out of here, we win. If not, he wins, and he
almost always wins.”
“A game?!? This is
a fucking game?” she asks, but I only nod. I don’t have time to explain it to
her. Like I said: elaborate.
I’m looking around the cement shed for some type of sign,
but then I remember I’m talking to the first one.
“Say, did you ever get in
trouble with the law, possibly financially? Tax evasion, embezzlement, you
know, that sort of thing?”
Her good eye narrows at me and she says, “noooo. Why?”
“Because. When there’s someone innocent there’s always a
connection to the person he’s trying to punish. I’m assuming you are innocent,
and I was a corporate financial investigator for a while before I worked for
Sage,” I say.
“Of course I’m innocent! Whoever did this is gonna—“
“What? Pay? Be sorry? No, he won’t. If we do make it out
alive, you’ll never say a word, princess. He’ll guarantee that,” I chuckle, and
stumble out of the shed into a filthy fucking wasteland.
“I’m not a princess,” she grumbles, and I can’t really
refute it, given the way she fought back before they knocked her out. She
follows me outside and helps me look on the walls. In the light I can see how
green she is, which is no surprise. She gags and says, “did you ever—“
“Wait,” I say. I hear something. It’s a buzzing sound, low
and constant. Something that would need electricity. “Come on,” I say and
gesture with my head toward the noise. Within hearing distance there’s nothing
but a bunch of decrepit, unusable furniture and three more blown-out sheds, which
I guess are actually houses people died in; one is in the wrong direction so I
only have two places to check. The rest of it’s a craphole desert where
everything left is dead and angled away from the blast site. Yep, Jalisco.
We limp toward the next house, and it takes forever to even
move ten feet. I tell you I’ve never hurt so bad in my life, the devil’s breath
against strips of raw burns on my left side, evenly spaced rectangles of open,
festering woundflesh caked with dirt. She’s not doing better. The wound on her
head looks to be swelling, and either that or dehydration is making her sway
back and forth stupidly as she walks.
I roll my eyes and go back to help her stand upright even
though it kills my ribs. “What were you going to ask me?”
“Did…did you ever do any homicide investigations?” she says,
just louder than a whisper, and then starts to nod off.
As a matter of fact, I did, and I shake her back awake to
look in her eyes. “Yes. Why? Can you hear me? Were you involved in a case?” She
nods, wincing in pain, but doesn’t say anything because she’s gagging again. I
flip her over just in time for her to retch away from my face.
“My…my dad,” she manages to get out after the first round of
dry heaves.
I pull her back close and start dragging her toward the
buzzing sound. “Keep going,” I say.
“My brother,” she says, trying to make her feet useful—and failing.
“Well which was it? Your dad or your brother?” She starts
heaving again, but I know nothing’s coming so I keep dragging her along.
“Both,” she says. “My brother killed my dad before I was
born.” I think back over my career, straight and criminal phases, and I can’t
remember working a case like that. Meanwhile, the first house is empty. I’m
dragging her to the next one when she mumbles something like, “jacksaw.”
Now I remember. I was only in high school when it happened,
but I remember the case because my partner wanted to reopen it when I was a
rookie. Some nutjob kid had tied up his dad in a garage and tortured the guy
until he died, then fled into obscurity. He was never found, but he carved jacksaw into a chunk of the guy’s beer
gut and left it like a front doormat for the police. The buzzing’s getting
louder, and I think I know what it is.
By the time we get to the last little house, the girl is
unconscious again, and I drop her into the dirt outside the doorway. In the
center of the one-roomer is a table with an array of knives and saws, including
a hacksaw. Carved into one corner of
the table are the words “you know what to do.”
I do. I walk over to the girl and pull up her shirt. In that
purple surgeon’s ink there’s a dotted line in the shape of an oval, and inside
it are dotted letters that spell out JACKSAW.
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