Chapter 18: The Rag and the Reckoning
The Escalade came up the street too fast for a residential block, then stopped hard in the drive. Brakes caught with a dry squeal Hugh had been meaning to have looked at for a year.
Marnie lifted her head off the cushion. Joaquin lay the length of the couch beside her, one bare foot hanging over the arm, his skin gone slick and cooling, the letter M cut into his chest already crusted dark with pink at the edges. The cup shards still glittered on the floor by the coffee table.
The driver's door opened. Then shut.
They looked at each other. Joaquin's mouth went first, a slow pull at one corner, and Marnie pressed her face into his shoulder to smother it. It came out of him anyway, low and careless, and she laughed with him until the springs complained under their weight.
Her split lip opened again from the smiling. She licked up the iron and got a taste of him underneath it.
"I'll keep him busy," Joaquin said. He didn't move. His hand found her thigh and squeezed once, then let go. "You go get a rag and the chloroform. I keep a bottle in the trunk."
"Two minutes."
She kissed his forehead. It tasted like salt. Her shorts were somewhere, and her shirt was under the couch, so she went out the way she was, barefoot, through the dark kitchen and the back door.
The grass was wet and cold between her toes. The latch on the gate clicked louder out here in the open than it ever did inside a house, and she held it with two fingers so it wouldn't swing. The trunk sighed open on its strut. Under a folded blanket and a bag of road salt sat a brown glass bottle in a shop rag, the cap taped once around, the label gone soft from heat.
She unscrewed it. The smell came up and sat in the back of her throat like a hand. She tipped it into a folded dish towel until the whole middle of the cloth went dark, then wrapped the bottle back up and shut the trunk soft.
The kitchen light came on inside her own house. Yellow, spilling out onto the patio stones. Then Hugh's voice, through the screen.
She walked the grass without hurrying and let herself in the back, and she stopped in the dark of the doorway where the hall met the kitchen, the wet rag hanging from her fist.
Hugh stood in the middle of her living room in his work shoes, jacket still on, staring down at the couch. Joaquin hadn't moved. He lay there naked as a man who had nothing left to spend, grinning up at the ceiling.
"What the fuck are you doing in my house?"
"I just finished fucking your wife."
The room went very still. Marnie watched Hugh's shoulders climb toward his ears. He looked like a man who'd been struck in the back of the head and hadn't decided yet whether to fall.
"What the fuck did you just say to me?"
"You deaf?" Joaquin said. "I said I had your wife in here calling me daddy. I'll tell you one thing. Baby girl's pussy is way better than Vera's."
"There's no way you're that stupid. You know what I'm going to do to you?"
Hugh didn't answer that one. He came across the rug at a dead run and both hands out, wide, like he meant to take Joaquin off the couch and through the window behind it. He bumped the coffee table hard enough to send a shard skidding across the floorboards.
Joaquin rolled off the cushion and landed already on his feet.
Hugh's hands closed on empty upholstery, and all that weight kept going. He went down face first into the seat of his own couch, into the cushion where the two of them had finished, into the dark wet shine of it, and his nose and his open mouth went straight into the spot.
He came up gasping. There was a strand of it on his chin. He made a sound from the back of his throat, half a gag, and dragged his whole forearm across his mouth, and then he dragged it again. His tongue scraped at his teeth. He wiped at his face with the flat of his hand and flicked it at the floor and wiped again, frantic, like a man who'd fallen into something in the yard and couldn't get the smell off.
"Jesus. Jesus Christ." He spat onto the rug. "What is that. What the fuck is that."
Joaquin stood beside the coffee table buckling his jeans, one hip up, laughing so hard he had to put a hand on the arm of the couch to stay straight. The M on his chest pulled each time his ribs moved and a thin line of red ran down toward his navel.
"That's us," he said. "That's what she makes when she comes. You want to know what it tastes like, you just found out."
Hugh scrambled up onto one knee. He wiped his face on the clean sleeve of his jacket and left a long wet smear down it, then got to his feet with his fists already balled, shoes squeaking on the floorboard, and his eyes fixed on Joaquin like a nail set in a board.
Marnie stood in the dark of the doorway with the chloroform rag in her hand.
Three steps would do it. Behind him, while he was looking at the naked man. One arm across the mouth and nose, her weight on his back, and he'd go down in nine or ten breaths with his shoes still on, right there on the floor he'd paid someone to lay. Joaquin would help her take the ankles. They could put him in the Escalade and drive him out past the feed store and no one in this neighborhood would ever know there had been anything but a man who traveled.
Or she could stand still and let them. Let her husband and her lover go at each other on her rug. Let Hugh put his hands on Joaquin's throat, and Joaquin, who had spent years learning how to look weak, find out that he was not.
She tightened her fist around the wet cloth and let it hang at her side, and stayed where she was in the dark, and watched to see which one of them moved first.
Joaquin's eyes came up and found her in the dark of the doorway, the way a man finds a light switch in his own house without looking. He knew where she was standing. He shook his head once, slow, the grin going wider, and tilted his chin at the lump of Hugh between them. Not yet.
Hugh was still staring at the couch. He turned a half step toward the stairs and cupped his hands around his mouth.
"Marnie? Babe, are you home?"
The house gave him nothing. The dishwasher hummed through the last of its cycle. Somewhere upstairs a floorboard settled.
"Marnie!"
The second one came out cracked at the top. Joaquin put a hand flat on his own chest, over the M, and laughed at the ceiling.
"Aw. Calling for your wife to come save you from the pathetic neighbor? How fitting."
Hugh's head swung around. Spit on his chin, one sleeve black to the elbow with what he'd wiped off his face, and his eyes gone flat and small the way they went in a boardroom when a number came in wrong.
"You hear me?" he said. "I'll kill you both. I'll kill you in this house and I'll never lose a minute of sleep over it, you piece of shit, do you understand what I'm saying to you?"
Joaquin started forward a step, unhurried, barefoot, jeans buttoned but not zipped.
"You will never lay a hand on her ever again," Hugh said. "Not one finger. Not ever again."
He came across the rug at a dead run, head down, both arms wide like a man going through a door he intended to take off its hinges.
Joaquin stepped left.
That was all he did. One step and a leg out, and the heel of his bare foot planted at the point of Hugh's knee while all that weight kept going forward. Hugh's shoe caught under the ankle and he went over it, arms windmilling, the whole handsome bulk of him airborne for a quarter second and then down, chest first, into the coffee table.
The table leg snapped at the joint. The top came up under his ribs like a fist and flipped him sideways. His temple caught the corner of it on the way past and then the floor took the rest of him, hard enough that the lamp on the end table rocked and the shard of cup by the baseboard jumped.
Hugh didn't get up.
Marnie stepped through the doorway. The cool of the hall was still on her skin, the grass wet between her toes, and the rag hung from her fist dripping one dark line down the side of her thigh.
Joaquin stood over the body with his hands on his hips, breath going in and out through his nose.
"Aw. I wasn't done having fun."
He kicked him. Not hard, the toe of his foot into the ribs, and then again into the soft of the arm where it lay open on the rug.
Hugh's mouth was open on the floorboards. Blood ran from his hairline in a thin track across his eyebrow and pooled against the white of his eye, and his shoes were still on, both of them, the way she'd thought about in the dark.
"Don't worry," Marnie said. She walked past Joaquin and dropped the rag on the coffee table's broken top, right where it had come apart. "You will have your fun. I know just the person to use this rag on."
Joaquin looked at her, then at the rag, then at the house wall his wife lived on the other side of.
He knelt down and went through Hugh's jacket. Wallet, keys, a pen he dropped on the floor without looking, and the phone, face down in the inside pocket where it always was. He stood up and held it out.
"Locked."
Marnie bent at the waist and took a fistful of Hugh's cropped hair. She lifted his head off the floorboards, which were wet under his face now, a pink shine spreading across the grain. His eyelids were closed. She turned his face toward the screen and held it there.
The lock came open.
She let his head down, careful, almost tender, and set the crown of his skull on the floor the way you'd set a plate down.
Joaquin typed with one thumb. Hey come over.
He turned the screen so she could see it and hit send. The bubble went, one small gray wake up the thread, and he set the phone on the arm of the couch.
Nothing for eleven seconds. Then it lit.
The message came back in a burst, three bubbles at once. What are you doing up? Is she there? And then, under it, I can be over in two. Don't do anything stupid.
"She thinks I'm having a bad night," Joaquin said.
"She thinks you're climbing the walls."
The last bubble sat there with its little tail, and then a fourth came in, shorter. On my way.
Marnie looked at the clock on the stove, which said eight forty, and at her husband on the floor of the room he'd paid to have redone in the spring. His hand had opened on the floor and his wedding ring had caught the light of the overhead, the same as it did every time he went for his phone.
"Take his shoes off," she said. "They'll hear him on the walk."
Joaquin crouched and did it. One lace, then the other, quick, and pulled both shoes off and dropped them side by side against the baseboard, neat, toes out, like a man coming home at the end of the day.
The front bell rang.
It didn't stop at one. It went twice, then once flat and long, the way she rang at her own house when she knew someone was inside and had decided they were done pretending not to be.
Marnie went to the front hall. She stopped at the arm of the couch long enough to pull Joaquin's shirt off it and get her arms through. It smelled of salt and his narrow back. She did up the middle two buttons and left the rest, because the bell had already gone quiet and she didn't want it to start again.
She opened the door.
Vera stood on the step in the black coat and the heels, one hand still up at the bell. Her eyes went to the shirt first. Then the split lip. Then the bruise at the throat, which was blooming purple now, four ovals and a smear. She read the shirt the way she read a contract.
"Where the fuck is he?"
"Well hello to you too, Vera. Who? My husband or yours?"
Vera's chin came up a quarter of an inch. She put one flat hand on Marnie's shoulder, the same hand she'd used in the kitchen at the sink, and walked straight past her into the house.
Marnie stepped aside and let her. She shut the door soft and the wet grass smell and the dark stayed outside.
Heels on the wood, loud, all the way down the hall. Vera stopped in the middle of the living room and turned a slow circle. She took in the shorts on the armchair. The towel on the floor. The coffee table in two pieces with one leg gone somewhere under the rug. Her coat was still buttoned and she hadn't taken her hands out of the pockets.
"Marnie, I asked you a question."
Then she saw him.
Hugh lay on his side on the rug with his jacket sleeve black to the elbow and his face turned up to the ceiling. His mouth hung open. His chest went up and down, slow but steady, and the blood from his hairline had run back along his temple into his ear.
Behind him, set neat against the baseboard, both his shoes sat toes out. Like a man come home at the end of the day. Like a man who'd taken them off himself.
Vera stepped back. Her heel came down on the shard of cup by the baseboard and it broke under her with a small dry sound.
Her head snapped around. Marnie stood in the doorway of the living room, shoulder against the jamb, in Joaquin's shirt with the hem at her thighs and the chloroform rag hanging from her fist with one dark line dripping down the side of her bare leg.
"What did you do to him?"
"Me? Nothing. I was just here for the show."
"What show?"
Marnie tossed the rag underhand. It turned twice in the air, and Joaquin caught it at his chest one-handed.
Vera turned around.
He was already there. Two feet back, barefoot on the floorboards, jeans buttoned but not zipped, the M a scabbed black mark down his ribs. Her mouth opened on something. It might have been his name.
He clapped the rag over her nose and her mouth, and got his other hand in the back of her hair and held her head still.
She fought. That was the thing to see. She got both hands on his wrist and drove her nails in and twisted, and she got one heel back into his shin hard enough that he grunted and lifted it. She tried to go sideways out of the grip and there was nowhere to go, so she went for the desk in the corner that wasn't there anymore, and he rode her down through the turn, hip to hip, breathing through his nose.
Her hand came off his wrist and closed on air. Her knees folded. He held the cloth there anyway and counted slow over the top of her head, watching her eyes the way she watched numbers on a spreadsheet.
At ten, he let go and stepped back.
Vera went down flat on her back with both arms out. Her head hit the floor at the end of the couch and bounced once, and her earrings knocked on the boards. Her coat slid open. She landed with her cheek a foot from Hugh's open hand, and neither of them moved.
Joaquin didn't reach for her. Not one finger.
Marnie walked over and stood above the pair of them. Vera's chest went down slow and came up slower. Her lipstick hadn't smudged.
"She's heavier than she looks," Joaquin said.
"Get the coat off her. She'll be sick in it and then we'll have to explain a smell to somebody."
He dropped to a knee and did it. One arm, then the other, and he folded the coat over his forearm, careful with the collar, the way you'd carry something out of a store. Underneath she had on the grey dress and a thin gold necklace. He worked the necklace loose and set it on the couch cushion. Then the watch off her wrist, next to it.
Marnie crouched by her head and got a thumb under one gold hoop of the earring. She unhooked it and set it in the palm of Vera's own open hand. It looked almost like a gift left there. She did the other one.
Vera's eyelids didn't even flutter.
"Her car's still in my driveway," Marnie said.
"I know. I heard it."
"Then we move her now, while the street's empty."
He took her under the arms. Marnie got the screen and the back door and held them, and the two of them went out onto the wet grass with Vera's heels dragging two dark tracks across the patio stones. Her head lolled. Joaquin had to shift his grip twice to keep her off the rosebush by the fence.
The gate clicked behind them. Under the fence, in the dark, a row of iris stood tall and still, and past them the Marshes' house sat with one light on in the kitchen and the rest of it black.
Marnie stopped at her own back door with her hand on the frame.
"Wait here with her. I need something out of the house."
"I'll start the hose." Joaquin settled Vera down against the fence and straightened her legs out flat so she wouldn't be folded when she woke, if she woke. "Her keys are in her coat. Back door and the deadbolt both."
Marnie went inside and up the stairs without turning on a light. On the nightstand, next to Hugh's empty tumbler, the locket lay where she'd left it. She opened it with her thumb, felt the needle ride up out of its bed, and pressed the pad until the bead came. Then she licked it off and put the locket on over Joaquin's shirt, and it lay cold between her breasts.
Down in the kitchen she filled a glass of water and drank it standing at the sink. Out the window the yard had gone grey with moonlight, and Joaquin was crouched at the spigot with one hand on the tap, and Vera was a black shape against the fence with her earrings gone.
Marnie set the glass down on its coaster and went.