She tried to follow through, but Dempsey’s foot was in the gap. Ryan watched the pallor seep into her face.
‘Please take your foot away,’ she said.
‘We’d like to wait inside,’ said Dempsey. ‘Like you say, it’s cold out.’
‘If you don’t remove your foot, I’ll call the police.’
‘That settles it, then,’ said Dempsey. His hand shot through the gap and grabbed Mrs. Napier by the hair, pulling her face toward him until it was sandwiched by the door and the frame. He let her see the gun.
‘Take the chain off.’
‘Please—’
Now he pressed the muzzle hard against her forehead. ‘I won’t ask again.’
‘I can’t take it off without closing the door.’
‘You don’t have to close it all the way.’
‘I have to close it a little.’
‘That’s okay. Give me your left hand.’
She hesitated. Dempsey pressed the gun harder against skull. She yelped in pain.
‘Easy,’ said Ryan instinctively, and Dempsey bared his teeth at him in warning.
‘Give me your hand,’ he repeated.
She did as she was told. Her wrist was very thin, and as brittle as the skeleton of a bird. Dempsey turned her hand so that her fingers were flat against the frame of the door. He handed the gun to Ryan, then slipped a knife from his pocket. He flicked the sharp blade and pressed it hard beneath the top knuckles of Mrs. Napier’s fingers. Seconds later, blood began to flow.
‘If you screw around, I’ll cut off the tips of your fingers,’ said Dempsey. ‘Close the door against your hand and lose the chain.’
Slowly, she closed the door. They heard her fumbling with the chain.
‘It still won’t open,’ she said. She had started to sob.
‘Try harder.’
She pushed against the door, trying to close the gap a little more. The pressure on her fingers made the blood flow faster.
‘It hurts,’ she said.
‘And you can make it stop,’ said Dempsey. He was getting anxious. The street had been empty until now, but Ryan could see the figure of a man approaching from the east, walking his dog before bedtime.
The chain came free. The door opened.
They stepped inside.
‘Nice. Your husband buy this?’
Dempsey was standing by a flat-screen TV, the kind that was so large you had to pivot your head to take in the whole picture. It looked as if it had only recently come out of its packaging. Beneath it was a Blu-ray player, a cable box, and an amplifier for the home theater system. It was a neat set-up, spoiled only by the clothes drying on a rack by the radiator behind the TV.
Mrs. Napier nodded. She was still pale, and shaking with shock. Ryan had found a clean cloth in the kitchen and had given it to her so that she could bind her wounded hand. The blade hadn’t required much pressure on it to break the skin, and there was a lot of blood soaking through the material.
‘New? It looks new.’
Mrs. Napier found her voice. ‘It’s pretty new.’
‘Driving a cab must be more lucrative than I thought,’ said Dempsey. ‘If I’d known just how much money could be made on it, I’d be driving one myself. How about it: You think we should go into the cab business?’
Ryan didn’t reply. He thought Mrs. Napier might be about to vomit. The first floor of the house was an open plan, with only a decorative arch separating the kitchen from the living area. Ryan moved toward the sink.
‘Where are you going?’
‘She’s in shock. I’m going to get some water for her.’
Dempsey looked at Mrs. Napier.
‘Are you in shock?’
She didn’t reply for a moment, then said, ‘I don’t know. I feel nauseous.’
‘Shock it is, then,’ said Dempsey.
There were cups on the draining board. Ryan filled one with water and brought it back to Mrs. Napier. She took the cup, but didn’t say thank you. Ryan wasn’t exactly waiting for her to do so, but still, it would have been polite.
‘Why are you shocked, though?’ asked Dempsey. ‘Are you shocked because you’re hurt? Are you shocked because we’re here? Or are you shocked because your cab driver husband seems to be able to afford Donald Trump’s own home theater?’
Mrs. Napier sipped her water and kept her eyes down.
‘What’s your name?’ said Dempsey.
‘Helen.’
‘So, Helen, your husband been buying anything else that we should know about? You had a new dress lately? Maybe you’re eating out in nicer places? You can tell us. We’d like to know.’
‘Just the TV.’
‘
Just
the TV?’ Dempsey laughed. He moved to the bookshelves, which were sparsely populated with books – a couple of paperback novels, a book on home finance, and a set of encyclopedias so old that they probably still contained pictures of airplanes with propellers – but had a whole shelf devoted to new Blu-ray discs, most of them still in their plastic wrapping. He checked out the titles, running his fingers along the spines, then stepped into the kitchen, examining the white goods, opening drawers. When he was done, he told Ryan to keep an eye on the woman while he went upstairs. Soon they heard closet doors slamming, and the tinkling of glass as something small and delicate broke. Helen Napier tried to get up, but Ryan put his hand on her shoulder, forcing her back into the chair.
‘Why are you doing this?’ she asked.
‘I’m sorry.’
‘No you’re not.’
She was trying not to cry, and she succeeded. The sight reminded Ryan uncomfortably of the woman back at the Wanderer. It didn’t make him feel good about himself.
When Dempsey came back downstairs, he had a shoebox in his hand. He squatted before Mrs. Napier and showed her the contents. The bills were neatly stacked and bound: twenties only. Ryan guessed there were probably two or three grand in the box.
‘You don’t trust the banks?’ said Dempsey.
‘I don’t know what that is,’ said Mrs. Napier, and Ryan believed her.
‘It’s money, that’s what it is.’
‘I didn’t know it was up there.’
‘Husband keeping secrets from you? That’s bad. Once the lies start, it’s the death of a marriage.’ He leaned in so that his face was close to Mrs. Napier’s. ‘You want to know how it got there? I’ll tell you. Your husband doesn’t just drop passengers at their destinations. He picks up and drops off packages too. He’s a regular courier service for protection money, cocaine, marijuana, maybe a little heroin. He’s not a dealer, but he works for the dealer. Our problem is that your husband now maybe fancies himself as a little bit of a dealer after all, an independent operator. Just a little bit.’ Dempsey placed a thumb and forefinger close together. ‘Teeny-tiny. With that in mind, he’s been skimming from the product: enough to earn himself some extra cash, and irritate the people who were paying for the full weight, not most of the weight, because if they’d wanted cornstarch and talcum powder they’d have gone to Walmart. So that means we have to talk to him and find out how much he’s taken, and how much he’s made, and reach an agreement about restitution. See?’
‘My husband doesn’t use drugs,’ said Mrs. Napier.
‘What?’ Dempsey appeared genuinely confused.
‘I said, “My husband doesn’t use drugs.”’
‘Who said anything about “using” drugs? Your husband is
transporting
drugs.
Doing
don’t enter into it. If he was skimming and then consuming he’d be even dumber than he is already, and you’d be watching
American Idol
on an RCA with a coat-hanger aerial. You know, you don’t seem so smart. That’s really unfortunate, because in my experience dumb bitches are the ones who drag their husbands down, and not the other way around. Is it your fault that all this has happened? Maybe you were the one who wanted the nice TV, and better clothes, and trips to Florida to work on your tan. Is that it?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘I don’t want any of those things.’
‘So what do you want?’
She swallowed hard. ‘For this to be made right.’
Dempsey patted her bare leg, then let his hand linger there a couple of seconds too long. ‘Maybe you aren’t so dumb after all.’
He looked at his watch.
‘Phone your husband. Find out where he is.’
Mrs. Napier shook her head. ‘You’re going to hurt him.’
‘No, we’re not. We’re just here to slap his wrist.’
‘Then why do you have a gun?’
‘Jesus, you as well. You married the wrong guy.’ Dempsey jerked a thumb at Ryan. ‘You and him should get together. I have a gun because often people are excitable, and it’s my experience that seeing a gun helps to calm them down. On the other hand, sometimes people don’t recognize the gravity of a situation, in which case the gun tends to focus their minds wonderfully. Do as I tell you: Call your husband, and soon all of this will be over.’
Mrs. Napier stood, wiping at her tears. Dempsey stayed close behind her as she went to her purse and retrieved her cell phone from it.
‘What are you going to say?’ he asked.
‘I don’t know. What do you want me to say?’
Dempsey smiled. ‘Now you have the right idea. You ask him when he’s coming home. Tell him—’ Dempsey’s smile widened. ‘Tell him his new TV is on the fritz. You turned it on and smoke started coming out of the back, so you turned it off again, and now you’re worried. You got that?’
‘Yes, I understand.’
Just to make sure that she did understand, Dempsey showed her the knife again, letting her see her reflection in it. She already knew what the knife could do, and what he was prepared to do to her with it. In her case, it was more effective than the threat of a gun. A gun was a weapon of last resort, but a blade had the capacity to be incremental in the damage that it could inflict.
Mrs. Napier pressed the Redial button and her husband’s name came up on the screen. Dempsey held his head close to hers so that he could hear both ends of the conversation, but the phone went straight to voice mail. He nudged Mrs. Napier and, somewhat haltingly, she passed on the lie about the TV and asked her husband to call her and let her know when she could expect him home. After that, she returned to her chair.
Ryan went back to the kitchen and made a pot of coffee, and the three of them sat in uncompanionable silence waiting for the arrival of the elusive Harry Napier. After half an hour had gone by, Dempsey began to get fidgety. He walked around the room, looking at framed photographs, leafing through papers in drawers and in closets, and all the time Mrs. Napier’s eyes followed him, furious and humiliated. Dempsey found a photo album and began turning the pages. He stopped when he came to a photograph of Mrs. Napier in a bathing suit. It had probably been taken four or five years earlier, and it showed off her figure to good effect.
‘You don’t have children, right?’ said Dempsey.
Something gaped darkly in Mrs. Napier’s eyes before she answered, like a wound briefly exposed, but Ryan saw it.
‘No, we don’t have children.’
Dempsey removed the photo from its page and held it up for Mrs. Napier to see. ‘Means you still look like this, then, doesn’t it?’
‘Jesus,’ said Ryan. ‘Do you—?’
‘Shut up,’ said Dempsey, not even glancing at Ryan. His eyes held Mrs. Napier’s. ‘I asked you a question. You still look like this?’
‘I don’t know. That was taken so long ago.’
‘How long?’
‘A decade?’
‘That a question, or a statement?’
‘A statement.’
‘You’re lying. This picture isn’t ten years old. Five maybe, but not ten.’
‘I don’t remember. I don’t look at old pictures very often.’
Dempsey laid the album on a chair but kept the photo. Once more, he squatted before Mrs. Napier, looking from the photo to her, and then back again.
‘Do you recall why we came here, Mrs. Napier. Or Helen? Can I call you Helen?’
Mrs. Napier didn’t answer the second question, only the first.
‘You said you were here to give my husband a slap on the wrist.’ Ryan saw her scratching anxiously at her left leg, just above the knee. There was a deep redness there, and he wondered if she had some skin condition, or if the scratching was a nervous tic.
‘That’s right,’ said Dempsey. ‘We’re here to give him a message about how bad it is to steal, to make him understand the consequences of his actions. I know you think we want to kill him, but we don’t. Killing is bad for business. It attracts attention. If we kill him, then we also have to kill you, and suddenly we’re looking for sheets and sacks, and we’re taking night drives to marshes and woods, and, frankly, we don’t have that kind of time on our hands. Similarly, I’m getting bored waiting around your lovely but dull home. We do have to get that message to your husband, but maybe you can pass it on to him for us. Or, more precisely, for me.’