Mules:: A Novel Read online

  A faint breeze had blown into the room from the hole in the window and the drapes fluttered. Els could see the chunk of asphalt sitting on the carpet in a shimmering lamina of glass shards. On the bed, Neesha was completely naked, propped up with her face down in the pillows, her knees beneath her and her ass in the air. She was unconscious, breathing shallow. At the foot of the bed was a tripod-mounted camcorder, still recording.

  Els stepped around the bed.There were clothes strewn across the floor, Neesha’s, and men’s jeans with white briefs bunched up, and a button down shirt. A Stetson sat on the dresser next to an open black medical bag. The bag was empty and its contents lay spread out in a neat row on one of the bathroom hand towels. There was a sickening array of rusty and dull-looking blades: broken scalpel, Phillips-head screwdriver, stainless steel scissors, two kinds of pliers, a little dirty jar full of screws and nails, a dildo crusted with what looked like dried blood.

  Els felt a mixture of nausea and fear spread through her body like an illness. She wanted to scream or vomit, to cry; anything to physically expel the sickness she felt.

  And then she heard a muffled noise from the bathroom. Els froze. He was still there. He was still in the room with them. There was a light on in the bathroom and she could see the faint shadow of the man blocking the glow from beneath the door.

  What was he doing in there? Was he waiting for her? Sitting patiently in the darkness, preparing to leap out at her like some ravenous spider?

  Els snapped the light back off. She bent down to pick up the chunk of asphalt and raised it over her head as she walked with calm, quiet steps to the closed bathroom door. She could hear him now. He had the faucet running and he was humming to himself; an old Spin Doctors song from the 90’s. She recognized the words he was muttering as the lyrics to Two Princes.

  She waited, poised, her body coiled like a spring ready to snap, the chunk of black rock hoisted high above her head. She stood at the door for what felt like an eternity, her head cocked as if listening to some private voice. Her arms started to quiver and they became numb, but she stood ready. The only sound she heard was her own ragged breathing and the muffled butchering of a 90’s power pop song from behind the door. She was only vaguely aware of a dull ache in her left breast from where the piece of broken glass had cut into her.

  And suddenly the door swung in and she felt her body jerk in response.

  There, standing before her, framed in a perfect rectangle of fluorescent glow, was the cowboy. He was stark naked except for a leather belt, the rigid tumescence of his erect penis jutted out at her. She could see surprise in his face, far more than she felt when he opened the door. He had twin white cords running from his ears into an Ipod clipped to his belt near the gratuitous buckle. He hadn’t been waiting for her, she had been waiting for him. She was the predator, the hunter, the skulking beast prowling the lightless outland.

  Their eyes met for the briefest part of a second before she brought the stone down into his face. There was a snapping sound as the rock collided with his nose, pulverizing it into a pulpy depression of bloody skin and cartilage. Three of his top front teeth broke from his skull and dropped to the linoleum beside fine spatters of red. Part of his lip severed when mashed against the rock and his bottom teeth and it hung down against his chin in bloody tatters.

  The cowboy staggered backward and Els closed the distance, pushing him back into the tub. The edge caught the back of his calves and he tumbled in, arms flailing. The back of his head slammed against the sea foam colored tiles leaving a crimson smear. Els leaned over him and brought the chunk of asphalt down again, square onto the top of his skull this time and his body slumped over, twitching in the bottom of the tub.

  She dropped the chunk of asphalt down on the floor and it landed with a thud. She went back a few uneasy steps and reached out for the sink to steady herself. She leaned over it with both hands on either side of the basin and locked her elbows. The adrenaline was leaving her body and now she just felt weak. She saw in the mirror that she was shaking. Along with the ill feebleness, she also started to feel a deep throbbing coming from her breast. Els pulled her shirt up to inspect the wound. The shard of glass had sliced through the cup of her bra and turned it a dark red. She saw a long deep gash the length of her index finger beneath the cotton padding. It would require stitches, but she couldn’t think about that right now.

  She stepped out of the bathroom, giving a brief glance to the naked man lying in a crumpled heap at the bottom of the tub, and turned the light out, closing the door behind her.

  She went to the bed, to Neesha. She rolled her over on her back and looked down at her. Her pulse was steady and so was her breathing. Els peeled back Neesha’s eyelid and stared into the white, unfocused gaze; the little black pupil surrounded by a ring of brown lolling to the bottom. She thought of a baby doll that closed its eyes when its head was leaned back.

  She had been drugged, but Els thought it would wear off in a few hours and she would wake up, groggy and confused, but she would be okay. Els looked down at her sweet, sleeping face, she wouldn’t try to wake her just now. It didn’t seem fair somehow to force Neesha to deal with the hideous certainty that she had saved her from; to make her look at the gleaming objects from the medical bag that she would have been dissected and tortured with; to take her into the bathroom and show her the raw, bloodstained face of the man who would have killed her. It wasn’t fair. Els made up her mind, standing beside Neesha while she lay unconscious, that she would never know what happened. Els would protect her.

  She got some clothes from her bag, underwear and a white cotton T-shirt, and dressed Neesha in them. She pulled the covers over her and rested her head on a pillow.

  And as she stared down at Neesha once more, making herself content with the surety of innocence she was preserving, she heard a noise from the bathroom.

  The smack of human flesh against linoleum.

  She shut her eyes as everything calm within her became strained once more. She was taut, like a piece of thread pulled between two fingers to find the breaking point.

  She came to the bathroom door again, reached slowly for the knob. She turned it, and pushed the door open into the dark room.

  She didn’t want to step inside, and she reached to feel around for the lightswitch.

  A hand shot out from the darkness and Els screamed as it closed around her ankle. She tried to step back, to shake off its grip, but it held her firm. It pulled at her, and a face emerged from the shadows. The cowboy stared up at her from the bathroom floor, his eyes wild in wounded fury. The bottom half of his broken face was a hideous red grin of torn, ragged flesh. She could see in the dimness that he had left a crimson trail behind him from the bathtub, like some grotesque slug. She swung her free foot back and then forward and connected with the center of his ruined face, driving her toe into the red sunken place where his nose used to be. He howled in pain and released her ankle. Els grabbed the knob and swung the door into his shoulder as he tried to retreat back into the bathroom. She swung the door again, catching his head between it and the frame. Again and again she slammed the door against his head until she heard the crack of his skull fracturing and he dropped face down onto the floor. The cowboy hung with his head halfway out the bathroom, tangles of his long hair matted with blood.

  Els left him and sat down on the bed again next to Neesha.

  FIVE

  They were still standing outside when she opened the door. The six drunken frat boys and Elton were gathered around, holding cans of beer, looking at her as if she were some source of amusement for them, a carnival attraction: Step right up to see the hysterical bitch. Marvel at the humiliating fantasies her silly little mind conjures, and share the laughs as she deals with their consequences. But she had something to take the starch out of their grins. She would show them something they would never forget, no matter how hard they tried.

  She said nothing, just stood aside and let them file in. Only Elton seemed to b
e concerned for her well-being. She had to wave him off when he expressed his alarm at the amount of blood on her shirt. He even offered to look at the wound, and his face immediately grew red as he realized the location of her injury and what inspecting it would entail. She assured him that she was fine.

  She let them wander around, watching the collective shock register on their faces as they discovered first the video camera, then the medical bag and neat row of cutting implements and pliers. They seemed particularly aghast at the rubber cock with flecks of dried blood on it like rust stains.

  They crowded around the tiny bathroom and stared in disbelief at the blood-streaked war zone it had become, and the naked man that Els had bludgeoned into a sanguine pulp lying face down and motionless on the linoleum floor.

  “Is he dead?” the shirt redheaded one asked.

  “I don’t know,” Els answered. “I don’t think so, though.”

  “We need to call the police.” He reached into his pocket for a phone.

  Els was prepared for this. “No. Nobody is calling the police. I’ve given this a lot of thought, and I don’t want the authorities involved.”

  “You don’t want the authorities involved? You just beat a man to death in a motel room. He’s right, somebody needs to call the cops,” another one said.

  “No.” Els said again. “Just hear me out. It’s not fair. To us, me and Neesha. It isn’t fair. We just wanted to have some fun on spring break. If you call the police and tell them about this, there’ll be an investigation, we’ll have to come back for his trial. His trial! Why should someone like him get a chance to stand trial? A chance at freedom. You saw what he was going to do. What if the police forget to read him his rights? What if he gets a good lawyer or something and gets off free? Or reduced jail time, or any of a million unfair things could happen. It’s not right.”

  “We’re in fucking Texas, he’s not going to get off. He’s getting the death penalty.”

  “Henry Lee Lucas,” said Elton.

  “What? Who the fuck is Henry Lee Lucas? Asked Tucker.

  “He was a serial killer. He killed people all over the country but they tried him in Texas. He confessed to hundreds of murders and got the death penalty. But every time his execution date neared he would confess to a new murder and they’d find the body and have to have a new trial. His sentence was commuted by George W. Bush when he was governor. He never got executed. John McNaughton made a movie about him with Michael Rooker. It was pretty good. Also that billionaire guy, something Durst. He killed an old man and cut up his corpse, right here in Galveston. Threw the pieces in the bay. He got off with time served. Never went to jail at all. Killed his wife and one of her friends who knew about it, too.”

  “See,” said Els “it happens all the time. If you call the police you’re pretty much guaranteeing that he goes free.”

  “So what are we supposed to do?” asked Tucker.

  “You’re going to take him.” Els said calmly.

  “What are we going to do with him?”

  “I don’t know. Throw him in a ditch. Burn him. Bury him. You can drop him off a cliff for all I care, it’s up to you. I want you to think about the people he’s hurt, who he might have killed. All the lives he’s ruined. Innocent women. Think about that and do whatever you think he deserves.”

  “That’s fucking crazy,” the redhead protested. “If we do something like that, it’s like making us all accessories.”

  “No, she’s right,” one of the boys other boys piped up. “If we call the police, they’ll take him to a hospital.They’ll save his life. It’s not right for him to have a chance to make bail or escape before he has a trial. I think we should take him.”

  “We need to think about this. Before it goes too far and we can’t back out.”

  But there was no discussion. There was nothing to think about. A mob mentality had overcome the majority, and the couple who disagreed were ignored. They pulled a sheet off one of the beds and wrapped the cowboy in it and threw him and his clothes and his bag into the back of a pickup truck that one of the boys brought around. They threw him in the back like a cooler full of beer and hauled him away to confer whatever capricious idea of justice could be decided by six drunk white men.

  Els didn’t feel the slightest strain of pity or remorse as she watched the pickup peel out of the parking lot and disappear into the night.

  Elton stayed behind with her and the two of them went about the wordless task of cleaning the room, trying to erase the memory of what had happened there. Elton mopped up the blood and cleaned the bathroom while Els picked up all the little shards of broken glass from the carpet. When the glass was picked up, they found the top of a cardboard pizza box in a dumpster outside to tape over the hole in the window.

  It was ten minuets to one when they finished. Els stared into the illuminated red numbers of the alarm clock. It was hard to believe she had only been in Texas for a little over six hours. It felt like days had passed since Neesha and she had rolled through from Louisiana.

  “What are you going to do now?” Said Elton. He was standing in the open doorway, on his way out, hand clutching the knob like he didn’t really want to go.

  Els shrugged. “I’m just going to keep on going, you know? I’m just going to keep on. Me and Neesha will be in Mexico this time tomorrow, and this whole thing will just be a dream. Can you believe it? We don’t even speak Spanish. It’s crazy.”

  “Yeah,” Elton managed to muster a thin chuckle. This was without a doubt the most bizarre situation he had ever been in. And what made it even stranger was the flip way that Els was dealing with it. Or rather not dealing with it. She was so freakishly calm he could hardly stand it. He wanted to grab her, to shake her and scream in her face: “Why are you acting like this? How can you? You just climbed through a broken window and beat a man to death with a rock, an honest-to-god serial killer, and somehow that warrants a reaction lower than smelling expired milk? Jesus Christ, that wasn’t ketchup we were just mopping up. I picked that man’s teeth up off the floor and you’re not even acknowledging it.” But the fact that he didn’t say any of these things to her made him realize that people dealt with things in different ways. Just because she wasn’t reacting externally didn’t mean she wasn’t crying, or screaming, or lunatic laughing, on the inside. One look into those hollow, deceptively vacant eyes told him that there was something rolling and dark beneath the surface, like gathering storm clouds. It would be for the best not to try and drag a satisfactory response out of her. But there was something oddly appealing about the girl. Something that suggested lifelong regret if this was to be the last time their paths crossed.

  “I’m sorry,” he said after a while. “I’m sorry I didn’t believe you when you said your friend was in trouble.”

  “That’s okay. I wouldn’t have believed me either if I was you. But I’m glad you did the right thing.”

  Elton turned his head to look out the door before looking back at Els. “Hey, listen. If you’re ever back in Texas, and you need a friend, you could give me a call if you want. We’re friends now, you know? I know where the bodies are buried, as they say.”

  That last part was supposed to be a joke, but Els didn’t smile. “Okay. Tell me your number.”

  “Don’t you want to write it down?”

  Els shook her head cast her eyes down, smiling self-consciously, “I’ll remember it.”

  Elton gave her his number and said goodbye. She watched him, through the window, get into his little truck and drive away until he was just a blur of red taillights on the dark road and then he was indistinguishable from every other light in the city.

  When he was gone Els got out her green Army surplus duffel bag and unzipped it. She rifled through it, feeling along the bottom. Her hands brushed against the survival knife with the whetstone built into the sheath and a compass in the end of the hollow steel handle that was filled with the waterproof matches and hooks and fishing line. She felt and moved past the fe
w MRE’s and cans of survival water until she found what she was looking for: the emergency medical kit. She took it into the bathroom and took off her T-shirt and bra. She looked at the wound in the mirror and hummed as she splashed disinfectant on it and cleaned out the dried blood to get at the tender pink skin beneath. She covered the gouge in iodine and threaded a needle. She didn’t so much as wince when she plunged the sharp point into and out of her skin to sew up the wound.

  When she was done she admired her handiwork in the mirror. She was pleased with the job; the stitches were tight and they would hold. There would be a scar, but she didn’t think it would be so bad, it certainly wouldn’t make the enormous heaps of flesh hanging from her chest any uglier.

  She put on a clean T-shirt and stowed the medical kit back at the bottom of her bag. She went to the bed and peeled the sheets back and crawled in beside Neesha.

  “Mexico,” she whispered into the back of Neesha’s neck as she made spoons with her, feeling the comfort of her warm body pressed against hers. The word was enthralling in some unexplainable way. It sounded like a charm to her.

  She lay still,thinking about what she had done for Neesha, how they were best friends now and forever, and nothing could ever change that. She would die for her. She would do anything to protect her.

  Els shut her eyes and tried to force herself to sleep for a few hours before the nightmares came.

  SIX

  Calisto stood outside the gate at the end of the chain link fence, waiting for someone to come down the hill and let him in. He looked at the chain wrapped around the gate, at the little padlock holding it together. It wasn’t anything a bolt cutter couldn’t go through in about a tenth of a second. Calisto leaned over and wet his thumb with his tongue, rubbed it over a spot of red on his boot. Leon liked to play like he was Scarface. That’s why Calisto had to come all the way out here to the middle of fucking nowhere. Leon could have a place anywhere in Colzorona, but he wanted a mansion on a hill. Leon’s ‘mansion’ was a four bedroom western ranch style with sliding glass doors that led to a patio and pool out back that some old gringos abandoned when the cartel took over the territory.