Filed to story: Return of the Reaper Story
“What sort?” The man on the bed’s disinterested gaze remained on the TV.
“Is he a white boy? Or colored?”
“That matter? If it matters, you needed to say something.” The man turned to him.
“No. Not really. They’re all pink on the inside, aren’t they?” Lex gave a simpering laugh at his own remark.
The man’s faux smile returned; the eyes remained flinty.
“He’s a colored boy. Light skin. His name is Lester,” the man said. “Why don’t you go on and take a look?”
“You think that’d be okay?”
“Sure. Go on ahead.” The man waved a hand toward the bathroom. “I’ll just let myself out and leave the two of you alone.”
“If you think it would be okay.” Lex half-rose from the chair.
“You paid your money, friend.” The man sat on the edge of the mattress to retie the lace of one of his boots.
Lex’s heart was pounding as he crossed the room to the bathroom door. His face was flushed, and he felt an excitement building. A trickle of sweat rolled down the nape of his neck and the room suddenly felt warm. His hand touched the knob, and he eased the door open. The patter of water from the showerhead grew louder. He stepped onto the damp tile. The tub was enclosed by an avocado-green shower curtain streaked rusty with mold. The room was fuggy with damp air, the mirror over the sink fogged.
“Lester?” Lex’s voice came out a croak, his throat constricted with anticipation.
There was no answer, only the uninterrupted hiss of the shower water.
“You can call me Uncle Lex.” He reached for the edge of the curtain and drew it back.
Cold water streamed from the showerhead into an empty tub.
Something like lightning flashed behind Lex’s eyes. An intense burning sensation started at the base of his neck to lance through every extremity and turned his legs numb. A second bolt of lightning struck him in the small of the back. His legs folded beneath him. His last memory was of the cracked porcelain edge of the cast-iron tub rushing up to meet his fall.
He woke shivering.
A dull ache in his head built to a hammering pain that rose and fell with each heartbeat. He opened his eyes, and the pain rose a notch in the bright light reflected off the white tile.
Lex Krogstad was buck-naked in a tub filled with cold water, the same tub in which he’d expected to find the six-year-old “Cheshire” he’d paid five hundred dollars for. More than naked, wet, and alone, he found that his wrists were bound behind him with what felt like plastic straps. A strip of tape covered his mouth, the glue bitter when he explored it with his tongue. He tried to call out, then to scream. It was barely audible against the torrential downpour hammering the roof in a near-empty motel far from the highway outside a flyspeck Georgia town the week after Christmas.
The water had a pink tinge to it. He looked down to see streaks of his own blood on his chest. It was dripping from the end of his nose. The blow on the tub’s edge must have split the skin. It sure hurt like the devil.
The door opened, and the big man in the work boots entered. He now wore a canvas farmer’s coat and a pair of blue vinyl gloves. Lex was more concerned with what the man carried in each arm.
Two twenty-pound plastic bags of ice like the kind you buy out front of a Speedway or 7-Eleven.
The pain in his head forgotten, Lex mewled through the tape over his mouth. The man rested the bags on the toilet lid to slice the tops open with a clasp knife. Lex’s mewling turned to an animal keening when the man upended the bags of ice and dumped them into the tub. Displaced water rose over the lip to spread across the tile floor.
He bucked and squirmed as ice mounded on his crotch. The cubes burned with a cold fire against his genitals. He looked pleadingly at his tormentor, muffled squeaks escaping through the slab of duct tape plastered across his mouth.
The man took a seat on the lid of the toilet and fished a smartphone from the pocket of his coat.
“I’m going to ask you some questions now,” the man said.
Lex nodded, bobbing his head, ready to say anything to get out of the icy bath that was already turning his hands and feet blue.
“And I need you to be honest with me.” The man touched the phone screen. “Don’t be lying, thinking I’m going to believe just anything and let you out of that tub.”
Lex’s nodded assent grew more emphatic. His entire body was shuddering with the cold.
“Take a look at this here.” The man held the phone out for him to see.
He fought down his tremors to focus on the video playing on the phone. It was of poor quality, but the setting was well lit, and the subjects were in plain view. There were two people in the shot: a white man with a skein of tattoos covering his upper arms and back and a boy, a dark boy, Mexican maybe, of about eight or nine. Both were naked and in a bedroom of some kind, a residence rather than a motel.
Normally, this was the sort of video Lex might have enjoyed. He had thousands of hours of this same kind of stuff stored on an external hard drive at his house in Augusta. The only sensation he felt viewing thisvideo was the clutch of the icy water. His manhood, such as it was, had retreated into his groin in a vain attempt to escape the freezing grip.
“You know this man?” the man in the work boots asked.
“I-I-I-I can only see his back.” Lex fought down convulsions to speak clearly.
The man touched a finger to the screen to advance the video and held it before Lex’s face again.
“You know him?”
The man in the video lay on his back, the boy atop him. The man’s face was clear now. Lex recognized him. The video was from a few years before, maybe ten or more, but it was unmistakably a man he’d met a time or two.
“You do know him.” The man took the phone back.
Lex nodded, the motion uncontrollable as the shakes wracked his body. His teeth were chattering hard, his jaw muscles bunched with the effort. He never knew cold could be this painful.
“Tell me his name.”
Any idea of either withholding the name or making one up fled from Lex’s mind. His only desire was to get out of this tub, to escape the numbing cold before his heart failed or he passed out and drowned in his own filth. He blurted the name, even spelling it, enunciating each letter through lips now torn and bloody, ripped by his chattering teeth.
The man entered the name on his phone, taking care, his big, callused index finger unaccustomed to such delicate work.
“Y-y-y-y-y-you got what you want,” Lex stammered The man rose and left the room.
“I-I-I-I-I-I gave you the name!” he shouted, his voice bouncing off the tiled walls. “N-n-n-n-now you let me go!”
The man returned with two more bags of ice and sliced them open.