Fifty Grand

Almost immediately his body begins to convulse in pain. I wouldn’t know but I imagine it’s like being electrocuted.

For a moment his legs stop kicking and he sinks beneath the water, but then-thankfully-he fights his way back to the surface.

Treading water, looking at me. His legs are powerful and he’s so strong I suppose he could keep this up for half an hour or even forty-five minutes if I assisted him a little from time to time.

I sit next to him on the ice and open the backpack.

I take out the Ziploc bag I found in his nightstand. Inside there’s six rolls of hundreds, a key of scag, and enough crank to animate half the corpses in Colorado. I suppose it’s some kind of emergency treasure. About a hundred thousand in currency and convertibles.

I catch his eye and make sure that he sees what I’m doing. I place the heavy bag in the water in front of him and we watch it sink to the bottom of the lake.

Does that help you understand? This isn’t about money.

In fact I can illuminate this even better for you now that you’re cuffed and in the goddamn hole. I take off the ski mask.

Recognition dawns immediately, recognition and amazement.

Good. And now for the most important part of all. This is the bit I’ve been dreaming about. For this I want your full attention.

I lean forward, crawl toward him, and turn his face so that he’s looking at me. When his eyes meet mine, I raise the gun, tip it vertical to show him the empty chamber, and then I click the magazine release and show him the empty clip.

Do you get it now, compañero?

Who did this to you? A girl. A wetback armed only with an unloaded pistol. At any time you could have run away and, my friend, when you had that hammer you could have ended this whole thing. But you didn’t. She bluffed you out. This girl, this perra latina.

He looks at the gun, says nothing.

I’m a little let down.

Where’s the fireworks? The fury?

Nothing. Well, you can’t have everything.

He saw and he knows.

His legs continue to kick furiously but his feet, in the cold currents of the hypolimnion, are beginning to tire already.

I nod, slide back from the hole, stand, retrieve the hammer, and put it, the gun, and the ski mask into the backpack.

“Help me! Help me! Help me!” he begins to yell.

I scan the shore. Nobody.

“Help me!” he screams, his eyes darting madly. Expecting what? Duck hunter? Ice fisherman?

No. No one comes here in the winter, and just to be on the safe side I’ve put up a sign, I’ve locked the gate, I’ve wiped the footprints.

“Help me! Heelp meee!” he screams.

The words hang for a moment and then freeze onto the ice.

His lips are turning blue. His skin, red.

He’s whispering. I can barely hear. I lean in. “Bitch, bitch, bitch, bitch, bitch, bitch, bitch,” he says.

Words are finite. The set of all the words that will ever be spoken is small and the subset of each human’s allotment is tiny. These could be your last. Is this really what you want to leave the Earth proclaiming?

“Bitch. Bitch. Bitch. Bitch.”

Apparently so. Well, you’re going to have to give me more than that if you want to get out of this alive.

After a minute the mantra changes but not by much: “Bitch, bitch, bitch, get you, bitch, you’ll see, won’t be fun for you, get you, teach you, yeah, bitch.”

But then he whispers something else. Something surprising. “Bitch, you’ve got no goddamn shame.”

That’s more like it. Where did that line come from? Shame-how old-fashioned. Hector says that shame was one of the casualties of the twentieth century. Hector comes out with a lot of stuff like that. Hector says that Cuba is a woman’s mouth, her lips squeezed together in a grimace, bruised and twisted at one end from all the beatings she’s taken over the years. You’d dig Hec, maybe we could get him a job in Hollywood. A character actor. A cigar-chomping Miami cop. Do they still make cop movies?

“No shame, get you, bitch…”

But you’re wrong. I have no morals, no husband, no children, but shame I have by the bucketload.

He starts to scream again.

“Help me! Help me! Help me!”

The duct tape is still in the backpack. I could cover his mouth, but what’s the point? Let him scream.

“Help me! Help me! Help me!”

In a minute he wears himself out.

His teeth chattering. His eyes closing.

I pull out the pack of Faros and put two in my mouth. I flip the Zippo and light both. I offer him one of the cigarettes. He nods and I put it between his lips. It’ll help him. In a couple of seconds the dissolved nicotine molecules will be firing neurotransmitters that’ll release small quantities of dopamine into his brain. As the cold starts to get to him, blood will retreat from his extremities and his brain will become overoxygenated, perhaps releasing more dopamine and endorphins. The feeling will not be unpleasant.

I put my hand beneath his armpit and lift him a little.

He draws on the cigarette and nods a thank-you.

“I just g-gave up. M-man, this is ironic, it r-really is,” he says.