Feast Day of Fools - James Lee Burke [67]
But something had just happened that neither she nor her adversaries could have anticipated. Her upper body was soaking wet, and the man on her left let his grip slip for just a second. When he tried to reposition his hands, she jerked free of him and fell backward to the floor, sucking air as raggedly into her windpipe as she would a razor blade.
The tall man reached down and grabbed the front of her shirt and pulled her to her feet. She could feel the sourness of his breath on her face. “Now, you listen,” he said. “You’re making us waste time that we don’t have. You’re vain from your hairline to the bottoms of your feet, and you know it. You’ve turned your pride into a religion and convinced a bunch of ignorant peons you’re a Catholic saint. Be assured, if you want to be a martyr, we’ll arrange that. But in the meantime, you’re going to tell us where Barnum is or prove to us you’re as unknowledgeable as you claim. If you don’t know where he is, give us the name of somebody who does. That will get you off the hook, that and nothing else.
“If you doubt me, tell me how you feel one hour from now, after I let my associates take you back in the hills. Maybe you saw ugly things in the Orient, the kinds of things my associates are capable of doing, but you saw them, they didn’t happen to you. If they had happened to you, you wouldn’t be here today. You would be either dead or in an asylum, unable to deal with your own memories of what was done to you. My associates have insatiable appetites. When they start in on you, you will renounce everything you ever believed in just to make them stop what they’re doing for only one minute. You’ll give up your lover, your family, your religion. I’ve seen them at work. I don’t judge them for what they do. They are only satisfying the desires that to them are natural. But I never want to witness human behavior like that again. You don’t know how kind I have been to you, Ms. Ling.
“There’s another notion I want to dispel here. People in your situation convince themselves that a miracle is going to happen, that their pain will be taken away, that angels will protect them in their last agonizing moments. But it doesn’t work that way. No God will help you, no plastic Madonna, no hallelujah choir will arrive singing the praises of Anton Ling. You’ll die a miserable death, and no one will ever know where you’re buried. Tell me what you want to do.”
Her hair formed a tangled skein in front of her eyes and dripped water and blood on her face and shirtfront. Her eyes were crossed from shock and trauma, her bare feet slippery on the wet floor, her pajamas sticking like wet Kleenex to her skin. Her chest was still laboring with shortage of breath, her heart swollen as big and hard as a cantaloupe. “I know nothing,” she said.
“Then enjoy your time in hell, bitch.”
His hand reached out and settled almost lovingly on the nape of her neck. Then she twisted her body and back-kicked him with more strength and force than she thought she had.
He wasn’t ready for it, and his upper body jacked forward with the blow, both of his hands grabbing his genitalia, a cry rising involuntarily from his throat. The man to her right tried to grab her, but she ripped her elbow into his rib cage, then kicked the tall man again, this time in the face. The third man grabbed her pajama top, tearing it down the back, but she pulled loose from him and got past the tall man and the man who had been holding her left arm. The inside of her head was roaring with noise, her hair matted with blood, her feet slipping on the floor. She felt a hand grab her neck, then fingers trying to find purchase inside the religious chain she