Gargantuan_ A Ruby Murphy Mystery - Maggie Estep [92]
I took my pack of cigarettes out of my coat pocket. I lovingly lit a cigarette and inhaled deeply. Though I’d been trying to cut down, this didn’t seem like the time to be hard on myself.
I could smell my own urine in the bucket, so I carried it to a far corner and covered it with a piece of moldy linoleum that I peeled off the floor. I thought about how miserable horses get when their stalls are dirty and for the first time I really understood. The guy pounded another sheet of plywood over the second window, but it wasn’t big enough to shut out all the light.
I went over to look through the contents of the sagging cardboard box that was nudged against one of the walls. There were a few tattered children’s books as well as a hardcover copy of Balzac’s Père Goriot. I gratefully picked it out and opened it. The first third of the pages were missing but the rest was there and I felt ridiculously elated. As if finding two-thirds of a book I like was a sign that all would soon be well. I kept digging through the box and felt a flush of adrenaline as I found a rusted old carpet knife. Clearly the psycho wasn’t experienced at kidnapping or he’d have looked through this box. I put the carpet knife into my pants pocket and looked around. There was a shaft of light in one corner of the room, so I sat down on the cold floor, pulled my coat around me, lit another cigarette, and started reading Père Goriot. For a time I was actually transported to Balzac’s world. As I read, I kept picturing Balzac’s face as it looms out from the monument on his gravesite in Paris, which I’d visited once years earlier. Somehow, thinking of Balzac’s face made me feel better. For a while. Then I got really cold and scared and time refused to move.
My captor doesn’t strike me as the person in charge of whatever is going on. Maybe the person in charge has already found Attila. I picture Attila’s face. His close-set vivid eyes. I think of how mean I was to him at the motel the other night. How suddenly everything in me had shut off as quickly as it had opened when we first met. I wonder at my own sanity. I pray that Attila is okay. I cry.
BIG SAL
32.
If Wishes Were Horses
I’m sitting in the living room with the TV on but I’m not seeing the screen, the living room, or anything other than a vision of Karen with her spandex workout pants rolled down over her shelf ass. I keep replaying the scene in my mind, but it’s not getting me worked up. It’s just making my heart break. Her note is there, on the coffee table, right where she left it. I’ve looked at it but I haven’t actually touched it. As soon as I saw it there, I knew what it would say. She’s gone. She’s taken Jake and they’ve split.
“…for a few days or until I sort things out.”
I have no idea where she is. Probably not at her mother’s since she can’t stand her mother. Karen’s got a couple of girlfriends but she’s always kept me away from them, like her relationship with the girlfriends is a thing I’m not allowed to sully. Not that it’s sexual or anything. Just that Karen likes her boundaries. She even likes the word boundaries and abuses it left and right. If I want to fuck her in the bathtub, there’s a boundary involved. My getting in the tub with her would violate the boundary of her being alone with her body. And maybe all these boundaries should have been a red flag. I don’t really know if you’re supposed to have quite so many boundaries in a marriage. In fact, right now, I don’t know fuck-all other than I got in late last night and felt like hell and now I feel even worse. It had been a rough day what with witnessing Layla’s death. Seeing that made me lose it a little and I’d gone off to think things through. I wanted to kill that jockey, but, eventually, I got to feeling bad about the poor jerk and went back to the track to try to keep an eye on him. I watched as he actually won another race. Afterward, I half expected that whoever had taken out Layla that morning would do the same to Attila. But no. I saw him go into the jocks room unmolested, then I saw him come out and I guess