The Savage Girl - Alex Shakar [61]
“Christ, Ursula. You sound like your sister.”
“Have you been visiting her?”
Chas waves his hand dismissively, leans back in his chair.
“No, not me. I tried once. She went berserk,” he says.
“Not you. Who’s Mr. Teeth, then? Javier?”
“ ‘Mr. Teeth’?”
The answer stabs her like an icicle in the chest. She can barely speak.
“It’s James T. Couch,” she whispers, and then yells, “It’s that . . . disgusting Couch! Isn’t it?”
Chas squints at the volume, twists a pinkie in his ear. “Couch is good with her,” he says. “He’s helped her more than you know.”
“ ‘Helped her’?”
“That’s right. Convinced her to get out of that hospital, out of those sexless clothes, back to work again.”
“ ‘Convinced her’ how?”
“I don’t know. Ask Couch.”
Suddenly she remembers what Ivy said when she talked about Mr. Teeth.
“The pictures,” she says. “Couch showed her those pictures Javier drew.”
“Yeah.” Chas nods. “That’s probably what sold her in the end. She turns herself on. But who can blame her, right?”
Ursula screams, not with anger but with fright. The room has gone dark.
“What the fuck?” Chas murmurs.
Everything has stopped. The darkness is total. No light. No sound.
“The power,” Ursula whispers.
“Wonder if it’s the whole damn building,” Chas says.
“More,” Ursula replies. “Behind you.”
She hears him swivel his chair around to face the sector of blackness where the window should be. Meanwhile she says nothing, tries to remain undetectable, the situation sinking in. She’s trapped in an empty, darkened office tower with a sadistic madman intent on controlling her sister’s life—her own life, too, maybe. What reasons can he possibly have for doing this to them? There are no reasons for this kind of thing. No reasons with madmen. No reasoning with madmen. She takes a step back.
“Not again,” Chas mutters. “The whole West Slope at least. Suburbs, too. What’s it this time? Terrorists or the usual incompetence?”
Ursula says nothing. He’s trying to bait her into talking so he can locate her.
“Can’t rule out Armageddon,” he adds dryly.
Ursula takes another step back.
“Where you going? You feel like walking down a hundred flights?”
“I’m not going anywhere,” she insists, sounding like a guilty child.
“Relax. There is somewhere we can go.”
She hears him get up, feel his way around the desk. She flinches as he finds her wrist and holds it, not tightly. He locates the door for them, then leads her across the reception room, through the front door, and down the hallway. She hears a heavier door open.
“Steps,” he warns. “We’re going up.”
He puts her hand in contact with a handrail, then lets go and starts to climb. He sounds calm, reasonable. She could never get away anyhow. She follows.
“Rare opportunity,” Chas says. “They don’t like people up there. Suicides. Lawsuits. Etcetera. But the alarm won’t sound with no power.”
Suicides, she thinks. But he won’t kill me, she tells herself. If he did, he wouldn’t be able to terrorize me anymore.
“Look,” he says. “Enough with the silent treatment. I asked Couch to assess Ivy’s stability, that’s all. We needed to know if she was together enough to pull this off for us.”
“ ‘We,’ ” she says. “You and Couch and Javier.”
“Right.”
“How long has Javier known about this plan?”
“ ‘Known about’ it?” Chas says. “It was his idea.”
“His idea?” she asks, her throat painfully constricting. She knows her voice will sound like a whimper if she opens her mouth again, but she’s beyond humiliation. “This whole fucking thing was his idea?”
“Goddamn creative genius, your boyfriend.”
She hears him stumble on a step that isn’t there. They’ve reached the landing. He pushes open a metal door. The bottom scrapes against the gravel of the roof. A blast of warmish, bitter-smelling air forces its way down the stairwell. She follows him out.
A flat, black, perfectly circular area about a hundred yards in diameter. They are close to the edge, the lava-rock wall, crenellated like a medieval parapet. Far off at the center of the circular roof stands a penthouse, a miniature black lava-rock castle with exaggerated