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With effort Rath could ratchet shut the scarred right side of his mouth, but he felt the lower lip tugging down now, wet with saliva. He fingered the point of his Ka-Bar; he’d already cleaned it in the sink, which held two dead cockroaches and a puddle of olive pits. “There’s a way to take someone’s eye out and turn it clear around so they can see their own ear,” he said. “But I’ve never done that. Need proper medical training, I think, to keep the optic nerves intact.”
Steve the White Pimp snuffled. “I don’t know what you want, man. But I got people. People who’ll come looking for you.”
“They say a decapitated head can still see for ten seconds, but that’s a crock,” Rath said. “They always pass out from the shock. Not so much as a blink of recognition. So.” He pulled the test tube out of his pocket and waggled it, sending the contents into a frenzy. “We set up something more fun.”
“What the fuck isthat? Wait—just wait, okay? Just hang on. What did I do? I can make it right. Look, you’ve made your point, okay? I won’t fuck with you. If I overlapped with … with a friend of yours, a daughter, whatever, I can make it right.”
“Oh,” Rath said, “We don’t care about any of that. We care about your big mouth.”
With the scrap paper, Gordo had made a fortune-teller like the ones schoolgirls played with, four origami pinchers with hidden flaps and messages. Grinning with childish pleasure, he snapped the beaks open and closed in different patterns with his enormous thumbs and index fingers. The dog observed, cocking her head with interest. Rath could see that he’d drawn doodles on some of the flaps.
Gordo could be a hoot.
Steve the White Pimp wheezed a little, drawing Rath’s focus once more.
“You see, Steve, you talk too much,” Rath told him. “Whiningto anyone who’ll listen. And we were happy to let you do that in your own little cesspool here, but recent events have made that … inconvenient. So.” He fixed him with an ugly glare. “You know how this ends, don’t you?”
“What …” A tendril of drool leaked from the corner of Steve’s mouth, thin as a spider thread. Rivulets of blood darkened his jeans, striping the denim from knee to ankle. He tried to jerk his legs, but his duct-taped shoes didn’t budge and the internal work of the tendons in his knees made him go stock-still with pain. A guttering breath until he could talk again. “What have I been talking too much about?”
Rath removed the stopper. “That doesn’t matter anymore.”
“But you don’t have to do this. Why do you have to dothis?”
“Maybe he’s right,” Rath mused. One of the captives had made it up out of the test tube and circled the lip. Its cutting mandibles trembled. An inch and a half was a lot of ant. “What do you think, Gordo? Should we give him a fighting chance?”
“Yes.” Spit bubbled at Steve’s lips. “Yes please yes please yes please.”
Rath asked, “What’s his fortune say?”
Gordo grinned wide. A game. He worked the paper fortune-teller open and closed, open and closed. The dog leaned forward and gave it a sniff. Gordo paused, angled the spread paper cup at Steve. “Choose a number.”
“What?”
“Choose. A. Number.”
Steve’s visible eye bulged and strained. It was funny how an eyeball looked moving around when the head couldn’t. “Th-three.”
Gordo peeled up the matching flap. Stared at it. “Uh-oh.”
“What, man?What?” The glass straw protruding from Steve’s nostril bobbed with agitation.
Gordo turned the fortune-teller to face the other men. Beneath the numeral was a drawing of a big red ant with jagged jaws.
A row of wiggly creases appeared on Gordo’s shiny forehead. “Thass too bad.” Frowning down at the paper, he lifted the other flaps. “Whoops,” he said. “Looks like I messed up. They’reallants.”
Leaning in at Steve, Rath gripped the glass straw to steady itand brought the tip of the test tube to meet the tiny opening. There was some spillage, the diameter only wide enough to accommodate one ant at a time. Finally the living jumble worked itself out into a flow. Urged by gravity, the bull ants began to stream up the throat of the straw.
Steve kept one bloodshot eye pegged hard to the side, watching as the parade approached his face. His grunts yielded to a hoarse scream that sent flecks of saliva across the wood. But he couldn’t look away.
Though it was an elaborate technique, Rath hoped it wouldn’t stretch too far into the night.
After all, they still had to drive out to Wellesley.
32
Mr. Hard Boundaries
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