Pretty Prisoner

Most people never find out who killed them.

Knox had built a career on that. His last job on Thanksgiving afternoon ended like a short breeze. A man walked to his car in a lit parking garage, thinking about dinner, and that was the last thought he ever had. No warning. No speech. Knox had never understood men who gave speeches.

So when he woke on his back under a yellow light, his face throbbing and a chain clinking with every breath, his first clear thought was that somebody had finally decided to do it differently.

Sloppy, he thought. They let me wake up.

He didn’t rush to move. Movement told people you were awake.

He listened instead. A hum somewhere above - a fridge, maybe, or a generator. A drip. Pipes. No voices. No footsteps. The air was thick and wet, the way Florida air always was, but it smelled of bleach and mould and the coppery tang of his own blood.

He opened his eyes.

The light was a single bulb in a wire cage, the colour of old piss. It buzzed.

He took the room in pieces.

Grey concrete walls and floor, sloping toward a drain in the corner. A steel toilet with no seat and no lid, the kind bolted into prison cells so nobody can rip it off and use it as a weapon. A roll of toilet paper on the floor beside it.

He was lying on a foam mattress, maybe three inches thick, under a fitted sheet washed so many times it had gone soft as skin. A flat pillow. A folded blanket at his feet.

A steel door, no handle on this side. A narrow slot at waist height.

Four walls. One door. One drain.

Then the chains.

He lifted his right hand and the weight came with it. A steel cuff, thick, tight around the wrist bone - not handcuffs, something welded, with a heavy ring. The chain ran across the floor to a hole drilled into the wall at shoulder height, lined with a steel sleeve. Same on the left. Opposite walls.

He sat up slowly.

The pain arrived in order of importance. Ribs first - left side, sharp on the inhale. Cracked, maybe, or just bruised to the bone. He pressed two fingers along them and counted. Nothing moved that shouldn’t. Shoulders next, both stiff, the right one hot and swollen like it had been wrenched. His face was tender all over, and when he touched his cheek his fingertips came away tacky. A scatter of shallow cuts across the left side.

The memory came back the way they always did after a hit to the head - in the wrong order, and out of focus.

His mother’s dining room. The perfectly white tablecloth. His siblings showing off how many deals they closed this quarter. His father at the end of the table asking, for the third Thanksgiving in a row, whether Knox had looked at any of the course brochures. His mother saying Hector, déjalo, and pouring more wine. The pie he didn’t eat. The drive home. Headlights at an intersection somewhere past Ocala, too bright and too fast and coming from the wrong side.

The crunch of his door folding in.

Then nothing.

He looked down at himself. Still in his dinner clothes. The charcoal trousers were torn at the knee. The white shirt his mother had bought him - she always bought him a shirt, as if he’d otherwise show up naked - was spattered brown with dried blood and missing two buttons. He winced, catching the stench of urine below his waist.

How long was I out?

His cufflinks were gone. His watch was gone. His shoes were gone, just socks remained.

Who would bother keeping me alive?

He went through his most recent contracts.

The accountant in Tampa who’d been skimming from the port contracts. Clean - just a small angry Vietnamese wife who he’d ordered from a vintage online dating site. The landlord in St. Pete. Messier. He’d had a brother in the Navy. The councilman’s driver in Jacksonville, who’d seen a face he shouldn’t have. A woman in Miami, two years ago. Her husband had cried at the funeral. Knox had watched from a car across the road and found it faintly disgusting, how much a grown man could cry.

Any one of them might have someone.

He’d figured it would come eventually. Retribution. He was careful, and he was very good, and he had never once left a loose end. But careful was a percentage, not a promise.

He stood. The chains slid with him, rattling through their sleeves, playing out from somewhere behind the walls. He walked the room. Nine paces by seven. The chains let him reach the toilet, the door, every corner. He leaned his weight back against them. The wall didn’t care.

Then he went back to the mattress, sat down and waited, because waiting was most of the job, and he was better at it than anyone alive.

He didn’t have to wait long.

A motor kicked on behind the wall. A low grinding whine, then the clack of a ratchet, and the chains jerked.

He braced. It didn’t matter. They pulled, both sides at once, steady and mechanical, dragging his arms out from his body. He dug his heels into the concrete and slid anyway. The mattress bunched under his feet and then was behind him. The chains hauled until he stood in the exact centre of the room with his arms stretched wide like a man on a cross, wrists burning, wrenched shoulder screaming.

Clever, he thought, with real, cold hatred. Very fucking clever.

The motor stopped.

A rattle at the door. The heavy clunk of a lock.

It opened, and a woman walked in carrying a white bucket with a basin perched on top.

That was the first thing he noticed - not her face, the basin. Pink plastic, the cheap Dollar General kind, steam curling up off it. A stack of washcloths folded over her arm. A red nylon medical bag hung from her shoulder, the kind EMTs carried, faded to salmon and patched with duct tape.

Then her.

Short. Five-three, maybe. Mid-twenties. Navy scrub pants faded at the knees and a grey tank top with sweat darkening the collar. Sneakers that had once been white. Brown hair scraped into a messy bun with curls poking out to frame her eyes. Dark circles underneath. A pen behind one ear.

A keycard on a lanyard around her neck. White plastic, no photo.

No gun he could see. No knife.

She didn’t look at his face. She looked at his body, top to bottom, quick and flat, the way a mechanic looks at a car that’s just been towed in.

“Okay,” she said. “You can stand. That’s nice.”

He said nothing.

She set the basin on the floor, knelt and wrung out a washcloth with a hard twist of her wrists. Water splattered the concrete. Then she stood in front of him, a full foot shorter, and reached for his face.

He jerked his head back.

She waited, cloth in hand, completely unbothered.

“I can do this nicely,” she said, “or I can do it with you tossing your head around like a horse, in which case it takes longer and you start to bleed again. Your call.”

“Where am I?”

“Basement.”

“Whose basement?”

“Hold still.”

She took his jaw in one hand. Her grip was firm, impersonal and surprisingly strong. He could have bitten her. He calculated how long it would take someone to come through the door if he did, and whether he could get a chain around her neck first, and decided not today. Not with his shoulder like this.

The cloth was hot. Almost too hot. She dragged it carefully across his cheek and it came away pink and brown. She rinsed, wrung and did it again. Then she tilted his head toward the light, squinting, and dug a pair of tweezers out of her bag.

“Little bit of glass,” she said. “Windshield. Don’t flinch.”

He didn’t.

She pulled out three slivers, dropping each into a little steel dish. Tink. Tink. Tink. She worked close enough that he could smell her: cheap coconut shampoo, peppermint gum, hand sanitiser.

“Lacerations are superficial,” she announced to nobody. “You’ll keep your pretty face. Congratulations.”

“Who are you?”

“Nurse.”

“That’s not a name.”

“No,” she agreed, and clicked on a penlight.

She flicked it into his left eye, then his right. He hated it - the white burst, the involuntary squint.

“Pupils equal and reactive. Follow my finger.”

He didn’t.

She moved her finger left. His eyes stayed on her face.

“Okay, we’ll come back to that,” she said. “What’s your name?”

“Fuck you.”

“Mm. Oriented to situation at least.” She didn’t write anything down, but he could see her filing it somewhere. “What day is it?”

Nothing.

“Do you know where you are?”

“Basement," he deadpanned.

The corner of her mouth twitched, very slightly, and then it was gone.

She put the penlight away and pulled out a pair of trauma shears - blunt-tipped, angled, orange-handled, the kind that could cut through a seatbelt. He noted the shears and where she put them back afterwards: the front left pocket of the bag. Unzipped.

She slid the lower blade under the hem of his shirt and cut straight up the middle.

“That was my mother’s shirt,” he said.

“It’s a men’s large,” she sneered. “So I doubt it.”

She cut along both sleeves, peeled the ruined cotton off his shoulders and dropped into the bucket.

Then she stopped.

Just for a second. Her eyes moved over his chest, and he watched her clock it - the old scar along his left side, pale and raised, eight inches long. A blade, years ago. Below it, a puckered dimple where a .22 had gone in and come out again.

She didn’t ask. She moved on to the seatbelt bruise, a purple-black sash from his left shoulder to his right hip.

“Seatbelt sign,” she said. “Good boy for buckling up.”

He went very still.

She pressed two fingers into his left side, just under his pec, and he couldn’t stop the hiss through his teeth.

“On a scale of one to ten, how sore?”

Nothing.

She pressed again, a little harder.

He grunted.

“I’ll call that a seven,” she said, satisfied. “Probably cracked. Nothing to do for it but wait and breathe deep so you don’t get pneumonia. If you start coughing up blood, tell me. If you start coughing up anything green, definitely tell me.”

She rinsed the cloth and washed his chest. Methodically - shoulders, collarbones, sternum, the long muscles of his arms stretched out on either side, right up to the cuffs and the raw red skin beneath them. She went gently over the bruise. She washed his armpits like they were any other part of him, and for some reason that offended him more than anything else so far.

She did his back. His neck. His hands, turning each one over and pushing a thumbnail under his nails to scrape out the dried blood. Then she stopped again and looked at his knuckles.

His knuckles were a mess. They always were. Old scar tissue on old scar tissue, the joints thickened, a pale ridge across the second knuckle of his right hand where it had split open on somebody’s teeth when he was fifteen.

She ran her thumb over it.

“Rich kids box now?”

“Lacrosse,” he said.

She huffed something that might have been a laugh. Then she let go and stepped back.

“You’ve got a sprained right shoulder. You’re lucky it’s just that. Oh wait, I forgot-” She nodded at his trousers and wrinkled her nose at the stench. “Those, I’m cutting off. Don’t be embarrassed, you were in an accident and have been out for hours, it’s a natural response. You’ll wash your crotch yourself though, this ain’t an all inclusive spa.”

She slid the shears down each leg, quick and efficient, until the charcoal material slid off and he was standing in the middle of a concrete room in his underwear and black socks with his arms spread wide and a stranger examining his thighs.

One was split, hot and swollen. She cleaned it, smeared it with antibiotic ointment and laid a square of gauze over the top.

She took a step back and admired her work. Then she picked up the bowl now full of dark brown liquid, went to the door, which gave way with a push.

Once the door slammed shut he eyed the medic bag in front of him. He reached his left leg forward; the was nearly unbearable on his shoulders. His left foot strained to search the medic bag that she’d left behind. He felt the hard handle of the scissors. It took a couple tries to hook his big toe around the handle with a sock on, but he eventually managed to yank it from the bag and kick it underneath the mattress that he’d dragged with him when the chains hauled him up.

She came back minutes later with another steaming bowl, another set of washcloths, and some folded clothing - black underpants and grey sweatpants, both with the Walmart tag still on.

She pointed to the bowl after setting it on the floor. “Wash your crotch, and probably your legs too. Front to back. Dress yourself. Everything else goes in the bucket. Comprende?”

He shot her a dirty look but said nothing.

She sighed and walked away, taking the medic bag with her. A few moments later the motor in the walls whined, and the chains slackened just enough for him to touch his toes. The burn left his shoulders all at once. He almost sagged.

He could feel eyes on him through the gap in the metal door burning into his skin. He wanted to protest, but his defiance wasn’t worth the stench of blood, sweat, and urine. He removed the remainder of his clothing and scrubbed at his skin, cursing at how his shoulders creaked and groaned with every movement.

The girl reentered as soon as the sweatpants rose over his hipbone, confirming his suspicion that he was being watched.

She had brought in a cardboard tray and set it down beside him. A paper plate of yellow rice, black beans, and grey mystery minced meat. A plastic spoon. A bottle of water.

“Dinner,” she said. “Eat slow. You haven’t had anything in about twenty hours and your body is fairly broken. If you throw it up, you’re cleaning it.”

Twenty hours.

She was already turning toward the door with the bucket and bowl in a loose grip. Her back to him.

He picked up the plate and threw it, overhand and hard, and it hit the wall a few inches from her head with a wet splat. Rice exploded across the concrete. Beans and mince slid down the wall in a long brown smear.

She stopped.

She looked at the wall for a long moment.

Then she looked at him, and it was the first time she’d looked him properly in the eye. Her own eyes were hollow and bloodshot.

He waited for the fear. He was very familiar with being feared - the widening eyes, the step back, the hand drifting up to the throat.

But she had no reaction to the look of death in his eyes.

She instead reached into the basin, took out the last two washcloths, still damp, and threw them at him.

They slapped him in the chest and fell into his hands.

“Clean it,” she said.

He stared at her.

“I’m not asking. The next meal comes when that wall’s clean, and not one second before.” She tilted her head and looked him up and down. “And I’d hurry, pretty boy. Rice dries like cement.”

She walked out.

The door shut. The lock clunked. The motor whirred once more, releasing enough slack in the chains to let him roam the room.

Silence.

Knox stood in the middle of the room holding two wet cloths, his pulse beating in his cracked ribs.

He stared at the stain on the wall for eight hours. He knew it was eight hours because he counted, the way he’d counted in hides and stairwells and the back seats of cars - three thousand six hundred to the hour. He sat on the mattress with his back in the corner and let the hunger gnaw on his stomach. He counted the links in his left chain. Eighty-one, from where he sat. He listened to the footsteps overhead - two heavy, one lighter, one dragging. He memorised the rhythm of a man pacing the floor above who coughed every few minutes, wet and phlegmy. A smoker.

At eight hours and nine minutes his hunger won over his ego, he got down on his knees and scrubbed the wall.

Rice did dry like cement. He had to wet the cloth in the toilet bowl and work at each grain with his thumbnail. The beans had soaked into the porous concreate wall and left a shadow he couldn’t get out.

He thought about her while he did it.

Blue eyes. Five-three. Right-handed. Sleep deprived. Her walking was strained like she’d been on her feet a long time today; she favoured her left heel. No wedding ring. She didn’t flinch.

She’d called him good boy.

She’d called him pretty.

He wrung the cloth into the toilet and started again on the shadow of the beans, and decided, calmly, that he would remember every transgression of hers.

Then he would make her pay for every one of them.

Nora peeled her gloves off into the bin beside the washing machine in the basement storeroom. The Jackals furnished this room at her request, granting their hostages the dignity of washcloths and clean clothes during their imprisonment.

The Jackals had been hesitant to grant their hostages any kindness, but were swayed by the basement not stinking of shit for the first time since its creation. It had the added benefit of making hostages more compliant - desperate to feel the warmth of a blanket and dry underpants in between rounds of agony.

After all the necessary tasks were completed she tiptoed up the stairs and to the main floor.

A middle-aged bleached blonde cougar dressed in tight leopard print greeted her as she entered. Dee was one of the ‘old ladies’, the alleged soulmate of Dan the Damned, who owned this particular gang pad. Though they both spent more time avoiding their marital bed than inside it.

“So how’s the golden goose?” said Dee. “He gonna live?”

“Cracked ribs, sprained shoulder, glass in the face. Mild concussion, maybe.” She dried her hands on a paper towel. “He’ll live. He’s just pissy.”

“Rich boys always pissy.”

She recalled the report Dee had given her before she walked down to his cell. Rafael Knox, age 29, son of famous property developer Hector Knox. Hasn’t had a job since graduating high-school. Lives in a flash penthouse apartment downtown, no doubt purchased by daddy dearest.

“Mm. He threw his food at the wall,” she said, omitting the part where it flew inches from her head. “If he’s cleaned it, he can get his next meal.”

“And if he don’t?”

Nora picked up her bag, which contained her keys and precious nicotine gum.

“Then he learns what hungry feels like,” she said. “He could do with a good humbling.”

There were things about him that didn’t fit, but she liked a good puzzle. Puzzles were one of the few things she was allowed to entertain herself with as a child, and even then, it almost always depicted a tortured man with his arms forced into a T-pose.

For a brief moment she pictured the male covered in bruises and urine as her own personal Jesus Christ. And herself as Mary Magdalene, a broken whore washing his body like he was a god.

But he’s not a god, she thought to herself. Just a spoilt pretty boy with some odd-shaped pieces missing to his story.

A seatbelt sign, a windshield and a sprained shoulder - those fit. A rich boy throwing his dinner at the face of his help - that fit.

The mangled scar along his ribs didn’t. Neither did the round, puckered one beneath it; a wound which she’d stitched far too many times since starting work for the Jackals.

And he hadn’t cried out in pain. Not when the chains pulled. Not when she pressed his ribs. Grown men whined when she disinfected their most superficial wounds. He’d just watched her the whole time with those starless black eyes.

He’s a rich kid, she told herself. Rich kids get into fights. Rich kids are into weird shit. Rich kids have tragic accidents on expensive hunting trips.

She hurried home before she collapsed from exhaustion, fed the cat, poured a full glass of the cheapest wine her supermarket sold and fell asleep on the couch with her shoes on.

At two in the morning, the cat climbed onto the pillow beside her head and breathed tuna straight into her face.

She was too busy to notice, dreaming about a tortured man looking down on her at judgement day, reading all of her sins and questioning how deep in hell she belonged.