Abruptly, she felt the vehicle slow, then make a turn that sent her body sliding over to her right to slam against the side of the compartment in which she lay. This new road was not at all smooth, and her flesh and bone recorded each bump and rut and wrinkle and pothole of the ill-kept surface. Another turn propelled her over to the opposite side, and the following stretch of road seemed to be no better than the preceding one.
“Christ Almighty, Kogh,” said Mariya, in Armenian, “why don’t you or Papa hire a scraper to make these roads at least passable for something more modern than a Model T or a jeep?”
“What for, big sister? We only come out here to visit the graves, anymore, and then we come by chopper,” replied Kogh Ademian. “Besides, we’d have to buy a damned scraper, bad as this drainage has gotten out here, and keep a permanent operator for it. You recall how smooth these roads were when we buried Marge?”
“Have you decided where best to keep her?” asked Boghos.
“Yeah, we got a place all ready for her nibs,” affirmed Bagrat Ademian. “The old smokehouse is as solid as it was the day that whoever built it built it, and it must be a hundred years old if it’s a day. Me and Kogh, we put a chemical toilet in there last weekend and a steel army cot, chained to a staple in the wall, too. We can put a bucket of water in there with her. There’s no lights, of course, it don’t smell too good, and there may be a few rats living under the floor, too. But she’ll never get out of there, and nobody that did get clear back in here would hear her with the door shut. And if she should happen to croak on us … well, the river’s not far away down the back road.”
“Don’t even joke about such a thing, Bagrat,” snapped Boghos. “She looks to be a tough, resilient woman, and she’s survived at least one total drug withdrawal recently, while she was serving her jail time; there’s no reason why she shouldn’t survive another under my supervision. The only thing that might kill her is plain, outright abuse. And that will not happen, you hear me? I’ll not condone torture of any sort. Besides, it would not achieve our purposes, as it might well leave traceable scars.”
At long last, the bumping ceased as the vehicle came to t halt. Doors opened and then slammed, feet crunched gravel, a lock clicked, and a tailgate came down with a shrill squeal of metal on metal. Hands grasped the sack and dragged it and its living contents out to thump upon the ground, bringing a moan from within the sack.
Evelyn Mangold felt herself pulled onto her numb, bound feet, felt the top of the canvas sack loosened, gaped wide, then pulled down the length of her. Still bound and manacled as she was, she was afraid to try to move lest she fall again to the hard, stony ground. She heard another car drive up and come to a stop nearby, the subsequent opening and closing of doors, muted conversations. Her captors seemed to number five, six, maybe seven, at least one of them a woman, all of them probably foreigners, since she had heard not a single word of English since she had regained consciousness. She felt herself trembling all over, inside and out, she knew that she needed a fix … bad.
Then she began to tremble in earnest when a horrifyingly familiar bass rumble of a voice spoke close beside her. “Now we can do this the easy way or the hard way, cooze. I can take off them cuffs and cut your feet loose, then strip you nekkid, then take you into where you gonna stay for a while and take out the gag and uncover your eyes. Do what you told and won’t nothing be done to you; you won’t be raped or nothing. Ain’t any man here is low enough to stick his wang in no ugly slab of meat and bone like you. Or,” he continued, now with a note of keen anticipation in his voice, “you can give me some trouble, try to, anyhow. Then I can leave you chained up and tied and I can cut your clothes off before I do anything else . . . ‘course, I’ll prob’ly take some of your horny hide, too. Then I can do what I done to you back in Richmond, by the Duck Lake. That was fun, for me. How’d you like it?”
Even blinded as she was, Evelyn still could see in her mind’s eye those cold, black, reptilian eyes. Tears of terror soaking into the gauze eye patches, she shook her head violently from side to side, her body’s crying need for the drugs to which it had become reaccustomed completely forgotten in her frenzy of fear of this terrible man and the agonies his huge hands could so easily inflict on her quivering flesh.
Meekly as any lamb, she allowed herself to be divested of every shred of clothing, not even moving to lay the goose flesh raised on her skin by the chill, night air. Then one of those big hands took her arm and led her barefoot over the coarse gravel, through a swath of cold-leaved, knee-high grass or weeds, up two icy stone or brick or concrete steps, and pushed her through a low doorway into a place with a wooden floor.
After six or seven short steps across the floor, Evelyn was pushed down to sit on what felt like a bunk and admonished not to move. When a cold, metallic something had been fastened around one of her ankles, the gag and the eye patches were removed, and she found herself sitting on a war-surplus steel bunk and bare mattress, with a GI blanket folded at one end.
The walls of the hut or whatever it was were constructed of thick, old-looking logs and, like the broad floorboards underfoot, were greasy to the touch. Into one of the nearby togs, two three-inch steel staples had been hammered. The bunk was chained to one of them. A much longer chain and a flat steel ring secured her right ankle to the other.
Across the width of the long, narrow space was a chemical toilet of sheet metal with a roll of toilet paper sitting atop its closed lid. Just beyond the foot of the bunk a small galvanized bucket sat on the floor with a chipped enamel dipper submerged in the water that almost filled it to the brim.
Two men, their faces unidentifiable under the nylon stockings they had pulled over their heads, were up in the rafters, just finishing tacking down an electric wire at one end of which was dangling a bare bulb of at least a hundred and fifty watts. The yellow-white glare hurt her eyes after so long in her blindfolded darkness.
Then another man in a stocking mask came in. This one had a stethoscope hanging from his neck and a black physician’s bag in one hand. At sight of the bag and the thought of all the blissful Pharmaceuticals she could imagine it to contain, her need for drugs briefly overrode her fear of the man who sat beside her and the pain he had proved capable of inflicting on her.
“Doctor?” She spoke fast, frantically. “Doctor, you gotta do suthin to help me! I got this terrible condition, see, an’ I need—/ gotta have—suthin soon\ Some Demerol or suthin like that an’—”
The newcomer just laughed coldly. “We all know precisely what your Condition’ is, you murdering Bitch. You’re a drug addict. I may eventually give you injections of drugs, but whether or not I do will be entirely dependent on how cooperative you are with us. Right now, I’m here to give you a physical examination; we wouldn’t want you to die on us, you know. You three get out of here. I don’t conduct physicals in public.”
The man beside Evelyn arose, saying, “I sure hopes you gives the doctor some troubles. You’re fun to hurt.”
Some ten minutes later, Boghos opened the door clumsily. A blood-soaked handkerchief was wrapped around one of his hands. “I suppose we’re going to need the gentleman’s service again, in here. She snatched the bag, someway. There’re no drugs in it, of course, but there are some instruments, one of which she just used on me.”
Seraphino “Sara the Snake” Mineo was well named, for despite his squat, broad muscularity, he was every bit as fast as one. In a trice, he had disarmed Evelyn Mangold and had her writhing on her knees, screaming in agony and abject terror of him. Much as he hated the woman, Rupen Ademian felt a sick disgust to see how much the short, powerful Sicilian relished the infliction of pain on her.