His voice whispered my name: “Andy. Andy. Andrew Thomas.” My eyes opened, but I saw nothing. The sotto voce whisper continued. “Hey there, buddy. Got a surprise for you. Well, for us actually.” The blinding beam of a flashlight illuminated Orson’s face—a smile between blood-besmirched cheeks. He turned on the lamp above the bed. My eyes ached.
“Let’s go. You’re burning moonlight.” He set the flashlight on the dresser and yanked the covers off me. Glancing out the window, I saw the moon high in the sky. Still exhausted, I didn’t feel like I’d been asleep long.
Orson tossed me a pair of jeans and a blue T-shirt from my duffel bag, which lay open in a corner. Impatient, almost manic, he resembled a child in an amusement park as he paced around the room in his navy one-piece mechanic’s suit and steel-tipped boots.
The waning moon spread a blue glow, bright as day, upon everything—the sagebrush, the bluffs, even Orson. My breath steamed in the cold night air. We walked toward the shed, and as we approached, I noticed the Buick parked outside, its back end facing us, the front pointed into the double doors. The license plate had been removed.
Something banged into those doors inside the shed, followed by a brief lamentation: “HELP ME!” When I stopped walking, Orson spun around.
“Tell me what we’re doing,” I said.
“You’re coming with me into that shed.”
“Who’s in there?”
“Andy…”
“No. Who’s in—” I stared down the two-and-one-eighth-inch stainless steel barrel of my .357 revolver.
“Lead the way,” he said.
At gunpoint, I walked along the side of the building. The shed was bigger than I’d originally thought, the sides forty feet long, the tin roof steeply slanted, presumably to protect it from caving under the crippling winter snows, if we were, in fact, that far north. We reached the back side of the shed, and Orson stopped me at the door. He withdrew a key from his pocket, and as he inserted it into the lock, glanced back at me and grinned.
“You like buttermilk, don’t you?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said, though I couldn’t fathom the possible relevance.
“Did you always like it?”
“No.”
“That’s right. You drank it ’cause Dad did, but you came to love it. Well, I think it tastes like shit, but you have an acquired taste for buttermilk. That’s sort of what’s gonna happen here. You’re gonna hate it at first. You’re gonna hate me more than you do now. But it’ll grow on you. You’ll acquire a taste for this, too, I promise.” He unlocked the door and put the key back into his pocket. “Not one word unless I tell you.” Smiling, he motioned for me to enter first. “‘Inhuman cruelty,’” he whispered as I opened the door and he followed me into the shed.
A woman lay blindfolded and handcuffed in the middle of the floor, a brown leather collar around her neck, a five-foot chain running from the collar to a metal pole. The pole rose from the concrete floor to the ceiling, where it was welded to a rafter. When Orson slammed the door, the woman clambered to her feet, wobbling awkwardly around the pole, attempting to gauge our location.
She must’ve been about forty-five, her blond hair losing a perm. Slightly overweight, she wore a red-and-gray bowling shirt, navy pants, and one white shoe. Her perfume filled the room, and blood ran down the side of her nose from a cut beneath the blindfold.
“Where are you? Why are you doing this?”
This isn’t happening. This is pretend. We’re playing a game. That is not a human being.
“Go sit, Andy,” Orson said, pointing to the front of the shed. I walked past tool-laden metal shelves and took a seat in a green lawn chair near the double doors. A white shoe rested against the doors, and I wondered why the woman had kicked it off. She looked in my direction, tears rambling down her cheeks. Orson came and stood beside me. He knelt down, inspecting the shiny tips of his boots. Suddenly, something clenched around my ankle.
“Sorry,” he said, “but I just don’t trust you yet.” He’d cuffed my ankle with a leg iron, bolted to the floor beneath the lawn chair.
As Orson walked toward the woman, he shoved my gun into a deep pocket in his mechanic’s suit.
“Why are you doing this to me?” she asked again. Orson reached out and wiped the tears from her face, moving with her as she backed away, winding the chain slowly around the pole.
“What’s your name?” he asked gently.
“Sh-Shirley,” she said.
“Shirley what?”
“Tanner.” Orson crossed the room and picked up two stools that had been set upside down on the floor. He arranged them beside each other, within range of the woman’s chain.
“Please,” he said, taking hold of her arm above the elbow, “have a seat.” When they were seated, facing each other, Orson stroked her face. Her entire body quaked, as though suffering from hypothermia. “Shirley, please calm down. I know you’re scared, but you have to stop crying.”
“I wanna go home,” she said, her voice shaky and childlike. “I want—”
“You can go home, Shirley,” Orson said. “I just want to talk to you. That’s all. Let me preface what we’re going to do by asking you a few questions. Do you know what preface means, Shirley?”
“Yes.”
“This is just a hunch, but when I look at you, I don’t see someone who spends much time in the books. Am I right?” She shrugged. “What’s the last thing you read?”
“Um …Heaven’s Kiss.”
“Is that a romance?” he asked, and she nodded. “Oh, I’m sorry, that doesn’t count. You see, romance novels are shit. You could probably write one. Go to college by chance?”
“No.”
“Finish high school?”
“Yes.”
“Whew. Scared me there for a minute, Shirley.”
“Take me back,” she begged. “I want my husband.”
“Stop whining,” he said, and tears trickled down her face again, but Orson let them go. “My brother’s here tonight,” he said, “and that’s a lucky coincidence for you. He’s gonna ask you five questions on anything—philosophy, history, literature, geography, whatever. You have to answer at least three correctly. Do that and I’ll take you back to the bowling alley. That’s why you’re blindfolded. Can’t see my face if I’m gonna let you go, now can you?” Timidly, she shook her head. Orson’s voice dropped to a whisper, and leaning in, he spoke into her ear just loudly enough for me to hear also: “But if you answer less than three questions correctly, I’m gonna cut your heart out.”
Shirley moaned. Clumsily dismounting the stool, she tried to run, but the chain jerked her to the floor.
“Get up!” Orson screamed, stepping down from his stool. “If you aren’t sitting on that stool in five seconds, I’ll consider it a forfeiture of the test.” Shirley stood up immediately, and Orson helped her back onto the stool. “Calm down, sweetheart,” he said, his voice recovering its sweetness. “Take a breath, answer the questions, and you’ll be back with your husband and—do you have kids?”
“Three,” she said, weeping.
“With your husband and your three beautiful children before morning.”
“I can’t do it,” she whined.
“Then you’ll experience an agonizing death. It’s all up to you, Shirley.”
The single bare lightbulb that illuminated the room flickered, throwing the shed into bursts of darkness. Orson sighed and stood up on his stool. He tightened the bulb, climbed down, and walked to my chair. Putting his hand on my shoulder, he said, “Fire away, Andy.”
“But…” I swallowed. “Please, Orson. Don’t do—”
Leaning down, he whispered into my ear so the woman couldn’t hear: “Ask the questions or I’ll do her in front of you. It won’t be pleasant. You might close your eyes, but you’ll hear her. The whole desert’ll hear her. But if she gets them right, I will let her go. I won’t rescind that promise. It’s all in her hands. That’s what makes this so much fun.”
I looked at the woman, still quivering on the stool, felt my brother’s hand gripping my shoulder. Orson was in control, so I asked the first question.