"It's a hundred bucks," Joyce said, "What the hell do I use my off-hand pinky for that's worth more than one hundred bucks?"
Gary wasn't sure. A hundred bucks didn't seem adequate.
Joyce said, "Do it, Gary. I'm telling you to do it."
"But—"
"Don't pussy out now," she said.
Gary swung the cleaver down. The blade severed her extended little finger just past the first knuckle. Blood spurted. Joyce screamed, and Mina, that creepy Japanese goth chick dressed as a nurse from hell, appeared and applied a tourniquet. She also fed Joyce a pill of some sort.
Gary's wife swallowed it dry, she didn't even bother asking what it was. He asked the question for her: "What the hell was that you gave her?"
"Painkiller," Mina said.
Meanwhile, Ben Crampton, the man in the thousand dollar suit, the man with the plan, the loudmouth with the deep pockets stepped right up to pay out. He produced the wad of cash from his inner pocket, peeled off a c-note, and dropped it on the butcher's block. The green paper wicked scarlet. "Guess it really is blood money, now," he said. Laughing, he dropped a second bill atop the first and added, "One hundred for each of you."
"Each?" Joyce asked through gritted teeth. "Awesome."
Two hundred bucks, tax free was a nice night out, the way they used to do before she faced those trumped up embezzlement charges—sure, the courts exonerated her, but the damned story circulated, and now no Fortune 500 or Mom-n-Pop wanted to touch her. She had to cool it for a few years and let everyone forget.
Of course, that was when he got downsized from the engineering gig.
Two hundred bucks. It could help them catch up on past due bills. God, the world sucked when you were unemployed. There was no way they could afford a room like this, a penthouse at The Four Seasons. Crampton had serious money to burn.
Gary thought this while trying to stave off the guilt of severing his wife's finger. Crampton got a wild look in his eyes and hustled back across the living room to his Eureka Box sitting on an end table. A touch of the button on the small box sounded an old school alarm clock bell, announcing he had a new idea.
"Now, it's the lady's turn," he said. "I got fifty dollars here for each of you. The Missus gets a chance at some payback, doing the same to her hubby!"
"Chop off my finger?" Gary asked.
"Only fifty?" she asked, woozy with the unlabeled painkillers Mina'd given her. "Why?"
"You've got the revenge angle," Crampton said. "Makes it way too easy for you to bridge over traditional moral questions. Your hubby looked fit to puke over the decision. You? I think you're ready to take back that ounce of flesh and fingernail with interest."
"How 'bout two fingers?" Joyce asked, "That worth a hundred?"
"Seems a bit gratuitous." Ben’s laugh rumbled out like thunder. "But I like the way you think!" He patted the suitcoat over the inside pocket where his wad of cash waited. "I'll give you fifty dollars per finger. You two can decide how many Gary's going to lose."
"I haven't even agreed to this," Gary said.
"You did mine, and now you're pussying out?"
"Joyce are you even listening to yourself? Maybe we can get you to a hospital, get it sewed back on—"
"And lose our winnings?" She shook her head, reinforcing her stance on no fucking way. "There's no insurance."
Joyce's eyes were out of focus but she still managed to stare into Gary's puny soul, making him writhe. "That could be two hundred and fifty dollars!"
"Two hundred. There are only four fingers on a hand," he said.
"What do you say, Mr. Crampton?" Joyce asked.
Crampton mulled this over before nodding. "Technically, he's right. Academics and doctors say thumbs aren’t really fingers. But I'm not a doctor. What the hell do I care? All five can go, and I'll pay to see it!"
"Five hundred dollars, Gar."
"Joyce."
"Put your fucking hand on the block," she said. There was a viciousness to her that was shocking to behold. "Or I'll have Mr. Crampton and his lovely assistant hold you there."
"Sorry, ma'am," their malefic benefactor said, "This needs to be consensual. For liability purposes."
"Slapping that waitress," Joyce snarled, "wasn't consensual."
"It was hilarious though," Crampton replied, "And it was just a little misdemeanor. Worth the thirty bucks."
It had been the first dare of the night. What followed, included peeing on the Krispy Kreme building's wall, smashing a closed gas station's window with a brick, and taking a bite of a dog turd. None of those tasks had been worth more to Crampton than fifty, sixty dollars. They'd come back to The Four Seasons for some high stakes options. He alone seemed surprised to find the room's expensive furniture pushed back to clear a space in the middle of the room where a butcher's block stood along with a pair of meat cleavers, butcher's knives, and an electric carving knife.
"Put your goddamned hand up there," Joyce said, seethingsnarled. "Before I get too woozy and whack your wrist or something."
"I might go a thousand for the whole hand," Crampton said.
"Keep out of this!" Gary said.
"A thousand?" Joyce whispered. "Each of us, right?"
"We're not doing my whole hand, Joyce," Gary said, "You can . . . you can take two fingers."
"Two? Come on, Gary—"
"I need two hands for work!" he snapped.
"What work?" she snapped, "You've been sucking off the unemployment system."
"And now it’s over. And . . . And that was a low blow," he said. But she was right. Guilt more than greed coaxed Gary to put his left hand on the butcher's block and extend his pinky and ring finger. The wedding band gleamed in the overhead lights. Would that symbol of their ten years together give her even a moment's pause?
Nope. She plucked up the cleaver already red with her blood and brought it down with a solid blow. Gary screamed. His knees threatened to go out from under him, sending him to the floor. The blade slammed into meat and bone but refused to go all the way through. She plucked it up and hammered it down a second time, parting his hand from the rest of his arm at the wrist.
"Thousand," she said, colder than an open chest freezer, "Each."
"Yes, ma'am!" Crampton said. The wad of cash returned to hand and he peeled off two thousand dollars in hundreds and fifties, dropping them down on top of the hand.
Gary reeled and Mina said, "Hold still," as she applied the tourniquet and fed him pills. "Water," he pleaded, and Mina rolled her eyes before retrieving a cup and feeding him a dollop. "Thanks."
Mina responded with a bored, customer service smile.
Blood loss or whatever painkiller Mina had given him made his vision go wobbly.
"Need to sit. Need to . . ." A sudden flaring agony eclipsed everything. He stumbled away from the butcher's block, the cash his wife was scooping up with both hands and the severed thing that once belonged to him but now looked like a Halloween prop. When his knees collided with the couch, he plopped down onto his keister. Only then could he face the stump.
By God it was a stump, wasn't it?
The end was a gaping tube of meat and bone. A throbbing sensation that was not quite pain pulsed in his head. Whatever that pill was, it worked. Numbness seeped into him. Fuzziness stuffed his eyes, requiring a few blinks to get rid of it. By the time he could see better, his wound lost all importance. He was more concerned with the blood. It was dripping onto the white upholstery. Marking. Discoloring. The couch had to cost ten or twenty grand. Was it stain resistant?
Who the hell cares?
The cut had not been clean. This was messy.
Hackwork, he thought with a guffaw.
"What's next?" Joyce asked.
"It's time for Gary to sack up and come back to the table, He gets his shot next," Crampton said.
"Why? I'm more entertaining, right?" Joyce said.
"I like the way you think, my dear, but it's one for you, one for him. We like to be fair here," Crampton said.
"For no reason."
"Oh, we have a reason," Crampton said. He headed to the couch and sat down next to Gary.
The money man prodded the edge of the skin. "Wow, that looks painful. Yeah, that could use some help, huh? I don't know what the chances are of getting a hand put back on, but off the cuff, I'd say it's pretty much nonexistent."
"She did this."
"How long have you been married?"
"Nine years..."
"Ten!" Joyce hollered over.
Gary knew that. Why did he say nine?
"Ten years."
"Wow, quite the feat. Congratulations. Bet you'd never thought in a hundred years that she'd do you this way, huh?" Crampton said.
Gary's head moved side-to-side in dull sweeps. "Not even a million."
"People can surprise you. You want to get back . . . in the game?" The pause suggested the man with the plan was going to say something else. You want to get back at her? Spoken aloud or not, the seed was planted.
"I think," Gary said.
This was enough to satisfy Crampton. The man in the thousand dollar suit clapped Gary on the knee three solid times and then pushed himself vertical. When Gary turned to complain, he saw something that gave him pause. The man's face wasn't right along its left side. A thin line marked the skin near the ear. This could have been explained away as a stray hair, but it did not match either the length or the salt and pepper color of the locks on Crampton's head. It was a seam, Gary realized. It puffed up for a moment, as Crampton found his feet, and underneath Gary spied something gray. Rubbery.
What the fuck?
Gary shook his head, and when he looked again, the seam was gone. Vanished. A hallucination. It had to be.
"What the hell did you give me?" he asked, but the words were like a mouthful of water, running down his shirt instead of flying to receptive ears.
Crampton returned to the butcher block, where Joyce waited. Mina stood off to the side near her first aid kit, running a file along her nails, unperturbed by the displays of sadism.
Crampton waved him over. Gary stood up, taking a moment to eradicate the wooziness and correct his balance. He stumbled across the room.
Crampton asked, "Hey, Gary, you still with us? Still want some money?"
"I'm here."
"So you are, and since you're here, it's your turn.”
"No more cutting."
"Sure, " Crampton said, "Easy enough to save that for another time." Not we're done but save the chopping for later." As I say, since it's your turn, I want you to tell your wife something you never told her before. Something she needed to hear, but you stayed quiet about. If it's a sweet nothing, you get twenty bucks. If it's something nasty, you get one hundred. And if it's emotionally devastating, you get five hundred dollars."
He wanted to make it nice. Something about how he never took the chance to tell her how much he loved her often enough. Or something like the beautiful babies they could be bringing into the world even though he'd once told her how much he hated the idea of kids. Unfortunately, his brain could not compose those thoughts into words. All it could come up with was: "I balled your sister the night before the wedding. I balled your Mom a week after we got back from the honeymoon. I balled your best friend Clarissa the night you had that stomach bug, and she came over with chicken soup. They were all better lays than you, and none of them were all that memorable. Not like the party girls I had in college."
As soon as he stopped talking and realized the words he'd said, shame arrived like a flash flood. He'd buried those infidelities deep, and though his therapist told him to confess to his wife to keep their marriage in a healthy state, he never could bring himself to do it.
"You, you." Joyce could not come up with a vulgarity strong enough.
"I'm sorry," he whispered. "I don't know why I said that." It was the painkiller. It had to be—
Joyce spat a fat loogie into Gary's face. "Divorce. I want one, I’ve been wanting one. I need a man who values me."
He fought the urge to clobber her. Not a violent man, nevertheless, Gary wanted to smack the shit out of her with an open hand. What stopped him was not loyalty. It was the desire not to give Crampton any amusement without remuneration. No freebies for the peanut gallery.
Joyce was less inhibited. She whacked him across the cheek. "You hear me? You buckle like a belt, you pussy out too easy, you give up—"
"That's enough. You don't mean that," Gary said.
"This is the freest I've been in years."
"As free as you were stealing thousands from your firm?" he snapped. "I might've lost my job because of downsizing, but you went to trial. You blew the savings I made keeping your ungrateful ass out of prison."
That shut her up faster than any physical blow.
"I never expected to become a marriage counselor!" Crampton slapped his knee with delight. The motion had a bigger effect than anticipated.
Joyce was busy staring at the cash and burying her tears to notice. Gary stared into the middle space between his wife and their benefactor. He saw what happened out of the corner of his eye.
It was the slightest slip, but Crampton's face turned a little too far sideways for his head. It slipped free like a latex application that had come unglued. A smear of gray was under there. The hair too might be a wig. It shifted back too far.
Before Gary could look over, Crampton realized the error and turned away. "Come here, Mina. Now."
The babe dressed in the gothic nurse from hell getup hustled over to her fella. She daubed his cheek. Picked at his forehead. Announced she was done by smiling beatifically at him.
As terror slithered into Gary's guts or chilled him to the marrow, he realized he would give his left nut to make her smile that way. Who knew devotion could be so erotic?
"Excuse me," said an irritated Crampton. He stormed off to the bathroom. Mina returned to her position at the first aid kit, ignoring everyone and everything around her.
Joyce wept softly into her hands, but Gary was too stunned to say anything. He was too angry to comfort, but at least he could say something, couldn't he? That slip was too distracting to get past.
A mask. Crampton's face was a mask, and what was underneath? These were devilish bargains he was making. Did that mean Crampton was . . . Old Scratch himself? Preposterous. There was neither God nor the Devil in this room --just people making bad choices.
Enablers and drugged, uninhibited recipients.
Crampton was the guiding force with his seemingly endless cash wad. The ghost of capitalism’s past. A specter from the Greed is Good, The Me Generation, the seventies . . . or were those the eighties?
When Crampton returned, he tossed off five hundred smackers onto the butcher's block. He waved a hand in the air, signaling Mina to close up her medical kit. Crampton tossed the remaining cash wad into a waiting attaché case. Gary spied more wads of cash inside. Then their benefactor announced, "Well, ladies and germs, I think that's enough for one night. It's been a pleasure sharing time and space with—"
"My turn," Joyce said, wiping her eyes across the back of her sleeve. "What about it?"
"Well, I don't have any ideas for your turn, sweetie," Crampton replied. "And if this goes much longer, well there won't be enough of you left to—"
"What about a life?" Joyce asked, and that stopped the man in the expensive suit from packing things up. He glanced over at her, and that devilish smile creased his face once more.
"I'd be interested in a life," Crampton said. "Wouldn't we?" He glanced back at Mina, who shrugged without bothering to look up from her scarlet nails.
"How interested?" Joyce asked, "How much?"
Gary snatched up the butcher's knife and pointed it at Crampton. "This ends now."
"Twenty thousand," Crampton answered.
"Fifty," Joyce said.
"Hell of a woman you had there," Crampton said to Gary, unconcerned with the blade. To Joyce, he said, "All right, fifty thousand."
"Each?" she asked.
"Seems like a moot point," Crampton said. A wicked grin bared his teeth. Again, Gary saw the mask slip and caught a glimpse of something fiendish beneath the smiling, human guise. More gray flesh around the eyes. Not smooth, wrinkled like a raisin. "But I guess the survivor doubles their money!"
"Now, Joyce—"
But she raised the cleaver. "Sorry babe. Your widow gets everything, it's a new start, better than a divorce."
Gary jabbed the butcher's knife into her stomach. The blade disappeared up to the hilt. Blood drenched his limb, his shirt, and spurted into his left eye. The blow did not stop the fury of her next blow. The cleaver caught him on the crown and smashed into his skull. Gary dropped to his knees. Mina moseyed to Joyce to offer whatever first aid could be applied to a gut wound. Crampton rained bills down upon her like some kind of macabre porn star.
How much will they pay Joyce to dispose of my body? Gary's lights winked out and death stoppered his ears before the offer came up.