Slaughter - Lutz John (читать книги без txt) 📗

It was a fairly normal night for the Krays, while five-year-old Nora slept peacefully in her bed in the far bedroom. Kent had told Jordan he’d heard their mother and father talking about moving Nora in with him and sending Jordan to Nora’s shoebox-size room. Alice and Jason—their mother and father—had talked about moving different kinds of equipment into the room with Jordan, but Kent, overhearing this, had no idea what they were planning.

Whipping required exertion, and Alice stopped and stepped back, breathing hard.

“Leave yourself alone and use this for a while,” she said, tossing Jason the coiled whip.

Jason obeyed, but didn’t whip hard. Jordan knew this wasn’t an act of kindness; his father was simply more interested in other things. Kent lay on his stomach, pretending sleep while facing the wall.

Jordan knew his brother was the better looking of the twins. His features were even and he resembled his mother, with her bold features and curly hair. Jordan had small, pinched features, and one of his ears stood straight out like an open car door and was kind of pointed. This, along with his diminutive size even for his age, lent him an elfin quality that would stay with him the rest of his life. The other ear—his left—stuck out a little and wasn’t pointed. The midwife who’d delivered the twins had learned from the firstborn, Jordan, who was a few minutes older than his twin, that identical twins weren’t alike in every respect. The protruding, pointed ear seemed to become even larger and more pointed after a schoolyard bully held Jordan in a headlock and rubbed the side of his face over and over on concrete. It was decided that Jordan had started the fight.

Kent tried to explain to his mother that the accusers were lying, but Jordan received a harder than usual whipping, and was made to stand in a corner for yelping and waking up Nora.

A week later Jordan tried to change the oil in the car but confused it with transmission fluid. He enjoyed working on things mechanical, large and small. He had a driving curiosity. Jordan liked to think that anything he took apart he could reassemble. He was as wrong as he was confident, but that didn’t stop him from tinkering.

He saved his money and bought a model airplane he had to construct by hand. When it was finished, it looked more like a Russian MIG than the sleek American Saber Jet pictured on the box. When he tried to glide it, the plane looped and then nosed hard into the ground. He would have rebuilt it and tried again, only his father stomped on the plane, laughed, and said he’d thought it was a big bug.

That was how Jordan’s childhood went, except for his dreams where he went to hide. Except for his nighttime hours of lying in the silence and thinking until early morning, when he was forced to get up and do his chores before walking down to the road and waiting for the school bus.

Kent sometimes walked with him, but usually had been sent on before Jordan. Nora, too young for school, lay dozing in her crib and was treated like a princess.

Jordan knew she wouldn’t always be treated like a princess. Sometimes he found himself looking forward to that and felt guilty.

He was thirteen when he came upon an old Movie Spotlight magazine that was mostly pages of beautiful women posed various ways in various skimpy costumes. Some of the women Jordan was familiar with, like Julia Roberts and Meg Ryan. Others were more his friends’ grandfathers’ age; Sophia Loren and Ava Gardner. Others had names that were only vaguely familiar.

Jordan turned a page and was surprised to see a photo of a man. Bing Crosby. Jordan knew he had been a singer and a movie star—had been famous for some time. There was a black-and-white photo of Crosby leaning on the fender of a car. A newer photo, in color, had him leaning on a tree and looking straight at the camera. He was, in fact, looking straight at the camera in both photos. In the earlier one, his ears stood straight out, not so unlike Jordan’s. In the newer, color photo, his ears were almost flat against his head. Beneath both photos was the caption “Bing’s Secret.”

Jordan read the accompanying short text. It seemed that Crosby’s ears did stick out, but there was this tape that was sticky on both sides that the movie star used when he was in front of the camera. Supposedly, Clark Gable used it, too.

Jordan couldn’t help but smile. If famous people used the special tape, he shouldn’t be embarrassed by his ears. He could find where the tape was sold and buy a roll.

He stood before the bathroom mirror, holding both ears back with his forefingers.

Yes, it made a difference.

He was almost as handsome as Kent.

He got a role of white adhesive tape from the medicine cabinet, and unrolled about an inch of tape, tore it off the roll, and then doubled it so it was sticky on both sides. He tried it on his right ear.

It worked for a few seconds, then the ear pulled lose and sprang out from his skull.

When he attempted to tear off another piece of tape, the metal and cardboard spool came apart. That and the roll of tape flew from his grasp and clattered to the tile floor.

The door opened. His mother. She looked at him, then at the clutter on the floor.

“What the hell are you doing?” she asked.

Jordan was too surprised and frightened to reply.

She grabbed him by the right ear, squeezing hard, and walked him out of the bathroom. He could feel tears streaming down his cheeks.

His father was standing in the hall, holding a sheet of newspaper—the sports page. “What the hell you catch him doing?” he asked Jordan’s mother. “Jerking off again?”

“Who knows or cares?” his mother said. She released his ear and slapped him hard on the left side of his face. His cheek burned.

“What’d he break now?” his father asked. “Was he taking that tape dispenser apart?” He clucked his tongue at Jordan. “You ever see anything you didn’t wanna take apart and screw up?”

Jordan knew when not to answer.

His mother shoved him toward the bedroom, scraping his bare elbow against the wall. “I’ll take care of him.”

Jordan’s father studied Jordan’s face, which Jordan studied to control, and then shook his head. “You really do need to learn to behave.”

“I’ll teach him.” Another push toward the bedroom. His mother and father’s room.

There was motion off to the side, and Kent peeked around the corner. His face paled. “What’s goin’ on?”

His mother glared at him, and he pulled back and disappeared.

The noise had awakened Nora, who screamed in her crib.

“I’ll take care of her,” Jordan’s mother said, “soon as I’m done with you.”

“Don’t be too hard on him,” Jordan’s father said.

She laughed at her husband and looked at him a certain way, until he turned away from her.

13

New York, the present

“Have a nice night, Margaret.”

The woman, Margaret, returned the good wishes of the man in the suit and tie who had come out of the office building she had just left. A fellow worker drone, no doubt.

Jordan watched her as she crossed the street at the signal. How could she move that way? The precision of her stride, the rhythmic sway of her hips, the swing of her free arm with its opposite resting lightly on the purse that was supported by a leather strap slung over her shoulder. Why wasn’t she like the other women he saw every day? How was she different?

Whatever the answers to those questions, he knew it was fate and not chance that had brought them together. And that would bring them ever closer to each other.

She descended the steps to a subway platform without losing her distinctive rhythmic gait that was almost a dance. He followed her down the narrow concrete steps.

Jordan observed her from farther down the platform. She was looking away from him, idly watching and waiting for the push of cool air and the gleam of lights that meant a subway train was coming. While she was momentarily distracted, he wandered along the platform toward where she was standing. Her hand tightened on her purse strap, as if she wanted to be sure she wouldn’t lose her bag in the rush of riders leaving the train, and those traveling in her direction to board.