‘I’ll play.’

‘What?’ said the Weasel.

‘I said I’ll play. Anytime you want.’

‘There, now. See how easy that was? Pity you couldn’t have made that choice before …’ He waved a hand vaguely at Ness.

Stanley hauled her to her feet. He’d knocked the duct tape off her mouth and it hung limply from her cheek. She was biting her lip in an attempt to keep from crying, but it wasn’t working and tears were rolling down her face. ‘Did I hurt you?’ he asked mockingly. Before she could react he slapped her face, drawing blood from her lip and fresh tears from her eyes.

‘Hey! You got what you wanted. Let her go!’ Tom felt fury burning in his guts and knew that some of it was because he could do nothing. He was all talk in this situation.

Stanley ignored him and gripped Ness’s bare upper arms so hard that, even in the half-dark of the barn, Tom could see the tanned skin going white under his fingers. Stanley lifted her nearly completely off the ground, looked intently into her face and hissed, ‘Remember this.’

Then he let her go.

Ness staggered but stayed on her feet. Her hair had come loose and hung in wayward strands around her face. Her shoulders heaved with sobs, and blood mingled with tears dripped off her chin.

Stanley turned back to Tom and grinned. ‘There’s something I want you to remember too,’ he said. He glanced at the Weasel. ‘Stand him up straight.’

Tom wished he didn’t know what was coming.

24

THE BITCH’S NAME was Annette Lim. She was twenty-five, pretty, smart, funny, caring and – in another time and place – would have been the perfect girl for Chuck Zhong to take home to meet his parents. Except she’d already gone home to meet Scott Redman’s parents, and they’d decreed her to be most satisfactory. In fact, out of his son’s earshot, Scott’s father had been heard to say that Annette was too good for him.

Scott wasn’t Vietnamese, but Annette’s parents didn’t require that he should be. They had been in America long enough to understand how love blurred national frontiers and stormed racial barriers.

Scott was a good guy. And a big guy. One of the things Annette loved most about him was that he was six foot five, weighed 265 pounds and could – and sometimes did – sling her over his shoulder like a caveman. For a young, liberated woman who’d graduated from MIT and was trying to play men at their own engineering game, cavegirl surrender was a fun and sexy game, so they played it often.

But right now, Annette and Scott were at an early showing of Pulp Fiction at the art-house theatre near Lee Park. Scott was a Samuel L. Jackson man and Annette had a weird little thing going for Christopher Walken that only Scott knew and was allowed to tease her about. So, despite the casual violence, it was the perfect date movie. They’d seen it before, of course, so they could neck in the Harvey Keitel scenes and not lose the thread.

After the movie Annette felt like dancing, so they went to Sugar Sugar, a diner with a dance-floor on Kennedy strip. Scott was big but graceful and the two of them twisted and jitterbugged until their entrées arrived. He had steak tartare, she had clam chowder, even though the clams must have been frozen. Unlike her parents and her parents’ parents, Annette Lim had never been fishing, so she didn’t know what she was missing.

Which is sometimes the perfect state of being.

As they got into his car, Scott asked her to come back to his place.

‘I can’t. I need to be in early tomorrow to finish up a report.’

‘What report?’

‘A technical report.’ She smiled.

‘Ooh, talk tech to me, baby.’

Annette giggled. Scott was a landscape gardener: what he knew about planes she could write on a grain of rice. ‘Great steel bird in the sky has pretty shiny beads in its belly that might go on the fritz if me no go in early tomorrow.’

Scott stopped for a red and pulled her into his shoulder so he could nuzzle her hair, which smelt of vanilla. ‘Or late tonight?’ he suggested.

*

Nicholas Nicholas held up a bread doorstep. ‘Peanut butter and jelly?’

They had started swapping food. Nicholas was a sucker for his Chinese dumplings, and the kiddies’ comic-book lunch-pail he unashamedly carried always held food designed to make anyone feel patriotic, even a first-generation Chink who was being shafted by America in many and various ways, thought Chuck Zhong. He shook his head and pushed his lotus-seed buns across the desk at Nicholas. ‘Have ’em. I’m not hungry.’

It was true. Since Jeff had started … sexually assaulting? Abusing? Orally raping? Chuck shifted uncomfortably, squeezing the vile words from his mind, not wanting them to settle, germinate and possibly blossom there so he could no longer ignore them.

Since Jeff had started … messing with him, he’d lost his appetite and subsequently weight. From being the first person in the Zhong family to appear well nourished, Chuck knew he now looked more like one of his stinking native cousins than a modern Chinese American who’d graduated top of his engineering class.

Chuck had washed his mouth out and done his teeth already tonight. He kept a toothbrush and paste in his uniform pocket for just that purpose. But the taste never completely left him. He knew it was psychosomatic; he knew it was impossible that, after the three long-weekend days when he didn’t see Jeff, he should suddenly be aware of the taste of him in his mouth. But that was what happened. Chuck would be eating chilli dogs at the mall or shovelling pork and fried rice at the Lucky Eight Sunday buffet ($8.99 All You Can Eat!) when that salty bitterness would flood his mouth and he’d have to swallow the bile that had risen in his throat and pretend that something had gone down the wrong way.

Now Nicholas Nicholas grinned at him through the sweet white dough. ‘You got AIDS or something, man? You skinny as an Af.’

‘Fuck you, man.’

Nicholas’s grin snapped off and he turned to the CCTV screens, dropping the bun on the desk, like he wouldn’t touch it again. Chuck felt bad. He knew Nicholas meant well, but that AIDS crack – that was all he fucking needed planted in his brain. What if Jeff had given him AIDS? What if the weight loss was about that, not about his sudden disinterest in food?

Fuck.

He wanted to punch something or somebody. He wished it could be Jeff but he was afraid that if he stayed here that somebody would be Nicholas H. Nicholas.

He snatched up his flashlight.

‘You doin’ rounds again?’

‘So?’

‘I din’t mean nothing, man,’ Nicholas said defensively.

‘I know. I fucking know. It’s me, man. I’m fucked up.’ It was as close as he could get to an apology when he felt so fiercely that none of this was his fault.

He banged open the security-office door and strode down the corridor, not even turning the flashlight on, daring the dark to mislead him.

He wanted out.

He had tried to get out.

After the second time, Chuck had waited until the man with the gun had given him his cash, then said, ‘I can’t do it any more.’

‘Sure you can.’

‘I can’t. They’ve tightened up security.’

‘You are fucking security!’

The man had laughed meanly, his bad skin dimpling awkwardly. Chuck almost backed down but didn’t. The thought of Jeff made him straighten his spine and keep his voice calm.

‘I’m not doing it any more. There’s a new guy. Nicholas. He drives a ’99 Civic. He’ll do it.’