Hunting Michael Underwood

by L V Gaudet

  It’s true. He can’t let her go. He never will. I see him talking to someone who’s not there when he thinks I’m not looking and I know it’s her, Cassie. Jane Doe might have been her, probably was her, but he lost her again. He will never give up searching for his sister for as long as he lives.

  Even if he finds her, he may never be able to give up the ghost of the sister that was. He may always doubt it’s really her. The idea terrifies Kathy.

  It was this obsession with his sister that drove him to kidnap those women, including me. A grown woman can never be the little girl he lost. Even if he finds her, that doubt will always be there. It was that doubt that drove him into the blind rages that made him kill those other women.

  It could happen again.

  Michael hates that Kathy looks so troubled and uncertain.

  I wish I could take her with me, keep her at my side and protect her. I never want her to feel fear or uncertainty.

  He looks into Kathy’s troubled eyes and pulls her into his arms.

  “I have you,” he says into her hair and kisses her gently on the top of her head. “I wish I could take you with me. Maybe soon. Maybe the next time I have to go.”

  Kathy stiffens. The next time? She pulls away.

  “This isn’t just one trip? There will be more?”

  Michael feels guilty for not telling her the truth.

  I can’t tell her the truth yet about the trips. I will have to sooner or later, but not yet. She isn’t ready. I’m not ready. I don’t know yet if I can trust Anderson.

  Jason McAllister, the man who posed as my father, had his own Anderson. The man who would have been my grandfather, William McAllister, had an Anderson too. From what Jason told me, his father’s Anderson encouraged bringing the wife and kids into it.

  They are all called Anderson. Just that; one simple name for every man who holds the same position in the organization.

  It’s traditionally a family business and the organization is big on traditions.

  Family members who might not approve are considered a threat. Kathy has to be in one hundred percent or she won’t be trusted. They have to find her to be trustworthy beyond a doubt and following the rules.

  Things are very different times from when Jason was a boy learning the business from his father. People are different; their attitudes and beliefs. It seems like life must have moved much slower then, more relaxed and trusting. Nobody trusts anyone anymore.

  “We discussed this. This is only the first trip,” Michael says. “There will be more, I told you that. I just don’t know when or how long it will be between trips. I’m doing this for us.

  It will be a good thing for us. We’ll never be able to settle down if I have to keep going from odd job to odd job. This will make our lives stable. We can find a safe place and settle in to make our lives there. No more moving around. We’ll be safe.”

  Of course we will be safe. We will be on the inside of a very underground group that stops at nothing to keep all of its trusted members and their families safe. Anyone looking for us would be made to stop before they can ever get close, including the police.

  “You won’t even tell me what this business is. Are you doing something illegal?” Kathy looks up at him anxiously.

  “You don’t need to worry about that. I have to go,” Michael says gently. “I won’t be gone more than four days. I’ll call you. Once I’ve got the business established I can start to bring you along if you want to come.”

  He gives her a parting kiss, quickly finishes stuffing his clothes in the bag, and hurries out the door before he changes his mind.

  Kathy accepts the kiss stiffly and does not respond. She just stands there looking at the empty bed where the bag had been, trying not to cry.

  Michael has to stop himself from looking back as he drives away, wracked with guilt.

  Michael is getting closer to the place he is to meet with Mr. Miller. With each mile that passes beneath his truck’s tires, his stomach roils and sours more. He is so nervous that he has to urgently find a toilet to release his watery bowels on.

  He spots an older gas station with outside entrances to the bathrooms on the side of the building and turns sharply into the lot, driving too quickly to the side of the building. The box of the truck has five large sealed plastic barrels. They wobble, threatening to tip on the turn, but righting themselves without falling.

  Putting the truck in park and shutting off the engine, he races for the bathroom, ploughing into the immobile door.

  Locked!

  “Damn!” he mutters.

  I would prefer to avoid going inside. They will have security cameras trained on the door to catch every person who enters. I hope if the equipment is working, it’s on an old-style tape loop that will be recorded over within days, and that the tapes and equipment are old enough to make the video quality so bad it would be useless.

  Those extra wasted moments might also be the end of his pants.

  His stomach clenches with the lurching pain of his unhappy bowels and he moves quickly, roughly shoving the door of the station open before him as he rushes for the counter, his hand reaching ahead of him by the time he gets there.

  “Men’s key please,” Michael says urgently.

  The guy behind the counter is little more than a kid. He snickers at the panicked look on Michael’s face and takes his time fetching the key from under the counter.

  “Thanks,” Michael says, irritated, snatching the key quickly and charging out the door.

  The kid behind the counter gives his retreating back a rude smirk.

  Michael rushes to the bathroom, fumbles in his urgency to unlock the door, and would have missed locking it if it was not a self-locking door.

  His stomach lurches at the sight and smell of the small bathroom.

  There is a single toilet, sink, broken paper towel dispenser, and a large cracked garbage pail. The mirror over the sink is either very dirty, stained, or both. It’s chipped along the edges as if it regularly gets bumped, although that seems impossible where it’s located.

  With a feeling of revulsion, Michael wonders when the last time anyone cleaned the toilet was.

  Not wanting to touch it with his skin, he snatches at the toilet paper dispenser, yanking out the too small squares of pre-cut rough paper and scattering them over the toilet seat. He barely manages to sit before his nervous bowels explode in a wave of foul smell and sound and a cold sweat washes over him.

  “What the hell! This has never happened to me before. This is not my first job.”

  “Get a grip man,” Michael mutters. “You’ve never been this nervous for anything, and you’ve done a lot of shit in the past.”

  But Michael knows why this time is different. For the first time, it’s not just himself he has to worry about. He has Kathy to keep safe and this is a dangerous life.

  He lived a life filled with this and worse. He has done this job before, and there were the things he did for survival as a runaway kid on the street. And there was his childhood. Growing up on the farm with Cassie; raised by a deranged killer who made him help dispose of the bodies.

  They weren’t only Jason McAllister’s victims either. The man who raised him and Cassie took them both on his special trips. Trips where he would leave them huddled hiding in the truck while he met with people in remote motel rooms, then led them to an even more remote location where they would swap the bodies from one vehicle to the other. Then there was the long drive to the woods where he and Cassie would have to walk for miles following him as he lugged the bodies to bury them where no one would ever find them.

  Cassie hated it and always cried on these trips. She cried over the putrid stench of the dead bodies, over her fear that she would be one of them one day, and over the dead themselves.

  They had no mother anymore, no one at the farm to look after them, so Jason McAllister took them with him.

  Michael and Cassie learned about death and dead bodies very young. Jason McAllister
murdered their mother.

  For Michael, these are memories he’d kept locked away behind a dark shroud in his mind for years. Many of them only recently came flooding back with his confrontation with the man he had worked so hard to forget.

  Michael swoons and the room darkens as weakness washes over him and an icy sweat chills his body, making him shiver with shock. A memory teases and prods against the dark curtain of haze that still locks away so many memories of his childhood.

  His mother’s voice echoes in the tiny bathroom, coming from far away, angry sounding, hurt. He can hear the tears cracking her voice while she tries to sound strong and angry.

  Then a man’s voice, anxious like a child who just got caught doing something bad.

  Michael doesn’t know what they are saying, but it’s something bad. The man did something bad.

  The man is not Jason McAllister.

  “Dad da,” Cassie says softly, tugging at Michael’s sleeve.

  His eyes are hot and wet and the tiny bathroom is blurry. Michael rubs his eyes with his fist and looks down at little Cassie.

  She stares up at him, so little and frail, her face frozen in a look of fear and sadness, eyes large and watering with the tears she is too confused to cry.

  She is a toddler, not the little girl he remembers. He pictures her sitting in a booster chair coloring at the table while their mother cooks their breakfast. She can say very few words but loves to sing when music is played.

  “Dad da,” she repeats quietly, her word for daddy. The world is large to Michael’s child’s eyes.

  He looks down at her little hand on his thick arm, so small against the muscles bulging tensely beneath his sleeve.

  “No, this is all wrong,” Michael moans, confused.

  He stares at her little hand on his arm, the arm of a grown man who has worked at hard labour. But I’m just a boy. How?

  Michael blinks hard and shakes his head, trying to find sense where there is none.

  The small bathroom rushes back in around him with a suddenness that leaves him reeling, overwhelming in the complete clarity of the cramped space in all its nasty filth and smell.

  He barely manages to spin around, squatting in front of the toilet to vomit into the vile mess already in the bowl, gagging more at the sight, smell, and just the thought of puking into his own shit.

  His stomach keeps heaving, the whole disgusting nature of his position making his stomach keep cramping with nausea.

  When he finally manages to stop and look around, Michael is confused to find himself alone, but doesn’t know why he is confused by it.

  Of course I’m alone.

  The sound of pounding seeps into his awareness.

  He looks up in confusion, taking a moment for it to register that someone is banging on the door and yelling.

  “Hey buddy, what the hell are you doing in there?”

  The pounding on the door, its echo filling the small room, almost drowns out the voice on the other side.

  “Give me a minute!” Michael yells, feeling weak and strange.

  He hurriedly cleans himself up, not bothering with the splatter on the toilet from erupting at both ends, stumbling to the sink to quickly wash his hands and splash water on his face, and stumbles for the door.

  He opens the door to a waft of relief in the form of fresh air only to come face to face with an angry man who looks like he has been driving for a very long time.

  Behind the man is a small boy who is holding himself and doing the pee-pee dance. Behind them is a station wagon with a harried looking woman in the front seat, three more kids in the back, the rear hatch packed to the roof, and a large hairy dog slobbering on the nearest back seat window.

  They saw Michael going into the bathroom as they pulled in, so didn’t bother going inside to ask for a key. The man had rushed the boy out of the car, nearly losing the untrained dog in the process, and rushed him to the bathroom door to wait impatiently.

  Less than a minute later he was already banging and yelling at the door while his son whimpered that he is going to pee himself.

  “S’cuze me,” Michael mutters, annoyed by the man’s rude impatience. He steps into the man’s space, making him take a step back before stepping past him, giving the door time to close while the man stares him down roughly.

  The toddler manages to squeeze past the adults and narrowing gap of the door, finding himself all alone in the strange bathroom as the door clicks closed behind him, locked.

  He looks around at the gross bathroom and pinches his nose at the awful smell.

  “Dad-da?” He calls. “Daddy!”

  Realizing too late that the door closed and locked, the father pounds even harder on the bathroom door in frustration, terrifying the toddler inside who doesn’t connect the pounding with his father on the other side of the door.

  Michael rushes back inside the gas station, depositing the key on the counter with a curt nod and quickly retreats outside to his truck.

  The little boy starts crying and screaming for his mommy.

  The father looks around a moment before it clicks on his exhausted brain that the boy is locked inside.

  He stops pounding and looks at the door in a mix of anger and despair.

  “Open the door,” he calls through the door, but the child just keeps crying.

  He swears and runs for the gas station door. “The jerk didn’t even give me the key. I just hope to hell they have one inside or I’m gonna bust that damned door in,” he mutters more in fear over his son being trapped than his quickly deflating anger.

  Michael is long gone by the time the family gets on the road again.

  Down the highway Michael finds what must be the last motel on the planet.

  It has to be for anyone to stay there by choice, he thinks. ‘Roach motel’ pops into his mind, but doesn’t even come close to summing up what the place looks like.

  If a health inspector ever took a look inside, the place would be immediately shut down and condemned to the demolition crew. I’ve stayed at some pretty bad places over the years, but this is possibly the worst I’ve seen.

  Michael takes a drive around the building, casing it out.

  There are only two vehicles in the lot. The parking lot is poorly gravelled, the rocks sinking into the mud to leave large areas that are more mud than rock. It is rough with ruts and potholes that formed in heavy rain and grew worse over years of neglect.

  Parking, he gets out and approaches the door for the room number he was given.

  He looks around furtively, knocks on the door, and waits.

  Michael senses movement inside before a shadow crosses the peephole. Someone is looking out.

  Michael tries to look casual, but not friendly. He wants the person on the other side of that door to fear him. He has no idea who it is, has never met the person, and may never meet them again. But, he needs them to trust and obey him without question.

  The door opens a crack, hesitates, and then opens a little more.

  A youngish middle-aged man’s face appears in the crack and Michael immediately thinks nerd.

  “Mr. Miller,” Michael says.

  The man nods nervously and swallows a knot of fear in his throat, opening the door a little wider.

  Seeing more of him gives Michael just as much of a nerd vibe.

  Michael nods. “Let’s go, let’s get this done. You followed all instructions?”

  Mr. Miller nods anxiously.

  “All of them?” Michael presses. “Told no one? How to prepare and wrap the package? No devices, cell phone or anything else that might ping a location?”

  The man nods again.

  “Can’t talk?” Michael jokes. “Relax. Let’s just get this done and you can go back to your life. Follow me. Follow all the rules of the road. Do not speed or run a sign for anything. If you get too far behind I will stop and wait for you to catch up. Just keep going on that road.”

  For just a moment the temptation to play with the man comes o
ver Michael. To lead him out and purposely lose him, let the man panic while he loops around to come up on him from behind.

  I have to stay professional. I don’t think Anderson has a sense of humour.

  Michael turns and heads for the parking lot.

  The wind changes direction and suddenly he can smell the man’s car. The odour is strong. It reeks of that special smell that can only come from one thing, a decomposing body.

  Michael swears and speeds up.

  We have to get out of here before anyone notices the stench of corpse, if they haven’t already.

  He gets in his truck and is already heading for the parking lot exit before Mr. Miller is in his car.

  Mr. Miller is panicking before he gets his car moving; worried he is going to lose the man who is here to get rid of his problem. He drives too fast out of the parking lot, racing to catch up.

  Michael glances in his rear view mirror.

  “Keep your distance,” he complains at the car driving too close behind him, although Mr. Miller can't possibly hear him.

  Michael is cautious to choose a route that avoids going too close to any homes where the residents might notice the smell.

  He finally pulls over and waits on the edge of a narrow dirt road.

  Mr. Miller pulls up and stops on the side of the road behind him, getting out and approaching the truck.

  Michael gets out and walks back to meet him, shaking his head.

  “Trunk to tailgate,” he says. “I’ll turn around.”

  He gets back into the truck, drives forward and does a three-point turn in the narrow road, leaving just enough room to transfer the cargo.

  He gets back out and walks up to Mr. Miller.

  “It stinks,” he says. “You didn’t follow instructions.” He points to the trunk.

  “I tried,” Mr. Miller stammers apologetically.

  “Open it up. Let’s just do this.”

  Mr. Miller opens the trunk, his keys jangling with the trembling of his hand.

  The stench that wafts out of the open trunk is overwhelming, making Michael’s eyes water. He turns to the truck and scowls.

  He drops the truck’s tailgate and grabs a large plastic barrel by the edge, dragging it closer. He pulls it out onto the ground and pries the lid off.