The Recruiter

by Dan Ames

  Chapter 88

  Her breath comes in ragged gasps. To an impartial observer, it sounds more like sobs. But the breath comes. The oxygen comes. It trickles into her lungs, and her nerves respond. She opens her eyes. She becomes conscious.

  And she realizes where she is.

  In the trunk.

  With that realization, other things come back to her. The vague memory, muted by the whiskey, of her confronting Ackerman. Of him punching her. Knocking her down.

  And then it had all gone black.

  Now, the memories bring the pain. Her jaw is on fire and hafts of pain shoot through her mouth and face. She can feel the whole bottom of her face is swollen and inflamed.

  Her body hurts as well. Her ribs and back ache. There, the pain is less intense, but its sheer pervasiveness shocks her and leaves her gasping for even more air.

  She struggles to move but finds that she can’t. Her arms are bound. Her hands are taped behind her back. In the pitch-blackness of the trunk, she can’t see anything. But the bindings on her hands don’t feel like rope. She shifts her weight and feels the texture on her skin.

  It’s tape.

  Does he intend to kill her? She struggles to come to grips with it. Murder? Is he really going to kill her to get Beth to sign up for the Navy?

  She doesn’t know a thing about him.

  But if he would do this to her, Anna can easily imagine what he will do to Beth.

  Suddenly, she’s paralyzed with fear. Where has he taken her? What is he going to do to her? Think, Anna. Think.

  First off, where is she?

  In her driveway? No. There’s no sound of traffic.

  Is she parked somewhere? In a parking garage?

  No, she can smell wood smoke. The old-fashioned kind. Like from a fireplace.

  So she’s not in the city. She’s out somewhere, rural.

  He’s brought her here to get rid of her.

  To bury her in the woods.

  She moans, a half cry/half scream, and panics. She thrashes, pulling and pushing her arms, kicking her feet against the side of the car. She keeps at it, thrusting her head forward and back. But it’s no use. The exercise leaves her breathless, covered in sweat, and racked with pain.

  She waits a moment to catch her breath.

  The tears come then. Hot and furious, streaming down her face. Oh god, I don’t want to die, I don’t want to die. Not here. Not now.

  Not with Beth out there, unprotected and vulnerable. Open to this psychopath.

  The image of Vince floats before her. She sees his eyes, so calm and so beautiful, the day he left for military duty. She remembers how he looked, climbing into the car with three friends, throwing his duffel bag in the trunk. So young. So proud. So strong.

  At the memory, Anna’s heart skips a beat, and she clenches her hand.

  And something strange happens.

  She feels something cutting into the skin of her arm. She manages to move it down to her hand.

  Anna knows what it is.

  A bottle cap.

  For a brief moment of absolute clarity, she knows what she has to do.

  Kicking and making noise isn’t going to do any good. There’s probably no one here but Ackerman.

  Second, kicking the trunk door open, even if it is possible, which it probably isn’t, will not really do anything.

  So first things first.

  Get your hands free.

  She works the bottle cap from her palm to her fingers, praying to God that she won’t drop it.

  She feels the sharp edge on her fingertip and quickly presses it against the widest part of the tape holding her hands together. She pushes the bottle cap down.

  And then she runs it back.

  Back and forth.

  And slowly, Anna Fischer develops a plan.

  Chapter 89

  Property searches sound easier than they actually are. You would think it could be accomplished by entering the subject’s name, hitting a keystroke or two, and up on the screen would pop a few addresses.

  But Mitchell knows the truth about property searches: they’re a giant pain in the ass.

  It took him nearly two hours to get the damn thing in motion. And now, sitting at his desk, he can only wait. Wait for the city assessor to look up the information that he, Mitchell, had to receive authorization for from a judge.

  Goddamnit, the wheels of justice grind not just slowly; sometimes they positively become entrenched. He looks at the papers on his desk. Folders, case notes, all waiting for him to slog through it all.

  He looks at his cell phone.

  Somewhere, Ackerman has a young girl who probably has no idea the type of guy she’s with.

  The bad feeling in Mitchell’s gut is mutating and growing.

  He looks at the cell phone again.

  Ring, goddammit. Ring.

  Chapter 90

  The fantasy momentarily soothes Samuel. It is a gauzy, filmy dream in which all sins are forgiven, in which his past is clear of violence.

  It is a blissfully uneventful past, leading to a wondrous, fulfilling future.

  In the fantasy, he and Beth are married. They make love long into the night. In the morning, they sleep in, eventually sharing a pot of good coffee and even better bagels for a late breakfast. Maybe a couple years down the road, they’re up all night taking care of the baby.

  Samuel can almost picture himself a father.

  The thought frightens him initially. The nightmare images of his own childhood, of his father’s flushed, insane eyes come at him, and he lapses into a fear of what would happen if he would become his father. But the fear passes. He thinks, fools himself into believing anyway, that he wouldn’t make the same mistakes, be the same monster his own father was.

  Even this cabin. It wasn’t idyllic at all. He only found out about it after his father was dead. Apparently, the old man liked to come up here and get drunk all by himself. Samuel was furious; they’d had no money his entire life but his father had a secret getaway. He probably brought women up here, too. Got drunk and smacked them around.

  He nearly laughs out loud.

  The hypocrisy of it all.

  “Beth?” he asks.

  They have moved from the rug in front of the fireplace to the bedroom. Samuel has no idea what time it is. They’ve made love…how many times Samuel doesn’t know. He’s lost track.

  Beth, half asleep with her right arm and leg draped over his body, murmurs into her pillow.

  “What are you planning on doing, Beth?” he asks.

  She rolls over onto her back and opens her eyes.

  “About what?” she asks, yawning in the process.

  “About the phone call. From the basketball coach.”

  Please let her give me the right answer, he thinks.

  Instead, she sits up in bed and asks him, “Do you want something to drink?”

  She gets out of bed, throws on shorts and a T-shirt, and pads into the kitchen.

  Samuel does the same, and he takes a seat across from her at the counter. She pours a beer into a glass and hands it to him. She opens another beer and takes a sip straight from the bottle.

  “We have to talk about this, don’t we?” she asks.

  He nods silently.

  She takes a long drink, and when she puts the beer bottle back on the counter, she looks into his eyes.

  “I’m not going into the Navy.”

  He says nothing.

  “Are you all right, Samuel?” she asks him, concern on her face.

  He can’t even muster a response.

  “It’s just that, after my injury, I never thought I’d play ball again,” she says. “Never thought I’d go to college. Never thought any of my dreams would come true. And when I was faced with that,” she holds her hands out, “I just had to get out. Any way to get out. But back then, I didn’t have a choice. Now I do.”

  She walks around the end of the counter and puts her arms around Samuel. “It’s so weird. I went from
having a shitty future, from having none of my dreams come true, to all of a sudden having two of them come true. Basketball. And you.”

  She kisses him, and he feels the warmth of her lips, feels the moisture from her eyes on his cheek. She’s crying. She loves him.

  But he won’t accept it.

  He won’t accept that everything he’s worked for, all of his dreams, are crashing to the ground. The fury sweeps over him, and he puts his arms around her. Beth snuggles in closer to him.

  He hugs her to him, and she tells him, “I love you, Samuel. I love you with all my heart.”

  He hugs her tighter. Can feel the bones in her rib cage protecting her. He squeezes harder.

  “Okay, Samuel,” she says and pushes away from him, but he pulls her tighter. “Ow, I can’t breathe,” she says, pushing even harder. But he keeps his face buried against her chest. He grits his teeth, a red mask of fury suffocating his brain, and all he wants to do is kill. He wants to rip apart everything and everyone who ever got in his way. The pain in his head is phenomenal, and he cries out in pain.

  Keeping one arm around her, he lifts his other arm up and encircles her throat, clamping her like a vise grip, cutting off her air flow.

  She struggles harder, pushing and kicking, but he easily lifts her off the ground.

  She’s dying in his arms.

  And then a brighter, more intense pain explodes in his head. He can actually see colors, like a rainbow before him. The nerves in his arms become numb, and Beth squirts out from his arms.

  He falls off the chair, stunned, landing on the oak floor with a thud that sends shooting pains up his arm.

  He looks up.

  A small shovel from the fireplace is still in the air.

  It’s connected to a small pair of old, arthritic hands. The hands travel down to bony, chicken-skin arms.

  And then Samuel sees the face of Anna Fischer.

  “No one messes with my daughter,” she says.

  Chapter 91

  “Three thirty four Bear Den Lake Road.”

  The woman’s voice on the other end is breathless. Did she actually run to the phone? Mitchell wonders. If she did, she deserves a gold star.

  “Got it,” he says and slams the phone down, mentally reminding himself to find out who she is and to thank her properly.

  He snatches the phone back off the cradle and immediately calls the dispatcher, gives her the address, and tells her to notify the local police and have them immediately send all available officers to the address. He gets basic directions from the dispatcher, and she tells him it’s no more than fifty miles north of the city.

  Mitchell races for his car. He can be there in an hour. Something in his gut tells him he needs to go. That Ackerman is there. And the girl.

  God knows what he’ll find when he gets there.

  Chapter 92

  Gasping for her breath, Beth watches as Samuel gets to his feet with a roar. In his hand is the fireplace shovel, the very same one her mother had used to clobber Samuel and break free. Now, as a scream flies from Beth’s throat, the shovel swings in a high arc and smacks with a meaty thud on the side of her mother’s face.

  Beth hears bone crunch and watches as Anna falls to the floor.

  Samuel steps over Anna without so much as a glance. Beth is wobbly and disoriented. This can’t be happening, she thinks.

  “Samuel.”

  “You shouldn’t have changed your mind, Beth.”

  His voice is the same. But everything else is different. His eyes are almost yellow with an insane light. His face is waxy. A streak of blood from his scalp streams down the side of his head.

  “But why are you doing this?” Her voice is hollow and thin, and she can hear herself pleading. She starts to go toward her mother, lying motionless on the floor, blood now pooling around her head. She stops, knowing what Samuel will do if he gets the chance.

  “Why? I just needed a recruit,” he says. His voice low and gritty. His jaw is clenched. The muscles in his face bulge as they become slick with blood.

  He is coming toward her now, backing her against the wall.

  “All I needed to be a SEAL was to get a few lousy recruits—one who was supposed to be you, Beth—and then in a few months, I would have been on my way. But no, you had to change your mind and decide you want to play basketball. Because that was your dream, right? Well, what about my dream, Beth?”

  Beth sees the spittle hanging from Samuel’s mouth. She understands everything now. Samuel is completely insane and will kill her unless she can think of something. Anything.

  “Okay, okay. I’ll go in the Navy if you let me go.”

  “Too late, Beth, and I’m not that stupid. The minute you leave here, it’s all over. In fact, it’s over anyway. It’s too late for me now too.” His voice trails off.

  A soft moan escapes Anna’s mouth, and Beth turns, just for a split second, shocked that her mother is still alive. In the brief slice of time, she realizes the move is a mistake.

  She snaps her head back to see the flash of silver as the shovel whips at her face.

  Beth reacts, unthinkingly, her basketball reflexes still lightning-quick despite the months of rehab. She ducks her head at the last moment, and the shovel smashes down on her shoulder.

  At the same time, she lashes out with her foot, catching Samuel in the solar plexus. He sinks to his knees as Beth is knocked backward against the cabin wall. Beth recovers first, wrenches the shovel away from Samuel, and swings it. The blow isn’t very powerful, but it cracks him in the temple, and he falls to the floor.

  Beth staggers to her feet, stepping toward her mother. Her legs wobble beneath her, the pain in her knee is searing. The cabin floor tilts upward at her. She regains her sense of balance. She looks again at her mother.

  She’s dead.

  She has to be.

  Her face is gray and her mouth is open.

  The pool of blood is big and spreading. A gasp catches in Beth’s throat. She starts to walk toward her mom, wanting to hold her and stroke her hair, but just then Samuel gets to his knees. He shakes his head, and then his eyes clear and he looks at Beth.

  She holds his gaze for just a moment.

  And then she follows the only course of action available to her.

  She runs as fast as she can.

  Chapter 93

  The cold night air hits her like a slap. It speeds the focus of her thoughts, and she considers which way to run.

  Not the road.

  Samuel is faster. He’ll catch her for sure. Off the road, in the woods is the better choice. Maybe she can duck into the woods somewhere and Samuel will run by her.

  Even as she limps across the front lawn of the cabin, she knows it won’t work. He’ll be right behind her and will see her before she can hide and try to get back to her mom.

  She hears the cabin door bang open as Samuel crashes through it. Instantaneously, she veers toward the water’s edge, toward a small boat pulled hastily ashore. Beth breaks for the boat, a stab of pain strikes her knee, and she nearly falls.

  And then she is on top of the boat, pushing it into the water. It’s her only chance. Samuel can swim, but he can’t beat her in a boat with a motor. And there isn’t another boat nearby. Maybe she can make it across the lake and get help before he figures out a way to get to her.

  Her entire body is shaking as she pushes the boat into the water, not bothering to slow down or break stride. She hits it full force, and the boat rockets from the sand and skids into the water, Beth behind it pumping and pushing.

  Before long, she is in thigh-deep water. With one last heave, she launches herself up and into the boat, landing in the bottom with a thud. Her shoulder crashes into the bench, and pain stabs into her ribs. Her head is inundated with pain; her shoulder from where Samuel hit her with the shovel is throbbing.

  She struggles to the back of the boat, and her hand grasps the pull cord of the small outboard motor.

  She yanks on it. Nothing happens.<
br />
  “Oh god,” she pleads. “Please, please, please…”

  She yanks again on the cord.

  The motor remains silent.

  Beth dares a look at the cabin.

  Samuel is across the grass.

  He’s charging into the water.

  She regains her focus and turns back to the engine. She spies the choke and pulls it all the way out.

  She yanks on the cord, and this time, the engine roars to life. But the boat’s not going anywhere. Beth sees the motor is in neutral. She pushes the lever to reverse, and the boat slams backward.

  She puts her hand on the throttle, and twists it all the way to the right. The motor screams, and suddenly, the boat rocks. At first, she thinks it’s from the motor, but then something wet, cold and hard snakes around her throat.

  “Gotcha,” Samuel says.

  Chapter 94

  Beth is facedown in the boat, Samuel leaning on her with his knee in her back. The boat is rocking, pounding the waves as he steers it out toward deeper water.

  “You just don’t give up, do you, Beth?” he says.

  “Let me go.”

  “Can’t do that. I don’t quit either. That’s why we like each other so much.”

  She pushes against him, but it’s no use. Her knee is useless, her lower left leg flopping around like a loose rope. A stream of water pours into her mouth, and she gags. Is this how she’s going to die? Is he going to kill her first and then throw her overboard? Stop it, she thinks. You can’t let him win.

  “Is this what SEALs do, Samuel? Kill old women and injured girls?” The words shoot from her mouth, and she knows they land with unerring accuracy. When he speaks, his voice is a mixture of acid and ice.

  “Shut up, Beth. Or I’ll kill you the hard way—with a lot of pain.”

  Suddenly the boat stops moving, and the engine throttles down. Beth is yanked to her feet, and she faces Samuel. His eyes are flat and cold. His hands move up around her throat. She kicks and hits him but to no avail.