Girl Who Wasn’t There

by Vincent Zandri

  CHAPTER 27

  HE’S BEING LED out of his North Albany mansion by a crew of men and women wearing navy blue FBI windbreakers. An unmarked cruiser is parked at the top of the drive, the doors open. The FBI agents shove the big, white-haired Rabuffo into the back seat, slam the door closed. The car then zooms off, no doubt on its way to the downtown FBI headquarters.

  The volume on the television is turned way down. But on the screen, the name Paul “Mickey” Rabuffo appears. Below it, “Arrested for racketeering, human and illicit drug trafficking along with multiple counts of murder.”

  Penny takes a step toward the television.

  “Jesus, that’s him,” she says. “Rabuffo is finally going to prison.”

  “Thus, our missing Chloe,” I say. “And thus, that son of a bitch Bertram who tried to knock me cold.”

  Giselle shakes her head.

  “So, if I were to put two and two together, I’m guessing you took the rap for this fella a long time ago and it cost you a lengthy prison stay. But he tried to quiet you, for like forever, and eventually you got tired of looking over your shoulder. So you organized a come-to-Jesus with the Albany DA.”

  “In so many words, that’s the story,” I confirm.

  She scrunches her brow.

  “Cheese Louise,” she says. “Usually all I do around here is look for missing wallets. But this is some serious crap. Even I know Rabuffo’s clothing shops are just a front. Same goes with his Chinese eateries, one of which is now located on Main Street in the heart of the village. He is not a man to dick around with.” Then, catching herself, “Oops, sorry about my French, Mrs. O’Keefe.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Penny says. “We’ve been cursing our fucking brains out since yesterday early afternoon.”

  My phone rings, startling me so badly, I nearly hit the ceiling. I go to the bedside, retrieve the phone, flip it open.

  “Shit,” I say. “My parole officer calling on a Saturday.”

  “At this point,” Giselle says, “maybe it’s best to speak with your lawyer first.”

  Now coming from outside the building, the faint but indiscernible sound of cop cruisers. I flip the phone closed, pull it from its charger, stuff it into my pocket.

  “Oh no,” Penny says. “It’s got to be Walton.”

  “And I can bet he’s got the entire village police department with him.”

  I pull the curtain open on the sliding glass doors. Instinct once more kicks in. The will to survive. To fend off the attackers. I glance at Penny, then at Giselle. I see Chloe’s silhouette on the beach near the water. I can give myself up to the police, risk being locked up for what I did to Bertram. Or, I could take another route. Perhaps not the smartest route in the world, but the only route available.

  I pull out the pistol from my jeans.

  “Where the hell did you get that?!” Giselle snaps. “You’ve got to hand that over right now.”

  “I can’t,” I say, the words barely making it out of my mouth. “This is something I have to do. For Chloe.”

  I look out back. The beach is empty this early in the morning, with the sun’s rays only now peeking out over the mountaintops to the east. No police occupy the immediate vicinity, as far as I can see. But that doesn’t mean they’re not there.

  “Penny,” I say. “Grab your phone from off the charger. Pack a couple of water bottles and some of that pizza into your daypack.”

  “Why?” she asks, her voice verging on weeping. “What are you talking about, Sid?”

  “If the police pick me up, they’ll toss me back in prison. That’s not going to happen.” I retract the revolver’s cylinder, check the six-shot load, then slap it back home. “Don’t you see what’s happening here? I’m being set up.”

  “By who?” Penny begs. “Rabuffo is already arrested.”

  “He’s got a restaurant up here. It means his people are here. We actually looked inside the place when we were scouring the village for Chloe. They’ve infiltrated paradise like cockroaches. This is revenge, pure and simple. They put me back in the joint, they’ll kill Chloe and then they’ll kill you. It’s all a part of their plan to torture me. They’ll make sure I live to see my family die.”

  “Mr. O’Keefe,” Giselle says, pulling back her jacket to reveal her sidearm, “I must ask you to stand down. Think about what you’re doing.”

  The police cruiser sirens are louder now. Closer. A Lake Placid cop SUV pulls up outside the back door. Then, coming from outside the room’s front door, a sound of jackboots slapping against the corridor floor. I hear car doors opening, weapons being locked and loaded. The entire room goes silent and still, as if my execution is imminent.

  Like I said, I have a distinct choice here.

  I can either surrender the gun to Giselle, and surrender myself to the Lake Placid Village PD, which means a sure one-way trip back to prison. Or I can take the one shot I have left to get my daughter back safe and sound. In the end, it’ll mean I either die trying, or at the very least, go back to prison anyway. But at least she’ll be safe and back in the arms of her mother.

  ….So what’s it going to be, Sid? Door number one or door number two?

  Two always was my lucky number.

  Giselle isn’t expecting it when I wrap my left arm around her waist, press the barrel of the .38 against her temple.

  “Penny,” I say, “grab her gun.”

  My wife has become a mannequin.

  “Penny,” I shout, “grab the detective’s gun! Now!”

  She breaks herself out of her spell, comes toward us, reaches into Giselle’s jacket, steals her gun. It’s a 9mm Sig Sauer short-barreled semi-automatic. Nice piece for a hotel detective. An expensive piece.

  “Thank you very much, Pen,” I say. “Now, take a look outside the curtain and tell me what you see.”

  “You really know what you’re doing?” Giselle whispers, her tone hard as nails and just as sharp. “You’re gonna fry like bacon when the village finest finally nail you, fella.”

  “Please, Detective Fontaine, I’m well aware of just how wrong this is. But what would you do if it was your daughter? I just want to get my Chloe back. Somebody took her right off this beach, and then that somebody actually had the nerve to show their face, or faces, after they did it. It tells me they aren’t all that afraid of the law enforcement around here. And that includes you, Detective.”

  I can feel her trembling in my arm. My guess is nobody has ever pointed a gun at her before. Not in this vacation utopia.

  “So what’s your plan, Mr. O’Keefe?” Giselle asks.

  “I’ll let you know as soon as Penny gives me the lowdown.”

  I focus on my wife, who is looking out onto the back of the hotel through a narrow slit between the curtains.

  “I see two police SUVs,” she says, “and four policemen wearing their uniforms. One of them is Chief Walton. All of them are holding guns, Sidney.”

  “Okay,” I say. “Here’s what we’re going to do. Penny, grab the stuff.”

  She goes back to the bed, grabs the daypack.

  “Now,” I go on, “Giselle, you’re going to be a good kid and walk with me to the sliding glass doors.”

  “What’s this train wreck all about, Mr. O’Keefe?” she presses, while I push her toward the doors. “Did you do something to your daughter? Did you get mad at her? Did she do something bad by mistake like step on your big toe? Something that threw you into a rage? Are we going to find her remains somewhere on the hotel premises? Are they going to dredge her body out of the lake?”

  The once nice and helpful hotel detective has now turned into someone I do not recognize. But then I guess the same can be said of me. I’m the one holding the gun on her. Maybe she’s suspected me all along of doing something horrible to my daughter. By the looks of it, the entire town suspects me of kidnapping and killing my own little girl.

  “Just please shut up,” I say, burying the barrel into her skull. So hard, I can hear her wince.
>
  “Now, Penny,” I go on. “On the count of three, I want you to open the curtains and the door, you understand?”

  She’s wide-eyed, her eyes incapable of blinking. It’s the stress, the absolute situational shock. She’s not saying a word, but I know what she’s thinking. This is crazy. This could land us in prison for a long time. But our daughter is out there, abducted, and the police aren’t looking for her. They’re looking for my husband … We have to do what’s right for Chloe, no matter what …

  “I understand,” she says. “But, Sidney, I am so, so scared.”

  “Just do what I say and we’ll be fine, Pen.”

  I shift my hold on Giselle so that I grab hold of her left arm, pull it behind her back, pushing upwards on it, applying severe pressure to the rotator cuff. It’s exactly the kind of move the COs would pull on us when things got rowdy. Once more she winces, and once more, she’s powerless to do anything about it.

  “Ready, Penny? On three … One, two …”

  When I get to three, she swings back the curtain, allowing the bright morning sunlight to fill the room and allowing our eyes to take in the cops pointing their weapons at us. Acting in one single, fluid motion, she grips the opener with both hands, yanks the door open.

  “Stand down, O’Keefe!” Chief Joe Walton shouts.

  Yanking on Giselle’s arm, I whisper for her to step outside. She does it.

  “You stand down, Walton!” I shout. “You never had any intention of looking for my daughter. You set your sights on me, and that’s as far as it went.”

  Standing maybe a dozen feet away, I make out the elderly man who was swimming laps in the indoor pool. He’s staring me down with wide eyes and an ashen face. I also spot the young couple we spoke to in the bar yesterday. The couple who offered their help. The young blonde woman and the Marine with Semper Fi tattooed to his bicep.

  “That’s them,” the young woman says. “He was drunk as a skunk, and they were upsetting the whole bar. Accusing us of taking their daughter.”

  “You’re full of shit!” Penny shouts. “We did no such thing. And my husband wasn’t drunk.”

  “Shoot him!” Giselle spits. “Shoot the darn bastard, Joe, while you have the chance.”

  Walton’s gun is raised, the bead planted on my head.

  “You do that, Chief,” I say, “and Giselle’s brains are blown all over the beach.” But I can only hope that Walton doesn’t call my bluff because I’d rather run than shoot Giselle.

  “What do you want, O’Keefe?” the chief begs.

  “My wife and I just want to walk out of here unmolested. You got that, Chief ?”

  Walton doesn’t respond. The other cops keep their weapons trained on us. But I can also see that they’re looking to one another for guidance. They’ve never encountered a hostage situation before. I get the sense that this is all new to them. Never mind pre-med or my med school classes in human nature and bio chem. It was prison life that taught me how to sniff out another man’s fear. And right now, I’m smelling a whole bunch of it. It’s not a fight or flight situation for these cops since choosing flight would mean the loss of their jobs or, worse, humiliation. But I can see the whites in their wide, unblinking eyes and the Adam’s apples bobbing up and down in their necks, like turkeys about to face the hatchet. Their faces bear a pale pallor.

  “I’m gonna tell you one more time, O’Keefe,” Walton states. “Stand down. Or we will fire on you.”

  “No, you won’t,” I say, working up a smile.

  Pulling the pistol away from Giselle’s head, I pull the trigger, fire a shot over Walton’s head. Across the bow, as it were.

  The police hit the dirt.

  One cop screams, “Don’t kill me!”

  “This is gonna hurt me more than you, Giselle,” I whisper into her ear. “But I’m not leaving Lake Placid without my little girl.”

  That’s when I pistol-whip her upside the skull, behind the temple so as not to cause her any concussive damage. She automatically drops to her knees, distracting the police.

  “Penny!” I shout. “Run!”

  CHAPTER 28

  WE SPRINT AROUND the hotel, to the parking lot. There’s a gathering of cops positioned around the front door. But the village PD have obviously concentrated their efforts on the back of the building where our hotel room is located and where we had easy access to the exterior.

  “We need a car,” I say, gazing at all the vehicles parked in the lot. “We can’t just hop a bus.”

  We’d taken the bus up north from Albany. The car Penny and I had before I went to prison was sold off a long time ago.

  “We don’t have keys,” Penny stresses. “How the hell we gonna steal a car, Sidney?”

  “I learned a thing or two in prison, Pen. Plus, I have the fingers of a surgeon. Problem is, I need to find an older model to work with.”

  We still haven’t been spotted by the cops positioned in the near distance. But that doesn’t mean we’re not being spotted on the hotel’s exterior mounted CCTV cameras in real time. Then, Penny raises her arm, points.

  “What about that one there, Doc?”

  I turn, spot the vehicle that’s caught her attention. It’s an old Jeep. A CJ Wrangler, probably dating back to the early eighties. There’s no top on it, hard or soft, and no doors. It means we don’t have to worry about door locks.

  “Good eyes, Pen. Now let’s just hope it’s got enough gas.”

  We go to the Jeep, which is parked in between a Mercedes sedan and a brand-new Ford F-150 pickup truck.

  “Hop in,” I say. “We’re gonna make this quick.”

  Reaching under the steering column, I feel for the spaghetti of wires with the index fingers and thumbs on both my hands. I pull them out, exposing them. There’s a series of four wires, but it’s the wires that bookend all the others that have my full attention. A red wire and a blue wire connected to the starter. What I need to do, in theory at least, is tap their ends together, and that should create the spark needed to fire up the engine. Problem is, I need something metal to create the proper bridge between the wire ends.

  Turning to my wife. “Pen, you got a safety pin or anything like that?”

  She reaches into her bag, rummages around, comes back out with a paperclip.

  “How about this?”

  “Perfect.”

  I bend the paperclip so that one end is touching the blue wire, the other hovering over the red. I’m just about to touch the red wire when I hear the shouts.

  “That’s him!” comes the voice of a man. “That’s O’Keefe there!”

  I shift my focus on the gathering of cops at the hotel entrance. Standing in the middle of them is the desk manager. He’s pointing at me.

  “There’s the murdering son of a bitch!” he shouts once more.

  The cops turn towards us, draw their weapons, enter into a sprint. Pressing both feet against the rubber floor mat to ground myself against electrocution, I touch the paperclip to the red wire. Sparks shoot out, but the Jeep starts up with a hearty roar.

  Left foot on the clutch, the right on the gas, I grind the gear into reverse, pull out of the parking space. Hitting the brakes, I throw the shift into first, and burn rubber. The cops go down onto their knees, combat position, the black barrels on their service weapons staring us in the face.

  Reaching out, I grab hold of Penny’s shirt, pull her down into my lap. I lower my head as the pop, pop, pop of discharged weapons fill the air and the bullets whiz past my head like hornets.

  “Why are they trying to kill us?!” Penny screams. “They’re supposed to be on our side.”

  “Don’t talk!” I shout, as I speed the length of the parking lot, knowing the only thing standing before the Jeep and the open road is four Lake Placid police officers.

  “I’m not going to stop!” I scream, throwing the shift from second to third, the big V6 engine roaring.

  I’m convinced I’m about to run all four officers down when, at the very last sec
ond, they leap out of the way. Peering into the rearview, I see them take aim once more, fire their weapons at will. More bullets whiz past, one of them bursting through the windshield, making a nickel-sized hole, from which several cracks emerge.

  Heading out onto Main Street, I hook a left, and gun the engine past Olympic Center on our right and the Village Police Station on my left. From there I turn onto the road that will take us south and into the Adirondack mountain range.

  State Highway 73.

  The highway through the forest.

  “You can get up,” I say to Penny, pulling on her shirt.

  She rises, slowly, cautiously, as if the police are right on our tail. Something that will happen sooner than later. That is, if I can’t find a suitable place for us to hide while we try and make sense of this whole thing.

  “Where are we going?” Penny asks as we pass by the old, massive Olympic ski jumps and head into the thickly forested region.

  But I don’t answer right away. I haven’t eaten anything of substance in almost twenty-four hours. But that doesn’t prevent the nausea from overwhelming me. I pull off the side of the road, jump out, bend over, vomit a stomach full of clear, burning bile.

  “Doc, what’s the matter?” Penny pleads. “We have to keep going.”

  It takes a long few seconds, but eventually, the nausea abates, and I make my way back to the Jeep, slip behind the wheel.

  “We’ve just fled from the police,” I say, still somewhat dizzy and sick. “I assaulted Giselle when I slapped her with the gun. This … this situation we’re in … it’s getting worse by the minute.” Wiping my mouth with the back of my hand. “The decisions I’m making. I’m worried they’re all wrong.”

  “We’re doing it for Chloe,” Penny says.

  “That’s what I keep telling myself. And it’s the truth. But listen, Pen, if we don’t find her, and the police catch up to us, I’m done, finished. I’ll never see the light of day again.”

  “We won’t let that happen.”

  “You say that. I say that. Maybe even God says that. But the smart thing to do would be to work with the cops, not fight them, run from them.”