Girl Who Wasn’t There

by Vincent Zandri

  “Penny!” I shout. “Penny, where are you!?”

  “Here,” she responds.

  I gaze in the direction of the voice. That’s when I spot her hiding under the bunk beds.

  “Jesus, spiders are everywhere under here!” she barks.

  I go to her, bend at the knees, take hold of her hand.

  “We’ve got to move, baby. We’ve got to get the hell out.”

  Yanking her out from under the bunk beds, I pull her up onto her feet, and drag her to the front door, a half second before the grenade connects with the back of the cabin.

  CHAPTER 33

  THE BLAST PROPELS us out the open front door, onto the front lawn, flat onto our chests. For a brief second, the wind is knocked out of me. I search for Penny. She’s only a few feet away from me, on my left-hand side. She’s moving around, so at least I know she’s alive.

  My head is ringing, the ground beneath me spinning. I’m waking up from a vivid dream that’s made me temporarily paralyzed. It takes all my strength to peel myself up off the ground. But when I manage to get back up on my feet, I spot the chopper making one more go-around. As it’s coming back at us, I shoulder the .30-30 and open up on her with all the ammo I have left, the rounds connecting with the Huey’s front end.

  Flames shoot out of the exhaust, but it doesn’t seem to affect the chopper’s ability to fly. Just a few seconds later, it disappears beyond the tree line.

  The police know our precise location. That is, if the chopper belongs to the police in the first place. Maybe it belongs to Rabuffo, or both.

  What this means is, Penny and I have no choice but to get the hell out of here. Go deeper into the woods, or maybe get out of the woods altogether and head to another town or city. Someplace we can lie low, figure out a way to rescue our daughter, then expose the men and women who are setting me up as a murderer. It’s exactly how I put it to Penny as the quiet of the deep woods once more replaces the mechanical blade slapping, whop-whop-whop noise from the helicopter.

  “Listen and listen clearly, Sidney,” she says. “I will not leave this place until we have our Chloe back. Do you understand me?”

  She’s right. There’s no point in even considering heading to another town when it only makes sense that whoever abducted Chloe is keeping her nearby.

  “Okay,” I say. “Let’s grab the bags, go deeper into the forest. If we’re lucky we’ll come upon another safe house.”

  We head back into the cabin. The damage from the grenade is not as extensive as I first thought. It’s taken out a good portion of the kitchen, but not much else. Even the fire is still burning steadily in the stone fireplace. It’s like we merely stepped outside for a nice brisk, post-thunderstorm afternoon walk in the fresh country air.

  “Check your phone again, Pen,” I say, heading to the bunk beds. “I’ll grab the stuff.”

  “There’s no messages,” she says.

  “How do you know? You haven’t even looked at your phone.”

  I pick up the daypack, strap it over my shoulder. Then I go to the gun rack, grab hold of the shotgun and an extra box of shells. I’m about to put the shells in the daypack when I feel the solid slam against the back of my head. My brain matter bounces against the interior of my skull, and the cabin turns into a deep, dark black hole.

  CHAPTER 34

  DARKNESS SURROUNDS ME.

  I’m falling through it. So fast I can’t take a breath. There seems to be no end to the falling, until suddenly I find myself walking a beautiful property. A heavenly property. The grass is freshly mowed, the trees in full bloom. The birds are singing in the trees and the cicadas are strumming. It’s a beautiful early summer day with a slight breeze blowing through the leaves. I hear giggling coming from some girls hanging around a swimming pool. Beyond the swimming pool is a house that’s bigger than the high school I attended.

  A man approaches me. He’s tall, with thick white hair, and he carries a soft underbelly. He’s wearing a silk robe over pressed trousers and black Gucci loafers, no socks.

  “I want to show you something, son,” Mickey Rabuffo says. “Something wonderful …”

  We’re down inside the depths of the mansion. It’s like a bunker, with bright overhead lighting that illuminates the long corridor. There are rooms on both sides. Rooms filled with weapons, another with drug product ready to be shipped. One major portion of the underground facility is used as a lab to cook methamphetamine. And yet another cell-like area houses illegal Chinese who are presently on the market. Finally, there’s a vault that houses the bulk of

  Rabuffo’s fortune. A fortune accessible only by retinal scan and a keypad access code.

  “Place your left eye up to the scanner,” Rabuffo insists.

  I do as he says.

  An electric sensor scans my eye for a few long beats, until the mechanical noise of a heavy vault door being unlocked fills the basement depths.

  “This is how much I trust you, Sidney,” Rabuffo says …

  But then Rabuffo is gone. The long corridor becomes dark and cold. I feel the cold seep through my bones, as if my blood were no longer warm. I see someone standing at the end of the long corridor. At first, it’s just a silhouette, but then the closer I come to her, I know that it’s a girl.

  It’s Chloe.

  “Daddy,” she says. “Please save me.”

  Rabuffo appears once more. He grabs hold of her hair with his fist, throws her to the floor. She screams …

  When I come to, I’m blinded.

  That’s because someone has laid me out on my belly, my face stuffed in a pillow. My wrists are tied or duct taped behind my back, along with my ankles. My head hurts. Hurts bad enough so that it’s possible I’m hemorrhaging. It’s as if the blood that soaks my brain wants to pop out of my skull. But then, if I were hemorrhaging, I’d already be dead or stroking out.

  Still, I manage to slowly turn my head, just enough so that I can see out the corner of my eye. It’s then I realize I’m laid out on the bottom bunk of the rickety bunk beds inside the cabin. My vision is blurry, my hearing not to be trusted, but I can make out at least three people positioned around the fire. One of them is Penny. She’s not standing, but seated on one of the wood stools. She’s looking up at a man. The man is in uniform. A cop’s uniform.

  It’s Walton.

  The person standing beside Walton is a woman.

  The woman should not be here. As in—she should presently be occupying a cold storage drawer down inside the Warren County morgue. It’s Detective Giselle Fontaine. She doesn’t look strangled to me. My eyesight might be cloudy at present or, hell, I might even be dreaming. But I’m not dreaming and sure as shit if she isn’t standing inside this cabin, warming herself by the fire like she just happened to walk in while out for a nature hike. It’s most definitely her. I can also see that she has reappropriated her pistol, since it’s currently back in her hip holster.

  It’s not a good sign for things to come.

  I try to move on this mattress of rusted and broken springs, but I can’t.

  I’m hogtied. For all they know, I’m still out cold, still sleeping it off. So here’s the dilemma: I don’t see my daughter anywhere, which tells me she is still being held against her will in some as of yet unidentified location.

  Here’s the other dilemma: I’m having a tough time trying to decide whether or not my lovely bride is currently also being held against her will, or if she’s … how shall I put this? … on the side of the enemy.

  Here’s what I’m going to do: I’m going to lie here as still as possible. I’m going to suffer through my blistering headache, and I’m going to listen to what they are saying. Then I’m going to make a determination as to my next move based upon the evidence gathered. Which, at this point, appears to be decidedly fucked up.

  “It wasn’t supposed to go down like this, Penny,” Walton gripes, the frustration oozing from his pores. He’s sucking hard on a cigarette, his round face red from the blood vessels that wor
m their way inside his skin. “You should have had the access code by now. We should have Rabuffo’s stash. All of it. That’s what you promised when we agreed to enter into this shit storm. We wait any longer, the feds are gonna take it, if they haven’t already.” He’s stomping his foot. “Christ, Penny, didn’t you get the text? I can make all this go away. Just deliver the access codes like you promised. Like we planned. You’re playing both sides of the street here.”

  “The darned feds haven’t taken over yet, Chief,” Giselle interjects. “That crap they showed on the television news this morning with the FBI busting Rabuffo was total federal bureau propaganda. Theatrics and politics. Rabuffo is still the property of the Albany cops while they process him. But I’ll bet dollars to Dunkin Donuts, that situation ends this afternoon.”

  “Which means what?” Penny says bitterly from down on her stool.

  “It means that by the dinner hour tonight,” Giselle goes on, “you’re going to see a whole bunch of men and women dressed in cheap suits and windbreakers bearing the letters FBI crossing the yellow APD Do-Not-Enter crime scene ribbon, while they tear the Rabuffo estate apart.”

  Walton tosses the cigarette into the fire, turns his attention to Giselle.

  He says, “She was supposed to have worked the damn code out of that muscle-head numb nuts by yesterday afternoon. It wasn’t supposed to go this far. Shit, he shot back at our chopper. You don’t fucking shoot back at a police helo. Goes against the goddamned rules.”

  Penny stands. “They shot at him first. They blew up the kitchen, for Christ sakes. Jesus, Walton, he’s my husband and he’s been through hell and back. Isn’t it enough that you’re using my daughter?”

  “No,” Walton sneers, “it’s not enough. How’s that grab ya? She’s perfectly fine. She’s got the run of my trailer, all the video games she wants to play, all the pizza she can eat.”

  “You give her back to me, you son of a bitch,” Penny snaps. “You probably have her locked up in a cage, you creep. You creep son of a bitch.”

  Walton takes a step toward my wife, his right hand raised like he’s going to slap her.

  “Darn it, Chief!” Giselle scorns, “That’s enough.”

  Walton lowers his hand, stares back into the fire.

  “We need the codes from your husband, Penny,” Giselle goes on, her demeanor softer, less demanding. “And we sort of need them now. Before it’s too late.”

  “Too late,” Penny grouses. “That why you tried to blow us to smithereens with that helicopter?”

  Giselle turns to Walton, sneers at him.

  “That police helicopter is the Chief’s overly zealous and testosterone-charged support staff nearly messing everything up for us. Isn’t that right, Chief ?”

  “They were only doing their job,” he says. “Or what they think of as their job. They could have been killed when our killer shot back at them. That would be on him. Not me.”

  … He’s got to be joking …

  Giselle refocuses on my wife.

  “There’s simply too darned much at stake at this point, Penny,” she says. “You see, we’re not career criminals here. We’re nice, peaceful, country people. But when offered a fortune that can only come your way once in a lifetime, you make amends, and you postpone your morals for a while. How did Mr. Shakespeare put it? ‘Taketh now or lose it forever more.’”

  “What if he doesn’t know any codes?” Penny sneers. “He’s been knocked out twice in twenty-four hours. What if he’s lost his memory? Or what the hell, maybe Rabuffo changed them after Sid was put in prison.”

  “Oh, Sid knows them,” Walton jumps in. “I know for a fact Mr. Muscle Head killer knows them. And he’s not braindead yet. And as for Rabuffo changing the codes, we thought that over already. We’re banking on the very distinct possibility he didn’t change them, because why bother if Sid’s going away for a hundred years or more.”

  “Okay, so on the off chance Rabuffo didn’t change them once Sid was released from prison,” Penny goes on, “how can you be so sure my husband still knows the codes?”

  “Because I know a man who knows the real deal. A man who used to be as close to your killer husband as a blood brother.” Walton looks at his wristwatch. “And that man should be here any minute to extract the codes to Rabuffo’s vault once and for all. Someone who lives and thrives on dirty work.”

  Maybe a minute later, I make out the sound of a four-by-four vehicle or truck pulling up outside the cabin. I can hear a commotion as not one, but several people exit the vehicle.

  “Keep your disgusting hands off me,” comes a voice I immediately recognize, even if it’s a voice I have not heard in many, many years. “You’re not the boss of me, you weirdos.”

  “We’re just doing our jobs,” says another voice. A man’s voice. Also, a familiar voice.

  “Leave him alone, Burt,” a woman speaks. “We were told to drive him all the way out here, and that’s as far as it goes.”

  “Don’t back-talk me, Claudia,” Burt says. “I know what I’m doing. And I’m not exactly in the best of moods now that I lost my iPhone on the beach.”

  “You should know better than to leave it sitting out on the beach chair, dummy.”

  “Don’t you call me ‘dummy.’”

  The two people who watched over my daughter on the beach before she was taken away enter into the cabin. Burt and Claudia Stevens. I gaze upon them with my eyes half closed. She’s just as smiley as she was yesterday morning in her yellow summer-weight sundress, and he’s just as portly in his Bermuda shorts, yellow knee-high socks, and pink Izod polo shirt.

  They have someone with them. The man they were supposedly transporting to this off-the-grid location. I recognize him as someone, like Detective Giselle, who should be six feet under by now. Or someone I assumed was buried a long, long time ago.

  He is Singh. And Singh lives.

  CHAPTER 35

  MY HEART IS pounding. My headache is long gone. It’s replaced, instead, with fury. Or maybe I’m just dreaming all this up. I’m yanking on the duct tape cuffs. There’s a couple of bed springs that have snapped in half over the years and pierced the old, rotted mattress material. I’m fiercely rubbing the tape against them. I don’t know if I’m doing any good, but it’s worth the shot.

  I’ve known Singh almost my entire life, only now, I feel like I am looking at him for the first time. He’s not the muscular, dark-haired macho athlete I knew in high school. Instead, his left hand is missing, no doubt where the bullets from the APD severed it as he and Wemps were making their escape from the bungalow that housed the Chinese family they slaughtered in cold blood. A pinkish-purple hypertrophic scar runs diagonally across his face, crossing over his lips like an earthquake fault, and his left eye is presumably missing, since there’s a black pirate patch covering it. As for the dark hair, it’s long gone, replaced by a scarred, egg head scalp.

  He turns to me. I’m quick to shut my eyes all the way, feign sleep.

  “There he is,” Singh says. “Jeeze, I haven’t laid eyes, or eye … get it? … on my old buddy in over a decade. In fact, he probably thinks I’m dead. Last I saw him, a whole lot of bullets were plugging me with a whole lot of daylight. I actually died on the operating table. But that’s when good ole’ Mr. Rabuffo stepped in, paid off whoever had to be paid off to pronounce me dead, and then shipped me off to his private hospital down in the basement of his mansion.”

  Singh’s got motor mouth, like he sniffed up a half dozen bumps of high-grade cocaine on the way out here. Or maybe he’s been sampling Rabuffo’s crystal meth now that the crime kingpin is no longer around to watch the store.

  “That’s some story, Mr. Singh,” Giselle says. “So why is it you don’t know the codes to access the Rabuffo vault like your old friend Sidney does?”

  I slowly open my eyes again, enough so I can make out the expression on Singh’s messed-up face. It’s not all that easy to tell, what with that purple scar planted in the middle of it, but if I
had to guess, I would interpret the look as one of scorn.

  “That’s because I wasn’t Rabuffo’s favorite. I didn’t have the education like the almost doc here did. I didn’t have the boyish good looks, the nice laugh, the all-around good-guy-caught-up-in-gambling-circumstances-beyond-his-control, like our passed-out boy Sidney did. I didn’t look good in one of his Rabuffo’s Custom Clothier’s one-thousand-dollar suits.” He shrugs his still beefy shoulders. “Hell, I don’t know, maybe Rabuffo was queer for him.”

  Walton approaches Singh.

  “Well, here’s what you’re going to do, Singh,” he says. “You’re gonna extract all the information we need from O’Keefe. More precisely, the code to that fancy safe he’s got stored inside the basement of his big-ass mansion. And then we’re all gonna take a ride and go get it.”

  “And my husband?” Penny says. “What happens to Sidney when this is finished?”

  Walton turns to her, laughs.

  “That’s really rich, Penny,” he snipes. “You had a chance to do things your way and we’ve got nothing to show for it. Now, all of a sudden you have feelings for the hubby? You kidding me? Wasn’t this your idea in the first place?” He holds up both his hands like he’s issuing a time-out. “Oh wait, excuse me. Allow me to correct myself. This wasn’t your idea. It was your boyfriend’s idea. Your boyfriend’s plan.”

  Penny’s face drains while my blood begins to boil, and my heart breaks.

  “Leave Joel out of this, Walton,” she says bitterly. “You hear me? He has his reputation to think about.”

  Okay, stop the world, I wanna blow it up. Or maybe I should find a way to blow myself up. How could I have not seen through the forest of lies and deceit before now? How could I not have realized something was entirely wrong the moment Penny had no problem leaving our eleven-year-old daughter alone on the beach? Maybe I hadn’t had sex with a woman in ten years, but that didn’t mean I had to do it right then and there. We might have waited another day, until we got home.