Girl Who Wasn’t There

by Vincent Zandri

  “I … love … you,” I whisper. No matter what she’s done, it’s still the truth.

  She doesn’t say anything in return. Instead, she just nods.

  That’s when I jump up off the wood stool, throw myself at the gun rack, pull down the shotgun. Singh’s teary eyes go wide, his mouth agape. I plant the bead on him.

  “Oh shit,” he mumbles.

  I press the trigger. The blast nails him square in the chest, sends him flat onto his back.

  Walton goes for his sidearm. I pump a second shell into the chamber, catch him in my sights. Fire. The blast takes a chunk of his shoulder along with a sizeable portion of flesh on his fat neck. But it doesn’t stop him from drawing his semi-automatic, aiming it at me.

  Pump another round into the chamber, the spent shell ejecting. Fire again, nail him in the beer gut.

  Bastard is still alive. Still kicking.

  He presses the trigger, sends two rounds up into the roof before the laws of nature take over and his body collapses to the wood floor.

  Then comes Giselle, her semi-automatic already aimed for me, dead on. I’m too slow shifting the barrel in her direction. She presses the trigger. But nothing happens. The mechanical click of hammer meeting metal fills the cabin.

  She presses the trigger again. Just another empty click.

  Heart thumping against sternum, I pump one more live shell into the chamber, while the spent shell flies out, bouncing on the wood floor.

  “Darn it all!” she cries. “Darn, fuck, fuck, darn! It’s jammed!” Then, sensing the shotgun aimed directly at her, she works up a nervous smile. A pretty smile. “You wouldn’t shoot a woman, would you, Mr. O’Keefe? I mean, you were supposed to be a doctor, right? Isn’t there like a Hippocratic Oath? Like you’re supposed to keep me alive at all costs. No matter what. Isn’t that right … Doc?”

  The lips that form her nervous smile are trembling.

  “Don’t call me Doc,” I say.

  I press the trigger.

  Okay, I’m going to come clean here.

  I most definitely pressed the shotgun trigger. I most definitely blew something away. But it wasn’t House Detective Giselle Fontaine. I raised the barrel up just high enough that I blew a hole in the ceiling, sharp splinters of dry wood and bits of old, green moss-covered asphalt shingles raining down upon her head.

  She’s so shocked by the shotgun explosion that her face turns pale, and her knees buckle. Even Penny’s jaw drops, her eyes wide and dazed. Stunned.

  The eyes say, “How could my husband shoot a woman in cold blood? Even if she did try and shoot him first?”

  I guess that would have made me a monster in my lover’s eyes, even if I wouldn’t mind turning the shotgun on her either. But then, as much as I trained myself for survival inside concrete and razor wire prison walls—as much as I had to deal with violence or, what was worse, the promise of violence on a constant, twenty-four-seven basis—I still could never get myself to kill a woman. Especially a woman who is unarmed. Or, in this case, a gun that’s pin is malfunctioning counts as unarmed.

  Instead, here’s what I do: I once more point the shotgun barrel at the detective’s pretty, but still pale face. I tell her to drop the gun, in as calm and collected a voice I can muster. As if I were asking her to open her mouth and say, “Ahhh.”

  I then tell her to leave.

  Her knees are still trembling. She’s wearing a skirt and high-heel shoes.

  She shakes her head.

  “What do you mean leave?” she says, taking on a smirk. “Jeepers, I can’t just walk out of here dressed like this. I don’t … I’ve never gone much for hiking … I’ve never been a woods walker. How about I take Burt’s truck or Walton’s SUV?”

  I pump the shotgun, the expended shell exiting the chamber, doing a couple of midair spins before dropping to the floor.

  “Giselle,” I say, “you’ve got a choice. The next time I pull the trigger, you can die. Or you can take your chances and walk back to Lake Placid, like Little Red Riding Hood.” My eyes back on Penny. “How’s the song go again, Pen?”

  She looks like she’s about to cry again. And she is.

  “Over the river and through the woods to grandmother’s house we go …” Her voice is trembling while the tears drop down her cheeks. “But that’s not Little Red Riding hood, now that I think of it. It’s a Christmas song, I think.”

  “I stand corrected.” My eyes back on Giselle. “So, what’s it going to be, Detective? A nice hike through the Adirondack Mountains or an early grave?”

  It somehow pleases me to use this “early grave” bit. Like I’m a real gangster in some old black-and-white Cagney flick.

  She releases the pistol. It drops to the floor, dangerously close to her toes, which would have made the trek through the woods even worse. Okay, impossibly worse.

  “Alrighty then,” she says, her face suddenly taking on a scowl, like I’ve just broken up with her over dinner at some fancy restaurant. She makes her way to the open door. But before she walks out, she turns to me once more. “I truly hope you get your daughter back, Mr. O’Keefe. I truly do. But if you don’t,” she adds, “you’ll have your wife to thank for it.”

  She might as well have shot me in the stomach after all.

  “Just … go,” I say.

  She issues me a smart-ass smile, then exits the cabin, begins the long walk back through the forest to Lake Placid.

  That leaves my wife.

  Good old Penny. The beautiful apparition I married not long before doing one last job for Rabuffo. The woman who bore my one and only child. The woman whom I thought about incessantly inside the joint. The woman I’d do anything for. The woman I dreamt about. The woman for whom I kept my mouth shut, for fear that Rabuffo would kill her and our daughter.

  Now, here we are, all alone inside a cabin filled with dead people and their respective pools of crimson DNA. Her coconspirators, who concocted an operation designed initially to get me out of prison, but inevitably to reap riches like she, or her cohorts, have never before known.

  Penny looks over one shoulder, then the other.

  “You’re not going to kill me, are you, Doc?” She forces a grin. “I mean, you let Giselle go.”

  I laugh sadly, sit myself down onto the wood stool.

  “Would you do me a favor, darling?” I ask. “Bring me a knife … pretty please?”

  After hesitating for a long beat or two, she goes into the kitchen. What’s left of the kitchen, that is. She comes back out with a steak knife. I make sure to hold the shotgun on her while she hands me the blade. I snatch it from her hand, cut the tape that surrounds my ankles. My legs freed, I stand, feel the circulation reenter into my lower legs and feet.

  I toss the knife to the side.

  “Your face,” she says. “It looks … terrible.”

  “Things you gotta do in the name of what’s right, Pen,” I say, heading back over to the gun rack, pulling some shells from one of the three boxes that’s stored there, reloading the shotgun. “I’ve had worse in prison.”

  Cocking a live round into the chamber, I bend down over Singh, rip the t-shirt off his torso, wipe my face with it, toss it onto his dead face. I then dig through his pockets, find a wad of bills. I stuff them into my pocket. Shifting myself over to Walton’s body, I retrieve his wallet, pull out his license, stuff that in my pocket. I pick up his semi-automatic, thumb the magazine release, toss the pistol across the room and into the fire. I don’t bother with checking him for money. Heading over to Giselle’s piece, I grab it up off the floor, release the mag, and toss the gun into the fire along with Walton’s.

  Then, coming from out of the near distance, the sound of rotors slicing through the air. Penny and I lock eyes.

  “The chopper’s back,” I say. “Walton’s people know we’re here. Rabuffo’s people …”

  I go to the bunk bed, grab the bag with the water, food, and extra shotgun shells.

  “We still have the rifle,” Penny s
ays, cocking her head in the direction of the .30-30 leaning up against the far corner, near the spot where Burt Stevens is still bleeding out.

  “You’ve lost your right to carry a firearm,” I say.

  I grab the roll of duct tape that’s set on the top bunk. I take hold of her left wrist, yank her into me. She shrieks like I’m hurting her, but at this point I don’t give a shit.

  “Give me your other wrist,” I order.

  She just looks at me.

  “Do it,” I say. “Or I’ll break it.”

  The chopper is closing in.

  She gives me her other wrist. I wrap six layers of tape around both wrists, cut the tape off with my teeth, then place the roll into the daypack.

  “Let’s move,” I say, “before this place is surrounded by assholes who want us dead.”

  Outside, most of the clouds have cleared, and I can make out the chopper coming at us from out of the west, where the afternoon sun is shining bright now that the clouds are gone. This time the Lake Placid Village Police Department chopper is not bothering to circle the property. There are no amplified calls for me to stand down. Instead, I see the side door opening, and another riot gear clad officer pointing an automatic rifle in my direction. The rifle is equipped with a grenade launcher, just like the first time around.

  “They’re just not gonna let up,” I whisper to myself.

  Grabbing hold of Penny’s taped wrists, I drag her across the lawn to the road, toss her down into the ditch that runs the length of the logging road. The first grenade is launched, shrieks across the sky, strikes the Jeep. The vehicle explodes in a fireball of white-hot heat.

  “Why are they doing that?!” Penny shouts.

  “They want to pen me in. Destroy my mobility.” I’m watching the Huey make a one-hundred-eighty-degree turn, coming back at us. “These assholes have to be working for Walton. And I don’t mean in the capacity of serving and protecting Lake Placid.”

  A second grenade launched.

  “Get down!” I shout, throwing my torso over Penny.

  It hits Walton’s SUV. The chopper makes a third pass, and yet another grenade launched, this one taking out Burt’s truck. Then a fourth pass. The explosive smashes into the cabin, detonates. The entire building front explodes, the wood, stone, and glass debris raining like hellfire. The chopper makes another turn. This time it heads back in the direction it came from due west. After a few more seconds, it simply disappears.

  When the debris has settled, I slip myself off of Penny, stand. She, too, stands.

  “Why don’t they just kill us?” she says. “They’re destroying everything else.”

  “So long as there’s breath in my lungs, I’ve got the codes they want. They kill you, or Chloe, then I don’t want to live.”

  “So they make sure we don’t die, but they do everything they can to torture us.”

  “Something like that,” I say. “They’re your friends, after all.”

  She gives me a look that stabs at my gut.

  “That’s not even remotely fair,” she says. Then, inhaling and exhaling a deep breath, “So what’ll we do now? How the hell do we get out of this jungle without a vehicle?”

  “Good question, Pen.” Looking her up and down. At her muddy jeans and formerly white pullover tank top. At her mussed-up hair, tired and frightened eyes. “Your phone still work?”

  Wrists still bound, she manages to pat her pockets. But then shakes her head.

  “It’s still in the cabin,” she reveals.

  “Guess that answers that.”

  “So what do we do then?” she repeats. “Am I your hostage, Sidney? Is that what I am now?”

  My eyes catch the lifeless body of Claudia Stevens lying face-down in the mud. A buzzing in my pocket. My phone, on vibrate. I pull it out, flip it open. I count twelve text messages left for me over the course of a three-hour period. Messages that I never noticed until now, not with my having been passed out and the subject of a prolonged beating.

  All twelve texts say the same thing.

  HELP ME … HELP US

  The name attached to the messages is one that is very dear to my heart.

  The name is Chloe.

  CHAPTER 37

  ONCE MORE, I take hold of Penny’s wrists, help her up and out of the ditch.

  “You don’t have to hang onto me like that,” she says. “I’m not an invalid.”

  “No,” I say, releasing her. “You’re just a cheater. And that’s a hell of a lot worse.”

  I keep walking.

  “Stop right there, you bastard!” she shouts.

  I stop on a dime. Set before me, the smoldering and in some cases, burning remnants of the cabin and the three vehicles. Some of the burning cabin embers have settled onto Claudia Stevens’s back. Some in her hair.

  I turn, face my wife.

  There’s an intensity burning inside her. An anger so intense I can feel it without touching her.

  She says, “Do you have any clue what it was like for me and Chloe over these past ten years? Knowing you’d never be coming home? That my daughter’s father was a convicted murderer? Do you have any clue what it was like for Chloe to suffer through a single day of school? All those kids who made fun of her, who caused her to cry floods of tears night in and night out. Did you know I almost pulled her out of school altogether?”

  “Why didn’t you?” I ask. “You could have homeschooled her.”

  “And who was going to put food on the table, Sid? Who was going to pay for our lives?” She pounds her chest with her fist. “I have a college degree. I even have my teacher’s certificate. I could have made a nice life for Chloe and me. But after your arrest, no one would employ me. I’d get a nice smile, a ‘We’re happy to keep your CV on file,’ but I could see beyond their smiles. I could see their contempt. Their hatred.” She wipes tears from her eyes with the backs of her hands. “Four people … four innocent people were killed in that house, Sid, and I know you were only the driver, and I’ve always trusted you on that. But it totally screwed up our lives. I was lucky to pick up what hours I could at the supermarket as a cashier. And even then, it was because the manager would stop at nothing to get his hands in my pants. So yeah, when Joel made a pass, I allowed it. When he told me he had a way of finally making some money, not for me, but for Chloe, and that it would mean your release, I jumped at it. I didn’t give a damn how illegal the plan was or how dangerous, or what creeps it involved. I was desperate and at the end of my rope. I just wanted a future for our daughter, and …”

  Her voice trails off.

  “And what, Pen?” I beg.

  “And I wanted her father to be there for her.”

  My eyes take in the destroyed cabin and the bodies now covered in smoldering rubble. Whatever fire has started is quickly burning out from the heavy rains that soaked everything earlier on, including the grass and the greenery surrounding the place. There’s the acrid smell of burning oil and plastic from the destroyed vehicles. My face and head hurt. But my heart hurts more.

  Oh Christ, should I forgive Penny, just like that? Allow her to walk right back into my heart and head, like she never sold me out, never slept with Joel behind my back? Like she’s had nothing to do with Chloe’s disappearance?

  Maybe she’s right.

  Maybe I made my own bed when I decided to take on that last job with Rabuffo. Maybe I’m just as guilty as Singh and Wemps in the murder of that Chinese family. Maybe I’ve been fooling myself all this time by insisting that I was only the driver. Just because I didn’t pull a trigger didn’t mean I hadn’t had a hand in killing them.

  Can I blame Penny for wanting a life for Chloe? For wanting her to have a future where she didn’t have to beg and scrounge for every single dime? A future without her father? Maybe in the end, Penny did the right thing for me. At least, that might have been her intention. How was she to know it would all go so wrong? That Chloe would suffer?

  Once more, I flip the phone open. I type.


  I’M COMING FOR YOU, CHLOE

  I wait for a response. When it doesn’t come, I close the phone, place it back inside my pocket.

  “We need to go,” I say.

  “Go where?” Penny says.

  Then, in my pocket, the phone vibrating. Pulling it out, I flip the top.

  COME QUICK

  “We’re going to get Chloe back,” I say, heart in my throat.

  Penny shakes her head, hard.

  “But that’s just it, Sid,” she says. “I don’t know where they took her. I mean, I never knew they were going to take her in the first place. You have to believe me.”

  I reach into my pocket, pull out Walton’s driver’s license. My gut speaks to me and I feel ice cold shoot into my veins.

  “Whether I believe you or not doesn’t matter anymore,” I say. “What matters now is I think I know where we’ll find her.”

  Together, we start walking the logging road in the direction of Lake Placid.

  CHAPTER 38

  IT’S GETTING DARK by the time we reach the road.

  “Do you really have to keep me tied up like this, Sid?” Penny asks. “I can barely walk as it is. It’s easier when I can swing my arms.”

  She’s breathing hard, perspiring. She’s dead on her feet. She’s my wife. For now, anyway. But then, she will always be the mother of my daughter, no matter what. Right now, we both want the same thing. To get our daughter back. Maybe, once that’s done, we can turn ourselves in to the Albany police, or the FBI or who knows what, and put this thing behind us. Maybe, just maybe, I won’t have to go back to prison if all goes well. That is, if we both tell the truth and nothing but the whole damned truth.

  I pat my jeans pockets. I don’t have a knife. Taking hold of her hands, I bend at the knees. Teeth still aching from Singh’s beating, I bite into the tape, then tear it in two. I rip the tape away from her wrists as fast as possible to minimize the pain.