by J. A. Kerley
“I knew t’at goddamn line gonna bust like t’at …”
He heard voices approaching from a cross passage and flattened behind a thick vertical pipe. Two grimy crewman passed by. One was small and skinny. The other was large and slouch-shouldered, a blue-ribbon beer belly drooping over his belt.
“Put nudder collar on it,” said the larger man in a Swedish-accented voice. “Wish t’damn hell sometime we fix t’ings down here. Got plenty money we spend on t’goddamn tiny girlfriends but none goddamn money come down to here.”
“Sssssh,” the smaller man cautioned. “Ain’t bloody smart talkin’ like that.”
Sandhill pressed against the wall, ready to fight, but the men passed by. Sandhill heard a third voice, electronic. He crept to the cross corridor, leaned out, and saw the large man pull a walkie-talkie from his pocket.
“Yah, Captain, we on our way t’there now. Yes, sir. Fix up tight, ten minutes.” The man jammed the transceiver back in his pocket. “Goddamn once I’d like to do t’job without t’goddamn captain ever’ two minutes on t’radio, goddamn …”
The voices stopped somewhere near. Sandhill heard a clanging of metal, and the voices grew closer again. The pair walked by in the opposite direction, one shouldering a length of pipe, the other a huge wrench. They’d gone to a tool room, Sandhill figured.
When the men were distant Sandhill crept to the cross corridor. His feet again became ensnared. He growled at the ball of twine at his feet and kicked it aside.
Two dozen feet down the corridor was a mechanics substation. Sandhill saw two large tables, one a pipe-bending station, the other covered with sheet metal and duct tape. A work bench held balls of baling twine and the plastic strapping used in shipping.
Sandhill jammed a roll of duct tape in his pants, figuring it would be helpful in false-taping his wrists and ankles if necessary. The only tools were huge wrenches and hammers like sledges. A wheeled arc-welding station sat in a corner beside a bandsaw. Sandhill checked under the tables—more sheet metal. He lifted a sheet of metal and something small fell to the floor.
A knife. Short, flat wood handle and curved blade barely three inches long. But it was sharp, probably used to cut banding. As he dropped it in his pocket a shape in the dust of the tabletop pushed his heart into his throat: a tiny handprint.
Sandhill gently touched the print, the palm a soft crescent, tiny dots where fingers had rested. A dozen inches from the handprint, Sandhill noted a dustless shape on the tabletop, a spot where a small round object had recently sat, an object as large in diameter as a grapefruit.
Or one of the balls of twine.
“Tell me that part again, Mr King.”
“What part, Jacy?”
“How They-soos undid the string in the cave of the Minute Hour. That’s the coolest thing I ever heard of.”
The engines increased in volume and Sandhill suspected the Petite Angel was heading for open sea. Knife in his pocket, tape in his pants, he slipped from the room. The aspirin was dulling the aches in his leg and side and head.
He returned to the ball of twine he’d kicked aside and traced the string across the greasy floor. He followed it around a corner, then another, staying low, moving as fast as possible.
“Goddamn the t’ings, never t’right goddamn size …”
The men were coming his way again. Sandhill dropped the string and looked wildly around—no pipes to tuck behind, just a long stretch of corridor behind him.
The steps grew closer. Sandhill saw a metal door to his right. He pulled it open and jumped inside, his heart racing. A bathroom. No, a head. There was a metal urinal against the gray wall and two stalls, one door closed, the other swinging wide.
Sandhill slipped into the open stall. He pushed the stall door shut and sat on the can. The door to the corridor opened. Footsteps crossed the floor to the urinal. A zipper fell and he heard liquid hitting metal.
Followed by a low grunt just inches away.
Sandhill looked beneath the divider and saw a foot in a blue canvas shoe, a sneaker. There was someone in the adjoining stall. The man in the stall grunted again, almost a moan. Sandhill hoped the guy was too busy with his unhappy bowels to want to talk. He heard the guy at the urinal finish up with a satisfied sigh, the pants rezipped.
The urinal user retreated from the room, pushed the door open. His footsteps paused. The man in the stall grunted again.
“Heinz?” The man at the door laughed. “T’at you in there, Heinz? I tol’ you t’at goddamn sauerkraut gonna kill you from t’inside out. Nex’ time you goin’ goddamn listen, eh?”
Another bark of laughter and the door closed. Sandhill flushed and escaped before the moaning man beside him started a conversation.
He picked up the string again, hand-overhanding along its path. It led back to the hold. He paused at the entrance to the cavernous area and listened; nothing but water against the hull and the basso grind of the ship’s engines.
The string continued past dozens of stacked containers. It disappeared beneath the closed door of an orange container on the bottom row. Unlike the others, Sandhill saw no papers attached, customs forms or bills of lading or whatnot.
“Jacy?” he whispered in the slit between the doors. “Jacy.”
Nothing.
He tapped the steel with his knuckles. “Jacy, it’s Conner Sandhill.”
A thumping from inside, like heels beating on floor.
Chapter 53
“Jacy, you’ve got to be quiet,” Sandhill said for the third time. “They’ll hear you. Shhhh.”
Jacy kept crying, a frenzy of terror and joy tumbling from her mouth, body shaking with the release, hands clutching at Sandhill as if trying to pull herself within his rib cage.
“Jacy, shush. Jacy. Please.”
She cried louder, the crying rolling downhill and getting faster and louder. Her cries seemed to fill the hold.
“Jacy, dammit. Shut up. They’ll hear us. You’ve got to be …”
“I want my mama. I want my mama help me mama help me …”
“Jacy. Your mama’s not here. She can’t be. She sent me.”
“I want my mama!”
“She’s not here, Jacy. Please.”
Jacy wailed. Sandhill pulled the girl tight to him. He rocked her on the floor of the echoing metal box.
“I WANT MY—”
Sandhill laid his hand over Jacy’s mouth. Put his lips to her ear.
“I’m your daddy, Jacy. Listen to me. I’m your father.”
A pause in the crying. “W-What?” she asked. “What did you say?”
“I’m your father, Jacy. I’ve come to take us home.”
Harry Nautilus was snoring when Ryder shook his arm.
“Harry, wake up,” Ryder whispered. “Come on.”
“Carson? What are you—”
“Shhhhhh, dammit. She’ll hear—Sophie.”
Ryder saw his partner’s dressing had been removed. The IV equipment had been taken away.
Nautilus checked the bedside clock. “It’s past midnight. How’d you get in here?”
“Sophie needs a better lock on the back door. Listen, Squill’s dead.”
“Dead? What the hell hap—”
Ryder clamped his hand over Nautilus’s mouth. “Shhhhh! He was found in Sandhill’s apartment. All signs point to Sandhill, and everyone in law enforcement for five states around is looking for him.”
Ryder lifted his hand from his partner’s mouth. “And the girls?” Nautilus whispered, his eyes huge.
“We tracked down the guys taking the girls, two brothers. We found one in his apartment, tortured. He died a few minutes later; shock, I guess. The other brother’s in the wind or dead. I’d bet on the latter. I think the girls have already been transferred, and the buyer’s eliminating witnesses. There are still teams looking for the girls and the missing brother, but …” Ryder shook his head.
“Do you know where Sandhill is, Carson?”
Ryder walked toward t
he window. He looked into the night for several seconds, then turned back to Nautilus.
“Out there somewhere, trying to figure out what’s happening. There’s something else, bro, something troubling. Real troubling.”
“What?”
“It was Duckworth that found Squill at Sandhill’s place. Said he went there because he had a bad feeling in his gut.”
“Duckworth? Intuition?”
“It gets weirder. Bidwell, Duckworth and I were at Sandhill’s, Ducks and me at one another’s throats, me defending Sandhill, Ducks calling him a thief. I made some remark about Sandhill protecting the evidence.”
“And?”
“Ducks got this crazy look on his face and screamed, ‘Why can’t you people leave all this shit alone?’”
Nautilus froze.
Ryder said, “Those were your assailant’s words, right, Harry? ‘Details. details, details. Why can’t you people leave all this shit alone?’”
“To the goddamn word,” Nautilus whispered.
A motorcycle roared down the street, backfiring. Ryder winced. He waited for the bike to pass, stuck his head into the hall and listened for Sophie. Nothing. He tiptoed back to Nautilus, now sitting, his eyes alert, charged.
“Listen, Harry. You had some cases on your desk a few days before you got assaulted, right?”
“Cold cases. You were prepping for a trial, and I had a lighter-than-usual caseload. Tom Mason dropped off some old unsolved cases for me to look at.”
“What were the cases about?”
“I never opened the jackets. They sat on my desk a few days and then I got taken down. Being cold, the files would have gone back to Property.”
Ryder nodded. He stood and pulled Mayor Philips’s keys from his pocket, shaking through them until he found the ignition key to the Prius.
Nautilus said, “If you’re going where I think you’re going, grab my shoes from the closet over there. I could use a shirt and pants, too.”
Sandhill set his daughter down. “I’m going to leave now, Jacy.”
“NO!”
He pressed his finger to her lips. “I won’t be far, Jacy. I’m in a big box, too. About as far away as four cars end-to-end. Pretty close, right?”
She nodded, not pleased, but dealing with it.
Sandhill lifted her chin. “It’s OK to be scared, but don’t fall apart. You know the difference?”
“Falling apart is crying and screaming. Like I did before.”
Sandhill stood, patted her shoulder in the near-dark. She had stopped trembling. “I’ll be back in a while. Everything’s gonna be fine. I promise.”
“Are you going to take off what’s holding my arms and legs?”
“If the bad people come back, it has to look like I haven’t been here, right? That’ll keep us both safe. I’m even going to have to put the tape back over your mouth.”
“So it looks like you haven’t been here.”
“You got it, girl.”
Sandhill gently reapplied the tape and kissed Jacy’s forehead. He managed a smile, shot her a thumbs-up, then stood. Sandhill looked back as the light of the open door fell over Jacy. Her eyes were calm with trust. Leaving the trailer was the hardest thing he had ever done.
When Mattoon returned to Sandhill’s container, he entered alone. Atwan remained at the opened doors, mistrustful, the weapon alert in his hands. The extent of Mattoon’s psychosis Sandhill couldn’t judge, but Sandhill had seen enough peds during his years with Sex Crimes to know Mattoon was a true pedophile as opposed to an “abductor” personality. The man was incapable of viewing his actions as harmful; in his mind he verged on saintly, beatified through his self-perceived adoration of young girls. There was no way to subvert the carcinomic delusion, only to harness it and ride.
Mattoon stood above Sandhill, arms crossed, feet planted.
“I am a wealthy man, Mr Sandhill. A man with much to give. Some would say—and I humbly submit they’re correct—that a life with me would be one of boundless beauty. Travel, luxury, joy. I am by nature a gentle man, a romantic, a lover of beauty. Having so much I ask very little. Indeed, I have but one need.”
“Jacy.”
“I prefer to call her Dearest. Or will, after the consecration of the ceremony. For now she’s Lorelei, her wandering name.”
“What cere—” Sandhill caught himself, looked to Atwan, staring intently into the container. Mattoon nodded to the man. “It’s all right, Tenzel, I’ll briefly accept questions from Mr Sandhill.”
“What ceremony?”
“The ceremony of combining, sir, conjoining. A celebration of joy times joy.”
“Wedding.”
“Similar, in your limited perspective, but far more meaningful. A ceremony cast in purity, chastity, untainted and expectant love. Tell me, what did you think when your daughter disappeared?”
“Jacy was dead. Or soon would be.”
“But, as you see, not only is she alive, she’s preparing for a magical journey. Your fears have been transformed, night into day. Is that not correct?”
Mattoon looked to Sandhill expectantly, as if for validation.
“I know what you’re thinking, Mr Sandhill, the base nature of your thoughts. Shame on you. Your culturally biased mind is dwelling on the physical nature of the union. Like so many others, you’re haunted by misplaced anxieties. My motives are pure, my soul is pure. Women open like flowers, Mr Sandhill, far earlier than expected. Only the purest know and understand this, and none better than I. Which is why I have come to you with an offer.”
Sandhill nodded, choosing his words carefully, playing to the needs of the man’s delusion.
“You want me to somehow help in your … quest for purity?”
Mattoon crouched beside Sandhill. “Sanction the union. Give your daughter to me in the ceremony. Lift her to me and encourage her to enwrap me in her arms. Help in her crossing.”
Sandhill affected a long moment of thought. “What of me? What do I get?”
“Gentle departure, Mr Sandhill. I had told Tenzel that, before you were sent to the bottom of the sea, he could savor several hours—days, perhaps—with you …”
Sandhill turned his head to Atwan, grinning at the end of the container, a malicious engine of sickness and depravity. Mattoon continued. “But if you give your daughter to me at my ceremony, I promise your death will be swift and without pain.”
Sandhill closed his eyes. “All I can ask, I guess.”
“It’s more than you know, sir. Tenzel is a man of extreme appetites.”
“What do you want me to do?”
Mattoon smiled and stood. “You will soon be called for. Your restraints removed. You’ll receive a bath, fresh clothes. The captain will perform the ceremony. My manservant and Tenzel will gather as proper witnesses. The magical occasion will present itself, and I trust you will perform your half of the bargain admirably. Can I count on that?”
“I’ll be ready,” Sandhill promised.
Mattoon left the container. Atwan slammed the doors closed and followed. When the pair were climbing from the hold, Mattoon said, “Have Mr Ghobali find decent garments for our guest, Tenzel. He’s about the size of Borsky in the engine room. Make Sandhill clean and presentable. Have him ready in an hour.”
“Policeman say he give away girl?”
“He has agreed, much to my delight.”
“After he give her, what?”
Mattoon turned and patted Atwan’s shoulder. “He’s yours, Tenzel. My gift to you on this beautiful day.”
Chapter 54
After the meeting with Mattoon, Sandhill studied the encounter from all sides. Purity, innocence, chastity … Jacy was an emblem, a flower of purity in Mattoon’s perverse concept of reality.
Could he tear that flower away before Mattoon’s hands closed around it?
Guards, crew, whatever, owned the topside of the ship, the decks. He had seen them through the huge hatch, hustling through their tasks, occasionally staring do
wn into the tight nest of containers where Sandhill crouched. Their constant presence had quashed his initial thought: grab Jacy, make for a lifeboat, get into the sea.
Until he imagined the noise such a project would make—tarps flapping in the wind, racheting chains, a hull slapping water. And did he have any idea how to lower a lifeboat?
None.
Think.
He’d considered radioing for help, but that took a radio. There seemed no such devices below save for the crew’s short range handhelds. He’d shot glances through the hatch to the ship’s superstructure, bristling with antennae. Chances were the radio operator’s lair was up there as well, in the open, a tower he did not dare climb.
Think!
He had one weapon, an almost laughable semblance of a knife. But the short blade could wreck an eye or sever an artery. Could he conceal it beneath the pad of gauze on his ribs? Sandhill felt hope’s adrenalin sparkle through his veins until Mattoon’s words echoed in his head.
You’ll receive a bath, fresh clothes …
And thus stripped, will get a full-body search. The hard-muscled man was an insane robot, but he was efficient and wary. Mattoon said there would be four from the ship at the ceremony: Mattoon, Captain, manservant, and the monster named Tenzel.
Terrible odds. Sandhill stared at the knife in his palm. There was no way to get the implement to the bridge.
He closed his eyes against the sweat ticking into his eyes.
Think, goddammit.
Five minutes later, Sandhill pushed from the container and crept to Jacy’s metal prison. He stretched out beside her.
“I’m pretty sure of what’s going to happen, Jacy. Some of it. I have a plan. It’ll take both of us.”
“I can do anything now. With you here.”
“I’m going to need you to be very brave, like Theseus. You think you can do that?”
“I’ll be brave.”
Sandhill took a deep breath and pictured events as he hoped to shape them.
“OK. Here’s what I need for you to do …”
Ryder and Nautilus stood at the entry of the building housing the MPD’s property room. They stared into the security camera above the door and listened to the tinny voice of Leland Royce through the intercom.