Ransom X

by a b

  “It will bring out your wild side.”

  “That’s the only side I’ve got, sister. So, you’re not here for a tour?” his voice rose slightly to keep from affecting a know it all tone.

  “Have you seen this girl?” The picture of Darci, creased from days of changing hands gave it a fittingly vulnerable look. Her pierced features looked like they might actually lift off the page in a kind of Braille that only other rebellious souls understood. She was an easy ID.

  “She stayed in the Edmunds’ cottage for a few days – ate the hospitality cookies three times a day. Pretty, but frayed, same expression on her face, like the tread of an old shoe.” He said, staring at the picture.

  Wagner said, “I need to talk to the Edmunds boy.”

  “I’ll do anything if you can tell me how you get your complexion so creamy smooth.” Wagner cocked her head to the side and they had a deal.

  Chauncy was about to play a part in the investigation, in his eyes, he was aiding and abetting a federal agent who had better skin tone than anyone he’d met.

  Wagner tapped on the door of cottage 3B, the penthouse unit that spanned two of the lower units with panoramic views of the freeway and local strip mall in the distance. A voice, groggy and half-stoned crackled over the intercom. “Who is it dude?”

  “FBI. Bud.” She couldn’t help herself. Motion within the cottage cranked up like a blender working up to speed in an immediate, directionless whirlwind.

  Wagner peeked in the pane of glass beside the tall wooden door. The early afternoon light shone off the textured walls and vaulted ceilings of the interiors, looking like a swirl of vanilla ice cream on a hot summer’s day. A flash of flannel crossed the kitchen entrance, which could have easily been a trick of the light or maybe the blink of an eye for how fast it happened. Wagner knew that the occupants were on the run. She casually unholstered her weapon and walked back down the steps.

  On the other side of the building, sneakers hit greenbelt slipping in a rotary motion that started with a cartoon-like leap from the lower balcony. Darren was the first to his feet struggling toward the entrance to the underground parking garage only yards away without looking back to see Bone struggling to his feet. His face was covered with mud after having slipped and landed in one of the marsh-like areas of one of the overactive brass sprinkler heads.

  Darren waited for him steps inside the garage with a very tangible need. “Keys, tell me you got the keys. Dude, you’re bleeding.”

  Blood trickled down the brim of his nose; his tongue darted out to taste it, in a move meant to gross out his brother. Unfortunately, Bone had forgotten that his face was also caked with mud - a fact that his taste buds reminded him of with a sticky dirt frosting effect. Darren smiled as he doubled over spitting his mistake into the dark corners.

  “Dumbass.” He chided.

  All was forgiven seeing the keys emerge from his brother’s shredded cut off pants pocket. “Let’s go.”

  Darren darted around the Lexus back bumper and hit the keyless entry button unlocking all of the doors. He reached for the handle but found a large hospitable hand blocking his entry. It belonged to Chauncy. The other hand grabbed him by the scruff of his neck. “Running off?”

  The clicking of Wagner’s heels on the rigid concrete floor of the parking structure was calculatedly slow, letting her approach grow in the minds of the two boys until her stature visibly increased. She looked over the pair with a serious expression. Neither one of them would look at her. Bone’s eyes darted around like they were following the movements of a bird in a cage. His mask of mud and turf a sharp contrast to his large white eyeballs.

  Wagner detected the stale smell of pot on the boy’s pajamas as she split between them walking toward Chauncy, who stood holding up a set of car keys. The keys changed hands with a loud clank.

  Darren finally got up the nerve to say something. “This is complete –”

  Wagner cut him off. “Failing to respond to a federal agent is a serious matter. Running from or evading an agent who is pursuing you as a principal witness comes with jail time.”

  Bone found his tongue, “Our dad’s a lawyer.”

  Wagner snapped back “My boss is the head of the FBI.”

  Darren’s jaw looked like the hinge had dropped out completely. It hung at an angle, his mouth searching for a response. Chauncy broke in with a chuckle, so irregular it sounded like an echo even before it hit the concrete garage walls. Wagner had asked him to box in the kids’ car, now she was putting the same fences around their options. Pretty soon, if she spoke with the right authority, the ideas would solidify around them until they were more effective than a jail cell. The adolescent brain can invent no end of its own torturous confines if nudged toward a blossoming future despair.

  “We don’t know his name.” Bone offered.

  “Shut up dude.” Darren replied.

  “Whose name?”

  “The guy who gets us the pot.” Wagner was dumbstruck, but to Bone it must have seemed like she needed convincing because he added. “You know, Jerry.”

  “Dude.” His brother conceded.

  “I thought you didn’t know his name.” Wagner followed.

  “We don’t, lady.” Stone offered not realizing his blunder.

  She countered, “You don’t know Jerry?”

  “Whoah.”

  “I’m not here for Jerry.”

  “What do you want?” Darren leaned forward into the light, flashed a smile. He had a kind of bumbling warmth that Wagner hadn’t given him credit for earlier. He brushed a long lock of hair off his forehead and slicked it back into the flow of his long hair. For a second, he almost seemed like a person who was exactly his age, but nowadays no one over the age of twelve could possibly be like that. They all have to seem wiser, or more discontent, gifted or troubled than the generation before them. “Officer babe, we’re clean. Hey, this is me being nice.”

  Wagner sneered a half cocked smile aimed to threaten the boy. Defiant laughter went through the Darren; he wasn’t stepping down, so Wagner walked over. Within inches of his face she remarked, “I like the nose ring.” She grabbed the stud that dug a trench between the septum of his nostrils. A plaintive howl of discomfort and embarrassment filled the garage. Bone watched, laughing and bleeding.

  A car took that moment to pull in; Wagner changed her grip so that it looked like she was playfully tweaking his nose, when really it was rotating the piercing.

  “God, please, stop. Alright, we’re sorry, whatever.” The list of things to say to make her quit flowed almost randomly from his mouth. Wagner didn’t hear a single one.

  “How about I wear this eyebrow piercing on my index finger.” She jammed her finger into the hoop, and then pulled it out an inch, stretching the skin above his eyebrow and bringing it into perhaps the most thoughtful expression of his life. “Or my middle finger.” The hoop fit on her finger, now she was effectively controlling his face like a bit controls the movement of the head of a horse. All the while flipping him off for his troubles.

  “This is me being nice.” She said.

  Within five minutes, she had them vying with each other for who could be the most helpful. The showdown had saved her probably three hours in a police interrogation room, and innumerable headaches with their father, the lawyer. A wink in Chauncy’s direction was an invitation for him to leave. She was ready to go to work.

  “We met like you said.”

  “Stealing? Why were you stealing anything?” Wagner said looking at the gleaming Lexus key ring in her hand.

  Bone cut in “That lady at the Gas and Loaf totally asks for it.” Bone didn’t have the sense to filter his honesty, and an odd companionship between stupidity and honor.

  Wagner recalled how her conversation with the clerk from the Gas and Loaf had pushed her to steal a refill on a cappuccino – one that she didn’t even want, for that matter.

  Her gaze swung back to Darren. “And you started a sexual relationship?”


  “I liked her.” Darren said protectively.

  This wasn’t what Wagner was expecting, usually women like Darci chose men who can hardly conceive of sentiment. It makes them feel more comfortable with the shabby treatment they ultimately get.

  Darren’s greasy hair was the constant preoccupation of his skinny fingers, pushing the coiff around, searching for a way to hide behind it. His story came out halting every once in a while, like he was letting the other people in the story catch up to his thoughts, or maybe he was just skipping like a record back into the groove in his head where he could still hear the echoing of his own words.

  Darren described the way they’d hooked up after the gas station. She became a regular at the gate, and at the hospitality room buzzer. He offered to get her a key once, but she’d dismissed it by saying something cute like “Fuck that, I stop coming if I’m either welcome or expected.”

  “I should have known right then.”

  “What?”

  “She was holding back.” His voice took on an adolescent approximation of a sage-like quality. “Just like when you’re working a new trick on the board, if you hold something back, that’s when you get hurt. If you’re all in, you’ll answer the bell after using your head as a friction brake on a gravel road, just to get that last ride. You get me?” His speech had a ring of familiarity to it, he probably used with all the girls. Wagner processed the boy, and played along.

  “Yeah, that’s deep. And she held back, where did that take her?” pressing him to return to Darci.

  Darren forgot entirely the position he was in, “Bet you never had anyone hold back with you.”

  If she had been able to escape the absurdity of the moment she would have recalled several relationships, all of them ended by her. It was always the same, face-to-face meeting with a different handsome young man who no longer held her interest – interest wasn’t right – they had simply lost their relevance in her life.

  Wagner flexed a lean, iron tricep and pulled Darren to his feet. “I don’t have time for games.”

  “Jesus, lame, hold on.” Again words spilled out without connection, “I was getting to that.”

  Wagner turned away from him and withdrew far enough into the shadows of the garage to become a faint outline.

  “We had fun, she told me about how her parents died in the war – um – you know, the last one.” An obvious history buff. “That she’d hitched a ride to Provo, and that she was waiting for a friend to join her before going down to Mexico. I thought it was a girl friend, cause you don’t tell your boyfriend about another boyfriend, but then something strange happened, and now I’m not so sure.”

  A snicker in the corner broke the silence. Bone, muddy, bloody and giggling at the misfortune of his brother. “She got you, man.” Wagner began to wonder what would count for strange among these brothers.

  “I’m going to meet her at the Kmart deli for an Icee and some fries, and I wait about twenty minutes and go out to have a smoke and wait some more outside. I’m not a patsy, but I think maybe she’s asleep in one of the dressing rooms so I ask some of the Kmart crowd if they’ve seen a girl like her. And one of them says that he was smoking in the loading area about ten minutes back and he saw a girl in a van.” A squeal erupted from his brother expecting the next tidbit of the story. “Shut up.”

  “I come around the corner and see her in the passenger seat talking to this old biker-fatty.”

  “Why do you say biker?” Wagner asked.

  “Tats, belly and beard – and something he said. Anyway she kicks her leg over him and they start to rock the van.”

  A whistle through Bone’s nose as he began to convulse in laughter. “And he watched, the whole thing. He waited till they were done before going up. Classic.”

  “I was fucking being polite.”

  “They were fucking, you were being polite.” Came from his brother.

  Wagner could see that the truth of the matter was that he hadn’t known what to do. And the intervening time hadn’t supplied him with any better answer than the one he’d had on that day.

  “I got angry and I banged on the van door.”

  “After they were finished.”

  “They opened the van door – He was doing up his pants. She introduced him as her uncle before I could even get pissed off. She was so smug and formal. Then he lumbered out and told me to stay the fuck away from her, and that if I didn’t, he knew my name. She could hear the way he was threatening me and she just laughed.” He turned on his brother’s laughter like it was some distant echo of hers.

  “Dude, shut the fuck up.” Bone wasn’t quite ready to stop, but he managed to lower the volume. “That’s when the biker guy talked about being on a short hop, and he’d be back through town soon.” He looked at Wagner like he’d said something important. She stared blankly back. Darren explained, “A short hop is a biker term for pit stop on the way home. Anyway I split.”

  “Then you took her back – and she dumped you again.”

  Wagner pulled Bone to his feet and sent him back to the apartment. He had been keeping Darren on the defensive. She needed everything he had, and Darren himself had noted the dangers of holding back.

  The minute Bone disappeared out of the bright corona of the open exit, looking back protectively like somehow something might happen to the paint job on the car during the interrogation, Darren’s story changed. It wasn’t the facts of what he’d said; it was the tone that accompanied the narrative. It was mournful and full of self-doubt. Darren obviously cared much more for Darci than he wanted to admit, his pride and a faint sense of urgency crept into his voice like he might somehow catch her from her fall with something that he said, something useful he remembered.

  Darren hadn’t left the area immediately as he’d said, he’d gone back into the Kmart and ordered more fries and waited. His instinct was right, about twenty minutes later Darci came in, looking like a total babe, certainly not looking for him as she gazed coyly down the rows of value priced merchandise. She spotted him and walked right up to the table. He’d pretended to believe the story that the big bald man with his zipper down was her uncle. She told him not to ever mess with her uncle because the boys he ran with had the kind of temper a man doesn’t learn, it’s the dark kind that a man can only be born with.

  “Darci finished two plates of fries then she kissed me goodbye. We went back to normal until –” Darren receded into a memory, from his expression Wagner could tell that he blamed himself for something.

  “Until what?”

  “I got a call, from the uncle.” Darren brooded.

  “What did he want?”

  “A favor.”

  The word ‘favor’ sounded like a foreign word. Like even now the concept did not match anything he could understand.

  “He said he’d been phoning all over trying to find me, and that I was the only one that stood between Darci and the morgue. I remember how he said the word ‘morgue’; it was like an immediate threat for her, and a later threat for me at the same time. He was desperate. He kept saying over and over that I had to go out in the middle of the night an find her and take her to my house. I must have been waffling, because he burst out with “I KNOW WHERE YOU LIVE.”

  “This guy was ready to jump down the receiver and strangle me.” Wagner could guess how the fat man felt, especially when she first met Darren, but she was beginning to warm to the concerned attitude and dusty soprano tones of the boy. His face seemed to re-experience details of the story he was telling on a five second delay. The words came out of his mouth only to have his facial expression catch up after a short break.

  Wagner looked differently upon the lines across his chin and brow that she’d thought must have been created by the set of a smug expression. Now she saw in the crease between his eyebrows, a look of concern.

  “I did it. I found her.” A look of triumph crossed his face moments later. “I told her that her uncle called, and she basically did everything he told her to do
without question. That included living with me.”

  “That was last Thursday.”

  “Thursday was the day she came to live here.”

  “Hold it, the clerk said she saw Darci hit you on Thursday.” She said, eyeing him suspiciously.

  “I called her uncle a fat fuck.” The anger caught up with his eyebrows and they creased the center of his forehead. “She went back to him, I’m so stupid.” Tears welled up in his eyes.

  “Where is she now?”

  Ten minutes later, Wagner pointed her government-issue rental sedan out of the gated community, still digesting Darren’s tearful last thoughts. She looked out of the tinted windows and saw no one to congratulate her on her fine work. Behind her there was only a weeping boy, and a hospitality room manager who desperately wanted her to stay and trade make-up tips. Neither of them had what they most wanted; only Wagner had walked out with it all.