Don't Lose Her

by Jonathon King

  The beach access was a crumbling asphalt path most likely grudgingly carved between two towers. It allowed the regular public to visit the public beach. It was like walking a back alley in midtown, but at the other end I could see a slash of blue horizon and could smell salt on the breeze. As I came out of the funnel, I spotted two figures: someone in a wheelchair accompanied by a man dressed in what hospital people call scrubs. I stepped to the side of the standing man.

  “Peter?” I said. The face that turned to me was in his mid-twenties­, cleanly shaved, and from the dusky skin tone and eyes so dark you’d say black before brown, Hispanic.

  “Yes,” he said, his tone slightly surprised and his eyes darting over my shoulder in the direction of the assisted living building. “Does someone need me?”

  “No, no. My name is Max Freeman,” I said ditching the probation officer ruse and offering my hand. Peter took it, his expression changing from concern to perplexity.

  “I’m a private investigator from up in Palm Beach County, and I’m here to talk with Mr. Maltese.”

  I gestured past the young man to the person in the wheelchair. The figure there had not turned his head or indicated in any way that he was aware of my presence. He was dressed in tan slacks and a pale windbreaker with the collar turned up despite the warm temperature. A baseball cap with the bill turned in the correct way to shield his face from the sun was pulled down.

  “Well, Mr. Freeman, I am afraid you will have a difficult time doing that,” Peter said, and I could hear the slight Spanish accent in his wording. “Mr. Maltese does not talk these days.”

  I nodded but gestured to the sitting figure. “May I try anyway?”

  The man named Peter hesitated, but then politely stepped back and indicated with an open palm—give it a shot.

  I knelt next to the wheelchair and made the same introduction to Maltese I had to his aide, but he continued to face out to sea. From up close, I could see wide wraparound sunglasses under the cap. His hands were clasped in his lap, mottled loose skin barely covering the thin bones that made me think of bird skeletons I would find occasionally in the Everglades during drought times. His thin legs protruded from the wheelchair seat, draped in the fabric of his trousers like cloth hanging on a towel rack. He may have been fifty-four, but looked ninety. Prison takes its toll, but in this case it had taken more. I let the silence sit for several beats and then stood.

  “Does he hear?”

  “Yes, but I think only when he wants to,” the aide said, perhaps a glimmer of a smile at the corner of his mouth.

  “Talk?”

  “You would not describe it as talk, no, sir.”

  When I gave him a quizzical look, Peter continued, moving in past me to bend at Maltese’s side.

  “When Mr. Maltese was in prison, they told me he was injured by the other inmates,” Peter said while zipping down the front of Maltese’s windbreaker and then unwrapping a soft cotton scarf from the man’s neck. Exposed was ochre-colored, crumpled flesh like cooked chicken skin that had been heated from the inside out. It ran from under Maltese’s boney chin down past where an Adam’s apple should have been and into the collar of his white T-shirt.

  “They told me the others pinned him down and poured Drano, you know, the pipe cleaner, down his throat. The acid, I guess, did what they wanted it to do.

  “He coughs. He growls sometimes when he is not happy. He moans when he is deeply saddened. But talk? No, he does not talk.”

  “How does he communicate, then?” I asked, fighting against empathy. I knew the man’s background, what he had visited on others through his ruthless enterprise. “How do you know what he wants?”

  “Since I started taking care of him last April, we have discovered a language together,” Peter said, tucking the scarf back into place and re-zipping the jacket collar. “I know when he is hungry and when he needs the bathroom. When I wash him, I know that he likes it. Sometimes, when we have a soccer game on the television, I can tell he is smiling inside.”

  “So he can see?”

  The aide looked out at the Atlantic, where the afternoon sun sparkled off the wind-rippled surface as if a thousand diamonds had been cast into the sea.

  “The doctors say yes. But I think he sees only what he wants to see. He likes the ocean, even when it is stormy or wet. If he sees it or hears it, I am not sure. I just know he likes it.”

  I kept pressing.

  “Can you take the glasses off?”

  Again, the aide hesitated and looked into my face. He was being protective. I realized it was his job to do so; still, there was more there than simple guardianship. The kid cared.

  After making some assessment of my intentions, he made a decision.

  “Sure,” Peter said, moving again to Maltese and carefully slipping the dark sunglasses off.

  Again, I knelt before the man, whose eyes were open, aimed out at sea, the irises a gray color that showed no recognition nor cunning, no depth nor guile.

  “Mr. Maltese, do you remember a woman named Diane McIntyre?” I asked, using Diane’s maiden name, from when she prosecuted his case. There was no reaction, not even a blink of eyelids. “Do you know Judge Manchester?”

  Again, no flinch or change in the coloration of his skin or rhythm of his breathing. I was talking to a wall. I stood again.

  “Does he write? Does he get mail? Does he get visitors?” I asked the aide.

  “No one has ever come, and I have never seen him put pen to paper. They never told me where his family is, or if he has any. I think I am all he has.”

  The man called Peter looked down at his charge and put his hand on Maltese’s thin shoulder. A sound like a muffled sigh came from the man’s scarred throat. Peter looked up into my eyes and smiled.

  “See?”

  “Yeah, I see,” I said, reaching out to shake the young man’s hand. “I’m sorry to have bothered you.”

  I returned to the Fury and sat in the driver’s seat looking back to the entrance of the beach access. Did I think I would see the two men jogging back across the street high-fiving each other over putting one past the idiot private dick? No. Could Maltese have hired some of his former underlings to kidnap the prosecutor who sent him away and in effect sealed his fate? Maybe; but why now, fifteen years after the fact? I wasn’t optimistic.

  I knew that if Billy decided to, he could make Maltese and Diane’s fear of him into a federal case and get the FBI to pull every telephone record and mailed correspondence ever attached to the one-time mobster. But I was convinced that the crumpled human being I’d just seen was beyond retribution or vengeance. We couldn’t wait on search warrants and records checks. We needed to find Diane.

  Chapter 18

  He kicked her awake.

  “Pooh,” Diane moaned, only slightly, and shifted on the mattress. She felt the baby move again. It seemed as if he’d been kicking for hours. He wanted out. He wanted freedom.

  When had she started thinking of her unborn child as “he”? She wasn’t quite sure. Together she and Billy had decided not to be told the sex of the child, a secret the obstetrician had kept even when showing them the sonogram photos. But her mind had taken over. You can’t call him it! Billy had already picked out a name, Adam, the firstborn. She’d gone with a girl’s name, Victoria, though she wasn’t sure about the inevitable shortening to Vicky.

  But now she was thinking “he.” She wondered if the physical abduction, the threatening and punishing, was such a macho, warlike, mannish thing that she’d let it drift into her own belly.

  Again, she felt a poke from within—maybe a foot or an elbow. It was only speculation, a game she’d played back when she was lying in bed with Billy visualizing the fetus inside her, trying to imagine the soft skull and fifteen inches of height and a suckling response already causing him, perhaps, to suck his forming thumb. Those comforting yet anxious pr
eviews were now obscured in the heat and dark and boggling fear surrounding her.

  The cloth of the hood was still on her face, the humid odor of her breath forming on the fabric. How many hours had it been? How many days? Each time she came out of a foggy half-sleep, part of her expected to be back in her apartment, wrapped in the cool muslin sheets with Billy lying next to her. It had to be a dream, a horrible nightmare, and a trick on the mind.

  But when she opened her eyes, the blackness was still there, the smell and the taste of the cloth and the realization that this was no dream. “Ooh,” she moaned again, and rolled her hips to press her stomach against the bed, trying to ease the ache in her shoulders that had been so unnaturally strained with her hands tied behind her. And then she heard the creak of floorboards, and yes, she believed she could actually feel her captor now whenever he moved to her side. The belief was strengthened when she felt the straw again poking at the bottom of the hood. She let it work its way up to her lips and drew it into her mouth.

  The concoction they were now feeding her came warm and smooth into her throat, and she took it greedily this time. If they were poisoning her, so be it. If they’d spiked the supplement with drugs, what were her options? Her obstetrician had warned her against dehydration. She’d even taken to keeping a bottle of water on her courtroom dais while she listened to the presentation of evidence and testimony.

  “Can you help me to the toilet again?” she asked when she was done drinking. “I’m sorry. The baby, you know—he pushes on my bladder and I have to go.”

  The first time she’d asked to pee, she thought she might be led to a bathroom, behind closed doors where she could remove the damn hood—not to be. Instead, her captor had grabbed up a fistful of fabric from the arm of her dress and half-dragged her to somewhere in the room, maybe a corner, and then forced her to sit down by clipping at the back of her knees and pressing on her shoulders until she felt the roundness of a seat meet her buttocks.

  Was it some kind of portable toilet? It felt similar to a “head” she’d used on a sailing yacht she’d taken with her family to Bimini years back. By blind feeling with her cuffed hands, she was able to rise slightly and pull down her own underwear and position herself. It was humiliating, knowing that within reaching distance her captor was watching her. She’d tried as best she could to keep her dress down around her knees, but could not cover the sound of her water hitting something that she assumed was a bowl below her.

  You do what you have to do, Diane thought. Was this part of the captivity? The raw humiliation of the prisoner? She’d read about such things, reports from prisoners of war and details from the diaries of abductees. Some simply wallowed in their own voids. At least there was a modicum of civility here. Was that a good sign? A sign at all?

  But if it was a forced humiliation she wasn’t going to let it happen.

  “It doesn’t bother me, you know? I’ve got brothers. With brothers, you learn to pee in front of men,” she said. No response. Just silence.

  Though she knew she was being watched, Diane had seen enough investigative reports as a prosecutor and judge to be thinking ahead. Not if, when the Marshal’s Service and FBI find me, they’re going to need evidence on the case of my kidnapping. I will, she swore to herself and her child, survive to tell my story. But she knew plenty about forensic evidence.

  Taking her time on the makeshift toilet, she used her hands, bound behind her, to feel the surface of what she was sitting on. She needed to find smooth spots where she could roll her fingertips like they do in booking to leave her prints behind. Would it help? Would her captors know to wipe everything clean? Obviously, she couldn’t know, but just the act, the clandestine act of doing something, anything, lit a spark of defiance in her brain. Think, Diane. Outsmart them if you can. It’s all you’ve got.

  When she was finished, she tried to stand on her own. There was no cleanup. She reached down and pulled up her underwear. She felt slightly dizzy. Was there spotting on her underwear? Was the anxiety and the fear and this wretched nightmare having an effect on her child? She wobbled on her feet. This time, her captor actually took her by the arm, clamping it and guiding her instead of pulling her by the sleeve. The tips of the guard’s fingers seemed small to Diane. She tried to analyze the touch, to gauge the angle, maybe judge the height of her captor. This trip to the toilet had also surprised her with a new sensation of tingling in her feet and legs upon standing.

  Her doctor had warned about the swelling that might occur in her legs and feet during the pregnancy, but she’d stayed active, had even gone down to the beachfront pool in her and Billy’s building to swim in the evenings after work. But in this captive state, lying on a mattress for hours on end, her circulation was next to nil. This time, she resisted, just slightly, from being led back to the bed.

  “Can I just stand for a minute?” she asked, showing deference with her tone of voice. “I just need to stand and move my legs, you know? I’m getting so stiff and the blood needs to move to get down to my feet and organs and the placenta for my baby.”

  She was working the angles, making herself more human to him: not just a thing being bargained for a price. If her captor had even a sliver of compassion for children or motherhood or humanity, she wanted, needed, to touch it.

  She took a shuffle to her right, put pressure on her foot, and then took a full step back to her left. She bent her knees. She took a full step to the left and again flexed her knees, waiting to be grabbed or pulled.

  “Do you remember when your wife was pregnant?” she said, taking a chance. Silence.

  She took another step to the right, and then back again. She arched her back and let out a groan at the effort, feeling muscles that were cramped, maybe even bruised, from the rough handling she’d received as they shoved her in the van and sat on her.

  “Maybe your mother? With a brother or sister?” Silence.

  “You know I’m already in my eighth month and I can feel the baby kicking?” she tried again. “If you put your hand right there on my belly, you can actually feel him.”

  Silence.

  “Do you think you could at least free my hands so I could feel my stomach? You certainly can’t think that I could overpower you or escape. I’m a fat, pregnant woman. I just want to use my hands to rub my stomach, feel my child, and calm him.”

  More silence.

  Then she felt the hand grab her arm above the elbow, not the comfortable, leading hand but a fingers-digging-into-muscle, pissed-off hand. She knew she’d gambled with the attempt at personalization. He dragged her across space, the seven steps she’d counted to the toilet, this time stumbling steps, and then spun her and backed her up again until her knees were clipped by the edge of the mattress. She sat down hard on the bed, her back stiffening this time so as not to bang her head on the wall.

  Not a word was uttered—not even a humph from the effort the captor had used to issue the silent message: shut the hell up.

  Diane sat, huffing into the cloth of the hood, smelling her own deteriorating breath coming back at her. I went too far, she said to herself. Christ, maybe this guy was a toss-away kid and has no memory of mother or family. Hell, maybe he was abused by his parents as a kid, and all I’ve done is goad memories that just pissed him off more.

  She stayed silent and listened, with a newly acute sense of hearing. Hadn’t she read somewhere that when one sense is removed or lost the others try to compensate? She couldn’t see, but she could hear.

  And there it was, that muted clicking sound: not teeth chattering in a closed mouth, or nervous foot-tapping. Not careful knuckle-cracking. This was tapping, not rhythmic, but fast. After a pause there was more tapping—definitely texting. And then nothing.

  She lay back. How long will this go on? How long? She felt the baby move again deep in her abdomen, that surreal, tiny push from the inside out that only one living thing in all of existence can fee
l. Then she heard the creak of a chair or floorboards. Again, she thought she could feel the air move.

  When something touched her elbow, she flinched and felt fingers take hold of her, firmly but not with malice. Then the grip pulled her and rolled her more to her side and she followed the unspoken instruction. And then she felt and heard, instantaneously, a quick pull and snick at her wrists and her hands fell free. The grip at her elbow disappeared.

  Chapter 19

  Midafternoon: I looked down at the next address on Billy’s list and shook my head. I’d driven more than an hour south on the Florida Turnpike toward Homestead, and then another half hour southwest past Florida City, the last civilized place on the southern peninsula of the state before the long jaunt on the Overseas Highway to the Florida Keys.

  I was now on Ingraham Highway—good luck with street signs. The eight-mile-long roadway is named after James Edmundson Ingraham, one of those “visionary” industrialists who was convinced in the late 1800s that the Florida Everglades could be drained and channeled and turned into a utopia of profitable farmland. Nature, of course, had her say, and now the road that bears Ingraham’s name runs from the entrance of Everglades National Park at its western terminus to the largest state prison in South Florida, the Dade County Correctional Institution, to the east. In a historical sense, both beginning and end seem apropos.

  On either side of the two-lane road were open fields of farmland as flat as a pool table and lined with knee-high tomato plants. At variable intervals, the plots would inexplicably end and butt up next to forestlike acres of mature avocado trees, lush and green and generations old. The next carefully zoned field would be lined with rows and rows of towering royal palm trees, standing like soldiers before the march. This was a part of Florida you never see on postcards, more akin to Midwest plains than the subtropics. With few signs and no discernible addresses, I was left to slow down at each turnoff or gate entrance to search for a mailbox or mile marker or number or clue.