Don't Lose Her

by Jonathon King

  After what seemed like three hours on the freeway, they’d pulled off on some goddamn side exit. Geronimo had to get out and unlock a big swinging metal gate to drive through onto a thin macadam road. That, she thought now, would have been the spot to bail out on this fucked-up adventure.

  Instead, they continued on, Danny driving the big car too fast on this back road with nothing on either side but this goddamn wheat field, which she could now see closer up was not wheat at all, but some kind of monster swamp grass. From down here instead of up on the elevated freeway, she could see the grass blades growing up out of standing water with only an occasional glob of some sort of tree mass that had sprouted up where they’d piled up the land to build the roadway. Sky and blade grass—that’s all she could see for miles.

  Where the hell are we going?

  Finally, Geronimo, who kept checking his phone, which she figured must have a GPS app, told Danny to turn off. They followed a gravel trail down to a piece of land next to open water.

  When they stopped and everyone got out, Rae was struck by the humidity that instantly wrapped around her like an invisible cloud. The AC in the Chrysler 300 must have been running full blast because the heat outside was choking.

  There was nothing here, no structure, no person, just this weird-looking boatlike machine sitting halfway up on the shore and half-floating in the water. She watched as Geronimo went around to the back of the car and popped the trunk. He bent his huge back over and scooped the woman out, setting her carefully on her feet, and actually giving her time to get her balance.

  Normally, Rae would have thought that the big asshole was being nice for once, but when he had bent to reach into the trunk, his shirttail had pulled up and Rae saw the ivory-colored handle of a knife sticking up out of his waistband.

  Everyone had heard the stories of Geronimo’s fucking monster bowie knife, the one some kids said they’d seen him throw and bury to the hilt in a fence post thirty feet away. The one they also said he used to carve up the bodies of missing persons from the casino before spreading them like droppings in the woods.

  This was never supposed to be about knives! Goddamn Danny! This was never supposed to be about killing!

  Rae turned her head and looked back up the road: Could she make a break for it? Could she run and make it back to the interstate? Get the hell out of this? Then she turned back to look for Danny. He’d already drifted over to the weird boat with the big-ass caged propeller on the back and was staring at it, fascinated by the mechanics… .

  She’d be on her own if she ran now—be on her own like she’d been for so many years. Her mom used to say everybody’s gotta have somebody whenever Rae had complained about the men who came and went from the house trailer. “Everybody needs somebody, Rae-Jay. That’s the way it is.”

  And I got Danny, she thought, and started toward him as the Indian boys took the woman by the arms and led her to the water.

  Now this was scary as shit. Yeah, she knew it was dangerous-fast, in fact much faster than she could have anticipated. It felt even faster because of the closeness of the water and the high grass. It was like nothing she’d ever experienced before and maybe that was the reason it was scary—but man, it was cool.

  They’d loaded onto the airboat, Rae and the woman on a couple of hard plastic seats, the two braves on the row behind, and Danny and Geronimo higher up in the pilot seats. Rae had looked back at Danny when Geronimo sat in the seat next to the driver controls and said,“You’re the wheelman, white boy. Get to it.”

  Danny said, “No problem,” and started fidgeting with controls and working the stick lever for throttle and adjusting the foils in back to direct the air flow to make the damn thing move. Rae knew he’d never been on such a contraption in his life, but had probably told them he had. She also had enough confidence in Danny to know that if it had a motor, he could drive it. Still, when he fired up the airplane engine on the back and throttled it up, the noise surprised the hell out of her. Rae could only imagine what the hooded figure beside her was thinking; she had to be freaking. But the woman just bent forward, cradling her stomach with her still-flex-cuffed hands, and rode it out.

  As Danny put the boat up on plane, Rae watched a tunnel of high saw grass start to fly by and felt the wind sweep over her face as well as the heat and humidity that went with it. She’d gone on many a speedboat ride with friends and with Danny on Fife Lake, and the feeling was similar: the swing and the roll of the boat in water, the patter of the rippled waves slapping the hull. But when they broke through to open space here, on Geronimo’s instruction, Danny pushed the thing out onto water sprouting sprigs and then even thickets of grass. She looked over her shoulder at him again.

  Danny just throttled forward and plowed right across what appeared to be solid ground like he was behind the wheel of some kind of hovercraft. He had that damn look in his eye that she knew was adrenaline and thrill, the look he got when he’d boosted a car and they were flying down U.S. Route 72 back home “just to see what she’s got.” Or when they were on someone else’s lakefront cottage deck, screwing like minks out under the stars, not knowing if someone would roll up into the driveway and catch them in the act.

  She couldn’t help it. His thrill infected her—the speed and the danger of it all.

  But still, in her head she kept seeing that knife in Geronimo’s waistband. Guns didn’t bother her. Every boy she’d grown up with in northern Michigan had guns. Their fathers and grandfathers were all hunters: rabbit all winter, whitetail deer in November, spring turkey shoots. The boys grew up with guns in racks at the end of their beds or in cabinets in the living room. It was a way of life.

  She’d even seen an early boyfriend and his father shoot rabbits with handguns. But Geronimo didn’t have a gun. He had a big-bladed knife that wasn’t for skinning game or filleting fish. He had it for trouble, and it was spinning around in her head that she and Danny could just as easily become the trouble as anyone else.

  Chapter 28

  Diane kept her head down, the wind pasting the hood to her forehead but leaving a ruffling, loose area around her mouth so that she could breathe. The airboat swerved at times and at other times slowed and lurched as if the pilot was finding his way on paths through the water. Intermittently, she felt the nausea creep up her throat, but kept it down. Though the noise of the engine was deafening­, she occasionally picked up a barked order in a man’s voice. They were quick guttural words, perhaps one telling the other what turns to take, which way to go. At times, she tensed her thigh muscles, found purchase of something solid with her left foot, and prepared to simply launch herself out off the boat and into the water. If they were planning to just dump her out there where no one would find her body, at least she’d be taking some control.

  No, no, no, Diane, she chastised herself. This is not just you anymore. You have another life you are responsible for. It’s not just your choice. You will endure this, dammit. You will endure it until you are without choice.

  As the boat roared on, she lost all sense of time and direction. She tried to feel the sun, but had no idea whether it was morning or afternoon and what part of the sky the sun might be in. After a time, they slowed, first to a slog and then to a crawl. She heard the scuffle of feet, people moving about on board. The boat shifted and slurred and then clunked up against something solid. The engine was killed.

  “Throw me that line,” a man said. It was the first discernible sentence she’d heard since “Get her ready. We are going.” But was it the same voice? Through the buzz still in her head from the engine noise, she thought, no, this was a younger voice, different somehow. And if he was asking for a line, coupled with whatever the boat had thunked into, she was praying for a dock.

  Again, she was gripped by hands under her armpits and lifted up. As she scrambled with searching feet to find something solid, she was rewarded with some kind of platform instead of merely be
ing tossed into the swamp in the middle of nowhere to die. Why were they keeping her alive? What the hell did they want? Were they bargaining her life for another?

  She’d given up thinking this was about Escalante. Had she made such a dire enemy in the past that this was the result? Was her abduction some sort of statement about the federal court system as a whole? There were sure as hell plenty of radical antigovernment groups in Florida, but what would they be bargaining for? And why her? Antifeminism? God only knew the minds of human beings.

  On the now-solid platform, they walked her several steps, their footsteps ringing on wood, her bare feet touching something solid and warm. She was beyond counting. Her stomach dangled; her legs felt rubbery and unable to support her. To the sound of a door being unlocked and opened, she was led into someplace without the touch of the sun. Another room? A room out in the Glades?

  Diane’s mind was muddled; she was exhausted. The stress had taken its toll. She was weak and tired and when they turned her and forced her to sit, she felt softness. A couch or a bed cushioned her. She curled her arms and her legs up into a protective wrap around her baby and lost consciousness.

  She awoke to sensations: a voice in her ear, a touch on her shoulder, light invading her eyes, and the smell of food in her nostrils.

  The perceived brightness actually hurt her eyes. She slowly realized that the cloth hood against her face was gone. She had to work against the stickiness of crusted eyelashes and her own reluctance to open her eyes. It had been so long. Did she want to see? Where was she, and what had become of her?

  She gave it a minute, blinked, and then allowed some light in as she tried to focus and then to register the face in front of her.

  “Come on. You’ve got to eat,” a male voice said. “Rae says you’ve got to eat something, so please, wake up and eat.”

  Diane moved her legs, rolled her hips, felt the pull of her stomach weight, and instinctively reached for her pregnant belly before she realized that her hands were free.

  She forced her eyes wider, and they drank in the swirl of color and texture that became a man’s face. He was young.

  Diane began to identify the odors: cooked eggs, warm butter, and coffee. She looked from the young man’s face to the plate sitting on the seat of a chair pulled up beside her.

  “Water,” she finally said, barely recognizing her own voice.

  The young man held out a plastic bottle of water, and she struggled to take it in her hand and tip it to her lips. She sipped slowly at first, moistening the dried membranes of her palate and throat, and then drew in more until she started coughing.

  “Easy,” the young man said.

  “Thank you,” Diane said instinctively, only later wondering where the politeness came from.

  The young man stood from his chair and pulled it away. Diane worked to absorb his image: tall, but not as big as the beast that had appeared in her cell door and bashed her in the head. Her first impression of him had been young, and now she guessed late teens, early twenties, with haystack-blond hair and a wispy, half-grown beard on a solid jaw. He was dressed in jeans and a plain gray T-shirt.

  “Please eat,” he said again, and then turned and walked across the room.

  Despite the jumble in her brain, Diane called out: “Wait. Wait. Who are you? Where am I?”

  Instead of answering, the young man stepped out and Diane distinctly heard the metal-on-metal of a lock being set.

  Slowly, she worked her way up onto one elbow. Then she swung her legs over the edge of the bed, and with her arms as a prop, hoisted herself to a sitting position. She tried to gather her wits and make sense of her surroundings. She knew first of all that she was not in a hospital. She was in a medium-size room, maybe fifteen by twenty feet. The bed she was on was big, a double with sheets and a comforter.

  There was a small couch on the opposite wall and two comfortable-­looking chairs in colorful fabrics. An armoire stood tall in one corner and folding doors, probably a closet, covered another wall. A second door, not the one the young man had left by, was opposite. The walls were made of some kind of natural wood, maybe pine, and the floor was also wooden, but covered by a large multicolored throw rug that looked handwoven.

  To her right was a waist-high counter and what appeared to be a small kitchenette. On the wall to her left was a window through which light made its way into the room. When had the hood been removed? Obviously while she was out cold—but why? When they had been so careful in the previous place, not letting her see, not letting her hear their voices or see faces? The thought ushered in a heavier sense of dread; she’d overseen enough criminal cases to know that eyewitnesses were loose ends. Professionals knew better than to leave them alive.

  Even though bits and pieces of her trip on the airboat were coming back, she could not resist the window and the view it offered of her new surroundings. She inched forward on the edge of the bed, planting her feet firmly on the floor, cupping her freed hands under her belly, and trying to stand. She lifted some of her weight using only her thigh muscles, but failed.

  She sat back down and looked at the food sitting on the cushion of the chair next to her: scrambled eggs with some kind of yellow cheese melted into them; toast with a slick of melted butter; a large cup of coffee, still steaming; and perhaps more telling, silverware. The surroundings and the meal said hotel, or resort. But where? In the Glades? She knew there were such places, but would kidnappers check into a resort?

  Determined, she ignored the food and with effort turned the chair next to her, slopping the coffee. Using the chair as a crutch, she cupped her stomach with one hand and pulled herself to her feet. The effort dizzied her, so she stood and closed her eyes, waiting for the vertigo to pass. Finally, she gathered her strength and walked in small steps to the window.

  The scene outside was a mélange of honeyed saw grass, blue and unruffled water, and sprouts of green in the distance; that was it, all the way to the horizon. Her perspective showed no buildings, no signs, no obvious other life. She held on to the window casing and tried to peek to either side, but could discern nothing more. If she was in a room within a large building, she could not tell. If this was it—a fifteen-by-twenty-foot rectangle in the middle of nowhere—she still couldn’t tell.

  Carefully, she made her way back to the bed and sat and ate. It was the first solid food she’d had in, what? How many days had this nightmare lasted? And the eggs were still warm. They had to have come from someplace. The coffee was almost hot, but the idea of caffeine made her slightly ill.

  While she ate, she kept looking up at the second door, as if some other danger lurked behind it. What had the young man said? He’d said that Ray wanted her to eat, that Ray said she needed to eat. Which one was Ray? Was he the huge backlit man? Was Ray in charge?

  Had it been Ray or the young blond man who’d watched over her in the upstairs room before they threw her in the trunk and drove out into the Everglades? And either way, why were he and Ray being civilized to her now? The questions made her dizzy again, and she pushed them away but could not stop looking at the unopened door.

  Finally, she used the chair back to raise herself, steadied her feet, and made her way across the room, this time to door number two.

  She stood against the frame and listened to the silence. She tried the knob and it turned free. She opened the door slowly, exposing darkness, but the light from behind her began to leak in, and she made out a sink and a vanity. She spotted a light switch, which she flipped, and a ceiling fluorescent lit up a tiled bathroom with a commode and a glass-door shower. If she’d seen a golden fairy rise up out of the swamp, she would not have been more stunned. She went to the sink and turned one of the faucet knobs, the hot one, and left her fingers dangling in the stream until the water turned warm.

  “My God,” she said aloud.

  Within minutes, she had thrown off her clothes and was standing in
the shower, warm water coursing over her head and across her shoulders and flowing down over the skin of her bulging belly. She did not know that such a simple thing could be such ecstasy. There was even soap. She leaned against one side of the shower stall and slicked all the skin she could reach without bending. She luxuriated in the warm water stream, washing and rinsing and washing and rinsing, until the water started turning cold. Then she lowered her head and looked down and for the first time saw the pinkish swirl of the water that circled the drain. She was looking at a rivulet of her own blood running down the inside of her thigh.

  Then she gasped.

  Chapter 29

  They were lying on their backs, looking up at a dome of stars that seemed so close you wanted to reach out and poke one. A thick comforter softened the hardwood deck beneath them. Danny was still breathing hard from his exertion and orgasm, but Rae had already recovered. She always wondered why he was the one doing the heavy breathing when she had been on top and doing all the work.

  Not that she thought of it as work. She loved making love with him. But she also had her motive. She knew it was selfish, but what the hell, what did one of her high school teachers call her? A great multitasker? Yeah, that was it, two birds with one stone.

  She did like the view out here. It kinda grew on you. When they’d started out in the airboat, it had been, yes, exhilarating, the speed and the wind in her face and all the stuff just whizzing by. At one point, Danny leaned down from his driver’s seat and aimed out in front with his finger, and when she followed his line, she saw something just sitting on the surface of the water. Just before they came too close, she recognized it as the floating snout of an alligator. She watched with surprise as it whipsawed its tail and dove down just before they came close to clobbering it with the hull of the boat.