Deadlock

by Robert Liparulo

  He nodded. “We’ll top off the tank too. Let’s get some sleep and plan on heading out tonight.”

  Laura bobbed her head up and down. Her hair fell over her face, and she looked utterly exhausted.

  “It’s going to be okay,” Hutch said. “You’ll see.”

  She smiled at him. “I’m supposed to tell you that.”

  “When I forget to say it,” Hutch said, “then it’s your turn.”

  FIFTY-EIGHT

  When Logan stepped out of the bathroom, Emile was sitting on one of the room’s two beds, flipping though news channels. A machine gun leaned against the wall by the door, within Emile’s grasp. A canvas tote bag occupied the bed behind him. He looked Logan up and down.

  “I need a belt,” Logan said. He was holding a wad of excess waistband in front.

  Emile looked at the other bed. Logan followed his gaze and screamed. Two bodies lay on top of the bedspread, shoulder to shoulder. He recognized one of them as the man who had tied him up: Anton. One of his forearms was bent as though he had another elbow there. Something under his shirt didn’t look right either; it was bumpy and poking up where it shouldn’t be. His face was battered and bruised. Someone—Emile, most likely—had wiped some of the gore away, but a lot remained.

  The other guy Logan had seen earlier as well. He was the corpse from the back of the van, the one Logan had kept rolling into and trying not to look at. It was this guy’s blood that had soaked Logan’s pant leg. The nub of an arrow protruded from the left side of his neck. It was broken off before the fletchings, probably to make the body easier to move. Brownish goop—dried blood, Logan knew—covered half his face, his left arm and chest.

  Logan started hyperventilating again.

  “Knock it off,” Emile said. “They’re bodies, kid. You’ll leave yours behind one day too.”

  “What . . . what happened to them?”

  “Isn’t that obvious?” Emile punched the remote. Another news station came on.

  “Why are they here?”

  “Where should they be?”

  “Not here. Your car?”

  Emile flipped to another channel.

  The bodies hovered at the corner of Logan’s vision, like ghosts trying to sneak up on him. He turned his back to them. He said, “Could you cover them up? Please?”

  Emile threw an exasperated glance at him. He sighed. He stood and walked between the beds. When no sounds came, Logan looked. Emile was frozen there, just staring at the dead men.

  “They were your friends,” Logan said.

  Emile’s face became hard, the way it had been when he’d come into the bathroom to cut Logan loose. He said, “They were soldiers.”

  He bent over Anton and unbuckled the man’s belt. He yanked it free of the loops and held it out to Logan.

  “I don’t want it,” Logan said.

  “Don’t be a baby.”

  Logan took it, examined it for blood, didn’t find any. He threaded it around his waist, but it was too long to do any good.

  Emile grabbed it. His knife came out and sliced off a foot of leather. With the knife’s tip, he made an extra hole where Logan needed it. He turned from Logan, sheathing the knife. He moved the canvas tote from the unused bed to the floor, pulled off the bedspread, and billowed it over the bodies.

  Logan crinkled his nose. “Are they going to . . .”

  “What?”

  “You know, start smelling?”

  Emile went back to the end of the bed, snatched up the remote, and sat. Staring at the screen, he said, “Not as bad as you did in the tub.” His boot bumped a white paper bag on the floor. He picked it up, said, “Here,” and tossed it at Logan. It was a fast-food breakfast: hash browns, a sausage-and-egg biscuit sandwich, a croissant. Logan’s stomach reminded him how much it wanted that food. But the bodies on the bed . . .

  It felt like someone had dropped a bowling ball on his gut.

  Better eat, he thought. Who knows when you’ll get more food.

  He stepped near the bathroom door, where he couldn’t see the bodies. He sat on the carpet and put the bag in his lap. Once he bit into the biscuit sandwich, he forgot about who else . . . what else . . . besides Emile shared the room. He shoved it in as fast as he could.

  “You’re going to choke,” Emile said.

  Logan licked his lips and nodded. He squinted at Emile. “How old are you?”

  Emile hit a button, muting the television’s volume. He said, “What’s it to you?”

  “You don’t seem very old.” Logan checked the bag: no napkins. He wiped his lips on the bag.

  “So?”

  Logan shrugged. He grimaced at the pain in his neck and shoulder. “Doing all this,” he said. “Kidnapping, guns, almost getting killed.”

  “That’s what soldiers do.”

  “Kidnapping? I mean, kids? In the United States? You sound American. Are you American?”

  Emile scowled. “Shut up and eat.”

  Logan chewed. He watched Emile glaring at the TV screen with the volume turned off. He said, “What time is it?”

  Emile brought his wristwatch up. “Eight thirty.”

  “What are we going to do?”

  “You’re going to shut up, and I’m going to get some sleep.” He glanced at Logan. “Don’t think that means you’re getting away. I’m going to tie you up again.”

  Logan felt sick.

  “Not like you were,” Emile said. “If I can trust you to be quiet, I’ll just—” His eyes roamed the room. He indicated the heating/air-conditioning unit under the window next to the door. “I’ll just zip tie you to that. You can sleep on the floor.”

  Zip tie, Logan thought. In his mind, he’d been calling it ziplock. The vocabulary lesson helped him not think about sleeping in the same room with dead people. He said, “Then what?”

  “Then we’ll see.” Emile waved the remote like a wand at the television and clicked it off. He stood up. “You done?”

  Logan pushed half a croissant in his mouth. He nodded. He got up, crumpled the bag, and tossed it into a wastebasket.

  Emile was fishing through the tote bag. He pulled out a handful of zip ties. He said, “Hit the head, dude. I don’t want you waking me up, and I don’t have any more pants for you.” He knelt beside the bulky contraption that would be Logan’s prison for the next few hours— better than the way he’d been hogtied in the bathtub—and began searching for anchor points.

  Logan continued chewing. He wiped his fingers on the T-shirt. He wondered how someone as young as Emile could wind up where he was, doing what he did.

  Emile spotted him watching. “Hey,” he said, pulling out his knife, twisting the point into the air-conditioning unit. “We’re, like, getting along and everything, right? Kind of two guys hanging out?” He waggled the knife back and forth between the two of them. “But you need to remember that’s not the way it is. If you try to get away, if you try to signal somebody . . . anything like that, I will kill you. Won’t even hesitate. You understand?”

  Logan caught a whiff of something unpleasant and thought it was coming from one of the bodies.

  “Well?” Emile said.

  Logan nodded. He went into the bathroom and shut the door. Emile reminded him not to lock it. He frowned at his image in the mirror. Just in time, he turned to the toilet, lifted the lid, and puked up his breakfast.

  FIFTY-NINE

  Shortly before midnight, Hutch edged the XTerra to the heavy gate at the entrance to the Denver Post’s parking garage. He waved his pass card in front of a reader, and the gate rattled open. The next day’s issue would have been put to bed about half an hour before. Evening-shift employees were leaving, but the paper’s graveyard shift kept a good number of cars in the garage through the night. Hutch steered the SUV onto an ascending spiral ramp.

  They had slept through the afternoon and early evening. None of them had truly rested the night before—the kids a little in the car, and Michael, though Hutch wasn’t sure you could count g
etting knocked out as sleeping. The crash that followed adrenaline-fueled activity and emotional chaos, like intense fear, had hit them hard. A few times during the day, Hutch had awakened. When he had checked on Michael in the next room, the boy had seemed to be sleeping soundly, normally. Sometime after Dillon and Macie had turned on the television, and Laura had gone out for food, Michael had rapped gently on the connecting door. He had climbed on the bed with the younger children and sat with his back against the headboard, quietly watching cartoons.

  Laura and Hutch had decided to get a late start, which allowed them to rest more and meet Larry when the chance of the building being watched was smallest. They would drive through the night and assess their energy level in the morning, and decide whether one of them was up to continuing or it was time to find a place to rest. Hutch had argued for coffee and NoDoz until they reached Page’s compound, until they rescued Logan, but Laura had made the point that he would have to be in better condition when they arrived in Washington than he was in now.

  Hutch had agreed, but had said, “Every second Logan’s gone feels like a lifetime of failing him.”

  “Don’t go to a movie,” Laura had said, giving his arm an encouraging squeeze. “But sleep when you need to, eat when you can. Staying sharp and fit is part of what you have to do right now.”

  Her advice had reminded him of one of the reasons he had enjoyed being married. It had tempered him; he had shared life’s blessings and had someone to ease its disappointments.

  Maybe Page had been right: Hutch possessed an obsessive personality. It simply never had a chance to blossom into nuttiness while he’d been married to Miss “Let’s Be Reasonable.” Since finding another guy and hitting Hutch with divorce papers—in that order, he thought bitterly—Janet had become Queen B of the Universe. Prior to that, however, Hutch had loved her dearly.

  It had surprised him when Laura had started stirring similar feelings during their long telephone conversations after he’d returned from Canada. But his kids were here, and she was there—and newly widowed, he’d reminded himself. So he’d pushed her out of his mind. And that had been about the time his outrage at Page had ratcheted up. Filling a void, he thought now.

  Hutch pulled past an empty parking space. His name was stenciled to the wall.

  “Hey, that’s you,” Dillon said. “Cool.”

  It struck Hutch how not just physically, but mentally limber kids were. The world could be ending around them, and they would acknowledge a school chum in the distance or lament missing their favorite TV show. Most adults would label it lack of focus—but Hutch thought there was something more important at play, some kind of creative and intuitive energy.

  A survivalist he had interviewed told him that getting in a rut, figuratively speaking, was the worst thing that could happen to people lost in the wilderness. The man had said, “It doesn’t matter if the rut is thinking you’re dead no matter what you do, or being determined to get out alive. Focusing too sharply on one thing means everything else is blurry.”

  He described an incident in which a lost hiker was so focused on getting over the next mountain, he’d walked right past a canoe that would have floated him to a nearby town. Instead, the guy had died. Hutch had dedicated a column to one fact the man had told him: businesspeople are more likely than tradesmen to die in survival situations. “Not because they’re wussies,” he’d said. “They’re just too tunnel-visioned on an outcome, and not so open to the various ways to reach it. They make a plan and stick to it, regardless.”

  Hutch thought it boiled down to the age-old wisdom of bending like a young tree, not breaking like an old, dry one. He hoped he could keep that in mind as he faced whatever chaos Page had planned for him.

  He put the car in reverse and backed into the space.

  “I shouldn’t be long, then we’ll be off,” he said. He looked over the seat back at Macie. “It’s not the kind of car trip I wanted to take with you, sweetie. When we get Logan back, we’ll do something really fun, Disney or something like that.”

  “Me too?” Dillon said.

  “I think we can work something out.” Hutch glanced at Laura, who nodded. He gave Michael a wry smile. “You want to come?”

  “I told you I’m ready to help,” Michael said. He opened the car door.

  “I meant to Disneyland,” Hutch said.

  Michael frowned, then smiled. “Yeah, sure. What about here? You need a hand?”

  “Help Laura watch out for dangers. We’ll have a few days on the road to figure out how all of us can pull together to get Logan back.” He nodded at the notepad in Michael’s lap. They had picked it up for him at Wal-Mart. He said, “The best thing you can do right now is keep writing down everything you know about Outis. The layout, its security, any weaknesses. Think about where you’d stash a twelve-year-old boy.”

  Michael flinched as though Hutch had accused him. Hutch believed the damage Outis had done crackled just under the surface. Like cleansing a cult’s influence from a former member’s conscious and subconscious, it would take years to detoxify this boy.

  Michael’s flinch, though, was something else, something Hutch had not thought about at the motel. It was guilt by association. Michael had not taken Logan, but his team had: close enough.

  Thinking it would shift the blame to the proper shoulders, Hutch added, “If you were Page.”

  Michael nodded. He lowered his eyes to the notepad. He put pen to paper, but his hand didn’t move. He seemed to stare at the speck of ink the pen had deposited as if waiting for it to snake out across the page and answer Hutch’s questions of its own accord.

  Hutch felt little fingers pressing on his shoulder. Macie was leaning forward in her seat. He gave her a reassuring smile.

  She said, “I don’t care about Disneyland, Daddy. I just want Logan home.”

  “Me too, sweetheart. He’ll be tearing up the house and back to insulting you before you know it.”

  “That’d be okay,” she said. “He can if he wants to.”

  “That’s what big brothers do, right?”

  “I wish he was my big brother,” Dillon said.

  Hutch narrowed his eyes at Dillon. He said, “You just want somebody to help you with the chores.”

  “And to go hunting and camping with.”

  Dillon’s smile was so broad, Hutch thought he could see every one of the boy’s teeth.

  “Well . . .” Hutch said. “Logan never really got into the hunting thing. He kind of liked camping when he was little. Not so much anymore.”

  Macie said, “He likes video games now. And football and skateboarding.”

  “Video games of playing football on skateboards,” Hutch said.

  Macie smiled, and he could tell she was thinking of her brother. He raised his eyebrows at her. “And drawing,” he said. “He’s been really getting into drawing lately.”

  She wrinkled her nose. “Gross stuff. People with big swords, fighting . . .”

  “I don’t know,” Hutch said. “What about those cartoons?”

  Macie laughed. It was a sparkling sound, free of the tension that had tightened her face all day. She glanced around at Laura, Dillon, and Michael, pulling them into her memories of Logan. “He did this one,” she said, barely containing herself. “These babies are sitting around a table in their diapers. They’re playing poker and drinking beer and smoking cigars. Under it he wrote, ‘Why guys should not babysit. ’”

  Laura and Dillon laughed. Michael was too intent on the ink spot to have even heard.

  Hutch said, “He did that one after I asked him to babysit Macie while I went to the store. I made him stop playing Zelda so he could pay attention to her.”

  “Logan showed me some of his cartoons,” Dillon said. “They were good.” He shrugged. “It’s okay that he doesn’t like hunting and camping.”

  Hutch opened his door. It lightened his heart to leave them like this, rather than the gloom-and-doom that had been hanging over them. They could not be
in a worse situation: Logan kidnapped; the man who took him bent on making a point or revenge or . . . Hutch didn’t know; all of them—kids!—on a trek to the dragon’s lair.

  Still, the mind could be wound only so tightly for so long. They needed relief, a breather. They needed reminders, however brief, of what made life worth living.

  According to Laura, adversity was what gave meaning to Hutch. He understood how it could look that way. He sprang to action when a situation required it. Did he feel more alive going after Brendan Page than he did hugging his son, hearing his daughter laugh? He didn’t think so. He didn’t think that action necessarily translated into living life to its fullest. Otherwise, what was sitting on a grassy knoll, watching the sunset with a person you love? What was falling asleep on the couch, your children cuddled up next to you?

  No, Laura had witnessed Hutch’s kicking into gear because that’s what was required of him. She did not see his heart, what truly made it beat.

  “Start the car, if you need the heater or the radio or something,” he told Laura.

  “My CD!” Macie said.

  “Carrie Underwood,” Hutch said. “It’s in there. Disc number four, I think.”

  “Got it,” Laura said. She reached for the key in the ignition to give the stereo some juice.

  Hutch shut the door and went to the back of the car to fetch the hockey equipment bag they’d picked up at the store. It was full of the Outis items he wanted to show Larry. As he came back around, Laura was leaning over the driver’s seat to lower the window.

  “What about cops?” she said.

  Hutch looked around. He didn’t see any guards, just a few stragglers making their way home. He said, “Larry said they’d come by. They think I’m in Washington, but it won’t be long for them to figure out I returned. Just keep a lookout.” He slung the bow bag strap over his shoulder, patted the windowsill, and said, “Be right back.”

  SIXTY

  Hutch’s desk was on the fifth floor. It was a level above the newsroom, where people bustled 24/7. His floor housed the staff concerned with less timely issues—entertainment, food, fashion, home and garden. Hutch’s column covered people who epitomized the “spirit of Colorado.” To fully embrace his subjects’ crises and triumphs—often the impetus for drawing out that spirit—Hutch spent most of his time in the field, interviewing, taking it all in. During the past year, focused as he was on Page, he’d relied heavily on telephone interviews and worked more increasingly from his home office. He didn’t get around to his desk here all that much anymore. In fact, he’d learned recently that his cubicle wasn’t only his anymore. He now shared his space with the guy who covered little communities around the state and a woman who wrote a column called Women and Wheels. Consequently, he kept nothing here that would help him now.