All The Way Back

by David Kearns

  Chapter Nineteen

  The fat man’s car didn’t appear in my rear view mirror on the drive over to Tillamook. We got to Emily’s house and parked the Camaro at the curb. Sandy was sitting on the front porch steps in a white bikini that she’d borrowed from Emily, and she was rubbing suntan lotion on her legs. Emily and I walked across the grass towards the house.

  “Hey there, girlfriend,” Sandy said. “Looks like you survived a weekend with the genetic lottery winner. You look good in my clothes.”

  “Hi,” Emily said. “You look good in my bikini.”

  “Thanks,” Sandy said. “What do you think, Del?”

  “I’m surprised none of the neighbors came over to get acquainted.”

  “A couple high school boys asked if I wanted them to mow the lawn. I think they just wanted to look down the front of my bikini from up close, if you want to know the truth.”

  “I doubt that they were disappointed.”

  “God gave me this body,” Sandy said. “I’m not embarrassed by it.”

  “Clearly,” I said.

  The knuckles on Sandy’s right hand had bandages going all the way across. “What happened to you?” I asked.

  “I did a little house cleaning last night.”

  “Did anything happen?” Emily asked. “Anyone bother you?”

  “Funny that you ask that,” Sandy said. “I had a visitor last night.”

  “Why didn’t you call me?” I said.

  “I tried three times before my battery died,” she replied bluntly. “You should move somewhere with cell service, or install a wireless router at your house. It’s not that hard.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  Sandy said “No worries. It gave me a chance to work on my tan. Let’s go meet your new friend.”

  Sandy stood up and turned towards the house. Her shapely backside rocked from side to side in the tightly-stretched fabric of the bikini as she went up the steps. Emily followed Sandy up the steps, with me bringing up the rear.

  He was in the utility closet by the bathroom. The Doberman lay on the hallway floor just outside the utility closet door. The dog lifted her head slightly and then put it back down.

  The man’s eyes were swollen and bruised from the beating he’d had. His ears and mouth were taped with duct tape. His hands were tied with nylon rope to the arms of the kitchen chair that he sat on; his ankles were tied to the chair legs. As a backup for the rope, thick layers of duct tape had been used to tape his arms and legs to the chair. He wasn’t wearing any pants, but he did have a towel across his crotch. He had on a black long-sleeved shirt and was barefoot. He was about six feet tall, had a thin build, and had hollow cheeks, black eyebrows, and short black hair.

  “He looks like a ninja,” Emily said.

  “That’s what I thought, too,” Sandy said. “I left the window cracked in the bedroom with just the window screen on it. It was too warm and I was just trying to cool the room off. I fell asleep, and I’ll tell you one thing: this guy is quieter than a church mouse. He came in more than once, I’m certain, and I didn’t even hear him until his last trip. I heard something that woke me up, and I saw him coming through the window. The dog had to have been drugged, because she didn’t even get up.”

  “Oh my God,” Emily said.

  “He crawled through the window like a giant black spider. Had a sap in one hand and a rag in the other.”

  I heard the air go out of Emily’s lungs.

  “I backed up against the headboard and got on my knees. I had my arms up like a boxer and waited until he came up onto the mattress and swung the sap at me.” At that point Sandy lifted her left arm and I could see the starburst-shaped bruise under her armpit. The purple and yellow discoloration was the size of a coffee saucer.

  “Is anything broken?” I asked.

  “I don’t think so. I pulled my arm up high when he swung, and brought it down and trapped his hand in my armpit. Then I started punching. He wouldn’t stop putting the rag on my face, so I spear-fingered him in the eyes.”

  Emily put her face in her hands.

  “Glad I could do it for you, sister,” Sandy said. “Honestly. This is a very bad person.”

  “What happened then?” I asked.

  “He freaked out and pulled so hard that his hand got free, and he tried to get away but he couldn’t see where he was going. So I jumped off the bed and got hold of his pants and the back of his neck, and then I ran him face-first into the door frame.”

  “You must have been so scared,” Emily said.

  Sandy shrugged. “At that point he seemed like he was knocked out, so I picked up his chloroform rag and tied it over his nose. Thought I’d let him breathe it for a while since he’s so fond of it. Then I went into the kitchen to look for tape or rope and got a little surprise. Why don’t you go in there and take a look so that you know what we’re up against?”

  Emily and I went into the kitchen, and what I saw was chilling. On his first trip into the house he’d assembled something on the kitchen counter that looked like a homemade torture kit. There were pliers for pulling teeth and pencil-sized instruments with sharp tips. A piece of broom handle with crude metal screws embedded in it so they could be screwed into flesh. A pair of giant alligator clamps cut from a pair of cables originally made for jump-starting a car. A rubber ball with a string run through it that could be used to muffle screams. I guess that hadn’t been enough. He’d gotten several of the bigger knives from the kitchen drawer and arranged them in a star shape on the table as if he’d planned to experiment with them. The fact that he’d been able to do all of this without waking Sandy or the dog was remarkable.

  “Oh. Oh. Oh,” Emily said.

  I put my arm around her shoulder.

  Sandy was standing in the doorway of the kitchen. “I’ll bet he’s done this a dozen times if he’s done it once,” she said. “Probably best that he not be released into the wild. Ever.”

  “Did you find his car?” I asked.

  Sandy nodded with exaggerated slowness.

  “Two streets to the west,” Sandy said. “Purple van with Arizona license plates.”

  “And you’ve gone through it,” I said.

  “Right.”

  “What do you think?” I said.

  “I think he drove here from Phoenix, figured out where Emily works and lives, and he’s been staying for almost a month at a day-to-day hotel off the highway. Guess he was just waiting for the right moment.”

  “You get all that off his cell phone?”

  “Peter and I played with some of his toys. The alligator clamps work wonders.”

  “Did you find out why?” I asked Sandy.

  Sandy said “Emily, did you have a conflict with the Backett family in Phoenix? Is that how you got into WITSEC? You testified against the kid and now he’s doing twenty years?”

  Emily nodded.

  “I thought that’s what he said,” Sandy said. “The tape on his mouth makes him hard to understand.”

  “How did he find me?” Emily asked.

  “Apparently one of his friends who knows how to use search engines did a reverse image search of your face and found a picture of you on some dating website,” Sandy said. “I guess they hacked the site and got your address. Didn’t Eric tell you not to post any pictures online?”

  “It was just the one picture,” Emily said. “Eric took it when I first got here and gave it to me to remind me that there can still be good days, too. I used the image when I joined an online dating service. I was only a member for a few weeks before I realized I wasn’t going to meet anyone who was right for me. I closed down the account and thought that was that.”

  “Apparently the Backett family wants you to know that putting their son in prison for twenty years comes with a price,” Sandy said.

  Emily leaned her back against the wall and put her face in her hands.

  Sandy said “When this guy doesn’t check in they’ll send someone else. Emily’s going
to have to move.”

  “I know,” I said. “Do you know if he’s a family member or just a hired gun?”

  “His name is Peter Stargen. He moves in the same circles as the Backett kid did before he went to prison. He said the Backetts paid him twenty thousand and told him if he brought back pictures of what he did to her it would be worth twenty more.”

  “Did you find a camera on him?”

  “He had footage on his cell phone of Emily leaving work, walking the dog, and going into a grocery store. And some of me lying on top of the sheets.”

  “At times I’m shocked at the level of depravity my fellow man will sink to,” I said.

  “I’ll bet,” Sandy said. “He told me he would have done the same thing for free, but they fronted him the money for the trip. I don’t have proof yet, but if the Backetts aren’t involved in organized crime I’ll eat my hat. How about it, Emily?”

  Emily nodded sadly and said “I need to go check on my dog.” She left the room.

  “And how was your weekend?” Sandy said.

  “Six of Peck’s people tried to take us down when we were walking on the beach this morning. We escaped by hiking up a cliff. Two of Peck’s guys didn’t make it back.”

  “Meaning?”

  “We threw rocks at the two who came closest. It won’t be easy to retrieve the bodies.”

  “We? Emily did, too?”

  “She can throw a hundred mile an hour fastball. Or rock, in this case,” I said.

  “Seriously?”

  “She has an arm like a cannon. She clocked one of them in the head with rocks that hummed when they went past me.”

  “Good girl,” Sandy said. “Is she doing okay?”

  “I think she’s getting there. It was us or them. Not a lot of choice.”

  “Still,” Sandy said. “That kind of event can mess with your mind for a while.”

 

  “She seemed pretty shaken at first, but I think she made her peace with it,” I said.

  “I hope so.”

  “Remember Eccles, the cop from Oklahoma City?”

  “Right,” Sandy said.

  “I talked to him a little while ago, and he’s confident that Peck was behind what happened to my parents but can’t do anything about it. He’s getting pressure to drop the case,” I said.

  “At least he tried.”

  “I think I have an idea, though.”

  “Sowing the seeds of chaos in your unique and misbegotten way?”

  “The chaos is a byproduct of confronting evil on its own terms,” I said.

  Sandy laughed a big, deep laugh. She put her hand on my cheek and said “I don’t know how you can say that with a straight face. Remember Alamogordo? Remember El Paso? You’re like a wrecking ball. You get results, but you leave a path of destruction in your wake.”

  “I am an agent of change,” I said.

  “You’re the master of disaster,” she said. “So what’s your idea?”

  She’d left her hand on my cheek, and I felt a pleasant amount of heat coming off of her palm. I smelled the coconut oil in her suntan lotion and the floral scent of her perfume. She was still wearing the bikini, and as attracted as I was to Emily, it was impossible for me to ignore Sandy’s figure when it was six inches away from me and all of it but about ten square inches was uncovered, nicely toned, perfectly shaped, and slick with suntan oil.

  “Eyes up here,” Sandy said. “I know you have more self control than those high school boys do.”

  “What if we turn our friend in there loose on Anthony Peck?”

  “What?”

  “Suppose we could get Peck loose from his crew? Let the ninja take him down to the bone marrow. Then tell Peck’s crew that what happened to Peck is a message from the Backett family.”

  “So ... start a war between two monsters and hopefully not be destroyed in the process?”

  “Right. After we find a way to make sure that Emily doesn’t get caught in the fallout.”

  “You’ve noticed the specialness of her whole package, have you?” Sandy said. She tilted her head slightly to one side, sizing me up. “You did. Didn’t you?”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “That’s okay. Your silence speaks volumes.” There was darkness in her blue eyes that I’d never seen before. She pursed her lips like she was thinking about something unpleasant, and then she left the room.