He had the presence of mind to put his hands up, but I half-expected him to go for the gun. Instead, I heard Melissa scream at me, and the door behind us fly open as someone heavy stepped into the room. Next came the distinctive schi-schlock! of a shotgun.
“Get off him!”
It was the same voice that had greeted us at the door, the man Melissa called “Grease.” I could see his reflection in the glass surface of the picture behind Gill’s desk. God, this guy was big. He carried a sawed-off pump action pistol grip, and his hands were so massive it made the gun look like a pee-shooter. I narrowed my eyes, unwilling to let his big gun trump me. “Go ahead,” I murmured to Gill. “Tell him to shoot. I’ve taken on the whole damn city. You think I can’t handle a two-bit thug like you?”
Gill’s jaw worked slowly, like he couldn’t make up his mind what to do.
“Better hope he’s packing sabot loads, or the spread on that shot is gonna go through us both. Come to think of it,” I glanced at the narrow space between our two bodies, “so will a sabot round. So the way I see it, you’re shot no matter what you do. And then the cops will come, and they’re gonna want to take a real careful look at this place. So we can stand here and end our lives, or we can engage in some mutually beneficial business.” I pulled the hammer back on the revolver. “What’s your pleasure, Gill?”
He blinked, and then nodded. In the glass, I watched the heavy grimace and lower his gun. “Mel,” I said, “take his gun.”
Melissa put out her hand, and after another nod from Gill, the big man surrendered the weapon. Mel held the gun as if she were unfamiliar with its use. She retreated to the corner, out of reach. Only then did I release Gill’s collar and step back. I kept the gun pointed at Gill until I took possession of the firearm from the girl, who huddled into herself as if she’d finally realized what trouble she was in. I waved Grease over to my line of sight and lowered the gun.
“All right then,” I said. “We have a deal. Five G’s and the papers I gave you, in exchange for a new social, certificate, license, and passport.”
“I need a photo,” he said.
“Pull it off the internet. I’m all over the news these days. And I can’t have my picture taken looking like this. Photoshop it or something. Close, but not too close.”
“And what makes you think I’m going to do anything for you once you leave here?”
I bit my lip. “‘Cause I’ve got something you want.”
“What’s that?”
I raised the pistol and pointed it at Melissa’s head. “Her.”
Chapter 27
Melissa gave a little shriek when I pointed the gun her way. “What the hell, Gerrold?!”
“She’s my prisoner,” I explained. “I took her captive at the hospital. She’s only breathing ‘cause she’s useful to me. Pray that usefulness doesn’t end.”
“That true, Mel?” Gill said.
“Tell them how we met.” I glared menacingly at the girl. Her lower lip quivered as she glanced between us.
“He c-car-jacked me. At the hospital. Before work.”
“She’s been doing as I say ever since. Little Stockholm syndrome going on here, but don’t let it fool you.” Truthfully, I added, “Her life is at risk every minute she spends with me.”
“All right. All right!” Gill said when I didn’t lower the gun right away. I put it down, trying not to wince as Melissa cringed, deep fear seared in her eyes.
“Count out five big ones from the envelope on the chair,” I said to her, “and leave it on the desk.”
She scurried to the chair and did as I asked. I half-smiled when I saw her eyes widen at the remaining money in the envelope.
“All right.” I nodded. “How much time do you need?”
“Three days.”
“You got two.”
He grimaced, his eyes flickering. I don’t think he was used to people speaking to him this way.
“Let’s go, Mel.”
She spun on her heel and fled the room. I followed close behind. As I shut the door, I nodded to the big guy. “Thanks for the gun,” I said, and left.
***
Outside, I caught up with the girl. It wasn’t easy, given how quickly she stalked to her car.
“Hey,” I said.
“What?!” She turned quickly, tears staining her face.
“You okay?”
She whirled about and climbed in the front seat, slamming the door behind her. I went around to the passenger side, but she locked the door. I could see her sitting in the car, her head in her hand, her keys clutched in her fist.
Do it, I thought. Please. “I’m sorry, Mel,” I said through the glass.
After a moment, she unlocked the door. I climbed inside and slid the gun into the back seat. Wordlessly, she started the car and pulled onto the road.
“You have to know that was an act.”
“Do I?” she shot back.
“You’re upset.”
She cocked her head, the tears in her eyes belying her ironic grin. “Let’s give a prize to Detective Obvious!”
“Mel, I would never do anything like that to you.”
“How relieving.”
I wasn’t getting anywhere, and I felt the frustration building. “What are you doing with a guy like that, anyway?”
“What business is it of yours?”
“He’s like, twice your age!” When she didn’t answer, I added, “A man like that only wants one thing.”
“All men only want one thing.”
“That’s true. Until they have kids of their own. Then they want something else.”
“Yeah? Like what?”
“Like keeping their kids safe. Protecting them from guys that’ll take advantage of a young girl’s vulnerability.”
She mouthed the word “vulnerability” and gave a derisive snort.
“Deny it all you want. You are what’s known as an ‘At Risk’ child.”
She made an unpleasant and anatomically impossible suggestion.
“You watch your mouth!”
“Look, Old School, don’t pretend you know me. I don’t need your labels, and I don’t want your help. Just ‘cause we shared a burger and a beer, that don’t make us BFF’s. So quit riding my ass! We clear?”
I glared at her. “We couldn’t be less clear.”
She steered the car abruptly to the side of the road and threw it in park. Outside, it started to rain. Tiny droplets landed like mist on the windshield and obscured everything outside the car.
“What? Are you like trying to win the Father of the Year award? You are not my old man!”
“You got that right. ‘Cause if I were, you sure as hell wouldn’t be hanging out with a son of a bitch like Gill. And what’s with that ring in your nose and the pink hair?”
She shot me a look of genuine outrage and pain. I knew I’d stepped on a nerve, and I tried to moderate my tone. “You are far too pretty a girl to need all that. It distracts from your face. Your eyes.” I kept pressing, hoping to make her understand. “Keeps people from seeing the real you.”
“Well, maybe that’s what I want. You ever think about that?”
I furrowed my brow. “Why wouldn’t you want people to know you?”
She dropped her eyes. “You wouldn’t understand.”
“Try me.”
Her lip quivered, and she looked at me. For a moment, I thought she was going to open up. But the wall dropped again. She turned away. “Forget it.”
Gently, I put my fingers under her chin and pulled here gaze back to mine. “I don’t want to forget it. You matter. Maybe you don’t see it, and maybe you don’t want to talk about it—God knows you don’t have to—but you matter. Too much to just forget about.”
The fountain erupted. She tore away from me, threw her seatbelt off, and dashed out the door, leaving it hanging open. I fumbled with my seatbelt. Finally got the damn thing off and followed her out of the car.
“Melissa!”
She
strode away from me, arms folded across her chest and head down, huddled into herself as if I’d stabbed her in the gut. “Melissa!”
I ran after her, catching her elbow and spinning her toward me. She beat me fruitlessly with her fists. “Damn you, Gerrold! What do you want with me?”
I encircled her with my arms and crushed her to my chest. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m so sorry.”
“I hate you.”
I stroked her hair. “Yeah. You probably should.”
The rain began in earnest, showering the ground and striking the pavement in tiny impact craters soon lost in the deluge. I peered up at the heavens, letting the water wash across my flame scarred face. I looked down. Melissa shivered. The rain matted her pink hair, collected in her eyelids and dropped off her chin. I opened my coat and put it around her shoulders. “Come on. You can hate me someplace dry.”
It won me a sad smile. Not as much as I’d hoped for, but it would have to suffice.
***
We didn’t speak much after that. I had her drive us to the zoo to scope it out. I asked her what time she needed to be home, but she shot me a black look and I let the matter drop. On the way to the zoo, I called Rogan and told him to take my kids home for the day, that’d I be in touch again tomorrow. He snarled at me and said, “I’m not your damn taxi service or your nanny!” but I hung up before he could get anything else out.
I desperately wanted to see Matt and Sara again, but things were happening too fast, and what with Mel’s current emotional state, I didn’t feel like I could push us into something that we were unprepared to handle.
There wasn’t a big crowd at the zoo because of the rain. I bought us a tiger umbrella from the gift shop where Misty had said she worked, and together Melissa and I strolled through the grounds, studying the layout on the map printed on the back of the zoo’s brochure. We stopped by the lion paddock, staring across the fields of grass to the rocky enclosure that served as their home. Melissa pressed her palms against the thick glass of the paddock wall and studied the languid forms of the giant cats.
“They’re not free,” she said.
“Good thing.” I smirked. I had no doubt of the damage an animal like that could inflict if it ever got out into the general population. Fear alone would drive it to attack and kill.
“They give them all this space and grass and sky—even those stupid plastic rocks in there—but in the end, it’s still just a cage.”
“I think the rocks are real, Mel.”
“Whatever.” After a moment, she said, “Do you think they know they’re not free?”
I thought about it a bit. “Well, they don’t have to hunt. Everything is provided for them. They’re protected from poachers. And they get free medical care. If they have any awareness at all, they must know that they’re being taken care of.”
“Glorified house cats.”
“They don’t really make good pets.”
“But in the end, they’re not free. They can’t go anywhere they want. They can’t do what they were born to do. Be who they’re meant to be. King of the jungle. Raar! It’s all bogus.”
“They don’t seem to mind.”
She turned and flopped against the cage, her fingers flitting to the bracelets above her hand. For the first time, I noticed she was sporting a pair of handcuffs around her left wrist and a key hung from a chain around her neck. I didn’t want to think about why she carried them.
“Maybe they just don’t know what to do about it,” she said. “Like, if they took these walls down. How long d’you think before they’d try to get out?”
“I hear that in prisons, some men become so acclimated to it that they can’t handle life on the outside. It’s like they come to need someone to tell them what to do every moment of the day.”
“None of us are free. We’re all in cages. They just have different shapes, like the ones in this zoo. Work, school, religion, country, family—home. They’re all just different words that mean the same thing. Cages.”
“There’s a big difference between a cage and a home.”
“What’s that?”
“Whether or not you want to be there.”
“And if you don’t want to be there, but you can’t leave?”
I didn’t answer the question. I didn’t need to. Instead, I said, “Tell me about your cage.”
She shook her head. I sensed something was trying to work its way into the open, but couldn’t quite escape her lips. A suspicion had been growing in my mind ever since we met, clawing its way toward certainty with every moment I spent with her. “Is it your Dad?”
“Step-dad,” she snarled. “Robert. My real Dad took off when I was five. Ain’t heard from him since.”
Step-dad. The pieces were falling into place. “What is your step-dad doing to you, Mel?”
She went rigid, stone-like. I knew I was close to home.
“Is he hitting you?”
Her face turned red, and she scrunched up her eyes, shaking her head. There was only one thing that could be worse.
“He’s raping you.”
A violent sob tore from her throat. She tipped forward off the wall, and I caught her as she fell. She clung to me, wringing out her grief. Her fingernails dug into my skin. She dragged me to the ground, and I knelt there with her a long time, too stunned for words.
Chapter 28
After Mel calmed down we moved to the food court where I bought us each a hot dog and root beer. One of the attendants came around and told us the zoo was closing in fifteen minutes, but I waved him off as we ate. Mel remained sullen, almost as if she were angry with herself for confessing her shame to me. I felt a little guilty for prying it out of her. What right did I have to stick my nose in her business anyway? On the other hand, what right did I have to ignore her? My Dad had always taught us that children are the responsibility of their parents, and if the parents aren’t responsible, then they are the responsibility of the next available parent.
But what Mel’s step-dad was doing went beyond parental irresponsibility. He was a sick bastard preying on a young girl.
“I want to help,” I said. That wasn’t quite true. I wanted to shoot the bastard’s balls off.
“You can’t,” she mumbled. I could barely hear her. “You’ll only make things worse.”
“Have you told anyone else?”
“Told Misty.”
I nodded. That made sense, though I doubted Misty had been much help. “What about another adult?”
Her jaw muscles worked as if she were chewing her words. “My Mom,” she finally said.
“And?”
“And she said I was a lying little bitch trying to ruin her life.”
“What about school?”
“What? You mean like a guidance counselor? Like Dr. ‘Smelly’ Schnelli? Clueless dipwad. He’d just go and ask my Mom, and she’d tell him the same damn thing.”
“Cops?”
“Told you. Cops and I don’t get along. Got busted once for possession, B and E. Cops threw me into a jail overnight and told me they hoped I got raped in there. I hate cops. If it weren’t for the overcrowding, I’d be doing time right now. Supposed to be on probation. It’s not like he cares. My PO don’t even know my name.”
“So your only recourse is to go outside the law for help.”
She snorted and looked away. “Whatever.”
It explained everything. Especially why she was stringing along a drug-pushing thug like Gill. I leaned back in the chair with my root beer in my hand. Now I had three kids to rescue. There was no way I was going to let this go on without doing something about it.
The announcement over the intercom told us the zoo was now closed. Dutifully, we gathered our trash and dropped it in the waste can, and left with the few patrons still meandering down the rain-soaked paths. Once back in the car, I turned to her and said, “In a perfect world, what would you do?”
“There’s no such thing.”
“Humor me.”
“Okay, maybe not a perfect world. But a best-case scenario for this world. What would you do?”
Her eyes took on a far away look. “I just want to see it burn. All of it. My mom. That bastard she married. The house. And—especially—that bedroom.” She turned to me, and I blanched at her expression. This wasn’t where I meant go at all. She pinned me down with her words. “You have to help me do it.”
***
She didn’t take my refusal well. Insinuated that I’d put the idea in her head. Virtually accused me of being just like everyone else. I tried to explain that I meant for her to get away. Maybe we could convince Gill to sell her a new ID; something that would let her start over somewhere. I have to admit, I wasn’t thinking very clearly. My own situation was far from ideal, but it pained me to see her in such dire straits herself. I didn’t want to admit that I couldn’t do anything for her.
The worst thing by far, however, was that she refused to drive anywhere until I agreed to it anyway. I contemplated getting out of the car and just leaving her there, but then what would I do? Go car-jack someone else? Besides, I’d already invested five grand and my evidence against the judge with Gill. Without Melissa as my “hostage,” I doubted he’d come through with my papers. More likely, he’d sic his heavy on me with a bigger gun than the 12-gauge I’d tossed in the back. But knowing what she’d endured, how she hurt, kept me anchored in the passenger seat.
“The thing is,” I finally said, “you can’t come back from this. It’s not going to fill the void in your heart. And it ain’t gonna make the pain go away. It’ll just snuff out whatever heart you have left.”
“Did it snuff yours?” she shot back. “Why d’you care so much anyway? You’re this badass stone cold killer, right? What are you doing? Fighting for your kids. Rallying to my defense, and you don’t even know me. If it killed your heart so bad, then you wouldn’t care at all.”
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