Victim

by Gary Kinder

  As Cortney entered the room, a burnished shaft of light from the late afternoon sun shot through a rear window of thick glass tile and dispersed across the huge speakers squatting on the floor. Cortney walked into the smoky play of light.

  “Thanks for letting me park behind the store, Stan.”

  “Stop, Cortney,” Stan said.

  Cortney already was past him, reaching for the doorknob.

  “Stop, Cortney! He’s going to shoot you!”

  But Cortney, in his hurry to get home, had turned the doorknob and was starting out the door.

  To his left he suddenly heard another voice.

  “Take another step, and I’ll put a bullet in you.”

  Cortney stopped and turned, and there on the other side of the broad shaft of light was a tall black man. He was aiming a gun at Cortney’s face.

  Cortney slammed the door and threw his hands up, the package of slides falling to the floor.

  “Geez, if you hadn’t said anything,” mumbled Cortney, “I never would’ve even known you had a gun.”

  Then Cortney was tumbling down the stairs. He was being kicked and punched in the stomach. Someone’s knee connected with his balls. He fell into the basement and lay upon the shag carpet, sweaty, frightened, trying to catch his breath. Another man was waiting in the basement shadows.

  He was a short black man, not more than five and a half feet tall. When he walked around the room, his ass cocked in such a way that he appeared to be strutting. It made him seem almost portly, but his body was hard. Thick ropes of muscle spread upward from his arms and chest, over his shoulders, and climbed his neck to support a swollen and misshapen head. His tall forehead sloped to meet the back of it. Though his head swelled large for his body, his eyes seemed too small and defined for his head, too sharp and glinty for the high smooth forehead, the broad nose, the bulbous lips. He pulled Cortney’s hands behind him and tied them together with plastic speaker wire, then bound his feet.

  Cortney lay parallel to the wall at the right of the stairs, his head toward the far corner. He had been in the room many times. It was decorated to resemble a den. Green shag carpeting covered the fourteen-foot-square floor. Three walls were painted eggshell and the fourth, opposite the stairs, was a sliding wood panel, behind which were the workshop and storage. Perpendicular to him ran a display rack filled with new quadraphonic amplifiers hooked to a console for demonstration. That afternoon the room was littered with boxes and with amplifiers waiting for repair.

  Stan too had been tied up on the floor of the basement and now lay with his head toward the wall opposite Cortney. A tall, husky boy of twenty, Stan had been left in charge of the shop while Brent Richardson was in San Francisco for a one-day trade show. Stan had thick brown hair and a broad smile of white, slightly imperfect teeth. He liked to wear heavy hiking boots and plaid shirts with the sleeves rolled up, reminding Brent of a jolly lumberjack. But Stan had a genius for electronics and sound systems and an easy way with customers.

  The previous Friday night the Hi-Fi Shop had sponsored a dance at Ben Lomond High and Stan had been the disc jockey. Brent had helped him set up the sound equipment, and Michelle, who had worked at the shop for only a week, accompanied them. When the equipment was in place and Stan was testing it with his favorite Jethro Tull sounds, Michelle had dragged Brent onto the dance floor. Michelle’s brunette hair cascaded in loose curls about her shoulders, framing a face of exquisite, porcelain features. At nineteen she was a curvaceous five feet five inches tall. Though she was engaged, she loved to flirt, and Brent found her warm and fun; it was a side of his employees he rarely saw. Brent had hired Michelle because he liked to keep bright, pretty girls working in the store. They were good for business.

  Now, Michelle lay next to Stan, both stretched in front of the wall of amplifiers, their hands and feet tightly bound with speaker wire.

  The black man who had called Cortney back into the shop was now in the basement, watching over them. Physically, he bore little resemblance to the man who had tied up Cortney. He was tall and athletic. Above his thin upper lip was a distinct, neatly trimmed mustache. As he stood in the basement near the foot of the stairs, he held a .38 in his hand.

  Upstairs, Cortney could hear the short man and another man in the parking alley behind the shop, one shifting Stan’s old utility jeep from near the rear entrance, the other backing up a truck or a van in its place. Noise from the muffler came up tightly against the outside wall, the exhaust echoing loudly off the back door. When the engine shut down, the footsteps began: quick, heavy footsteps out, a pause at the back door, long strides back in. Some of the footsteps popped or squeaked, the men stepping on spilled flakes of packing material. Occasionally came a muffled clank! as one of them hit the metal fire grating just above Cortney’s head.

  Cortney, Stan, and Michelle remained tied and lying on the floor among the boxes and amplifiers, not knowing what their captors had planned for them once the movement upstairs had finally stopped. They lay there while an hour passed, an hour of squeaking and popping and shuffling and clanking upstairs, and stillness in the basement. Earlier, one of the men had threatened to shoot all of them if anything went wrong. Lying in the basement, Stan and Courtney tried talking to the man now holding the gun on them. They pleaded with him to leave them alone, to take the equipment and then be gone. Stan did most of the talking. He was good at reasoning with people. But then Cortney said something about the stereo equipment the men were hauling out of the shop, something that just slipped out of his mouth and that Stan thought would anger the man.

  “Shut up,” he whispered to Cortney, “do you want them to shoot us?”

  “They’re going to, anyhow,” said Cortney. “Aren’t they?”

  After school that afternoon Cortney had gone to his flying lesson at the Ogden Municipal Airport, early as always, and walked among the rows of light private airplanes, their wings and tails anchored by drooping chains. He could hear the high-pitched engines of small planes taxiing down the runway, then the receding drone as they lifted off, gained altitude, and shrank in the distance. In moments the planes would become silent white specks against the mountains.

  Flying had grown to be an obsession with Cortney. As far back as kindergarten he had brought model airplanes to school and assembled them with puddles of glue. Then he had advanced to the sophisticated radio-control planes with the broad wingspans and the light balsa wings stretched over with thin fabric and painted with shiny wood dope. He was fascinated with the physics of it all, the way vortex and vacuum and the speed of air molecules all came together to lift a wing so simply and effortlessly. Cortney’s dreams were filled with wings and clouds and sky the way homecoming queens and the winning run melted into the wishes of most boys.

  Cortney’s flight instructor was Wolfgang Lange, a round-faced, stocky German of thirty-six with bright blue, jocular eyes. When Wolfgang talked about flying, his hands fluttered and arced as though they were little planes.

  “Cort was a happy kid and a little bit of a wise guy like all sixteen-year-olds,” recalled Wolfgang. “But he was an easy student to teach. I mean very, very easy. I called him an airport bum, because he came out here even when he wasn’t flying. I asked him once, ‘What’re you gonna do after you graduate from school? You gonna be a doctor?’ And he says: ‘Oh, no. I want to be an aeronautical engineer.’ He had the stuff for it, too. I’d show him a maneuver once and he’d have it mastered. There was a few times I even had to hold him back just a little to put him in his place. I try to teach ‘em judgment, too. But it was a joy to fly with him. When I knew he was coming out, I knew it was gonna be easy for me. Cortney just loved to fly.”

  It was a warm day in early spring. The snow had disappeared from the ground and from halfway up the awesome rock wall known as the Wasatch mountain front. The jagged peaks would remain white even into summer. Just prior to 4:30 Cortney wandered over to the small Cessna building, where Wolfgang had his office. Wolf was waiting for him.


  “Hello, Cort,” he said.

  “Hi, Wolf.”

  “Have you done your homework?”

  “Sure,” said Cortney. “I know what we’re going to do. I’m pretty sure I know how to do it.”

  “Any questions,” asked Wolf, “anything you don’t understand?”

  Cortney said what he always said. “Nope. Let’s go fly.”

  They left the office and walked down a row of parked planes until they came to a red and white Cessna 150 Skyhawk. After removing the tie-down chains and inspecting the outside of the plane, Cortney climbed into the left seat and Wolfgang into the right.

  “Okay,” said Wolf, “it’s your airplane. I’m just watching.”

  Cortney flew the Cessna in wide arcs around the airfield, landing and then gaining speed to take off again. Wolfgang had a policy never to tell a student when he would be soloing for the first time. Otherwise, it made the student nervous and he didn’t sleep the night before. Somewhere between ten and fourteen hours in the air, the student would begin naturally to reckon with his own mistakes before the instructor had to. At that point, Wolfgang would get out of the plane. As he appraised Cortney’s performance that afternoon, he knew that Cortney was ready to fly on his own.

  When they landed after the third touch-and-go, Wolfgang reached for the radio mike next to Cortney’s right knee.

  “Ogden Control, this is Wolf. I’ve got a first solo here, so give him a little room, okay?”

  Wolfgang replaced the mike and looked at Cortney. “Now, I want you to go back up. I’m going to get out of the plane. Remember, I weigh about one hundred seventy-five pounds. When I get out, the plane will be flying faster because it’s just you in here. And it will glide farther. So you have to make the proper corrections. Keep your nose down when you climb out.”

  “Gotcha,” said Cortney.

  “Now hold on a minute. When you come down and you start to glide, you gotta close your throtde a little bit sooner, because it’s going to glide farther on you. You got that?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Any questions about anything?”

  “Nope.”

  “Okay, I want you to go back out and make three touch-and-gos, like we just did, and then on the fourth time around make a full stop landing. You nervous? You don’t look nervous.”

  Cortney shook his head.

  “And, Cortney, don’t go buzzin’ around ten feet off the deck like you like to do. Remember, judgment.”

  Wolf stepped out of the plane and signaled to Cortney that he was a safe distance from the propeller. Cortney mentally checked off the oil level, the gas drain to rid the fuel of water, the primer to pump the fuel directly to the cylinders.

  “Clear!” he yelled out the window.

  The propeller turned slowly, caught, and whirred into invisibility. The plane vibrated, and the loud thrum of the prop filled the cockpit. Cortney checked the oil pressure and called the tower for clearance.

  “Ogden Control, this is Cessna one-one-zero-niner-two at Cessna building to taxi to takeoff.”

  “Roger, Cessna zero-niner-two, you’re cleared to taxi to runway three-four. Wind is two-seven-zero at six, altimeter niner-niner-eight.”

  The propeller pulled the light plane slowly along the taxiway. Cortney brought the plane up to the stop line, adjacent to the runway, where he ran the engine up to 1,700 rpm to check the magnetos. He scanned his instrument panel. Everything was functioning properly. He swung his rudder in each direction and switched his radio to Tower frequency.

  “Ogden Tower, this is Cessna zero-niner-two, ready for takeoff.”

  “Roger, zero-niner-two, cleared for immediate takeoff.”

  With the rudder pedals on the floor Cortney swung the plane in a tight turn to the right and onto the runway, which disappeared into a dot, seemingly at the base of the mountains miles away. Cortney eased open the throttle. The plane moved forward, all noise and vibration, gaining speed until it was hurtling toward the dot at sixty miles an hour. Cortney reached down by his right knee and spun the trim wheel to raise the nose, but only slightly, as Wolfgang had warned him. Then the wheels sprang from the runway and he was climbing, angled toward the sky.

  Cortney gained altitude, rising over the freeway, over the city, aimed at the undulating, white-capped wall of the Wasatch Range. In a long, wide arc he banked the plane to the left, heading west toward Antelope Island, the big mountain rising amidst the afternoon shimmers of the Great Salt Lake. He looked down upon the green and brown farming squares on the plain below, the orderly roofs of housing tracts and trailer courts, the drying puddles of white crust left behind by the receding salt lake. The view had been his many times before, but now he was flying above it all for the first time alone.

  He circled back toward the south and reached for the radio mike at his knee.

  “Ogden Tower, this is Cessna one-one-zero-niner-two ready to land.”

  “Roger, Cessna zero-niner-two, you’re cleared to land.”

  The red and white Cessna approached the runway from the southwest. Cortney remembered at the last minute to ease up on his throttle. The plane floated down toward the runway. The concrete came up quickly in sharp focus and moved swiftly beneath him. The plane listed slightly to the left, the left wheel hit, then immediately the right. The plane bounced. Cortney picked up speed again, hit sixty miles an hour, rolled the trim wheel, and lifted off for his second loop around the airport.

  When he had landed for the fourth time, Cortney taxied to the end of the runway, switching frequencies on his radio.

  “Ogden Control, this is Cessna one-one-zero-niner-two, off the active, would like to taxi to the Cessna building.”

  “Roger, Cessna zero-niner-two, cleared to taxi to Cessna building.”

  Cortney steered the plane along the taxiway, maneuvered it into the empty tie-down slot near the building, and cut the engine. Wolfgang had been watching from the time Cortney had first taxied out to the runway until he had landed for the last time. He opened Cortney’s door.

  “See,” he said, “it flies without the instructor.”

  Cortney jumped out of the cockpit. “That was easier than I thought it was going to be!”

  “That first landing you made was a little rough, but not bad.”

  “I know, I almost forgot to close the throttle like you told me.”

  “You’ll learn. When you come out next time, we’ll go around together first, then I’ll let you solo again.”

  “Okay!”

  “In the meantime, you better get your butt up to that ground school tonight.”

  “Yes, Master Instructor.”

  “I mean it.”

  “Okay, I’ll go, I’ll go. I just think I’m wasting my time up at that college.”

  “I know, but you gotta get that written examination passed, or you can’t get a license. So get your rear end in gear, you haven’t got a lot of time till that class starts at seven. Come on in the office now and we’ll fill out your logbook.”

  When they walked into the office, Wolf said to the secretary, “Get the scissors out, we’re going to cut his shirttail!”

  For months Cortney had waited for this moment. It was a ceremony of sorts, informal but meaningful, like a pilot getting his wings. Cortney pulled his shirt out and the secretary snipped the tail off and pinned it to the wall with the other shirttails. While Cortney and Wolfgang filled out Cortney’s logbook, she typed a card and placed it just above the shirttail. The card read:

  CORTNEY NAISBITT MONDAY, APRIL 22, 1974—WOLFGANG LANGE

  Wolfgang signed Cortney’s logbook and Cortney went over to the wall and looked at the shirttail with his name above it. “I can’t wait to tell my mom and dad,” he said to the secretary.

  “Cort!” said Wolfgang. “Ground school.”

  “I know, I’ll be there.”

  Cortney was walking out the door when the office phone rang. It was for him.

  Another hour in the basement had passed. It was now just
after eight o’clock. The vehicle parked at the back door had started up and pulled away across the cinder alley, and another had been backed up in its place. The tall man who had stood over Cortney and the others in the basement had gone back upstairs, and the footsteps overhead had begun again. Back and forth they traveled through the sound room to the rear door of the shop. They had been traversing the sound room but a short while when suddenly above his head Cortney heard two men running. The men ran to the back door and raced down the stairs in quick, indistinguishable footsteps. They stood in the shadows at Cortney’s feet, away from the shaft of light still beaming down the stairs. One was the taller man who earlier had held the .38 on Cortney, Stan, and Michelle. The other was the short man with the high forehead. Cortney could hear them both panting.

  In the alley a car door slammed. Cortney heard footsteps crunching on the gravel. They paused near the back door; for seconds they shuffled. Then he heard the crunching again. It moved toward the door.

  The Hi-Fi Shop was silent as the door opened.

  Gary Naisbitt hadn’t thought about it for six weeks. When he awoke that morning, he suddenly recalled: “It’s Monday, the twenty-second! I’m supposed to have a tooth filled today!”

  At twenty-nine Gary Naisbitt was a handsome man: five eleven, slim, muscular, with light brown, very straight hair. He was the Naisbitt’s eldest son, the loner in the family, intense, articulate, introspective. Although he held college degrees in chemistry and German, he was now involved in real estate, but was becoming increasingly unhappy with the profession. His unhappiness had deepened recently when his Danish wife, Eva, had left him to return to Denmark.

  The dentist’s office was in Ogden, twenty-five miles from Gary’s apartment in Centerville. He arrived a few minutes late, had his tooth filled, and departed with a rubbery jaw. It was too late to return to his office, and as long as he was in town, it seemed a good time to look for a house he had promised to find for a friend.