Airbag Scars

by Jim Heskett

  He stood up from the barstool, and his sloppy hand knocked over his beer, which spilled onto the lap of a biker two seats down. Donovan paused a moment to mourn; spilled beer was one of life’s true tragedies.

  The hefty man with the wet pants rose to his feet. He didn’t look happy about wearing Ten Pin Porter.

  “Excuse you,” the guy said. He had a bald head and a Fu Manchu mustache. Redneck type. Blubbery neck folds spilled over the confines of the tight collar of his leather jacket.

  Donovan stared. He was drunker than he thought. “Excuse me?”

  “You dumped your beer on my jeans. Are you going to apologize for that?”

  “Now, why the fuck would I do that?” Donovan said. “Seems to me you owe me a beer, because that one–which I was going to drink–is now all over your pants. I didn’t say it was okay for you to wear my beer on your pants.”

  The biker grinned, with no hint of fear in his eyes. This pleased Donovan, because there was no fun in tussling with the unprepared.

  Then he realized if he squabbled with this biker, all sorts of bad things could come out of it. He might break his hand on this lunkhead’s face. He might injure his back trying to bodyslam the fat bastard.

  “If that’s the way you want to go, we can do it that way,” the biker said as he fingered his mustache. The guy obviously took great pride in the sausages hanging from his chin.

  A shotgun cocked behind him. Donovan turned, and the bartender was holding a double-barrel, leveled directly at him. “Not in my bar.”

  “I’ll meet you outside,” the biker said.

  “Sounds good to me.” Donovan waited until after the biker had left, put on his coat, and then slipped out the back door.

  He strolled across the street, disappointed there’d been no fight, but he had more important matters right now. He had some trouble getting the car key in the door, but once he was behind the wheel, he felt fine. Just fine.

  Driving home was no easy task, but he made it without crashing into anything.

  Patton greeted him with barks and yips like Donovan had never seen before. He usually came home every few hours and let the dog out, but he’d been so preoccupied with getting Hayden situated that the dog had been the last thing on his mind. With a quiet hand motion, he commanded the dog to sit.

  Patton obeyed and pointed his wide eyes at his master. Donovan dropped to a knee and stroked the dog’s throat and chin. The dog responded with voracious face licks.

  Patton nipped at his feet, then stretched in anticipation, his tail stub hitching left and right.

  “Damn it, dog, I told you to wait.”

  Patton chirped a single bark and Donovan grunted his reply. “Fine. Let’s go.”

  He slipped a choke chain over the dog’s neck and escorted him to the elevator. They went to the first floor and exited the building, Patton leaping forward with every step. Blustery cold greeted them in the outside world.

  The dog lifted up his leg against the first tree they came across, and Donovan made sure to keep back from the ricocheting spray. He watched the dog, balancing on three legs, squeezing his abdomen muscles. An impressive creature. The dog looked up at him, for approval, validation, or whatever. Donovan stared at this thing that slept at the foot of his bed every night. Felt distant from it.

  Even though the dog had concluded his business, Donovan decided to walk him around the block to defuse his adrenaline and counteract the alcohol in his system so he could think. They crossed the street and continued on the sidewalk to the stop sign, and then the dog went crazy. Twenty feet away, a squirrel chirped at them. There was no tree nearby for it to climb, so the little furry creature had frozen in place, barking like a rodent twenty times his real size.

  Patton repeatedly charged against the choke chain, not caring that he was going to suffocate himself by doing so. Donovan watched the dog: whimpering, desperate, single-minded of purpose. The only thing in the world that Patton wanted was to chase and kill the creature sitting in the grass. Every muscle in the dog’s body had tensed in a predatory, murderous rage.

  Donovan opened his hand, and when the leash fell to the ground, Patton took the hint. He sprinted at the squirrel, six feet of webbed nylon fluttering behind him. The squirrel bolted and the dog gave chase. Donovan watched them, both animals running at top speed in a blur of beige and brown. Chunks of snow and dirt flew into the air in Patton’s wake. They continued until the squirrel turned a corner, and Patton followed, the sounds of his panting growing fainter.

  They were gone.

  Donovan took out his phone and dialed Micah’s number. Before Micah could say hello, he said, “how was everything with Roland?”

  “We got him. I don’t know why you did that but—”

  “Don’t worry about it. That was just a little favor. But now we have some real business to talk about.”

  Silence on the other end for a few seconds. “What business is that?”

  “Hayden. I have her. If you want me not to kill her, you’re going to give yourself up to me, and come back with me to Mexico. We’re going to meet our old friends, and you’re going to atone for what you’ve done.”

  “You have Hayden?”

  Donovan grumbled at how thick-headed the snitch could be. “Yes, obviously, I have her.”

  “Why should I believe you?”

  “Goddamn it, Micah, you are such a difficult little shit, aren’t you? In an hour or two, I’m going to send you a text with a GPS drop pin of the address. You come meet me there alone, or she dies. Bring cops or your buddy Frank, and I’ll know. It’s that simple.”

  Micah didn’t say anything, so Donovan felt the need to fill the silence. “Well, that’s all we have to talk about. You make it right and settle what you’ve done to me and all of our friends, or she pays the price for it. It’s your choice.”

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  HAYDEN AWOKE with a start. The awful realization spread that Donovan kidnapping her had not been a dream. She was bound to a chair in some office room, lit only by a lantern sitting on the desk next to her. For all she knew, she was in Kansas or Utah.

  But he wasn’t here.

  She sat quietly for a minute, listening to the sounds of the room. No hum of a heater, and she guessed by how cold she was that the building had no heat at all. She could hear the occasional squeak of a rat, and if she weren’t so freaked out by the whole experience, she might have found that unsettling. Obviously, she had bigger problems than rats.

  As she turned her head to take in her surroundings, she felt that sick half-drunk, half-hungover sensation of waking to early morning sunlight after a rowdy night on the town. Whatever he’d injected into her butt cheek had blurred her head and her body.

  This small room had a collection of dusty and spiderweb-covered file cabinets pushed against the walls, and some thumbtacked posters. Workplace safety. Employee Assistance Program. Okay, so she was in an office building or a warehouse. She could see only darkness through the room’s windows.

  After the minute went by and there was no sign of Donovan, she had to decide what to do. She wriggled her hands, and they barely moved at all. Her arms were at her sides, with her hands pressed into her lap. She could move her head a little, and she discovered that she had duct tape covering her from her ankles all the way up to her neck.

  She couldn’t break out of duct tape. No way. If she’d been near something sharp, maybe she could have scooted the chair over to it, but she saw nothing within a few feet in any direction.

  Was she still wearing her bathrobe as she had been when Donovan burst into her apartment? She tried to feel the cloth against her skin, but couldn’t tell for sure.

  Hands and feet bound, duct tape keeping her secured to the chair. The image of Glen’s brain matter splattered on the art print on her office wall kept flashing in her head.

  No way out.

  Her heart rate started to climb as the futility of the situation settled over her. She was going to die. This crazy so
n of a bitch was going to come back any minute and he was going to kill her.

  She would die.

  Her lips curled into a frown as the tears streamed down her face. She couldn’t even wail, with the duct tape over her mouth. Then, a tear slipped from her cheek down onto a piece of tape on her chest.

  Inspiration struck.

  She took in a deep breath and pushed, until she started peeing her pants. She let it all go, as disgusting as it was. She peed until her bladder was empty. She felt the moisture saturating the duct tape around her hands, could feel her fingers becoming slick.

  Then she went to work.

  She started wriggling her hands—both together since they were bound—back and forth with her pee as lubrication. After a full minute of doing this, she felt a little of the duct tape flecking away from her skin. She could wiggle her hips. The fresh cuts on her stomach stung, but she was used to that.

  It was working. Now the only question was: where had Donovan gone, and when would he be back?

  She managed to move her arms enough so her elbow gained a little traction. She started pushing outward, feeling the duct tape fall away from her chest. Her hands burst free of the tape through a hole.

  Success. She had a chance. She tried to shout about her new sense of hope, but the duct tape turned it into a mumble.

  With her hands now out, she started wriggling her arms to work the duct tape on the upper part of her torso away. She pushed the bottom line of tape up a few inches, then she gained access to her shoulders. Working, shifting, moving the tape into bunches. When she was able to free her shoulders entirely, she looked for edges of the tape to pick at, and found one.

  She tore long strips away. Peeling the tape off the back of the chair was an arduous task, and she kept thinking of the time. She didn’t have access to a clock, but she knew she’d been at this for a half hour, maybe longer. Every tick put her closer to danger.

  She removed enough of the tape that only some stray strings of it were still attached to her upper body. Then she went to work on the tape covering her legs, which was a lot easier now that she could bend over.

  Some time later, maybe fifteen minutes, she removed the last of the tape binding her to the chair, and she leaped to her feet. But, since her legs were still tied together with rope, she immediately toppled and went face-first into a desk next to the chair.

  Standing up again proved to be a challenging task, but she managed to get to her knees, then throw her hands on top of the desk and push herself up. Needed to find something to cut the ropes, but she had trouble putting clear thoughts together. Mind too muddy.

  She hopped around the office, checking the file cabinets along one wall, and then she went back to the desk. In the top drawer, she found exactly what she’d been looking for: a gold letter opener. She tried to grip it in her hands and then turn it toward the ropes, but the angle was all wrong and she couldn’t get the leverage to cut. So she stuck the hilt of the letter opener in the drawer and shut it, then shoved her stomach against the drawer to hold it closed. She pressed the rope against the blade and moved her hands up and down.

  Because of the dull blade, this took another five or ten minutes. She was still groggy from whatever Donovan had given her the second time, and now exhausted. He’d probably expected her to sleep through his entire absence. As she raked her hands against the blade, images of Glen’s mouth wrapping around that pistol barrel kept popping into her head. She tried to blink the images away, and they were replaced instead with the vision of that art print of the Denver skyline, dripping with Glen’s brain matter. It wouldn’t go away.

  When her hands were freed, she sliced through the bonds on her feet. Impulse told her to sprint; to get the hell out of this place as soon as possible. But what if Donovan was right outside this room, waiting for her? What if this was some kind of sick test, and he was out there, ready to snatch her as soon as she got free?

  She eased toward the door of the office and tried to spy through the cloudy glass out into the next room. Again, no sound, no movement. She opened the door, struck by the realization that she was in some kind of massive warehouse with ceilings three or four stories high. Moonlight filtered down from a few windows high on the walls, but she couldn’t see much inside.

  She let her eyes adjust to the darkness and began to feel her way around. When her feet struck a solid mass, she toppled forward and braced her hands out. Something mushy came back against her hands. Soft, but not slick. She moved her fingers around, and it felt like a bed sheet, with something underneath it.

  She squeezed. A bed sheet, covering a body, or an animal. Then she recognized the odor coming off the form under the bed sheet. Definitely a corpse. She gasped and fell backward onto her hands. As her eyes adjusted, she could tell there was a female figure wrapped in that sheet.

  Part of her brain told her to ignore it, to get up and run away. But a part of her had to know what was hidden inside it. Her hand reached out and lifted the sheet at one end, and it took a few moments of staring for her to realize what she was looking at. She almost knew the face at the top of that stiff, bloated body.

  And that’s when the footsteps echoed a few feet behind Hayden, and the beam of a flashlight shone over her shoulder.

  “Ahh,” Donovan said. “I see you’ve found our friend Sherry.”

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  MICAH CRAWLED across the floor in the corner of his bedroom, running his fingers along the carpet where it met the wall. He found the latch he’d been seeking and pulled on it. A section of the carpet came away from the floor, and he tugged until he could get a hand underneath it. When he’d pulled back enough carpet to reveal the hardwood underneath, he lifted the floorboards closest to the wall. His hand slipped underneath them and came back out with his small shoebox.

  He set the shoebox on his lap and opened it. A collection of photographs, concert stubs, a couple flash drives, that cursed business card with the wolf logo, and love letters from high school girlfriends stared back at him. Many of the pieces of paper were starting to yellow and fray.

  Micah wasn’t supposed to have this. No personal effects from his old life as Michael McBriar were meant to have come with him to Denver, but Micah had smuggled this one small collection after he’d left his old life behind. It had been a great risk, but he couldn’t bring himself to destroy that other person completely.

  In the same way part of him had trouble accepting the fact that he could never drink again, he couldn’t erase the person he’d been for the first twenty-seven years of his life.

  He set the love letters aside and thumbed through the pictures. Most of them were from his childhood. Parents, his brother and sister, some aunts and uncles. There were only a few of his time working for El Lobo, because not many people in that organization cared to have their picture taken. But there was one person in particular, Micah’s friend who’d died, and Micah found himself lingering on a photo of the two of them next to the river canal in Bricktown in Oklahoma City. The drunken smiles on their faces. The way his friend’s arm hung over Micah’s shoulder, like brothers.

  “I’m sorry. This is all my fault. If I’d known… I would have done everything differently.”

  Someday, he would have to deal with his friend’s death and make amends for his part in that. But not today. He had to stay focused.

  Micah’s phone buzzed. He wrenched it from his pocket and checked the text message, which was a drop pin from Donovan, with a location in Commerce City. The little blinking dot taunted him, pulsing at him, telling him this might be the end.

  He had several options. First, he could go and freely give himself up, just as Donovan wanted. That would mean death for Micah, because whoever was left of El Lobo’s crew would not roll out the red carpet for Micah’s triumphant return. He’d be strung up and tortured as an example to anyone else who might consider snitching on the cartel.

  And, there was no guarantee that Donovan would let Hayden live, even if Micah complied wit
h Donovan’s every demand. She knew too much now.

  The next option would be to involve Frank, but that didn’t seem fair. This was Micah’s mess, and he should be the one to clean it up. Besides, Donovan had warned him specifically not to involve the old man.

  He could call the police, but that was still an unpleasant choice. Even if he did it anonymously, Donovan might kill Hayden before they could raid wherever they were holed up. Micah had to assume Donovan either had surveillance cameras or would be at a vantage point that he could see Micah’s arrival.

  Any option where Hayden died was unacceptable. None of this was her fault.

  Micah returned the pictures and the love letters to the shoebox and stuffed it back under the floorboards. He went into the living room and slumped on his couch. Three objects on his coffee table stared back at him: a cigar box, a women’s running shoe, and the severed head of Boba Fett. The shoe was a lost cause, and he would never have an answer to the riddle that had plagued him for the last several weeks.

  Boba didn’t have anything useful to offer.

  But the cigar box, it contained something that might make a difference. The last option, the only one that made sense anymore, was based on the advice Frank had given: you’re going to have to kill him.

  Micah took his revolver from the box and checked to make sure it was loaded. He spun the cylinder and popped it back in, then squinted down the sights at his television to check his aim. His hands were shaking a little, but nothing he couldn’t deal with.

  Once Hayden was free and clear, then Micah would make another choice, possibly the last one he’d ever have to make.