Warpath

by Ryan Sayles

  I lean in. “Graham, it’s Richard. I. Will. Find. Molly. Alive. I swear it to you.”

  He clears his throat. “You...have to.”

  “I will.”

  “The b—box...” he weakly motions to the mail organizer/key hook which adorns the wall next to the front door.

  I look; see two pegs but only one set of keys. Two handcuff keys strung on the ring. Graham’s then. Graham’s unmarked car is out in the driveway. Molly’s car, the shitbox as we call it, is not.

  I nod, leave.

  I light up a smoke as I cross through the front door, take the steps in one drop and hit the grass. I work Graham’s phone and find the cell phone locator app he has installed on it. Molly’s phone comes up, a flashing dot superimposed on a map. The street is labeled; nine blocks north and three to the west.

  Got the location, got the getaway car. I walk past the black and white with its door standing wide open, flick my cigarette inside. Hopefully it’s that rookie cocksucker who thinks I’m any old reporting party waiting for him at the end of the drive.

  “Sorry, pencil dick. I’ve got someplace to be.” And I roll out. Nine blocks to the north and three to the west.

  38

  The first time I saw Molly, I thought of classic Hollywood.

  The way her hair seemed to glow in the sunlight like a halo. My wife’s did that. No one else’s did until Graham introduced me to his bride. Her big smile, capped under high cheekbones. Molly wore her eye shadow in a complete circle around her eyes, which set them off as a sparkling, dazzling electric blue.

  “Richard, this is Molly. She’s the one who liked the Oktoberfest brew over the autumn lager,” Graham said as he motioned to her, quaintly dressed in gray plaid with red lips.

  We were waiting outside a steakhouse so I could catch a smoke before we were seated. He had been bugging me to meet his wife for months and I had kept putting it off because Denise in Records said she’d seen Molly and thought Molly was a whale who fancied herself a whore.

  Couldn’t be further from the truth. I should have known; Denise herself needs to buy two airplane tickets and gets easily threatened by any woman who isn’t dead. Women are so catty.

  “Don’t marry her then,” I said, extending a hand to shake hers. “The Oktoberfest was swill compared to the lagers.”

  Graham and I had been drinking the local brewery’s stuff a lot around that time. I knew Graham had been dating Molly since before he’d become a cop and they were married shortly after he graduated the academy, which was great for their honeymoon.

  “I see why Graham has kept you hidden from me for so long, Richard,” Molly said, shaking my hand.

  “Why’s that?”

  “Because I punch anyone who drinks that autumn lager.”

  “You beat your husband?”

  “He drinks Oktoberfest at home with me. I think he’s humoring you with that lager.”

  I gave Graham a sidelong glance. He shrugged, turned red.

  “Sonofabitch, Graham,” I said. “Your wife is going to punch me and you’ve been lying about beer? This whole time?”

  Graham put an arm around Molly and said, “I think our table is ready.”

  I never invited him for an autumn lager again. I don’t booze with liars.

  Reaching back to those memories, how her strawberry perfume mingled with my rib dinner that night, I think to how Graham would never say anything without bringing his wife into the conversation. How they never had children. How they almost adopted twice before being nitpicked and rejected at the last minute. Once I saw her looking at a professional picture of all these happy, chubby babies lined up and smiling, and her hand absently caressed her own womb. Found nothing. How Graham told me she had four brothers and two sisters.

  But she was happy. She was fulfilled. A good man loved her and now she’s stuffed in her own car and if I don’t do something right now, she’s as good as morgue-bound.

  I check the blinking dot on the phone and gun it harder.

  Hardware store.

  The shitbox is parked out in BFE, near the exit to the road. I roll up and leave my own car running, charge up to the driver’s side and see it’s empty. Molly’s cellphone is in the cup holder where she leaves it all the time. She also has a bad habit of leaving the window rolled down and therefore has a bad record of said cell phone getting stolen right out of her car.

  The rapist has left it unrolled as well. I lean in, pop the trunk. A muffled scream. I come around the car and she’s bound but flailing about, trying to kick in the face whoever walks up.

  “Good girl,” I say and dodge a blow. Lean in; lift her out with an arm. Shut the lid. Pocketknife cuts her gag and wrist bindings. She starts bawling and wraps her arms around my throat. I squeeze her tight and watch the hardware store’s front entrance. No skeezy perv coming out.

  I grab her face, tilt it up to me. No blood, swelling or otherwise. Eyes puffy from crying. Edges of her mouth rubbed raw from the gag. I look her up and down. Squeeze her shoulders, rotate her arms in my hands, pat her hips. She bears her own weight.

  “Move quick, Molly. Quick.”

  “Richard! Richard! That guy! He’s beat up and he’s so high—I think—”

  “I know, I know. Round two is coming right up.”

  I kneel, cut her ankle bindings. Stand. Even with her stark, red eyes and the way the terror of the past few minutes have stained her, have bled upwards and out through her skin like grease, she is gorgeous. And alive.

  “Richard! He’s inside! He’s—” but her voice distorts with the first runner of color across my vision. Not again. Not again.

  “Not again.” I grumble. “Smear.”

  “Richard! No! You’ve got to—”

  “Quiet. Get out. Call PD. Go. Go!” I push her away and she stares at me for a second and I turn away. My car is eight stalls down. “Go!” I shout over my shoulder and stumble towards it. Get in. Got to. Just get in—

  I look back. Molly is beating feet through the intersection. A car honks but she keeps on keepin’ on. Makes it to a grocery store.

  Six stalls and the deluge begins. Purples squiggle and make noise. They give way to a calming pink and I get four stalls away. Some old lady gives me the bug eyes as I lumber past her, dragging each foot and my lips wet with drool.

  Two stalls and my left eye goes cold and blank. I risk it and try to run. Zombie shuffle. Hand on my door handle and I feel it bulge up in my guts. Knees weak. Colors start to run down my brain, freezing everything as they come. Door open. Head inside and the world falls away in a gorgeous waterfall of everything in my mind being dumped out into my lap.

  39

  The world falls back into place one starkly distinct pixel at a time; a puzzle piece falling light as snow until it collects to my head and fills in another missing bit of me.

  Each cuts like an icepick through my forehead and my eyes feel like they’ve swollen twice their size. My knees burn and I can feel a breeze travel up my thighs. I peel my face off the pleather driver’s seat and find that I went black, dropped to my knees on the parking lot and hit the seat face first.

  Tore the knees out of my pants. No cops, no medics called to a check the welfare in the parking lot. Armed man passed out in his car. Thank God for the little things.

  I pull myself up; see where I pissed my pants. Taste bile. Look over eight stalls. No shitbox. I lean my head back, ease a smoke into my mouth. A cop car cruises by on the street, turns into the grocery. Molly.

  Fresh kidnappings give you a tiny window of action before the trail shits the bed. Sure, the bad guy may send a ransom note or whatever, but unless he wants to exchange the victim for money, you’re looking at someone’s life clock winding down. For about twenty minutes that was Molly.

  Better to not dwell on all the rape/murder victim images flooding my mind. Stop putting my best friend’s wife’s face on all their bodies.

  I feel self-satisfied that I trashed old boy’s apartment and beat the fuck out of
him. Took away his haunts, his resources. He wanted vengeance, but needed it on the fly. This hardware stop...I can’t imagine what he bought.

  But then I look down to Graham’s cellphone and see a little dot blinking, superimposed on a map as it travels south. Nineteen blocks deep so far and counting.

  My money is on that he doesn’t know Molly is gone. But he might. In the end it doesn’t matter. Maybe I’ll go find out what he bought. And then use it on him.

  40

  Three-story construction in the ghetto, all flat concrete walls and unfinished rebar.

  No windows, doors. Nothing permanent. Just boards hastily nailed into place. In the lot next to it is a sister construction. Just as unfinished and left to rot in the world. Molly’s shitbox blends in with the neighborhood. The trunk is left standing open, as if the rapist left it that way so his little dove might return when it sees how inviting that cavern is.

  And in this neighborhood, locked in a truck might be the safest place.

  The dirt under the rear end is scrambled and torn up like he was standing there as a hive of bees attacked. Footprints and ruts in the soil where his heels dug in, swirls and scrapes like he was dancing for his life. Must have been when he flung open the trunk and found her missing. Just lost his shit right then and there. Tantrum the likes of which nobody this side of Honey Boo-boo has seen. Like Keith Moon and Stephen Dorff had a lovechild and set it loose in a hotel room. That kind of mess.

  The taillights bashed in. The bottom lip of trunk lid looks like he found some way to slam it open and shut without it locking on him every time. The tire jack must be comfortably resting on the front seat since it appears he threw it through the back window.

  Cry baby.

  I cruise by, park a few blocks over. Hotfoot it to the construction. Ease out my iron; lead the way with the business end. I sneak inside as the sun sets to my left. As I hit each landing I spend some time looking across to the other construction; telltale signs that he’s got a camp in there somewhere.

  Here and there I kick a loose nail, crunch crumbled drywall. I duck and tread lightly but I still knock a wayward wrench off of a hip-level landing. It pings and settles; deafening as a firing squad. I crouch, wait for gunfire or the shadows to move. Something. But nothing comes.

  Second floor. Only the wind rustling through to keep me on my toes. Nothing on the other side. Gang graffiti. Hobo trash. I skirt a long-deserted campfire on the floor and reach the third landing. A petroleum stink wafts down to me in little gulps, like the room is quietly belching fuel. I climb anyways. At the top is a window frame. I look long at the opposing building. Nothing but a good view of the roof of Molly’s car.

  The wall coming up the landing turns a corner behind me and I clear it in increments. Slicing the pie, the Tac guys call it. Little steps, gradually opening the room to yourself. Gun out, holding my breath. A wall of cardboard boxes gets in my way before I see much of anything. But I hear snoring.

  Rapist? Bum? He parked next to that building and comes up here? Decoy? Throwing off the scent? Clever? Fuck it. Let’s burn this place to the ground. Satisfaction rushes and my guts buzz with excitement. Motherfucker walks in on me while I’m wiped out and now I get to do it to him and—

  Foot catches on a trip wire and as my body weight hitches forward, I think I smell the gasoline before it ignites.

  The wire is across my shoe’s tongue and I jerk and feel my knee pop something bad and my nose hits the concrete floor something worse and I must break a knuckle in my thumb cushioning my revolver as it hits the concrete something awful and the Universe is laughing at me about how this piece of shit is always one step ahead and then—

  God intervenes. The trip wire is hung up on my shoe, but nothing has blown.

  Silence. Keep it silent. See if the snoring skips or adjusts. Stops, maybe. I lay in the quiet with my broken-thumb revolver aimed at the boxes. Life ticks away from us. Whoever is over there. If it turns out to be a homeless man sleeping one off I’m going to beat him to death and then carry him over to the other building, find the rapist and use the bum’s corpse to beat him to death. I swear.

  Absolute calm licks at the walls and the sun draws its scalp down below the horizon.

  Palms on the ground. Push up gently. Ease the tension on the wire. The faucet of my busted nose splatters on the concrete. I rest an arm under it so my jacket absorbs the crimson. Thumb throbs, holding my breath burns. I need a smoke. This takes time. I risk getting my flashlight from my pocket, fire it up against the wall behind me. Draw the beam until it catches the silk thread of the trip wire.

  Follow it. Follow it. One end tied around a pipe stub-up. Next to it is a five-gallon can of gasoline. Why would there be a can of gas here, now? Don’t know. Why do some women think that nineteen cats are a suitable replacement for a man? That I do know.

  But the other end of the trip wire goes straight into a homemade bomb, pulled over on its side by me. Yanked it over in the fall. Holy shit, I’m not sprayed across the wall because whoever rigged this thing didn’t anchor it the way it needed to be?

  And everybody thinks God hates me.

  I shrug the trip wire off my foot, still gentle—my luck enjoys cornholing me. I ease up, zero in on the snoring and make sure there are no other booby traps as I clear the boxes. First I see two brand-new lengths of chain. A drill bit fatter than most dildos and a hand crank for it. No power tool. Close and personal. Duct tape and wood clamps. A receipt from the hardware store that has more than ten items listed on which I’m not readily seeing in the pile. Oh Molly. God doesn’t hate you.

  Now I see it. At the bottom of the list there is the red gas can. What was he planning on doing?

  Lying there with a cooked spoon and used needle beside a flop-mattress is the sexual deviant I should have beaten to death in a women’s shower room.

  41

  The rapist’s snores are deeper than anything Confucius ever said.

  He looks weak. Worn thin. His life was pedestaled very high just a little while ago, and those have since crumbled and left to oblivion. His clothes are dirty and stink of not being washed for days. His hair, mussed and oily. I got him good; his face is an ugly purple from bruising.

  The spoon and needle look used before now. His escape. Pain management. Brown, wet cotton balls scattered like dirty snow in his private hell. Molly’s keys sitting on the floor near him. They go in my pocket. I lean in; put my barrel an inch from his head, just above the ear.

  Why is he here? Just squatting? His blackmail money spent on heroin? He can’t go to any area hospital; they’ll have to call the cops. He’d get tied back to it all. He must have wanted one last hurrah before blowing this popsicle stand forever. Tiding over here tonight.

  Half the trigger pull is out and I stop. Let it go. Back up, step over the trip wire. Look at the explosive. Glass jar filled with a gasoline gel. Suspended in the gel are razors and ball bearings. Like tidbits of pineapple and orange floating in Aunt Annie’s Christmas Jello mold. This is just the vicious version.

  It’s wrapped in duct tape, packing it tight. The trip wire was supposed to drag a match along a striking surface and ignite some metallic-looking powder, which is piled neatly onto a sheet of cigarette rolling paper sitting atop the gel. Hmmm...

  An angel on one of my shoulders, a devil on the other, they usually quibble but right now they’re putting their heads together. Then all of a sudden the angel is licking her lips and doing a little dance while the devil is twirling his greasy mustache between two fingers while a dastardly laugh escapes. I got it.

  “Hey, douche, sleep tight until I come back,” I say. Leave.

  42

  I come flying up to my favorite intersection, which just so happens to be seven blocks south and five west.

  Baltimore and 42nd.

  The Carnivore Messiah’s new hooptie comes screeching out of the shadows and stops in my path. The same dickhead comes strolling out from under a porch awning and I get giddy with my luck. H
e’s six feet from the car when I swing open my door.

  The front and back passenger doors on the hooptie open, thugs pop out. The dickhead sees me and once my face clicks in his memory he shits his pants. Oh goodie. Wheels his hands in thin air. Backpedals. Stumbles, lands on his sweet little tush.

  I rush forward, iron out. I put two through the hooptie’s passenger side. Glass shatters. The thugs raise their guns. I drop one where he stands. The second one fires wildly and tries to take cover in front of the car.

  The driver and some other dude hop out, come around with their pieces aimed in my general direction. Which, since they’re gang members, doesn’t mean much.

  Dickhead scrambles away from me, a kind-of crabwalk as he scurries. His pants are belted just above his knees and dragging his ass along the street pulls them down around his ankles. “It’s him!” he shouts and his voice squeaks with it. Nothing makes me more proud of my effect on people than when grown men screech like women as they announce my presence.

  “It’s fuckin’ him! The guy that jumped us!”

  I’m the guy that jumped a robbery set up? Of course I am.

  The thugs hear that and they run. Don’t bother with the car. Don’t bother with revenge. Don’t even bother with rescuing their dead homie or the living one right in front of me. They beat feet in the opposite direction.

  I snag this fucker by the collar; lift him up. “That’s gotta make you feel good, don’t it?”

  “W—what?”

  “Your whole crew jets when I show up, and leave you here with me.”

  “What you want, man?”

  “I want Thuggie.”

  “Nah, man. Nah. Kill me. I ain’t no snitch and I—”