by Alex Grecian
“No,” Skottie said. The man had used the word here, which meant he was nearby, watching the house. She looked at the front door, then walked to the window and used her free hand to peel a strip of duct tape from the corner of the garbage bags that covered it. Travis saw what she was doing and went to the other side of the window. He cut a small slit in the plastic with a sharp knife that seemed to have appeared from nowhere. He put an eye up to the slit and peered out at the street.
The man on the phone kept talking. “He still there in your house? Our friend?”
“You mean Deputy Puckett?”
“He still alive?”
“Well, I didn’t kill him yet, if that’s what you’re asking. But if you’ve done something to my daughter, I swear to God—”
“All right, ma’am. We haven’t killed anybody, either. So let’s say we arrange a trade. Your girl for our friend.”
Travis took his eye away from the window and nodded to her. He moved quickly across the living room and into the kitchen. Goodman followed him, grabbing his hat from the back of the couch. Skottie felt a cold breeze as the back door opened and then heard the soft click of the latch as it shut behind them.
“You there?” The guy on the phone sounded nervous.
“Give me a second,” Skottie said. “I don’t understand what you want.”
She heard the sound of muffled talking, the phone being dragged across cloth. Then the first guy was back on. “What’s to understand, bitch? Give us Christian back and maybe you get to see your baby girl again, right? You get that?”
Faintly in the background, Skottie could hear the second guy. “Give me that back.”
“You’re not doing it right, Donnie. You gotta—”
“You just told her my name!”
Skottie felt the room spinning around her and she struggled to stay calm. They were obviously amateurs, and one of them was a little smarter than the other. The dumb guy needed to prove himself, a situation that could easily lead to violence. Brandon would no more lose his phone than he would lose his gun or his badge. Had they killed him to get it?
She interrupted the argument on the other end of the phone. “Let me talk to my husband.” She hated herself for choosing Brandon. If she asked to talk to Maddy, the men would assume Maddy was most important to her and they might hurt her to get Skottie’s cooperation. She was throwing Brandon under the bus, making him the bigger target, but he would do the same if it meant protecting their daughter.
The men were silent for a moment. Another burst of static noise. Then the smarter of the two answered. “He’s, uh … They’re not here with us.”
“Where are they?”
“Don’t worry. They’re somewhere safe.”
“How do I know—”
The man hollered and it sounded like he dropped the phone. She could hear snippets of anxious conversation.
“Who are you?”
“Gun it! Drive!”
“Oh, shit, Donnie, shit, man!”
There was the sound of an engine, a car door slamming, and someone shouting, his voice growing fainter in the background. Another car roared to life on the street outside the house. Skottie ran to the front door and opened it in time to see two sets of taillights at the corner, red dots in the mist, diminishing to pinpricks and fading away.
Goodman walked out of the darkness pulling something heavy behind him. As he drew closer, Skottie could see that he was dragging a young man who was crab-walking along, trying to keep up as the sheriff hauled him backward by his shirt collar. Goodman stopped and picked the kid up by the front of his shirt and heaved him up on the porch.
“There were two of them,” Goodman said. “Watching your house from the street. The other one drove off, but the doc’s following him in my cruiser.”
“They have Maddy,” Skottie said. “And my husband, Brandon.”
“They weren’t in that car,” Goodman said. “None of ’em. There was just the two guys. I got the license number off their car. You wanna call it in, Trooper, or should I?”
The young man tore at his shirt, yanking it out of Goodman’s grasp, and tried to scramble away, but the sheriff stomped on him, held him down with his foot while he lit a cigarette. “See this gun on my hip, youngster? Yeah, you see it. So stay put and stay quiet.” Goodman put his lighter away and looked up at Skottie. “What do you say we ask this boy some hard questions?”
4
One of them was following him. Donnie had no idea what they’d done with Lance or Christian, but the trooper and her people were dangerous. The two big guys had come up on Donnie’s car without a sound, opened the passenger door, and pulled Lance out without any trouble at all. Donnie hadn’t wasted any time in getting away from there, but now they were right behind him.
He still had the phone he took from the trooper’s husband, and he pulled up the keypad with his left thumb, glancing at the screen when he could. He kept the accelerator depressed as far as he dared, zooming through residential streets, moving into a quiet industrial neighborhood, passing the hotel where they’d snatched the girl and her dad. It took him three times to dial the right number, and he felt a tremendous wave of relief when he heard Heinrich Goodman’s familiar voice.
“Who is this?”
“Deacon? This is Donnie. I’m in big trouble.”
“Where are you calling from?”
“Um, I stole a phone.”
“Good,” Heinrich said.
“That trooper, it’s her husband’s phone.”
“How did it go?”
“Things got complicated.”
“Are you with the police?”
“No. I’m driving, but they’re following me and I don’t know where to go.”
“Following you in a car? Tell me everything, but do it quickly, Donnie.”
“Yeah, I’m in my car. We went in, but the trooper got Christian. So we grabbed her daughter and her husband.”
“You have them?”
“I brought the girl in. You can ask the reverend.”
“And the husband?”
“I stopped the truck and put the husband on it. He’s gotta be halfway to Mexico by now.”
“I’m not sure you should have done that, Donnie. Why didn’t you call me before doing something so drastic?”
Donnie had wanted to handle things himself, to make the deacon proud. He had thought maybe Heinrich would promote him past the rank of acolyte. Maybe he would even get another audience with Reverend Rudy. “I don’t know,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
“And the trooper is following you now? Looking for her child?”
“No, it’s the other one, I think. The hunter. But there were two of them, maybe more. They have Christian and they have Lance, and I’m about out of gas.”
“You can’t lead them here, Donnie,” Heinrich said. “You need to slow them down, create a distraction while I prepare the church for their coming.”
Donnie’s stomach somersaulted, and he felt beads of sweat breaking out on his forehead. “Where am I supposed to go?”
The deacon spoke slowly. “It’s your time now. You’ve served your purpose and I commend you, but it’s time to join the lightning.”
“Are you sure?” Donnie could barely breathe.
“Do you have a weapon?”
“I got a gun I took off the trooper’s husband.”
“Good,” Heinrich said. “Use it. Use it on as many of them as you can before you turn it on yourself. It will unnerve them, give us a psychological advantage and give me time. Go, Donnie. Go in glory.”
Deacon Heinrich’s voice was replaced by a terrible silence, and when Donnie glanced down at the phone again, he saw that the connection had been broken.
5
“You don’t wanna talk,” Sheriff Goodman said. “I get it.”
Christian and Lance sat next to each other on the kitchen floor. Lance’s arm was bleeding, but the sheriff had handcuffed his wrists behind his back. Skottie had tried appealing to
the two young men, begging them to tell her where Maddy was, even showing them photos of her daughter in hopes of humanizing her for them. But they had adopted identical defiant stares, neither of them volunteering a single word. At last Goodman had stepped in.
He looked at Lance. “I seen you around, haven’t I? What’s your name?”
Lance shook his head.
“Nice friend you got, Christian,” Goodman said. “Guess you met him at church, right?”
Both captives were quiet.
“Since you’re not feeling chatty, how ’bout I do all the talking here and you just tell me if I’m right or not?” Goodman said. “And since you’re not being cooperative, we’ll make it interesting.” He went to the living room and came back with his gun from the end table. He cocked his head to the side and shook it, holstered the pistol, and pulled out a stun gun from a clip on the other side of his belt. He held the stun gun up so they could see it and pressed a button on its side. An ominous buzzing sound filled the tiny kitchen.
“Yeah, that’s more like it,” he said. “These things hurt like a sonofabitch.”
Skottie took him by the arm and led him around the corner, out of earshot of the two captives.
“This makes me uncomfortable,” she said. She kept her voice low. “We don’t torture people.”
“You wanna get your daughter back,” Goodman said. “So trust me.”
“Why do you even care?”
“I’m just doing my job.”
“I thought your job was keeping people like me from moving into the neighborhood.”
“The hell with you.” He turned and started to walk away, then turned back, holding the stun gun dangerously close to Skottie’s face. “You’re from Chicago, right? So you don’t know me, and you sure as shit don’t get to come out here and judge me.”
“I was born here.”
He took a step back. “I’m on your side here.”
“It’s the way you’re going about it.”
“I get that, but principles are a luxury at a time like this. They’re for when your little girl is back with you.”
He returned to the kitchen without waiting for her response. “Where were we? Oh, yeah. Maybe I can guess where the girl is. I been Burden County sheriff for a long time now. Christian, you know the score up there. That church runs the town, and the town runs the county, and the county pays me a whole lot of money to look the other way and make sure things go smooth for the church. Ain’t that right?”
Christian said nothing, so Goodman moved in closer to the two men and pressed the button on the stun gun again. Both men jumped, and Goodman stepped back.
“Just testing this thing,” he said. “Make sure the batteries still work. Anyway, y’know, I did what my dad and my uncle Jacob wanted me to do, but I grew up in Paradise Flats, ran around that lake up there with my friends, kissed my first girl, and married her, too. That’s my home. My friends live up there. I know you get it, fellas. Your friends live there, too, right? Like that guy who just drove off and left you here?”
Christian spat at him, and Goodman buzzed the air near Christian’s ear with the stun gun.
“Behave yourself, Nephew. Now, when my buddy Mike’s little girl disappeared a couple years back, I got busy looking into that, until I got word I should stop looking. Now why, I wondered, would the church want me to stop looking for a missing kid? You got any idea about that or was it before you started working for my brother? Girl’s name was Drew. Ring any bells?”
Christian looked away from him. Goodman arched an eyebrow at Lance, but got no response from him, either.
“Well, I got an idea or two, ’cause I been pokin’ around. What I think, the church has a whole lotta you guys going around and finding kids, maybe some women, maybe even some men, I don’t know. You’re a good recruit for them, Christian. I bet that patrol car lets you get real close to kids.” Goodman’s voice grew tighter and deeper as he continued speaking. The muscles in his jaw tensed and rippled. He was shaking. “Do you use that official car I gave you to grab children off the street, Nephew?”
He leaned forward and touched the stun gun to Christian’s throat. The younger man jerked and squealed, bucked against the handcuffs and duct tape, his head banging into the counter behind him. Skottie started forward, but Goodman held out his hand to stop her.
“I tell you? I never did find Mike’s little girl.”
Skottie took a deep breath. She stepped back and crossed her arms across her chest.
Goodman glared at Christian. “I think you boys hang around the bus stops and the mall down here, maybe you go all the way out to Wichita, for all I know, but you snatch kids up and you deliver them to the church. Maybe keep ’em in those houses all up and down the street over there until you got enough of ’em to make a package deal? Does my dad know about that part or is it just my brother? Your grandpa, is he the one put you up to this?” He shook his head. “I think you take these kids, you stick ’em in a truck and send ’em down to Mexico or thereabouts. I’m pretty sure about most of that. Part I’m not so sure about is the trip back. Does that truck bring Mexicans up this way? Sure a lot more Mexicans around here lately, working the kitchens at Chinese restaurants.”
Goodman looked around Emmaline’s kitchen like maybe he expected to see a Mexican worker. He sniffed and took a step closer to his nephew. “What do you think, huh? Am I at least close? In spitting distance?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Christian said.
“Oh, hey, you can talk,” Goodman said. “So I’m gonna ask you one more time. Where is Trooper Foster’s daughter?”
Christian lunged forward, pushing off the counter, clearly intending to head-butt Goodman in the groin, but he fell short and thunked to the floor at his uncle’s feet.
Goodman reached down with the stun gun and pressed the button again, watched Christian rise up and bounce off the floor. Goodman backed up and spat a brown gob at the deputy.
“No use to anyone.”
He turned and left the kitchen, handing the stun gun to Skottie as he passed.
“Well, anyway,” Goodman said, “that’s what I think’s going on up there, Trooper. I figure your girl’s on a truck bound for Mexico right now.”
6
The streets were dark and empty. Travis kept Goodman’s silver cruiser a few yards behind the other car, just close enough to see it through the mist, but far enough back that he might not be noticed. Either the driver knew he was being followed, in which case fear and anxiety would lead him to make a mistake, or he didn’t and he would lead Travis somewhere interesting. A frightened mouse scurries for his hole.
But the driver pulled into a vacant lot across from an abandoned gas station and shut off his headlights. Travis cruised past and circled around at the next intersection. The lights from a nearby building loomed through the fog. He drove slowly back down the street, going the opposite direction, and saw the driver was out of his car, standing in front of it with his arms out. He was holding a gun loosely in his right hand. No mouse hole for this one.
Travis pulled into the lot and parked four yards away. The man’s eyes were closed and his lips were moving. Travis sat and counted to a hundred, waiting for the man to move. His Eclipse was back in Skottie’s house on her end table and the weapons he had purchased from Walmart were locked in Goodman’s trunk, out of reach for the moment. Travis opened his door and stepped out of the cruiser. His boots crunched on brown grass that had sprouted between cracks in the blacktop.
The other man opened his eyes. “What’s your name?”
“Travis.” He kept his hands out at his sides, showing the man he wasn’t armed.
“You’re the one who came to bust up the church,” the man said. His voice was shaky.
“That was not my original intent, but it seems to be the course I am on. What do you call yourself?”
“My name’s Donnie.”
“Donnie, you could give me your gun and we could talk.”
“I can’t do that.”
“Why not?”
“I got orders.”
“From whom? Who gave you these orders?”
Donnie shook his head. “This is it for me,” he said. “For you too, I guess.”
He raised the gun and pointed it at Travis. Travis didn’t move.
“What will you do after you shoot me?”
“I guess that won’t be any of your business,” Donnie said. “What I do after you’re dead.” There was desperation in his voice, something Travis had heard before in people who thought they had reached the end of the road. He knew there was no way he could reason with Donnie; they were past all that. Whoever had given him his orders would probably never give another thought to Donnie, but his hold on the poor man was complete, and Donnie had clearly reached the end of his usefulness as far as his master was concerned. Travis felt a great sadness wash over him. Everything about the situation was ugly.
And Travis was standing exposed in an empty lot with no cover. He realized he had made a mistake in not considering how desperate Donnie might be. He could only hope poor visibility and fear would cause the man to miss his shot.
Travis had just begun to tense, watching Donnie for the moment he pulled the trigger, when the mist parted and a massive creature appeared from out of the darkness. It slammed into Donnie, who went down in a limp tangle of arms and legs, the gun skittering away across the pavement and stopping in a clump of dead weeds. It took a fraction of a second for the scene to change, and then it all came into focus again. Bear’s jaws were fastened about Donnie, and the dog’s massive head swept back and forth, slamming Donnie’s body into the ground again and again.
“Bear!” Travis ran forward. “Haltu!”
Travis banged to his knees and Bear came to him, covered in blood. The dog snuffed at him, licked his face and knocked him over, nudged at him with his head. Travis felt through the fur for injuries and found a deep wound in the dog’s withers, a groove running across the top of his shoulders and along his back. The lesion was oozing, and Travis was careful not to aggravate it. There was more blood, flecks of it coating Bear’s mist-slicked fur, but Travis probed with his fingertips and found no other injuries beneath the thick pelt. The blood was mostly Donnie’s.