Ribbons

by Evans, J R

  “We want him alive,” he said. Then he added, “I’m required to say that.”

  The tip had come in just a couple of hours ago. There were lots of tips coming in, though, and so far none of them had provided any significant leads. At first this one had sounded like it could be a dead end, too. Maybe just a nosy neighbor complaining about a vagrant. But the woman had been very insistent, so the call had gotten through the initial screening process and Dani had picked up the phone. The woman’s name was Lois. Once she had calmed down and finished her rant about not being taken seriously, Dani started to run through her standard questions. Lois stopped her right there. What she had to say made Dani stand up and wave Dwayne over as she put Lois on speakerphone.

  Lois spoke deliberately, like she was reliving the experience. Her description of the box cutter was what got Dani’s attention. That and what the man had said when he was talking to himself. It was Foster. It had to be.

  Everybody sat up straight as the van slowed to a stop. Dani adjusted her grip on her assault rifle and jammed the stock under her armpit. They parked next to a small house that had a car up on blocks in the driveway. Based on the layer of dust on the car, it had probably been years since anybody had worked on it.

  There was a moment of absolute stillness as the sergeant checked in with another officer who had eyes on the abandoned building. It was like waiting for a roller coaster to crest the rise before the first big drop. Everybody stared at the sergeant’s radio.

  A hiss of static broke the silence. “Confirmed. No pedestrians on the street. Green light.”

  “Go, go, go, go!”

  Daylight lit up the interior of the van as the doors cracked open. The team was out in seconds and lined up on the sidewalk. They moved forward, crouched with their weapons angling out in front of them. The sergeant joined Dani at the rear of the column, radio in one hand, pistol in the other.

  A man stepped through the front door of the house next to them. He stopped short, and a cigarette tumbled out of his lips as he gawked at the squad. He looked like he was trying to figure out what he’d done wrong. The second officer in the column jabbed a finger at the man and then at the front door. He had to do it again before the man got the hint and stepped back into his house. His face appeared in the front window a few seconds later.

  The officer taking point got to the fence line of the abandoned building and dropped to one knee. He leaned around the edge of the fence and raised his rifle to cover the rest of the column as the team hurried past. The next officer stopped at a faded sign that read, Tule Springs Group Home and then did the same. Dani had a strange sense of déjà vu as boots trampled through the old playground. Cops and robbers. Cowboys and Indians. Duck, duck, goose. Kids were always hunting each other.

  Officers stacked up against the wall next to the entrance of the building. Gun mounted flashlights clicked on. It was still early afternoon, but the building was boarded up, and it was going to be dark inside. It would take them time to adjust to the light. Just a few seconds, but Dani knew she could empty her rifle in just a few seconds. The lead officer unclipped a flashbang grenade to even the playing field. He looked back at the sergeant.

  Dwayne tapped the rear officer and motioned him forward with a flick of his fingers. The officer ducked low and rushed up. He was carrying a small metal battering ram. The double door had a chain threaded through its tarnished brass handles, and one of the handles flew off in an explosion of splinters as the ram made contact. Both doors flew open, and dust billowed up like smoke. The entryway was inky black.

  The lead officer stood with his back against the wall but directed his voice into the building. “Police! On the ground! Now!”

  He didn’t wait for a reply. His finger yanked a pin, and everybody ducked low as he threw the grenade into the darkness. There was a dull thunking sound as the grenade rattled across a linoleum floor. The shadows disappeared in a white strobe. It was followed by a thunderclap and then everybody was up and running.

  At first, their flashlights just served to create cones of white smoke in the darkness. As bodies rushed in, the smoke swirled and started to disperse. Dani’s flashlight lit up an old poster telling her to Just Say No. She turned to the right and stayed low until she reached a corner. Then she spun around and aimed her rifle out into the middle of the room. It looked like a reception area. There was a low wall with a desk behind it across from her.

  Somebody yelled, “Clear!” He must have been able to see more than Dani could.

  Everybody was up and moving again. There were two doors leading out of the room and a hallway that stretched back deeper into the building. Dani stuck with the team on the right. Two officers covered the hallway but didn’t move down. The other two got into position by one of the doors. Dani put her back to a wall and noticed that she was crunching through something on the ground. She looked down. They were papers of some sort. More fluttered down around her as she moved down the hall. She pointed her light at the wall and saw a row of children’s drawing just barely clinging to the surface, held in place by ancient, yellowed tape.

  One officer by the door nodded, and the other kicked it in with a booted foot. He stepped back after the kick, and the first officer rushed inside, weapon raised. Bathroom stalls were illuminated in a dancing beam of light. There was another kick, and then a woman’s voice shouted, “Clear! Coming out!” She rejoined her partner, and they headed back toward Dani. Apparently, that was a dead end.

  Another voice shouted, “Clear!” from the other side of the reception area. Dani turned and saw Dwayne motioning toward the hallway. Officers lined up along the walls to either side. The sergeant tapped one on the shoulder. The officer spun around the corner, low and already looking down the sights of his weapon. Officers leapfrogged down the hallway, a new one crouching down to cover the rest every twenty feet or so.

  “Watch those windows!” The sergeant was pointing to some interior windows facing out into the hallway.

  A team cleared the room. Some kind of administration office, Dani guessed. Another cleared a cafeteria and then went deeper in to clear the attached kitchen. Dani stayed in the hall with Dwayne. They had been in the building less than a minute.

  “Light!” The officer on point in the hallway was motioning at a door farther down.

  Dani saw a faint line of light spilling out from the crack beneath the door. She thought she saw movement in that light. It was hard to tell because her eyes had to keep adjusting from bright LED lights to dusty shadows. She also thought she heard something. Laughter.

  Dani and the sergeant backed up two other officers that formed up on the door. Dani remembered what Dwayne had said about being a crap shot. She let him go first. He tapped the officer in front of him, and the officer’s boot kicked out, the door exploding inward upon impact. Adrenaline shot through Dani’s body like a jolt. She gritted her teeth and rushed in with the rest. She forced herself to exhale the way she did when she squeezed the trigger on her pistol. It came out as a low growl.

  Nobody.

  She still heard that laughter, though.

  This room had more light than the others. The plywood covering one of the windows was gone, and the glass had been shattered. Toys sat on old shelves. They were evenly spaced out, and each one seemed deliberately placed, like tiny shrines to nostalgic gods. One of the toys was moving. It was a chubby-looking thing with a drooping eye and big pointy ears—a Furby? The fur it still had left was matted with mud or else falling off in patches. Its plastic mouth opened and closed in spasms as the gears that worked it slipped and stuttered. It made the laughter seem out of sync, like in an old kung fu movie.

  One of the officers had his weapon pointed at the toy, but he kept his cool. “Clear!”

  The sergeant pointed to the open window. “Check that! Circle around back.”

  The officer covering the creepy toy moved to the window. “Coming out!” Then he poked his head out, rifle leading the way. The other officer planted one hand o
n the window frame and vaulted out after him.

  Dwayne was moving to follow the officers, but Dani put a hand on his shoulder. When he turned to look at her, she pointed at the wall. Her flashlight lit up a mosaic made up of fairy tales. Pages had been torn out of dozens of storybooks and pasted to the wall from floor to ceiling. Knights and dragons, mermaids and pirates, castles in the clouds, and cats with fiddles—all ripped into fragments and remade into a new image. Or rather, the shreds of paper created the outline around the empty space that formed the image.

  It was shaped like the silhouettes of three women holding hands under a tree with long snaking branches. Lines drawn on the wall decorated the silhouettes. Lines that told a story in a language they couldn’t read. Lines that smelled like imaginary berries.

  Dwayne lowered his pistol. “Well fuck.”

  His radio hissed. “Building clear. No contact.”

  Another voice came over the speaker. “No movement out front.”

  Dwayne mashed a button on the side of his radio as he held it up to his mouth. “Clear it again. All points. Check everything. Lockers. Kitchen cabinets. Crawl spaces. He had no way out.”

  “Understood.”

  He lowered the radio and looked at Dani. “Where is he?”

  She slowly shook her head. “I don’t think he’s here.”

  She stepped closer to the mosaic and raised her flashlight again. The beam swept from one silhouette to the next. They weren’t all the same. Two of the women had blue paper eyes. One didn’t have any eyes at all.

  Dani reached up to touch the silhouette. “I think he’s looking for her.”

  28

  “Azrael!”

  “Azrael? Here, kitty, kitty, kitty!”

  The sun was going down, and Adam wanted to make sure his cat found his way back home before it got dark. He wasn’t a kitten, but he wasn’t an old lap cat, either. Adam locked him in the clubhouse at night, and every morning he was yowling to be let out. Or maybe he was just yowling for his breakfast. He usually hung out in the backyard, but Adam had lost sight of him for a bit. He had been decorating the wall inside the clubhouse and bringing down some things from his room to make it a bit cooler.

  Matt seemed all right, but sometimes he was pretty clueless when it came to kids. The CD player he had put in the clubhouse worked, but Adam didn’t have any CDs. He did have his mom’s old iPod, though. Its battery was starting to fade, so it needed to stay plugged in most of the time. Luckily, it had its own tiny speaker. He found that he could just plug it into the end of the string of Christmas lights. He also brought down some of his comic books and a few models he was trying to paint. The models were for a war game, but he had never found anyone to play with.

  He had tried out the dartboard that Matt hung up. After Adam fiddled with the fins on the back of the darts, they had flown pretty straight. So far there were just as many holes in the wall as there were on the dartboard, and after one had bounced backward and almost hit Azrael, he decided to leave it alone for a while.

  Still, he was glad to have his own space. The bedroom that he shared with his mom was pretty small. Her half always seemed to be much neater. That was probably just because she didn’t spend much time in there. Adam’s half was more comfortable. He liked to have his favorite things within reach of his bed, so it didn’t make a whole lot of sense for him to put them away on the shelf across the room. Now most of that stuff was in the clubhouse. She seemed happy about that.

  The cat wasn’t allowed inside the house. Mom said it would be bad for business. People might be allergic. Or he might scratch the furniture. Matt seemed to like him, though, and was always giving him little bits of lunch meat. He even bought him some cans of fancy wet cat food, but Azrael liked the dry stuff better.

  Adam rattled the bag of cat food. “Azrael!” That would get him running for sure.

  He looked down the side of the house toward the front yard. He saw something moving, but it was just a little kid across the street. The kid had his arms outstretched and was pretending to be an airplane or something. Adam took a few steps to get a better look. The kid made engine sounds as he zoomed around on the sidewalk. There was a man walking behind him who was probably his dad. The kid made a U-turn and came right at the man. They were both smiling, and the kid’s sound effects were interrupted by giggles.

  The dad squatted down right before the kid was about to crash into him. He scooped up his son and set him on his shoulders. “The clouds are up here, buddy.” The kid laughed and stretched out his arms again as his dad continued down the street.

  Adam could feel his face getting red. He hadn’t felt that kind of sting in a long time. He didn’t cry about not having a dad around. Not anymore. That’s why he started to feel angry with himself when he realized a tear was running down one cheek. He rubbed it away with the back of his hand. He had a dad. They didn’t play stupid airplane games, but he did come around. And he was a real-life hero. He was busy, though. He hunted down bad guys.

  “Hey, Adam?” It sounded like Matt.

  Adam walked back to the corner of the house. Matt was standing by the clubhouse. When he saw Adam, Matt held up an orange cat. “You lose something?”

  Adam ran over to them. Azrael was biting Matt’s hand and giving him a couple of halfhearted kicks with his back paws. His ears perked up when he heard the crinkling sound of the cat food bag in Adam’s hand.

  “I found him inside,” said Matt. “He must have snuck in when your mom came out to say good-bye. He’s kinda mad that I didn’t give him any lunch meat.”

  Adam opened the door to the clubhouse. Azrael didn’t wait for Matt to set him down. He kicked Matt one last time for good measure, and then leaped toward the door. The cat ran right between Adam’s legs as he tried to get inside. Adam had to keep sidestepping so that he didn’t trip over him. He poured some kibble into a bowl, and Azrael head-butted the bag out of the way to start getting at the food.

  Matt ducked as he stepped inside. “Has he been keeping this place clear of Smurfs? ’Cause we can put down some Smurf traps, too, if he’s being lazy.”

  “I haven’t seen any,” said Adam.

  Matt looked at one of the chairs around the little table. Maybe he was afraid it would fall apart when he sat on it. He lowered himself down on it anyway. “I like what you’ve done with the place.”

  Adam folded up the cat food bag and put it up on the bookcase. “Thanks. I was gonna hang up a couple posters. Have you heard of the Imperial Academy Dropouts?”

  “Is that a band?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Sorry, you stop listening to new music when you get old like me. The last album I bought was by the Beastie Boys. And it wasn’t even their latest.”

  Matt picked up one of the models on the table. Adam had just started painting it, so it still looked pretty plain. When it was done, it would be a badass armored warrior with a glowing sword in one hand and a machine gun in the other. Right now it just had its base coats of paint so it looked kind of cartoony.

  “I know these guys, though,” said Matt. “Warhammer 40K right? They’ve been around forever. I wanted to play but . . .” He just ended with a shrug.

  Adam pointed out the symbol on the model’s armor. “This guy’s an Inquisitor. They hunt down chaos demons and stuff.”

  “Cool.”

  Adam picked up another model. This one had tentacles instead of arms. It still had a machine gun, of course.

  “Do you have a dad?” It sounded strange as soon as he said it.

  Matt paused for a second, but he didn’t look at Adam like he was weird. “Kind of. I have a guy who showed me how to tie a tie.”

  “I’ve only seen you wear a tie once. At the funeral.”

  “Exactly.”

  Azrael hopped up on the table. His dinner had already vanished, and now he was looking for someone to pet him. He slobbered a little after he ate, and the first thing he did was wipe off his mouth by rubbing it on Adam’s arm.

&
nbsp; Adam had to put down his model to give his cat the attention he was demanding. “Was he nice?”

  Matt scrunched up his lips. “Hmm. Sometimes, I suppose. They’re not all great. Sometimes you’re better off without one.”

  “I guess,” said Adam.

  “Seems like the police sergeant is pretty cool.”

  “He’s cool. Mom won’t let him be my dad, though. She says he didn’t want a family.”

  Azrael flopped over and purred. A squad of space marines got pushed aside as he stretched out.

  “He seems to come out here a lot,” said Matt.

  “He mainly wants to see her,” said Adam. “He says stuff about wanting to go to the movies. But we never do.”

  “That sucks.”

  “Yeah.”

  Matt reached out a hand to give Azrael some more love, but the cat lifted its head and twitched an ear back. Matt wisely pulled his hand away.

  “Your mom does a lot for you,” he said.

  “Yeah,” said Adam. “She tries.”

  Matt reached into one of his pockets. He held out a pill between his thumb and finger. Adam cringed a little inside.

  “She sent me out here to check on you,” said Matt. “And to give you this.”

  Adam took the pill, but he didn’t put it in his mouth.

  “Thanks,” said Adam. He said it the same way that someone might say it after being dropped off at prison.

  “She also said she would bring home burgers after her visit with Erica,” Matt told him.

  “She never eats burgers,” said Adam. “She just likes to eat the fries. Sometimes she dips them in her milkshake.”

  Matt stood up and started heading for the door. “I do that. But I eat my burger, too.”

  “Maybe you can join us.”

  “Sure . . . well, you can ask your mom.” Matt nodded toward Adam’s hand. “Don’t forget to take your medicine.”

  Adam rolled his eyes and popped the pill into his mouth. Matt smiled and left. As soon as the door closed, Adam spit the pill back out into his hand.