by Keith Nixon
She drove her father’s car out of town. The paper bag next to her had all her clothes from her night with Sheriff Dan. She obeyed all the traffic lights. She couldn’t resist a smirk when she drove past her father’s church. She drove slowly past the police station. No sign of the sheriff’s car. She sped past a number of mean bars, any of which could be helping her father’s thirst. She dialed up some easy–listening music so she could think it through from end to end, just like one of her father’s proofs. The LED numbers said 11:34 or HELL backwards. He’d appreciate that.
The highway by day offered little in the way of excitement. There were the green signs that marked the exits, or told of exits to come. The lettering said where to, and a variety of polygons indicated exchanges, routes, and other highways. She didn’t need any directions; she knew the way out of town; she trusted her instinct to find the neon sign, the heraldic symbol of her defeat. She spotted it blinking between billboards for a casino and an adult bookstore.
She dialed dear old dad first.
“Hi Dad,” she said half jagged and all distressed.
“Where are you?”
She sniffled. “I…I think I’m in a motel.” She inhaled through her nose for effect.
“That son of a bitch,” he said. “Where?”
“I’m not sure,” she said and paused. “I see a bird, a crane, I think, through the window. I see the highway and two billboards. I see a set of stairs to the room.”
“You stay right there. I’ll go home and get the car.”
“No. No, don’t do that, dad.” Panic infused her voice.
“Why not?”
“He’ll expect that. He knows the car. And Dad?”
“What?”
“Have you been drinking?”
“Stay put. I’ll grab a taxi.”
This was fun, she thought as she walked into the lobby. The old codger was right where Bigelow had said he would be: in his chair. Ninety years old, deaf and blind, he slept in the chair as if he were a wrinkled newborn. She took the keys from the rack and went outside. She climbed skyward up the back staircase. She rehearsed in her head honey and a touch of vinegar. Next call was to the police station, a request to the dispatcher to patch her through to Sheriff Bigelow.
“It’s me,” she said with slight tremble in her voice.
“Who is this?”
“Who do you think? It’s Jessie,” she said it, as if she had put a pin through a butterfly.
“Jessie? Where are you?”
“At the hotel. I’ve been thinking, Dan.”
“People get hurt when they start doing that.”
“I’m confused.”
“About what?” he asked. “You need to put what happened to rest.”
“That’s it, Dan. I don’t want to.”
“Now, if you got some crazy blackmail idea in your –”
“That’s it, Dan. I don’t.” She let her voice get breathy. “I’m just so mixed up…because it was so intoxicating…and exciting and I think I liked it.”
“You did, did you?”
“Uh huh,” she said and paused for the clincher. “I want it and we’re going to do it again, but this time — this time, you have those handcuffs, don’t you?”
“Of course I do.”
She hated herself for it, but she faked a giggle. “Come and arrest me. You can do that, can’t you?”
“Same room?”
“Same room.”
Her father probably had a taxi that would test the speed limit to a tenth of a digit for an extra twenty bucks. Sheriff Bigelow had sirens he could mute, but he could also use them to spritz his way through town and traffic. Both of her saviors would make good time on the highway.
She had the scene set up: the crime scene. She scattered her clothes everywhere, pulled the bed sheets down and knocked the room into shambles. When she heard the biting sound of gravel outside, she looked out and saw the sheriff’s car. She waited behind the door. Bigelow bounded up those stairs, fueled by sex hormones, and swept through the door asking for her and she answered him with a sharp close of the door behind her and a revolver in front of her. She placed the lead just above his heart.
She pulled up a chair to watch him die. He blinked several times. She let him sniff her panties before he departed his hypocritical life and used them to wipe her father’s gun clean. She waited.
The cab came minutes later. She could see her father paying the driver. It seemed that he had paid the man extra for either the speed or his discretion, or both. The taxi left. Her father stood there as if he were trying to think up a soliloquy. The mathematical genius that he was saw the police car then would try to solve the mystery of why his red Honda Civic was parked there. She saw that he saw the stairs. She stepped away from the window. She sat on the floor next to the propped up Bigelow, with his service sidearm in her hand at an acute angle to the door her father could appreciate. Her guess was a fatal forty–five degrees.
The door opened and she was two for two.
Dad was gasping his last breaths when she was working the gun into Bigelow’s dead hand. Jessie checked the time. She had a cell phone to trash, a car to drive into town, and a story to tell at the station.
She stood over her father.
He gasped, “Why?”
She patted his cheek. “For mom.”
“But…but,” he sputtered.
“Don’t exhaust yourself, Dad. Don’t worry. Jesus loves you.”
“At least someone does,” she said as she walked out into the sunlight. She had a house and a trust fund and an open road: her future.
THE BRAT SNATCHER
Craig Furchtenicht
“Hang in there, kid. We’ll have you home in no time.”
I turned the stereo down just to see if the kid was still breathing or not. He hadn’t made a sound since I put him in the back of the van. Made one hell of a racket at first, when I collected him from Donny the Pimp’s apartment and practically shoved him inside. Kicking his feet on the walls and bouncing his head against the chunk of carpet I’ve got glued to the floor. Damn kid went all out ballistic. He’d seen what goes on in the back of that van.
Normally I would have cranked up the disc player, jamming exclusively to Blues Traveler. Something about the way John Popper belts ‘em out keeps my head screwed on straight during runs like that. Fat bastard sure has some pipes on him, but it's awful hard to enjoy good tunes with the possibility of a dead kid looming in the back of my mind.
I told the pimp not to be pumping him too full of that junk he pushes on his regular bitches. I just wanted him to keep him calm, not cause him to overdose. If the kid bites it before we get him back to his folks there will be hell to pay.
Maybe I should back up for a second and explain myself before anyone gets the wrong idea. I’m not some sick twist who goes around luring children into the back of my van for no good reason. I don’t park outside the local Kinder Campus with an ashtray full of lollipops and a towel draped over my lap, waiting for one of the dumb ones to wander too close to the fence. I hate those fucks just as much as the next guy.
It’s my job, snatching these kids off the street. Not the most noble of occupations, but a job nonetheless. How is it that I came to be a professional kidnapper, you ask? I guess you could say that it just sort of fell into my lap.
You know how it is. You do something that borders on the unthinkable and suddenly everyone hangs some convenient label on the end of your name. One misstep in judgment they think defines who you truly are. They base their perceptions on that one fateful day when you kidnap your mother–in–law, lock her in an abandoned garage and refuse to tell the authorities or your soon to be ex–wife her whereabouts until the greedy bitch gets any ideas about alimony out of her thick head.
After the drawn out court case and my mother–in–laws lengthy recovery in the hospital there wasn’t much left for my ex to squeeze out of our dwindling estate. What little money we
had accrued during our decade long train wreck of a marriage was sucked up by legal and medical bills. The house went back to the bank and Molly moved in with her mother, keeping whatever paltry sum there was left to speak of. Meanwhile, I became an honorary guest of the state for the next six and a half years.
A month after I was paroled my ex’s divorce attorney contacted me with an offer, one I couldn’t refuse. Well, I could have said no if not for the fact that I was dead broke at the time. With a felony record, especially one with a back story like mine, landing gainful employment was all but impossible. I was down to a few bucks and an expired bus ticket when the call that turned my life around came.
I had no idea what was in store when the idiot manning the front desk of the homeless shelter reluctantly handed me the phone. The smell wafting from his side of the battered counter indicated that he had no more interest in hygiene than the vagabonds he checked in each day. Ignoring the condescending glare that insinuated I should be thanking my lucky stars for him bending the rules about personal calls on the house phone, I wiped the greasy film from the surface of the earpiece with my shirt and turned my back as I spoke into the other end.
“Yeah, that’s me,” I replied when the caller recited my full given name in the form of a question. “Who the hell’s this?”
“This is Miles Norton, sir,” the voice on the other end said. “I represented your...”
“I know who you are,” I cut him off. Nearly a decade of pent up animosity surfaced in the back of my throat. “Look, if you’re after money you are barking up the wrong tree. Call that cash–grubbing bitch you helped to rake me over the coals. Maybe she’s got something left of that pot to piss in I use to have.”
A wavering sigh trickled through from the other end of the line followed by a brief dead air of silence. Just as I was about to hand the phone back to the malodorous desk jockey and put the conversation out of its misery, the lawyer finally spoke up.
“It’s not your money I am calling about, sir.” There was a desperation in his voice that was thick and undeniable. “I know that well has run dry.”
Of course he did. It wasn’t the Ritz fucking Carlton that he rung up to get a hold of me.
“Then what the hell do you want?”
“I am calling to offer you a job, sir.”
I was intrigued. Skeptical and slightly irritated, yet intrigued nonetheless. What kind of work could this conniving sack of rat shit have for an ex–con that he helped to render penniless before the hacks even had a chance to throw away the key? But like I said, I was flat broke and spending my nights on a cot in a room packed full of mouth–breathing vagrants. For that reason alone I stayed on the line.
“Okay, I’ll bite. What kind of job? And stop fucking calling me sir. It’s annoying.”
Norton didn’t answer right away. Again more with the melodramatic sigh and pause routine. I can’t say for sure but it almost sounded like he was palming the phone on his end to keep me from hearing him weep.
“It’s my daughter,” he finally said. “I need you to find her. Take her away and help her.”
That’s how my illustrious career started. How I fell ass first into the whole kidnapping business. Kind of like one of those brainy hacker types that give the credit card companies fits, cracking codes faster than the legit geeks they employ can write them. They eventually get caught and do their time in some swank minimum security joint. Then the same companies that demanded their heads on a pole are tripping over their dicks to hire them. To lead their newly formed fraud elimination departments and school the house coders on what’s what.
You see, I didn’t know it at the time but my aforementioned crime had some sort of profound impact on my ex–wife’s mother. It went well beyond the psychological trauma of being forced at gunpoint from her home and getting stuffed into my trunk. The old ball breaker was never the same again. Apparently surviving on cold pizza and listening to me drink beers in the dark for a week had a lasting effect on the old gal. Miles Norton saw my taming of the battle axe as nothing short of genius, the result of some rare talent that even I didn’t know I possessed. I was his glimmering hope. His last ditch effort to save his daughter.
I took the cash advancement the lawyer had fronted me and enlisted my sometimes pal Donny the Pimp to get the job done. Donny was in need of some working capital to upstart his own fledgling business. I just needed a ride. There we were, two enterprising businessmen seeking to carve out our own measly piece of the proverbial pie. The only thing standing between us and our lofty goals was finding the lawyer’s daughter and figuring out how to persuade her to change her whorish ways.
Locating the girl was easy. Being a pimp and all, Donny knew all the back alley hangouts and dark street corners frequented by the working girls. Within the hour we recognized her from a Xeroxed yearbook picture that Miles had provided. The photograph was obviously taken before her moral descent. Before the hair extensions and the dark circles under her eyes. The Debbie Norton face of yesteryear knew nothing of cold sores and split lips. That sweet girl would have never considered leaning into the open window of a bucket of rust Impala to strike up a conversation with two scumbags like us.
Getting her into the car was even easier. A flash of twenties and the promise of exchanging them for a bit of double–stuff action was all it took. She was in the backseat before The Pimp could even show her the condom that he was already wearing. Yeah, even back in the beginning Donny took the whole method acting aspect of the job very seriously.
“What do we do with her now?” Donny asked, leaning over his seat and pressing the ether–soaked rag over the girl’s screaming face. “Turn her out on some of my heavy hitters? I know a few twisted dudes who’d fork out major coin for a crack at making this one’s kidneys bleed.”
With my head on a swivel I nervously surveyed the dimly lit street. The handful of urchins frequenting the same corner as our quarry watched with deliberate indifference as one of their own was thinned from the herd. Their wary, sideways glances filled me with disgust. If money hadn’t been at stake I would have gladly mowed down each and every one of them with the Impalas front bumper. Instead I dropped the shifter into drive and rolled away, relieved to put distance between myself and the gutless little turds.
“Do whatever it takes, Donny,” I replied. I didn’t care how he did it. As long as the little slut in the back had the virtues of a nun by the end of the week, the deadline that her father and I had agreed upon. “Just take that rag off her face before you kill the bitch. And put your damn dick away. You’re kinda freaking me out right now.”
Our methods weren’t exactly the most orthodox, but the results spoke for themselves. After nearly a week of serving as a three–holed punching bag for some of The Pimp’s more sadistic clientele little Debbie Norton was ready to limp back into the waiting arms of her doting father. In fact, she was begging for it. The transformation came about so quickly that I urged Donny to call off the “dates” he had scheduled on her last few days with us. He reluctantly agreed.
I half expected the lawyer to call the cops when we showed up on his doorstep. He’d paid us handsomely to bring back his little girl. What he got in return was the bruised and bloodied husk of her former self. The broken young woman standing before him would never again think of turning a trick without succumbing to the grips of near–paralyzing anxiety. A large number of cylindrical shaped household items would most likely trigger the same response. She wasn’t so much scared straight as I had promised, but rather scared stupid.
To my surprise Miles Norton was beside himself to have his only child back home again. With the proper counseling and a bit of luck, Debbie would be ready to get back into the swing of her freshman year in college. The lawyer was so grateful to have his family back intact that he vowed to send referrals my way for any of his clients that could benefit from my invaluable services.
Within a matter of months business was booming. Calls came in at all hours of the night from di
straught parents who had exhausted every other avenue to control their unruly offspring. Illicit drug use, truancy, shoplifting. You name it. Through trial and error, the Pimp and I developed a system to modify any nasty habit that was put in front of us. We had to recruit three of the more employable derelicts from the shelter just to keep up with the demand.
Right now, somewhere in this city, a boy who steals from his mother’s purse is getting the tips of his fingers flattened with a ball pein hammer. Promiscuous tweens who foolishly think being a grownup means having a cock inserted into one or more orifice at any given time are getting the living shit kicked out of them by psychopaths in three piece suits. Becoming painfully intimate with the business end of random objects that would put any sizable hardware store to shame.
Little shits that thought they had the world by the short hairs until the moment came when they found themselves being ripped from the sidewalk and into the side door of my van. While their friends were counting the days until summer camp they were embarking on a week long journey through hell. No matter what moral shortcoming they exhibited, the cure was just a phone call away.
By weeks end they all go home to their mundane lives, free of their past transgressions. Forever changed by the valuable lessons that either myself, The Pimp or one of our associates have carefully ingrained into their formidable young psyches. Parents praise me as they fork over the college savings that they dipped into to pay for it all. Then they tell their friends of the brilliant man who saved the child they had all but given up on.
I was living the dream and loving every minute of it. Cracking the bones of a few young people didn’t cost me one wink of sleep at night. I never cared too much for children in the first place. Probably why I never had any of my own. I liked their parents even less. They would rather pay me to crush their defiant little brat’s spirits than to admit they were too weak–willed or lazy to do it themselves. So what’s wrong with me scratching out a living by doing it for them? Sick as it sounds, I thoroughly enjoyed my job.