The Feeder

by Mandy White

  “Who is he, Cammie?”

  “Never mind. Stay out of this.”

  “Tell me.”

  “No.”

  “I will find out. Tell me.”

  “It doesn’t matter. I got away and he won’t find me here.”

  “Did you call the police?”

  Camille’s eyes grew wide with terror. “Fuck NO! And you can’t! Please promise me you won’t call the cops!”

  “I can’t promise that.”

  “You have to.”

  “Why?”

  She ducked her chin and stared at the floor in the corner of the room.

  “Because he is the police.”

  “What? Are you shitting me?”

  She shook her head sadly. “He’ll find me eventually. This is just a little vacation from frustration. But he’ll find me. He always does.”

  I took her chin in my hand and lifted her face to mine. “Look. I’m here now, and I’m not going to let anyone hurt you. He won’t get you, I promise. I will deal with this asshole.”

  Camille shook her head frantically. “Sammie, you have to go home. I don’t want you involved in this. You have no idea what you’re dealing with. They’re all dirty, every last one of them.”

  “Who? The police?” I wasn’t completely surprised, but I got the feeling my sister was over dramatizing the whole thing.

  “You can’t trust the cops. They’re like the mob. If you mess with them, they’ll fuckin’ kill you.”

  I sighed. I recognized drug-induced paranoia when I saw it. Getting Camille clean was going to be a long haul but first I had to get her out of there. I picked up Camille’s hand and stroked it, noticing a purple bruise on her knuckles. I hoped she’d given the bastard a black eye before she left.

  “I’m going home,” I said, “but not without you. I’m getting you out of here.”

  I was shocked when Camille nodded in agreement. I’d thought I was going to have a fight on my hands.

  “Okay,” she said, “but I’ll need something else to wear. You soaked my only clothes, dickhead.”

  It hadn’t even occurred to me to pack a bag when I left. I was so concerned with getting my ass to LA that I had traveled with nothing but the clothes on my back.

  “I’ll go find you something. I saw a surf shop up the block. They should have some clothes there. You get yourself cleaned up and then we’ll get the hell out of here.”

  Camille stepped into the shower, under warm water this time. I slipped her room key into my pocket and ran up the street to the Board Members surf shop I had seen on my way in. I searched the racks of brightly patterned board shorts until I found a pair in Camille’s size with a blue and pink floral pattern that wasn’t too gaudy. I selected a fuchsia T-shirt to match and also found a long-sleeved gray and pink hoodie that would fit her. Camille would approve. She liked pink. I wanted to conceal her bruises and the track marks on her arms as much as possible before trying to put her on a flight. I hoped she had some makeup with her at the motel.

  I returned to the motel room with the bag of clothes in one hand and a steaming latte in the other and let myself in with the key. The shower was still running, so I sat down to wait while calling the airline from my cell phone to find a flight for us. After I hung up the phone, the shower was still running. I knocked on the bathroom door.

  “Hey, hurry up. I got us a flight but we need to get outta here now. Got you some clothes.” There was no answer, so I went inside and slid the frosted glass door aside. The shower was empty.

  ~ Chapter 3 ~

  The Odie-Hole

  Camille was gone.

  Her soaking wet clothes were still on the bathroom floor where she had tossed them when she undressed. I ran back into the bedroom. The small bag of heroin still lay on the nightstand beside the spoon and syringe. I knew no junkie would leave voluntarily without her precious dope. Someone had taken my sister against her will.

  “Camille!” I yelled, running out the door. I ran to the street and looked one way, then the next for signs of my sister’s abductor. The motel parking lot was deserted except for two vehicles that had been parked outside other rooms when I arrived. The street was empty.

  I burst into the motel office. El Bitcho was still on duty behind the desk.

  “Did you see anyone go to 102 while I was out?” I demanded. I really wasn’t expecting to learn anything from her, but I was desperate. I could at least ask her to connect me to the police.

  To my surprise, she nodded. “Yeah, but I’m not gettin’ involved in dat shit.”

  I whirled from where I had been looking out the office windows for some sign of something. “What do you mean?”

  “The cops. They say they gotta warrant, I give ‘em the key. I’m not gonna argue.”

  “What?” I roared. “The police came?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, did they say what they wanted?”

  The woman looked more scared than pissed off at my questioning. “I tole you, I don’ ask that shit. They wanna a key, I give ‘em one.”

  “Did you see a warrant?”

  “I don’ ask. I don’ wan’ no trouble.”

  “So you’re telling me that the cops came and arrested my sister, and you gave them a key to the room?”

  “Yeah. I don’ wan’ no trouble.”

  “Did they say where they were taking her?”

  El Bitcho shrugged. “Jail, I guess.”

  “Fuck!” I screamed, slamming both palms down on the countertop.

  As I stormed out of the office, I could hear El Bitcho muttering, “I don’ wan’ no trouble…”

  I scanned the wide expanse of beach, which was empty except for a few distant figures of people, scattered at random spots along the shoreline. I couldn’t believe Camille was gone.

  Arrested. For what?

  He is the police.

  Camille had told me that. She had said the police were dirty and compared them to mobsters. I thought she was just being paranoid.

  Maybe she was. She was a drug user. Maybe she’d gotten busted and was on the run because of a drug charge. But it had happened so quickly it seemed more like an abduction than an arrest.

  He is the police!

  I remembered the bruises on my sister’s face and body. A cop had done that? It didn’t feel right. The bruises looked like a mixture of fresh ones and old ones, maybe up to a week old. It did not match the typical injuries one sustained from resisting arrest. She looked like a victim of domestic violence. She had seemed genuinely afraid of this asshole. She’d even been afraid for me, even though she knew I could take care of myself.

  If you mess with them, they’ll fuckin’ kill you.

  What the hell kind of trouble had my sister gotten herself into?

  My cell phone vibrated in my pocket.

  A text message.

  I didn’t recognize the number but as soon as I saw it I knew it was from Camille.

  The message read:

  dont reply its only way ul b safe bye odie

  I returned to the room, heart pounding. Camille was alive, and she somehow had a cell phone. I hadn’t seen a cell phone anywhere in her room. She had called me from the hotel phone. She didn’t call often, but she had my cell phone number memorized.

  Her wet clothing had been left behind. The only thing missing was the pair of panties she had wrung out.

  I paced back and forth from the door to the bed as I tried to analyze it in my head.

  Camille had been arrested, or apparently abducted, by someone from the police department. Evidently she was naked except for a slightly damp pair of panties. I had to assume she was in a car, either an unmarked one or a police cruiser.

  Naked.

  Police didn’t typically arrest naked people and carry them away in a car in view of the public without offering them some sort of cover – a towel, a blanket…

  A jacket.

  I began to form a theory. I’d always had a knack for imagining likely scenarios
and most of the time my analysis wasn’t far from the mark. I should have been a detective. A cop.

  Suppose, just suppose… the cell phone she was using belonged to her abductor? Who would abduct/arrest a woman and then allow her access to his cell phone?

  Someone who knew her.

  Someone who knew her well enough to allow her to grab her panties on the way out… to offer her his jacket to cover her nakedness and avoid attracting attention. Cell phones were often found in jacket pockets.

  I slumped to the bed with my head in my hand and a painful lump forming in my throat, gazing at the cryptic message one more time.

  I analyzed the text message.

  ‘dont reply’ supported my theory that she was using her abductor’s phone to send me a secret message. If I replied, he would find out and she would be in deeper trouble than she already was. Okay, so replying was out of the question, but I took a moment to save the number in my address book for future reference.

  I will find you, asshole. And you will pay, I promise.

  I moved on to the next part of the message:

  its only way ul b safe

  Camille obviously felt the need to protect me from this steaming heap of human waste, but she didn’t realize he was the one who would need protection from me.

  bye odie

  That was strangely out of place, since she always called me Sammie.

  Odie was the name of the cat we’d had when we were children. Odie had been scratching in the big litter box in the sky for years. Why would Camille mention her now, of all times?

  ODIE!

  I jumped to my feet and spun around, facing the bed. The bed was like any typical double bed in any motel room. A mattress sat atop a solid pedestal, which took the place of the box spring. Different from our beds at home, but…

  I tossed my phone on the nightstand next to my sister’s drug paraphernalia and tore the bedding off of the mattress. Nothing. I lifted the mattress and looked underneath. Still seeing nothing, I flipped the mattress off of the pedestal.

  The pedestal was a plywood box with floral upholstery around the edges. The sides of the thing were solid, but at the head of the bed I noticed a space between the wall and the pedestal. I slid the pedestal back, seeing it wasn’t nailed to the floor and discovered a hollow space underneath.

  Camille had been using the space to hide a few things. As I retrieved the contents of Camille’s stash, tears welled up in my eyes at the memory of Odie.

  We named the calico kitten Odie, after the dizzy dog from the Garfield comic strip. All kittens are a bit nutty, but Odie seemed to take nuttiness to a whole new level. She did eventually mellow with age as most cats do, but when she was young she was tons of fun.

  Odie loved to hide. She could cram herself into the oddest spaces and then simply fall asleep. We often found her sleeping in closets, stuffed into boxes or balanced on top of clothes hanging in the closet.

  Odie lived indoors, but she often disappeared inside the house for a day or two at a time. When Odie made up her mind to disappear, she was like a ninja. She vanished until she was ready to be found, and then she would launch a sneak attack on the nearest pair of unsuspecting ankles. Cammie and I used to make a game of trying to find her. She had one hiding spot that mystified us for the longest time.

  We were playing with Odie one day, tossing a ping-pong ball for her to chase. She batted it under Camille’s bed and chased it underneath. When the ball reappeared but the cat didn’t, we peeked underneath to see what she was doing.

  No cat.

  We looked around the room to see if she had come out the other side and she was gone. We called her and tossed the ball around some more to get her attention, but Odie was apparently finished playing and had decided to disappear.

  I grabbed a flashlight and slid under the bed on my back to see what I could see and there she was. Odie had either torn or found a hole in the sheer fabric on the bottom of the box spring and crawled up inside. She had slithered between the springs and then curled up for a nap, using the fabric as a handy hammock.

  Over the years, Camille used Odie’s hiding spot herself, for various purposes. She stashed her Halloween candy in there when our mother confiscated the bulk of our loot after Trick-or-Treating to try and limit our daily consumption of junk food.

  When we were older, she hid cigarettes in there and eventually weed as well. When Camille was fifteen, she visited the free clinic to get birth control pills without our parents’ knowledge. She used the Odie-hole to hide her packages of pills where they wouldn’t be found. It was better than hiding things under the mattress, where they could be easily discovered when changing the bedding. The Odie-hole was the logical place to stash anything one didn’t want found by casual observers.

  I sat cross-legged on the bare plywood surface of the bed pedestal and surveyed the items I had retrieved from Camille’s makeshift Odie-hole:

  A baggie of pot with a bunch of loose rolling papers stuffed inside. Another small bag of heroin. A large shoulder bag, black leather with snakeskin, featuring several zippered pockets.

  The bag contained makeup, a few magazines and other assorted girl-things but the first item I saw when I opened the bag brought tears to my eyes. I hugged the item to my chest for a moment before examining it, praying it would tell me what I needed to know. It was a journal.

  Thank you, Cammie!

  ~ Chapter 4 ~

  The Journal

  Camille had started keeping a diary at about eight years of age.

  I supposed that was the approximate age when little girls began to have secrets from their parents and were literate enough to write them down.

  I had never been one for diaries. In my opinion, displaying my innermost feelings on paper for anyone to see just didn’t seem like a logical thing to do. Secrets should be kept hidden, not dangled in front of would-be snoopers behind a clearly marked cover. Trusting one’s private thoughts to a tiny, easily-picked locking hasp seemed to me to be the exact opposite of what should be done with secrets.

  Camille was obsessive about her diaries. She received one for each birthday and as a Christmas present; cutesy girly looking books with covers in varying shades of pink and purple, some adorned with fake gemstones, sequins or feathers. The girlier the better; nothing was too garish for Camille.

  I on the other hand, had no use for such nonsense. I received one of the locked books as a birthday gift once. It was more of a sensible model than the frivolous stuff Camille liked but I still had no intention of putting any ‘deep personal feelings’ into writing.

  I didn’t want to hurt my mother’s feelings; I knew she had picked out the gifts with love. I did my best to explain that I wasn’t into writing but I think her feelings were hurt anyway. Once again I was left feeling like an ass for being such a coldhearted shithead.

  I put my journal to good use anyway. I used it to keep track of addresses, telephone numbers, emails and website addresses I needed to remember in case of an unexpected computer meltdown. My habit of backing up important data via hard copy was an odd one, considering my profession – I was a computer technician by trade.

  Camille was the writer of the two of us. She kept a detailed account of everything that happened in her life from eight years of age. A trunk in the basement of our parents’ home in Vancouver held stacks of her diaries, which had accumulated over her childhood and part of her teen years, up until she left home. She dreamed of being a writer one day. She planned to write volumes of fantastic stories based on the adventures contained in her journals. I had always hoped she would but as the years passed and her wayward lifestyle continued, the likelihood of my sister realizing her dream faded.

  I gazed down at the gold lettering on the deep violet cover of the small book I held in my hands. I was almost afraid to open it for fear of what it might tell me. What little I had seen of my sister’s life in this brutal city was enough to bring to tears even a coldhearted shithead like myself.

  Instead of
reading the first page, I flipped to the end of the book. If I knew my sister as well as I thought I did, I knew what I would find at the end.

  Like me, Camille had a habit of recording important information in her journal. She never seemed to have the same cell phone long enough to be able to rely on a digital address book. The only difference was she delegated the last half-dozen or so pages for this while I had a tendency to start at the beginning of the book.

  Camille didn’t disappoint me. Just as I expected, several pages at the back of the book were filled with names, addresses and phone numbers. I scanned through the list, looking for anything familiar; names she may have mentioned to me at some point. Several of the names in the list were indeed familiar, but not because Camille had mentioned them. They were the names of celebrities, some of them quite famous. Most of them had contact numbers beside the names.

  Interesting.

  It seemed my sister had been rubbing shoulders with some of Hollywood’s most influential people… or if not their shoulders, then what else had she been rubbing?

  I closed the book and once again stared at the front cover, thinking. Having a list of Camille’s contacts didn’t bring me any closer to knowing where she was at that exact moment. It wasn’t like I could just start phoning people on the list.

  I had no way of knowing which of the non-celebrity names if any, belonged to her cop boyfriend. By now I was now pretty certain he was her abductor as well as her abuser. I didn’t want to tip him off or endanger her further. The number from which Camille’s cryptic text originated was not in the list.

  In spite of the urgency of the situation, I understood the importance of thinking with a clear head and not allowing panic to steer me into rash decisions. I wanted to rush after Camille and rescue her but that was impossible when I had no idea where to go. I would need to have some sort of strategy before I made my next move.

  Patience. Breathe.

  I leaned back against the wall and opened the book to the first page. With any luck, this journal would provide me with enough information to know what my next step would be.