How to Disappear

by Ann Redisch Stampler

  “You should get a better lock,” the big guy says. “Word to the wise.” He sounds as if he’s auditioning for a part in an episode of the kind of old black-and-white crime show my dad liked—or maybe a parody of that kind of show.

  He’s not getting the part.

  I say, “Make yourself comfortable.”

  “Cool customer.” Crap, this part of the nightmare has a terrible script.

  “You’re in my apartment. Your boy has something aimed at me. Do you know who I am?”

  I’m trying to sound like a prodigy crime lord, Son of Crime Lord, any heavy-duty thing I can think of.

  He laughs at me.

  There’s nothing to lose. Something bad is going to happen here. The guy behind me is leaning against the bookshelves (I can hear them creaking), lazy.

  I swivel toward him, take the knee without too much trouble, my hand on his wrist, the only challenge how sweat-slick it is. The knife falls against my calf. I kick it to the side, out of reach, the payoff for ten years of martial arts.

  The hulk in the chair barks, “Manx! Chill!”

  The little sweaty guy is lying on the ground, swearing at me. All I’ve got going for me here is my lineage and a lot of sparring with an Israeli Krav Maga instructor who took me down every single time. I’d rather have metal in my hand.

  The guy in the chair raises his eyebrows. “We don’t want trouble from you.”

  “You ambush me in my apartment? Seems like trouble.” I’m doing the best possible imitation of my dad, or maybe the Godfather. I hope it’s good enough.

  The guy in the chair takes his gun out from under the jacket and lays it across his lap. “Just tell me where she is, and we’ll leave.”

  “Where who is?”

  This was stupid because, in his line of work, he’s got a temper, and there’s a Beretta in his lap. He puts his hand on the gun and gives me a significant look, exactly like bad TV except for the real possibility of sudden death.

  I say, “Okay, sorry. But if I knew where she was, do you think I’d still be here? I’d be at the beach.”

  He’s looking me over, trying to decide if he believes me. “You find her, we take her,” he says. “Easy.”

  If I say easy, maybe he’ll go away.

  He’ll also know I’m blowing smoke.

  I shake my head. “That’s not what I heard.”

  He half-rises from the chair, his hand suddenly cradling the gun, the barrel and the silencer pointing straight outward. He shakes his head. “I know who you are, kid. Do you know who I am?”

  “Karl Yeager’s cousin Bob? Cops who’ve been undercover too long?”

  “Watch yourself!” his friend growls from the floor, the terror effect he’s going for undermined by the fact that he’s flat on his ass.

  Beretta Man says, “You find her, we get her. Understood?”

  I realize they have no idea where Nicolette is.

  And, shit, they’re here because I led them here. How else? That was the point of Don’s making me visit him—not him showing off how much power he wielded over me, but Yeager’s guys being able to follow me out of the prison parking lot. And if they found me, they can find her. I’ve led them straight to her.

  Now is when I have to do it, now before they find her, now before somebody other than me gets to her, and she and my whole family end up dead. But where? If they followed me back, they had days to do recon at the campsite. I was the hotshot, hiking around memorizing the terrain, and I didn’t notice these two? Or what if it was someone else? What if they tag team? How many people are looking for this girl?

  Nicolette, why did you have to do it?

  I say, “I can do this myself,” with more bravado than confidence.

  “Sure you can,” the guy in the chair sneers as the guy on the floor edges toward his knife. I kick it into the kitchen.

  Then there’s the choke hold. It’s not even the big guy, it’s the little guy I put on the floor—the one I thought was harmless. He comes up at me so fast, I’m just standing there, looking stupid. I can’t move, can’t breathe, his arm is pressed around my neck. My field of vision narrows to a speck. If I struggle against it, my windpipe is crushed and I’m dead sooner, and Nicolette is dead too. I hear them. “Arrogant little pissant.” And I’m thinking my last thought: Pissant, are you kidding me? Who says that?

  Then my head implodes.

  53

  Cat

  Abandon nice old lady in a house of food she won’t remember to eat, and disappear into the night.

  Not exactly.

  I tell Mrs. Podolski’s son, Walter, I have a family emergency.

  He doesn’t even care.

  He says, “She’ll be okay till you get back.”

  I can’t tell if he’s stoned. Or a bad person. Or a moron.

  I say, “No, she won’t! Seriously? You have to hire somebody else. Do you want her to eat safety pins?”

  “She hated those other girls. When do you get back?”

  “You have to hire someone right now!”

  I clear any number of Sunday School hurdles.

  I don’t take Mrs. P’s stash of emergency twenties.

  Plus, I feel bad about walking (running) away from J right after I made him all mushy and soft. Which he hates.

  Oh God, I like him so much.

  Normally, this isn’t when I leave guys. It’s when I peel off my judgment like a pair of used gym socks. Reducing myself to a bundle of impulses, dangerous attraction, and bare feet.

  Not suited to running.

  But I can’t be anywhere within a thousand miles of police looking for a girl with an ice pick. I can’t.

  Wait while he ditches the car. Check.

  Wait while he goes to a freaking wedding in South Dakota. Check.

  Wait for him to go, I’m back, now let’s get out of here. Nothing.

  And I’m not about to twist his arm. Or wait.

  Come with me to Argentina, babe.

  Yeah, right.

  I wish, I wish, I wish. But seriously? Yeah, right.

  I’m keeping my socks on, and I’m gone.

  Plus, I can look him up later. Years from today. When I’ve bought a new face and a passport that says I come from Paraguay.

  I can go, Hola, Jeremiah.

  How many Jeremiah Jenkins can there be?

  54

  Jack

  I’m on the floor where they dropped me, ears ringing, head pounding, mouth full of sewage that belongs in my stomach. Something stinks. They emptied the kitchen garbage on me—nice touch. The place is trashed. It’s dark, and I can’t raise my head to take in the full extent of it, but I can tell it’s time to go.

  How many words do Eskimos have for stupid? Not as many as I deserve, or they’d all have been eaten by polar bears.

  I pull myself off the floor, not sure if I’m supposed to be alive. It’s not easy to breathe with a neck that’s been pressed closed, or to deal with the humiliation. The little one got me? Jack Manx, arrogant pissant: words to live by.

  I dial her number. Very quietly, I ask her, “Are you alone?”

  “I’m with my other boyfriend. What do you think?”

  I say, “I can’t sleep. Let’s go somewhere.”

  There’s a long silence. “It’s three in the morning. You know that, right?”

  “Let’s get out of town and see some stars.”

  “Like stars over Crothers or stars in Argentina?”

  “God, you’re picky. You say you like romantic, and I give you stars.”

  She says, “I’ve created a monster.”

  “I was already a monster.” She has no idea. “Are you coming or not?”

  I know she’s coming.

  “Dress warm—I’ll be there in thirty. Make sandwiches, okay?” My throat feels like someone buffed it with sandpaper, but I’m hungry.

  I spend five minutes throwing everything into my duffel, shovel the trash back into a black plastic bag, put the drawers back in the dresser and the
cushions back on the couch. Cleaning up isn’t on my top ten list for the night, but neither is having the girl who rented me the place show up to what looks like a crime scene.

  I go out the kitchen window for the second time in two days. That cop car that scared me into avoiding the front door and instead climbing over my sink and out the back window to get to Nicolette’s place is what kept these two guys from following me straight to her yesterday. Hats off to community policing. It’s the first cop car that ever did me any good.

  I look around the side of the apartment. I’m pretty sure which car the two guys who threatened me are in, meaning they didn’t intend to kill me, just to leave the taste of death in my mouth so I’d know what I was up against: people who are better at this than I am.

  I drop down behind the bushes that surround the building, then sprint to the side of the house next door. I don’t hear a car start or see one following when I shoot around the corner.

  I cut through alleys and behind buildings to get to my junker. It’s parked far enough from my apartment that they can’t see it from where they’re sitting—but only just barely. Starting it up, it feels as if I’m pushing the button on a detonator. I drive without headlights, park between a couple of bigger cars in a lot a few blocks from her place. The only person who could have followed me would be an invisible guy with night-vision goggles and a jetpack. I close the car door so quietly, it’s hard to differentiate the sound from the ambient night noises—crickets, branches, muted traffic.

  I approach carefully, making sure there’s nothing strange, no one watching the street or watching me. She’s good to go in sweats, toting a grocery bag full of food and the ubiquitous daypack. She leans up to kiss me.

  “We could just stay here and have a picnic, say, on the table,” she says.

  I look around the garage she lives in. I can come back sometime after and wash it down, but what’s the point? You can’t get rid of all traces. If anyone figures out what happened, I’ll be too busy exporting whatever you export from Madagascar, holed up in a tropical paradise fighting off poisonous insects, to care.

  I tap her on the butt. “Let’s go.”

  She finds this extremely annoying. She says, “Could you please not go all master-of-the-universe on me?” She does half an eye roll. “That’s what my friend says you are, too.”

  “It was an accident. Sorry.” And then, damn, “You just talked to your friend about me?”

  “Oh no!” This is her at her most tender. “Not about what happened to you. I would never tell anyone. Please trust me.”

  Frankly, how bad it was with her running her fingertip along the scars, how naked I was, how much I wanted her to shut up, how important it seemed, how sorry she was—now it’s like it was nothing.

  “I’m not the most trusting guy.”

  Her face falls. I know I have to fix this fast, but all I have room for in my brain is getting her out of here and processing that she’s been talking about me, that when she goes even more missing than she is right now, somebody out there will know God knows what about me. At some point, someone—Olivia most likely—is going to put two and two together and get four, and this won’t be good for me.

  I just want to get her out of here and into my car before we have company.

  We’re leaving now, and we’re leaving fast.

  55

  Cat

  It’s stars. And it’s the middle of the night. And it’s romantic.

  The affection-binging camel is a glutton for this stuff.

  Plus, how bad could one more night be?

  The gym socks slither down my ankles.

  J says, “Wait here. I’ll get the car.”

  “I think I can manage to walk two blocks without breaking.”

  He grins the hot grin. “Said the agoraphobic wreck.”

  Really? He tells me his secrets. He comes apart. I stick him back together, plus pie and a lot of making out. But now it’s three thirty in the morning, and he isn’t being very nice.

  “I never said I was a wreck.”

  “You came very close.”

  “Not that close.”

  He seems nervous, looking around my room, pulling the curtains over the bed closed tighter. Switching off lights.

  “If you’re looking for evidence of all my other boyfriends, I had a half hour to hide everything.” Exactly one half hour. J is punctual.

  “Can we go?”

  “You invited me. Aren’t you supposed to be all happy I’m coming?”

  He puts his arm around me. It’s so rigid that stretched out, it could be a battering ram. Which makes me feel kind of secure. I might need a battering ram.

  But he was so smiley before. After we changed the subject. After we buried the whole conversation about his horrible dad in three boxes’ worth of baked blueberries and lightly whipped cream. He ate seconds. He had a purple tongue from all the berries.

  God, I don’t want to leave him. Have to. Don’t want to.

  “Can we please go?” he says. He takes the grocery bag and drags me out the door.

  All the way to the car, he’s bent over me like a live raincoat with a hood. My head is under his chin for part of the walk, and then he’s moving from one side of me to the other on the sidewalk, like he can’t make up his mind.

  I say, “You’re acting kind of strange.”

  He says, “Hurry up.”

  We drive through student housing, south of the college, and then pull onto the freeway. Then off. Then on again.

  I say, “Do you even know where we’re going?”

  “It’s a surprise.”

  Then it occurs to me that maybe this is the big seduction scene.

  A car that smells like peanut butter sandwiches so isn’t what I had in mind.

  He reaches behind my head and weaves his fingers through my hair. “We could be in the mountains in two hours. It’ll be awesome.”

  Except he’s changed directions twice.

  I say, “Are you all right? Listen, if you’d rather go to a motel instead of the mountains, I might be open to it.”

  One last slight fling.

  Why not?

  I know why not, but I halfway don’t care.

  “You might be?” he says. “I have to keep outwitting you to hang on to my virtue.”

  “Stop teasing me.”

  “I’m sorry.” He sounds kind of shocked, actually. “You want to go to a motel with me?”

  Shock is not what I was after. “That might not mean what you think it means. You know, fool around a little. Not conceive your first-born child. Sack out. Beats going into a ditch when the driver falls asleep.”

  “So fooling around with me . . . or whatever . . . would be a step up from being in a car wreck?”

  “Possibly two steps. Even three.” I have no idea what I’m doing to freak him out, but he’s driving like a crazy person. Perfect speed limit, checking his rearview constantly. First we were pointed south, then west, and now we’re pointed toward the mountains.

  I say, “We could park and eat sandwiches. We could wait a while. Maybe you’ll feel better.”

  “Wait for what?” He’s shouting at me.

  “Don’t yell at me! It’s not like I’m questioning your manhood. Do you want me to drive?”

  He shouts, “I’m fine!” Looking straight ahead, he says, “I need to talk to you. Let’s get out of here.”

  We need to talk??? This is so not what I had in mind.

  “Just so you know, you can’t break up with people after you drive them two hours from home. It’s bad form. If that’s what this is.” I’m rethinking my stealth breakup by disappearance. If this is what breaking up with him feels like.

  “How can we break up if we were never together?”

  This feels like a blow to the head until I remember I’m the one who said we weren’t together in the first, second, and third place.

  “Are you teasing me?” I say. “Because I thought all was forgiven. Only then you call me at
three in the morning because you’re pissed off and you want a sandwich.”

  “Are you angry? You sound angry.”

  I snap, “I’m not angry!”

  “Because if you’re angry that I didn’t spill my guts about how it felt to have a guy three times my size come at me with a belt buckle, get used to being angry.”

  “You’re the one who’s angry. And I wasn’t pressuring you to spill anything. When you said you couldn’t talk about it, I respected that.”

  J accelerates around a curve so fast, I’m afraid we’re going to spin out.

  I try again. I touch his arm. “I hate what happened to you. And”—giant leap—“I understand. I do. I get what it’s like to have somebody you lean on turn on you. I get not being able to talk about it.”

  He tightens his grip on my hair. “Why, did somebody turn on you?”

  “I can’t talk about it.”

  He pulls his hand out of my hair. “That’s not funny.” Scary voice I do not want to hear again. Ever.

  “You so don’t get me! I wasn’t mocking you! Stop growling at me!”

  How could he think I’d tease him over something like that? I was being honest. We’re miles from civilization. We’ve turned off the main road and we’re heading into the national forest. Soon we’ll be fighting on hairpin turns. In mountains. Narrow roads, sheer drops. Fighting.

  I’m from Northeast Ohio. It’s flat from crushing sheets of glacial ice. Taking the Greyhound bus across the Rockies was a nightmare. Being scared that you’re about to crash through a guardrail because the driver is yelling at you isn’t romantic.

  “I want to go home.”

  He doesn’t say anything, just presses down on the accelerator.

  “Turn the car around! I want to go home!”

  He puts his hand on my hand. I don’t want it there. He says, “I’m sorry. Let’s go make up somewhere, okay? This is stupid. If I floor it, we’ll be there for sunrise.”

  “Don’t floor it! Are you insane? And where will we be, exactly?”

  “I planned this. This will be special.”

  “Not that special! The first time we do it—if we ever do it—it won’t be make-up sex. Don’t even bother.”