by Alex Grecian
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.
Travis picked himself up and went to Donnie’s body, Bear padding silently along behind him. He knelt and felt for a pulse in Donnie’s throat. It was there, and steady. He pulled out his cell phone and dialed Goodman’s number.
“I could use some assistance,” he said when the sheriff picked up.
He gave his location and cut the connection, sat on the broken blacktop and beckoned for his tired dog. He made Bear lie down, cradled his head in his lap, and waited.
7
Sheriff Goodman ended the call and went looking for Skottie. She was on the phone, pacing up and down in her bedroom, grabbing guns out of her safe and throwing them on her bed. She pulled the phone away from her ear and said, “Just a second, Ryan.” She gave Goodman a questioning look, and he could see that her wide eyes were red-rimmed, her skin puffy, her hands shaking.
“That was the doc,” Goodman said. “He caught the other kid. I’m gonna go pick him up.”
“Did he find out anything about my daughter?”
“I don’t think so.”
“We need to get going. Do you have any idea what Maddy’s going through right now?”
“No, ma’am, and neither do you. Thinking about the worst of it . . . Well, it might not be as bad as you think anyway. Not yet. You’re better off rounding up as many people as you can to help find her.”
“That’s what I’m doing. The Highway Patrol’s putting out an APB. Who else do you know who can help?”
Goodman could tell she was close to hyperventilating. He reached out to put his hands on her shoulders, then pulled back. “Well, shit, I ain’t much good to you. I got my best deputy on his way already, but he’s the only one I trust. Burden County ain’t all that big, but a lot of the people there are likely in that church or have family there. And everybody’s related to everybody. I don’t know who else I can call. Hell, the bad guys got people in my family, in my department . . . I don’t even know I can trust my wife right now. Don’t tell her I said that.”
“I don’t know—”
“Listen, they’re not too far away. They’re probably not expecting us to be on ’em yet, and they’re gonna be going slow. If I’m right, they won’t wanna get pulled over with what they got in the back of that truck. We got a little time to prepare. We might catch ’em with my Crown Vic or your Explorer, but maybe think about who’s got the fastest car you know and give him a call. I’ll be right back with the doc. It’s gonna be okay. I promise.”
He tipped his hat and turned away, hoping she hadn’t seen the doubt in his eyes.
8
They took Donnie to the emergency room at Hays Medical Center.
“A stray dog mauled him,” Travis said. “It came out of nowhere.”
“It mighta been a wolf,” Goodman said. “Should probably treat him for rabies. All the injections.”
The on-duty nurse gave Travis a clipboard with a form to fill out. He set it on an empty chair, and when no one was looking, he and Goodman left.
By the time they made it back to Emmaline’s house, Deputy Quincy Griffith had arrived with a giant thermos of coffee. It was his night off, but he had jumped in his patrol car as soon as Goodman called him and had made record time getting to Hays. Quincy took Emmaline’s two captives to the Ellis County sheriff’s office with instructions that they were to be held for the holiday and would be picked up after the weekend for transfer to Burden County. Quincy promised to return as soon as possible.
When she saw Bear, Emmaline took him by the scruff of the neck to the bathroom.
“Let’s get him cleaned up, and I’ll take a look at that cut,” she said.
Skottie came down the back hall, her phone calls complete and her arms full of the guns she had taken from her bedroom safe.
“We’re wasting time,” she said. “I think I have enough weapons here for all of us.”
“I have a few more in the back of the sheriff’s car,” Travis said.
“This boy went on quite a little shopping trip tonight,” Goodman said. “Pretty near cleaned out the sporting goods department.”
“Travis, I know you want to find your dad,” Skottie said.
“My father would be disappointed in me if I did not help you.”
“Thank you,” Skottie said. “We’re gonna get Maddy back tonight.”
“You find a fast car?” Goodman said.
“Better than that. I remembered I know a guy with an airplane.”
NOVEMBER 2018
Ransom was nodding off in his rocking chair when he heard the door handle. Rudy came in and closed the door behind him and looked around the tiny room as if he had never seen it before. They were in one of the sheds that lined the inside of the church’s fence. The books on the shelf next to the door had titles like Stay Invisible, Black Like Them, Dark Matters, but Ransom had no desire to read them. He wasn’t sure he could read them if he wanted to. He spent most of his time watching shadows on the wall and thinking about his children.
Rudy sat across from him on the edge of one of the two bottom bunks, propping his cane between his legs. He watched Ransom rock back and forth. Ransom couldn’t help it; he needed to rock all the time or he felt anxious. His fingertips tingled, and the side of his head burned where the half-moon incision was beginning to heal.
“Didn’t sleep?” Rudy said. “I understand. I don’t sleep much myself.”
Ransom glared at him.
“How are we today?” Rudy said.
Ransom didn’t answer. He formed several responses, but his mouth wouldn’t make the words.
Fuck you, he meant to say.
If I could move any faster, I would kill you.
Wait until my sons get their h
ands on you.
He said none of this, but he took some satisfaction from the apparent fact that Rudy didn’t know he could still think clearly. Whatever Rudy had done to him, Ransom was still whole inside. It was just that his brain couldn’t communicate very well with his body.
“I wanted to tell you that I’m very proud of you,” Rudy said. “I can’t call you a complete success, but our time together has taught me a great deal. If you could understand my work, you might even thank me for allowing you to be a part of it.”
“Fuck,” Ransom said. He grinned, proud to have blurted out the one word that summed up all his feelings.
“Probably not,” Rudy said. He leaned back and stroked his beard. “I don’t imagine you’ll be doing that ever again.”
Ransom slumped in his chair, exhausted by the achievement of speaking that one word. Rudy grabbed his cane and pushed himself up from the bed. He went to the mini-fridge under the shelf and opened it, grabbed two longneck bottles of imported German beer, and held them up.
“Drink?”
Without waiting for an answer, he took his keys from his pocket and popped the caps off with a bottle opener on his key ring. One of the caps went flying and he retrieved it from the floor, setting his keys on the edge of the shelf above, pushing the books back toward the wall to make space for them. He tossed the caps in the small trash can and straightened back up with some difficulty, holding the small of his back with one hand. He passed a beer bottle over to Ransom and sat back down on the bunk bed with a huge sigh.
“I’m getting old,” he said. “But you understand. You’re no spring chicken yourself.”
Ransom concentrated on moving his arm. He considered throwing the bottle at Rudy, but knew the attempt would fail. Rudy was three feet away, but he might as well have been on the moon. Ransom brought the bottle up to his mouth and took a shaky sip of beer.