Cut and Run

by Ridley Pearson

  “No.”

  Another step closer.

  “There’s something about taking my clothes off, undressing. It’s a moment of extreme… vulnerability. I’m glad you’re here.”

  “Hope… I…”

  “If you’re ever asked about this, questioned… I know you, Lars. You’d never lie about it. I know you could lose your job, and I know how much it means to you, how good you are at it. All those things. So you see… there’s only one way this can happen. Between us, I mean. I’m usually not the forward type,” she said, pulling off her top and standing now in bra and underwear. “Not at all.” She reached behind her back and deftly unclipped the bra. “This doesn’t come easy for me.” As the back strap came loose it slipped half off her breasts, the shoulder straps sliding lower on her arms. “But it has to be that I seduced you. It has to be all me, all my doing. That I came up with some lame excuse about being afraid to undress in the room alone-it was all I could come up with on short notice,” she said. “That I came on to you in a moment of weakness.”

  “It’s supposed to be me protecting you,” he said hoarsely, his throat gone dry, “not the other way around.”

  “We’ll look after each other then,” she said. She allowed the bra to fall. Her breasts rode high on her chest, her nipples and areolas far darker than her complexion suggested. She climbed out of the bikini briefs, and he could feel her embarrassed determination to continue. She wore only a thin silver necklace now-something he hadn’t yet told her would have to go before enrollment in the program.

  She stepped forward and melted into him, her arms between them, her hands already working on his shirt buttons.

  He reached around to embrace her and she chided, “No… No… No…” Looking up at him, she suppressed a grin as she explained, “I want it to be entirely my doing, Lars.” She mocked a response to her being interrogated about this. “He stood there stoically. He was in the room as I undressed. I asked him to be. I can’t explain that, but I couldn’t take off my clothes without someone there and Deputy Larson was the one guarding me that night. And, well…” She continued working his shirt open. She moved on to his belt and khakis. “I suppose I felt vulnerable, or in need of company, safety, security, but I found myself not heading for the bath, as I’d suggested, but instead, one thing led to another and I found myself flirting with him.” In her regular voice, she said, “Flirting’s far too soft a word. Not the right word at all. I’ll have to come up with something better.”

  “Hope…”

  “You be quiet, Deputy. We need the record clean. We need our story… straight.” With that she had his pants open and him firmly in hand. She brought his fingers up to her chest and whispered, “This once, the first time between us, it has to be all me.”

  Her nipple firmed and grew puckered under his touch.

  She undressed him, saying, “You’re going to lie down on the bed and do your best to resist me.” Again, Larson reached to embrace her, having had enough of the game, but she held him off, saying, “Please,” and he understood from her tone that she was serious. Perhaps she couldn’t confront true lovemaking. Perhaps it was too soon for her. Perhaps this was more born of a primal urge to dominate after days-weeks-of having her every movement controlled and coordinated by others. And all of them men, always men.

  “My turn,” she said, confirming his thoughts.

  She lay him back on the bed and climbed atop him, dragging her warm spot against him, drawing something abstract with her soft paintbrush. She climbed over him and lowered a breast and nipple to his lips, and as he kissed her there, as his tongue raced circles, she reached back and touched him and he shuddered head to toe. She alternated breasts to his lips as her fingers explored him.

  She pulled her breast free of him and raised up on extended arms and locked elbows, hovering over him on raised toes like doing a push-up, and slowly lowered herself to where it was the heat from her skin he felt first. Then her breasts lit up his skin and she slowly eased her full weight down onto him, melting down into him to where arm matched arm, belly matched belly, and thigh matched thigh. Then she rocked her hips, opened her legs and reached down there, taking hold, sliding lower along his chest, and with this motion joined them with barely any effort.

  She lay there quietly, Larson fully inside her now, not a motion between them beside the drumming of their pulses, their conflicting heartbeats. She held him like a clenched fist. He tried to initiate a rhythm and she pinned down his hips and said hotly into his ear, “You’re all mine.”

  And he was.

  He grew delirious in the heat of the room. He lost track of time but never of her. They melded into this single, humming entity. A lone moth worked along the ceiling, dancing with its shadow. They must have lain absolutely still for ten minutes or more-it was like nothing he’d ever experienced. At the first sense of him losing his erection she moved one full, glorious stroke, lifting herself up to sitting, and driving him back into her, filling her, completing her, before stretching out prone and lowering herself incrementally again in that same dizzying fashion as before. Now she lay fully atop, their bodies meeting together again, both of them murmuring.

  “I’ve wanted this for so long,” she whispered into his ear. “I didn’t want to waste it.”

  She sat up then, pulled his hands to her breasts, and began her musical rising and falling.

  “Look at me,” he said, and she did, and it felt like days later before her eyes rolled back into her head and the world exploded through him and into her in a perfectly timed choreography of contractions and sharp cries of satisfaction.

  He awoke to the sound through the wall of her bath running, and might have believed it all a dream had not that paddle fan been grinding its way through the chorus of that same grating song.

  Rolling swales of bleached and dying field grass gave way to slate ponds stitched together by meandering streams the color of old steel. A pair of mallards rose and crossed the road, their wings beating so fast they seemed to fly without them, veering away from the Explorer and up into a guncotton sky.

  Hope sat stone-faced in the passenger seat, a knot of concern worn on her brow like a birthmark. “How do we know that will work?”

  “Because we’ve done it before,” Larson answered.

  “But it hasn’t rung.”

  “It will.” He’d call-forwarded her cell phone to his secure BlackBerry, and had then shut her cell phone off, to prevent any chance of her phone being triangulated, a sophisticated method of radio telemetry. If Penny had been kidnapped, and if her captors called, if an effort was made to negotiate, Larson believed it would only be to hold her on the line long enough to electronically track her location. He dared not underestimate the reach of the Romeros. If they could corrupt the federal court system-and some said they already had-then cell phones weren’t going to inhibit them.

  “This drive is bringing back all sorts of stuff for me,” she said.

  “Yup. Good stuff.”

  “You sure?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “What’s her name?” Hope asked, out of the blue.

  “There is no ‘her.’ There’s a friend, Linda. It got heavy for a couple months, a long time ago, but it’s friends now, and that’s good.” He said, “You?”

  “No.” She offered a mocking smile. “Not even close.”

  She’d overheard Larson’s call to Linda, suggesting she stay with her mother for a day or two. The incident at the hospital and the kidnapping had rattled him. It seemed unlikely the Romeros would connect him to Hope, then his dog to Linda, but he’d never forgive himself should anything happen to her because of him.

  Unsurprisingly, Linda had reacted calmly, her primary concern that he make sure he was taking all necessary precautions for himself.

  “Did you come to St. Louis looking for me?” Larson asked. Why he couldn’t bring himself to ask the real question, about Penny, he wasn’t sure. The moment he’d heard the child’s age, he’d known. S
o why the indirect questioning?

  She almost smiled. “Yeah, I did. Had no clue there’d be no way to find you once I got here. You’re not in information, not in any phone books. Nothing on the Internet. You’re worse than I was in protection.” She hesitated, as if ashamed to admit it. “I even sat outside the Federal building a couple different days looking for you. How’s that for sick?”

  “Not at all.” He thought a moment. “Much Ado About Nothing? Was that your laugh I heard?”

  “Don’t miss the turn,” she said, indicating the left.

  As if he would have.

  “Are you sure there’s no way they can detect that I’ve call-forwarded my number? Why haven’t I heard from someone?”

  Good job changing the subject, he thought. But at that very moment Larson’s BlackBerry chirped at his side to save them both.

  Rather than answer himself, he pulled over sharply and caught a quick look at the caller ID: OUT OF AREA. Calls from anyone inside the Service came up PRIVATE on caller ID. Believing this could be intended for her, he passed her his phone, still ringing. He switched off the car as she cradled the BlackBerry awkwardly and pressed it to her ear.

  “Hello?” Her eyes darted first to Larson, then out toward the landscape.

  Larson leaned across to listen in and for a moment their heads touched and he felt that same sense of burning he had felt all those years ago. He withdrew quickly but now it was she who angled toward him, and again, he leaned to meet her.

  “You are missing a package,” the voice said. “A very pretty little package.”

  But the way the words were drawn out and strung together convinced Larson that the call was nothing but a ruse to buy time to trace Hope’s location. Larson’s BlackBerry was untraceable; and though it housed a GPS chip, that chip had to be switched on manually.

  “You leave her out of this!” Hope blurted out, contrary to what she knew was required of her.

  “Oh… but it’s a little late for that now, don’t you think? I wonder what Social Services would have said about you locking her out like that?”

  Tracing calls worked both directions. The Romeros had to know that the full technological might and power of the Marshals Service would be summoned to locate this girl. So why play so loose with time? Caller ID was nearly instantaneous, whether the caller believed the line blocked or not. This caller had already stayed on much too long. Larson suspected that a reverse trace was under way: The caller had been advised to keep Hope engaged for as long as possible. But by remaining on the line, the caller was in fact leaving his own foot squarely in the bear trap.

  Larson drew a fast circle in the air, indicating she should keep the caller talking.

  “What do you want?” she asked.

  “It’s not about what they-what we,” the male voice immediately corrected, “want. If you want to recover the missing package, I suggest you keep your phone close by your side. Instructions to follow.” The line cleared.

  Larson found the caller’s slipup telling-from “they” to “we”-and the choice of language intriguing. It sounded as if the man had been reading from a script at the beginning and end but had improvised in between.

  He took back the phone, expecting to hear from the Clayton office within minutes. The call had lasted plenty long enough for them to trace, even if some kind of switching device were involved. Sitting upright behind the wheel again, Larson turned the key.

  Hope’s face was streaked with tears, her arms now crossed so tightly he wondered if she could breathe.

  “Don’t,” he cautioned. “Don’t let them win. They want this kind of reaction from you.”

  “Shut up!” she said, ratcheting her head away from him, gazing out at the patch-quilt geometry of some farmer’s labors.

  “It helps them.”

  “Leave it,” she told the tilled fields. After a moment she asked, “What now?”

  “They think if you leave your phone on they’ll find you, and that will end it. But, we won this round. We’ll trace them. Maybe they know that, maybe they don’t.”

  “So, what now?” she repeated.

  “We’ll get you settled in at the farm. Normally a couple of our guys would join me, but Rotem and I think that’s too risky right now. Soon enough. Until then, basically, you’re missing and I’m AWOL. My boss has to plug a leak. Until then, you and I remain on our own. It’s best. I have some stuff to work through once you’re okay.”

  “I am okay,” she said.

  He had the car going again. “There’s a psychology to this-to abductions. I’m not expecting you to be able to detach. Of course not. But their plan is to play with you-to manipulate you into making a mistake and offering them a chance to kill you. That’s all they want. They don’t care about Penny the way we do,” a slip he covered by talking more quickly now, “and nothing they say one way or the other about her is the truth. What we know-what we absolutely know-is how important she is to them right now. She’s their passport to you. That’s all that matters, all there is. She’s a means to an end, and as long as we, I, the Service, keep them from getting you, Penny retains her value. Do you understand? It’s important you understand this. You don’t do anything without me knowing it. Nothing. I don’t know how, but they’re going to try to push you into something-we don’t know what it is yet-but what I need you to keep in mind is that denying them is the key.”

  “Sounds like there’s a lot you don’t know. Not very reassuring.”

  “As long as they don’t have you, Penny’s safe.” God, how he hoped he was right. “And whatever you do that they ask will only ensure that both of you are killed.”

  The Explorer complained as it climbed a long twisting hill, revealing pumpkin patches and apple orchards and unexpected colors brought on by early frosts that had yet to reach the city. The leaves were changing here, a swirling mix of maturing oranges, reds, and browns. Paint by number. PICK YUR OWN-3 MILES AHEAD. The Orchard House was just around the next bend. Her body stiffened once again, telling Larson that she recognized it, too.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  In the motel room’s dimly lit bathroom Paolo dabbed a slippery antibiotic cream into the red, raw, self-inflicted wound on his abdomen, addressing the infection. In the mirror, covered in the white flyspecks of someone else’s flossing, the chaotic scar tissue, the randomly drawn bumps and lines that lay across his chest and midsection reminded him of dead worms on blacktop after a hard rain.

  His eyes shifted focus in the speckled reflection. Behind him and to his left he encountered the bound ankles, knees, and shoulders of the little girl tucked into the bottom of the open booth that served as a closet. She wore a pair of his dirty socks tied around her head, the ends connected by a shoestring, the bulging knot jammed into her mouth.

  Having phoned in the girl’s abduction-his success-to Philippe, he now awaited instructions as to what came next. He placed down the tube of cream. The girl turned away from him as he double-checked her gag and the duct tape on her wrists and ankles. He repeated this ritual every five minutes. Kids could be tricky little things.

  “I don’t like this, either,” he said to her, though he might have been talking to himself again. “I told you that.” The girl made no indication of hearing him. “It wasn’t exactly my idea, snatching you up like that.” Now, for the first time, she turned her head. Her sad eyes, bloodshot and irritated to a pitiful pink, pleaded with him. Then he watched as she caught sight of the mosaic of his scars.

  Whimpering, she turned away again.

  Paolo slipped on a black T-shirt. He tried again. “I can remove this stuff, you know? Penny? Are you listening? The tape. The gag. You understand? You could watch cartoons. Whaddya think?”

  He stood and fumbled with the remote control. “You want to watch cartoons?” He cycled through the channels, hitting mostly ads. No cartoons. He tossed the remote onto the bed, pissed off at it.

  “Come on!” he said to her. “Do something. Nod, if you want me to remove the g
ag.”

  She cowered into the corner of the closet, a tight little ball of pale fear.

  “Nothing I’d rather do than cut you loose. You understand that?” He studied her. “All we need is an agreement, and I can cut you loose. No screaming, no fighting-and I remove the tape and gag. Okay?” He moved closer to her, craned down to where he could smell her fear, and said, “Do you think you’re helping anything?”

  Her head pivoted slowly. Her nose was runny, and he went over and got her a tissue and brought it back and held it at her nose so she could blow, and she did. Not just once, but a couple of times.

  “See?” he said. “I want you to be as comfortable as possible. This is going to work out.”

  She nodded and tried to speak. Paolo grinned ear to ear. His eyes brightened. He reached out to pet her head, but thought better of it.

  “By nodding you’re promising me you won’t do anything stupid-won’t shout or anything like that. Are we both clear on that?”

  Penny nodded for a second time.

  “All right then. Yes. Good.” He was already loosening the gag. “Real good.” The sock fell down around her neck.

  Penny said softly, “I’ve got to go potty.”

  A few minutes later he’d untied her and helped her to stand. Her knees, ankles, shoulders, and wrists ached. She leaned on him for the first few steps, trying to find her balance.

  “You can shut the door,” he said. “But don’t lock it. If I hear you lock it, I’m going to have to bust it down. And then our deal is over, and I’ll have to tie you back up.”

  Frightened, she managed yet another nod.

  “Okay. Go on and do your business.” Penny entered the bathroom and closed the door behind her. She dropped her pants and pulled down her panties and sat down to pee, but her mind was on escape. She was hearing her mom telling her all this stuff she never really bothered to listen to. Over and over, the same boring stuff. Stuff about where to go if they were ever separated, how to scream and run, how to bite. Her mom had once showed her everything in the kitchen that could be used to hurt someone, telling her over and over that she was only showing her this stuff in case it was absolutely necessary, in case someone tried to rob them or something like that. But the way she’d said it, the something like that was the important part. This felt like one of those times: something like that.