by Phoef Sutton
“That’s right,” Gail said calmly. “That’s what will happen. If you do that.”
“What do you mean, if I do that?” Frida asked, affronted. “That’s what’s going to happen.”
“Are you on the clock?” Crush asked.
“Pardon?”
“Have you reported in? Or did you stop by on the way to work?”
Frida stared at him. “You’re not really suggesting what I think you’re suggesting.”
“I’m suggesting it,” Crush said.
Angela spoke up. “If you haven’t reported in, then this really hasn’t happened. Professionally speaking, I mean.”
“Don’t you talk to me.” Frida turned to Gail. “Tell her not to talk to me.”
“Don’t talk to her, Angela,” Gail said.
Frida pulled out her cell phone.
“Frida, wait,” Crush said. “At least hear us out.”
Noel shook his head. “It’s useless, can’t you see? She’s working for them.”
“For who?” Frida asked.
“You’re not helping, Noel,” Crush said. Noel huffed and shuffled back upstairs to the bedroom.
Frida’s thumb was poised over the keypad on her phone.
“Tell me one thing before you call,” Gail said. “How did you know?”
“How did I know what?” Frida replied.
“How did you know it wasn’t K.C.?” Gail asked.
Frida paused. “I could just tell. It was obvious.”
“Not from the first. If you knew from the first you would have called him out. When did you know?”
Frida thought. “I guess…when he looked at me. It wasn’t the same.”
“What wasn’t the same?” Gail asked.
“It wasn’t the same feeling. When he looked at me.” Frida struggled to put it into words. “It just wasn’t...there.”
“What wasn’t there?”
“The feeling. The familiarity.” Frida shook her head in frustration. “Why am I even talking to you about this?”
“The familiarity. The friendship, you mean?” Gail asked.
“This is just wasting time.”
“He’s your friend, Frida. Whether you want to admit that or not,” Gail said. “He’s your friend and you deserve to hear him out.”
“All right. Fine. You win. And I will hear him out. As soon as I can talk to him. Which means, as soon as they bring him in.”
“You can hear from him before that,” Gail said.
“What are you talking about?” Frida asked.
Gail looked to Angela who pulled out her cell phone. “Somebody texted me,” Angela said. “They said to FaceTime this number at eight-thirty.”
“And you think it was him?” Frida asked.
“Or the people who have him,” Gail said. “There’s only one way to find out. Just wait five minutes. You can be here when we call.”
Frida did a turn around the kitchen table. “This is stupid.”
“But you’ll wait?” Gail asked.
Frida sat. “What the hell, I’ll wait.”
“You want some coffee?” Crush asked.
“What the hell, I’ll have some coffee,” Frida said.
Crush poured her a cup and Gail pulled up a chair to sit next to her. Crush poured Gail a cup, too. Gail gestured for Crush and Angela to leave them alone. Crush took Angela into the bedroom.
“That was subtle,” Frida said.
“I wasn’t trying to be subtle,” Gail said. “I was trying to give you some space. What happened yesterday?”
Frida sipped her coffee. “I don’t know whether you’re my sensei, my therapist, or an accomplice to an offender.”
“Well, I’m not your therapist. But I can listen.”
Frida put her cup down. “Remember that INKY I told you about?”
“Inky?”
“Sorry, P. O. talk. Incorrigible Juvenile Offender. Aaron Reddick and his family. The usual Friday night routine. Dad comes home, beats on Mom, the kid tries to break it up, the parents gang up on the kid, the kid fights back, and the parents call me. To put the fear of God and the law into him.”
“That sounds pretty bad.”
“Yeah, it’s what we call an F.U.F.U.—A Fucked Up Family Unit. They have a choice. They could work on their problems or they could blame the kid. They blame the kid. Of course Aaron acts out, just to give them something to complain about. Vandalism, tagging, shoplifting. He’s been in amd out of Juvie and on probation since he was thirteen. A problem child, they say. With an alcoholic, abusive father and an enabling mother. This is the stuff I have to deal with, day in, day out.”
“But this time it was different?”
Frida ran her fingers through her hair, put her hands on the table, and looked at her nails. “This time it was different. I should have sensed that, but it started just the same as always. Mom and Dad had been wailing on each other and Aaron started breaking up the place, just to distract them. By the time I got there, he was busting up the kitchen with a broom handle and they were yelling at him. I tried to get Aaron to stop, to calm everybody down. You can guess how well that went. By the time I got the kid to put down the broom, his father was picking up an old stainless-steel meat tenderizer and bringing it down on Aaron’s head. So Aaron picked up a cast-iron skillet and started swinging at his father while his mother was screaming like a scalded cat.
“I don’t think the dad meant to hit me with the mallet. I just got caught in the back swing. I fell back against the counter and the mother decided to help me by screaming in my face. Aaron dropped the skillet and ran to me, but his dad kept pounding at him with the mallet.
“I don’t know who called the police. I guess one of the neighbors finally ran out of patience, or maybe somebody new had moved in, somebody who wasn’t used to the mother’s screeching. The cops burst in just as Aaron grabbed a butcher’s knife off the counter. They took one look at the scene and decided that the young guy with the knife was the aggressor.”
Frida paused and took a sip of coffee.
“Well, they didn’t shoot him, I’ll give them that much credit. But Aaron wouldn’t drop the knife—not as long as his dad still held that mallet. So they tased him. Aaron fell to his knees, but he still didn’t drop the knife. One of the cops put him in a choke hold. Flipped him over and put his knee on his chest and his hand on his throat. Until he stopped struggling.”
Frida stared into the murky depths of her coffee cup for a long moment.
“Positional asphyxia they call it. Not intentional, of course. But the position made it hard—impossible really—for Aaron to breathe. So what they thought was him resisting them was actually him struggling to breathe. And when he stopped struggling, that didn’t mean he was subdued, it meant he was dead.
“The mother screamed louder then. And the father, when he saw what they’d done to his precious boy, he started to swing the mallet at the cops. Beat one of them bloody. And the other one, seeing his partner getting clubbed senseless, hollered for Aaron’s father to stop. He didn’t. So the cop shot him.”
Frida looked out the window.
“It wasn’t your fault,” Gail said.
“No, it wasn’t. But I didn’t do anything to stop it. And that’s what I’m supposed to do, isn’t it? To help...I don’t know what I’m going to do now.”
Gail put her hand on top of Frida’s. “You’re going to hurt for a while.”
Frida gave a wry smile. “Is that the best you can give me?”
“Yeah.”
“I need a better therapist.”
“Maybe.”
“I keep hearing this voice in my head saying I blew it. That I should have done something.”
“Fuck the voice in your head. I have the same voice. Everybody does. Trust me, it doesn’t know everything.”
“But it does, doesn’t it? I mean, it was there. It’s me, isn’t it?”
Gail shook her head. “The voice in your head is never you.”
“How c
an you be sure?”
“Simple. You’re the one who says fuck the voice in your head.”
Crush and Angela waited in Crush’s bedroom, which he hadn’t put back together after the altercation with Donny last night and which was pretty small. Angela had to sit on the bed and Crush had to pace about in the tiny space.
“You look like a caged tiger, Crush,” Angela said. “Why don’t you sit down next to me?”
“No thanks.”
“Speaking of animals,” she said, “how ’bout that elephant in the room?”
Crush stopped and looked at Angela on his bed. “The whole point of having an elephant in the room is to ignore it. However big it is.”
She lay back, stretched out on the bed. “What if I don’t want to ignore it?”
“That’s your choice. Me, I’m going to keep acting like it’s not there.”
“That might not be so easy.”
“I’ve tackled worse.”
She sat up and pouted. “All right. What time is it?”
He checked his phone. “Eight twenty-eight.”
“Two minutes till the phone call. Do you think it was Zerbe who texted me?”
“It didn’t sound like him. There was nothing funny in it.”
“Maybe he didn’t feel like being funny.”
“Zerbe always feels like being funny.”
“Can we trace the number?”
“We can try, but it’s probably a burner. They’ll use it and throw it away.”
“Who will?”
“Whoever has him.”
“It doesn’t make any sense. Noel arranged for K.C. to be kidnapped. He didn’t arrange for anybody to keep him.”
“You sure about that?”
“Noel’s crazy but he’s harmless. He wouldn’t trap somebody against their will.”
“Not even to save them from the Great Whatever?”
She shook her head. “Noel’s not lying. He’s a terrible liar.”
Crush walked to the door. “I guess we’ll find out what we’ll find out.”
They walked out to find Gail and Frida sitting silently at the kitchen table. “It’s time,” Crush said.
Gail took out her iPhone, dialed the number, and waited.
CHAPTER SIX
Zerbe dreamed of being beaten.
The dream had the feeling of being a memory, but a memory from when Zerbe wasn’t sure. Was he recalling one of his many prison beat-downs? Was it a playground altercation in grade school? Or one of the nasty scenes that played out in his high school locker room? Zerbe had to admit he’d been beaten up with regrettable frequency throughout his life.
He hoped he was reliving one particular Pasadena Prep locker room beating. The one that seemed to change his life for the better. It was after the usual painful game of dodgeball, when Zerbe had to endure the daily humiliation of the communal shower. What could be worse than having to march, naked, into a cold, tiled room and lather up with a bunch of pubescent but still immature and confused males? Zerbe darted in and out of the shower, just long enough to get his hair wet to prove he’d washed, then dashed back to his locker to get dressed.
Then the gang of blond, blue-eyed Aryans came up to Zerbe and called him a Jew-fag, though in truth he was neither. When he didn’t answer to their satisfaction, they slammed his locker shut on his hand and let loose with their fists and their knees. Zerbe had tried every strategy, from curling up like a possum to ineffectual slapping in resistance, but nothing seemed to make them lose interest in the constantly entertaining sport of beating up K.C. Zerbe at the end of gym class.
And all at once it changed. Zerbe’s new stepbrother, Caleb (the one who brooded silently in his room, glared at his new family over the dinner table, and had never seemed to like Zerbe), loomed up from behind his attackers, big and powerful and naked. He grabbed a couple of them by the hair, yanked their heads back, and told them to stop it. When Redmond Hart, the bulliest of the bullies, tried to fight back, Caleb showed him what a street fighter could do to a prep school bully. In short order, Caleb fractured his wrist and smashed his nose without breaking a sweat.
As Hart lay in a heap and his friends cowered, afraid to go near him, Caleb Rush said quietly, “So you won’t bother him again, am I right?” They nodded rapidly.
He wasn’t called Crush yet, but in his memory Zerbe got the timelines mixed and said, “Thanks, Crush.” Crush just nodded and walked on to get dressed. In that moment, Crush became Zerbe’s superhero.
However, the beating in his dream continued and Crush didn’t show up to save the day, so perhaps this was one of Zerbe’s other beatings. Which one? It was more methodical than the playground scuffles he’d gotten into in grade school. And less sadistic than his prison assaults had been. In fact, the blows seemed…softer. As if the fists that were striking him were wearing boxing gloves or at least half-finger mitts, the kind Crush and Gail wore when they sparred. And the blows came at oddly regular intervals, as if there was no passion behind them. As if they were just fulfilling an assignment.
It was then that Zerbe realized he wasn’t dreaming. He was being beaten in the here and now. Tied to an upright chair, he was being pummeled like a punching bag.
Oh, yes, Zerbe remembered. He’d been kidnapped. Twice.
The first time was by an incompetent young wannabe. That had been almost funny. The second time, not so much. He had been wandering through the warehouse full of unfinished Rose Parade floats, trying to figure out how to get back home before the police found him, when he saw a figure in a baggy, black hoodie holding a machete in one gloved hand and an iPhone in the other.
The figure held the iPhone out in front of him, like the Ghost of Christmas Past pointing his finger at Scrooge. On the phone’s screen were words printed in plain type: BE QUIET. COME WITH ME.
Zerbe thought of running, but the image of that machete slicing at his throat, like Betsy Palmer in Friday the 13th, was too much of a deterrent. So he followed the shrouded figure through the maze of parade floats to a door in the back of the warehouse that led to the front office. He heard someone calling his name as the door shut behind him. Was it Angela? Zerbe drew a breath to answer when the shrouded figure raised his finger to point at Zerbe and lifted the machete as if to strike. Zerbe remained silent.
The figure led Zerbe to the street exit, and Zerbe reflected that, whoever the man was, he certainly knew his way around here. This was clearly an inside job. But the shrouded figure was a head taller than Zerbe, so he knew it couldn’t be Noel. Who was it?
He led Zerbe across the parking lot to a nondescript white van and, opening the back doors, gestured for Zerbe to get in. Zerbe hesitated. He had seen enough serial killer movies to know that people who got into nondescript white vans seldom made it out alive. He started to run.
The figure chased after him and tackled him to the ground, bringing the machete butt down on his head. That was the last thing he could remember until now.
But he wasn’t dead, he felt sure of that. If he was dead, how could he feel so much pain? Unless his Catholic upbringing had turned out to be correct after all, and this was hell. An eternity of being beaten while tied to a chair in the back of a white van. Hardly Dante, but effective.
Then the beating stopped.
The blows were no longer raining down on his face. He caught his breath. Now what? he thought. Nothing happened. And nothing happened again. And again. Things were looking up.
All right, he thought, this gives me a chance to gather myself. To put myself back together again. A chance to see what condition my condition was in, he thought, and realized he was quoting The Big Lebowski quoting The First Edition. He laughed at the absurdity of it and sputtered blood all over his Captain America T-shirt. Don’t get hysterical. Don’t lose it. Keep calm and carry on. Just concentrate. How do you feel physically?
The short answer was he felt bad. His head ached and his face felt like it had been gone over by an industrial sander. There was a pain in the back
of his head that was greater still. Had the machete split his skull? He doubted it. He didn’t feel any brains dripping down his back. So his attacker had probably been kind enough to use the hilt of the weapon on him, rather than the blade. So he wanted to keep Zerbe alive. For now. That was okay—even a “for now” was comforting under the circumstances.
Now what can you tell about your surroundings, he asked himself. The first thing you have to do is look. He opened his eyes. Well, he opened one eye. His left one was too swollen shut to be of much use. Still one eye was better than none.
Now, what can you see? Not much, at first. It was dark but not completely dark. As his eye adjusted to the murky light, he could see that he had been correct, he was still in the van. He was seated in an upright metal chair that had been bolted to the floor of the van, facing the back doors. Not a factory installation, but one that had been prepared for this express purpose. So this wasn’t a spur-of-the-moment “snatch and grab.” This had been planned.
That made him feel good, too. The preparation involved meant that the kidnapper wanted something specific from Zerbe or his family. And he would keep him alive, at least until he got what he desired.
Zerbe tried to move his arms and legs but they were bound tightly to the arms and legs of the chair. Probably with those little plastic thingies they used for the purpose nowadays, which was good as well. That was what a professional would do, so Zerbe was definitely in the knowledgeable hands of an expert. One who wouldn’t kill him unless it made good business sense to do so.
Things were looking better and better.
He squinted through the darkness to see if he could make out anything. He saw an object in front of him. Was it a table? With something on it? He could vaguely discern three objects but couldn’t tell what they were. Torture implements, perhaps? Just because this guy wanted to keep him alive didn’t mean he wouldn’t make him wish he were dead. Zerbe felt his stomach contract.
All at once, the back doors of the van were flung open and bright light flooded in. Zerbe flinched and shut his eye, then took a deep breath and forced his eyelid to open. Better to see what’s coming than to have it surprise you, he thought.