by Phoef Sutton
“They say they’ll kill him if we involve the police,” Angela said.
The old man was dismissive. “Oh, they always say that.”
“Have you dealt with kidnappers before?” Crush asked.
“How much do they want?” Emil asked, ignoring Crush’s question.
“They don’t want money, Daddy,” Angela said.
“They always say that, too.”
“He wants you to hear something,” Crush said, pulling the napkin from his jacket pocket and handing it to Angela.
“We talked to K.C. on the phone,” she said. “His face looked horrible. He’d been beaten.”
Emil grunted. “Well, what do they want me to hear?”
Angela unfolded the napkin and started to read. “‘The GV is dead. The SG is out of the HSR. Remember the seventy-six thousand. The debt is not paid.’”
Emil listened. The live side of his face was just as expressionless as the dead side.
“Does that make sense to you, Dad?” Angela asked.
Emil made a sound that might have meant he was thinking or might have meant his jaw was hurting him.
“What’s your answer?” Crush asked. “What do you want me to tell them?”
“When are you going to talk to them?” Emil asked.
“I don’t know. What difference does that make? What’s your answer?”
Emil started to turn the wheelchair away. “I’ll think about it.”
Crush blocked the wheelchair with his foot. “Goddamn it, this is K.C.’s life we’re talking about. You didn’t care enough to keep him out of prison. Don’t you at least want to keep him alive?”
“Please. He only served two years. It probably did him some good.”
“Someday I’ll have him tell you how much good it did him.”
Angela spoke up. “Daddy, this really is serious. They might kill him.”
Emil spit. “Oh, they won’t kill him. They don’t have the guts.”
“Who doesn’t?” Crush asked.
“Whoever has him.”
“Do you know who that is?”
“Stop asking stupid questions.”
“What does the message mean?” Crush demanded.
“I have no idea.”
“HSR. That stands for high-speed rail, doesn’t it?” Crush asked. “What does SG stand for?”
“How should I know?”
“SGCF,” Angela said. “Is that it?”
“Could be,” Emil said. “Could be a lot of things.”
“What’s that?” Crush asked Angela.
“It’s the French railway company. Daddy’s one of the main shareholders. They’re the ones who are bidding for the high-speed rail.”
“High-speed rail is the future!” Emil burst out with the speech as if it were his mantra. “High-speed rail was the future back in the nineties, when my brother and I started trying to build it. Every country in the civilized world has an HSR. Most of the countries in the uncivilized world have one. But not America. Why? Why does the US lag so far behind? Why can’t we invest in our infrastructure? Well, when we start building the HSR next month, that will make a statement. America is not in decline. America is the greatest nation on earth!”
“Is that what this is about?” Crush asked. “Is somebody trying to stop you from building your bullet train? Who? A rival company?”
Emil erupted in anger. “Enough! You want my answer? I’ll give you my answer. Tell them the debt has been paid. In full. They can’t threaten me!”
“But what about K.C.?” Angela asked.
Emil brushed her off with his good hand. “Oh, they’re bluffing.”
“But what if they’re not?” Crush asked.
Emil leveled his eye on him. “That’s a chance I’m willing to take.”
Zerbe didn’t know how long they’d been driving. It was certainly more than an hour and certainly less than a day. Buffeted around in his metal chair, he’d long ago given up counting the number of right turns and left turns, the stops and the starts. All he knew was he had traveled a long way through the heavy traffic of metropolitan LA until they had broken clear of the gravitational pull of the city and were now driving steadily toward destination unknown.
He listened to the steady hum of the wheels on the road and thought about his life. There were a number of things he wanted to do that he hadn’t done. Direct a movie for one. Climb Mount Everest for another. Make love with Scarlett Johansson. Why not? “Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for?” as Browning wrote.
Then he heard something and decided he was going crazy. What he heard was the road. The sound of the wheels on the road. A rhythmic sound. Almost musical. And he could make out the tune.
The theme to The Lone Ranger. Yes, that was it. The road was playing the William Tell Overture. He was definitely going crazy.
Then he thought he’d replay some happy childhood memories to help him hold onto his sanity. The only problem was that he couldn’t come up with any. None that didn’t turn dark in the end.
Zerbe thought of the nights he used to spend as a teenager playing Dungeons & Dragons with his brother and sister and her friends. Her friends. Not his friends. And certainly not Noel’s friends. Neither of them had many friends. Or any, really.
Still, they were an integral part of what K.C. had named the Colorado Boulevard Irregulars. They played other games, of course. They even did some live-action role-playing and practiced with a bow and arrow at the Arroyo Seco Archery Range with the Roving Archers of Pasadena. But it was at Dungeon & Dragons that they really excelled.
Noel was the Dungeon Master but Angela was the Queen of the Game. The reason everyone came. Her character in the game was a high-ranking elf by the name of Loralana. Her cousin, Renee Zerbe, was the other reason they came. She was a lovely Halfling called Dardrey.
K.C. himself was a gnome named Billin. The other players were mostly male Orcs, Tieflings, half-elves, Dragonborn, even humans, and they all wanted to sleep with Dardrey and Loralana, or both. The real secret of the game was the Power of the Magical Cousins.
Renee was sad, K.C. could see that. There was a troubled look in her eyes and a deep sorrow in the way she gripped her twenty-sided dice. K.C. was two years younger than Renee and had been in love with her for as long as he could remember.
It was, of course, an impossible love. The two of them were first cousins, blood relations. A taboo if ever there was one. But still, she was his ideal. His dream woman. His Guinevere. His Zelda. His Hermione Granger. Only with long black hair, black like the night. Black like a starry sky wrapping around her face, falling upon her dreamed-of milk-white breasts. A girl he could never love, but couldn’t help but keep loving.
Renee didn’t love him back, of course. How could she? Or if she did love him, she loved him, quite appropriately, like a younger cousin. A friend. A group mascot. It was a role Zerbe grew all too comfortable with as the years passed. The loyal friend who was in love with the beautiful woman who didn’t see him as a potential lover. Look at Frida now. The pattern only repeated itself.
It didn’t help Zerbe’s heartache that Renee was always attracted to alpha males who were total assholes. Football players and rich preppies who used her and tossed her aside. Who even beat her, Zerbe was sure of that. Who left her broken and yearning.
Like tonight. Zerbe could swear he saw tears glittering on her lashes. He cast his eyes around the table to see which of the players was the one who had hurt her. There were Evan Gibbard and Sonny Kraus, both obnoxious rich kids who thought they were born not on third base, but having hit the game-winning home run. Renee, suffering from low self-esteem for no reason Zerbe could think of, had been traded between Evan and Sonny like a joint at a frat party. Zerbe wondered which one had hurt her last?
Of course, it didn’t have to be just romantic heartbreak that could be bringing tears to her eyes. Renee, who had always been melancholic for no particular reason, came face to face with real tragedy w
hen her father had died just a few weeks before, on New Year’s Day, in a most spectacular suicide that was all over the front pages and had brought the Rose Parade to a sudden halt. He had been in charge of driving the Zerbe Enterprises float that year, a phantasmagoria of happy dinosaurs frolicking at the base of a smoking volcano. The calm before the storm.
Halfway down Colorado Boulevard he had blown his brains out with a Glock 18. They hadn’t mentioned that in the television coverage of the parade, of course. It didn’t quite match the celebratory mood of the occasion. But afterward, on the evening news, it was all anybody wanted to talk about.
Renee had been very close to her father. The tragedy and the subsequent publicity cut her to the core. Her mother was all but destroyed by it. It had turned what had previously been a Byronic pose into a harsh reality. Renee really was a “sad girl” now.
As Zerbe surveyed this memory, he was a little surprised to see Crush there. Or “Caleb,” as they all called him then. Then he realized what night he was remembering and he knew he’d find no comfort there.
Zerbe watched as Renee suddenly pushed away from the table and hurried into the kitchen. He didn’t know if he should follow her or not. For some reason he looked to Caleb for reassurance. The big guy just shrugged and looked toward the kitchen door. Was he telling Zerbe to go after her?
Zerbe got up and walked into the kitchen. Renee was standing by the open door to the garden.
“Hi, Billin,” she said. He saw that she was holding a large carving knife in her right hand.
“Hi, Dardrey,” he said. “What’s the knife for?”
“It’s for to kill myself, Billin,” she said.
Was this the game, or was it reality? Zerbe wondered. “Why do you want to kill yourself?” he asked.
“Because my father didn’t,” she said. Then she took the knife and slid it over her left wrist. A bright thread of blood followed the knife as she drew it across her flesh. Then she threw it into the sink and ran out the door, dripping blood on the tile as she went.
Zerbe remembered how he stood there in the kitchen, stunned, staring, thinking it must be a joke. A special effect. A magic trick.
But the blood. It looked so real. It looked so final.
Fuck that memory. This reality—being kidnapped and tied to a chair in the back of a moving van—was better than that recollection. He tried his best to banish it from his mind, but in his mind’s eye, all he could see was that open door and the blood trail leading out of it.
So he tried to think of nothing at all. He tried to be grateful he hadn’t had to pee all this time, but that seemed a small consolation. After a little while, the van stopped moving. Had they reached their destination? What now? he wondered. He heard doors opening and closing from the outside. Was that the driver getting out of the van?
He waited. He waited longer. He waited so long he almost fell asleep. He waited so long that he really had to pee. Then the back door of the van opened. A figure in a hoodie got in and Zerbe shut his eyes. He heard the figure settling in opposite him. Heard the girl’s electronically modified voice again.
“Why are your eyes closed?” his kidnapper asked.
“Because I don’t want to see you,” Zerbe said. “I don’t want you to worry about me identifying you. When you let me go.”
“What makes you think I’m going to let you go?”
Zerbe’s heart sank. “Because you don’t want to kill me?” he said. He didn’t like that it sounded like a question.
“That’s up to your father. Do you want me to tell you why you’re here?”
“No. I don’t want to know anything.”
“Why not?”
“Because I might learn something you don’t want me to tell anyone else.”
“And then?”
“And then you’ll have to kill me.”
“And you’re worried about that?”
“Yes, I’m worried about that!”
“Worrying won’t help, you know. You should relax.”
“Really? Relax?” Zerbe asked in disbelief. “I’m tied to a chair and you’re telling me to relax?”
“I’m telling you that what you’re feeling will have no effect on what happens to you. Or to your family. Or to your city.”
“Jesus, shut up!” Zerbe cried.
But his kidnapper kept on talking in that silky, feminine voice. “So you might as well…relax.”
“I think I’ll panic instead. It just feels right, you know? And I’m going to wet my pants. I hope you don’t mind.”
“As long as you listen to what I’m going to tell you….”
And Zerbe had no choice but to listen.
Crush and Angela walked away from the gym, leaving Emil to his physical therapy and his regrets.
“He didn’t mean that,” Angela said. “He cares about K.C., he really does.”
“He hides it well,” Crush said. “I want to see Noel’s room.”
“What for?”
“Whoever kidnapped K.C. knew about Noel’s plan to get him arrested. They knew where he’d be. Does Noel confide in anyone?”
“Nobody. Not me. And I’m the closest thing to a friend he has.”
She led him upstairs to Noel’s room. It was the same room he’d had when they were kids, but now it was transformed into an artist’s studio. Scale models of Rose Parade floats and various sets and installations filled the floor so that they had to maneuver around them.
Crush opened the drawers of Noel’s desk. He looked for personal papers, bills, anything to show some contact with another person. But there was nothing. No letters, of course; this was the twenty-first century, after all. But no notes. No bills. No receipts. Nothing jotted down. Nothing in his handwriting. No flyers for concerts or clubs. Nothing to show that anyone lived here at all.
The one personal item he found was a small, oblong metal disc, like an oval coin, with the initials TI engraved on one side and the words “one year” engraved on the other. “What’s this?”
“I never saw it before,” Angela said.
“It looks like a chip from an Anonymous organization.”
“Anonymous?”
“You know, Alcoholics Anonymous. Gamblers Anonymous. I have no idea what ‘TI’ stands for though. Do you know if your brother is an addict?”
“He’s got problems. He has OCD. He’s paranoid. He may be bipolar. But I don’t think he’s addicted to anything.”
Crush pocketed the token. “Tell me about that French railroad company.”
“The SGCF?”
“Yeah. What does that stand for?”
“The Société Générale des Chemins de Fer Français. ‘Chemins de fer’ means ‘paths of iron.’ Isn’t that a cool term for ‘railroad’? It was founded in 1938.”
“Does your father own it?”
“I don’t think he owns it. He controls it. It’s been in the family for generations.”
“But they’re French. What are they doing in this country?”
“Oh, they’ve built a lot of railroads all around the world. In Spain and Israel. South Korea and Taiwan. My father’s been trying to get a foothold in America for years.”
“And who wants to stop him?”
“Who doesn’t? The environmentalists. The California High-Speed Rail Authority. People who don’t like the route they’re proposing. People who want the train to go along the coast rather than along the 5 and up through the Grapevine. And people who just want the graft for themselves.”
“This is personal. Who wants to stop it personally?”
“I don’t know. It’s a long list. Lots of people hate Daddy. Hank Gibbard for one.”
“Is that Evan Gibbard’s father?” Crush remembered Evan from Pasadena Prep. Evan was a creepy friend of Noel’s. He was usually accompanied by Sonny Kraus, and the two of them were notorious for supplying kids with adequate fake IDs and more-than-adequate pot.
“Yeah. He used to be my dad’s partner, remember? Until he got forced out. N
ow he runs a nonprofit. Save the Hahamongna Watershed. That’s the big muddy mess between JPL and the Devil’s Gate Dam at the foot of the San Gabriel Mountains.”
“I know what it is.” Crush didn’t want to be reminded of it.
She sighed. “Well, if we build the bullet train on the route Daddy wants, which is up what they call the Grapevine, along the 210, you know? Then it’ll plow right through there. They’ll have to dig the whole watershed up. And good riddance, I say, but a lot of tree huggers want to save it. Something about it being an ‘alluvial canyon,’ or something. And there’s even some fucking endangered bird that lives there, too. The Least Bill whatever.
“Believe it or not, Hank Gibbard was suing us to stop the dig. But, if you ask me, he was really doing it to fuck with Daddy. He couldn’t care less about some stupid warbler. Well, Daddy got that suit thrown out of court so now nothing’s stopping him. The bullet train is definitely on. When it’s done, we’ll be able to get to San Francisco in, like, three hours. Isn’t that great?”
“Is it really? I hate the Giants.” Crush said as he glanced out the second-story window and saw a brown UPS truck pulling up in front of the house. He sat on the edge of Noel’s bed. “Let me get this straight. Your father has the anti-GMO-food folks after him. He has the bullet train haters after him. And he has the wetland lovers after him. Are there any activist groups he’s missing out on?”
“There are a few more I haven’t mentioned.”
“But none of them sound crazy enough to kidnap K.C.”
“You’d be surprised. You don’t know what these vegan enviro-nuts can be like.”
“Some of my best friends are vegan enviro-nuts,” Crush said.
“I bet they are. But I think it has something do with the bullet train. That has the most money surrounding it.”
“And you think this is about money?”
“Don’t you?”
“Maybe. But like I said, this feels personal. ‘The seventy-six thousand. The debt is not paid.’ What the hell does that mean?”
“Maybe we should go to the police,” Angela said.
“Okay. But it’s been my experience that the police are not at their best when handling a delicate situation.”