by Kim Powers
CHAPTER TEN
The call came at 7:30 A.M.
Somehow, we all knew it was the one. It just felt different, like that time we’d walked into the house after that robbery. The heavy jangle of the landline, against the quiet of the morning. The loudest noise I’d ever heard, jerking me awake from where I’d nodded off for an hour or two in the living room.
Mizell had just come back into the house after leaving at two in the morning, with Starbucks, Krispy Kremes, and a different wig. She was pouring coffee from her giant ten-cup Box of Joe when that phone ringing made a spasm go through her body; she flung a cup of the scalding liquid all over herself. Guillory, the cop who’d set up the phone trace and stayed overnight, stabbed himself with chopsticks, from the container of leftover Chinese food he was eating for breakfast, the same food I’d brought home for Skip more than twelve hours ago. Even hard-of-hearing Sig flew up from the couch, where he’d fallen asleep.
I ran to the old phone, stuck into a recess in the bead-boarded wall underneath the stairwell, but Mizell beat me there, sucking on her burned hand. She slapped it over the top of the phone before I could reach it.
“If it’s him, keep him talking, until we can get a trace.” She nodded at Guillory, who turned on his recording equipment. Then she nodded at me, a signal I knew in my gut, without ever being told.
Pick up the phone.
But when I did, whatever we’d all been expecting—dreading and praying for both—this wasn’t it, as the voice broadcast over the trace equipment into the whole room.
Daniel went to the lions’ den;
Do the same with your girlfriend, Wen.
A tussle with the king of the jungle . . .
Becomes a dance of death you don’t want to bungle.
For if you do, it’s little Skip’s life; only question is, bullet or knife?
Whoever was on the other end of the line didn’t need to disguise his voice, because it was like nothing any of us had ever heard before: somehow hollowed out in the middle—a center column of air, of nothingness—but with a raspy, grasping shield around it. Like he was having to squeeze out his lungs, to make any sound at all.
“Who the FUCK . . . IF YOU TOUCH HER . . . ” I started, forgetting everything Mizell had coached me on.
“And no police. Just you. We have so much . . . to catch up on.”
A click, from the other end.
No request for money, no proof he had her, no proof of life, no directions, no address, no anything except utter, horrifying, rhyming reality.
Skip’s life, bullet or knife . . . Skip’s life, bullet or knife bullet or knifebulletorknife . . .
“Oh my God. Oh God. Jesus.”
Mizell pushed me down onto the chair next to the phone—as if there was a surge of helium throughout my body and she knew she had to anchor me down to keep me from floating away.
“Focus. Did it sound like anybody you know . . . somebody who writes poetry . . . somebody who . . . you know him. So much to ‘catch up on.’ That means you’ve met him before. Just think . . . ”
“What the fuck do you think? . . . JESUS CHRIST!” I screamed it, and the helium discharged. Exploded. “OH MY FUCKING GOD.”
The call hadn’t changed anything, because he hadn’t told me anything I could get a handle on, to know where I’d met him before. He hadn’t told me where to go or what to do next, except don’t bring the police. Don’t bring the police where? Or had he just told me where to go? Something was coming together in my head, as I grabbed a pen and paper that were there for messages and phone numbers, and began scribbling down those insane words I would never forget.
Guillory was listening through his headphones, transcribing the rest of the words. “‘Lions’ den.’ What’s that? Is that someplace you . . . ”
“Oh my God. Wendy.” I’d sent her home late last night, sent her away to him. “The lions’ den. That’s where she works. Our nickname for it. The zoo. The teaching zoo at the school. King of the jungle. It’s the lions there! It has to be.”
“Is she there now?”
“First thing every morning.” I ran upstairs, two steps at a time, to grab my cell phone, as Mizell raced up behind me, barking out orders to Guillory down below. “Get a car to his girlfriend’s house. And the zoo. Now.”
In my bedroom, I hit number five on my speed dial. “C’mon, c’mon, pick up . . . ” but all I got was Wendy’s voicemail. “Hello, you’ve reached Dr. Wendy Borden. If this is an animal emergency . . . ”
“Shit. She’s not there.” I spun around to face Mizell. “Does he have ’em both? Does that mean he’s got ’em both? Oh my God. Oh God.” My voice had gone so high-pitched, you could barely hear it. A slice, through the air, then it was gone.
“We’ll find out. You stay here while . . . ”
“NO. He wants me. He said it. You heard him. No police.”
I was throwing on my track shoes and coat, on top of the sweat pants I’d been wearing since yesterday afternoon.
“Let us handle this. We’ll get a negotiator . . . ”
“No. My kid. My way. He wants me.”
“And what’s he gonna do once he gets you there? Take you too? Then I’ve got two people to worry about. Three if he’s got Wendy.”
I forced myself to take a breath to slow down, the way I used to before a race. “He didn’t say bring money. So what the fuck does he want? Will he have Skip there? I’ll switch places. He can take me. He can kill me. I don’t care. I just want Skip safe.”
I was mumbling to Mizell, to myself, to thin air. To God. I was making my deal with Him: You give me her, then you can do whatever you want.
“You go; we follow. You stay alive. Skips needs you. No horseshit, no heroics. I’ll have backup. First sign of trouble, we’re there.”
Without meaning to, without even knowing I did it, I looked at her legs. She wasn’t a runner. She saw my eyes go there. “Don’t worry. I passed the physical.”
“So did I. Thirteen years ago.”
She flashed a smile, the first one since she told me that Skip was probably just playing a joke on me. “’Bout the same time I did. I’ll get you a Kevlar vest downstairs.”
“A bulletproof vest? You think he’s gonna shoot?”
“I don’t know.” She took the same calming breath I just did. “You don’t have to do this, you know.”
“Yes I do.” I’d never known anything more strongly.
She went downstairs ahead of me, while I began shimmying under the bed to get the box of bullets that was taped to one of the bed slats. Were six bullets in a gun chamber enough to kill somebody, if I’d never shot a pistol before?
And I knew one other thing: that I’d never stop pulling the trigger, even when nothing but tiny metallic clicks were coming from the gun.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
“Your father. Sends his. Love.”
Skip heard the creak of the floorboards that always announced his entrance. Not like normal walking, but . . . was he bent over? Crooked? Like it was as hard for him to walk as it was for him to breathe. She’d heard it during the night when he’d come in to put a blanket over her shoulders, but she’d pretended to be asleep.
“Truth be told, he said. ‘Who the fuck.’ But I’m sure he meant. I love you.”
“What else did he say? My father?” Then she rattled off more, because that sounded like she was imitating him again, stopping and starting. “I mean—does he know I’m okay? Did you tell him that much? Please. Just let me know he knows I’m okay.”
“I can assure you. He is quite worried. And he is beginning. To look. We’ll soon see how smart. He is.”
His breathing gave her an idea. She could lie and say she had asthma, and that’s why he had to let her go, or she’d die if she didn’t have her medicine. She had a friend who had asthma, who was always having to breathe in from this little plastic tube. Skip tried it once, when her friend went to the bathroom, and it choked her. A puff of cold air that tasted like metal,
or deodorant. Her friend came out of the bathroom and said, “You tried it, didn’t you? Everybody does. Getting choked serves you right. Now you know what I have to go through.”
“I’ll die,” Skip said. “You can’t leave me here. I have asthma. I need my atomizer.”
Thank God she remembered the name of it. Atomizer. Like an atom smasher, her friend always joked.
“Oh, I’d so hoped. You wouldn’t resort. To things like. That. Lies.”
“But I do. I swear. Especially if I’m scared, it gets worse. And who wouldn’t be scared in a situation like this?”
“I’ve known you since. You were little. Everything about you. You don’t have. Asthma.”
What, he knew her? How could he know her? How could somebody who knew her do something so bad to her?
“Who are you? How do you know me? Do I know you?” She didn’t know anyone who sounded like him, no one she could remember.
“All good things. To those who wait. And now the waiting. Is officially. Over.”
He chuckled, to himself.
“Now, in the clear light of day. The house rules. No one can hear you. It would be pointless. To scream. You’ll just hurt your throat. And then you’ll. Sound like me. And that’s no. Day at the park. The picnic? Day at the . . . picnic? I’m a little . . . removed from the vernacular.”
That one took the longest gulp of air she’d heard him take yet.
“I think it’s, uh . . . no picnic. Just by itself. Or no walk in the park. Those are the ones I know. I’m a little out of it too,” Skip said, without meaning to, without thinking. And then she thought—maybe that was smart. It told him she was like him. Maybe not so popular. Maybe sort of left out. If he thought she was more like him, maybe he wouldn’t hurt her.
He was quiet for a moment; she felt him staring at her again. Like he was deciding what to do next. Like he’d been thrown for a beat. That’s what they called it in acting: a beat. Like a thought. That’s what she was going to do: act.
She was going to survive this whole thing by acting, like she was playing the character of a teenager who’d been kidnapped. It wasn’t really her in the chair; well, it was, but it wasn’t. She was just pretending. Nothing would hurt her. It was all make-believe. And her mother’s meatloaf recipe card, she was going to think about that too, how it was waiting for her under the refrigerator to pick up, when she finished playing her part and the show was over and she could finally go home.
She heard him go down a hall, and then a door slid open, the same sort of heavy metallic sound she had heard when her mother got in their SUV, that last time.
She heard the outdoors. And then she heard a second voice, a deep, full one which had no trouble getting a lungful of air. “You ready to go, boss? Just tell me when and where and we’ll get ya there in no time flat.” All of it, said in one fell swoop.
There were two of them.
CHAPTER TWELVE
He thought she would scream, but she didn’t. Or if she did, he couldn’t hear it. His soundproofing had worked. Nobody would hear it.
Good.
He remembered how easily the windows had opened some thirty years ago, when his volcano explosion had gone off and hung like a mushroom cloud over the teacher’s desk, and she had to get the big boys to push open the windows so they could all breathe. But now, if one were to want to open the windows, which one did not, how hard it would be: paint unsticking from wood; jagged, rubbery splinters of goo; layers of institutional green and gray and beige, painted one on top of the other, pulling loose. It would be very hard indeed to open these windows, even if his helpers hadn’t already nailed them shut, from the outside.
He stretched his trembling arms out to the sky and, in his head, said a prayer to welcome the morning, a prayer of thankfulness for quiet. Most people wouldn’t believe him, that he made that prayer, that he made any prayer or that he even believed in God, but he did. They taught them religion at the home. But he kept the prayers in his head, because they sounded better there. He didn’t run out of air in his head. Words—sentences—sounded better there. There wasn’t the pause, the hesitation that his speaking voice had. Now, whenever he talked, his throat quivered; his lungs couldn’t fill up enough to complete a sentence. His breathing had gotten worse these past few months; soon, his lungs would be completely overtaken by his disease, if the rest of his body didn’t succumb first. He had to hurry.
The front steps of the old schoolhouse where he was now were where the teachers used to be waiting every morning, when his bus would pull up. Those kind women in their schoolteacher dresses, listening to the morning songs in the woods, the rumble of a bus full of misfit toys . . .
He meant boys.
So much life in the overgrown woods around him: deer and snakes, squirrels and chipmunks, little and orange and scurrying away. Life in the woods, which had now grown up and virtually strangled this schoolhouse where children used to learn. Where he had been allowed to learn. Even then, he’d known it had been an honor to be selected, to be released from the home to travel there, to learn, to have “lunch” and “recess”—how he reveled in what he thought were such grown-up words, after he had been denied so many other grown-up things. And even in the back of his head, he somehow knew this place would figure into his plan for revenge, years away in the future. Years in the making. Even then, as a child, he knew the what, the why, but not yet the who. That would come later.
And now it had.
As an adult, he’d kept his eye on the place. Should he buy it outright, or just squat there, until his project was done? He’d searched the county court records and saw that the school was no longer owned by anyone, one of dozens of properties that had been abandoned over the years, once they’d outlived their usefulness. His project was short-term—two days, forty-eight hours and change—so he wouldn’t need to go as far as buying it. That would set off too many alarm bells, but he would need to get running water and electricity. Those could stay off the books as well. No permits for him, except for what he permitted himself. He didn’t exactly want a team of inspectors coming in, to see what he’d done with the place. There wouldn’t be that much work. He just needed two rooms.
One for him. One for her.
Home away from . . . the home.
The original ground plan of the school was long gone, one wing collapsed in on itself, so the roof of shale and slate was on a slant, much of it shattered. There were so many trees and brambles surrounding the place that not much light came through anymore: a little bit here, a little bit there, the forest deciding what it would allow.
He was thankful that it had allowed him back in.
He needed beauty and nature, and calm, to get him ready for what he was about to do. He could still let her go; it wasn’t too late. Just tell her to count to five hundred after he loosened her bonds, and she could walk out of the forest to the highway and hail down a passing car. She hadn’t seen him yet, and with a few years of therapy—and who couldn’t use that?—Skip would be as good as new. She might be afraid to be alone for a while, but she was scrappy; she’d get over it. He knew. He’d watched her for years. She was a jock in the making, just like her father. And besides, it was her father that he really wanted; she was just collateral damage. What better way to teach an adult a lesson than through a child? After all, that’s what he had been when this all started. A child. All those years, he’d spent . . . waiting. And that was the experience he wanted to pass on to her father. The waiting. The not knowing. No—and this was the hardest prayer of all, knowing what was coming at the end—better to stick with the original plan; it had taken so much work to get everything just right, and he wasn’t a well man. Not well at all. He didn’t want it to go to waste. Eyes on the prize. Ethan Holt had won one, and now he wanted one too.
And with that decision made, he went to the van that was waiting for him, with a long-range rifle waiting inside. And said one last, inaudible prayer to God: enough air to finish the job. To kill. Amen.
&n
bsp; CHAPTER THIRTEEN
A dance of death you don’t want to bungle.
For if you do, it’s little Skip’s life; only question is, bullet or knife?
Those psychotic words from the kidnapper had burned into my head and would never leave. I didn’t need to check them against a piece of paper; they were part of my DNA now. But something else was too: that if I had anything to do with it, it would be a bullet. Shot into him. One of the six I’d loaded in my .38 revolver I’d never shot before, just as I was racing out of the house.
I clicked the chamber around and around, every metallic stop it made a worry bead, a rosary prayer, as I came to a screeching halt at the zoo, jumped out of the car and began running, the pistol stuck into the waist band of my pants.
I was screaming.
So were the animals, in return.
Wendy and Simba both saw me at the same time, racing toward the lion enclosure. Simba was a big cub, already 150 pounds. He snapped his head toward me, disturbed to be taken away from his breakfast bottle. Wendy popped up, the heavy leather belt she always wore when she was “on duty” swinging around, its slots and clips filled with the tools of her trade as a vet.
“Oh my God, have they found . . . ” Wendy started.
“No, but . . . your name . . . ”
“What?”
“The kidnapper. He called. He said your name. This crazy poem about the lions’ den . . . ”
“What?”
I couldn’t tell her the worst part, about the bullet or knife or Skip’s life. She came to the edge of the “fence,” a glass wall about five or six feet high, with an invisible barrier of mild electric pulses and zaps extending another three or four feet above that. Wendy had told me it was the next wave of zoo enclosures, to see how little could be done to keep animals and viewers safe. She’d designed it. It was her pride and joy—well, her pride at least, she always joked.
So as much as I wanted to touch Wendy, to yank her out of there, I couldn’t.