“Okay,” she said, “get into the trunk.”
“What,” he half-whispered, “or otherwise you’ll kill me?” He turned to face her. “I don’t think so.”
His empty stare no longer frightened her. “Jail time’s made you dumber than ever,” she said, and swung the baton up and touched the tip to his belly. Contact was less than a second, but his body stiffened and his face contorted, and she wondered if he could stay on his feet.
He did, though, and it was quickly over. He was backed up to the open trunk … but still made no move to get in. She holstered her gun. “I just saved your life,” she said, keeping the baton between them, “so you—”
He lunged and grabbed the baton—and made contact with its metal side strips. The charge he took this time was far worse. He froze up, then crumpled backward, and she shoved him into the trunk. It took him a few minutes to recover, and while he did she cuffed his wrists together.
With one hand on the trunk lid she said, “You think that was pain? Think about the fun those those two goons would have had. You’d have been begging them to kill you. But no, they’d have taken you to your uncle Polly … for worse. But me? I saved you, Carlo, and I even cuffed your hands in front of you, and not behind your—”
“Kiss my ass.”
“Right,” she said. “But no time to thank me now, because those two mopes might wise up pretty soon and come back looking for us.”
54.
Polly’s thugs weren’t about to come back, of course. That wasn’t in the script.
Kirsten drove east, through farmland and a couple of tiny towns, past I-57 and into Indiana. Then, at a crossroad in the middle of nowhere, she pulled into what was once a gas station but was now a burnt-out shell on an island of crumbling concrete. She opened the trunk, showed Carlo the baton, and told him to stay put … and to listen.
“Until I came along you were headed for your uncle Polly,” she said. “He’d have tortured you for a while to see if you knew where your sister Debra is, and then he’d have killed you. Everyone knows this. And if you don’t know it, you’re out of your mind.”
“Fuck you,” was his whispered answer. His throat still bore the ugly scar from the County Jail incident.
“I’m giving you a chance to avoid Polly,” she said, “and here’s why. Your sister is holding my husband somewhere. She plans to kill him. I’m going to offer her your life for his. If she doesn’t like the deal, you die.”
“You won’t kill me, bitch. You don’t—”
“Kill you? Not me. I just take you back to Polly. Finishing that job on your throat is the least of what he’ll do. Count on it.”
That seemed to get through to him, but all he said was, “He’d kill you, too. For taking me.”
“He’d do his best, maybe,” she said. “But that won’t help you. What you need to know is this: unless I get my husband back, I don’t give a damn what happens to me.” Her voice was trembling. “Do you understand that?”
He didn’t answer, but it was true and she was sure he believed her.
“So here’s the deal. If you and Debra cooperate, I give you to Debra and she gives my husband to me, and that’s it. Otherwise, you go back to Polly. And meanwhile if you behave, I treat you decently. I’m not into pain. But if I need to, I will hurt you … whether it’s with this baton or by putting a bullet into your one good leg. You got it?”
Again, no answer.
“Okay,” she said, “that was fun. We’ll chat again later. Oh, and I hope you have good bladder control.”
* * *
The next time they stopped was at a rest stop along I-94, in Michigan. She parked at the far edge of the area designated for trucks and took the long walk to the restroom. She left Carlo in the trunk. He wasn’t going to kick his way out—not with one false leg and little room to maneuver. Renfroe had made it impossible to open from the inside, and then—his own idea—had reinforced the wall between the trunk and the backseat, and added a bit of soundproofing. He’d let Kirsten lock him inside for a while, to prove he hadn’t cut off the air supply.
She bought two Cokes and three sandwiches at the vending machines, then went back and maneuvered the car so its rear end faced away from the parked trucks. It was damp and cool and getting dark, but not raining.
She ate a sandwich, then opened the trunk. “Hungry?” she said.
“Fuck yes.” The first real answer he’d given so far. Progress.
“I’m going to let you out, and if you run I’ll catch you.” She held up the baton.
“How fast can I run with this damn thing?” He patted his cuffed hands on his thigh.
He was stiff and sore, and she wasn’t about to remove the handcuffs, so it took him a while to get out and get half-standing, half-sitting against the edge of the open trunk. Eating with handcuffs proved awkward, and she had to alternate giving and taking back the Coke, then a sandwich, then the Coke. He downed both sandwiches—turkey and Swiss—and seemed to enjoy them, although she hadn’t detected any flavor at all in the one she ate. They didn’t talk. She kept the baton handy.
When he was finished she let him stand up and stretch a little before she ordered him back into the trunk. He started to get in, then looked back at her. “I gotta go to the bathroom.”
She glanced around. They were quite isolated. “Hey, don’t mind me.”
“No, I mean … you know … I gotta take a dump.”
“Get in,” she said. “I’ve been thinking. Just hold it a while.” He got in and she closed the trunk and drove out of the rest area.
There was highway construction going on everywhere along I-94, with lots of idle machinery and no workers around this late in the day. She’d do whatever she had to, but she didn’t look forward to standing close by as he squatted behind a bulldozer. She found a site with portable toilets and stopped and—thank God—found one unlocked. She explained what he should do and then walked him to the toilet.
“Try anything,” she said, waving the Panther baton at him, “and you’ll spend the entire rest of our time together lying in your own filth.”
He went inside and stuck his hands back out and she removed the cuffs and shut the door. When he came out again she didn’t put the cuffs back on him, but—baton in hand—walked him to the car. He got into the trunk without her saying anything, and she still didn’t cuff him. She sensed he was getting resigned to having to cooperate. Maybe hard time had done that to him. Or maybe hour after hour spent in the fetal position. And maybe the baton and the Colt .380 helped a little.
She closed the lid and drove on.
* * *
Nine hours after she had taken Carlo from Polly’s goons, Kirsten stopped at a small, nearly deserted motel outside Saginaw, Michigan, and rented the end unit. She’d thought a lot about how to deal with Carlo overnight. She took her backpack and his gym bag inside. In his bag was the wallet she’d taken from him—with fifty dollars in it—a change of clothes, and a few toilet articles, including a disposable razor which she tossed up onto the roof of the one-story motel. She checked the bathroom to be sure there was no hair dryer or coffeepot, or any other potential weapon, then left the bags in the room and drove to a gas station and then to a KFC.
Back at the motel she parked down at their end with the rear of the car facing away from the row of units. She cuffed him again and got him out of the trunk. Inside the room he headed straight for the bathroom, turned, and held his hands out toward her.
“Uh-uh,” she said. “Go figure it out.”
When he came out she sat him at the little table. She left the TV off and neither of them spoke while she ate salad and he—with his hands still cuffed—ate chicken nuggets and french fries. When they finished she said, “Do you know where we are?”
He didn’t answer.
“Right,” she said, “who cares? We’re only killing time until your sister calls. So get used to fast food and living in the trunk.” She gathered up the remains of their meals and threw them out.
“Maybe you’re wondering how you can get away. You being big and strong and all that. But why? Even if you made it—and you won’t—where would you go? You have no money, nowhere to hide from your uncle. The only reason he didn’t go after you again, after that night in County Jail, was because it looked like you stopped talking to the feds. And some day you might lead him to Debra.” She paused. “Do you know where she is?”
“Hell no. Why would I give a shit?”
“Because she loves you?”
“Fuck that. She’s … you know … weird about stuff.”
“Oh? I hadn’t noticed.” She wondered, though, whether his time away from Debra had made him wake up to how weird she really was. “Anyway, I guarantee you that Polly will track you down. He’ll find out first if you know where she is, and then he’ll kill you like a dog. You and Debra killed his only brother—his twin, for God’s sake. You think he’ll ever let that go? Debra knows how to hide. You don’t.”
“When you run out of bullshit,” he rasped, “I wanna watch TV.”
He settled on a rerun of Everybody Loves Raymond and watched it with his usual blank expression, but surprised her with a chuckle now and then. She sat across the room, her eyes on him and her mind racing. On Saturday morning Debra had said she’d call back in a few days. This was Monday night, and the call might come any time now.
However Carlo felt about Debra after being beyond her influence for so long, Kirsten was counting on Debra still caring about him. A lot. When she’d last seen them together the sexual tension was humming like current through high-voltage wires. Made all the more weird by Debra’s maternal smothering of Carlo, her domination over him. He was a bit slow; Debra was the real crazy. Kirsten shuddered at the memory.
After back-to-back episodes of Raymond, Carlo wanted to watch something else, but she took him out and put him in the trunk. There were a few more cars in the motel lot, but none down near them. The night was cool, somewhere in the fifties. She went and got all the pillows and blankets from the bed, and set them on the pavement and opened the trunk.
“Here.” She gave him the pillows. “Arrange yourself.” He did the best he could, with his hands cuffed; and she helped the best she could, holding the baton. Then she covered him with the blankets. “You forgot to say ‘thank you,’” she said, and closed the trunk.
She relocated the Impala, this time backing it into the slot right in front of the room. Inside she turned off the lights and dragged a chair over to the open door. She wrapped herself up in the bedsheets, and a spare blanket from the closet, and sat down. She’d be almost as uncomfortable as Carlo, but able to see anyone who wandered too close … and to hear Carlo if he raised a fuss.
She was way too keyed up to sleep.
55.
Kirsten had no recollection of how they got there, but she and Carlo and Polly Morelli were all in a room together. Carlo was tied to a chair, screaming and crying. Kirsten jolted him with the stun baton, over and over, laughing the whole time. Polly was laughing, too, and threatening to shoot her if she stopped. And behind it all her cell phone rang and rang.
She woke up with a start and turned on the light. Just past midnight. She fumbled with the phone and finally answered it.
“It’s me,” Dugan said. “I’m okay. Don’t worry about me and don’t do anything—” He stopped.
“Where are you?” He didn’t answer. “Where are you, Dugan?”
“He doesn’t know.” It was the same woman. “And anyway, he’s back in his box now.”
“I know who you are, dammit.”
“You know nothing. You—”
“I have Carlo,” Kirsten said.
“What?”
“Your brother. I have him.”
“He doesn’t even get—” She stopped, but too late. “What are you talking about? What brother?”
“He got out two days early. I have him.” By now she was at the car. “You can talk to him.” She opened the trunk and Carlo blinked up at her. “It’s Debra,” she said. “Talk to her.” Baton in hand, she held the phone to his ear.
He just stared at her, eyes wide,
“Tell her it’s you, God damn it.”
“It’s me,” he said, “Carlo.” He listened, then spoke again in that same harsh whisper. “No, dammit, it is.” He looked at Kirsten. “It’s my fucking voice. She can’t tell for sure if it’s me.”
Kirsten spoke into the phone. “It’s him, all right. I’ll have him tell you something only you and he could possibly know.” She put the phone back to his ear with her left hand, with the stun baton in her right. “Go on!”
He seemed to be thinking. Then he grinned—not a pleasant sight—and said, “Remember my twelfth birthday? That old mattress in the attic?” He stopped and listened, and the grin disappeared. “Hey, it’s not my fault. It was Uncle Polly’s guys.” Still the hoarse whisper, but whining now, too, like a small boy. “She tricked them. I tried to tell them, but they were too stupid to—” He stopped. “God damn it,” he said, “you should be happy. Polly’s fucking out of his mind. They told me he’d fucking cut my other leg off. He’s gonna kill me, for chrissake, and all you do is blame me, like you always do, for every—”
He didn’t finish, because Kirsten took the phone away and quietly closed the trunk lid.
“He’s back in his box now,” she said. “Anyway, he got out a couple of days early and I stole him away from Polly. Polly’s mad as hell about it. But … hey … I thought you’d be pleased.”
“You fucking—”
“Carlo says he can’t wait to see you and … oh, just a minute.” She paused, then went for it. “He says he wants you to know … he loves you.”
It was the right thing to say. She knew that, first by the silence that followed, and then by the sound of Debra’s voice when she finally answered. “If you hurt him,” she said, “this fucking husband of yours will—”
“Call me again in twenty-four hours. Don’t fail. Carlo is fine … until then. If you don’t call, or if I don’t get Dugan back healthy, I will hurt Carlo. And then I’ll deliver him back to Polly.”
“You—”
Kirsten switched off her phone. Her hands were shaking, but there’d be no more talk. Not for twenty-four hours.
* * *
She spent the rest of the night in the chair by the open door, nodding off from time to time, but never really sleeping.
In the morning the sun was shining, the temperature in the low sixties. She checked her voice mail and there’d been two calls, but each time the only thing recorded was a hang-up. She turned the phone off again, knowing it would infuriate Debra to have to follow orders. She uncuffed Carlo and got him out of the trunk and to the bathroom. He was so stiff he could hardly walk. He needed a shower, too, but she didn’t mention that.
When he came out she put him back in the trunk and cuffed him again. She wanted her own shower, but instead she went to the motel office and signed up for another night.
She drove to a McDonald’s for take-out breakfasts and a Saginaw newspaper, and from there to a mall. Neither the biggest store, a Target, nor anything else was open yet, and the huge parking lot was empty. She went to the far end and ate, and then removed the cuffs and let Carlo out so he could sit on the concrete curb and eat his breakfast. Then she took him for a walk along the edge of the lot, maybe fifty yards and back.
When she told him to get into the trunk he balked. “I don’t fucking have to do—”
She touched the baton to him. She hated doing that, but it was effective. When he recovered he got inside and she cuffed him again. She slammed the trunk lid and turned away, and warm food rose up in her throat without warning and she vomited her entire breakfast out onto the pavement.
* * *
According to the paper there were no clouds or rain in the forecast and they were in a full moon cycle, which meant there’d be several bright nights in a row. Both she and Debra were using cell phones, and neither knew where the other was calling
from. Kirsten, though, knew where Debra lived.
She found the house again easily.
She approached from the west, so the house was on her left, on the north side of the gravel road. Everything looked about the same, with the chain still blocking entrance to the driveway. But now there was a full-size van—a Ford, she thought, maybe ten years old—parked in the backyard facing away from the house, as though backed up to the rear stoop or to the sloping cellar doors.
She was wearing a White Sox cap and as she got closer she pulled the bill low over her forehead and leaned away, as though playing with the radio. She was going forty-five or so, and she didn’t slow down. There were so few cars on this road, Debra might be especially suspicious of one that went by too fast or too slow. As she drove past the house heading toward the river, she glanced back and from that angle could see into the three-sided shed out near the evergreen trees. It wasn’t a shed for tractors or farm implements. It was a hangar, and sitting inside was a small airplane, the kind she thought might be used for crop dusting.
She kept going east, up the slight rise and then down the steeper slope to the river and across the bridge. Where the road ended with a T at the crossroad, she turned north. From her canvass of the scattered homes in the vicinity a week ago, she remembered driving past a deserted farm with a FOR SALE sign. Today she made a few wrong turns, but eventually found the place again. The only structures still standing were the house itself, its paint worn away and its windows broken out, and half of a barn. Even the Realtor’s sign looked old and ready to fall down.
She turned up a driveway being taken over by weeds, parked near the house, and got out of the car. She could hear Carlo calling to her from the trunk, but ignored him and retrieved a gun case from the floor of the back seat and opened it. The shotgun was a pump-action Remington 12-gauge short-barrel, with a Browning recoil suppressor custom-built into the stock and a tube magazine that held five shells. She had three additional five-packs, twenty shells in all, packed with double-O buckshot, standard police issue. Way too many, she hoped, even figuring the few she’d expend now in practice.
All the Dead Fathers Page 24