The Keeper

by T F Allen

  “I’ll see what I can do,” Michael said.

  “I need a stronger commitment than that.” He held up the sheet of paper again. “These people aren’t used to waiting.”

  And Michael wasn’t used to being pressured. On any other day, he might have told Thatcher off for pushing so hard, but he felt bad for destroying a painting this man had paid a ton of money for. Then there were the lawyers who’d appeared just when he needed them. “Give me a few days and I’ll come up with something.”

  “Sounds like my golden boy talking.” Thatcher retied his robe and grabbed a cigar from a drawer in his desk. “Hey, want to jump in the hot tub with me and Tiff to celebrate?”

  “No thanks.”

  • • •

  As we walked together down the long driveway toward the street, Michael spoke to me. “Did you hear what Thatcher said? ‘Crank out a few dozen masterpieces and all is forgiven’? Who does he think he is?”

  I answered the only way I knew, using another ability I’d discovered by accident a long time ago. The words started in my mind and entered like a whisper in his: He’s a businessman, not an artist. What did you expect him to say?

  “He never even looks at them. It’s only the signature he cares about.”

  Remember what he did for you in Chicago. At least he was there when you needed him.

  Michael smirked. “I thought that was your job.”

  I was there, too. But you wouldn’t listen.

  “That’s over now. Time to get to work.” He turned away from the house and saw something that caused him to break into a run. “Hey, get away from my car!”

  On the street a tow truck had hoisted the back end of Michael’s Hyundai into the air. The driver stood at the lift controls. Tall and thick-bearded, wearing a denim ball cap and matching coveralls, the man didn’t react when Michael sprinted toward him.

  “What are you doing? This is my car!”

  “My job,” the man said.

  “Are you a car thief?”

  “Repo man, actually.” The driver pulled a handkerchief from the front pocket of his coveralls and turned away from us.

  Michael checked the towing mechanism under his bumper. He knew at first glance he could never unhook it by himself. “This is a mistake. You’ve got the wrong vehicle.”

  The driver kept his back to us, working his hands, fidgeting with something we couldn’t see. “I hear that every day. But this is what happens when you don’t make your payments.”

  “I paid cash for this car. Like I said, you’ve got the wrong—”

  The driver spun around and covered Michael’s nose and mouth with the handkerchief. He pressed it hard over his face, forced him backward, and drove him to the ground. Michael gasped, then everything went black.

  That’s how I lost him. It happened right in front of me, faster than a blink. And all I did was watch.

  CHAPTER 3

  I had no excuse. In that split second when Michael needed me most, I froze instead of helping him. Worse, I never should have let it get that far. If I’d been doing my job, I would have known the tow truck driver was up to no good and could’ve warned Michael to run back to Thatcher’s house.

  But I didn’t. And now Michael lay on the grass unconscious.

  I looked around. The entire street seemed quiet and abandoned. The few people in their homes were probably staring out their back windows toward the Pacific Ocean.

  The driver took the handkerchief away and reached into one of his pockets. He pulled out a syringe, then knelt over Michael.

  I rushed between them, grabbed the driver’s arm, and pulled with all my strength, but it was useless. I couldn’t do anything to stop him. The driver stabbed the needle into Michael’s thigh and emptied its contents into his body. Whatever drug it contained would soon take effect.

  I screamed for Michael to get up, to run away, to do anything but lie there so vulnerable and lifeless on the grass. His mind had shut down—no thoughts, no dreams, nothing but a darkness so complete he seemed buried in it.

  The driver opened the rear door of the double cab truck, scooped Michael into his arms, and heaved him onto the bench seat. He slammed the door, climbed behind the wheel, and started the engine.

  I jumped into the truck cab. My body passed through the door like it wasn’t even there. As the truck pulled away, I took my seat next to the driver.

  He had no idea I was riding with him. His fingers danced along the steering wheel like a pianist’s over ivory keys as he towed Michael’s Hyundai through the streets of Sea Cliff. He spoke with a tone of confidence, like he’d done this dozens of times. “Here we go, nice and slow. Smooth turns, full stops. We’ll be there before you know it.”

  At first I thought he was talking to Michael. I scanned the rest of the cab to make sure it was just the three of us. I checked the dash—no Bluetooth connection was active. He must have been talking to himself, walking through the next steps of his plan, making sure he didn’t forget anything.

  I leaned in closer. He didn’t look like a typical tow truck driver, but it seemed he was trying too hard to dress like one. His denim coveralls showed no signs of wear—not a smudge of grease, not a tear. And the crease along the top of his thighs made me think he’d bought them at a department store. His cap looked clean, no oily fingerprints either above or under the brim. But his biggest mistake was the beard—so dense, so black, so perfectly uniform in every way it had to be a fake.

  The driver turned off the radio and grabbed the wheel with both hands. He used his blinkers, braked when a light turned yellow. And he kept the truck and Michael’s Hyundai rolling through the city like any other driver on the road. No one had any reason to stop and question him. No one would look into the back seat and see the horrible thing he’d done.

  Even though I knew the city well, I took a mental note of each intersection we crossed. That was the only thing I could do. We took Twenty-Fifth Avenue south through the Richmond District, passing through the heart of Golden Gate Park. Then we merged onto Highway 1 and drove south through the Sunset District. Soon we’d slip outside the city limits. Wherever this man planned to take us, it wouldn’t be close to home.

  I checked on Michael, still unconscious in the backseat. His mouth had fallen open. A stream of drool soaked into the cloth seat. I already knew how he’d react once he woke up. Of course he’d get mad and try to escape. But part of him would figure he deserved it, the part that couldn’t forget how he came into this world.

  Michael first appeared outside Saint Bartholomew’s Cathedral in Houma, Louisiana. Someone had abandoned him on a cold February night in a dumpster behind the church. Sister Mary Elizabeth, who lived in the convent on the grounds, discovered the newborn just before dawn among the leftover cuts of wood used to form the rafters of their new chapel. She found him shivering at the base of a long four-by-four post that leaned against the inside of the dumpster. A short two-by-four beam lay across the post at such an angle that it formed a Latin cross. He had beautiful dark curly hair and caramel skin, both features of a child from mixed racial origins. And so, hoping to give him some type of ethnic identity as well as honoring the miracle of his survival, the sisters gave Michael the fine Cajun name of Delacroix—literally, “of the cross.”

  As he grew up, he carried with him two opposing truths: that his parents had abandoned him in the most thoughtless way and that his survival on that cold night proved a higher power was protecting him. Sister Mary Elizabeth convinced the young boy an invisible guardian watched over him, but at the same time, he suffered from the gnawing awareness that since those who should have loved him had thrown him away, he must be, at his core, unworthy of love or protection. I battled against this internal dialogue constantly. And I feared I might never win.

  After the events of this morning, I worried the battle was lost for good. Even if he survived whatever this man had planned, Michael might never shake the feeling that he had it coming.

  We stayed on Highway 1 all
the way through the city of Pacifica. A mile later we took an unmarked dirt road into a shallow valley away from the coast. Whirls of dust flew around Michael’s Hyundai, obscuring it in the rearview mirror. I wondered if that was the point of taking this road, because none of the other possibilities could be good.

  The man reached across the cab and opened the glove compartment. He took out a long, skinny knife. It looked like the palette knife Michael sometimes used, only thicker and honed to a sharp point. He slammed the compartment shut and laid the knife across his lap. A streak of sunlight reflected off the blade and into my eyes. I looked around the cab, at Michael, out the window, anywhere but toward the driver’s lap. But I couldn’t get that image out of my mind.

  He made a quick turn and slung both vehicles into a parking lot lined on all sides with walls of cars. Everywhere I looked I saw them, Fords stacked on Dodges on top of Nissans, all of them crushed into the same blocky shape. Now I knew why we were here.

  The driver stopped the truck but didn’t move, didn’t turn off the engine. He stared through the windshield toward a small building in the center of the lot. He tapped his fingertips against the ebony knife handle, keeping rhythm with whatever beat was in his head. It shocked me how calm he appeared. He never turned to check on Michael. He just kept staring at the building and tapping his knife like he’d forgotten the most talented artist in California lay unconscious in his backseat.

  The door to the building swung open, and a man walked out. The driver killed the engine and laid the knife on the center console, then hopped out of the truck. I jumped out the other side.

  The man coming to greet us definitely wasn’t pretending to be someone else. He smelled like motor oil and tobacco. His clothes had all the smudges the driver’s were missing and then some. A name tag had been stitched onto his coveralls above the top pocket, but I doubted his mother had named him Smash. “You the one who called this morning?”

  “That’s right.”

  Smash sidestepped the driver and eyed Michael’s Hyundai. “Is she hot?”

  “Does she look hot?”

  “I need to know what I’m dealing with.”

  The driver pulled a wad of bills from his back pocket and flipped through them. “You’re dealing with a man who understood there wouldn’t be any questions when I got here. This car isn’t hot, but it needs to disappear.”

  Smash stared at the green dollars shuffling through the driver’s fingers. “You’re taking the plates. I can’t be responsible if someone comes snooping around.”

  “They won’t.”

  The driver held out a thick stack of money. Smash grabbed the dollars and stuffed them into his dirty pockets. “Got a screwdriver?”

  “Not with me.”

  Smash looked down the narrow dirt road that led to his property. I followed his stare. Nothing but open land for miles. “Drop it right there and take the plates.” He pulled a screwdriver from his back pocket and tossed it to the driver. “I’ll crunch her later this afternoon.”

  The driver snatched the screwdriver from the air and grinned through his fake beard. “Do it now. I want to watch.”

  CHAPTER 4

  When Michael woke up late that evening, I did everything I could to keep him calm. As he yawned, stretched, and realized he no longer stood in Thatcher’s driveway, I grabbed his shoulder to comfort him. When he jumped from the twin bed and looked around the room, I shouted his name to let him know he wasn’t alone. He ran to the window and threw open the curtains, revealing a wall of glass blocks at least six inches thick. He rushed to the only exit, a gate made of stainless steel bars. He shook it, then stared at the lock.

  “What the hell?” He stomped back toward the bed. This room was a thinly disguised jail cell. Fresh gray paint coated the walls, which were made of cinder blocks instead of drywall. The only decoration was a three-by-four-foot mirror set into the longest wall. The bed was bolted to the floor. Behind a curtained half wall hid a toilet and a stainless steel sink.

  “Glad you finally came to.” A man stepped into view just outside the barred gate. From his silhouette I could tell this was the same person who’d covered Michael’s face with the handkerchief, the one who’d driven us here. He appeared so quickly behind the bars, like he’d been waiting nearby for Michael to wake up. “I worried I’d killed you already.”

  Michael swallowed hard. His mouth felt dry, his throat raw, his head still dizzy from the drug the man had given him. “Who’s there? What’s going on?”

  The man hit a switch on the wall, and a light came on over the doorway. His fake beard was gone, revealing a bare chin and jawline that looked as sharp as the cinder blocks. Also gone were the cap and coveralls, replaced with a designer button-down shirt and jeans. His new clothes highlighted his large athletic frame. But one last detail scared me the most. Clipped to his belt was a leather sheath holding the knife I’d noticed earlier.

  It amazed me how much a change of clothes and a fake beard could affect his appearance. Looking at him now, I realized we both already knew this man.

  “Donnie Harkrider,” Michael said.

  “Don’t look surprised. You know I’ve always been a fan.”

  “You tried to steal my car.”

  Donnie shrugged. “I did you a favor. That car was a rolling death trap.” He took out a set of keys and unlocked the gate. “Besides, you won’t need it anytime soon. You’ve got work to do, Delacroix. Serious and important work.”

  Donnie had been a former classmate of Michael’s at the San Francisco Art Institute. The son of respected vineyard owners, he had little in common with Michael other than painting. While Michael had bounced through a dozen foster families in the Louisiana swamps, Donnie had been coddled in the arms of one of the richest families in Northern California.

  Honestly, I’d never given Donnie much thought since he and Michael ran in different circles. I never felt the need to look inside his head. Despite his size, he seemed harmless enough back then, but now I realized there must have been signs. I’d missed seeing the darkness inside him.

  “I’m working on an experiment, and I need your help,” he said.

  “Does it involve abduction and unlawful imprisonment?”

  My spirits soared. Michael had finally caught on.

  “Couldn’t be helped.” Donnie stepped inside the cell and left the gate open. He motioned toward the walls like he was proud of the prison he’d built. “This is all temporary. After we’re done and I’m satisfied, I’ll let you out. You’ll thank me, and we’ll share a laugh about this.”

  Apparently Donnie didn’t know Michael as well as he thought. He didn’t seem to notice the rage building inside Michael. Standing there in front of the barred gate, talking to us like he was a researcher when we knew this was a kidnapping, Donnie came across as insulting. I knew Michael still suffered from the drug’s effect, but his focus sharpened as Donnie kept talking.

  “I knew you were the most talented artist at SFAI a year before you painted Jolene. Your ability to inject such strong emotions into your work makes you special. That raw emotion, the pain you conveyed through that painting—it was amazing.” He rubbed the side of his face, scratching at his cheeks. “That’s what I want to capture. I need you to find that dark, painful place in your heart again. And I’ll stop at nothing to help you get there.”

  Michael rushed toward the exit. Thinking he had a chance to push Donnie aside and escape, he lunged forward and charged as fast as he could. Donnie barely reacted. He slid his right hand deeper into his pants pocket.

  We heard a click. Then an electric charge jolted Michael’s body. His muscles seized. His legs straightened and froze. He collapsed three feet in front of Donnie. I tried to catch him, but he fell through my arms, and I had to watch him twitch and jerk on the floor of this terrible prison.

  “I knew you’d try something dumb like that.” Donnie pulled a small remote out of his pocket. “That’s a shock collar fitted around your neck. It’s designed for l
arge dogs, but I doubled the voltage and added a remote.”

  Michael rolled around on the floor. His mind raced. Even as the last traces of electricity streaked through his body, he couldn’t believe anyone would do that to another person. He felt for his throat, grabbed at the collar he found wrapped around his neck. He pulled at it again and again.

  “I riveted it on while you slept,” Donnie said. “The charge automatically increases with each use. Something to think about.” He winked like he was doing Michael a favor. “Now get up and sit on your bed. There’s something I need to show you.”

  For as long as I could remember, Michael’s first reaction to any order was to do the opposite. Even now, after being abducted, drugged, thrown into a cell, and electrocuted, he looked around the room for a way out. He didn’t see the same Donnie I saw. He hadn’t noticed the knife on Donnie’s belt or the wild glint in Donnie’s eyes. All he saw was the unlocked gate—a gate I knew Donnie was only leaving open to taunt him.

  Donnie waved the remote in the air. “This is the last time I ask nicely.”

  I grabbed Michael’s arms and pulled. I couldn’t stand seeing him get shocked again. Finally he climbed to his feet and sat on the bed.

  The inset mirror faced him from the opposite wall. In it he saw his own image. The curls of his hair were flattened on one side of his head. His face looked paler than normal, but the area under his eyes was still dark. A thick band of leather laced with electrical contacts circled his neck. He let his face fall into his hands and wondered how much worse this could get.

  “When I said your painting was amazing, I meant it.” Donnie’s forehead seemed to glow when he walked out of the cell and stood under the recessed light again. “Jolene was a groundbreaking example of your talent. When I looked at it, I could feel the rage you seared into every brushstroke. The feeling was intoxicating—the very essence of what art should be.”