In the Hush of the Night

by Raymond Benson

  “Well, it’s over,” Paley said, snapping back at her. “The law won. You, however, have lost. We’re going to take a little trip to my cabin, now. Trey is already there. I figure these fellows here, and I, deserve to have a final, farewell Bacchanal. You and another girl are the guests of honor. She’s the last one we brought over from Russia. The pipeline is now closed.”

  What the hell is a Bacchanal? Another girl? Could this be … ?

  “Do you mean Yana Kravec?”

  “Who?”

  “The other girl. A woman named Yana Kravec is missing in St. Petersburg. Trafficked here.”

  “As far as I know, her name is Nadia.”

  Annie narrowed her eyelids. “You bastard.”

  Paley placed his hands together. “I need to warn you about Trey, though. He’s got … well, I told you already that he has some psychological problems.” The man shook his head. “In the old days of the Bacchanals, when Louis, Fyodor, me, and another former friend who isn’t here anymore took part, we just brought girls to the cabin to have a good time over the weekend. When it was over, they were sent back to the brothels. But Trey … Trey has a sickness. He has an addiction to, well, violence. When he was in the army, he got in trouble for losing his temper and killing some civilians. Unfortunately, he still gets these urges to inflict pain. He has to exercise this need on someone every month or so. He would probably just go out and kill a woman in the city somewhere, and he’d get arrested and go to prison, or he’d be killed by the cops. That actually happened in 2014. Maybe you know about that case? A young woman was found in a dumpster in south Chicago?”

  Annie nodded.

  “Well, I’m afraid Trey would simply continue to do that kind of thing if he isn’t supplied with an outlet for his urges. So I arrange for one of our girls to visit him at the cabin, and he does what he wants. That’s what the Bacchanals became over the last three or four years. They’re for him. Of course, he invites his friends to participate sometimes. Most of the time the girl goes back to the house at the end of the weekend, but I’m afraid sometimes Trey goes too far.” He shook his head sadly. “Personally, I don’t like it. I don’t attend. But I will tonight. For old time’s sake.”

  Annie mulled over the implication of this. “That’s what happened to Irina Semenov. Trey killed her.”

  “Who?”

  “The woman in the car accident near here, last May.”

  “Oh, her. That was unfortunate. The driver was drunk and careless. Actually, she wasn’t dead. She would have recovered from her injuries, had the idiot not crashed into the truck. That’s what set all of this in motion, isn’t it?”

  “Yes. And I beg to differ with you about Irina’s condition. She may have been alive in the trunk of that car, but she was at death’s door. Your son went too far.”

  Paley nodded. “Like I said, it’s happened before. Fortunately, the forest is a great place to hide bodies.” He then looked at Freund and Baines and nodded. “It’s time.” The three men stood. To Annie, he said, “You can cooperate, and it will be a lot less unpleasant.”

  Now she was afraid for her life. How was she going to get out of this? She was not going to let them touch her.

  Louis moved forward to pull Annie out of her chair, but she stood on her own. “I’m coming.” She looked at Paley and asked, “Did you know your future son-in-law is at the cabin?”

  Paley furrowed his brow. “What?”

  “Jason Ward. He’s there. With your son.”

  “Jason? How the hell do you know Jason?”

  “Never mind that. He’s there at the cabin. Is he taking part in this Bacchanal?”

  Paley looked at Baines. “Did you know about this?”

  Captain Mike averted his eyes. “Uh, yeah. I should have told you. I thought if he was there and Trey was cool with it, then it was okay …”

  Paley pursed his lips. “Well, this will be awkward.” He slammed a fist on the table. “What, am I going to have to do something with him, too? My daughter’s fiancé? Like I did my fucking brother? God damn it!” He stared at Baines for a moment, and then he shook his head at Freund, as if to say, I’m surrounded by idiots …

  “Come on,” he commanded. “Get her in the trunk of your patrol car, Mike. Louis, you drive Agent Marino’s car. Let’s see what’s going on at the cabin. I wish to Christ cell phones worked there. I tell you, my moron of a son can really do some crazy shit.”

  They marched her out of the station’s back door. Baines pulled up his patrol vehicle and opened the trunk. They were about to force Annie inside, but she decided to save her strength for later. She climbed in voluntarily.

  They shut the lid, and Annie was plunged into darkness. It was terribly uncomfortable, lying on her side with her hands tied behind her back, vulnerable and exposed with no weapon to defend herself with. After a moment, the car started moving.

  Now think, Annie! her mind screamed. How are you going to save yourself?

  35

  Jason and Yana were both out of breath when they reached his car, which was still stuck in the road. It had taken perhaps twenty minutes as they hurried along the cold, damp pathway. To hell with any remaining mud; it was faster to use the middle of the path than it was to move along its edges as he had done before. Besides, the closer one got to the trees, the scarier it all became.

  “Let’s see if I can get out now,” he said, unlocking the door and slipping inside. “I might need you to push. Can you do that?”

  “Push? Push where?” Her voice was hoarse and tired, her breathing rapid.

  “The back end. You’ll see where it’s stuck.” He started the engine, and then thought, What am I doing? The poor woman is beaten and exhausted …

  He left the car running and got out.

  “Can you drive?” he asked.

  She nodded.

  “I’ll push.”

  Yana exchanged places with him and he went to the back of the car. “Give it the gas!” he yelled. The tire still spun noisily. He pushed the car with all the strength he had. The vehicle moved up and forward a few inches, but the tire continued to spray mud backward, right onto Jason’s shirt and pants.

  “Okay, okay, stop! Stop!”

  Jason kicked the buried wheel and cursed at it. It was no use.

  “Listen!” Yana said as she got out and closed the car door.

  Jason stopped. The sounds of the forest were now much more pronounced than he had noticed before. All sorts of cricks, buzzes, chirps, and scratches filled the air. At first he heard nothing but the ambient noise of nature in the woods at night, but then it filtered through—an angry voice in the distance, not too far away. He only heard snatches of it.

  … damn idiot! We better find … gonna be your ass! … not coming back ’til we do! …

  “They’re after us,” he said to her.

  “What do we do?”

  “We keep going down the road to the highway. I forget how many miles it is. I think maybe two or three.”

  “Look!” She pointed back up the road toward the cabin. Beams of light were moving toward them.

  “Christ, run!” he commanded. He took her hand, and they started moving. The mistake he made was turning on the flashlight again.

  After a moment of hurrying along the road, they heard a voice—Hey! Stop!—which was followed by a gunshot. Yana gasped. As they ran, she and Jason eyed each other to confirm that neither of them had been hit. They had no idea where the bullet had gone. Jason switched off the flashlight.

  He noticed she was limping, slowing them down.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “I am so out of breath … I feel weak … I haven’t eaten much. I’m sorry.”

  Jason halted and let her lean against him. He gazed back up the road. The two beams of light were still approaching.

  “We have to go into the woods,” he said. “If we keep following the road, they’ll catch us. Come on.”

  She didn’t protest. He helped her cross the drive to the edg
e of the forest—and they ventured in. The progress was immediately hampered, especially without the flashlight’s beacon leading the way. As there was no flattened path, both of them had to step through, on, and over dark rocks, branches, and bushes. It was nearly impossible to see where they were placing their feet. Only ambiguous black shapes warned them of an obstacle, and the trees were huge, intimidating sentinels they had to dodge as they went forward.

  The forest grew thicker as Jason and Yana thrust onward into the dark wild. Branches and brush tugged at their clothing or swept into their arms and faces. But they kept moving, no matter what, although Jason was aware that they weren’t headed toward the highway. It was possible that they were running west, parallel to Highway 82, but he wasn’t certain. If this was true, they needed to veer to the south.

  “Wait … wait …” he panted, holding his arm out to stop Yana from going further. She was breathing heavily, wheezing as if she had a cold. “Catch your breath. Listen.” He turned to look back toward the direction from which they’d come. There were no lights. Aside from the sound of oxygen pumping through their mouths, he heard nothing but the forest’s natural overlay of insect song.

  “Are they gone?” she asked.

  “I don’t think so.” He pointed to what he thought to be southwest. “We need to go this way.”

  “You are not sure.”

  “No. I’m sorry. I really didn’t have a good plan to get you out. I had to improvise.”

  “I understand. I am grateful.”

  “But we need to keep moving.”

  He risked turning on the flashlight. The beam seemed much brighter in the more claustrophobic surroundings of the woods.

  “Will they see it?”

  “I don’t know.” He turned it off. It was too risky. “Come on.” Jason angled their forward trek to the left, but inside he was panicking. He had no idea where they were. He was frightened, lost, and very cold. As they pushed through the landscape, he was now aware of the biting chill. It must have been in the low forties or upper thirties.

  “Are you warm enough?” he asked her.

  “No. But I will survive.”

  He’d given her his only jacket, a lightweight one, more like a windbreaker. She needed it more than he did. Still, his long-sleeved button-down shirt was thin. Jason was freezing.

  A gunshot echoed somewhere behind them.

  They both jerked their heads at each other, wide-eyed, and attempted to move faster. Jason knew the sound had come from behind them, but he wasn’t sure how far back. They couldn’t stop for a moment.

  A light beam abruptly appeared out of the blackness and passed over them.

  “There they are!” someone—perhaps Makar—yelled.

  Jason grabbed Yana’s arm and they ran out of the perimeter of the illumination. It was difficult for the pursuer to keep the light on the moving targets, and soon he lost them.

  They continued to move as quickly as possible, and Jason hoped they’d left their hunter far behind in the darkness. As they pressed forward, the setting began to change in front of them—the woods became thinner. A different type of topography lay ahead.

  They suddenly found themselves in a narrow clearing though which a stream flowed. The open space and lack of trees allowed natural illumination from the night sky to fall over the area. A half moon registered above. They could see things more clearly, and their surroundings had more definition. The stream wasn’t big enough to be called a river, and it didn’t appear to be a difficult cross. Jason figured it was about twenty feet to the other side. The water rolled strongly from the left to the right, indicating the direction downhill. Jason racked his brain, trying to think about their position in relation to the map he had left in his car. He knew there were rivers in the forest, and he also knew that a lake abutted the Paley’s property. He had no idea what side that would be, or if finding the lake would help them. He felt useless.

  “We have to cross,” he said. “It doesn’t look deep.”

  She followed him without questioning. They awkwardly stepped over some rocks and into the rushing water.

  “Yow,” Jason spat at the knife-like assault of the chill that enveloped his feet and ankles.

  “Oh, it’s cold!” Yana yelped.

  They splashed onward. The water rose up to their knees, but luckily it wasn’t deeper than that. They trudged on and eventually emerged on the opposite bank. He pulled her into that side of the forest. Not daring to stop, they moved blindly onward, their calves and feet cold, wet, and sore. Several minutes went by, and they saw or heard no signs of the searchers. No high-powered beams. No shouts. They stopped to catch their breaths again. Jason figured they were now maybe a quarter mile from the stream.

  “I … I can’t do this … all night …” she managed to say between wheezes.

  “Neither can I. Yana, I’m sorry, but we’re lost. I don’t know where we are.”

  “I think we have to find someplace and wait until daylight.”

  Jason knew she was right. He dug out his phone, turned it on, and looked at the time. It was just after midnight, and yet it felt as if they’d been running all night.

  It would be a long time until morning.

  “We have to keep moving. We can go slower. Let’s follow the same direction the stream was moving in. It goes down to something. There’s a lake nearby. Maybe more people will be around there, and we can get help.”

  She nodded, but Jason could see she wasn’t doing well. The poor woman had been locked up in a shed for days, fed sporadically, beaten, and sexually abused. It was a miracle she could walk at all, much less slog through the forest with him as she’d been doing. Jason admired her stamina and conviction. He was aware, though, that she was right—they would need to really rest at some point.

  They continued at a slower pace. Jason began to think about what kinds of bugs were out there, and what might bite them if they decided to sit or lie on the ground. Ants, surely. Ticks? Jason was deathly afraid of ticks, which could cause some serious damage, Lyme disease notwithstanding. Spiders and beetles and flies and cockroaches and wasps and bees and moths and mosquitoes—anything was possible. They were going to be eaten alive.

  A dark, mound-shaped protuberance on the ground lay ahead. As they approached, it revealed itself to be a large tree that had grown lopsided along the earth rather than into the sky. A curvy nook in its trunk was big enough for two people.

  “Let’s stop here for a bit,” he said. He turned on the flashlight and examined the tree. “Just making sure we’re not about to lean against a wasp nest or something.”

  It wouldn’t have been his choice to sit on dirt and nestle into a nook of a tree, but it appeared to be the best room in town. He took her hand and they both got down on the cold earth. He turned off the flashlight. Even there, he still felt they were exposed.

  “Hold on a sec.” He got up.

  “Where are you going?”

  “Wait here. Be right back.” He moved to a low branch of the tree that sprouted smaller, leafy branches, dug the Swiss Army knife out of his pocket, and started sawing the base of the branch, which wasn’t very thick. It took a couple of minutes, but the knife did its job. Picking up the branch and all of its tendrils, he carried it back to their cubbyhole. He backed himself in and laid the branch over the nook, providing camouflage for their resting place.

  “That is smart,” she said.

  He was happy that the knife had come in handy, after all. “Not sure how protective it will be, but it’s something. Now let’s just rest, listen, and watch. If you want to try and sleep, I’ll stay awake.”

  “I can’t sleep here.”

  “Well, neither can I. But we can rest. You’re right, we can’t run all night. And neither can they. They’ll get careless. You heard Trey. He yelled to Makar that they wouldn’t go back to the cabin until they find us. They’re going to search all night. The good news is this is a big forest. Maybe we fooled them when we crossed the stream. I bet they tho
ught we’d stay on that side of it.”

  Her eyes were closed and her head rested against the gnarly bark of the tree. Jason stopped talking. His body was itchy. His sleeves were torn and the scrapes on his arms had bled a little. He wondered when he’d last received a tetanus shot. Then he felt something crawling on his left arm and slapped at it, startling Yana.

  “Sorry.”

  “I was not asleep.”

  “Looked like you were. Close your eyes for a bit. It’s okay.”

  “Why do you do this for me?”

  Jason thought about that. He had never ever imagined that, one day, he would literally be risking his life for a stranger. But it was happening now. “It was the right thing to do,” he answered. He didn’t have anything better to say.

  “Who are you to them?”

  Jason let out a sarcastic guffaw. “The soldier one, Trey—I’m engaged to his sister.”

  “What?”

  “Yeah, I know. It sounds crazy. I’m not supposed to be up here. I came to the cabin to surprise them. I thought they were just up here drinking beer and shooting squirrels. The discovery of your existence was quite a shock, let me tell you. I didn’t plan on this, Yana. Jesus.”

  She placed a hand on his arm. “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome. But we’re not out of the woo—uh, we’re not safe yet. Better get some rest. Don’t be scared.”

  “After what I’ve been through the past three months, this is a holiday.”

  He didn’t know what to say to that.

  They were quiet for a while.

  36

  The rough ride in the trunk of the patrol car lasted an uncomfortable half hour, but the car finally slowed and stopped. She heard the driver’s door open and slam shut, but the engine was still idling. Then came the voices—she recognized Greg Paley complaining about something. After a moment, the door opened again and the engine shut off. A few seconds later, the trunk lid popped up. Baines stood over the trunk, pointing a Glock 22 at her. At first Annie thought it was hers, but apparently the captain carried one just like it.