by K. L Randis
Jared rammed his fists into the steering wheel as his voice trailed off. The tears were hot and heavy on his face as he pounded his frustration into every inanimate object in front of him. When he started screaming he felt arms around his shoulders and a soft voice echoing in his ear. After a few moments he leaned forward and put his head against the steering wheel in exhaustion.
“Okay Jared. Okay, you’re right, you’re right. What did I do? Oh what have I done to myself…” Tina sobbed.
CHAPTER SEVEN
The cemetery was barren. Lacey’s headstone still had a striking sheen to it that brightened up the somber fall backdrop behind it. Everything around him was dead. The brittle leaves, the browned grass, and Lacey. In the spring two of those three things would come back to life. They would get a second chance, like he did, and hopefully amaze and flourish for another season as if they didn’t remember the bitterness of the raw winter.
Lacey wouldn’t be so lucky.
He laid a pink carnation at the base of the marble and knelt there for a few moments, lost in time and purpose. When he needed a better glimpse at the choices he was making he found himself in the cemetery, reminding himself of where he’s come from and fighting to continue making the choices he knew would keep him sober. The struggle was just as emotional as it was physical and there was never a day that the mistrust in his own decision-making abilities burdened him with.
“I don’t know what to think anymore Lace, about Dad and about Dex. Sometimes I feel like I’m chasing an imaginary bunny down the rabbit hole putting my efforts into this.”
The wind whipped around the open field and against his cheeks. If he had been crying the tears would have surely froze.
“It just doesn’t make sense with Dad, you know? I mean I knew he was angry about what happened…what I did to you. I just can’t see him hurting someone like that, can you? He wouldn’t hurt Hailey, would he?”
The sun was failing at trying to peek out from behind the soggy clouds overhead. Jared wasn’t sure why he talked to Lacey like she would respond but it made the connection to her real. It kept her alive, in a sense, to talk to her out loud instead of just remembering her picture in his head.
He tried to remember the last time his whole family was together and actually enjoyed each other’s company. Lacey had celebrated a birthday not long before the accident and she had wanted to go to the Philadelphia Zoo. Jared tagged along, watching her zip down the path in front of them, smiling behind her as she called out the names of the animals she saw. His mom and dad held hands, calling out to Lacey when she toddled too far ahead or when she threatened to put some type of foreign object in her mouth.
They ate at the Zoo’s café and Lacey made Jared wear a zebra bib as he ate his cheeseburger. After they left and when Lacey started to complain that her feet hurt from all the walking, he had lifted her above his shoulders and nestled her legs on either side of his neck. She would bend over his head every few minutes, hysterically laughing and giving Jared what she called, from her newfound height, ‘giraffe kisses.’
His mom panicked when she realized that it was beginning to get dark and that they genuinely had no idea in which direction the nearest exit was. She was always a worrier, a hot mess with directions, but sweeter than raspberries.
His dad sauntered over to the refrigerator-sized billboard that depicted a map of the park and stuck his thumbs in the belt loops of his jeans. He leaned forward, squinting at the maze of paths and colored icons, rubbing the stubble on his chin. “You can never be lost if you know where you’ve been,” he had said. Sure enough, within a few short turns he had navigated the family toward the exit. Lacey clutched a white balloon in her left hand, sleepily blowing kisses to Jared as she swayed on her mom’s shoulder.
Jared realized he was smiling as a whip of arctic air flung him back to the loneliness of the cemetery, his dad’s words echoing in his head. “You can never be lost if you know where you’ve been,” he whispered to himself.
The weight of the words sunk in and he looked up at Lacey’s headstone. Jolted by the overwhelming ignorance surrounding his father’s disappearance, Jared scrambled to his feet and raced towards his car, calling out over his shoulder, “Lace, I know where Dad is!”
“How could I have been so stupid,” Jared yelled at the windshield, as he tore down the dirt road of the cemetery towards his apartment.
His dad lost a piece of himself shortly after witnessing the traumatic attacks of 9/11. As a NYC firefighter, he spent countless months in the aftermath of the World Trade Center attacks searching the rubble and debris for his fallen brothers.
If a body part or badge was ever identified, he had to notify the family, holding their hysterical wives in his arms. There were times that nothing was found and the pain of never knowing where their loved ones took their last breaths tore into the core of the families he had to report empty knowledge to.
Jared’s mom was a worrier. She always was. Her worrying only escalated as his dad relayed stories to her when he would be able to make it home. So when his mom caught wind of a new piece of technology—tiny little stickers that you could place on anything, like a purse or remote control—where you could track it’s location with your smart phone, she raced out that afternoon and bought it.
When his dad got home after a long week of digging through the wreckage of Ground Zero, his mom pulled out his dad’s wallet and his cell phone and stuck a tile on the inside of the leather. The tiles only had a one hundred foot radius in order to be able to ping a location on the cell phone, but the idea was that his dad always had both his cell phone and his wallet on him at all times so they’d both be within the parameters.
She even stuck a tile on the inner fireproofed seam of his work gear. She downloaded the app to his phone and to a spare phone she kept in the junk drawer as a back-up. Even if somewhere down the road he managed to leave somewhere without his cell phone or wallet, the app would save the last known location. She religiously replaced the tiles every year, as updated versions came out, and it gave her the peace of mind she needed to kiss him goodbye every morning. Knowing that she could open the junk drawer at home and see where he was located at any time saved her sanity.
His mom was a fucking genius.
Jared pushed through the front door of his apartment and headed into the spare room. He located a box marked OFFICE STUFF and dumped it’s contents on the floor. The cardboard box hit the adjacent wall as Jared fell to his knees skimming the clutter. He grabbed the familiar black-shelled phone and held the power button.
As it booted up he recalled the day his mom realized that he had stolen the cell phone from the junk drawer. The promise of an extra hundred bucks was all he needed to swipe it when he was low on cash and he spent the next week convincing his mom that she must have misplaced it and she would just need to go buy another spare phone to track his dad.
When a pusher came through with scoring a large client on the outside of Scranton hours prior to him selling the phone at GameStop he had thrown the phone in the back of his dresser, completely forgetting about it and too proud to put it back in it’s right place to prove his mom right.
He was so glad she was right.
The thudding in Jared’s chest was immeasurable as the phone kicked to life and he swiped the home screen. Within two seconds he spotted the app and tapped the corner of the screen. A blue wheel dramatically spun as a message of ‘Please wait while we load the last known location’ flashed underneath it.
The chime that told Jared that the location of the tile had been found was deafening. “Hell yeah!” he yelled, swiping on the screen to bring up the map.
He pushed his two fingers apart, zooming in on the glass and brining the street names into focus. As he squinted, much like his dad did at the zoo that day, he mouthed the name of the streets and his own voice caught in his chest when he recognized the location.
Mineola Road, right in Brodheadsville. Specifically, right where the Wash N’ Go car w
ash should have been. The car wash Flick owned.
“Right in plain sight,” Jared whispered, repeating Flick’s concept. He stuffed the phone into his pocket and headed towards the front door.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Jared turned off his headlights as he approached the Wash N’ Go, innocently cruising into one of the self-serve wash stalls as though he were a paying customer. The seasonal time change from the week prior would give him plenty of cover as night fall blanketed all around him, but he knew Flick would have his men carefully watching wherever his dad was being held.
The icon on the smartphone pulsed as it glowed a downward arrow towards the part of the property where it was picking up a signal. Jared had never noticed any other structures on the plot whenever he drove by the car wash so it meant he would need to do some searching by foot. He locked the car doors and stuck his keys under a wheel well just in case he was found and frisked. He needed a quick getaway, he just wasn’t sure from what or who.
The thicket that lined the edge of the property was compact. Jared pulled a hunting knife from his left side, slashing in front of him, stopping every few feet to listen but only hearing the passing cars on the main road.
He was going to kill his dad when he found him. He had already decided that on his way over. If Flick had him hostage in one of her warehouses it meant that she had finally found him and was likely planning on calling Jared in the morning.
His dad had no excuse. It was Hailey’s pain from her attack that forced her to leave him. It was her recovery that he struggled to watch her try and overcome and it was his father’s hands that had depleted the life in her eyes when she told him she needed time.
All Jared had was time.
Time would ease the pain of Lacey’s death and the weight of his own mistakes. Time healed his addicted mentality, showing him over and over the inevitable impact of a little white pill with red specks. Time gave him a life with Hailey, and time also took that away.
His dad was out of time.
The warehouse hanger seemingly came out of nowhere as Jared pushed through the last of the brush and knelt down on the cold earth. His breath danced around him as he surveyed the darkened mass and double-checked his phone to make sure he was on target. A matured Wash N’ Go sign was tilted on it’s side holding up one portion of the outside wall. From his observations it looked like an abandoned building that maybe held old car wash cleaning supplies or possibly was even a futile rendition, at one point, of a space to be transformed into a larger indoor car wash arena.
There was one dove-colored unmarked police car tucked close to the tree line on one side of the building. Since it was a weekday Jared hoped that the manpower would be minimal on site. One or two guys max. He would need to create a diversion to have them come outside so he could weasel his way inside.
As if on cue, an obscure outline of a man appeared by one of the doorways. A heavy fog of smoke drifted over his head and Jared smiled.
Cigarette break.
Working fast he inched his way back through the trees and slivered onward until he was still within eyesight of the front door but far enough away that it would give him time. He knew confronting Flick’s guys would only complicate things. He needed to lure them out.
He used his back as a shield as he worked, gathering dry leaves and twigs around him. He didn’t want to watch the whole place go up in flames so when he was sure the perimeter around his leaf pile was efficiently cleared he lit the lump into a blaze with the lighter that was still hostage in his pocket from meeting Tina.
There were only a few seconds before the pile would give off enough light to expose Jared’s presence. Once he was convinced that the fire would catch, he bolted in the opposite direction, careful to keep his shadows from dancing with the light.
The guard’s back was facing the fire as Jared settled into a spot not far from the doorway where he stood. He puffed on the end of his cigarette, shifting from one foot to another and glancing, every now and then, upward at the night sky.
“Come on you moron, look behind you,” Jared pleaded.
The guard hacked into his sleeve and flicked the butt onto the concrete. Jared’s pulse rose as he realized he wouldn’t see the fire if he walked inside without turning around. As if on cue, a disgruntled driver blared on his horn from the main road and the guard shifted his gaze as he reached for the handle. Doing a slight double-take, he squinted into the darkness. Panic struck him as he realized what he saw and he opened the swinging door, his voice booming to alert the other guard.
“Pat! Yo Pat get out here man there’s a fire. You throw a cigarette in the woods you shithead?”
A few moments later Jared heard the clunk of boots against the concrete. “What are you talking about? I don’t smoke as often as you, it was probably one of yours.”
“I don’t smoke out there,” the first guard said, motioning towards the glow of the woods.
“Ah the whole place will go up if we don’t put it out. Find a bucket, something.”
The door slammed behind them as one guard made his way towards the amber light show and the other went in search for a bucket. When Jared was sure they were out of earshot he rushed the door and pulled it open, just as quickly pulling it closed behind him and holding his breath as he waited to see if he was spotted.
He wasn’t.
There was only a sliver of light to illuminate the space around him. He could hear water dripping to one side and a bellowing echo of nothingness in the shadows ahead. Leaving the hanger would be easier than getting in, there were plenty of other exits he could sneak through now that he knew where the guards were stationed. After taking note of several potential getaway points he moved through the corridors of the warehouse. The smell of bleach stung his nose so he was sure that the building had been used to store cleaning supplies.
He moved toward the only glowing light towards the back of the hanger. No footsteps or talking could be heard, but instead of comforting him it made him more anxious. His sneakers padded his movements and he skimmed the walls as he moved, careful to maneuver slow and steady.
The cold molding of the doorway met his back as he hesitated before advancing into the barely lit room. There was a chance there were more guards, or even Flick, standing post inside. He wouldn’t be able to explain why he was there other than telling her about the tiles that he used to track his dad’s wallet. He didn’t care.
Turning the corner with his Glock raised he poised in the doorway, his legs framed and ready. Adrenaline helped him focus on the room and when his dad’s face slowly rose it took most of his impulse control not to run over to him.
“Oh what in the…” Jared started.
The bruising around his eyes was saturated to a shade of purple Jared had never seen before. Dried blood caked his lips, eyelids and jawbone. A skeleton of a man he once knew was hunched over in a metal folding chair and a yellow janitor’s bucket next to it. His hands and feet were secured and it appeared as though it took most of his efforts to keep his head in an upright position. The burly, masculine man he remembered was gone and the replacement figure in front of him was despondent and beaten.
“Jared?” Mike said, grunting to strain his eyes in an attempt to identify the man that had a gun pointed at him.
“Dad…what the hell is going on?”
“Jared, let me loose me, please help me,” he begged.
Jared cleared his throat, trying to juggle the storm of emotions in his throat. “Why, so you can beat me within an inch of my life too?”
Mike shook his head, lowering his chin to his chest. The subtle rocking of his shoulders told Jared that he was crying and for an awkward moment Jared lowered his gun. “What did you do to Hailey? Was that some kind of punishment? You know you ruined her life, she can’t remember anything. You nearly killed her.”
“The girl? I didn’t know you knew her. I had no idea who she was,” Mike sobbed.
“You get kicks out of beating up beautiful women? Wh
ere’s mom?” Jared asked, suddenly noticing she wasn’t in the room.
“I don’t know where she is son. Believe me, please. I had no idea who that girl was. They took your mother. I don’t know where they have her.”
“Who took her?”
“These men, I don’t know. The woman was there, the one with the heels.”
Jared stiffened. “What woman?”
“Flicker? Or Fern? They only said her name once so I’m not sure. She runs the show around here though. The guys are terrified of her. Do you know who she is?”
“How long have you been here?”
Mike shook his head. “I have no idea Jared, the days just blur. The only time they let me up is to use that bucket.” He nodded towards the makeshift commode next to him. “Please tell me what’s going on. They took me and your mother in the middle of the night, blindfolded. They told us to grab our coats and that woman separated us, put your mom in a different car and we drove for hours. I wound up here but I can only gather pieces of why. They kept calling me an insurance policy to keep you in the area. Did you know some guy named Dex?”
Jared was impressed that Flick would use a tactic like driving around in the car for a long time to stimulate that they were holding him hostage in a desolate location. When he heard his dad say Dex’s name he crossed the room and in a rush of callous instinct he propped the gun under his dad’s chin, seething as he spoke. “Where is that scumbag and how do you know his name? Where is he!”
“He’s dead Jared. He’s dead! Whoever he is Fern killed him.”
“Flick?” Jared asked.
“Is that her name? Then yes, Flick. She said she didn’t plan on Dex leaving and you hunting him down so she killed him because he was a liability, does that make sense? None of this makes sense to me. Please get me out of here before she comes back.”