Just Try to Stop Me

by Gregg Olsen

  “We didn’t do anything to you,” said Blake, crying. Her mascara ran like a muddy river down her cheeks.

  “Everyone back in the van,” he said. It was an order. Not a request.

  Kelly was on her knees, next to Patty. She had her hand on the driver’s and was jiggling it a little to see if Patty would wake up. Blood oozed like maroon candle wax from the gaping wound on the side of her head.

  “What about her?” Kelly said. “You shouldn’t have done this to Patty. She didn’t do anything! She needs a doctor! What kind of a sick person are you? This is not right. You don’t just shoot someone for no reason.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  On the highway behind the van, a car’s wheels slowed. Its headlights stabbed at the darkness as the vehicle with the intruder with the gun had. The beams bounced off the van, revealing it was a light-colored VW bug, old school.

  The man lowered his weapon. “Say a word and you’ll be dead,” he told the teens. “You know that I’m not kidding, right?”

  None of the girls said anything. Their vocal cords were frozen.

  The newcomer lowered the window on the driver’s side.

  “Everything okay?” a young man’s voice called out. He was in his twenties, with a passable goatee and shaggy hair that even in the darkness looked messy and in need of a cut.

  “All good,” the shooter said. “Just need a jump. Got my cables in my car.”

  “All right,” the Good Samaritan said. “Want me to call someone?”

  “No service,” the shooter replied with an annoyance that indicated experience with that stretch of road.

  “Tell me about it,” the young stranger said. “Up the road. Past the bend. Completely dead. My commute. I hate it.”

  “Thanks,” the man said, “but we got it handled. Right, girls?”

  “Yeah,” Blake said, her voice cracking. “We’re like getting a jump and then we’re going.”

  The young driver got out of the VW and walked to the side of the van closest to his car. Gravel crunched under each step. The noise was like muffled gunfire five miles away. The shooter stayed planted near the driver’s door. On the front seat, Patty Sparks’s eyes stared into nothingness.

  “You sure everything’s okay?” he asked.

  Kelly leaned over. Her breath was hot on Chloe’s ear. She whispered as quietly as she could.

  “He’s going to kill him.”

  Chloe braced herself. She gave Kelly a look.

  Don’t do anything stupid. Don’t. We’ll all die.

  Blake noticed the shooter raise his gun a little, the barrel catching a glimmer of light, though still mostly out of view.

  The shooter looked in the direction of his car, and then at the kid who’d stopped to help. “You want to help?”

  “Sure,” he said. “Helping these gals will be the highlight of my day.”

  “Really,” Kelly said, struggling to keep her tone even, “We got this. Thanks, anyway. We don’t need help.”

  The young man stepped closer. Too close for his own good, really. He looked inside the van, his eyes traveling across the passenger seat to where Patty’s lifeless body had slumped behind the wheel.

  His eyes went wide with alarm, his mouth hung open.

  “Hey!” he called out. “What’s wrong with her?”

  Wrong question.

  Pop! The sound of gunfire ricocheted through the van, over Patty’s body, over the girls, into the young man’s head.

  The girls yelped in unison.

  “Shut the hell up, you four little bitches!” the man said.

  “Why did you do that?” Kelly screamed.

  The man kept his composure and looked down at the lifeless young man. “He should have kept going.”

  Amber wrapped her arms around Kelly. Chloe and Blake huddled together. The girls were whimpering because they knew crying would be too loud. They’d been commanded to be quiet.

  “You!” the man said looking at Amber, “help me move her.”

  Amber, tears streaming down her face, shook her head. “No,” she said. “I’m not helping you.”

  “You don’t get to decide that. I do.” He pointed the gun at her face, and then tilted his head to indicate Patty. “You want to end up like her? Or maybe like him?”

  Amber kept her mouth shut.

  “I’ll help,” Kelly said. “Please don’t hurt us.”

  The man smirked. “Good girl,” he said. “This one’s a little hefty, but let’s get her over on the passenger side.”

  “But she’s all bloody,” Kelly said.

  “You’ll live,” he said. “Now let’s do it. You too.” He indicated Amber, and following Kelly’s lead, she did what she was told.

  “Get in the van,” he said to the other two. “Unless you want a bullet in the head, too.”

  After Patty was shoved to the middle of the front seat, the man got behind the wheel. He told Amber to crawl over Patty and sit in the passenger seat by the window. She did. All the girls were sobbing. No one spoke. No one could.

  Chloe looked over at the shooter’s car as he turned the ignition on in the van. As it rolled back onto the highway, she thought she saw another person in the car. Tears flooded from her eyes and rolled down her cheeks, so she wasn’t exactly sure what she’d seen.

  She felt so alone. Completely alone. Her lifeline had been left behind. She prayed to God that someone would find her phone.

  When he had held open the bag for their phones, Chloe dropped in the silver compact that her mom got her at Sephora.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  Chloe spoke up first. She might have been small, but she was a little sister to three girls, and she knew that the only way to get any attention at all was to go for it. The only way to get an answer was to ask the question.

  “Where are you taking us?” she said from her place in the middle of the van.

  Blake abdicated the sum of the van’s pool of assertiveness to Chloe. Kelly, next to her, was also silent. Amber, in the front seat, couldn’t find her voice at all.

  The driver kept his gun pointed in her direction.

  “Just be quiet,” he said. “No one talks while I’m driving. Talking distracts me.” He held the gun close to Amber’s head. She pulled away, toward the window.

  “Please don’t hurt me,” she said, her words soft.

  “Yeah! Don’t hurt her! You sick piece of crap!” It was Blake. She’d pulled herself together and decided to go full-on tough bitch. It was an affectation that she usually employed to get some silly advantage at school or even at home with her family.

  She’d never needed it to save a life.

  Someone else’s.

  Or her own.

  “He’ll kill me,” Amber said. “Don’t make him mad.”

  The man glanced at Blake, Kelly, and Chloe in the rearview mirror.

  “Listen to her,” he said, indicating Amber. “She’s next. And then I’ll blow each of you away. One by one. You saw that kid’s brains poking out of his head like a smashed pumpkin?”

  They all had. None would ever be able to erase that hideous, bloody image from their memories.

  Chloe sat still, tears coming from her eyes.

  “You shouldn’t have shot Patty! You shouldn’t have killed that guy,” she said. “He didn’t do anything but stop to help us.”

  Amber spoke up next, her body still twisted away from the driver. Her head pressed on the cold glass of the window so hard that every bump on the road caused a wince of pain.

  “He’s going to kill all of us, anyway,” she said. “We didn’t do anything either. Neither did Patty. He killed Patty for no reason too.”

  After the words came from her lips, the girls didn’t say so, but each of them had the same thought. He had killed Patty for a reason. They had been the reason. He’d killed Patty on purpose. He wanted them.

  “Are you going to rape us?” Chloe asked.

  The driver grinned. His eyes met hers in the mirror. “No. Not
going to rape anyone.”

  She persisted. “Then what are you going to do?”

  Blake wished she were not so beautiful. If she were average, she would never have done catalog modeling. If she’d never done that, she’d never have been on cheer. She’d been destined to be coveted and adored. But not like this. Not by some sicko. Her mental pity party stopped when she noticed the headlights of the car that had been tracking them since they’d left the turnout. She leaned close to Kelly and whispered.

  “Someone’s following us,” she said.

  Kelly glanced behind them, and as she did so, she let out a scream.

  “What the hell?” the driver said.

  “Patty’s alive!” Kelly said.

  Patty Sparks, her face bloody like she’d been dipped in red molasses syrup, lifted her head from where she’d been dumped in the back with the pom-poms, jugs of Gatorade, and the stash of energy bars that Chloe’s mom had provided.

  “Help me,” Patty croaked.

  “We need to get her a doctor!” Blake said.

  Kelly started to unbuckle herself and turn in Patty’s direction when the van swerved. Amber screamed. They all screamed.

  “Amber!” Chloe called out. “Amber!”

  “I’m all right,” Amber said.

  The driver pulled off the highway and started down a gravel road. About fifty yards off the main roadway, he pulled over. He grabbed the keys from the ignition with his hand that held the gun, swung open the door, and stepped out into the darkness.

  “Damn you!” he said as he opened the back door of the van. “You’re supposed to be dead!”

  Lights from the car that had been following flooded the space behind them. A soft breeze rolled over an open field, making the grass undulate like the ocean. A couple of houses provided pinpricks of light, but they were far away. No matter how fast any of them could move their legs, there was no way to make a run for it. Besides, the shafts of light from the car behind them held them like a supermarket’s grand-opening searchlight. None of the girls could see who it was or knew anything, beyond the obvious. That person and their driver were working together.

  “Help me,” Patty said, her voice urgent. “Blake, Kelly, Chloe, help me.”

  The girls huddled away from what they knew was about to happen.

  Kelly was crying. “Please,” she said, “don’t hurt her again.”

  “Don’t do this, sir,” Patty said, her voice a weak rasp. “Don’t hurt my girls!”

  Flash! The gun fired again.

  The gurgling sound of Patty’s dying breath cut through Kelly’s tears. None of the girls said a word. Blake stayed frozen. She thought about the kids that had been killed in school shootings and those who had survived by playing dead. She willed herself to barely breathe.

  She closed her eyes.

  Chloe held on to Patty’s last words. She’d begged not for her life, but for the life of each of them. They had all been so mean to her. They’d teased her for everything from the clothes she wore to the way she wore her hair. She was fat. But she was nice. Always and unfailingly so.

  The man shut the back of the van and returned to the driver’s seat.

  “Look,” he said, as though they’d just stopped at a Starbuck’s drive-through window and had been disappointed that the barista was out of chocolate syrup, “no one else needs to get hurt.”

  “We’ll do anything you want,” Amber said. “We won’t cause you any trouble. Please don’t hurt us. Please let us go.”

  “You be good to me,” he said. He looked behind him through the side mirror. “You be good to my friend. And, yeah, I’ll let you go. One by one. Promise. I’m not a bad guy.”

  “What are you?” Chloe asked.

  He glanced in her direction. “I’m just a guy with a point to prove.”

  What was that?

  He turned the ignition and the sound of the gravel road shifted under the van’s tires.

  “It won’t be long,” he said. “We’ll get there soon enough. I bet you’re all a little hungry. I know I am.”

  * * *

  Later that evening, the moms and dads of the missing cheer squad felt that pang of anxiousness that comes now and then with parenthood. It was true that their girls weren’t always perfect angels and had been late coming home before. They were teenagers, for crying out loud.

  Yet something seemed more worrisome about their tardiness that evening. Amber and Kelly were good friends; Blake and Chloe were close. As a foursome, they didn’t hang out together outside of their cheering. They had been expected back around 10 P.M. or maybe 11 at the latest, if they’d managed to talk Patty Sparks into stopping at a restaurant that they’d read made the best gluten-free pizza in the Pacific Northwest.

  Chloe had told her mother that it was a good bet that Patty would say yes.

  “She’s never said no to a meal that we know about.”

  “Chloe! That’s not nice!”

  “Just saying, Mom!”

  It had started to rain on the coast earlier in the day, and a storm warning had been issued for Clallam, Jefferson, and Northern Kitsap Counties. A couple of the moms wondered if the weather had washed out a road or had slickened the pavement and caused a traffic accident.

  Sue Turner was the first to call the other moms to see if any had heard from their daughters.

  Kelly’s mom, Shari, said that her daughter had texted that the cheer event was a “bust” and they were heading home around seven.

  “That was hours ago, Shari.”

  “They probably stopped to eat.”

  “I guess so.”

  In the next few hours all the moms and dads would worry.

  Boyfriends too.

  * * *

  Elan Waterman finished his homework, watched an old episode of Sons of Anarchy on Netflix, and texted

  Amber around 11 P.M.

  Where u at?

  No reply.

  He placed his phone next to his bed and pulled the covers up. It had been a long day, but a good one. And yet something niggled at him. His sleep was restless as he fought to find a cool spot on the pillow where he could lay his head. He opened his eyes to tiny slits and checked his phone at 1:30 A.M. Still nothing from Amber. She’d warned him that the cell reception was “complete crap” up in Port Angeles. He put it down to bad service or another Amber-like problem.

  She let her phone battery run down. Again. That had to be it.

  * * *

  By four in the morning, every parent of the missing girls had called 911. Kelly’s mom phoned all the hospitals too. Blake’s father, the owner of a car dealership on Bay Street in downtown Port Orchard, drove over to van driver Patty’s house by the South Kitsap Mall and pounded on the door.

  Her husband, Frank, tossed on a bathrobe and answered.

  “We’ve been trying to find your wife,” said an anxious Jack Scott. “We need to talk to her.”

  Frank looked over at the carport. The van was missing.

  “Hell,” he said, “where is she? I took a sleeping pill and didn’t even notice she wasn’t home until you rang the bell. What happened?”

  “That’s what we want to know, man.”

  Frank, a middle-aged man with a sandbag belly, scratched his head and looked at his watch. His sleepy eyes looked worried.

  “Patty should have been home hours ago!”

  Jack Scott stepped back, his eyes bugged to a new level of worry. “Did she call you? Text? When was the last time you heard from her? Don’t you get it? If she’s not home, where the hell is she? And where the hell are our girls?”

  “She texted me around seven,” Frank said, now very much awake. “She was about ready to leave the school up in PA and then she was getting some dinner with the girls. Van must have broke down. God! That damn piece of crap!”

  Jack Scott didn’t know what to do. He’d called the police. They said there had been no reports of any accidents along the highway to Port Angeles.

  “If the van broke down,
” he said, “why wouldn’t she have called you?”

  Frank didn’t know. It was late. It was dark. Five minutes ago he’d been asleep with the couple’s cat, Trouble, cuddled at his feet. He hadn’t been thinking anything was wrong.

  But something was. Something very bad had happened.

  “I’ll get dressed,” Frank said. “I’m going with you to look for them.”

  Jack went inside the Sparks’ residence to wait for Patty’s husband to dress. He phoned his wife, Kathryn, and told her that there was no sign of Patty or the van.

  “We’re going to drive up 101 and look for them,” he said. “I don’t know what else to do.”

  Kathryn could feel her voice crack when she spoke.

  “It’s probably nothing,” she said, in what she was sure was more hope than truth. “I’m sure they are all okay.”

  Even before the words disappeared into her phone, Kathryn had the sickest feeling that she’d just told a lie. Inside she had that feeling that mothers know better than most fathers. Blake, beautiful, accomplished, sweet, was in serious trouble.

  She never missed an episode of Real Housewives of Orange County. A new one had aired that night and they’d planned to watch it at ten when she was home.

  * * *

  In the master bedroom of the Wilder home, Brenda slid closer to Sherman so that he could touch her breasts. The down comforter was light against her body, but she kicked it to the floor. She wanted him to get lost in all she had to offer. That’s what she bought them for, anyway. She didn’t enjoy sex, but she had mastered the art of making a man—or woman—think that he or she had rocked her world.

  Sherman was nice enough. He’d done everything she’d wanted him to do. She knew that he was two or three levels below her in the looks department and that he’d probably pinched himself more than a time or two at his good fortune of having a lover as beautiful, sexy as she.

  “Your mother,” she said, rolling onto her side, and wrapping her leg around his, “doesn’t much like me, does she?”

  He looked in her eyes.

  She liked his adoring gaze. She could almost measure how far he’d fallen for her and how she owned him in every way possible. He didn’t know that, of course. Her takeover had been slow. Sublime.