I imagined the shame I’d feel if the photo were in the newspaper. I was woozy and nauseous and had to fight against losing consciousness. I wondered when Female Johnny was going to burn me with the cigarette she was smoking. I tried to imagine different scenarios for retrieving my gun. On some deep level, I felt my body gathering its strength. Preparing.
It was then I noticed my mouth was filled with blood. It spilled out over my lips and onto my lap. I stared down at the red color in awe. I felt around inside my mouth with my tongue and discovered that my right wisdom tooth was missing. Christ. They had extracted my wisdom tooth while I was unconscious. I bet I could guess which one had done the dental work.
“Looking for this? A real beauty, this one. Long roots. You’re an animal.”
Female Johnny held a tooth, my tooth, between her forefinger and thumb. She was wearing a maniacal grin. My tooth was pink and a bit of gum tissue still clung to the broken root.
“Where’s the girl?” I asked, the miracle of speech having returned.
“She didn’t want to play anymore,” said male Johnny in a pouty voice. “You scared her off.”
“And so now,” said sister dearest, “you’re her—whatcha call it? Udderstudy?”
Female Johnny pointed to a small digital camcorder on the front seat. Maybe it was Dani’s camcorder, the one that had never been found at the crime scene. Dani’s torture as it had been depicted on Johnny’s huge television screen flashed through my mind and an icy fear gripped my heart.
“We’re gonna make you a star. Put your sweet ass on the Internet.”
She blew more smoke in my face, then held her burning cigarette so close to my right eye that I felt the spot of heat on my eyeball. I focused on the yellow-brown camel on the cigarette paper and prayed that we didn’t hit a bump. I wanted to close my eye but feared that my eyelash would catch. I slowly leaned my head onto the back seat, away from the cigarette. A deranged laugh started in the woman’s soft belly, moved up through her chest, and came out her throat like the call of a rabid hyena. I tried hard not to show any emotion. When she laughed her fill at the idea of debasing me or torturing me, probably both, and distributing it on the Internet, she puffed on her cigarette some more and eyed me.
“Hey, don’t I know you?” she asked.
“We’ve met.”
“You’re the hero dyke from the bathroom at De Sade’s, right?”
“I’m not a dyke.”
“You ain’t lookin’ like no hero, either.”
She guffawed at her joke then reached for the jar that she held between her massive thighs. She held it in front of my face and rattled it. It was full of wisdom teeth. She twisted off the top and dropped mine in with the others.
There had to be two dozen teeth in that glass jar. One of them was more recent, like mine, with tissue still clinging to it; must have been Dani’s. The look of deranged glee on Female Johnny’s face filled me with repugnance. I felt nauseous. Bile rose up my throat. I let more blood flow out of my mouth onto my lap. I didn’t want to swallow it and I had to make room for my tongue in there. I imagined myself diving to the floor, grabbing the gun, and shooting twisted sister. I began the slow maneuvering so that I could use my legs against the door of the van to propel me. It seemed like a way long shot, but it was the only chance I had.
“So, you guys brother and sister?” I asked in the way of conversation.
“Smart bitch, aren’t you? If you’re so fucking intell-agent, how come you’re going to die? Huh, bitch?”
“Call me Joan. And you are?”
“Don’t let her be so smug,” said Johnny.
Female Johnny hoisted her massive body and a fresh wave of rancid body odor washed over me. I cannot convey the revulsion, nor the fear, that I felt when she bit my upper arm. I screamed and she stopped and promptly struck my face with her sledgehammer of a fist, which gave rise to another explosion of stars and meteors and ignited a special pain in my jaw where a tooth used to live.
“Don’t be smart, bitch. It gets worse, not better. Got it?”
I got it, all right. The word “subhuman” took on new meaning for me.
“Okay, hold it down back there,” Male Johnny said. “Don’t get me excited when I’m trying to drive.”
A safety-conscious psychopath. Interesting. The van was of the commercial variety; therefore there were no windows except for the back doors and in the front they were all tinted. All I could see was straight ahead through the front window. We were on a freeway going through desert, but nothing I saw struck me as familiar. I must have been out for hours. At that moment, a screeching siren came from my back pocket and the two ugly Johnnies froze. The siren was increasingly insistent.
Female Johnny leaned her hulk toward me again. I cringed as her probing fingers felt around in my pocket and came out with the phone and my keys.
“Look, the bitch is being called by three one oh, five six eight, three nine six seven,” she said. “Who’s that?”
“My partner.”
“He’s a little late, wouldn’t you say?” Her maniacal laugh took over again. I didn’t really relate to her humor.
Johnny looked into the rearview mirror like some kind of mad mesmerizer and said, “She didn’t answer your question.”
“I thought she was speaking rhetorically,” Female Johnny said. “Smart cunt.” She picked up a screwdriver and a hammer from the floor of the car. She clenched the screwdriver in her fist then cocked her arm back with menace.
“Now answer me, bitch!”
“Yes, he’s late,” I said calmly.
Female Johnny giggled for a long time then suddenly stopped and stared into my eyes. I stared back. “She’s scared!” my tormentor hooted. “Maybe you are smart after all, honey. If ever there was time, this is it for shittin’ your pants. Got that?”
“I got it.”
The siren screeched again. She checked the number. Her eyes narrowed to slits.
From the front, Johnny said, “Kill it.”
Mary put the phone on the floor, lifted the hammer, and swung it down, smashing it to smithereens.
“Those damn things can be so irritating.” She kicked at the plastic shards.
“You can’t possibly believe you can kill a cop, record it, webcast it, and think you’re going to get away with it. They already know who you are and where you live. It’s not going to work,” I said.
“I suggest that you quit pretending that you have any measure of control,” said Johnny. “Do you understand? Your laws don’t apply here. Forget that.”
“Hey, bitch. Did you know that the thighbone is the hardest bone to break in the human body?”
“No, I didn’t.”
“What do you think would happen if I hit your thigh as hard as I could with this hammer? Think I could break it?”
“Could you explain to me what the point is in this? I don’t get it.”
“She thinks we should explain ourselves to her,” said Male Johnny. “She would like to know the point.” He giggled, spurting a high creepy giggle like a deranged baby.
I eyed the jar of teeth. “Are the previous owners of all those teeth dead?”
“Your powers of deduction amaze the fuck out of me,” Female Johnny barked. “Most of them were much younger than you. Let’s see, you’ll make the number twenty, even.”
“In how many years?”
“No, fuck you,” Female Johnny barked. “I asked you a question. I suggest you answer it at this time.” She raised the hammer and snarled at me. “Think I can break your thighbone with this hammer?”
“I think you probably could.”
“Let’s just see about that, why don’t we?”
“No, wait,” said Johnny. “If you do that she won’t be able to walk. Blindfold her and save that for later.”
“Okay, fine,” said Female Johnny and she pinched the inside of my upper arm and twisted. This time I refused to give her the satisfaction of showing my pain.
“Oh, she’s a challenge,
this one. She’s going to be lots of fun,” said Female Johnny.
My head ached and I wondered what I’d been hit with when she had surprised me from behind. The hammer? If so, it was lucky I wasn’t already dead.
We left the freeway and began to drive into higher and greener country. I had to act soon, before we got to where we were going. I weighed the consequences of a possible car accident against being taken somewhere and bludgeoned to death, plus maybe even the honor of being tortured and having it recorded digitally for viewing in cyberspace. It was obvious to me that these two Johnnies were used to intimidating their captives into submission. I thought of their young victims and a new rage burned through my pain and weakness. Now was the time. Now. After one more moment of consideration, the car accident just seemed like the way to go. I didn’t have much to work with seeing as my hands were handcuffed, but when did I ever let something like that stop me? I’d successfully twisted my body so that the soles of my feet were against the side of the van. I would have to shoot my body out straight and down, grab the gun, and turn before she could grab me. Maybe safety-first Johnny would stop the van. It seemed likely that I was going to die in a most unseemly fashion.
“You are a very bad impersonation of a human being and you really stink, you know that? I’m pretty sure I’ve met rabid dogs with better personalities. Didn’t your mother teach you anything?”
It took a few seconds for the shock to give way to violence, but I was ready, and as she lunged for me, I invested everything I had and smashed my forehead into her nose. That stunned her. I was down on the floor, grabbed my gun, clicked off the safety and turned just as sis’s knee crashed into my kidney. I managed to squeeze off a round into the tree trunk of a leg above that knee. The gunshot was as loud as an anti-aircraft gun inside the van.
“Pull over, you sick bastard, or your sister dies!”
“No!” said Male Johnny. “Please, no. Oh God, oh God, oh God.”
“Stop the car or I’ll kill her!” I shouted and punctuated my command with a hard jab of the gun barrel into her amazingly soft belly. “One wrong move and the gun goes off in your stomach.”
“Shit,” she whispered and grabbed at the gun. Her fingers pried at my hands like iron claws.
What could I do? I had to shoot her. I managed to pull the trigger and gut-shot her. A loud “oomph” escaped her, but her grip didn’t falter. She’d hardly noticed. Blood oozed through her shirt. She managed to twist my hands so that the gun was pointed straight up.
“Stop this van!” I screamed. “Pull over!”
In our struggle for control, the gun went off again and fired through the roof. Johnny shouted something unintelligible from the front seat but kept driving. Another shot fired through the roof. Female Johnny was bending my arms back. I was giving every iota of strength I had, but I was losing control as the gun came down by the side of my head. Another shot went off and my ear went deaf except for an unbelievable ringing. This time it went out the front of the van which began to swerve from side to side.
“Pull over, now!” I screamed.
But the van was spinning out of control. There was a sharp jump as we hit the shoulder of the road and we plunged over the embankment, momentarily airborne. When the van hit, we were shoved up against the roof and the gun was knocked from my grasp. We bounced and bucked down into a ravine and came to a sudden stop against a tree. The side panel door had sprung open and I was looking out into the lovely green woods. The gun was at my feet, but before I could move, Female Johnny came over the back seat and made for my throat. I tried to stop her with my knees but the combination of her weight and strength was overwhelming. I managed somehow to get my hands between her arms and drove my knuckles into her larynx. Her lock on my throat continued. Just as her fingers were pressing down into my throat, I dug my thumbs into her eye sockets without mercy. I felt my face swell like a balloon. I was near passing out and grabbed with my fingers around her eyeballs when she backed off and my hands came away bloody. I grabbed my gun and flung myself out of the open door and rolled away as fast as I could. With one eye on the van, I worked on unwrapping the gaffer’s tape around my ankles. I didn’t know what happened to Johnny Tyler, but I knew the sister was still alive. I hoped the one bullet I had left in my gun would be enough to stop her if she should come at me. I didn’t have long to worry when in the next moment, she charged out of the van like something out of a horror movie. I fired and hit her in the chest, but she kept coming at full charge. At the last instant, I curled into a ball and threw myself at her ankles. She went flying over me and out over the steep-sided ravine. I went to the edge and saw her sprawled out and unconscious. She was breathing. The van was spewing steamed heat and I hoped it wouldn’t explode—or worse, catch on fire.
I looked up and saw a couple of lumberjack-looking guys standing up on the embankment.
“I’m a cop,” I shouted. “Call nine-one-one. Tell them an officer needs assistance.” I laughed in strange relief. What an understatement. Several more people gathered at the top of the hill looking down on us.
One of the lumberjack guys waved his cell phone at me. “I already called nine-one-one!” he shouted.
“Oh. Okay. Call three one oh, five six eight, three nine six seven!” I shouted back.
He looked surprised. “Say that again?”
I did. Plus, I told him to tell the detective that answers that Detective Lambert needs backup. I then asked if they would be good enough to get me out of there. There were very nice men. Very kind.
Once I was up on the road, I sat on the ground and allowed myself to have a little cry, I’m not ashamed to say. One of the men put his hand on my shoulder to comfort me. He didn’t say anything, just kept his hand on my shoulder.
•••
GUS WANTED TO TAKE me to the hospital, but I talked him into letting me go home instead. The Tylers were incapacitated but still alive. Gus was kind enough to take care of all that. He also arranged to have the guys drive my car from the Tylers’ place to Parker Center so I’d be able to go right home once I got there. As Gus drove back to Parker Center, the night was quiet and everything; even the gray sedan seemed to be moving in slow motion. I recognized it as an aftereffect of a high adrenaline flush.
“When we got there and you weren’t around, I knew there was a problem,” Gus said. “I was damn worried; I don’t mind telling you. You got a knack for getting right in the middle of some bad shit. Yes, you do. It’s uncanny.”
“At least we put an end to their tooth collection.”
“There’s that.”
“Where’s the girl?”
“What girl?”
“The one with the pink hair, the one Hector dropped off. Apparently, he’s still providing runaways to the depraved.”
“When we arrived, there was no girl with pink hair on the scene.”
“Johnny was strangling her, Gus. That’s why I went in. Exigent circumstances.”
“I believe you, Joan, but there’s no girl to verify your story.”
“My story.”
I fell silent. Twenty-one thousand kids went missing in this country a day. That’s 750,000 a year. What was the chance that we’d ever find the girl with pink hair?
We came to a red light. It seemed to take several minutes before the car came to a stop. “There’s the videotape,” said Gus.
“Of Dani being killed?” I asked. He nodded.
“We can work that,” he reassured me. “Are you sure you’re okay?”
“Oh, yeah. Thanks, Gus.”
The red light took eons to change to green.
I didn’t let on that I’d been hit in the back of the head. I wasn’t in a hurry to say that my concern for the girl with pink hair had caused an oversight on my part. That I let Female Johnny sneak up on me and knock my ass out. She had managed to get the upper hand on me twice now. Nor did I mention anything about the badge or the gun since, luckily, I had reclaimed them both. Of course, I’d have to explain some of t
hese details in the report.
“Uh, Gus, I messed up… I, uh…”
“You’re a good cop, Joan. A damn good cop. You just need reining in.”
“Sounds like you’re talking about a wild horse. You trying to break my spirit?” I gave him a weak smile.
“Not me. Nope. That would not be my intention.”
“Gus, why are people so mean?”
“I don’t know. Just crazy, I guess.”
“Hector stole my doll.”
“What’d you say?”
“Never mind.”
“Joan, you look terrible, I really think you should go to the hospital.”
“No way. I’m going home. I just need sleep.”
•••
THE JOHNNIES WERE BOOKED as John Tyler and Mary Tyler. They pled not guilty to all charges. The teeth, the videotape of Dani, the camcorder, and all their torture equipment were taken in as evidence. I had thankfully pulled my badge from between the seats before the lumberjacks helped me out of that ravine. I can’t begin to tell you how relieved I was to have my gun and badge back. For as long as I lived, I would never forget my encounter with John and Mary Tyler.
I must have been in a daze when I got home because I don’t remember it. In the morning, when I awoke, I didn’t feel Pancho in the bed. I bolted upright and searched through my house. The dog was gone.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
I CHARGED INTO THE captain’s office. Satch was rearranging his workspace. This is not a good sign. Satch only moves things around in his office when he’s upset. He was bending over to grab some books; his big body straightened when I came in. As I got closer, I could see on his computer screen that he was in the middle of typing up a press release for media relations and that he was sweating. I always feel concerned about his health when he sweats like that. Don’t know why. I try to tell myself that it’s only natural.
“May I speak with you, sir?”
Satch bent over and laid his hands flat on his desk and gave me his full attention.
“Yes, Joan?”
“First, I’d like to say that the dog is gone. Thought I’d tell you in person. Before I left the house last night, there was a prowler. It never occurred to me that he was after the dog.” Satch gave me a pitying look.
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