The Knowing Box Set EXTENDED EDITION: Exclusive New Material

by Ninie Hammon

  He practically fell on his face at their feet and had to catch his breath enough to speak. When he did, it come out so fast it sounded like a woodpecker tapping on a tree.

  “Heard them in the woods, beating up Jack so I hid, and then Jacob had a knife and wanted to cut Jack’s ears off, but Cole wouldn’t let him because they had a job to do and that would bring the police—”

  “Where’s Jack?” Bishop demanded.

  “Up in a tree. They stuck a screwdriver in his leg and then threw him up into a tree. I’ll show you.”

  Mikey started running back up the trail, fast for a kid his size, with Bishop and Daniel behind him.

  When Bishop seen Jack, sprawled on his belly across a big limb that must have been twenty feet off the ground, he called out to him.

  “Jack, you all right, son?”

  “I can’t get down,” he said, his voice raw. “And my leg…”

  “What do you mean they stuck a screwdriver in his leg,” Daniel asked Mikey.

  “A Phillips head. Cole stuck it on his shin and then began grinding it into the bone.”

  Bishop felt a flash of hot rage wash over him. “You hang on now, boy. We gone get you down.”

  He boosted Daniel up into the tree to help Jack, and in a few minutes Jack was on the ground, pulling up his pants leg to examine the small hole in his right shin. It was red and swollen, but didn’t look like it was paining Jack nearly as much as it must have been.

  “Cole said nobody’d know, that it’d look like I banged my shin on something,” Jack said, his voice tight.

  “Can you stand?” Bishop asked.

  Jack got carefully to his feet with Daniel’s help, then tested putting weight on his injured leg. It was clear the wound hurt somethin’ fierce, but he managed to limp forward.

  “Daniel, can you help Jack?” Bishop asked, and Daniel draped Jack’s arm around his shoulder and nodded. “Good, ’cause I got bidness to do!” Bishop turned and thundered off through the woods toward the baseball field.

  CHAPTER 28

  2011

  When the flight attendant instructed the passengers to discontinue the use of all electronic devices, Daniel started to press the off button as a text pinged into his phone.

  Again, he didn’t recognize the number, though the area code was Kentucky.

  The message said simply, “You give me back mine and I’ll give you back yours.”

  What in the world could that mean? He mulled it over as the big jet lifted off the ground from the Cincinnati International Airport and pointed its nose eastward toward the coast.

  You give me back mine, I’ll give you back yours.

  He’d borrowed a putter from Hugh Beddingfield a three-month lifetime ago, back when playing golf and other mindless activities filled up all the cracks of his mundane life. But Beddingfield didn’t have anything of his to trade back, not that Daniel knew of.

  What did Daniel have that belonged to somebody else, something they wanted back?

  The punch in his gut was so painful he could not imagine that somebody hadn’t kicked him in the belly. What did he have that somebody wanted back—Becca! At least Billy Ray thought he had her. And that meant…

  It couldn’t possibly be. No.

  But it made such nauseating sense that he was afraid he was going to have to use the sick sack in the seat back pocket in front of him. He had Billy Ray’s daughter, which meant Billy Ray…had his.

  With trembling hands, he turned his phone back on. The flight attendant spotted him and leaned over to tell him, “I’m sorry, sir, but the use of cell phones is not permitted at any time during the flight.”

  He ignored her, punched messages as soon as the phone sprang to life.

  Sure enough, the message he’d received a few minutes before read: “You give me back mine and I’ll give you back yours.”

  He touched the number of the message.

  “Sir, I have to ask you to turn that off. The use of cell phones can interfere with our navigational equipment.”

  Daniel had never believed that, by the way. He’d always suspected it was the one thing they’d thought up to say that would scare people into compliance. “Then you better hope the pilot can see the Washington Monument from here.”

  “Sir, I will have to inform…”

  “Inform anybody you like. Do whatever it is you people do when you don’t get your way. My little girl is in trouble, and I am making this call.”

  But he didn’t make the call. He had no bars. No coverage.

  He looked up pleadingly into the flight attendant’s eyes. “In-flight phones. You have those, don’t you? I have to make this call.”

  “Some flights do but not this one.”

  As the plane passed over the Blue Ridge Mountains far below, he punched redial again and again and again, dozens, maybe hundreds of times. Just as the aircraft began its descent into Dulles, the call connected. Daniel was so surprised, he wasn’t really prepared when Billy Ray answered on the second ring. But it didn’t matter. Billy Ray was as chatty as he could be.

  “Daniel. Wondered when you’d call. What took you so long?”

  “Where is she? What have you done with my daughter?”

  “Why, Daniel, I don’t have any idea what in the world you might be talking about. All kind of folks could be listenin’ in to what we say. Technology's like that these days. All I done was text you about that grubbing hoe you borrowed. You remember. I found a baby chick belongs to you, and I was thinkin' we might make a swap…your chick for my hoe.”

  “Billy Ray, if you hurt…”

  “Now, Reverend, I don’t think you are in any position here to be makin’ threats. Chicks is fragile things—wouldn’t take nothin’ to hurt one real bad. But I ain’t got no reason at all to hurt yours. Fact is, if I’s to harm a single feather on that little bird’s head, a world of hurt would come down on me so fast I’d be the one winds up in a cage. It’s in my best interests—and if there’s anything I’m real good at, it’s lookin’ out for my own best interests—to make sure that baby chick don’t even ruffle up its down.”

  “I don’t know where Becca is! I already told you that.” And this time it was true. He really didn’t know where she was now.

  “Then best you find her—quick! I figure to hand off this chick while she’s still all chirpy like—not had time to miss the barn and her own nest. Any more than twenty-four hours and baby birds is susceptible to all kinda problems.”

  “I’m on an airplane, Billy Ray! On my way to Washington.”

  “Then you best get on another plane soon’s you land and fly right back to Cincinnati. We got bidness to do, you and me, ’fore the sun goes down tomorrow night. I’ll be in touch. Oh, and one other thing. You call in the…you know, the game wardens, the ones that look for lost chicks, then it becomes in my best interests to see to it your little birdie don’t never chirp again. Like I said, I always look after my own best interests! I’m a man of my word; ask anybody. You might not like me, but you know that’s true. I tell you your chick’s safe, you can b’lieve it.” He paused. When he spoke again, his voice was soft and menacing. “And if I tell you she’s gonna get plucked and fried if you don’t give me what I want, you can b’lieve that, too.”

  The line went dead and the wheels squealed as the big plane touched down on the runway of Dulles International Airport.

  ******

  “Slow down, Daniel!” Jack said. “You’re not making any sense.”

  The fear in Daniel’s voice made a great thundering sound in Jack’s head, like it was league night at a bowling alley.

  “Billy Ray has Andi. He kidnapped her. He wants to trade her for Becca.”

  Bam! Somebody on the bowling league got a strike.

  “How do you know that?”

  “He texted me, then we talked on the phone and…none of that matters, Jack. It’s true—Andi’s gone. I called Mrs. Beavers, and she was freaked out, said she’d been trying to reach me. She thinks Andi ran away
because she didn’t want to go to her piano lesson, dropped her music on the sidewalk and left one shoe in the driveway of a neighbor who’s out of town.”

  The last few words came out with a choking sob, and Jack could hear the rising timbre of panic in Daniel’s voice.

  “Daniel, calm down and tell me what Billy Ray said. Exactly what he said. Word for word.”

  Daniel repeated the conversation.

  “You told him you didn’t know where Becca was?”

  “He didn’t believe me any more than he did the last time I told him that when I did know where she was.” He paused. “He said if I called the police, he’d...Jack, what do I do?”

  Jack suddenly understood on a visceral level why surgeons refused to operate on their own children. How could you do your job, make the hard, perhaps risky, calls you make every day with other people when the kid going under the knife is your own?

  Get a grip.

  Daniel suddenly burst out, “Andi knew it, Jack! She saw this. In a vision, just like she did the triangle and the square and the rope. She told me about it, but it didn’t make any more sense than the other one did. She was seeing what was going to happen.”

  “Tell me about the vision. Everything she said. Every detail, no matter how small.”

  As Daniel spoke, Jack wrote furiously in his officer’s notebook, stopping him constantly to ask questions.

  “She said the license plate read ‘Land of…something’ but she couldn’t read the next word. Had an Indian design on—”

  “Yellow license plate with a Navajo design, Land of Enchantment—that’s New Mexico. Did she see the numbers?”

  “It was splattered with mud—red mud.”

  Jack peppered him with questions and learned about the train, three men, the tattoo and the dreadlocks, about groceries from BetterBuy and beer with two x’s that was still cold.

  “One of the men was Hispanic, sounded like Speedy Gonzales, said they should have eaten his mother’s tacos.”

  Jack questioned Daniel for another five minutes. When he was finally satisfied, Daniel went back to his original question.

  “Jack, what do I do? Do I call the police? The FBI?”

  Jack was slow to answer. “This is a federal crime,” he said. “Not just because it’s kidnapping. She heard one of them say ‘the south side of the river,' which means they transported her across the state line into Kentucky. If you call the police, they’ll hand it off to the FBI. When you tell the FBI about Billy Ray, they’ll be all over him.”

  “They’ll arrest him?”

  “They might. They might storm his house with a SWAT team. Or maybe bring him in for questioning. At the very least, they’ll blanket him with surveillance, trying to track where he goes.”

  “Even if it’s only surveillance, he’ll know,” Daniel said. “Imagine trying to track Billy Ray Hawkins through the woods and him not catch you at it?”

  “The FBI has resources—technology they can use where he’ll never know a thing. Heat sensors so they know who’s in a house. Other things. And they’ve got the manpower to check all this—to check the BetterBuy stores south of the river, find out who owns satellite dishes, the location of railroad tracks and times of trains. They even have a database of tattoos on convicted felons. The problem is—”

  “How can I tell them what I know about where she is and get them to believe me?”

  Jack was silent, then said in a resigned voice. “You can’t. Try explaining to a ‘suit’ that you know a guy in dreadlocks and another dude with a dragon tattoo kidnapped your daughter because she had a dream about it. At the very least, they’ll blow you off.”

  “Or think I’m crazy. Or that I know all this because I’m involved in it somehow. Ok, then I won’t tell them the part about the vision.”

  “If you don’t, they’ll be useless. We know Billy Ray didn’t act alone, but the FBI doesn’t. They’ll channel all their resources into targeting Billy Ray—because he’s all they’ve got. And we know that where they’re holding her isn’t anywhere near Billy Ray.”

  “So what do I do?”

  Jack said nothing.

  “Jack…?”

  “I’ll find her.”

  Jack had been coming around to that conclusion all along. A surgeon operating on his own kid.

  “Can you do that?”

  “I have a whole lot better shot at it than the FBI. At least, I won’t get Billy Ray’s back up and I’ll be looking in the right place.”

  “I haven’t had time to find the next flight back to Cincinnati. I don’t know what time I’ll be—”

  “Stay where you are, Daniel.”

  “Stay here? My daughter’s been kidnapped, and I’m going to help you find her!”

  “Do that! Help me find her—by staying right where you are.”

  “Jack, I’m not going to—”

  “You’ll get in my way, Daniel!” He hadn’t meant to sound brutal, but maybe that was the only way he could get Daniel to listen to him. He continued in a kinder voice. “You won’t mean to, you’ll be trying to help, but you’ll slow me down. I don’t have time to coddle an anxious father.”

  The silence from Daniel’s end of the phone was so profound Jack feared Daniel had hung up on him. When he spoke, his voice was barely a whisper. “Find my baby.”

  Jack sat very still after he hung up, his rapid heartbeat stitching a gauzy web of fear around him, white and sticky and inescapable. He was a police sergeant in a suburban department, a beat cop with zero experience as a detective. He didn’t have the skill to do this. Or the manpower. If that little girl died, it would be his fault—and it wouldn’t be the first time someone he loved had died because of him.

  CHAPTER 29

  1985

  When Bishop came out of the woods, the six Bad Kids were milling around the dugout that was between them and the bleachers and parking lot. Bishop charged at Cole Stuart, grabbed him by both shoulders and slammed him so hard against the post holding up the net behind the catcher that the netting swayed back and forth from the impact. The look of surprise on Cole’s face morphed into rage in an instant. He put his hands on Bishop’s chest and shoved him. Bishop flew backward and landed on his backside in the dirt halfway to the pitcher’s mound.

  He got up slowly, a great angry bear. When he spoke, his voice was the sound of cannon fire in the distance. He had let his rage carry him, and it was all he had. The only thing that kept the terror at bay was the red curtain of fury that shrouded his eyes and obscured the features of the demons screeching at him.

  “Good! That’s what you gone have to do when I come after you.”

  He strode menacingly toward them until he could lean in and spit words into Cole’s face. Cole and all the others were so surprised they only stared at him.

  “You listen up. All six of you—hear this. I am done with your evil, mean torture. What you done to Jack…” For a moment he was overcome with such rage he couldn’t form words. Only for a moment though, then he drilled his booming voice into their faces. “It’s over. You hear me? Over. You dare touch so much as a hair on the head of any one of them children again, and I will come for you.”

  Now, he poked his finger into Cole’s chest. All the other demons were screaming and growling so loud it was hard to think, like being in a room full of wood-chippers—but Cole Stuart’s demon was silent, glaring at him in malignant fury.

  “I’m gone find you somewhere public, lots of people around, and tear into you like a chain saw.” He poked Cole again. “You listenin’ to me? When I do, I ain’t gone stop 'til I kill you or you kill me, but one way or the other, it will be the end of whatever it is you got planned!”

  Cole’s demon responded to that. He ground his razor teeth, and his scorpion tail twitched back and forth.

  Bishop leaned over Cole and growled the next words. “Case you ain’t noticed, I’m a whole lot bigger’n you are, son! Ain’t no way in the world you gone beat me ’thout using superhuman strength—and th
at big ol’ crowd of people gone see it when you do. By the time we’re through, everybody will know you ain’t human!”

  The hot rage in Bishop’s chest suddenly cooled, became a steely frozen resolve that rang out with the pure clarity of a hammer striking cold steel. “Explain that to the one who sent you. How one big ol’ black man done outsmarted all his hired help and spoiled his grand plan!”

  Now the demons were quiet.

  “Are. We. Clear?” Bishop dropped each word individually, like tossing pebbles into a pond. “Or we can settle this right here and right now.” He gestured toward the bleachers, blocked from view by the dugout, where moms, grandmothers, little sisters and brothers waited to watch the day’s practice. He pointed to the parking lot, where two cars had just pulled in and other cars could be seen turning in off the street. “I’d be glad to destroy your ‘mission’ and end it all in the next thirty seconds. There’ll soon be plenty of folks to bear witness.” His huge hands balled into fists like sledge hammers. “You in?”

  In the silence that followed, Bishop became aware for the first time of the freezing cold that emanated from the demons. And now that his anger wasn’t hammering courage into his veins, he felt oily black terror slither in.

  Then Cole Stuart spoke.

  “We’re so sorry, Coach Washington, if our horseplay with Jack got a little out of hand. It won’t happen again, promise.” He draped a smile on his lips. “Looks like we’ll soon be ready for the team picture." He flattened his Mohawk and seated his ball cap firmly on is head. "I’d be glad to help you get everybody lined up.”

  The rest of the practice was surreal. With every word he spoke, every direction he gave, Bishop felt the silent hatred of six monster creatures. Their combined malice pummeled him like physical blows, battering him, and he struggled every second not to be beaten down by their collective evil. The demons didn’t make a sound, only watched him with their nightmare eyes while the bodies they’d hijacked were totally cooperative, couldn’t have been more polite, performed excellently—but not in any superhuman fashion, of course.