Primary Valor

by Jack Mars

  Clare was still shaking his head. “Like I said… sorry.”

  “If you can’t help us, that means you’re useless to us,” Ed said. “You know what we call things that are useless?”

  Clare didn’t answer, so Luke answered for him.

  “Trash,” he said.

  “And you know what we do with trash, right?”

  There was a long pause before Luke spoke this time.

  “We take it out.”

  Louis Clare shook his head. “I don’t believe you.”

  * * *

  Clare screamed into the deep darkness. It echoed among the trees and swamps, and came back to them. The sound was haunting.

  “Shout all you want,” Ed said. “There’s nobody else here.”

  There was a long moment of quiet.

  “What do you see out there?” Luke said.

  He swept his flashlight across the water. Eyes sparkled in the inky darkness, twenty or thirty pairs of eyes. They were low, at water level, along the embankments of the creek. As Luke watched, a couple of pairs seemed to creep closer. There was a splash as something heavy went into the water.

  “Eyes!” Clare said. “I see eyes!”

  He was standing now, his blindfold off, at the edge of the deck that looked over the water. The railing had collapsed at some point in the past. Ed had looped a length of thin rope that they’d found in a drawer through the zip ties on Clare’s wrists.

  Clare leaned way out over the water, his feet on the deck, his body in space. His arms were pulled behind his back at nearly a right angle. His shoulders were bunched, and his neck was sticking out like some strange bird. The position looked uncomfortable.

  The only thing keeping him here was Ed, who was holding him up by the rope. The rope was taut, each end of it wrapped around one of Ed’s hands. Ed leaned back a touch, the muscles in his shoulders, biceps, and forearms working.

  The zip ties were tight on Clare’s wrists. His hands had turned red, then purple from the loss of blood flow.

  “You want to meet those eyes? In the drink, hands tied. You know what the gators do, right? They hold you down and drown you. Then they save your body to snack on later. They like it when you start to rot and fall apart.”

  “The meat falls right off the bone,” Luke said. For a second, he sounded like a waiter in a nice restaurant.

  Ed giggled at that. He must have thought the same thing.

  Clare was smoking another cigarette. Even in this moment of extremis, he was putting another nail in the coffin. He would go to the gates of hell with a smoke dangling from his mouth.

  “I’ll tell you what I know. Okay?”

  “I thought you didn’t know anything?”

  “I don’t,” Clare said. “But I can guess.”

  “So guess.”

  “Someone sold the girl out. It was too easy to take her. Whoever did it knew where she was going to be. That’s inside information. They knew everything she was doing. You can’t anticipate a kid like that unless you’re close to her, real close. They had her texts, they had her emails. They knew what she was up to.”

  “Who are they?”

  He shook his head. “I don’t know.”

  Ed let his grip on the rope slip the tiniest amount. Clare’s body lurched forward over the water. He made an animal sound, like a grunt. It was the sound of fear.

  “Guess.”

  Clare was speaking quickly, his words a torrent.

  “I don’t know. Hired hands. Probably freelancers. Someone wanted a kid like that one. People have their preferences. Sixteen-year-old girl, that’s pretty vanilla. Maybe they wanted that specific kid for some reason. I don’t know. Anyway, they brought people in, professionals. They did the job, passed the kid along the line, and moved on. In and out in a few hours. Some guys like to work that way.”

  “Where did they take her? Where does the line go?”

  “I have no idea.”

  Ed nearly let him go again. This time, Clare made something closer to a squeal.

  “Last chance, Lou. You’re going in. We’re out of patience.”

  “Wait! Wait. I know of a building. I can give you that much. It’s a safe place. People temporarily park kids there sometimes, or they used to. I don’t know if it’s still in operation. It’s a couple hours from here. It’s all I know. I’m out of that life. Okay? You’re talking to the wrong guy.”

  “Where is it?”

  Clare shrugged, but didn’t say anything.

  “Lou…”

  He breathed deeply. “You don’t know the kind of trouble I could get in.”

  Luke shook his head. A memory flashed in his mind of Big Daddy Bill Cronin. This was Bill’s domain, making people talk. Luke thought of all the times he had winced inwardly while watching Big Daddy work. Big Daddy would get angry with the interview subjects sometimes, treat them badly, hurt them.

  “They’re weasels,” Bill had told Luke one time. “And they will always try to weasel out if you let them.”

  Luke hardened. He felt it coming over him suddenly, almost as if someone had dipped him in quick-set concrete. This man, who had been a very bad man and might still be one, was going to try to weasel out. But they weren’t going to let him do that.

  “I’d say you’re in the biggest trouble of your life right now.”

  He took his gun out of its shoulder holster. He slipped a long sound suppressor from the pocket of his pants, fit it to the grooves of the barrel, and began to mount it. He felt cold now, outside of himself.

  “The alligators will eat your body. They just won’t have to drown you first.”

  Clare was looking back at Luke. He eyed the gun warily. He seemed to go limp. He knew what a silencer looked like. He knew what it was for.

  “All right. Look. It’s up in Florence. Not that far. I don’t know the address, but I can tell you how to get there.”

  With a sudden burst of violent effort, Ed yanked Clare back in. Clare collapsed to the porch, his body trembling.

  “We’re going there tonight,” Ed said. “Right now, in fact. You live here until we come back. If we get there, and it isn’t real, I swear…”

  “It’s real,” Clare said from the floor. “It’s more real than you could ever want.”

  “Good.”

  “I hate you guys,” Clare said. “You know that?”

  Ed squatted down next to him on the deck.

  “I hate you, too.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  March 28, 2006

  12:25 a.m. Eastern Standard Time

  Florence, South Carolina

  “We got a van earlier today,” Swann said.

  He was still awake, and on the job. He had guided them to this spot, locating it from satellite images, based on the information Clare had given.

  Now he was murmuring into Luke’s ear. Luke held the phone close. In his other hand, he held a large pair of bolt cutters. On the way here, he had stopped at a twenty-four-hour Walmart and bought the cutters for cash.

  Swann droned on. “Your typical Ford van, white, unmarked, the kind of thing people carry junk around in all the time. It was spotted on a private security camera in the Wrightsville Beach neighborhood where the party was held the night of the abduction. It was also on camera footage taken from inside a restaurant on the main drag of the town. The camera was pointed out the window of the place, at the street. The van was at a red light for a couple minutes, a little before two in the morning. Careful driver, didn’t risk running the yellow, had his left turn indicator on. No sense getting pulled over for something minor.”

  “Yeah,” Luke said, walking with Ed down a back street in a deserted industrial zone just a few miles from the famous Darlington Motor Speedway. Swann said that when looking at the area from the sky, the race track was easily the biggest man-made thing for a hundred miles in any direction.

  Luke would like to go there. He had loved auto racing when he was a kid. But he filed that thought away. Not tonight.

 
“Here’s the kicker,” Swann said. “The van was parked outside the girl’s high school for half an hour in the afternoon earlier that day, right around the time school let out. Video cameras caught them there, too. There are video cameras everywhere nowadays. These guys were stalking their prey.”

  “Where’s the van now?” Luke said.

  “It’s a rental van. Not a U-Haul or anything like that. A small business, local to the area. I’m going to give you the details of the place once you finish up there. Maybe in the morning you guys can stop in and have a chat with whoever’s on duty.”

  “All right,” Luke said. “That’s sounds good.” And it did. The van sounded promising, but he was focused on where they were at this moment. “We’re almost at the building. I’m going to hang up now.”

  “Good luck,” Swann said.

  Luke hung up and put the phone back in his pocket.

  They had left the car a few parking lots away. The road here was closed, blocked by a weather-beaten, crazily leaning wooden fence. The fence was easy to walk around, but to bring the car in, they would have had to ram the thing down.

  The whole area here seemed closed, a wasteland. There were beer cans strewn all over the unused road. They passed an old sofa, the stuffing ripped up and exploding out of it like some weird volcano. The warehouse building was just up ahead, small, nondescript, and gone to seed.

  It was two stories high. Broken windows were covered by wooden boards. Grass grew through cracks in the blacktop of the parking lot. Overhead sodium arcs gave off bleak yellow light. Most of the lights were out.

  “Doesn’t look like they’re using it anymore,” Ed said.

  Luke shook his head. “No, it sure doesn’t.”

  There was an old box truck in the parking lot, but no cars. The truck had no obvious markings on it, other than a faded serial number at the rear. The lot was fenced in, the fence topped with barbed wire, and the gate had a thick chain looped through it, with a heavy padlock.

  Swann had alerted them to the locked gate ahead of time.

  “Nobody home,” Ed said.

  “No.”

  “Guess we should let ourselves in.”

  Luke clipped the chain on the gate. The gate was on rollers and was rusty. With a little effort, they pushed it aside.

  Now they were trespassing. They had driven up here on the say-so of a former human trafficker who had given them the information because they kidnapped him and threatened to kill him. They had flown here under assumed identities. They were well outside the rules of the game.

  When they did black operations, they were usually in some other country. That didn’t make this right or wrong, just different.

  As they crossed the parking lot, a motion detector light came on. It was very bright, glaring. Luke shielded his eyes. He knew that motion detector lights were meant to keep the amateurs honest. Kids, graffiti artists, vandals—a sudden bright light to the face kept these types out. It did nothing to Luke and Ed but annoy them.

  Luke glanced at the truck as they passed it. The door to the box was also secured with a heavy chain and a padlock. That caught his eye. He thought of truck rental places, many trucks in a row, the back doors open, the box swept broom clean.

  The box of an empty truck usually wasn’t locked. Why lock it when there’s nothing inside?

  “Let’s check the truck before we go in the building,” Luke said.

  Ed shrugged his big shoulders.

  “All right.”

  They went to the back of the truck and Luke clipped that chain with the bolt cutters as well. He let the heavy chain snake to the ground. Ed turned the handle and yanked the door up.

  The smell hit them both right away. It was subtle, no longer overpowering because it was from a long time ago. Even so, they both recognized it instantly. The fact of it was like a punch in the face. The smell of rot. The smell of dead things.

  Ed groaned.

  “Oh no,” Luke said.

  They climbed into the truck. It was dark inside, and they flashed their lights around. The inside of the box had been lined with foam egg crate material, the kind used for soundproofing music studios.

  Against one wall was an oversized chest, four or five feet long, like something people would put ice in for a family gathering at the beach. Two strong men would carry it, one on each end, and it would be filled with beer and soda, and hot dogs and hamburgers for grilling.

  The chest had a lock on it. This was the smallest and easiest of the locks to clip.

  Luke felt a rush of dread as he cut the lock.

  Ed lifted the lid.

  “Dammit,” he said, his voice low.

  The remains of a person were inside the chest, submerged in filthy water that had probably once been ice. The body was badly decayed, dressed in a skirt and what Luke thought must have been a tube top. The skin of the corpse was sunken and dark, and rotting away. Chunks of it were floating free in the water. It had a full head of long hair, fanned out in the water like seaweed. It was impossible to say much about it, other than it was the body of a child.

  “I’m going to kill somebody,” Ed said.

  Luke stared at it, the horror sinking in. He had spent a lot of time in war. People were killed in war. Children were killed in war. This wasn’t war. This was something else… premeditated, thought out. This place was abandoned, and no one came here anymore. The child had been left behind, like an afterthought.

  Like garbage.

  Someone got what they wanted, a voice told him, and left this here.

  Without warning, Ed lurched and jumped out the back. The sudden movement of his massive frame made the entire truck shudder.

  Luke watched him go.

  Ed stumbled a few steps away, then sank to his knees. He was in shadow, outside the range of the motion detectors, but Luke could see him raise his fists to the sky and shout something. The sound was unintelligible. There were words in it, but all Luke heard was the shriek. Then Ed vomited.

  He was on all fours now, his body spasming as he wretched up the Taco Bell they had picked up on the way here. Ed had eaten a lot of it. It all came out.

  Luke closed the lid of the chest.

  He reminded himself that the child was already gone. Whatever fear and loneliness that child had known was over. The real child was not in that chest.

  He climbed down and walked toward Ed.

  Ed had been to war, done the things Luke had done, seen what Luke had seen. He had never seen Ed react like this. But Ed had a child on the way, and he had been acting out of character for weeks.

  An image of Gunner flashed in Luke’s mind. A big, fat, happy baby.

  He shook his head to clear it. Gunner had nothing to do with this. Nothing like this was ever going to happen to Gunner.

  “Are you okay?” he said.

  Ed was on his knees now, wiping his mouth. “Do I look okay?”

  “No. That’s why I ask.”

  Ed looked up at him. His eyes were red. Not only had he puked, but big Ed was crying. It wasn’t a lot, he could speak through it, but it was there.

  “You and I don’t talk much, do we?”

  Luke considered that.

  “Like, in a real way,” Ed said. “Real shit.”

  Luke supposed they didn’t. That was true. They had been on some heavy metal operations together, and Luke thought of Ed as a good friend. He had trusted Ed with his life many times, and never regretted it. But in their personal lives, they tended to keep it jokey and light. It was easier that way.

  “No. I guess we don’t.”

  Ed looked at the ground. “I knew a girl when I was a kid. Cynthia. Just a girl from the neighborhood, but with a fancy name. Not Cindy. Cynthia. She insisted on that, even when she was ten years old. I don’t know why.”

  “Ed…”

  Ed raised a hand. “Wait. Let me finish. Cynthia was a good girl. But as we got older, teenagers, she fell through the cracks. Some kids do. Rough home life, problems in school, I don’t k
now. In her case, it was drugs, then prostitution. I felt bad about it, but we had drifted apart in high school, and I was a kid myself. I joined the Army, and then I was out of the neighborhood. I went on a long deployment one time, and after that I had some extended leave, so I went back to the old stomping grounds.”

  He was quiet for a long moment.

  “I was nineteen. Still a kid, but more like a man now. I had been to war. I stood tall. I had filled out.”

  Luke suppressed a smile at the idea of Ed “filling out.”

  “When I got back, I looked people up. Cynthia was gone, snatched. Somewhere in my head, I had imagined her getting clean and turning it around. People do that. But it wasn’t the case. I had just missed her, as it turned out. She had only been gone a couple of weeks.”

  He paused for a long moment.

  “They had taken her. Those people, man.”

  He gestured with his head at the truck.

  “These people. You know. These people who think that it doesn’t matter. Other people ain’t nothing to them. Hopes, dreams. It doesn’t mean a thing. They’ll do what they want.”

  Luke had a sinking feeling. He did not want to hear the rest of this story.

  “I found them,” Ed said. “There are no real secrets. This child here wasn’t a secret. People know about these things. People are sitting on information. The trick is to find those people and get them to speak. Which I did. I did not take no for an answer. When I got to the apartment, when I got there, Cynthia was already dead, but they still had the body with them. They had put it in the bathtub. The things they had done to her…”

  His voice trailed off and he gritted his teeth.

  “There were two of them. I’ll never forget them as long as I live. I don’t want to forget them. I always want to remember them. The first guy resisted me and he died quick. Too quick. I was sorry about that. So the second guy…”

  He looked up at Luke again. Tears were streaming down his face. Luke didn’t know whether to hug him or arrest him.

  “I kept that man alive for a week while I killed him.”