by Peter Craig
“I need you guys to do me a favor,” she said.
“Anything, baby. I’m your man,” said a boy with headgear and braces.
“There’s this guy stalking me. Okay? And he’s got friends with him. And he may have something to threaten me with—something that makes me have to leave with him. I’m going to give you a cell phone number—do any of you have a cell phone?”
They all began pulling phones and pagers from the pockets of their baggy pants.
“Okay, good,” said Lydia. “Punch in this number. It’s a guy named Kirby—and I want you to do something. If anybody tries to get me out of this mall—anybody—I want you to call this number and describe what happened. Tell him who I’m with, where I’m going. Describe whatever you see. If you see me get into a car outside, give this guy the license plate. Any information, okay? I’m going to try to stay right here, but I have no idea what these people are going to do.”
“You want us to get the cops?”
“Not yet. But if they get me out of here, if it gets to that point—then, yeah. Call the cops.”
“Just hang with us,” said the smallest boy. “We’ll protect you.”
“Thank you,” she said, smiling. Her phone began to ring again, and she answered it while the kids were still boasting that they could handle the situation. On the other end, Jonah said, “Get rid of the Little Rascals—or they’re going to turn out like those little dealers out at Slab City.”
Lydia covered the receiver and said, “He says you guys have to go. Please. And please just stay someplace where you can see me.”
Now they seemed to assume that she was blowing them off or playing a prank, and they talked with sweeping cocky gestures, saying that she was tripping, until Lydia rose her voice sharply and said, “Now. Let’s go. I’m not playing.”
They responded with the sighing, listless compliance of teenage boys, and for a few brief seconds, as she held the phone and watched them trail away, she thought it was the first time in her life that anyone behaved as if she had some authority. This glimmer of triumph quickly evaporated as she saw Chase and Cully approaching along the support columns.
From out of the crowd, Choop slipped into the plastic bucket seat beside her and began wiping spots of ketchup off the table. He didn’t greet her. Chase sat down across from her with a dusty wrapping of old gauze around his right hand, and Cully lingered between the edge of the table and a trash can. Lydia took a deep breath and exhaled down against her collarbone. They sat in silence for a few minutes, no one acknowledging her, until Jonah worked his way through the crowd and sank into the unsteady seat across from her.
Heavy bandages and plastic wrappers covered the lower right corner of his neck, from just above his collarbone to below his windpipe, with gauze that looked dusty and ragged. From the glassy look in his eyes, Lydia could tell he was taking huge amounts of painkillers, and this altered his voice into the deliberate, overenunciated pace of a lecturing drunk. No matter how many back-alley doctors had sewn and patched up his neck, Lydia thought it was only by sheer luck that he could have survived, the combination of a cheap 9mm range bullet and an amateur shot that missed his arteries by a fraction of an inch. She was sorry for him as he struggled to speak in his usual businesslike tone.
He said, “I can’t think of any worse hell than a mall the week before Christmas.” His breathing was strained; he took a napkin and wiped his mouth.
Cully said, “They’re not doing well, man. Retail is way down.”
“You get anything for me, Lydia?”
On the lunch table, Jonah began unpacking her shopping bags and tearing through the wrapped presents, the tie for her father, the bracelets in small blue boxes, a hand-painted belt, and a new, empty scrapbook. Lydia watched his face closely as he tore through each gift, and, with his eyes fixed and determined, he seemed to be little more than a cruel and impulsive child. Then he looked up, smiling as if he were very pleased at the mess he’d made. He held up the tacky bracelet, twirling it around his finger, and said, “This is what you were all along, wasn’t it? Just a cheap little mall rat.”
Lydia glanced beyond him to see if the skaters were watching still, but she couldn’t find them anywhere; they had spread off into the crowds around the portcullis door of an arcade.
“What are you looking at? Somebody’s going to help you over there? Look at me,” said Jonah. “Listen close. You’re going to be calm, and we’re going to walk out of here.”
“I got somebody watching. He’s going to call the police as soon as I go.”
Cully said, “Go ahead and call the cops, bitch. We’ll get to you. Protective custody or not. Just hire some crack ho to cut you open in county.”
Jonah said, “We have some insurance. We’ve got somebody you know.”
She searched his eyes and said, “Bullshit, my dad would kill you or himself—I don’t believe you.”
She recognized just the faintest twitch of indecision in his eyes, and she knew that he didn’t have her father; so she sat up straight and smiled.
Choop had a gun buried in his sleeve, and Chase now held one up against the bottom of the table as well, cursing because his hand had scraped over stalactites of old gum. Jonah said, “You’re going to get up, and walk calmly—”
Lydia ran. She climbed onto the table and vaulted to the next, leaping platform to platform over drinks and cafeteria trays, dodging through spaces in the crowd, regaining her balance each time with tiny steps. When she landed on the floor off the last table, she sprinted past the music stand and arcade and rounded a bend into the anchor department store, clambering down an escalator and into the silent, brightly lit display of bedroom and dinette sets.
Across the wide floor there was a small log cabin, raised on blocks, showing a rustic theme of tartan blankets and kerosene lamps, taxidermy and hunting trophies. Lydia crawled inside of it and scrambled behind a tinsel-covered Christmas tree, between phony presents stapled to the ground and a woodstove fire made from ruffling orange cellophane. She heard people moving toward the display, then her phone rang again. She switched it to the vibrating mode.
Someone had moved right into the entrance of the cabin display, and Lydia prepared to escape out the window behind her onto the queen-sized beds. But it was a saleswoman. She cleared back the branches of the tree and said, “Young lady—no. No. You can’t play in here like this. Let’s go.”
“Ma’am, please. I’m in so much trouble.”
“No, no. This isn’t the place for this. Let’s get up. I’m going to call security.”
“Call security,” said Lydia. “Please. Call them and tell them I’m going to die.”
The woman rushed to the cash register, and, from far away, Lydia heard her describe the situation: “We’ve got a girl up here who’s on something. Can you please come right now?”
Twenty yards past her, traversing through aisles of cookware, his warped reflection in the copper pans, Chase was moving slowly while reading the screen of his cell phone. Lydia figured that they were sending text messages to each other to coordinate their search. She fled from her hiding place.
Choop was already behind her, approaching.
She dashed across the floor, mounted a shelf covered with evergreen and Christmas bulbs, and ran along it, leaping off beside the escalator to shamble downhill. When her path was blocked by a woman encumbered with shopping bags, she climbed onto the middle divider and slid the rest of the way down, jarring her tailbone on a metal bump, finally landing on a floor of mannequins decked out in gangsta clothes.
She traversed the aisles, back to the main body of the mall, where she realized how organized Jonah’s crew had been. After spotting Tito, who had obviously been watching from a distance earlier, at the base of the far escalators, she saw Cully and Jonah hovering for an ambush around the exits.
She could think of nothing but getting security to haul her out of here—maybe to a back room where they would threaten to call her parents.
&nbs
p; So she ran ahead and knocked bracelets off the racks of a kiosk, pushing through the browsers, and moving to a central, sunken area of blue and white tile, where she stepped into the fountain and stood in ankle-deep water, turning in circles as a crowd gathered to watch. “Security!” she shouted. “Help me! Please. Somebody!”
The shoppers, many of whom were lined up with children for a visit with a mall Santa, began trailing backward away from her, and the more she cried for help, the more mothers guarded their kids. The rubberneckers hung far away around plants and store thresholds, until her desperation seemed to have created the largest open space in the mall.
Out of the perimeter of the crowd came a man with his head down, wearing a ball cap and a store uniform, and he swiftly stomped through the shallow water and grabbed her. He was calling to everyone that it was all right; it was not until she had walked a dozen steps with him toward the exits that she realized it was Iván. He whispered, “Walk with me or this is going to get even uglier.”
“You’re my friend,” she said as he worked a gun into her side. Lydia turned and began screaming, but he picked her up and carried her, kicking and fighting, through a panel of fire doors into the parking garage.
From farther down the ramp, Tito yelled that security was coming, released finally from an orchestrated distraction across the mall. They needed to move fast. They were frantic as they tried to force her into a white rental car. She fought and splayed her legs until Tito came up behind, sniffled with a heavy cold, and shouted, “Fuck this.” As four men held her writhing arms and legs, Tito punched straight down through her face, stunning her. They threw her collapsed body into the backseat. She felt blood coming from her nose and she covered her face as if she expected a boot heel or another fist.
In seconds they were screeching out of the garage, and from her spot in the back, collapsed against Chase’s knees, she saw Choop hand an envelope to the parking lot attendant from the driver’s window. Jonah leaned across and said, “There’s the rest of your tip. Remember—you didn’t see shit.” There was another car pulling through behind them, and in the confusion of whipping turns and accelerations, the landscape from her view was only passing phone wires and empty sky.
She heard no sirens. She saw a few red streetlights, and she felt only a series of right turns throwing her head into the door. There was a gusting rise of speed as they merged onto the interstate. Her cheek was swelling. From her crumpled position on the floor she saw cirrus clouds and signs passing overhead that indicated they were heading west. The men were calm, talking about directions. Jonah made a call to the trailing car, asking if they had all the tools. Time stretched out and slowed, and Lydia started to cry.
She looked through tears at the sand-swept horizon, whispering, “Please, Jonah, please.” She whispered please a hundred times, and finally added, “I’ll go away. I’ll go away forever.”
“I know you will,” said Jonah.
A cell phone was ringing incessantly and no one could find it.
Jonah checked his, listened for Choop’s, and put his ear toward Lydia. He started to laugh finally and said, “The fucking sponsor.”
Jonah opened the glove compartment and dug through papers and notes. He found the phone, answered, and listened for a moment. “Who is this? I know. Who are you?”
He hung up and shook his head. Then he twisted around to look at Lydia, and he said, “Somebody just called to tell me my own license plate number. Friend of yours?”
Lydia stared up at him with her mouth open.
He said, “You don’t think my people can go through a crime scene and find a few names and addresses? Your dad’s been calling this AA piece of shit for days now. We had him the whole time—got his address out of the wrecked trailer.”
Chase laughed and said, “Tell her.”
“This dude was like a cult member,” said Jonah. “Wouldn’t talk, wouldn’t say a thing—going on and on about his code. Lost three toes and his kneecap before he started talking, and then Chase had the idea: Get him fucked up. You ever see an ex-alkie take shots with a gun to his head? He looked like he was killing his own son. And then, you know what? He got a little too moralistic for me—I lost my temper. I’ve been under a lot of stress, Lydia, and I just vented on him a little bit. He didn’t last long.”
Jonah leaned all the way back into the space between seats to talk to her again, twisting, as if he could coil around the seat. Her phone buzzed against her leg. Jonah said, “This shit out here—these alkali flats—it’s all full of bodies anyway. All the smuggling routes. You got vultures and rats and coyotes, a whole little ecosystem feeding off of dead people who tried to sneak across the border. You’re not the top of the food chain out here, Lydia. You’re just blood and water and bones. But I’ll tell you something: That asshole friend of your father’s was lucky. It may not be a Christian burial, but I’m sure he’ll be at the next AA meeting in heaven. You? You got a long afternoon still ahead of you.”
Kirby’s phone began ringing again, and they all laughed. Jonah answered, still giving a labored chuckle that sounded more wincing than amused. “Good, it’s you. The old redneck,” he said. “I’m your new sponsor. Here’s some advice: Drink up.”
eighteen
When Link returned to the mall that afternoon, there was a patrol car idling in front of the main entrance, where an officer was talking to a saleswoman, along with four boys as they fidgeted on their skateboards. Link asked what had happened. At first, he was alarmed that the cop addressed him so courteously, believing it must be a bad sign. But then he remembered his own uniform—the monkey suit, the clean-shaven face, and the tie around his throat—and he marveled at the effect. From his tone, the officer seemed to have already spent a long time piecing together a story. A girl had leapt into the fountain and made a scene, high on something, until her friends calmed her down and carried her out of the mall. He didn’t believe it to be much more significant than that.
When Link asked how he knew they were her friends, the officer said that numerous witnesses had seen them together in the food court.
Calmly, Link told the cop that the girl had been abducted. The police needed to get a description of the car and put out an APB.
The officer stared at him for a while with his mouth open, but then radioed to another unit in the parking garage, from where a muffled voice responded that the attendant hadn’t seen anything out of the ordinary. The teenage boys had agreed with Link, claiming that she was trying to get away from “some stalker dude,” but, as they skateboarded in circles and hit each other, they seemed the least credible witnesses in the mall.
“If you’re not going to deal with this,” Link said to the officer, “then get back on the radio and find somebody who will.”
“Sir? We’re looking into that possibility. We’re talking to everyone who saw anything. Did you know this girl?”
Link didn’t answer, and it was amazing how long the cop went without losing his patience. He was a young kid himself, with his hat off and a touch of sunburn under his crew cut, and he had slow, trusting eyes that craved procedure. Link finally shook his head and walked away, accelerating through the glass doors.
He was light-headed and his fingertips were tingling, but he avoided drawing any conclusions. If this was a disaster, he couldn’t look at it yet. The air inside the mall was artificially cool and crisp, like another climate, and all around him the steel railings and shining glass looked as sterile as a hospital. He turned into a clothing store, where a few shoppers roamed amid the aisles, and he rushed to the front counter. Taking the phone from beside the cash register, he tried to call Lydia’s cell, then began dialing Kirby’s number, knowing but refusing to formulate the thought. When the salesgirl came to protest, he simply put his finger to his lips and said, “My wife just had a baby.”
The phone rang through until a strange voice answered. While looking up past the track lights and a steel staircase to a window striped with clouds, Link knew they had f
ound Kirby, and the thought filled him with such anger and disgust he felt as if he’d just emerged from a long, violent blackout. He steadied himself against the counter and watched the salesgirl mouth the word, “Congratulations.”
The man on the line told him to start drinking again. His voice was crushed and airless, as if he were speaking between coughs. Jonah asked, “You’re not going to say anything about your friend, huh? You figure I’m just the answering service.”
The salesgirl gestured that it was okay for him to continue, then drifted away toward a customer. Link waited and said, “You’re going to pay worse than you know, motherfucker. Now just tell me where my daughter’s at.”
“The old biker,” said the voice. “I’ve heard a lot of stories about you.”
There were a few shoppers milling around the counter, so Link picked up the phone and moved a few paces away, as far as the cord would reach. He stopped beside a ladder that rested against a high wall of shelved jeans. “You’re the guy I want, right?” the voice asked. “Is this you?”
“Yeah, I’m the guy. Nice work.” The reception was spotty, and Link could hear rushing air and other murmuring voices. He thought he heard Lydia call him from the background.
“I want to talk to her,” said Link. “Put her on the phone.”
“No, I don’t think that’s going to happen.”
Never before had Link experienced the kind of hatred he felt for this voice on the phone, not in prison, not in the hospital, not for murders or betrayals: His mouth went dry and his eyeballs stung; his palms dampened and his skin bristled. The intensity of the feeling muddied his thoughts, and for a while he could only listen to the kid’s strained breathing.
The salesgirl was folding sweatshirts behind Link, so he moved forward, putting his head down into a cubicle of jeans, and whispered, “I’m going to say it real straight to you here, kid. You’re a businessman. You’re a smart guy. I think you’re going to know a good deal when you hear one.”