The Lonely Mile

by Allan Leverone

  She kept her eyes closed and began turning over in her bed, ever so slowly, moving onto her left side. Sometimes, curling up in the fetal position with her arm covering her eyes helped block out the light, and with this massive headache attacking her, she was ready to try anything. But as she pulled her right arm to place it over her head, she realized she was unable to move it. Her arm was stuck.

  She pulled harder, but something was grabbing it. She could hear a clanking, like the creepy noise of the chains poor Marley was forced to tote around in A Christmas Carol, except not as loud. What would chains be doing in her bedroom? Carli tried to open her eyes, and the reality of her situation finally penetrated her consciousness. She groaned, partly out of fear and frustration and partly from the pain pounding through her head.

  She was here, wherever “here” was, in the basement of the lunatic’s house. She had grabbed the grimy knife off the kitchen table in a desperate attempt to slice open the kidnapper and escape and had actually, for just a moment, thought she might manage it. She had even sliced open his arm. Then he overpowered her and grabbed the knife and—what? Did he cut her with it? In the head?

  She didn’t think she would still be alive if he had used the business end of the steak knife on her head, or anywhere else for that matter. Plus, the almost unbearable pain thundering through her head led her to believe she was, in fact, still alive. Either that or Hell was a real drag.

  Whatever Martin had done to her was definitely effective, she had to give him that. She reached her left hand, the one not handcuffed to the bed frame, tentatively up to the right side of her head and gasped in pain when her fingertips touched the open wound.

  The skin on her skull was torn and raw, and blood oozed sluggishly from the gash. The blood had seeped into her hair, making it messy and sticky. Then it had dried, clumping great tufts of hair together until it felt matted and disgusting. One eye was sealed shut. She touched it with her fingers and felt dried blood crusted all over it. She lifted her head and peered around her with her usable eye. The pillow and threadbare sheet were stained with both dried and newer blood. It seemed like a lot of blood; a frightening amount of blood to have all come out of her head. Fortunately, the flow of it seemed mostly to have stopped, at least for now.

  What would happen when she tried to get up was anybody’s guess, but with her head pounding and throbbing the way it was, she knew she was more helpless than before. If that was even possible.

  Then she realized that she had peed herself sometime during the night. Half-dried, sticky wetness covered her butt and the insides of both thighs. And the worst part was that she needed to go again. Note to self, she thought groggily: Wait until after your kidnapper allows you to go to the bathroom to attack him with a dirty steak knife. This sort of information is invaluable, she thought to herself, and will really come in handy the next time you’re kidnapped at gunpoint off the school bus by a stark raving mad lunatic.

  Carli eased her good eye closed again, grateful for the resulting darkness as the pounding in her head seemed to lessen slightly. She wondered what time it was, how long she had been unconscious, and most importantly, where the crazy pervert with the knife had gone and when he would be coming back.

  Weak, watery daylight struggled through the dirty basement window, so she knew she had been lying unconscious on the bed for quite some time. It had been the middle of the night when she tried to play ninja with her kidnapper, and now it was daytime.

  Without fully realizing it, Carli drifted back into an uneasy half-slumber.

  * * *

  Martin sat on the bottom step of the basement stairs and watched his angel quietly as she fidgeted on the bed. She explored her head wound, which had bled like crazy as head wounds always do, but which Martin still figured was not too serious. He was something of an expert on inflicting damage on teenage girls, and he figured she may have suffered a slight concussion and probably had a doozy of a headache, but that was likely the extent of it.

  The skin he had torn open with the butt end of the knife had more or less stopped bleeding. It probably required nothing more than a few stitches, not that he was about to bring her to the hospital. The scar would be almost invisible under her luxurious mane of blonde hair, so his contact would not be too upset, and the wound might serve as a handy reminder to her of what would happen if she tried to rebel against him or her next owner again.

  He would let her suffer for a while with her bloody face and pissed pants—it was exactly what she deserved after her treachery last night—and later, after she had had a chance to meditate on her foolishness, he would bring her upstairs to clean the cut on her head and allow her to shower. While he watched, of course, as a security measure.

  Clean clothes wouldn’t be a problem. After hosting more than a dozen girls, all roughly her exact dimensions, for anywhere from a few hours in the beginning to seven days more recently, Martin had built up a pretty fair collection of stylish clothing favored by the twenty-first century teen girl. All the hot brands—t-shirts, sweat shirts, jeans, skirts, tank tops, and, of course, pretty underwear—he had it all, stacked in piles in the back of his closet, all waiting for the perfect girl to wear them.

  Carli would be the one. She was perfect.

  Eventually, he would do all that. For now, though, he was content to sit unobserved and watch his little angel as she began the process of adjusting to her new way station and her new situation. As angry as he had been at the moment of the attack last night, Martin now realized he had brought it upon himself. He never should have trusted her. It was just so hard not to.

  The 4:00 a.m. trip to the hospital had been interesting. Martin had driven himself to the emergency room, his sliced-up arm screaming in protest, even after he had swallowed all those ibuprofens. The road in front of the windshield had wavered and shimmied as if he were driving drunk, sometimes disappearing entirely for a second or two as his body dealt with the shock of the serious wound, before swimming back into focus, more or less.

  Then, at the nearly empty emergency room, first the nurse and then the doctor who eventually stitched him up took one look at the chunk taken out of his arm and eyed him suspiciously. The injury had “domestic dispute” written all over it, and the concern of the medical staff was clearly for whoever had been on the other end of the knife, and what fate she might have suffered.

  Martin chuckled, watching as his angel tossed and turned on the bed in obvious discomfort. The medical buffoons assumed it was a domestic dispute, and in a way they had been spot on. But of course, Martin had known what conclusion they would jump to and was ready with a story. He had been replacing the muffler on his car. “The wrench slipped,” he said, the picture of innocence, sincerity in his eyes, “and I gouged my arm on a loose piece of exposed sheet metal.”

  “You were working on your car at three o’clock in the morning?” the doctor asked sarcastically, making no attempt to hide his disbelief. Martin didn’t blame him, really; the explanation was about as flimsy as they come. But what could the doctor do? Martin stuck to his guns, and, in the end, they had done the only thing they could do—suture the wound, give him a prescription for some high-quality painkillers, and then send him on his way.

  They were suspicious, of course they were, but there wasn’t a thing they could do about it. Even if they decided to alert the authorities, their efforts would be wasted. The license and insurance information was all bogus—fakes provided by his contact for use in the event of just such an emergency.

  By the time he walked back through his front door, daylight was dawning, although the sky was overcast and moisture hung in the air like evil intent. Martin was exhausted. He stumbled into the basement and checked on Carli, still passed out on the filthy bed, and then went back upstairs and taken two Percocets. He had slept like a baby. A baby high on prescription pain meds.

  The disappointment of not being able to consummate his burgeoning relationship with Carli last night was fresh in Martin’s mind, but a
fter participating in a knife fight, enduring the cleaning, and suturing of a serious stab wound as well as the accusatory stares of the hospital personnel, and being up all night to boot, Martin decided it couldn’t hurt to wait another few hours for the big moment. He wanted to be able to enjoy it, after all, and right now, with his forearm throbbing and barking at him, the sex wouldn’t be that much fun anyway. It would be nothing more than animal rutting, and he wanted it to be special. He wanted it to be something they could both remember with fondness as the years went by, despite the fact they might not ever see each other again.

  There was still plenty of time, after all. He had six more days, and Carli Ferguson wasn’t going anywhere until every last hour of that time was up. He watched her sleep for a few more minutes and then rose and ascended the stairs. It was time for more Percocet and another nap.

  CHAPTER 44

  May 28, 2:05 p.m.

  SPE

  FAR

  ET

  EIGHT LETTERS CLUSTERED IN three distinct groups, running from upper left to lower right, down the side wall of a truck’s cargo box. Eight seemingly random-looking letters that obviously weren’t random at all. They had, at one time during the truck’s previous incarnation, signified something, something that meant enough to someone to shout it out to the world.

  Bill chewed on the significance of the letters, certain he had seen them somewhere before, pacing his tiny apartment and walking the neighborhood under glowering skies, the air so heavy with moisture and the promise of rain that he felt as though he was practically swimming.

  And then he knew.

  He was in the middle of vacuuming out his van—not because the carpeting was dirty, but because he needed something to do—when the significance of the letters revealed themselves to him. The resulting vision of the truck was so clear that Bill could hardly believe it had taken him this long to figure it out.

  The breakthrough came in the form of a mental picture, sort of a waking version of the dreams he had suffered through the last few nights. He thought he had seen the letters before because he had seen them before, and when the vision clicked on in his brain, he could picture the truck in his head as it existed prior to the sloppy, amateur paint job as clearly as if it were parked in the driveway in front of him.

  In its earlier incarnation, the truck had been used as a delivery vehicle for a small produce supplier called Specialty Farmers Market, LLC. The company was local and independently owned, supplying grocery stores and markets in the area with fresh produce and vegetables. Bill had seen the trucks on occasion, driving as much as he did between his two stores, and he suspected he may even have supplied the company with tools and small power equipment sometime in the last few years.

  The design of the company’s logo had not changed as far as Bill could remember. He figured at some point the owner of Specialty Farmers Market must have upgraded his delivery fleet and sold off his old truck or trucks.

  The I-90 Killer had been in the market for just such a vehicle, and Bill assumed he must have bought one of them. Obviously he couldn’t drive around kidnapping teenage girls with foot-high identifying letters emblazoned in green on the side of his getaway truck, so he had done a quick repainting job, and now that paint was beginning to fade. It was a huge blunder for a man who had evaded an intense manhunt for nearly four, long years.

  Now that Bill could clearly picture the vehicle, the sixty-four thousand dollar question was this: had the owner of Specialty Farmers Market sold the truck to the I-90 Killer himself, or had he involved a middleman—such as a dealer—from whom the kidnapper had purchased his vehicle?

  There was one way to find out.

  * * *

  In addition to trucking their produce to various area locations, Specialty Farmers Market operated an independent store, in which they offered their own products for sale, as well as basic grocery staples, like bread and milk. The market was housed in a long, rectangular-shaped rustic log building that looked like a cross between an ice arena and a steroid-enhanced version of Abraham Lincoln’s boyhood home. A mammoth concrete and aluminum warehouse protruded out the rear of the store, angling away to the left, with a paved employee parking lot located at the rear of the property.

  Bill had never been inside Specialty Farmers Market, but he had driven past it once or twice, so he knew where it was. He figured it was as good a place as any to begin the process of tracking down the company’s owner.

  He was well aware that his first move should be to alert Agent Canfield to the potentially critical piece of information he had recovered. He also knew he was going to do no such thing. Bill had spent a lot of time thinking about the situation regarding the I-90 Killer since his meeting with the FBI agent at the coffee shop this morning, and the more he kicked it around in his head, the more a surprising realization began to solidify.

  He was going to rescue Carli himself. Forget the authorities.

  This lunatic, this “I-90 Killer,” had targeted him specifically; setting his twisted sights on Bill Ferguson’s family solely because Bill had interfered with his attempt to kidnap an innocent girl at an interstate rest stop. He had taunted Bill, approaching his daughter on the street and spelling out in a letter exactly what he intended to do with her, and then he had gone and done it, just a couple of days later.

  The authorities, the same ones he was expected to now trust with the job of rescuing his child, had analyzed the letter after its delivery and concluded the I-90 Killer was full of crap, that he was boasting and bragging but would do nothing. Well, he had turned out not to be full of crap; he had done exactly what he said he was going to do. He had taken Carli, and right out from under the noses of the very people who were supposedly protecting her.

  And now the FBI, in the form of Special Agent Angela Canfield, was telling him to do nothing; to hand over any information that might be helpful in the search for his daughter, and then to just stay out of the way. Let the professionals handle the search. For the man they had been hunting without success for nearly four years. With Carli’s life hanging in the balance.

  No way. Bill didn’t care how sexy and alluring Angela Canfield was, he was not about to run to the phone and pass along the information he had finally managed to recover, and then step aside and wait for Canfield or one of her FBI flunkies to report back to him at their convenience the fate of his only child. The I-90 Killer had snatched Carli Ferguson for a reason; a reason above and beyond the fact that he was a perverted, murdering, slave-trading psycho. He had targeted Bill’s child. And Bill was going to get her back.

  Or die trying.

  * * *

  May 28, 2:45 p.m.

  Business was brisk at the retail home of Specialty Farmers Market, LLC. Cars filled the customer parking lot nearly to overflowing, and people entered and exited the front doors in a more or less continuous flow. Bill wondered what in the world the place could be selling that was so popular. It was too early in the season for most fresh veggies, but he supposed since the store was open year-round, they must offer some other enticing homemade food products, as well.

  He hurried across the lot under slate-grey skies that had been threatening rain all day but had not yet followed through. The moisture in the air was so heavy and thick it felt almost as though the skies had already opened up, even though the rain had yet to begin falling. One massive storm was on the way and would be arriving later this afternoon; that much was clear.

  Parked at the rear of the lot was a white box truck, with “Specialty Farmers Market” emblazoned on the side of the cargo area in green, block letters. The truck was similar in size and style to the repainted one he had watched the I-90 Killer escape in last week at the rest stop, only newer and less worn down. He glanced at it, confirming what he already knew, before continuing through the front entrance.

  Bill walked into the store and approached the lone cash register, operated by a girl roughly Carli’s age. She was maybe fifteen pounds overweight, sporting jet-black hair w
ith a maroon stripe dyed into the bangs, and wore a look of intense concentration as she dealt with the line of shoppers waiting to pay for their purchases.

  “Excuse me,” he said, stepping up to the counter. “Could you please tell me where I might find the manager?” The customer currently standing in front of the register, waiting while her purchases were being rung up, glared at him like he was planning on cutting the line. He ignored her. He doubted her daughter was being held captive by a homicidal maniac.

  The cashier looked up at him defensively, as if he had just caught her with her hand in the till. Bill figured she must assume he wanted to talk to the manager because he had a complaint, maybe about her. “Straight ahead, all the way to the back of the store on the left,” she said testily before returning to her work.

  Bill nodded his thanks, a waste of effort since she was no longer paying any attention to him. He weaved his way through the shoppers to the back of the building. A cold case filled with milk, a few different brands of juice and soda, and maybe the best selection of beer this side of the average college student’s dorm formed most of a back wall. To the left of the case, though, was an open doorway giving on to a short corridor. Halfway down the length of the corridor on the right was a unisex bathroom, and on the left, the manager’s office.

  The office door was propped open, and inside, a grey-haired man worked on a computer that took up most of the space on his desk. Whatever he was doing involved a lot of typing, and Bill was impressed by the speed he was able to manage, particularly given the fact he was typing with just one finger on each hand.

  He knocked on the open door and the man waved him in, glancing up for about a half-second before returning his attention to his project. “Be right with ya,” he said. “Take a seat, if you like.” He gestured vaguely with his left hand at a single chair placed in front of the desk and continued typing with his right.