by Jack Heath
Thistle is quicker on the uptake than I am. “He offered you a deal?” she asks.
Gabriela nods. “He found me, soon after I met Ken. He said there was no record of me in the system yet. He said if I did some things for him, he wouldn’t file the paperwork.” She looks at the floor. “He used a condom, but I suppose it broke, or he took it off.”
“Does he know about Hope?” Thistle asks.
“No. When I found out I was pregnant, I knew he would try to make me have an abortion. So I never tried to call him.” Her eyes widened with alarm. “You’re not going to tell him?”
“No. Don’t worry.”
She relaxes. “That’s good. He may want to meet Hope, but I don’t want her to meet him. He is a bad man.”
“What about your husband?” I ask. “Did he know?”
“No,” Gabriela says, fingering the crucifix around her neck. “We weren’t married yet, and I was worried he, too, would pressure me to terminate the pregnancy. It seemed better to lie to my husband than to kill a baby.”
Out of the corner of my eye I think I see Thistle flinch. But when I look over, her sympathy-face is back.
“Later I realized I’d made a terrible mistake,” Gabriela continues. “Ken was a good man. He would have loved Hope, and me, no matter what. But after he found out, he felt betrayed. I could have prevented that.”
“He found out?” I ask. “When?”
“In May this year,” Gabriela says. “I deceived him for almost twenty years. That was what hurt him.”
“May 18?” I ask. That was one of the dates on the wall planner.
“I’m not sure. Why?”
“Never mind, I’m sorry. How did he find out?”
Gabriela looks at the closed curtains. “Kenneth suffered from depression. He had good days and bad days, but after Hope tried to... Well, he started blaming himself. Not just for leaving the gun safe open, but for her mental state. It was hereditary, he said. So eventually I told him. I wanted him to know it wasn’t his fault.”
“How did he take it?” Thistle asks. “When you told him?”
“Better than most men would have, I think,” Gabriela says, a bit defensively. “He was angry. He wanted to know what else I had kept from him. Soon he realized there was nothing, and he cooled down. He asked me if Hope knew, and I told him she did not. Eventually he said he understood the choice that I had made, and that he didn’t want to throw away our marriage because of one mistake twenty years ago. But it wasn’t the same. He became withdrawn.”
Perhaps he committed suicide. Stripped off his clothes and walked into the woods. Weird way to do it, but possible. If that turns out to be what happened, I’ll have a hell of a time explaining the severed hand.
Thistle’s phone is ringing.
“Excuse me,” she says, and walks into the kitchen.
“How was he with Hope?” I ask Gabriela. “Did they drift apart?” Distance from family is a risk factor for suicide, and he would certainly have felt less close to his wife.
But Gabriela shakes her head. “The opposite. It was as if the farther he drifted away from me, the closer he became to her. To him, the genes didn’t matter. She was his daughter.”
It’s like trying to solve two or three jigsaw puzzles at the same time, the pieces all jumbled together.
“He was a good man,” Gabriela says again.
Thistle grabs my shoulder. “We gotta go. Now.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
I eat and grow, I die without air, but I am not alive. What am I?
It’s impossible to find a parking spot anywhere near Joseph and Francine Luxford’s house. There’s a car in every driveway and on every front lawn. The streets are thick with people. Seems like everyone in Houston is here.
Some of the protestors have signs with hashtags: #JusticeForAbbey and #EndRapeCulture are common. Others have longer messages, like Don’t Tell My Daughter to Stay Home—Teach Your Son Respect and What Kind of Mother Raises This Kind of Man?
Apparently, since Shannon is nowhere to be found, his parents have become the target. As we drive, Thistle tells me that there was a story about Abbey on breakfast radio. It took the internet all of twenty minutes to find the address of Shannon Luxford’s childhood home. The #JusticeForAbbey hashtag is trending, and more and more people keep showing up.
As Thistle and I push through the throng, I see that every type of protestor is here. There’s the screaming guy who just wants someone to punch. There’s the past victim, tears flooding down her cheeks. There’s the shirtless party animal, his hairy nipples erect in the cold. There’s the guy in the Black Lives Matter shirt who hasn’t yet realized he’s at the wrong protest—or maybe he’ll show up anywhere there’s cops.
And there are plenty of cops here, dressed like they’re ready to occupy a hostile country. Kevlar, gloves, combat boots. Helmets with visors. Flash grenades and canisters of tear gas dangle from equipment belts. There are more assault rifles here than I’ve ever seen in one place. An armored vehicle rumbles past, slowly nudging pedestrians out of the way. The sun is just peeking over the horizon.
“Is that an actual tank?” I ask.
“APC,” Thistle says. “Come on.”
It’s the wrong vehicle for the task. There are cars parked haphazardly on both sides of the street, and soon the APC gets jammed between them. It could probably push them aside, but not without scratching their paintwork and potentially plowing into the crowd of pedestrians. The driver switches on the siren, as though that will get the parked cars out of the way.
A bottle explodes against the side of the APC. “Bon voyage!” someone yells, cackling drunkenly.
“This is not safe,” Thistle shouts at me over the ruckus. “If one person starts shooting, half these people are dead.”
She’s not wrong. The Houston PD officers have clenched jaws and sweaty brows. The civilians are screaming at them, daring them to shoot, phones raised to capture the action.
We push through. Thistle keeps her badge in the air. Cops keep leveling their weapons at her—a black woman in a mostly white crowd—then seeing the badge and lowering them.
I’m not sure she’s making the right call. It’s only a matter of time before one of these knuckleheads mistakes the badge for a gun.
Finally we reach the Luxfords’ house. Protestors are trampling the front garden and pounding on the windows and the front door of the house. A group of six are rocking the SUV in the drive from side to side, trying to flip it. The police haven’t made it this deep into the crowd yet. They’re too scared to leave their APC and their line of shields.
Now that we’re so deep in the crowd, I realize that Thistle might be the only police officer within a hundred yards.
“The county cops will try to disperse the crowd with tear gas any minute,” she says. “If Luxford’s here, we have to find him ASAP.”
I look around. It’s impossible. There must be a thousand people on this street, half of them with baseball caps over their eyes or bandanas covering their mouths. Even if Shannon cares enough about his parents to come help them, we’d never know he was here.
“Put the badge down,” I say. “These guys could turn on you.”
Thistle doesn’t. “Police,” she bellows. “Step away from the vehicle!”
She radiates such authority that four of the six men rocking the car immediately put their hands up.
Someone else—a skinny meth head with a scraggle of chestnut hair—turns around and spits in Thistle’s face. She barely flinches.
I grab the guy by the front of his tattered T-shirt and bare my teeth. He realizes that I’m not a cop. Not someone who isn’t allowed to hurt him. His eyes go wide.
“Blake!” Thistle snaps. “Blake!”
I let the guy go. He slithers away into the crowd.
I nearly bit him, right
in front of Thistle. It’s dangerous for me to be here.
I suddenly realize that one of the screaming people is Joseph Luxford. He’s standing on the lawn in flannelette pajamas, his socks caked with mud. He’s bellowing, “Get the hell away from my house, you fucking animals!”
No one takes any notice. He just looks like another crazy protestor.
Leaving Thistle behind, I push through the crowd and grab Joseph. “Is Shannon here?”
He screams at me, “Get away from my goddamned house!”
“Hey! Remember me?” I step back so he can focus on my face. “Timothy Blake, FBI. If your son is here, he’s in real danger. Have you seen him?”
“You’re police,” he says, realizing. “Do something about these sons of bitches!”
“Where’s your wife?” I ask. Maybe she’ll be willing to talk.
Before Joseph can answer, I hear breaking glass and a cheer from behind me. A black man in an army jacket has smashed the lounge room window with a baseball bat. A white guy with a shaved head and a goatee is clicking a lighter.
Joseph sees. “No!” he screams. “Don’t!”
The Molotov cocktail catches, leaving the sting of spilled gas in the air. The white guy hurls it through the smashed window. Smoke, underlit by the flicker of flames, pours out the window frame.
“No!” Joseph shrieks. “Francine!”
Shit. I look back at the house, up at the top floor. A shadow flickers between the window of that tiny bedroom, the one with the lock on the door.
“Is she locked in?” I ask.
“I—I just wanted to keep her safe,” Joseph stammers.
I shove him out of the way and push through the crowd toward the guy with the army jacket and the baseball bat. He’s watching the flames with fading delight, as though he didn’t expect things to go this far.
I grab the end of the bat. It feels like a good quality one, two or three pounds, mountain ash recently cleaned with rubbing alcohol.
The guy doesn’t let go of the rubber handle. “Hey, what the hell?” he complains. “Fuck off, man.”
I look around. Thistle is nowhere to be seen. No phone cameras facing me. So I yank the guy in and bite his wrist, severing the tendons that allow his fingers to clench.
He shrieks as he drops the bat. “What the fuck? Jesus!” I’m already walking away with his bat. I force myself to spit out the blood. Telling myself that I’m on a diet, and this time I’m gonna stick to it. Today is the first day of my new life.
I grab the lattice on the side of the house and start climbing. It’s slow-going, with the baseball bat in one hand.
When I’m a few feet up, Thistle sees me. “Blake!” she yells.
“Francine is in there!” I shout. There’s no time to explain further. I climb the ivy and creaking wood, the bat in one hand, splinters digging into the other. It’s a long way down, and if I fall, I’m likely to get trampled to death.
I reach the window and peer through the glass, but I can’t see anything. So I swing the bat one-handed.
The first swipe cracks the glass, but doesn’t shatter it. Strike one.
The second blow knocks out a chunk not big enough to crawl through. Strike two. My left arm trembles from the strain of holding me up.
On the third swing, the glass disintegrates. I wrap my hands in my sleeves as I climb through the gap, but one of them gets sliced, anyway. A warm flush of blood turns my sleeve the color of red wine. I clench my fist tightly, trying to staunch the flow.
Francine is facedown on the floor. It’s too soon for the smoke to have knocked her out—though I can smell it leaking through the bottom of the door—so she’s unconscious for some other reason.
There. A spike of bone protruding through the skin of her upper arm. Maybe Joseph hit her, or maybe she tried to shoulder-barge the door. She probably fainted when she saw the injury, or felt the pain, or lost too much blood.
I can’t carry her back out the window. Even if we managed to get through the frame without slicing something critical, she’s too heavy to carry one-handed.
I hold the bat with both hands and ram it against the part of the door where the bolt was. No good. The bolt’s on the outside, but the door opens inward. The frame is too solid.
Instead, I wedge the rim at the end of the bat’s handle under the bottom of the door, and tilt the bat backward.
There’s a creak. I keep pulling.
The leverage forces the door upward until the hinges snap. The door sags sideways. I rip it out of the frame and it topples over, narrowly missing Francine.
The smoke floods through, and I choke. It smells like bleach as well as gasoline. The guy who threw the Molotov must have added some extra ingredients when he mixed it, turning the bomb into a chemical weapon. The smoke cloud is toxic.
I lift Francine over my shoulder, facing forward rather than backward so I can hold her nose and mouth shut. Breathing nothing is better than breathing bleach. Then I carry her out of the room and stagger through the smoke to the bathroom.
Holding my breath, I grab a hand towel and drench it with water. Then I use it to cover Francine’s face—easier than keeping her nose pinched shut and her mouth closed with one hand.
The stairs look like a gateway to hell. Smoke flooding up them, fire glowing at the bottom. The heat dries out my face and hands. I close my stinging eyes and go by feel, fumbling for each step. I need both hands to keep Francine on my shoulder and to keep the towel over her face. My lungs are bursting.
The ground floor feels like an inferno. I can’t open my eyes. There’s crackling and spitting all around me. Luckily, I memorized the layout of the house the last time I was here. I bump into the kitchen bench, which helps me to orientate myself. I work my way around it, headed for the lounge room.
Broken glass snaps underfoot. I must be at the window. A shard of it punches through the sole of my cheap shoe. Soon I’m squelching in my own blood. For a second I worry about leaving so much DNA behind, and then I remember that for once I’m not committing a crime.
When we reach the front door I reposition Francine so I have a free hand to work the handle.
It doesn’t turn. Locked. I fumble around, looking for a latch or button. Can’t find anything. Can’t see. Can’t breathe. Fucking Joseph must have locked the door when he went out there. We’re trapped.
There’s a mighty crunch, and the door bursts open. It hits me in the face and I tumble over backward. Francine slips out of my grip. As I hit the floor tiles, I take an involuntary gasp of poisoned air.
“Blake?” a voice says. Thistle. “Blake!”
I try to answer, but someone has turned my volume down to nothing. No matter how hard I push, the air in my lungs won’t turn into sound.
“I’ve got you,” Thistle says, grabbing my shoulders. “Can you hold on to me?”
I cough. “Francine is...”
But then the whole world fades away to nothing.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
What do people pay for what they never want to use?
Francine looks at me like one of those starving kids in the World Vision commercials. Resigned and hopeless. Seems to me that she has more reason to be optimistic than she did before. But I guess that house wasn’t just her prison. It was her home.
“You saved my life,” she says flatly, without lifting her head off the hospital pillow.
I clear my throat. “Tell me about Shannon.”
My voice comes out in an Alex Jones rasp. According to the doctor, I’ll sound like this for a while. “You shouldn’t breathe bleach,” he said, like I was an idiot. At least I can still use my slashed hand. I’ll have another cool scar in a couple of weeks.
This isn’t the same hospital that Abbey was taken to. It has nicer art on the walls, a bigger courtyard in the middle for exercise. More nurses, fewer patients. I g
ather that Francine had some kind of fancy insurance. They wouldn’t even have treated me except that Thistle implied that I was a cop, injured in the line of duty.
“Where’s my husband?” Francine asks.
“Talking to the police,” I say. “They’ll want to talk to you, too.”
“About what?”
“About why you were locked in a room inside your own house.” I sink into a chair beside her bed.
“Joseph didn’t know the building was going to catch fire,” Francine says. “He was just trying to keep me safe.”
Against all odds, she is safe. The doctors have reset her broken bones, and thanks to the wet towel, she didn’t inhale as much smoke as me.
“I’m not interested in arguing about the kind of man your husband is,” I say. “I want you to tell me where Shannon is.”
“I already told you. On Monday he dropped off some laundry—”
“And then he picked it up again. Didn’t he?”
Francine says nothing.
“When I visited your house the first time,” I say, “I didn’t see a bag of clothes. Either dirty or clean. And the washing machine wasn’t running. You don’t have an outdoor clothesline. Therefore, he came back.”
“He’s my son,” Francine said. “Please. I can’t help you.”
“If the police find him, he’ll be arrested,” I say. “If someone else finds him, things could be much worse. Next time it might be him trapped in a burning building. Or beaten to death by an angry mob.”
“I don’t know where he is.” She says this as though she’s trying to convince me it’s the end of the matter.
“But you do know something,” I say. “Don’t you?”
She looks away, tears sparkling in her eyes.
“I saved your life,” I add. “Are you gonna help me save Shannon’s? Or are you happy to let him die?”
“He needed a ride,” she says quietly.
I sit down next to her. “Where?”
“I picked him up from near his house. He said there was something wrong with his car.”