by Robert Brown
“All right, folks, this is getting downright uncivilized,” Heinrich said. “How about you just let us go and nobody gets hurt, eh?”
If the musclebound Dutchman wielding the medieval polearm understood English, he gave no indication. Instead, he let out a bellow and charged, swinging the halberd in a wide arc.
Heinrich brought up his own halberd and parried the attack. The thick wooden shafts clashed, the force of the impact jarring his limbs. He tried to jab with the point, but the twin heaved on his own weapon and pushed it away.
Heinrich jumped back and freed his weapon just in time to turn and skewer the guy running down the stairs with the sword. The tip of the halberd stuck several inches into his chest, stopping only when it reached the broad axe head and hammer that composed the rest of the weapon. Heinrich turned to the twin just in time to see the guy’s own axe head coming down at him.
He parried at the last moment, yanking the spike out of the man on the stairs and raising the shaft of his halberd over his head. He caught the twin’s halberd by the shaft, but the strength of the blow brought him to his knees.
Heinrich tried to swing the halberd to cut the twin in the side, but his attack was stopped short when the butt of the shaft struck the stairs. The twin raised his halberd again. With a sickening realization, Heinrich realized he would not be able to stop another blow like the last two. In his mind’s eye, he saw his arms buckle and that heavy blade cleave into his skull.
Fuck that, he thought as he launched himself at the twin. He held the shaft of his halberd crossways and got the twin right across the stomach.
His opponent doubled over, the blade of his halberd striking the stairs, the shaft smacking Heinrich in the back.
They rolled on the floor, both dropping their polearms. Heinrich got up first and stomped on his opponent’s face.
Instinct learned from years of boxing practice made him duck. The other twin’s fist whipped past, the gleaming brass knuckles missing by barely an inch.
Heinrich gave the guy a sharp jab to the stomach, which accomplished nothing, then backpedaled to avoid another swing from the brass knuckles. His opponent’s brother, still on the ground, tripped him up and Heinrich landed on the suit of armor.
The hard edges of an armored shoulder jabbed his sides. He rolled over it and grabbed the nearest thing he could.
It turned out to be an iron helmet. Not the best weapon with which to face an enraged man-mountain with brass knuckles, but it sure stopped the guy cold when Heinrich smacked him across the face with it.
The twin fell next to his brother. Both were hurt but not out. Heinrich gave them each a rap on the head with the helmet, denting what was no doubt a priceless antique but probably saving him from being torn limb from limb in the next couple of minutes.
Then he saw a sight that destroyed what little remaining faith he had in humanity.
Casey was running up the stairs, clutching a wailing Arizona to her chest and shouting, “Anders, save us!”
“You gotta be fucking kidding me,” Heinrich growled.
Heinrich ran after them, grabbing the dead guy’s sword as he passed. He caught them at the top of the steps.
“Where do you think you’re going?”
“Let go of me! You have no right to kidnap us.”
“Jesus Christ, woman. Your kid is being used for weird-ass porn and you’re wailing about being forced to leave?”
“Don’t call me a woman, you murderer!”
“Right, you’re not a woman even though you have a uterus,” Heinrich grumbled as he pulled her down the stairs, taking care not to make her fall and drop the kid. “I wish I had been born in a different century.”
“You should have been, you poster child for toxic masculinity!”
There’s a dead body on the stairs and she’s talking identity politics? Do these people ever shut up?
The twins were just coming to when he passed. Heinrich was tempted to clonk them over the head again with the helmet, but figured they wouldn’t be on their feet for another minute or two. Besides, Casey would try to run away as soon as he let go of her. And he couldn’t use the sword on helpless men—even helpless men who would gladly have done the same to him. Despite what Casey said, killing left him queasy. He hated the fact that a man lay dead because of him. The fact that he’d had no choice in the matter didn’t really help.
He pushed Casey out the front door. The guy he had knocked out at the gatehouse staggered into view, took one look at Heinrich’s sword, and ran back into the gatehouse.
“Smart move!” Heinrich shouted after him.
Running around the corner of the castle, they came to the cars, all parked in a row. Casey was still swearing at him and Arizona had been bawling since the fight on the stairs. Heinrich suspected that Casey hadn’t covered her eyes during the fight like he’d told her to do. He suspected that she never did anything a man told her to do unless money was involved.
Heinrich tried the keys on the first car he came to. No go. At the second car, he got lucky. He opened it, pushed Casey and her daughter into the back seat, and got into the front seat.
Then he had to spring out again as Casey got out of the car.
“Quit screwing around!” he shouted.
“Mommy, let’s go! I don’t want to be here,” Arizona cried.
Heinrich wasn’t sure if it was her daughter’s pleading or the dangerous look on his face that convinced Casey to get back in the car, but get back in she did.
“Buckle up,” he said, turning the ignition.
He pulled around the castle and came to the front. The twins were just staggering out the front door, too late to stop him. He revved the engine and drove through the gatehouse.
“Don’t worry,” he told his passengers. “We’ll stop at the nearest town and go straight to the police station. In less than an hour, we’ll be safe.”
Then something he saw told him it wasn’t going to be so simple.
The watchman hadn’t run off; he’d gone into the gatehouse to raise the drawbridge. As they pulled into the gatehouse, they saw the wooden drawbridge slowly rising.
“Fuck it,” Heinrich said. “Hold on!”
He gunned the engine and sped through the gatehouse, nearly knocking over the watchman, who leaped out of the way at the last moment.
The car hit the drawbridge with a bang, shot up the incline, and flew into the air.
Someone was screaming in the back seat. Actually, it sounded like both of them back there were screaming. In fact, someone was screaming in the front seat, too. Heinrich forgave himself.
The car slammed down on the gravel driveway. Both his passengers bounced up and hit their heads on the ceiling. Once again, Casey hadn’t listened to him. He’d buckled up, though, so he was fine. But was the car? He gritted his teeth as he picked up speed, trying to hear, over Casey’s swearing and Arizona’s wailing, whether a tire had blown out or if there was any trouble with the engine.
After a mile of tearing down the country road, Heinrich hadn’t detected anything wrong with the car. He let out a sigh of relief. “Looks like we’re home free.”
He looked in the rearview mirror. Casey glared back at him, cradling her weeping daughter.
“Is she hurt?” he asked.
“Just a bump on the head. She’ll be fine, no thanks to you.”
“No thanks to you, either. Anders was putting her in your damn movies.”
“That’s a lie. Who told you that?”
“Arizona.”
“Bullshit.”
“Ask her.”
But Arizona was too traumatized to say anything.
They drove for a while, the only sound being Arizona’s sobbing.
The country road soon branched into two. A sign indicated two towns that Heinrich had never heard of, one in each direction. He chose a direction at random.
Heinrich kept checking the rearview mirror but didn’t see any signs of pursuit. While he hoped he had gotten enough of a lead
to shake them, he drove as fast as the gravel lane would allow.
After another couple of miles, they came to a highway. “Thank God,” Heinrich muttered, driving onto it.
As soon as he did, he saw a sign indicating that Amsterdam was only thirty kilometers away. While he was tempted to get off at the next exit, where he saw a small town that no doubt would have some police, he decided to return to the big city. He wanted to get as much distance between Arizona and those freaks as possible, and he wanted to make sure his hotel room was secure. Plus, he’d had many dealings with small-town cops. A foreign private detective carrying a sword in a stolen car with a woman in bondage gear saying that she and her daughter had been kidnapped would not go over well. The cops in Amsterdam would be more used to bizarre cases.
Heinrich tried his cell phone and found that the battery was dead. “Damn.”
He’d just have to deal with the cops in person.
They entered the city. Heinrich decided to go to the hotel first. His clothes were filthy, his shoes were covered in mud, and his shirt and pants still smelled of urine. Going to the cops looking like that would probably not be a good idea. Sure, these were Amsterdam cops, but they were still cops.
After several false turns, and after asking for directions from a pedestrian who stared at Casey the entire time, Heinrich found the hotel. He parked around the corner, then turned to face Casey, who sat sullenly in the back seat.
“OK, this is how it’s going to work. Did you see that hotel we passed? I’m going to walk there with Arizona. I’m in Room 41. You come in after a minute and join us. If we all three walk in together, the people at the front desk will freak.”
“Screw them.”
“Bondage gear isn’t appropriate clothing in the middle of a city in broad daylight while walking with a child,” Heinrich said with as much patience as he could muster.
“What are they going to do, call the cops? You’re going to call the cops anyway.”
Arizona had been quiet throughout all this. She had stopped crying a few miles back. At last she spoke. “I want to go with him,” she said softly.
“He’s a bad man,” Casey told her daughter.
“No. Anders is a bad man.”
The little girl’s words put a chill through the car. For a moment, there was silence.
It turned out Casey was the only one who didn’t feel it.
“He’s treated us well,” she said with a dismissive air.
“I’m taking Arizona,” Heinrich said. “You can join me. Room 41. Give us a couple of minutes’ lead time.”
To his surprise, Casey didn’t argue. He stowed the sword out of sight, tried to make himself as presentable as possible, and gathered up Arizona from the back seat.
“That’s OK, I can walk,” the little girl said.
“You’ve been very brave through all this,” he replied, taking her hand.
Heinrich tensed as they walked down the street. He felt like all eyes were on them. The rational part of his mind told him that nobody was paying the least bit of attention. Generally, people remained in their own little worlds, and it took a lot for them to wake up. A man in filthy clothes walking with a little girl in pajamas wasn’t enough to do that if the little girl was chatting merrily away. However, if they’d been accompanied by a woman in an S&M outfit, that would have been a bit too much.
“Is my daddy at the hotel? I really miss him.”
“He’s in New York but we can talk to him on Skype. He’s really missed you, too. Your daddy told me all about you and said you were a very good little girl.”
“I miss my sister too, even though she’s stinky sometimes. Is she OK?”
“Your dad is taking good care of her.”
“Is this the hotel? It looks nice. Is there a pool? Can we go swimming?”
“No pool, sorry. There’s satellite TV, though. You can get your favorite channels from back in the States.”
“Cool! Dutch TV is OK but I don’t understand it. It’s funny to see your favorite shows in Dutch, isn’t it?”
“Sure is.”
Heinrich never ceased to marvel at how quickly kids could adjust. This girl had been bawling her eyes out for the past hour, and with good reason, but now that she was away from the castle and going to speak with her father, she was bubbly and skipping along.
It was a good thing, too, because no one batted an eye as Heinrich and Arizona walked through the hotel’s front lobby. Heinrich realized he hadn’t once looked behind him to see if Casey was following, and found that he didn’t much care.
Jan had adjusted quickly, too. Heinrich had met him on a case in Poland, where the young teenager had dealt with a shitty home life by joining a group of Nazi skinheads, getting into fights, and taking any drug on which he could lay his hands. Now the kid had grown his hair out, wasn’t sniffing glue anymore, and was back in school. Jan still got in fights sometimes and talked back to the monitors and teachers, but he was well on his way to being a normal, happy kid—something he had never been.
They got to Heinrich’s room, which, to his relief, he found untouched. He plunked Arizona down on the end of the bed in front of the TV, turned it to an American kids’ channel, and fired up his laptop.
He tried to Skype Brixton Murphy but found he was offline. Oh well. Heinrich sent Brixton an email saying that he had found Casey and Arizona and that he was going to call the police.
He was about to do that when Casey walked through the door. She didn’t knock, just walked in like she owned the place.
“The guy at the front desk gave me a funny look.”
“Considering what you’re wearing I’m not surprised. No one saw you come in here, did they?”
“No. The hall was empty. You don’t have to worry about your mundane little reputation.”
“Hi, Mommy. We’re going to talk to Daddy on Skype.”
Mommy didn’t reply. Instead, she went to the mini refrigerator beside the TV and removed a couple of little bottles—a whiskey and a vodka.
“Mixing drinks is always a bad idea,” Heinrich said.
Casey ignored him like she ignored her daughter.
Heinrich decided that before he called the cops, he’d better check out what was on those portable hard drives. Turning the laptop away from Arizona’s view and making sure the sound was off, he inserted one of the drives into his USB port.
He came across several movie files. Heinrich started going through them while Arizona watched TV and Casey worked her way through the bar.
The files were all movie clips. Some showed Casey at work, while others were obviously backgrounds to insert into the green screen. They showed blasted landscapes of volcanic rock or fields of fire with demons dancing around them. They looked like they had been taken from feature films. The quality was certainly better than what Anders was making.
“Is my Daddy online?”
Without Heinrich hearing her, Arizona had walked up behind him while he watched her mother whip the shit out of some fat naked guy. Heinrich hurried to minimize the file.
“Oh, don’t worry, I’ve seen Mommy do her movies before.”
“Really?”
“I’m bringing her up with a healthy view of sexuality,” Casey said, slurring her words.
“This isn’t healthy sex,” Heinrich replied.
“Don’t be so traditional.”
“Arizona, could you go back and watch TV? Your daddy isn’t online right now but I’ve sent him an email telling him you’re safe.”
“OK.” Arizona went back to the bed.
Heinrich inserted another USB drive and started searching through more file. To his disgust, he found what he was looking for.
Anders had used the green screen to splice Arizona into a scene with her mother and some gimp. They stood in what looked like a medieval torture chamber—perhaps the one in the castle that Anders had threatened him with. The man was on his knees and was bound in black leather straps from head to toe. Casey was whipping him from o
ne side and Arizona from the other. Anders had done a good job with the green screen; it really looked like the girl was in the same room as the male victim.
It was all Heinrich could do to not punch the computer screen.
“Casey, could you come over here, please?” he asked softly.
His tone kept Casey from making one of her usual obnoxious replies. She moved behind him to see the screen.
A choke and a sob escaped her throat. Heinrich looked up at her. Casey’s face was a collapsing facade of drunken shock, fear, and utter regret.
You’re finally acting like a mother, Heinrich wanted to say. Too late, though. How much of this shit is already for sale?
He got no pleasure from showing her that he was right. It only made him feel ill.
Casey sank down on the end of the bed and gave her daughter a big hug. Arizona hugged her back.
“It’s OK, Mommy. We’re away from them now.”
Heinrich wondered what else the hard drive might contain. He fired a priority email to Biniam. “You mentioned once that you could find hidden files on a hard drive, right?”
The message came back a moment later. “Sure. You want me to check that portable hard drive you just plugged into your laptop?”
Heinrich stared at his screen for a moment, then typed, “Fuck you, Biniam.”
He got a series of smiling emojis in response.
“Yes, please check,” Heinrich typed, shaking his head.
“Give me five minutes.”
Heinrich set his laptop on the dresser and turned to Casey. He put a hand on her shoulder. “I’m going to shower and change. Then we’re going to call the police, all right?”
Casey nodded, tears in her eyes.
Heinrich took a long, hot shower and changed into clean clothes. He couldn’t wash the dirt out of his memory, though. At least it was over. He’d call the cops and hand over the evidence. They’d take care of Anders and his crew. Meanwhile, Heinrich could fly Arizona and Casey back to the States. Maybe the police would want Casey to stay for a while as a witness. If so, Brixton could fly over and pick up his daughter. Considering the circumstances, he was sure to get custody. Either way, Heinrich was done with this case—and good riddance.
