by Todd Borg
The man lifted his radio to his mouth and appeared to say something, although I couldn’t hear it. Next to me, Spot lay motionless but for his nostrils and ears. He stared toward the man, assessing with dog perception. Could he smell him? Could he pick up information beyond what I could see in my binoculars?
Another man emerged through a different door. He looked equally fit and was dressed the same. He walked over to the man with the karambit knife. They spoke. The second man stepped up on the platform and looked over the fence. As he stepped up, I saw that he too had a gun, this one in a belt holster, parked right behind his radio. I didn’t see a knife, karambit style or otherwise.
Despite the weaponry, I had nothing on them. Until I could see a boy and determine he was being held against his wishes, I had no ethical justification to intervene. Add to that the knowledge that if I did intervene, these guys would likely cut my head off, shoot my dog, and drop us in the lake or off the side of a mountain. It was hard to muster any desire to polish my armor, saddle my steed, and rush in to save the world.
There was another sound. Incredibly, a third man, similarly dressed and armed, appeared back by the garage. He carried a small rifle outfitted with a serious scope. He too looked like a fitness model, hard body, stylized hair shaped with gel, muscular walk. The three men together telegraphed private death squad for hire. The third man looked around the landscape as if scanning for intruders.
I remembered watching Vince take three men up the mountain. One had slid and tumbled into a ravine at very high speed. Vince and I had both assumed he’d died. The remaining two men must have thought so as well, as they had been lifted off the mountain by helicopter. The helicopter pilot had later been found dead. Yet now there was once again three men.
One man went inside, and the other two walked along the fence, down the driveway, eventually disappearing out of sight.
I pet Spot to keep him from getting frustrated with being motionless and silent. As if bored now that the men had gone inside, Spot yawned, long and wide, his giant tongue extending and retracting.
“The trouble with stakeouts, largeness,” I whispered, “is the boredom. It helps to imagine a big turkey breast on the barbecue, sizzling and popping. Doesn’t that help?”
He yawned again. Then I yawned. Scientists have demonstrated that dogs catch yawning from people. Or maybe it’s people who catch yawning from dogs.
Fifteen minutes later, I gave up and was turning to leave my observation hideout when Spot’s ears twitched again. Then came a noise loud enough for me to hear. I turned back and saw an open door.
A young girl came out. She was small, thin, prepubescent. She paused, squinting in the bright sun and holding her right hand up to shade her eyes. One of the men I’d seen earlier - the man with the most hair gel - followed, prodding the kid with his finger to the girl’s back. The girl didn’t move. The man behind her pushed her hard enough that she was knocked forward, stumbling for several steps.
“Ouch! Stop that! No matter how much you abuse me, I still can’t help you!”
I wanted to charge over the fence and tackle the man. But that would probably get both me and the girl killed.
The girl said, “You can’t just hit me!”
“Yeah, I can. You’re my prisoner.”
The girl walked across the yard. She was slight of build and walked with a fluid movement reminiscent of a cat. She had her shirt tails untucked, and she’d taken the front two and tied them together at her waist. She was about the size of Paco Ipar, a kid I’d helped rescue from killers who targeted him for being Basque. I recalled Paco as being 10 years old. This girl seemed like that. Vince and Brie said Jon was almost 12. Maybe the kidnappers had taken multiple kids. Or maybe this lodge and kid had nothing to do with Jon’s kidnappers.
The man behind the girl said, “Why do you walk like that?” With his stylish dress, the man reminded me of a James Bond bad guy. He may have been a Swedish prison gang member, but he sounded like he was born and raised in South Dakota. I wondered what his connection was to the Brotherhood gang.
I cupped my ears with my hands to hear better.
“Walk like what?” the girl said.
“Like a girl. Boys should stand up tall and rugged. Like they’re strong and in control. But you tie your shirttails up like a girly blouse. And you walk like a girl. Why would a boy want to act like a girl?”
The child didn’t respond immediately.
I tried to figure it out. Was the man confused about the kid? Or was the kid not a girl but a boy? I remembered that Vince had said something that suggested his son Jon wasn’t the masculine boy he wanted. Vince thought his son acted feminine.
The kid said, “I don’t act like a girl. I am a girl.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
The child had a soft voice, high-pitched but not especially so. There was a preciseness to her words. Her simple declaration that she was a girl carried a strong sense of self-esteem and confidence. I’d never before heard anyone of that young age make such a statement. Our perception of gender is so central to how we think of a person that it’s startling to consider questioning what we think. Yet the child’s conviction seemed clear. And it matched what I thought from the moment she walked out of the house.
I pulled out my phone and took some pictures.
The guard’s pejorative view of the feminine aspect to her clothes was ironic because the guard and his colleagues were wearing matching outfits suitable for a precision dance troupe - male or female. And this man had spent more time on his hair gel than most women did styling their hair. How could he express displeasure about this girl paying attention to her clothes and tying up her shirt tails when he and his pals had put so much thought into their appearance?
“They said your name’s Jon,” the man said.
“I’m changing it to Jonni,” the child said. “Not spelled with a Y like the boy Johnny, but the girl Jonni. With an I. J-O-N-N-I.”
“I get it,” the guard said. “You like boys. You’re just another gay boy.”
The kid paused. “I like boys. But it’s not because I’m gay. I like boys because I’m a girl. Maybe not on the outside. But on the inside, I’m a girl.”
“You’ll never convince anyone of that,” the man said. “It’s totally obvious you’re a boy. Everyone would think so. And yeah, I see the lipstick. But that’s not going to fool anyone.”
Despite my distance, I could see Jonni frown. “I’m experimenting,” Jonni said.
“So that explains the curled hair. It was straight yesterday. How’d you do that?”
“There are pens in the desk in the room. I got my hair wet and wrapped it around the pens. The pen clips are like bobby pins.”
“It’s just play, kid. You’ll grow up and realize you’re just confused.”
“I’m not confused.”
It was impressive that Jonni didn’t act scared. Maybe she’d gone through so much grief in school that an armed guard wasn’t intimidating.
“You’re ridiculous,” the guard said.
Eventually, Jonni spoke, “If I spoke Russian, and you didn’t understand me, would you think I was ridiculous? Or would you just think I was different?”
There was a pause as if the man needed a moment to understand what Jonni had said. “You don’t know anything,” the man finally said.
“I know I’m a girl.”
“Take my advice, kid. All this kind of stuff they show on TV is sick. You should forget about it and just be happy with the way you were born. I’m happy with the way I was born.”
“Aren’t you lucky,” Jonni said.
“It’s not luck. It’s recognizing who you are and where you belong, not wishing for some other fantasy world where things are easy. Let me tell you something, kid. Life can be hard for boys and men. We don’t get to take it easy like girls. Men have to do the hard work. So why don’t you man up and face reality, face the hard work?”
“You think treating me like a prisoner is hard
work?”
“Watch your mouth kid, or I’ll toss you off the mountainside. We’re out here for your exercise, so go run around or whatever you do.”
“Run around?” Jonni said. “Like in circles? I don’t think so.”
“Or maybe you don’t exercise. Maybe you just play with dolls.” The man’s tone was scornful.
“In the summer, I skate, and in the winter, I ski. I can probably do both better than you.”
“You mean, you skate in the winter.”
“No, I mean in the summer. Rollerblades. Inline skating.”
“Oh, those skates with four wheels all in a row.”
“Yeah. But mostly I just write code.”
“What’s that mean?”
Jonni didn’t immediately respond. “Computer code. I’m learning to write apps for phones.”
“Do you know how phones work?” the man asked.
“How they work? Smartphones are computers. Really complicated computers. Asking how they work is like asking… I don’t know… How spaceships work. It’s not something with a simple answer.”
“Well, if you write apps, maybe you can fix my phone.”
“It depends. If you broke the glass, I can’t fix it. If you’ve gotten stuck in a coding fault, I can’t fix that, either. I don’t really know a lot beyond the basics. If you’ve got spaghetti code, I get as lost as anyone.”
“All I know is I tried to watch this video last night and it froze my phone. I can’t get calls, emails, nothing.”
“Did you reboot?” Jonni asked.
“You mean turning it off? Sure. Just like they told me. Hit the button to turn it off. Then hit the button to turn it on. I get the start screen or whatever you call it. But when I press the little symbols, nothing happens.”
“Have you charged it?”
“Yeah. Plugged it in all night.”
“Maybe your video downloaded some malware.” Jonni paused, then said, “I could look at it.”
Jonni immediately sounded different. I thought I detected a calculating tone. “A kid in school showed me a phone hack,” Jonni said.
“Hacking means breaking into the phone, right?” the man said.
“Sometimes. It’s mostly just doing things in different ways. I’m going to summer school. The focus is computers. We get these rotating teachers who come through the classroom. Business people. One of the teachers said that even though everyone opens a can from the top, you can open a can from the bottom, too. Same thing with turning a phone on. I could try it. But it might mess up your phone.”
“How? Could I still get phone calls?”
“Maybe. I don’t know. I’m just saying that when you do stuff on a computer, you can’t always back-button your way out. There could be, like, permanent consequences.”
“Consequences. Is that what happens with boys who want to be girls? They start using words like consequences?”
Jonni looked down at the ground. Her shoulders hunched up and shook. Even from my distance, her body language telegraphed major tension and stress.
“Oh, now you’re gonna cry,” the man said. “I can’t believe this. What kind of a wimpy girl-wannabe are you?”
Jonni seemed to melt, sagging down until she was sitting on the dirt. The man’s extreme loutish insensitivity was an assault, and I felt a powerful sympathy for the girl, a kid who was being nice and offering to help. I wanted to charge over the fence and grab the man and shake him. An adult who bullies a child commits an unforgivable crime against the child’s soul. Anyone can see that a child, even if they get past it, never loses those scars.
The man seemed to look up as if rolling his eyes and sighing. He turned, looked out at the lake, turned back.
“Anyway, my phone is worthless to me now,” the man said. “So if you want to look at it, go ahead.” He pulled his phone out of his pocket and held it out.
It was a long moment before Jonni spoke. She reached up to her eyes and wiped away tears, her fingertips tracing her bottom lids. Most boys wipe tears with the heels of their palms. Most girls use their fingertips. It’s not something that kids analyze.
“It would take some time,” Jonni said, “’cause I’d have to figure stuff out. It would help if I had my own phone. I could Google some workarounds.”
“Sorry. The boss has it. Doesn’t trust you with it.”
“I think I can do a forced shutdown and reboot with a certain sequence of the buttons.” Jonni looked around the small, mountaintop yard. She pointed to a tree near the fence. “I could sit there in the shade and work on your phone.”
The man looked at the tree and then around at the yard. I guessed that he wasn’t worried about Jonni causing a problem or climbing over the barbed-wire-topped fence and escaping. I think the man was worried that his comrades would question whether he was doing his job if his charge was sitting and looking at his phone instead of chasing a Frisbee or whatever they envisioned.
“Okay,” he said. “But I have a schedule. I have to bring you inside in fifteen minutes.”
Jonni reached out and took his phone. She stood up. “Is this password protected?” Jonni asked.
“No, it’s steel-protected.” The guard made a quick-draw motion toward his belt and pulled out his karambit knife in a flash of movement. His forefinger was in the circular finger hole, and he held the knife up so the blade flashed in the sunlight.
Jonni flinched from the sudden motion.
The man’s schoolyard-bully style was so revolting, I could barely sit still.
Like an old-west gunslinger, the guard shifted his grip on the curved, wicked knife and spun the knife around his finger in a blur, four or five rotations. Then he once again grabbed the grip in the meat of his hand. He made a punching, stabbing motion with the blade.
Jonni cowered from the man.
The man was slipping the knife back into the holster on his thigh when he jerked.
“Dammit!” He grabbed at his thumb with his other hand. The man raised his hand as if to get a closer look and released his grip on the knife.
“Ow!” he yelled, his voice high.
I could see the blood spurting from where I sat.
He grabbed again at his thumb and bent down, holding his wounded hand to his stomach. He was panicked.
Jonni ran over. “Stop moving and lift your hands above your head.”
The man ignored her. He was still bent, shaking his hands. Blood sprayed from his motions.
“Listen to me!” Jonni said. “I’m going to be a doctor when I grow up, so I know what I’m talking about! Stop shaking your hands. Sit down.” She pulled at his clothes, dragging him down until he was sitting on the ground, leaning back against the outer wall of the lodge.
“Now raise your arms above your head.” She lifted on his arms.
He did as instructed.
“You’ve cut your thumb artery. It’s small, but it bleeds a lot. Having your hands above your head will reduce the blood pressure to the wound. Now we need a compress. A strip of fabric. I can cut a piece from your shirt. Is that okay? I’ll have to use your knife.”
The man nodded. Even from my distance I could see that he was shaking with fear from the sight of his own blood. I thought of charging the fence and grabbing Jonni. But there were still two other men nearby. The wounded man would call them on his radio.
Jonni reached down and pulled the knife from its holster. She stretched his shirt out from his body and used the knife to cut the front of it off. She laid the fabric on the ground, cut three strips, and set the knife down.
“I have to go inside and get one of these wet so we can clean the wound. Is that okay? I’ll be back in a minute.”
He nodded.
Jonni grabbed the strips and ran inside. A minute later she was back. She stood next to him and reached for his hands. I couldn’t see the details of her movements. But in a few minutes, she had his thumb and hand wrapped and bandaged. She’d wiped away much of the blood. She had him continue to hold his hands abo
ve his head. She put her hands on his arm, just below his elbow.
“The Brachial Artery is deep in your arm,” she said. “It branches just below the inside of the elbow. One of the branches is the Radial Artery where you feel your pulse in your wrist. It goes to your thumb. I’m applying pressure to the Radial Artery to shut off the blood flow.”
“You must know a lot about this,” he said.
“Three-step standard procedure,” she said. “A compress on the wound. Elevate the wound. Apply pressure to the artery upstream.”
“What do I do next?”
“You should go to a doctor.”
“What if I don’t? Will I bleed to death?”
“I doubt it. We’ve stopped the bleeding. If you stay like this, the clotting will continue. Unless you’re taking an anti-clotting medicine. Are you on aspirin?”
“No.”
“Good. After maybe ten minutes, you can move around, but you’ll still have to keep your arm elevated. Whatever you do, don’t remove the compress or the strip bandage holding it in place. If you do, it will tear open the wound again. By tomorrow, you should soak the bandage to loosen the dried blood. Very gently wash the wound, then re-bandage it. Do that for at least five days. If you do as I say, you’ll probably heal okay. But I still think you should see a doctor. Now I need you to apply pressure to the artery. Do you see how I’m squeezing your arm?”
“Yeah.”
“Do that with your other hand.”
He did as she said.
“Okay, hold that position for ten minutes. Now I’ll see what I can do about your phone.”
She picked up his phone and walked away, taking slow, deliberate steps. When Jonni was ten feet away, she turned and walked to the tree. She sat down on the ground, back to the tree, eyes on the guard. Slowly, she turned her attention to the phone. From my angle, I could see her better than the guard could. With the help of my binoculars, I saw that she held the phone for a minute and then began tapping with her thumbs and swiping at the screen. The guard watched Jonni for a bit. From his position, he probably couldn’t see her finger motion on the screen. It would just look like she was still holding the phone. The guard turned and looked toward where the other men had walked. He was probably embarrassed about cutting himself with his knife.
