by Jack Hardin
“Were you?”
“Yes. I was telling her how you got me that box of chocolates last week. I miss you,” she said. “Where have you been?”
Grooming another girl in Fort Lauderdale and another in Kendall. “My mother has been sick,” he replied. “The flu or something. I’ve had to watch after her.”
“I’m sorry. You’re good to take care of her.”
“She’s better now. Who’s your friend?”
“Oh, this is Carla.” Felipe pulled the van to the sidewalk and left it running as he came around to the other side. Ana reached in and gave him a hug but quickly pulled back. She took a step back and shriveled her nose. “You’ve been smoking. I thought you said you didn’t do that kind of thing?”
“I don’t. I was at a friend’s house.”
“It’s on your breath, Jesse.”
Alarm bells were started to sound off in the back of his mind, but he did not currently possess the ability to act on them properly. His eyes drooped a little. Benito’s stuff was still working at him. That was exactly why he’d quit smoking weed when he took this job. But when Benito had offered him some a couple of hours ago, it hadn’t seemed like such a bad idea. Nor did lighting up in the van a few minutes ago. He smiled, but it was overdone and looked unnatural. “Okay,” he conceded, “I had a little bit. But it helps me relax, okay? Not a big deal. It’s not like I’m hitting the hard stuff.”
Ana frowned. “You lied to me?”
“No. I didn’t lie to you. Today was the first time in a long time.” That much was true. And the irony was that it was probably the only bit of truth he had ever spoken to her.
“I don’t like you smoking that stuff, Jesse. My old boyfriend did it, and he wasn’t any good.” This received a huff of agreement from her friend, who was looking at him with grating suspicion. He decided immediately that didn’t he like her. And he didn’t like the way Ana had responded to him enjoying a little smoke.
An idea suddenly burst through the haze like a rising sun on a foggy morning. The metal cylinder containing the knockout gas was still in the van. He hadn’t taken it out since they last used it last week. The gas mask was under his seat. The look of betrayal and disgust on Ana’s face was beginning to annoy him. Her voice was suddenly whiny, and, while her looks were striking, he was tired of her. The thought of spending a few more weeks grooming her now seemed about as fun as hanging out at the old bus stop.
He could end this. Right now.
He looked afresh at Ana’s friend. She wasn’t bad either. A little on the plump side. But some men preferred that. He turned to the van and opened the side door, then gestured with his hand. “How about I take you both to dinner? Where do you want to go?”
“Really?” Ana perked up, seeming to forget all about the last minute of conversation. She bit down on her bottom lip and peered up at him with large, pleading eyes. “Could you take us somewhere downtown?”
“Sure I can. Get on in.”
“Okay!” Much to Felipe’s delight, Ana stepped toward the van. She ducked her head and had just set her foot on the inside step when her friend grabbed her shirt and pulled her back. “What are you doing?” Ana snapped.
Her friend was shaking her head. “I don’t want to go anywhere with him.”
“But it’s Jesse. You know him. I’ve told you about him.”
The friend’s face was severe now, and she looked Felipe directly in the eyes as she spoke. “I don’t like him. Something isn’t right.”
“What are you talking about, Carla?” Ana reached out and ran the tips of her fingers down Felipe’s forearm. “He’s fine.”
Felipe made a quick glance down both ends of the empty street. Ana’s fingers were still resting on his skin when he chose to act. He reached for her, grabbing her by the shoulders and thrusting her toward the open door of the van. She wasn’t expecting the sudden act of violence, and she went easily, tumbling onto the cracked vinyl of the front rear seat. She yelled out in a confused medley of both pain and anger, but Felipe paid her no attention. He had already turned his attention to her friend.
Carla’s eyes were wide with fear, and Felipe could see the panicked indecision in them as she wavered between defending herself against him or trying to save her friend. He didn’t wait. He reached out and snatched her by the hair. Carla cried out, and as he pulled her toward the curb, she shot a foot out, catching him just below the kneecap. A burst of heat exploded inside his leg, and he released his grip on her hair. But, much to his surprise, the pain subsided as quickly as it came, allowing him to regain his focus.
Carla had taken advantage of the tiny window of time to slip behind Felipe. She was at the door of the van now, reaching through as she screamed at her friend to grab her hand.
She was right where Felipe wanted her to be.
He shoved Carla with both hands, and she fell forward. Her face smacked into the floor of the van, and Ana screamed as Felipe grabbed Carla’s feet, which were still floundering outside of the door, and tried to push her the rest of the way in.
Felipe had been grooming Ana for nearly two months now. All along she had displayed the textbook qualities that revealed her as the perfect girl for him to choose. She was naïve, lonely, and with no family to speak of, alarm bells wouldn’t sound too loudly when she turned up missing.
Felipe was tall, his hands strong, and under normal circumstances, the girls would have been no match for him. But these were not normal circumstances. The second joint he had relished not thirty minutes before made his movements sloppy and languid, and he was slow to notice Ana leaning back on the seat before she propelled the heel of her boot into Felipe’s face while he continued his struggle with Carla. The sudden force to his face made him stagger back away from the van, and it gave the girls just enough time to scramble back out to the sidewalk.
Carla opened her hand and slashed haphazardly at Felipe’s face. Her nails caught the flesh at the top of his cheek, and as she pulled down, they raked away the top layer of skin. She followed it up with an angry foot to his groin.
It was in that moment, as his loins took the brunt of the kick, that Felipe realized he had acted rashly. He bent forward, and his eyes bulged in his skull as the pain took over and he tried to breathe through it.
Ana finally found her lungs and pealed off a ragged shriek of a scream, one sharp, elongated note of terror that brought two ladies out of a hair salon at the far end of the street. Carla grabbed Ana’s hand and pulled her away from her wannabe kidnapper. They turned and fled down the street as though they had just flipped to the wrong page in a choose-your-own-adventure novel, only this wasn’t a story about ant people or being lost in the Amazon. No, this was real life, where real men with fake names tried to draw you into their wicked webs.
Felipe watched helplessly after them as he hobbled back to the van. He slammed the side door and, as a middle-aged lady in curlers pointed toward him, he went around to the driver’s side and slid in behind the steering wheel.
As he put the van in gear and sped away, he glanced in the rearview mirror and watched as the girls disappeared around a corner. He hit the steering wheel and cursed loudly. All the work, the dozens of hours he spent trying to win Ana over, they had all been in vain.
The girls would tell the authorities. There were at least two other witnesses to his crippled attempt at an abduction. They would tell the authorities too.
He couldn’t come back here. He would have to forget about Ana and continue his focus on the other girls in his sinister pipeline.
Felipe could feel the pulsating rhythm of his heartbeat, and his chest rose and fell as he tried to catch his breath. The pain around his groin was beginning to ease, and the rush of adrenaline was like a sudden breeze that served to clear some of the lingering haze from his mind.
The light at the next intersection turned red, and he slowed to a stop behind an Altima. Other cars began to slow as well, and they gathered around him. He suddenly felt as though the entire world
was looking at him, that they were privy to his kidnapping attempt and were, at this moment, calling it in to the police. Even the red light up ahead looked like an ominous, all-seeing eye intent on discovering his secrets. He flipped on his turn signal. When the light switched to green and the space widened between the other vehicles, he changed lanes and turned left. He would take the long route home.
Felipe sighed and tried to forget about the last several minutes. He glanced over at the baggie of marijuana that was still resting on the seat next to him and almost reached for it. But he didn’t, choosing instead to roll down his window and let in a humid breeze that was freshened by the ocean beyond.
It was time to paint the van again.
Chapter Seventeen
When Ellie was a little girl, her mother took her two small daughters to a bygone but still functional fire station nestled on the edge of Fort Myers’s industrial district. In the late 1920s, just before the Great Depression began its grand sweep across the country, the city built the narrow station into the corner of a two-story red brick building that had been home to a munitions factory during the first World War. The building’s wooden bi-fold doors were a glossy dark green, and two archways were wide enough for the fire engines to pass through. The old building was nothing if not charming.
Katrina O’Conner had grown up in a bleak and harsh Cold War Russia where happiness, if it was to be had, was found in the little things. Ellie remembered her mother peering inside the red fire engines and watching a fire drill and a demonstration on the fireman’s pole, all the while appearing as enchanted and captivated as her daughters.
She died three months later undergoing an emergency appendectomy, leaving two little girls to face a strident world without her. In the years since, Ellie had stacked up three decades’ worth of memories, all absent of her mother. Even so, it had become her experience that a daughter’s longing for her mother never fully subsided. Her absence, while no longer at the forefront and all-consuming, remained ambient, and, like the air, it covered everything.
It was ten-thirty in the evening. Ellie had spent the last hour observing the old building from a darkened doorway further down the street, away from the revealing glow of a crescent moon. At some point in recent years, when the industrial district began a slow migration into North Fort Myers, the city decided to relocate the fire station a mile west, off Tice Street. Whoever purchased the old building from the city had since swapped the green doors with plain metal ones, and one of the two arches intended for fire truck access was now fully bricked in, as were the windows. The second vehicular entrance, while still in use, was bricked in at the top, an industrial roller door finishing out the lower portion. The street number was hand-painted above the door, but there was no sign to designate which business, if any, worked out of the location.
The entire area felt like a modern-day ghost town, and there were no dark cars parked along the edge of the curb or men in leather jackets smoking outside. Ellie had seen no one, heard nothing. Only two trucks and one car had lumbered by, and the latter, Ellie was fairly certain, had been lost. The streets were empty, their lighting intermittent and poor, setting the deserted intersection into a dingy afterglow.
So far, she saw no indication that anyone was inside. A thin sliver of light shone through the side edge of the roller door, but the door had yet to go up; no one had gone in or come out. Coming here had been a gamble to begin with; she knew there was but the smallest of chances that anything would come of it. It seemed that her final option before reaching a dead end was to ask Jet to look up the name of the building’s new owner. An online search performed a few hours ago had yielded nothing on Breakwater’s ownership either. Jet would need to help with that too.
Ten-thirty gave way to eleven o’clock, and Ellie was considering heading back to her truck when a pair of headlights appeared at the far end of the street. They drew closer, and the vehicle began to slow. It was a white van, and much to Ellie’s satisfaction, the roller door rumbled up, and the van drove in.
Ellie was wearing blue jeans and a dark hoodie over a gray tank top. The hood was already up, but she tucked her hands into her pockets and started to walk. A sheen of yellow light emanated from the open doorway, and she heard the hollow thud of a vehicle door slamming shut inside. She was thirty feet from the entrance when the van reappeared, turned out, and went back down the street before turning at the second intersection and disappearing altogether. Ellie quickened her pace, hoping to get a glimpse inside, but the door rumbled back to life and shuddered down before she had the chance.
She paused at the entrance and set her ear to the door. The light inside was still on, but she heard nothing and was unable to determine whether there was anyone inside. A new set of headlights emerged down the street, and she was forced to start walking again. She drew up at the end of the block and waited. The vehicle turned before it reached her, and Ellie was about to go back when, from a rooftop across the street, a brief glint of reflective light suddenly activated her defensive instincts. She slipped around the corner and set her back to the wall.
The building directly across from the old fire station had been home to a fiberglass factory for nearly six decades before getting bought out by a conglomerate that uprooted the operation to New England. Now the massive structure was nothing but an empty shell. Along the entire perimeter, the top edge was lined with rows of casement windows, some broken, all of them dusty and opaque from years of neglect.
Someone was on its roof.
Ellie cautiously peered around the corner and looked up. She could just make out the head of a darkened figure over the roof’s parapet wall.
The glint of light told her they had a lens, and whether it belonged to a rifle scope or a camera, she was unable to say. Whatever the case, they certainly weren’t there for her; she didn’t tell anyone she was coming here, and she had already exposed herself by walking down the street and pressing her ear to the door.
She stayed out of sight and jogged down the street, away from the factory and fire station. After putting two blocks behind her and turning south again, she finally made her way to the back side of the old factory, still a block away from where she had been two minutes earlier. Staying close to the wall, Ellie quietly tested steel doors along the perimeter until she found one that opened to her. She stepped inside.
She waited while her eyes adjusted to the darkness and gathered in what little light pierced through the upper row of windows. A wide, empty floor was open before her, punctuated only by steel support columns that rose like naked sentries in the musty air. Working on the assumption that whoever was on the roof might have a lookout below, Ellie stepped into the shadow of the outer wall and quietly worked her way to the other end, where she finally made out the skeleton of a staircase zig-zagging up the wall.
She padded quietly across the concrete while scanning the floor and the staircase for another figure. Seeing nothing alarming, she placed a foot on the bottom rung and slowly set her weight into it. It was solid. She moved up to the next step, careful of the speed at which she advanced. The last thing she wanted was for a temperamental step to belie her presence with a raucous squeak.
Finally arriving at the top landing, she moved to the far end where three more steps led to the roof hatch directly above. Her orientation informed her that when she opened the hatch, she would be facing whoever was on the roof, assuming they were still there and hadn’t altered their position. She set her fingertips against the metal and held her breath as she pressed upward.
The figure—clearly a man by his countenance: tall, strong legs, and wide shoulders—was stationed at a four-foot parapet not five yards in front of her. He was wearing blue jeans and a black long-sleeved t-shirt; a dark ball cap sat atop his head. He was on a knee, looking over the wall. Ellie couldn’t see what he was looking through, but she relaxed as she saw that his body positioning did not speak to a rifle or a gun. His shoulders were too straight, and whatever was clasped in his hands was
too close to his face.
She continued observing from her concealed position and soon heard a series of muffled clicks. The man stepped back, and when he shifted around, the moonlight’s silvery glow caught him along his cheek.
It was Jet.
Chapter Eighteen
During the three-hour ride across the Everglades, Felipe smoked half a pack of cigarettes and emptied all the tequila from his tall flask. He felt good now, as the double-duty buzz produced by both the alcohol and the nicotine surfed through his bloodstream. He closed his eyes and leaned his head back against the headrest, glad that he didn’t have to drive to their destination.
He couldn’t remember his driver’s name or where he had seen him before. But his white pants and shirt, stained with half a dozen colors of paint, gave away his skill set. As did the paint cans in the back of the van. During the last half an hour, neither had spoken a word.
The driver took the next exit off the highway and slowed at a stop sign. He turned right and continued down an empty road that led to a cluster of buildings in the distance. The area was familiar to Felipe; he had been here many times before. More than he would like to recall. The van completed a final turn, slowed, and pulled through the vehicle entrance. The high ceiling of the old building was fifty feet above. The scars along the upper perimeter of the wall could still be seen from where the second floor had been secured decades before. But it was gone now. Other than a half wall near the back, the place was a hollow shell.
Felipe hadn’t been here in a couple of weeks, not since Cruz decided to use an alternate location for their staging area. But he was surprised to see that it had been emptied so quickly. A few panels of sheetrock lay against the bare bricks of the outer wall. All the shelves, previously filled with equipment and supplies, save for a few paint cans, were empty too.
Felipe got out of the van and noticed his driver was still buckled, his hand on the gear shift. “You getting out?” he asked.
