Scavenger Hunt

by Michaelbrent Collings

  “No time,” said Clint. He snapped his fingers an inch in front of her nose, obviously trying to draw her out of the shock he feared would incapacitate her. “We gotta go, Elena.”

  She nodded. “’Kay,” she said. Then firmed her mouth and said, “O-kay,” consciously over-enunciating the first syllable, as though doing so would bring her mind back into focus.

  It worked, at least enough to get her moving. She took a few stumbling steps, realizing as she did that Noelle had pushed herself under Elena’s arm, and now partially supported her as they tripped their way out of the yard where Chong had –

  Don’t think of that.

  Wise words. There was enough to think of without focusing on something that was over and done and couldn’t be helped.

  She took a few more lurching steps before her gait firmed. Noelle let go of her, obviously sensing that Elena could move of her own accord and that trying to bear her weight would likely only result in both of them tripping over each other.

  Elena spared one more look behind her. She saw she was wrong in her previous appraisal: the explosion hadn’t completely disintegrated Chong or the gang-banger who had beaten him to death’s door. There were still pieces of them. A smear of gore on the singed siding of the house. Something hanging off one of the chain-links that fenced in the yard. A leg bone, denuded of all but a few strips of blackened flesh, jutted out of the ground like a sapling in a madman’s garden.

  She turned away.

  Nothing I could do. Nothing to do but what I did. But what we did. But what we’re doing.

  The words were a familiar refrain. Not a welcome one, but at least comforting in that familiarity. They were words she had heard in her mind hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of times.

  She ran, and the words bounced with her steps, and when she and Clint and Noelle all dove behind a parked car in order to avoid being seen by a police cruiser roaring down the street, the words followed her still.

  Nothing I could do. Nothing to do but what I did.

  2

  Elena was the one who came up with the idea, all those years ago. It hurt, but there was nothing else that could be done. Not and keep the home operating. That was the most important thing, and the thing she had to remember: it was all for the greater good, and the only thing that mattered was the children. Not one specific child, but all of the kids as a group.

  It didn’t even matter that Higgins took the idea and ran with it, or that he pocketed so much off the top of each deal. Though when she finally confronted him about that she realized she had severely underestimated how much he was stealing. She pushed him – not physically, but emotionally. It worked, too.

  Higgins liked to think of himself as some kind of supreme power. But it was just a dream, and easily burst when Elena broke into his computer and saw the ledger. Not the one that he showed to the government or to the donors, the real ledger sheet. A list of offshore accounts and balances that Higgins no doubt thought he’d kept well out of the range of mortal eyes.

  But he wasn’t as smart as he thought. Not very smart at all, in fact. It was an easy matter to figure out his passwords, and an even easier one to arrange transfer of half the funds in his accounts to new accounts that she opened – some of them in the very same banks he was using.

  He found out, of course. Higgins might have overestimated his importance in the grand scheme of things, and certainly overestimated his intellect in comparison with others, but he was not a complete fool. He saw the dip in his accounts, and easily figured out that Elena was the one behind it – just as she had known he would.

  “Where’s my money?” he demanded.

  It was early. No one was in earshot, and probably no one else in the building was even awake. That was, no doubt, why he had chosen to come in and challenge her like this. Higgins was a “roll in at the crack of noon” kind of guy, but he knew that Elena often showed up well before official work hours started. She cared. She thought what she was doing mattered.

  So of course she would come in early. Of course she would work hard. And of course he would storm in like this, full of what he undoubtedly thought of as thunder and fury, but which more resembled whining and bitching.

  “Well?” he demanded when Elena did not respond to the first shouted question.

  She continued to ignore him. She entered the final tally on the business ledger that she had been keeping since she started here, saved the work, and only then looked at Higgins.

  “Your money?” she said quietly.

  She was only twenty-two at the time. Fresh out of college, only a few months into this job. But she had sized Higgins up early and well, and knew that he would react to bluster with bluster. But the quiet tones of someone who held real power… that he wouldn’t know how to deal with.

  Just as predicted, he looked away from her as soon as she spoke the words. Still, the fire wasn’t completely gone from his spirit. “My money,” he said again. “Where did you put my money?”

  “Nowhere.”

  “Nowhere? Did you give my money away or something? What do you mean ‘nothing,’ and where do you get off –”

  Elena held up a hand. Higgins clamped his jaw shut, obviously trying to convince himself it was because he was a good, benevolent deity, and not because he was just afraid of what she might do next. He glared, but the glare was weak.

  Elena smiled her sweetest smile. “I didn’t do a thing with your money,” she said.

  He slashed a knife hand through the air. “Don’t give me that,” he said. “Half the money –”

  “You’re not listening, David,” she continued sweetly. “I said I didn’t do anything with your money. But some of the money in those accounts wasn’t yours. So I took it and put it somewhere safe, until it’s needed.”

  Higgins’ eyes grew so wide he looked more like a caricature than an actual man. “You… you what?”

  She steepled her fingers and looked squarely at him. “I. Took. The. Money. That. You. Stole.”

  “How dare you –” he began.

  Now it was her turn to cut him off with a gesture. “Cut the crap, David. What are you going to do about it? Tell the police? What would that do to this place?” she said, gesturing around her.

  “I don’t give a shit what it would do to this place,” he snarled.

  “I know that,” she said. “But it’s good to finally hear you admit it. So how about this: you get half. I could have taken more. I could have taken all of it. But as bad as you are, you’re a convenient face for what we have to do. So do your jobs – both of them – and leave me alone to do mine.”

  David’s eyes bulged so far out of their sockets that Elena suspected he would either explode or just die of a heart attack. He did neither. Instead, he visibly deflated. “I’m going to change the accounts,” he muttered.

  “Fine. But I know how much to expect from each transaction, David. And though you could steal it all, you won’t.”

  “Why not?” he said. A bit of the snarl returned to his voice – but only a bit.

  “Because I didn’t just take the half of the money that you stole, David. I gathered information about the accounts, and about where the money went after that. I have enough dirt on you to ensure you go to jail for a very long time.”

  “And you, too.”

  Elena spread her hands wide and put on an innocent expression. “For what, David? There’s no proof of anything but you taking money that has no explanation. There’s no proof that I ever had anything to do with what’s going on here. Just you, David.”

  He looked like he was trying to figure out something to say. Finally, he settled on, “Be careful, Elena,” before sweeping out of the room and slamming the door behind him.

  That was fine. Let him posture. Let him bluster all he wanted. Elena didn’t care. She only cared about getting the money to keep this place going. For the children.

  3

  She hadn’t been lying about what she said: David was a convenient face for
what she came to think of as “funding.” She certainly didn’t want to be the person showing up for the drops, or the one who was contacted for the supply lists that needed filling.

  But “convenient” was different than “necessary,” and she suspected after their little meeting that David would probably outlive his usefulness in either department. She had thought him a fool based solely on how easy it was to guess his passwords; now she knew he was a fool based on how easy it was to guess them even after he changed them. They were all names of his dogs, and even though she’d told him she broke into his computer, he kept right on using his pets’ names as passwords. The names themselves were easy to find, since David kept a list of them taped under his desk.

  Idiot.

  And she thought him an even bigger idiot when she realized he was still skimming off the top of each deal. Elena was still living in a one-room apartment in a part of the city almost as rundown and ramshackle as the place she worked, and she was fine with that fact. She had decided long ago that being rich wasn’t a goal.

  But if she was sacrificing comfort and security, why should she have to watch David flaunting his excesses and his expenditures? Worse, sooner or later someone would have to realize that he was spending far more than he made. An IRS investigation would not harm her directly – she’d been telling the truth when she said that any evidence of wrongdoing would only link to David – but she didn’t need the attention.

  Neither did the children.

  And it was all for them, wasn’t it? All for the children she had grown to know and love? Wasn’t everything she did meant to keep them sheltered and fed and protected?

  And David… David was going to ruin it all.

  The final nail came when he showed the thug into the home. When he allowed that monster to come in and take what he wanted.

  Elena wasn’t there when it happened. She was home, sleeping the sleep of the just and the merciful. But she noted that one of the hall motion sensors registered movement in the night, and checked the CCTV footage of the hall. The images were grainy, but enough to make out that David was one of the people who had walked through the hall. The other was clearly some kind of gangbanger, with a hat whose brim was pulled low enough she could not make out his face. But she could tell the look well enough – the basketball jersey, the high-tops, the jeans slung so low she thought they had to fall off at any moment.

  She followed David and his guest through the place, cueing up different feeds each time they left one camera’s field of vision and entered another one.

  And finally she came to the moment where David gestured at one of the children. When the other man packed the little girl in a suitcase like she was nothing more than a pair of socks or a t-shirt.

  David entered the office while she was still watching the feed. He tossed a pile of bills on her desk – an even stupider move than usual, given that the secretary that helped her and the three other case worker/social worker/everything elses that the center needed to operate was sitting right outside her open door.

  Elena slid the money quickly into a drawer. Locked it. Then she went to the door and shut it before returning to her desk and saying, “What did you do, David?” She kept her voice low. The alternative would be to start screaming.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Don’t, David,” she said. Her words came out sharper than she intended, and much louder. She calmed herself, willing the secretary to keep on working and not stick her nose in – there was enough for Elena to deal with as it was.

  Especially with one of the kids missing.

  She waited a moment. The door didn’t open, and Elena spat, “Did you think I wouldn’t notice what you did?”

  “Cash was low,” David said with a shrug. “You know that as well as I do.”

  “I do. And I also know that you care very little about the kids, and very much about yourself. So don’t pretend that what happened over the weekend was about anything but you.”

  “Look –”

  “How are you explaining the fact that we’re missing a child?”

  He waved her off. “Same as always. Papers have already been prepared and filed. Officially, the girl is at a foster home. Someone who has been paid – out of my cut, thank-you-very-much – to wait a few weeks, then file a missing persons report.” He shrugged. “So sad when they run away.”

  “You didn’t check any of this with me.”

  “Why should I?” snarled David. Now he was in her space, pushing his gray, forgettable face up close enough that she could smell his breath, boozy and heavy and sour. “I’m in charge, Elena. You are the newest of new hires, and not someone I have to keep around.” He seemed to realize as soon as he said this how untrue it was, because he sighed – another blast of cheap whiskey fumes – and his expression softened. Not his eyes, though. They remained hard and quietly angry. “I know you’re heart’s in the right place. Isn’t that why we started all this in the first place?”

  “Maybe it’s time for a change,” she said.

  He snorted. “Sure. And we go back to serving crap food and providing cots that barely hold the kids up without breaking. We go back to wondering where the next month’s rent comes from, and where the next meal for the kids comes from.” He pointed at her computer, where the feed had frozen on the moment where the man folded the little girl into the luggage.

  In the image, it looked like David was looking at the camera. And smirking.

  “I left that there for you,” he said, his expression a mirror of the one she saw on her computer. “I wanted you to find it.”

  “Another stupid move. What if someone else had seen it?”

  “No one else looks at the footage. No one else cares.” David sighed again. “And even if someone else wanted to, they couldn’t have seen the footage. I password protected it.” The sigh turned to a grin, the grin turned to a leer. “And I didn’t use one of my dogs’ names, either.” The leer widened. “I had to come up with a whole new system.”

  “Let me guess – birthdays?”

  David’s smile hitched a little. He covered with a laugh. “You got me.” He spread his fingers. “But I can take care of that. You, however, have something else you should be watching out for.”

  “What’s that, David?”

  The grin disappeared. “Mr. Higgins.”

  “What?”

  “My friends and peers call me David. You are neither.”

  Elena didn’t like the way this conversation was going. She felt a sudden thrill of fear, which was totally new to her. She had been creeped out, irritated, and bored by David Higgins, but never afraid of him.

  This won’t do. It won’t do at all.

  She covered with an eyeroll, but could tell from David’s expression that he bought it about as much as she bought his pretense at nonchalance over his continuing password gaffes. “What exactly is it that I should be worrying about?” She nodded at the drawer holding the money. “This money from an ‘anonymous donor’ will cover Eighth Street Children for a good long time, and since that’s the only thing I care about, I can’t see anything to worry about, other than your bringing people into the home rather than sticking to procedure and having the kids grabbed in their foster homes or at school.”

  He shrugged. “It was a rush job. No time to wait. They had a specific need, and we had something that would fill it.” He leaned in again, placing curled fists on the edge of her desk. “He needed something to take her away in. That surprised me a bit – kid looked plenty strong to me. But I realized I had just the thing. I knew you’d love my choice, too. It had your name all over it.”

  Elena felt her brows come together. She looked back at the image on her computer. The man putting a small bundle of flesh and bone into a suitcase. She clicked the mouse, zooming in close. She had been furious when she saw the girl being packed in that way. The children that disappeared were sacrifices to the greater good. That didn’t mean they had no value, and that thought was all that had p
ounded through Elena’s mind. It had crowded out everything else – everything but rage at what had happened, and how the little girl had been treated.

  It had even crowded out the recognition of her own property. “You used my bag,” she said dully.

  “Your fault, when you think about it. You come in late to work from a long weekend, trailing that bag with you like some kind of prize, showing everyone that you think you’re so much better, Miss World Traveler –”

  “I was visiting my mother in Phoenix. Hardly world travel, hardly –”

  “– and you just left it here –”

  “I just kept forgetting –”

  “– for weeks and weeks –”

  “I just –”

  “– even though I kept telling you to take it home.”

  She stared at David. He was still grinning. She felt fear, and knew that the game had changed.

  “Did you empty it out first?” she asked.

  David nodded. “Mostly. I may have forgotten a thing or two. Some panties.” He chuckled. “I was pretty surprised at some of them. Naughty, naughty.” His eyebrows gave a sadistic, sexual up-and-down.

  “Where is it?”

  “Your underwear?”

  “The bag, you shit.”

  “Now, now,” said David. He sounded totally at ease all of a sudden. Not a good sign, Elena knew, because a man like David could only possibly be at ease when he knew he was holding not just a winning hand, but the only hand. “Language, Elena.”

  “The. Bag.”

  He shrugged. “Honestly? I have no idea. The buyers probably ditched it somewhere. Maybe tossed it out of a plane over the Pacific Ocean. Maybe fed it to a furnace.” He leaned in closer than ever. So close that David Higgins was all she could see. “Maybe I asked them to bring it back. Full of hairs and maybe some skin.” He shook his head, mock-sadness lengthening his features. “Shame if the police realized a little girl was missing, and realized that traces of her were in a suitcase. Your suitcase.”

  “They would never be able to match her up with –”