I am not a man who is easily spooked, but even I have to admit this is one hell of a ghost town. With renewed confidence in my directions to Lauren’s old house, I start up the engine again and roll out onto the main road through town. As I drive through, I continue to tally up the number of dead, scraped-out husks of old public buildings and homes. It looks almost as though some horrific natural disaster has cut through here, but I know that’s not what killed the town. Not here. Disaster isn’t necessary; this place was doomed from its conception.
I make a few turns, every now and then catching sight of a light on in a window, telling me that there are still some stragglers stubbornly trying to stick it out here in desert purgatory. I hesitate to call them brave souls. More foolish than brave, I would say. But I have to give them some credit for managing to survive in a town that has long stopped supporting them back. I follow the road map image in my head until finally I roll up to the front of a small, sagging bungalow with a crooked, damaged roof and a very unsafe-looking front porch. The front steps are missing a stair, and the windows are nearly black with dust and grime. The house looks utterly cursed and clearly abandoned. But I can tell by the broken, rusted tricycle lying on its side in the driveway that it wasn’t properly cleaned out when its tenants moved on.
“Oh, Lauren. What a shitty start to your life,” I murmur grimly to myself as I turn off the bike engine and slide off to walk up the crooked driveway.
I look around just in case there are any nosy neighbors watching me about to break into an empty old home, but I don’t see anyone around. In fact, this whole street might as well be torn down. There are no signs of life to be found here. In the red-dust front yard filled with cracked and parched brown grass, there is a rusting FOR SALE sign sharing a stake with NEW PRICE! It only adds to the forlorn appearance of the place, especially because anyone in their right mind would know this place will never sell. Nobody wants to live here. There is something dark and ominous in this house, like the filthy windows are a pair of unblinking, vigilant eyes.
I deftly climb up the broken front steps onto the creaky front porch with its missing planks and gaping holes. I move cautiously up to the front door and listen closely, holding my breath. There’s no sounds from within, just as expected. Still, I’m not totally keen on the idea of just bursting into this abandoned old house just yet, so I take out my cell phone and decide to attend to some other business first. I dial the number for Ironsides, listen to the line ring twice, and then he picks up.
“Yeah?” he answers in typical gruff fashion.
“Any new leads on the frat guy situation?” I ask in a lowered voice.
“You mean Brandon? Yeah. I talked to the guy. Real skeevy kid. Skittish like a little weasel. I don’t like him,” Ironsides says.
“And? Did he listen to reason?” I prompt him.
“Sure did. We came to an, uh, agreement,” he replies.
“What about Lauren?” I ask. “Was she around there?”
“No. No sign of her. And Brandon, dumb as he may be, seemed to be telling the truth about this mess. He has no idea about anybody getting abducted. That’s not the topic we met up to discuss, though,” he relays.
I groan and pinch the bridge of my nose. “Alright. Well, did you at least convince him not to press charges?” I ask.
“Eh, we’ll figure that out when you get back here, yeah? That’s not important right now. You went out there to find your girl, right?” Ironsides says.
“Yes,” I sigh.
“Good. Keep looking. Focus on that. We’re busy back here, too, looking for Diesel and his slimy gang,” he grunts.
I can feel anger rising in my chest. I’m impatient. I want all the shattered pieces of this mess to fall into place already so I can find Lauren and get her back to safety. But I know Ironsides is right: I need to stay focused on the task at-hand and keep my rage at a safe distance. I need to remain calm. I have to do this right.
“You good, man?” Ironsides says, shaking me out of my thoughts.
I clear my throat. “Yeah. Yeah, I’m good. Listen, I’m standing on the front porch of Lauren’s old house she grew up in. I’ve got to go,” I explain.
“Say no more. Go ahead. Just be careful. That place may be a ghost town but you still don’t want a breaking and entering charge over your head,” he warns.
“Got it. I’ll be careful,” I tell him. “Talk later.”
“Yep. Later,” he says, and the line goes dead.
I slide the phone back into my pocket and tentatively try the front door knob. I fully expect it to be locked, but to my surprise, the door just creaks open. I am instantly hit square in the face with a putrid smell and I wrinkle my nose as I step through the threshold.
This place is a damn pigsty. Books with pages ripped out. Clothes stained and holey draped all over the floor and dusty, moth-eaten furniture. A cockroach scurries away from my heavy footsteps to take refuge under a sagging lounge chair. The place looks even smaller and more cramped on the inside than it appeared on the outside. I can’t imagine a lot of positive memories happening in a house like this, even before it was abandoned. These people left in a hurry, that much is clear. They didn’t pack up well. The house is still littered with stuff, as though they only took some clothes and valuables and hightailed it out in a rush. On the molding rug there’s a doll with one glassy eye missing, the other half-lidded and staring right at me. Her plush little body is naked, a fly crawling on her porcelain cheek.
I walk through the foyer to the little kitchen area. There are still pots and pans on the stove, dishes collecting mold and grime and flies in the parched sink. I have to cover my face to walk through it, the smell is so foul. I step into a small living room, where an empty entertainment center takes up the bulk of the space. There’s a red velour sofa stained and sticky with age. The pillows are ripped open, with little bits of cottony fluff scattered across the creaky floorboards. On the coffee table, caked with years of thick dust, is what looks to be a scrapbooking binder or maybe just a photo album. I gingerly pick it up, feeling the dust sink in under my fingernails as I open the front cover and begin to flip through. It is a photo album, but only a sparse number of photographs are in here. Most of them depict Lauren’s father and mother, only rarely showing photographs of Lauren herself as a child. And to my horror, I realize that in the majority of those, Lauren’s sweet little childish face has been burned out, probably with a cigarette. It fills me with rage to know how unfairly she was treated, how little her own family thought of her. It amazes me how strong and kind and resilient she has become, despite the terrible upbringing she suffered through. These people, her supposed parents, gave her nothing to go on. They did not prepare her for the world. Hell, they didn’t even protect her from it. I shake my head, clenching my teeth and fists with bitter anger.
I feel a strong sense of resolve for my mission once again. I have to save her. Nobody else will. She just has to hold on and stay strong a little longer. I will find her and I will set her free. I only hope I can get to her in time.
I set down the photo album and think for a moment. Where should I look next? I recall Lauren telling me briefly about the shed out back where her slimeball of a father kept his young victims captive. I stomp through the house to the back, scraping the sliding glass door open to step out into the blistering desert sun. In the back corner of the yard, sure enough, surrounded by years of stacked pine needles in varying shades of red, brown, and green, is a shed. However, I can tell by the positioning of the shed that it must have been removed for a time and then brought back. I don’t know if it was the police that did it or somebody else. Either way, it’s there.
I notice then that even though I can’t hear anything amiss, there are relatively fresh tracks on the ground through the pine needles and sandy mud. With adrenaline starting to pump through my veins again, I take out my gun and slowly begin to approach the shed. I stop at the door for a brief moment, looking around to make sure nobody can see me. It
’s dead and empty out here. Quieter than a tomb. So with no further hesitation, I clutch my gun and kick down the door.
Bones
The door nearly splinters and disintegrates under the force of my kick, showing its age and degradation. A puff of dank, musty air leaks out of the door, filling my nose with the acrid scent of dark intentions and unmeasured evil. Again, I feel the hairs on the back of my neck stand up, my skin growing goosebumps as I squint into the near-pitch blackness of the shed. I glance around one more time for safe measures, and then I step inside, ducking under the low entryway. The place looks and feels empty, just as abandoned and isolated as the rest of this ghost town. I can feel sorrow and pain leaks through the walls. Spiders scurry and spin on their webs in the corners. Little bugs skitter away from my impending footsteps, disappearing back into the warm, wet safety of the dark. There does not seem to be any sign of life beyond these insects and arachnids. A whistling wind blows around the shed like a wailing witch, adding another aspect of creepy desolation. I take a few more small steps inside, careful not to let the door shut behind me. Although, I think to myself with a wry smile, I kicked the damn door in so hard I doubt it will even fit on the hinges properly anymore, much less have the capacity to automatically lock from the inside out like it was clearly designed to do.
I can’t help but look around in the shadows and imagine the horrors that went on in here. Murray Smyth was one sick, demented man. The idea that he would have tortured and abused innocent little girls in this place is more than enough to lend it a level of unease and perversion. Bad things have happened in this place. This ground is probably stained with the blood of the naive, the soft, the more harmless and helpless of us all. My hands curl into fists at the thought of Murray Smyth luring a little girl into danger. I wonder how he did it. Did he offer them something in exchange for giving up their safety? Candy? Money? Most of the little girls who grew up in this godforsaken town must have struggled from the very start. It’s a food desert, and jobs are few and far between. I bet all of his little victims hailed from similarly strapped families. They would have known, on some level, that their parents were struggling to pay rent, to keep the lights on and the water running. Smyth preyed on the most vulnerable among us, weeding them out and separating the calves from the crowd like some perverted wild predator. Only instead of hunger guiding his hunt, it was some sick pleasure in hurting others.
I shudder and have to remind myself to unclench my teeth and fists. This shit just makes me so damn angry. How can a man call himself a man when he carries out such hideous acts against helpless children? I am no stranger to darkness. I know precisely the kind of trouble a man can cause. I have lived on the border of dark and light for a long, long time now. And yet, the kind of evil represented in Murray Smyth is one I do not understand. I don’t even want to understand it. I just want to stamp it out and kill it so it never has to happen again.
Strangely enough, just as I’m thinking about that shithead, I hear the crackle of a small ham radio starting up and then cutting off again. I look around in confusion and my eyes land on a small wooden work bench, on top of which sits the ham radio. I bend down and switch the thing back on. It feels like it was left here for a reason. It might be a trap, but it could also be a clue, so I’ll bite at this bait. There’s a moment of harsh violin music and then a muffled, garbled male voice speaking in the kind of halting tone you get when someone is reading off a cue card. Almost as though possessed, it begins to fashion its staticky sound into words.
It doesn’t take more than a few seconds for me to realize with a jolt that it’s a live feed of Murray Smyth’s appeal trial. The defense lawyer, scumbag that he must be, is giving an impassioned sob story about how his client was wrongfully accused.
“Ladies and gentlemen of the courtroom, you have to listen closely to what I am about to tell you all,” he begins. I can almost picture his smug, punchable face as he speaks. I can see him pacing back and forth with his hands behind his back and an accusing glare in his eyes.
“My client, Murray Smyth, has become a household name. Not for his work or his positive achievements throughout his life, but for the ways in which his good name has been slandered clear from here to across the world,” the defense attorney explains. “For many long years, this man has been held in prison, at the mercy of the unfeeling guards and his vengeful fellow inmates. Do you know, my friends, what happens to men incarcerated for child abuse or pedophilia? Do you know how many times my client has been beaten and punished for a crime he did not commit? The first time he was attacked was right here, in this courtroom, when a jury convicted him of crimes he has nothing to do with. That was the first strike. The first blow.”
“Oh, come on,” I murmur impatiently.
“Now, I don’t have to fill you in on everything that has gone wrong, although you can rest assured that the judicial system has routinely made mistake after mistake in this case,” the lawyer claims. “You have all heard about the DNA found at the scene, about how it broke the case and removed any shadow of a doubt about my client’s guilt. But I am here today to tell you that you have been purposefully misled. That DNA, which greased the wheel for the prosecutors to shuffle my client off to jail, could very well have belonged to Smyth’s daughter, who also spent time at the scene of the supposed crimes. This was never mentioned in the trial. Ask yourselves, why is that? Why was such a crucial aspect of the DNA evidence completely left out of the public record? And on top of that, you have to question why the DNA was such a surefire proof in the first place. After all, the shed did belong to my client, Mr. Smyth. He spent time there. It was his work shed. It makes sense that his DNA would be present at the scene, but it does not automatically mean he is guilty of the crimes that took place there.”
The lawyer pauses as a titter of soft conversation and surprise ripples through the courtroom. I feel that old rage swelling up inside of me again. How could these people be so stupid? So easily led astray? Can’t they just look at Murray Smyth’s dead, dark eyes and tell there’s no soul knocking around inside of him? Can’t they listen to the evidence collected and know without a doubt that he is a guilty, perverse man? How can they let this quick-talking lawyer put questions in their heads? He has them right where he wants them. Eating out of the palm of his hand, totally unaware that he’s feeding them poison. He goes on.
“And let us also remember that Mr. Smyth’s wife, the mother of his child, still supports her husband after all these years. Think about that for a second. Do you think a level-headed woman in her right mind would ever continue to support and advocate for her husband if she had any inkling that he might be involved in such disgusting affairs?” the lawyer points out. “How many times have we heard the story of the husband committing a heinous crime and the wife turning against him? It’s an age-old story. I can tell you, as a defense attorney with a lot of years under my belt, it happens all the time. People take sides. People defend who they believe to be telling the truth, even in the face of courtroom condemnation,” he says.
Wow, this guy sure loves his alliteration. And his bombasting.
“But my client’s wife believes him. She stands with him, even after all these years of separation and incarceration. She believes him so completely, in fact, that she has turned against her own daughter to support her husband. Do you understand how sure a woman must be of her husband’s innocence to side with him over her own child?” the lawyer declares.
I shake my head, trying to remain calm.
“If that alone isn’t enough to sell you on Mr. Smyth’s innocence, I don’t know what will. Listen, my client has already paid his debt to society, spending years and years behind bars for a crime he did not even commit. Could any of you really, in good conscience, sentence him to remain there any longer? My client deserves a fair trial for once. He deserves to be listened to. He deserves to breathe the free air and walk the streets uninhibited by chains. Will you stand on the right side of history and set him free? Or will you
condemn him once again for some other man’s crimes? Thank you. That will be all,” the lawyer concludes theatrically.
As soon as he is done speaking, I hear a dull roar of activity and whispering in the courtroom audience. So much of it, in fact, that the judge has to bang the gavel to call order once again. And when the tittering dies down to silence again, I can make out a new sound, a strange one that does not seem garbled by static like the rest of it. What is that?
I hurriedly switch off the ham radio and listen intently.
There it is again. A sniffle. A sob. My heart begins to pound as I look around frantically. Somebody is here, cowering in the pitch-black back of the shed. Clutching my gun, I slowly make my way across the shed toward the back, my eyes slowly adjusting to the lack of light. I can make out a small, curled up shadow of a human form near the filthy ground.
No. It can’t be.
“Lauren?” I say, the syllables hanging thick in the air.
The sobs turn to a sharp gasp. “Bones?” asks a thin, trembling voice.
“Lauren!” I shout, rushing to her side.
She’s hunched over on the ground, shivering and crying. Her face is splotchy with tears and exhaustion, but I would recognize those glorious eyes anywhere, even in the dark. I throw my arms around her and hold her tight, noticing that she feels even more delicate and fragile than she normally does. I feel a flicker of hatred for the man who did this to her. Clearly he hasn’t been feeding or taking care of her in the least. Bastard.
Bones: Heartbreaker MC #2 Page 16
