They're Gone

by E. A. Barres

  He broke the window with two hits from the handle of his gun, hastily pushed loose glass off the sill, pulled himself up and dropped inside.

  Cessy felt detached, almost like she was watching a television show.

  Hours of tailing Levi since last night had led to this. Hours of tension, her muscles like a cat’s haunches poised to jump, and now it was time and the attack was happening in front of her, and she didn’t know what to do.

  And then Cessy remembered the shots and her brother. Reality rushed back.

  She hurried down the rest of the hill and ran to that smashed back window. Heard a woman crying inside the room and Levi shouting.

  “Do what I tell you!” he was ordering someone. “Out the window!”

  Hands appeared on the windowsill, a woman’s thin fingers. A head next. Kim’s crying face, looking down in surprise at Cessy.

  Cessy lifted a finger to her lips, then reached up and helped Kim down.

  “About time,” Levi said, and his head loomed over the window sill.

  Cessy grabbed the top of his head. Drove his forehead down into the wooden window pane.

  His head popped up and she did it again. And maybe it was part of her that she shared with Chris, some biological communal violence, but Cessy found the feeling and sound of Levi’s head smashing down deeply satisfying.

  He slumped out of sight.

  “My mom,” Kim said. “My mom’s inside.”

  “I’ll get her,” Cessy told her. “Our car is on top of that hill. Get inside it and wait for us. It’ll be me, your mom, and my brother.”

  “What kind of car?”

  “A blue Civic. It’s old and ugly. I’ll bring your mom back to you, I promise.”

  For a moment, it seemed like fear had rooted Kim to the ground. Something she wanted to say. But she turned and hurried up the hill.

  Cessy watched her, waiting to make sure Kim followed her instructions, and then she ran around the motel, heading to the front and her brother.

  Neither Cessy nor Kim looked back as they raced away.

  If they had, they might have seen Levi Price, his face bloodied and angry, pulling himself out of the bathroom window.

  And following Kim.

  CHAPTER

  52

  SETH BACKHANDED DEB into a wall. She collapsed, unconscious. He regarded her for a moment. Then he lifted his foot, kicked through the bathroom door. Seth walked in, took in the scene—the broken window, the glass on the floor, the blood on the sill. He guessed what had happened.

  Seth left the bathroom, stepped back into the bedroom. Examined the bloody man on the bed, held his index finger under the man’s nose. Didn’t feel air. He glanced down at Deb, her body crumpled in a corner of the room. Thought about tying her up, carrying her outside, tossing her into his trunk. He had zip ties in his pocket, but the ball gag and blindfold were in the car. Seth knew from experience that people didn’t stay unconscious for long; at most, minutes. And fastening her wrists and ankles, then lifting her, all carried the risk of waking Deb. If she woke when he was carrying her, Seth could simply hit her again, or choke her until she faded. But another hit might break her neck, send her into shock. Inadvertently kill her. Temple wanted her alive.

  Seth’s car was parked outside, the trunk facing the room door. He could go to his car, grab the blindfold and ball gag out of the glove compartment, come back to the room, secure Deb. By that time Price should have found Kim, although it was more likely, given the mess in the bathroom and Price’s general incompetence, that he’d lost her. Kim was probably consumed by panic after seeing that man shot to death, after hearing her mother beaten. Probably racing up Route 1, screaming the entire way. Seth had seen scared parents offer up their children in exchange for their own lives, spouses viciously turn on each other, longtime partners sell each other out. Very few people, when violence erupted, held their beliefs. Panic overtook them, the desperate need for control, for normalcy.

  Seth touched the scarred skin on the back of his neck.

  Ninety-nine percent of the time, this was true.

  He’d been surprised once, surprised at someone who fought back—a woman, no less. He hadn’t expected to have trouble with her. Hadn’t expected her ferocity. Seth had been winning the struggle, overwhelming her, and suddenly a lighter was in her hand and she was smiling and his body was aflame. She’d pushed him away, and his clothes had melted into his skin, and his skin melted into his bones, and nothing could stop the fire. Not rolling on the ground, not stumbling away for help, not screaming. Seth had woken in a hospital, tubes everywhere, one eye refusing to open, his body in a stunned, exhausted state. And then, moments later, the pain had returned and he’d screamed again, pulling the tubes, until nurses and doctors held him down, and his good eye closed. This had happened for days, although Seth had assumed it was months, even years, in his hazy mix of anguish and unconsciousness.

  “He should be dead,” he’d heard one of the doctors say.

  Seth regarded Deb again, strode past the bodies in the bedroom, stepped into the sunlight outside of the motel room.

  A foot landed in his gut.

  Seth was more surprised than hurt.

  “Where’s my brother?”

  A young woman stood in front of him. Cessy Castillo, by what he’d been told. She didn’t seem surprised by his scarred face, didn’t have the repulsed reaction or fear everyone else did. She punched his chin and Seth smiled, the same smile that woman had given him, the one woman who had escaped, the woman he’d someday find and question and kill. Question her about their fight, about how she’d managed to fend him off despite his ambush. About the fire. About her smile.

  Something smashed into the back of Seth’s head.

  He turned, saw Deb Thomas holding a small metal garbage can with a dent the size of his head.

  Heard a siren in the distance, and Seth realized he didn’t have any more time to waste.

  He pulled his gun back out.

  Both women stepped back and Seth came up with a plan to take them. Force them at gunpoint into the car, drive him somewhere quiet, have them tie each other up. But Seth discarded the plan in seconds. Too much potential for things to go wrong, for Deb or Cessy to panic and run off. His only hope was that Price had kidnapped Kim. That Price had managed to do one thing right in his life, and they could use Kim as leverage to find out where Cessy had hidden those photographs, find out everything Deb had learned about Temple’s operation.

  “Either of you talks to the cops before you hear from me again,” Seth gestured at Deb, “and her daughter dies.”

  He turned away, kept the gun out.

  Pulled the hoodie over his burned head and walked off into the cold sunlight.

  CHAPTER

  53

  DEB AND CESSY watched Seth walk away.

  “What’s he talking about?” Cessy asked. “Kim’s in Chris’s car. Up the hill, behind the motel. Edge of the parking lot.”

  “Your brother …” Deb started to say, and stopped.

  “What?”

  “He’s inside.”

  Cessy looked at Deb, wondering what she couldn’t say, then stepped into the room as Deb hurried off to find her daughter.

  Chris was still. A stillness she immediately recognized.

  Cessy knelt by him.

  She pulled Chris’s face to her, pressed it into her neck.

  Cessy felt like she could somehow rewind time, return back to when he was living, before the bullets. She’d found him seconds too late. Mere seconds. Seconds were nothing. It didn’t seem possible that they could be so catastrophic. So callous.

  Hands on her, urgent hands.

  “Kim’s not there. Your car’s not there.”

  Cessy heard Deb’s voice, but it was coming from another world.

  Cessy didn’t move, didn’t respond.

  “Please,” Deb said. “Please! Cessy! They’re gone.”

  PART FIVE

  THEY’RE GONE

 
CHAPTER

  54

  THE ROPES BIT into Kim’s wrists. Her arms were bound behind her. Shoulders ached from being stretched.

  But all that pain was secondary to fear. Fear coursed through her body like electricity; fear made the world seem like it was happening in flashes; fear forced her to shake; fear wouldn’t let her stop crying. Kim was almost grateful for the hood over her head. She didn’t know what was going to happen, and was scared to find out.

  She wanted to be home with her mom and dad, well before she’d gone to college, back when they would light a fire against those freezing Virginia winters and celebrate their Christmas tradition of drinking eggnog, which none of them liked, but Mom insisted it was tradition, so they had to. And watching A Christmas Story, which Kim always griped about but secretly enjoyed. She wanted to be back in the warmth of that house and those memories, when her dad would laugh his great booming laugh that always held surprise.

  Her mom.

  Kim couldn’t think about her mom without despair, without the floor disappearing underneath her. Couldn’t bear to think of what could have happened to her.

  It was all too much. If these men were going to kill her, then Kim wanted it to happen soon. She almost wanted to ask for it, to tell them that dread and worry were eating her and she couldn’t bear to wait anymore. That any sound near her face made her body spasm, that her heart was beating so fast her chest ached.

  She wanted to live and she wanted to die.

  The two men who had driven her here were arguing.

  “So we take her to my cousin, and then what happens? Come on, Seth. Let me call her mom. Then we’ll take both of them to Scott, maybe all three.”

  “We take her now,” Seth said. The certainty in his voice, the rough assurance, struck terror in her.

  Kim had to force herself not to whimper.

  “I’m just saying we can find all three,” Levi argued, “and get everyone together. End this at one time.”

  A pause in the conversation.

  “You want to see Deb now,” Seth said slowly. “You’ll see her soon enough.”

  “That’s not … entirely it,” Levi argued, and his voice was muffled as a door slammed.

  It took a few seconds, but Kim realized the men had left whatever room she was in. She was alone.

  Instinctively, her arms pulled against the ropes as she tried to rise. But there was no escaping her bonds. And even if she did, she had no idea where she was or where she could run.

  Kim sat back in the chair, tried not to let fear devour her as she heard the two men walk back into the room.

  She sensed them standing in front of her.

  CHAPTER

  55

  CESSY AND DEB waited in Chris’s car behind a McDonald’s, about a mile from the motel, out of the range of the sirens.

  Cessy sat in the driver seat, arms loosely folded over her stomach, staring forward, staring at nothing, her brother’s blood on her.

  It didn’t seem real that Chris was gone.

  She kept expecting him to appear. She had an urge to call him, to tell him what had happened. She wanted to talk to Chris about his own death, about how she’d felt when she learned he was gone.

  And there was another part in her, another part that had always expected to receive word that Chris had been killed in Arizona, the same sudden way their mother had been killed. As if Cessy had always been steeling herself for the only way his bloody path could end.

  She wiped her hands on her jeans, rubbed them back and forth. Blinked back tears.

  It wasn’t the murder that surprised her. Cessy would have been more surprised if he had died naturally of old age in a rocking chair or from the horrors of cancer. But that would have never happened. She imagined Chris smiling, taking his gun and leaving the doctor’s office after some awful diagnosis, finding a way to go out in a blaze of gun smoke.

  Chris was always meant to be killed.

  “I don’t know what to wait for,” Deb said suddenly. “Are they going to call me?”

  It took Cessy a moment to come back. “Who?”

  “The men. The ones who took Kim.”

  Cessy thought the other woman sounded strangely calm. She’d assumed Deb would be overcome by panic. This was a surprise.

  She wondered if Deb was in shock.

  “I need to call Levi,” Deb said. “Tell him that he can have me for my daughter.” She looked at Cessy, and Cessy saw the helpless expression on the other woman’s face. “Right?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Dammit!” Deb exclaimed. “Maybe we should just go to the cops. They can’t all be crooked, right?”

  “It’s not that they’re crooked. It’s that their boss is.”

  “So what do we do?”

  Cessy wiped her face, smeared tears. “We go at Temple.”

  “What?”

  “We put a gun to Temple’s head,” Cessy spoke, and listened to herself speak. It was almost as if she had no control of what she was saying, Chris’s spirit guiding this ruthlessness and daring. “We tell him that we want your daughter for his life. Get him to confess to everything, put it on tape. We get your daughter back, get Temple in jail. Or I kill him.”

  “Can’t we just go to the FBI or something?”

  “He’s the district attorney. He is the law. The minute we poke our heads up, he’ll see. And he’s not going to keep us alive. We know that now after everything that just happened.” Cessy blinked, paused. “The only thing keeping your daughter alive is that they don’t know where to find us. The minute they do, they kill her.”

  Deb was silent for a moment.

  “I know,” she said heavily. “I’m trying to keep my head straight because I know Kim needs that now. But it’s hard. I’m so scared. I don’t know where to turn or what to do. I know you’re right. I know we can’t go to the cops or anyone else.”

  Cessy watched her.

  “I’m sorry for what happened to your brother,” Deb said, her voice small. “But I’m just so scared for Kim. I’m scared for her, and I feel like panic is about to rush over me, and I can’t let it. Right now those men have my daughter and she has to be scared, and I don’t know what they’re doing to her. And I can’t even let myself wonder what they’re doing to her. I can’t let myself think too much about her right now because if I do, I feel like I might die.”

  “I know.”

  Cessy felt the other woman’s panic.

  And she felt Deb’s need to trust in her, her desperate hope that Cessy would be able to help.

  She wanted to say something to give the other woman courage, something that would dispel darkness. But she couldn’t think of anything, no phrase or promise that would put Deb at ease.

  She fought a sudden urge to drive back to the motel, throw herself on Chris, will his body back to life. Give it her spirit and her blood. Give him anything, just so he would rise and walk and laugh.

  “Let’s find your daughter,” she said instead. “Let’s go find your daughter.”

  CHAPTER

  56

  TEMPLE GUNNED HIS Prius down the road, driving way too fast, something left over from his days of riding around with cops. Cops always sped when they were off-duty, like they refused to settle into being typical citizens. You put someone in a job like that, Temple thought, and they’ll never understand complacency afterward. Kind of like Seth. No way that guy would ever be anything other than a killer.

  Temple had time to reflect as he drove down the dark, starless highway, and he thought about Kim. Tried to imagine the girl’s terror as she was kept, blind and bound, in a house with two dangerous men. The panic whenever the floor creaked above her. Her sleepless, painful night.

  Nope. Nothing.

  Temple took the exit to Columbia. It had always been this way, like emotions were some sort of bewildering foreign language. It confused him as a child until the teasing of other children, and the rigidity of his father, taught him the importance of mimicry. And that mi
micry had taken root, become as imperative to his life as breathing. It wasn’t until college, when self-examination was expected, that he realized what he was.

  But he still kept it a secret.

  Temple was good at secrets.

  Pimps had the tendency to leave trails, and Temple had to make sure those trails came to abrupt ends. Nothing he did himself, of course. He had men throughout the DC/MD/VA triangle, small men who imagined themselves as giant businessmen, hopeful entrepreneurs who saw dollar signs where other men saw tits and ass. Men who understood the necessity of a stranglehold.

  His men cracked down on corners, caught the new pimps as they slunk forward, let them know the old way of doing things had changed. Let them know that if they wanted to run girls on these streets or clubs or cities, someone was overseeing them. And that someone was building an army.

  The pimps caved or died. Two bullets. A trademark.

  The money came in cash. They gave him part of their take, and in return Temple sent the cops and detectives in different directions. Protected the pimps who swore to him, arrested those who didn’t.

  Cops, judges, attorneys, journalists, and politicians—they’d all been his customers. They didn’t know who was blackmailing them, but he knew everything about them, the growing number of powerful men who had discovered they were only a photo or confession away from ruin.

  Temple was one of the world’s greatest pimps and ruled his empire with whispers and bullets.

  He pulled into his townhouse community, parked in the driveway, stepped out of the car. He could afford more than this slender home—much more—but he knew the importance of a modest appearance. His home in Aruba was far more extravagant.

  His father’s career as a police officer had placed his family on the poorer side of town, and Temple would never return there. He’d hated that life, the distinct economic separation at law school, the mocking tone friends and colleagues assumed when they learned he’d grown up in blue-collar Dundalk, the constant jokes about Baltimore’s crime and poverty. Temple would smile and laugh and play along. Inside him, a match flared. Burned.