Little Falls

by Elizabeth Lewes

  A moment later, the skinny kid from the day before walked onto the screen of my phone. Donovan, he’d said into the walkie-talkie. He was wearing the same jeans, the same shit-kicker boots. Dirty white hoodie instead of the yellow T-shirt. Strapped to his back was a canister and strapped to that, a spray wand. Just like my dad had used to spray pesticides. He was whistling.

  He walked right past me; dirt puffed up from his boots and blew away on a gentle breeze, into my face. I wiped off the camera lens, tracked him to the helicopter’s open door. He reached up, pulled a heavy-duty gas mask—the kind that scares children—over his head, adjusted it, then pulled on a pair of bright yellow dishwashing gloves.

  And then … fragments.

  It was like I was there, but I wasn’t there. It was like I was seeing the helicopter, that Sikorsky S-76, for the first time, like it hadn’t been at the airfield the first time I went. Like the woman who was there the second time really was the only employee and the fat civilian in orange … maybe he was only in Iraq. Had I gone to the airfield? Had I seen the brown bird in that hangar, cold and gray as a tomb? Or had I imagined it? But I remembered the dog, that shaggy golden mongrel that was too fat, too pretty to have been in Iraq. The dog that smiled at me …

  I looked up from the screen of my phone and stared hard at the mud-brown Sikorsky in the clearing, willing it to be real. From my position, buried deep in the brush, I couldn’t see Donovan. I couldn’t see the tail number or what was inside the passenger compartment. But I saw the four long, spindly blades of the rotor hanging limply, like a dead eagle’s wings. I saw a narrow red racing stripe like a bloody gash down the side of the airframe. I hadn’t noticed that before. I heard spurts of liquid spraying onto a hard surface: psssh, psssssshhhh, psssssshhh. And when the breeze gusted, I smelled that slick tang of bleach.

  That was real; as real as Patrick Beale’s tortured corpse.

  19:17 PDT.

  I backtracked past the first clearing I had come to earlier, took a look since I was there. The old barn was glowing gold, the low roof of the metal shed flashing silver in the last rays of the setting sun. I approached the barn, stepped out of the trees, and stood silently at the rear corner of the building. The Beretta was in my hands, the safety off. I nosed around the corner: no one in sight. I got to my knees to pass under the windows, then stopped mid-crawl.

  Voices, inside the barn.

  “See? It’s all there,” a male said. “Just like he wanted.”

  The barn had thin wooden outer walls, but his voice carried clearly, like the doors of the barn were open. I was too pessimistic to hope for the evidence from the trailer where Patrick Beale had been tortured, but by then I would have taken anything incriminating, anything that proved I wasn’t delusional.

  I pulled out my phone, hit the video button, and held the viewfinder just above the windowsill. The screen was mostly brown fuzz, the dust on the windowpanes catching the last of the sun. A few feet away, the black and red Suburban—recently returned home—blocked the rest of the interior of the barn. There was no visual of the people speaking, but at least I’d get the audio.

  “Where’s the wire?” a second male said, his voice dead calm.

  “There,” the first said. “There’s about thirty feet left.”

  “The battery?” the second said.

  “On the floor.”

  “What about the tarp?”

  “We burned it.”

  “The fuck you do that for?” the second said, his voice flat, almost whining. But it had this edge, this … twang that sounded familiar, like I knew it a long, long time ago. “You had orders.”

  “It was—”

  “Forget it. You got his shirt, don’t you?”

  His shirt?

  “In that box,” the first said. “With the pliers and the battery leads.”

  Bile rose in my throat. They kept his shirt. They kept Patrick Beale’s shirt. With the pliers they used to pull out his fingernails. With the leads they used to electrocute him. My God.

  “The hell does he want with this stuff anyway? The kid’s dead. I took care of it,” the first said, his voice a little too hardy, a little too macho. Captain Jimmy Kingman. Had to be.

  “For him to know,” the second said, his voice still emotionless.

  “Fucking weird, man.”

  “Like I said, for him to know.” A pause. Then, “The product ready?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You gonna show me?”

  “We gotta do this tonight?” King said, clearly annoyed. “You said he wanted it Monday.”

  “Timeline’s changed.”

  “Since when?”

  “Since your little fuck-up.”

  “Jesus Christ. I told you,” King said, “this site is secure. That little prick didn’t know about it. No way he could have told the feds.”

  They knew. Todd Beale had ratted on his brother. I had never been more sick about being right.

  “Yeah, like I’m gonna take your word for it,” the second man—the mystery man—said sarcastically. “You fucked up, Jimmy. You’re makin’ it hard for the boss. And he’s makin’ it hard for me. He’s makin’ me clean up a lotta shit because of you.”

  “What the fuck, man? You know me. You know I’m gonna do it right.”

  “All I know is you let in one helluva shitbird, and I got orders to unfuck the operation.”

  “What are you trying to say?” Kingman said, his voice louder, aggressive and harsh. “What you gotta unfuck?”

  “You got the product or not?” the second snapped.

  Silence. I watched the screen of my phone for movement. Still nothing. But a moment later King, his voice like a rubber band ready to snap, said, “Look. I got so many guys out on patrol … I’m short-handed. Donovan can’t—”

  “You saying you failed?”

  “No.” King’s voice took on a dangerous edge. “I can give you ten kilos.”

  “It’s supposed to be thirteen,” the second said, his voice low and razor sharp.

  “I got ten. You want it or not?”

  Silence.

  Kingman, backtracking: “Give me a couple of days and I’ll—”

  “Show me,” the second growled.

  Wooden doors slammed closed, metal scraped against metal, then the heavy click of a padlock snapping shut. Two sets of footsteps on packed earth, on the screen of my phone, two men walked quickly past the windows of the Suburban. Bent over to clear the lower sill of the windows, I darted to the corner of the barn, then dove to the dirt. The men were walking toward the metal shed. One wore faded jeans and a faded black T-shirt, his long hair an unkempt fringe below the rim of a dusty ball cap. The other was taller and wore pressed BDUs cinched tight at the waist and a brown T-shirt that rippled over the muscles in his back. His hair was cut so short his scalp shone in the fading sun, and when they reached the shed, when he reached forward to unlock the door, for a moment before they disappeared inside, I saw his profile: James Kingman, Captain, U.S. Army. Jimmy King. I was right.

  And the other guy? I didn’t care.

  I waited. The fans on the metal shed spun, their white noise drowning out the sounds of the night.

  Eventually, I checked my watch: almost eight o’clock. When I looked up again, a shaft of light spilled out of the closing door of the metal shed and cast a shadow in front of one man walking down the gravel drive. His back was turned toward me, and as he walked away, the door of the metal shed swung shut. I listened to his footsteps until I couldn’t hear the crunch of the gravel anymore.

  Was it King? I couldn’t be sure, but I didn’t think so. The frame was wrong and he was too short, didn’t carry himself like an officer, even a bent one. So it must have been the other one, the one who wanted his thirteen kilos of meth. But he hadn’t been carrying anything, and he hadn’t been headed back to the helicopter. A third man? Perhaps.

  I held my position. As the last of the light drained out of the clearing, the shed faded into the backgrou
nd until it was only a darker blot against the trees.

  A few minutes after eight, a truck rumbled into the clearing, and two guys in camo jumped out. They carried AR-15s and moved with the reluctance of teenagers who have been ordered to get out of bed. One of them wandered around the clearing in a vague circle, then grabbed his radio and stated he’d completed a perimeter check. The other rattled the door handle on the shed. Locked. Had I missed King? Had I fallen asleep again? Or maybe the door just locked automatically and he was still in there, busy making the other three kilos.

  Night deepened, the stars clustered above; there was still no sign of King. But I had to move. The bass was rumbling, shrieks of laughter carried on the still air from the party down the road. King was not the mission; Sophie was.

  21:03 PDT.

  I shadowed the gravel track, retraced the route I had taken through the trees earlier that day. The music grew louder until it was deafening, echoing off the walls of the cliff that rose to the west; and shooting through it, the shouting, the screams, the squeals of the party people. Then I was at the edge of the clearing. The older house was to my right, the newer one to my left. Tiki torches flickered on the lawn between them. Kids—a hundred, maybe two hundred, maybe more—clustered around them, drinking and dancing and gyrating. A thick fog of marijuana and tobacco smoke hung in the pocket of air.

  I shrugged off my pack, retrieved the binoculars. Through the lenses I saw a party that made my wildest look like a Girl Scout sleepover: drugs, lots of them, and not just the bongs being handed around; keg stands; sex, lots of it, mostly in the shadows.

  I spotted Dougie first. He was on the porch of the older house, his face and God knew what else mashed into a bleached blonde leaning against the rail.

  I scanned the crowd, changed positions. Minutes passed without recognizing anyone. Then I saw Ibensen, loitering beside the patio near the newer house. He was with a group of people shouting and carrying on, watching something at the center of the crowd.

  After shifting a hundred feet to the east, I focused again on Ibensen. My trigger finger itched, my mind spun out all the targets. His heart? Too clean. His head? Too quick. His stomach? Too slow, too much chance of making it to the hospital. His lungs? Now that’s a possibility.

  I shook my head, pulled my hand away from my holster. Ibensen was only a lead, a lead to Sophie.

  He was still on the patio, his long nose silhouetted against the light of a Tiki torch, but where the house had blocked part of the circle before, my view was now clear. At the northern end of the patio, close to the house, Nick sat with one arm around a girl with light hair and a bikini. In his other hand, a bottle of booze glinted amber in the torchlight. The girl was giggling and teasing him, her fingers tangled in his long black hair. He didn’t seem to notice. Why? Because in front of him, in the center of the circle, was another girl, the waterfall of her thick dark hair shimmering in the porch light of the older house as a hula hoop swept around her bare midriff and bounced off the waist of her ripped denim shorts. Her hips gyrated to the left, and she slowly turned around, her hair whipping around her bare shoulders and her small bare breasts until she had completed the circle and I could just see her face.

  Sophie.

  The crowd closed, but I knew what I had seen. My daughter: fifteen, trashed, nearly nude.

  I shoved the binos in my pack and crashed through the woods. Two hundred yards, one hundred, twenty. Twenty yards was the closest I could get without breaking cover. The Beretta was in my hand, but I had no idea how it got there. I saw nothing except that circle, watched no one except Ibensen. Ibensen was the key. He would follow Sophie; I would follow him.

  The hula hoop flew up into the night sky, circled the stars, then fell to earth. Again it flew, and again it fell. Until finally someone held it up briefly, shook it like a prize. And then the circle broke; people trickled away until I saw Sophie again. She was on the ground at Nick’s feet—asleep, passed out maybe. A smaller group of people lounged around them. Ibensen and a few others stood at the fringe, passing a bottle around.

  22:11 PDT.

  Minutes crawled by; an hour disappeared. Every muscle in my body was tense, my teeth ground together until my jaw burned. She was right there and I couldn’t do anything, couldn’t grab her without bringing the entire compound down on both of us.

  Finally, she stirred, rose up on one elbow. I couldn’t see her face, just her hair streaming down to the ground. Then Nick spoke, leaned down. Sophie rose unsteadily, sat on his knee. She leaned into him, pressed her bare chest into him.

  Acid bubbled into my throat. I gulped in cool mountain air, quieted my heaving stomach. But when I turned my attention back to the patio, Sophie was gone.

  My adrenaline surged, my nerves screaming like I was under live fire in a minefield. Nick was still there, his face buried in the light-haired girl’s neck. But his lap was empty, the ground at his feet was empty. And Ibensen … Ibensen was gone.

  I was moving before I knew where I was going, gun in my hand, racing through the trees with no thought to maintaining my cover. I passed the house, darted around to the other side, to the rear entrance, the only entry point where I might slip in undetected. But before I got there, there was a scream in the woods, ten yards from where I was about to break cover. I stopped and listened. When I heard another, I dove back into the trees.

  There was a fight, the sound of skin smacking against skin, a male shouting harshly, a female pleading. I changed course, plunged farther to the north. Outlined in the darkness, a male: tall, rangy, broad-shouldered. He was standing, elbows cocked, unbuckling his belt. And at his feet—

  In the darkness, in the heavy shadows, I didn’t see the branch that caught my running foot. I didn’t see the rock that hit my head when I crashed to the ground. But I heard her scream. It tore through the night, through the fog in my head, through the bass thumping and the shouts and the crackling of the fires. Drowned it out. Until—silence.

  I opened my eyes. Blood in my mouth. Dirt in my eyes. I was on the ground, panting, my heart bursting in my chest. And my hands were empty. Mother fuck. I needed a weapon, any weapon. Now.

  My fingers, scrabbling in the dirt—gritty, dry—brushed against something cold and hard. A rock maybe. A rock was better than nothing.

  I reached, I grabbed. Then hands closed over my ankles.

  Another scream. A wail. Terrified. Pleading.

  Thrashing and kicking, I turned toward that scream. Toward him. When he looked back at me, even in the gloom of the forest I saw the viciousness in his eyes, the ice in his soul.

  He rocked back onto his knees, then his heels, his feet.

  I flipped, flailed frantically for the rock I had touched moments before. I’d throw it if I had to, charge him if I could. Beat it into his skull, if I was lucky.

  But there was no rock.

  My fingers closed around the barrel of a gun.

  I rolled. I aimed. I fired.

  The void collapsed; sound rushed in.

  And I was standing. My chest heaved. There was blood—slick and warm—on my face. On my hands. On my gun.

  At my feet, a shape, a—just a shape in the dark. Crumpled, still. And crouching beside it, a girl, her long hair tangled and dull in the dappled moonlight. She was whimpering, sobbing, but when I bent down, when I wiped the blood off on my jeans, when I reached out to push her hair out of her eyes, she fell back, her arms splayed behind her, her bare chest raised to the night sky. She twisted, scurried away.

  “Sophie,” I said, desperate even to my own ears.

  A branch snapped.

  “What the fuck?” she yelled, hysterical, her voice breaking with fear.

  “It’s okay,” I said. “It’s okay,” I said again to myself.

  “Who are you?” she said, farther away this time, her voice muted by the party and the trees. I followed it anyway.

  “It’s me,” I said more loudly, then paused, waited for the next sound, the next indicator of her locati
on. When there was nothing, I said more loudly still, “Camille.” Then, even though it sounded strange in my head, felt strange in my mouth: “Your mother.”

  “You’re lying!” she shrieked. “You’re fucking lying!”

  She was gaining distance, heading away from the clearing, north into the forest. Into the wild. I ran after her.

  “No!” I shouted into the darkness. Branches whipped my face, underbrush tore at my jeans as I pounded through the trees. “You’re not—you can’t—”

  “I don’t have a mother!” she shouted, closer now, her voice dark and hoarse.

  “I am!” I yelled, the words bursting from my chest. “I am your mother!”

  “No!” she screamed, her voice breaking again. In pain, in fear, in anguish? I didn’t know. I flew over a felled tree, crashed through a thicket of brush, and—

  And there she was.

  She was bent double, her hands on her knees, her shoulders heaving, retching. When she was done, she fell to the ground, her thin legs bent at the knee, spread in front of her while she leaned over them, her head in her hands. I broke cover.

  “I am,” I said quietly.

  Her head jerked up. In the moonlight, she was feral.

  “What the fuck are you doing?” she said, mania rising again. “Why are you here?”

  “To save you.” I advanced quietly, cautiously toward her. She pushed herself to her hands and knees, scrambled to a tree. “To take you home.”

  “I don’t need to be saved! I don’t want you to save me!” she screamed. But she was sobbing, her voice was catching in her throat.

  “You do.”

  “You’re fucking psychotic,” she yelled. “Did you shoot him? Is he dead?”

  But even then, it was all … static. Static like on the old black-and-white television set we had when I was a kid. Black lines, white lines, rolling over the screen. Glimpses of color, snatches of sound. The deafening roar of the void.