by a b
Darren nodded at his brother who rocked back and forth a little unsteady from the oxygen deprived head rush. “Pay the lady.” Bone pulled out a stack of twenty dollar bills from his crotch pack and dropped a couple on top of his purchase: a bottle of drain-o, a candy bar, toilet paper and a package of replacement windshield wipers. He then proceeded to vomit on the whole stack.
Needless to say, there was no drain to fix, or car needing wipers. Life was a pointless game for the brothers, and there were no rules.
Bone staggered toward the door. Darren watched Darci through the yellowing weathered plastic sheets that made up the nearby bus stop enclosure. A bus pulled up and she waved it on. He let a shiver of the outside world into his reality for just a moment, it was as close to maturity as he allowed. A craggy voice screeched over his shoulder.
“That little snow angel’s a tramp, bona fide tramp. She made fun of that poor abducted girl on TV.”
“How?” Bone was always looking for a laugh.
“She wanted to make a prank call the FBI, tell them that she was the same abducted girl too or some damn nonsense.” Bone remembered his change and walked back to the counter, “You don’t get any, I don’t know what else she had in her pockets.”
Bone shrugged, he was pretty certain that Darren had loaded his pockets with candy. He flipped the earflaps on his hat down and trudged toward the door. Darren held the door open, then the as he passed lunged into his body bumping him into a display stack of oil cans outside the door. The cans scattered, snow flew up in a cloud and when it settled the boys stood staring back into the store, posed in unbelievable enthusiasm, like they were in a Mentos commercial, holding stolen candy flipping off the clerk.
*****
The international airport in Bismarck was officially closed when the converted military transport 707 touched down. Wagner looked out the window. There was no evidence of the earth beneath her other than the sound of the engines struggling to slow and stabilize the plane at the same time. This was the white out that they’d promised when she took off. There couldn’t be worse conditions for gathering physical evidence, and she doubted it was a coincidence.
She gathered her carry on and made it through the concourse, all the while cursing the person who had sent her. At least it couldn’t get much worse.
She stepped out into the frigid night. A black town car was waiting for her on the curb, and the distance almost killed her. Before she even crossed the threshold, a chill went through Wagner’s body like nothing she’d ever felt before in her life. They sky cap had warned her that her coat wasn’t rated for the Dakotas, where the “wind splashes the skin like ice water.”
Stepping out of the automatic door into the night air she understood the warning in a more personal way. The first place where the swirling wind struck was crawling up the open sleeves of her overcoat. Like a submarine with the hull breeched, it flooded her arms. Before she could wrap her arms tightly around herself, the vortex of air snuck into every opening of her wardrobe. The biggest insult came when involuntarily she drew a deep breath in reaction to the shock. The wind had won, and it engulfed her body from the inside out. She couldn’t manage to talk when she shut the door to the car behind her. The agent behind the wheel asked “That your coat?” She couldn’t answer. “I’m supposed to take you to the station - “ She still couldn’t answer, and instead her head bobbled in an approximation of a nod.
The greeting that nature offered Wagner turned out to be one of the nicest parts of the trip. And she would have gladly taken a second plunge into the elements hours later to avoid the crippling emotional chill playing out in a smoky interrogation room in the local sheriff’s office.
The rural office hadn’t seen action like this since – well, never. The locals had given complete control over to the feds by the time Wagner walked passed the entryway that housed clusters of dark suits – along corridors filled with stern hunter’s eyes, and purposeful strides. There were no familiar faces, although the officers calling the shots on the ground were waiting for her arrival. She knew her special treatment would ruffle her fellow agents. Wilkes had arranged a private audience for her with the victim.
Tracy drew the smoke of a glowing cigarette into the bottom of her lungs, as she held a steaming mug between her cupped hands. Her words were infused with a distant emptiness, like she was a witness reporting back and not the victim. The story however was very personal. “I tried to keep some of the – physical evidence, under my fingernails – in my mouth, but Blue knew. He knew everything.”
“If you’d allow us to swab, even after a couple days - “ Wagner leaned in.
Tracy’s eyes rose from the bottom of the cup, “Don’t stick anything in me, not my nails and not my veins. I’m not fucking evidence.”
“You don’t know what traces - “ Wagner replied bluntly.
“I know.” She half stood leaning out over the table toward Wagner, “and I’ll tell you how I know – Blue filled my mouth with rubbing alcohol and bleach then told me that if I swallowed, I’d go blind and crazy. My gums burnt for hours but I didn’t notice it because he put his knife to my throat and told me that all of the blood in a human body could drain in under a minute.” Her expression turned mocking. “I had other things on my mind.”
Wagner controlled her urge to cut in, she knew that Tracy needed to be in charge, and even though it went against every impulse that Wagner had, she sat in silence and waited for Tracy to come back to her.
“Do you know what it’s like to be worthless? Down in your soul, to feel like garbage? I can’t tell you a single thing about the men who abducted me, I have no idea how long I traveled to get here and the only part of the experience I have is up here.” She pointed to her head, “and I don’t trust the words that my mind is sending to my lips, I don’t know if I’d help you if I could. I don’t know who I am. He turned me inside out.” She looked away, a flash of horror in her eyes. “I might even be him.”
Wagner reached across the table, Tracy flinched, but Wagner reached past her arm and took a cigarette out of the pack on the corner of the table. A deputy stepped forward with a lighter then stepped back beside a sign that read no drinking eating or smoking. Wagner expelled the words efficiently as she exhaled. “Your blood might tell us something about where you were – you don’t have to trust anybody, and we don’t have to trust you.” It was clinical, and cut straight to the point. Tracy’s mouth bent up into a poison smile.
Tracy spoke, looking over Wagner’s shoulder into the darkness. The tone was like she was still talking to Blue, daring him to step from the shadows of the interrogation room, “He made me into this and the fucking, burning truth is that only he understands me now.” She crushed out her cigarette, laid her arm out on the table. “Take your blood, I have nothing more to say.”
Wagner turned around in frustration looking back at where Tracy had been staring and at that moment she saw some of her own demons catching up with her. From her angle she could see through the darkness to a glass door to the hallway leading to the entry. Agent Wilkes entered the lobby. Even from fifty yards, he bore the unmistakable stride of someone who was pissed off. Reporting to him was going to be her own bloodletting experience.
Wagner and Wilkes sat in the break room. A bank of vending machines lit Wagner’s face and gave Wilkes a fluorescent outline. There was nothing left to eat, so Wagner drank instant coffee with extra cream.
A lipstick stained cigarette butt sat in an ashtray between the agents. It had been taken right down to the filter before becoming the object of art that reminded Wagner how long they’d be speaking; the pleasantries were long gone. Impatient voices spoke over the ashes.
“Where the hell is more important than here?” Wilkes roared.
Wagner stumbled into a sentence that sounded vaguely Samoan. “Ah, hah – no.” Her voice caught in her throat somewhere between excuse and condemnation.
Wilkes wasn’t listening, “There is no satisfactory answer. There’s no
way I can hold my head up after this investigation is over, win or lose. But we cannot lose. Are you getting this?” Wagner nodded.
“If the one unique strategy that I bring to the table. If the one man who I stake energy, resources, and confidence in turns out to be a waste, then we lose. I won’t even have the weight to fall on my own sword, agent. And I’m being literal. So when you tell me that you’re done with the only witness we have and are going out into the field after only thirty minutes, I ask you: where the hell is more important than here?” Wilkes didn’t wait for an answer; he pulled a cell phone from his jacket pocket and dialed a number. It was 2 AM in Virginia when the phone rang.
Chapter 21 Preservation
Legacy’s eyes were open; they’d been open for almost five minutes staring at the far wall of his bedroom. He didn’t move or make a sound. There was activity on the other side of the wall, footsteps far too heavy to be those of the elderly occupant. Mrs. Winch was an old widow who voiced the odd hallway or condominium association complaint. She stood up at all of the meetings to urge for more security in the complex because she had so many valuables in her unit. After thirty years of complaints, someone had listened to her, it seemed.
Legacy had called the police four minutes previous, after he was sure there was a break in – in progress. Now, he waited silently, knowing that any noise could wake Mrs. Winch and alert her to the situation, potentially setting off a powder keg on the other side of that wall.
Thud. Another noise from beyond farther away, an interior hallway, it could even be near his door. Legacy was out of the bed and silently on his feet in the span of time that it took most people to flinch.
He’d trained seven years with special ops – until they discovered his hidden talents in the interrogation room and he was reassigned. Legacy had proven himself in the field as a highly rated military resource. When they told his colonel – Franks, an aging hawk –that they needed one of his best operatives to get information out of captives, it probably translated in his head like, “Give me one of your best field assets because we want him to chat with people too important to kill.”
Col. Franks had told his men repeatedly that nobody was too important to kill. He held a deep belief that bad guys went to the bone yard and bending the rules for some only encouraged others to be worse. Negotiating set up a hierarchy of evil that somehow exempted those at the top from the ultimate punishment because they were somehow a more useful evil. Franks had no use for evil. Legacy remembered how he spat on his shoes the day he’d left the regiment.
He put on a pair of shoes that he kept beside the bed and was in the hallway. Legacy skimmed the wall heading for Chess' room – three doors down on the right – he hugged the carpet edges because the tack sticks underneath spread out his weight and made his stride even more silent.
Another sound behind him, shrill, urgent, a scream. Legacy slipped through his daughter’s door to find her sitting upright, baseball bat gripped in her hands. She had the family reflexes after all. Legacy clicked his teeth, and Chess relaxed hearing the signal.
Legacy hugged his daughter pulling his lips up to her ear. “It’s the next apartment down”
A second scream came through the walls, followed by a rattle of words that were indistinct. Finally there was a thump on the wall, and the sounds of a scuffle.
Chess pushed her father away “Do something.”
Legacy replied barely audible “I can’t leave you.”
The sound of footsteps continued in the other apartment, but the outcry was over. The alarmed voice had been silenced.
Legacy looked into the whites of his daughter’s eyes, the light from the hallway cast across her face in a stripe just wide enough to see the depth of disappointment in her expression. Legacy couldn’t stand it, he motioned for silence and she nodded. He slipped out of the room racing his own shadow gliding deftly on the wall. Legacy wanted to make the errand a quick one.
He knew that the assailants were in escape mode and the hallway offered the only access to the stairs or fire escape and down. Legacy scuttled down the locks on his door, and pushed it open with a click. Legacy crouched in the entryway, lying in wait for whatever passed.
He didn’t have to wait long. The door on Mrs. Winch’s place was thrown open and a man entered the hallway, as heavy steps came toward Legacy’s door. The lighting in the hall cast a shadow forward that the next light couldn’t quite fill in and judging from the angle, the slight shade that hit the doorframe meant he was about two paces away from Legacy’s door. The calculations were instinct, he was a much better predator than his flannel pajamas and corduroy slippers suggested. Legacy’s hand shot out, catching the fleeing man’s forearm.
Legacy had the leverage, and the strength, but the fat intruder had fat, lots of it. When he spun around like a turntable ornament he looked at his smaller attacker with surprise that verged on disbelief. Before he could explore the feeling fully, pain hit him and brought him to his knees. Legacy had a grip, thumb to forefinger between the split bones of the forearm. The grip pinched down on the tendons running to the hand and played the nerve center like an over stretched string of a violin.
Legacy’s command tone was barely louder than a whisper “Is the old lady OK?”
“Yes.” The fat man said wincing in pain. Honesty is always a quicker defense than a lie. Legacy believed him.
“Are you alone?” Legacy increased the pressure trying to get another quick answer, but all the blood rushed out of the fat man’s face and the pain caught his breath leaving him unable to speak. Legacy eased off, but it gave the man time. The fat man gasped out “I work with a team, one of us hits each house on a floor.”
Legacy studied his wide, dilated eyes, he was ninety nine percent sure that it was a lie. In his experience, fat men are often slower on their feet and quicker to think. He puffed out, “Sammy is in your house right now.”
His neighbor across the hall, Paul opened his door at that moment leaving it on the chain. “Do you need any help?” The sound of his daughters crowding the hallway behind him covered the approach of the police up the stairs.
“Freeze!”
Legacy had no time to think. Three officers of the Alexandria police stood with guns drawn.
It changed the game, now anyone hiding on the floor would be desperate. Desperate enough to take a hostage, being cornered and ready to do anything so as not to be taken into custody. Legacy couldn’t take that one percent chance. He released the fat man and ran inside his home.
He found Chess on her bed, and she hugged him tightly. “Did you get him?”
Later, they were all in the hallway. Mrs. Winch was shouting at a group of officers about the response time, she hadn’t thanked Legacy for calling them. She seemed fine. There were other things in the hall that were not at all regular. An ambulance had pulled up in front of the house and two EMTs were wheeling away a stretcher with a frightened young girl still bleeding from a cut to her head.
After the perpetrator “slipped out” of Legacy’s grasp, he’d broken down the door opposite and it had come down full weight on his neighbor, one of the daughters had suffered a head wound from the splitting wood. They were going to be OK, but the suspect had gotten away through a back window in the other daughter’s room. The youngest, Laney, wouldn’t let go of her father’s broken hand, and although each tug was a splitting pain, he let her hold on. She was shaking with fear.
Chess heard her father tell the police how the perpetrator had gotten away from him. She waited until the door was closed behind them before she added her opinion.
“He didn’t get away from you.” She paced the front foyer, furious.
“He told me that he worked on a crew and that one of them was in my apartment. It could have been you bleeding –”
“Yeah, I’m thrilled a seven year old and a defenseless grade school teacher took that guy on and not you.” She pleaded in rage, “Please don’t say that this happened because of me.”
L
egacy wasn’t ready for the deeper truth to be tested that night. He kissed her forehead, said “Good night, Chess” and walked back to his room.
Chapter 22 Painted Love
The morning didn’t return any dignity to Laura. There really was no morning in her world. She slept until Blue came to wake her, make her up for her next role. The camera’s eye had captured her wrapped in plastic wrap, the only holes for her mouth and other points of entry. Leather fetish, baby-doll, schoolgirl were all now in her distant memory. Still she sat stoically, carefully painting her face and body for the next session. Blue now gave her the freedom to mark her skin with fertility runes and glyphs – he thought it was quaint to have some history brought into the brothel. He always kept one of her hands bound and for good reason. The one time she’d had both of her hands free, she’d found a way to sneak a pair of tweezers into her mouth and then just before they were supposed to go live, she’d cut the ties on her hands and was strangling Brown and Yellow was bleeding. A stun gun had brought her to her knees. The boys took out their fantasies, and their anger on her, but she never gave them the satisfaction of being a victim.
