Ransom X

by a b

  What sickened him weren’t the mistakes in the field however; it was a nagging feeling in the pit of his stomach. It was something he couldn’t quite put his finger on, but it rumbled on regardless. There was something about the operation other than the result that personally didn’t sit well. What could it be?

  He looked across the table where Tyke pretended not to know the outcome of his night was disastrous. He stared back, waiting an explanation. Everybody wanted an explanation for everything and it seemed like Legacy was the only person on duty at the information desk.

  “Did he get away?”

  He shrugged and said in a weary voice “Not yet, but he’s going to.”

  Legacy stood to leave. Tyke stood at the door awkwardly deciding whether to shake his hand or pat him on the back as he passed. Something in Legacy’s posture told him to do neither, and after two days of close quarters they parted in complete silence.

  *****

  Halfway across the country Wagner wasn’t having much better luck. She’d gotten six propositions from truck drivers as she showed her “pretty face” in gas station after gas station – in the files it said that Darci frequented the convenience stores, sometimes making them a perch for weeks at a time. Wagner had sifted through groups of world-weary teens, drinking from soda cups the size of soup tureens, smoking clove cigarettes to ensure that it stayed on their clothes and announcing their subversive culture to everyone downwind. But she’d gotten only vague statements.

  “Yeah, I seen her around.” Said the rebel son of a local dentist.

  “She was like trippin’ on somebody – love of her life or something.” Continued a girl who looked barely in her teens. She inhaled deeply on a cigarette and blew it toward her bangs. “She didn’t act heartbroke, though.” She batted her eyes toward a greasy haired skate punk.

  “Hey, we were in love twice a day, regular.” He snarled.

  Wagner asked a question that always came back negative, no matter how many times she asked it. “Have you seen her in the last week?”

  “Last Thursday.”

  She snapped her notebook shut and moved on. Wagner moved through a hazy overcast day feeling like the mood of her surroundings was beginning to sink beneath her skin. Snow was never far away in Provo, the mountains rising from the hills to the east. The architecture was 1960’s authentic. Nothing had been updated, including street signs, since the Eisenhower era. It might have been charming in a climate more friendly to paint and plaster, but most of the buildings cracked and peeled in intricate patterns, openly reminiscent of the past.

  Wagner drove along a strip of greenbelt called Sunny Day Park. It was abandoned. The surroundings reminded her of her geographical exile from the case. She hadn’t heard a word from Legacy since boarding the plane. She refused to call in, for fear that he would order her reassignment. If he put in the paperwork and she didn’t show up it could mean a reprimand in her file. Wagner could handle almost anything that she could confront, but the moment that it went into her file, paperwork would destroy her. She wouldn’t give Legacy the chance to reel her in, although the idea of a well-made cup of espresso made her bite down on her ruby red bottom lip. What she wouldn’t give for properly foamed soymilk.

  A banner at a little mom and pop convenience store read “new cappuccino” Wagner was half way past when she saw the sign out of the corner of her eye. She slammed on the brakes and seeing nobody on the road behind her, reversed back to park on the street in front of Gas and Loaf.

  An appropriate name, considering the two young men sitting on the stoop in front of the door. They looked like surfers, with long dyed hair and tanned skin. Wagner approached the door when the bleached blonde said “Don’t go in there, lady, clerk’s a complete bitch.” She noticed the designer mock turtleneck and expensive watch on him. He was not the kind of kid she was looking for. His friend, the one with avocado green hair, chimed in singing “Stay, stay the night!” imitating the grating falsetto of the lead singer of the rock group Chicago. He stood and put his arm across the door.

  Wagner flashed a smile, then a badge. Either one would have sufficed with the boys, and a nod of her head sent them on their way.

  Wagner had skimmed the reports passed down from the agents that come to the Gas and Loaf before her. They’d described the owner-operator as “uncooperative”. She had answered no to every question – even when after a series of “no” a young sparkplug agent had asked her “If her responses were part of some local comedy routine?”

  She said “no.”

  It was hardly the kind of affirmation that Wagner needed along an already cold trail. What she needed was cappuccino.

  What met her inside nearly drained her of all will to live. The cappuccino machine was really a cocoa machine that dispensed powdered, sickeningly sweet chocolate mocha cappuccino. It came dispensed in cups of 12, 22 and 32 oz. “Who drinks a quart of this crap?” Wagner thought, eyeing the HOT TUB extra large cup. She filled a 22-ounce cup and headed toward the cashier. It was a long narrow store, which gave her added time to observe the sour face of the aging store attendant.

  She took a sip on the way, a habit hand to mouth. Her distaste must have shown because the clerk smiled with gritted yellow teeth and said. “Makes you fat, too. That’ll be 75 cents.”

  Wagner wasn’t sure that she’d heard her correctly, “What?”

  The clerk explained in a raspy voice “It tastes bad, it makes you fat and it wires you up. It’s your generation. Refills are a quarter.”

  Wagner defended her generation by refusing to stoop to insult “Can I have a lid?” She stepped closer and flashed a bright smile.

  “Fed’ral cop?” the clerk asked. Wagner was about to ask how she knew when the clerk turned around with a twinkle in her shrewd-looking eye “I saw you flash the badge. You’re wasting your breath and your face with me, dearie.” The clerk zipped her mouth closed and threw away an imaginary key.

  “Too bad,” Wagner thought. She was starting to like the clerk, much like the way one appreciates cactus growing in another yard or clotted sour milk in somebody else’s cappuccino. Which, coincidently, was the same cottage cheese curd consistency as the skin on the clerk’s cheeks, chin and nose. A series of moles and pock marks bulged and fell like rock outcroppings down her loose jowls. Up close, it was hard to look at her without flinching.

  Wagner turned to leave as a disdainful snort caught up with her about halfway to the door. She thought of the satisfaction of topping off her drink, without offering the quarter refill charge, right in front of the smug clerk. That led to the fantasy of pulling out her service revolver and putting the cappuccino machine out of its misery.

  Two sets of magazine racks flanked the exit, and although it was not her usual habit to scan the fashion magazines, she found herself fixed on one headline. It read “Are you ready for the best fitting swimsuit of your life?”

  Wagner doubted if anyone from Provo was ready for anything less. OK, perhaps the truly indifferent folks who only wore a swimsuit once or twice a year – wait, that was the entire population. Most of the readers shared almost none of the same values as the editors, yet one never found literature in any of the permutations of the Gas and Loaf stores across middle America. These fashion magazines were everywhere, and there was one in the hands of the clerk.

  Agent Wagner reached the doorway and paused. The magazine text made her think of Legacy. He talked about how he was always open to trivial thoughts that impressed upon his world. He opened his arms to every thought equally, those that he sought out to analyze and those that simply drifted in upon the wind. It was, he’d said, not because he was more intelligent than others, but that he did examine every thought that he had more completely than almost anyone.

  Why had she connected the headline to Legacy? She stood in the doorway, eyes fixed on the words. The best fitting swimsuit of your life, it was absurd. It meant nothing. Somehow it kept people with limited discretionary spending coming back to the sticky, glossy
pages. They must find some kind of harbor in the inflated drama of another’s struggle with thigh fat and capri consciousness that only covered half of what it should. Then she knew what the clerk needed, she felt it in her shoulders then the feeling moved upward and became a gleam in her eye.

  “Are you just going to stand there?” the clerk asked.

  “Don’t talk. We’re being watched.” She spat in a stage whisper. “Your life might be in danger. If you know the girl I’m looking for.” She swiveled on a heel. “You know the picture I’m talking about. Those men who came before, they weren’t with the bureau.”

  “They showed me a badge that looked just like yours.”

  “Did you examine it? The Chinese mafia does a beautiful forgery.”

  “He was a Chinaman.”

  Liu would be pleased. “He’s watching this store, he knows that this is his best lead.” The edge of her statement hung in the air, razor thin and easy to miss if viewed from the front. It was the unfamiliar thrill of mystery and danger that pulled the clerk out of her safe hiding place to face Wagner’s challenge. She said, “I knew that girl was nothing but trouble.”

  Wagner stepped back up to the counter and found a comfortable angle to lean with her hip pointing outward, elbow resting on an advertisement for chewing tobacco.

  Wagner asked her again about Darci, entreating her to “Act casual and point to the TV like we’re talking about a new show.” She was pleased to find that the clerk’s memory of her was detailed and descriptive. She’d only seen Darci twice, but both sightings were memorable. She told Wagner about the strange behavior of the girl and the way she mocked the poor abducted girl. Her description of Darci’s hysteria brought on by the images of the missing girl’s televised return made Wagner’s ears burn – it must have brought back all of the horrors.

  Why didn’t Darci go to the police? Wagner stopped taking notes for a full intake of breath.

  The clerk snarled and explained how Darci’s laughter proved that the girl was either on drugs and totally out of it, or just another selfish teenager mocking other people’s pain. “What’s the matter with you?” The clerk asked.

  Wagner felt the tightness of her skin stretched against the bony frame of her forehead. She pictured Darci watching the aftermath of her ordeal reflected in another girl’s eyes; it must have shaken the ground beneath her feet and sucked the air out of the room around her. The clerk cleared her throat, annoyed. “Well?”

  Wagner eased the creases in her forehead, gave the clerk the prompt she needed to continue the narrative. “I’m afraid that if we put you in protective custody these men will have the resources to get to you.”

  “I’m not afraid.” Her eyes lit up.

  The clerk then spoke of the shoplifting, thinking in an obvious way that the investigation must have something to do with theft. “Cookies were probably just the start for a no good hoodlum like that.” Wagner imagined that it would take more than a few packets of stolen cookies to redeem Darci. But that wasn’t what made her go underground, the timing didn’t make sense.

  “This all happened the day they found the girl?” She asked.

  “Yeah a couple of weeks ago.”

  The sequence didn’t fit. Maybe Legacy’s prediction that the Vinyl Men came back to erase their mistakes was right. If her torturers had caught up with her last Thursday, Wagner should be looking for a body, not a witness.

  The next thing the clerk said came at her like it was in orbit around an imaginary center mass comprised of her, the kidnappers and Legacy. It came from nowhere and seemed to lead out into the darkness of space, only to come back around and clock her with a revelation even Copernicus would be proud of.

  “Then I saw her slap that Edmunds kid. Everyone knows the Edmunds’.” She spoke the name like it was part of local lore. Wagner nodded in stone agreement to keep the words flowing from the stagnant woman. “Well anyway, she did what everybody round here wants more than anything to do. Right out there.” She pointed to the spot on the pavement outside the store with specificity, like a monument should be put up on the exact site. And a contumelious chuckle erupted followed by a wet and very common hacking cough.

  “Last Thursday.”

  The Edmunds kid suddenly became the last person to see Darci, and the punch she had landed on him felt like it had come to rest in the pit of Wagner’s stomach. She was worried that it was too late.

  Wagner pulled up to the North Cliff gated community, the only gated community in town. The town didn’t really need any gated communities, it was on the list of the most safe places to live in Utah. The distinction of being the safest in Utah must make a mockery of all of the other safest cities in the country.

  Still some people, like the Edmunds, liked to have the feeling of going through a gate before parking their overpriced, oversized vehicles in the stubbornly regular sized parking spaces allotted to each tenant, parking space width being one of the last great social equalizers.

  It was one in the afternoon, and Wagner rang the bell for “common cottage” 3A. “BZZZT” The word ‘cottage’ was another affectation of the ruling class of people who paid so much for an apartment that they couldn’t possibly call it by the name allotted to it by the real estate code. “BZZZT” She rang again, with no answer.

  Wagner noticed a button marked “hospitality room” and pressed it. A deep vibrating voice shook the speaker. It would have sounded much more commanding if each of the words hadn’t resolved in an effeminate lisp.

  “Hospitality.” Before Wagner could say anything, the deep bass voice continued. “Come on in.”

  The door buzzed, rattling the screen and sending shivers up the side of the light blue cape cod absurdity that stood in four clusters inside the high-gated walls. There was no cape nearby, or cod for that matter. False wharfs and planked walkways lead from one building to another. It created such a false fiction that one half expected Captain Crunch to saunter past.

  Chauncy, the general manager and hospitality room curator, met Wagner at the door with a cup of steaming cappuccino. Before she could say anything his meaty hand laid the cup in hers. The circle of his forefinger and thumb easily spanned the circumference of the rim.

  “I’m a big man.” He replied to her unspoken observation, “and I’m getting bigger every year.” He patted the flabby gut that hung in the spotlight of one of the recessed lights overhead. Not only was Chauncy largest, blackest and baldest person that Wagner had seen since arriving in Provo, he immediately proved himself to be the most intuitive as well, “Thought you sounded like the cappuccino type.” He said in an apologetic tone, not wanting to offend if he was off, even though he knew he was not.

  Chauncy had a gift for knowing what people needed. “You’re looking for information, not real estate.”

  Wagner’s heart sunk, she thought for a moment that Chauncy had already received a visit from the FBI. “Somebody spoke to you?”

  Chauncy chuckled, a deep rumble, “No darlin’, I’m in hospitality, I just know what people want.” He was a talker, and he began reciting some of his hospitality highlights, each story laced with a level of professional pride and reverence that Wagner wouldn’t have expected. “When one of the Dixon kids of the complex called down asking for extra towels, I knew instead to call a plumber. When the divorcee in cottage 2A met with the local radio personality in 4C, I knew not to show any west facing apartments because of the fact that maintenance was always called to fix the deck railing after her visits – and I won’t even take a stab at explaining how it came loose.” He leaned forward and raised his eyebrows like he was telling a secret in a crowded room. “Perhaps the ex was behind bars for something that funded the sleek SLK that she drove, and she was recreating the feeling of her new life with him. I’m talking too much.”

  He picked up the serviette and took a pair of dainty tongs and picked up a sugar cube, then replaced it. Chauncy smiled humbly, “You don’t want sugar.” He said flatly.

  Wagner liked him m
ore with every syllable. His voice had an easy way of convincing the listener that he was there to please. “No thanks.”

  “Sweet little thing like you stirs it up without adding a thing” Something in the rumbling compliment was so genuine that it made her blush. The lisp reasserted itself “That’s the color I want for my nails.” He held up his hand painted nails to her face.