The Girl From Nowhere

by Christopher Finch

  “Okay,” he said, buzzing me in, “but leave us out of this. We’ve gotta coexist with these freaks—y’know what I mean?”

  The lobby of the building, if that’s not too grand a word, provided access to a freight elevator and a stairwell. Having told Mr. Novelty Tops that I was going to the basement, there was no question of taking the elevator, so I quietly made my way up the stairs to the fourth floor.

  I was confronted by the door to Jilly’s loft, unmistakable because she had painted its metal-reinforced exterior with one of her razzle-dazzle op art designs. I listened and could hear nothing. Very carefully, I tried the handle and found, unsurprisingly, that the door was firmly locked. I recalled from my previous visit that it was fitted with a Fox Police Lock—the old-fashioned kind with a heavy bar that fits into a metal plate set into the floor—so there was no point in playing games with the edge of a credit card the way people do to trip latches in movies. My common-sense choices were to bang on the door, yell Sandy’s name, or just go away. For all I knew she was on a Greyhound bus headed back to Nowhere. But that viral hunch was acting up again. My mother once had shingles on the brain and it drove her temporarily insane. That’s the way the hunch was manifesting itself now. It was a long shot that Sandy was inside that loft, and yet this relentless presentiment was torturing me with what seemed like the certain knowledge that she was in there, and maybe in trouble.

  There was a window on the landing, blocked off with heavy, folding wooden blinds fastened with a padlock. Padlocks I can manage. Soon, I had picked it open. The blinds themselves looked like they had been closed since Mayor La Guardia was down the street in City Hall, reading Little Orphan Annie over WNYC. They creaked like crazy as I folded them back to reveal a double-hung window so caked with dirt you could barely see the other side of the street. Getting it open took some effort, but it finally submitted. I leaned out to discover that the fire escape was out of my reach, unless I wanted to try a Flying Wallendas routine.

  The next step was to see if I could get access to the roof. This proved to be easy enough, and I was about to let myself onto the fire escape a floor below when I heard the sound of horses’ hooves on cobblestones and looked down to see two mounted cops on their way to the police stables on Varick Street. I waited till they had passed, then dropped to the fire escape and headed down to the fourth floor, hoping not to attract too much attention. Nobody tried to stop me, and I stepped onto the slatted metal landing just outside the sightline of the nearest of three windows.

  At that moment I noticed someone across the street, at a window one story higher than me—a bearded man in jeans and a black shirt. Next to him was something on a tripod that could have been a rifle. That gave me a momentary scare, but it turned out that his toy was a high-powered telescope. The guy had no more interest in me than in the garbage cans on the sidewalk. Probably waiting for some chick to come home from work and take her clothes off.

  I edged closer to the nearest window and peeked around the jamb. What I saw made my skin crawl. About twenty feet from my vantage point was the “throne”—the raised platform where Jilly posed life models for her drawing classes. Clustered around the throne was the hodgepodge of chairs and stools and studio mules used by the artists when they were making their drawings. All except two were unoccupied. Seated on the most comfortable of the chairs was the hood that had been stationed on the corner of 12th Street and Hudson earlier in the day, who I had presumed to be one of Joey Garofolo’s boys. He was smoking and thumbing through a copy of some superhero comic, and he was dressed in some kind of medical orderly’s outfit. On the stool next to him was a heavy-duty revolver of the sort bad guys carry when they’re in the mood to cause a lot of mayhem. A few feet away from him, tied with rope to a kitchen chair, was Sandy Smollett. Her back was turned to me, but I could see that she was also gagged with what looked like duct tape or gaffer tape applied over what might have been a folded washcloth. Her wrists were bound behind her back and behind the back of the chair with the same kind of black tape.

  At least I had found her. But that didn’t do her or me much good. I gave the situation some thought and, for once, submitted to common sense. There was nothing I could do on my own. I had to call the cops. It might land Sandy—and me—in the shit, but it might save her life.

  I climbed up to the floor above, which had roller blinds on windows that were closed and locked. I thought of breaking the glass to enter, but that would have been noisy and might have attracted attention on Jilly’s floor. The top floor was a loft in the process of being renovated, with stacks of sheetrock on the floor. There was nobody to be seen there, so I figured my best bet was to return to the roof, head down through the building, and find a pay phone on the street. If the worst came to the worst, I reminded myself that I was just a short distance from that police stable on Varick Street. As I descended the stairs, I began to plan what I should say when I called 911. Should I go the anonymous route? That would help me out, but it might be dismissed as a probable crank call . . . which could lead to delays . . . which could cost Sandy. I decided to use my name and maybe try to speak to Detective Campbell.

  At this point, I had reached the fourth-floor landing. That was when someone poked something hard into the small of my back.

  “Don’t turn round,” said a voice that sounded like Lee Marvin with emphysema, “and don’t open your mouth.”

  The muzzle of a gun was now jabbed into the back of my neck, just to make the point. It felt like one of those big-caliber magnums—like the one I’d seen on the stool next to the kid who took a shitload of sugar in his coffee—the kind of heavy-duty burner that, with a squeeze of an index finger, can plaster your gray matter over an area the size of Far Rockaway. I paid attention.

  Whoever had the gun in my back yelled out, “Frankie!”

  I heard the police lock being disengaged and the dazzle-patterned door opened, but only a couple of feet. No glimpse of Sandy. Should I call her name? The guy behind me reminded me that that would not be a cool idea. Frankie was the hood I had bought coffee for that morning. So much for the kindness of strangers. He sneered at me but didn’t say anything smart, which was a small mercy. The unseen guy behind me told him to search me. Frankie parked his revolver, began to pat me down, and found the Ruger in about two shakes of a Lamborghini’s taillights. He continued to pat me down and took the opportunity to squeeze my balls, which he seemed to find amusing. The guy behind me told him to cut it out and sent him back inside the loft to keep an eye on Sandy.

  “If that greaser lays a hand on her . . .” I started.

  The hood behind me responded by cracking me across the side of the head with his gun. My guess had been right. It was a revolver. A big one. I had just long enough to wonder if the cylinder had left permanent dents in my cranium before he hit me again, just at the base of my skull. This time I didn’t get to wonder about anything.

  SEVENTEEN

  I came to in an ambulance, stretched out on a padded bunk with my head resting on Sandy’s lap. She stroked my face, which was nice but did nothing to mute the climax of the 1812 Overture, which was playing on a loop somewhere just behind my eyes. It almost managed to drown out the tortured shriek of the vehicle’s siren, which had also taken up residence somewhere in my cerebellum.

  “Who called the medics?” I asked, stupidly.

  Sandy saw that my eyes were open and let out a squeal.

  I told her that hurt, and asked again, “Who called the medics?”

  There were no medics. Garofolo’s hoods had simply stashed us in a vehicle they had stolen from outside some emergency room, or that they kept around for occasions like this. We were being taken somewhere. Sandy had no idea where. What better way, though, of getting somewhere in a hurry and without interference than in an emergency vehicle?

  “I know we crossed a bridge,” she said.

  Which could mean we were in Brooklyn, or Queens, or the
Bronx, or Westchester, or Jersey, or Rockland County, or on our way to the abyss. There were two small windows at the back of the ambulance, and I looked out to see if I could pick up any clue as to our location. All I could tell through the tinted glass was that it was dark and we were traveling on a highway with a center divider. We were passing through a heavily wooded area with a few lights showing through the trees.

  I returned to the bunk and lay down next to Sandy, who cradled my head on her lap. She was apparently quite calm. I hadn’t taken in till then that she was wearing the white dress I had first seen her in—or one exactly like it, since there was no sign of blood on this one.

  “How many of those do you own?” I asked.

  “Enough,” she said.

  I could taste gaffer tape on my lips, which were sore. My wrists were raw too, and I realized I had been bound and gagged.

  “I pulled the tape off your mouth,” Sandy said. “I thought it would hurt less if I did it while you were still unconscious. And I untied your wrists and ankles. They weren’t very good at knots. I’m not sure why they untied me. They said something about me not being marked up for my big night.”

  “What big night?”

  “They didn’t say.”

  “What’s going on?” I demanded.

  “Don’t get mad at me,” she said. “I didn’t do this to you.”

  “Except that you got me into this mess. Why did you leave the apartment?”

  “When will you start believing me? I didn’t want to get you into trouble.”

  “So you decided to get Jilly into trouble instead . . .”

  “I didn’t think anyone would come looking for me there. I thought I’d be safe until I could come up with a plan to get out of town. They must have followed me—at least one of them. I called you as soon as I got there. They came busting in a few minutes later.”

  “Didn’t you lock the door?”

  “I could never figure out that weird lock with the rod, and I’d had a couple of drinks. I called you, then I heard the door open, but I thought it must have been Jilly so I didn’t try to hide or anything. The one called Vin burst in with his gun pointed at me. The other one was right behind him. Then they tied me up.”

  “And are you finally going to tell me why all this is happening? How come a girl like you gets to attract all this attention?”

  She bit her lip.

  “Don’t put me on the spot,” she said.

  “Why not? I’ve been pistol-whipped and trussed up like a turkey, and now I’m in an ambulance headed for who-knows-where with a bunch of goons who are probably planning to pump a slug into my brain.”

  “That reminds me,” she said, brightly.

  She picked up the big purse she always carried and rummaged among the assorted contents. I had a flashback of Janice assuring me that the car keys were somewhere in her bag and spending the next twenty minutes searching through loose bills and credit cards—for Bloomingdale’s, and Alexander’s, and Gimbels, and Altman’s, and Lord & Taylor—and hair bands, and assorted sunglasses, and scrunched-up pantyhose, and travel tubes of toothpaste, and bottles of nail polish remover, and coming up empty-handed. Sandy did better. After just a couple of seconds she pulled out a pistol that looked a lot like my .38—the one she had taken from the safe in my closet.

  “Is that what I think it is?”

  She grinned and nodded, very cocky.

  “How did you get it?”

  “I borrowed it from you—remember?”

  “I mean, how come you still have it now? Didn’t they take it away from you?”

  She shrugged and smiled.

  “That’s the good thing about people thinking I’m just a dumb girl. It never occurred to these morons that I might be carrying a gun. They didn’t bother to search me. When they were taking us out to the ambulance, I told them I needed my bag—for the makeup. The one called Frankie even carried the bag out for me.”

  I held out my hand for the pistol. She shook her head.

  “I think I’d better keep it. I’m an expert, remember?”

  “That was true about your dad?”

  “Yup—he’s a big noise in the NRA, and before that he really was an arms instructor in the military—a designated marksman. You know, a sniper.”

  She seemed proud of this.

  “So you were a military brat? That’s the Nowhere you come from? That’s why you’re comfortable in places like West Germany?”

  Now she seemed embarrassed, as if she had given away something she had meant to keep hidden.

  “That’s just part of the story,” she said.

  It was around then that the ambulance left the paved highway we had been travelling on and moved onto an uneven, heavily rutted surface. Through the rear window I could see that we were on a dirt road that cut through dense woods.

  “It looks like we’re about to arrive someplace,” I said. “What did you do with the rope I was tied with?”

  She produced two neat coils of electrical cord and I told her to bind me the way I had been tied before, but loosely, so I could break free. I also told her to salvage the gaffer tape that had been used to gag me, but not to finish putting it in place till the ambulance came to a standstill. I told her to have the gun ready in her bag, but instead she hitched up the skirt of the white dress and stashed the pistol at her hip, secured by the waistband of her panties. She asked me if I had a plan.

  “I guess we’ll have to play this by ear,” I said.

  “Do I shoot to kill?” she asked, very matter of fact. “No, I think I’ll aim for the knees. Dad always says that’s the best way to put them out of commission.”

  I was beginning to wish her dad was with us.

  We jolted along for another five or ten minutes, then the ambulance slowed almost to a standstill. Sandy finished putting the gag over my mouth, leaving it loose and barely attached. She then helped me lay on the bunk the way I had been left before. When the vehicle came to a complete stop, she peeked out through the window.

  “It’s some kind of clearing in the trees,” she said. “There’s a car parked nearby, but I don’t see any driver or anything.”

  I heard people leaving the cab of the ambulance and the doors closing. Was this the end of the road? It was apparent that Garofolo’s hoods had plans for Sandy, at least in the short run, but did they have any further use for me? If they were not intending to take me along for the ride, this would be the place where they would dump my body.

  I had a flash of Janice’s face.

  I heard footsteps stop at the rear doors and a voice—the voice of the man who had hit me with the gun outside Jilly’s loft—called out that they were about to open the doors and that nobody should try anything clever. Sandy looked back at me, blew a kiss, then crouched on the floor, pretending to cower. The doors opened and I could see two men—the one who had just spoken, presumably Vin, and Frankie, who stood behind him with his gun at the ready. Vin looked down at Sandy, who was pretending to cry, then told her to snap out of it and get out of the ambulance. She whimpered, and then I heard a sound that for a moment I didn’t quite believe. Sandy was peeing. A nice touch.

  “Jeez . . . Fucking get a grip, bitch,” said Vin. “Get down from there—move. And don’t make a run for it, or we’ll shoot your ass off like a fucking jackrabbit.”

  Sandy jumped down, stumbled, and regained her balance. Vin nodded to Frankie.

  “Get the loser out of there. We’ll take care of him now.”

  Frankie vaulted into the ambulance. For a fraction of a second, his pistol was unsteady in this hand as he tried to catch his balance. Sandy anticipated this, pulled the .38 from under her skirt, and took a snap shot at Frankie’s gun hand. She hit it full on, and his revolver went flying. I kicked free of my bonds and dived for the gun. Vin started to reach inside his jacket for his own weapon, but be
fore he could pull it out Sandy put a slug in his shoulder, then another in his right knee. He grunted and his gun clattered to the ground. Sandy kicked it away, then dodged out of his grasp as he collapsed to the dirt and tried to grab hold of her leg. Frankie, meanwhile, was fighting to get his gun with his good hand, which I stomped on. He managed to trip me and tried to bite my ankle, but by then I had the gun. I leveled it at his eyes, which were half scared, half defiant, then looked up to see that Sandy had the muzzle of the .38 held firmly against Vin’s temple. He sat in the mud, one leg folded under him, the other thrust out in front of him. His knee was a bloody mess.

  “Okay,” he said, “we can fuckin’ talk about this.”

  “Nothing to talk about,” she replied.

  I wondered for a moment if there was anyone else around we should be concerned about, but I supposed they would have come into play by now. Presumably the other vehicle had been left there so that the ambulance could be ditched. The question was, what to do with these two schmucks? Frankie was pretty subdued by now and nursing his hand. Vin called Sandy everything from cunt to putana, but it’s not easy to be real scary with a smashed shoulder and a shattered kneecap. I went over to take a closer look.

  “I should’ve finished you before,” he said.

  “Was it you that took a shot at me on Madison?” I asked.

  “Fuck you,” he said.

  I was tempted to give him a souvenir crack or two around the ears with his own gun, but reminded myself about the solemn vows I made before being issued with that PI’s suit of shining armor. One of them read, “I swear by The Thin Man’s sacred shirtmaker not to pistol-whip a bad guy when he’s been fucked over heavy duty, especially by a woman.” Instead, I left Sandy in charge and walked over to the car that was parked at the side of the dirt road, a Lincoln. It was unlocked and the keys were on the driver’s seat.

  I went back to Sandy and told her, “We’re going to leave them here.”