The Empty Bed

by Nina Sadowsky

  On the distant edge of the deep blue sky, thick dark clouds mass together, the first threat of a storm. Jake turns into a dead-end street and Dakota trails after him without a backward glance, confirming his impression of her idiocy.

  “How many do you have?” Dakota babbles. “Because a couple of other kids on our hall were maybe interested; I pooled our cash.”

  When he turns back, she looks at him eagerly. He realizes her skin in this game; how badly she wants to be the badass rebel turning the whole dorm on to X.

  “I have everything you need,” Jake replies. He pops open the trunk and leans forward to pull a black canvas bag from its recesses. Zips it open and throws back the top flap.

  “Take a look,” he says.

  Dakota glances at him, her eyes bright with delighted daring. She turns her attention to the canvas bag, leaning over, and as she does, Jake strikes. One hand covers her mouth. The needle filled with fentanyl pricks her neck. Her eyes flare briefly in alarm before she crumples.

  Jake bundles her into the trunk. Extracts her cellphone from her front pocket and then slams the trunk lid shut. His heaving breath roars in his ears. He feels dizzy, queasy. He practices mindful breathing as he’s been taught: slow long inhales through his nose released through his mouth. He looks around. The narrow dead-end street is deserted. He’d disabled the CCTV cameras the night before. A handful of drunken frat boys stumble past at the far end, laughing and hollering. They pay him no mind. Jake’s hammering heart slows.

  He climbs into the driver’s seat of the Ford Fusion he rented in Baton Rouge and drove to New Orleans. He’s changed the plates, of course; destroyed the agreement between Thrifty rental cars and one John Bernake of Salt Lake City, Utah. Jake feels comfortable in John’s persona. He’ll be sorry to have to retire him, when it comes to that.

  He pulls smoothly out of the alley and into congested traffic, navigating away from the snarl. As he pulls onto the freeway, he drops Dakota’s phone out the window of his car.

  Damn, the things Jake would like to say to that girl!

  Stupid enough to buy ecstasy from some strange dude she met at a party, even dumber to take on the role of supplier to her cohort. Idiotic enough to follow said strange dude into an alley, even dopier to let herself get stuck in the neck and shoved in a trunk.

  Smart enough to get into a top school, though, Jake muses.

  He drives the speed limit. He keeps a wary eye open for police. He watches the other cars and trucks that flow around him to be sure no one seems interested, on his tail. He resolves himself to the patience needed for a long road trip. Fiddles with the radio until he finds some Johnny Cash. Begins to compose his report to Catherine in his head.

  REPORT

  As per orders, contact was initiated with the Target the night before extraction. After reconnaissance revealing the Target’s weekend plans, “Diesel” arranged to encounter her at an off-campus party held in a cottage on nearby Freret Street. This location was chosen after the premises were duly checked for security cameras, and those as well as the cameras on Freret Street disabled.

  Diesel established confidence in his persona and a consequent request for a drug purchase the next day was achieved within forty-one minutes.

  All went according to plan with the minor exception of the Target arriving at the rendezvous point with a Collateral, despite explicit instructions to come alone. As instructed, Diesel walked away. The Target followed as predicted.

  Jake tends to keep his reports factual and minimal. Catherine uses every single phrase as a point from which to start an interrogation under the guise of expanding his training. What was it about playing a drug dealer that appealed to you? Why did it come so easy? Did your relationship with your sister impede or assist your ability to create rapport with a teenage girl?

  Jake accepts the personal probing that is a pivotal part of his tutelage. Catherine unapologetically warned him she was going to break him down psychologically in order to build him back up before they began working together and then did just that. He’s strong of mind now, stronger than he’s ever been. Stronger of body too, buffed and polished. He appreciates the elements of his transformation while also wondering where it will take him.

  Does anyone ever feel finished? Jake feels unfinished, as well as wary. He’s uncomfortably in process. Like one of the famous Michelangelo bondage statues, exquisite marble figures wresting themselves from solid rock, half human, half stone, totally tortured.

  Unease grips Jake’s belly like a claw as he recalls sticking that needle in Dakota Harris’s neck. Feeling her crumple in his arms took him back to Paris, where Catherine had neutralized him in just the same manner a few short years before.

  For a brief flash, Jake smells the acrid, rusty scent of blood in his nostrils.

  He wipes a palm across his suddenly sweaty brow as he thinks of his sister, Natalie. Not much older than Dakota, Natalie is in her junior year at RISD. She’d had a show of her glass sculptures at the end of her last semester that had created a bit of a sensation. At the opening reception, Jake couldn’t help but gloomily wonder if the feverish buzz was as much about their tortured and public family history as it was about the tableau of monsters menacing fairies she’d crafted from blown glass. He’d thought her technique impressive but the art’s obvious metaphors shamelessly exploitive.

  They’ve been on the road for about an hour. Dakota’s roommate might be concerned by now, but probably not enough so that she’ll have sounded an alarm. Maybe she’ll think she misunderstood and was to meet Dakota back at the dorm, or at the game. By the time the roommate’s asking mutual friends or possibly taking the next step of alerting the girls’ RA, Jake will be miles gone. When and if they really start searching for Dakota Harris, the only leads left behind will point to a mythical drug dealer nicknamed Diesel.

  Misinformation is an essential part of their campaign to keep this idiot girl safe.

  The sky finally splits and fat drops of rain plummet from thick clouds. Jake switches on the windshield wipers. He peers uneasily through the coursing water at the suddenly darkened road ahead.

  As he takes a sharpish turn his wheels spin out, the Fusion hydroplaning on suddenly slick asphalt. A sickening thud booms from the trunk.

  Jake leans into the skid and brings the sedan back under control. Weak with relief over righting the car, he panics anew as he questions the meaning of that thud. What if Dakota rolled over and she suffocates? What if she hit her head and she’s already dead? What if I’ve killed her?

  Fear adds lead to his foot. Jake accelerates, crossing two lanes of traffic to take an exit. He pulls off the ramp and turns into a gas station, pulling around to the back of the building near a pair of restrooms. A vehicle is parked, a battered Dodge pickup truck. Jake glances inside the truck as he pulls up alongside. Empty.

  Jake pulls on a hoodie to shield himself from the rain and bounds to the back of his car. He glances around to make sure he’s unobserved. Pops the trunk.

  Dakota Harris is as he left her. Somnambulant. Still. Jake stares at her for a long moment, water coursing down his back. A drop of rain hits the girl’s cheek and she stirs slightly, moans.

  The ladies’ room door swings open, and a leathery cowgirl in her forties sashays out in red cowboy boots and a denim minidress. She pops open a red umbrella. Jake slams his trunk shut.

  “Whooee, this rain is something, isn’t it?” The cowgirl grins at him as she hustles back to the pickup.

  Ducking deeper into his hoodie, Jake climbs back into his car as fast as he can and hightails it out of there.

  Dakota looks so young, so vulnerable lying there in the recesses of his trunk.

  He understands Catherine has her methods; she’s trained him well in both technique and theory. But is her way always the right way? He lifts one hand from the wheel and to his neck, his fingers seeking the spot wh
ere Catherine had injected him back on rue Saint-Honoré. It feels like a lifetime ago.

  Several hours of mind-numbing driving later, Jake pulls over on a swampy stretch of pitch-black backcountry. They came through the worst of the rain a while ago, although the very air itself is misty and wet. The headlights of the Fusion cut deep golden circles into trees weeping with hanging moss and quivering with droplets.

  Dakota Harris should be waking up by now.

  Jake takes a long satisfying leak off the side of the road, letting his eyes adjust to the darkness. As Catherine had promised, this stopping point is spectacularly isolated. Rustles, coos, and hoots float from every shadowy direction but his flashlight and the Ford’s headlights are the only illumination.

  Jake pops the trunk, flashlight in hand. Dakota’s still curled in a fetal position. Her eyes blink as the beam from the flashlight penetrates her fentanyl fog.

  She gasps. Pushes herself up on an unsteady elbow. Attempts a scream, but is too dazed and drug sick, so a sickly yowl like an injured dog’s whimper is all that emerges from her throat.

  But fear blazes in her eyes. And revulsion. Jake hopes the beam of the flashlight blinds her to his sudden recoil. I don’t want anyone, ever, to look at me that way again.

  When did he become a man who drugs teenagers and bundles them into car trunks? He guesses the day he said yes to Catherine. The ends justify, right?

  “My name is John. Your parents sent me to get you,” he tells Dakota sternly. “And there’s no point in yelling. We’re in the middle of nowhere.” Two truths and a lie.

  “Why should I believe you?” the girl snarls. “You’re a fucking drug dealer! You kidnapped me!”

  “Believe your parents then,” Jake retorts, hitting a preprogrammed number on a burner phone. “This was the best way to get you out of New Orleans. For your own protection.”

  The cell connects and Jake hands it over to Dakota, taking a step away from the trunk. He can hear the tinny electronic wash of her parents’ voices through the phone’s speaker, rising, falling, overlapping, beseeching, promising, reassuring.

  “Okay,” Dakota says into the mouthpiece. “Okay, okay. Right. Okay.”

  The girl hangs up the phone. “Fuck my life.”

  Jake holds out a bottle of water. “If it’s any consolation, this is the safest way.”

  Dakota grabs the bottle and cracks it, draining it in three greedy swallows.

  He offers her an arm and she climbs unsteadily out of the trunk.

  “If you need to, you know, go, you should do it now on the side of the road. First, give me that phone back.”

  Her fingers tighten around the burner. “Where’s my phone?”

  “Long gone. Also for your own protection.”

  “I don’t believe this shit! I have friends who will be looking for me, you know.”

  “Exactly.” Jake wrests the burner from her hand.

  “Here. Take the flashlight.” He holds it out to her, along with a box of tissues.

  He feels her fingers tighten around the heft of the flashlight as he passes it over, so admonishes her, “Don’t do anything stupid. Just take care of business.”

  Dakota grabs the flashlight and tissues, moving around to the far side of the car, cursing under her breath all the while.

  Jake turns in order to give Dakota privacy. “When you’re done, lie down in the backseat. I’ll cover you with a blanket. Best if you stay under it. There’s more water, crackers, and fruit back there too.”

  “Are you waiting for a thank-you?” the girl calls back. “So not happening.”

  Jake drops the burner cell on the ground. Stamps down on it hard. Repeatedly.

  “Is that the fucking phone?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is there another one?”

  “No.”

  “What if I need to speak to my parents again?”

  “You’ll be with them in about seven hours.”

  “Okay. Get this. I am keeping my shit together,” she tells him, “but barely. We are not friends. Don’t talk to me. Don’t look at me funny. Don’t say one word. I’ve had all I’m gonna take.”

  Jake turns to see Dakota zipping up her cutoffs and striding back to the car. She crawls into the backseat and allows him to cover her as she releases a dramatic sigh and a well-aimed eye roll. Jake gets back behind the wheel.

  Next Steps and Risk Assessment: All of Target’s previously owned electronic devices have been seized and destroyed, known social media accounts and other Internet histories need to be deleted and scrubbed. The Target will require monitoring, as although she is certainly bright enough to understand the dangers inherent in contact with any of her former friends and associates, she is still a teenager and suffers from limited impulse control.

  Jake runs the phone over with the Fusion for good measure before they leave this little piece of nowhere.

  It’s as much to make an impression on Dakota as anything. Catherine has taught him much about the value of the well-timed point.

  REUNIONS AND INTRODUCTIONS

  Catherine,

  Wheeless, Oklahoma

  A relentless drone of chattering bugs vibrates through the open windows. Lisa Harris’s soft, anxious voice barely rises above the scrum of noise. “Have you heard anything yet?”

  Turning away from the window and the barren landscape it frames, I glance at my burner phone. “No.”

  Stephanie arrived three hours ago with the Harrises’ pristine false papers, but Jake and his precious cargo are late. Nineteen minutes ago, I sent Stephanie out as an advance woman to keep watch for Jake on the long, empty road that leads to this shack. It’s really only a ploy to get the Harrises to calm the fuck down. Jake’s not terribly beyond schedule and I understand the extraction went seamlessly.

  As soon as Jake arrives with Dakota Harris, I’ll escort the family to our planned rendezvous with Dex, a pilot friend of mine from Texas who’s arranged to meet us at the nearby Boise City Airport. (My history with Dex is a story for another time.) Dex will fly us to Mexico City. I have a safe house there.

  “What’s taking so long?” Lisa’s fraying from the stress. Her normally soft voice is strident, her face pinched.

  My burner phone lights up with a text. “She’s spotted them. They’re almost here.”

  “Thank god.” The words burst from Steve. “Thank god. Dakota. Our little girl.”

  I realize these are the first words he’s said in hours.

  Finn peers up from underneath a sandy fringe of bangs. “Kota coming?”

  His mother strokes his hair. “Yes, baby. Dakota’s coming.” Finn smiles and recommences humming.

  The door bursts open, but it’s just Stephanie, black shaggy hair tousled, binoculars strung around her neck. “They’ll be ten to fifteen,” she estimates, waving the lenses. “Saw them as they turned down by that big old dogwood.”

  “Let’s get ready then,” I command. “Pack up. We’ll drive down and meet them on the road. Go right to the airport.”

  Steve and Lisa exchange a glance, the deadly reality of their situation hitting them in a fresh, sickening wave. When they were waiting for Dakota, that simple act occupied the entirety of their hearts and minds.

  This is the moment of action, the moment of no return. Now Steve and Lisa Harris will accept fake passports, flee the country, live undercover. Before my eyes these two people are slamming up against the terrifying consequences of “doing the right thing,” haunted by the recognition that this choice is also requiring actions on their part that they would previously have found morally repugnant (not to mention ridiculously far-fetched). All complicated by their quite legitimate fears about the impact this will have on their lives and those of their teenage daughter and autistic son.

  “Right now?” Steve’s face is white. “We haven�
��t even seen Dakota yet. And with Finn…you know, we sometimes have to ease into things.”

  “I respect that,” I answer. “But in that case, I suggest you start preparing Finn to go now. The faster we’re out of here and you’re all on that plane the better. I always have my kit, if you prefer that option.”

  “I’m sorry,” Steve says to his wife for the hundredth time in my hearing.

  “You did the right thing. You’re doing the right thing.” Lisa’s reply is automatic; she’s given it as many times as he’s offered the apology. She stoops to her son’s eye level. “Finn, baby, we’re going to go meet Dakota now.”

  The boy hums on, fixated on his game. “Come on, Finn,” Lisa croons. “Let’s get ready to see Dakota.”

  Steve watches his wife coax his son up from the floor. The man’s hands hang limply by his sides; a defeated look softens the contours of his face.

  “Go pack up,” I repeat to Steve. He startles to attention and nods at me abruptly before walking into the bedroom he’s been sharing with Lisa and Finn.

  I turn to Stephanie. “Get in the car. We’ll be out as soon as.”

  “Yes, boss.”

  The reunion, when it happens twenty minutes later on a dusty shoulder off an empty stretch of sunbaked road, is epic. Finn Harris clamps his thin body around his older sister and whimpers with joy. Lisa and Steve encircle their two children with their own loving bodies. All four stand in a huddled cocoon of familial relief as I pull Stephanie and Jake over to the side.

  I introduce my two operatives to each other by first names only, John and Stevie (although their exchange of sly glances reveals both probably and correctly expect that the names given are false). I explain I will drive the Harrises to meet their plane. The two of them will follow me to the airport. After the family and I are safely out, they will coordinate in order to dispose of the three vehicles we’ve used thus far in this operation. Then they are to disperse and wait for further instructions.