by Jeff Strand
He checked his watch. “Pardon me, I need to get back to work. Please continue,” he said, gesturing to Craig as he re-entered the bathroom, again closing the door behind him.
“So he tracked Ned-that’s the Headhunter, Ned Markstein-for a couple weeks. He snuck into his apartment, went through his things, all that stuff. He found more letters, nothing that identified the kidnapper, but there was enough evidence in them to prove that the person writing them had Charlotte. Last week, he hacked into the Headhunter’s personal computer and found this letter in progress. It’s here somewhere…”
Craig opened a briefcase, flipped through a couple of files, and then took out a manila folder and handed me the printout of the letter inside.
“ Buddy,
Time’s getting close, isn’t it? It’s been too long since I’ve had a nice vacation. I’ll definitely bring my share of the party favors, but I’ll take it one step further. I’ll bring you Andrew Mayhem and Roger Tanglen. And then we can ”
“Can what?” I asked.
“I’m not sure. We never saw the finished letter.”
“So how do two people like this meet? What, did he take out a personal ad? Single White Psychopath Seeks Same?”
“I think it started on the Internet, actually.”
“It’s always the Internet, isn’t it?” I said, annoyed. “So why the hell didn’t you go to the cops? My wife and I almost got killed!”
“Thomas told me not to. He said we couldn’t let the Headhunter know that we were on to him, or he wouldn’t lead us to Charlotte ’s kidnapper. So we followed him down to Chamber.”
“And let him kill all the party guests.”
Craig bit his lip. “He wasn’t easy to keep track of. We weren’t expecting him to do anything like that. I think he was just trying to show off before he brought you to the kidnapper, make himself look better.”
“You didn’t even think to warn us?” I was furious. “My wife almost got her head chopped off, too!” A horrible thought occurred to me. “How do I know he didn’t get Roger?”
“Oh, no, no, Roger’s fine. Really, he wasn’t going to kill you, just your wife. He needed you.”
“This certainly makes me feel special,” Helen muttered.
Craig stared to reply, but seemed to sense that he was losing control of the conversation. He knocked on the bathroom door.
“I’m just a bit busy,” said Thomas from inside, annoyed.
“I need you to explain the plan.”
“You know the plan.”
“But I need you to explain it to them.”
There was a moment of silence, and then the toilet flushed. Thomas emerged, wiping his hands on a towel. We all stared at him.
“What?” he asked.
We continued staring at him.
“Oh, grow up. So what’s the problem?”
“Just tell them what we need,” Craig said.
Thomas tossed the towel aside. “Andrew, we need you and your friend Roger to serve as bait.”
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” I said. “First of all, if I understand Craig’s story right, Helen and I acted as bait this evening, and we almost died.”
“Not you, just Helen.”
“You know, this is starting to piss me off,” Helen said.
“I apologize, ma’am; that was unprofessional. Here’s the situation. Three days from now, our friend in the bathroom is supposed to meet the man who kidnapped Mrs. Burgin in New York City. Queens, to be specific, and he’s supposed to have you-” he pointed at me “-and your friend with him. Naturally, he won’t be showing up. I will. The kidnapper doesn’t know what the Headhunter looks like, so I’ll be playing his part. You and Roger will be safe in the car, pretending to be prisoners. Once I’m satisfied that he’s the right individual, he’ll find a gun in his face, and then he’ll go through the same line of questioning the Headhunter did. He’ll tell us where Charlotte and the others are, don’t worry.”
“Others?” Helen asked.
“Oh yes. Apparently there are several others. At least ten, though we don’t know how many for certain. Most likely they all have families who are going through the same mental anguish that Mr. Burgin here is suffering. You can see what it’s done to his ability to outline a simple plan.”
“If you know all this is happening, why don’t you go to the police?” I asked. “Why do this by yourself instead of letting the NYPD handle it?”
“It’s bad enough that your wife has to know about it,” said Thomas. “Listen to me, Andrew. I don’t know who the kidnapper is, but I do know that he thinks this is all a big game, a way to have a few laughs. He doesn’t care if Charlotte or the others live or die. But I can make him care. Believe me, the NYPD might not be able to get him to reveal where the prisoners are, but I definitely will.”
I didn’t doubt that.
“Why does he want me?”
“Why wouldn’t he? From what I understand, you were responsible for quite a few deranged individuals getting what they deserved. Maybe this deranged individual had a friend among them, or maybe he just wants to strike a blow for his fellow deranged individuals, I’m not certain. But I promise you, you won’t be in any danger.”
“Like behind the planetarium?”
“That was a less controlled situation,” Thomas explained. “We were the ones in pursuit. This time the culprit is coming to us.”
“Please,” said Craig. “You’ve got to help us. I’ll pay you anything.”
“Naturally, my client doesn’t have the financial resources available to pay you anything,” said Thomas. “But you will certainly be generously compensated, and you’ll get a free New York City vacation out of it, though naturally you won’t be permitted to leave the hotel until after the meeting. But this isn’t about money or vacations; it’s about bringing these poor people back to their families. And all you have to do is sit in the car.”
“Is it safe to sit in a car in Queens?” I asked.
“Not really,” Thomas admitted.
I knew perfectly well that, left on my own, I’d end up accepting his offer. I’m not all that heroic, and I don’t devote my life to the betterment of mankind, and I’ll occasionally pretend that I don’t have any change when the Salvation Army Santa Clauses are standing outside of shopping malls ringing the hell out of their red bells, but to refuse to help people who’d been kidnapped by an obvious sicko just wasn’t going to cut it. I mean, it’s not like I had to worry about missing work.
However, I made sure to get the opinion of the person who kept the Mayhem household supply of common sense. “What do you think, Helen?”
“I think you’re going to do it no matter what I say.” She turned to Thomas. “If you put my husband in danger, the guy in the bathroom won’t be the only one looking to chop off your head.”
“Understood.”
“Thank you so much,” said Craig. His tone of voice made me concerned that he might drop to the floor and start slobbering all over my shoes in gratitude, but fortunately he didn’t.
“So what’s the next step?” I asked.
I NOTICED that Roger had a new scratch as he opened the door. He frowned as he saw Craig and Thomas standing behind me.
“What have you gotten me into?” he asked.
“So, Rog,” I said, giving him a reassuring smile, “got any plans this week?”
Chapter 7
NEW YORK, New York. The Big Apple. The City That Never Sleeps. Spider-Man’s hometown. I assume it’s a pretty cool place to visit, when you’re not stuck in a fleabag motel for three days cramming for finals week in the psychopath exams.
“Where were you born?” I asked for about the ninety-second time.
“ Cleveland, Ohio,” said Thomas, spitting out his answer like he was in basic training.
“What’s your favorite food?”
“Ham and cheese on rye.”
“When will this nightmare be over?”
“Two hours, twenty-six minutes.”
>
“Can we quit now?”
“No we may not.”
I set the stack of papers on the bed, which was almost completely covered with pages of personal information about Mr. Ned Markstein, alias the Headhunter. We’d been going over it non-stop. This would’ve been a pretty miserable experience regardless of the information involved, but it was made worse by the fact that we were mostly working with descriptions of grisly murders. Fourteen of them, counting the mass decapitation. How I longed for the good old days of biology finals. Except the dissections.
I did find out that whomever the Headhunter was corresponding with hated me because one of his close friends had been sent to prison because of me. He didn’t identify the jailbird, not that it would have helped.
My own proposal was that instead of Thomas pretending to be the Headhunter, we should use the real Headhunter and make him very much aware that Thomas was pointing a gun at him, but Thomas said it was too risky. “One wink of his eye and the whole plan could be ruined,” he explained, using a tone carefully calculated to let me know that I was a blithering idiot.
So Thomas, Roger and I sat in a motel room making sure Thomas knew everything he possibly could about the Headhunter. The actual Headhunter was back in Florida, heavily drugged while being watched over and re-drugged by Craig. Roger and I weren’t allowed to leave the room, because we didn’t know if anybody was watching us. Thomas was scared of a bug or something being put on him, so the only place he went for food was the hamburger place next door, where the ketchup burned your mouth and the mustard had hard little chunks in it that hurt your teeth. I commented that our room was filled with so many bugs that one more couldn’t hurt, but Thomas didn’t find that comment particularly humorous.
The whole memorizing-every-detail-of-the-Headhunter’s-life thing seemed like kind of a waste to me. I mean, if the kidnappers didn’t know what the Headhunter looked like, how would they know his shoe size? I pointed this out, too, but once again it was explained to me that I was a blithering idiot, which is apparently not a good type of idiot for a person to be.
“Day three,” said Roger, speaking into his miniature tape recorder. “Morale is low. Television programs have continued to be poor, but we remain ever hopeful that reception will improve. Body odor maintains its downward trajectory.”
“Put that away,” I told him.
“Andrew continues to be a substantial penis,” he narrated. “For the record, this is not new behavior, but it’s rare that I have the agony of spending three days in his company without time for recuperation.”
Roger had decided that he was going to take notes on our entire adventure. Because I got the big book deal last time, he figured it was his turn. I tried to explain that there would be no adventure, that we were going to sit in a car and do nothing, but his response was “Yeah, right,” which was a little disconcerting since I was thinking the same thing.
About an hour later, Thomas opened a black briefcase. “It’s time to go,” he announced, taking out a pair of handcuffs. He proceeded to snap the bracelets around his wrists, and then held out his arms toward us. “If matters don’t proceed as planned, here’s what you do. Twist your hands in opposite directions like this, then pull your wrists forward like this.” The handcuffs unhinged and fell to the floor. “Understand?”
“Do you have those in fur-lined?” I asked.
“Pink fur, if you’ve got it,” Roger added.
“You know,” said Thomas, “I used to be appalled at the workings of the minds of individuals like the Headhunter, but after being around you two I’m starting to understand the desire to kill.”
“Hey, Thomas, you made a funny!” I said. “Congratulations! Welcome to humanity!”
“I wasn’t joking.”
AFTER WE each did a practice run with the trick handcuffs, which wasn’t all that easy with our hands behind our backs, Roger and I were separately led out to Thomas’ rental car. He was pressed up right against me, since if the kidnappers were watching it had to look like he was trying to hide the handcuffs from the general public. To anyone else, it probably would have looked like we’d had too much fun with the handcuffs, but fortunately the parking lot was empty.
Roger and I sat in the back seat, behaving ourselves, while Thomas drove us the half hour to our destination. I hadn’t seen snow in quite a while, but it was pretty much the same as I remembered it (white) and the thrill wore off quickly. He parked outside of a large six-story brownstone with lots of chunks missing.
Thomas turned around to face us. “Okay, I would now like to apologize to you gentlemen, since I haven’t been completely honest about the situation.”
I frantically began twisting my hands in the trick cuffs.
“No, it isn’t like that. The plan is exactly the same, merely a bit more involved. Not a lot. Barely at all. It’s simply that the meeting is inside this condemned building, and you’ll have to come with me.”
“You turd!” I shouted.
Thomas frowned. “Did you seriously just call me a turd?”
“Sorry. I have a seven year-old. But yes, you’re a damn bastard turd! What do you mean we’re coming in with you?”
“Like I said, I apologize. I had no choice. Your wife wouldn’t have let you come if she’d known.”
“My wife hasn’t been around for three days! You haven’t even let me call her!”
“Right. Well, you might not have come either. I promise you, the danger is minimal. Almost non-existent. The situation has barely changed from the scenario that you both agreed to.”
“Actually, I don’t remember being given all that much choice, if we want to get picky,” said Roger.
I sighed angrily. “So what other information have you kept from us? Should I learn how to defuse a nuclear warhead?”
“Nothing else, I assure you,” Thomas insisted.
“And why should I believe that?”
“Because,” Thomas said, pointing a gun at my face, “you don’t have a choice.”
“Aw, c’mon! Why would you do that?” I asked. “All this time I’ve been feeling pretty good about myself, putting myself at risk to help some poor guy get his wife back, and now you’re forcing me to do it, which means I can’t get any personal satisfaction out of it. Thanks a hell of a lot!”
Thomas lowered the gun. “I apologize. I just needed to ensure that you didn’t walk out on me.”
“I wasn’t going to.”
“Well, I’m putting the gun away, then.”
“What good does that do?” I asked. “I still know it’s there. I still know I’m being forced into this. You can’t exactly give a Boy Scout points for helping an old lady cross the street when he’s doing it at gunpoint!”
“There’s no gun,” said Thomas, holding up his empty hands. “I won’t shoot you. You have free will. Go as you please.”
“Just shut up and take us inside,” I said.
“I for one would be happy with merely the outward appearance of free will,” Roger complained.
“All right, let’s go.” Thomas unlocked his door, started to open it, and then looked a bit embarrassed. “Of course, I have to take you in there at gunpoint anyway to maintain the illusion. Sorry.”
“Don’t worry about it.”
THE APARTMENT building may have been condemned, but it certainly wasn’t vacant. Homeless people were sleeping on the floor, some with blankets, some with newspapers. Several fires burned in coffee cans, providing some light and warmth, but not enough of the latter. A couple of the inhabitants rolled over and groaned as Thomas shone his flashlight around the room, which had obviously been several rooms back in the days when it had walls. A pair of youths, perhaps sixteen or seventeen years old, were sitting on the stairs, ignoring us as they shared a hypodermic needle. I won’t even discuss the smell.
“Should we double-check the address?” Roger asked.
“Quiet!” Thomas whispered, prodding us to move forward. There had to be at least forty people on the
ground floor alone, sleeping or huddled together. Most of the ones who were awake watched us closely.
Thomas slid his foot along the floor, wiping away some shards of broken glass. “Kneel here,” he said.
We did so without a word, and then waited.
A grey-bearded man under an Indian blanket rolled over on his back and began sobbing in his sleep. The man next to him kneed him in the side and he went silent.
“Place looks like it’s about to collapse,” muttered Thomas, a definite hint of fear in his voice.
We waited for a good ten minutes, not saying a word. My hands were freezing. I wondered if the kidnapper was in the room right now, watching us.
At the sound of footsteps, Thomas swung his flashlight toward a man in a dirt-covered, formerly yellow raincoat. He looked about forty, with a thick beard that hadn’t been trimmed in months.
The man spoke when he was about ten feet away from us. “You’re n-not here for n-nothin’ good, are you?”
“We’re just minding our own business,” said Thomas.
“Okay, I know w-when I’m n-not wanted,” the man said, coming closer. “I’m n-not here to h-hurt you, I was j-just hoping you could h-h-help me out a bit.”
“Sorry, we don’t have any money,” Thomas told him.
The man broke out into a rotten-toothed grin. “Aw, s-sure you do. I don’t n-n-need a l-lot, just a quarter or somethin’, buddy.”
“Sorry.”
“Don’t t-tell me you’re s-sorry. You’re not fuckin’ sorry. You don’t c-c-c-care about me. C’mon, buddy, one l-little quarter.” The man walked up right beside Thomas.
“All right, let me see what I’ve got,” said Thomas, digging in his pants pocket.
“J-just one quarter, I m-m-mean it’s not that b-big of a deal. Just a quarter.”
“Look, here’s some change,” said Thomas, holding out a small handful. “Now if you’ll excuse us, we have important business to attend to.”
“Thanks, buddy, I d-didn’t wanna be a b-bother,” the man said, taking the change with his right hand. His other hand moved before I had a chance to shout out a warning.
