Threat warning

by John Gilstrap

  Jonathan understood better than most the lives of disaffected youth. At one level, all that differentiated him from these punks was the fact that his father’s criminal enterprises had been enormously successful. Money talked. Dion and his friends never had the benefit of Jonathan’s fifteen-thousand-dollar-a-year high school education.

  These boys had been throwaway strays since the day they were born. Jonathan pitied them the way he pitied everyone who was born into crime. Years ago, he’d founded Resurrection House, a tuition-free residential school for children of incarcerated parents, specifically in hopes of breaking the cycle of misery that began for children when their parents were arrested, and often followed them all the way to their graves in a potter’s field beyond their own prison walls.

  Jonathan noted a smirk on Engelhardt’s face as he led the way back out through the maze of airlocks. “Something funny, Deputy?”

  Englehardt bristled. “Keep your tough-guy rap for the inmates,” he said. Then he laughed. “But wait till you see the Secret Service dick. You seem to have an interesting way with people.”

  Jonathan’s first impression of Agent Clark when he saw him waiting in the receiving area was that Engelhardt had gotten it wrong-the guy looked like he’d swallowed a bucket of spiders, not worms. Worms would have brought a look of disgust. This guy looked scared.

  Jonathan knew exactly what had happened: Dom had placed a call from the Woodrow Wilson Bridge to the J. Edgar Hoover Building on Ninth Street, beginning a ripple of consequences that had led to Clark learning this vivid lesson in Washington politics.

  “Good evening, Agent Clark,” Jonathan said through a broad smile. “Nice of you to come.”

  Clark stood, but his face remained as hard as granite. “There are a lot of people dead out there tonight, Mr. Grave,” Clark said. “Forgive me if I don’t find that funny.”

  Jonathan glared at the classic inside Washington bullshit. When rocked on your heels, take the offense by being offended. Warfare by sound bite. It was a game Jonathan chose never to play. He shook his head in the most patronizing way he knew how. “I’m going to go home now and read about the murderer who got away because you wouldn’t let me shoot her.”

  That ought to do it.

  As Jonathan pushed past, Clark grabbed his elbow. The fact that they were in a police station saved him from a nightmare of facial surgery and jaw wire. “Wait,” Clark said.

  “If you’re not arresting me, you’d better holster that hand,” Jonathan growled.

  Clark let go. “Look,” he said. “I don’t know who you are, or how you got the attention of the head of the FBI, but Director Rivers for sure has the attention of Director Miller, and he called me personally to tell me to come here and apologize.” He steeled himself with a deep breath. “I apologize.”

  Most people’s features age when they’re under stress, but Clark was the exception. He somehow appeared younger. Maybe it was the kid-in-the-principal’s-office body language. Whatever it was, Jonathan couldn’t bring himself to hammer any more soul out of the man. “Apology accepted.”

  He started to move past again, and Clark again grabbed his arm. At that moment, the jail’s front door opened, and a hot babe in a ski jacket hurried into the over-lit white-walled room. A dark ponytail flopped from under a wool stocking cap. Jonathan could think of no one he’d rather see.

  “There’s more,” Clark said, hanging on to the arm. “I’m supposed to offer you a ride home.”

  “He’s already got a ride,” the new arrival said. Then, in response to Clark’s confusion, “I’m Gail Bonneville, Mr. Grave’s business partner.”

  Clark looked unsure whether to believe her. Jonathan couldn’t have cared less.

  “This is the quick-witted Agent Clark of the United States Secret Service,” Jonathan explained. “He’s the one who put me up in this fine bed-and-breakfast.”

  Clark reddened.

  “Just doing his job, I’m sure,” Gail said. “From what I’ve heard, you showed a lot of courage out there on the bridge, Agent Clark.”

  Jonathan rolled his eyes. “Let’s go home,” he said.

  Clark cleared his throat and shifted his feet. Clearly, there was more. “The director was very specific,” he said. “I am to shake your hand and offer you any other assistance that I can.” He offered his hand.

  Now Jonathan felt bad for the guy. How much humiliation had Irene Rivers demanded? He accepted the man’s hand. “Consider it done. In fact, consider anything else that the director insisted that you do to be done. There really are no hard feelings.”

  He was pretty sure that was a one-sided statement.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Ryan’s mind raced. They should be fighting back, shouldn’t they? Instead, they were just doing what this bitch with the gun told them to do, driving long into the night-over two hours now-without a word being spoken by anyone.

  This Colleen chick was an odd piece of work. Even as she threatened their lives, she managed to sound friendly. Now that the threat was made-and Ryan didn’t doubt that she was capable of killing again-she’d stopped talking, except to give Mom occasional driving directions. She spent the quiet time softly humming church songs. Ryan recognized “Amazing Grace”-who didn’t know that one?-and several others sounded familiar enough that he could have hummed along if he’d wanted. Ryan didn’t consider himself anyone’s expert on religion, but he was pretty sure that Heaven was out of reach for murderers and kidnappers. When one person did both, the odds had to be pretty awful.

  Colleen had actually spoken Ryan’s thoughts when she warned against tumbling out of the car and going for help. That was exactly what he’d been considering. Now, with the dire threat to kill Mom still standing, the moment for action was lost. But maybe only for a little while.

  Ryan’s dad had told him a thousand times that eighty percent of so-called “victims” of violent crime were in fact willing participants who talked themselves into victimhood as a means of rationalizing their fears. They didn’t consider life-saving action because it added new risk.

  In the abstract, it’s easy to think of people who feel fear as cowards, but in real time, when you’re the one who’s likely to die if the nut job pulls the trigger, fear feels more like a survival skill than cowardice.

  Interstate 66 led to Interstate 81, which in turn led to Route 262. After that, he lost track of the route numbers. They drove west, endlessly into the night.

  They drove into a future that Ryan imagined held little comfort for the Nasbe family. Their next opportunity to make a difference would arrive when they made their first stop-whether it was at their final destination or at someplace along the way for gas or maybe even a pee break. A dozen ideas churned in Ryan’s brain, from the simple to the heroic. Somewhere in the mix of all those options, there had to be one that would work. The trick lay in choosing the right one at the right time.

  The trick also lay in Mom’s willingness to take a risk. Weapons notwithstanding, two against one presented real advantage; but if one of the two hesitated, none of the rest would matter.

  He tried repeatedly to capture his mother’s eyes to communicate that he had a plan, but she seemed to be intentionally avoiding his glance.

  “I need to go to the bathroom,” Ryan announced.

  The noise seemed to startle the girl with the gun. Then she shrugged. “So go.”

  Ryan recoiled. “What, on the floor?”

  Colleen leaned forward and lifted an empty Evian bottle from the rear center console. “Or here.”

  He was horrified. “I’m not going to go in a bottle. In front of everybody.”

  Colleen put the bottle down. “Suit yourself.”

  “Can’t we stop somewhere?”

  Colleen laughed. “Could you be more obvious?” She tapped Christyne’s headrest with the barrel of her pistol. “How much gas do we have, Mom?”

  Christyne cleared her throat, then said, “A little more than half a tank.”

  Colleen lea
ned closer to peer over her shoulder. “Looks more like three quarters to me,” she said. “A minivan like this, that’s got to be fifteen, sixteen gallons. At twenty miles to the gallon and sixty miles an hour, what’s that, three gallons an hour? We stop in five hours.”

  “Five hours?” Christyne exclaimed. “Where are we going?”

  Colleen said, “Second star to the right, straight on till morning.”

  Ryan recognized the directions to Peter Pan’s Neverland, and had started to look out the windshield again when quick movement from Colleen made him jump. Before he had a chance to react, Ryan was staring down the barrel of the pistol. It looked huge, even in the dark. In his mind, he could almost see the bullet launching into his face.

  “Don’t ever lie to me again,” Colleen warned. “Don’t try to trick me, don’t try to piss me off. This isn’t a game. Do you understand me?”

  Ryan nodded. For the first time, the true gravity of what was happening registered in his mind. He was genuinely terrified.

  “I need the bottle after all,” he said.

  Ryan lost track of the turns and the route numbers-and also the time-as the roads became progressively narrower and the night darker. But for the clock on the dash that told him it was one-thirty-three, he would have sworn that it was even later. For the last half hour or more, they hadn’t passed a single car. Good thing, too, because Ryan didn’t think there would have been room for two vehicles abreast.

  The terrain out the window was mountain-steep, and when the headlights weren’t splashing over rocks, all he could see were trees. Sometimes-rarely-he caught glimpses of lights shining from buildings way off in the distance, for all he knew maybe miles away, mostly in the valleys far below.

  He’d never seen his mom so stressed behind the wheel. The last few miles were all short-radius switchbacks, a far cry from the suburban roads in Mount Vernon, and as the van’s transmission screamed for relief, she gripped the steering wheel as if it were a climbing rope. Ryan had considered offering to drive for her, but decided that that would be a bad idea.

  Finally, the bitch with the gun told them to turn onto yet another road-paved, but just barely-and then sent them for miles down a lot of nothing, the darkness interrupted only one time by a large house on a hill. At last, they stopped at a heavy-duty gate made of chain link.

  “What now?” Mom asked.

  “Just wait a second,” the kidnapper said.

  Two men seemed to condense out of the black night. They wore black clothing and each carried a rifle that looked like the ones soldiers wore in battle on the news. Flanking the van on both sides, they kept the muzzles pointing to the ground as they approached the car, but their fingers stayed precariously near their triggers. The one on the left used his non-trigger hand to make a whirling motion in the air to tell Mom to roll down the window.

  As she did, the nut job in the backseat leaned forward to be seen.

  The man in the window smiled. “Sister Colleen,” he said. “Welcome back. I understand you did some excellent work tonight. We’re all very proud.” Turning away from the window, he pulled a flashlight from his belt and flashed it twice at the gate.

  Within seconds, another black-clad man with a rifle appeared in the wash of the headlights, approaching from the far side. He removed a padlock from a heavy-duty chain and pulled the gates apart. He and the man at the window both stepped out of the way.

  “Go ahead,” Colleen said, using her pistol to point through the fence opening.

  As the minivan eased through, Ryan noted through the side-view mirror that their back bumper had barely cleared the fence before the guards were pulling it closed again.

  Outside the wash of the headlights, the darkness that surrounded them was near absolute. This part of the roadway wove through trees, but he sensed that the area was more field than forest. In the dim starlight, he thought he could make out the outlines of buildings, but even that was hard to tell. Some distant windows emitted yellow light, but in each case, the light seemed dim.

  By the clock on the dash, it took six minutes to cover the distance from the gate to the sturdy block-and-timber building where so-called Sister Colleen told them to stop. This was one of the buildings with lights on, and now that they were close enough, Ryan could tell from the flickering that they were looking at candlelight. Candlelight and a gun-wielding bitch who thought she was a nun. Oh, this was bound to get interesting.

  He shot a glance at his Mom. “No electricity?” he asked.

  She didn’t answer. Maybe it was just that obvious.

  “Turn off the lights and the car,” said Sister Colleen.

  Their world went blacker still.

  The front door to the house opened, spilling a parallelogram of light across the porch and onto the ground. Two shadows filled the space almost immediately. Both were maybe six feet tall and athletic looking, though Ryan categorized the one on the right as football-athletic, and the one on the left as soccer-athletic. Neither appeared older than twenty. They each carried an old-fashioned oil lamp, the kind with a hurricane globe around the wick and handle on the top-Ryan associated them with movies about old-time railroads-and pistols in holsters on their belts. As they approached, Colleen opened the sliding door, introducing a blast of frigid air.

  “Everybody out,” she said. “And please don’t give us reason to hurt you.”

  Ryan did as he was told, pausing to grab his coat from the floor and put it on.

  “Good idea,” Colleen said. “You’ll want to have your coats with you. It can get chilly at night.”

  The one who looked like a football player looked even bigger up close.

  “The mission went perfectly,” Colleen announced. “This is the Nasbe family.”

  Football held his lamp high and peered through its shadow for better view. He looked each of them in the eye, and smiled. He exchanged nods with the other lamp bearer. “Perfect indeed,” he said. “I am Brother Stephen. This is Brother Zebediah, and you have already met Sister Colleen. Gather closer together.” He made a gathering motion with his hands, sort of like a stiff-armed clap, but without actually clapping.

  Ryan sidestepped closer to his mom’s right.

  “I have always believed that honesty is the best policy,” Brother Stephen said. He continued to hold the lantern high, and as he spoke, clouds of condensed breath occasionally obscured his face. “You should know that you are prisoners, and that Brother Zebediah and Sister Colleen and I are your jailers.”

  Christyne’s hand gripped Ryan’s arm.

  “If you behave and do as you are told, your life will be tolerable. If you cause trouble, your life will be hellish, and perhaps unnecessarily short.” He paused for effect. “I know you have questions-you’d be foolish not to-but I won’t be answering any of them. Consider yourselves fortunate that on a night when so many others died in their cars, you are still alive. Follow me inside now.”

  Christyne hesitated. Ryan saw tears on her cheeks.

  That seemed to please Brother Stephen. “What’s your name again?” he asked.

  “C-Christyne.”

  “Do I scare you, C-Christyne?” he reproduced her stammer perfectly.

  She nodded.

  He gave a little smile and cocked his head. “Good,” he said. “It’s good to be scared of me. The idea of hurting a pretty lady like you actually turns me on, know what I mean?” He rubbed his crotch.

  “That’s enough, Brother Stephen,” Sister Colleen snapped.

  He ignored the rebuke and maintained his eye contact with Christyne. “Be very, very afraid of me.” He stood, and turned his attention to Ryan. “I’ll even let you watch.”

  Ryan lunged without thinking, and Brother Stephen stopped him with a punch to the center of his chest. Just like that, his breath was driven from his lungs, and he found himself struggling to get it back.

  “You a tough guy, little man?” Brother Stephen asked with a grin.

  Christyne moved instantly to intervene, pulling R
yan behind her to shelter him with her body. “He didn’t mean anything,” she said. “We’re just both very tired. We’re not thinking straight.”

  “Got your mommy to hide behind, eh, little man?” Brother Stephen mocked.

  Ryan had never felt this way. He didn’t know what to do. Anger, humiliation, and terror together drove his heart rate to something beyond anything he ever felt on an athletic field.

  “Don’t say a word, Ryan,” Mom said.

  “Smartest advice you’ll ever hear,” said Brother Stephen. “You just do what she says, do what I say, and I won’t have to cripple you.”

  “For crying out loud,” Sister Colleen said.

  Brother Stephen leaned in closer to the boy, silently emphasizing the five inches in height and eighty pounds in weight that separated them. “But any time you want to go a round with me, you just let me know.”

  Ryan struggled to find words to say, something cool that might help him resurrect some measure of honor. But he was simply too terrified to make his voice work.

  “Inside now,” Brother Stephen instructed. “Both of you.”

  Sister Colleen led the way. The front door opened into the middle of the house, in the center of what appeared in the dim light to be one big room constructed of hewn timbers-like a log cabin, but without the mud crap between the logs. The inside dimensions were smaller than the outside dimensions, though, leading Ryan to believe that there must be additional wings on the sides, accessible, he supposed, through doors that hid in the shadows beyond the lamp light.

  An army-style cot, made up with a sleeping bag and pillows, sat along the back wall of the main room, just barely visible along the edge of the flickering light. Ryan thought he saw a sink of sorts, positioned under an old-style hand pump. The remnants of a fire glowed in the bottom of a stone fireplace, just behind and to the right of the cot.

  In a flash of understanding, Ryan realized that he’d just reentered the nineteenth century. No electricity, no running water, no heat to speak of. The lack of running water, in fact, explained the vague smell of shit that hung in the air. He wondered if maybe they were in Pennsylvania Dutch country-the Amish, he remembered, from some Harrison Ford movie that his mom had made him watch-but then he remembered that the Amish were all about peace. Whatever these creeps were about, it definitely was not peace.