by Lee Thompson
The smell hit them first, a cloud of chemicals he could not place. The windows were boarded to prevent any light from entering, and a long desk with assorted tools and a small sink were against the far wall.
Richard flipped the light switch.
The bare bulb bled a dull red above them.
Looking at Ted he saw his friend covered in blood.
Ted said, “You don’t look so good.”
“He developed his film in here…”
Ted grunted. “Must be developing it somewhere else now.”
He walked across the room and used the barrel of the pistol to remove a few strands of spider web from beneath the work bench. “This is a good indication he hasn’t been in this room in a while.”
“Let’s get out of here.”
Ted wiped off the barrel and slid the pistol back beneath his jacket. They went back out the way they’d come in. The back yard seemed even more a playground for ghosts than it had before. He said, “Rich?”
“What?”
“You okay?”
“Not really.” He didn’t know how to explain what he was feeling, how he had expected to find his daughter inside the house, or have a confrontation with a man who preyed on the innocent and helpless, or how badly he was looking forward to such a confrontation. He said, “One more place. Soon as we’re done there, we’ll call the police.”
“It’s only a few blocks east of here.”
None of the neighbors looked out their windows. Very few cars drove down the street. It felt too quiet. Richard walked in a daze. Ted kept quiet. Richard assumed he was thinking about the horrible things that had happened at the house they’d left behind.
It had been an evil place, and he wondered if the molester had grown up in one of those rooms, if, by chance, the Crayon drawing he had seen on the wall was created by the man who had once been a vulnerable child and one who had been victimized at an early age. The media usually put that spin on such deviants, didn’t it?
The victim was likely to become the hunter.
7
Jacob circled the church for a while, looking for any trace of Sebastian following him. A crick formed in his neck from glancing over his shoulder. He stopped at a liquor store and bought a couple of Coors Lights, carried them behind the building and then guzzled them. He went back into the store and bought two more. He drank the third one quickly, and carried the last one inside his hoodie pocket next to Santana’s ashes.
He wasn’t sure what part of town he was in now. He had a slight buzz and it felt like it took monumental effort to lift his legs and replant his feet. The suburb he traveled through was a strange neighborhood. Older Cadillacs sat highly polished in driveways, and some of the houses were painted in bright colors. Some black folks sat on their porches and he waved to them as he passed and they nodded at him in acknowledgement.
He turned onto a quiet, narrow street. There weren’t any trees bordering the road, only trash cans at the corner of each drive, some of the houses had boarded windows, some of the lawns were overgrown. He saw a white Lexus parked in a driveway about fifty feet ahead. The house was a ranch style with black shutters and a cracked living room window, the shades drawn. An old van painted flat black sat in the driveway in front of a car port that had seen better days.
Two black men were beating heavily on the front door. Jacob kept walking closer, deep inside his own head, seeing but not seeing as the owner opened the door, just a small white guy, maybe one hundred and thirty pounds, no taller than five-foot five. He couldn’t keep his hands still. He pointed at the men, at the road, at himself. His eyes looked black from a distance. Jacob heard one of the black men say, “Why’s a white guy living in a black neighborhood?”
The skinny, small white man said, “I like it here.”
“You like little black girls, you mean.”
“What if I do? What business of that is yours?”
“You see this barrette? Does it look familiar to you?”
The white guys eyes lit up and he grinned. And Jacob was close to the edge of the lawn by then, and the man wearing the army jacket had pulled a pistol, and the man with him had grabbed the white guy by his lapels and jerked him from the door and spun him around and bashed his back against the front of the house.
The guy in the army jacket with the gun noticed Jacob then and his face was a serious one, and he jerked his head, motioning for Jacob to keep walking. It was none of his business and he began to walk away when he heard someone scream, and looked over his shoulder.
The black man bouncing the white guy off the front of the house, said, “Where is my daughter? What did you do with her, you sick motherfucker? Talk. Take me to her, or I swear to God—”
But the white guy, who at first had seemed shocked by their aggression, was smiling now and his eyes were slits, and he reached behind him and pulled something from the back of his pants. He pressed it up under the black man’s chin and pushed a button and the black man let him go, thinking it was a gun—Jacob had thought it was a gun at first too, but then he noticed, a second later, how boxy it was.
The black guy held his hands up.
The white guy pressed the stun gun to one of his open, exposed palms and zapped him. The current was invisible, but its effects were plain as day. The black man who had been asking about his daughter and what the white man had done to her, jerked left a few inches and then right, and his eyes rolled back in his head and he bent in half, convulsing for a moment on the ground.
His friend with the pistol began to raise it, but the white guy had only needed to take two steps to close the distance between them. He knocked the barrel aside and hit the man in the army jacket with the stun gun, catching him on the shoulder.
When the second man went down, and while the white man was bending over to pick up the pistol, Jacob ran toward him. He wasn’t sure why at first, and didn’t have time to question his motivation.
The man rising, holding the pistol, began to raise it and point it toward the man who had bounced him off the siding. There were no other people in the world for him, only the pistol he held and the man he was about to execute.
Jacob was there just as he pulled the trigger. He chopped his forearm just above the wrist, and the gun went off. The bullet hit the dirt next to the fallen black man and kicked up a chunk of dirt and grass, the air smelling strongly of ozone like it had when Sebastian had first disappeared.
The white guy dropped the pistol but was in the midst of raising the stun gun as Jacob punched him squarely in the ear. It felt as if his head bent under the force of the blow and his scrawny neck looked pale, and long, almost feminine.
His knees buckled and Jacob slapped him. When the man hit the ground, his eyes dazed, Jacob bent over him and kicked the stun gun out of his hand.
He heard one of the black men behind him, groaning, pushing himself up. He glanced back. Army Jacket was still out and looked like he was having trouble breathing. The man who wanted his daughter back stumbled over to the pistol and picked it up. His voice was slurred when he looked at Jacob. He said, “Who are you?”
“I was just walking by,” Jacob said. “He was about to shoot both of you.”
The worried father looked at his friend and said, “Go in the house and call an ambulance will you? Theodore has a pacemaker.”
Jacob went into the house, expecting to hear a gunshot behind him.
The interior was meticulously clean. He found the phone in the sparse living room and dialed 911, his hands trembling. He told the dispatcher the short version and refused to give his name. After he hung up, he walked back outside. The white guy was sitting up while the black man with the gun was kneeling near his friend. Jacob said, “Ambulance and police are on the way.”
“Thank you.”
“I need to go,” Jacob said.
“Go on.”
He nodded, wondering, as he approached the street, if he’d just had another vivid hallucination. It had all happened so fast and there was
a dreamlike quality to the events. But his knuckles hurt from punching the white guy and his heart pounded as if he’d just run a mile through the dark with something large and hungry chasing him. He looked over his shoulder occasionally, worried that he was losing his mind.
8
Richard called Loretta from the hospital. When she answered her spirits seemed lifted and she told him quickly about Nina’s visit, before she said, “Where are you?”
“Ted had an accident,” he said.
“Is he okay?”
“I don’t know yet. We’re at the hospital and he’s in the emergency room now. I probably won’t be home for a few hours.” He cleared his throat. “That was nice of that little girl to visit our house.”
“Have you talked to the police today?”
“I’m about to call the detective,” Richard said. “I have a feeling we’ll get some news soon.”
“Good news?”
“I can’t say.”
“Come home as soon as you can. I’ll pray for Ted.”
“Thank you,” he said. It felt like he was talking to a person he rarely communicated with. He said, “I love you.” She said the same, and he hung up. He went back to the visitor’s lounge and sat down. The days’ activity had tired him greatly. He yawned and stretched, replaying what he and Ted had done through his head over and over. After the police had come to Jesse Brown’s house and taken Richard’s statement, Detective Reeves had shown up and given him a stern look while two other officers led Jesse, in cuffs, to the back door of a cruiser parked behind his van. Reeves said, “He could have killed you.”
“It was a chance I was willing to take.”
“Mr. Gunderson feel the same way?”
“Ted knew what risks we were up against.”
“I could arrest you for messing with my case, for obstructing justice. Brown might press charges for the beating you gave him.”
“He could have killed us. I was only defending myself.”
“Excessively.”
Richard had not told him about the pistol Ted had brought. He could have used it, and that would have been excessive, but he’d hid it in his glove box, waited by the curb after he’d beaten Jesse nearly to death with his fists. He said, “We looked at another place too. Nobody has been there in a while. I think you’ll find it interesting.”
He handed Reeves the slip of paper with the address. Ted had circled the address on the way over to Jesse Brown’s house. Richard pointed at it so the detective knew which place he was referring to. Reeves said, “You think Brown took your daughter? Or the guy who lives at this address?”
“Nobody lives at that address right now. Brown, he’s not ashamed of what he is. I think he could have taken Robin, yes.”
“Brown doesn’t like little girls, only little boys.”
“What are you trying to say? That what we did was wrong?”
“He’s not our guy.”
“He needs to be locked up either way.”
“He’ll serve a little time for owning the stun gun. But it won’t be much.”
“Great system we got going on,” Richard said. “Man that gets a couple of speeding tickets and can’t afford to pay them has to serve more time than a child molester.”
“I don’t make the rules,” Reeves said, “and I don’t like it any more than you do. I’ll let you know anything we find out about Robin, Mr. Stark.” And then the detective walked stiffly back to his unmarked car and drove away. Richard took a ride to the hospital, afraid that Ted had died in the ambulance on the way there, his fake ticker not able to stand up to the juice from Jesse Brown’s stun gun. And how was he supposed to deal with getting his best friend killed? He sure as hell couldn’t fathom it. Ted had been in his life longer than Robin had, and although he wasn’t blood, wasn’t his daughter, he was like family.
He thought: I messed up real bad, Lord. Don’t make Ted pay for it…
9
After Nina and Mrs. Stark ate the pizza they sat in the living room for a long time. Mrs. Stark answered a phone call and talked to her husband for a minute. Once she’d hung up and sat back on the couch, she told Nina all about Richard, and of their fears both large and small. She never mentioned Robin’s life there until she leaned forward, set her tea on the coffee table, and said, “Would you like to see her room?”
“Your daughter’s room?”
“Yes,” Mrs. Stark said.
“Sure?”
She stood and tapped Nina on the shoulder and said, “Come on.”
They went to the back of the house and then up a flight of stairs. Mrs. Stark clung to the handrail and moved slowly and Nina thought this was an important thing for the woman so she didn’t know how to tell her that she was uncomfortable with the whole ordeal.
She shook it off, following closely, a lump in her throat as she considered the possibility Robin would never set foot on these stairs again, never again would she stand outside her bedroom door which a stranger and her mother were fast approaching now as if Mrs. Stark was suddenly eager to show it, the room and what her daughter’s life had amounted to so far in six years. But Nina knew there were memories tucked away inside the woman she would never share with anyone, and she probably had a photo album in her closet that she would sometimes pull out to see the years marking their voyage across her daughter’s body.
“It’s a little messy, but what can you do? I don’t want to touch nothing just yet.”
She pushed the door open and stood to the side, her heavy breasts blocking Nina’s view. Nina slid by her, hoping Loretta was offering her permission to enter what would one day soon become a temple.
Nina uttered a quiet prayer, Please God, bring her back to them, and looked at the walls which were bright pink, and there were horses everywhere: an old fashioned wooden rocker with pegs for a child’s hands where the horse’s ears would be; stuffed horses, plush and soft; plastic horses upon a shelf a child could reach; horses emblazoned on the bed spread and pillow.
Nina said, “Did she like horses?” When she saw Loretta smile, she relaxed a little. She said, “It’s a very nice bedroom.”
“For a very special girl.”
Robin’s mother picked up one of the plastic horses and studied it for a moment, wiped a bit of dust from its flanks and said, “She cleans these ones every week. I always wondered at what adventures she’d have when she’d play for them hour after hour but I didn’t want to make her explain anything. It could kill the magic, you know? And a kid needs magic to keep going. They need their hopes and their imaginations.”
Nina nodded. She touched the bedspread and felt its warmth. The room smelled lived in. She said, “She spent a lot of time in here, huh?”
“It is her favorite place.” Her bottom lip trembled. “Wherever she’s at now, I’m sure she thinks of it, to help her get by, you know? I bet she thinks of returning to her horses and caring for them.”
“I’m sure she does,” Nina said. She didn’t want to think about it anymore. She walked over to the window and looked out on the street below and the houses across the way, and the church steeples in the distance. She could count four of them. She said, “I’d like to come by when she’s returned to you. I have a toy horse and I never play with it.”
She felt embarrassed for saying it but she’d outgrown the toy and had never cared for horses much to begin with.
“That would be nice.”
Nina nodded. She looked back out the window and saw a man walking across the street. Her heart seemed to stop and then slam extremely hard in her ribcage. As if sensing her stare, or the energy in her gaze, the man looked up at the house and then stumbled on down the street. She didn’t know where to put her hands. She said, “Well, I should be going…”
“Okay,” Loretta said, “I’ll hold you to bringing that toy horse by when Robin comes home.” Her voice was without inflection. Nina knew the woman would be terribly lonely the moment Nina left, or worse, she’d be occupied with the memories and sounds an
d smells of the daughter taken from her. But Nina needed to get on the street and to catch up with Jacob and warn him about the large man hunting him.
She said, “Is it all right if I give you a hug before I leave?”
Mrs. Stark smiled and then her eyes grew moist again. She held her arms out and curled her fingers and said, “Come here, honey. God bless you for caring when we have family that don’t even stop over or call us.”
“Shame on them,” Nina said, and hugged her tight.
She was a soft woman and Nina felt as if she were disappearing inside her print dress. Loretta squeezed her tightly and then sighed as she let her go.
Nina thanked her again and said, “I’ll see you guys soon.”
“All right. You be careful out there.”
Her legs felt numb as she waved and nearly ran down the steps, one hand sliding down the banister, her feet heavy as she hit the ground floor landing and the smell of the house overwhelmed her, the feelings she sensed nearly oppressive: the love that was there, the scents of family and hard work and sweat and sex and a million other lingering impressions.
She stumbled out the screen door and caught it before it slammed shut. She closed it softly and looked up the street. Jacob was sitting on a curb a block ahead, and he had a beer between his legs. She ran down the side of the road. It was a quiet street and she didn’t see anybody out but she could hear a marching band practicing in the distance, a few blocks over, probably at the university.
She slowed about ten feet from Jacob. He sipped from his drink and looked to the side. Nina waved. He didn’t wave back, just burped and then hung his head, telling her silently to leave him alone, but she couldn’t do that, so she sat down next to him.
He looked worse than the last time she’d seen him. His beard had filled out more, his skin was dirty, his clothing torn in places as if a dog or some other savage had attacked him. He still had the watch he swore he’d never part with. He didn’t say anything. She waited a few minutes. Then she said, “You’re not even going to say hello?”
