by Paul Blades
“That’s nonsense,” Attorney General Baker spat back. “The man’s been in prison for 12 years. He wouldn’t know a debit card from a get out of jail free card. He’d have no idea that he could be tracked that fast. He headed up to Wausau, I tell you. Now get the woman’s picture out as soon as possible.”
The door to the room flew open. In walked a dark suited man with grey hair, a little past 60, trim. He walked with an air of assurance. Following him was a young woman. She was also dressed in a business suit, well tailored. She was attractive and intelligent looking.
“Who the hell are you?” Baker sputtered. “You can’t break into our meeting like that! Chief,” he said looking at the director of the State Police, “get security on the phone.”
“No need to bother with that, Mr. Baker,” the gray haired man stated with authority. “My name is Jason Holmes. Special Agent, FBI. I’m taking over this manhunt as of this moment.”
“You can’t do that,” Baker replied spitefully. “This isn’t a federal case yet, not until there’s been a ransom demand.”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Baker. They’re your wrong. It’s a federal crime to murder a law enforcement officer. In addition, I understand that Mr. Jackson here committed credit card fraud on companies engaged in interstate commerce. That’s wire fraud, another federal crime.”
“So what do you expect us to do? Go home and play tiddly winks?” Baker replied nastily.
“I expect you to give myself and the Bureau full cooperation. I expect that all information gathered as a result of continuing investigations will be directed to me. I expect that all media inquiries will be directed to me and I expect that all information released to assisting law enforcement departments will come through me. Is that understood? I can get a Federal judge to order if within the next 20 minutes if you like.”
Baker waved Agent Holmes off. “You can do what you want. We’re acting on the information we’ve already gathered. We don’t need the FBI. We’re hot on this guy’s trail. I already ordered an all points bulletin on the kidnapped girl and her car. We should have reports coming in within an hour of sightings.”
“If you release that information, that young woman will be as good as dead,” Holmes replied. “Jackson will kill her as soon as he believes that she is a liability. And if she and her car are all over the news reports, she will be a huge liability.”
“Don’t be ridiculous!” Baker retorted. “He’s got to know that we’re going to make the connection between her disappearance and his escape. If there’s no news report about it, he’ll smell a rat.”
“Maybe so. But if her picture is not all over the news, then he won’t have a motive to kill her and dump her body somewhere in the woods. He may figure out that we’re keeping her kidnapping quiet in order to keep her alive. That’s okay. I know that’s it’s a gamble, but we have to do everything that we can to preserve this girl’s life.”
“I say that you’re handcuffing us, Holmes,” Baker protested. “Besides, what help are you going to be to us? We know where he’s going. Our men have a lot of experience up near the Wasau area. You guys don’t know shit from shinola about it.”
“He’s not headed to Wausau,” Holmes replied.
“Oh he’s not, isn’t he? We think we know our man pretty good and we believe he’s headed to his old stomping grounds. The stop at the ATM machine and the convenience store confirm it.”
“You’re making a big mistake. I’ve read your boy’s file. He’s no knucklehead. He’s had 12 years to think about this. The last thing he’s going to want is to be trapped between your people and the Canadian border. He wants out of the country, but not to Canada. Dollars to donuts, he’s headed to Mexico. And he’s going to look for a Rogues chapter that can help him get there.”
“It’s almost 1,500 miles to Mexico from here,” Baker protested. “He’s not that stupid. He knows he can’t travel that far without being caught.”
“Look, he’s got one chance of survival. He’s got to get out of the country. Mexico is his best bet. He’ll travel at night, stay in small, remote motels, or even maybe camp out. There are 8 Rogues chapters from Dallas to San Diego. Or he could go to Los Angeles, Denver or Oklahoma City. They all have Mexican connections and could help smuggle him out. That’s where to look for him. That is, if he escaped Wisconsin. My bet is that he holed up somewhere in state today and that he’s going to cross the border into Minnesota sometime tonight. You’ve got the border crossings all covered. Leave them in place and you may be able to catch him.”
“You just got done telling us that he’s headed south to Mexico and now you’re telling us he’s headed west,” AG Baker replied haughtily. “Make up your mind.”
“From his point of view, he would realize that due north and due south are the directions we’d most likely look for him to go. He did head north for a while, but that’s only a decoy. He wouldn’t have backtracked too far, so he would have either gone east or west. East doesn’t help. So he went west. Tonight, once he crosses into Minnesota, he’ll head south. Mark my words.”
“Well you can get all your little special agent men out there in Minnesota looking for him, Holmes,” Baker replied. “We know where he’s going and where he probably is already. I’m directing all our resources to that area. If I get my men on the state line crossings on the move now, they can be in place in Wassau in the morning to start an area wide search. That’s my plan. If you want to hold back the girl’s kidnapping from the news media, that’s your business. But I want that directive in writing so that the press doesn’t have my ass when the girl is found up in Wausau with her throat slit.”
“I can’t get my men to the border crossings in time. Your men are in a perfect position to catch him. He has to cross the Mississippi River to get into Minnesota. There’s only about 20 places he could cross. You’ve got to keep your men in place.”
“You deal with your men, I’ll deal with mine, Holmes,” Baker stated flatly. “We know what we’re doing.”
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Carly didn’t know how long she had been tied up in the bathtub, but she knew it was a long, long time. She had stopped trying to scream and yell so that someone might come and save her about an hour ago. She had realized it was useless from the start, but she felt she had to try.
She had thought the man was going to murder her when he dragged her into the bathroom after whipping her. At that point, she had almost wished that he would get it over with already. When he made her get in the tub and then lie down, she thought that maybe he was going to drown her in it. But then he tied her knees together and connected her already bound ankles to her wrists. Her shoulders screamed out their complaints. Her back protested as did her thigh muscles. She started to panic that he was going to leave her like this and started moaning and trying to plead for release through her gagged mouth right away. She hadn’t seen him coming with the pillow case. He looped it over her head before she knew it. And then he tied it around her neck. She thought for a moment that he intended to strangle her and didn’t want to watch her face, and was relieved when he didn’t tie it off too tightly. But then she realized that any plea for help she made would be doubly muffled by the addition of the cloth covering. Then she heard the TV go on in the bedroom and then the bathroom fan. Then she knew that screaming for help would be useless. But she had to try anyway.
And, although she knew she shouldn’t do it, she was so overwhelmed with the fear of being left alone like this that she yelled and screamed please for him not to do it. She tried to rock her body, pull at her bound arms and legs, swing her head back and forth, do anything to achieve movement. But it was all useless. She could move virtually nary a muscle. The light, which she could see dimly through the pillowcase, went off. She heard the door close and knew he was leaving. She cried and cried and cried.
After that was when she began screaming. She must have screamed for 15 minutes continuously. Her throat became raw. Her blood pressure built up to boiling. She almost drove
herself mad.
After that, she just gave up. She cried some more, over being so cruelly bound, about all the things that had happened to her, being whipped and used and humiliated. Her hands seemed somehow like foreign objects to her. They were out of her sight and out of her control. More than that, they, like her pussy, had betrayed her. They were joined together and refused to become untied to help her. What good were they! They were worse than no help, they were a hindrance, since her feet were tied off to them and now her feet couldn’t move either. It was her hands’ fault. Her rebellious, disobedient, traitorous hands.
She had never known that her body could become her enemy, like her pussy and now her hands had. In fact, her whole body was in rebellion against her, being all scrunched up and helpless, refusing to become untied, refusing to stand up and walk away. Her mouth refused to talk, her eyes refused to see. She was her body’s prisoner, holding her captive so that that man, Blackjack Jackson they had called him, that murderer, could work his will on her. She tried to negotiate with it, begging her hands to move, her feet to slip free of her bonds. She tried to wriggle her body up the sides of the tub, but she couldn’t gain even a millimeter of height.
She had never been very religious, but she started to pray. She promised God all sorts of things if he would free her. No more sex, at least until she was married. No more smoking pot. No more drinking. Church every Sunday and all the major holidays. She would give to charity, teach at an orphanage, devote her life to serving Jesus, join a convent, go work for a mission in Africa or India like Mother Theresa. She promised that she would do anything that God commanded. Anything. But please, please, please, get me out of this.
When that didn’t work, she began to argue with God. Why did he pick her out for this? It wasn’t fair. There were lots of worse people in the world. Why didn’t this happen to one of them? And why did he give that man so much strength and cleverness? Fixing her up here in the bathtub had been amongst the cleverest things he had done so far. Why were you, God, helping him and not me? Why didn’t you smite down the wicked? Why didn’t you protect the weak? Why did a poor girl like me have to suffer this way? What good did it accomplish? If it was your will, God, why was that? Did you enjoy seeing people suffer? Did you enjoy seeing them helpless and miserable and begging you desperately for help and crying and pleading and not getting any answer and feeling worse and worse and worse?
Then she forgot about all that. Who cared about God? If he existed, he was a prick who let all kinds of bad things go on that he could prevent.
Her mind started to wander. She could hear the TV in the other room faintly over the ever present sound of the whirring fan. Strange, disembodied voices, talked, yelled, screamed, sang, argued. She really couldn’t make out any distinct words. It was like being held captive by foreigners and they were in the next room arguing in their native tongue what to do about you.
And it was funny, too, she thought, that if they were the disembodied voices, she was the disembodied body. She had a useless, functionless body which could no longer be animated by her mind. She couldn’t talk. All she could do was float in a strange, dark void where movement was impossible. Every once in a while she would try and twist her wrists free, or spread her legs or wriggle her feet free of their bonds only to break out into tears at the impossibility of it.
One thing that she kept coming back to was the image of herself in this teeny tiny space, all scrunched up, and all that empty free space all around her. First there was the empty space in the bathroom that she couldn’t reach. Then there was the space in the rest of the cottage. All those things, her dress and shoes, all the furniture, the tin cans, the rest of the junk the man had bought, they were all out there and unavailable to her. But they were still real and they were still out there. It only seemed like the universe had been reduced to less than a cubic yard.
And then there was the outside. There were trees and the other cottages and the parking lot and the old man, the road that led to the highway and the world. Maybe the old man was walking around even now, checking things out. He would hear the TV on in their cottage and think, “How wonderful that they are enjoying themselves,” or some such rot. But he would be out there. Although it seemed that way, she was not the only person in the world. There were hundreds, thousands, millions and billions of people and they were all just right outside the door to her little prison. And of all those million, billion people, there was not a single solitary one who was going to help her get out of this or a single solitary one who cared if she lived or died.
That was when she really hit the bottom. She was so alone. It was horrible. No one knew what she was going through with the exception of her captor who seemed to delight in her suffering. No one knew where she was except for the dotty old man last night who didn’t even care if she put down the names of characters in a fifties sitcom as their names on the register. And even he probably thought she was calmly watching TV, eating crackers and cheese and waiting for her boyfriend to come back with the car.
No, she was all alone and she was powerless. Powerless to ameliorate her suffering. Powerless to free herself. Powerless to make the time go by quicker. Powerless to prevent the man from using her and then putting her away like she was some kind of object he had lost interest in. Powerless, powerless, powerless.
But her captor had power. Seemingly inexhaustible, almighty power. His power was here now with her. It was his power that energized the knots that were holding her so thoroughly still. He had frozen her in place by an act of his will. And she had no power but to obey. And the ball in her mouth. It seemed like he himself were present there, a piece of him that he left behind in her mouth, left behind to invade her inner space, the inside of her body occupied by him. And no matter how she chewed at it, pushed at it with her tongue, shook her head or screamed and yelled, she could not dislodge it. It was him, lodged inside her and he would not go away.
It was all so unreal. Yesterday, this time, she and Randy were probably getting ready to have dinner, kissing and joking, as happy as clams. Clams that were totally ignorant of the cruelty inherent in their world and lurking out there in the darkness waiting for them. “This can’t really be happening,” she would think to herself from time to time. “I can’t really be tied up in some unknown cottage in some unknown town, lying face down in a bathtub, hogtied and hooded, gagged, naked, and at the mercy of a homicidal escaped felon. I really can’t be. It’s just the plot for some stupid movie. It’s not real. It can’t be real. Please! Please! Don’t let it be real!” But she knew it was real and a sense of mind numbing despair would overcome her.
Her failed attempt at escape came back to haunt her. If only she hadn’t slipped! If only she hadn’t fumbled at the bolt holding the door closed! If only he had taken a few more seconds to react! She would have been out and running as fast as she could. And screaming! Screaming bloody murder, as the expression goes. But no. She had failed. And now here she was, tied up worse than she had ever been before.
She felt like the most dismal of all the dismal creatures on earth. Part of her felt she deserved her suffering because she had been powerless to prevent it. She wanted desperately for it all to end. She wanted to shrink herself into a little speck of dust and go down the drain. She wanted to stop breathing. She wanted her heart to stop beating. She wanted to stop thinking. Yes, most of all she wanted to stop thinking, measuring the passage of her lonely tribulations by the hundredths of a second. Make it all speed up and bring her to the very end. Skip all the suffering in between and bring on death. But for all her wishes, for all her prayers, for all her broken hopes, she was condemned to await all alone for the disposition her captor deigned for her, no matter how long it took or how miserable she became, naked and bound into total motionlessness and silence, helpless to forestall her fate.
She knew he had returned when the TV was shut off. Her blood ran cold. Then the door to the bathroom opened and the light flicked on. She raised her head, fearful and hysterical,
and tried to beg him to release her. But the light went out and the door closed once more. She lowered her head and sobbed.
He saw her there. She was still alive. He thought for a moment that she might be dead, strangled on the rope around her neck or suffocated by the pillow case. Half of him hoped that she would be. That would relieve him of the decision he had to make. When he saw her head flailing around and her muffled pleas for freedom, he realized how distasteful it was going to be to kill her. The taste of the death of the store clerk was still in his mouth and he had hardly said a few words to him. The girl was different. She had helped wash away the bitterness of 12 years of captivity. She had restored him to feeling human, restored his manhood. And her body was so smooth and delicious and her mouth so sweet to kiss and her pussy so sweet to be in.
Then he realized that he never had to see her face again. He did not have to watch her agonized eyes staring at him, pleading with him, hear her cries and wails. All he had to do was reach over, close the drain and turn on the water. He would turn out the light and close the bathroom door. He could come back in 15 or 20 minutes and turn off the water. It would all be over. Like turning off a switch.
He couldn’t make up his mind. He turned out the light again and closed the door. He would get ready to go first. Then he would decide.
He gathered all their goods. He heated up the last of the coffee and then washed the pot and the inner workings. He emptied the ash tray, put away the rest of the rope. He made the bed. He swept up. He lit another cigarette and sat down to finish the coffee.
He had stopped at a fast food joint on the way back from the army navy store and had bought himself a deluxe double cheeseburger and fries. He bought for her chicken nuggets. With honey mustard sauce. He hadn’t been sure she would ever eat it, but again, if he didn’t bring her food, that sort of decided the question and he still hadn’t made up his mind. He ate his burger. It tasted like shit. He just kept thinking about that girl’s sweet, young body and its destruction. No one in the world would ever again hear her moan with pleasure like he did, would look into her eyes as she came, would feel her pussy vibrate with elation around their cocks. And he thought of her silly, little yellow handbag and the picture of her boyfriend in her wallet, her look of unhappy surprise when she first saw him. He was like a wave of misfortune that had been visited upon her.
