by Sam Reaves
They were in a parking lot, well lit, nearly full. Ben had her neck in the crook of his arm, the gun to her temple, hauling her along a row of cars in an awkward embrace. Warm blood was trickling down her face. “Ben,” Abby gasped. “Talk to me.”
“Now you want to talk to me?” He halted at the rear of a dark-gray Honda and forced her to her knees. “That’s a switch.” He had keys in his hand, the gun at her temple. The trunk popped open. “Get in the trunk,” he said.
“Where are we going?”
“Where do you think?” Ben grabbed her by the hair again and pulled, making her cry out. “Get in.”
Abby went limp, sinking back onto the pavement, grimacing against the pain in her scalp. “Not till you tell me where we’re going.” All Abby could think to do was to make him keep talking.
“We’re going back to the Tau Kap house and I’m gonna light those dumb jocks up. You sicced those assholes on me, now you’re gonna see how tough they are when I’ve got the equalizer. Now get in the fucking trunk.”
Eyes squeezed shut, Abby sagged back against the fender of the car. She heard a door open somewhere, urgent voices emerging from the building. “Let go of my hair.”
To her surprise, he obeyed. Ben stepped back, raised the gun toward the building, and squeezed off a shot. Somebody swore loudly and there was a rapid scuffling of feet. Ben leveled the gun at Abby and said, “Get in the trunk, Abby. Or I’ll shoot you right here.”
Abby raised her hands. “Ben. First of all, I didn’t sic anybody on you.” She knew she was talking for her life; she was on the high wire in a high wind, teetering over the abyss.
He drew himself erect, the gun aimed at her face, “You can stop lying any time, Abby. I know what you did. All I wanted was for you to be nice to me. And you laughed at me.”
“I never laughed at you.”
“I saved you from that old dyke. I saved you from that creep tonight. I saved you from that guy inside. But you don’t care. You laughed at me, you snitched on me to Spassky, you set those gorillas on me. All you are is a cold heartless bitch. Well, bitch, now you’re gonna have to watch what happens when people get pushed too far.”
Abby stared into the dark eyes, seeing nothing but the void. “All right, I’ll watch. But don’t make me get in the trunk. I won’t give you any trouble.”
“No, sure you won’t. Get in the trunk or I’ll shoot you right here.”
In the distance a siren sounded, faintly. Abby looked past the muzzle of the gun into Ben’s eyes and tried to read how many seconds of life she had left. “OK, Ben. You’re the boss.”
“God damn right I am.”
Abby climbed into the trunk.
As far as Abby could tell Ben was driving carefully, smoothly and not too fast. She was in total darkness, in a fetal position on her side, face to the rear, but there was just enough room for her to move her limbs, shift position slightly.
A detached part of her was amazed that she was so calm. The police will save you, she thought. They will have evacuated the fraternity house and they will be waiting, watching for a dark-gray Honda with a couple of bullet holes in it. They will arrest Ben and they will set you free.
That, Abby thought, is a desperate mind at work.
There is a tire iron in here somewhere, she thought. If this car is like mine, it is next to the spare tire in its well and I am lying on top of it. In despair, she began to feel around her. Something was digging into her shoulder; she squirmed, twisted, grunted with the effort, and managed to close her hand around it. She pulled a metal cylinder to her chest, explored it with her fingers, identified a spray can with a nozzle. She turned the nozzle away from her face and pressed the button once. There was the hiss of a powerful spray and an oily, pungent odor, and after a moment she blinked, her eyes stinging.
Not without a fight, Abby thought.
Ben drove for what seemed a very long time. Abby lay in the dark thinking about her mother, her father, about New York and Cambridge and people she loved, Samantha and Evan and all the sweet wasted life she had not enjoyed enough. The car stopped and she tensed, but nothing happened, and after a long time it began to move again. Abby began to cry, weeping for everything she had lost, for Lisa Beth and Ned massacred, for the stupid lizard brutality that was about to stamp out her life. The car stopped again.
Abby wiped tears from her face and took a deep breath.
A door opened and then slammed, shaking the car. Footsteps sounded, coming around to the rear. A latch clicked and the trunk lid popped open, a line of dim light appearing. Then the trunk lid was rising, Ben standing there with the gun in his right hand. Abby reared up, supporting her weight with her left hand as she pushed up on the lid with her right, the spray can hidden by the curve of the lid.
“You double-crossing cunt,” said Ben, dimly visible in the light from a streetlamp on a tree-lined street. He had shed the white coat and was just a slender figure in the dark. “There are cops everywhere. You set me up.”
“Please just do me one favor,” Abby said, squirming to stabilize her position with her knees under her, looking at the muzzle of the gun a yard from her chest. “Please don’t shoot me in the face. If you ever loved me, please just do me that favor. Shoot me in the heart instead.” Slowly she reached for the pistol with her left hand, looking Ben in the eye. “Shoot me here,” she said, gently grasping his wrist and pulling his hand toward her chest. Ben’s eyes were wide, riveted to hers.
Abby swept the gun away from her as she brought the spray can down from under the trunk lid and gave him a face full of lubricant from a foot away. Ben snarled, pitching backward, and a shot deafened Abby as he tore his wrist out of her grasp. She dived headfirst out of the trunk and caught Ben square in the chest with both hands, knocking him backward, landing hard on the pavement and rolling, coming up against the curb. She was on her feet in an instant as another shot cracked, whistling by her head, and then she was running in the dark again, alive. “Police!” she screamed. “Somebody please call the police!” Abby ran with death at her heels, not feeling her injured knee or her blistered feet, trusting her well-trained muscles to save her life. Behind her, steps slapped on the pavement, too close.
Tires squealed, a siren blared impossibly loud, impossibly close, a bright light hit her in the eyes. “Over here!” somebody yelled. Men were coming out of the shadows, into her path. She ran into the arms of a uniformed policeman as behind her a man shouted, “Drop the fucking gun!” The cop steadied her, pulled her upright, said, “It’s OK, honey, we got you.”
Abby wheeled, struggling in his grasp, and looked behind her. A searchlight on a police car had caught a figure kneeling in the middle of the street, a boy with one hand to his face and a gun in the other. He was waving the gun back and forth, his head bowed. “God damn you, Abby!” the boy screamed.
“Drop the gun!” Policemen were at the edge of the pool of light, guns leveled at the boy.
Ben raised his head, eyes squeezed shut, and put the gun to the underside of his jaw. “Abby!” he shouted, hoarsely now.
Abby closed her eyes and was spared the sight as he pulled the trigger.
“If you have to get shot, the emergency room of a hospital is about the best place to do it,” said Ruffner, tie loosened and shoulders slumping. “They had him on the table in about three minutes. They stopped the bleeding and were able to repair the intestine, and the prognosis is good. He’ll be in intensive care for a while but he’s going to make it.”
“Thank God.” Abby was drained; her capacity for emotional reaction was exhausted. She was lying on a gurney again, perhaps the same one, but this time instead of Ned she was sharing a curtained alcove with Ruffner and a uniformed police officer. There seemed to be somewhat more commotion outside the alcove than there had been on her previous visit an hour before. “Don’t leave me, please,” she said.
“Don’t worry,” said Ruffner. “We’re not letting you out of our sight. When you get stitched up we’ll put you i
n a room and Officer Thornton here’s going to camp outside. When you’ve had a rest I’ll be back to take your statement.” He hesitated. “I believe you have set a world record tonight for abductions by separate offenders. I can’t remember anything like what you’ve been through, ever.”
“Lisa Beth said it was the cluster effect. That makes me nervous because I don’t know how many make a cluster.”
Ruffner rested his hand on her arm for a moment. “You saved lives tonight. It would have been real ugly. You came up with the right answer just in time.”
“I don’t feel like I won. I feel like I lost. My friend’s dead.”
“And you’re alive. From my point of view, you just won two of the toughest fights anybody’s ever had to face. In one night. I don’t know how you did it.”
Abby closed her eyes, her head spinning, enormously, fathomlessly tired. Her mind shied from the grieving she knew lay ahead but at the same time she felt herself soaring in wonder at the immensity of the life she had come close to losing. “It didn’t kill me,” she said. “I don’t know what it did to me.”
“Be careful on the steps,” Abby said. “They’re icy.”
“I’m good. See you next time.” Natalia waved and disappeared around the corner of the house, stepping carefully on the snowy ground. Abby lingered for a moment at the door, looking through the bare trees across to the chapel on the campus, the centerpiece of a postcard view. She shivered and went back inside, closing the door. She walked to the steps at the rear of the room and went up to tap on the door at the top and open it.
Ned was at the table in the kitchen, frowning at his laptop. “How’s the prize pupil doing?” he said.
Abby shrugged. “She’s getting there. I don’t know that she’s going to ace the SAT, but she should score high enough to get into school somewhere. She’s come a long way.” Abby sat at the table and rested her chin on her hand. She gazed at Ned until he looked up from the computer. “So have you.”
“Me?”
“You’re putting the weight back on, starting to look . . .” She hesitated.
“Less like a corpse?”
“I was looking for a more tactful way to put it.”
“I feel good. I feel like the innards are finally healed. Eating is fun again.”
“Well, you’ll have to manage dinner without me tonight. I’ve got a session in Lafayette.”
Ned shrugged. “I’ve been cooking for myself for twenty-five years. So this thing is working for you?”
Abby nodded. “Yeah, it’s good. If you’d told me a year ago I’d be in group therapy I’d have run the other way fast. But I wish I’d done it sooner.”
“You need people sometimes.”
Abby’s gaze went away out the window. “They’re my new best friends. You cry on my shoulder, I’ll cry on yours.”
“They say it helps.”
“It’s the only thing that helps. We’ve got a couple of vets of course, guys that got worn down by too many trips to Iraq and Afghanistan. Tough guys, salt of the earth, but suffering. And we’ve got a woman who stayed with her husband for twenty years, till the kids were raised, despite the beatings. Talk about tough. And then there are the rape survivors. I had no idea there were so many people with PTSD out there.”
“There’s a lot of trauma out there.”
Abby stared out the window. It had begun to snow again. “I’ll tell you one thing. I’m done with the guilt. That’s gone.”
“Glad to hear it.” Ned shoved the laptop away. “I’ll be gone soon, too,” he said.
Abby stared. “What?”
“I got a job.”
“You’re kidding me.”
He shook his head. “Passing that physical last week was the last step. I’m cleared to go.”
“Go where?”
“Africa.”
“You’re serious.”
He nodded. “I’ll be doing logistics for Doctors Without Borders. In the Central African Republic. Where there’s a civil war on and a hell of a lot of suffering right now. Minimum one-year commitment. I leave in a month.”
They looked at each other for a while. Ned’s expression was grave. Abby found she was not really surprised. “Well. It was good while it lasted. Who’s going to be my landlord?”
“A nephew of mine just got married. He works in Lafayette. He and his wife are going to take the house. You’ll like them. They’re good people.”
“I hope so.”
He frowned out the window, then turned back and reached across the table for her hand. “I never was much for social conventions, but I think starting a romantic relationship while recovering from a serious gunshot wound is kind of out there, even for me.”
“I can’t say I have much experience in this regard, either. It just kind of happened. But it’s been good. I think we needed it.”
“Yeah. Anyway, we said there were no strings attached and we would just kind of roll with it.”
“We did.”
“I don’t know how long I’ll be out there. You don’t know where you’ll be in two years, either. If this is worth it, we’ll know.”
Abby nodded. “I suppose we will.”
“No strings attached, but I’m starting to feel like Humphrey Bogart at the end of Casablanca.”
“Excuse me?”
“I think this could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”
Abby considered that, frowning faintly. “I’d say that’s romantic, but I think that makes me Captain Renault.”
The laugh was good; the tears came and went quickly. Outside, the snow went on falling.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The author wishes to thank Andrew Salter, Bob Rivers, Adriana Deck, Jessie Salter and Nick Salter for the professional, sociological and mathematical information they were kind enough to share.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Photo © 2015 Kevin Valentine
Sam Reaves was raised in small towns in Indiana and Illinois but gravitated to Chicago upon graduating from college and has been there ever since, when on US soil. He has lived and traveled widely in Europe and the Middle East and has worked as a teacher and a translator. He has published fiction and nonfiction as Sam Reaves; under the pen name Dominic Martell, he has written a European-based suspense trilogy. He is married and has two adult children.
