by Kim Powers
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
I knew this gym so well—I had spent four years of my life in it, after all—that I could find the exact place to stand, to cast a shadow over TJ, without him even knowing it.
I wanted to have the element of surprise.
I wanted to scare him.
I wanted to kill him, this boy whom I had just found out was Mark Casey’s son. Markson. Mark’s son.
TJ didn’t even see me, his eyes closed, lost to the music on his iPod.
The first thing he knew, I was directly over him, yanking the ear buds out of his ears so fast they flew back and smacked him in the face.
“SHIT! Fuck . . . you scared the piss outta me.”
Sweat was running off his forehead, into his eyes. Mine too. Maybe it was a Pavlovian response to coming back to my old stomping grounds. Maybe it was just my pulse already racing, at this bizarre trick being played on me.
“Any word?” he said, trying to catch his breath.
“No.” I wanted him confused, off his game.
I could mean No word . . .
I could mean No, she’s dead . . .
I could mean No, how could you?
“Uh . . . we’re going out with more flyers this afternoon,” he said, struggling to sit up. His core was all dough. Soft. It didn’t have any power on its own. “Over by the mall. I thought if we could . . . ”
“Your form is shit. Here. I’ll spot you.”
I pushed him back down on the bench. So many ways this could go.
“Are . . . are you okay? Did they hear anything? Did you hear something? Tell me . . . ”
I went back to the rack, behind TJ’s head, and added more weight to the bar. I sized things up—not heavy enough, not punishing enough—and added some more.
“Uh . . . I’m just a beginner. I don’t think . . . ” He tried to get up. Again.
I pushed him back down. Again.
“Try it. It’s just weight. You must be used to carrying that around.”
He couldn’t tell if I was joking or not, although there wasn’t any smile on my face. So he started joking out of nervousness. “Yeah, those books get heavy. Especially the old ones. They sure didn’t care about wasting paper back then. All that tiny print . . . ”
His words echoed in this cavernous room, all the way up to the vaulted ceiling and back down, but they didn’t sound big. They sounded tiny, as tiny and pathetic as he was, in this shrine.
“Really. It’s gonna be too heavy. I know I can’t do it.”
“Just DO IT. You know—like the Nike ad?” I flashed him one of those sick smiles he was always giving me, then kicked at his feet. Sneakers, with black socks. I grabbed his hands and squeezed them against the metal weight bar, my own hands clamping over them so they couldn’t move. Idiot. He wasn’t wearing gloves. When his hands came off, they’d have the imprint of the metal crosshatches, cutting into his palms.
Good. Every boy needs a tattoo, to remind him of Daddy.
TJ tried to bench press the weight—he looked too afraid not to—but his arms quivered. I gave him a little assist. “You should’a seen me in the old days . . . the stuff I could do in here. I really was Hercules.”
I started to hoist the bar back into the holding rack, but all of a sudden I pushed it back down on TJ, pinning him across the chest. “So much better than your father ever was.”
I had to hand it to him. He didn’t pretend to not know what I was talking about. He’d been caught, which is what he wanted all along. He pushed right back—with words, the only weapon he had, even though he could barely breathe. “Only he never got a chance to prove it.”
I pressed the bar harder into his chest. I didn’t care if he couldn’t breathe. “Where’s my daughter? Who the fuck are you?”
He could barely get his breath, but it didn’t matter. He’d planned these words for years. He didn’t need oxygen to say them. “What kind of person . . . could make a man. Kill himself?”
“Where. The fuck. IS SHE?”
With two clean jerks, I threw the bar onto the floor with one hand and yanked TJ up with the other, then slammed him into the wall behind him. Mats hanging there, throwing up dust when TJ hit them.
That’s when Mizell came running in—door banging open, her shoes echoing on the wooden floor. That was our bargain, to let me at him first. Get a confession. I got it, at least the first half. He was Mark Casey’s son.
“That’s enough,” she yelled.
No, it wasn’t. My palm went smashing into his face. His cheek turned white, then red, then it stayed that way, tattooed with my hand.
Good. Another tattoo. Two of them. Just like mine.
Now he was alive. Now he hurt, just like me.
Now he spit out these words, to the man he’d blamed for killing his father, all these years. “You tell me what happened at the Olympics . . . and I tell you . . . what I know. About Skip.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
The two shadowy figures that Skip had sensed in the background before, the men who must have strong-armed her because the man on the crutches couldn’t have, came into the room. With three people guarding her, there was no way she could escape on her own. And she’d been making good progress on cutting through the tape, even though he must have used three or four layers of it. She just had to keep sawing away at the duct tape, and remember to keep her hands tight together, behind her, so they couldn’t tell that there was some slack there now.
But maybe they were letting their guard down, even with the two extra helpers. Maybe she still had a chance. They’d taken off her blindfold and put her glasses back on; they kept it so dark in the main room that she couldn’t see anything, except for the glow that the two giant Xs through the first two murals gave off. And that wasn’t enough to see anybody’s face, not really.
That’s when she thought of another trick, to help catch them when she got out.
She shook her glasses off. She was terrified and already shaking, so they pretty much fell off on their own anyway, to the floor. But she gave her head an extra jerk, and they went flying.
One of the “helpers” bent down to get them, then put them back on her face, leaving a big smudge on one of the lenses. Dirty glasses normally drove her crazy; she was always cleaning them with dishwashing liquid at the sink at home or asking to go to the bathroom at school, just to wash them.
But now she wanted them dirty.
With a fingerprint. Somebody’s fingerprint. A clue she could give the police, when she got out of here. That would push her on. Another small victory. She twitched her head again so her hair would fall down over her forehead, so they wouldn’t see the smudge and take her glasses away to wash it off.
She noticed the one helper smiling at her. She’d have missed it without having her glasses on: him mouthing “I’m sorry,” then looking around to see if the main man had seen him. The helper wore glasses too, and they were just as smudgy as hers, but he seemed to not even notice it. She had to get somebody on her side, somebody who could untie her. He was the one, if it was going to be anyone; a man with smudgy glasses needed friends. Wanted friends.
She smiled at him, so he’d know she didn’t blame him.
He looked normal, or almost normal. Small, with a suit and dark red hair. A lot of it. Too much, actually, for such a little head. He needed a haircut. Big bushy eyebrows topping those glasses, like caterpillars crawling across his brow. His tie had a stain on it, but at least he’d tried to look nice.
He whispered it again: “I’m sorry.”
“Help me!” Skip whispered back. “Untie me!”
And then his face went blank. The other helper was coming close to them, carrying a TV tray covered by a napkin. This guy was the opposite: big. She couldn’t tell if he was strong, or just burly. Fit-fat, her father called it. His sleeves were rolled up, exposing his biceps, but they weren’t really defined like her father’s. They were more like they used to have muscles on them, but then the fat took over. A shaved h
ead, sort of Hispanic looking, a belly sticking out over the belt of a gray work uniform. A uniform like the janitors wore, at Canaan College.
He wouldn’t look at her, like the other one did. She wasn’t going to get any help from him. She had to get the first guy alone somehow, but not now. The main guy was coming in, only now she heard a rolling sound behind her, not the usual tip-tap tip-tap his crutches made on the floor. No, now there was more of a metal sound, and rubber.
Wheels. He was in a wheelchair now. She saw just the front of it as he bent down and adjusted some levers to lock the wheels into place. His feet resting on the two separate footrests near the bottom of the chair; his legs sort of leaning over to the left, falling on themselves, like you did when somebody fat had to squeeze past you in your row at the movies.
“Thought I would make. Tire tracks today. Instead of being on my feet. Nice to have an option, when I’m just too worn out. A seat to come home to. Now, it’s time for us. To all get acquainted. Some of my old classmates. From the home! A class reunion! We’ve been through. So much together! Haven’t we boys? Since I’m obviously . . . unsuited to . . . heavy lifting, I depend on my ‘helpers.’ And all they ask in return is a little . . . pick-me-up. They’ve had theirs, now it’s time for mine.”
Skip thought he must have already had some, because his breathing was easier now. He could say more, for longer periods of time.
“I go to a lot of doctors, as you can well imagine; well, you probably imagine. Not nearly enough, and you wouldn’t be wrong. But enough to take what I need, a prescription pad here, a prescription pad there. The doctors are so busy eating their free lunches the drug reps bring that they never even notice. Now. To my partners in crime. I’ve given them ancient names. Like something your. Father would do. My trusty ‘charioteer,’ Iolaus, who drives me . . . ”
The big one bobbed his head—she saw the bristles on his scalp shake in her direction—but he still wouldn’t look her in the eye.
“ . . . and Hippocrates, who shoots me. Up, that is.”
As if on cue, he lifted the napkin off the TV tray to reveal several syringes underneath it, next to a vial of clear liquid.
“What are those for?” Skip asked. “I don’t like shots. Please.”
With a determined set to his face—not daring to look at Skip again, in view of the others—the small man began drawing the liquid into the first syringe, then thumped it, to make sure there were no air bubbles.
“Not exactly the ring of fine crystal, but . . . it’ll do in a pinch,” the man in the wheelchair said. “Now, if you’ll pardon us while he gives me my medicine . . . he’s got to keep me alive long enough for me to keep you alive.”
On TV, they always said juries wouldn’t look at you, when they were about to say you were guilty. When they were about to announce your death sentence.
Is that why they took her blindfold off? Like they didn’t care what she saw anymore, because they knew they were going to kill her anyway?
Oh my God. Skip began squirming, trying to pull away, even though she knew it was useless.
“No. No! What’s in that! Please. Don’t.”
“I like to do. This part myself. Stay in the game.” Still behind her, the kidnapper took a cotton ball saturated in alcohol; the sharp smell of the alcohol cut through the odor of decay in the room, the unwashed smell that was now on Skip.
“Please. I’m begging you. I hate shots. They hurt.”
“Oh, you’d be quite surprised. What you can. Adapt to. Just look at me. Well, not all of me, not just yet.”
He pulled his wheelchair closer to her, then plunged the syringe directly into the flesh of his leg, right through the material of his pants.
Skip jerked back in her chair, as if she’d been the one who got stabbed. She was relieved she hadn’t, but almost horrified at what he’d done to himself.
“I’ll stay behind you, just like a psychiatrist. An analyst, listening to your dreams. Those doctors I’ve seen a lot, to deal with my . . . anger issues.”
Then a sound came out of the slit for his mouth: a deep breath, a sort of ahhh that was part pain, part pleasure.
“Now, I’m ready. For a story. Aren’t you? I’ve actually been ready to tell this story—waiting to tell it—for quite a number of years now.” His voice was relaxed and easy now; the shot must have worked immediately. “Boys, leave us alone. You’ve heard it before. My . . . broken record. My . . . broken self.”
Skip made one last, plaintive look toward her only help—the man who had prepared the syringe—and found that he was looking back at her, trying to say a million things with only his eyes. Was one of them that he would come back and save her? She was torn between yelling for him to stay, and at last, hearing the story that the man in the chair had saved up, just for her.
“Let’s see. How shall I start? How about ‘Once upon a time.’ Don’t all great stories begin that way? ‘Once upon a time’?”
And he took a deep breath, gathering strength.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
TJ wasn’t in handcuffs because Mizell didn’t know what to charge him with. Not yet. But there was no fear of him escaping, even without handcuffs, because I was the one dragging him in, as we entered the Mt. Gresh police station. Dragging him, that is, until I stopped short at the sight of what was in front of me, the minute I rounded the entry hallway.
My life, and Skip’s, on three dry-erase boards that had been pushed together like a bay window. All the crime scene photos they took at my house, squiggly black arrows pointing every which way, blown-up versions of all the rhymes so far. Six photos of men, all under the heading “Registered Sex Offenders.” And Skip. Ten or eleven photos of Skip. I only gave them one; I don’t know where they got all the others, but now a wall of them confronted me.
“Jesus Christ.”
“I forgot about this,” Mizell said to me. “Holt, you’re gonna have to leave . . . ”
“Not until we find out what this shithead knows about.” I turned on TJ again, ready for another round.
“I didn’t do anything to Skip. I wasn’t anywhere near your house. I wouldn’t hurt her! But . . . but . . . ”
My hands went around his neck, pushing him down to the ground. “WHERE THE FUCK IS MY DAUGHTER?”
Two men in suits ran in to split us apart, introductions even with their hands all over us. “You must be the father. I’m Special Agent Michaelson.” Tall, with an even taller forehead, until his shock of brown hair met it. A hint of something Southern in the way he sounded, a good ’ol boy. The good cop.
His buddy, the bad one, his suit at tight, sharp angles, an American flag pin on his lapel. “And I’m Special Agent Zaccaro. From the FBI’s CARD team.”
Mizell spelled it out for me. “Child Abduction Rapid Deployment.”
“You fucked up on the ‘rapid’ part. Why the hell did it take . . . ”
In no time flat, I was as furious at them as I was at TJ. They were Frick and Frack as far as I was concerned. Interchangeable. But they weren’t here to make apologies. “We’ll need to interview you as soon as possible.”
“‘As soon as possible’ was two days ago, and he’s the one you need to interview.” I practically threw TJ at them. “His father tried to do me in years ago, and now he’s repeating the process. Like father, like son. Ask him what he knows about my daughter!”
“We’ve got a protocol in cases like this and . . . ”
“‘Cases like this?’ Have you ever had a ‘case like this’ where the kidnapper puts your daughter on the phone and all she gets to do is squeak out your name before . . . ” I was losing it again.
TJ broke in, talking for the first time since we’d taken him from the gym. He shut us all up. “I wanted to blame somebody for so long, for my dad . . . for what happened at the Olympics . . . for you beating him . . . for him dying . . . ”
“I didn’t put the goddamn noose around his neck. And what the fuck were you planning on doing, anyway? Your big revenge
? Spill coffee on my laptop? Jump me in a dark alley?”
“Remind you he was dead. And why.”
“How the fuck could you remind me if I didn’t even know who the FUCK YOU WERE?”
Silence. Everybody was watching, waiting. Even Frick and Frack. TJ couldn’t look at us anymore, couldn’t look at anything except his shoes.
“And why wait ’til now?” I kept going at TJ. “You’ve been here four fucking years.”
“I started liking school too much. I was good at it. Finally. Something I was good at. I started liking you.”
TJ was still in his workout clothes, and they stank; he was sweating more than anybody I’d ever seen in my life. Not from what he’d done in the gym, but from fear. I remembered it. Afraid of Daddy. Afraid of getting in trouble. Afraid of not winning. That was the one thing TJ and I must have had in common. We’d both been terrified of our fathers.
Fathers. That’s what I had to work with. That’s how I could get TJ. Switch tactics, now that I’d roughed him up. “Please, TJ. I’m begging you. Just like I begged him. The kidnapper. Just think about Skip. I don’t care what you think about me, or what your dad did. Do this for Skip. You came to our house . . . she came to the office . . . she baked cookies and brought them to the office and . . . you knew her.”
That’s when I nearly lost it again, changing tenses. Making everything past instead of present. “You know her. Tell me. Tell me what you know.”
TJ sat down and started pulling at his socks. Those pathetic, nylon black socks. Up and down, up and down. He couldn’t look at us. He couldn’t look at me. “We’re handing out the flyers, and this guy comes up, and I think . . . this is how I can do it. This is how I can get back at you. I don’t tell you what he looks like.”
“You’ve been sitting on a description this whole time?” Now Mizell was the one who wanted to pummel him.
