Swerve

by Inglath Cooper

  She steps in close, leaning forward to stare at the screen, and then, with the breath catching in her throat, “Yes. Yes, it is.”

  Her voice is so low, he can barely hear the response. He glances at her face, sees that all color has drained from it. “I’ve been able to spot her and Grace in four different frames. I’ve also noticed the man in the gray baseball cap in three of those frames.”

  He can feel her stiffen beside him. “That’s not a coincidence, is it?” she asks.

  “Probably not,” he says.

  He clicks on the man’s face, enlarges the screen. “His features distort when I zoom in. The only thing I can make out is the logo on his hat.”

  “What is it?” she asks.

  “Carlos Garcia.”

  “Is that a brand?”

  I click over to the webpage where I’ve already found it online and read, “Streetwear brand Carlos Garcia offers the coolest everyday wear for kids looking to make a statement. T-shirts, jeans, backpacks make up a line of highly desirable clothing.”

  She visibly swallows and says, “Why would he be following them?”

  “It could be a coincidence,” he says.

  “But you don’t think so?”

  He doesn’t say anything for several seconds, and then, “Probably not.”

  “How can we find out who he is?” she asks, panic now edging her voice. “Is there some kind of facial recognition software—”

  “Not with photos this blurred,” he says, shaking his head.

  “What then?” she pleads, pressing her hand to his shoulder.

  He looks up at her, sees the warring emotions of hope and despair and struggles with which one to encourage her to latch on to. “I’ll work on the hat label. I’ll look into the DC stores that might carry it. Pay them a visit and see if anyone recognizes the guy in the photo.”

  Hope flares in her eyes, despite my unwillingness to build this into something more than it might end up being.

  “Have you already looked up the stores?”

  “I found three,” he says. “All in downtown DC”

  “Can we go now?” she asks.

  “Maybe I should do this on my own.”

  “Please,” she says. “I want to go. I’ll go crazy if I stay here waiting to hear something.”

  “It could end up being nothing,” he says.

  “Detective Helmer. This is the first glimmer of even a hint at what might have happened to Mia and Grace. You don’t need to protect me from hope. I realize how fragile it is.”

  He stares up at her, fully aware that he should refuse to let her go. There’s something about her that interferes with his judgment, the way police radar scramblers mix a portion of the signal with background clutter, confusing the computer inside the radar gun. He’s not sure if his own signals are strictly about the job at hand or something they shouldn’t have anything at all to do with. But as strong as the voice telling him not to take her is, he finds himself saying, “Most of the leads we follow don’t pan out. I need to know you understand that.”

  “I understand.”

  He picks up the images and addresses he’s already printed out and says, “Then let’s go.”

  Mia

  “Life is about how much you can take and keep fighting, how much you can suffer and keep moving forward.”

  —Anderson Silva

  SHE HASN’T EATEN since the night of the festival. What was it that she and Grace had eaten there and loved so much? They had told Emory about it when they’d FaceTimed.

  It scares her that she can’t remember now.

  Mia presses her hand to her stomach, noticing that it is no longer growling in complaint, as if it has finally accepted that food is not coming, and it won’t do any good to put out a request.

  Her mouth is so dry she can barely swallow. It’s the water she’s missing most. The thought of food actually makes her nauseated. What she would give for a huge glass of cold water though.

  But she won’t let herself touch the one sitting by the door. They have been replacing it on a regular basis, ice cubes visible through the glass, as if they know she will eventually concede and down it.

  So far, she has not. Something tells her that as soon as she gives in to accepting their food and water, she is theirs.

  And that is something she will never willingly be. She would rather die first.

  She’s beginning to realize that might actually happen.

  She tries to remember what day it is. How long she’s been here. But her brain can’t seem to figure it out. Day three. Five? Or is it longer?

  She’s wearing the same clothes she’d arrived here in, and she hasn’t had a shower. Her hair feels oily, and she shrinks from the smell of her own perspiration.

  What was it the man standing guard outside her room had said? “It will be much easier for you once you start cooperating. Wouldn’t you like for life to be nice again? A warm shower with lots of soap and shampoo. A hot meal of your favorite food. All you have to do is tell me what it is, and I will get it for you.”

  She hadn’t given him the satisfaction of a response. Instead, had turned her head to the wall and refused to look at him.

  She hears the door click and feels her stomach drop as it swings inward.

  The same man who had abducted them stares at her from the opening. Her gaze goes to the logo on his baseball cap, recognizing the Carlos Garcia brand. She wonders if he grew up here or if he had made his way to this country with the life goal of kidnapping young girls. Or maybe the original plan hadn’t worked out and this was the result?

  “You must eat,” he says, his strong voice startling her in the silence. She looks at him and shakes her head.

  “Why should you make this much more difficult for you?”

  I study him, noticing the line of frustration between his eyes. “You should have picked a pansy,” she says.

  “What is this pansy?”

  “Someone who would give you what you want without a fight.”

  His eyes light up with amusement. “One of you has.”

  Rage erupts inside her, and something screams for her to launch herself at him, claw his face into ribbons of blood. “I hate you.”

  He shrugs. “That is not problem. Is problem that you not eat. I will arrange for visit from doctor.” He walks toward her, pulling a syringe from his back pocket. “First to prepare you for that visit though.”

  “What are you doing?” she screams, hating the fear propelling the question out of her.

  He stands above her, the obvious awareness of his own power making her hate him even more. He jabs the needle in her thigh before she can raise a hand to stop him.

  “You will sleep,” he says. “When you wake, the good doctor will have filled you with many good nutrients.”

  “No,” she says, her eyes growing heavy and her throat barely able to force the word out.

  “It is much better to cooperate. You will learn this as you go along. Because eventually, the outcome can only be one. You will do what we ask you to do. Or we will get rid of you. You are much too young and beautiful to die. Surely, you agree with this?”

  She tries to raise an arm to push him away, but her body will not respond. She understands in a way she never has before the desire to kill another human being. She would kill him if she could. But she can’t. She can’t. Her eyes slide closed, and he disappears.

  ~

  SHE COMES TO in a snap, her eyes slamming open, the bright light above her blinding.

  The light had gone out on the tail end of her screams, and she finds herself again screaming as she scrambles up, trying to remember what happened.

  The man. He stabbed the needle in her leg. She feels there now, probing for the spot. She finds it, winces at the soreness, and then notices that her left arm is sore also.

  She glances at the bend of her elbow, sees the telltale bruising of a needle mark. What had he done to her? She notices then that she’s no longer thirsty. What had he given he
r?

  A key sounds in the lock. The door swings in, and the man she has come to hate again steps inside, a wide smile on his face. “Feeling much better, yes?” he asks, a smirk in his voice.

  “What did you do?” she bites out.

  “The good doctor gave you nourishment. If you won’t willingly eat or drink, we’ll have to do it for you until you change your mind. We kept you out long enough to give you IVs of all the things your body needs. What is it they say? The miracles of modern medicine?”

  Mia stares at him, an anger rising inside her that is like nothing she has ever felt. She feels as if the flames of it will completely melt everything in its path, her will, her resistance, the very essence of who she knows herself to be. “Why are you doing this?” she asks.

  He studies her for a few long moments, and then, “It is not personal, beautiful. It is business. It’s not that you and your friend did something wrong. You were simply the ones I came across that night as right for our operation. Do not waste time trying to figure out what you could have done differently. How you might have made another choice. There was no escaping it. This is your fate. Life is cruel that way.”

  She squeezes her arm at the place where the needle had gone in, as if she can remove the life-sustaining nutrients he had forced on her. “So you get to decide who is a victim and who isn’t?”

  “Yes,” he says. “That is my job.”

  “You’re despicable.”

  “Despicable?” he asks casually, as if she has called him something flattering.

  “Scum of the earth.” She struggles for other words strong enough to convey what she sees in him, but she can’t find any. She spits at him, hitting him dead between the eyes.

  She has never seen fury blaze to life the way it does on his face. He draws back a fist, and she closes her eyes and braces herself for the punch. But it doesn’t come. Instead, he makes a sound that almost isn’t human, both of his hands shoving her backward so that she slams into the wall and melts to the floor, the breath knocked from her lungs.

  He’s on top of her then, and she’s trying so hard to pull in air that she can’t scream, can’t resist him.

  “So, Miss Queen of Ice, I have never believed in waiting for you and the others like you to come willingly. Force works better anyway. Once I am done with you, you will be happy to receive the limp-dick senators who will be your customers.”

  He tears open the zipper of her jeans, yanking them off her with a loud ripping sound. The zipper catches the skin of her leg, tearing a scream from her throat. Her air is back, and she begins fighting, clawing at his face as she had wanted to earlier, knowing she will not give up until his blood covers her hands. He unzips his pants, and she feels his hardness against her leg. She struggles, writhing under him as she tries to remember something from the self-defense class Emory had made her take, and then the instructor’s voice comes to her. “Go for the eyes. One finger is all it takes.”

  Mia jabs her thumb to the center of his eyeball. He turns his head in time to lessen the blow, but still howls, flinging himself off her, covering his eye with his hand.

  She scrambles back to the wall, pulling her jeans up as quickly as she can while she watches him roll in pain, his now limp penis flapping like a flag of surrender.

  A key turns in the lock, and the door opens again. Mia looks up to find a woman staring at them both, her expression as blank as the wall behind her. She is tall and intimidating. Her black hair hangs from a center part and glances off her shoulders. She is wearing a dark-gray suit and a white blouse that seem as severe as the storm in her unnaturally green eyes.

  “Sergio,” she says evenly. “Leave us. Now.”

  Biting back a moan, he stumbles to his feet, pulling up his pants as he goes. Mia bites her lip at the sound of his zipper, resisting a suddenly hysterical urge to laugh.

  Another glance at the woman’s stone-faced expression kills the urge, and she pulls her knees up against her chest, holding her gaze on the instinctive knowledge that to look away would suggest weakness. Something tells her that would be a mistake.

  “So you drove Sergio to cross a line he has never crossed before? This is interesting. That tells me a good bit about you.”

  “If you let us go,” Mia says, forcing an even note in her voice, “I swear on my life that we’ll never tell anyone what happened. We’ll say we ran off for a few days. Just being teenagers.”

  The woman laughs, a low, throaty laugh that suggests she is very much used to being in control. “Oh, my dear, I am afraid it is much too late for that. We have plans for you. Guests for you to entertain. Your friend Grace is already well on her way. She’s already grown tired of being hungry and thirsty. She very much enjoyed her shower and the luxurious massage and spa treatment we provided her. As we speak, she is trying on some of the clothes we bought her to wear tonight.”

  “You’re lying.”

  “In fact, I’m not.”

  “What’s tonight?”

  “Tonight she will have the chance to become friends with one of our most valued clients. I believe she will impress him.”

  A twisting cyclone of fear and outrage torpedoes out of Mia. “You can’t do that. Grace would never—”

  “Actually, she would,” the woman disagrees. “It’s a matter of options, dear. She prefers this option to the others we have presented her with. Isn’t that what all of life is? Choosing among options?”

  “You’re crazy!” Mia screams. “Please let us go! Our families will give you money—”

  The woman laughs. “I am sure you have no idea what you are worth. But I doubt that your families could get anywhere near that.”

  Mia wants to argue, but she honestly has no idea how much money she and Emory have. And she knows that Grace’s parents aren’t wealthy. “Please. Don’t do this. You have no idea what you’ve done to our—”

  “They will go on,” she says matter-of-factly. “It is a sad fact of life, but we do survive our tragedies. Your family will survive this one.”

  “Why are you doing this?” Mia asks, hating herself for the weakness in her voice.

  “I have clientele to please. It is simple.”

  Mia stares at her, sensing that she is right when she says, “You enjoy this. The cat-and-mouse thing. You being the cat, of course.”

  “Of course,” the woman says, smiling now. “Very perceptive of you.”

  “Were you born without the empathy chip or did someone create you?”

  The woman’s stare becomes a glare. But, as if she doesn’t want Mia to think she has gotten to her, she smiles again and says, “Does it really matter?”

  “I think it matters. If you were a victim, you should understand what it feels like to be one.”

  “A victim is someone with absolutely no choice in what happens to them. You have a choice.”

  “You call being a prostitute for you a choice?”

  “Such a crass word, prostitute. What we do here can’t really be equated with that.”

  “Sex for hire. Isn’t that what it is?”

  “We prefer to think of it as providing pleasure to those who can afford to pay for it. And who don’t mind being generous when they get what they want.”

  “I won’t do it.”

  The woman sighs. “I am afraid that if you don’t soon come around to our way of thinking, I will be forced to have you spend some time with some of the less-desirable members of my team. And that will make your almost interlude with Sergio seem like an infinitely desirable thing. It would be a shame too because there would be mandatory recovery time for you. I’ve only had to play this card with a few of our girls, but it wasted valuable resources for us all. And if your situation required a hospital visit, well, you know we would simply have to end things there.”

  Mia’s bravado wavers despite her attempt not to let it show.

  “Once I make the decision to send you down that avenue, I will not change my mind. I’ll give you one more night to come around to our
way of thinking. I will check in with you tomorrow morning, and if you are still in this oppositional state of mind, you will be spending tomorrow night wishing you had. It is very simple really, this decision that is before you.”

  Mia swallows hard, despair replacing the blood in her veins so that she suddenly feels incapacitated by it. The fight leaves her, and she leans against the wall, sliding to the floor. She looks up at the woman, staring hard at her before she says, “Okay. I will do what you want. But only if you let Grace and me be together.”

  The woman folds her arms, studies Mia for a few long moments before saying, “I suppose that can be arranged. But first, my dear, you need a shower.”

  Knox

  “Beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster.”

  ―Barry Eisler

  HE SHOULDN’T HAVE let her come along.

  He doesn’t need the distraction.

  For the majority of the drive into downtown DC, he again uses music as an excuse for them not to talk. But at some point, she reaches over and turns it down. “What was it like being a SEAL?”

  He glances at her, expecting to see casual interest on her face, but she is looking at him with serious eyes, and he resists the urge to be sarcastic. He considers the question and then says, “Every day is another opportunity to probe your weak points. SEAL candidates undergo six months of training by professionals whose mission is to find any weakness that might make you inferior when it comes to serving your country at the highest imaginable levels. They basically try to throw more challenges at you in six months than they believe a normal human being can handle.”

  “But you handled it?”

  He shrugs. “Sometimes, that still surprises me. My class started with one hundred and forty-eight men. After six weeks, we were down to thirty-seven.”

  “And I’m assuming those are some of the country’s most qualified young guys?”

  “The competition is stiff.”

  “How did you survive it?”