Desperate

by Daniel Palmer

  Brad got into the car, but before I could drive, I had to focus. I knew what I was capable of doing under great pressure—I could organize a funeral for my wife and son, I could host family and friends in the days and weeks following their burials, I could pop a pill and go to work each day, and I could damn well stay focused and calm enough to save my wife.

  I got quiet for a moment, gathering my center, fortifying my resolve.

  “Are you all right?” Brad asked.

  “No,” I said. “I’m not all right. Not at all.” I handed Brad my phone to show him the picture of Anna being held hostage at knifepoint. I watched the color drain from his face.

  “My God, Gage,” he whispered.

  I slammed the car into reverse, burning rubber as I spun out into the road.

  “Yeah,” I said. “My God.”

  Brad held onto my phone and was looking at the picture of Anna while I drove at probably too high a rate of speed and glanced at the time on the dashboard clock. I didn’t know when I’d drive these roads again, or see my parents, or even Brad for that matter. The road map to my future had transformed into something unrecognizable, a total eclipse into which I could not see past today.

  My conviction was strong—I was going to rescue Anna and make sure Roy couldn’t hurt anybody I cared about ever again. But first I had to find Anna, and then I needed a plan to set her free. That was why I included Brad. I felt confident I could get Anna away from Lily and Roy, but only if I had help creating a distraction. Brad was the only person I trusted.

  “It could be dangerous,” I said, giving Brad a chance to back out. We were headed into Boston, fighting our way through the unyielding push of afternoon traffic.

  “What if I don’t go with you?” Brad countered.

  “Then I’ll do it alone.”

  “And you’ll probably end up dead.”

  I shrugged off that distinct possibility with maybe a bit too much nonchalance.

  “It’ll be what it’ll be,” I said.

  Brad mulled this over.

  “You sure we can’t go to the cops?”

  “He’ll kill her. Roy won’t go back inside. He said so.”

  “Bluffing?”

  “Not a chance I’m willing to take.”

  Brad gave this some additional consideration. “Okay,” he said, running his fingers across his mustache. “So what’s your plan? What’s our next step?”

  “We need to find where Roy is holding Anna,” I said.

  “And how do we accomplish that?”

  “We go ask the one guy who said he could track Roy down anywhere he’d hide and find out where he might have taken her.”

  Brad had never been to this section of East Boston before, and he certainly had never heard of a restaurant called Nicky’s. We had parked down the street, not far from where Roy parked his Camaro on our first visit here. Waves of heat rose from the scorching sidewalk, and the stench of trash cooking in overflowing barrels sent wafts of foul-smelling air my way. Not that this smell deterred any locals from enjoying a fine meal at Nicky’s. I saw people going into the restaurant with scowls and coming out with smiles on their faces.

  “So you’re just going to go ask this drug dealer to help you out?” Brad asked, studying the restaurant from a distance. He shielded his eyes from the glare of the late-afternoon sun even though he was wearing his signature aviator shades.

  “Yeah,” I said. “That’s the plan.”

  “And why do you think he’s going to help you?”

  “Because I’m going to do what Roy did to me.”

  “And that is?”

  “I’m going to show him my text messages with Roy. They’re incriminating enough. I’ll threaten to send it out to the police if he doesn’t help.”

  “From what you described, he doesn’t seem like a guy who responds well to threats.”

  “It’s the best I’ve got.”

  “What if he calls your bluff?”

  “We’ll improvise.”

  Brad groaned.

  “What?” I asked.

  Brad shook his head. “I was afraid you were going to say that.” He followed me into the restaurant.

  The setting was all too familiar. A waitress was working the front room, and I could hear noises spilling out from the upper-level dining area. I hadn’t ever seen it in use during any of my prior visits. It was later in the day, so maybe Nicky waited for the after-work crowd to open that section of his restaurant.

  I went right to the bar with Brad close on my heels, glancing briefly at the elevated round table where a week ago Roy and I sat with a million dollars at our feet.

  The bartender, the same stocky guy I saw working the first time I came to Nicky’s, was at the sink drying glasses with a dishrag. The tweed cap he apparently favored stayed firmly rooted on his round head even with his gaze lowered on the glasses.

  I went up to him, trying to look confident while ignoring all the other emotions. I thought of Anna, her picture etched in my mind, her distress embedded in my heart. She would give me the strength I needed to do what had to be done.

  “Excuse me,” I said. “I’d like to speak with the owner, please. I’d like to see Nicky.” I tried to bolster my confidence with a smile, but I’m sure it looked forced. The thought of squaring off with Nicky Stacks was not one I relished.

  The bartender looked up at me without a flicker of recognition. He picked up a phone behind the bar and keyed in a number. Next I heard him say, “Yeah, it’s me. There’s some guy here who wants to see you. Okay.”

  He turned back to me. “Just a sec, all right? You guys need anything to drink?”

  “No, thanks,” I said.

  Brad leaned into me. “What now?” he whispered in my ear.

  “Now we wait.”

  A few minutes later there was no sign of Nicky Stacks. Did he know I was here? Was he preparing an ambush? Was Roy in contact with him? All these thoughts simultaneously came at me when I saw a short and slight Korean woman exit through the kitchen doors and approach the bar. She was dressed for work, wearing a sauce-stained apron over a blue dress made of heavy fabric. Her graying hair was nested inside a mesh hairnet. The woman walked right up to me while I was looking over her shoulder for Nicky to come out the same door.

  “Yes?” she asked. “Can I help you with something?” She spoke with a slight accent.

  “Yes,” I said. “I’m looking for Nicky.”

  The woman nodded. “Yeah. That’s me. I’m Nicky.”

  I blinked several times and looked back at Brad, my brain foggy and confused.

  “No, I’m sorry,” I said. “Let me explain. I’m looking for Nicky Stacks. He’s a big guy. Big,” I repeated, reaching my hand above my head, thinking for some reason I needed to pantomime the description to make myself clear. “He owns this place.”

  The woman shrugged and returned my quizzical look with one of her own. “I don’t know any Nicky Stacks, but I’m Nicky and I own this restaurant.”

  I turned my gaze to the bartender, thinking he could vouch for my story.

  “You remember me, right? I was here with a guy named Roy Ripson. We met with Nicky Stacks, the owner of this place, right up there.” I pointed at the entrance to the upstairs portion of the restaurant.

  “A lot of guys come here,” the bartender said with a shrug. “But I don’t know anybody named Roy. Look, I can’t keep track of everybody who comes and goes from here, buddy. Sorry, I can’t help.”

  “I can help,” the woman said with confidence. “I’ve owned this restaurant for fifteen years. I’m Nicky of Nicky’s. Well, I’m really Mi-Yun, but who is going to eat Italian food if I called the place Mi-Yun’s, huh?” Mi-Yun threw her head back with a roar of laughter as if she’d never told that joke before. “My grandmother and mother wanted me to cook Korean food, but me, I loved the meatballs and sauce.” Again she laughed.

  “I don’t get it,” I said. “I’ve met Nicky Stacks. I’ve met the owner.”

 
Mi-Yun looked at me with a hint of concern. “Look, mister, I don’t know who you met here,” she said. “But I can tell you one thing for certain.” Mi-Yun held up one finger to emphasize her point. “Whoever you met, he wasn’t the owner of this restaurant.”

  CHAPTER 55

  My thoughts were spinning. Where was Nicky Stacks? It didn’t make any sense. Roy had been clear. Nicky Stacks was the owner of Nicky’s. Who was Mi-Yun, and what had become of the bull-headed man who threatened my life?

  I rethought my plan. Maybe I should just go back to Lithio Systems and get Roy the real design plans for Olympian. It was the Kobayashi Maru test all over again, the test for which there was no good outcome. Destroy Lithio Systems or save Anna?

  I drove Brad back to my condo in Arlington. I couldn’t think straight in any other setting, and I needed a new plan of attack. We got home just fine, but I wasn’t prepared for the profound feeling of despair I encountered upon setting foot inside. My wife was gone, but I could feel her presence. Perhaps it was the negative energy left behind by a terrifying kidnapping, something Brad must have picked up on as well. He looked disturbed and agitated.

  I imagined Anna’s terror as she raced to get away from Roy. Chairs were tipped over, and an end table too. Had he hurt her? Had he used drugs to render her unconscious?

  I swallowed my fear. For Anna’s sake, I had to stay lucid. Of course that also meant popping an Adderall, which I did in the bathroom.

  “What now?” Brad asked.

  I was pacing in the living room, trying to answer that question for myself. What now?

  “I need to find Anna. I need to find out where Roy is holding her hostage.”

  “I get that,” Brad said. “But how?”

  I took out my phone and looked at the image of Anna once again. It was surreal. I internalized her fear and felt it as if it were my own.

  Hold it together, Gage. For Anna’s sake, pull yourself together.

  “The image,” I said. “Look at it with me.” Brad knew as much about construction as any general contractor. He’d have some good insights. “What can you tell me about the space?”

  Brad took the phone, studied the image, and took a moment to get composed.

  “Good God, Gage,” he said. “Who are these people? Why didn’t I see Lily’s aura for who she really was?”

  “Maybe she’s a chameleon,” I suggested.

  “Or she knew how to guard herself. She knew how to shut it off.”

  “It’s not your fault,” I said. “Don’t blame yourself. Let’s focus on this. What can you tell me about the picture?”

  Brad made a careful study.

  “The building is old,” he said. “Very old, in fact. You can see the wide plank flooring—over eight inches wide, I’d say. Looks like pine. It’s a soft wood, easy to handsaw and face nail to a beam or a joist.”

  “What else?” I asked.

  “Look to the sides here,” he said. “It looks like she’s in an empty room. Can you upload this to a computer? I want to get a closer look.”

  My eyes went wide as excitement boomed through my chest.

  “The image,” I said, slapping my forehead because the answer should have been obvious. Guess I needed Brad to make mention of a computer to jog my memory. Having worked with cell phones at Lithio Systems for so long, I knew every feature like I was a walking, talking product manual.

  “You can extract location information from an image,” I said.

  Brad appeared surprised. “Doesn’t it have to be tagged on Facebook or Foursquare or something like that? The girls do that a lot. I kept telling them to stop in case a stalker wants to track them down.”

  “No,” I said, feeling the excitement coursing through me now. “It gets stored in an exchangeable image file format, Exif for short. Typically the default setting for this service is turned on and people don’t even know it. Using an Exif viewer I can get all sorts of location information from an image, including location data. It may not reveal an exact location,” I said, “but it could provide us a general idea.”

  “A general idea might be good enough,” Brad agreed. “We’ll know to look for old construction, something with thick concrete walls and what looks like a big metal door. A really heavy door, in fact.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Let me get to work on this.”

  I checked the time.

  Four hours to go.

  “What do you want me to do in the meantime? I can try to search for Nicky Stacks,” Brad said. “Make some calls.”

  The word that caught my attention was search.

  “Go up to the apartment and look around. Look everywhere. See if maybe they left behind something that might give us some idea where they could have taken Anna.” I stood to get my laptop, and Brad headed upstairs.

  At this point, my thoughts, lucid and rational thanks to a punch of Adderall, betrayed me. My mind flashed on an image of Anna’s corpse, gutted as Roy had promised. A shiver ripped through me, so powerful it nearly sent me to my knees. I calmed myself by pacing a series of rapid circles around the dining room table, head lowered, massaging the base of my neck, and eventually settled enough to get my laptop.

  Back at the dining room table where Anna had watched me build model rockets for hours on end, where we ate and fantasized about soon putting out place settings for three instead of two, I powered up my laptop and downloaded a Safari extension that would allow me to view the Exif data.

  It took a while, a bit of downloading and clicking, but soon enough I had the image open in the Exif viewer and found the coordinates where the geolocation data were displayed. I pasted those coordinates into Google Earth. With a quick refresh of the screen, Google Earth transported me as if I were free falling from space to an aerial view of North America, and then to Station Street in Brookline Village.

  The Village, as it is often referred to, is a very neighborly section of Brookline, the town abutting Boston. Brookline’s earliest shops and restaurants started here, and to this day the Village retains a special charm, evoking the feel of a small town within the confines of a city.

  Google Maps displayed the names of all identified businesses near the coordinates I had entered, giving me a broad overview of this area. I saw a post office, a coffee shop, a yoga studio, a restaurant, and one especially interesting business: Longview Storage Company, a yellow-brick structure about six stories high.

  With a couple of mouse clicks, the website of Longview Storage told me all I needed to know. The About Us section contained an old advertisement for the business when it first opened to the public. It was originally called Brookline Storage Warehouse, and it specialized in storing furniture, pianos, works of art, trunks, carriages, sleighs, and merchandise of all kinds. The old ad ran in the now nondefunct Brookline Street Directory and it was from the year 1903.

  We’re looking for an old building . . .

  I was about to go trumpet my announcement to Brad when he came into the dining room with a small, colorful cardboard box in his hand. It took a second to recognize the familiar labeling of Alka-Seltzer tablets.

  Brad dropped the box onto the dining room table in front of me and said, “I found this in the medicine cabinet upstairs.” Something rattled inside.

  Reaching for the box I said, “Thanks, buddy. I could use something to calm my stomach.”

  “That’s not why I brought this down,” Brad said. “Check out what I found inside the box.”

  I tipped the box open and out spilled a circular plastic container holding about thirty pills. The center of the case had a movable circle with written instructions to use a coin to set the starting day. Next to each pill was written a day of the week, Monday through Sunday, repeating. The pills were color-coded: red, green, yellow, and white, seven pills in each set, one for every day of the week.

  I held the pill container in my hand, trying to make sense of what I was seeing. I steeled myself against a fresh wave of nausea, feeling as if the floor had dropped out from beneat
h me.

  “I’m a plumber, not a doctor,” Brad said, “but I do know that a pregnant woman doesn’t need to use birth control pills.”

  CHAPTER 56

  Brad was on the phone to his contact at the Brookline building department. Through his plumbing business, Brad knew the town building people in almost every area he serviced, and all of them considered him a friend. He wanted to get detailed building plans of the Longview Storage Company. From there we’d be able to figure out a possible plan of attack.

  I wasn’t going to change my mind about calling the police. Roy was a desperate man who felt trapped and cornered, and if he felt threatened there was a good chance Anna would die.

  My mission might not have changed, but the facts surrounding it were startlingly different. Nicky Stacks didn’t own Nicky’s restaurant, and Lily apparently wasn’t pregnant. I had to assume she had never even been pregnant. If so, that changed everything. It meant she wanted something from us, and I thought I knew what that was.

  Before I could confirm my suspicion, I had to check something else out first.

  Brad finished his call. “My buddy at town hall is going to take pictures of the architectural plans and text them to me. I should have them in a little bit.”

  I nodded as I sucked down a breath fraught with anxiety. My heart was doing cartwheels in my chest, and it wasn’t from my most recent Adderall fix.

  “If she was never pregnant, that means she targeted us,” I said.

  “Why you? How would she know you?”

  “The ParentHorizon website,” I said. “Our profile was on the site with a lot of personal information about us. What if she checked out our profile before she even told us she was pregnant? What if we didn’t just stumble on her? What if she had cross-referenced our names to our address? She could have been following us, for days, for weeks, who knows, waiting for the opportunity to strike.”

  “So she was stalking people who wanted to adopt a baby?” Brad asked.

  “Not people who wanted a baby,” I said. “She was stalking us.”

  “But why you guys?” Brad asked.

  “I don’t know.”