by Justin Bell
Two police officers huddled over the crumpled form in the road, the bent and broken body evident even from several steps away as FBI Agent Julie Swift currently was. She strode towards the body and one of the cops broke away, coming to intercept. Flashing her credentials the police officer nodded and stepped away, letting her pass through and she walked to where Chunhua Liu lay in the street, smashed and broken like a discarded China doll. Her top half pointed back towards the sidewalk, while her legs splayed out towards the opposite side of the road, her back bending between top and bottom. One shoe was missing, and a streak of blood ran up across her left cheek. She almost didn’t look real, like a polished mannequin set up to replicate the look of a crime scene.
But Agent Swift knew different. She knew far too well how real she was.
“Her husband?” she asked, turning to one of the officers. The cop gave her a blank look.
“She was the only one here when we got here,” he said. “No car, no husband, just her.”
“Who called it in?”
The beat cop nodded down the sidewalk where the owner of the bakery stood, chatting with a third person the agent had not seen until now.
Agent Swift thanked them and stepped up on to the sidewalk towards the pot-bellied man who was speaking with who looked to be a Boston police detective.
The detective turned towards the approaching Swift. He was wearing a gray suit with a dark tie, the precise color she couldn’t tell in the darkness.
“Agent Swift,” she said, flipping open her badge wallet and showing her identification.
“FBI?” the detective asked. “Seriously? You guys showed up quick.”
“Her husband is one of ours,” Swift replied. “Well, kind of, anyway.”
The detective shook his head. “Not good.”
“Do you still need me, Detective Olson?” the bakery owner asked in a thick Italian accent.
Olson turned back towards him. “Not for now, you answered all of my questions, thank you. We may call you again. Either me or the FBI.”
The man nodded and turned away, heading back into the bakery, his plump form framed by the rectangle of light shining out from his small establishment.
“You guys still have power out here?” Swift asked, looking around at the sporadic lit windows scattered throughout the buildings.
“Up and down,” Detective Olson replied. “Up at the moment.”
“So, anything firm yet?” Swift asked. “Any true eye witnesses?”
The detective shook his head, tipping up a foam cup of coffee and taking a long sip. “Guy in the bakery saw the car fly by, that’s why he called. Dark colored sedan, he didn’t grab any plates or make or model, so not much help.”
“Did he see anyone else? Was the husband here or was she walking alone?”
“He says he saw two bodies before he called, though one of them was moving. We’re pretty sure the husband was with her. No clue where he is now.”
Swift reached into the pocket of her suit coat and produced a business card, extending it over towards the detective. “Give me a call if you hear anything more, okay? Especially if you hear from the husband. He hasn’t called in; we’re worried about him.”
Olson nodded. “Sure thing.”
Swift turned away from the detective, walking back towards the fallen body of the young woman. She hadn’t known Agent Liu for long, but long enough to know he was married and she got the impression he was feeling mixed about leaving his wife alone so much the past few days. Kramer had given him a whole day off after his whirlwind trip to Galveston, but who could have known how that day would end?
Stepping back into the road, Agent Swift took in the crime scene, the location of the street, the sidewalk, the bakery, and all the surrounding buildings. She tried to track in her mind how the car would get from the street to where it had hit the couple and then back onto the street. A light pole was right there, and if the vehicle had drifted, she believed it would have hit the pole first.
Instead, it had managed to swerve inside the pole, mow them both down, then swerve back around it, back out into the street, missing the buildings and disappearing into the night.
This was no accident. At least her instinct didn’t think so.
She removed her phone and hovered her thumb over the call button before she remembered that cell service was still near useless and trying to call Kramer would only result in frustration. Lowering her head, she stuffed the useless device back in the pocket of her suit coat and began the trek back to her car to return to Chelsea and bring the news to the FBI field office. Maybe, she hoped, Agent Liu would go there and they could provide the necessary support. If he didn’t go there, where would he go? How would he handle this event stacked up on top of everything else he’d been dealing with?
Swift wasn’t sure, but she was glad that, in the world she now lived in, she only had herself to worry about.
***
Brad choked out a loud, dry cough just as Angel showed up with a bottle of warm water.
“Drink up, big guy,” he whispered to the young man, holding out the liquid. Brad snatched it from his hand and guzzled it down, tipping the bottle vertical and swallowing it gulp by desperate gulp.
Jerry paced back and forth in front of Brad, who sat on an overturned milk carton, his breathing starting to steady and some life returning to his cheeks and eyes. Max had shouted to them upon discovering who the mysterious walker was, and they’d brought him into the convenience store, then waited as he struggled to awaken and find his voice. Even now, as he drank another long swallow of water, they tried to give him the chance he needed to provide some information without bombarding him with overwhelming questions.
“So where have you been?” Max asked first, breaking the silence.
“Walking,” Brad replied. “About thirty miles, I think? Something like that.”
“Thirty miles?” Jerry asked, his face slack and stunned. “You walked that whole way?”
Brad took another sip. “Well I stopped and slept in another abandoned store about halfway back. I was able to get a little water and food there, too. But yeah. Besides that, I was just walking.”
“So tell us how you escaped,” Greer interjected, pulling over another milk crate and flipping it over to sit on it.
Brad shrugged. “They never caught me. In all the chaos, I just ran up to the back of their truck and jumped in it. They had a bunch of stuff back there, tarps and things. I’d pop up once in a while carefully to see where we were going, but once they stopped, I buried myself under the tarps and waited until I knew they were all gone.”
“But why?” Jerry asked.
“I saw they were taking the girls,” Brad replied. “I knew if they grabbed them and left, we’d never find them. Not unless we knew where they were going.”
“But if they’d found you—”
“They didn’t,” Brad replied, shrugging. “It’s Max’s fault,” he finished.
Max’s head sprang up, his eyes narrow slits, anger building. “What?” he demanded.
“I mean that I thought to jump in the truck. I learned that from you. I thought it was something you might do, and I owed it to you guys to do it.”
Max’s cheeks flushed. “Brad, this was all you, man. Don’t give me any credit.”
“You guys didn’t have to take me in,” he replied. “You didn’t have to come all this way to bring me to my mom and dad. I wasn’t going to let anything happen to them without doing something.”
Greer shook his head back and forth, looking at the stained tile floor. “You are one brave kid, Bradley DeAngelo,” he whispered.
Brad shrugged. “Not brave enough to try to rescue them. I came back here to tell the rest of you.”
“That’s the smartest thing you could have done,” Jerry replied. “Exactly what you should have done.”
Greer pushed himself to his feet, slapping Brad’s shoulder and squeezing it. Max walked over and gave him a soft high five.
&nbs
p; “Thanks, Brad,” he said, a smile splitting his face for the first time in two days. “This is huge.”
“It’s not huge until we get them back,” Brad replied. “I can tell you where they are, but we still need to get them back.”
Jerry nodded. “Hey, that’ll be the fun part, right?”
Then it was Brad’s turn to smile.
“So, talk to me, little man,” Jerry said. “Where are they? How many are there? Where are the girls?”
Brad stood and hung a left, walking towards the front door of the closed-up convenience store. An old wire rack sat there with a few scattered state maps still lingering in the empty cavities of shelf space. Pulling one out that included satellite views of the region on the reverse side, he unfolded it as he walked back towards them, finding the spot and holding it out for Jerry.
“Like I said, about thirty miles south of here. Mostly warehouse district on the outskirts of a huge Wal-Mart distribution plant. They’ve taken up shelter in one of the warehouses, a big storage building here.” He fingered a spot on the map, and Jerry nodded.
“I’m kind of familiar with that area,” he said. “When I got back from Afghanistan, I did a few months as a truck driver. I actually delivered there a few times.”
“I didn’t count exactly how many were there,” Brad said, “but there were probably around twenty, give or take. There’s a loading dock on the right side of the building as you drive in. They brought the girls in that way.”
“Freezer,” Jerry said. “That loading dock goes right into a huge freezer where they store most of the cold goods. Good thing is, if the power’s out, the freezer won’t be running so they shouldn’t be too cold or anything.”
“But there’s probably a pretty thick door and walls,” Greer chimed in.
Jerry nodded.
“The loading dock goes right into the freezer?” Angel asked. “No door or walls at the dock, right?”
Jerry nodded again, his mind working through possible options. “It’s a concrete dock, probably about chest height,” he said. “No way we’re getting an ATV up there, so we’ll have to get creative.”
“Anyone know how to hot wire a car?” Greer asked, then looked at Angel. Everyone else in the room turned his way as well.
“Oh is that how it is?” he asked. “I’m the criminal, I gotta automatically know how to hot wire a car?”
The room was silent for a moment as everyone continued watching his reaction. After a few moments of silence, he shrugged.
“Yeah, okay. I can hot wire a car.”
Greer smirked and looked back down at the map. “So if we grab the girls, maybe we can steal one of their trucks to get them out?”
“Possible. But we’ll need to think about back up plans, just in case.”
“What about the trailer?” Phil asked. Jerry looked at him. “Well, we can use it to get the girls out, sure, but it’s big and clunky, and it would make it hard to maneuver in an escape. Do we leave it here or take it?”
Jerry thought on this for a moment, then smiled. “We take it.”
Phil looked back down at the map, flipping it over to look at the satellite view. “Okay. So we go in this way, right?” he traced an entrance path with his finger. “That’s the only way in or out? I see lots of trees and other buildings flanking this warehouse. Probably some fences, too.”
“Yeah, definitely some fences. It’s not the best part of town.”
“So we should expect some kind of guards there or something,” Phil continued. Jerry looked and nodded.
“That would make sense.”
They both looked at the map with Angel and Greer coming over to peek as well, tracing paths, eyeing the warehouse and talking through some options.
“There are only six of us,” Phil said, sitting back. “How are we going to do this without everyone dying?”
“This isn’t a gunfight,” Jerry reminded him. “All we want is Rhonda and Winnie. We get them, we get out.”
Phil nodded. “Get them, get out, and survive long enough to get away. That’s what I’m worried about.”
“We can do this,” Jerry replied. “I think I know how. But we’ll have to wait until it’s dark.”
Max looked out the window and saw that dusk was already settling, preparing to wrap its dim-hued arms around them, to swallow them into night.
“It’ll be dark soon,” Max said.
“Then we’d better get ready.”
***
Rhonda squeezed her eyes closed, willing herself not to cry, not to let a single tear escape from her moistened eyes. It wasn’t her circumstances that had her on the verge of revealing her emotions, but the stabbing, nagging pain in her shoulder. The Demon Dogs had shown no mercy when dragging her into the van, and even less when they tied her wrists behind her back and stuffed her in the corner of the freezer, surrounded by stacked, empty shelves. They'd emptied out the contents of the frozen compartment long ago, and the power outage meant it wasn’t that cold inside, but the floor was hard and the edge of the shelves behind her even harder, and the muscles in her shoulder screamed in pain with her arm twisted around.
Greer and Jerry had used their cobbled together first aid kit to sew up the wound and bandage it, and she’d been lucky that the bullet had passed clean through, but it still hurt like crazy, and as she moved to try to get more comfortable, she thought she could feel the stitches pulling free.
“You okay, mom?” Winnie asked, working her way closer to her mother. Her arms were twisted and pinned behind her, and she was sitting with knees bent. Her muscles ached after sitting in the same pose for the better part of two days, but considering the potential alternative she was okay with it.
“I’m all right,” Rhonda replied through gritted teeth, not fooling anyone. She pressed her back against the shelf behind her and scooted into a more upright position. For one brief, frightening moment, she felt a pearl of wetness build up in her left eye, but she blinked hard twice and forced it away.
“Evening, ladies,” the man said, pushing his way through the plastic flaps hanging over the doorway separating this freezer section from the next. Two more men flanked him, reduced to vague shapes behind the semi-translucent plastic material. Brody Martin towered broadly before them, over six feet tall with shoulders the approximate width of an adult ox. His hair was slicked back on top, dark and pulled tight into a knotted ponytail. His large arms crossed over his larger chest, twisting barbs of tribal tattoos coiling around the curved musculature of his limbs. A dark-colored tank top stretched to its breaking point over his barrel-shaped frame and he looked down at Winnie and Rhonda with mock disinterest. He smiled wide, his grin showing multiple empty spots where teeth used to be, looking like a checkerboard of white and dark colors mapped out between two narrow, pink lips.
“We gave you two a couple of days off to get acclimated, but we’re about ready to have you begin your work days. How’s that sound to ya?”
“Not really interested,” Rhonda replied.
“How’s your dental plan?” Winnie asked with a smirk.
Brody smirked even wider. “Oh you’re a funny one? I like the funny ones.”
Winnie’s smile dissolved and without warning, the large man lunged forward, kicking out with a boot-covered heel. It crashed into Winnie’s left shoulder and threw her over into a clumsy, awkward sprawl, skidding across the rough floor.
“Leave her alone!” Rhonda screamed. “So help me, I’ll—”
“Oh, please, do tell,” Brody sneered, bending low to look Rhonda in the face. “Please tell me what yer gonna do, all tied up and bleeding…trying not to cry yer eyes out. Tell me again what yer gonna do.”
Rhonda scowled but kept her words to herself, instead looking over towards her daughter.
“Win, are you okay, honey?”
Winnie pushed herself up with her elbow and managed to work her way back into an upright seated position. “Fine, mom.”
“For now,” Brody said. He turned and pu
shed his way back through the plastic strips. “You two stay here.” He addressed the men standing outside the freezer next. “I’ve gotta go check with production and see where we’ve got room for them on the line. I’ll be back. They smart mouth you, feel free to rough them up.”
Rhonda looked out through the strips at the two men on the other side. She couldn’t make either one of them out, but she could tell one was wearing a red plaid shirt while the other still wore his dark leather jacket, the same one he’d been wearing when they swept into the store and kidnapped them two days previously.
Two days. She still couldn’t believe it had been two days. All at once it seemed much shorter and much longer, the hours and days swirling together into a strange blended mash-up of blurred detail. She’d tried to memorize the route they’d taken while locked up in the dark van, and she’d tried to count the right and left turns, trying to get some idea of where they were going so she could find her way back if they escaped.
When they escaped. When? It had to be when. They’d survived nuclear Armageddon, and they’d escaped a small town militia kill squad…twice. She wasn’t going to spend the rest of her life locked in this stupid freezer packing dime bags of meth.
What time had Brody said it was? Had he said? Was it night or day?
It was night. Rhonda couldn’t tell, but the sky was dark and full of the light spark of spring time stars, the flat face of the white moon glaring down on the warehouse in distaste. The concrete loading dock on the right-hand side which led to the freezer sat empty, the old model pickup truck parked a few meters away, crooked and abandoned, barely visible in the scant light of late evening.
The cracked pavement of the parking lot stretched out in front of the warehouse, painted lines fading, at one time clearly designated with spots for the fifty employees that worked in the storage facility. Thick thatches of persistent grass and weeds now grew through the broken asphalt. Double front doors sat squat in the middle of the front of the brick building, which was also pock marked with broken mortar and shattered windows. A dark colored panel van sat askew to the left of the main entrance, a man with a rifle leaning against the smooth, metal hide.
