Gone in a Flash

by Susan Rogers Cooper

  ‘Oh my God!’ Bess said. ‘That guy at the Driscoll! The one who fell off the roof! You think this is about him?’

  ‘Not so much about him,’ Willis said, ‘but more about what was in the satchel.’

  ‘But there was nothing in there!’ I said. ‘We checked it out! Remember? You got the Dopp kit, I took the clothes to Goodwill and Alicia got the satchel as a backpack.’

  Willis jumped up and headed to the master bedroom, the rest of us following and hanging out at the bathroom door while Willis checked out the Dopp kit. Dumping his razor, shaving cream, and deodorant in the sink, he brought the Dopp kit itself to the bed. I sat down next to him and, with the kids looking on, he took his Swiss Army knife out of his pocket and began to tear the lining and the bottom out of the kit. There was nothing there. Several shoulders slumped.

  ‘OK, so where were we in my scenario?’ I asked the room in general.

  ‘The guys shove him off the top of the Driscoll parking garage,’ Graham said.

  ‘But only one guy chases him up there,’ I said. ‘The other one had to be near our truck, going for the satchel. Then we show up—’ I started.

  ‘And they get the license and follow us home,’ Willis finished.

  ‘What guy at the Driscoll? What are y’all talking about?’ Graham pleaded.

  ‘Tell you later, son,’ Willis said, grabbing his phone out of his pocket. ‘Gotta call Luna!’

  SIX

  THURSDAY

  VERA’S STORY

  We found the beauty shop, or as they called it, ‘The Salon’ in fancy script. We went in and I talked to the girl at the reception desk.

  ‘Hi,’ I said. ‘My name is Vera Pugh and my roommate Rachael Donley had her nails done here on Tuesday, but she had to leave the hotel for a family emergency.’ I’m not big on lying, but this was for the greater good, and pretty much close to the truth. ‘She asked me to pick up a copy of her charges here so she could pay me back when I see her.’

  And I was right, I was going to be responsible for her manicure, too, along with her half of the room! This was costing me a fortune.

  ‘Sure,’ the young woman said. ‘Donley?’

  ‘Yes. D-O-N-L-E-Y,’ I said.

  She went on her computer, hit a couple of keys, then smiled. ‘Here it is.’ She hit another key and said, ‘It’s printing. Let me go get it for you.’

  She was back in less than a minute – it was a small shop – and handed me the bill. Fifty-two dollars! I almost choked on my own spit! I looked at it closer and saw that, hey, it was only forty-two for the manicure – the rest was tip!

  Since I wasn’t able to speak, Gerald thanked the girl for me and we headed off to the lobby.

  Dad called Luna and filled her in. She said she was going to call the detectives in Austin covering that case and get back to him. Graham and his sisters sat in the family room, side by side on the sofa, not watching TV for a change. They just sat there, not even talking much. Finally, Mom came in and told Graham the details of the man – James Unger – who had, as was now suspected by the police, been pushed from the top of the Driscoll’s parking garage.

  Graham nodded, taking in all the strange happenings since he’d left home only a few days ago. It could have been a year for all that had happened. Back in Austin, not so much. He’d registered, gotten some classes he wanted and a couple he didn’t, at times that were scattered all over the place, making no rhyme or reason. He’d been very careful when designing his schedule to put all his classes in the afternoon so he could sleep late and study before he had to get ready. He’d also planned them according to the U.T. map he was given, so he could walk to all of them and leave enough time to walk from one side of the campus to the other. He had no intention of wasting what little money his parents allowed him on student parking on campus. But now he had one class in the chem building on the west side of campus immediately followed by engineering in another building on the northeast side of campus, then back to the chem building for lab. With ten minutes to traverse the famous forty acres twice.

  He’d made one day of classes so far – English 101 and American history 101, both taught by TA’s who didn’t have English as a first language and with accents so thick he only understood every fourth word or so. Every day his stomach had been tied up in knots and he’d puked his guts out just the day before. So far, college had not been the magical experience his mother had claimed it to be. And then he gets the phone call. Megan telling him Alicia had been kidnapped. Right after lunch. He puked that up.

  He excused himself and headed upstairs. He needed to lie down. Once in his room he realized something was different. He didn’t know what it was until he laid down on his bunk. He could smell her. Putting his nose to the pillow his mother had put on his bed, he sniffed. Alicia had been in his room, on his bed. He could smell her. For the first time since he was eleven years old, Graham Pugh began to cry.

  Alicia woke up to angry voices. At first she had no idea where she was or why her arms and legs wouldn’t move. Then it all came rushing back to her. The sun was coming up. She could see it through the window. The sky was lightening, the trees and shrubs and cattle becoming clearer. Across from her on the sofa, the old man, Bert, lay asleep, his feet tied, his wrists bound in front of him. They had offered her the sofa last night but she’d declined, saying Bert should have it. Right now all she wanted to do was stand up and stretch. Everything ached.

  The angry voices were coming from the kitchen, which she couldn’t see from her vantage point.

  ‘There’s nothin’ in here!’ screamed an angry voice that she didn’t recognize. Maybe this was the Mr Brown Mr Jones had spoken of ?

  ‘There was nothing in there when we got it!’ Mr Smith said. That voice she’d never forget.

  ‘Look!’ the other voice said. ‘See this hole you made? You don’t think I can see this, asshole?’

  ‘I didn’t make that hole! Jones, come here!’

  A third voice entered.

  ‘Yeah?’ Mr Jones said.

  ‘Did you put this hole here?’ Mr Smith asked him.

  There was a short silence, then Mr Jones said, ‘No.’

  ‘Do you know who did?’ Mr Smith asked.

  ‘I dunno. Did you?’ Mr Jones asked. To which Mr Smith answered with a resounding, ‘No!’

  Then there was silence. Alicia knew who had put that hole in the bag. And now she knew for sure what they were after. The flash drive. Of course, she’d known that somewhere in her psyche as soon as she’d found the damn thing. Now they were going to want to know where it was – and she wasn’t about to tell them she’d left it in her room. They’d go back to her house and God only knows what they’d try to do to her family! Alicia felt the first twinge of panic since the entire ordeal had begun. She tried to take deep breaths, in and out, in and out, trying to conjure up yet again the might of her sister Megan. Her new mantra was WWMD – What Would Megan Do? And she knew exactly what Megan would do.

  Mr Smith charged into the room, followed by Mr Jones and another man. The new guy was smaller than even Mr Smith, who was much smaller than Mr Jones. The new man had wispy blond hair and deep-set black eyes that did not sparkle or even gleam. He wore a snug T-shirt that showed off muscular arms, and even his jeans showed off overly-muscled thighs. After so much time with the beautiful Calvin the day before, she found herself describing the new guy in her mind: Roman nose, medium-to-dark complexion, yellowish teeth, firm jaw. He looked nasty.

  Mr Smith was carrying her satchel. ‘What’d you do with it?’

  ‘With what?’ Alicia asked.

  ‘The thing that was in this hole!’ he shouted, spittle flying across the space between them and landing on her face. With her hands secured behind her she couldn’t wipe it off. She was rethinking that hand-sanitizer bath – maybe it should be Clorox.

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. That hole was there when I got the satchel,’ Alicia said.

  The new man knocked Mr Smith aside
and leaned in to Alicia, his muscled hands resting on the arms of the ladder-back chair, his face only an inch or so from hers.

  ‘Bullshit, little lady,’ he said, his voice no longer screaming. It was worse. It was soft, quiet, and quite chilling. ‘You cut that hole when you felt something in the lining, am I right? And then you did what with it?’ He looked deep into her eyes, then smiled. ‘You put it on your dresser in your bedroom, didn’t you? Or on your nightstand—’

  ‘She has a desk,’ Mr Jones supplied.

  ‘Now that makes sense,’ the new guy said. ‘I bet you have a computer, don’t you, honey? And you put it near your computer because you were going to see what was on there. Did you? Did you stick that flash drive into your computer?’

  Alicia remained silent. The new guy picked up her chair with her in it, held it about thigh high, then dropped it. Alicia thought some of her innards might just flop out.

  He leaned in again. ‘So where is it?’ he asked.

  Alicia refused to answer.

  He shoved her chair away from him and turned to Smith and Jones. ‘It’s back at her house. In her bedroom. Probably on her desk near her computer.’ He headed for the front door. ‘Smith, you’re coming with me. Jones, kill them.’

  ‘I hope she knows we’re looking for her,’ Willis said. He and I were in the living room, sitting on the sectional, holding hands, away from our kids who were in the family room, trying to make their own sense of this mess.

  ‘Why would she ever think we’re not?’ I asked, squeezing his hand.

  ‘That business last summer—’ he started.

  I rested my head on his shoulder, my arms around his middle. ‘That’s behind us, honey. She knows.’

  ‘If they do anything to her—’ he started.

  ‘Shhhhh,’ I said. ‘Don’t go there. Please don’t go there.’

  We saw Graham come down the stairs. I wiped a tear off my cheek. ‘Hey, honey,’ I said. ‘I didn’t know you’d gone upstairs.’

  ‘I thought I could rest.’ He shook his head. ‘Not gonna happen. I’m going for a drive.’

  ‘Don’t,’ Willis said, getting up. ‘You need to stay here.’

  Again my son shook his head. ‘That’s not gonna happen either, Dad. I’ve got to be out there. I know it probably won’t do a damn bit of good, but I’ve just got to …’ His voice trailed off. Then he turned and headed into the family room to the back door.

  Willis and I followed. ‘Graham,’ I said. ‘Please stay with us.’

  He shook his head. ‘Gotta go.’

  ‘We’re going with him!’ Megan said, jumping up, followed more tentatively by Bess.

  ‘No—’ Graham started, while at the same time Willis and I were both giving vehement negative responses.

  ‘We’ll keep an eye on him,’ Bess said and, with his sisters flanking him, Graham left the house and headed for his car.

  This mess was really affecting all my kids – my entire family. And I was getting mad. I wasn’t sure exactly what Luna and Donaldson were doing to find my daughter; all I knew was it wasn’t enough. Obviously they needed my help.

  Mr Jones stood in the doorway to the living room, alternately staring at Alicia and Bert and then at the gun in his right hand. He’d been given his orders, and orders were orders, but … A kid and an old man? Jeez, he was a criminal, not a barbarian!

  ‘Mr Jones?’ Alicia said, trying at this point to channel her smart sister, Bess. Bess wasn’t just smart, she knew people, knew how to reach them, and not in a smarmy way, but with understanding and empathy. But Alicia wasn’t sure she could figure out how to empathize with a stone-cold killer, which she assumed to be an accurate description of Mr Jones.

  ‘Don’t talk to me,’ Mr Jones told her.

  ‘Do you really want to do this?’ Alicia asked him. She was thinking quickly, wondering what she could say for Mr Bert. ‘Look at Mr Bert, here. He’s spent his whole life working this farm. It’s been in his family for generations. His wife died right here in this house, the same house where she bore him three beautiful daughters. He’s trying to hold on to this land for his grandson, to keep it in the family. Can you really just snuff out his life? Not to mention me, Mr Jones; up until a year and a half ago I was a foster kid, thrown from one rotten foster home to another. Given up at the age of three by a junkie mother. Too old to be adopted. But now I have a family. A real family, for the first time in my life. Please don’t take that from me, and please don’t take me from them,’ she finished, tears in her eyes that were mostly genuine.

  She noted with satisfaction that there were also tears in Mr Jones’s eyes. He put the gun down on the table by the door. ‘I don’t wanna kill y’all,’ he said, sinking down onto the sofa next to Bert. ‘I really don’t. But what am I supposed to do?’

  ‘Untie us and let us go?’ Bert suggested.

  Mr Jones nodded his head. ‘I suppose I could do that. But then I’ll be in a heap of trouble.’

  ‘Well, let’s think of a way you can let us go and save face, shall we?’ Alicia suggested.

  It was the middle of the day; the girls should have been in school. Graham should have been in Austin to deal with his second day of classes. His ‘B’ day classes that he hadn’t been to yet – chemistry and engineering. At this point he wasn’t sure if he was ever going back to Austin – not for anything more than to pick up his stuff.

  The sky to the east was darkening, storm clouds gathering. They seemed to fit his mood. He saw a lightning strike in the clouds then heard the clap of thunder. The clouds clapping, that’s what Mom used to call thunder. Just the clouds clapping. And then he and his sisters would clap their hands just like the clouds. Jeez, things used to be a lot easier. Back then there hadn’t been anything that Mom and Dad couldn’t fix. Not a boo-boo they couldn’t heal, not a bad grade they couldn’t help you change.

  He’d been a smart-ass kid, and sometimes he felt bad about that. Mom had her hands full, especially after Bess came to live with them. He’d been six years old then, and he knew what had happened next door. He remembered it all, quite vividly: his mom carrying Bess in from her house next door where, he eventually learned, Bess’s entire birth family had been killed; Bess, covered in blood and gore from her mother. And then Bess coming to live with them, so traumatized by what had happened that she had been unable to speak for weeks. But eventually it was easy for her to become his sister. It had taken no time at all for him to want to knock her lights out, just like he wanted to with Megan. She was his sister through and through.

  But that had never happened with Alicia. Neither of them were kids, like he and Bess had been – she had only walked into his life a year and a half ago. And of course, part of that time he’d been with Lotta, his old girlfriend. But even then, after Megan and Bess gave Alicia that make-over and he saw for the first time what was under that mass of hair covering her face and that awful gray wool jumper she wore every day, even with Lotta still in his life, he was amazed at how the new Alicia made him feel. And it wasn’t just the attraction part of it, although that was definitely there. It was much more. He wanted to protect her. Not in the way he wanted to protect his other two ‘sisters,’ (as if he could ever think of Alicia as a sister) but to keep her safe in every way possible. He wanted to take away her past, change it from the horror it had been to something that she deserved, but there was no way he could do that, and it bothered him.

  Graham was still trying to figure out what manhood was all about. How much of the world he could control. And every day it seemed as though fate was telling him how little control he had over anything. He knew he couldn’t change Alicia’s past, but he’d be damned if someone else was going to change her future.

  They’d taken the old man’s pickup truck. Parked on the side street, they could see the house where the brown-haired girl lived, and the driveway. They watched as a tall young man and two girls came out and got in a Toyota.

  ‘Who are the players?’ Mr Brown asked.

  �
�The two girls are the brown-haired girl’s sisters. I don’t know who the boy is,’ Mr Smith said.

  ‘Which leaves who in the house?’ Mr Brown asked.

  ‘The mom for sure, and maybe the dad because of the missing kid. One of my kids goes missing, I don’t think I’d go to work, know what I mean?’

  Mr Brown did not respond. If Mr Smith had children, which he found difficult to imagine, he really didn’t want to know about it. They ducked down as the Toyota turned their way, came to a stop at the end of the street then turned left, right by the old truck. Mr Brown listened for the car to pass, then sat up.

  ‘OK,’ he said to Mr Smith. ‘You carrying?’

  ‘Absolutely,’ Mr Smith said, pulling a revolver from its resting place at his back, stuck in the waistband of his jeans.

  They exited the pickup and started down the street, turning into Sagebrush Trail. Just as they did, a car passed them, turning into the corner house. Mr Smith made an about-face and headed back to the pickup.

  ‘What the fuck?’ Mr Brown hissed to Mr Smith’s retreating back.

  ‘She’s a cop!’ Mr Smith hissed back.

  Mr Brown quickly joined his colleague and both climbed back into the pickup. Mr Brown started the engine and they drove away, just as the sky opened up and spilled the rain.

  Mr Jones removed the bonds that held both Alicia and Bert. Alicia stood up and stretched. Bert sat on the couch and rubbed his wrists and ankles.

  ‘Sorry about all that,’ Mr Jones said.

  ‘You only did what you had to do,’ Bert said, shivering a bit at a huge clap of thunder outside the window.

  Mr Jones nodded his head. ‘I didn’t mean for all this to happen. I mean, Max – ah, Mr Smith says he’s got a job, gonna pay me twenty-five grand, and I need the money, you know? I got an ex-wife and two kids, and I’m behind in my child support, and I’ve been out of a job for more than six months! But I didn’t count on all this stuff going on. I mean, I’ve done some stuff I’m not proud of, and I’ve done time, but I never killed anybody and I don’t wanna start now! And Mr Smith keeps threatening to shoot me! All the time!’