Hostage Zero

by John Gilstrap

  Everyone in the room shrugged together. “Okay,” Wilson said.

  “Well, I think I’ve got something here that belongs to you.” A smile appeared in his voice. “Some one, actually. He says his name is Jimmy Henry. Does that mean anything to you?”

  The morning crew at the Washington Birthplace Memorial had been shocked to find the shackled man chained to the base of the obelisk that marked the entry to the park. According to the incident reports they’d filled out for the National Park Service, the young man had been sleeping soundly on the ground. Once the workers saw the chains and the orange jumpsuit, they were able to link what they were seeing with the reports they’d heard on the radio, and they’d called higher-ups without actually approaching the fugitive.

  Granville George was waiting at the jail when Jimmy Henry arrived. The overtime hadn’t been approved, but he didn’t care. If he had to eat a couple of official hours on his own nickel, that would be fine, just so long as he saw justice done.

  They’d sent a car from Middlesex County to Westmoreland County to make the pickup, and when Jimmy was escorted in, Granville made a point of being right there in his face to let him know that actions had consequences in this part of the world, and that Jimmy had chosen poorly.

  The rules in a case like this were clear. Jimmy Henry was processed just as if he were a first-arriving prisoner. His personal effects-none-were catalogued, and then he was escorted to the processing bay, where he was stripped naked and cavity searched. It was a part of the process that Granville didn’t particularly enjoy, but he’d long ago lost his guyshy instincts. It doesn’t take but one incident where someone literally pulls a weapon out of his ass to make you respect the importance of a cavity search.

  He’d accordingly been prepared for the humiliation; but he hadn’t been prepared for the bruises. Jimmy Henry’s left leg was bruised beyond purple. It bore a deep black stripe from what must have been a brutal attack. When they called in the jail physician-actually a local doctor who moonlighted for folding money-they also found bruising around the kid’s throat, in addition to the more typical stress wounds inflicted by the unyielding shackles.

  “Who did this to you?” the doctor asked.

  “I don’t have to tell you anything,” Jimmy answered.

  “Seems to me it serves your best interests to talk about the people who tortured you,” Agent Meyer said. Sergeant Wilson was in the room, too, but remained silent. If Granville wasn’t mistaken, she was embarrassed by the prisoner’s nakedness.

  “Who said anything about torture?” Jimmy asked. “These bruises are from falling down.”

  “Must have been a hell of a fall,” Granville said.

  But the prisoner had shut down. “I know my rights,” he said. “I don’t have to tell you anything without a lawyer.”

  “Who broke you out of here?” Sheriff Willow asked.

  Sergeant Wilson put a hand on his shoulder. “He asked for a lawyer,” she said. “We’re done with questions.”

  With that, it was over.

  Granville stayed with Jimmy as he dressed himself in fresh orange coveralls, and then escorted him back to the cell where his evening had begun only a few hours before. As they walked together down the central hallway, Granville called out to the other inmates, “Take a look, gentlemen. You can try to run, but you’ll never get away.” Faces appeared at the windows in cell doors. “Jimmy Henry is back with us after only five hours on the run. He raised all that ruckus, and what did it buy for everyone? Forty-eight hours in lockdown. When y’all start going stir-crazy in there, I don’t want you getting pissed at me and the other guards. I want you to remember that Jimmy is the one to blame.”

  Jimmy shot him a panicked look, and Granville shook it off. This was the kind of announcement that could get an inmate beaten to shit, but Jimmy should have thought of that before.

  “You’re a kidnapper,” Granville said to his charge as they arrived at his cell door. “And you’re the guy who cost every inmate a lot of privileges. I’d be careful if I were you.” Jimmy’s eye grew large as the truth sank in. “If I were you, I might think about cooperating a little.”

  Something happened behind the kid’s eyes, but it was gone as quickly as it arrived. Fear, maybe? Perhaps just a grim acceptance of what lay ahead. “Well, I tell you what, Deputy George. If I was you, I’d have killed myself a long time ago. Now, why don’t you just quit worrying about me?”

  Granville opened the cell and let Jimmy inside.

  As he pushed the door closed, he glanced to his left and saw another prisoner, Antoine Johnson, grinning widely as he strained to see what was happening.

  “What are you looking at?” Granville barked.

  Antoine gave a little giggle. “I’m just happy to learn that I’m smarter than I thought I was,” he said.

  Evan Guinn knew that he was moving.

  He couldn’t see or hear anything, and his head hurt like it had been pounded with a hammer, but he knew he wasn’t lying still anymore. He had the sense of floating. Maybe the sense of spinning. It wasn’t a good feeling like the ones you get when you dream about flying on Harry Potter’s broom. This was a sick-making feeling, not unlike the morning after the night when Powell Andersen had treated a bunch of the RezHouse crew to the moonshine that had been sneaked into the dorm via his Uncle Ed. Evan had always thought that Father Dom had suspected something that day, but he’d never called the question.

  Even as he was floating, though, he had the sense that he was somehow anchored down. He couldn’t feel any ropes or chains, but as he tried to move, his arms and legs felt as if they weighted a hundred pounds apiece.

  He needed to run. But why?

  Men in the dark. Men with tape and heavy hands. The foul-smelling rag over his face.

  He’d been kidnapped. Kidnapped. Was that possible?

  Who would want to kidnap him?

  The more he thought about it, the more his head boomed. He wanted to move, to run; but he was paralyzed.

  Except his eyelids. If he really struggled against the weight that burdened every part of him, he could get them to open. First his left eye, all by itself, and then his right. It was hard to focus, but when he forced himself, he could make the scenery come together.

  He lay on his back, staring up at a low ceiling that had knobs and things he’d not seen before. They cast shadows that cut straight across at a sharp right angle, and from that he knew that the light was coming in at him from the side, instead of from above, as he would have expected. He turned this head to the right-carefully, to keep the hammers inside from beating against each other-and he saw an oval window that looked out on the sky. It was a little thing, nowhere big enough to climb through.

  He was on an airplane. He’d never been on one before, but he’d seen enough of them in movies. The fact of being airborne made him feel fear for the first time since awakening. There’s kidnapped, he thought, and then there’s kidnapped. If they flew you to where you were going, you’d be gone forever, right?

  Moving his head to the left, he confirmed his suspicion. This was definitely an airplane.

  “He’s waking up,” a voice said, and Evan feared he’d done something wrong. If he could have made his vocal cords work, he would have apologized.

  “Not for long,” said another voice.

  The shadows shifted, and a man appeared in his field of vision. “You must have a hell of a liver, kid,” the man said. He bore the faint scent of garlic.

  Unable to do anything-to talk or scream or even roll over-Evan watched as the man lifted a plastic tube and stuck a needle in it.

  He had the fleeting thought that the other end of the tube must be stuck in his arm someplace, but then his thoughts and his mind went blank.

  CHAPTER TEN

  A stick cracked.

  While it could have been caused by anything, Harvey knew that someone was coming to kill him.

  He’d dozed in the camp chair, leaving the sleeping bag and the air mattress for
Jeremy. He hadn’t intended to sleep deeply. He hadn’t intended to sleep at all. Hell, he hadn’t intended a single moment of what had happened during the last twenty-four hours.

  It didn’t matter, because he was wide awake now, and so was the new day, the sun hanging low and golden in the east. Without moving his body, he opened his eyes and scanned as far to the sides as his eyes could shift. The morning revealed nothing.

  Another crack. Rustling.

  From the darkness of the tent, Jeremy whispered, “Harvey?”

  The words were barely audible, but they registered on Harvey’s ears as a shout. “Shh,” he hissed. “I hear it.”

  The boy’s face appeared in the triangular opening of the tent. “Who is it?”

  “Maybe it’s just a deer,” he hoped aloud.

  “But I heard a car,” Jeremy said.

  Harvey’s stomach fell. He hadn’t really believed that it was a deer, anyway.

  Jeremy crawled out farther. “It’s them, isn’t it?”

  Keep it together, Harvey told himself. Losing it now wouldn’t help a soul.

  “Harvey?”

  “Shh!” This time, the hiss was emphatic. More than anything else, they needed silence. Silence and invisibility. A trip back in time to undo his decision to get involved in this crap would be good, too.

  “I’m scared, Harvey.”

  What part of “Shh” did the kid find confusing?

  Jeremy kept coming. He crawled all the way into the open, and then over to Harvey, where he crouched next to the camp chair. He clutched Harvey’s arm.

  He expects me to protect him, Harvey thought. What a stupid move that was. Harvey Rodriguez had room for exactly one important person in his life, and that was Harvey Rodriguez himself. If Jeremy-a stranger-thought for an instant that he would risk even momentary discomfort for some larger, nobler cause, then he was woefully mistaken.

  The sounds of movement grew steadily clearer. Within a minute, he could hear voices. A few seconds later, he could hear what the voices were saying.

  “…no goddamn sense.”

  “When was the last time this job made sense to anybody?”

  “So I gotta pay for it? This shit just ain’t right.”

  Both voices were male, and both sounded neither young nor old-a conclusion confirmed just a few seconds later when Harvey got his first glimpse of them. Thirty yards away, they both wore jeans and T-shirts, and as they waded toward the tall grass, they headed directly toward the spot where Harvey had discovered the unconscious boy.

  Jeremy’s hand tightened on Harvey’s arm. “It really is them, isn’t it?” he squeaked.

  “Don’t move,” Harvey said. With the sun rising over the tent, into the eyes of the visitors, there was a chance that they could remain unseen if they just didn’t move. These guys weren’t moving with any sense of danger, which meant that they were likely to accept their surroundings as is. It’s human nature to accept a first impression as normal-making it possible to literally hide in plain sight. But thousands of years of evolution still had not erased the instinctive alarm triggered by movement.

  Both men had a wiry athletic look about them, a clear source of pride for the one closest to Harvey. His T-shirt was at least two sizes too small, straining the fabric at his biceps and pecs. He was also the one who carried the folded gray body bag under his arm. It bothered Harvey that he could recognize it for what it was.

  “Lie down,” Harvey whispered. “Very, very slowly.” As he spoke, he wrested his arm free from the boy’s grasp and pressed down on his shoulder. Jeremy did not resist. He lay flat on his belly, his arms tucked under his chest.

  With the kid stable on the ground, Harvey edged his own butt to the front of the camp chair and pressed his shoulder blades against the sling backing. The effect was to lie flat, his front to the sky, though his eyes never moved from the visitors. Warnings against movement notwithstanding, a smaller target was always better than a larger one.

  “So where is he?” asked Body Beautiful.

  “I know what you know,” the other one said. He was as powerful looking through his shoulders as the other one, but wore his T-shirt looser. And his hair was longer-over his ears but not over the top. “He’s here somewhere.”

  “Sayin’ it don’t make it so. Jerry said to go to the end of the parking lot and then straight till you’re almost in the water. That’s what he said, and that’s where we are. Show me a dead kid.”

  His butt on the ground now, Harvey could still see the tops of the visitors’ heads above the swaying grass.

  “Then he’s got to be here somewhere.”

  “Maybe somebody moved him,” Muscles said.

  “No way. Somebody found him, this place would be lousy with cops. It’d be all over the news. They’re already ape shit over the shit at the school. Can you imagine the shit if one of the kids was found dead?”

  Muscles nodded. “Have it your way. How’d a dead kid get up and walk away?”

  A long silence followed as they continued their search. As the sun rose higher, the details of these men’s appearance grew clearer, and Harvey had the terrifying thought that they were cops. They looked like cops. It was the military bearing, the focus on the task at hand. His already-pounding heart picked up more speed. Cops trying to kill a kid, with him stuck in the middle. He was so screwed.

  “Hey, Billy,” Long Hair said. “Look at this over here.” By Harvey’s calculation, he was standing at the exact spot where he’d found Jeremy. “Look at this grass. It’s all matted.”

  Harvey tried to recall what he’d left behind, but he pulled up a blank. He’d been concentrating too hard on the kid.

  Billy joined his partner. “And what fine matted grass it is. Where’s the body?”

  “Christ, I don’t know. Maybe animals dragged it off.”

  “And where’s the blood?”

  For the first time, Harvey considered bolting off into the woods and taking his chances. The kid was the one they wanted. If he ran…

  …they’d still hunt him down and kill him. Who was he kidding?

  “I’m beginning to think maybe he was never killed,” Long Hair said.

  A long pause. “You can’t just stop there.”

  “Think about it. Explains a lot.”

  Billy was genuinely lost. “You’re saying he was wounded and wandered off.”

  “Maybe. Or maybe…” He shifted his gaze directly toward Harvey’s campsite. “What the fuck is that?”

  In unison, they drew firearms from underneath their T-shirts and pointed them at Harvey.

  “You there!” Long Hair shouted. “Don’t you fucking move.”

  “Ah, shit,” Billy whined. “Who the hell is he?”

  Singular, Harvey thought. I’m the only one they see.

  “Stand up!” Long Hair said. “And be really fucking careful if you don’t want to die.”

  Harvey’s head raced faster than his heart. Dying was nowhere on his list of things to do today.

  “Harvey…” Jeremy whined.

  He ignored the boy. As he stood, he pressed down on Jeremy’s head for leverage, as if it were a rock. It was important that the kid stay out of sight. If they saw him, they’d shoot him. And if they shot the kid, what incentive did they have to let Harvey go on breathing? Jeremy needed to disappear, and since that wasn’t possible, he needed to keep out of sight.

  “Hello,” Harvey said, as brightly as he could. He recognized the pistols in the man’s hands as 9-millimeter Berettas, standard military issue. Police departments hadn’t gone to that particular weapon in most cases, certainly not here in Westmoreland County.

  “What are you doing there listening to us?” Billy asked.

  Harvey pegged him as the hothead of the two, the one to be talked down first. “It’s hard not to listen to a conversation in an open place,” he said. “It’s quiet out here.” As he spoke he took a couple of steps forward, hoping that if they couldn’t see the boy, they wouldn’t make the connection. H
e also moved to his left to break their sight line away from the kid in case he moved in the background.

  “Why are you hiding there?” Billy asked.

  Harvey forced a chuckle that he hoped sounded more genuine that it felt. “Y’all heard what you were sayin’, right?” he quipped. “Wouldn’t you think about stayin’ outta sight if that’s what you heard?”

  Billy raised his arm perpendicular to his body and drew a bead on Harvey’s chest. Harvey recognized the look. It was over for him.

  But the other man grabbed Billy’s wrist and spoiled his aim. “No,” he said. “Not yet.”

  “We’ve got to.”

  “Not yet,” his partner repeated.

  “Sean-”

  “I said no.”

  So the other guy’s name was Sean. It was always nice to know the names of the people who were going to kill you. Harvey’s heart continued to pound, but he was surprised how clear his head felt. “Yeah, Billy, he said no,” Harvey said.

  “Christ, now he knows our names,” Billy spat.

  Harvey had thought that a little levity might defuse things. He’d been wrong.

  Sean let go of his partner’s wrist and allowed him to reacquire his target. “This would be a good time for you to do some explaining,” he said.

  Harvey had been moving left the entire time, never closing an inch, but continuing to draw their aim away from the campsite. He stopped now. “I’m not a threat to you,” he said. “It’s like you said earlier. If I’d wanted to bring the police into my life, this place would be alive with them. Do you see any cops?”

  Billy and Sean exchanged confused glances.

  Harvey used the brief silence to design a lie that would buy him some time. “I was here night before last,” he said. “I saw them drag that boy out here and shoot him. Then I heard the chopper. Scared me to death.” He let the news settle on them. “If I was going to call somebody, that would have been the time, don’t you think?”

  He could almost hear Sean’s brain trying to process it. He knew what the inevitable question would be, so he moved ahead with the scary-big lie. “Fact is, you’re about three hours too late.”