Taken

by Chris Jordan

  In other words, without Captain Cutter to lead them, Hinks and Wald would be losers.

  “Package is dead to the world,” says Hinks, fiddling with the PlayStation controls. A gift from Cutter, who understands the need to remain occupied while enduring downtime. “Shot him up like you said.”

  “You checked his pulse?”

  “Wald’s department. He’s playing doctor.”

  “Wald?”

  “Fifty-five and steady.” Wald doesn’t look away from the images on the screen. Some cartoon creature with massive limbs and enough weapons to blow its imaginary world to hell.

  How Wald thinks of himself, Cutter muses. Tough, durable and deadly, but controlled from a distance, by someone with a smarter computer chip.

  “You made sure his throat is clear?”

  “Breathing like a baby, last time I checked.”

  “And when was that?” Cutter asks.

  Wald glances at his wristwatch, a strapped and gleaming device that notes the time in all twenty-four zones. “Thirty minutes, give or take.”

  “Check again.”

  “I’ll get right on it, sir,” says Wald, but makes no move to abandon his cartoon killer.

  “Now, Wald.”

  “Favor, sir? Make sure Hinks don’t mess with my buttons.”

  Cutter rolls his eyes. Wald puts down his PlayStation controls and pads into the adjoining room. Hinks grinning and reaching for his partner’s controls. “Mind if I fuck him up?” he asks.

  “Not in the least.”

  “We got the money?”

  “We got the money,” Cutter says. “Wire cleared at thirteen hundred hours.”

  Hinks fiddles with Wald’s controls, very pleased with whatever mischief he’s committing. “Mind if I ask you a question, Captain?”

  “Permission granted. You may speak freely,” says Cutter, using an irony that, he knows, will go through Hinks like invisible smoke.

  “When do we get paid?”

  “Three days. That’s how long it will take to get the money back into the country.”

  Hinks nods, as if satisfied. Cutter gets the impression the man isn’t primarily in it for the money. He likes the excitement. Not that he’d give up his cut.

  “’Nother question, sir.”

  Cutter nods.

  “Why not take out the female, sir? Why leave her alive, now that we’ve got the dough?”

  “Are you questioning my methods?”

  “Didn’t say that, sir. Just wondering if it’s worth the risk.”

  “Risk assessment is my responsibility, remember?”

  “Sure, of course. I was just, you know, wondering and all.”

  Cutter stares at him, expression neutral. “Don’t wonder, Hinks. Leave the wondering to me. But just so you’re not tempted to exercise your brain, the lady has been left alive because she’s part of the diversion. What form that diversion will take, you’ll just have to wait and see. You’ll just have to trust me. Do you trust me, Hinks?”

  “Yes, sir. Absolutely.”

  Wald appears in the doorway. “I said no fucking around! I better be at third level, you cheating, thieving bastard!”

  “The package?” asks Cutter, willing himself to have patience.

  “Fine, sir. Except he pissed the bed.”

  “In that case you better change the sheets.”

  “Fuck.”

  “Do it, Wald.”

  Wald sighs, vanishes back into the bedroom. Bitching all the way.

  “Two hours,” Cutter tells Hinks. “Then we make our next move.”

  Hinks looks up from the game. “Permission to ask another question, sir?”

  Cutter nods. “Go ahead.”

  “Did you do her, Captain?”

  “Define ‘do.’”

  “Fuck her, mess with her naked body, whatever.”

  Cutter smirks. “Is this in regards to your ten-dollar side bet with Wald?”

  Hinks’s jaw drops.

  “I know everything,” says Cutter. “You should know that by now.”

  “I’ll be damned. You wired the van!” Hinks looks amazed.

  “I wired your brain, Hinks. I know how you think.”

  Hinks shakes his head in admiration. “So did you do her, or what?”

  “Let me put it this way,” says Cutter, allowing himself to preen, for Hinks’s benefit if not his own. “The lady is totally fucked.”

  11

  in the basement

  Groundhog Day all over again. What was his name, the guy who played the wacky weatherman in the movie? Waking up each morning to find he was trapped in the same day. Only, the movie was funny and this, whatever it is, is decidedly not funny, not with my cheek pressed to the bathroom floor. I’m staring at the white porcelain of a toilet, able to see, more or less, but not yet able to move. More a lack of will than any sort of paralysis, because I can feel all of my limbs, prickly with pins and needles, as if I’ve been lying in the same position for hours and hours, or possibly days.

  Bill Murray. The guy in the movie. Brain sluggish. Feels like my thoughts are filtering through heavy oil. Why am I still in the bathroom? Isn’t it time to go to the bank, wire the money? No, wait, I already did that. I recall going into the bank, speaking with a nice lady. Something about the parking lot, a feeling that unseen people were watching me. Then—wham! It all comes pounding back, a rush of images. My panic attack, the cell phone screaming at me, the darkened garage, the man in the mask with his knees crushing my chest. Saying he’ll put me to sleep again, which obviously he did.

  What time is it? How long have I been out?

  Must get up, must find Tommy. I struggle up to my hands and knees, head whirling, panting with the effort. There, progress. Now I’m perched on the toilet seat, willing the vertigo to pass. Expecting the man in the mask to barge in any second. What did he say before he knocked me out—he had “other things to do”? What other things? Did other things include returning my son?

  “Tommy!” I call out weakly.

  Without warning my stomach decides to empty itself. Taken by surprise, I aim for the bathtub, am only partially successful, spattering my feet with flecks of watery vomit. God, how I hate to throw up. Always fought it, even as a kid. Taste in my mouth is, well, awful, but it gives me the impetus to lurch from the toilet to the sink. Leaning heavily while I fumble with the faucet. Using both hands to splash cold water on my face, into my mouth. Better, head clearing, less dizzy.

  Outside, the hallway is a hidden roller coaster, the carpet undulating under my feet, but I hang on to the banister and call out my son’s name.

  “Tommy! Tomas, are you there? Can you hear me? It’s Mom!”

  Nothing. The kind of overwhelming silence that means the place is empty. My instincts have already told me that I’m alone, but my instincts have been so wrong lately, they can’t be trusted. I desperately want to climb the stairs and check in Tommy’s room, just to make sure—he could be napping, exhausted from his ordeal!—but that will have to wait until the roller coaster stops and equilibrium returns. Confined to the ground floor, I stagger into the kitchen. Nobody home. Slide along the wall—very clever and solid, these walls—and check out the TV room. Half expecting to find the man in the mask reclining in my brown leather chair. Messing with Tommy’s video games. Wrong. Using a hand against the wall to make certain of my balance, I check my downstairs office. Looks like somebody has made a mess of my desk, scattering papers and catering contracts, but the culprit has vanished. What were they looking for? Was it a “they,” or just the man in the mask? Does it matter? Not right now it doesn’t. This can wait.

  I take my hand away from the wall. Amazing, girl, you’re walking on two legs. Look, Ma, no hands! Reminds me of Tommy toddling across the carpet, going boom-zi-day as he reaches for Ted, falling flat on his tiny face and laughing. Not crying, laughing. Like falling down was fun, a show he was putting on for his dad. Ted laughing, too, with tears in his eyes, shooting me a look that said, We
’ll never forget this, will we?

  No, Ted, we won’t.

  “Tommy! Tomas, are you there?” Hopeless. My son isn’t in the house, I know it in my gut, in my heart, in my head, in every weary bone in my body. He’s somewhere else. He’s been taken.

  The phone rings. Not a cell phone, my home landline. I’m at the desk in a heartbeat, snatching up the receiver. “Tommy?”

  “He prefers ‘Tomas.’ You really ought to make an effort. Names are important.”

  The man in the mask. I recognize his sneering voice.

  “Where’s my son?”

  “He’s not your son, Mrs. Bickford. He belongs to someone else. Always did, always will.”

  “Let me speak to him, please? I’m begging you! You promised!”

  “You’re a nice woman, Mrs. Bickford. So I’ll give you some parting advice. Whatever you do, don’t go into the basement.”

  The phone goes dead.

  Don’t go into the basement. The words drive me to my knees, reverberating inside my head, a kind of high, terrible keening basementbasementbasement. What has he done? What has that monster done to my son?

  Bing, bong.

  Front-door chimes. Who can it be? A wild rush of hope floods into me and I react by running full tilt through the hallway, banging my shoulder on the doorjamb as I head for the foyer.

  Bing, bong.

  Let it be Tomas. Let it be my son. Not dead in the basement, but alive on the front steps, ringing the chimes because he no longer has his key. I can see his big loopy grin, I can smell his hair, I can feel the bony softness of him pressed to my breast, struggling to get out of one of Mom’s dreaded super-hugs.

  Hands shaking, I fumble with the lock and the chain—open, open!—and then the door swings wide and sunlight spills into the foyer.

  Cops. Uniformed deputies. Lots of them.

  “Tommy! Did you find him? Have you got my son?”

  “Mrs. Bickford, may we enter your domicile?”

  I gesture them inside, momentarily speechless. Dread descending because there’s no sign of my son out there, and the cops do not look happy. As if they resent being the bearers of bad news. It’s enough to make me flop onto the nearest sofa, burying my face in my hands as the uniforms flood into the foyer, into the living room, into my house.

  “Mrs. Bickford, look at me, please.”

  I look up and see a face I recognize. Terence Crebbin, one of the Fairfax officers. Sheriff Corso speaks well of Terry, refers to him as “my right arm,” and more than once Deputy Sheriff Crebbin has made an appearance at the ballpark when pressing police business intruded on Fred Corso’s sideline as a Little League coach. Always made an impression with the moms because he’s cute, a slightly harder but no less attractive version of Brad Pitt, except that his hair remains sturdily brown, no highlights.

  Terry knows me well enough to use my first name, and so the “Mrs. Bickford” sounds more than ominous, it’s like a physical blow to the body. I’m cringing, waiting for the bad news. But what he says comes as a complete surprise.

  “Have you seen Sheriff Corso?” he demands.

  “What? No. My son. What about my son?”

  “Never mind your son, Mrs. Bickford. That’s none of our concern right now.”

  “None of your concern? But he’s been abducted! That’s what I’m trying to tell you!”

  I’ve known Terry Crebbin on a casual basis for at least three years, and have always found him to be cordial and polite, if slightly distant, as I suppose any married guy is apt to be around a single mom. So there’s something wrong here, some terrible misunderstanding, something my poor addled mind has failed to grasp.

  “Look,” I say, my voice shaky and uncertain, “what are you doing here? Who called you?”

  I’m desperate to know, but Deputy Sheriff Crebbin is untouched by my anxiety, and betrays not a scintilla of sympathy. His cold, mysteriously stubborn expression makes me crazy—how dare they treat me like this, after what I’ve been through? What I’m still going through?

  “I don’t know what you think is going on,” I begin somewhat heatedly. “But here’s what happened. My son, Tommy, was snatched at the baseball game. When I got home his abductor was waiting. Right here in the house. He had a gun. He made me go to the bank and wire money to an offshore account. He promised to let my son go, but I think he was lying.”

  “Uh-huh. What makes you think this ‘abductor’ was lying?”

  “The last thing he said was ‘don’t look in the basement.’”

  Crebbin reacts as if he’s been slapped. “Basement?” He turns to the cops who have been, I now realize, handling my belongings. Picking things up, putting them down, which strikes me as rude. “Griffin! Pasco!” Sergeant Crebbin barks at his underlings. “Take a look around the basement.”

  Griffin, who appears to be several years older than Crebbin, shoots him a look of concern. “Sarge, don’t you think, maybe we, um, need a warrant for that?”

  Crebbin cuts him off with an impatient gesture, and turns to me, his expression intense, angry for some reason. As if something about me has deeply offended him. “Mrs. Bickford, do we have your permission to check out the basement? You’ve already given us permission to enter your domicile, and the law permits us to examine evidence found in plain view. The basement is assumed to be part of the domicile, so in essence you’ve already given us access to the basement.”

  Why is he babbling in legalese? Nothing makes sense. Is my brain still numb with the drug that knocked me out? Why can’t I make them understand that my son has been kidnapped?

  “The basement, Mrs. Bickford.”

  “Yes, yes,” I tell him. “Tell your men to go ahead. I want you to look in the basement. I want to know.”

  “What exactly do you want us to know?”

  But I shake my head, wave him off. Can’t speak of it. Too awful to contemplate. But I’ve been thinking about nothing else since the man in the mask phoned.

  “Stay on the sofa, Mrs. Bickford. Deputy Katz? See she doesn’t leave the room.”

  Katz is Deputy Rita, a female officer I’ve never seen before. Small-boned and Hepburn-thin, she stands awkwardly beside the couch with her hand on her buttoned holster, as if fearing that I’ll make a run for it. And she avoids looking me in the eye. I try to tell her what happened to my son, babble something about the man in the mask, but she seems determined to avoid conversation with me. I’m not ordinarily such a motormouth, but nerves keep me yakking, as if the steady stream of words may act as barrier for whatever unthinkable thing waits in the basement.

  “I thought he was here, you know? That he’d gotten a ride home with one of the other parents. From the game. Tommy won the game, he was excited. So was I. Yelling from the dugout, you know? We’re not supposed to. The parents, I mean. Supposed to maintain, be supportive, but not too noisy. Other parents might get offended. Then he went for an ice-cream sundae and then he wasn’t there and I was worried. Like you get when you can’t see your kid. Do you have kids? You’re so young, maybe not, but believe me, you never stop worrying. So I came home, looking for Tommy. Tomas, actually, that’s his real name. I thought he was here in the house, playing his video games, but it was the man in the mask, waiting for me. He had a pistol and, like I said, this ski-mask kind of thing.”

  A door slams with the force of a gunshot. I just about jump out of my skin, as does Deputy Katz. Crebbin storms back into the room, glaring at me. I can tell he’s resisting the impulse to lay his hands upon me. But why? What does he think I’ve done to deserve his withering contempt.

  “Come with me, Mrs. Bickford.”

  There’s no fight in me, and no point in resisting. I accompany him into the hallway. A uniformed cop rushes by, grabbing for his walkie-talkie. Then Crebbin takes my arm and leads me through an open door, to the landing for the basement stairs. My knees get even weaker. Below are lights, more cops, the low hum of excited voices trying to keep it down. Crebbin expects me to refuse, but my mother�
��s body takes over, desperate to know what happened to my son, and I find myself descending the stairs, passing into the shadows of the partially illuminated basement.

  At the bottom of the stairs, cops wait on either side, leaving an opening just large enough for me to pass through. Passively forcing me to the north wall of the basement, and to the large chest freezer that holds goods for my catering business. Cookie and bread dough, mostly.

  My heart is racing and my jaw is quivering, but there’s just enough of me paying attention to get the impression that these men have already looked inside the freezer but are pretending not to have done so for some reason. Maybe because whatever waits in the freezer cannot be said to be in “plain sight,” and is therefore not subject to a warrantless search.

  I want to scream at them to act human, stop acting like cops, like a warrant matters at a time like this, but I haven’t got enough spit to open my mouth. Why are they looking at me like I’m the monster? Do they really think I’d kill my own child?

  “Go on, Mrs. Bickford. Open the lid, please.”

  I stagger to the freezer on wobbly ankles, sick with dread, partially blinded by my own tears. Not really there inside my head at all, but floating outside my own body, watching poor wobbly Kate Bickford reach for the handle. Watching her lift up the spring-balanced lid, letting it fly open. Watching as she covers her mouth and screams and screams and screams.

  Screams not of grief, exactly. Shock and relief, perhaps, but not grief. Because the body in the freezer is not her precious son, Tomas “Tommy” Bickford. The body in the freezer is an adult male with frost on his lips and a small purple hole in his forehead. The body in the freezer is the late Fred Corso, Fairfax County sheriff, Little League coach, and friend.