Knife Creek

by Paul Doiron

  39

  A rite of passage for all cadets at the Maine Criminal Justice Academy is to be shot in the face with oleoresin capsicum, a chemical derived from chili peppers and pressurized as an aerosol to fire accurate blasts from a canister at distances up to twenty feet. The purpose of the exercise isn’t just so future cops will appreciate the excruciating pain they can inflict if, in the line of duty, they pepper-spray a noncooperative person. It is also to prepare you in case you yourself are attacked with capsaicin.

  I remember my instructor standing five feet from me, screaming at me to hold my eyelids open while he emptied an entire canister in my face. The sensation was instantaneous and unbearable. It felt as if the fluid inside my eyeballs had begun to boil. My tear ducts opened like floodgates, as did my sinuses. The skin on my face burned as if I’d pressed it against a hot plate. I remember doubling over, choking and coughing, while my instructors and fellow cadets shouted my name.

  The exercise only began with being sprayed. Part two was to make my way, half-blind across the yard, to a tackle dummy, which I was expected to pummel into submission. Next to a mat where a teacher was playing the part of a resisting arrestee. Through commands and wrist locks I needed to subdue him and take him to the ground. The last stage, for me, was the hardest. Suffering, sputtering, spilling fluids from every orifice north of my pelvis, I was commanded to recite the specific legal language regulating use of force by police officers.

  What the instructors at the Maine Criminal Justice Academy had never prepared me for was the possibility that I would be pepper-sprayed by the kidnapped woman whose life I had hoped to save.

  Nor had they prepared me for a simultaneous sneak attack.

  As I bent over in mental and physical shock, gushing tears and snot, coughing through a windpipe the size of a soda straw, I had the presence of mind to raise my handgun up into my “workspace,” which is the area close to the face and chest from which you are taught to start your target acquisition.

  Casey was just a bloodred blur now. I think I saw her stutter-step away from me, retreating into the shadows once her canister was empty.

  Holding my weapon in both hands, I extended my arms in her direction.

  Then came the shock of the Taser.

  I felt the barbed electrodes pierce the back of my pants legs like two darts. A millisecond later a charge shot through my body. Every single one of my muscles went rigid. My motor skills left me as fifty thousand volts short-circuited my nervous system. I dropped forward onto my chest like a statue pushed off its base.

  Being tased was another rite of passage at the academy. Odd as it might sound, being electrocuted is much better than being pepper-sprayed because the moment the Taser shuts off, you regain control of your central nervous system. The torturous effects of oleoresin capsicum can last for hours.

  Between the chili pepper in the eyes, the shock of being immobilized by the Taser, and then having the wind knocked out of me as I fell chest-first onto the hard-packed earth, I was utterly helpless. It was enough time for the person behind me—whoever had shot me full of electricity—to club me hard in the back of the head.

  * * *

  Being knocked out isn’t like in the movies. It’s not as if someone gives you a love tap on the jaw or at the base of the skull and you suffer a fleeting moment of unconsciousness. You don’t just wake up minutes later, dazed but more or less functional. When you are hit with real force in the head, the blow sends a shock wave through the tissue in your brain. Your gray matter sloshes around the inside of your cranium. There is significant cell death. Just ask a boxer what it feels like to take a KO-quality punch.

  I don’t remember anything from the time I was clubbed until I eventually “woke up,” handcuffed and blindfolded.

  It is likely my assailants hit me in the head again during transport. To keep me docile.

  They must have had trouble moving my heavy, limp body as well. Some of the first sensations I felt as I came back were of patches of skin rubbed raw where I’d been dragged along the ground, and localized pains that would later blossom into purple bruises the size of my hand.

  My return to consciousness was gradual. My mind sputtered like an engine that was having trouble turning over. Thoughts flashed one after the other, none of them connecting.

  The Technicolor field of wildflowers in the summer sunlight.

  The overhead rustling of pigeons in their dirty nests.

  The intense focus in Casey’s brown eyes as she aimed the capsaicin at me.

  The expulsion of air from my lungs as my rib cage compacted against the ground.

  And then—

  My throat was still raw, and my face felt as if I had suffered the worst sunburn of my life. My eyelids were swollen shut, but no amount of effort could push them open. That was when it came to me that I was blindfolded.

  I seemed to be sitting with my back against a pole of some sort with my arms behind me. I tried to move them, but I was unable to separate my wrists. I was handcuffed, I realized. Probably with my own cuffs.

  Casey Donaldson was Martha Tarbox.

  Four nights earlier, I had thought she wanted me to rescue her. But she and someone else, probably the other woman, Becky, had lured me to the abandoned house to ambush and abduct me. It had never occurred to me that Casey might have been brainwashed during her long imprisonment and was suffering from Stockholm syndrome: the psychological disorder in which a captive begins to feel trust and affection toward her kidnapper. I hadn’t thought it possible.

  What had Menario said to me the night before? What were the words he’d used? “You make a lot of assumptions, you little punk. Someday they’re going to catch up with you.”

  The detective had been right. Not since my first months on the job had I felt such a sense of mortification and failure. I had been a fool, an utter fool. Now it was likely that I would pay for my carelessness with my life.

  But I couldn’t give up. I needed to gather my resources—I needed to “secure my shit,” as Tommy Volk would say—and take action. Self-pity was a luxury I couldn’t afford.

  The room I was in felt cool, as if I were underground. My nose searched for odors in the air, but the pepper spray had damaged the receptors in my sinuses and mouth. So I was deprived of my sense of taste and smell, as well as sight.

  What did that leave me with? My head ached so hard I had trouble focusing.

  Remember Charley’s checklist, said a voice in my head.

  What do I hear?

  A mechanical humming overhead. Not a furnace. Not an air-conditioning system. Maybe a big blower fan, like the kind used in construction projects? If I called out, I would never be heard above the machine.

  What do I feel?

  My fingers felt for the ground and encountered a smooth, hard surface. Poured concrete. The pole against my back had a coating of paint. I was in a basement.

  I brought my hands close to my back and discovered that my gun belt had been removed. No surprise there.

  They’d taken off my ballistic vest, too.

  I pushed my spine against the pole and brought my knees up. The muscles in my calves and quads were sore from the Taser. But I pressed hard and found that I could slide against the pillar until I was on my feet. Standing, I felt suddenly queasy. The blow (or blows) to the head had brought on vertigo.

  I gave myself a few minutes for the nausea and unsteadiness to pass. Then I made a circle around the pillar. I braced myself against the steel column and extended a leg as far as I could, trying to see if it would make contact with anything. But no, I seemed to be in the center of a room.

  At the academy, we’d received a few minutes’ training in what to do if we were ever taken hostage—communicate, have faith, keep up your morale, cooperate until you find an avenue of escape—but the lecture had been perfunctory and was of no help in my current situation.

  I hadn’t told anyone about the call I’d gotten from “Martha Tarbox.”

  Or that I was headin
g to a remote location down the rarely traveled Horseshoe Pond Road.

  My captors would have known enough to destroy the GPS in my cell phone. Or, better yet, throw it in the back of a pickup headed somewhere far from where they were taking me.

  No one knew where I was.

  Including me.

  My breath began to come quicker and quicker. I could hear my staccato heartbeat inside my aching skull. There was no denying the truth: I was terrified.

  As far as I know, I didn’t make a noise. I didn’t let out a sob. I didn’t begin to shiver or shake.

  But I must have given myself away somehow because a woman’s voice said, “What’s a matter? Are you scared?”

  Then she began to laugh.

  It was Becky. She had been in the room with me the whole time.

  40

  Even blindfolded, I knew where she was sitting. Her voice had given her location away. She was twenty feet or so directly in front of me, which told me that this basement was big. I hadn’t heard her moving or breathing. That told me she was careful and dangerous.

  Now I heard a chair scrape along the floor as she pushed it away. Heard her voice grow louder as she advanced on me. “You should be scared,” she said in that unmistakably shrill voice. “You’re going to die today. It’s going to hurt, too.”

  My bee-stung tongue had a hard time forming even a single word. “Becky?”

  “That’s my name. Don’t wear it out.”

  “You don’t want to do this.”

  “No, I kind of do.”

  “Killing a cop—they’ll execute you for that.” This was no lie. Maine didn’t have the death penalty, but the feds still did, and the US attorney would crucify anyone who assassinated a police officer—even a game warden.

  Her laugh was a series of rasps. “I’m not the one who’s going to kill you, douche bag.”

  I waited for her to explain what she meant, but she didn’t. She was standing just out of reach of my legs. Maybe nine feet away?

  One of the imperatives we’d been given at the academy, if we ever found ourselves in a hostage situation, was to humanize yourself. “My name is Mike Bowditch. I have a wife and—”

  “Bullshit.” She called me out on my lie. “You have a girlfriend named Stacey. You don’t have any kids. You don’t even own a dog.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Because he is smarter than you. The big guy is a genius.”

  “Who are you talking about?”

  “You’ll find out soon enough. Or maybe you won’t? I’m kind of hoping you don’t. It’s sadder to die without any answers. My pop died of lung cancer and he never knew how he got it. Never smoked a day in his life. At the end it made him insane, dying for no reason he could understand.”

  The more I talked, the better I seemed to smell, the more I seemed to taste. “I’m sorry about your father.”

  She burst into a coughing fit of laughter again. “That is so lame! You’re not sorry about anything—except getting caught like this. You should be sorry. We thought we might have trouble catching you. We were wrong about that, I guess.”

  “You got me there,” I said, hoping the admission might throw her off-balance. “You fooled me pretty good.”

  “Keep trying, Warden. It ain’t going to get you nowhere.”

  The woman was smart or, at least, smart enough. She had recognized every stratagem for what it was.

  “You don’t have to kill me.” I tried not to make it sound like a plea. I wasn’t going to beg for my life. “You have other options.”

  “Oh, yeah?”

  “Just take off again. It’s obvious that the state police can’t keep up with you. You’ve outwitted—”

  “Do you know how tempted I am to shoot you right now?”

  I heard the click of the hammer being pulled back on a semiautomatic pistol.

  “I got your gun pointed at your chest, just so you know. SIG Sauer P226! And, yeah, I’ve fired one of these before. I’m a crack shot, the big guy says. Jesus knows we practiced enough. See, what you don’t understand is how pissed we are. We had a good deal going. What’s the expression you people use up here? A ‘wicked good’ deal? You ruined that for us. And now you have to pay.”

  “Where’s Casey?”

  “Who?”

  “Casey Donaldson.”

  “Oh, you mean Kendall. She’s upstairs. Don’t worry, though. She’ll be down soon enough. You’re even going to see her! We’ll take off your blindfold so you can gaze into her pretty, pretty eyes.”

  The message couldn’t have been clearer: they were going to execute me soon.

  The only comfort I could take was that, so far, they hadn’t removed my blindfold. As long as there was something they didn’t want me to see, I had a chance. It meant that my death wasn’t entirely preordained. The moment to panic would be when they no longer cared what I saw.

  “I called in my location when I arrived at that abandoned barn.”

  “No, you didn’t.”

  “Are you willing to bet your life on that?”

  “It’s not my life that’s forfeit. You’re the one who fucked it up for us. The big guy is merciful. But he ain’t going to forgive you that. You’ve made things too difficult, you stupid man.”

  “Becky—”

  “Save it,” she snapped. “There ain’t a single thing you can say now that’ll stop you from getting what you deserve. It’s all foretold at this juncture. It was foretold the moment you knocked on our door that night. You’ve been dead this whole time and not even known it. I’d feel sorry for you if I wasn’t so fucking pissed about having to move again. I hate moving!”

  Just then an electronic noise echoed through the basement: chirping electronic crickets.

  I heard Becky take a step away from me. “Hi, baby.”

  The cell phone speaker wasn’t loud enough for me to hear the other side of her conversation, but I could recognize that it was a man’s voice on the other end.

  “Yeah, I’ve got him handcuffed to one of the poles in the basement. He’s awake now.” She paused. “I didn’t know where else to take him. I understand that it creates problems for you. I’m sorry, baby.”

  More male mumbling.

  “We left his truck in the barn and closed the door as much as we could. You can’t see it from the road now. And I threw his cell phone into a pickup headed south, like you said I should. There ain’t no way now they can track us here. Even if they find the truck, they won’t know which way he might’ve went. He’s one hundred percent off the radar.”

  The man on the other side raised his voice in reply, but I still couldn’t make out more than garbled words.

  “Well, we had to do something!” Becky pleaded. “He was the only other one that saw me. So what if they got that sketch? I can change my face. I done it before.”

  I heard the man on the other end raise his voice even louder.

  “I was trying to protect you, baby. I just figured it was her turn now. She needs to do it. It’s her initiation. We can’t trust her until she does one.”

  Her answer didn’t seem to placate the man on the other end.

  “I shouldn’t have brought them here.” She sounded genuinely contrite. “I’m sorry. I am very sorry.… Yes, baby, I’ll take my punishment. I’ll take it and like it.”

  She paused a long time while I heard indecipherable ranting on the other end of the line.

  “I won’t do nothing until you get here, baby. I promise.” She paused. “Can I take his mask off? I want to see the look in his eyes. You know that’s my favorite part. I want her to see it, too.… Thank you, baby.”

  Her next words were directed at me. “I gotta go upstairs for a minute.” The tone of her voice rose in amusement. “Don’t go nowhere while I’m gone.”

  I listened as she ran up the basement stairs, her steps as light as a child’s.

  * * *

  My head ached and my insides burned, but I knew I had only a few minutes to de
construct the phone call I’d overheard.

  Becky had seemingly gone rogue. I wasn’t sure if the plan to kidnap me had been her idea or that of her master, the “big guy,” but he clearly disapproved of her having brought me to this house. In his mind, my being here had created a problem—perhaps because he had no desire to burn the place to the ground, as he had done with the others, to destroy DNA traces that proved I’d been here.

  As I’d feared, they had seemingly done an expert job at hiding my truck and disposing of the cell phone the Warden Service would use to locate me.

  I smacked my lips and drew in a deep breath through my nose. The faintest of smells registered in my brain. Basement-floor sealant?

  What had Becky said? “I figured it was her turn now. She needs to do it. We can’t trust her until she does it.”

  They had killed someone before, and I had a strong feeling it wasn’t the baby Stacey and I had found.

  Their plan was for Casey to kill me. I was to be the final rite of initiation into the gang or the cult or whatever it was.

  Just then I remembered the hidden dagger in my boot. I squatted down and brought my feet to the sides of the pole. I stuck my index finger into the top of the boot, hoping to snag the ring at the top of the skeletonized steel blade. Where was it?

  Two sets of footsteps on the stairs now.

  The first, staccato, had to be Becky’s.

  The second, slower, tentative, almost shambling, must have been Casey’s.

  Through my blindfold I became aware of an overhead light coming on. The utterly black fabric became an espresso-colored brown.

  Frantically, I tried my left boot, thinking that maybe I had concealed the dagger in that one instead. I clearly remembered picking it up that morning.

  “Looking for this?” Becky said.

  I heard something metal hit the floor off to my left.

  “We found your hidden knife. We searched you from head to toe. Kendall did, I should say. Too bad you were out cold. You would’ve enjoyed getting felt up by such a pretty girl.”