Ransom X

by I.B. Holder

  Chapter 61 Unwanted Escape

  Tears ran down Darci’s face, washing into the rainbow-colored temporary tattoo that circled from the point of her chin up to her right eye. The pattern was tough and beautiful, but now the design had broken down with river marks creating shorelines of residue. She would have liked to follow one of her tears down and away from this place, maybe pick up some brown or green on the way to somewhere else.

  Darci didn’t have that option. She was sitting in front of the cruelest officer of the law she’d ever encountered. This heartless bitch was making her examine everything that happened in her life, viewed in one continuous arc. She wasn’t allowed to compartmentalize by the random places she’d been. Or even make distinctions by lumping all of her experiences into the intoxication of a constant adolescent binge of alcohol, ecstasy and marijuana. All of the excuses that had been buttresses against collapse were now paper-thin partitions and led to a resulting flood of tears.

  The agent didn’t let her think, she kept feeding her question after question. Everything the agent wanted to know by now, she knew. Her love affair with Mac, or “Brown” as she preferred to call him, who had originally brought her to the biker’s lair. The agent had seemed revolted when she’d learned that Darci had been the catalyst for the money making side of the operation. She herself had marketed her images to the websites in her hometown. The men were incidental, just like she’d said. People who’d wanted to see her get fucked wouldn’t care if it were by nameless, faceless blobs. It was her painfully low estimation of men. She was, unfortunately, right.

  Darci had protected only one thing, and that was because the agent had bought her statement at face value, wanting to believe it and thus leaving it unprobed. Darci told her that she’d come back for revenge, personal revenge against Blade. It was indeed a fantasy of hers, so the tone and delivery must have been reasonably convincing. She hadn’t told the nodding agent the real reason, that she was in love, and why would she guess that anyway? Nothing about Darci spoke to romance, except with Mac’s meaty protective arms wrapped around her. There she felt safe, and after being in a perpetual state of imbalance, riding wheels that rattled like they were within a revolution of coming off, “safe” had a fresh ring to it.

  The question was coming; she could feel it materialize out of the stale scent of decomposition that moved through the place, stirred by the wake of every movement, every unwashed customer’s entrance. The walls began to close in on Darci. The agent wasn’t going to let her leave until Darci told her everything. There was nothing she could do but stall, and maybe hope for a natural disaster. Maybe an earthquake would bring the dusty walls down on them and she wouldn’t have to answer the question she could see building on the agent’s lips. Darci imagined the timbers snapping. She felt the rush of musty air escaping the dark and brittle phloem of the supports. In her imagination, everyone was looking for cover, while she was sitting calmly at the table. Darci could see the beam above her waver then drop as if released from both sides. She smiled, knowing that the act of crushing her bones would hardly even slow it down.

  Darci had a vivid imagination, helped by the fact that reality was the disciplinarian in her imaginary family. The only way to keep away from the punishment was to go inside herself. Darci’s eyes focused again and as she looked up, she slightly repositioned her chair under the heavy beam that hung above.

  The sound of the bottle returning from the lips of the agent to the table startled her, Darci stared at the spot on the table like it were to blame for the sudden noise.

  Agent Wagner said in a reassuring tone, “We need to know where they are, then we can finish this, none of them will ever get to you again, they’ll be behind bars for life.”

  It registered in Darci’s eyes before she was able to contain it, the sweet shift of satisfaction replacing fear. What a relief it would be to have Blade out of her nightmares, gone forever behind bars and if there were any justice, getting the treatment from his fellow inmates that he so richly deserved. In a flash, she was imagining him being awoken surrounded by a group of four, maybe five hulking brutes ready to initiate him.

  Darci’s mouth started to move, and the agent leaned in.

  Darci struggled, and then finally said, “I’ve got to go to the bathroom.”

  How could she explain it? This was her dream, and yet it was surrounded by her greatest fear. Never to see Mac again? It was impossibly cruel that she would go through all of this and not end up in his arms. She snuck a glance over her shoulder at the agent. Her face looked so perfect, strong and defiant, like a boxer’s or maybe one of the models on a French catwalk. She didn’t smack of compromise; in fact there was nothing in her unwavering gaze that suggested she would comprehend capricious love. The agent looked like she’d planned every line, every color and every intersection that drew her into another person’s eyes. Darci, in comparison, reflected as complete chaos.

  She couldn’t risk telling the agent and losing Mac, Darci thought, rounding the corner and hearing the compressor for the ice machine kicking in, echoed on the rafters above her. It was the perfect accompaniment for her thoughts, which roared through her mind inefficiently, churning out an internal cacophony. It churned out a theme song for the dispossessed.

  The women’s bathroom had been turned into a storage closet, so she unlatched the L-shaped piece of metal that kept the ill-framed door shut and used the cover of the open door to walk into the men’s room. The place was immaculate, which didn’t surprise her, Burly always kept his place clean. She sat on the toilet, but she didn’t pull down her skirt, she just sat and cried. Then decided. The agent would just have to wait.

  Wagner’s beer washed over her back fillings, chilling the metal and lingering, mixing with her sweet breath and coming out with a sigh. Darci had left the table two minutes ago, and she was beginning to get nervous.

  She had her, Wagner knew she had her, but something spooked her at the very last minute. She would have followed her, but for the fact that she had a clear sightline below the saloon doors that lead to the women’s bathroom, and they hadn’t moved since she’d closed them two minutes ago. In fact, she hadn’t blinked even as she retraced every aspect of the conversation she’d had with Darci. Still something didn’t make sense.

  What was she missing? If Darci wanted revenge, why wouldn’t she simply give them up, did she want it to be personal? Was Darci really interested in plunging in the knife herself? She didn’t look like she had it in her. Wagner took a deep breath and thought about how Legacy was always telling her to step outside her own assumptions.

  Was there any chance that she hadn’t come for revenge at all? Was there a benevolent option? Wagner remembered the boyfriend, the one so interested in protecting her. Was it possible that she felt some loyalty to him after all that he’d done to her? If she saw him as being her rescuer, that could go a long way in the mind of a confused, abused child.

  Her questions were interrupted by the sound of a roaring pack of motorcycles outside. The throaty engines thumped out a vibration that Wagner could literally see in the form of a nervous spoon on her table. Then something quite surprising happened.

  The front door of the place opened, but instead of the expected bikers it was a pretty-faced but somehow fragile young woman in a fancy cocktail dress. Wagner monitored the conversation; she didn’t have a choice, as most of it was shouted.

  “Snowflake?” Burly, too, seemed to be taken off guard.

  Snowflake looked on the verge of producing pear-shaped tears. Her eyes glistened. “My county commissioner – “ She couldn’t get out the rest of the sentence. Wagner guessed that it was bad news because of the sobs. If it had been ‘my county commissioner just gave me a check for ten thousand dollars’, or even ‘my county commissioner decided not to run for a second term’, the reaction would not be laced with so much heartbreak. Snowflake’s words were coated in a teenager’s myopic sense of loss. She could not have predicted the
train wreck that would follow.

  “Don’t take another step, Snowy. It’s over.”

  It sounded like some kind of alpine soap opera. Wagner could only guess at their history, the dirty-faced refugee showing up at sundown, expecting to be welcomed back. But she wasn’t welcome at all, Wagner felt the bartenders’ resolve in the curt exchange, and it looked like the situation was beginning to sink in for the young woman, Snowflake.

  Wagner had seen people fall apart before, in fact she’d read about the topic extensively and her favorite Dr. Sopklem, PHD had broken down the visual aspect of complete emotional breakdowns into five distinct categories. It was a fascinating topic that toed the line from disintegration to explosion. It was descriptive, and complete. Wagner added a sixth category that night. She watched Snowflake’s features flush with grief only to drain completely, snow white. She stood in the place she was most familiar with, and she was completely lost. Her arms stretched outward, trembling, then fell to her sides like the strings cut from a marionette. Snowflake cast about her eyes for an anchor, then seemed overwhelmed by every object in the room, like it was the first or last time she’d ever see again. Her expression, desperately sad, finally emptied of emotion completely.

  She turned on a squeaky floorboard, and only then did Wagner notice one of her feet was bare, the other was in a heel befitting a night on the town. Something had changed, and her wardrobe had been unable to keep up.

  Whether out of guilt or sympathy, Burly raised his voice once more at the willowy girl who’d been his sixth wife. “Go back to him Snowy, only a fool wouldn’t take you back.”

  Wagner heard the haunting reply, and she wished she hadn’t. Snowy said with a hollow finality, “He won’t.” And then she was gone.

  The phone rang as she crossed the threshold; it sounded like one of those obscene security systems that they have at large chain stores that nobody pays any attention to, but is of a pitch that is designed to startle anyone nearby. Burly went to the phone.

  Wagner’s mind was on the bathroom: she’d let her eyes wander to the meltdown with Burly’s sixth ex-wife. Could Darci have slipped out? Wagner stood and walked toward the saloon doors. She heard Burly on the phone, “Sounds like the boys just pulled up, you want to wait?” Then she heard a bark through the receiver that was audible clear across the bar. The man on the other end of the line didn’t want to wait.

  She pushed through the doors and tapped softly on the door marked “Cowgirl”. No movement, no sound at all. She pushed the door inward.

  The dark supply closet was the last thing Wagner expected to see. A pull chain above ignited a yellow bulb that dangled from the rafters.

  She moved quickly to the “Cowpoke” bathroom and pushed open the door. A message was scrawled on the mirror in eyeliner. “I’ll be back at midnight, and I’ll take you to where they are.”

  Cinderella was at the ball, damn it. She’d slipped out the back. Wagner stepped back into the hallway, retracing Darci’s path to the back door, and looked out into the blackness of the mountain night. The chill in the air pushed through the screen of the back door, and it gently flapped inward to an irregular beat.

  A creaking in the floor directly behind her brought her back to the moment. She froze, feeling the presence of someone directly behind her. The place and the time were all in his advantage, the confinement of the doorframe, and the sound of the compressor masking the approach. There was no time to draw a weapon, not any time to think as a hand came down upon her shoulder.