Web of Fear

by Mike Omer

  He sighed, then bent and picked up the two uneaten sandwiches. He left the room with all three sandwiches in his hands, locking the door behind him.

  Abigail tried to go back to sleep. There was nothing good about staying awake. When she slept, time went by. Perhaps someone would find her. Perhaps her kidnappers would return her home. Time was her friend. She thought about Gracie. It was strange, she hadn’t thought about her friend up to that moment. They had tried to escape the kidnappers together. Had Gracie made it? Was she back home, wondering what had happened to Abigail?

  She would have done anything to talk to Gracie. Her friend could always make her happy. She had such a positive outlook on life. She’d have pointed out that the kidnappers kept her fed and masked their faces. They clearly intended to set her free in the future. She would probably quote a statistic about how most kidnappings ended well. Gracie always had statistics up her sleeve. Abigail almost smiled, imagining Gracie’s face as she said, “You’ll be home in no time, and you’ll be the most popular girl in school! Everyone will want to hang out with Abigail Lisman, the girl who was kidnapped.”

  Time moved by. The door opened again. She ignored it this time, keeping her eyes closed, her head facing away.

  Except the smells made her change her mind. It was the smell of baked dough and cooked cheese, a smell any kid knew by heart. The smell of pizza.

  She opened her eyes. The man stepped to her bed, holding a pizza box in his hand. She sat up, and he laid the box on the bed and opened it. The pizza was still hot and steamy. The box was green and red, with a logo she didn’t identify, but the implication of all this was clear.

  She was being held somewhere near a pizza place. That meant she was in a city, maybe even Glenmore Park. If she managed to escape, she could get somewhere safe, call the police or her parents.

  “Eat,” the man said.

  A sliver of hope crawled into her mind, and with it came her appetite. She realized she was famished. The pizza smelled amazing. She picked up a slice with a shaking hand, and took a large bite. The taste was exquisite. This was the best pizza she had ever eaten in her entire life.

  The man fished around in a plastic bag slung on his arm and pulled out a can of Coke, which he handed to her. She wolfed down the pizza slice, then opened the can and drank, enjoying the sudden sugary rush. She picked up a second slice of pizza and bit in, and her face rose to meet the man’s eyes.

  He looked at her strangely. It was difficult to know what he thought. People always said you could spot an emotion in someone’s eyes, but Abigail was realizing that if a person was masked, if she couldn’t see the person’s mouth, or nose, or forehead, she just couldn’t figure out what he felt.

  She swallowed the bite she’d taken. “Thank you,” she said.

  “You’re welcome,” he said. “Better?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Good. It’s important that you eat.”

  “Are you going to send me home soon?” she blurted out.

  He hesitated for a moment. “Soon,” he finally said. “Yes. Not today, but soon.”

  Abigail nodded and took another bite. She wondered if he was telling the truth. Should she try to escape? There was a pizza place nearby.

  The man pulled out his phone and aimed it at her. The flash blinded her and he put the phone away.

  “Why are you taking all those pictures of me?” she asked.

  “To let your parents know you’re alive.”

  Her parents knew she was alive. She hadn’t realized how worried she was about them not knowing. If they knew she was alive, they’d never stop looking for her.

  He didn’t have to tell her that. It was an act of kindness.

  “Thanks,” she said.

  He nodded and got up. “Don’t eat too fast,” he said. “You might get sick.”

  She grabbed the third slice of pizza. As he locked the door behind him, she allowed herself, for the first time in a couple of days, to smile.

  By Thursday, over fifty million people all over the world had been exposed to Abigail Lisman’s images.

  People began reacting. #SaveAbigail was trending on Twitter. Comments flooded the images on Abigail’s Instagram. Redditors, that odd breed of folks who hung out on the site reddit.com, marshaled to find clues in them that could pinpoint her location.

  And then someone figured out that she had been kidnapped on Saint Patrick’s Day. A lot of pictures had been taken that evening, selfies of drunken people at parties, in bars, and on the street. The citizens of Glenmore Park were asked to share images and videos from that evening, to save Abigail. Because if they didn’t share those images, it was tantamount to wanting Abigail to die.

  Soon there were a lot of images to pore through.

  One of those images was a selfie of a hugging couple, suffering from that malaise of the selfie age, where heads always seemed to be too close to each other. In the background, several people could be seen—including two girls walking down the street. They were fuzzy, unfocused, but it was still easy to see that they were small, no more than thirteen. The shapes of their bodies, the length and color of their hair and skin easily matched to other images in their Instagram profiles.

  Abigail and Gracie.

  Chapter Eleven

  “I spy with my little eye, something beginning with J,” Agent Perkins said.

  Agent Bob Tyler glanced at him, unamused. This joke was getting old, and it wasn’t funny the first time. Perkins insisted on using it every time they went on a stakeout together.

  They were in their white Chevy with its sparkling clean interior. At Tyler’s insistence, they’d had the car washed yesterday. A stakeout in a clean car was infinitely better than a stakeout in a dirty car. Now, sitting back, smelling the pine air freshener, he thought even Perkins could see that this was better.

  “Well? It begins with a J,” Perkins said again.

  Jurgen Adler was fifty feet ahead of them, in his own car, an ugly blue Ford Fiesta, doing nothing. He had parked there about ten minutes before, and the agents following him were quick to stop their car. Tyler wondered what he was waiting for. Was he meeting someone? Perhaps the kidnapper? Tyler sure hoped so. The FBI had been trailing Jurgen for the past two days, with no tangible results so far.

  “Give up?” Perkins asked.

  “Is it a Jeep?” Tyler asked.

  “No,” Perkins beamed at him. “It’s Jurgen Adler.”

  Tyler ignored him. Perkins was a decent partner, he really was. Sure, he had his quirks, but who didn’t? The important thing was, he was a good guy, and Tyler could trust him blindly when things got out of hand.

  So he had a stupid sense of humor, and was a bit racist. So what? Tyler’s previous partner had had bad breath. That might sound like an insignificant flaw, but spend fourteen hours in a vehicle with the guy, and you’d consider instant retirement.

  He looked out at the stores lining the street. In front of them, the man who owned the flower shop, Hummingbird Blossoms, was talking to a woman near a large display of bouquets. The explosion of colors stood out on the gray, drab street. It must be nice to work in a flower shop all day, selling things that made people happy. When he’d been younger, Tyler had brought flowers to his wife every week. She was always so thankful when she got them. Why had he stopped? He resolved to start buying flowers again.

  “His name is a bit weird, isn’t it?” Perkins said.

  “Why?” Tyler asked distractedly. He knew where this was going, but this discussion would open a whole can of racist worms he didn’t want opened. Racist worms were the worst. This made him think of a joke.

  What’s worse than finding a worm in your apple?

  Finding a racist worm in your apple.

  Perkins’s sense of humor was apparently infectious.

  “Well, Jurgen isn’t a Japanese name, is it?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “But this guy’s Japanese.”

  “He’s half-Norwegian, half-Chinese,” Tyl
er said wearily.

  “Yeah, well… still. I mean he looks like—”

  “It’s just a name,” Tyler said. “My parents nearly named me Sauron. That doesn’t mean I came from Mordor.”

  “Seriously? They considered calling you Sauron?” Perkins asked.

  “It was an option on the short list.”

  “How long was the short list?”

  “It had three names,” Tyler said.

  “Wow. Lucky break for you, there.”

  Tyler nodded. “It sure was,” he agreed. “I mean… growing up being called Sauron would have been… terrible.”

  “Bob is a really nice name, though.”

  “Thanks.”

  They sat and looked ahead at the blue Ford Fiesta.

  “Could have been cool, though,” Perkins said. “To say my partner is the dark lord.”

  Jurgen Adler sat in his 2012 blue Ford Fiesta, waiting for Heather Gibbons to emerge from the bank. He’d been following her for the past hour, wondering if she was on her way to meet her lover. Her husband was almost certain she had a lover, and he wanted Jurgen to give him some evidence he could use when filing for divorce. Up till now, Jurgen hadn’t been convinced this lover existed, though his Spidey-sense tingled. Something was definitely off with Heather. She had a secret. And in Jurgen’s line of work, a secret nearly always meant a lover.

  “Isn’t there a movie actress named Heather?” he asked aloud. “Who was it? Do you remember, Sharon?”

  Sharon was Jurgen’s car. As an ex-cop, Jurgen was used to having a partner to talk to during his stakeouts. But now, as a private investigator, he sometimes spent long hours with no one to talk to. Unlike his somber, silent Norwegian father, Jurgen loved to talk. So he talked to his car.

  He tapped his steering wheel, chewing his lip. “Heather Graham,” he finally said. “She was awesome in Austin Powers. And in Hangover.”

  He sneezed and fumbled for his box of tissues. He was still a bit under the weather. He had spent the past week mostly in bed, trying to get over a bad bout of the flu. He hated having a cold more than almost anything else. He hated it when his nose was runny, like a case of God’s plumbing malfunctioning. He hated it when it clogged up, making him choke and snore when going to sleep.

  Right now, due to the fact that he’d never bothered with a trash bin for his car, the entire floor was carpeted with used tissues. The tissues he used were white or pink, and he felt as if he was driving in the midst of a field of crumpled, snot-filled petunias. He wiped his nose, squashed the paper, and tossed it over his shoulder to the backseat. Once he was over the cold, he’ll clean the car until it sparkled. He just had to get over this horrid, nose-destroying virus.

  He looked out at the street. George, the owner of Hummingbird Blossoms, talked to a young woman who nodded, pointing at various bouquets. She was quite beautiful, and Jurgen stared, wondering how it felt to hold her, to kiss her neck, to caress her thighs. It had been a while since he’d broken up with his last girlfriend, and he felt lonely. Sharon, for all her fantastic qualities, was not enough.

  He sighed and looked back at the bank.

  “There we go,” he said, tensing up. “She’s leaving. Better get ready, Sharon, we’re about to hit the road.”

  Heather really regretted snorting the last half gram of her cocaine stash.

  She usually waited until noon, which was the most difficult time of the day, before her daily hit. That way, she had half the day to look forward to that wonderful moment, and then the middle of the day was quite nice. She’d spend the afternoon watching TV, so the down wasn’t so hard.

  But that morning her husband had looked at her and asked how her diet was going. And she didn’t need a decoding ring to figure out what he meant by that. You look like a pregnant whale, Heather—that’s what he wanted to say. And that’s what she heard. Once he had gone to work she hurried to her dresser, located the last bit of coke she had left, and inhaled it as fast as she could.

  Now it was nearly noon, the effect had worn off, and she was out of cocaine. She had to go meet her dealer, get some more.

  She quickly headed back to the car, the three hundred dollars she had just withdrawn tucked deep in her purse. As always, after the cocaine buzz faded she was left depressed and anxious. She could feel the eyes of the surrounding people. Could they see the redness of her nose? Did they know what she was doing?

  You are horizontally tall, Heather.

  She opened the door to her car and got inside, feeling heavy and clumsy. Not for the first time, she wondered if all the money she spent on cocaine would not be better spent on a gastric bypass surgery. She sat still, on the verge of tears, hating herself.

  You are queen-sized, Heather.

  A woman stood just across the street, buying flowers. Heather looked at her thin, sexy body, her long legs, that tiny waist. She hated that woman. She hated her even more than she hated herself.

  She had to get some cocaine. With a shaking hand, she switched on the engine. She was always terrified when meeting her dealer. Would today be the day she was arrested for buying drugs? Had the police tapped her phone, monitored the short text she had sent her dealer? Her anxiety fought with her depression over who would get more real estate in her brain. Currently, her anxiety was winning.

  She pulled out of her parking spot. She needed to get this over with.

  Jurgen was the first to admit that when it came to tailing cars, his skills were a bit underwhelming. When he’d been a cop he hadn’t done it often, and when he had, his partner was usually the one driving. Now, as a private detective, he had to do it all the time, and he hated it.

  The two bullet-points for tailing a car were: don’t get spotted, and don’t lose your target. Completely absurd. Either you did something, or you didn’t. That was like telling someone to eat a large dinner, but to make sure he stayed hungry. Couldn’t be done.

  So his style for tailing a car was simple. He stayed far behind his target, but once he felt he was losing it, he panicked and sped up until the car he was following was two feet ahead of him. At which point he would realize he was too close, and hit the brakes. As far as he could tell, the reason he wasn’t spotted more often was that people couldn’t believe anyone tailing them would draw so much attention to himself.

  When Heather’s green Audi pulled out, Jurgen waited for a few seconds. When he finally decided to pull out, traffic seemed to thicken, and he couldn’t merge into the lane. He finally hit the gas and swerved into traffic just in front of an incoming van, which honked. The driver screaming something Jurgen couldn't make out.

  He cursed, worried about the number of cars between him and Heather. Worse yet, there were three green cars in front of him, and though he thought he knew which one was Heather’s, he wasn’t completely certain. One of them turned right at the next intersection and he nearly followed it, just because of an irrational worry that he got the green cars mixed up. But no, it wasn’t even an Audi, and anyway it was more like olive green, and Heather’s car was lime green.

  Finally, traffic thinned, and he could positively spot Heather’s head in the driver’s seat in front of him. He slowed down, the car behind him almost ramming into him, honking as well.

  “What’s his problem, Sharon?” he said, craning his head to make sure Heather was still there. “It’s his fault. He shouldn’t have been so close.”

  He followed Heather for another couple of minutes, growing quite proud of his cool driving. Then he sneezed.

  It was one of those “everything must go, geyser erupting” sneezes, and he fumbled helplessly for the box of tissues. Finally, he grabbed a handful of used tissues from the floor, and wiped his nose and hand with them. Another low point of the day.

  Looking back up, he realized he couldn’t see Heather anywhere.

  “Damn it!” He hit the gas, zigzagging between cars, spotting her just as she turned right. He was in the left lane, and as he crossed both lanes furious honking erupted around him.
r />   And now he was too close again.

  “What the hell… is he drunk?” Fowler asked as their Chevy followed Jurgen’s Ford. The man drove like a panicky teenager on the first day behind the steering wheel.

  “I don’t know,” Tyler said, frowning. He had read Jurgen’s file carefully, and it hadn’t mentioned drunk driving anywhere. But who knew?

  They tailed Jurgen’s car from afar, watching traffic swerving out of his way, people shaking their fists at him. And then he suddenly swerved and turned right, disappearing down a side street.

  “He spotted us,” Tyler said speeding up. “He’s trying to shake us loose.”

  “We have to stop him!” Fowler said. “If he gets to the girl—”

  “I know,” Tyler muttered. Now that Jurgen knew the FBI were on to him, this could spin out of control. They could have a hostage situation before long.

  No. This had to end now. They’d bring Jurgen in, interrogate him, find out the location of the girl.

  They turned right. Jurgen zigzagged ahead, getting further away. The street was packed with traffic, and Tyler could see no way around it. They were losing him.

  “Call in the chopper!” he barked at Fowler. “He’s getting away!”

  Everyone around Heather kept honking. The jarring noise was making her frantic. She could hear brakes squealing behind her, and yelling. Something was definitely off. Was it possible that the police really had intercepted her text? Were they chasing her even now? She glanced in the rearview mirror. There were a lot of cars, but no squad car. Could they be following her to get to her dealer? She didn’t want her dealer to think she had ratted him out!

  She accelerated, and several cars behind her also seemed to accelerate. Was it just her anxiety acting up? It didn’t feel like it.

  She got closer to the street corner where she and her dealer met, but she decided to avoid it, drive around a bit, make sure she wasn’t being followed. Her dealer would appreciate her caution. She turned left at the next intersection. A few seconds later she heard honking behind her again. By now she was crying. She had to get on the highway. She’d lose them on the highway.