The Lonely Mile

by Allan Leverone

  No matter. Bill Ferguson was the man’s name, and he owned a hardware store. How many Bill Fergusons could there be in the area who also owned hardware stores? This guy would be very easy to find.

  He took a sip of his warm, flat cola and reached for his remote, changing the input on his television so he could watch a DVD. A long, lonely night stretched endlessly in front of him with no blonde teenaged companionship to help pass the time. That was the fault of one person and one person only. But it was okay, because Martin had all the information he needed to begin rectifying the situation.

  It was time for a little porn and some planning.

  CHAPTER 15

  BILL STOOD ON THE varnished surface of the oversized farmer’s porch running the length of the colonial style home and rang the doorbell. He hoped Carli would be the one to answer the door, but knew that was unlikely. She was probably upstairs, finishing her homework or listening to music or texting her friends. The intense heat had barely abated even though it was now nearly dinnertime, and Bill was thankful for the shade the porch provided. He hadn’t realized how much the confrontation with the I-90 Killer had taken out of him until just now. He felt shaky, washed out. As soon as he was done here, he would drive straight to his apartment in town and put his feet up, crack a beer, and watch the Sox game.

  Heavy footsteps approached the door, and as it opened inward, Bill found himself staring into the face of his ex. Crow’s feet were beginning to show around her eyes, and a touch of grey was making inroads on her blonde locks, but otherwise, Sandra and her daughter were dead ringers. He felt the familiar ache for just a moment and then swallowed it down, locking it away, pasting a pleasant smile on his face.

  He never blamed Sandra for leaving; not even after the affair she had begun with her now-husband Howard while still married to Bill. He knew it wasn’t easy being the wife of a small business owner, especially when the business in question was a pair of hardware stores continually in danger of being forced into bankruptcy by the big chains. Mom and Pop stores everywhere in the hardware game were disappearing, but through gargantuan effort, Bill had thus far managed to keep his stores afloat.

  That effort came at a price, though. A steep one. All that driving from one store to the other trying to keep his business going with the growing competition from the big box stores translated into time spent away from home. Time spent away from Sandra and Carli.

  Eventually, all those lonely hours, nights, and weeks, had become too much for his wife to endure. She began a relationship with an old high school boyfriend who still lived in the area. Howard Mitchell had never married. He was a successful dentist, complete with a thriving practice, a big house, a pool, and expensive cars. Most importantly, Bill knew, Howard Mitchell was home most evenings for his family, which, to Sandra, translated into a considerable upgrade over her husband.

  It had been two years now since Sandra left him, marrying Howard Mitchell six months after that, but no matter how much time passed, Bill knew he would always feel a momentary tug of sadness, of pain and regret, whenever he laid eyes on his former wife.

  “Bill,” she said in surprise, brushing a stray hair out of her eyes, stepping back into the foyer out of the unseasonable late-afternoon heat. “What are you doing here? Are you all right?”

  “Sure, I’m all right. Why wouldn’t I be?”

  “Why wouldn’t you be? You’ve been all over the news this afternoon. Fighting with that horrible I-90 Killer. You could’ve been killed!”

  “Oh, that, yeah,” he said. “Sorry. I don’t know why, but it didn’t occur to me you might have seen the reports. I mean, I saw all the news trucks and the reporters at the rest area, but it all seemed a little unreal to me.

  “Anyway,” he said, suddenly feeling silly but not letting it stop him. “I was wondering if I could see Carli for a couple of minutes. It’s been…I don’t know…kind of a long day, and I just wanted to say hi to her.”

  She hesitated for half a second and then pulled the heavy door open wider. “Of course. Come on in out of the heat. Wait right here and I’ll get her.”

  Bill stepped inside, and his ex-wife pushed the front door closed. The house felt cool and comfortable, a far cry from the stifling temperatures he knew he would face when he went home. A window fan moving stale air around a second-floor one-bedroom apartment could not compare with the comfort of central air conditioning. He stood awkwardly on the gleaming hardwood floor of the foyer as Sandra brushed past, stopping at the foot of the stairway and yelling upstairs to his daughter. To their daughter. “Carli, your dad’s here!”

  From somewhere down the second-story hallway came a muffled reply. “Be right there,” it sounded like, but Bill could not be sure. She was obviously in her room behind closed doors. Sandra smiled at him, and his heart ached.

  “So, what the heck happened today?” she asked.

  He shook his head. “It all went down so fast, I’m not exactly sure. I was having a cup of Smokin’ Joe’s Coffee at the highway rest stop—”

  She laughed. “You always loved their coffee, and I never understood why.”

  “Hey, it’s really good,” he protested. “Give it a chance and you’ll be hooked. Anyway, there I was, minding my own business, getting ready to go back out to the van, when this guy pulls a gun on a teenage girl. He was right in front of me when he did it, Sandra, and nobody else saw a thing. He was hustling her out to the parking lot and, in about three seconds, would have had her out the door and she would have been gone. And still nobody noticed. So I just reacted and did what I had to do. What anyone would have done, hopefully.”

  From the top of the carpeted stairway came an excited shriek. “Dad, you’re a hero!”

  Carli bounded down the stairs like a whirlwind, taking them two at a time, launching herself at him off the bottom step and nearly driving him through the closed door and into the front yard. Bill laughed and caught her, wrapping his arms around her slim body in a bear hug, one he wished he could hold forever. Sandra turned and walked up the hallway toward the kitchen. “I’ll give you two some privacy,” she said as she rounded the corner.

  “Dad, are you okay? The whole school was talking about what you did today. Even the principal made a big speech during closing announcements about how you saved some girl from the I-90 Kidnapper, and guess what?” she said, her eyes shining with excitement.

  Bill smiled. His day was looking up already. “Yes, I’m okay. And what?”

  “Cody Small—he’s the captain of the football team, Dad—he came up to me and talked with me all the way to the bus. Cody Small has never paid any attention to me before. I didn’t even think he knew who I was!”

  “Well, then, it was all worth it.” He looked his daughter in the eyes gravely. “Can I let you in on a little secret?”

  “Of course. You know you can always tell me anything.”

  Bill laughed. “Hey, that’s supposed to be my line—you stole it from me! Anyway,” he said, “that was the whole reason I decided to help that poor girl. I figured you needed a little boost with Cody…what was his name again?”

  “Small, Daddy, Cody Small.”

  “Oh yeah, Cody Mall. That’s why I saved that girl, so Cody Mall would talk to you.”

  Carli laughed. “Small.”

  “Well, I’m sorry,” he told her. “I can’t do anything about his height. I’ve given you all the help I can with this Cody Mall character. The rest is up to you now.”

  His daughter shook her head. “You’re hopeless,” she said, but she was smiling widely, and Bill knew the trip over here had been well worth it. She kissed him on the cheek. “I’ve got to get back to my homework.”

  “Yeah, sure,” he said. “I know you’re really texting Lauren, telling her this whole Cody Mall story, embellishing it and making up all kinds of cool details that didn’t really happen.”

  She stuck her tongue out at him. “Maybe so, but I’m getting my homework done, too!”

  Bill opened his arms an
d gave his daughter another hug. She might be seventeen and going off to college next year, but she would always be his little girl. “I love you, sweetheart.”

  “I love you, too, Dad.”

  CHAPTER 16

  MARTIN KRALL SELECTED A DVD and pressed the “Play” button on his remote before firing up his computer. Instantly, the high-definition flat-screen TV taking up half of one living room wall was filled with the image of a well-endowed blonde writhing and moaning. She had the hard-edged appearance of a woman who had once been beautiful, but now, after years of drug and alcohol abuse—not to mention the rigors of dozens upon dozens of porn flicks—simply looked used-up.

  The barest shadow of a long-lost former innocence, an innocence Martin found sexy and appealing, colored her features as she moaned and groaned, giving the performance an almost comic quality as three young men, probably years younger, did things to her that most people reserved for the privacy of their bedrooms. All three men featured bored, half-attentive expressions.

  The performance was largely wasted, though, because after a cursory glance at the screen, Martin lost himself in an Internet search, paying only the slightest attention to what was happening on his TV. Missing the video action didn’t matter; he could always watch later. First things first. And the first thing tonight was the fascinating information Martin was beginning to uncover about the busybody hero wannabe from earlier today; the guy who had stuck his nose where it didn’t belong and, in the process, ruined a perfectly good kidnapping.

  It was unbelievable how much an intrepid explorer could discover on the information superhighway if that explorer was properly motivated and willing to put forth some effort to retrieve it. In Martin’s case, it didn’t even take a whole lot of effort. After all, the TV news bimbos had given Martin a leg-up on the search by flashing that beautiful, high-definition video sequence of the busybody leaving the scene of the failed kidnapping in his work van.

  And just in case there had been any doubt in Martin’s mind as to who had ruined his plan with the blonde teenager—like, say, maybe the guy driving the van was just an employee of Ferguson Hardware and not the actual store owner—the coiffed and blow-dried news pimps had very generously provided Martin with a name as well. Bill Ferguson. Of the aforementioned Ferguson Hardware empire.

  Armed with that knowledge, finding out all Martin Krall had ever wanted to know about the buttinsky was simply a matter of taking the time to read the information generated by properly worded search engine requests. For example, he discovered that Bill Ferguson was the owner of a pair of independent hardware stores in the local area, one in Winton Center, New York, and the other—the home office—located in West Stockton, Massachusetts.

  Through various background check sites, Martin was also able to discover that Bill Ferguson was forty-three years old, two years divorced, with an ex-wife who had remarried not long after ending the relationship. He maintained an apartment in the local area close to—and here was the best part, the deliciously cosmically perfect part, the juicy cherry on top of the vengeance banana split—his daughter, Carli, a seventeen-year-old, slim, athletically inclined, blonde high school senior.

  And that was perfect. Because depending on whether she was a dog or not, Bill Ferguson’s daughter could be the perfect replacement for the prize Martin had lost today.

  He navigated to the Web page of Stockton High School. Stockton was a small town, so Martin figured there was a better than average chance she played at least one sport at the varsity or JV level. First, he checked out the softball team’s page. No luck. She was listed on the roster as a varsity infielder, but Martin didn’t care about that. He was looking for a picture. No luck under field hockey either. Then he clicked on the girls’ soccer link and smiled as his patience and hard work was rewarded. Filling the screen was a full-color action photograph of none other than Carli Ferguson herself!

  She had just scored a goal and was captured at the apex of an exultant leap in the air, high-fiving two teammates on a sun-dappled late-fall afternoon. Her blonde hair, pulled into a ponytail, hung perpendicular to the ground at the top of her leap, her cream-colored, satin uniform jersey pulled taut against her smallish breasts. She featured the toned legs of an athlete, long, as though her physique had struggled to keep pace with her body’s growth.

  In short, and just as Martin had already known, she was perfect. Young, blonde, beautiful—couldn’t be better. He sat admiring the photograph of his soon-to-be companion, lost in his fantasies, still paying no attention to the artificial ecstasy taking place on the television screen in front of him. He mused about how he had spent such a long time this afternoon picking out the girl he had hoped would be the one back at the rest stop, only to have her wrenched from his grasp by that loser with the gun who didn’t have a clue how to mind his own business. Then, by doing so, the same idiot presented him with an even better replacement!

  He would have to do more digging—for example, what were the young Carli Ferguson’s living arrangements, and how much time did she spend with her father, the busybody himself?—but after just thirty minutes, Martin had decided exactly what he was going to do and how he was going to do it. He couldn’t believe his good fortune. This was perfect. It was as if the gods of karma were telling him the little chickie he had tried to snatch this afternoon was simply not good enough for him, that another girl would be a much better fit.

  And now he knew who that girl was. Her name was Carli Ferguson, and, incredibly, if she lived anywhere near her father, she was just thirty or so minutes away from this very living room. Over the course of the last three years plus, Martin had been careful to spread his kidnappings over a very wide geographical area, covering more than five hundred miles of the east-west highway. He was certain that caution—among other important factors—had resulted in the authorities not having the slightest clue as to the location of his home base. They wanted him badly, of that he had no doubt, but they would never find him.

  The drawback to being so careful was the time spent on the road, far from home, scoping out potential victims and then snatching them from the mind-numbingly similar rest stops dotting I-90. Recently, he had begun returning home via back roads rather than the Interstate, all in an effort to throw the nosy pigs off his trail—those inconvenient Amber Alerts could really throw a monkey wrench into his well-laid plans.

  So, the fact that his soon-to-be special friend Carli Ferguson happened to live in the immediate area was one more stroke of good fortune, all of it leading Martin to the conclusion that she might actually be the perfect temporary companion, the one special girl he had been searching for all these years. Time after time, he thought he had found her, only to discover upon closer inspection that the girl’s eyes were placed too closely together, or she refused to shut her mouth when ordered to, or she was too tall or too short or weighed a couple of pounds too much. It was always something.

  None of that mattered in the long run, of course, since seven days was such a short length of time—a drop in the bucket, really—but Martin considered himself extremely discriminating, and although he could still have plenty of fun with a companion who possessed a few flaws, he had lived his life waiting and hoping that the perfect one would eventually appear. The search had been exhausting, both mentally and physically, and there were times when Martin had begun to fear he would never find the girl of his dreams, that she was nothing more than the figment of an overeager and overheated imagination.

  But now, with the delectable Carli Ferguson nearly in his grasp, combined with the perfect method of lowering the boom of vengeance on her busybody father, Martin felt like climbing onto his roof and shouting out to the world, “Yes! Yes! I’ve found her! This girl is the one!”

  It was obvious to Martin that the fates had been at work. The girl he had chosen back at the rest stop was unworthy; he could see that now with the benefit of hindsight. The one he had nearly been stuck with was not quite tall enough, and her dishwater blonde hair was dull and l
ackluster compared to Carli Ferguson’s, whose golden locks seemed somehow to contain rays of sunshine itself. He stared at the screen, awestruck by the serendipitous way things had turned out.

  Martin would have been thankful for Bill Ferguson’s interference, but for the knowledge that the wannabe hero had had nothing to do with this afternoon’s good fortune. That had been karmically preordained: it happened because Martin Krall was meant to possess Carli Ferguson. Of that he was certain. He gazed at her photograph, imagining the things they would do together, and marveled that such an angel had been produced by the likes of Bill Ferguson, so clearly a representative of the shallow end of the gene pool.

  Ultimately, though, he knew it didn’t matter. In addition to finally possessing the one—his soul mate, the girl who would worship him and serve him and make this whole dreary existence worthwhile, at least for a short time—Martin Krall would enjoy the added bonus of evening the score with that gun-toting fool Bill Ferguson. Because, even though it was preordained that he experience a week of bliss with the angel Carli Ferguson, he would still derive tremendous satisfaction out of making that stupid bastard Bill Ferguson’s life a living hell. That fool would regret the day he had ever stepped between Martin Krall and Martin Krall’s objective.

  Another thought struck Martin out of the blue. It came to him fully formed, with the clarity of divine inspiration. Why couldn’t he enjoy his perfect angel for months, or even years, rather than the agreed-upon seven days? Why should he turn her over to his contact at all? Why couldn’t he snatch some other girl to satisfy his contact, and keep Carli for himself? Hiding her from his conspirators would not be easy, but it could be done. It was definitely something to consider.

  Martin shut down his laptop, but only after making Carli’s goal-scoring photo the background on his computer screen, so he might gaze upon the sight of his angel whenever he booted up the machine. Then he turned his attention to the big-screen television. The credits were rolling across a black background, something Martin had always thought was ludicrous. Credits for a porn flick? Okay, people might want to know the name of the star, so they could buy her other movies, but who the hell cared what the director’s name was? It’s not like anyone would confuse Naughty Nurses Five with a lost classic from Alfred Hitchcock or something.