by Ty Patterson
On cue, Beth appeared at the door, Meghan behind her, hopping from one foot to another. ‘You joining us? Or are you too old?’ the older sister smirked.
The three went for a morning run whenever Zeb was in the city and followed up with an exercise drill that he’d taught them. The drill was a mix of freestyle martial arts moves and core strength workouts that he’d customized for them.
A light rain was falling by the time they got to Central Park and upped their speed. Zeb led initially, and then the twins. They usually went ahead, letting him run at his pace, knowing that he liked his solitude.
There were a few cyclists, a few other runners, fellow fitness enthusiasts nodding at each other in greeting. Zeb moved to the side to let a bunch of people overtake him; it wasn’t about speed for him.
A hooded runner approached him and ran past him, and for a moment Zeb admired the way the runner’s arms and legs flowed, and then he was past and Zeb was in his own world.
He went into his grey zone, conscious of all that was happening around him, distant from his surroundings at the same time.
He ran his ten miles and slowed and searched for the twins. There they were, all by themselves, near a bench. Some men stopped to look at them, a couple whistled. The sisters didn’t look up, didn’t respond, and Zeb felt warmth seep through him at their lack of reaction, at their discipline.
He went through his own routine, more elaborate than that of the twins; strikes and blocks, kicks and parries, feints and thrust, slow, fast, fast, fast, till his limbs seemed to move like a blur. He was aware of someone clapping, people drifting, and then the beast roused.
Zho didn’t know why he was observing Carter and the women; he just was.
He had returned from Northlyn and had been satisfied by the social media storm he had initiated. He knew Peng Huang was pleased too, as were the shadowy puppet masters in China.
Zho had returned to his stakeout on Columbus Avenue as if drawn by a magnet, and when the three people had stepped out, he had instinctively followed them. He was conveniently dressed in his gym gear - hoodie, tracks, running shoes – and he followed them without thought.
He hung back on the first lap and changed direction on the second. He wanted to see Carter up close, wanted to see his eyes.
Carter didn’t meet his eyes. The man seemed to run as if lost in himself, other people on the track falling away from him, giving way to him.
A tingle ran through Zho as he recognized the way Carter ran; it was how he himself moved.
He leaned against a bench and stretched his legs as Carter and the women went through their workouts. He recognized most of Carter’s moves, Muay Thai, Silat, Wing Chun, many others. Carter, like himself, seemed to adopt various moves from different styles.
Maybe it was his body motion as he removed his right leg from the bench and extended his left, that caught Carter’s attention.
Suddenly Carter was looking straight at him.
He’s the one! Zeb knew instinctively, recognizing the way his body reacted, flooded with awareness, at the other man’s presence.
The ghost’s hoodie had slipped off his face giving a glimpse of lean cheeks, clean shaven, short black hair, dark eyes that seemed to be electric.
He’s Chinese, too.
The man was as tall as Zeb, his movements as languid, as he withdrew his leg and straightened, and walked away without a backward glance.
‘You know him?’ Meghan joined him and followed his gaze. ‘I spotted him a few times today.’
‘Never seen him before,’ Zeb replied, his eyes still on the receding figure.
‘You reacted as if you’d met him before.’
‘I’m sure I will meet him.’
Chapter Twenty-Nine
The woman knew something was up; she had been bundled into a van and driven, before, but this time something felt different.
She had been woken late in the night, had been tied and blindfolded and had been roughly shoved into a van. She was aware of two men, one who guided her to the open doors of the vehicle, the other who seemed to be the driver.
The woman had been held captive for such a long time that she had lost track of days, weeks, and years.
There were days when her memory was like a clear stream and she could remember everything, there were other days when everything was hazy, like a blurred picture. Squint and peer as much as you might like, the details remained elusive.
Her captors had beaten her and tortured her. They had pulled her nails, and held her feet over fire. They had waterboarded her a few times. The torture wasn’t limited to physical. They deprived her of sleep and food and interrupted her whenever she nodded off.
Her cell was a small windowless room with a single light bulb that was never turned off. They replaced the bulb when she smashed it, taking care to sweep away all fragments of glass. She remembered snorting; they needn’t have worried about her taking her own life. She wasn’t the suicidal type.
That was then. Now, she wasn’t sure.
She looked down at herself, at the scrawny arms and legs, at the scabs and open wounds on her feet and fingers. She didn’t have a mirror, but knew her teeth were damaged and her lips were shapeless. She had been called beautiful once, she had turned heads. She was sure she would still turn heads, in the other direction.
They had moved her from apartment to apartment, block to block, after her initial two weeks. She didn’t see much of the apartments she was brought to. She was blindfolded each time and all she saw was her room, her prison. She thought she was still in New York, but wasn’t sure of anything, anymore.
She had scratched days on the walls of the first apartment, using her nails. She had given up after a while. There wasn’t any point after time had become a seamless continuum.
They hadn’t raped her and that surprised her. Her chief tormentor, a Chinese guy who never gave his name, had seen her without clothes several times. Each time there hadn’t been even the faintest flicker of desire in his eyes.
She had tried, awkwardly, to play the coquette the first time he’d asked her to strip. He’d backhanded her casually, breaking her lips and a tooth.
She had revealed everything to them, after the regimen of psychological and physical torture. She had been trained to withstand aggressive interrogation, but the human body could take only so much.
Her mind gave way and she spilled freely, whenever they asked her. She had felt shame initially, now she felt nothing.
The torture had stopped once she had told her secrets, but they continued to hold her prisoner. They didn’t kill her, fed her the bare minimum nourishments her body and mind needed to function, and moved her from place to place.
She had asked her tormentor why they kept her alive. He hadn’t answered. He had spoken quite freely initially, in the early days of her captivity, but the words in him seem to have dried up. Now, he only asked her questions. And tortured her.
Her tormentor usually worked alone, but had two other men helping when they moved her. Those men didn’t speak either. She had caught a glimpse of one of them the first time they hurried her into a van.
He was Chinese, as was her tormentor.
The door to her room opened silently and her tormentor entered. He was bald, had small eyes, and was perennially expressionless.
‘Stand up,’ he commanded.
She struggled to her feet and rose slowly.
‘Turn around.’
She faced the wall obediently and felt the mask fall over her face. ‘Are you moving me again?’ she whispered through her smashed lips. It had been so long since she had spoken that shaping her lips around words took an effort.
There was no reply. She felt the man’s breath on her neck as he fastened her wrists behind her back, his touch surprisingly gentle. He turned her around and something stirred in her that she thought had died.
She shouldered him roughly, hoping to make him stumble, and blindly raised a knee to where she thought his groin was. The next
moment she was bent double, gasping, as a pile driver pounded into her belly and drew away all her breath.
She coughed and spit; tried to, since her throat was dry, and moaned when he hauled her up by her hair, grabbing it through the hood, and shoved her out of the door.
She shivered in the cold and knew it was night when she stepped outside. She could smell it in the air in the closed space that she could sense. A garage.
That was how they moved her from A to B. They brought her out through a door that led to a garage and pushed her inside a van.
This night was no different. She could hear her tormentor speak softly to two men, words that she couldn’t catch, and then one man gripped her by the elbows, another opened the door, and they helped her inside.
Neither of the men who had handled her was her interrogator. She knew his feel, these men were rough, they had longer nails and calloused hands.
She fell inside what felt like a padded van and lay on her side, breathing shallowly, as she tried to listen. She knew the van was escape proof from her previous outings, but maybe she’d get a clue to their destination, by listening.
All she heard was an order. ‘Drive.’
Two men in the front, she thought, not that it would do her any good.
She was flung from side to side as the van turned corners and took lefts and rights. From the faint sounds of traffic, she assumed it was the deep of night. At one point she heard another car pull up beside them, at what she assumed was a stoplight, and heard laughing above the throb of engines.
She thumped the padded sidewall with her elbows and knees, knowing fully well it was futile. Sound didn’t escape the vehicle. She had tried several times before, each time in vain.
They seemed to be entering a busier thoroughfare when the van resumed again, going by the sounds of traffic. Driving straight since the vehicle rocked gently and didn’t twist and turn.
The steady drive changed suddenly when a horn blared and the van braked hard throwing her against the front. More honking sounded, urgent, furious, and then a vehicle crashed into the front of the vehicle, dragging it to the right.
Another crash, in the side, bent the sidewall and buckled the rear doors.
A few vehicles raced on, many seemed to stop at the scene and she heard footsteps race past, to the front of the van. She heard angry yelling as she braced herself against the front, dragged her head down against it, and managed to get the hood off her face.
She hobbled to the rear doors and kicked against them. They held. No one seemed to hear her from the outside.
She kicked again and thought she saw a sliver of light. She lay down on her back, bent her knees and summoning all her energy, kicked hard. The doors still held, she wasn’t strong enough. She rose and threw herself against the rear, taking the impact on her back.
Her heart beat faster when the doors parted an inch. She got to her feet and pushed with her shoulder. The doors resisted for a moment, their hinges broken by the impact, and then they gave way.
She hopped out, lost her balance and fell. She got to her knees, then her feet, and straightened herself and looked around swiftly.
The van was jammed tight against the curb, with cars, pickups, flashing lights, lined up behind it and to its side. Headlights lit the rear of the van making her squint, but there didn’t seem to be any occupants in the vehicles behind the van. They all seemed to be bunched at the front where furious arguments seemed to rage.
A car door popped open, a few vehicles down the line, and a woman called out, ‘hey?’
For a moment she thought of going to the woman and seeking help, but the image of her torturer came to her mind. She didn’t know how well organized her captors were. Maybe they had vehicles following the van. Escape seemed to be the better option.
The captive looked away from the lights and took off with a hobbling run. She got to the sidewalk and walked at a fast pace, her head bent down, ignoring the yells from the rear.
Through the corners of her eyes she saw the two men from the van backed up against it and surrounded by a throng. She hurried, but no one seemed to pay attention to her. Maybe the two men had said the van was empty. The woman who had yelled at her still seemed to be calling out, though.
The captive turned back once and was reassured when she saw no pursuers. She broke to a shuffling run, movement difficult because of her bound arms, and in the distance, saw something that gave her hope.
It was a sanitation truck, parked, its lights blinking. She could make out garbage collectors hauling what looked like black sacks, heading to the vehicle. She wondered briefly at the odd timing of their collection, then put the thought behind her mind and ducked behind a car and watched them for some time.
The rear of the truck was open, like a giant mouth and she could dimly see sacks piled up inside. That too was odd, but she wasn’t going to question her luck.
She timed her move when both the collectors had their backs to her and were moving to another house. She slipped the first time she tried to climb inside. She jumped as high as she could and got her back on the metal bottom of the truck, tucked her legs tight, and rolled inside. She crawled swiftly to the front and burrowed deep amidst stinking sacks of waste; just in time as more black sacks crashed on top of her.
The truck rumbled to life ten long minutes later during which the woman crouched, her heart pounding loudly. It set off on a meandering drive and stopped several times to fill its insides with more of the city’s garbage.
She escaped at its fourth stop when the truck was well away from the accident scene. She crossed the quiet street and hurried down, not recognizing the neighborhood.
Her luck held again when she spotted a dog walker emerge from a dark home.
‘Sir,’ she shouted. It sounded more like a croak to her.
She hurried and the man looked once at her and turned his back on her, his dog tugging at its leash. He didn’t seem to give a second thought at her appearance. This was New York, unusual was normal.
‘Sir,’ she called out again, and this time he stopped and turned, a frown on his face.
‘I need your help, sir.’ She turned around to show him her bound wrists. ‘Could you please call the police?’ The words tumbled out like a stream that had been once dammed.
‘I am Calliope Minter.'
Chapter Thirty
Meghan rushed out of her apartment and tapped on Beth’s door as soon as she’d hung up on Chang. Her sister flung it open and marched out, dressed in her jacket, her Glock visible beneath it.
‘Zeb?’ she enquired.
‘Waiting. In our chariot.’
Zeb opened the doors for them, touched an invisible hat and bowed when they boarded his SUV. He got a snicker from Beth, and an astonished look from Meghan.
‘Looks like someone’s developing a sense of humor,’ the older sister commented and pointed grandly ahead, ‘Forward.’
‘Any more details from Chang?’ Beth asked her sister when Zeb had raced out of their basement and was barreling down Henry Hudson Parkway. They came across a few cabs, shift workers, but the city was theirs that early in the morning and they made good time.
Chang had taken to calling Meghan for any update, something that had initially rankled the younger sister. ‘I want to be informed too,’ she had hissed at the cop.
He had rolled his eyes and said he couldn’t give the same briefing twice. ‘I call the first number on my phone for the two of you. That just happens to be Meghan’s.’
‘My name should come first, that’s assuming you know your alphabet,’ she’d fumed sarcastically.
Chang had turned his phone around to show their names in his directory. They were entered as Petersen1 and Petersen2.
‘No,’ Meghan replied, ‘Cali isn’t in a fit state to talk. Can’t be questioned.’
‘Where’s she now?’
‘The Bronx State Hospital. She was found in Baychester by one Dwight Kalecki who took her to that hospital. Her folks will be soo
n moving her to a hospital closer to home.’
‘What did she say?’
‘Nothing, other than revealing her name. She persuaded Kalecki, who was walking his dog, to inform the police. Kalecki did, the call finally reached Chang and when they reached Kalecki’s residence, he’d taken her to the hospital.
‘He seems to be an enterprising man.’
‘Meet him and see for yourself, is what Chang said.’
Kalecki’s dog had kept tugging, urging his master to resume their walk. He had smells to sniff at, lamp poles to explore, and here his master was wasting time, talking to some lady.
He tugged again and this time Kalecki turned around and gave him The Look. Oh well. He planted his bottom on the sidewalk and waited with his tongue out. It looked like the walk had just been canned.
Kalecki took his time in responding to the woman, his eyes watchful, wary. He looked behind her and didn’t see anyone following her. He had been mugged a few times and knew what to look for. None of those signs were present, the woman seemed to be alone. Her hands were bound for sure and in the early morning light, she looked as if she had been roughed up. Still, appearances could be deceptive. He checked out the street again before turning to her.
‘I haven’t heard that name, ma’am. It should mean something?’
The woman’s teeth chattered and Kalecki felt bad immediately. His Dawn would’ve given him a roasting, if she had been alive. The woman’s bound, Dwight. She’s shivering and has been abused. Don’t you have eyes? she would have yelled at him.
‘Let’s first get you inside, ma’am. Get you warm and have some food inside you. Looks like you haven’t–’
He sucked in his breath sharply when a passing vehicle’s beams lit the woman’s face up.
