“At the school?” I asked, confused that would even matter to this guy.
The Driver’s face moved forward a little more, and the light caught the lower part of his face so I could see his mouth. It was a muscular mouth, and somehow familiar. It looked like it could take a bite out of plate steel, chew it up, and spit it out – I wanted to punch that mouth, bad; I wanted to smash it in with a two-by-four.
“You and me, we’re only good at one thing,” he said. “It’s what we were born to do. We take people’s lives for our own.”
“Maybe so, but at least I kill men face to face, not take little girls from behind,” I blurted. “You only kill the weak.”
His head pulled back into the dimness of the car’s interior and he yanked the girl back with petulant roughness, cramming her into the passenger seat like an errant grocery bag. “You shouldn’t have said that, Markus. Now she screams louder, and it’s all your fault.”
He started driving away slowly, as if daring me to try catching the car again. “You keep this up, I’ll keep it up too. You especially won’t like what I do to the next one.”
He stepped on it and the Cougar sped away with a guttural growl, Booker T and The MGs spilling out the window. I watched him roar past the hospital and disappear into the woods enclosing the Gardens. Out of sight now, I heard the Cougar turn right, head past the Gardens and all that new development, and finally move up Moose Creek Road. After a bit, I couldn’t hear the engine anymore.
“I know you,” I said. “You disguised your voice. You’re someone I know.” But it was hard to feel any satisfaction at that tidbit with my shoulders slumped so low.
Chapter 34
I ran the rest of the way to Natalie’s. The Gardens were in an uproar when I got there: people shouted and ran up and down the block, doors were slamming.
A Hmong woman was shrieking in the middle of the street, one blast after another, so loud and unrelenting I wondered that she could have that much breath inside of her. Her extended family surrounded her.
I ran inside Natalie’s house without knocking, and snatched up the phone. “We already called,” Natalie said, but I ignored her as I jammed away at the buttons.
A female voice answered in a clipped nasal twang: “911 dispatch, what is your emergency?”
“We just had a stranger child abduction here. He took her up Moose Creek Road; we need an Amber Alert ASAP.”
“What is your location?”
“The Gardens.”
The dispatcher was silent for a few moments. “Officers will arrive shortly to take your report, sir,” she finally said.
“What’s their ETA?” I demanded. “We need police response, like
“You need to calm yourself, sir. I cannot give you an ETA at this time.”
I wanted to reach through the phone and throttle her. “Listen, bitch. While you’re dicking the dog here, he’s got her. You want that on your conscience?”
“I don’t have to take that kind of attitude from the likes of you, Markus,” she said, and the line went dead.
“You ever go to catch an elevator, but there’s someone already waiting for it that got there ahead of you?” Natalie asked in that same tired voice. “And you see the button’s lit up; you know that person pressed it before you even got there. But you still got to push that button anyway, more than once even, just in case that first person pressed it wrong or something.”
She gave me a haunted look before walking slowly back into Little Moe’s room. I went outside.
“He’s never done that before, grab somebody from right here in the Gardens instead of out in town,” Big Moe said, resembling Eeyore more than ever. “This is new. He’s stepping it up.”
“We live in Stagger Bay too, but we’ve always been apart, even in the middle of all these goings on.” Moe gestured toward where the lights of Stagger Bay proper shone against the night sky on the other side of the wooded ridge. “They’re all against us; we’re outnumbered and outgunned. If we ever stand all the way up, the whole town will just march out here and wipe us off the planet.”
We headed toward the entrance to the Gardens. Two black-and-whites were parked there nose to nose blocking the road, their strobing trouble lights spinning like idiot dervishes. Reese and another officer leaned against their rollers with riot guns in their hands.
“There’s the Driver right there,” Moe said, indicating Reese.
“How do you know?” I asked.
“Who else could it be?”
“Just running a random field sobriety checkpoint here,” Reese said as we approached. “Anyone coming in or out of the Gardens gets a free body cavity search.” His fellow officer snickered at Reese’s wit.
“She’s only a little girl,' I said. “No threat to anyone, no detriment to Stagger Bay.”
He shrugged, but his eyes wouldn’t meet mine. His uniform appeared sloppier than it had at the deposition. “Kids run away. Sometimes they come back, sometimes they don’t.”
“How can you live with yourself?” I asked, not prodding for once but truly curious to understand the mechanics of whatever rationalization system he’d constructed for himself. “Why won’t you do your job, like Kendra did?”
“You won’t say her name again,” Reese said, his hands shaking as he racked a shell into his pump’s chamber.
Moe flinched, and I’ll admit to a startle reaction myself – only a madman or a kamikaze ignores a shotgun prepping for action. Reese closed his eyes and breathed in and out hard as I counted to ten internally.
When he looked at me again his voice was soft and calm and controlled. “You’re coming mighty close to disturbing the peace here, Markus. Maybe we should go for a ride, and you can resist arrest where there’s no one to video-tape your heroics this time.” His partner snickered again, like a halfwit with no larger repertoire.
“Besides,” Reese continued, “I’m the one who decides what my job is, not gutter trash from the Gardens.”
“How ‘bout you, Moe?” Reese asked. “You think I should do my job?”
Big Moe shook his head, looking at the ground. I was ashamed for him, and for the fear I saw in his eyes. We slunk back to the Gardens.
Chapter 35
They found her body next morning. I heard a low murmuring outside, and roused from the couch to join a quiet throng streaming to where Reese and his brother officer had blockaded us the night before.
She lay in the middle of a subdivision lot across the street. The graded earth looked like it had been deliberately leveled to improve her display, naked as the day she’d been born. She was uncovered so God and everyone could see the things that had been done to her.
Weird signs and symbols were scalloped into her flesh – he’d taken his time to carve them just so. He hadn’t touched her face, probably on purpose. I judged from her frozen stare that she’d been alive through a goodly portion of it.
Her mother fainted, sagging into a boneless heap in the midst of her family. The big Indian kid Mackie took off his flannel and covered the little girl’s body with it. One tiny hand stuck out from under the shirt, palm up.
A caravan came our way: a squad car, followed by an ambulance and an Escort with a magnetized ‘Stagger Bay Coroner’ sign crookedly stuck on the driver side door.
They stopped and got out: Officer Rick Hoffman; two ambulance attendants serving meat-wagon duty; and the coroner, an older man with a doctor’s bag. They fidgeted on the far side of the flannel-covered little piece of evidence, avoiding our gazes as they looked down at the tiny body.
