Jordan Belcher - Status

I handed it to him. When he put it on the floor and crushed it under his heel, I was speechless. Deja started laughing, her teeth bloody red, and it all became clear. I hadn’t made a mistake with the addresses at all. This was Gideon’s house. He and Deja were in cahoots.

“Tie her up with her daughter,” Gideon said to Deja.

“No, shoot her,” Deja cried. “She knows what’s going on.”

“Just tie her up first, Deja. Shit.”

Deja pushed me toward the gas pipe and shoved me to the floor next to my daughter. She cable-tied my wrists around the pipe. Extra tight.

“We need to talk right now, Gideon,” said Deja. “We can’t keep both of ‘em here for long.”

Gideon looked at me and sighed. “It’s wasn’t supposed to be like this,” he said to me.

Then the two of them walked up the stairs and closed the door.

I immediately tried yanking on the ties. The pipe didn’t budge one bit.

“She use swizzers ,” Kylie pronounced. “When I had to go to the bafroom , she cut t’em with swizzers .”

We didn’t have scissors so I started looking around me to see if I could find anything sharp within a leg’s reach. I didn’t see anything but lint balls and used fabric softener sheets. There were boxes on the other side of the basement but there was no way I could get over there.

“I know it’s something in those boxes…” I said to myself.

“I can get loose,” Kylie said. I watched as she tried to pull her little hands out of her ties. Her thumb was bending in unnaturally and I started to tell her to stop until I saw her hand slip free. I gasped, and a second later her other hand was loose too.

“Look and see if you can find some scissors,” I said.

My heart was beating fast as she scampered over and searched one of the boxes. I heard Gideon and Deja upstairs arguing and I knew it was only a matter of time before they came back down.

“We should have killed Kylie the first day we took her!” Deja yelled.

“And what would we have done with the body?” Gideon hurled back.

“Bury it!”

“Bury it where?”

“Anywhere! In the backyard.”

“Are you crazy? How about we bury her in yo backyard!”

I asked Kylie did she find anything and she looked at me and shook her head no. I whispered for her to look for anything sharp, not just scissors. Then she ran over with a device that I was sure was going to save our lives—a cell phone.

I held the power button and said a silent prayer. It was an old cell, not a smartphone, that Gideon probably stuck in a box down here. The screen lit up and so did my eyes. Even when the display flashed “no service,” I still had hope. I knew 911 could still be dialed out without minutes or a service plan. But when I pressed the “9,” the screen went black. I tried to turn it back on but the battery was dead.

I told Kylie to go look for another one.

“We gotta take ‘em outta state,” I heard Gideon say, “like we planned to do in the first place.”

“No, we have to get rid of them now!” Deja shouted.

“I told you why we can’t do that. We can’t kill them here. That’ll be too much evidence in my basement. You’re supposed to kill them where you bury them. Niggas in the joint told me this shit.”

“That plan sounded good before Tyesha got here. It would’ve been easy to move Kylie alive because she’s a little girl. Trying to take Tyesha too will get us caught. She busted my fuckin’ head up. Something can go wrong on the trip there. She’s a sneaky bitch, Gideon!”

“Don’t call her out her name.”

“Are you fucking serious?!”

In a sharp whisper, I told my daughter to hurry. She dug in a box that tipped over and spilled contents to the floor. My heart raced, waiting for one of them to come bolting down. But they kept yelling at each other. Kylie picked something up and ran over to me. It was a box cutter.

Hurriedly, I stuck the dull blade between my wrist and the zip tie. I sawed back and forth until it popped off and did the same with the other one. I went and rummaged through the boxes, looking for another phone. Instead, I found a laptop computer. It didn’t look new at all—the Dell symbol was missing, and so was the “H” and the “E” on the keyboard. But it had a wireless symbol so I tried to power it on.

It worked!

Deja’s voice boomed through the floor above us. “You know she has to die too now, right? Tell me you know that, Gideon!”

“So you get to be with Rodrick… and who will I have now?”

“That’s not my problem! We teamed up to get rid of their daughter. Everything was fine until your girl showed up. Now she has to die. What do you think, that she’s still gonna wanna be with you?!”

This had to be the slowest computer I’d ever seen. It was still booting up. No wonder he trashed it.

“Go down there and handle your business, Gideon. Or give me the gun. I’ll do it… Give me the gun, Gideon!” There was silence upstairs, then: “Fine,” Deja said. I heard her stomping across the floorboards into another part of the house. “I’ll stab that bitch to death.”

Then her footsteps were coming back, closer to the basement door.

I had to hurry!

“No, Deja!”

“Move, nigga!”

The home screen appeared and I clicked the internet icon. It started to buffer. I glanced up the steps, hearing them yelling at each other close to the door. When the Web finally popped up, I logged in to The Site and typed in my username and password. There was more buffering—I turned and looked up the stairs again, told Kylie to say a prayer—and then my profile page popped up. I dug the sticky note out my pocket and typed Gideon’s address in without using the missing letters. Also, The Site had a navigation feature that pinpointed the exact location posts were coming from; I clicked it.

My fingers hovered over the keyboard, trying to think of a message I could post that didn’t have an “H” or “E” in the spelling. I couldn’t put “help me” or it would read “hlp m.” I couldn’t put “save me” or it would just come out as “sav m.” My brain wasn’t working fast enough!

Then a thought came to mind, the only thing I could think of.

Tyesha816:349 Dnvr av CALL_COPS!_#KIDNAP_#QUICKLY!

The basement door flung open. Me and Kylie ran back to the gas pipe and I stuffed the computer behind the washing machine. We both wrapped our arms around the pipe as if we were still tied to it. The box cutter was still in my pocket, the handle sticking out. I placed my elbow over it to conceal it.

Deja came flying down the steps. When I saw the large kitchen knife in her hand, I grabbed Kylie around the waist and was about to roll us out of the way when there was a loud blast. Deja’s mouth widened in shock—and I thought she was surprised to see our arms untied, until I saw the blood pour out her mouth. She collapsed to the cracked concrete right in front of us. I quickly made Kylie hug the pipe again.

Gideon slowly trotted down the steps. When his face came into view, it was a mask of deep regret. He sat down on the last step and looked at me with sorrow in his eyes. Then he closed them, lowering his head.

I looked behind the washer and saw that I hadn’t clicked “post” yet. My message was just sitting there. Secretly, I stuck my hand out and tapped enter. His head popped up and I jerked my hand back.

“I just wanted you in my life,” he said to me. “That’s what this was all about. She wanted Rodrick, I wanted you.”

“Are you gonna kill us?” I asked him.

“I think I have to, Tyesha. It was just supposed to be your daughter. Because me and Deja knew the only thing keeping you and Rodrick together was Kylie. But then you came here and threw everything off. I knew I couldn’t let Deja kill you. If anybody is gonna do it, it’s gonna be me.”