Brian Freeman - The Cold Nowhere

He followed the school walls and found a door tucked in a shadowy nook that gave way when he pulled on it. When the door opened, an old school desk tumbled onto the cement with a crash. He swore. Someone had rigged the desk as a primitive alarm, and if anyone was inside, they knew he was here. Meanwhile, the real security system had been disconnected. His arrival didn’t trigger any sirens.

Stride found himself in a corridor lined with tall red lockers. It had a shut-in smell of dust and dampness. The air was cold; the furnace had been set just high enough to keep the pipes from freezing. The corridor was dark, like a tunnel. He could see only a splash of light at the far end where the corridor opened into the school cafeteria. The dim glow made the handles on the lockers gleam like a trail of silver. He made his way down the hallway.

One of the lockers was cracked open. He nudged the metal door with his finger and found a winter coat hung on the hook, a bottle of water, and a pack of cigarettes on the locker shelf. He saw a worn leather wallet, too, and when he opened it, he spotted a driver’s license with a photo of a man named Alton Koren. Stride remembered the name from a report of a vehicle break-in several days earlier. The wallet itself had been stripped; the money and credit cards were gone.

He spotted a second wallet on the floor of the locker. He squatted to retrieve it, but as he did, a door banged behind him. He glanced back and saw a girl burst from inside one of the classrooms. She screamed like a banshee, swinging the forked head of a crowbar toward his skull. Twisting, he shunted away and heard the whoosh of the heavy steel sail past his ear. The hook missed his head, but the rod landed on the meat of his shoulder and drove him to the floor. The crowbar clattered to the ground beside him, and the girl leaped over his body, but he landed a grip on her ankle, making her trip and fall. As she scrambled to get up, he grabbed a belt loop on her jeans and dragged her toward him.

She squirmed like a cat wriggling to get free. Shouting, flailing, she hammered his shoulder, and one of her sharp nails scratched his face. He yanked her up, keeping a tight lock on her arm, and marched her down the corridor to the bright, open space of the cafeteria. A wall of picture windows looked out toward the lake. The room was filled with dozens of round tables topped with plastic chairs. He overturned one chair and forced the girl into it. When she scrambled to her feet, he pushed her back down.

‘Who the hell are you?’ she snarled.

‘My name’s Stride. I’m with the Duluth Police.’

‘What do you want?’

‘Are you Brandy?’

‘Go to hell. I don’t have to tell you who I am.’

He grabbed another chair and sat in front of her with their knees almost touching. He knew she was Brandy. Cat and Curt Dickes had both mentioned the girl’s eyes, and they were her most distinctive feature, huge and blue. They were nakedly sexual eyes, and tough, like a tiger that wanted to eat you. She should have been pretty, but life and want had gnawed at her face like an attack of bed bugs. She wore a dirty yellow tank top over her jeans. She had tattoos covering most of her arms, and her long hair was streaked with blue and purple, with a racetrack shaved over her right ear. She was feral, and she didn’t like being caged.

‘I just want to talk,’ Stride said.

‘I said, I don’t have to tell you a fucking thing!’

‘No, you don’t, but you’ve got a choice to make. I can take you in for trespassing and possession of stolen property, which are misdemeanors, or I can add on first degree assault of a police officer. That’s a minimum of ten years, no parole.’

‘You don’t scare me,’ she insisted.

‘If I don’t, I should. What’s it going to be, Brandy?’

Her eyes never left his face, and her stare was so direct it unnerved him. Calculations spun in her mind, as obvious as reels on a slot machine. Her features softened. Her lips nudged into a smile, as if she could flirt him into submission.

‘What do you want to know?’ she asked.

‘Tell me about Cat Mateo,’ he said.

‘Cat? She’s a pretty little kitty. What about her?’

‘I understand you like to beat her up.’

‘Sometimes.’

‘Why?’ he asked.

‘Why not? If you’re going to join the circus, you better expect to step in some elephant shit.’

‘You told Cat that someone was asking around about her. Is that true?’

‘I don’t know, is it? Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. She’s fun to mess with. So paranoid. Always thinking somebody’s after her. Maybe it’s because of how Mommy died.’ Brandy made a fist, as if she were holding the knife, and stabbed the air.

‘Is it true, or did you make it up?’ he repeated.

‘If I tell you, will you let me go?’ She grinned.

‘No.’

Brandy pulled her tank top down, squeezing it against her breasts. Her nipples protruded like bottle caps. ‘You sure? I’ll give you a freebie.’

‘If you tell me, I’ll forget about the assault charge.’

She pouted. ‘Yeah, okay, fine. It’s true. Somebody was looking for Cat.’

‘When was this?’

‘I don’t know. A month ago?’

‘What did he look like?’

Brandy wagged a finger at him. Her silver nails were filed into points, like talons. ‘Not a guy.’

‘It was a woman?’ Stride asked, surprised.

‘That’s right.’

‘Who was she?’

‘Who knows? I was in a sleeping bag with a guy in the graffiti graveyard. I heard some chick asking about Cat on the other side of the embankment.’

‘What did she say?’

‘Just that she wanted to find her. It sounded like they knew each other. She said she’d found her there before.’

‘In the graffiti graveyard?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Did you ever see this woman again?’ he asked.

‘Nope.’

‘You said it was a month ago. Do you remember exactly when?’

‘The guy I was with, he was wearing a Jason Aldean T-shirt. Wasn’t there a concert or something?’

Stride nodded. ‘There was.’

‘See? That’s worth a free pass. Now let me go.’

‘Cat thinks someone is trying to kill her,’ Stride went on. ‘Do you have any idea who that might be? Or why someone would want to hurt her?’

Brandy’s bony shoulders shrugged. ‘Doesn’t sound real to me. Sounds like one of her dreams.’

‘Dreams? What do you mean?’

‘Cat goes crazy at night. It’s like howling at the moon, you know? She wakes up screaming. Fucking annoying if you’re close by. It’s all death and blood and knives.’ Brandy leaned forward, taking him by surprise, and shrieked in his face. ‘ I’ll kill you, I’ll kill you, I’ll kill you, I’ll kill you, I’ll kill you! ’

She sat back, bubbling with laughter. Her tiger eyes danced. ‘See? Fucking annoying.’

‘Cat dreams about someone trying to kill her?’

‘No, man, it’s the other way around.’

‘What do you mean?’

Brandy made the stabbing motion with her fist again. ‘I think the sweet little bitch dreams about killing somebody .’

Her words hit him in the face, and he took his eyes off the girl, just for a moment. That was all she needed.

Brandy lowered her head and charged like a ram. She collided with his injured shoulder and butted him backwards over the chair. The pain froze his muscles and left him immobile. By the time he recovered, Brandy was halfway across the cafeteria, and he was too far away to catch her. He watched her bolt through the door out of the school with a rebel yell. She jumped the balcony, tore across the wide lawn with her hair flying behind her, and disappeared down the slope leading to the city.