Brian Freeman - The Cold Nowhere

He’d never gotten past the guilt of what happened to her. For a decade, she’d been his nightmare.

And now this.

Catalina. Cat. Michaela’s beautiful little girl, descending into the lost life of prostitution. A runaway.

‘Mr. Stride?’

She stood framed in the doorway of the dining room, with the lights behind her. She came toward him tentatively. When he read her face, he knew they were both thinking about the same night. Remembering her mother.

Cat slipped to her knees and Stride folded her into his chest and hugged her with the tenderness he would give a child. Ten years had passed, but she was still a little girl. She was fragile and warm in his arms. He wanted to change the past for her and make everything right. He wanted to restore what she’d lost, but that was beyond his power. He couldn’t undo what was done or erase his mistakes. All he could do was make a promise.

Not to himself. Not to Cat. To Michaela. A new promise to replace the one he’d failed to keep ten years ago.

He would rescue her daughter.

He would save her.

The girl had vanished again. She was smart.

He threw down the garage door with an angry jerk of his wrist, shutting out the noise of the wind. With the door closed, he stood in perfect blackness beside the snow-crusted Dodge Charger. He switched on the light, which illuminated the concrete floor, with its mud and grease. The garage was neatly organized. Metal shelves. Tools on peg boards. Chest freezer. He grabbed a plastic gasoline can and topped off the Charger’s tank. Gasoline spilled onto the wool of his gloves, raising pungent fumes. Despite the cold air in the detached garage, he felt sweat under his winter hat.

He’d spent half an hour scouring Canal Park and the streets surrounding the city’s convention center. The girl had to be freezing. She had to be scared. There were moments when he knew she was close — he felt it — but wherever she was hiding, she kept out of sight.

Smart.

He gave up on the search as it got late. The Charger was stolen. It wasn’t safe to stay in the tourist area longer than necessary. He didn’t think the girl would call the police, but he knew that they patrolled the Canal Park area through the overnight hours, and he didn’t want them eyeing the Charger with suspicion. A car slowly making circles through the deserted streets attracted attention.

He headed back to his hideaway in the forested lands north of the city. He could park the Charger, take his car from the garage’s other stall, and go back to his real life. Shed one skin, put on another.

He slid open the second garage door and studied the woods outside before he made his escape. He was sheltered from the highway, and it was a lightly traveled road. No one could see him. The owners were snow birds; they wouldn’t be back for months. He had to be cautious about neighbors noticing tracks in the driveway, but few people lived year round on the lonely back roads, and the wind and snow would cover up his trail overnight. This had been his lair for a month. He would be gone long before anyone discovered it.

His phone vibrated in his pocket, demanding attention. He knew who it was. Only one other person had the number for this phone.

‘She got away,’ he said, answering the call.

There was no reply. He could hear mixed emotions in the silence. Terror. Relief. Then finally a voice: ‘Maybe we should just forget about her. Maybe it’s okay.’

‘It’s not okay,’ he said.

‘The girl doesn’t know a thing. Let her go.’

‘We can’t. Don’t you get it? She’s a bomb waiting to blow up in our faces.’

He heard another long, tortured pause.

‘So what happens next?’

‘She disappeared again,’ he replied. ‘She’s on the run. You need to find out where she is.’

‘I already told you exactly where she was going to be tonight. You said you would handle it and you didn’t. You said it would be over by now.’

His gloved hands squeezed into fists. He didn’t need blame. They were way past blame. He couldn’t believe that one teenage girl could put the entire scheme at risk.

‘Just find out where she is,’ he repeated angrily.

‘How do I do that?’

‘That’s your problem. And do it fast.’ He hung up the phone.

He was breathing heavily. It was true; it should have been over by now. A teenage hooker had outsmarted him. He’d let her sneak through his grasp again. She should have been in his hands weeks ago; she should have been dead and forgotten. Once she was out of the way, the trail would be buried like dirt over a grave. They’d finally be safe.

He told himself he still had time to fix this. No one was asking questions now. No one knew the girl’s secret. Even so, the clock kept ticking. A month had passed. The longer he waited, the more chance there was for things to go badly. Someone had already made the connection and, sooner or later, others would follow, as long as the girl was out there. The dominoes would fall, snaking their way back to his doorstep. He couldn’t let that happen.

Time to go. The outside woods were deserted. The street was empty.

Real life.

Before he got into his car, he spotted the chest freezer on the far wall. He couldn’t help himself. He checked it again, the way he’d checked it a thousand times, lifting the lid, feeling the frost envelop his face. The body was a horrible thing, rock solid, like an alabaster statue. It was odd how he still expected the eyes to pop open, the mouth to form a scream as it gasped for air. He wasn’t a monster; he felt regret. Sometimes there was no way but the hard way.

Some secrets couldn’t be allowed to come back to life.

He shut the lid of the freezer, leaving the body to feel the burn of the ice. It was a tight fit but there was enough room for one more inside. The girl was small.

‘Go with me on this,’ Maggie Bei said. She sat on Stride’s kitchen counter, kicking her legs and sipping hot coffee from a cardboard cup. ‘I think a sausage McMuffin with egg may well be the world’s perfect food.’

Stride glanced at the clock. It wasn’t even six in the morning on Saturday, and it was still dark outside. He’d been asleep for two hours, but the noise of his partner in the kitchen had awakened him. He opened the McDonald’s bag and saw a second sausage McMuffin inside, which he took out and ate ravenously. ‘I think you’re right,’ he said.

‘It’s the little slice of cheese that does it. I love that. And the egg that looks like a hockey puck. I could eat these every day.’

‘You do.’

‘No, some days I get those little breakfast burrito things.’ She popped the top of a can of Coke with her fingernail and handed it to him. ‘You look like you need caffeine, boss.’

‘You think?’ Stride said. He still wore his jeans from the previous night and the same wrinkled dress shirt. He’d kicked off his old boots, and he felt the coldness of the floor under his feet. His head throbbed, but the fizz of Coke was like aspirin.

‘Sorry it took me so long to get over here,’ Maggie went on. ‘The phone didn’t wake me up. Weird.’

He wondered if that was true or if she’d chosen to ignore his call.

The tiny Chinese cop hopped off the counter onto her big block heels and sat at his dining room table. She wore drainpipe jeans and a tight red Aerosmith T-shirt that barely covered her stomach, despite the morning chill in the cottage. She acted as if nothing had changed between the two of them but, in fact, their relationship was strained. For years, she’d shown up with breakfast two or three times a week. He’d wake up and find her reading his newspaper, eating from her McDonald’s bag.