Linwood Barclay - Trust Your Eyes

She wants her to open up the back.

“Open the door open the door open the door.”

But just as the blonde had her hand on the lever, the cop turned and ran back to her cruiser, hopped in, and sped away.

“No!”

Julie could guess what had happened. Another, more urgent call had taken priority.

Maybe, when the trooper was talking to the driver, she’d noticed something in the back that raised her suspicions. Not actual bodies. If she’d thought she’d seen bodies-living or dead-she wouldn’t have headed off to another call. A large box, maybe? Some kind of container big enough to contain a body?

She had to have seen something.

“Shit,” Julie said as the flashing lights of the police car faded away in the distance. The woman got back into the van, and seconds later it continued on its way.

So did Julie.

Almost twenty minutes later, Julie’s cell rang. She answered without looking to see who it was.

“Hello.”

“Detective Duckworth here. What’s so important you have to get abusive with our dispatcher, Ms. McGill?”

“I think-okay, I don’t know for sure-but I think someone may have snatched Ray Kilbride and his brother.”

“What are you talking about?”

She told him about getting to the Kilbride house seconds after the van pulled out of the driveway. The fact that no one was home. The missing computer, the set of plastic cuffs.

“He was supposed to call me back,” Duckworth said.

“What?”

“Ray Kilbride called me. Then he was interrupted, said he was going to call me back soon, and he hasn’t.”

“I’m right,” Julie said. “They’ve been taken.”

“Who the hell would do that?” Duckworth asked. “Listen, I’m gonna go out to the Kilbride house, see what’s going on. You got the license plate on the van?”

“I’m not close enough to read it. When I had the chance, I wasn’t thinking.”

“Okay, look, anything happens with the van, call me at this number. This is my cell. Got that?”

“I got it.”

She stayed with the van.

There was an accident at the far end of the Lincoln Tunnel. Traffic was getting through a car at a time by the mouth. The white van was about five car lengths ahead. Once it was past the accident, it took off.

By the time Julie’s car was past the fender bender, and she drove onto the island of Manhattan, the van was nowhere to be seen.

“Motherfucker!” she shouted, banging her fist against the steering wheel.

After pulling off the moving blankets and dragging me from the van, Nicole or Lewis tore off the tape that was binding my legs. But the ski mask stayed on. They led me through a door and guided me no more than half a dozen feet down what I supposed was a short hallway. My shoulder brushed up against a wall at one point, and wooden boards creaked below my feet. Hands from behind held both my shoulders, as though guiding me through a doorway.

Then the hands stopped me, and turned me 180 degrees.

“Sit,” Lewis said, working my bound arms over the back of what felt like a standard wooden chair, then shoving me down into it. Then he ran a couple loops of duct tape about my waist, securing me to the chair. He didn’t tape my ankles to the legs, so I moved them around in small circles, getting my blood circulating wherever I could. Suddenly, someone grabbed a fistful of ski mask at the top of my head and yanked, grabbing some of my hair in the process.

I blinked several times as my eyes adjusted to the light, although there wasn’t all that much of it. Lewis was standing directly in front of me, then moved out of the way as Nicole brought Thomas into the room. He was pushed down onto a second chair a couple of feet away from me, taped in, and then Nicole pulled his ski mask off. He blinked a couple of times, as I had, then exchanged a frightened glance with me.

“I’ll get the computer,” Lewis said. “And let Howard know we’re here.”

We were in a windowless room, about twelve by twelve, that had the feel of being the back of a shop. In one corner was a heavy, antique rolltop desk, the sliding door in the up position to allow for a computer. The various cubbyholes were jammed with paperwork, what looked like bills, receipts, newspaper clippings. The walls were almost entirely covered in shelves, made from the same kind of planks that made up the worn, wood floor. The shelves were crammed with old, musty books, antique clocks, Royal Doulton figurines, old-fashioned cameras with bellows that could be stretched out, accordion-style. But most of all, there were toys. Decades-old tinplate cars and trucks, the paint worn off by children who were very likely dead now. Pewter toy soldiers. Dinky Toys, like the ones I had when I was a kid. I spotted an Esso tanker truck my father had given me around the time I was three. An assortment of Batmobile models, in metal and plastic and in various scales. A set of lawn darts and hoops, like we once had and played with in the backyard until Thomas nearly speared the neighbor’s dog. A child-sized plastic fireman’s helmet in red with the word “Texaco” emblazoned across the front. Cardboard boxes of old board games based on long since canceled television shows, like Columbo, The Six Million Dollar Man, The Brady Bunch, and The Man from U.N.C.L.E. And, of course, countless dolls. Barbies, Raggedy Anns, Cabbage Patch Kids, and life-sized plastic babies whose eyes would shut when you laid them flat. Some were minus limbs; others, heads. One shelf contained a collection of old metal robots; another a pile of tinplate trains that looked as though they’d been in a catastrophic wreck. Three black balls, each about the size of a squash ball, which I recognized as sixties-era Wham-O Super Balls, the kind that could bounce over a house.

But I didn’t feel nostalgic, looking at these treasures from yesterday. What I felt was scared. Scared shitless.

Lewis returned with the computer tower and set it on the desk. He detached various cables from the computer that was there, then attached them to Thomas’s.

Nicole, expressionless, addressed Thomas and me. “Someone’s going to be asking you some questions, so the tape’s coming off. If either one of you starts yelling, I hurt the other one. Fast and hard. Are we clear?”

We both nodded. Nicole ripped the tape off me with one short, cruel, backhanded stroke. I winced, licked my lips, and tasted blood. When she did it to Thomas, he yelped. “That hurt!” he said, like he’d been kicked in the schoolyard. But then he immediately apologized to Nicole. “Sorry. I’ll be quiet. Don’t hurt Ray.”

I said to him, “You okay?”

He shook his head. “No. My arms hurt, my lips hurt, and I can’t feel my hands.”

I couldn’t feel mine, either. The plastic cuffs had cut off most of the circulation. I appealed to Nicole. “My brother’s hands, they’re probably turning blue. Mine, too. Can you help us out here?”

Lewis went into his backpack for a pair of orange-handled snippers. “Don’t do anything stupid,” he said as he cut my cuffs, then secured my wrists to the chair with duct tape. The blood rushed back into my fingers, and I closed and opened my hands a dozen times to get the tingling out of them. Lewis did the same thing for Thomas, then went back to work on the computer tower, hooking up the last of the cables and pressing the start button. The machine began to whir and the monitor he’d commandeered started lighting up.

Thomas said, “Anything that’s on there is confidential.”

The home screen, powder blue with only a couple of icons on it, cast a soft light across the room. There was one to open up an Internet browser, one for mail, one down in the corner for trash.

Lewis went on the Net and checked the computer’s Internet history. Thomas hadn’t had an opportunity to clear it, as was his custom at the end of the day, but there wasn’t much to look at. Just plenty of locations from Whirl360.