Pearce Hansen - Stagger Bay

I walked forward quickly. I wanted to talk to this guy bad; I had some less than friendly thoughts to share. But he just tapped the gas a bit, maintaining a constant distance between us; I stopped.

“Got your message. You wanted to see me?” the Driver asked, letting his beefy arm dangle out the window. His voice was a deep baritone that sounded forced.

“I do. How’s about you get out the car and we have us a little chat about it?”

He snorted. “Soon. Just wanted to show you something for now. Want to see something neat-o? Something peachy keen?”

He reached over to the passenger seat and I tensed, ready to duck and bail if he pulled a gun. But when his hand rose back into view he held a little kid by the scruff of the neck. He turned the child to face toward me and her face glowed like a little moon from the interior: a tiny Asian girl with duct tape covering her mouth, her eyes glassy with terror.

In a singsong chant the Driver crooned, “Looky, looky, I’ve got nooky.”

The grin left my face. “You son of a bitch,” I said, my voice wobbling, a roaring in my ears. “Let her go. Keep it between you and me.”

I sprinted forward. But he just tromped the gas again and the Cougar’s tires smoked as the car leapt ahead, fishtailing a bit until he spun the wheel over, hit the brakes, and skidded the car so it came to a halt broadside to me.

He was about twenty-five yards away now. The Driver was still concealed in the darkness of the car’s interior, but even at that distance I saw the gleam of his teeth in the dimness, and that blond mop of his bulking around his head.

“Good job, Markus,” he shouted over the Cougar’s chugging bass idle. “You really saved her.”

He dragged the girl to him and held her so their faces were side by side. “Are you saved, child?” he asked her. “Are you impressed by Mister Markus?”

Then, with mocking slowness, he pushed her head out the window until I saw her clearly in the streetlights’ glow. Her eyes begged but I stood there useless and trembling with my fists clenched hard enough to cramp at my sides.

“How ironic,” the Driver yelled, still in that forced fake voice. “Been wanting to hook up with you for a while, but you keep running away whenever I get up the nerve to say hello.”

“Please let her go,” I begged, my own voice raised over the Cougar’s engine. “I’ll do anything you say, whatever you want.”

But he only laughed and shook his head. “No, she’s forfeit, though you make an interesting offer. Don’t waste both our time by pleading. Everyone’s making such a big deal out of you. I’m jealous you’re stealing my thunder so much – it’s me they should be afraid of, not you. Still, I must admit to being impressed with the work you did at the school.”

“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.

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 right now.”

“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.”