Mark Gimenez - The Abduction

Now Ben was trying to pour a cup of coffee, but he was fighting the morning shakes. Kate took the coffee pot from him and poured then walked the cup and saucer over to the breakfast table without a word. Ben sat down, held the cup with both hands, and sipped the coffee. Five years since she had made his morning coffee, but Kate remembered the routine; there was enough caffeine in this coffee to defeat the mother of all hangovers. But Ben Brice had not surrendered to the bottle last night.

Sam sat across the table. He was still wearing the Boston Red Sox uniform, but he now had a blue scarf wrapped around his head. He was alternating between taking syrupy bites of his pancakes and reciting lines as if acting out roles in a play.

“Wait! You have to take me to shore. According to the Code of the Order of the Brethren-”

Sam turned slightly as if facing another character; his voice changed.

“First, your return to shore was not part of our negotiations nor our agreement. So I must do nothing. And secondly, you must be a pirate for the pirates’ code to apply and you’re not. And thirdly, the code is more what you’d call guidelines than actual rules. Welcome aboard the Black Pearl, Miss Turner.”

Ben looked at Kate by the stove. She said, “Movie dialogue. He’s got John’s memory. He can recite entire movies verbatim.”

Sam continued: “So that’s it then. That’s the secret grand adventure of the infamous Jack Sparrow. You spent three days lying on a beach drinking rum!”

Sam gestured as if his knife and fork were bottles.

“Welcome to the Caribbean, luv.”

Kate said, “Sam, is that from a PG-13 movie?”

Sam froze, his mouth full, his arms still outstretched, and his eyes suddenly wide as if he’d been caught red-handed. His eyes darted to Ben. He decided to save his grandson again.

“The Red Sox are your team?”

Kate shook her head and turned back to the stove; Sam turned back to his pancakes and said, “After the IPO.”

“What?”

“Dad’s gonna buy the Red Sox for me, after he’s a billionaire.”

“Really?”

“Yep.” Sam took a huge bite of pancakes-his cheek was now bulging like a baseball player’s with a wad of chewing tobacco-and said, “So how much money does the cretin want?”

“Who?”

“The man that took Gracie.”

Ben glanced over at Kate. “Oh. He hasn’t said yet.”

Sam sighed. “Well, I wish he’d shit or get off the pot.”

“Sam!” Kate said.

Sam shrugged. “Yeah, then Dad can write a check and Gracie can come home.”

“Our town’s a damn safe place to call home!”

Across town, Police Chief Paul Ryan was standing in the mayor’s office, looking at the mayor’s broad back, and listening to the mayor’s whiny voice as His Honor pleaded with a Dallas newspaper reporter not to write a negative story about Post Oak, Texas. But as if his mind were repeatedly pressing the ALT CH button on the remote control, his thoughts kept switching back and forth between dark images of a little girl he didn’t know lying dead somewhere and the bald back of the mayor’s head, wondering how much hair spray it took to keep his comb-over in place. Paul Ryan never trusted men who combed over.

The mayor never came in on a Sunday and never early on any day of the week. But this Sunday, Ryan had arrived at seven and been immediately summoned to the mayor’s office. He knew the mayor would not be pleased, what with the town just getting over the heroin OD at the high school, and now this. Bad for business, heroin in the high school and kidnappings at the park. And the mayor was all about business.

Theirs was a tenuous relationship at best. Ryan was a holdover from the old days, back before the Dallas developers had discovered their sleepy little town forty miles north of the city and had bought up the open land he used to hunt as a kid and carved it up into exclusive gated communities promising peace and prosperity, bait to Boomers fleeing the ills of urban life. And the Boomers had come, arriving in their Beemers and Lexuses and Hummers like fire ants in the backyard-one day they’re not even here, the next day they’ve taken over the goddamned place. Ten years ago this had been a farming community with a land bank and a feed store; today it had a Victoria’s Secret and a Starbucks.

Paul Ryan hated the Boomers.

But the mayor had welcomed them with open arms. Because the mayor owned the land, or damn near most of it, inherited from his daddy or acquired at foreclosure for pennies on the dollar during the drought years when the farmers couldn’t keep up their payments to the bank, which the mayor and his daddy before him owned. Paul Ryan’s father had committed suicide less than a year after the mayor’s father foreclosed the farm.

Paul sighed. The mayor was a short, pudgy bastard who couldn’t even make the high school football team that Paul Ryan had starred on. But now, just like the mayor’s daddy had held the note on the Ryan family farm, the mayor held the note on Paul Ryan’s career, a career he could foreclose at any time: the town charter expressly stated that the police chief served at the pleasure of the mayor. And the mayor was not pleased. He hung up the phone and glared at Ryan.

“Paul, why the hell did you bring in the FBI?”

“To find the girl! The Feds got more experience and a helluva lot more resources than we got.”

“Yeah, but they don’t got jurisdiction!”

“FBI helps local police in all child abductions. They bring a lot to the table, Mayor.”

“They bring the media to my town!” The mayor pointed a fat finger at Ryan. “Paul, you either find that girl alive or you find her dead, but I want her found, I want someone arrested, I want this deal closed in forty-eight hours or you’ll be a goddamn security guard at the Wal-Mart!”

FBI Special Agent Eugene Devereaux dodged the little Brice boy as he entered the kitchen for a cup of coffee. He knew the caffeine would only inflame his prostate, but a little girl was missing and he needed a shot of caffeine to get sharp. He had gone to the motel at midnight and just returned with an empty gut. He would normally lose ten pounds over the course of an abduction investigation. Hell of a way to diet.

Devereaux was about to walk out when the grandmother shoved a plate of food at him. The smell reminded him of his own grandmother’s breakfasts back on the farm in Louisiana. He figured it was better to eat her food than donuts all day. So he sat across the breakfast table from the grandfather; they acknowledged each other with grim nods. The grandfather’s hands exhibited the morning tremors of an alcoholic. After Devereaux had eaten half his stack of pancakes in silence, the grandfather said, “Why would he leave her shorts in the woods?”

Devereaux was trying to think of an appropriate answer other than because he’s a sick bastard when the father rushed through the kitchen looking like he had just rolled out of bed; his black glasses were riding low and lopsided on his face, one side of his curly hair was pressed flat, the other side was standing on end, and he was still wearing the same dirty clothes. He exited through the back door without a word. Minutes later, the father returned and walked directly over to Devereaux; he held out a camcorder like the one Devereaux had given the wife for Christmas.

“I forgot,” he said.

“Forgot what, Mr. Brice?”

“I taped Gracie’s game.”

She was Michael Jordan in soccer shorts.

The other girls seemed like typical ten-year-olds, awkward, plodding, stumbling at times, while Gracie seemed… well, graceful, elegant even, her gait smooth and rhythmic, gliding down the field in her white shoes, then a sudden burst of speed propelling her past the defenders, all the while making the white ball seem like a puppet on a string, dancing in front of her, now to her side, then abruptly racing ahead on her unspoken command. And she owned her opponents equally, moving them about like pawns on a chessboard, a slight shoulder fake sending the defender charging one way only to watch helplessly as Gracie spun off in the opposite direction, where the ball was somehow waiting. Natural athletes always made it look easy. Gracie Ann Brice was a natural athlete.