Бентли Литтл - The Disappearance

He did not notice the name of the town they finally reached, but the second they pulled into the parking lot of the police station, Gary was out of the car and dashing toward the building. It was nearly night now, and the sky in the east was a threatening bluish black. All he could think about was the fact that Joan was out there somewhere and it was getting dark. Running footsteps sounded behind him, and he was only a few feet from the door when a strong hand grabbed his shoulder, fingers digging into his flesh.

“Stop!” Reyn’s voice in his ear was low but insistent.

Gary pulled the hand off his shoulder. “What are you doing?”

“Listen to me,” Reyn said. “You can’t go into that police station.”

“What the hell—”

“What if they don’t believe you? Huh? I know you’re just going to tell them what happened, but your girlfriend’s missing, and you probably have more than a trace of some heavy and illegal narcotic in your bloodstream. Automatically, you’re going to be suspect number one. They may lock you up now and ask questions later.”

Gary looked into his friend’s eyes. He hadn’t thought of that. None of them had until now.

“Along with us.”

“Then what do you think we should do?”

Reyn took a deep breath. “I think we should drive back to Los Angeles.”

“We can’t leave!” Gary yelled. “Joan’s missing! She’s out there somewhere!”

“Keep your voice down! What are we supposed to do? Let Barney Fife lock us up? Go back to our camp in case she shows up again? Hole up in a motel room here in Buttfuck, Nevada, wait for the drugs to leach out of our systems and then try to explain to the police why we decided to wait two days to tell them your girlfriend disappeared?”

“You go back,” Gary said. “I’ll take my chances.”

“For all we know, she’s sleeping peacefully in her bed in California right now.”

Brian and Stacy had walked up. “Reyn’s right,” Stacy said, putting a sympathetic hand on his shoulder. “She could have gotten a ride back. She could be in her room sleeping it off.”

“Maybe she’s the one who drugged us,” Brian offered. “Maybe she’s a—”

“Shut up,” Reyn said. “You’re just being an asshole.”

Gary took out his phone, called Joan’s cell. There were five rings, no answer; then her recording came on, asking him to leave a message. The sound of her voice, so familiar and yet now so far away, made him catch his breath. His eyes were suddenly watery. “Call me. Now,” Gary said, not trusting himself to say more. He terminated the connection, then punched in the number of her dorm room. It, too, rang and rang, with neither Joan nor her roommate, Kara, answering.

He ended the call, clearing his throat. “So, what do we do?”

“We go home,” Reyn said. “Maybe she’ll be there by then, maybe not. If not, we say that we thought she’d gotten a ride from someone else, like Stacy said, and we didn’t realize she was missing until we returned.”

Gary was already shaking his head. “But that’s wasting time! What if she was kidnapped? What if one hour makes all the difference? I can’t chance that.”

“What good are you going to be to her behind bars?” Reyn demanded. He gestured toward the station, a small building that looked more like a minor post office than the headquarters of a police department. “And do you really think the men on this force are the ones best equipped to find her?”

“We get our asses back to California and call some real cops,” Brian suggested. “They’ll find her.”

“But the crime scene’s six hundred miles away from Los Angeles!”

“If it is a crime scene,” Reyn said, “and hopefully it isn’t , they’ll probably come out here themselves with all of their high-tech equipment. If not, they’ll call these local yokels, who’ll go out and dig through the dirt and report back what they find. Worst-case scenario? You have two police departments on the case.”

“No,” Gary said, shaking his head.

“I don’t like this, either,” Reyn told him. “But we don’t have much choice.”

“I’m going in there.”

“You can’t!”

Stacy seemed to understand. “Let him go,” she told Reyn.

He wasn’t waiting for their approval or permission; he was already walking toward the building’s entrance. “Wait for me at that Dairy Queen down the street,” he said, pointing. “If I’m not there in a half hour, take off without me. I’m not going to mention you guys or bring you into it; it’s just me and Joan.”

“We’ll wait an hour,” Stacy said. “Then we’ll… I don’t know, call a lawyer.”

“A bail bondsman,” Brian suggested.

“We’ll think of something,” she promised. “Go.” He did. From the corner of his eye, he could see Reyn shaking his head and lecturing Stacy as they hurried back to the car. Then Gary was in the station, approaching the uniformed woman at the front desk and asking to talk to someone about reporting a missing person.

He was out of the station in less than twenty minutes. Brian had been right. There was a forty-eight-hour waiting period. Joan might have disappeared, but until she was missing for two days, the cops wouldn’t so much as glance out the window to look for her. Gary did tell the sergeant who had volunteered to interview him that he and his friends had been drugged, but the older man didn’t seem to care. There was no effort made to draw blood or test him, and the cop’s attitude was one of bored disdain. It was as if this sort of thing happened all the time and he was tired of dealing with it.

Gary emerged from the station feeling angry and frustrated. The sergeant had filled out a form and asked some perfunctory questions so that, on the off chance that Joan didn’t show up and remained missing after forty-eight hours, they could get a head start on the case. But the policeman made it clear that he had no doubt she would surface within the next twelve hours. “Trust me,” he said. “We deal with this every year.” Every time you freaks stage your festival , he didn’t add, though he was obviously thinking it.

Walking out of the building, Gary realized once again how little he actually knew about his girlfriend. Aside from her name and a physical description, he’d been able to give them nothing, and at least three-fourths of their questions had remained unanswered. Most of them were facts that he should know, that he wanted to know, but that he just hadn’t gotten around to learning. Things like her parents’ names, the names of any siblings, her permanent address, her birthplace. There’d been no hurry because he’d assumed that there’d be time to learn all that. He hadn’t known… .

He was acting as though she was dead, and he forced himself to push those thoughts from his mind. Right now, she was only missing and, like his friends said, there were alternate possibilities; kidnapping was not the only explanation for her disappearance. And even if it was what had happened, the kidnappers might be hoping for a ransom because maybe her parents were rich, and maybe—

Maybe she’d been raped and murdered and was lying in a ditch.

No. He couldn’t think that way.

Gary walked slowly across the small parking lot, empty save for two police cars and an old pickup truck.

The night was dark, and the town had no streetlights. The sky looked as it had when they were camping out at Burning Man: massive and infinite, larger, deeper and darker than it ever was in California or Ohio. Gary walked down the cracked and gravelly sidewalk to the Dairy Queen, whose backlit sign was like a white beacon on the highway. Reyn was right, he decided. They needed to go back to Los Angeles. It felt disloyal to even consider such a thought because he knew she might still be somewhere out in the Nevada desert, but the truth was that he’d done all he could here.