Aric Davis - The Fort

“Maybe I can get in more trouble, maybe I can’t,” said Tim. “But I do know one thing. You could get in way more trouble if I tell Mom what you were really doing.”

“I was at the movies, duh. Best of luck. Don’t let the door hit your ass on the way out.”

Tim gave her a look that she met and matched. He knew that he needed to get her attention, and do it fast, or he was never going to hear the truth. “Aren’t you even worried about Molly?”

She threw herself upright against the headboard, the book closed, forgotten on her lap. “That’s a shitty thing to ask me, you little turd. Of course I’m worried about Molly. Not that it’s doing any good. The cops think she’s dead.”

“I don’t think you are,” said Tim, treading in shark-infested water. “In fact, I think you and your friends are sort of hoping maybe she won’t come back, and then none of you will get busted for what really happened.”

“You shut up. You can’t just barge in here saying all this awful shit. My friend got kidnapped, and you and your stupid friends got jealous and made up some dumb lie that you immediately got caught telling, and now you want to bring me down to your level.”

Tim took a deep breath. It was time to go for the kill. Becca was teed up for it. “You aren’t even considering one thing,” he said in a measured tone. “My friends are telling the truth, and so am I. I’m telling you, we saw Molly with a dark-haired guy in the woods. He had a gun to her back. A black gun, and Molly was scared out of her mind.”

Becca grimaced slightly at that. It was barely there, but Tim saw it.

“Well, good job, Becca. You and all your friends lied, and now one of your best friends is going to die. That detective might think he caught the real liar, but he’s wrong. You haven’t told anyone the truth.”

“Shut up, would you?” Her face was paling by the second, and her eyes were sparkling with greasy-looking tears. “Just shut up!”

“You need to tell the truth, Becca. She’ll die if you don’t.”

“I can’t ,” she said, backhanding the tears from her eyes and glaring at him. “I can’t. It’s terrible…we’d be in so much trouble. Mom and Dad would, like, I don’t know, disown me, or send me off somewhere.”

“You guys weren’t at the movies at all, were you?”

Becca shook her head back and forth, tears streaming down her face. Tim knew that now that she was started she’d tell him the whole thing, she’d be desperate to blurt out every sordid detail of what had really happened Monday night. For better or for worse, Tim was going to get the truth.

“They threatened me, said that if I told anyone, I was done at the high school. If I was lucky they’d just kick my ass, or maybe even something worse would happen.”

“Why did they not want Molly found?”

“Tim, you don’t get it,” said Becca, exasperated with him. “That happened before we went out. All the threats, the don’t tell anyone, ever —all that happened before Molly was gone, before we were even there.”

“What are you talking about? What were you doing?”

Becca adjusted herself on the bed, managing to look both comfortable and miserable at the same time. “Go check the door,” she said. “Make sure Mom’s not out there, and if she’s not, shut it quietly.” Tim did, and when he came back, he sat at the foot of the bed. “The older guys called it fishing. A bunch of girls dress up really skanky, and then they drive us down to South Division Street, the bad part. The girls get dropped off, and the guys go to a couple of motel rooms, except for a couple of them, who stay in the alley to protect us.”

“But what were you doing?”

“We were pretending to be hookers,” said Becca matter-of-factly. “And when a guy picked one of us up, we’d tell him to go to the motel because we have a room. The customer or whatever comes up with the girl, and once he’s in the room, a bunch of the guys jump him and take all of his money. He can’t call the cops because he was breaking the law, and we all split the money up.

“I did it, like, once. My shirt got ripped when the guy I brought up grabbed me. He was super pissed and really scary. Anyways, Molly got picked up and never showed up. Then we heard that cops were coming on the police scanner that Tyler brought, and we all had to leave. I figured she just got to the motel after we had to leave and got arrested, or had to do, well, what the guy wanted.”

“Becca, what is a hooker, exactly?”

“Jesus,” she said. “You’re such a baby. It’s someone who has sex for money. That’s how we knew all the guys would have cash. They were going shopping, just not for groceries.”

Tim let it all sink in. He understood most of it but didn’t want to feel stupid by asking too many questions. “So this guy could be anyone?”

“Yep,” said Becca. “And whether that’s Molly by the drive-in or not, there’s no way she’s still OK.”

“Unless we can find who took her,” Tim said. “It’s someone from this neighborhood. You guys might have been downtown, but he came back here. You know how I can prove it? When we saw his gun, Luke shot him in the leg with Scott’s stepdad’s rifle.”

Becca snapped to attention. “You really did see them—like, for real?”

“That’s what I’ve been saying. Why the hell would we make it up? Not only did we see them, we hurt him. Now we just need to find out who he is.”

They were both quiet for a long minute, staring at each other without really seeing each other. Then Becca said, “Well, it’s been raining a lot. Everybody’s lawn is going to grow a ton. If he really did got shot in the leg, there’s no way he’s mowing his lawn.”

Tim’s mouth dropped open, and then a banging on the door made them both jump. “Tim, get out of your sister’s room and go pick up everything outside,” said their dad. “Storm’s coming.”

“One more thing,” said Tim, quietly. “You said there were people watching to make sure you guys were safe, right?” She nodded. “You need to see if they can tell you the type of car Molly got into. We know he lives around here.”

“I’ll try, but I’m grounded from the phone.”

“Just try,” pleaded Tim. He stood and waved to his sister, smiling sadly. She gave the same look back, because Molly really was in trouble, and Becca had to know that it was her and her friends’ fault.

36

The wild beeping of Scott’s watch alarm shocked him awake and sent him scrambling to silence it. His mom and Carl were just across the hall but, impossibly, didn’t stir. Heart hammering, he eased out of bed, pulled on dirty clothes as Tim had suggested, removed his window screen, and slid to the earth, thankful that he didn’t have a second-floor bedroom.

The air was cooler than it had been the night before, and Scott was briefly sorry he hadn’t brought a sweatshirt with him. He reached the fort in no time, though. He threw his Coke cap down, noticing that tonight he was the third man to the party. He scrambled up the ladder and threw himself over the threshold at the top to find his friends grinning and waiting for him. “Glad you could make it, slowpoke,” Tim teased, and Scott faked a punch at him before sitting. “Any news?”

“Nothing on my end,” said Luke. “I sat in the fort all day and didn’t see anything.”

“I talked to my sister,” Tim said, and then began to relay what she’d told him. The fake-prostitution trick, the way Molly had really been taken, the tip about looking for little signs in the suburban neighborhood, like unkempt lawns, and finally, the idea to have her try to figure out the make and model of the car the man who took Molly had been driving. He went through it breathlessly, racing to relay the information.