A Blind Eye (3 page)

She groped her way along the bathroom wall, her hands up high, searching for something. A window? There were none.

“I'm gonna go talk to them,” I said.

She spun around, her back pressed against the yellow tiled wall. “No.”

I left the woman's bathroom—thankfully—and approached our table slowly, listening. I ducked behind a half-size wall topped with fake plants that had faded to an unnatural color of green.

“I don't know,” the waitress said. “They were here a minute ago.” They all stared at the table—their backs to me—as if by watching long enough, I might materialize out of thin air.

“Did you see them leave? Did you give them a bill?” The man asking the questions was the taller of the two, lanky with light-brown hair. He had a calm, deep voice that came from his throat. “Did you run a credit card?”

“No, they must've left without paying.”

I pulled out two twenties then walked over and dropped them on the table. “Sorry about that. I went to get some cash.” I motioned toward the ATM machine I'd noticed in the vestibule as we came in.

“Where's the girl?” the shorter cop asked. He had reddish-blond hair and a nasty scar across one eye.

When I saw them close up, they didn't look like cops. The tall man wore a cheap, poorly tailored suit, the other man, a tough-guy leather jacket. They looked like suspects on
America's Most Wanted
. But more than that, they didn't feel right. My guts screamed at me to keep out of it. When I left the bathroom, I'd planned on turning Scarlett in, but it felt like leaving her on the I-205 all over again.

“She left,” I said, hopefully in an easy-come, easy-go kind of way. “I gave her some money and put her on a bus.”

The tall guy stepped aside and started punching numbers on his phone.

“Which bus?” the one with the scar asked.

I knew nothing about public transit in the greater Portland-Vancouver area. I tried to bluff. “Who are you? Do you have some kind of warrant or license or something? Maybe I should call the cops.” I got out my cell phone to show I meant business.

“You don't want to do that,” Scarface said. He opened his jacket to reveal a big handgun parked in a shoulder holster. “Which bus?”

I glanced at the waitress. She was stacking our dirty plates and hadn't seen his threat.

I should've left Scarlett on the highway. Well, maybe not on the highway but at least at the airport. This was more mess than I wanted to be involved in. “I don't know. The big one with Portland blinking across the front.” Hopefully,
Thou shalt not lie
didn't apply when dangerous-looking men were flashing guns at you.

The tall guy repeated that information into his phone.

“How do you know her?” Scarface asked.

Who were these guys? What could Scarlett possibly have done to have men with guns tracking her? She seemed pretty helpless to me.

“Speak up,” he commanded.

“Look, I don't know anything, okay. I found her on the side of the highway. I gave her a meal and money for the bus. That's all. Why? What'd she do?” I doubted they'd tell me anything, but it didn't hurt to try.

He got all concerned-looking and said in a sugary voice, “She ran away from home, and her parents are worried sick.”

From London? With no bags or money? How stupid did he think I was? “You know what? I think that's a load of—”

I didn't get to finish because he launched forward and punched me hard in the face.

Christian vs. The Audible

I flew back, crashing onto the table behind me. I'd never taken a right hook to the jaw before. It hurt a lot more than I expected.

The waitress rushed over. “Hey! That's enough. We answered your questions; now you'd better leave. Or I
am
calling the cops.”

The tall man glared at Scarface. “Nice work, Connor,” he said as they walked toward the door. “We told you to keep a low profile.”

They left the restaurant, and the waitress turned to me. “You okay, kid?”

“Just swell.” I rubbed my face where he'd hit me. “Ow.”

The waitress pulled a wad of napkins from the stainless-steel dispenser and handed them to me. “You're bleeding.”

I dabbed at my lip. He'd cut it when he smacked my jaw. I opened and closed my mouth, making sure I didn't have a broken bone.

“I'll get you some ice.” She went to a serving station and filled a plastic cartoon-decorated kiddie cup with ice chips then snapped on a bright red lid. “Sorry, I don't have a bag.”

“Thanks,” I said, holding the cool relief to the side of my face.

“Sure.”

I nodded and walked back to the women's restroom. It was empty. “Scarlett?” I checked under the stalls for the second, and with any luck, last time. Nothing. “You can come out now. They're gone.” I pushed open the stall doors, crossing my fingers that some short old lady wasn't sitting on the toilet. I'd be scarred for life.

A woman walked in, saw me, and checked the picture on the door.
“I'm almost done,” I said, not really sure what that might mean. But she left.

I opened a cupboard under the sink and found Scarlett curled up amidst a stash of scented plug-ins and ammonia glass cleaner.

“They're gone. You wanna come out? Or stay here? It doesn't matter to me.” The weird thing is, it kind of did matter. She'd gotten under my skin, and hard as I tried not to, I cared about what happened to her.

She crawled out. “What did you tell them?”

“I told them you took a bus back to the city.”

“How did they find me?”

“I don't know. Maybe the traffic guy at the airport.” That was a good question. Did they know who I was? Were they following my car? They seemed to accept my story about the bus. But what about Scarlett's story? I'd just taken a fist in the face for her; she owed me the truth. “Let's get out of here.”

“Okay.” She reached out a hand, and I laid it on my arm.

We left the bathroom and headed for the exit. The waitress watched us for a moment, Scarlett clinging to my arm—wearing sunglasses—inside—at night—and seemed to finally digest Scarlett's disability.

“Hey,” I said to the waitress. “I don't really know what's going on. But I have a bad feeling about those men. If they come back, maybe you could pretend you didn't see us leave together?”

She nodded and turned her back.

I paused before opening the front door and scanned the parking lot. A young family made their way toward the restaurant, the parents wrangling their herd of kids toward the entrance. Other than that, the place was quiet. We hurried out to the car, and I did my best to keep us in the shadows, away from the glow of the street lamps. I pulled out of the parking lot, checking repeatedly in the rearview mirror. No one seemed to be following us.

No one seemed to be following us?
Those were words I hadn't thought I'd need today when I packed up my stuff and left home. Now I glanced over my shoulder every two seconds. What had this girl gotten herself mixed up in? I'd never make it to Canada tonight. Especially not with documentless Scarlett in tow.

I called an audible. My parents had an old cabin in Hood River. A little A-frame snuggled at the base of Mount Hood. My dad hadn't been there since Mom died, but I went with my buddies on the weekends sometimes. Or by myself when I needed to get away.

I'd take Scarlett there and wait out the night. And in the morning? Well, hopefully I could get more information out of her before then.

I didn't want to backtrack where Scarface and his pal might be lurking. So I took us east on the Washington side of the Columbia River. It'd add a half hour to the trip, but it was safer. At least I assumed. I had no clue what exactly we were running from.

When we passed Camas and merged onto the Lewis and Clark highway, I couldn't wait any longer. The time had come to get some answers.

“Scarlett, you have to tell me what's going on.” I drove with one hand on the steering wheel and the other holding the melting-ice cup to my aching jaw. “How am I supposed to help you if you won't tell me the truth? Why are those guys looking for you?”

She squirmed in her seat and shivered. I showed her how to turn on the seat heater.

“I sort of saw something they did,” she finally said. “Something bad. I went to the police, but they didn't believe me. Somehow, they must have found out.”

“Wait a minute. You
saw
something?” There's no way she'd been faking her blindness.

“The truth is”—she paused for a second then continued in a melodramatic voice—“I see dead people.”

I rolled my eyes for her benefit then remembered she couldn't see it. If she'd said that at the restaurant, I would have laughed out loud. But here in the dark, with the green glow of the dashboard reflecting off her sunglasses and illuminating her pale face, it creeped me out.

“Are you telling me you see ghosts?”

She laughed. “No, I'm kidding.” She tucked her legs up and circled her arms around them. “But I do sometimes see people who are going to die. Like a vision of the future or something.”

“You mean, like a fortune teller?” Maybe she had Braille tarot cards.

All the humor faded from her face. “When I was nine years old, we were poor as church mice. We lived with my grandmother. Mum drank and had a hard time keeping a steady job. Anyway, I loved Gran. She took me to the park and read to me. She saved up all her money so I could have books in Braille.” Scarlett ran her knuckles back and forth on the window, making lines she couldn't see in the condensation. Her accent grew stronger the longer she spoke.

“One night, I dreamed she didn't wake up. I shook her and shook her, but nothing happened. Mum was out, and I waited home alone all day. I woke up screaming. Gran came in to comfort me, said it was just a dream and that she would be alive for a long time still.

“A week later, Mum was at work, and I went in to wake up Gran. I wanted breakfast. It happened exactly like my dream. Exactly. She wouldn't wake up. I sat home, alone, all day with my grandmother dead in her bed.”

Holy smokes. That would be enough to permanently damage any kid.

“A few months later, I dreamed our landlord got shot by an angry tenant. I told Mum, and she called me a barmy git. Then, guess what?”

I didn't like where this story was going. “Your landlord got shot?”

“Bang on.” She slipped her fingers under her glasses and rubbed her eyes. “The police interviewed everyone in the building. I told them about my dream, and they laughed. What would a blind kid know about anything? A few weeks later, I dreamed the landlord's wife hanged herself from the balcony. This time, I kept it to myself. Next day, the police were back at our building cutting down her dead body.”

“What about your mom? Didn't she believe you after the landlord?”

“Maybe. But I think it freaked her out. She hit the bottle even harder, and we lived on nothing but my measly government stipend for being blind. That's when social services sent me to Shepherd Hill. After a year or two, Mum came to the Shepherd to say good-bye. She'd taken up with a guy from Amsterdam, and she was leaving to be with him. I haven't heard from her since.”

She'd lived a hard life, that's for sure. I hoped her school had treated her better. “And you were at Shepherd Hill until you got kidnapped?”

“No. Had to leave end of last year, didn't I? We finish at sixteen.”

“So they dumped you with nowhere to go?” I tried to picture Scarlett living off the streets of London—blind. She must not have done too bad; pink hair and Doc Martins aren't exactly free.

“I had a friend. A bloke I met at the Shepherd—Simon. He works there, one of the administrators. He let me crash at his flat for the summer.”

I wasn't sure I really wanted to know what Simon might have asked for in return for free room and board. But I couldn't help myself. “Was he your boyfriend?”

“No. Just a friend.”

Right, a friend. How often did that really work out? But we'd gotten off topic. “So why did Scarface take you?”

“Scarface?” she asked.

“The guy, I think his name was Connor; he had a scar across his eye.” I drew a line down my own face for demonstration then kicked myself again for being so boneheaded. Would I never get used to the fact that she couldn't see? Until I'd met Scarlett, I'd never realized how much I took sight for granted. I based everything in my life on vision. I couldn't imagine a world of darkness.

“Oh.” She cleared her throat. “After I left the Shepherd, I dreamed that one of the other girls was taken and killed. I went to the police and told them my past experience with dreams and what I saw happen to Katie. The gits still didn't believe me. Two weeks later, she vanished. The police came and asked me more questions, details about who did it. But I couldn't describe him in a way that satisfied the investigators. They asked me loads of times about hair color. Don't know colors, do I?”

Probably not. If you've never seen color, how would you? In that case, how would she know anything? What did death look like in the dreams of a blind person?

She took a deep breath and continued. “Next day, some men broke into the flat, put tape on my mouth, and stuffed me in a bag.”

I almost swerved off the road. “A bag?” Every word she told me made me sicker and sicker.

“Like a suitcase or gym bag or something.”

I clenched the steering wheel. Who did stuff like that? Did she fly in a duffel bag across the Atlantic, wedged into the pressurized cargo hold? Who knew what else they might've done? My bacon double cheeseburger churned in the pit of my stomach. I didn't want to hear any more. I'd seen stuff like this on TV all the time. But having it sitting next to me in the car wrenched my guts.