Darknet (8 page)

“Have you had lots of hit songs?”

“Enough.”

He put the guitar down and looked right into her eyes. She felt her face flush at the attention.

“Want to know a secret?”

She nodded and bit her lower lip, her shyness overtaking her again.

“Go get your iPad and find the state lottery site.”

It took her a few minutes. She mostly only used her tablet for reading.

When she found it, she turned it around so he could see it.

“Check the Lottery numbers from three weeks ago.” He pointed at the item in the menu and she tapped with her fingers to find what he suggested.

“See the winning numbers?”

She nodded.

He pulled out his wallet and took out a crinkled lottery ticket. She stared in surprise when she saw that the numbers matched.

The man kept a ticket in his wallet that was worth $1,320,239.

She didn’t know what to say, but astonishment must have shown all over her face. He laughed and put the ticket back.

“Gotta go. Maybe next time I’ll take you up on that cup of coffee.” He took her hand and kissed it.

She watched as he left the store, wishing she at least had had the courage to ask his name.

Cindy Gail McKay went through school sandwiched between her two brighter siblings. Her older sister Wendy and her younger brother Randy were both the brightest kids in their class all the way through their school careers. They both always got straight A’s without really having to try, always ended up winning awards and scholarships and being the kids that everybody cheated from. Academically, they could do no wrong.

Wendy had been two years ahead of Cindy, Randy one year behind her. And in the middle, Cindy struggled to maintain a B- average, which sometimes slipped to a C when she didn’t put in an agonizing number of hours of homework.

It’s not fair
, she had often thought.

All the teachers frowned at her when she failed any test, as if they knew she just didn’t give a shit. Truth was she cared more than Wendy and Randy. She just wasn’t born with the same kind of brain they had or something.

She’d struggled with numbers her whole life, could never pull 12 x 11 out of thin air, and for many years that haunted her because she always felt she was a failure in her parents’ eyes. Hell, she still was. Her parents still looked down on her, as if she were a scrap of dog shit stuck to the bottom of their shoe. They’d never accepted her radio career as anything other than a stupid hobby, and she barely spoke to them anymore.

Now? None of those school days mattered anymore, at least to her. She knew how to calculate numbers using her iPhone or her iPad, and if she couldn’t remember exactly how to spell something, Microsoft Word was always there to auto-correct.

None of the ways she’d failed all the way through school made a hill of beans worth of difference.

What all those C’s did teach her, though, was how to be organized. If she couldn’t always remember every little detail, she knew precisely how to keep lists of things. She always kept a spiral notebook handy and had a page for every day of the year. On each page she kept everything she needed to know: to-do lists, phone calls to make, grocery items to buy, appointments for herself, Tony, and Avril, and everything else she needed to remember for the day.

Her organization skills were second nature and she never thought about it. It was her primary weapon in life, and it helped her with everything, every single day.

Meanwhile, sister Wendy was an accountant who hated her job, and who spent much of her free time complaining.

Brother Randy was some kind of scientist who specialized in dinosaur bones. Cindy last heard from him about a year ago. He’d been on an archeological dig in Montana. She’d never heard him mention having any friends, but he could multiply two three-digit numbers in his head and recite the value of pi to 100 decimal places.

Today, written in her spiral notebook was the cryptic note:
4 w M, old place.

The note had to be somewhat cryptic. Tony sometimes picked up her book and glanced through it. She hated the invasion of her privacy, but she couldn’t bring herself to hide the book from him either, because she never
had
anything to hide. On the occasions when he did read whatever notes she’d scribbled for herself, he’d frown and shake his head as if she was doing something dirty and disgusting. She hated how he could demean her without saying a single word.

To Cindy, the note meant: Meeting Maria at 4:00 at the place we used to hang out.

The Puget Spaghetti House was one of their favorite places to meet. It was a touristy-type pasta restaurant that had wonderful spaghetti with meatballs and about a hundred other dishes. Cindy and Maria Delgado would meet there about once a year and enjoy their time together.

Cindy was, as always, five minutes early. And as always, Maria walked in about fifteen minutes later, apologizing for being late. Cindy laughed and waved it off. She was already enjoying her second glass of wine, and sitting there relaxing all alone had actually been a nice treat for her.

“You know it was less than two weeks ago that we had dinner last time,” said Maria. “How the hell did you manage that?”

Cindy shrugged. “Can’t I enjoy some time with my best friend?”

Maria smiled. She was perfectly dressed in a white cotton dress with a matching white headband. She looked like she was a mannequin in a department store showing off the best of the new summer line of clothes. Her long black hair twisted down over her left shoulder and she looked beautiful.

Once again, Cindy wondered why Maria wasn’t married or even in a serious relationship, but she knew that just wasn’t her style. She liked her freedom, and that thought pulled a sad veil down Cindy’s face.
Freedom.

“What is it?”

Cindy shook her head and sipped her wine. She pointed at the waiter and then at Maria. He came over and took Maria’s order.

Neither said anything for a couple of minutes. Cindy realized her friend was waiting for her to spill the beans.

“Okay, so I don’t know where Tony is tonight, and to be honest, I don’t care. I just took the chance to come see you. I’ve been—I don’t know—checking something out. Investigating. Researching. I don’t even know what to call it.”

The waiter brought Maria a glass of wine and a bottle that he set on the table between them.

“We didn’t order that,” said Maria.

“On the house.” He smiled at Cindy. “After all these visits from you ladies, somebody finally recognized that we have a celebrity here.”

“Oh shit,” whispered Cindy. “Please don’t tell anybody.”

“Of course not. We’re just glad to have you join us.” He nodded and left.

“We have to find a new place to meet,” said Cindy.

“Don’t worry about that. What were you talking about?”

Cindy wanted to tell her but she didn’t know how to start. She took a deep breath and closed her eyes. Maybe it’d be easier if she didn’t look at Maria directly.

“You know things haven’t been good for a long time with us.”

“Yes. I know you haven’t been happy for years.”

“Not ever.”

“Ever?”

“Not since we got married. He—”

Her voice cracked and she fought back tears. She blinked her eyes; tears leaked out. She was shaking and just wanted to leave, but she couldn’t.

“It’s okay. It’s just me. You can tell me anything.”

“He—he hits me.”

“Oh, God, Cindy . . . Really?”

Cindy glanced at her friend but then couldn’t stand to look at her and she lowered her head. She felt so ashamed and knew she was turning red. She just wanted to slink to the floor and hide under the table.

 “I didn’t know what to do. I still don’t.”

Maria walked around the table and turned Cindy to face her, so that she could give her a hug.

“You know you haven’t done anything wrong.”

“Not according to him.”

“I know you, babe. You could never do anything. Even if you did, there’s never any excuse for that.”

Maria pulled Cindy to her and held her. Cindy was crying in silence, and they stayed that way for a moment. Cindy hated showing how weak she felt, but she couldn’t do anything else. She felt relief at finally telling somebody but also felt helpless at the same time.

She finally took a gulp of air and broke from her friend.

“I’m okay,” she whispered. She used her napkin to wipe the tears from her eyes.

Maria rubbed Cindy’s arm and then moved back to her own seat.

“You can’t stay with him,” she said.

“It’s not that easy.”

“Sure it is. Just leave.”

Cindy looked around to be sure nobody was watching or listening to them. Nobody was.

“He said he’d kill us.” She looked straight ahead, lost in thought. “I believe him.”

Maria just stared at her, as if Cindy had been speaking in Swahili. Cindy understood the confusion, because Maria saw Tony the same way everybody else did. He was the smiling, happy-go-lucky guy who was the life of the party. Everybody loved Tony and knew he wouldn’t hurt a fly. Certainly not his little daughter.

Cindy continued, “I know it sounds impossible, but believe me, I’m telling you the truth.”

She told Maria about all the times Tony had beaten her, how he made sure to never leave marks, and how he almost never broke any bones. She talked for ten minutes without stopping, and by the end, Maria was fuming and believed everything.

“Fucking asshole.”

Cindy nodded. “I have a plan.”

“Tell me.”

“I found somebody who is going to fake my death. Mine and Avril’s.”

“No way.”

“Yeah. I have to get out. He’s going to make it look like we were killed in a fire on a boat.”

“But there’ll be bodies.”

“They’ll be about our size but there won’t be enough left to identify.”

“Whose bodies will they be?”

Cindy had avoided thinking about that and she shook her head. “Maybe stolen from a morgue?”

“Where the hell did you find somebody who can arrange this?”

“On DarkNet. It’s the part of the Internet that nobody knows about. You can find—”

Images passed through her mind of the child pornography, organ harvesting, murder, and so many other terrible things that she’d seen.

“You can find anything there. Trust me on that.”

“This sounds like a scam.”

“No. It’s real.”

“Oh, babe, you’re in way over your head.”

“No. He’s going to help me.”

“By ruining your fucking life? You’ll be in hiding and never be able to come back.”

“Maybe when Avril is grown up. We’ll have new names.”

“I’ll never see you again.”

Cindy was silent and drained her glass of wine.

“It’ll never work. You know that.” Maria’s voice was calm and reassuring. “You can’t hide. You need your freedom. What kind of life is he giving you? What about Avril? Can you really sentence her to a life in the shadows?”

There was that word again. Freedom.

Maria locked eyes with her and they just looked at each other as if they were making a silent promise.

“This guy is a killer, right?”

Cindy nodded.

“He’ll kill people to get bodies that would pretend to be you. I know you, and you would never really let him do that to innocent people.”

Cindy’s eyes watered again. She felt her body drain of energy and just wanted to crawl under a rock.

“No, I can’t.”

“You know what you have to do.”

Do I?

“Do it for Avril. Don’t make her hostage to that bastard. She doesn’t deserve to have to hide the rest of her life. Neither do you.”

Cindy wanted to agree, but she couldn’t say the words out loud. She looked around again, satisfied nobody was paying them any attention.

“I know. But—”

“Have
him
killed. You know that’s the solution. This guy can help you, but not the way you said. He needs to kill Tony and set you free.”

Once again tears filled Cindy’s eyes. This time, the tears were from relief.

“I think I just needed you to tell me,” she said. “I wanted to but I couldn’t. I’m so scared. I’m scared of Tony, scared of this guy, scared of getting caught, scared of what might happen to Avril, just scared of everything.”

She rested her face on her hands and closed her eyes.

“I just don’t want to be afraid anymore.”