Method 15 33 (22 page)

I shoved the ring of keys in Dorothy’s hand.

“Go now! Do what I said. One minute. Run! Go, go, go. The van key is the one that says Chevy. Go. Go.”

These were the last words I ever spoke to Dorothy M. Salucci.

I ran straight toward Brad, a knitting needle in one hand and a bedpost arrow in the other.

“Son. Of. A. Damn. Bitch. Lola. Sonofadamnbitch!” I said, after slamming the flip on my giant cell phone and cringing from the incessant ringing in my ears. Boyd had answered my call, and I think he agreed to check the schoolhouse and bring his gun, but I couldn’t hear him. Then he’d called back, I think within five minutes—I knew only because I’d set the ringer to vibrate. Boyd’s words melded together in a muffle to me, which must have registered on my face, for Lola crawled past the flaming car, grabbed the phone even though I hadn’t said a word to her, and listened to whatever Boyd was yammering on about. She relayed Boyd’s news—once again shocking and near unbelievable—by scrawling out a summary in the notebook she kept in the square pocket of her man pants.

Here’s what her note said:

B find DSaluc at his van. ?? Woods? No Lisa. B say, “Ain’t no sign of no other girl. Ain’t no one around here.” B used phone in school kitchen. B reports, “Some kinda smell downright awful in here, coming from the upstairs. Smells like death.”

After this fairly appropriate, file-worthy note, she added her thoughts on a second page of paper, while saying the words slowly so I could read her lips:

“And how the hell’s Boyd supposed to understand what an awful smell is? That shit-stinking chicken farmer.”

The Bureau required all of our notes and observations, especially those we wrote, to go into the official record. But you
try and stop Lola from spouting off on her constant opinions. I ripped her second note, wishing she wouldn’t editorialize so much.

“With all the burning cars and people—like your dumb ass—I got to save, spare me the pleas about my opinions, Liu,” she hissed when I tossed the pieces of her note to the now slick ground.

I knew what she said, mostly because I read her moving lips; the ringing, the ringing, how awful that ringing had risen. I was a mad deaf man, fighting to hear clearly again. I felt I was still dreaming, running so fast, beating my legs to pump harder and harder, my chest heaving in the stress to move forward, but moving nowhere, an inch an hour. Ring, ring, ring, the ringing drowned everything out, blurring the world. I clawed my hands, cupped my ears, searched the falling sky for any other sense, any color, only to find the mottled gray of an unfurling curtain—and the shadows of black, how they, too, fell like ghosts. The clouds had merged into a coiled thunderhead, and yet, despite the ominous darkness, relinquished only bits of water as though to torture us all in that strip mall parking lot. And the fire didn’t care; no liquid could quench its anger. Sammy’s Volvo, stripped of much of her paint, became a warped box of burnt steel. Only blotches of orange remained in the parts untouched by flames.

One of those irritating raindrops, a fat one, plunked on the bridge of my nose, rolled on the crest before plunging left to ride the cavern of my cheek, and landed on the topmost rim of my lips. The friction of the water’s movement itched me to an untenable annoyance, so I quickly rubbed my face hard with the sleeve of my moist, gray jacket. The ringing seemed to soften when I fixed on this other sense.

After reading Lola’s disdainful opinion of Boyd’s report on the smell of death, I shot her the “Seriously” look while covering both my ears as though this would dampen further the bleating bells. She backed down.

An ambulance and a fire truck came onto my and Lola’s
accident scene, the ambulance practically skiing in on two tires. By this point, Lola and I were standing and separately guarding the chief and the deputy. Onlookers had formed a half circle behind us, all safely at bay given Lola’s ferocious commands and spitting yells. While she kept our boundary intact, I scanned the crowd for anyone who might have an off-road truck.

A woman in a quilted Carhartt jacket stood taller and wider than her compatriots. She had long, thick, farm-girl hair, and under her jacket she wore a flannel shirt, buttoned to the top and untucked over a pair of white-washed jeans. Mud melted up over the toes of her boots, the kind with a thick rubber sole. I placed her at about mid-forties. Apart from the Viking stature, she was rather attractive.

“Ma’am,” I shouted, nodding to her.

“Me?” She mouthed, inaudible to me. At this point, I suffered a dulled ringing accompanied by an auditory windstorm.

“You got a truck?” I yelled.

“Ford F-150,” she said. I moved closer and faced my ear directly on her speaking mouth. She pointed to a shiny, black Ford F-150, sure as rain, right behind her. Slow raindrops cut lines down her fogged windows.

“All wheel?”

“Of course,” her lips said, the woman sniffing back a bit of indignation. A man with mutton chops crossed his arms and nodded my way while screwing his face toward her, and with a nose flick, said, “This guy for real?” in his gesture.

“Ma’am, we’re going to need your truck,” Lola intervened, having caught on to my struggle and to my intention.

I stepped closer and pulled the Viking woman out of earshot of everyone else. “And if you could direct us to the old boarding school?”

She again sniffed, but added a disbelieving smile.

“Wow. Hmpph,” Lola later told me the woman said. “I taught there twenty years, until the foreclosure. I’ve been wondering what the hell’s been going on up at the Appletree. Yeah, I can give you directions, all right.”

I rolled my shoulders, scrunching in shoulder to shoulder, attempting to quell the screeching wind within my broken ears. Lola took over, although she too seemed distressed in the way she kept twitching her nose. The stench of burning metal and leather was probably unbearable to her superior olfactory sense.

“Cool your heels, put that bandy down,” Brad said in his awkward manner of speech. He then, not awkwardly but very deliberately, aimed a nine-millimeter to my face.

I paused in the driveway, Dorothy’s knitting needle and my arrow still poised. And there we stalled in an odd stand-off: me, pregnant and panting with MacGyver’d weapons, him, draped in a bloody jacket and with a cocked gun. Although our version of the classic stand-off was so far from a proper Western, in retrospect, I’ve always painted this memory with tumbleweed bouncing on its way to nowhere and crossing our toe-to-toe line.

Where are the damn cops?

But nothing. No one came.

Still, we froze in place.

Out beyond, toward the van, a cacophony of yelling erupted, which surely wasn’t the sound I had expected, such as the clunking of the van’s engine. The medley was of Dorothy’s high-pitch scream and then the more distinct chorus of men shouting. I, mistakenly, pivoted to listen to the noise beyond the pines.

“Boyd! Boyd! Catch her, she’s falling!” I heard one man shout.

Must be the cops
.

Exposing a quick vulnerability, I unwittingly allowed Brad to make up the distance between us. He grabbed me by the side, causing me to spill my handheld assets, and dragged me in a standing top slant. My sneakered heels parted the film of dirt on the driveway into two paper-thin trenches.

What is it with these brothers dragging me backwards?

Brad held his breath in his unrelenting effort to haul me to his two-door VW Bug, an older model in pearl white. In he pushed me, the gun to my temple. And without removing the aim of the barrel on me, he crab-walked backwards and sideways to the Bug’s engine. The rain had smeared the windshield with foggy dots, filtering Brad into a watercolor impression of himself as he rounded the car.

I considered opening the door and rolling down an embankment once our speed reached 25 mph, and I would have taken my shot at the physics of velocity and downward motion to safely jettison my body, but I had an eight-month-old baby in my carriage and I had vowed that not one fine fiber of his budding hair would be ruffled. In fact, my running lunge toward Brad only minutes before was really just a ploy to distract him from Dorothy’s escape—I had planned to cut left and run down the dirt part of the long driveway, in the hopes the cops would soon intercept. But Brad, panther-quick Brad, called my bluff by pulling his gun, which I suspect is the weapon he recovered from his brother upstairs.

I should have taken his gun
.

Off we drove down a dirt road in the woods, in the same direction as the quarry, and adjacent to the curvy, narrow path my captor had forced me down only days before.

The apathetic sky half-heartedly offered rain, but the canopy shielded the car of most of the drops. I stared straight ahead, counting the passing oaks, the passing pines, the lovely birch, and a couple of saplings of unknown vegetation. The forest, although dark from the black clouds, bloomed in uncurling new leaves, leaves of lime and emerald. Had the sun been in control that day, I’m sure brushstrokes of light would have accented the bright hues of green and made shadows dance in a kaleidoscope forest, transforming it to a magical place—for those with the vision to see such things.

Here I am going on about the beauty of a cold forest when
I’m really telling of a drive of horror. But the truth is, I did consider how I might capture the scene in a painting and how I might reduce the play of shadows in shades of gray and deep green and offset those with highlights of lime and sunshine yellows. So if part of this retelling is trying to convey how one without emotion might think in this situation, I’m just recounting the mental and physical facts, as they were.

The tumble of tires over a dry stream caused me to look in his direction. Brad’s nostrils were flared, his eyes glistened from sobbing, and the blood from his face hole dripped to his velvet jacket. When he sensed my eyes on him, he snarled.

“Bitch. I’m taking that baby today,” he said.

I looked forward, concentrating on the black rings of a white birch and how they complemented her budding yellow-green leaves. The tree reminded me of one in the grove behind my home, the one in which I’d hidden Jackson Brown. Such a memory in that moment gave me the resolve to harden further, to generate even more strength. I pushed levers in my brain so roughly, I killed any lingering shred of fear. Yes, practice in my jail cell prepared me for this—the unfortunate inevitable reality. I may have miscalculated Brad’s travel patterns, but I had not failed to prepare for the worst.

The birch allowed me to calibrate a steady self-command, a warrior mode. I sat straighter in the car, as though leaning against the tree’s solid trunk.

Brad, apparently expecting me to beg his mercy, slammed on the brakes, and I folded forward at the waist, bracing against a head slam with quick hands on the dashboard. I was drawn in, however, for I had buckled myself. The forest surrounded us, but for the dirt road behind. Ahead, the road went on about another fifty feet and abruptly stopped at a pile of deadwood that dammed the end-point. There was no other direction to drive except backwards. End of the line.

“Ronny told me you were a cold bitch. He called you a crazy bitch. A crazy fucking bitch. Oh, I’m taking your baby. And you
will pay for what you did. No one knows where you are now. And no one is going to find my exit, little bitch panther bitch.”

How eloquent. What poem are you quoting, Walt Whitman?

What exit? There is no exit. You’re full of shit. You got yourself trapped. You don’t know what to do next. I can see the dancing in your nervous eyes. Idiot. You’re so dumb, dumb as your brother. Couldn’t even plan an escape contingency. How foolish. How juvenile
.

“I know what you’re thinking, panther bitch. You think I need the doctor to slice that baby out of you. Ha ha ha,” he chortled, and on his special, patented low voice, he added, “Who do you think used to cut those girls up before he came? Huh? Me, bitch! Me! And my brother. I got all the tools I need in the trunk. I’ll take your baby, throw you in the quarry, and hike on out of here unseen.”

Okay, he might be telling the truth now. Perhaps this is the plan
.

I pursed my lips and flattened my face, involuntarily signaling I was slightly impressed with his strategy. I almost said, “Touché.” Instead, I chose to raise his bet, launching our game of Crazy Poker into full swing.

“You know, Brad. That’s a nice plan and all. But I don’t think you have the stomach for any more blood today,” I said, winking slowly to match my sly smile. “I mean, the hole in your face is getting real ugly, going to scar your pretty little face pretty bad, precious.” And then I blew him an air kiss.

I have to admit something here. Really, I do. I don’t want you to get the wrong impression. I don’t want you to think me brave, to say such a thing. Actually, I find it rather fun to be wicked. I do, okay. I admit this much here. Frankly, I do have a bit of evil in me, a notion I can’t quite shut off all the way, a feeling of pleasure when someone else squirms in my presence. Please don’t tell the doctors who have so far agreed to not label me a sociopath.

I must have shocked him—which is exactly what I intended to do—for as though I’d tagged him in freeze tag, he stared at me, unblinking. The water from his eyes stopped bubbling anew,
but the older tears fell down his cheek and mixed with the blood, creating a pinkish sludge that pooled in the stubble on his chin.

Dear Brad, you look so terrible. Tee-hee-hee
.

He stared on and on. The sporadic raindrops pinged the hood of the car, here and there, their light tapping nearly silenced by the engine’s purr. All else was quiet, even frozen Brad zipped his lips. Ping. Purrr. Silence. Purrr. Silence. Ping.

Do you see him? A creepy, blood-faced man, shaken, uncoiled, bug-eyed on me. He wakes me from sound sleep, seventeen years later. I bolt up in bed, the world darkened still by him. I noted the time on the car’s analog clock when we stopped: 1:14. At 1:34, Brad was still staring.