Method 15 33 (25 page)

I leveled my gun, aimed at Blacksuit’s right eye, and fired. Bull’s eye. Snapped him dead on. He crouched to his knees in the driveway, screaming. Redsuit took hold of Mozi, as if to use him as a shield, but Mozi was so short, the driver’s torso and head, although bent, were in full view. I fired again, this time at Redsuit’s left eye. Bull’s eye. Snapped him too, dead on.

“Mozi, Mozi, run, buddy! Run to me. Run Mozi,” I screamed, while jumping from the tree. My second tree jump of the day. This time my sleeping legs failed me when I landed, and the gun flew from my arms. But adrenaline, now adrenaline, what a friend. Fighting every instinct I had to give in to the debilitating fire in my legs, I stood, wobbling, grabbed my gun and aimed again at the men, who were howling in the driveway.

“Mozi, Mozi, run, buddy!”

But Mozi appeared too drugged and scattered. He teetered forward, he sort of saw me, he teetered more. He was only one foot away from Blacksuit and Redsuit. I had to get closer.

Walking like a determined and murderous soldier approaching an unarmed enemy, I cocked my gun, kept it forward, and issued no warnings. I fired again, hitting an arm here, a leg there, any part made vulnerable to my shooting. Their bodies writhed in pain under my power. One of them turned an ear to me, so I aimed for the small hole and set a bead straight into his hearing canal. I’m pretty sure that shot hurt even more than the eye. Well, maybe not. But who gives a shit.

“Mozi, get over to me now,” I shouted.

Behind me, finally, someone noticed.

“What the hell is going on?” A woman behind me yelled.

“Call the cops!” I said. “Call the cops!”

I later learned she’d been out walking her poodle and collie.

The two men limped quick to their Datsun, and without even shutting the doors before backing up, peeled out of the driveway, out of the cul-de-sac, and out of town. Cops snatched the idiots in a failed shoot-out at a McDonald’s in nearby Cicero.

Mozi fell on the grass, and I ran to meet and encapsulate him. He had no clue what was going on. That night. That night, Mozi slept mercifully oblivious, given the pills the doctors gave him.

Mozi has never talked about his day with those scumbags. Never said what went on in that house. But Mozi never put on his funny red cape again. Never sang a funny song. I’m sure I haven’t seen him smile in all these years. After his second suicide attempt and his third failed marriage, Mozi moved into my parents’ house, refusing to ever set foot in their basement or any basement, anywhere, ever again.

Once I took Mozi on a fly-fishing trip to Montana—my hope to extract from him the poison so flooding his veins. All he did was fish. And one night, he cried in his tent. I didn’t want to embarrass him, so I stood helplessly outside, pacing around the
bonfire, staring at the flames like I do, biting my thumbnails, and confused as to what step I should take. I prayed the zipper would come down, and he’d crawl out to find and talk to me. I wanted so badly to enter his tent and hold him. Squeeze all the bad memories away. But he never came out.

I’m still so heartbroken whenever Mozi waddles in his slippers into a room; a vastness follows him, sucking away whatever energy he might have carried with him. The blackness under his eyes, his drooping lids, these are the signs of his sleepness nights.

So I hunt. I hunt all those deplorable, worthless nobodies, those vacant suits of meat who deserve nothing, those demons who abscond with children and deserve less than we’d give a rabid rat.

My parents formed their newfound goal, a relentless hope that their babies would never be taken again, a responsibility they poured into me. They dragged me to the shooting range, insisted I take up archery. Whispered in my sleeping dreams how I should train for law enforcement. This was their vicarious wish, their way of coping with the horror. My seeing gift was out of the bag, and I became the regional record-holder on bull’s eye arrow shots and telescoping those with a second arrow.

Oh, whatever.

Here’s the point: I can take any shot. Any damn shot.

The Feds first tried to force the sharpshooter program on me. But I insisted on kidnappings. They either relented to my persistence or conspired to be voluntarily unaware of the psych tests that must have warned otherwise. Eventually, they assigned Lola as my partner or problem, depending on how viewed. I’d definitely say problem when we first met, but very soon thereafter, a partner in the highest sense.

So as Lola and I drove through the very middle of flat Indiana in a borrowed F-150, and as my vision sharpened and my hearing dulled, I set my sights on shooting someone that day. Everyone who took a child and taunted me, also took Mozi, scared Mozi, stole
his humor, over and over again. And I felt every single one of them should suffer terrible pain and unbearable humiliation.

We turned where our truck owner told us to turn. The all-season tires scattered rocks along a dirt road, which had parts paved and parts unpaved. Unpruned apple trees, knotted and jagged with age, bordered the drive, and out beyond rolled the longest field full of cows I’d ever seen. How quaint I thought the fall arrival must have been for students when this country school was in its prime. Now it drooped in coldness and neglect, tortured by the lethargic rain, which barely cared to fall on this forgotten place. Everything was draped in a blackness above and an evil within.

I had the ultimate asset in Brad’s VW: his gun, Asset #42, if only I could pry it from his bloody fingers. After he called me the C word, my eyes began to flutter and roll deep within their sockets. This happens to me once in a great while. It is this involuntary state my mind takes me to when my overactive cerebral cortex is in overdrive. Trance-like I become, and the sensation of lightness, busyness, zapping in my brain feels so great—like a perfect buzz with the best of wine, only you become sharper in thought, not blurred like you would with alcohol. The feeling is rather addictive, but you can’t force it—you must simply wait and allow for the tingling to take over.

All I needed was a distraction to Brad’s left. If he turned his head, his right arm—the one closest to me and which held the gun—would shift back. If I acted on this split second when his muscles would be in repose by pushing with one hand on his right shoulder, his elbow would jam into his seat and his forearm weaken. His grip would loosen. With my other hand, and with the element of surprise further lessening his hold, I could snag the gun. I’d have all of one second to make the move once a distraction hit.

But what distraction?

We were stalled in the middle of the woods. Trapped at the end of what must have been a mining road.

The rain fell, again, only here and there. The watery plopping was not even loud enough to call to mind the firing of my first-grade school shooting episode.

A squirrel might hop tree to tree. A bird might swoop limb to limb. These movements were not enough of a true distraction. I had no assets outside that car. Or none that I knew of, just then.

I could have said, “Hey, look, over there, a polar bear.” And since he was a dumb-nuts psychopath, he may have craned his neck. But first he would question me, even if for only a nanosecond, and in so questioning, he’d tighten his grip. I needed a truly alarming jolt to make him twist, for this was what would push him physically and mentally into my plan. Shock and jelly muscles. These are what I needed.

Since I could find no distractions in scouring the forest outside the VW, my eyes continued to flutter, flipping through options, calculating and connecting dots, drawing lines, designing a new plan. The car was littered with assets. And as I logged them, my eyes rolling, he taunted me with wicked words.

“You crazy little bitch, you lunatic. Look at you,” he said, his face curled in disgust.

A screwdriver on the floor of the backseat, two feet from my left hand, down, left angle, Asset #43
.

“Stop blinking your fucking eyes!”

Roll of duct tape around the stick shift, Asset #44
.

A pen on the floor by my right foot, hitting the pinky toe side of my Nikes, Asset #45…

The tie around his neck, Asset #46
.

His phone in the cubby, Asset #47
.

“Panther, you scare me. You try, oh ha ha.”

I fluttered on, even though the blinking was becoming less and less natural and more and more forced. I thought a charade of craziness might lull him to feel safe in his own. He seemed to be getting distracted. His grip lessened on the gun, which I could tell by the return of some wrinkles on his waxed knuckles.

And then…

Like a glorious gift, when I was about to consider very closely the screwdriver, to my great surprise, an outside distraction actually came. If I weren’t so practiced and empty, I probably would have been stunned.

“Put your fucking hands up in the air,” a man yelled from outside the car.

I didn’t even look up. Brad twisted toward the voice in the woods, just as I had only seconds before hoped he would, and I simultaneously shoved his right shoulder into the seat. His elbow pushed back, his grip opened, and I grabbed that damn gun.

I looked up to see a mixed-ethnic man, half-Asian, half-Caucasian, his legs A-framed, and his gun poised. His gray suit screamed federal agent.

Behind the car was a thick woman with a short haircut and a masculine nose. Her gray pants and white button shirt also screamed federal agent. She, too, had Brad in her gun’s scope. Beside her was not an apparent agent, but a farmer-looking old man with a cocked and aimed rifle.

“Get out of the fucking car you piece of shit, asshole,” the woman demanded.

“Lola, take cover, I got this. Boyd, stay put. Yeah. Stay put, old boy,” the male agent said, a bit too calmly. He squinted to aim, and I believe he winked at me, as if thrilled to perform a murder on my behalf.

I could tell he meant to hurt Brad.

I liked him immediately.

I squirmed backwards, intending to exit the car, and realized too late that I was still buckled in. And then Brad took the wild option, one I had considered but ruled out because I thought it too insane, even for him. Before I could exit the car, he floored the gas, going faster than appropriate down the short stretch of remaining road. We barely missed the passing trees when he jerked the wheel swiftly left and off the road. Low-lying limbs scratched the sides of the car as we continued on and up the granite slant of the low end of the quarry.

Into the water we plunged.

The gun fell beyond my reach.

We arrived at Appletree, and just as soon as we did, Boyd came hauling out the door of one of the wings. Appletree Boarding School, so said the weathered sign on the side. Boyd slung his rifle up over his shoulder. He beckoned us to get out of the truck and run to him. My hearing was coming back in waves, a disconcerting undulation of dying and then replenished noise. A whoosh, a crackle, a series of disjointed words, up with volume and then a quick decline.

Boyd’s words came to me in a flood. “Come on now, y’all. Bobby’s pretty sure they took the dirt road that goes to the quarry. They trapped in there, for sure. Prolly hidin’ an all. Bobby just ran up here to tell me so and he’s off to the hospital with the otha girl. Otha girl says there’s anotha girl. Girl is Dorothy, the one Bobby’s got. This seem right, Mr. Liu?”

“Yes, Boyd. Where do we go?”

“Come on now, I’ll show y’all.”

Procedure says I should have confiscated Boyd’s gun and made him point the way, insisted he stick close to the schoolhouse and call any other authorities there might be in surrounding communities.

Fuck procedure. Lola and I needed back-up. And I didn’t have any time to spare on others getting mobilized.

Boyd, turns out, is a champion hunter. Hunted his whole life. Back then, he held the Indiana State Title for largest buck taken with a single shot. So Boyd knew how to traipse lightly
on fallen leaves. The sight of him, it was almost cute, tip toeing like a creeping Fred Astaire through the woods. Lola and I were trained on how to follow footprints and muffle our own approach, so we did just so. But frankly, I couldn’t hear much of anything anyway, so I’m no judge on how quiet we really were. My hearing had gone back to a muffled wind. I’d catch only pieces of Lola’s whispers.

“Liu…there…smell…gas…car…engine running.”

I didn’t smell any car. The aroma to me was just the forest, the wet leaves, the musty bark, the crispness of damp dirt. I think this is the exact same scent most everyone else on the planet would catch when walking in the woods. But since Lola was the connoisseur of odor, I followed her nose.

Boyd nodded his approval, for he was headed that way anyway.

Sure enough, we came upon the back end of a parked VW. Smog billowed out of the tailpipe, plainly visible on the cold air.

I crept slowly closer and to the driver’s side. And as clear as if only one foot in front of me, I saw Lisa, seemingly in a trance, blinking her eyes wildly. She looked exactly like the school photo they had scanned in her file—the file they gave to the wrong team. Who I thought was Ding-Dong faced her, not me. He seemed to be shouting in her face. How odd they appeared, victim and perpetrator, sitting in a car in the middle of the woods, staring each other down.