Gone in a Flash (14 page)

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. That hole was there when I got the satchel,’ Alicia said.

The new man knocked Mr Smith aside and leaned in to Alicia, his muscled hands resting on the arms of the ladder-back chair, his face only an inch or so from hers.

‘Bullshit, little lady,’ he said, his voice no longer screaming. It was worse. It was soft, quiet, and quite chilling. ‘You cut that hole when you felt something in the lining, am I right? And then you did what with it?’ He looked deep into her eyes, then smiled. ‘You put it on your dresser in your bedroom, didn’t you? Or on your nightstand—’

‘She has a desk,’ Mr Jones supplied.

‘Now that makes sense,’ the new guy said. ‘I bet you have a computer, don’t you, honey? And you put it near your computer because you were going to see what was on there. Did you? Did you stick that flash drive into your computer?’

Alicia remained silent. The new guy picked up her chair with her in it, held it about thigh high, then dropped it. Alicia thought some of her innards might just flop out.

He leaned in again. ‘So where is it?’ he asked.

Alicia refused to answer.

He shoved her chair away from him and turned to Smith and Jones. ‘It’s back at her house. In her bedroom. Probably on her desk near her computer.’ He headed for the front door. ‘Smith, you’re coming with me. Jones, kill them.’

‘I hope she knows we’re looking for her,’ Willis said. He and I were in the living room, sitting on the sectional, holding hands, away from our kids who were in the family room, trying to make their own sense of this mess.

‘Why would she ever think we’re not?’ I asked, squeezing his hand.

‘That business last summer—’ he started.

I rested my head on his shoulder, my arms around his middle. ‘That’s behind us, honey. She knows.’

‘If they do anything to her—’ he started.

‘Shhhhh,’ I said. ‘Don’t go there. Please don’t go there.’

We saw Graham come down the stairs. I wiped a tear off my cheek. ‘Hey, honey,’ I said. ‘I didn’t know you’d gone upstairs.’

‘I thought I could rest.’ He shook his head. ‘Not gonna happen. I’m going for a drive.’

‘Don’t,’ Willis said, getting up. ‘You need to stay here.’

Again my son shook his head. ‘That’s not gonna happen either, Dad. I’ve got to be out there. I know it probably won’t do a damn bit of good, but I’ve just got to …’ His voice trailed off. Then he turned and headed into the family room to the back door.

Willis and I followed. ‘Graham,’ I said. ‘Please stay with us.’

He shook his head. ‘Gotta go.’

‘We’re going with him!’ Megan said, jumping up, followed more tentatively by Bess.

‘No—’ Graham started, while at the same time Willis and I were both giving vehement negative responses.

‘We’ll keep an eye on him,’ Bess said and, with his sisters flanking him, Graham left the house and headed for his car.

This mess was really affecting all my kids – my entire family. And I was getting mad. I wasn’t sure exactly what Luna and Donaldson were doing to find my daughter; all I knew was it wasn’t enough. Obviously they needed my help.

Mr Jones stood in the doorway to the living room, alternately staring at Alicia and Bert and then at the gun in his right hand. He’d been given his orders, and orders were orders, but … A kid and an old man? Jeez, he was a criminal, not a barbarian!

‘Mr Jones?’ Alicia said, trying at this point to channel her smart sister, Bess. Bess wasn’t just smart, she knew people, knew how to reach them, and not in a smarmy way, but with understanding and empathy. But Alicia wasn’t sure she could figure out how to empathize with a stone-cold killer, which she assumed to be an accurate description of Mr Jones.

‘Don’t talk to me,’ Mr Jones told her.

‘Do you really want to do this?’ Alicia asked him. She was thinking quickly, wondering what she could say for Mr Bert. ‘Look at Mr Bert, here. He’s spent his whole life working this farm. It’s been in his family for generations. His wife died right here in this house, the same house where she bore him three beautiful daughters. He’s trying to hold on to this land for his grandson, to keep it in the family. Can you really just snuff out his life? Not to mention me, Mr Jones; up until a year and a half ago I was a foster kid, thrown from one rotten foster home to another. Given up at the age of three by a junkie mother. Too old to be adopted. But now I have a family. A real family, for the first time in my life. Please don’t take that from me, and please don’t take me from them,’ she finished, tears in her eyes that were mostly genuine.

She noted with satisfaction that there were also tears in Mr Jones’s eyes. He put the gun down on the table by the door. ‘I don’t wanna kill y’all,’ he said, sinking down onto the sofa next to Bert. ‘I really don’t. But what am I supposed to do?’

‘Untie us and let us go?’ Bert suggested.

Mr Jones nodded his head. ‘I suppose I could do that. But then I’ll be in a heap of trouble.’

‘Well, let’s think of a way you can let us go and save face, shall we?’ Alicia suggested.

It was the middle of the day; the girls should have been in school. Graham should have been in Austin to deal with his second day of classes. His ‘B’ day classes that he hadn’t been to yet – chemistry and engineering. At this point he wasn’t sure if he was ever going back to Austin – not for anything more than to pick up his stuff.

The sky to the east was darkening, storm clouds gathering. They seemed to fit his mood. He saw a lightning strike in the clouds then heard the clap of thunder. The clouds clapping, that’s what Mom used to call thunder. Just the clouds clapping. And then he and his sisters would clap their hands just like the clouds. Jeez, things used to be a lot easier. Back then there hadn’t been anything that Mom and Dad couldn’t fix. Not a boo-boo they couldn’t heal, not a bad grade they couldn’t help you change.

He’d been a smart-ass kid, and sometimes he felt bad about that. Mom had her hands full, especially after Bess came to live with them. He’d been six years old then, and he knew what had happened next door. He remembered it all, quite vividly: his mom carrying Bess in from her house next door where, he eventually learned, Bess’s entire birth family had been killed; Bess, covered in blood and gore from her mother. And then Bess coming to live with them, so traumatized by what had happened that she had been unable to speak for weeks. But eventually it was easy for her to become his sister. It had taken no time at all for him to want to knock her lights out, just like he wanted to with Megan. She was his sister through and through.

But that had never happened with Alicia. Neither of them were kids, like he and Bess had been – she had only walked into his life a year and a half ago. And of course, part of that time he’d been with Lotta, his old girlfriend. But even then, after Megan and Bess gave Alicia that make-over and he saw for the first time what was under that mass of hair covering her face and that awful gray wool jumper she wore every day, even with Lotta still in his life, he was amazed at how the new Alicia made him feel. And it wasn’t just the attraction part of it, although that was definitely there. It was much more. He wanted to protect her. Not in the way he wanted to protect his other two ‘sisters,’ (as if he could ever think of Alicia as a sister) but to keep her safe in every way possible. He wanted to take away her past, change it from the horror it had been to something that she deserved, but there was no way he could do that, and it bothered him.

Graham was still trying to figure out what manhood was all about. How much of the world he could control. And every day it seemed as though fate was telling him how little control he had over anything. He knew he couldn’t change Alicia’s past, but he’d be damned if someone else was going to change her future.

They’d taken the old man’s pickup truck. Parked on the side street, they could see the house where the brown-haired girl lived, and the driveway. They watched as a tall young man and two girls came out and got in a Toyota.

‘Who are the players?’ Mr Brown asked.

‘The two girls are the brown-haired girl’s sisters. I don’t know who the boy is,’ Mr Smith said.

‘Which leaves who in the house?’ Mr Brown asked.

‘The mom for sure, and maybe the dad because of the missing kid. One of my kids goes missing, I don’t think I’d go to work, know what I mean?’

Mr Brown did not respond. If Mr Smith had children, which he found difficult to imagine, he really didn’t want to know about it. They ducked down as the Toyota turned their way, came to a stop at the end of the street then turned left, right by the old truck. Mr Brown listened for the car to pass, then sat up.

‘OK,’ he said to Mr Smith. ‘You carrying?’

‘Absolutely,’ Mr Smith said, pulling a revolver from its resting place at his back, stuck in the waistband of his jeans.

They exited the pickup and started down the street, turning into Sagebrush Trail. Just as they did, a car passed them, turning into the corner house. Mr Smith made an about-face and headed back to the pickup.

‘What the fuck?’ Mr Brown hissed to Mr Smith’s retreating back.

‘She’s a cop!’ Mr Smith hissed back.

Mr Brown quickly joined his colleague and both climbed back into the pickup. Mr Brown started the engine and they drove away, just as the sky opened up and spilled the rain.

Mr Jones removed the bonds that held both Alicia and Bert. Alicia stood up and stretched. Bert sat on the couch and rubbed his wrists and ankles.

‘Sorry about all that,’ Mr Jones said.

‘You only did what you had to do,’ Bert said, shivering a bit at a huge clap of thunder outside the window.

Mr Jones nodded his head. ‘I didn’t mean for all this to happen. I mean, Max – ah, Mr Smith says he’s got a job, gonna pay me twenty-five grand, and I need the money, you know? I got an ex-wife and two kids, and I’m behind in my child support, and I’ve been out of a job for more than six months! But I didn’t count on all this stuff going on. I mean, I’ve done some stuff I’m not proud of, and I’ve done time, but I never killed anybody and I don’t wanna start now! And Mr Smith keeps threatening to shoot me! All the time!’

Alicia walked over to where Mr Jones sat on the sofa next to Bert and patted him on the shoulder. ‘I know this can’t have been easy for you,’ she said.

‘Not at all!’ Mr Jones said, tears in his eyes.

‘OK, scoot,’ she said, getting between the two men on the sofa. ‘Now we need to come up with a scenario that will pass Mr Brown’s inspection. One where Bert and I get away, but you’re not blamed for it.’

‘Anybody else notice it’s storming out there?’ Bert asked, his eyes focused on the window where a bolt of lightning had brightened the storm-darkened sky.

‘We have to do it, Bert,’ Alicia said. ‘Do you have any raingear? Like umbrellas or slickers or anything?’

‘I got one umbrella,’ he said apologetically, ‘but it’s in the truck.’

‘Well, we’ll manage somehow,’ Alicia said. ‘Meanwhile, back to the problem of getting out of here and saving Mr Jones from Mr Brown.’

‘I can only think of one thing,’ Bert said. ‘We bash Mr Jones here over the head with something and tie him to that chair there,’ he said, pointing at the ladder-back chair, ‘and then you and I take off.’

Alicia grimaced. ‘I don’t want to hurt Mr Jones,’ she said, having realized he wasn’t quite the stone-cold killer she’d assumed.

‘It’s the only way to do it, like Bert said,’ Mr Jones said. ‘But first you tie me to the chair, then hit me on the head. Y’all wouldn’t be able to move me if I was unconscious.’

‘Good point,’ Bert said. He stood up and began looking around the mostly empty living room. ‘I just don’t see nothing here to bash your head in with. I mean, I got a cast-iron skillet in the kitchen, but how’re we supposed to get that and come in here and bash your head in if we’re both tied up?’

‘Yeah,’ Alicia said, ‘and how are you going to explain to Mr Brown how Bert and I got you in that chair?’

Bert looked at Alicia. ‘He’ll have to be sitting in the chair when we hit him,’ he said.

‘Wait!’ Alicia said, jumping up. ‘Mr Jones, are you hungry?’

‘Ah, now? Well, I could eat—’ he started.

‘Of course you could. And you’d order me to cook for you, wouldn’t you? Me being a girl and all—’

‘Oh, no! I’ve been cooking for myself a long time now—’

‘Noooo,’ Alicia said. Then succinctly, ‘You ordered me to cook you breakfast. I got out the cast-iron skillet to cook eggs and—’

Both men grinned at her. ‘Good one!’ Mr Jones said, standing up and high-fiving Alicia.

‘I love it when a plan comes together,’ Bert said.

They drove aimlessly around, with no idea where to go. ‘They wouldn’t keep her here in BCR,’ Megan said. ‘They’d either take her to Codderville or someplace else.’

No one responded. ‘I’m just saying,’ Megan tried.

Still no response. Megan, riding shotgun, turned to look at Bess in the back seat. They both shrugged their shoulders.

Suddenly Graham slammed on the brakes. Megan, who’d been turned in her seat, slammed her head against the passenger-side window. ‘Ow!’ she yelled.

‘Sorry,’ Graham said, but his tone said he couldn’t care less. ‘You think Codderville?’ he asked Megan.

‘I just think they’d try to go further than just here – BCR, you know?’ she said.

He nodded his head, put his foot down on the accelerator and made a U-turn in the middle of Black Cat Ridge Blvd., only losing traction for a moment due to the slick road.

Alicia had tried to hit Mr Jones in the head with the cast-iron frying pan, but her effort had been weak and only managed to elicit an ‘Ow’ from Mr Jones. Bert had to take over. The ladder-back chair from the living room was one of a set of four that went with his kitchen table. He had Mr Jones sit in one of those, then whacked him a good one on the side of the head. Mr Jones started to say something, then his eyes rolled up in his head and he fell out of the chair.

‘Oh my God!’ Alicia yelled. ‘Is he breathing?’

They both knelt beside Mr Jones and felt for a pulse. Alicia found one, beating strong. She sighed with relief. ‘OK,’ she said, ‘let’s tape him up.’

She and Bert managed to get Mr Jones taped up, grabbed a couple of granola bars out of the cupboard and some bottled water out of the fridge and headed outside.