Lost (11 page)

Ricky is keenly aware that any fool with a computer can Google a satellite image these days, check out your backyard, see if you mowed the grass. He’s made sure the Beechcraft is concealed in a hangar, that activity in and around the airfield is kept to a minimum. The place is probably still under some sort of minimum DEA satellite photo surveillance from the bad old days. Nothing to draw their attention now—he made it his personal business to clean up the tribal drug trade. Couple of the stubborn old farts thought it was still a going concern, had to be fed to the gators. The others soon saw the error of their ways, agreed to live on tribal income and whatever they’d managed to hide in the ground.

Gator bait was usually ripe chicken, but like they say, everything tastes like chicken once you take the skin off.

“Smells bad down there,” Roy warns him, approaching the bunker.

Ricky stops, looks Roy in the eye. “White shit smells different from people shit, you ever notice? One sniff, I can tell.”

“Oh yeah?” Roy responds, glancing away. “The boy don’t know whether he’s coming or going, or where he’s at.”

“Uh-huh,” says Ricky. “Dug, you bring them loppers?”

“Yeah, Chief,” says Dug, bringing up the rear, letting the big-branch loppers bump against his trouser leg. Seems to
think carrying the loppers is some sort of game he can win, if only he can figure it out.

Ricky holds out his hand, stops Dug in his tracks. “Ain’t no chief to you,” he says. “I am chief to my own people, only to them.”

No surprise, Dug looks confused, seeking help from his brother, who shrugs as if to say
Roll with it.

“You got the key?” Ricky asks. “Open says me.”

Ricky’s laughing as Roy fumbles with the key. Neither brother registering the humor in “open says me,” puns and wordplay not being their thing. Which, in Ricky Lang’s febrile mind makes the Whittle twins more amusing than the usual swamp crackers, a tribe he has made use of, and thoroughly mistrusted, for his entire life. Started out helping his father, Tito Lang, swap tanned hides for the whiskey the crackers made in their hidden stills. Saw the contempt in their colorless eyes—drunk Indians selling their birthright for the poison that would surely kill them. A poison self-administered, and no different in its outcome than the hot bullets so many of the people fired into their own brains as punctuation to their defiled lives.

“Wait,” says Ricky, cocking an ear. “You hear that?”

Strange noises emanating from the bunker. Sounds like children keening. In his mind it feels like the transmission has slipped, can’t get in gear to the next thought. Stuck on children keening,
eee eee eee.

“That’s the ventilation pipe,” Roy reminds him. “Wind goes across the top, makes a weird noise.”

Keening becomes wind and his mind moves on.

“Open the door,” he says.

Out comes the nasty smell. To Ricky a white smell. “Need to empty the bucket,” he points out.

“He kicked it over.”

“Then mop it up. Use Pine-Sol.”

Roy gives him a little look, like
are you serious?
gets it that Ricky is deadly serious, and looks away. “Okay, sure. Pine-Sol it is.”

Inside the fetid bunker Ricky clicks on his lantern flashlight. The beam finds a frightened face, hollow eyes, a handsome mouth distorted by a gag.

“Hey, Seth, I talked to your dad. He sends his love.”

Ricky jams a tranquilizer dart into the white boy’s thigh, sees his eyes registering a higher level of fear.

“Nothing to worry about,” Ricky says soothingly, watching the tranks hit him hard, making the eyes dull, the rigid limbs relax. “Won’t take anything you’re gonna miss.”

21. We All Scream

As young moms go, I was clueless. For instance, I’d never seen an infant nursed until Kelly started playing patty-cake on my left nipple. Never, for that matter, held a newborn baby. Worse, I had no concept of what really happens to the female body during pregnancy and after. Not to be gross, but for a couple of weeks we both wore diapers to bed, me and Kelly.

I was a child raising a baby. That’s one of my secrets. Kelly can do the math, but she has no idea how young I really was at seventeen, mentally and emotionally, or how much she frightened me. It’s true. I was scared of my own baby. Terrified I’d do something stupid and she’d either be taken from me, or die. All that stuff about maternal instincts, it wasn’t working for me. Yes, I loved the little bean from the very first moment, but that didn’t stop the fear or ease the anxiety.

My mother, bless her soul, carried little white paper bags
in her purse, unfurled whenever I hyperventilated. Passed them to me like you might offer a Kleenex. Later she told me the bags came from the candy store, which somehow seems fitting. What’ll you have today, Janey, a quarter pound of nonpareils or a panic attack? Baby Ruth or a real baby?

Poor Mom. To this day I’ve no idea how she managed it. Somehow she worked full-time, taught me how to care for a baby, dealt with my father’s terrifying temper, navigated the divorce minefield, and made plans for my future. When Kelly was six months old she assumed the baby-care duties and more or less forced me to get my GED and then take design courses at Nassau Community College, where I eventually discovered my inner seamstress. Looking back, it may have been that she actually thought being a single mom was a good thing for me. One less complication, not having to deal with a man. No doubt a result of her own failed marriage, but at the time I appreciated that she never once made me feel ashamed for the strange circumstances of Kelly’s conception. The big secret we never spoke of. Whereas it poured through my father like acid, corroding whatever love he’d had for either one of us.

Why is Mom so much on my mind? Because I’m wondering what she’d make of Randall Shane. For that matter, what do I make of him? The big guy has been in my life for less than a day, but already I’m letting him influence decisions that could determine whether my daughter lives or dies.

For instance, his decision to stop for breakfast.

“It’s two in the morning!” I rant. “Are you crazy? Are you insane? We should be notifying the FBI or the media or both, not eating waffles!”

“I’m more of a scrambled eggs person,” Shane says, very calm and matter-of-fact. “Can’t notify my friends at the agency without protein. Preferably in the form of bacon.”

I know what he’s doing. He’s using gentle humor to calm me down. Just like he’d gently but firmly discouraged me from throwing rocks at Edwin Manning’s big glass house. Like he’d prevented me from grabbing the rich little weasel by the throat and shaking the truth out of him.

“If I thought that would work I’d do it myself,” he explains, coaxing me out of the place, back into the Town Car and away from the Manning estate. “The man believes his silence will keep his son alive. He’s clinging to that hope. Physical intimidation won’t change his mind. You could hook him up to a battery, he still wouldn’t talk.”

“You’d do that?”

Shane shrugs his big shoulders. “Whatever a given situation requires. As a rule I try to avoid torture.”

I’m pretty sure he’s kidding about torture. He’s not kidding about scrambled eggs. Shane heads for this all-night diner in Wantagh, gets us there with a minimum of fuss. Says you’re never more than ten miles from a diner in Long Island and he knows them all. The place in Wantagh is the real thing, the shiny metal kind, with a gum-chewing waitress in a starched uniform, a tattooed short-order cook in a white undershirt, overhead lights bright enough to dissolve your eyelids, the whole bit.

When we’re seated with thick white china mugs of steaming coffee, Shane explains, “I can’t start making calls until seven a.m. Call in the middle of the night, you need a situation.”

“My daughter missing, that’s not a situation?”

“Not without further information, no. Nothing we can give them tonight requires an immediate response. If for instance we knew she was being held against her will in a certain location, that’s a call can be made at any time.”

“But we tell the FBI, right? Once they’re up and showered, had their coffee, whatever.”

He ignores my sarcasm, sips his coffee. “Yes,” he says. “We’ll tell them what we know, what we suspect.”

“And they’ll take over? Get Manning to talk?”

He shakes his head, smiling faintly. “That’s not how it works. Agents can only be assigned to a specific case upon request of the local authorities. Mr. Manning would have to call in the police, the police would in turn notify the FBI, and then the wheels would start to turn.”

“So we tell your old friends what we know and they do
nothing?
”

There are about six people in the diner, including the waitress, and they’re all staring at me. Apparently I raised my voice.

“Order something,” Shane suggests quietly. “You need fuel, Mrs. Garner. Keep running on empty and you’ll crash.”

“Can’t handle eggs. Not hungry. Answer my question, please.”

“I’ll have the Wake-up Special with whole wheat,” he says to the waitress, who has ambled over to take the order and also, from her eagle eyes, to check me out. Shane points his thumb at me and says, “She’ll have the same thing, hold the eggs.”

The gum-snapper likes his style. “Coming right up.” She smiles at him, flutters her false eyelashes and marches away on sturdy legs.

When she’s gone, Shane quietly continues where he left off. “I’m sure my, um, old friends in the agency will be as helpful as the law allows.”

“Helpful? Great. And we just wait until I get a ransom note?”

Shane leans across the table, more or less forces the cup of coffee into my hands. “Mrs. Garner? There may never be
a ransom note. Ransom notes are actually quite rare. At this point, we don’t know what happened, or why your daughter hasn’t contacted you again. All of our efforts must be directed toward locating her. We concentrate on that. Finding her. The law can sort out the rest.”

The only reason I’m not crying is because I’m too exhausted for tears.

“What do we do?” I ask, feeling faint.

The tray arrives, loaded.

“Eat,” he says.

Home fries, sausage, cinnamon toast, applesauce, I’m gorging like a lumberjack. Instinct taking over, making me eat. And as Shane promised, the calories start to have a calming effect. When I’ve become more or less human, he explains that his next move—and our best shot—involves Kelly’s cell phone.

“She’s a minor, so the account will be in your name, correct?”

I nod.

“As the account holder, you have a right to know where and when the phone has been used. If you know the approximate time when you received her last call, we can find out where she was when the call originated, roughly.”

“Roughly?”

“What cell tower was accessed to route the call. Narrows it down to about twenty square miles or so. Again, not like on TV. But it could be very helpful.”

“But we have to wait until morning?”

He nods. “Afraid so. And even then it usually requires several hours to get through channels. We’ll be lucky to have the location by noon.”

“Noon?” Seems like a century away, a future hard to fathom.

“Here’s what I suggest,” he says, as if ticking off a list.
“We get you home. You shower, put your head on a pillow, get some rest. Meanwhile I’ll be riding my laptop, see what I can find out about Edwin Manning. I’ll bring the Nassau County Police Department up to speed. At the appropriate hour I’ll contact my friend in the FBI, report what we suspect, and initiate the cell phone search.”

“I can’t sleep.”

“Take a pill,” he suggests. “Later in the day I need you fully cognizant, Mrs. Garner. Firing on all cylinders.”

“What about you?”

He squints, genuinely puzzled by the question. “What about me?”

“Don’t you need to sleep, too?”

“No,” he says, as if taken aback. “Oddly enough, I don’t. Not when a case is active.”

I stare at the guy, forcing him to look at me with his pale blue eyes. And notice, for the first time, evidence of something he’s hiding. Something he keeps dark and deep and does not want to share.

“It’s a form of stress-induced insomnia,” he explains, studying the saltshaker. “I’ve been the subject of at least two papers on sleep disorder.”

“You’re serious,” I say, astonished.

He shrugs his big shoulders, trying to make light of it. “I’ve learned to live with it. To use it to my advantage.”

By way of ending the conversation, obviously very uncomfortable for him, he waves the waitress over. She’s been hovering at a polite range, waiting for him to beckon.

“Yes?” she asks brightly, basking in his presence. “Anything else? More coffee?”

“Ice cream,” he says. “Vanilla, one scoop.”

“Apple pie under that? It’s good here.”

“I’ll try it next time,” he promises. “Dessert for you, miss?”

I shake my head, staring at him. “At this hour? Ice cream?” “We all scream for ice cream,” Shane says without a trace of irony.

22. Her Own Personal Black Hole

A liter water bottle, a bucket, a lamp. These items have become the center of her universe. The bottle for hoarding and drinking. The bucket for bathroom business. And most precious, a small, battery-operated lamp that she also hoards, not wanting to run it down. That’s the only power she has now, the ability to click the little switch, push the darkness back for a few moments. Not that there’s much to see. Four walls, floor, ceiling, all made of thick sheet metal. She’s being held in some sort of walk-in cooler, she surmises, although the cooler part is clearly not functioning. The air is hot as hell, syrupy thick, getting staler with every breath.

Using the lamp, Kelly has located an air vent. Unlike in the movies, this particular vent can’t be utilized as an escape hatch. It measures no more than four inches by twelve inches—too small for a human, although there are signs of a rodent infestation. She’s hoping squirrel or chipmunk, but it’s not like mice or even rats would really freak her out. Kelly’s personal gross factor is more attuned to slimy creatures like worms or snakes. Her friends think
Snakes on a Plane
is a laugh riot, especially the scrotum-chomping vipers, but Kelly has to avert her eyes whenever they crank up the DVD.