Lost (9 page)

Legal jeopardy. Up to me, I’d say Seth Manning is in deep shit.

We’re both out of the Town Car, stretching our legs and checking out the heavy gate. In movies the hero simply mows the gate down, but this one has electronic locks that slip into a sturdy concrete footing and I’m not at all sure even the mighty Lincoln could get through. Plus we’re under surveillance by at least three cameras, one of which is night vision equipped, according to Shane. Try to monkey with the security gate and the local cops, rented and otherwise, will be on us long before we pry it open.

I know this because I’m the one who advocated the mow-it-down theory of making ourselves known.

“Can’t help you if I’m under arrest,” Shane points out, nixing the idea. “Antagonizing the authorities won’t help.”

Very rational, but I’m not feeling particularly rational. I’m exhausted, anxious and cranky. I’m acutely aware of wearing the same skirt and cotton top donned for my visit to the county cops, hours and ages ago. Clothing that now
smells sour. I need a hot shower. I need a warm meal and a good night’s sleep. I need to brush my teeth. I need my daughter home, my life returned to normal.

“Doesn’t this just prove that he’s gone?” I fret, gesturing at the locked gate. “Or that he’s in there with Kelly and won’t come out?”

Shane studies me, runs a hand over his neatly trimmed beard. “Seth Manning is in his early twenties,” he says. “I’m assuming this is the family home. The property is listed under the name Edwin Manning. Could be the father.”

“Right, of course.” I’d been concentrating on the cradle-robber himself, hadn’t given a thought to his parents.

“His parents may not know what’s going on. If you were his age, planning to run off with a minor, would you inform your parents?”

“Doubtful.”

“For all we know, Seth may in fact live elsewhere,” Shane reminds me. “But this is the address on his driver license, so we start here.”

“Okay fine,” I concede. “So Mom and Dad are on vacation. They own other homes. They’re in Gay Paree, or the Ukraine, or touring the moon.”

“Yes, quite possibly they could be elsewhere,” he concedes, nodding in agreement. “You want to leave?”

“No! That’s not what I’m saying! I’m saying if nobody answers the damn bell, I’m climbing the damn fence!”

“There could be dogs.”

“Then the dogs better watch out. Woman bites dog, that’ll be the headline. And you can’t stop me!”

Not sure how it happened, exactly, but suddenly I’m seething, lashing out, and Randall Shane is a convenient target.
Oddly enough, the big man doesn’t react. It’s as if he’s been expecting me to flip out, and braced himself for it.

“What makes you look so smug!” I demand.

“The lights,” he says, pointing at the heavy foliage obscuring the curve of the driveway.

Are there lights twinkling through the leaves? Hard to say.

“The house lights? Are you sure?”

“No,” he says. “Not to a certainty. But moments after I first pushed the button, lights shifted.”

“The wind? A timer?”

He shrugs. “Maybe. My gut says somebody is home. And ignoring a buzz from the gate, that tells us something.”

“What?” I ask, embarrassed for teeing off at the guy. “What does it tell us?”

Before he can explain, a figure emerges from the bushes and takes a position several paces behind the locked gate. Surprising the hell out of me but not, apparently, Randall Shane.

In the darkness the figure resolves into a small, slender man dressed from head to toe in black. He has thinning hair, raccoon eyes, and seems to have rubbed dirt on his face.

The small man raises something that could be a gun and points it at us. Before I can duck, the beam of light makes me flinch.

Flashlight, not gun.

“Who are you?” he demands in a shaky voice. “What do you want?”

“Mr. Manning? I’m Randall Shane and this is Mrs. Jane Garner.”

“I don’t know you.” He backs away, looks ready to slip back into the foliage. “What do you want?” His voice sounds like a speaker with a loose wire, like he’s on the verge of laryngitis, and fighting it.

Shane raises both hands, as if in surrender, and takes a step closer to the gate. “We have reason to believe that Mrs. Garner’s daughter, Kelly, has run away with Seth Manning, who is listed as living at this address. Are you Seth’s father, sir? Are you aware that Kelly Garner is a minor? Can you help us find them?”

At each statement of fact the man in black seems to shudder, as if receiving a series of thudding body blows. Shaking his head, no, no, no. “Never heard of the girl,” he responds, voice cracking. “You’ll have to leave. I demand that you leave immediately!”

Shane slips closer to the gate. His own powerful, compelling voice becomes less demanding, more conciliatory. “Where’s your son, Mr. Manning? Can you help us, please? Mrs. Garner is worried sick. This isn’t about pressing charges, it’s about getting her daughter back.”

“Go away! You must go away!”

“Why is that? Has something happened?”

The man in black retreats, blending into the foliage. Only his eyes showing, like the Cheshire cat. “Nothing happened,” he says softly. “Go away.”

Shane takes a business card from his wallet, slips it through the iron bars. It flutters to the ground like a small, white leaf. “My card, sir. I can help you.”

The eyes vanish. The voice has been reduced to a pleading whisper. “You can help by going away.”

Then the leaves shiver and he’s gone.

Shane pulls the Town Car over in a shallow turnaround a few hundred yards from the Manning estate. He kills the engine. On the other side of the road, seemingly close enough to touch, the water is black, glistening. A few miles away, visible along the shore, the snug little cove exudes life. Docks, homes, streetlights.

A familiar, clustered warmth that seems alien out here on the Neck, where many of the homes are hidden from view.

Shane shifts himself in the driver’s seat, facing me.

“Your reaction?” he asks.

“Messed up,” I admit. The feeling of dread has returned, nagging at my guts. Getting into the car, my knees had been weak. “That was Seth’s father, wasn’t it?”

Shane nods. I can’t quite make out his eyes. He’s a handsome skull in the dark. “Almost certainly,” he agrees. “I addressed him as ‘Mr. Manning’ several times and he failed to correct me. Probably used to people knowing who he is.”

“His face was dirty,” I say, mouth as dry as sandpaper.

“Smeared on the dirt so we wouldn’t see him,” Shane says. “I’m almost certain he was hiding in the leaves, listening to us for a while before he revealed himself.”

“But why?”

The big man sighs. “This is pure speculation, but I assume he wanted to know who we are. Or more importantly, who we aren’t.”

“Why?” I repeat. “Why not call the security guards to run us off? Or call the cops? Why come out to the gate at all? People who live in houses like that, on estates like that, they don’t run around at night, dressed all in black, faces smeared with dirt.”

I’m unaware of clutching the back of the leather headrest until Shane gives my hand a reassuring pat, as if preparing me for bad news.

“In my estimation Edwin Manning is desperate,” he says carefully, gauging my reaction. “He’s making it up as he goes along.”

Desperate, frightened, lost. That was my impression, too.

“I’ve seen parents behave like that, many times.” Shane
says. “Not the sneaking-around part, exactly, but the frightened-out-of-their-wits part. He’s sick with worry, just like you.”

“Because his son took off with my daughter?” I ask, dreading the answer.

Shane says, “Or because his son has been abducted, and he’s been warned not to contact the police.”

18. Calling All Fathers

It’s after midnight and Ricky can’t sleep. Lying a foot or so from Myla on the custom king, he just can’t make it happen. Too many things going on. His sleep button is stuck and the pills no longer work. White man’s medicine, all it does is slow his thoughts a few miles per hour, not nearly enough to let his mind rest.

Only thing to do when this happens, he decides, is get up, keep moving. Forward motion pushes all the crazy thoughts to the back of his head, prevents them from bouncing. Saved by gravity or momentum, or whatever the hell it is.

Ricky slips out of bed, leaves Myla sleeping like a curled-up kitten, a slender hand draped over her eyes. He prowls his new house in the dark, naked. Bare feet cool on the tiles, walking a circuit that takes him through the kitchen, into the hallway, past the three bedrooms he furnished for his children, around through the entertainment alcove, and back into the dining room. Sodium lights coming though the slats like knife-cuts on the tile floors.

Step on a crack, he’s thinking, break the motherfucker’s back.

On his third circuit Ricky leans into Tyler’s room. Disney World poster, bed like a race car, brightly painted. No Tyler tonight. Sometimes there’s a shape in the bed that might be
his little boy, but not tonight. Decides not to check on Alicia and Reya because the girls will be with Tyler, all three together, forever and ever, amen.

The new house, big as it is, is too small to contain him. In the laundry room he slips into a pair of elastic-waisted, cotton gym shorts, heads into the four-bay garage. No shirt, no shoes, he loves the feeling of air on his skin, believes he can soak up oxygen, make himself stronger. He decides, on impulse, to leave the Beemer and take Myla’s new convertible Mini Cooper. Pushes the driver’s seat as far back as it will go, his big arms cocked over the sides. Thinking he must look like one of those Shriners driving a toy car for the kids. All he needs is the funny hat.

Ha, ha, ha, he laughs all the way to the airstrip. Not quite to the airstrip, actually, because the ruts and potholes on the final approach are bigger than the Mini. So he parks the little car in the brush, goes the last couple of miles on foot, snorting great drafts of muggy, night-swamp air though his flaring nostrils. The odor of ancient muck, animal scat and the thin, delicious scent of slow-moving water. Thinking, this is how the old-timers did it, hunting more or less naked, alive to the world, paying attention with all the nerves of their bodies.

Ricky feels power flowing into him, and a soothing calmness that slows his brain, stops it from spinning like an off-kilter gyroscope. When he emerges into the clearing he instantly clocks the beautiful Beechcraft exactly where he left it, wings glinting with the light of distant stars. Not far away the jacked-up, fat-wheeled Dodge Ram lurks next to the camouflaged hangar. The toothy front grill makes the truck look like a shiny steel cougar ready to pounce.

“Roy!” Ricky bellows, cupping his hands to his mouth. “Dug! Roydug! Roydug! Roydug!”

Amused by putting their names together, the swamp-cracker twins who have sworn him allegiance in exchange for the new truck and whatever crumbs may dribble their way. Roy is the brains of the family, meaning he doesn’t drool overmuch. Whereas Dug, his very name apparently misspelled by his illiterate, white-trash mammy, young Dug seems to be missing about half his puzzle.

Ricky always deals with Roy, for obvious reasons, but this time it’s Dug who comes lurching out of the truck, swollen eyelids crunchy with sleep.

Upon seeing Ricky he stammers, “Um-um. Yeah hey what?”

Bare chested, bare-legged Ricky Lang coming out of the dark, chanting his name, it’s like being awakened by a hard slap in the face. An experience not entirely unknown to Dug, whose late and unlamented pappy was notoriously ill-tempered and free with his hands.

“Where’s Roy?” Ricky wants to know.

Dug is looking around, wondering how the man got here. A little segment of his brain wondering if maybe the crazy Indian really can fly without benefit of aircraft. Materializing like a ghost with Dug’s name in his mouth.

“Um-um,” says Dug.

“Um-um, where’s he at?” Ricky demands. Standing close so the stammering white-bread can smell the feral stink of him, the swamp and danger on his breath.

Dug is afraid of Ricky—any sane individual smaller than King Kong would be afraid of Ricky Lang, who exudes a kind of steroid strength from the top of his bowl-cut hairdo down to his splayed feet—but Dug is even more afraid that he’ll react the wrong way, ruin everything for Roy. Not knowing what to do, fearing the wrong reaction, he’s reduced
to stammering, making um-um noises while his brain sorts out the options.

Strangely enough, Ricky seems to understand what’s going on with Dug—the obvious strain of having to think—and steps back, giving him room to work it out.

“Roy,” Dug finally says, savoring the name. “He gone to check on the girl. I’m guardin’ the airplane.”

Giving it the swamp-cracker pronunciations, two words, era plane.

“Left you the truck,” Ricky observes. “What’s he driving?”

Dug has to think about it, then carefully assemble the words. “Four-wheeler. One in the shed?”

That sets Ricky back on his bare heels just a little, because he has always intended the four-wheeler to be a present for his children, eventually. Purchased on a whim months ago, with nobody’s birthday pending anytime soon, he’d decided to store it at the airfield until they were old enough to drive the thing. Picturing Tyler gleeful as he guns the engine, spins the fat wheels. Tyler screaming.

Ricky takes a deep breath, swallows his rage, saving it for later.

“Took the wheeler, did he?” he says pleasantly, showing his teeth.

Dug nods deliberately and with enthusiasm, as if grateful for any question that doesn’t require a verbal response.

“Where’s that cell phone at, Dug? The one the girl had. Did Roy leave it with you?”

Dug nods again. Two in a row.

“Give it over, I need to make a call,” says Ricky, holding out his big fist, opening his blunt fingers.

Dug hurries to the truck, returns with the sporty little Razr
cell phone, places it carefully into the palm of Ricky’s hand. Takes a step back, waiting.

“Battery, Dug,” says Ricky, ever so softly. “I need the battery, too.”

Back to the truck like a two-legged retriever. Actually Ricky’s pleased that the twins remembered to remove the battery, as instructed. Ricky knows all about surveillance and triangulation, and how an active cell phone can be a homing device.