“So whaddaya need to do, Row?” Ben asked as he nosed his van into a parking space, levered it into park, and then turned in his seat to look back at me.
Felicity was sitting directly behind him in the back seat, and I was on the passenger side near the door. Agent Mandalay was in the front with him, riding shotgun. She had returned Felicity’s call just as we were getting ready to leave, so we had waited for her arrival before making the trek to the Northwoods Shopping Mall.
“Where did the abduction actually take place?” I asked.
“Let me see,” he murmured, then began counting to himself as he lazily gestured out the window with his finger. “…Four… Five… Six… That one. That should be it, right over there.” He pointed through the passenger side of the windshield. “See that light standard? That should be the one she was next to when she was grabbed.”
I followed the line of his arm to the large concrete footing and towering light post some thirty to forty yards away in the opposite row.
“You don’t know for sure?” Felicity asked.
“I’m not actually workin’ this case,” he reminded her, then pointed out the passenger side window. “I know for sure it was on this lot. There’s the Kathy’s Closet store, over there, and that is the row Ackman said she was parked in. Right now I’m just goin’ by what I was told and the tape they showed me when I was asked to ID the shithead.”
“If you aren’t on this case then what are you really supposed to be working on, Storm?” Mandalay asked.
“Last week’s gang shooting,” he replied absently. “And about five more unresolved gang shootings. What about you?”
He leaned forward and sent his eyes searching.
“Miscellaneous bureaucratic paperwork,” Mandalay admitted, then continued her own line of questions. “So where does your lieutenant think you are right now?”
“Day off,” he explained, his attention still directed elsewhere. “Had ta’ go see my lawyer. But, they called me in to look at the tape so I asked a few questions, and now I’m here.”
“Unofficially, of course?” she half-asked, half-stated.
“Well sure.”
My friend stopped scanning and cocked his head, then pointed again, this time to a different post. “If I’m rememberin’ the angle right, that should be the security camera over there. It’s an older system, so like I said, the picture wasn’t the best.”
I panned my gaze across the muted tableau. It looked dull and flat. Even the more brightly colored vehicles congesting the parking lot seemed subdued under a dusky grey film. Sunset was less than two hours away, and with the overcast skies already blocking a good percentage of the light, perceived nightfall would be coming even sooner than usual.
I don’t suppose it made any difference one way or the other, whether it was day or night, with maybe one exception: We knew Brittany Larson’s body had been buried under the cover of darkness, and you can bet the others were as well. Since Kimberly Forest had been in the hands of the very same sadistic bastard for a little better than eight hours, I had to wonder if she was even still alive and if we should be staking out wooded areas near the Missouri River instead.
The harsh reality was that we really had no way to know how much time she had left. With the exception of what had happened with Brittany Larson, we had no actual evidence of the lag time between abduction and disposal of the body. It was all guesswork on our part.
In the back of my head- only because I didn’t have the stomach to voice it- I was hoping that the amount of torture Kimberly Forest could endure before her body finally shut down would be a deciding factor in her fate. As much as it sickened me to consider what was probably being done to her, even as we sat here looking across the parking lot from which she’d been taken, I was hoping she had a strong constitution.
And, more importantly, an even stronger will to live.
“Okay, I need to go over there,” I finally said, reaching for the door handle. “Just wait here.”
“I’m going with you, then,” Felicity said.
“That’s really not necessary,” I objected.
“Aye, don’t start with me, Rowan,” she returned.
“Don’t either one of ya’ start,” Ben announced. “We’re all goin’.”
I didn’t argue. It wouldn’t have done me any good. Instead, I just continued lifting the lever and unlatched the side door, then slid it back on groaning tracks. Once we had all climbed out of the vehicle, and Ben had locked it up, we began wandering in the direction of the light standard.
“Just so I know, are ya’ gonna go all Tee-Zone on us, Row?” Ben asked.
“If we’re lucky, yes,” I replied.
“Fuckin’ lovely,” he muttered. “What about you, Felicity?”
“We’ll see,” she said, the tone of her voice offering no assurances whatsoever.
“So whadda we do if ya both start floppin’ around like a coupl’a fish?”
“If we say anything then take notes,” I offered.
“Yeah, great,” he replied. “What else?”
“Try not to let us hit the asphalt too hard,” Felicity returned.
“Yeah,” Ben muttered. “Coupl’a fuckin’ comedians aren’t ya’.”
We stopped talking but all smiled and nodded as we met a young couple heading in the opposite direction. They gave friendly nods in return, continuing along their way as they passed us by. A moment later, to our backs, we heard the clipped ‘whoop’ feedback of a car’s locks being unlatched by a remote key fob.
“Jeez,” Ben exclaimed as he looked around the busy parking lot. “It’s five freakin’ P.M. on a Thursday. What’s with the crowd?”
“You don’t shop much, do you Storm?” Constance asked.
“Why would I?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” she replied in a sardonic tone. “Clothes. Shoes. Underwear without holes in them.”
“My undershorts are just fine, thank you,” he returned.
Somewhere in the distance, I heard the driving thrum of heavy metal music blaring, or at least that is what I thought I was hearing. I glanced around, looking for the source, all the while having a sudden attack of deja vu.
“Boxers or briefs?”
“None of your business.”
“So, I guess your wife did all the shopping for you?” Mandalay contended.
“Pretty much, yeah,” he agreed.
“Yeah, well you’ve been on your own for a while now, and you said your divorce is going to be final in a couple of months.”
“Yeah, so?”
“Yeah, so you’d better learn to shop. Either that, or get yourself a girlfriend who wants to do it for you.”
“You volunteerin’?”
“Yeah, right,” Mandalay replied, actually laughing as she made the sarcastic remark. “In your dreams, Storm.”
“Maybe,” he casually snipped. “But I’m pretty sure the woman in my dreams is taller than you.”
I glanced over at Felicity and saw that she seemed to be handling the conversation well, considering. There was a time when I personally would have been almost livid about the insensitivity of their exchange in light of what was happening. To be honest, it still bothered me a bit, but to a large extent I had grown used to this sort of thing. I knew that the jokes and nonchalant conversations were just a defense mechanism that most anyone in their profession quickly developed. It was either that or the job would eat them alive, and I certainly couldn’t fault them their sanity. I suppose in a way I was a bit jealous that I couldn’t turn off the horror and hide behind the mundane as easily as they.
“I’m betting she has a set of thirty-eight double-D’s too,” Mandalay baited my friend with a note of disdain.
“Nope.”
“Excuse me,” she chided. “Forty-fours then.”
“Nope. Not really all about the boobs,” he replied with a shake of his head. “I’m more of a leg guy.”
Constance grew quiet for a split second. The pause would have been almost imperceptible except that time seemed to be expanding all around me. When she spoke again, I could have sworn I picked up a hint of surprise in her voice, but then, the growing roar in my ears was making everything sound odd.
“Really?” she said, voice phasing through a shallow echo.
“Yeah, really.” Ben’s languid words flowed in behind hers.
I was just getting ready to call out to everyone that something was wrong when the thrum ended with an unceremonious crash, and the world around me phased into solid reality. I caught myself as I stumbled
“Row,” Felicity asked, taking hold of my arm. “Are you okay?”
Ben and Constance stopped dead in their tracks and turned the moment she asked the question.
“Yeah,” I replied, nodding. “Must be some residual dizziness or something from the seizure earlier.”
“You sure, white man?” Ben asked.
“I think so.”
“That’s not what I asked you,” he replied.
“Okay, yeah, I’m fine.”
“Rowan…” Felicity began.
“Really,” I told her. “Whatever it was, it’s over now. I’m fine.”
Ben looked me over as if he were sizing up a suspect, then muttered, “Okay.”
My friend turned and started walking again. We all fell in step with him.
“So, I take it Albright is still running the investigation?” Constance asked, changing the subject.
“Yeah,” Ben nodded. “You don’t think she’d miss a chance to score points with the mayor, do ya’?”
“It figures,” Constance replied. “But I was hoping maybe she’d handed it off to an underling by now.”
“She did,” he said. “While it was cold, but she took it back before the poor bastard had a chance to finish his first cup of coffee this mornin’. Now she’s right back in the fuckin’ limelight.”
“Okay, so what if we hit on something here? How are you going to get it past her?”
“I was hopin’ you’d tell me,” he said.
“Me?” she asked. “I’m not assigned to this anymore.”
“Yeah, well you’re one up on me. I’m flat out banned from it.”
“So what does that have to do with me?”
“Your badge is fancier than mine.”
“Dammit, Storm,” she admonished. “You know if you keep butting heads with Albright, you’re not going to have a badge at all.”
“Yeah, I know. That’s why you’re here.”
“Well I don’t know that there’s going to be anything I can do,” Constance offered.
Ben turned to face her and said, “Well, it’s either that or we find the fucker and I just cap ‘im myself.”
“I’m not listening,” she replied without missing a beat.
“Yeah, well,” he said. “This has gotta stop.”
“I agree with you,” she told him. “But turning into a vigilante is not the way to do it.”
“Sometimes I wonder,” my friend mumbled.
We came to a halt as a group, standing to one side of the traffic lane behind a row of cars. Twenty feet to our left was the concrete base of the light standard.
“I’m still not listening,” Mandalay told him again.
“Good.”
Ben looked across the parking lot, twisting in place as he scanned the area, an intense frown digging a deep furrow into his face.
“Some rent-a-cop is probably watchin’ us on the camera right now,” he finally said while looking over his shoulder.
“More than likely,” I heard Constance reply, her voice starting off at a normal tone then suddenly stretching into a stream of Doppler distorted syllables.
It was happening again. A sharp pain sliced through my ribcage before I could even open my mouth, and I felt my chest instantly tighten. Still, I tried to speak but found that I had no breath.
A choppy drone that vaguely resembled Ben’s voice fell into the humming void behind Mandalay’s. “Guess you better do whatever you’re gonna do before security shows up. Okay, Row?”
The parking lot was starting to spin away, whirlpooling from my sight in a psychedelic swirl, like multiple colors of paint pouring down a drain. My heart was hammering in my chest, and suddenly nothing made sense to me any longer.
I didn’t know where I was.
I didn’t know who I was.
I didn’t know what I was.
But, for some strange reason, I did know I was in trouble when I heard a vaguely familiar voice. It was loud; distinctly feminine, possessed of an Irish lilt, and unmistakably anguished as it echoed in my ears, “Ground! Dammit Rowan! GROUND!”