Bad Guys (25 page)

“No, hang on.” I could hear her shifting in her seat. “It’s like an SUV or something, a huge black one.”

“Angie, did you say a black SUV?”

“Yeah, but bigger than normal ones, you know?”

“Is it an Annihilator?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know what these things are called. Hang on, somebody’s getting out, coming up to the window. Whoa, there’s a couple guys getting out.”

“Angie, what do they look like?”

“Look like? I don’t know. Just some guys in black jackets, that’s all.”

“Angie, don’t open the window, and lock the doors.”

“I think they just want to ask me some questions or something. What a hoot, if they think I can give them directions, what with my sense of direction—”

“Angie, don’t put down the window!”

“Yeah?” I heard Angie say to someone.

Then I heard some muffled voices. And then Angie again: “Hey, back off, man, I’m not getting out—”

“Angie!” I shouted into my cell.

“Get your fucking hands off me, ass—”

“Angie!”

Then I heard my daughter scream. And then the line went dead.

IMMEDIATELY I PHONED Angie’s cell back. It rang four times, and then she answered.

“Hi, it’s Angie.”

“Angie, Jesus, what’s going—”

“I can’t take your call right now, so feel free to leave a message.”

I figured I was at least another three or four minutes away, and I was driving the Camry in ways it was not designed for. I was taking the corners so quickly the car was drifting into four-wheel skids, and at least once the back wheel slammed into a curb before I was able to regain control.

The Dairy Queen where we used to stop after ballet class was up ahead. That was Eastland, and Angie had said the apartment building where she’d stopped was a few blocks up from there. I rounded the corner, heard a noise that sounded like a hubcap breaking free of the wheel and spinning off toward the sidewalk, and floored it.

It couldn’t be the same guys. It didn’t make any sense for it to be the same guys. What would those guys in the Annihilator, the ones who destroyed Brentwood’s, the ones Lawrence and I chased through the Midtown Mall, want with Angie?

How did the lines cross? How did the dots connect?

They didn’t. They just didn’t.

Maybe it wasn’t even the same guys. Maybe it was a different bunch of guys, in a different black SUV.

But that didn’t make the situation any better. Regardless of who they were, Angie sounded like she was in a lot of trouble.

And what about Trevor? Did he have something to do with this? He shows up, and all of a sudden this crew arrives? Had he set her up? Had he led them to her?

“Be okay,” I said aloud. “Be okay, be okay, be okay.”

Up ahead, on the right, an apartment building. And cars parked, nose in, on an angle, out front. But the street out front was empty. No SUV. No guys. No Angie.

Wait. Someone was stumbling out beyond the back of the parked cars.

Trevor.

I slammed on the brakes, right behind our Virtue. Trevor was using the back of the car to support himself. I don’t even remember putting the car in park or taking off my seat belt. But I was out, running around the front, headed for Trevor.

“Where is she?” I screamed. “Where’s Angie? What have you done with her?”

I lost it.

I grabbed Trevor by the lapels of his long black coat and swung him around, slamming him into the side of the Camry, shaking him violently, putting my face into his. I was consumed by rage and fear, and at that moment, I had only one thing in mind, which was to beat this kid to a pulp. Even the mild-mannered among us can, given the right set of circumstances, be overtaken by pure fury.

Why hadn’t I stopped him earlier? I shouldn’t have worried about Angie’s feelings, about embarrassing her. I should have come down on this kid like a ton of bricks at the first hint of trouble. You trust what your gut tells you, Lawrence had advised me. And my gut had told me from the beginning that Trevor Wylie was trouble.

I felt a force traveling through me, into my arms, headed for my fists. I knew what I was about to do. I was going to destroy the face of this kid who’d somehow arranged for this terrible thing to happen to Angie.

I let go of his lapel with my right hand, still leaning up against him and holding him against the car, and brought my arm back, squeezed my fist, got ready for the first strike.

“No!” Trevor screamed. “I didn’t do this!”

There was something about his expression, the fear in his eyes that appeared to have already been there before I’d started throwing him around. There was no fight in him.

My fist was suspended in the air, still ready. “Where is she?” I shouted. “Where’s Angie?”

If I have ever, in my entire life, seen anyone who looked more frightened, I don’t remember when it was. For a moment, I thought he was in shock, his mouth open, his eyes frozen wide.

“Where is she?” I said again, not shouting this time. I brought my right arm down to my side.

“She’s gone,” he whispered. “They took her.”

I glanced over at the Virtue. The driver’s door was open, Angie’s keys in the ignition. I looked up at the apartment building, saw a few people come out onto their balconies, look through their windows, wondering what all the commotion was. Somewhere in that building, I figured, lived Angie’s boyfriend Cam, but if his apartment wasn’t on the side that faced the street, he wasn’t going to be aware of what was happening out here.

I went back to Trevor. Only now did I notice that he had a dark gash on the side of his head. A patch of his hair was clotted with blood.

I put everything I had into trying to speak calmly.

“Trevor, who took Angie?”

“They, they were in this truck. They tried to start the car, and it wouldn’t start, and then they took her.”

I was reaching into my jacket for my cell. I was getting ready to punch in 911.

“No!” Trevor screamed. Hysterically. “No, no, don’t call the police!” He was grabbing for my phone, trying to get it out of my hands.

“Trevor, I have to call the police. Let go of my phone.”

“No! They said they’d kill her! Don’t call the police!” He was wide-eyed, grabbing me by the shoulders.

I was starting to reassess things. Not about calling the police. That was the only thing that made sense. I was reassessing Trevor. His panic was genuine. It was possible that he really had nothing to do with this.

“Trevor, you have to calm down. We have to get the police working on this right now, as fast as we—”

“They said they’d know.”

“What?”

“They said they’d know. That they have people in the police, people who tell them things, that if you call 911, if you call the cops, they’ll know, and then they’ll kill Angie.”

Kill Angie.

The world spun. For an instant, I had an image of Angie, sitting in a highchair, laughing, chocolate pudding on her nose.

“That’s crazy,” I said, freeing the phone from Trevor’s grasp. “They’re just bluffing.”

But I found myself hesitating, knowing I should punch in 911, but not quite able to do it.

“No.” Trevor shook his head violently. “They weren’t bluffing. I could tell. They said they’d know instantly.”

I swallowed. “Trevor, tell me what happened. From the beginning.”

“They jumped out of a truck and they took her. They tried to start the car, but it wouldn’t work, so they took Angie instead.”

“What do you mean? That doesn’t make any sense.”

“Shut up! Just shut up! Let me try to explain.” There were tears running down his cheeks now, and when he went to wipe them away, his hand brushed his hair. When he saw the blood on his hand, he looked at it, baffled, then touched his head where his hair was black.

“We have to get you to a hospital,” I said.

“It’s okay,” he said. “I don’t even feel it.” He sniffed, took a couple of breaths, tried to compose himself. “I came over to say hi to Angie, and then this truck, this SUV pulls up.”

“Did you notice what kind it was?”

He blinked, tried to think. “One of those army kinds of ones. An Annihilator, I think.”

“Tinted windows?”

“Uh, I, I guess. I think so.”

“Okay, go on.”

“So it stops behind Angie’s car, they’ve got her blocked in, and they tell her to get out of the car, and she starts fighting with them.”

“Go on.”

For a moment, I thought maybe this wasn’t happening, that it was a dream. That I wasn’t here, in the middle of the night, on a street I rarely traveled, prying information out of some teenage stalker, whose motives I was still unsure of, about the whereabouts of my daughter. It simply couldn’t be happening.

“And one of them, he gets in the car, but he can’t get it to start, and he starts going nuts, banging on the steering wheel and swearing and everything. By now, there are people coming out, up there, on their balconies, and one of the other guys says they have to get out of there, they’re attracting too much attention.”

“Okay.”

“So another one says, he says, ‘Grab the girl, we’ll trade her for the car,’ and they drag Angie, right into the truck.”

Another flash. Angie, five years old, first day of kindergarten.

“But the one guy, I think the one who’d been driving, he comes up to me, he says, ‘You know the man owns this car?’ And I said yes, and he says, ‘Is this his daughter?’ and I said yes, and he says to tell you, he says, if you want your daughter back, get this car running and bring it to him, and he’ll give you Angie back.”

“Take it to him? Where am I supposed to take it?”

“He didn’t say.”

“He didn’t
say
?” Now I had my hands on him again, ready to shake him until his head fell off. “You didn’t ask him where I’m supposed to fucking take the car?”

“He said he’d be in touch! Jesus!” Trevor pushed me away. “He’d be in touch soon. And then he told me not to call the cops, to tell you not to call the cops, that they’ve got people in the force, that if you call the cops they’ll know. And then”—he put his hand back to his blood-soaked hair, touched it tentatively—“I guess, I think he hit me.”

“Why did they want the car?” I asked him. “Why do they want this car?”

“I don’t know!”

We were both quiet for a moment. I moved closer to Trevor, forced him up against the side of the Camry again. I leaned in.

“Trevor, I want you to be very straight with me. Did you have anything to do with this?”

“What?”

“Did you have anything to do with this? Because if you did, I swear to God . . .” I felt my fist forming again. “Do you know who took Angie away?”

“Are you kidding? Are you out of your fucking mind? Do you have any idea what Angie means to me?”

“No,” I said. “Suppose you tell me.”

Almost whispering. “I love her. It’s like I told you, about how certain people are meant to be together. That was supposed to be us. And I let them take her away! I wasn’t able to do anything about it!” And he began to weep.

I took in a few breaths of night air, looked at the cell phone in my hand. Could I really believe this story, that if I called 911, somehow Angie’s abductors would find out? Isn’t that what any crook might say to keep you from doing the sensible thing? Come up with a bullshit story like that?

But then, what if it was true?

Either way, I was gambling with Angie’s life. Wasn’t it better to gamble with the cops on your side? Didn’t that improve your odds?

“Don’t do it,” Trevor said, seeing me stare at the phone and reading my mind. “Don’t do it, Mr. Walker. They had me convinced. I don’t want them to kill Angie.”

I looked up at the stars, as if hoping for some sort of divine guidance. “Trevor, is there anything you’re not telling me? Anything else I need to know?”

“I could help you,” he said. “I could help you get the car to them. I could help you get Angie back.”

Somehow, I felt I’d benefit from more professional assistance.

“I don’t think so, Trevor. You need to get out of here, go home, get someone to take care of that head of yours. You need to—”

And the cell phone in my hand rang.

I pressed the Send button. “Yes?” I said.

“Hi, Daddy.” I could hear driving sounds in the background, tires humming on pavement.

“Angie! Angie, are you okay? Where are you?”

“Daddy, they want to talk to you.”

I heard the phone being moved about, then another voice.

“Mr. Walker,” a man said.

“Yeah.”

The man coughed, cleared his throat. “We need to arrange an exchange.”

“WHATEVER YOU WANT, IT’S YOURS,” I said. “I just want my daughter back.”

“That’s the spirit,” the man said. He coughed again, and hearing that, along with his voice, I was reminded of the man Stan had confronted at the auction.

“Looks like we can help each other out here,” he said. “I’m guessing, given that you don’t seem all that surprised to be hearing from me, that you’ve had a chance for that young lad to bring you up to speed.”

“I just got here, yeah. He’s been filling me in. And he’s hurt. His head is bleeding.”

“Gee, that’s awful. If you could get me his name and address, I’ll send him a card. I’m guessing he told you that calling the police would be a big mistake. Did he tell you that?”

“Yes.”

“And it looks to me like you took his advice, am I right?”

How could he know that, I wondered, unless it was true? That he did have contacts in the police?

“That’s right,” I said. “We don’t need to involve the police in this. Not if it means you’ll let go of my daughter.”

“That’s what I like to hear. Cooperation. It’s what makes the world go round. So, you know what it is we want?”

“You want the car.”

“That’s right. That’s one shitty car, I have to say. We could have been spared all this trouble if the fucking thing had only started.”

“It does that sometimes. I thought it was fixed.”

“You should have bought from a dealer. You’da got a warranty. Buying from these auctions, it’s not the way to go.”

“Evidently not.” So he was the guy. From the auction. And, I was willing to bet, the guy who had slammed Stan Wannaker’s head with a car door.