Method 15 33 (27 page)

I crept closer to Lisa, who was shivering from the cold. Stifling my own chill from the water, I lowered into my shoulders, like a turtle to his shell, and shook one leg, then the other. Water dripped off me like I was a squeezed sponge. My drenched gray suit buckled at the elbows. A thermos of hot coffee would have been nice right then, a daily comfort turned unrealistic luxury in that moment. I might as well have wished for a unicorn to swoop from a tree and carry us to Candyland for gumdrops and licorice.

Lisa hugged and rubbed her bulging belly, seemingly in an effort to warm the baby within. She did not appear quite ready
to flee the scene, as I expect any other victim would have been. She was also not hysterical, not crying, not shouting for her parents. She wasn’t demanding the regular demands, not a doctor, not anything you’d think. Silently, she watched me approach her, seemingly considering my stride, possibly counting my steps. With Lola and Boyd pressing handcuffed Brad against a tree, I attempted to collect Lisa so we could leave the woods.

“I’m Lisa Yyland. Don’t you fucking call an ambulance or put one damn thing on a radio. I want to catch the rest of the bastards who did this.”

Her soul-absent glare bored into my bones. Her disconnection to this scene, her determination, her power, everything about her overcame me. I fell into a stupor. A shock. I held my hand up behind me, a warning to the others, turned only my head, and as though possessed by her, repeated her exact words, “Don’t fucking call an ambulance or put one damn thing on the radio.”

“We’re going to trap the rest of them today, and you’re not to call my parents yet. No one is to know I’ve been found. And if you need any convincing, if you think maybe you need to call my parents first, perhaps alert a higher authority, let me show you something. Unhook that rope, sit behind that rock, and pull.”

The rope. I had avoided looking in its direction while underwater. I knew the rope had something awful on the other end. I did exactly as Lisa directed me: I unhooked the rope, sat behind a rock, and pulled.

Now I’ve seen many horrible, gruesome things in my career. I’ll spare you. Suffice it to say, at that point in my life, I should have been numb to torsos without heads and heads without faces and bodies crushed, burned, battered, and broken beyond recognition. But something about the black quarry, the shivering trees turning their backs, the steel-colored sky, the vacant, vacuumed air, and the dead-lock sneer Lisa gave the bubbling water, made me gag upon sight of a young girl’s broken gut when her corpse cut the surface of the water. I imagined Lola in the future at some meal we’d silently pick through after this horrible
day, “Liu, with what I got to see in basements and crawl spaces and abandoned quarries, spare me the pleas about my ‘food’ or ‘my tobacco’ or ‘my drinking’ or ‘my belching,’” or whatever it was she bathed in to soothe her barbed memories.

Lisa held a frigid hypnosis at the dead girl. She had one arm across her bulging stomach and another up to her chin, as though she were delivering a hearty philosophical college lecture. Her wet hair was plastered to her skull and face.

I dropped the rope when Lisa turned away from the water. The body and board plummeted back to the depths of the quarry. Lisa walked up along the top of the quarry, down the other side, and to Boyd and Lola and Brad. When Lisa winked at Brad in her passing and shot his face with an air gun, blowing invisible smoke from the top of her finger, I wished she were my daughter. She exited down the path Boyd had led us on, offering no invitation for us to follow, but of course we did, landing in her soggy footsteps and trying to catch up, gun prodding the whimpering Brad to move along.

Lola and I knew well enough to just follow. We motioned to Boyd with our fingers to our mouths for him to likewise stay silent. All the way back to the schoolhouse, across a small area for parking, down a wooded path, at the end of which was an empty space beneath a willow tree, we marched. Pregnant Lisa paced like an angry cat, and when Boyd went to say something, I shushed him.

Again we followed our teenage ruler back through the wooded path and to the school house. We stood waiting for directions, all looking at Lisa, in front of one of the wings. Lola had placed Brad, cuffed and legs tied to a hook, in the bed of the F-150.

“I don’t know where The Doctor works. Where is Dorothy? She must have gotten away in the van.” Lisa said to me.

“What do you mean? Who is The Doctor?” I said.

“He’s the one who delivers the babies,” Lisa said.

“The otha girl, she Dorothy? My cousin took her to the ‘mergency room.”

Lisa nodded a confused approval.

I was about to ask more questions when out of the corner of my right eye, I saw Lola, sniffing her way through another door at another wing. She seemed entranced by something beyond the door, entering the building without motioning me or anyone else to follow.

“She probably smells the asshole I burned up in my jail cell. Tell her not to touch the water. It might still be electrified.”

Behind me, Boyd said, “Ay-yup. That’s the smell I told ya about. Door up there is locked.”

Lisa handed me the keys she held clutched in her hand.

I ran to Lola.

What we found on the third floor trumps any story of any circus bear dressed in pink.

After Lola and I saw what we saw in what I learned was Lisa’s former room of incarceration, Lisa said nothing more to plead her case. All she said was, “Agent, we’ll set up a sting for this afternoon. I’ll lure them in. You catch them.”

Lola was already convinced, nodding her head to Lisa, agreeing with whatever our young mother demanded. Lola smelled blood and wanted to swallow it in gulps down her gullet.

“Agents, I was supposed to join that girl in the quarry today.” She rubbed her girth, hugging the baby. “I cannot explain the depths of my hate for these people. You’ve seen what I’m capable of, what I did to their goon upstairs. I want to destroy them. And I will. I will hunt them down and poison them slowly, unless you agree to lay a trap and arrest them all today. I must be the bait. It is the only way. I’ve thought it over a million times.”

I had no doubt she had.

“Lisa, tell us your plan,” Lola said.

With what I would later learn amounted to a wide grin in the emotionless girl, Lisa clicked her eyebrows and slightly lifted her chin toward Lola. A sign of respect. A sign of thank you.

Lisa detailed her plan. It was simple really. She said we needed to force Brad, at gunpoint to his temple, to call The Doctor and tell him she was in labor. “The Doctor seems to travel with The Obvious Couple, so he’ll bring them with him, they’re so anxious to take my baby. We’ll snag them all together. Got it?” We agreed we’d have my back-up agents, who were close to arriving, stakeout the hotel of The Obvious Couple and office of The Doctor—which we’d first confirm before allowing Brad to place his call—in case his accomplices somehow got tipped off. I wanted Lisa’s plan to work, to capture them all together at the Appletree, for a few reasons:

Appletree was a secluded spot and civilians would not get hurt in a shoot-out.

Them driving to the premises after being beckoned by Brad would be solid evidence of their involvement.

Lisa had asked, and I agreed she deserved, to see them face-to-face, outside of the restrictions of a courtroom or prison. Or witnesses.

I later got enough details to understand what Lisa meant by The Doctor and The Obvious Couple. She also explained that Brad was not the “Ron Smith”—Ding-Dong—I thought he was, but rather his twin brother. Obviously shocked, I had a million questions to ask of her. But at the time, I just said, “Okay. Let’s go over your plan one more time.” There was no way I was going to insert my own design into Lisa’s war. I was her sudden soldier. Lola happily hoisted her gun as crouching sniper in an apple tree in the adjoining orchard. I reluctantly reminded her not to shoot if the clan we expected was unarmed. Her left nostril twitched like she might bark, and her finger curled tighter around the trigger. I left her in the tree and hoped she’d obey, planning to back her up if she didn’t.

I’d called my bureau back-up and had them meet me at Cousin Bobby’s so I could hand off Brad to one team, and instruct the other team on where to lay low and hold sniper spots. I didn’t mention to them Brad’s failed attempt to “flee” the back of the truck
where we tied him up, cuffed; didn’t mention the deal we struck with him, in private. A private deal between me, Brad, and Lisa. After removing Brad’s scarf-muzzle before delivering him to the other agents—who actually followed protocol and wouldn’t have gagged a prisoner—I was forced to listen to his histrionic whining about the hole in his face, which made me wish I’d left him on the bottom of the quarry. What a ball of crazy he was, vacillating between a high girl voice and a demented demon, his pitch constantly shifting as I pushed him through the field to Cousin Bobby’s. When we passed a mooing cow and he looked her in the face to say, “Big Bessie, aren’t you just precious, now, Bessie,” and then shifted to a growling yell, “I’ll slice your babies into veal, bitch,” I became concerned he’d walk on an insanity defense.

It went down just as Lisa expected. The Doctor came hauling up in a brown-on-caramel El Dorado, The Obvious Couple his passengers. This Mr. Obvious and his wife, the Mrs. Obvious, had been holed up in a local motel, ironically—and horribly named—The Stork & Arms, waiting out the time until their bundles of stolen joy came into the world. They planned to abscond to Chile, to their chic and tree-covered mountain retreat, nestled among five vineyards and the bliss of a southern hemisphere. Blond babies would be their ultimate art in a practical castle of paintings and sculptures. Lola and I were allowed to visit the estate when a team inventoried the place. We found so much documentary evidence tying them to our crime and several others, such as high-profile art thefts, we lost count of the charges.

On the day we nabbed them, Lola pounced from the tree to kick dirt in their eyes for taking from her the chance to shoot them, for they showed up unarmed and duped.

“Check,” Lisa said, while I cuffed The Doctor.

Being a chess player myself, I wondered why she didn’t say “checkmate,” as in, “game over,” but I soon learned Lisa had more planned for The Doctor.

Liu, he’s so dramatic. I know he’s told you all about his childhood scare. How he came to be what he is. I think what he did for his brother was flat-out marvelous. Genius. When he told me his story, I decided he should be my eternal best friend.

Of course, I would have handled his brother Mozi’s situation much differently. But let’s not dawdle on impolite criticisms. Besides, Liu should be championed for his superior pupil cones and what I suspect to be an impressive amygdala and hippocampus, along with enhanced connectivity between the two. The circuit between these brain parts in Liu is likely a superhighway with huge neuron trucks barreling back and forth with payloads of rich sensory and factual experience: memory. My theory is that Liu’s heightened visual acuity mixed with a larger than normal amygdala and hippocampus is what provides for his scary recollection of details. I’d need to split his skull and dissect his eyes to be really sure—I don’t trust the accuracy of MRIs—but I’m not about to perform an autopsy. On a friend.

Nevertheless, how tenacious, how calculating, how heroic Liu was for Mozi. How very cool. I flipped on Love, Admiration, and Devotion all for Liu when he told me that story. But at first, when he saved me, or rather, when he helped me save me, I didn’t turn on a thing. I used him as yet another asset: Agent Liu, Asset #49.

Liu provided the distraction I’d hoped for, opened my submerged door, and helped me bag the rest of them. So, to me,
on that day, he seemed rather useful. When he finished cuffing The Doctor and The Obvious Couple, he and “Lola”—this is how I’ve been asked to refer to Liu’s partner—drove me to the hospital in a Ford truck. Lola wedged in the middle because my width was too wide to fit behind the stick shift. How cozy the three of us were, as if a farming family on their way to shovel seed. As for an ambulance, which might have been a more proper mode of transportation under the circumstances, they didn’t trust leaving me to anyone else, and I refused to go in one anyway.

The other agents detained the farmer man, Boyd, at his “Cousin Bobby’s” farmhouse to answer questions. I really liked the speech Boyd gave Brad when he pointed his rifle in his face at the quarry. I later asked Nana to embroider me a pillow with this monologue—and you know what—given her darker view of the world anyway, what with her crime writing, and given her uncontained joy at my rescue, she considered my request. She joked about using purple thread in a cursive and appliqués of fuzzy, frolicking rabbits, tumbling over forest rocks, to signify Boyd’s “run like a rabbit” line. Ultimately, however, as I knew she would, Nana used our conversation as an opportunity to teach me about proper emotional reactions to highly stressful situations. She finished the pillow with just the rabbit appliqués and “I Love You” embroidered on the front. I love Nana. Never turn Love off for Nana.