Psycho Save Us (15 page)

The sisters
touched one last time.  Then, Big Sister severed the Anchor, and turned to face
their tormentor.

Kaley turned
slowly away from Shannon, who was still sniffling, still keeping up her part in
this game.  Then, all at once, she felt worry wash over her, and Shannon
reached out to touch her elbow.  When Kaley looked back, Shannon was shaking
her head.  Kaley gave a sharp but almost imperceptible nod.  Shannon was
terrified that Big Sister would be killed if she tried.  Kaley tried to send
her a wave that told her this was their best shot, their
only
shot to be
free of Oni.  She would dive at his legs—his knees, because those were the
weakest and would buckle, causing Oni to topple—and Shan would have a few
seconds’ head start.

Shannon shook
her head again vehemently.

Kaley turned
away from Little Sister, and huffed up the courage.  Then, there was the sound
of a rumbling engine and squeaky brakes.  Headlights splashed across the street,
blinked twice, and Oni reached down to snatch her up by the collar.  “Come on. 
We go.”

There was a
terrible instant when Kaley felt conflicted.  She felt the moment slipping
away.  Her focus dwindled, and her courage with it.  Because she was now susceptible
to Little Sister’s fear, which washed over her and utterly drowned the part of
her that had devised the plan and built up to it, she was diminished.

They stepped out
of the cover of woods and onto the street.  The girls were shoved ahead of Oni. 
The car pulled up to them and slowed down.  It was a dark-red Dodge Durango
with tinted windows.  The back door opened for them, and in the back seats were
two white men, both of them blonde and wearing black jackets, both of their
faces and hands adorned with various tattoos.

“Get in,” said
Oni from behind.

Kaley had one
last moment where she thought she would proceed with her plan, but the barrel
touched the back of her head, convincing her not to. 
He doesn’t have the
charm, but he does have something
. 
He knows what I’m thinking
.

Kaley climbed
meekly into the back seat, Oni behind them.  The door was shut behind her and
for a horrifying moment she thought Shannon was being taken someplace else. 
She started to struggle but stopped when Shan was brought around to the back
hatch and shoved inside, landing beside someone else.  There was another girl
there, a black girl a few years older than Shan who was similarly bound and
gagged.  She wore a red coat and tattered blue jeans.  A silver locket hung
from around her neck, one that she clutched as she stared up at Kaley
hopefully.

The girl looked
passing familiar, but Kaley couldn’t place the face.

Kaley felt the
young girl’s heart leap, then deflate when she saw that Kaley and her sister
were in the same boat she was.  She felt the young girl’s hope diminish just
like hers had in the woods only seconds ago.

Oni hopped into
the front passenger seat.  To the driver, he said, “
Zdravstvujte, dorogaya
moya
.”  He blew kisses at the driver, a man even larger than Oni and who
reached out and smacked him across the face, laughing.

On either side
of Kaley, there was a pair of men who might’ve been twin brothers—buzzed blonde
hair and cold hazel eyes.  The only thing that separated them was the one on
the left had yellowish skin, what Kaley had learned in school was called
jaundiced skin.  They all chuckled, and the jaundiced man pulled out a cell
phone and started chatting leisurely with someone.  Kaley wanted to scream for
help, that maybe the person on the other end would hear and come to save them,
but her charm told her that that wouldn’t help at all.  She could feel the
comfort the jaundiced man had with his conversation partner. 
He’s talking
to someone who’s just like him
. 
Someone who wouldn’t care if they heard
a screaming girl
.

As they started
to drive off, Kaley looked back at Shannon, who was staring across at the other
bound girl.  For a moment, they shared a connection.  They were both too
frightened to know what was really happening to them, and far too petrified to
move or do anything besides wonder what horrors waited for them.

“Don’t worry,
little girls,” said Oni from the front seat.  Kaley turned to look at him.  He
had twisted in his seat and was smiling back at her.  “Don’t worry.  We fuck
you soon.”

The SUV erupted
in laughter.  The aggregate of her sister and the other girl in the back seat
was almost impossible to take without passing out.  Kaley cast her eyes down at
her knees, wishing she could turn back time and tackled Oni in the woods while
the son of a bitch wasn’t expecting it. 
That’s the second time I’ve not
listened to my gut tonight
, she thought.  Kaley made a solemn vow to
herself. 
There will
not
be a third!  God as my witness, there
will
not
be a third!

The truck was
found at 12:42
AM
on the south end
of Joseph E. Boone Boulevard.  It certainly matched the description that the
clerk at Dodson’s Store had described.  The Tacoma’s license plate had it from Troup
County.

The plate’s
almost certainly been switched with another vehicle’s
, David Emerson
thought.  If so, then trying to track it down would do little good, because the
owner of the
other
vehicle, whose license plate this really was,
probably wouldn’t know his license plate had been swapped for someone else’s
for quite some time.  Few people knew their own license plate number, or knew
when it had been swapped.  They’d have to find this license plate’s true owner,
wherever he was (hopefully close-ish), take a look at
his
license plate,
and then figure out who this Tacoma truly belonged to.

David had pulled
on his raincoat since a drizzle had started.  He handed Beatrice a Slim Jim to
open the driver’s side door.  She popped the door, and began checking inside
with her Mag-Lite while David bent to one knee and checked beneath the
carriage.  So far, they hadn’t found anything suspicious or illicit—no weed, no
coke, no meth, and no weapons of any kind.

Headlights
poured over the car.  He looked up.  A black sedan had come up.  It was one of
the dicks, but he didn’t know which one until the mountain stepped out of the
car.

Leon Hulsey looked
as impermeable as a brick wall.  He was a regular down at the gym, and David
knew him well.  The guy had been a beat cop with the APD for almost a decade,
working Zone One (the area containing the Bluff) that whole time before finally
taking the exam that put him in the League of Detectives, as Hulsey was known
to refer to it.  He was a comic book fan, and his favorite team was the Justice
League.  David happened to know that Hulsey had a Superman symbol tattooed on
his left pectoral, and that it was large enough that it had excluded him from
undercover work years ago.  A much too obvious and defining mark that wouldn’t
be forgotten by Atlanta’s underworld.

Hulsey was an
old hard ass with very little sense of humor.  Gerard Laurent in
Robbery/Homicide said that Hulsey had it amputated the first week he started
working the Adult Missing Persons Squad.

And that was the
thing.  David knew Hulsey worked the
Adult
Missing Persons Squad, not
Missing and Exploited Children.  “Hey, Hulsey.  What’re you doing here?”

“I was closer
than anybody else, I suppose,” he said, extending his hand.  They shook hands
briefly, and then Hulsey put on a pair of rubber gloves and looked ready to
give a rectal exam.  “You guys find anything yet?”

“No.”

“Called the tow
company?”  His breath smelled like Tic Tacs.

“Yep.  They’re
on their way.  Hopefully forensics can find a print or a hidden compartment
that’ll give us something.”

Detective Hulsey
pursed his lips.  “I doubt there’s a compartment large enough to hide two
little girls in here.”

David
stiffened.  “That’s not exactly what I meant, but…”  But he didn’t finish his
statement.  It wasn’t necessary.  Hulsey was moving on around the car and
ignoring him now.

“Beatrice,” Hulsey
said.  “How’s things?”

“Good,” she
sighed, and pulled the hood of her raincoat up over her head.

Hulsey had no
raincoat or umbrella.  He just turned up the collar of his long coat and
walked, for all intents and purposes oblivious to the rain.  “Howard and the
kids all right?”

“Yep.  Right as
rain.”

“Keepin’ ’em all
straight, huh?” he said without a smile.  Asking generic questions about home
life was the closest Hulsey ever got to being amiable.

“You know it,”
Beatrice said.

David walked
over to join them.  Hulsey had already reached beside the steering wheel to pop
the trunk.  He walked around and opened it wide, glanced at a few things, and
nodded to himself.  “Something?” David said.

“I got an update
from dispatch just before I got here,” Hulsey said.  “A Tacoma was reported
stolen outside of a Great Clips hair salon in Troup County about this time
yesterday.  The owner said he had just replaced the alternator and the
battery.  I can see here that both are new.  Looks like we got our stolen
Tacoma.”

“Fella did this
knows how to hotwire,” David said.  He waved Hulsey over and showed him, aiming
his flashlight at where the ignition cover had been removed at the steering
column and the power and starter wires had been connected.  Other wires were
still hanging out like the entrails of a gutted chipmunk.

“Hm,” said the
detective.

David saw that
look on Hulsey’s face, and said, “What’s up?”

Large, callused
hands touched the space just beneath his iron chin, and tapped it a couple of
times, like he expected a fresh thought to pop up.  “The guys in Troup County
said that another stolen vehicle was found about a quarter-mile hike from where
the Tacoma was stolen.  The vehicle was a Chevy Blazer, reported stolen in
Muscogee County off a turnpike.  Not too far from where the Blazer was reported
stolen, Muscogee police found a Dodge Grand Caravan that was taken from
Tallapoosa County.”  He reached in to touch the dangling wires.  “That’s in
Alabama,” he said over his shoulder.

I know where
Tallapoosa is
. 
David considered what he had said.  “We got a guy playing leap frog across the
South?”

“Looks like
maybe that’s the case,” he said, hopping inside the Tacoma and opening up the
glove compartment and checking things that Beatrice and David had already
checked.

“So that’ll kick
this case over to ATTF.”

“
Also
,”
Hulsey said.

“What?”

“That’ll kick
this case over to ATTF
also
,” said the large man.  He hopped out of the
Tacoma, and the thing lifted a few thankful inches as he did.  David even
fancied he heard a sigh of relief from the truck.  “I’ll be coordinating with
them for tonight, and give the Missing Children guys a bit of a hand.  ATTF
won’t like it, especially since the car got dropped off down here in the
Bluff.”

“They still
lookin’ for the right chop shop?”

Hulsey nodded
and looked up and down the street.  A few late-nighters had paused to see what
the cops were doing.  A trio of young toughs had gathered around a
spray-painted mailbox, and up the street from them a bearded fellow in a blue
flannel shirt stood as still as a statue, just staring at them like a deer in
headlights.  “Almost two dozen auto shops in a ten-block radius, but none of the
ATTF boys are sure which one’s their big flipper.”

David turned and
looked up the street, where a few cars had stalled at a stoplight, even though
it had turned green.  Everyone was so curious tonight, even more so than usual. 
It’s like something was in the air. 
Something’s changed
, he thought,
and knew he was being silly. 

Or was he? 

The Bluff had
always had a weirdness to it, especially at night.  No one denied that.  A lot
of local church leaders had started campaigning for the revitalizations of
areas in and around the Bluff, and had started programs to coordinate with
police, even going so far as providing safe havens for informants that needed
to disappear for a while.  But Atlanta’s Major Crimes Division had its work cut
out for them when it came to this end of town.  Abductions were on the rise. 
It wasn’t anything quite so alarming as what you’d see in Phoenix, but the same
drug cartels that had moved in there had now taken up residence in the A-T-L,
plus a few extra, such as the
vory v zakone
, who conducted organized
kidnappings like the Mexicans but for different reasons.  At least, that was
the new report that was moving fast out of the rumor mill and headed directly
for the land of certified fact.

The
vory v
zakone
, the influx of Mexican cartels, the new human traffickers and the Auto
Theft Task Force’s frustration at not finding this major chop shop, which they were
all positive was helping these other groups and was
some
-God-damn-where
in this area, were just other symptoms of the changes here.  Once, the Crips
and the Bloods had been the big problem.  Then had come the brief occupation of
heavy hitters from the Five Families.  Now, people from other countries were
calling the shots here.  They had proxy groups and proxy gangs doing their
deeds for them, and they never even had to leave their home soil.