Stolen (18 page)

That’s when I screamed.

I
closed the laptop and dropped to my knees. The bar stool fell sideways at the same time Ruby lost her balance reaching for me. She toppled out of her seat and landed right on top of me, cushioning her fall with my body. I clambered back to my feet, straining to reach the laptop—pawing for it—but Ruby had the better position and got there first.

“Don’t look at it!” I shouted at her. “You don’t want to see!”

“Mom!” Ruby cried out, fumbling to flip open the top cover.

I guess Ruby thought it was a picture of her mother that had made me scream and fall to the floor. I wasn’t trying to be protective of Ruby when I told her not to look. I was speaking the truth. A lifetime ago—at least that was how it seemed—I had created a mental picture of what Rhonda Jennings looked like when the police found her body, but that image paled entirely when compared to seeing the real flesh and blood thing.

The blood.

It was everywhere, but it didn’t cover the purple bruise marks on Jenna’s throat where Uretsky had choked the life out of her. Jenna’s face, moonlight white, was marked with bloody crimson streaks that appeared painted on, and with crude brushstrokes. Her cloudy eyes, open and lifeless, were partially covered by one of her severed fingers. The finger’s ragged flesh, lumpy and torn at the knuckle, appeared to have been ripped off her hand, not sheared. Two of Jenna’s fingers jutted out from her ears like heinous, bloody antennae. Another two, those a pulpy mess as well, had been set upon her pale blue lips in a purposeful manner.

See no evil.

Hear no evil.

Speak no evil.

Ruby stared blankly at the screen. A baleful scream, low at first but rising in pitch, escaped from her tremulous mouth. She threw the computer against the wall with enough force to break it open on impact. Chunks of flying metal and glass spread out like shrapnel, with a few pieces nicking me in the face and neck. Ruby grabbed hold of the apartment phone, which I had let drop in front of the kitchen island.

“Damn you!” Ruby screamed into the phone. “You monster! Let my mother go! Let her go!”

I couldn’t hear Uretsky’s reply, but Ruby let the phone fall from her grasp as though it had become too hot to hold. I watched it swing back and forth in front of the kitchen island, moving slowly like the pendulum of a grandfather clock. Ruby dropped to the floor, huddled into a protective ball. I picked up the phone, put it to my ear, and heard Uretsky’s singsong voice to the tune of “Camptown Races” saying, “Put John on, or your mother dies. Put John on, or your mother dies. Put John on, or your mother dies.”

“I’m here!” I shouted. “It’s me! It’s John.”

Uretsky stopped his singing.

“Johnny!” he exclaimed, sounding excited to hear from me, as though we were old friends newly reunited. “You hanging in there, Johnny?”

“Please . . . ,” I said, tears again stinging my eyes. “You didn’t have to do that. She didn’t do anything to you.”

“
You
did this to her, not me. You tried to pull a fast one on me, didn’t you? Rules are rules, and you broke ’em. Now, there’s a price to pay when you don’t follow the rules.”

“Just let Winnie go,” I said. “What can I do?”

“Not that easy. You’ve got to play a penalty round.”

“I’ll do anything.”

“I think you’re going to come to regret that statement,” Uretsky said.

“Tell . . . me . . . how,” I said, my shaky voice barely audible.

“You sure you want to keep playing? You can say, ‘Game over.’ That’s always an option. Of course, I’ll kill Winnie if you don’t play along, and I’ll probably come after Ruby next.”

“Tell me what to do to free Winnie,” I said in a low voice.

“Okay. You made the choice, so it’s game on! Thatta boy, Johnny! Now, listen to me, and listen close, because I’m not going to repeat myself.” Uretsky’s voice had dipped in volume, a return to the serious business of the game. “There’s a warehouse in South Boston, on the corner of West Third and B Street. It’s in a part of town that doesn’t see a lot of foot traffic. Across from that warehouse is a single-story brick building with a Dumpster in the back parking lot. You’re going to go Dumpster diving. Inside that Dumpster, you’ll find three five-gallon canisters of gasoline buried beneath the rubbish. You’re going to take those gas cans over to the warehouse and enter through the green door, which I’ve left unlocked for your convenience.”

I could feel my insides shriveling up into nothing. “Then what?” I asked.

“Then I want you to use the accelerant to soak a pile of wood pallets on the first floor. I suggest you save some gas to make a trail to the door. You don’t want to be close to those pallets when they go up in flames.”

“You want me to start a fire inside the warehouse?” I said.

“That’s exactly what you’re going to do. Strike a match and start a fire. I have a scanner, so I’ll know when the fire department gets the call. I have other ways of knowing you’ve followed my instructions to the letter.”

“Escape without getting caught,” Uretsky continued, “and I’ll let Winnie go. If you fail in any way, Winnie will look a lot like Jenna, maybe even worse. That’s the deal, and it’s nonnegotiable.”

“Let her go first and I’ll do it,” I said.

“Nonnegotiable,” Uretsky repeated. “You have one hour from this very moment to become an arsonist. Best of luck.”

Z
iggy no longer had the familiar feel of just being our car. It had transformed into something sinister when it became our getaway vehicle for the Giovanni robbery. It sickened me to put Ziggy into ignoble use once again, but it was “game on” and I had to play. For Winnie’s sake, I had to play.

I plugged the address Uretsky had provided into my GPS, and soon we were on our way to the site of a future arson incident in South Boston. I had divided the allotted time into three critical sequences : thirty minutes to reach our target (morning commuter traffic would still be a problem); ten minutes to get the gas canisters; twenty minutes to spread out the fuel and strike a match. I might have had a plan in place, but my thoughts were with Jenna and Winnie.

Ruby’s pale complexion and her body’s persistent trembling suggested that she was thinking the same.

“What are we doing?” Ruby said, her voice cracking from the strain. “What the hell are we doing?”

“We’re going to save your mother.”

Ruby held her head in her hands, her body convulsing. Her face flushed as she began to sob so hard, she could barely breathe. “What he did to that poor woman. How could he do that? How?”

“We can’t think about that right now,” I said. “We’ve got to think about your mom.”

“Every time I close my eyes, all I see is what he did to Jenna. That image—it’s never going to go away. Never.”

Somehow I managed to navigate my way through the barrage of traffic without getting into an accident. But Ruby was right. The image of Jenna would last us a lifetime. My eyes saw the road, but my heart saw only blackness, death, and Jenna’s bloody fingers. What I’d once thought to be our incorruptible morals turned out to have all the flexibility of a pipe cleaner—with disastrous or near disastrous consequences.

For Rhonda Jennings, who would never marry.

For Giovanni Renzulli, who almost choked to death before two million YouTube viewers.

For a redheaded prostitute named Jenna, whose mutilated body had yet to be found.

We had saved Dr. Adams’s life. How far would we be willing to go to save Winnie’s—or our own, for that matter? At what point would we be asked to do something we’d simply refuse to do? How far could we be bent before we broke?

I lost sight of myself, my morals, the moment I became Elliot Uretsky. What other crimes was I capable of committing? I wondered. I really didn’t know. That might have terrified me most of all. Uretsky didn’t know, either, but he was determined to find out.

“It’s my fault,” Ruby said, her sobs slowly abating. “I should have just gone through with it. I’m the reason that girl is dead.”

“Don’t do that to yourself,” I said.

Ruby flashed me an angry look. “Why? Because you don’t blame yourself for what happened to Brooks Hall?”

“That’s different,” I said.

“No, it’s not. It’s no different at all. You cut the rope. I couldn’t sleep with a stranger. We both made choices that cost innocent people their lives.”

“But I knew what was going to happen to Brooks. You didn’t know Jenna would be murdered.”

“It was a risk involving her with Uretsky in the first place. I knew that much,” Ruby said.

I didn’t say anything. How could I? She was right.

 

I parked a few blocks from the warehouse. I worried about surveillance cameras capturing video of two arsonists climbing into a red Ford Fusion to make their escape. We each wore Red Sox baseball hats, the ones I’d bought last year, during our annual anniversary date at Fenway Park. Ruby’s hat served a dual purpose, concealing her identity from the cameras while shielding her sensitive skin from the sun. I gave Ruby a pair of sunglasses to wear. Meanwhile, I donned a handkerchief to hide my face. I wanted to do this alone, but Ruby wouldn’t allow it.

We walked to the intersection of West Third and B Street. Sure enough, I saw the Dumpster behind the single-story redbrick building with a flat roof and a white garage door. The parking lot housing the Dumpster was empty. In fact, the only things in abundance in this desolate part of town were broken bottles and crumpled aluminum cans. I looked to my right and saw the warehouse we’d been instructed to torch, directly across the street from the Dumpster.

The three-story brick warehouse looked dark and empty, with many of the windows boarded up, covered in newsprint, or broken. I thought about how the flat tar roof would burn when the fire reached that floor. I imagined the smoke would be thick, black, and toxic, transforming a dumpy cityscape into the lead story on the six o’clock news. Would it be a three-alarm fire? Four?

And then I thought about a firefighter climbing up his steel ladder, hose slung across his shoulder, vanishing into a smoke-filled window and never coming out.

In my single-minded mission to save Winnie, it simply hadn’t occurred to me that a firefighter—or plural—could die while battling a blaze that I started. I pondered the conundrum while my stomach roiled.
Walk away and Winnie dies. Set the fire and maybe somebody else—or plural—dies or gets burned to the point where death would be preferable
.

Ruby saw my hesitation.

“What are you thinking about?”

I told her, and by her blank look, I saw that she understood the gravity of our situation.

“Do we let my mom die?” Her voice held no trace of sarcasm—same as me, she honestly considered just walking away.

I paced in a tight circle, cursing aloud to nobody but the pigeons enjoying a mid-morning snack of trash. I needed to start a fire. I had to burn a pile of wood pallets using three canisters of gasoline. I didn’t have time to go hunting for Uretsky’s hidden cameras. Either I did it the way he wanted it done, or I didn’t. But how could I start a fire that would be the least risky for the responding firefighters?

I caught sight of something that gave me an idea.

“No, we’re not going to let your mom die,” I said, pointing.

“How is a fire alarm box going to help us?” Ruby asked.

“Because we’re going pull the alarm before we start the fire,” I said.

I checked the time on my watch and set its stopwatch feature to zero. We had fifteen minutes to get that fire started.

T
he green, rust-speckled Dumpster smelled of ammonia, rotting food, and gasoline. I saw the chain used to secure the flip-top lid on the blacktop beside it, coiled like a metal snake poised to strike. I could see where the chain had been cut, presumably with bolt cutters and undoubtedly by Uretsky’s hand. I pried open the lid and let it drop with a clang. Hesitating, I did a quick double take and agreed with Uretsky’s assertion that this desolate part of town saw very little foot traffic. Still, I pulled my hat down lower and the handkerchief covering my face up a bit higher. I climbed onto the lip of the Dumpster with ease. For a second or two, I crouched there, with my legs spread wide and my sweat-slickened hands down between my knees, gripping at the lip for balance.

“Apparently, he likes to hide things in the trash,” I said, remembering that he’d hidden a gun in a bathroom waste receptacle at the movie theater.

Beneath a cloudless sky and pale yellow sun, I jumped in and sank waist deep into the spongy refuse. The smells were more intense down here. Gag worthy, in fact. It was a potpourri of scents taken from the worst places imaginable: think the Port Authority bathroom, a field of rotting vegetables, a trash-filled car left baking in the sun.

I felt about blindly, reaching my hands lower and lower into the seemingly bottomless mass of foul-smelling trash. I dug and dug until the tips of my fingers brushed against a plastic handle. Gripping that handle, I yanked the object toward me. Almost immediately, my throat closed as my gag reflex kicked into overdrive. Evidently, I had brought to the surface, along with the first canister of gasoline, a fetid rag that stunk of excrement. Maybe it was something else, but it sure didn’t smell that way to me. It was a reminder that Uretsky was always playing games, using any opportunity he could to torment me.

It didn’t take long to find the other two containers of gas Uretsky had stashed down there. I set them in a neat little row on the blacktop beside the Dumpster.

I checked the time and swallowed hard. I didn’t know whether Uretsky first choked his victims and then cut off their fingers, or if it went the other way around, but if we didn’t pull the fire alarm in ten minutes, Winnie would have a few seconds of terror to find out.

While I was busy fishing containers of gas out of the trash, Ruby looked up some information on her smartphone. “There are two firehouses nearby,” Ruby said. “There’s one on K and Fourth Street and another on D and Third.”

“Perfect. So the fire department will get here in two minutes, tops,” I said.

“Tell me what you’re thinking.”

“You pull the alarm, and I’ll stand by the warehouse door with a match. We wait forty seconds, and then I light the gas. The pallets will burn for no more than a minute before the fire department gets here, and we’re already gone. Uretsky sees the pallets are on fire via his hidden camera—no false alarm, either, as it’ll be on the police scanners—and we’ll have met his demands without creating a towering inferno.”

Ruby thought a beat, searching for any holes in my plan.

“It’ll work,” she said. “But is he going to honor the rules of his game?”

I nodded. “He will,” I said, certainty in my voice. “It’s the only thing honorable about him.”

I was preparing to dash across the street, gripping the three red plastic gas canisters, when I heard an approaching car. I grabbed Ruby and pulled her down behind the Dumpster with me. We watched as the car—some sort of sedan—turned right onto B Street. Only when the sound of its wheels and engine had gone did we dare breathe again. We popped up from behind the Dumpster like wary prairie dogs.

Once again I hefted the gas canisters. Dropping into a crouched position—as if that would render me invisible in broad daylight—I broke for the warehouse across the street. I didn’t dare think about someone spotting me from a darkened window of the nearby buildings.

I checked my watch.

Ten minutes to go.

I went to the door that Uretsky said would be open, tried the knob, and found it was locked. I cursed under my breath. Again, Uretsky had proved he never tired of toying with us. Rather than search for an unlocked entrance, I decided to break the glass of a first-floor window to get inside. I assumed I could open the locked door from the inside; if not, I’d have to find another way out.

I looked around for a solid object to use, found half a brick, and pitched it baseball-like through a first-story window. Shards of broken glass fell to the ground, sounding like wind chimes plinking in a soft breeze. I motioned for Ruby to cross the street, and she came over in a crouched posture, same as I had done.

“Help me up,” I said to her.

My breathing wasn’t labored. I was surprised, too, at the calmness of my voice. I wasn’t relaxed, but I wasn’t hurried, either. The adrenaline rush made me so focused on my goal, I forgot to be completely terrified. Perhaps that’s how real criminals feel before they commit their crimes—more amped than afraid.

Ruby locked her fingers together, and it seemed the adrenaline had got to her as well. Even in her weakened condition, she had no trouble giving me the needed lift. I set my forearms on the windowsill, relieving Ruby of my body weight, and clumsily used my elbow to push the remaining glass inside to clear away the jagged edges. I had just enough room to swing my body around until my legs dangled on the inside and my torso extended outward.

“Pass me a canister,” I called. I had my body perfectly balanced on the sill, making it easy to reach down and grab hold of the gas. I tossed the first canister into the warehouse, then the second, and soon enough I had all three of them down there. The rising vapor stung my eyes and burned the back of my throat, but that didn’t stop me from sliding off the sill as if I was being sucked down the gullet of some gas-breathing monster.

Ruby called, “John, are you all right?”

“I’m fine!” I shouted back.

The warehouse was dark inside except for places where the paper coverings on the windows had peeled back to allow slivers of light inside. Dust motes swam in and out of those light shafts, agitated by my presence. I took out the portable flashlight tucked in my back pocket and shone the beam around. The warehouse was nothing more than a big open space with concrete support columns staged evenly throughout.

Almost immediately, I saw the pile of broken wooden pallets Uretsky had instructed me to burn. I shone my flashlight around some more, wondering if I could spot one of Uretsky’s hidden cameras. I saw huge piles of debris scattered about, but I didn’t inspect them closely—there simply wasn’t enough time or reason. Nor did I worry that they would catch fire. Judging by the distance from the pallets, I felt confident the fire department would get here before the closest—and largest—pile could burn.

“Hello!” I yelled out. “Anybody here?” My heart was pounding in my chest, and my shaky voice mirrored my nerves.

I shone the light on my watch and shivered.

Six minutes to go.