The Lonely Mile (8 page)

“Of course. You know you can always tell me anything.”

Bill laughed. “Hey, that’s supposed to be my line—you stole it from me! Anyway,” he said, “that was the whole reason I decided to help that poor girl. I figured you needed a little boost with Cody…what was his name again?”

“Small, Daddy, Cody Small.”

“Oh yeah, Cody Mall. That’s why I saved that girl, so Cody Mall would talk to you.”

Carli laughed. “Small.”

“Well, I’m sorry,” he told her. “I can’t do anything about his height. I’ve given you all the help I can with this Cody Mall character. The rest is up to you now.”

His daughter shook her head. “You’re hopeless,” she said, but she was smiling widely, and Bill knew the trip over here had been well worth it. She kissed him on the cheek. “I’ve got to get back to my homework.”

“Yeah, sure,” he said. “I know you’re really texting Lauren, telling her this whole Cody Mall story, embellishing it and making up all kinds of cool details that didn’t really happen.”

She stuck her tongue out at him. “Maybe so, but I’m getting my homework done, too!”

Bill opened his arms and gave his daughter another hug. She might be seventeen and going off to college next year, but she would always be his little girl. “I love you, sweetheart.”

“I love you, too, Dad.”

CHAPTER 16

MARTIN KRALL SELECTED A DVD and pressed the “Play” button on his remote before firing up his computer. Instantly, the high-definition flat-screen TV taking up half of one living room wall was filled with the image of a well-endowed blonde writhing and moaning. She had the hard-edged appearance of a woman who had once been beautiful, but now, after years of drug and alcohol abuse—not to mention the rigors of dozens upon dozens of porn flicks—simply looked used-up.

The barest shadow of a long-lost former innocence, an innocence Martin found sexy and appealing, colored her features as she moaned and groaned, giving the performance an almost comic quality as three young men, probably years younger, did things to her that most people reserved for the privacy of their bedrooms. All three men featured bored, half-attentive expressions.

The performance was largely wasted, though, because after a cursory glance at the screen, Martin lost himself in an Internet search, paying only the slightest attention to what was happening on his TV. Missing the video action didn’t matter; he could always watch later. First things first. And the first thing tonight was the fascinating information Martin was beginning to uncover about the busybody hero wannabe from earlier today; the guy who had stuck his nose where it didn’t belong and, in the process, ruined a perfectly good kidnapping.

It was unbelievable how much an intrepid explorer could discover on the information superhighway if that explorer was properly motivated and willing to put forth some effort to retrieve it. In Martin’s case, it didn’t even take a whole lot of effort. After all, the TV news bimbos had given Martin a leg-up on the search by flashing that beautiful, high-definition video sequence of the busybody leaving the scene of the failed kidnapping in his work van.

And just in case there had been any doubt in Martin’s mind as to who had ruined his plan with the blonde teenager—like, say, maybe the guy driving the van was just an employee of Ferguson Hardware and not the actual store owner—the coiffed and blow-dried news pimps had very generously provided Martin with a name as well. Bill Ferguson. Of the aforementioned Ferguson Hardware empire.

Armed with that knowledge, finding out all Martin Krall had ever wanted to know about the buttinsky was simply a matter of taking the time to read the information generated by properly worded search engine requests. For example, he discovered that Bill Ferguson was the owner of a pair of independent hardware stores in the local area, one in Winton Center, New York, and the other—the home office—located in West Stockton, Massachusetts.

Through various background check sites, Martin was also able to discover that Bill Ferguson was forty-three years old, two years divorced, with an ex-wife who had remarried not long after ending the relationship. He maintained an apartment in the local area close to—and here was the best part, the deliciously cosmically perfect part, the juicy cherry on top of the vengeance banana split—his daughter, Carli, a seventeen-year-old, slim, athletically inclined, blonde high school senior.

And that was perfect. Because depending on whether she was a dog or not, Bill Ferguson’s daughter could be the perfect replacement for the prize Martin had lost today.

He navigated to the Web page of Stockton High School. Stockton was a small town, so Martin figured there was a better than average chance she played at least one sport at the varsity or JV level. First, he checked out the softball team’s page. No luck. She was listed on the roster as a varsity infielder, but Martin didn’t care about that. He was looking for a picture. No luck under field hockey either. Then he clicked on the girls’ soccer link and smiled as his patience and hard work was rewarded. Filling the screen was a full-color action photograph of none other than Carli Ferguson herself!

She had just scored a goal and was captured at the apex of an exultant leap in the air, high-fiving two teammates on a sun-dappled late-fall afternoon. Her blonde hair, pulled into a ponytail, hung perpendicular to the ground at the top of her leap, her cream-colored, satin uniform jersey pulled taut against her smallish breasts. She featured the toned legs of an athlete, long, as though her physique had struggled to keep pace with her body’s growth.

In short, and just as Martin had already known, she was perfect. Young, blonde, beautiful—couldn’t be better. He sat admiring the photograph of his soon-to-be companion, lost in his fantasies, still paying no attention to the artificial ecstasy taking place on the television screen in front of him. He mused about how he had spent such a long time this afternoon picking out the girl he had hoped would be the one back at the rest stop, only to have her wrenched from his grasp by that loser with the gun who didn’t have a clue how to mind his own business. Then, by doing so, the same idiot presented him with an even better replacement!

He would have to do more digging—for example, what were the young Carli Ferguson’s living arrangements, and how much time did she spend with her father, the busybody himself?—but after just thirty minutes, Martin had decided exactly what he was going to do and how he was going to do it. He couldn’t believe his good fortune. This was perfect. It was as if the gods of karma were telling him the little chickie he had tried to snatch this afternoon was simply not good enough for him, that another girl would be a much better fit.

And now he knew who that girl was. Her name was Carli Ferguson, and, incredibly, if she lived anywhere near her father, she was just thirty or so minutes away from this very living room. Over the course of the last three years plus, Martin had been careful to spread his kidnappings over a very wide geographical area, covering more than five hundred miles of the east-west highway. He was certain that caution—among other important factors—had resulted in the authorities not having the slightest clue as to the location of his home base. They wanted him badly, of that he had no doubt, but they would never find him.

The drawback to being so careful was the time spent on the road, far from home, scoping out potential victims and then snatching them from the mind-numbingly similar rest stops dotting I-90. Recently, he had begun returning home via back roads rather than the Interstate, all in an effort to throw the nosy pigs off his trail—those inconvenient Amber Alerts could really throw a monkey wrench into his well-laid plans.

So, the fact that his soon-to-be special friend Carli Ferguson happened to live in the immediate area was one more stroke of good fortune, all of it leading Martin to the conclusion that she might actually be the perfect temporary companion, the one special girl he had been searching for all these years. Time after time, he thought he had found her, only to discover upon closer inspection that the girl’s eyes were placed too closely together, or she refused to shut her mouth when ordered to, or she was too tall or too short or weighed a couple of pounds too much. It was always something.

None of that mattered in the long run, of course, since seven days was such a short length of time—a drop in the bucket, really—but Martin considered himself extremely discriminating, and although he could still have plenty of fun with a companion who possessed a few flaws, he had lived his life waiting and hoping that the perfect one would eventually appear. The search had been exhausting, both mentally and physically, and there were times when Martin had begun to fear he would never find the girl of his dreams, that she was nothing more than the figment of an overeager and overheated imagination.

But now, with the delectable Carli Ferguson nearly in his grasp, combined with the perfect method of lowering the boom of vengeance on her busybody father, Martin felt like climbing onto his roof and shouting out to the world, “Yes! Yes! I’ve found her! This girl is the one!”

It was obvious to Martin that the fates had been at work. The girl he had chosen back at the rest stop was unworthy; he could see that now with the benefit of hindsight. The one he had nearly been stuck with was not quite tall enough, and her dishwater blonde hair was dull and lackluster compared to Carli Ferguson’s, whose golden locks seemed somehow to contain rays of sunshine itself. He stared at the screen, awestruck by the serendipitous way things had turned out.

Martin would have been thankful for Bill Ferguson’s interference, but for the knowledge that the wannabe hero had had nothing to do with this afternoon’s good fortune. That had been karmically preordained: it happened because Martin Krall was meant to possess Carli Ferguson. Of that he was certain. He gazed at her photograph, imagining the things they would do together, and marveled that such an angel had been produced by the likes of Bill Ferguson, so clearly a representative of the shallow end of the gene pool.

Ultimately, though, he knew it didn’t matter. In addition to finally possessing
the one—
his soul mate, the girl who would worship him and serve him and make this whole dreary existence worthwhile, at least for a short time—Martin Krall would enjoy the added bonus of evening the score with that gun-toting fool Bill Ferguson. Because, even though it was preordained that he experience a week of bliss with the angel Carli Ferguson, he would still derive tremendous satisfaction out of making that stupid bastard Bill Ferguson’s life a living hell. That fool would regret the day he had ever stepped between Martin Krall and Martin Krall’s objective.

Another thought struck Martin out of the blue. It came to him fully formed, with the clarity of divine inspiration. Why couldn’t he enjoy his perfect angel for months, or even years, rather than the agreed-upon seven days? Why should he turn her over to his contact at all? Why couldn’t he snatch some other girl to satisfy his contact, and keep Carli for himself? Hiding her from his conspirators would not be easy, but it could be done. It was definitely something to consider.

Martin shut down his laptop, but only after making Carli’s goal-scoring photo the background on his computer screen, so he might gaze upon the sight of his angel whenever he booted up the machine. Then he turned his attention to the big-screen television. The credits were rolling across a black background, something Martin had always thought was ludicrous. Credits for a porn flick? Okay, people might want to know the name of the star, so they could buy her other movies, but who the hell cared what the director’s name was? It’s not like anyone would confuse
Naughty Nurses Five
with a lost classic from Alfred Hitchcock or something.

Martin snickered to himself at the picture of fat Alfred shooting video of naked models, and thumbed the “Play” button on his remote. Instantly, the film began again, the same tired blonde with the same used-up features writhing and moaning in the same patently phony way, but Martin didn’t care. All he saw when he looked at the screen was Carli Ferguson, and she wasn’t used up at all.

At least, not yet.

CHAPTER 17

THE DREAM IS ALWAYS
the same.

You’re lying in bed, tucked under the covers, fresh from a bath, squeaky-clean and warm. You fall asleep almost immediately because there is so much to do when you’re ten years old, and you’re so tired at the end of the day.

After midnight, it’s always after midnight when it happens, your bedroom door cracks open and a sliver of hallway light flashes across your carpeted floor, followed immediately by the figure of a man. He is tall and bulky, but he moves with surprising stealth and speed. He sits on the edge of your bed as you pretend to sleep. The springs squeal, protesting the added weight of his body, and he knows you are awake, that you are only pretending to sleep, but you do it anyway. You can’t help it.

You know what’s coming; it’s the same thing that is always coming. You wish it weren’t, but wishes don’t matter, even in dreams. The man places his hand tenderly atop your head and strokes your hair gently, almost reverently. Soon his touch takes on a more insistent quality and he begins to caress your face. His hand feels fevered, sweaty. “I know you’re awake,” he whispers.

You open your eyes at his words and shake your head in mute protest at what you know is about to happen but it doesn’t matter. It never matters. The man pulls the blanket down and lifts up your pajama top and traces the bony contours of your prepubescent body with his rough hands. He is breathing harder now, harsher. His respiration comes in gasp-like bursts; he is nearly panting.

Finally he hooks his fingers under the waistband of your flannel pajama bottoms—the ones with Aladdin and the Genie on them, they are your favorites and you wear them to bed whenever you can—and slides them over your hips and down your legs. Then he climbs on top of you and does what he came to do, ignoring your whimpers of pain and protest. He finishes quickly and then leaves the room, always with the same parting words: “You’ll learn to like it if you just give it a chance.” The door closes silently behind him and the room is plunged into darkness.