Lost (17 page)

“McQuarrie. His name is McQuarrie.”

“Whatever.”

Something I’ve never really understood, Fern not liking my friend Alex. It’s not that he’s gay—Fern has more gay male pals than Cher and Madonna combined. She thinks Alex is a terrible snob, and of course that’s true, but if I don’t find his snooty attitudes offensive, why should Fern? One of those unfortunate things about life—no matter how hard you try, not all your friends are friends.

“The detective called,” she’s saying. “Jay Berg? He sounds full of himself. Nothing to report from his end, just checking in—wanted to know if Kelly had made contact. I said no, was that okay?”

“That’s fine. I don’t want to start lying to the cops, not if we can help it.”

“Any news?”

“We just got here. How could there be any news?”

“You sound so stressed! Janey, listen to me, you need a shoulder to cry on, cry on his. Those are good shoulders.”

“Got to go. Thanks, Fern, you’re a saint.”

“Not if I can help it. Bye-bye. Love you, Janey poo.”

Janey poo.
Fern is the only person in the world who can get away with calling me that. My playground name. I’m seven years old, fall on my bum in the mud. All the kids laughing, saying I pooed my pants, which seems so utterly unfair, since I haven’t even wet the bed in years and years—or months, at least. Fern, who loved being the playground hero, swooping in like the wonderful wicked witch, saying she’ll poo on them if they don’t shut their dirty mouths, and from then on it’s her secret sister name for me. A name that says we’re in this together, blood of my blood, best friends forever.

Thank God for Fern. Having her on my side makes an impossible situation just a little bit easier to take.

Randall Shane returns from the counter disappointed. No Lincoln Town Cars available. “I settled for a Crown Vic,” he says, handing me the paperwork. “You drive.”

On the short bus ride to the car lot he explains that he’s into his twenty-seventh hour without sleep and doesn’t trust himself behind the wheel.

“Are you sure you’re okay with the rest of it?” I want to know. “Can you do this?”

“I’m fine,” he insists. “Never felt better. The twenty-four-hour rule is my own personal thing. Like not driving if you have a glass of wine.”

“Lots of people drive with a glass of wine. I have, if it’s only one with dinner.”

“Not me. Never,” he says, very firmly.

End of discussion, obviously. Mr. Shane has his rules and sticks to ‘em, thank you, ma’am. What’s with him, anyhow? The so-called sleep disorder—did he have an accident, fall asleep at the wheel, is that what this is about? At some point I do want to know, but it’s not important enough to pursue, not at the moment. Certainly not worth surrendering my secrets.

Ancient history. There are bigger priorities.

Waiting in the Hertz lot is a big, dark green Ford sedan with tinted windows. To me it looks suspiciously like a cop car. Shane says that’s no surprise, lots of law enforcement agencies use the Crown Victoria, including the FBI.

“You’re thinking of the P71 Police Interceptor model. This is the rental version,” he says, sliding into the passenger seat. “Less power, smoother ride. Also shotgun, police radio, or on-board computer. Otherwise pretty much the same vehicle.”

“Feels like a boat,” I point out. “Drives like one, too,” he says. “Where are we headed, exactly?” Shane unfolds the Hertz map. “I want to find that cell tower,” he says. “We’ll go from there.”

3. Darkness My Old Friend

The mosquito is driving her insane.

Kelly knows she should conserve the battery in the lantern—her only source of light—but for the past twenty minutes a mosquito has been sucking her blood like a winged vampire. She’s decided she can take the confinement, the hunger, the worrying about what has happened to Seth, the toilet-in-a-bucket, but the goddamn mosquito makes her want to run into a wall, knock herself out.

Crazy thought. How can she find a way to escape if she’s unconscious?

Zzz-zzz-zzz, dive-bombing her ear. Stupid bug!

Kelly clicks on the feeble light. Catches a glimpse of something zipping around her face, then loses it. She crawls to a corner, hoping the bug will stay around the light, leave her alone.

The strategy works for less than a minute. Zzz-zzz-zzz. With her back braced to the corner, swatting air, she makes a terrible discovery: there’s way more than one mosquito. There are dozens, attacking in turn, and more are streaming in through the narrow air vent.

There will be no end to the biting, the buzzing, the swarming dots of madness. Sobbing frantically, she slaps at her ears, hair, neck.

Kelly remembers a kid in the hospital having a seizure, how
scary it was to observe, and this is like that—uncontrollable, involuntary. Her limbs kicking out, her brain throwing sparks instead of thinking. And she hates it, not being in charge of her body.

As she continues to slap herself, the hate part gradually overcomes the fear. She concentrates on hating what’s been done to her. A hatred as white and hot as a knife to the brain. How dare they? Not that she has a clear idea of who
they
are. The mission was to deliver his father’s company plane to a location in Florida—a fabulous flight in a dream aircraft, with Kelly flying hands-on most of the way. Supposedly a favor to some business associate. Deliver the King Air, then return on a commercial flight, they’d both be home the same day, no big deal. But when she and Seth exited the aircraft, three men were waiting on the packed gravel runway. Dark, dangerous men—one of them darker and more dangerous than the others. Glossy black hair in a bowl cut—he’s the one who shot her, drugged her. Wait. Does she have that right, was she really drugged? Did he shoot her with some sort of dart or is that something from a bad dream, the nightmare of waking up in the dark?

Hard to sort out that jumble of images, decide what’s real, what’s imagined. Similar to how her memory got scrambled when they gave her anesthesia in the hospital. You come out of a black hole, can’t quite put it all together. Dazed and confused for sure.

Gradually Kelly settles. Takes control of her breathing, stops slapping at herself. Let the bastards bite, she’s got more important things to do.

Figure it out, Kel. Or, like her mom is always saying, use your noodle.

First thing, she turns off the lamp.

Darkness my old friend.
Something from a song her grandmother
used to play. An actual turntable album, probably still there with the stuff in the attic Mom can’t bring herself to throw out, although the turntable itself is long gone. Kind of a spooky-pretty song, high boy voices, and when Kelly had to go back into the hospital, face it all over again, the words resonated.
Hello darkness my old friend, I’ve come to speak to you again.
Made sense to her then, and it makes sense now: the darkness really can be her friend, if she can find a way to use it. She can’t break through the steel walls or fit through the ventilation slot. She has no knife, no gun, no secret karate moves. There’s only one way to escape: she has to think herself out.

Her weapon is her brain. Her brain and the dark.

4. Small Alligators

The road runs straight and true, a sliver of hot black tar straight into the middle of nowhere. This is my first experience driving in South Florida—with my mom we took shuttles and courtesy vans—but I seem to be doing okay. With Shane navigating, I manage to connect with a street south of the airport and follow it west until the endless stoplights gradually diminish and the flat, urban sprawl gives way to a sea of grass that stretches all the way to the horizon. Nothing but sunburnt grass, and low mangroves, and silvery glints of water under a bleached-out sky.

We’ve gone from the twenty-first century to some ancient, empty wilderness in less than forty minutes.

“This is the Everglades?” I want to know.

“The edge of it,” he says, consulting the map. “Pull over at the next rest stop.”

It’s not so much a rest stop as a narrow strip of baked earth. When I shove open the heavy door and step out, the sudden blast of heat takes my breath away. Shane is already peering
off into the great flat distance, using a rock-steady hand to shade his eyes.

“There,” he says, pointing.

Half a mile away, on a little man-made island in the grasslands, a sky-blue tower juts up like a rude finger.

“Got it,” I say, squinting into the brightness. “But what good does it do us?”

Can’t say I ever before actually noticed a cell tower. Why would I? Normally all I care is if the phone works, not the technical aspects. But here we are, in the middle of the soggy forever, staring up at this huge thing that bristles with what Shane says are microwave transponders.

“Cell phone transmission is basically line of sight,” he explains. “What you carry in your purse is a small radio transmitter with a range of only a few miles. The nearest tower picks up your transmission, beams it to a base station, where the call is shunted into the normal phone lines we all know and love. Think of it as a much bigger way of doing what your cordless phone at home does, providing radio connection between the bases. Pretty simple, really.”

Yeah, sure, pretty simple if you happen to be a techno-freak. Some of us have never figured out how electricity comes out of those little receptacles in the wall, let alone how cell phones, or TVs or radios work. Mostly because we don’t really care how stuff works, just so long as the toaster oven gets all hot when you push the button.

I’m thinking about heat and toasters and ovens because it feels like we’re being baked alive. When the big trucks roar by, the gusts of wind hit like a hot slap in the face. I’m going to need a hat or a visor, and most of all a pair of big, wraparound sunglasses—or maybe one of those welder’s masks, to shield me from the brutal sun.

Shane smiles, showing his teeth. Looks like a handsome shark, pleased to be out of water. “The most recent calls from your daughter’s cell phone were made in line of sight from here, via that tower. Figure the height of the tower, that means a radius of up to ten miles.”

“Yeah, I get it. But if someone else is using her phone, then she isn’t necessarily within the same area, right? Plus there’s nothing out here. Maybe the kidnappers were driving along this road when they made the call. Maybe they’re a hundred miles from here by now. Or a thousand, if they stole the flyboy’s airplane.”

Shane nods, still shielding his pale eyes. “Agreed, lots of maybes. But we have to start somewhere. I wanted to get a physical look at the area before I start working from maps and aerial photographs.”

The heat is curdling my brain, making me cranky. “Okay, you had a look,” I say. “What do you see but a whole lot of nowhere?”

He seems to take the question seriously, has another slow scan around the area. “I see hundreds of birds. Mostly cattle egret—those are the little guys—but some heron and ibis and at least one osprey. I see miles and miles of waterway that would be navigable in a flat-bottomed boat, or even better by an airboat. I see a man in a straw hat fishing with a cane pole. I see a small alligator.”

“What!” I do a little involuntary dance step, as if something is nipping at my heels.

“On the canal bank,” he says gently. “Over there.”

Blame it on the blinding light, but I really hadn’t noticed much of anything but the sky and the grass. Shane is right, of course. The little white splotches are birds, I can see that now. A lot of birds, some of them circling high overhead,
which probably means the place is teeming with life, right? Nor had I noticed the canal that runs along the road, because it looks more like a wide irrigation ditch, and who pays attention to ditches? Most shocking, there really is a small alligator—maybe three feet long—on the opposite bank, as motionless as a moldy log. Never saw it. And the old man with the really long fishing pole, how did I miss him? Or the rusty old pickup that must have brought him here? If I didn’t notice a man and a truck and an alligator all out in the open, what else haven’t I noticed? Did I expect to find my missing daughter waving her arms, shouting “Over here, Mom!”?

“This whole area, it was a major drug smuggling destination some years back,” Shane explains. “You can’t see it from the road, but within a few miles of here there are remote airfields, old storage buildings, trailers, bunkers, you name it. Lots of secret places to run a criminal enterprise, hide an abductee, whatever.”

Lots of places, I’m thinking, to bury a body.

“Those birds up there,” I say, pointing. “The ones way up high. Are those vultures?”

“Buzzards.”

“What’s the difference?”

“Not sure. Vultures are bigger.”

“But they both eat dead things, right? Dead things out in the swamp?”

Shane nods to himself. “I think we’re done here,” he says gently.

5. Pretty Little Thang

The only thing Roy Whittle likes about the Glade City Hunt Club is the stuffed wolverine perched atop the old wooden
phone booth in the lobby. The nasty beast, big as a dog, is in full weasel snarl, teeth bared, glass eyes flat with a hatred of all creatures not itself. In the wild, a fifty-pound wolverine in a bad mood can take down a moose, fueled by sheer tenacity and scalpel-sharp claws. As a kid Roy used to imagine the stuffed wolverine coming to life, leaping on the fat neck of Buster Nyles, the Collier County sheriff who took bribes with both hands, and then betrayed low-level drug smugglers like Roy’s father. The good old boys who ran the show walked away, burying their millions in pickle jars and offshore investments while swamp-cracker chumps like Pappy shuffled into cells at Raiford. And yet the old man, dumb as a load of cinder blocks, always aspired to be one of the regulars who drank with Sheriff Nyles and his minions, impressing the hell out of the sunburned tourists and occasional movie stars who flocked to the fabled Hunt Club for a taste of Old Florida ambiance. The huge gator hide nailed to the red-cedar paneling, darkened by a century of cigar smoke. The lovingly framed photo of Hemingway standing at the famous veranda bar, his arm thrown over the shoulders of a very young Buster, then a lowly game warden who told lies outrageous enough to impress a famous novelist. The formal menus signed by Clark Gable and Harry Truman, the fat, exuberant tarpon mounted over the entrance to the immense screened-in porch where the movers and shakers, the elected and the anointed, had for generations gathered to gorge on blackened redfish caught by their guides.