Soul Hostage (7 page)

     “The doctor and the orderly were immediately at the bedside moving me back to the middle of the bed.  I tried to resist.  However, in my weakened condition, the only effect this had was to bring a smile to the detective’s face.

     “‘Is there some reason you don’t want to stay here to talk with me, Mister Stoaffer?’  His words came out with hardly a trace of sarcasm.

     “I looked over at him standing a few feet back from the bed as I tried to form some response. ‘It’s impossible that I have been here for three months.’  I raised myself slightly to look at the doctor.  ‘Doctor?’     

     “Doctor Chad was watching me closely.  I could see that he was trying to gauge how his response would affect me.  After a moment, he answered, ‘Yes, you have been in a comatose state for the past eighty-six days.’

     “Eighty-six days!  The words knocked me back and drained me of the little energy I had. It now strikes me as a little odd that eighty-six days seemed so substantial.  In proportion, how significant is a mere eighty-six days to a lifetime of days?  Anyway, that is how I look at it from the distance of years.  At the time, when the eighty-six days missing were the previous eighty-six days, the stolen time seemed momentous. 

     “All of my frustration and confusion must have been showing itself in my face, because the doctor told Detective Columbus that his questioning was going to have to wait until I had some rest.  The detective was clearly not pleased and started to say something but then stopped.  Instead, he turned and muttered something to the officer before leaving. The officer stayed near the door staring blankly at me. 

     “I let my body drop back to the bed and was asleep within seconds.  When my eyes opened again, I wasn’t sure how much time had passed, but the detective had replaced the officer near the door. 

     “As soon as he saw that my eyes had opened, Detective Columbus was at the bedside. ‘Good morning, Mister Stoaffer.  Remember me?’ 

     “For some reason, I felt really happy to see him         once again.  Maybe it had to do with the idea of seeing something that looked familiar.  Anyway, I smiled and nodded.

     “‘Good.’ The detective smiled in return. ‘Mister Stoaffer, I need to ask you some questions. Do you think that will be okay?’”

    “I nodded again.

     “‘Okay, can you tell me what happened the night you were brought to the hospital?’

     “This time there was no nodding. I tried to remember anything I could. Nothing. I squeezed my eyes tightly closed as if this would somehow extract the stubborn memories from my brain.  The only thing I got was a throbbing pain appearing at the back of my head.  The words of Doctor Chad came back to me; ‘The memory doesn’t react well to force’.  I certainly had to agree with the good doctor. Finally, I opened my eyes and simply shook my head. 

     “‘No problem, Mister Stoaffer.’  The detective said in a friendly, comforting voice. ‘You’ve been through a lot.  Got yourself a severe head trauma I’m told. A little memory trouble is to be expected.  Maybe if I ask you some direct questions that will help you remember things.  What do you think?’

     “I remember thinking that amid all of my frustrating struggles with memory and everything it was nice to have someone helping me to make sense of things.  I smiled at the detective and nodded.

     “‘Great!’ It seemed like I had just made the detective’s day. ‘So, Mister Stoaffer, do you remember going to the home of Gary and Linda Blake?’ 

     “At the mention of Gary and Linda, another smile came to my face.  Images of many hours spent drinking, eating, talking, and laughing at their house floated through my mind. I was beginning to feel a little of myself coming back.  It was a good feeling.

     “‘You remember going to their house, don’t you?’  Detective Columbus commented with enthusiasm.

     “I nodded to him.

     “The detective also nodded and then asked, ‘So do you remember where you got the gun?’

     “And just like that, all the smiles and warm memories and nods disappeared in a room that seemed to be spinning wildly.  The mention of a gun could only mean that someone had been shot. I had no memory of any-thing like that. But then again, I had no memory of many things. I forced my eyes closed again and tried to squeeze out any memory that would explain the presence of a gun.  All I found was darkness and more pain at the back of my head.

     “‘I’ve never even held a gun.’  I managed to force out. Something else occurred to me just then.  ‘Where is Theresa?  She can tell you.’

     “‘We’ll talk about your wife soon enough, Mister Stoaffer.’  The detective’s voice had lost a bit of its previous affability. ‘So you remember going to the home of Gary and Linda Blake, but you don’t remember the gun.’  This last part came out as a simple statement of fact. At the time, I had lost all ability to focus on anything being said.

     “My mind was like some impenetrable fortress holding my memories. Until I managed to find a way inside that stronghold, I would be unable to make sense of life.” 

Chapter 4

     By the time Louis Stoaffer paused, it was nearly dark. I really do not remember ever being so wrapped up in a story.  I had not even noticed the sun go down.  Judging by Joey’s silence, he had also been engrossed in the tale. With the intermission, we both came back to our senses.

     “Time to get goin’.”  Joey announced as he got to his feet. His voice had its normal confident tone, but a sideways glance in my direction showed that he was feeling anything but normal.

     Louis was standing on the same mound as when he had begun his story.  “Yes, I agree.   We need to continue our journey.  There will be time to finish my story later.”  He turned quickly and began walking toward the town.

     I grinned at Joey and repeated in a deep voice, “We need to continue our journey, grasshopper.”

     We followed him down the hill.

     In about fifteen or twenty minutes, we were standing under a flickering streetlight next to a dark, empty two-lane highway.  The only movement was from the moths fluttering underneath the light.  On the other side of the highway was a gas station and attached garage.  It was one of those older full-serve places that had been converted to a bright green self-serve station with a mini mart. The conversion must have been the result of someone’s optimism about the place’s retail potential. Such optimism was clearly misplaced. 

    Something about crossing the road made me feel uneasy.  The feeling did not come from any concern for traffic. There was none.   It was more like the sense that crossing the empty road was another step in a journey to a place where I did not want to go.  Joey would surely have called me a scared little girl if I said anything about my feeling. Even though, I knew this judgment was probably right, I could not ignore the sense of dread which had planted itself firmly inside of me.

     “Well, we’re not going to get to San Pietro by standing here!”  Louis announced and immediately began striding toward the station. 

     Joey and I trailed behind. I did not make a conscious decision to follow the old man. It was more like the idea of not following him never occurred to me.

     That pretty much summed up how I had arrived at this moment in my life. No other option occurred to me. I never intended for phrases like
armed robbery
and
accessory to murder
to have some connection to my life. Not as though I had been living like a saint or anything like that. I had been involved in a couple of burglaries and had stolen a few cars.  Nothing where anybody got hurt bad. Somehow my life had just moved along how it wanted to and I had never chosen a new direction.

     Anyway, Louis Stoaffer stood on the other side of the road watching as we crossed.  There must be a joke in there somewhere.  Why did the criminals cross the road?  To… To continue a journey that would lead to a very bad place. Not a very funny joke.

     “So now where?” Joey asked of no one in particular.

     Although the mini mart was closed, the blinking neon lights in the windows continued blinking their red and blue and white glow around the place. 

     “Well, with any luck, we’ll find a couple of repaired cars parked out back,” I muttered. 

     Since this was the only suggested course of action, we immediately walked around the garage.  Whether it was good fortune or not, there were a few cars. Not exactly a fleet of luxury cars, but all we needed was one that could get us to San Pietro. 

     Unfortunately, none of the dirt-covered cars behind the garage looked like it could get us to the nearest corner let alone the five hundred miles to San Pietro. But my pessimism was unwarranted.  I popped the hood on a baby-blue-and-primer-colored ’57 Chevy to find a clean engine.  On the ground near the car, I found a six inch piece of green wire.  This wire and my penknife allowed me to bypass the ignition switch and start the car.  A surprisingly healthy rumble burst from the engine.   Inside the car’s white tuck & roll upholstery reminded me of a car a friend had driven back in high school.  In fact, I couldn’t remember seeing a ’57 Chevy with the fins and tuck & roll interior since leaving high school.   

     Stoaffer slid into the backseat of the car on the passenger side, and Joey took the shotgun position.  Soon we would be back on the road headed south.

     “You, my friend, are some kind of wizard with the cars.” Louis said with a surprisingly sincere tone.

     “Yea, Thomas, he’s a hundred percent right there,”  Joey agreed.  “But now we gotta work on gettin’ somethin’ tuh eat.”

     “Well, as dead as Chrystal Springs seems to be, nobody should miss this car until morning so we should be okay stopping at the first place we see.” My answer sounded amazingly cheerful and for some reason that is just how I was feeling.

     The mood died a second later as a door creaked open in the dirty white metal wall at the back of the gas station.  Whoever was on the other side of the door was in no big rush to come out from behind it. I heard the unmistakable clunk of a wooden baseball bat tapping against cement as the door squeaked open a little more. 

     “Steve…Steve!”  A young voice called from behind the door.  “You and Mickey better not be messin’ around out here!” The speaker tried to sound confident while struggling to keep his fear quiet. 

     As he moved out from behind the door, it was clear that fear had won the struggle. The boy looked to be around fourteen although the red hair and freckles covering his cheeks might have made him look younger than he was.  He wore a faded pair of blue denim overalls and clutched the baseball bat to his chest.  As he stepped out from the dark of the doorway into the light, his green eyes darted around quickly like some frightened mouse.         

     “Steve!  Dammit, I’m gonna-” Red never got a chance to finish his thought. 

     Somehow Stoaffer had slipped out of the car and snuck around behind the kid. It seemed impossible for him to have done this in the short time since the door opened, but all of a sudden there he stood.  He did not move for a moment as he looked directly at Joey and me sitting in the still running Chevy.  The old man’s bright blue eyes stabbed right through me.  But the weirdest part of the whole thing was that Stoaffer smiled as he watched Red standing in front of him peering out into the darkness.  In the next instant, he sprang forward and around the kid.

     From where we sat about twenty feet away in the car and in the dark, it was difficult to see exactly what happened. I could tell Stoaffer had something in his hand and was pushing it in and pulling it out of the kid’s face. There was no struggle. Red’s legs just collapsed until the only reason that he was still standing was that Stoaffer was holding onto the thing sticking out his face.

     “Let’s just go,” I said to Joey without really thinking. “We don’t need this crazy fucker. We’ve got a car.  Let’s just go.”

     If Joey heard, he didn’t say anything.  He simply jumped out of the car and trotted over to where Louis stood.  After a moment, I followed him.

     Stoaffer was standing over the body silently watching the last twitches. I saw the thing he had been holding was a screwdriver with a black and yellow handle. The tool was now sticking out of the place where Red’s left eye should have been. There was other damage left by the screwdriver. A hole in his right cheek revealed a few crooked teeth.  Blood soaked the front of his shirt below a hole in the kid’s neck. 

     “Shit, Lou! What’re yuh some kinda ninja?”  Joey exclaimed.

     I could not pull my eyes away from the body.  It was hard to believe so much destruction could be done so quickly and by one old man.

     Stoaffer was quiet for a while as he just stared blankly at the still body. Finally, he cheerfully announced, “Well, we’re not going to get to San Pietro by standing around here!”  He walked over and climbed into the backseat of the Chevy.

     Joey and I stood there staring at the body and then each other.

     “Well, we’re not gonna get to San Pietro by standing around here!”  He grinned at me, and we headed to the car

     The car was quiet as we pulled out on to the empty highway. 

     “That was sure fun,” Joey said finally breaking the silence.  “But I’m still hungry.”

     A roar of laughter came from the backseat.  “Yes, I think I worked up an appetite as well!”

     We found a place about fifteen minutes down the road, a family-style restaurant named Jack O’s. It looked to be one of those places with crayon-colored drawings hanging on the walls, lots of pies, and greasy chicken fried steak.  Normally, I would not even consider stopping at such a restaurant.  But the word
normally
did not exactly fit the situation.  Since no one knew how far it might be to the next restaurant, we decided to stop.