Trapped (20 page)

years—or months, at least. Fern, who loved being the play-

ground 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.

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Thank God for Fern. Having her on my side makes an im-

possible 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 passen-

ger seat. “Less power, smoother ride. Also shotgun, police

radio, or on-board computer. Otherwise pretty much the same

vehicle.”

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“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 lan-

tern—her only source of light—but for the past twenty min-

utes 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 some-

thing 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 swarm-

ing dots of madness. Sobbing frantically, she slaps at her ears,

hair, neck.

Kelly remembers a kid in the hospital having a seizure, how

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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 grand-

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mother 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 reso-

nated.
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 ven-

tilation 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 navi-

gating, 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

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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 grass-

lands, 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 con-

nection 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, wrap-

around sunglasses—or maybe one of those welder’s masks,

to shield me from the brutal sun.

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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 some-

thing 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,

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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 at-

tention to ditches? Most shocking, there really is a small al-

ligator—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 destina-

tion 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

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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