Taken (3 page)

After he finished pumping gas, Jack strolled over to the convenience store where he found an antiquated pay phone screwed haphazardly into the wall. He picked up the receiver and hastily punched in numbers from the back of his prepaid phone card to call home.

No answer.

He started to call again, but changed his mind and set the handset back in its cradle, disappointed.

As he stuffed his hands in his pockets to warm them against the frosty night, he felt a something crumpled in the left front left. He knew he needed to haul ass, but it was a five dollar bill. He could win a million more for Dianne; against his better judgment he turned and walked inside the store to try his luck on a scratch-off lottery ticket.

He scratched the ticket and was astounded to find that he had won twenty five dollars. This random luck was a pleasant surprise and he felt triumphant as he proudly lay the winning ticket down for the cashier to pay out his loot.

The young man behind the counter seemed extraordinarily fidgety and nervous; Jack became suspicious of him right away. He suddenly realized that the lighting in the store was too bright; headache inducing fluorescents caused him to squint uncomfortably.

“What's the matter?” John asked the kid at the counter. His voice sounded too loud in his own ears, as though he had just shouted in a cave.

The jittery young man cut his eyes to the right and shook his head a few times quickly. “N-Nothing, sir,” he stammered. His long brown hair swung back and forth in front of his greasy face like a pendulum as his head moved.

The kid pushed five wrinkled and greasy five dollar bills across the plexiglass counter in Jack's general direction, motioning with a shaky hand for him to pick it up. The kid was purposefully avoiding making even incidental eye contact with Jack..

Jack stepped back a few feet so he could fully assess the body language the kid was exhibiting. Something was wrong. Jack looked behind the counter to see if there was a television set, but there wasn’t one in evidence, hell, there was not even a radio back there. If anyone had seen him with the waitress in Slidell, if someone had seen what happened in the parking lot, it might be nationally broadcast news by now.

He wondered if the police had issued a “be on the lookout” broadcast for a red Freightliner with a driver matching his description. If they had, he doubted the search would have expanded beyond
Louisiana state lines at this point.

He figured he was just being paranoid, anyway. An adult had to be missing for twenty four hours before law enforcement would intervene, at least as far as he knew. He guessed the waitress’ coworkers assumed she had hitched a ride home with a good looking trucker, and was maybe riding him like a cowgirl in a sleazy hotel room even now.

But what if someone had seen him stick a needle in her neck and called the cops right away?

The nervous kid developed a voice and broke Jack's reverie.

“Don't you want your money, man?” he said, shuffling back and forth frantically. Jack eyed him warily.

“You gotta piss, or what, kid?”

“Yes, sir,” the teen laughed uncomfortably. “Back teeth are floatin',” he added with a nervous guffaw, undulating in his unceasing potty dance.

Jack smiled to himself and shook his head in disbelief at his own paranoia.
You're losing it, Jack.

“Have a good night.” he advised the vibrating counter jockey. Twenty-five dollars richer, Jack’s confidence was growing again; but as he strolled past the surveillance cameras in the brightly lit parking lot, he still could not shake the feeling that the kid behind the counter
knew
.

The rest of the trip was a nightmare of dread and paranoia. His fear was at full tilt, and threatening to undo him. Danger seemed to be around every curve. He passed several state troopers; each one of them watched him intently as he drove by.

Jack was slick with sweat and in desperate need of a bathroom by the time he rolled onto the street where he lived, navigating with extreme caution. He drove a slow five miles an hour down Blairmore Drive, the narrow dirt road that led to the humble home he shared with his Goddess.

His driveway was at the end of the street, a mile and a half beyond the point where civilization ended; it loped around a copse of water oaks and back out onto itself. It could have been called a cul de sac, he supposed, but there were no other houses in the sac.

His house was a modest prefab with a brick facade, a dainty looking flower garden in the front that feral cats had taken to using it as their litter box. The rest of the yard was surrounded by dark woods.

Jack eased the tractor to a whining stop by the front door. He had driven 1200 miles over the last two days, just about eighteen hours straight, and it was a miracle that he had not had to go off his route at all. Lady Luck had smiled on him so far, but now he was almost completely exhausted.

Flood lights lit up around his property, activated by motion sensors. They bathed the front yard in a shocking stage-like glow.

He looked in the rear-view mirror and saw his haggard reflection; his own face actually frightened him a little.

Lord,
he prayed softly to himself,
please
let all of this be worth it. Please tell me I did this for a good reason. Please, please, please.

He knew his prayers were probably useless. Why would God grant a kidnapper’s requests?

Jack unrolled the waitress burrito wedged in the back of the cab.  The waitress was sweaty and fully awake, and her eyes practically bulged from their sockets. She tried to resist him at first; but when she realized he would drag her out of the truck one way or the other, she lay limp and allowed him to heave her body over his shoulder.

“Don't try anything stupid, lady. This is all going to work out fine, you'll see. Dianne will take care of everything,” he said in a voice that was reassuring but firm.

The waitress stiffly nodded her head in agreement.

He opened the door to his humble abode, and stepped inside. He stood in the doorway with the girl slung over his shoulder, eagerly awaiting Dianne’s adulation, praise the likes of which he didn’t dare imagine.

As he stood in the doorway awaiting the appearance of his beloved, a song by John Cougar Melloncamp floated in from the other room. It was “Jack and Dianne”; how appropriate. Jack knew that Dianne must have waited for this precise moment to make that song play on the radio. She always was so good at things like that.

The front entrance opened into a small foyer; to the left was the living room, sparsely furnished with a threadbare beige sofa. A dusty lamp cast a dim pall on its cushions, and a coffee- stained end table next to it was simply adorned with a stack of ancient TV guides. Jack carried the waitress through the living room and into the dining room.

Dianne was waiting for him there, partially hidden in the shadows, sitting in a wobbly wooden chair facing toward the front door. Even in the near darkness she shone with a radiance that filled the room.

He was surprised to find her sitting in the exact same position she had been in when he last saw her two days ago. Her hair was perfectly coiffed, and even though her expression was blank she was still as attractive as when they had first started dating so many years ago. She had done her makeup just right, and she was wearing the pink dress he had bought for her on one of their anniversaries. She was beautiful.

Jack smiled broadly as he stood triumphant with Dianne’s trophy hanging limply over his shoulder. He eased the waitress down into a chair that faced his beloved, and said, “Dianne, I’d like to introduce you to Rayne.”             

He was nervous and he waited for any sign of her approval. When Dianne failed to respond, he felt himself becoming upset. He hoped so badly that he had not disappointed her.

“I have
got
to pee,” he said, looking for any reason to excuse himself from the awkward silence. “You girls get to know each other for a minute - I’ll be right back.”

Jack strode briskly back into the family room, leaving the quivering young waitress and his surprisingly subdued wife to work things out for a moment. He stepped into the bathroom to relieve himself, splashing cold water onto his flushed face to hide the massive perspiration that was developing on his brow. After he felt that he had sufficiently regained his composure, he walked back to the dining room, where Dianne looked as though she was ready to talk.

“Yes dear?” he asked Dianne sweetly.

Her voice finally comforted his ears.

“So this is my prize, is it?” she asked.

“Indeed, my dear. I told you I could do it,” he said, looking desperately for any sign of approval.

“Take all that tape off of her and hold her down on the table for me, lover.” Dianne cooed.

Jack was surprised by this request, but was unable to deny his Goddess any demand.

“You won't try to get away, will you, little lady?” she whispered slowly to the girl as Jack laid her down on the table.

“If you think you can get away, think again; Jack is strong; he won’t let go of you.”

The girl tried to wriggle free from where she lay on the table, but the duct tape with which she was bound muted her efforts. When Jack approached her with his buck knife drawn, she calmed down considerably.

He began to cut her free from the tape using the knife. He tried to be careful, but his hands shook so badly that the knife slipped and dug into the flesh of her shapely legs not just once, but twice.

She bucked from the pain of being cut, but Jack held her down tightly as he continued to saw his way through the tape, fresh blood glistened on the sharp edge of the wayward knife’s blade. The waitress was bleeding from both of her calves and her left arm by the time he got to her mouth.

Jack tore the tape from her lips with one sudden
yank.
She let out a loud scream, and rolled over onto her stomach on the dining table, to find her face only inches from Dianne's breasts. Now unbound, she backed away from Dianne; she touched wounds Jack had carelessly inflicted with his knife, wincing from pain. She placed her face into her blood-covered hands and began to cry.

“Take off those rags she's got on, Jack. I want to see what we’ve got to work with here.”

Jack began awkwardly tugging her shirt up and over her head. The waitress sat up straight, holding up one arm in a gesture Jack assumed was intended to make his job easier. But then her other hand shot into her fanny pack and came out with her tube of lipstick. Jack was happy to see that she was getting into the spirit of things; he knew this would all be so much nicer if she was a willing participant.

The waitress slipped the cap off the tube; before Jack could react, he found himself getting a face full of pepper spray. He screeched in agony
as she sprayed the caustic stuff right into his eyes. Jack tripped over a chair and fell onto the floor, where his skull thudded loudly against the linoleum.

His head exploded with sparkling light, and pain seared from his eyes into the back of his head; he couldn’t see.

The waitress was on him so fast that he never had a fighting chance. He heard a scraping, like alligator teeth grinding together, and then came real pain – like his head was imploding.

A second traumatic blow to his head was accompanied by the brittle
crack
of splintering wood; then another blow, and an absolute tsunami of pain cascaded over him, leaving mass destruction in its wake.

And then nothingness, as Jack passed out and collapsed in a heap on the floor.

When he regained consciousness, panic and pain were having an orgy inside his skull. His pulse quickened as he heard the brash bang he had heard a thousand times before, the screen door of his house slamming shut somewhere behind him.

He was still blind from the pepper spray, his eyes felt like fried eggs that had been stomped into a shag-carpet by a grizzly bear with shit on its paws. He tried to blink the remnants of the pepper spray out of his eyes, but it was no use.

Jack could hear fervent activity going on in the room around him, but was too blind to see what was happening. He licked his lips, and gagged in revulsion as the pepper spray burned his gums and tongue.

As he attempted to wipe his eyes with his sleeve, he realized the gravity of his situation. He realized he was bound tightly to a chair. How the hell had this happened? How had he lost control so utterly and completely? How had the waif-like waitress managed to turn the tables on him so successfully?

Losing his ability to see was the most terrifying thing that had happened to him, but the sounds of movement erupting here and there around him held a close second. He struggled to free himself, but he couldn’t budge an inch. The waitress, it seemed, was a natural at this sort of thing.

“Dianne,” he croaked. Her name ripped out of his throat and he began to cough convulsively, his throat on fire.

Dianne did not reply, but he knew she was in the room with him. He sensed her presence. He caught a whiff of her perfume, and realized she had to be within feet of him.

“Dianne?” he whispered. It took an alarming amount of effort.

His sense of smell was suddenly awash with the strong vapors of gasoline.