“Mrs. Brice, your mother had a stroke.”
She recoiled. “A stroke?
When?
”
“Uh, today, I guess. She’s in the hospital.”
She appeared confused. She pointed back toward the field. Wally looked that way; a man was sitting alone in the bleachers.
“My husband didn’t say my mother had a stroke.”
“Gracie’s dad was at the game?”
She was now looking at Wally like he was a complete idiot.
“He’s sitting right over there in the goddamn stands!”
Now Wally was confused; he removed his cap and scratched his burr-cut head. He kept his hair cut short because that way he didn’t sweat as much under the hair net at work.
“You’re not looking for Gracie, are you?”
She exhaled loud enough for him to hear. “I didn’t come for the snow cones, Wally.”
“But … but she’s … she’s
gone
.”
“Gone where?”
“To the hospital, to see your mother.”
“My mother lives in New York!”
“But your brother said your mother had a stroke and he came to take Gracie to the hos—”
The woman lunged at Wally and grabbed his jersey, her eyes and face suddenly wild like an animal; she clawed so close he could feel her hot breath on his face when she screamed.
“I don’t have a brother!”
Wally was so scared he felt a drop of pee drip out. He dropped his snow cone. The wild woman released him and ran toward the concession stand screaming her daughter’s name.
“Gra-cie!”
Police Chief Paul Ryan’s voice mixed with the other voices coming from all around him in the dark, the voices of cops and civilians searching the woods bordering the park for the missing girl, and he thought,
Kids don’t get abducted in Post Oak, Texas!
“Gra-cie!”
When he had gotten the call, Ryan figured a rich Briarwyck Farms soccer mom was throwing another conniption fit, as they often did over their very special children. His wife, a teacher over at the elementary school, called it the Baby Jesus Syndrome, every rich mom thinking her spoiled little brat’s the second coming. He had no doubt the mom would get a call on her cell phone and learn the girl had gone home with a friend, and the mom wouldn’t say “I’m sorry” or nothing, she’d just wave and climb into her SUV and drive off for the post-game pizza party over at Angelo’s, figuring the police department was her private security force to call out anytime she wanted. But when he had arrived on scene and talked to the girl’s coach, Paul Ryan knew immediately that this was a real abduction: a blond man in a black cap had asked for the girl by name.
“Gra-cie!”
All Ryan could see were the five feet of trees and ground cover in front of him illuminated by his Mag flashlight as he advanced deeper into the dark woods.
He hears the others around him, but all he sees now is a vague vision of trees and vines and undergrowth, dense and impenetrable—a jungle. He’s fighting his way through a jungle on a dark night. He hears a child’s distant cry. He picks up his pace, but it’s like trying to run through molasses. He’s got to hurry, something terrible is about to happen, is happening. He hears more cries. He’s drenched in sweat now as he struggles onward through the steamy jungle. Vines strangle him, branches slash his face and arms, undergrowth grabs his boots, the cries grow louder, his breath comes faster, his heart pounds harder against his chest wall—
—and he suddenly stumbles out of the darkness and into the light. Fires light a hamlet, straw huts burn, and flames spit out of rifle muzzles. He hears the BOOM BOOM BOOM of high-powered weapons, people screaming, pigs squealing, and water buffaloes grunting. He smells the stench of burning animal flesh. He sees women and children being dragged out of their hiding places and thrown into the dirt, the blaze of their burning homes illuminating their terrified faces, their Asian features so delicate and desperate. He watches them being herded up and driven forward down a dirt path, carrying babies wailing in the night and begging for mercy—
“NO! NO! NO! NO VC! NO VC!”
A young girl, a fragile china doll stripped of her clothes and innocence, stumbles along, desperate to escape the savagery suffocating her, pushed forward by big hands connected to big arms. Terror seizes her face because she’s heard stories about what these men do to pretty young girls like her. She searches for sympathy in the hard faces, and she finds it in his. She turns to him, silently pleading for help. He knows he must save her to save himself: her life and his soul hang in the balance as she falls face down in the dirt. A big hand grabs at her, but he shoves it away and gently lifts her delicate arm. He hears her sobbing voice in her native tongue: “Save me. Please save me.” The china doll turns her face up to him, in slow-motion she turns into the light, and he sees her face, the face of—
Gracie.
Ben Brice screamed himself awake and sprang to a sitting position in bed, gasping for air. His heart was beating rapidly, his chest and face and hair were matted with sweat, and his ears were ringing. The phone was ringing. He reached for the phone and knocked over the empty whiskey bottle. He put the phone to his ear and spoke.
“What happened to Gracie?”
Dawn was breaking when Ben parked the old Jeep, grabbed the duffel bag from the passenger’s seat, and double-timed into the Albuquerque airport terminal. His head throbbed with each jarring step. Skiers heading home after the season’s last runs already crowded the gates early on a Saturday morning. He located an arrival/departure monitor. The first flight to Dallas departed at 0600 from gate eight.
“I understand it’s an emergency, sir,” the female gate attendant said, “but the flight is overbooked, and we have twenty stand-bys. In fact, all our flights to Dallas today are overbooked.” She glanced at her computer. “Earliest available flight out is Monday.”
She gave him a sympathetic expression and a shrug and held her hand out to the next person in line. Ben picked up his duffel bag, stepped away from the counter, and studied the waiting passengers, bleary-eyed college kids returning to school from spring break; none seemed likely to surrender a seat to a stranger.
But he had to get to Dallas.
He spotted three men in uniforms marching down the main corridor toward the gate: the flight crew. The man in the middle appeared about his age and wore captain’s wings.
He stepped over and intercepted them.
Karen, the nineteen-year-old gate attendant, shook her head when the man stopped Captain Porter. Six months on the gate and the story was always the same:
It’s an emergency! A crisis!
She always wanted to say,
Well, so is my social life!
But it was against company policy to act rude to customers, so she just smiled and shrugged. The man seemed sincere, though, not the type to lie his way onto an overbooked flight. He had nice eyes. Still, she picked up the phone just in case she needed to call security.
Karen handed a boarding pass to the next customer in line and then glanced back at the man pleading with Captain Porter. She liked Captain Porter; all the girls did. The airline hired only military pilots; the younger ones thought they were such studs, always bragging on themselves and expecting every female employee to drop her skirt on command. The older ones, like Captain Porter, were different. They were respectful of the girls, probably because they had daughters the same age, and they never bragged on themselves or what they had done in the military. The younger pilots thought Captain Porter was some kind of god; they said he had been a real top gun in some war she barely remembered from history class in high school and had been held prisoner for like, three years. Karen shuddered at the thought: no MTV for three whole years!
The man was now pointing up at the CNN monitor. Karen leaned around the counter to see the monitor. On the screen was the face of a little blonde girl under CHILD ABDUCTED
and above RANSOM SUSPECTED. She was cute. Karen looked back at Captain Porter, fully expecting him to send the man packing with a sympathetic expression and a routine shrug—
What can I do, I just work here?—
the universal response to any passenger complaint quickly mastered by all airline employees. But Karen stood slack-jawed and oblivious to the passengers waiting in line when Captain Porter dropped his flight bags and hugged the man like he was his long lost brother then released him, picked up his duffel bag, and carried it over to Karen.
“Karen, stow the colonel’s gear,” Captain Porter said. “And bump someone in first class.”
Karen could swear Captain Porter had tears in his eyes.
Over her mother’s objections, Gracie had come to visit him every few months and for a month each summer, for five years now. But for her visits, the morning Ben would not answer Buddy might have already arrived. He needed her and he knew why; she needed him but he did not know why. All he knew was that God had bonded them together in a way he neither understood nor questioned: his life was inextricably tied to hers, and somehow, hers to his.
Ben now sat in the back seat of a yellow cab doing seventy on the Dallas North Tollway, a turbaned driver behind the wheel, the city noises beyond the windows, a ferocious pounding behind his eyes. Outside, a concrete world raced past; inside, his stomach stewed over the thought of never seeing Gracie again. He felt as if he might puke the peanuts-and-coffee breakfast he had on the plane; and if he continued to focus on the four little Dallas Cowboy dolls standing on the cab’s dashboard, their oversized helmet heads bobbling around, he surely would. So he leaned his head back and closed his eyes; his thoughts returned to Gracie’s last visit. They had sat in their rocking chairs on the porch and watched the sunset; after a period of silence, she had said, “Mom says you’re a drunk.”
He had said, “She’s right.”
“But you don’t drink from those whiskey bottles when I’m here.”
“I don’t need to drink when you’re here.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know. I guess I only think good thoughts when you’re here.”
“Then that settles it: I need to be here all the time.”
He had smiled. “That’s real nice of you to offer—”
“No, Ben. I mean it. I want to live here with you.”
“Honey, this is no place for a girl.”
“Then you come live with us. It’s a really big house.”
“That’s no place for me. Once you’ve lived in a jungle, you can’t live in a subdivision.”
Gracie was quiet, then she said, “She still loves you.”
When Ben opened his wet eyes, the cab was pulling up to the entrance guardhouse at BRIARWYCK FARMS, AN EXCLUSIVE GATED COMMUNITY, or so read the sign embedded in the tall brick wall. Black iron gates with TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED across the bars blocked their way. Ben recalled the front doormat at his childhood home in West Texas that read
Welcome, Y’all.
After Ben’s ID checked out, the guard gave the cabby directions and activated the automatic gates. They passed through the gates and entered an oasis in the concrete desert: tall oak trees shading the wide road, expansive stretches of green grass, sparkling blue man-made ponds encircled by walking paths, and magnificent mansions set deep into large lots, homes that would cause most visitors’ jaws to drop; but Ben barely noticed. His thoughts were of Gracie.
The cab driver turned up the radio: “At six-fifteen last night, Post Oak police issued an Amber Alert and provided descriptions of both the victim and the suspect. Gracie Ann Brice is white, ten years old, four feet six inches tall, weighs eighty pounds, and has short blonde hair and blue eyes. The suspect is white, twenty to thirty years old, six feet tall, two hundred pounds, has blond hair, and was last seen wearing a black cap and a plaid shirt. Police are asking anyone who videotaped any of the games at Briarwyck Farms Park yesterday to bring the tapes in.”
The cabby made eye contact with Ben in the rearview. “Little girl, she was taken. In my country, we find the man”—he slapped the edge of his open right hand down on the dash—“we cut off his dick. Then we cut off his head.”
The cabby’s eyes returned to the road—“
Aah!
”—and he slammed on the brakes; Ben was thrown forward. The cab had almost plowed into a police barricade across Magnolia Lane; two uniformed cops stood in front of the cab, their hands on their holsters and shaking their heads. The cabby turned in his seat, shrugged, and said, “Can go no more.”
Ben paid the $45 fare with a fifty and un-assed the vehicle. The morning sun punished his eyes; he patted around his clothes for his sunglasses then remembered he had left them in the Jeep. He rubbed his temples, but it did not relieve the pounding in his head. He needed his morning run with Buddy to exorcise last night’s demons, but that would not happen this morning; he was in Texas and Buddy was in New Mexico. Ben's buyer in Taos promised to check on Buddy each day; the dog could tolerate city life even less than Ben. He slung the duffel bag over his shoulder and walked past the barricade, down the sidewalk, and into a media circus.
Satellite uplinks mounted above TV vans lined both sides of the street and had lured the residents out of their homes before breakfast. Kids, parents, cameramen, reporters, and cops crowded the street and sidewalks; their voices competed with the incessant THUMP THUMP THUMP of a news chopper hovering low overhead.