Dark Creations: The Hunted (Part 4) (10 page)

Suddenly, Melissa felt terrified.

Gabriel, along with Melissa, Yoshi and Alexandra, had arrived in California a day earlier.  Exhausted from the nearly six-hour flight from New York to Los Angeles, they had gone directly from the airport to their hotel, checked in and went to sleep.  The long flight, coupled with nerves and the three-hour time difference, had formed a perfect storm of sorts and served to enervate them collectively.  The circumstances posed a challenge he and his friends had not been prepared for, but in light of what he suspected they were up against, it seemed a trivial gripe.  And when they awoke the next morning, jet lag seemed inconsequential.   In the light of day and far from home, Gabriel was all too aware of what lay ahead of them.  The only redeeming factor of their trip was that it promised time alone with Melissa.  Though they had not shared a hotel room the night before, he hoped they would in nights to come.  But before he could consider the comfort of spending the night with the woman he loved, he needed to formulate a plan during the hour and a half drive from Los Angeles to Santa Barbara County.   Yoshi had taken Alexandra to pick up their rental car and get breakfast so that he could review all of the information gathered. 

Yoshi had charted the vanishings of pregnant women in the California area.  His map was marked with red pencil and notes had been scribbled in every conceivable corner along its border.  Women had disappeared in several counties.  Among them were San Luis Obispo, Ventura, and Kern Counties with one as far north as Monterey County.  The most recent disappearance was in San Diego County, it was also the point farthest south to date.   Gabriel stared at the red markings and at his friend’s notes.  From what he could decipher of the cramped handwriting, Yoshi believed Santa Barbara to be the epicenter of the abductions and the likely hideout of Dr. Franklin Terzini.  A deep-seated presentiment warned him that it was a likely assumption.  His moment of intuiting was interrupted, however, by a knock at his door.  Too early to be a member of the housekeeping staff, he guessed–and hoped–it was Melissa.  But since the threat always existed that a diabolical creature lurked just beyond the safety of his doorstep, he moved silently to the door and looked through the peephole.   Melissa, refreshed and glowing from several hours of sleep, waited for him to open the door.  He quickly unlocked the deadbolt, fumbled with the handle and opened the door.

“What took you so long?” she asked with mock impatience.

“Oh you know how I take my time, leave pretty girls waiting on me,” he joked.

“
Girls
, as in the plural form of the word girl, meaning that
multiple
girls wait for you at your hotel room door?” she asked and narrowed her eyes at him in pretend anger.

“You’re my favorite girl,” he said feebly. “Doesn’t that count for anything?”

“You’re horrible!” she teased.

“You started it!”

Melissa smiled and her whole face came alive, even more radiant than it always was.  He had to remind himself to breathe. 

“Fair enough,” she began giggling. “Let’s start over.  Good morning Gabriel.  How did you sleep?”

“Good morning to you, Melissa.  I slept okay I guess.  I could have slept better, though.  That is, if someone had been with me,” he flirted then immediately worried he had come across as presumptuous. 

He waited for several agonizing seconds trying to gauge her reaction.  Her cheeks had flushed, but only briefly.  And if she were going to reprimand him, he guessed her action would have been swift, immediate.  He wanted to scooped her up in his arms and hold her, to have the feeling he always had when they were touching, that the world was shut out and all its problems distant.

“I’m not sure what to say to that,” she said and smiled again.  “If I were Alex, I’d have a brilliant, snappy comeback, but I don’t.  I’ve got nothing.  Um, how about me, too?  Does that work?”

“Does it mean that you would have liked to have been with me, too?”

“Yes.”

“Then it works just fine,” he replied and breathed a sigh of relief.  “We have a busy day ahead of us.  Are you up for it?”

“I hope so.”

Gabriel, unable to endure the distance between them any longer, stepped toward her and wrapped both arms around her.  He closed his eyes, tried to block out everything but her.  He breathed deeply.  She smelled of fragrant shampoo and soap, sweet and comforting.  He released her slightly so that he could bend toward her and press his lips to hers.  Just as their lips were about to touch though, a voice interrupted.

“Oh no Yoshi, I think they were about to get it on,” Alexandra mocked.  “Someone get a hose for these two!”

Yoshi laughed aloud.  Encouraged, Alexandra continued. 

“This is not some romantic, hump-fest getaway you two!  Let’s get our heads in the game.”

Alexandra was just about to make an inappropriate pun about her last statement when Melissa interrupted her.

“Bagels! My favorite!  Thanks Alex. Thanks Yoshi,” she said politely as if she hadn’t heard the other comments. 

“Let’s eat and get going,” Gabriel heard himself add.

They ate quickly and quietly before journeying for more than an hour to their first stop in San Luis Obispo County.  From there, they continued to Ventura and Kern Counties then ended in Ventura County.  At each address, they had offered the same story they had devised during the car ride.  They had told the families of the missing women that Melissa, too, was in search of a disappeared loved one.  She explained to each that she had an Aunt from Arizona who was pregnant and missing as well.  Gabriel, Yoshi and Alexandra had posed as concerned friends of the family helping Melissa in her search for any information, anything that would be considered helpful.  Though the newspaper articles did not offer the specific addresses of the missing women, they did offer the portions of the county where they were from, as well as names of friends in the immediate area who spoke of them.  Both made zeroing in on exact addresses easier, except for the most recent victim.  Her address had been acquired through less than legal methods. 

While the methods used to obtain abductee addresses differed slightly, the response Gabriel and the rest of them garnered did not.  At each residence, he observed how quickly Melissa was dismissed.  He didn’t know if such a phenomenon was attributed to her age or waif-like appearance, or the fact that she possessed no proof of the missing aunt she claimed to have and therefore could have been a reporter digging for family dirt.  Either way, she was sent away, sometimes hostilely, without any new information.

When at last they reached the final and most recent name on their list, he nearly groaned.  Sergeant Jack Downing, an Army Staff Sergeant, was the husband of a pregnant woman named Dawn who had been taken from her home forcibly.  In all other cases, there had never been a witness.  No one had seen the other women taken.  Concrete evidence that they had even been kidnapped did not exist, just suspicion.   Sergeant Downing, on the other hand, had given his statement to the police, was quoted in the local newspaper accusing police officers of her abduction.  His statement had been refuted by both the authorities and neighbors alike.  His claim had been considered outlandish, impossible.  In fact, the community in which he lived offered no support to his eyewitness account whatsoever and, because he had just returned to the states after his fourth tour of duty in military operations in both Iraq and Afghanistan, they rejected it outright claiming he likely suffered from some form of post-traumatic stress disorder.  Gabriel had been outraged when he’d read the largely slanderous articles and wondered how a man who had served his country for nearly a decade, three of which had been spent in active combat overseas, had been so easily discredited.  He was unsure of what to make of a neighborhood that rejected one of its members so pointedly, but he was sure their meeting with Sergeant Downing would be interesting if nothing else.  And Gabriel was not alone in his reservations about interviewing the smeared soldier.

He saw the anxious look on Melissa’s face, the doubt she wore plainly, as he pulled into the unpaved driveway. 

“Are you ready to do this?” he asked her.

“Ready as I’ll ever be,” she said and blew air out of her lungs with her lip pursed in a circle.  She looked as though she were whistling soundlessly.  “You’d think I’d have this down pat by now.  But I’m a bit of a wreck here.”

Gabriel squeezed her hand reassuringly.  “You’re doing a great job,” he told her.  “This is the last house.  If this guys doesn’t tell us anything new then we are on vacation in sunny California for the next week with nothing to do but relax.”

“He won’t have jack shit to tell us,” Alexandra bellowed from the back seat.

“Ha!” Yoshi laughed.  “I get it;
jack
shit!  Funny!”

“Maybe I’ll try surfing.  I’ve always wanted to learn to surf,” Alexandra shared.

“You’re probably right, Alex,” Gabriel added.  “He probably won’t tell us anything, especially since he’s been written off by everyone else.  But you never know.”

“Here goes nothing,” Melissa said nervously then climbed out of the passenger seat of the rental car and strode to the front door. 

He watched as she rang the doorbell and waited.  After several seconds, no one answered.  She rang again and he joined her on the stoop.   He knocked, and still, no one answered.  As they turned to walk back to the car, a voice called out to them.

“You kids looking for Jack?” the female voice shouted from the house next door.

“Yeah, do you know where we can find him?” Gabriel asked.

“Same place he is every day: Rory’s, the bar down the street,” she replied.

“Thanks!” Gabriel called back.

He and Melissa moved quickly to the car and shared what they’d learned with Alexandra and Yoshi before turning back on to the main road they just traveled along and heading to the only bar they’d passed.  They pulled in to the gravel filled parking lot and walked to the door.  The squat, white building had a stucco exterior and a flat roof that looked as if it would collapse under the weight of the oversized neon sign that flashed atop it.

“Gabriel, how are we going to get in to this place?” Melissa asked.  “None of us are twenty-one.”

“You think they’re going to card two gorgeous girls?” Alexandra asked incredulously. “Be serious, Melissa.”

“She’s got a point,” Yoshi chimed in.

“Yeah, if anyone is going to get carded, it’s us,” Gabriel added gesturing to himself then Yoshi.

“All we can do is try, right?  If they tell us to get lost, then we go and wait for him,” Melissa said.

Gabriel walked through the door followed by Melissa, Yoshi and Alexandra and was not greeted by a bouncer wishing to check his identification as he’d expected.  Instead, he was met with the smell of stale cigarette smoke mixed with a sour, liquor and sweat medley, along with the sound of dreams being quelled one glass fill at a time.  The scene, and all of its sensory offerings, was depressing.  Few people sat at the bar as they approached it.  He was able to exclude three of them immediately because of their age.  Men who appeared to be over the age of seventy-five were unlikely candidates for either recent military service or the impregnation of a twenty-six-year-old woman.  Other than them, two others remained, a woman who looked to be in her late fifties, and one man at the far corner of the bar. 

The man, whose countenance resembled a boulder in every sense of the word, wore his hair buzzed closely to his scalp and sat, stone-faced, as he nursed a glass of brown fluid.  Everything about his posture and presence suggested discipline and honor, everything save for the glass he clutched in his hand in the middle of the afternoon.

Melissa must have been making similar suppositions about the man as she began walking toward him.  Gabriel followed with Alexandra and Yoshi in tow.  She sat down beside him and made quick eye contact.  He returned her glance with a lingering look of disapproval, a nonverbal warning to leave him alone and move to a seat farther from him.  Gabriel was shocked to see that she did not wither under the intensity of the soldier’s stare.  To the contrary, she engaged him in conversation.

“Hi. My name is Melissa and I was wondering if you could help me,” she began. “My Aunt Maggie, she lived in Arizona and was around five months pregnant when she disappeared.  I read in the paper that your wife was pregnant when she disappeared also.  I’d like to talk to you about it, see if there are any similarities.”

He needed little provocation and unleashed a diatribe that was neither aimed directly at her nor particularly cruel. 

“Are you fucking kidding me?  Sorry about your Aunt but I can’t help you!” Jack snapped.  “My wife was kidnapped by two cops.  I doubt we can compare notes on that one, sweetheart.”

“But,” Melissa began but was cut off by Jack.

“Just leave,” he ordered Melissa.

She turned to go and Gabriel approached him, surprising both himself and the others.

“I just want to ask you one question before I go, and it may seem like a weird one.  But I promise if you answer it, we’ll leave you,” Gabriel attempted.

His request seemed to enrage the soldier.  “I don’t have anything to say to you!  Now get the hell out of here!”