Authors: Andersen Prunty
But why would she take her cell phone?
He felt helpless.
Mr. Moran’s place was to the left. He took a sharp right, walking toward their driveway and around the side of the house. And then the back of the house. And then onto the other side of the house.
No sign of Gina.
He raised his hand to Mr. Moran. The old man said, “Short breakfast.”
“Actually,” Jack began. “We haven’t eaten yet. I have maybe a strange question for you.”
“Shoot.”
“You haven’t seen Gina, have you?”
“This mornin?”
“Yeah.”
“Nope.”
“See... I’m a little confused. She was in there when I left and then, well, you know, I just came back and she’s not in there. She’s nowhere to be found.”
“Maybe she stepped out.”
“It’s possible, I guess. But you would have seen her if she left, wouldn’t you?”
“Well, my eyes ain’t as good as they used to be. And I mostly been lookin at this here tree.”
“Regardless. I mean she’s, you know, like human-size and everything. Kind of hard to miss, wouldn’t you say? She would at least be like a big blur, right? Maybe even say hi or something?”
“I don’t think I care much for your tone.”
“Look, I’m sorry, Mr. Moran—”
“Call me Dick.”
“Okay. Look, I’m sorry
Dick
but I’m a little...
frazzled
and just really really confused and I need all the help I can get so if you saw anything I really need to know.”
“Nope. Sorry. Ain’t seen nothin. I’d let ya know if I seen anything.”
“Okay. Of course. Yes, I know you would. So I guess I’m gonna go back in and make some more calls. Will you just let me know if you see her or hear from her? I know it sounds stupid. I’m probably just freaking out over nothing. But if you do...”
“I’ll let you know.”
“Thanks.”
“She’s so beautiful. I’d hate for anything to happen to her.”
“Me too.”
Jack turned back toward the house, already sliding the phone from his pocket. He didn’t really know where he should call. He guessed he would try the cafe first. Maybe someone had called her, needing her to come in and work or maybe she had gone to pick up a paycheck or something but he knew she just got paid on Friday and he was almost certain she would have called him if she had to work. Still, he had faith in that reason. Yes, almost certainly, she was at work. People always called in on Sundays. Especially Sunday morning. People always called in hungover on Sunday mornings. That wasn’t really out of the question at all.
He went into the house and sat down on the couch. He
made
himself sit down on the couch. If he didn’t sit down, he was just going to nervously pace the entire house again.
Before he could punch in her work number, his phone rang.
Eight
“Jack Orange?”
“Yes.” The voice didn’t sound familiar. Or it sounded like any male who could have been calling. He felt like he didn’t know anything anymore. “Who is this?”
“I just called to talk.” The man sounded like he was smiling and something deep inside Jack knew that wasn’t good at all.
“Who are you?”
“I think you know who I am.”
Already he had a picture of this guy in his head. He was like a more bloated version of his high school history teacher. The teacher would come in and lecture for an hour about holocausts and smile the entire time. Only his history teacher had been very thin. Just from a couple of sentences, Jack pictured this guy as a plump man. He didn’t know why. He was there, on the other end of the line, his plump red cheeks all pulled back, those white teeth, almost perfect enough to be dentures, gleaming out from all that rosiness.
And this man had Gina.
He either had Gina or he had done something with her.
“If I knew who you were then I suppose I wouldn’t be standing here so confused right now,” he said. His heart was really beating now. Already, his head raced with ideas of trying to track the man by this phone call. Of trying to pick up some sound from the other end that would allow him to place it. The sound of kids playing in a playground, or a siren from a fire engine, or a train. Anything. But he didn’t hear anything except for the man’s somewhat labored breathing and, perhaps, the sound of his cheeks pulling back from his gums in that hideous grin.
“I wasn’t talking about my name. I was thinking more generalized. You
know
who I am.”
“You have Gina.”
“That’s right, Jack. I have Gina.”
“But why?”
“Geez,” the man said. “What would a man want with an attractive young lady? I could go into detail but I feel like that would be insulting your intelligence.”
“You better not hurt her.”
“Don’t start with the threats. Not yet. I’m the wrong guy to be threatening, Jack. Besides, maybe you’re too late. Maybe I’ve already hurt her.”
“What do you want?”
“Do you honestly want to hear about what I want?”
“If it’s money, whatever, just don’t hurt her.”
“But what if that’s what I
want
? What if I want to hurt her? What if I want nothing more than to hurt her? Hurt her and do things with her?”
He resisted the urge to go off on the man. He couldn’t afford to do that. Maybe if they were standing face to face... but they weren’t. He was in the dark. Mr. Grin held all the cards. One card in particular.
“Besides,” Mr. Grin said. “Don’t offer me money. I know you don’t have any of that. I know quite a bit about you.”
“Again, what do you want? You wouldn’t have called me if you didn’t want something.”
“Did you and Gina have fun last night?”
“What do you mean?”
“Fucking. Jesus, you’re obtuse. Did you have fun fucking last night? That was the last time you did that, wasn’t it?”
“How do you know that?”
“She has a nice little mark just below the neckline of her t-shirt. That’s mighty big of you, to keep things like that away from the public eye. We wouldn’t want her friends and coworkers or, God forbid, the
public
to think she was a nasty little slut.”
Jack’s heart continued to rage and anger surged up through him. At the very least, he thought, this man had removed Gina’s shirt.
“But, you see, Jack, Gina
is
a nasty little slut. Bet you didn’t know that...”
Jack desperately wanted to say something but he didn’t think anything he could say would help his cause.
“Know how I know she’s a nasty little whore?”
“How?” Jack spat.
“Because I’ve fucked her. I’ve fucked her quite a bit. And I want to keep on fucking her but you are threatening that. You’re threatening to get in the way of all of it.”
Now other thoughts were spiraling through his brain, none of them good, and he found himself inexplicably mad at Gina, even though he knew what this man said couldn’t be true.
Or could it?
Immediately, he began thinking about the opportunities she may have had to cheat. Then he stopped himself. That wasn’t really the issue now. That could only be a distraction. What he had to realize right now was that she was in danger and he needed to find her. He needed to help her.
“See, Jack, she’s made it very clear to me that she would like to stop fucking me and keep right on fucking you.”
“That’s impossible.” He couldn’t help himself.
“Well, that’s what I thought too. How could anyone want to stop fucking me...”
“You know what I meant.”
“Oh, you mean it’s impossible that she could be fucking someone else?”
“Yes.”
“She’s a very resourceful gal, that Gina. Anyway, I feel like you’re not really listening to me anymore.”
“I’m listening.”
“Okay. So, in short, I don’t want to stop fucking her. I like her pussy. I like the way she... shaves it.”
A vice clamped Jack’s heart, imagining Gina in some sicko’s house, stripped down for his perusal and pawing.
“Now, I’m willing to take this like a man but I can’t just bow out completely. What kind of man would bow out completely, without a fight?”
Jack found it very hard to breathe.
“Why, I’ll tell you... it wouldn’t be a man at all. It would be a pussy. I am not a pussy, Jack.
You
are a pussy.”
This childish insult almost made Jack laugh out loud.
“So,” Mr. Grin continued. “I’ve decided to give you a chance to find me. And I’ve decided to let you in on the rules.”
“The rules?”
“Yes. The rules. Ready?” A brief pause. “If you go to the police with this, Gina is dead. Not just dead but tortured, degraded, humiliated... and then killed. And don’t kid yourself by thinking I won’t know if you go to the police. I will be the third person to know after yourself and the person who answers the phone at the station. So don’t even think about that. Unless you like to hear Gina scream.”
“Don’t hurt her.”
“You sound like a broken fucking record.”
“What are the other rules?”
“That’s really the only one. You have twenty-four hours to find me. That’s the other one. After that, we will be so far away, you’ll never be able to find us. You won’t even know where to begin looking. Gina’d be plenty upset but, over time, I think she’d get used to it. And if you find me, one of us is going to have to die. So, therein lies your big ethical decision. Do you forget about her, convince yourself she’s a lying slut and let us get on with our lives together? Or, once you find me, are you willing to kill another human to keep the one you supposedly love? Or, do you sacrifice her by calling the police and doing the ‘right’ thing?
“What’ll it be, Jack?”
“I’m going to find you. And I’m going to kill you.”
Mr. Grin laughed on the other end. “Well, then, I guess you’d better get busy, hadn’t you?”
Then he was gone. Disconnected. And Jack stood there in the living room, thinking how beautiful it had been that morning. But that now seemed like forever ago. This was not the same Jack who had stood there before. This Jack felt like he was actually mad enough to kill someone else. And that was something he had never felt in his adult life. He had also never even considered the fact of Gina’s fidelity. He had trusted her with every ounce of his being. He didn’t know if the call changed that. He desperately wanted to go out to the car and start driving, looking for her, but knew he had to put his thoughts in order first.
He took a deep breath and sat down on the recliner.
In twenty-four hours, he was either never going to see Gina again or someone was going to die. Both of those things burned him to his soul.
Nine
He had never been so confused in his life.
This whole scenario just seemed preposterous. Really, who did this happen to? He knew there were some people who found themselves, continuously and repeatedly, in odd situations. Trouble maybe. Some people were born trouble. It was like something in their brain just didn’t function like other people. They always went about things the wrong way or did things they didn’t really have any business doing in the first place.
Sitting in the recliner, he took a deep breath.
He was not one of those people. In his twenty-odd years on this planet, he had led a relatively trouble-free existence. He was born an only child and he didn’t think there were that many kids who could complain about too much attention. No, he received just the right amount of attention. That was why his parents had only had one. Not for any physical reason and not because they wanted to dump all of their attention and affection on this one single human. No. It was because they had their own lives when he was born and didn’t plan on throwing both of their lives and interests away to focus on a slew of children. If they were strong individuals they felt he would be a strong individual. And he liked to think he was, for the most part.
He made it through school without being bullied. He could have easily gone to college if he wanted to but that seemed dull. He wanted to get out of the house. He wanted to be on his own. If he went to college that would be like tying himself to his parents for four more years, at least. Maybe this lack of trouble he had was more a sense of purposeless directionlessness.
Relationships were easily come by and just as easily buried in the dust. He didn’t think of himself as an abnormally cold person but, realistically, he found himself with a girlfriend when he wanted something else to bury his cock in besides his hand and, eventually, he inevitably tired of this person because there was a lack of connection. None of them mentally turned him on. And he didn’t think any of them could manage to physically turn him on day after day. Until he had met Gina. From the time he met her he knew there wouldn’t be anyone else. If she didn’t feel the same way about him in the long run and left him, he knew he wouldn’t be able to stop her and he knew he wouldn’t give up women but he
did
know she would be the girl who every further girl would be judged against. It wasn’t any one thing he could put his finger on unless, maybe, it was mutual understanding. He knew what she wanted out of life. She knew what he wanted out of life. They made each other laugh. Life was better when they were together.