Authors: Kyle Mills
It took a moment for her eyes to adjust from the glare of the bare bulbs in the garage to the gloom of the kitchen, but the moonlight streaming though the windows above the sink created enough colorless contrast to see what was happening.
A man in a dark suit was dragging her mother toward the living room. His hand was clamped over her mouth and his thumb and index finger pinched her nose shut.
Jennifer resisted the urge to run to her mother and pry the man’s hands from her face. Instead, she retreated, almost falling backward down the steps. When she reached out to steady herself, her eyes finally found her father. He was pinned against the kitchen counter by a similarly dressed man. The combination of a thick forearm pressed against his
throat and a gun pushed into his cheek had silenced him.
Everything in her told her to stay and fight, but she knew that would be stupid. There was nothing she could do. She had to go for help.
She spun around and cleared the stairs leading into the garage in one jump. The keys were still in the car.
She didn’t see the hand as it reached out from behind her father’s tool bench and grabbed her by the back of her sweatshirt; she only felt the shirt go tight across her chest and her feet skid out from under her. She would have fallen on her back, except a powerful arm had snaked around her waist. An instant later, the hand that had been tangled in her sweatshirt moved to her face and clamped over her mouth and nose.
She thrashed wildly when her air was cut off, surprising her captor with her strength and throwing them both against the wall. She grabbed at his arm, finally getting her fingers behind something that felt like a thick metal bracelet.
It was hopeless. Panic and lack of air were making her groggy, and she felt herself weakening as she fought back the blank whiteness encroaching on her peripheral vision. It took only a moment for the man to regain his balance and lift her off her feet, robbing her of what little leverage she had.
Making one last effort, she grabbed for the door-jamb as she was carried into the house. Her strength had left her, though, and her sweaty fingers slid ineffectually along the wall.
“Stop!”
Jennifer heard the shout—a woman’s voice—but had no idea where it came from. The fingers around her nose loosened and she felt her feet connect with the ground, though the man’s arm remained tight around her waist and his hand was still clamped on her mouth. She took in a deep breath through her nose and felt the oxygenated blood begin to clear her head.
A woman stepped out from behind the shadow of the refrigerator, prompting the man holding her to loosen his grip a bit more and allow her to take another deep breath as she watched the woman approach.
She was probably three inches shorter than Jennifer’s five-nine, with a boyish haircut—short and parted on the side. Her skin must have been very pale, because it just glowed the color of the moonlight bathing the room.
The woman stopped about a foot away and reached out. Jennifer jerked her head back, but it just bounced off the chest of the man holding her.
“You must be very still and very quiet,” the woman said, running a hand through Jennifer’s hair.
Jennifer let out a quiet squeal, muffled by the hand still clamped over her mouth. She tried to look into the woman’s eyes to see if there was anything there that could tell her what was happening, but they just looked black.
The woman moved to her right slightly, letting the moonlight hit her fully in the face. “Look at me, Jennifer. You will be quiet, won’t you?”
Her voice was smooth and soft, but her newly illuminated eyes looked cold and cruel. Jennifer
wanted to scream when the man’s hand slid from her mouth, but she found herself transfixed by the woman’s stare.
“That’s better,” the woman said, letting her fingers fall from Jennifer’s hair and slide down her arm, finally closing them around Jennifer’s wrist. “Come with me. There’s something I want you to see.”
She pulled Jennifer from the arms holding her and toward the living room. Jennifer wanted to break away, to run for help, but she was afraid. Not of the man who had captured her or the ones who had subdued her parents, but of this small, pale woman and what her eyes told Jennifer she was capable of.
She allowed herself to be led to a small loveseat situated on the far wall of the living room. The light was better there, thanks to two skylights and the large windows that surrounded the room.
Jennifer sat down on the sofa that she had spent so many nights on—watching TV, doing homework, talking on the phone. But now her eyes were locked on her parents and the men holding them at gunpoint at the other end of the room. The woman’s hand slid from her wrist and Jennifer watched her walk through the moonlight to her parents and begin speaking quietly to them. Jennifer leaned forward to try and hear what was being said, but a strong hand grasped her shoulder and pulled her back.
She watched them for what seemed like forever. The shadows made it difficult to read their expressions, but she could see the tension slowly falling from her parents’ bodies. Her father was the first to peel his back off the wall, followed closely by her mother, who stepped forward, put her arms around
the small woman, and began to sob. The muffled sound coming from her throat was a strange combination of deep sorrow and joy that Jennifer had only heard once before—when a close family friend had died after a long and painful bout with bone cancer.
Jennifer relaxed slightly. The cruelty she had seen in the woman and that had caused a nauseous feeling of hopelessness to form in the pit of her stomach must have been a trick of light and darkness. Her parents recognized her. Maybe they’d known her for years. Perhaps the woman was afraid, too. Perhaps she was here because she needed their help.
When the man standing next to her father reached out and offered him his gun, Jennifer let out a deep sigh of relief. Certainly killers and rapists weren’t in the habit of arming their victims. Maybe she and her family were in some kind of danger and these people were here to protect them?
Her father wiped at his eyes with his sleeve as he took the gun. Jennifer watched as he weighed it uncomfortably, then pointed it at the back of her mother’s head and pulled the trigger.
For a moment she felt like she was sitting in a dark theater watching a movie. The crack of the pistol, her mother’s body jerking forward, the black fluid momentarily backlit and then silently painting the wall.
Jennifer threw herself forward, trying to escape the sofa, but the man behind her had anticipated this and jerked her back again. The room started to spin and she felt her stomach tighten into a sickening knot as she struggled against the hands that held her in place.
“Daddy!” she screamed as her father tucked the gun under his chin.
Her shout seemed to pull him from his trance, and he hesitated for a moment. “I know this is hard, honey. But you don’t belong just to us. You never belonged just to us.”
The gun sounded again and the window behind her father cracked from top to bottom, leaving a spiderweb prism as he collapsed to the ground.
She felt all the strength go out of her. She slumped forward and turned away from the scene in front of her. For a moment, it felt as though she had forgotten how to breathe. Her mind seemed to shut down everything as it tried to process what had just happened.
Her parents had both been only children and her grandparents had been dead for years. In an instant she had gone from being one-third of a happy family to being completely alone. It must be a dream. A nightmare. It must be.
She didn’t see the woman approach, and barely noticed when she knelt in front of her. Jennifer saw the dull flash of the syringe in the woman’s hand and felt herself being pushed face down into the soft cushions. A hand slid beneath her stomach, unbuttoned her shorts, and pulled them and her underwear down. There was the sharp jab of the needle and an unnatural heat flooding her body. Then there was nothing.
“P
UTTING’S NOT GOLF,” MARK BEAMON SAID,
finally nudging his ball the last three inches to the hole. “Guess that’d be, uh, seven?”
“Try eight,” the man with the scorecard said. “If you didn’t swing so hard, you wouldn’t have to try to improve your game with creative math.”
Beamon hiked up his red-and-green-checked pants and dunked his hand into the cup. “I don’t think you appreciate the subtle genius of my game, Dave.”
“Oh, but I do, Mark. That genius is the reason I haven’t had to pay for a drink at the clubhouse since you moved to Arizona.” He nodded toward a tall, squarely built man standing at the edge of the green. “You’re up, Jake.”
Beamon slid his putter into his bag and dropped into the driver’s seat of the cart to watch Jacob Layman, his new boss, putt. It was an easy shot and Beamon tried to will it in, but the ball broke right and missed by a good three inches.
Another brilliant plan shot to hell, he thought as he watched a flush grow slowly out of the man’s polo shirt.
Layman was apparently from a “good” Virginia family—whatever that meant. He’d attended the right prep schools and had enjoyed a successful, if not exceptional, career in the FBI.
Because of this, and despite the fact that he wasn’t exactly a barrel of laughs, Layman had risen to a respectable height in Arizona’s social circles. It was a position that, through incessant name-dropping, he never let anyone forget.
Enter Mark Beamon, an overweight and poorly dressed product of the Texas public school system. Favorite pastime: drinking and eating too much at parties, then insulting the guests.
But Beamon had spent his career riding herd over some of the FBI’s most complicated and visible cases. His face had been on TV, in magazines, and all over local newspapers. It was the kind of career that made you powerful friends.
Despite his somewhat intentional lack of social graces and the fact that he’d only moved to Arizona a month ago, Beamon had already been befriended by some of the most powerful people in the state. Suddenly he was what his secretary called an “A” party guest.
Initially, Beamon had accepted his new stature with good humor. Why not? Sure, the people could be a little phony and dangerously boring, but the food was good and the booze was free. He’d started to rethink things, though, when he’d noticed a rapid cooling in Layman’s attitude toward him.
At first he’d thought his new boss had found out that some of his people were bypassing him and coming to directly to Beamon for advice on tough cases—a practice Beamon strongly discouraged. But then it became clear that it didn’t have anything to do with the job. He just felt that Beamon had overstepped his natural-born social status.
And so here they were.
A few years ago, he would have ignored the situation and eventually paid for his refusal to play the game. But now he was the new, improved Mark Beamon. He’d cut his smoking in half, taken Up a sport, made a valiant and modestly successful attempt to replace bourbon with beer, and promised himself that he would suffer no more concussions from beating his head against the Bureau’s political brick wall.
Today’s golf excursion included the mayor of Flagstaff and the star of a Fox crime drama filmed in Tucson, neither of whom had been particularly excited by Beamon’s insistence that his new boss round out the foursome.
And now Layman was having what was probably the worst game of his life.
Beamon twisted around and tossed his empty beer can in the cooler bungee-corded to the back of the cart, then pulled out a full one and popped the top. “Make it up on the next one, Jake,” he said as his boss slammed his putter into his bag and slumped into the seat next to him.
Somehow it didn’t look like Layman was going to remember this as the peace offering he had intended.
Beamon jumped on the accelerator and hurtled down the cart path, ignoring the cold wind penetrating his golf shirt and trying to forget that the man sitting next to him was probably trying to figure out a way to work the word “asshole” into his next performance appraisal.
When they arrived at the next hole, Beamon
grabbed his driver and went to stand at the tee, leaving Layman to sulk in the cart. As their partners pulled up, the unmistakable chirping of a beeper started in earnest. Layman looked down at his hip and the mayor toward his bag, but Beamon was already holding his up like a trophy. “Mine.”
He dropped his driver, walked back to the cart, and began digging through his bag for his cell phone. With a little luck, terrorists had taken a stadium full of college students hostage. Otherwise, he was probably going to have to shoot himself in the foot to get out of the last six holes.
E
XCEPT FOR THE ODD GOLF TRIP TO PHOENIX
, the reality of Arizona just wasn’t living up to the fantasy.
Mark Beamon unconsciously lifted his feet as his car plowed through a six-inch-deep snowdrift that washed up under the chassis and lifted the vehicle off the ground. Fortunately, the drift wasn’t much wider than it was deep, and he managed to correct a minor fishtail and keep control.
“Goddammit!” he said to the empty car. “It’s not supposed to snow in Arizona!”
He had been the Assistant Special Agent in Charge, ASAC, of the FBI’s Flagstaff office for about a month. And in that month he’d learned something. It
did
snow in Arizona. Hell, it blizzarded in Arizona. The pictures he’d seen on TV of a guy sipping a margarita in the shade of a twenty-foot-high cactus had probably been taken in California. Or maybe the southern tip of Saudi Arabia. Still, all in all, he had to admit that it wasn’t a bad gig—he finally had his own office to run and he had some good kids working for him. Now if he could just keep from screwing it up.
Beamon slowed the car to a crawl and flipped on the interior light. The high-end houses in this Flagstaff neighborhood weren’t visible from the
road, hidden by dense pine forests and the four-foot snowbanks piled up on either side of the quiet street. According to the directions he’d scribbled on the back of a blank scorecard, though, he wanted to take the next turn.