Rote stuck the heel of his hand on Carp’s lips, and pressed his jaw open; he pressed down harder until his fist filled Carp’s mouth. John looked at Carp for five seconds, then dug in his pocket and took a red Swiss Army knife out. He chose one of the blades, looked down at Carp, and said, “I’m gonna ask you one question. If you don’t answer it, I’m gonna cut your nose off. Then I’m gonna cut your eyes out. Here’s the question. What town is Rachel closest to? Universal? Longstreet? That crossroads? Here in Bradentown? Which town? Don’t have to tell us where, just which town she’s closest to.”
Rote pulled his hand out of Carp’s mouth. Carp gasped for air, groaned, and then said, “I don’t care if you kill me, I’m not gonna tell you where she is. You cocksuckers, you cocksuckers.”
John leaned forward with the knife. “I’m gonna cut your nose off,” he said. “In ten seconds, your nose gonna be gone. Nobody’s gonna put that nose back on.” He was talking quietly, but his face was a stone; he was scaring the shit out of me. “So answer my question. Not where she is, just what town she’s closest to.”
Carp stared at him for six of those seconds, then finally spat out, “Universal. If you’d really given me the keys, I would have told you.”
John turned to me and said, “Get back up there.”
“I need to-”
“Just get back up there,” he said impatiently. To the others, “Let’s move him. Terry’s gonna be running out of bullshit.”
ROTE handed me the bolt cutters, said, “For the chain, if there is one,” and that was the last I saw of John’s friends. John was running things now, and I got in the car and did what he told me: I headed up to Universal.
GETTING there took a while. Driving at the speed limit, watching the yellow lines, scared to death that a cop might stop me for anything. Saw no cops; Universal was as dead as ever.
Fifteen minutes after I got there, I was sitting in a booth in the cafe, one of two customers. The other guy looked like a farmer, and he was eating pie at the far end of the line of booths, reading the local newspaper. I was picking at a BLT and a plate of fries-I wasn’t hungry, but I needed a reason to wait there-and Marvel arrived.
I saw her get out of her car in the parking lot, and she looked at me through the window. As she came in, the counter lady said, “Hello, Miz Marvel,” and Marvel smiled and asked, “How are things?” Then she turned as if checking out the rest of the cafe, spotted me, did a double take, and said, “Say, aren’t you Mr. Barnes from the highway department?”
“Yup. And you’re the mayor of Longstreet.”
“Can I join you? I’ve been meaning to call you about the bridge approach lanes.”
“I was afraid of that,” I said. I made a gesture to the seat opposite. Marvel asked the counter lady for a Coke and a piece of apple pie, and came and sat across from me. We talked about the bridge until she got her pie, and then, when the counter lady went to talk to the other customer, Marvel leaned forward and said, “John called. We’re waiting. He said he’d call again on my phone.”
“Where are they?”
She shrugged. “I don’t think we want to know too much about it.” She looked suddenly bleak. “I love that man. I know he’s done some things in the past and I love him anyway. But I haven’t seen him like this. He scared me this morning.”
“He scared me this afternoon,” I said. I spotted the cafe lady coming with a carafe of Diet Coke, and added, “But if there’s no way you can push the millage rate, I really can’t see the state sequestering the money long enough for you to make it up through the regular road revenue.”
“There’s gotta be some loose money somewhere,” Marvel said. “It shouldn’t be up to the taxpayers in Longstreet alone to take care of that bridge. People use it for hundreds of miles around.”
“You’ll have to talk to the legislature about that,” I said.
We went on like that for ten minutes, and were running out of bullshit. Then John called, and Marvel’s dark eyes lit up; she got a map out of her purse and said, “Yes, I see. Yes, I see. Okay. I’ll go now.”
She hung up and said to me, “I’ve got to go. I hope to see you at the public hearings this fall. Any help you can give us with the regional supervisor would be welcome.”
“Got to go myself,” I said. I dropped a couple of bucks on the table, and we paid our bills separately at the cash register. I lingered, talking a minute with the cashier, buying a couple bottles of Dasani water, and let Marvel get outside. She was headed south on the highway when I got in my car. I caught her a minute later, and she took us, moving fast, south down the highway for six miles, then turned away from the river and took us about five more miles back into the countryside.
She pulled to the shoulder at a dusty crossroads that looked a little like the one we’d been at a few hours before-except this one was in rougher country, small cut-up fields spreading away from three-quarters of the crossroads, with a steep wooded hill on the other quarter.
At the bottom of the hill was an abandoned wood-frame building with a fading sign that said “Charm Township Hall.” Marvel got out of her car and said, “We’re supposed to use the map from this morning, but the old town hall is the abandoned school.”
I nodded and said, “There should be a trail on the side of the building.”
I got the bolt cutters and the two Dasani bottles, and we found a trail right where it should have been, and headed up into the woods. “Watch for snakes,” Marvel said as I led off.
THERE were no snakes. The trail got narrower but was always visible, as we went up the hill. It was half game trail, and maybe used by hunters in the spring and the fall, I thought, guys going into the woods. We spooked three does a quarter-mile back and watched them bounce off ahead of us.
A half-mile in, Marvel said, “You think we’ve gone a mile yet?”
“No. Half-mile, maybe.”
“Carp told John it was a mile. He said he checked it with a GPS. A mile in a straight line.”
“Ten more minutes, on this trail,” I said, “if we don’t lose the trail.”
We went on, getting hotter and hotter by the step. There was good leafy overhead, but the air was so hot that even the shade didn’t account for much; both of us had sweated through our shirts by the time we were at the top of the hill. The path continued just below the crest-a good sign of a deer trail-and after a few more minutes, I said, “We gotta be close.”
The woods were thick, and brush was piled up beside the trail. We couldn’t see more than fifty feet in any direction. Marvel tilted her head back and screamed, “RACHEL!”
Nothing.
“RACHEL.”
And faintly, “He-e-e-el-l-l-lppp.”
SHE was a noisy little kid, with a fine set of lungs. We found her, another two hundred yards along the trail, in a little open patch of grass. She was standing next to a tree, laptop under her arm, a skinny girl with big eyes, wearing a blue, flowered blouse and jean shorts, a chain around her waist, closed with a padlock. The other end of the chain was wrapped around a two-foot-thick tree, also padlocked. Just like Carp had said; a chilly breeze swept through my soul, as I realized that he would have left her there.
Marvel ran the last hundred feet, fell down, bruised herself, popped back onto her feet, and closed in and grabbed Rachel and lifted her up, and started crying, and Rachel looked at me and said, “I got bugs all over me,” and she began to cry, and I took the laptop from her, and between gasps she said, “Jimmy James hurt me. Jimmy James hurt me. Jimmy…”
I caught on with the first word; Marvel didn’t, not right away. She was just cooing, “We can fix it, honey, we can fix it, you’re okay now, where’d he hurt you?”