‘I’m really sorry about Amy, Rand,’ Stucks said loudly, as we hurtled out of the parking lot with unnecessary speed and hit the highway. ‘She’s such a sweet person. One time she saw me out painting a house, sweating my ba – my butt off, and she drove on to 7-Eleven, got me a giant pop, and brought it back to me, right up on the ladder.’
This was a lie. Amy cared so little for Stucks or his refreshment that she wouldn’t have bothered to piss in a cup for him.
‘That sounds like her,’ Rand said, and I was flush with unwelcome, ungentlemanly annoyance. Maybe it was the journalist in me, but facts were facts, and people didn’t get to turn Amy into everyone’s beloved best friend just because it was emotionally expedient.
‘Middlebury, huh?’ Stucks continued, pointing at Rand’s T-shirt. ‘Got a hell of a rugby team.’
‘That’s right we do,’ Rand said, the big smile again, and he and Stucks began an improbable discussion of liberal-arts rugby over the noise of the car, the air, the night, all the way to the mall.
Joe Hillsam parked his truck outside the giant cornerstone Mervyns. We all hopped out, stretched our legs, shook ourselves awake. The night was muggy and moon-slivered. I noticed Stucks was wearing – maybe ironically, possibly not – a T-shirt that read Save Gas, Fart in a Jar.
‘So, this place, what we’re doing, it’s freakin’ dangerous, I don’t want to lie,’ Mikey Hillsam began. He had beefed up over the years, as had his brother; they weren’t just barrel-chested but barrel-everythinged. Standing side by side, they were about five hundred pounds of dude.
‘We came here once, me and Mikey, just for – I don’t know, to see it, I guess, see what it had become, and we almost got our asses handed to us,’ said Joe. ‘So tonight we take no chances.’ He reached into the cab for a long canvas bag and unzipped it to reveal half a dozen baseball bats. He began handing them out solemnly. When he got to Rand, he hesitated. ‘Uh, you want one?’
‘Hell yes, I do,’ Rand said, and they all nodded and smiled approval, the energy in the circle a friendly backslap, a good for you old man.
‘Come on,’ Mike said, and led us along the exterior. ‘There’s a door with a lock smashed off down here near the Spencer’s.’
Just then we passed the dark windows of Shoe-Be-Doo-Be, where my mom had worked for more than half my life. I still remember the thrill of her going to apply for a job at that most wondrous of places – the mall! – leaving one Saturday morning for the job fair in her bright peach pantsuit, a forty-year-old woman looking for work for the first time, and her coming home with a flushed grin: We couldn’t imagine how busy the mall was, so many different kinds of stores! And who knew which one she might work in? She applied to nine! Clothing stores and stereo stores and even a designer popcorn store. When she announced a week later that she was officially a shoe saleslady, her kids were underwhelmed.
‘You’ll have to touch all sorts of stinky feet,’ Go complained.
‘I’ll get to meet all sorts of interesting people,’ our mom corrected.
I peered into the gloomy window. The place was entirely vacant except for a shoe sizer lined pointlessly against the wall.
‘My mom used to work here,’ I told Rand, forcing him to linger with me.
‘What kind of place was it?’
‘It was a nice place, they were good to her.’
‘I mean what did they do here?’
‘Oh, shoes. They did shoes.’
‘That’s right! Shoes. I like that. Something people actually need. And at the end of the day, you know what you’ve done: You’ve sold five people shoes. Not like writing, huh?’
‘Dunne, come on!’ Stucks was leaning against the open door ahead; the others had gone inside.
I’d expected the mall smell as we entered: that temperature-controlled hollowness. Instead, I smelled old grass and dirt, the scent of the outdoors inside, where it had no place being. The building was heavy-hot, almost fuzzy, like the inside of a mattress. Three of us had giant camping flashlights, the glow illuminating jarring images: It was suburbia, post-comet, post-zombie, post-humanity. A set of muddy shopping-cart tracks looped crazily along the white flooring. A raccoon chewed on a dog treat in the entry to a women’s bathroom, his eyes flashing like dimes.
The whole mall was quiet; Mikey’s voice echoed, our footsteps echoed, Stucks’ drunken giggle echoed. We would not be a surprise attack, if attack was what we had in mind.
When we reached the central promenade of the mall, the whole area ballooned: four stories high, escalators and elevators crisscrossing in the black. We all gathered near a dried-up fountain and waited for someone to take the lead.
‘So, guys,’ Rand said doubtfully, ‘what’s the plan here? You all know this place, and I don’t. We need to figure out how to systematically—’
We heard a loud metal rattle right behind us, a security gate going up.
‘Hey, there’s one!’ Stucks yelled. He trained his flashlight on a man in a billowing rain slicker, shooting out from the entry of Claire’s, running full speed away from us.
‘Stop him!’ Joe yelled, and began running after him, thick tennis shoes slapping against the ceramic tile floors, Mikey right behind him, flashlight trained on the stranger, the two brothers calling gruffly – hold up there, hey, guy, we just have a question. The man didn’t even give a backward glance. I said hold on, motherfucker! The runner remained silent amid the yelling, but he picked up speed and shot down the mall corridor, in and out of the flashlight’s glow, his slicker flapping behind him like a cape. Then the guy turned acrobatic: leaping over a trash can, shimmying off the edge of a fountain, and finally slipping under a metal security gate to the Gap and disappearing.
‘Fucker!’ The Hillsams had turned heart-attack red in the face, the neck, the fingers. They took turns grunting at the gate, straining to lift it.
I reached down with them, but there was no budging it over half a foot. I lay down on the floor and tried threading myself under the gate: toes, calves, then stuck at my waist.
‘Nope, no go.’ I grunted. ‘Fuck!’ I pulled up and shone my flashlight into the store. The showroom was empty except for a pile of clothing racks someone had dragged to the center, as if to start a bonfire. ‘All the stores connect in the back to passageways for trash, plumbing,’ I said. ‘He’s probably at the other end of the mall by now.’
‘Come out, you fuckers!’ Joe yelled, his head tilted back, eyes scrunched. His voice echoed through the building. We began walking ragtag, trailing our bats alongside us, except for the Hillsams, who used theirs to bang against security gates and doors, like they were on military patrol in a particularly nasty war zone.
‘Better you come to us than we come to you!’ Mikey called. ‘Oh, hello!’ In the entryway to a pet shop, a man and woman huddled on a few army blankets, their hair wet with sweat. Mikey loomed over them, breathing heavily, wiping his brow. It was the scene in the war movie when the frustrated soldiers come across innocent villagers and bad things happen.
‘The fuck you want?’ the man on the floor asked. He was emaciated, his face so thin and drawn it looked like it was melting. His hair was tangled to his shoulders, his eyes mournful and upturned: a despoiled Jesus. The woman was in better shape, with clean, plump arms and legs, her lank hair oily but brushed.
‘You a Blue Book Boy?’ Stucks asked.
‘Ain’t no boy, anyhow,’ the man muttered, folding his arms.
‘Have some fucking respect,’ the woman snapped. Then she looked like she might cry. She turned away from us, pretending to look at something in the distance. ‘I’m sick of no one having no respect.’
‘We asked you a question, buddy,’ Mikey said, moving closer to the guy, kicking the sole of his foot.
‘I ain’t Blue Book,’ the man said. ‘Just down on my luck.’
‘Bullshit.’
‘Lots of different people here, not just Blue Books. But if that’s who you’re looking for …’
‘Go on, go on, then, and find them,’ the woman said, her mouth turning down. ‘Go bother them.’
‘They deal down in the Hole,’ the man said. When we looked blank, he pointed. ‘The Mervyns, far end, past where the carousel used to be.’
‘And fuck you very much,’ the woman muttered.
A crop-circle stain marked where the carousel once was. Amy and I had taken a ride just before the mall shut down. Two grown-ups, side by side on levitating bunny rabbits, because my wife wanted to see the mall where I spent so much of my childhood. Wanted to hear my stories. It wasn’t all bad with us.
The barrier gate to the Mervyns had been busted through, so the store was open as wide and welcoming as the morning of a Presidents’ Day sale. Inside, the place was cleared out except for the islands that once held cash registers and now held about a dozen people in various states of drug highs, under signs that read Jewelry and Beauty and Bedding. They were illuminated by gas camping lamps that flickered like tiki torches. A few guys barely opened an eye as we passed, others were out cold. In a far corner, two kids not long out of their teens were manically reciting the Gettysburg Address. Now we are engaged in a great civil war … One man sprawled out on the rug in immaculate jean shorts and white tennis shoes, like he was on the way to his kid’s T-ball game. Rand stared at him as if he might know the guy.
Carthage had a bigger drug epidemic than I ever knew: The cops had been here just yesterday, and already the druggies had resettled, like determined flies. As we made our way through the piles of humans, an obese woman shushed up to us on an electric scooter. Her face was pimply and wet with sweat, her teeth catlike.
‘You buying or leaving, because this ain’t a show-and-tell,’ she said.
Stucks shone a flashlight on her face.
‘Get that fucking thing off me.’ He did.
‘I’m looking for my wife,’ I began. ‘Amy Dunne. She’s been missing since Thursday.’
‘She’ll show up. She’ll wake up, drag herself home.’
‘We’re not worried about drugs,’ I said, ‘we’re more concerned about some of the men here. We’ve heard rumors.’
‘It’s okay, Melanie,’ a voice called. At the edge of the juniors section, a rangy man leaned against a naked mannequin torso, watching us, a sideways grin on his face.
Melanie shrugged, bored, annoyed, and motored away.
The man kept his eyes on us but called toward the back of the juniors section, where four sets of feet poked out from the dressing rooms, men camped out in their individual cubicles.
‘Hey, Lonnie! Hey, all! The assholes are back. Five of ’em,’ the man said. He kicked an empty beer can toward us. Behind him, three sets of feet began moving, men pulling themselves up. One set remained still, their owner asleep or passed out.
‘Yeah, fuckos, we’re back,’ Mikey Hillsam said. He held his bat like a pool cue and punched the mannequin torso between the breasts. She tottered toward the ground, the Blue Book guy removing his arm gracefully as she fell, as if it were all part of a rehearsed act. ‘We want some information on a missing girl.’
The three men from the dressing rooms joined their friends. They all wore Greek-party T-shirts: Pi Phi Tie-Dye and Fiji Island. Local Goodwills got inundated with these come summer – university graduates shedding their old souvenirs.
The men were all wiry-strong, muscular arms rivered with popping blue veins. Behind them, a guy with a long, drooping mustache and hair in a ponytail – Lonnie – came out of the largest corner dressing room, dragging a long length of pipe, wearing a Gamma Phi T-shirt. We were looking at mall security.
‘What’s up?’ Lonnie called.
We cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground … the kids were reciting in a pitch that was close to screaming.
‘We’re looking for Amy Dunne, you probably seen her on the news, missing since Thursday,’ Joe Hillsam said. ‘Nice, pretty, sweet lady, stolen from her own home.’
‘I heard about it. So?’ said Lonnie.
‘She’s my wife,’ I said.
‘We know what you guys’ve been getting into out here,’ Joe continued, addressing only Lonnie, who was tossing his ponytail behind him, squaring his jaw. Faded green tattoos covered his fingers. ‘We know about the gang rape.’
I glanced at Rand to see if he was all right; he was staring at the naked mannequin on the floor.
‘Gang rape,’ Lonnie said, jerking his head back. ‘The fuck you talking about a gang rape.’
‘You guys,’ Joe said. ‘You Blue Book Boys—’
‘Blue Book Boys, like we’re some kind of crew.’ Lonnie sniffed. ‘We’re not animals, asshole. We don’t steal women. People want to feel okay for not helping us. See, they don’t deserve it, they’re a bunch of rapists. Well, bullshit. I’d get the fuck out of this town if the plant would give me my back pay. But I got nothing. None of us got nothing. So here we are.’
‘We’ll give you money, good money, if you can tell us anything about Amy’s disappearance,’ I said. ‘You guys know a lot of people, maybe you heard something.’
I pulled out her photo. The Hillsams and Stucks looked surprised, and I realized – of course – this was only a macho diversion for them. I pushed the photo in Lonnie’s face, expecting him to barely glance. Instead, he leaned in closer.
‘Oh, shit,’ he said. ‘Her?’
‘You recognise her?’
He actually looked stricken. ‘She wanted to buy a gun.’