“Then let me go.”
“I can’t.” I remove a sweatshirt and lay it beside the gun on the floor at my feet. The fire keeps the cabin warm, here at least. The bedroom is cold. She sleeps layered, long johns and a sweatshirt and socks, and still she shivers until long after she’s fallen asleep.
I know because I’ve watched her.
She asks again what I want with her. Of course I want something with her, she says. Why else would I snatch her from my apartment and bring her here?
“I was hired to do a job. To get you and bring you to Lower Wacker. To drop you off. That’s it. I was supposed to drop you off and disappear.”
Lower Wacker Drive is the bottom part of a double-decker street in the Loop, a tunnel that goes on for I don’t know how long.
I see it in her eyes: confusion. She looks away, out the window into the dark night.
There are words she doesn’t understand: a job, drop you off and disappear. It was far more realistic for her to believe that this was random. That some madman chose to kidnap her for the hell of it.
She says the only thing she knows about Lower Wacker is that she and her sister used to love to drive down there when they were kids, back when it was lit with fluorescent green lights. It’s the first personal thing she tells me about herself.
“I don’t understand,” she says, desperate for an answer.
“I don’t know all the details. Ransom,” I say. I’m getting pissed off. I don’t want to talk about it.
“Then why are we here?” Her eyes beg for an explanation. She’s looking at me with this blend of complete disorientation and frustration and conceit.
That’s a fucking good question, I think.
I checked her out, online, before I nabbed her. I know a few things about her, though she doesn’t think I know shit. I’ve seen photos of her socialite family in their designer clothes, looking rich and uptight all at the same time. I know when her father became judge. I know when he’s up for reelection. I watched news clips of him on the internet. I know that he’s a prick.
The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.
I want to tell her to forget it. To shut up. But instead I say, “I changed my mind. No one knows we’re here. If they did, they’d kill us. Me and you.”
She stands up and begins to traipse around the room. Her feet are light on the floor, her arms tangled around herself.
“Who?” she begs. Those words—kill us, me and you—take her breath away. The rain comes down harder, if possible. She leans in to hear my voice. I’m staring at the wooden floorboards of the cabin. I avoid her expectant eyes.
“Don’t worry about it,” I say.
“Who?” she asks again.
And so I tell her about Dalmar. Mostly so she’ll shut up. I tell her about the day he tracked me down and handed me a photo of her. He said I was to find and deliver her to him.
She turns her back to me and asks with this accusatory tone, “Then why didn’t you?”
I see the hate covering her from head to toe and think that I should have. I should have handed her over to Dalmar and been through. I would’ve been home by now, plenty of money to pay for food and bills, the mortgage. I wouldn’t have to be worrying about what I left behind, wondering how things are going back home, how she’s going to survive, how I’m going to get to her before I run. I find myself thinking about it all the time. It keeps me up at night. When I’m not worrying about Dalmar or the cops, I’m thinking about her, in that old house all alone. If I would’ve just turned the girl over like I was supposed to do, this would’ve all been through. Then the only thing I would’ve been worrying about is if and when the cops were gonna catch me. But of course that’s nothing new.
I don’t answer the girl’s stupid question. That’s something she doesn’t need to know. She doesn’t need to know why I changed my mind, why I brought her here.
Instead I tell her what I know about Dalmar. I don’t know why I do it. I guess so she’ll know I’m not screwing around. So she’ll be afraid. So she’ll see that being here with me is the best alternative, the only alternative.
Much of what I know about Dalmar is hearsay. Rumors about how he’s believed to be one of those child soldiers back in Africa, the ones that are brainwashed and forced to kill. About him beating a businessman in an abandoned warehouse out on the west side because he couldn’t pay a debt. About how he killed a boy, nine, maybe ten years old, when his folks couldn’t pay the ransom for his return, about how Dalmar shot the kid, sent photos to his parents to rub it in, to gloat.
“You’re lying,” she says. But her eyes are filled with terror. She knows I’m not.