Method 15/33 Read online

  Did I mention how I trained to be a sharpshooter early in my career? Did I mention my better-than-20/20 vision? Lola and I combined made for a virtual Superhero of sight and smell. This is probably why the Bureau paired us together in the first place. So without the distraction of sound, I could have seen to Texas if hills and buildings weren’t in the way.

  Lola hunched her shoulders and scrunched her nose as though truly bothered to be alive. I tried to focus on anything other than the silence, reading the signs on whatever lonely stores and restaurants we passed along the straight way on the straight road. The rain was the annoying, cold kind, the kind that won’t decide to stop or fall. A melancholic rain. Although mid-day, the sky was as dark as dusk.

  A wide-mouth bass mailbox made me think of my childhood neighborhood, but then again, any of the cases I worked made me think of childhood. Given my possible hyperthymesia, which I usually controlled pretty well—unlike others with true hyperthymesia—my “exceptional memory” took over, and I once again fell slave to scenes I hated to remember. The replay of one day in particular invaded my thinking, a cyclical spiral I’d entered so often in life. Here it is, cat’s out of the bag, I guess I’ll let you in on a little secret I’ve held back from you until now. I told you earlier that I decided to join the FBI to “please my parents” or support my college girlfriend-cum-fiancée, but we didn’t know each other well in the beginning of this dual memoir.

  When I turned thirteen, my father got a job planning power plants for a big construction outfit in Chicago. We moved from the lap of luxury in Buffalo to a brick bungalow in a suburb about twenty minutes west of downtown Chicago, called Riverside. Riverside is filled with Frank Lloyd Wright masterpieces, peaceful birds and towering trees, quiet streets, and an addictive ice-cream shop, appropriately named Grumpies.

  The same gentleman who designed Central Park, Frederick Law Olmstead, designed Riverside. Olmstead had this vision to create a town where each house had a view of a park. Thus, you will find that Riverside streets are circular, looping knots, interrupted by wedges of tiny plots of grass and full-blown parks, such as Turtle Park—which features a green-painted cement turtle.

  Way back when I was a boy, because of Riverside’s design, real estate agents claimed crime was low: the rat’s nest of streets making easy getaways for robbers, well, not so easy. If you were a criminal in Riverside, you best know the lay of the land, the twist of the pretzel streets, and the misdirection of curving parks. You best be an insider.

  Turtle Park was in the middle of everything, surrounded by layers of gnarly streets, as if the center of a grapevine wreath. It was here that something gravely significant revealed my seeing gift. When I say significant, I mean the kind of event so profound it slaps the direction of your life into a new direction, takes any emotions and settled fears, grabs and pushes them inside out, and creates a whole new set of fears you never thought possible; they exist thereafter as a constant undercurrent, the theme song to every waking minute.

  This particular event also planted the bug my parents thereafter suffered: a desire that I go into law enforcement. Throughout my subsequent childhood, teenage period, and college, however, I fought back by burying that day in writing comedy, creating comic strips, and acting in dramatic plays.

  Nevertheless, by my senior year in college, the St. John’s Jesuit priest I’d been playing chess with convinced me to face my fears. Taking his Godly advice to the extreme, I did the most drastic thing possible: I entered the very field that had for so long haunted me, kidnapping.

  There we were: thirteen-year-old me, my mother, my father, and my eight-year-old brother, Reese, who we never called Reese. We called him Mozi. The day was a cloudless, high-blue July, windless and hot, so my parents walked us from our bungalow to Grumpies for ice cream. About an eight-block walk. Midway back home, we stopped at Turtle Park.

  Mozi and I had already biked and raced the whole town, twenty times over, sometimes with our day-babysitter. Having my pesky autobiographical memory, I’d conceptualized each square inch into 3-D models in my mind. I knew the Frank Lloyd mansion, the one that looked like a rectangular starship on the corner of Turtle Park, measured .5 miles from our bungalow. I knew the basketball-sized rock by its driveway had ten nicks on the top. I knew five Victorians, three stone mansions, two new construction mega-homes, a Cape, a gambrel, and a run-down ranch surrounded Turtle Park. The distance from house to house allowed for multi-legged foot races between me and Mozi, all of which I could have easily won, but throughout I’d scatter losses, so as to allow my four-eyes, thick-lensed, short-stature, younger brother, a modicum of self-respect. I loved Mozi. How light he was. A “silly pants,” my mother called him. He made everyone laugh. Everyone pegged him to be a comedian someday.

  I was never ever going to be like Mozi; and he was never ever going to be like me. But oh, how I tried to model his early years, to resurrect for all of us that long-ago lost boy of sweetness and laughter.

  We’d gotten our ice creams, now dripping from cones and onto our wrists, and we sat like a family of quacking ducks around a lake, only the cement turtle in Turtle Park was our lake. Dunking his spent and mushy cone in the trash, Mozi said, “Hide and Seek, you’re it, Pop.” Then he ran, and I ran, and our mother struggled to get her balance from standing up to join in the fun. My father tossed his own cone in the trash and said, “Game on,” hiding his eyes in his sleeves.

  Between Turtle Park and another large field with a baseball diamond, a U-shaped road formed a division bordered with pines and oaks. Mozi ran like heavy rain across the U road and to the far end of the second park, while I stayed in Turtle Park, climbing a tree to perch myself within the lush canopy. I had full view of Mozi, who wedged himself in a bush about two hundred yards away.

  On the edge of the second park snaked another road, sewn like a thin ribbon of black to the green of the grassy field. Mozi hid about two feet from this ribbon road, visible to drivers, but invisible to a father, who counted with closed eyes, and to a mother, who hid in a jungle gym beneath a slide and facing the wrong direction. And even if they were looking Mozi’s way, I doubt their eyesight carried that far. But mine did. I didn’t realize then that I was different. I thought I saw what everyone else saw.

  A brown Datsun, parked ten yards from Mozi, slowly rolled along the edge of the park toward Mozi’s hiding bush. The license plate, plainly visible to me, was immediately out of place but instantly familiar: Idaho, XXY56790. The eye doctor they called to trial to support my testimony said most people can read license plates “three to four car lengths away.” And while the tree in which I perched was about “forty car lengths away,” my “visual acuity” was “better than the best recorded and nearly immeasurable.” This was in rebuttal to the defense lawyers who claimed I could not possibly have pegged the license plate from so far away. “He’s obviously been coached,” they argued. They also objected to what I testified I saw the driver of the Datsun say.

  As the car reached Mozi, the driver and passenger doors opened. Two men in tracksuits, one red, one black, exited. The driver stood by his opened door, scoping for onlookers, of which there were none, except for invisible me in the tree. The other, the one in the black suit, strolled over to Mozi, plucked him from the bush, and ran with him under his arm, his hand firmly over Mozi’s mouth. He threw him into the back seat of the Datsun, got in next to him, and continued to bottle his screams. The driver said—I read his lips: “Midnight.” And they sped off.

  I jumped from the tree, landing square, my knees buckling beneath me. I trip-ran to a full-out sprint, yelling to my unaware parents behind me, “Mozi. They took Mozi. They took Mozi. They took Mozi.”

  Not waiting for them to catch up or understand, I kept running and I kept screaming. “They took Mozi. They took Mozi.” I didn’t have time to stop and explain how I’d previously mapped the Datsun they took him in, how I could recite the number of windows and doors on the house where it usually parked so innocuously, before. />
  I’m pretty sure I didn’t breathe the entire four blocks to our bungalow. I ripped open the side door, using the key my parents hid under the mat, flung my body down the basement stairs, grabbed my BB gun and a box of BBs, flew outside, and threw the gun and pellets and then myself over the fence to the schoolyard beside the house. I heard my parents about a block back yelling for me, but they hadn’t had the chance to see me flee over the fence, and I didn’t pause one second to let them catch up.

  I snaked my way around the school, through the play yard, and down and around and around and around several windy, tree-lined streets and onto the outskirts of town, where split levels and small ranches took the place of the nicer bungalows, spaceship Lloyd Wrights, and Victorians further in. Our babysitter had walked us this way three times because her boyfriend lived in this particular quadrant.

  I came upon a cul-de-sac of three split-level homes, set in a demilune around a crescent sliver of grass in the center, which cars circumnavigated and children Hot-Wheel’ed in a perfect circle. The babysitter’s boyfriend’s garage apartment was two roads over, and to get there, I’d be out of visual range of the house I needed to watch, given the twistiness of the streets and the merged canopy of the oaks and sycamores. Leading to the cul-de-sac, was strangely, nothing. No homes with a clean line of shot on the target, no houses on or at the end of the straightaway that led there either. An empty lot of abandoned construction further divided me from seeking help. The place to which I’d run was indeed a rare, secluded outpost, so different from the congestion of homes elsewhere in the village. The three homes in the cul-de-sac were architectural triplets, obviously built by the same developer. One house, a white split, seemed empty, given the newspapers piled up. Another, white bottom with brown top, screamed of a definite vacancy, given the no-curtain view of the empty living room and the uncut grass. The yellow caution tape around the missing stairs further confirmed the property’s abandonment. The third, the one on the left, royal-blue peeling paint with white shutters, appeared unoccupied, but for the brown Datsun in the driveway. Exactly where I’d plotted it on one of our walks. Same plate: Idaho XXY56790. The screen door on the royal-blue split air-braked to a close, having seconds before been opened and crossed.

  Statistically speaking, most kidnap victims are hidden or their bodies dumped within miles from where stolen.

  A quandary. On the one hand, I couldn’t barge on in for fear the two grown men would tackle and take me too. Plus, I worried there were other men in there. On the other hand, I didn’t dare take my sight off the house in case they decided to flee with my beloved Mozi. I held a pained hope the reference to “midnight” meant they’d leave at midnight, at which point, I’d be ready to ambush them. I had one choice: I’d have to wait and hide in the sycamore across from the house, poise my gun at the side and front exits, and fire away as soon as midnight hit and they set out to leave.

  It was only noon.

  Lord only knows what torture Mozi endured inside.

  That day in the tree. Oh, that day in the tree.

  If you’re reeling reading this, shouting at the page about another way out of this mess, an easier and obvious solution, good for you. I was thirteen, not as experienced as you in the ways of the world.

  I quickly shimmied up the trunk, the BB gun hanging to my back, the pellets in my pocket. About ten feet up, a straight and perfect branch, one intended by God for a swing, allowed me to hoist one leg up higher, and then the other. There I sat on that blessed fat branch, pressing my side against the trunk, and holding another, smaller, crooked branch above me for balance. And I waited. And waited.

  Every so often, I’d have to jostle my bottom, left cheek, right cheek, left, right, squeezing blood back into my tingling mass. Then my feet, my legs, arms, and hands, same drill. The biggest battle that day was keeping my muscles awake in such cramped quarters. As a newfound sniper but a quick learner, however, I figured out how to increase blood flow with the simplest of maneuvers, and I practiced aiming and shooting without having to steady myself. By about dusk, I graduated to Expert Shooter In A Tree. I also became an ornithologist, a studied observer of the comings and goings of a mother cardinal who fed her babies in a nest five feet from me on a leaf-domed branch. At some point I grew jealous of their safe little family, eating worms and chirping in a boastful way, clattering on about how untouched by evil they felt. Snug in their teeny, tiny twig home, they’d poke up their gumball heads and bobble about, seemingly to coax me to laugh along to their cooing. I may have pointed my gun in their direction, angry at their happiness. But I thought better of such a senseless act and focused my hatred on the man in the black suit and the man in the red suit.

  Around dinnertime, I saw a flurry of activity over at my babysitter’s boyfriend’s apartment. My parents pulled in and to much commotion and hugging and crying, they met up with my babysitter and her boyfriend, all of them lighting candles and carrying flashlights. I couldn’t hear anything they said, just doors shutting and opening. So I didn’t yell over for help and I wasn’t going to leave Mozi for any amount of time. Just in case. What if they drove off? What if they leave and we never find him again? I had to stay put, I figured.

  Now with hindsight and better reason, there were a million things I could have done. Not a day goes by I don’t berate myself for my poor problem solving that day.

  Sometime after dinner, a metallic-green boat of a car waffled around the circle. The old man driver slowly turned his wheel, outright singing a song to himself and totally unaware of the boy above him in the tree. A squirrel came a little too close until I fly-swatted him to scat.

  Here came the darker darkness, and the gaslamps lit. The cul-de-sac housed one lamp in the right pocket, which glowed as though an old London street, long ago, when candles ruled the world. The moon was a useless fingernail, barely casting enough light to tie your shoes. My legs were on their tenth round of sleep, and I began to shake them, carefully, holding tight to the branch above where I sat. I’d given up on feeling anything in my ass hours before.

  Sometime around ten p.m., quick flashes of Blacksuit and Redsuit were visible through the half-drawn curtains of the living room window I spied. Blacksuit would cross through to a hallway beyond the living room’s wall, and Redsuit would follow, carrying a backpack. Back and forth the two of them went, back and forth with bags and papers and items. They were packing and preparing. I searched hard for Mozi, but did not see him. With the house’s lights, all became visible within and around the place, as though a lone star in a black sky. The contrast made scoping targets simple.

  Although I waited a good long twelve hours, holding vigil and focused on that awful blue house, I tensed in shock when the side door finally creaked open and out stepped Blacksuit, a backpack slung sloppily over his left shoulder and a duffel bag in his right hand. He searched the perimeter of the front lawn for any enemies hiding behind bushes. My G.I. Joe digital watch ticked to 12:02 a.m. And then I cupped my mouth to stifle a gasp in reaction to who came next.

  Mozi, sloppy on his feet and far too compliant in the way he quietly marched behind Blacksuit, dragged himself out of the side door, Redsuit prodding him forward. Mozi’s droopy shoulders told me he’d been heavily drugged. The three of them walked single file toward the Datsun, appearing to the world to be refugee brothers, a warped and weird family, setting out to run the border at night.

  I leveled my gun, aimed at Blacksuit’s right eye, and fired. Bull’s eye. Snapped him dead on. He crouched to his knees in the driveway, screaming. Redsuit took hold of Mozi, as if to use him as a shield, but Mozi was so short, the driver’s torso and head, although bent, were in full view. I fired again, this time at Redsuit’s left eye. Bull’s eye. Snapped him too, dead on.

  “Mozi, Mozi, run, buddy! Run to me. Run Mozi,” I screamed, while jumping from the tree. My second tree jump of the day. This time my sleeping legs failed me when I landed, and the gun flew from my arms. But adrenaline, now adrenaline, what a friend
. Fighting every instinct I had to give in to the debilitating fire in my legs, I stood, wobbling, grabbed my gun and aimed again at the men, who were howling in the driveway.

  “Mozi, Mozi, run, buddy!”

  But Mozi appeared too drugged and scattered. He teetered forward, he sort of saw me, he teetered more. He was only one foot away from Blacksuit and Redsuit. I had to get closer.

  Walking like a determined and murderous soldier approaching an unarmed enemy, I cocked my gun, kept it forward, and issued no warnings. I fired again, hitting an arm here, a leg there, any part made vulnerable to my shooting. Their bodies writhed in pain under my power. One of them turned an ear to me, so I aimed for the small hole and set a bead straight into his hearing canal. I’m pretty sure that shot hurt even more than the eye. Well, maybe not. But who gives a shit.

  “Mozi, get over to me now,” I shouted.

  Behind me, finally, someone noticed.

  “What the hell is going on?” A woman behind me yelled.

  “Call the cops!” I said. “Call the cops!”

  I later learned she’d been out walking her poodle and collie.

  The two men limped quick to their Datsun, and without even shutting the doors before backing up, peeled out of the driveway, out of the cul-de-sac, and out of town. Cops snatched the idiots in a failed shoot-out at a McDonald’s in nearby Cicero.

  Mozi fell on the grass, and I ran to meet and encapsulate him. He had no clue what was going on. That night. That night, Mozi slept mercifully oblivious, given the pills the doctors gave him.

  Mozi has never talked about his day with those scumbags. Never said what went on in that house. But Mozi never put on his funny red cape again. Never sang a funny song. I’m sure I haven’t seen him smile in all these years. After his second suicide attempt and his third failed marriage, Mozi moved into my parents’ house, refusing to ever set foot in their basement or any basement, anywhere, ever again.