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  The back end of the VW began to sink and we settled flat. We’d landed on a cliff in the quarry, and I could tell it was a cliff, because although we’d kicked up a ton of sediment and the water was murky, out before us the water was lighter on top, and darker below, much darker below. This meant, just ahead, the water dropped steeply to a deeper hell.

  Also, something floated on a rope in front of us, and the rope seemed to extend further down from where the car rested. I knew exactly what was on that rope, even though the grainy water needed to settle for clearer view.

  Beside me, Brad slumped on the steering wheel, passed out from hitting his head or out of sheer shock over his dumb self, I have no idea. Either way, I was thankful I didn’t have him thrashing about like a fool. Asset #48, Unconscious Brad.

  Water began to rise in the car, creeping in the cracks in the doors and the up-rolled windows. My too-big Nikes were covered, next my shins. Rising, rising, rising to my hips. The water around us became clearer and clearer; I marveled at how fast this quarry recovered herself, as if all she had done was swallow yet another victim, another pile of metal, into her vast, dark stomach. Ho-hum, her liquid body seemed to groan.

  The floor of the quarry was a junkyard: bent rebar, a child-size metal tractor flipped upside down, buckets, bricks, chains, and indeed, a chain link fence that crawled out of the depths in front of the car and onto the cliff, as though a long, curling tongue reaching out of a devil mouth.

  The water kept washing in, like liquid being forced through closed teeth. Next, my hips were covered, my wide belly, my baby. I sat still.

  Out before me, the picture was opaque, but she was visible, floating on the wakeboard, the rope harnessed around her cut torso. She shifted slightly in her underwater grave, tethered and buoyed in death, her hair slowly waving in the scant movement of the water. Together, her and her contraption appeared like a shriveled balloon, inexplicably flying high above a deserted car dealership, somewhere out West, somewhere where no one drives anymore, unless lost and out of gas. Waiting for vultures.

  To my right, that man agent began crashing his flat hands on my passenger door window, pounding, pounding, pounding with his palms. Bam, bam, pounding, pounding, and so returned the school gunman, firing his gun. The pop, the screams, the banging, the ringing of his bullets through the classroom.

  I fought my anger switch from turning on. I stayed the course; I sat still. I clutched my own fists, fist in fist. I turned to the agent, who remained furious at the window—his thuds dulled by the water—and yanking on the door—his strain slowed by aquatic gravity. Of course all of his flailing was useless.

  I held up my hand to stop him, fanning my palm against the glass. Because my head was still in breathable air, but the water up to my neck, I said, “The water has to equalize on both sides first. Then the pressure will be even and the door will open. Calm down!”

  Doesn’t anyone remember anything from high school physics?

  The water covered the roots of my hair. I unbuckled. I reached for Brad’s ring of keys, hanging from the ignition, and turned to the agent, who was foolishly still banging like a wild school shooter on my window.

  Will this noise always haunt me? Will I forever be reminded of that day? Who can I hunt down to stop this infernal racket? Who can I torture with this sound?

  I eyed the agent and raised my hands to gesture, “Well, what are you waiting for?”

  He tried the handle once again and opened the door.

  I swam ten feet to the top.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  SPECIAL AGENT ROGER LIU

  I followed Lisa to insure she got to the surface and into Lola’s arms. Once secure, I swam back down, and although weighed with reluctance, I snatched the driver from what should have been his watery grave. I pushed him to the surface, and Big Boyd yanked him out at the armpits. Only Boyd had the wherewithal to give him mouth to mouth, which, as a farmer, he somehow knew. I don’t know how. I really don’t care. I wouldn’t have put my lips on that cold fish.

  The driver coughed into a fighting life, screaming and wailing and flopping on the granite rocks. Lola waltzed over and kicked him in a thigh. I was bent, laboring for my own breath, and standing close to Lisa.

  “You’re going to wish we left you down there, scumbag. Keep your mouth shut. Keep your damn mouth shut before I yank every single one of your teeth out.” Twisting her head to Boyd, she added, “Chicken Man, hold his hands behind his back.”

  “His name is Brad,” Lisa yelled over, calmly, but with definite distaste, as though “Brad” were a laughably embarrassing name.

  “You have the right to remain silent…” I delivered the Miranda in a quick monotone, letting him understand how perturbed I was to have to read him rights he didn’t deserve. I had to do the Miranda, because Lola never would have. She cuffed him roughly, and because he wouldn’t stop wheezing for breath and whining about everything, she ripped a scarf from within her blouse and tied it tight around his mouth. Only a muffled groaning continued.

  Boyd stepped back and raised his rifle at Brad.

  “Ah, shit, Chicken Man, don’t shoot him. I like the sentiment, but we can’t shoot him now,” Lola said, thawing toward Boyd.

  “Ma’am, I ain’t gonna shoot the bastard ‘less he try to run. And if he do, well, now, I need another trophy head for my wall,” Boyd said, never losing his gaze on Brad. “Hey there, boy, you like these here kiddies. Well now, know this, I’m the state’s record holder in single shot huntin’. Uh, huh. So’s, I sorta want you to run an’ all. Go ahead. Go ahead. Run like a rabbit.”

  Lola smiled at Boyd. And I did too. He was now firmly part of our gang.

  Lisa, standing with her arms crossed at the side of the quarry, leaning close to that rope I’d seen tied to the wall, lifted one side of her mouth, which I soon learned meant she smiled too. So, there we were, all four of us, a newfound band of vigilantes. At least we had the legitimacy of my and Lola’s badges for cover. I considered the oddness of the coincidence that Boyd should sell our kidnapper his van and this kidnapper should park said van on Boyd’s family property, miles away from where he’d purchased the vehicle. To others, it sure would sound suspicious on one end of the believability spectrum and impossible on the other. But I remembered too the words of the woman who witnessed the “Hoosier State” on the license plate and how she and her husband watched “Hoosiers” the night before. “Divine coincidence,” she’d said. Divine coincidence, indeed. It was as if she’d provided a clue or a premonition, perhaps a subtext to the whole investigation.

  I crept closer to Lisa, who was shivering from the cold. Stifling my own chill from the water, I lowered into my shoulders, like a turtle to his shell, and shook one leg, then the other. Water dripped off me like I was a squeezed sponge. My drenched gray suit buckled at the elbows. A thermos of hot coffee would have been nice right then, a daily comfort turned unrealistic luxury in that moment. I might as well have wished for a unicorn to swoop from a tree and carry us to Candyland for gumdrops and licorice.

  Lisa hugged and rubbed her bulging belly, seemingly in an effort to warm the baby within. She did not appear quite ready to flee the scene, as I expect any other victim would have been. She was also not hysterical, not crying, not shouting for her parents. She wasn’t demanding the regular demands, not a doctor, not anything you’d think. Silently, she watched me approach her, seemingly considering my stride, possibly counting my steps. With Lola and Boyd pressing handcuffed Brad against a tree, I attempted to collect Lisa so we could leave the woods.

  “I’m Lisa Yyland. Don’t you fucking call an ambulance or put one damn thing on a radio. I want to catch the rest of the bastards who did this.”

  Her soul-absent glare bored into my bones. Her disconnection to this scene, her determination, her power, everything about her overcame me. I fell into a stupor. A shock. I held my hand up behind me, a warning to the others, turned only my head, and as though possessed by her, repeated her exact word
s, “Don’t fucking call an ambulance or put one damn thing on the radio.”

  “We’re going to trap the rest of them today, and you’re not to call my parents yet. No one is to know I’ve been found. And if you need any convincing, if you think maybe you need to call my parents first, perhaps alert a higher authority, let me show you something. Unhook that rope, sit behind that rock, and pull.”

  The rope. I had avoided looking in its direction while underwater. I knew the rope had something awful on the other end. I did exactly as Lisa directed me: I unhooked the rope, sat behind a rock, and pulled.

  Now I’ve seen many horrible, gruesome things in my career. I’ll spare you. Suffice it to say, at that point in my life, I should have been numb to torsos without heads and heads without faces and bodies crushed, burned, battered, and broken beyond recognition. But something about the black quarry, the shivering trees turning their backs, the steel-colored sky, the vacant, vacuumed air, and the dead-lock sneer Lisa gave the bubbling water, made me gag upon sight of a young girl’s broken gut when her corpse cut the surface of the water. I imagined Lola in the future at some meal we’d silently pick through after this horrible day, “Liu, with what I got to see in basements and crawl spaces and abandoned quarries, spare me the pleas about my ‘food’ or ‘my tobacco’ or ‘my drinking’ or ‘my belching,’” or whatever it was she bathed in to soothe her barbed memories.

  Lisa held a frigid hypnosis at the dead girl. She had one arm across her bulging stomach and another up to her chin, as though she were delivering a hearty philosophical college lecture. Her wet hair was plastered to her skull and face.

  I dropped the rope when Lisa turned away from the water. The body and board plummeted back to the depths of the quarry. Lisa walked up along the top of the quarry, down the other side, and to Boyd and Lola and Brad. When Lisa winked at Brad in her passing and shot his face with an air gun, blowing invisible smoke from the top of her finger, I wished she were my daughter. She exited down the path Boyd had led us on, offering no invitation for us to follow, but of course we did, landing in her soggy footsteps and trying to catch up, gun prodding the whimpering Brad to move along.

  Lola and I knew well enough to just follow. We motioned to Boyd with our fingers to our mouths for him to likewise stay silent. All the way back to the schoolhouse, across a small area for parking, down a wooded path, at the end of which was an empty space beneath a willow tree, we marched. Pregnant Lisa paced like an angry cat, and when Boyd went to say something, I shushed him.

  Again we followed our teenage ruler back through the wooded path and to the school house. We stood waiting for directions, all looking at Lisa, in front of one of the wings. Lola had placed Brad, cuffed and legs tied to a hook, in the bed of the F-150.

  “I don’t know where The Doctor works. Where is Dorothy? She must have gotten away in the van.” Lisa said to me.

  “What do you mean? Who is The Doctor?” I said.

  “He’s the one who delivers the babies,” Lisa said.

  “The otha girl, she Dorothy? My cousin took her to the ‘mergency room.”

  Lisa nodded a confused approval.

  I was about to ask more questions when out of the corner of my right eye, I saw Lola, sniffing her way through another door at another wing. She seemed entranced by something beyond the door, entering the building without motioning me or anyone else to follow.

  “She probably smells the asshole I burned up in my jail cell. Tell her not to touch the water. It might still be electrified.”

  Behind me, Boyd said, “Ay-yup. That’s the smell I told ya about. Door up there is locked.”

  Lisa handed me the keys she held clutched in her hand.

  I ran to Lola.

  What we found on the third floor trumps any story of any circus bear dressed in pink.

  After Lola and I saw what we saw in what I learned was Lisa’s former room of incarceration, Lisa said nothing more to plead her case. All she said was, “Agent, we’ll set up a sting for this afternoon. I’ll lure them in. You catch them.”

  Lola was already convinced, nodding her head to Lisa, agreeing with whatever our young mother demanded. Lola smelled blood and wanted to swallow it in gulps down her gullet.

  “Agents, I was supposed to join that girl in the quarry today.” She rubbed her girth, hugging the baby. “I cannot explain the depths of my hate for these people. You’ve seen what I’m capable of, what I did to their goon upstairs. I want to destroy them. And I will. I will hunt them down and poison them slowly, unless you agree to lay a trap and arrest them all today. I must be the bait. It is the only way. I’ve thought it over a million times.”

  I had no doubt she had.

  “Lisa, tell us your plan,” Lola said.

  With what I would later learn amounted to a wide grin in the emotionless girl, Lisa clicked her eyebrows and slightly lifted her chin toward Lola. A sign of respect. A sign of thank you.

  Lisa detailed her plan. It was simple really. She said we needed to force Brad, at gunpoint to his temple, to call The Doctor and tell him she was in labor. “The Doctor seems to travel with The Obvious Couple, so he’ll bring them with him, they’re so anxious to take my baby. We’ll snag them all together. Got it?” We agreed we’d have my back-up agents, who were close to arriving, stakeout the hotel of The Obvious Couple and office of The Doctor—which we’d first confirm before allowing Brad to place his call—in case his accomplices somehow got tipped off. I wanted Lisa’s plan to work, to capture them all together at the Appletree, for a few reasons:

  Appletree was a secluded spot and civilians would not get hurt in a shoot-out.

  Them driving to the premises after being beckoned by Brad would be solid evidence of their involvement.

  Lisa had asked, and I agreed she deserved, to see them face-to-face, outside of the restrictions of a courtroom or prison. Or witnesses.

  I later got enough details to understand what Lisa meant by The Doctor and The Obvious Couple. She also explained that Brad was not the “Ron Smith”—Ding-Dong—I thought he was, but rather his twin brother. Obviously shocked, I had a million questions to ask of her. But at the time, I just said, “Okay. Let’s go over your plan one more time.” There was no way I was going to insert my own design into Lisa’s war. I was her sudden soldier. Lola happily hoisted her gun as crouching sniper in an apple tree in the adjoining orchard. I reluctantly reminded her not to shoot if the clan we expected was unarmed. Her left nostril twitched like she might bark, and her finger curled tighter around the trigger. I left her in the tree and hoped she’d obey, planning to back her up if she didn’t.

  I’d called my bureau back-up and had them meet me at Cousin Bobby’s so I could hand off Brad to one team, and instruct the other team on where to lay low and hold sniper spots. I didn’t mention to them Brad’s failed attempt to “flee” the back of the truck where we tied him up, cuffed; didn’t mention the deal we struck with him, in private. A private deal between me, Brad, and Lisa. After removing Brad’s scarf-muzzle before delivering him to the other agents—who actually followed protocol and wouldn’t have gagged a prisoner—I was forced to listen to his histrionic whining about the hole in his face, which made me wish I’d left him on the bottom of the quarry. What a ball of crazy he was, vacillating between a high girl voice and a demented demon, his pitch constantly shifting as I pushed him through the field to Cousin Bobby’s. When we passed a mooing cow and he looked her in the face to say, “Big Bessie, aren’t you just precious, now, Bessie,” and then shifted to a growling yell, “I’ll slice your babies into veal, bitch,” I became concerned he’d walk on an insanity defense.

  It went down just as Lisa expected. The Doctor came hauling up in a brown-on-caramel El Dorado, The Obvious Couple his passengers. This Mr. Obvious and his wife, the Mrs. Obvious, had been holed up in a local motel, ironically—and horribly named—The Stork & Arms, waiting out the time until their bundles of stolen joy came into the world. They planned to abscond to Chile, to their
chic and tree-covered mountain retreat, nestled among five vineyards and the bliss of a southern hemisphere. Blond babies would be their ultimate art in a practical castle of paintings and sculptures. Lola and I were allowed to visit the estate when a team inventoried the place. We found so much documentary evidence tying them to our crime and several others, such as high-profile art thefts, we lost count of the charges.

  On the day we nabbed them, Lola pounced from the tree to kick dirt in their eyes for taking from her the chance to shoot them, for they showed up unarmed and duped.

  “Check,” Lisa said, while I cuffed The Doctor.

  Being a chess player myself, I wondered why she didn’t say “checkmate,” as in, “game over,” but I soon learned Lisa had more planned for The Doctor.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  POST INCIDENT, HOUR 4

  Liu, he’s so dramatic. I know he’s told you all about his childhood scare. How he came to be what he is. I think what he did for his brother was flat-out marvelous. Genius. When he told me his story, I decided he should be my eternal best friend.

  Of course, I would have handled his brother Mozi’s situation much differently. But let’s not dawdle on impolite criticisms. Besides, Liu should be championed for his superior pupil cones and what I suspect to be an impressive amygdala and hippocampus, along with enhanced connectivity between the two. The circuit between these brain parts in Liu is likely a superhighway with huge neuron trucks barreling back and forth with payloads of rich sensory and factual experience: memory. My theory is that Liu’s heightened visual acuity mixed with a larger than normal amygdala and hippocampus is what provides for his scary recollection of details. I’d need to split his skull and dissect his eyes to be really sure—I don’t trust the accuracy of MRIs—but I’m not about to perform an autopsy. On a friend.