Nefarious

Crime Fiction by Michael Wegener

Before approaching the auto shop, she’d duct-taped her gun hand to his back so he wouldn’t even think about trying anything. Had him help her wrap it around his torso, alternating with her wrapping it around her right hand and wrist—muzzle of the gun pressed right on top of his spine—making sure the gun couldn’t easily slip or be taken out of her hand. When it was done, it looked as if she was holding on to him one-handedly by short, duct-tape reins.

Slipping like that out of the night and into the shop through a back door, the hard white light from the overhead fluorescents and the smell of grease and sweat made her head hurt and bile crawl up the back of her throat. The other men in the garage didn’t notice her at first, fully hidden as she was behind Roy’s figure, the top of her head not even reaching above his shoulders.

“There he is!” one man said.

“It’s not nice to keep your girlfriend waiting like that,” another one said.

A third man cackled.

They didn’t even seem to care that Roy was holding up both hands at chest level.

Lucía steered Roy into a slight turn to make herself be seen, and to be able to see herself. Two men were sitting on a work bench to her right, beer cans in hand. The third man was leaning against a car occupying the left bay of the three-bay garage. Like Roy, all three men had changed into different clothes, not looking anymore like they had before. Looking somehow younger now, too.

The two men on the bench spotted her first, each reacting with the patent slack-faced look of the mouth breather, their mosquito brains unable to compute what the eyes were seeing. The third man to her left, hand rubbing absently at his stubbled cheeks, didn’t even look at her, staring instead at a girl tied with handcuffs to the column of a car lift in the middle bay. The moment Lucía’s eyes found Izzie—bound and trembling and undressed to her underwear and bleeding from a cut on her temple—her finger almost squeezed the trigger, her mind already visualizing Roy’s spine blowing out of his chest.

Instead, she pressed the gun harder into the bone.

“Mommy,” Izzie said when she saw her mother, lower lip quivering.

“Like we discussed, big boy,” Lucía said to Roy, trying to sound calm while her body—her being—felt seconds from falling to pieces. “You do the talking.”

“Let her go,” Roy said, needing two attempts to release the words from his dried-up throat.

The two men on the bench looked at each other with chimp-like expressions.

The third man, finally taking notice of her, briefly raised a worn and faded baseball cap as if to air his head, then pushed himself away from the car. “Fuck are you talking about, Roy? Think lil’ mamacita here can waltz in and take all of us on? Is this even a real gun?”

Roy licked his slips. “It’s a real gun, Evan.”

“How do you know? Did she shoot your balls off with it?”

“Because it’s my fucking gun.”

“Huh. Well, ain’t that stupid.” The man named Evan reached behind his back and drew his own gun from the waistband of his pants; the gun looked similar to the one Lucía had taken from Roy, the kind with a magazine in the grip. He raised the gun without any urgency and pointed it at Roy’s head. “Looks to me there’s a simple solution to all our problems.”

Lucía heard Roy pass gas, possibly shitting his pants.

This latest turn of events finally animated the apes on the bench. One of them stood and raised a hand and a beer can toward Evan in a calming gesture. “Woah. Easy now, bro. Easy.”

Evan kept the gun steadily pointed at Roy’s melon of a head, but his eyes stared holes into Lucía’s. “That’s right,” he said. “Easy.”

All of them stood frozen like that, for the time it took a drop of sweat to creep from the nape of Lucía’s neck down her back into her pants.

Then Evan lowered the gun. “Let her go.”

“Wha—” the standing ape said.

“Just do it!” Evan snapped, then gave Lucía a smile that sent goosebumps up her arms. “It’s not like they can do anything. If they go to the cops, they’ll probably arrest her for kidnapping.” He coughed up something like a laugh. “Yeah, I think I’d like to see that. So please…” He opened his arms in a please-help-yourself gesture. “Be on your merry fucking way.”  

The second ape that had remained sitting on the bench jumped down, exchanged uncertain looks with the guy next to him—before he shrugged and walked over to Izzie while digging a key out of a pants pocket and opened her cuffs. Soon as she was free, she ran to her mother, got behind her, threw her arms around her as if to keep herself from drowning in a river that wasn’t there.

“You okay, Baby?” Lucía whispered.

“I’m okay,” Izzie whispered back.

A closed and apparently locked door next to the workbench began to shake and rattle and someone hammered at it from the inside, the noise joined by panicked voices. “Help!” “Hey!” “Please!” “Help!”

Lucía felt Izzie’s breath in her ear. “They got more girls in there, mom.”

Evan made an aw-shucks face. “Sorry, mom. You can’t have those, I’m afraid.”

None of the men moved as the locked-in girls kept screaming and hitting the door and Lucía told Izzie to take a pair of scissors from the back pocket of her pants and use it to cut Roy loose. Izzie did as she was told. When she was free of him, Lucía used one arm to herd Izzie back behind her while keeping the other up and the gun aimed, and together, they retreated backwards, to the back door. Roy slowly turned around, looking like a lost little boy about to throw a tantrum.

Stepping out of the garage, the night felt like a physical thing rushing in to wrap itself around them. Lucía said, “Run.”

And they did.

They’d made it halfway down a block of weed-infested lots and dark warehouses when Izzie stopped in the middle of the deserted street. “Mom, wait!”

Lucía stopped and turned. “Isabella, what are you doing, come on! Asshole’s car’s parked around the next corner!”

Izzie looked back at the garage. No one was following them. “We can’t just…” Standing with her back straight, chin raised, holding a pair of kitchen scissors clenched in one fist and not making any attempt to cower or cover herself despite being dressed only in her underwear and streaks of dirt and sweat and bruises and blood on one side of her face, she looked like the male Hollywood fantasy version of an action heroine.

She turned back to her mother. “We can’t just leave them.”

Lucía looked into her daughter’s eyes, and what she saw made her want to weep with despair. It also filled her with love so fierce, it felt like her heart stopped. She grabbed her little girl—who was half a head taller and already wiser and braver than her mother—into a violent hug, wishing she could hold on like that forever.

She told herself she simply would. Never let go, ever again.

***

The sun had dropped out of sight, leaving behind a faded-blue sky bruised with purple clouds. Lucía climbed the stairs to the front porch of the house and knocked on the door without hesitation—which some part of her registered with mild surprise.

A gray-haired woman at least ten years older than Lucía opened the door. When she saw who was standing outside, she moved the door half-way closed again. “Yes?”

“Hi, I’m so sorry to disturb you. Uh, is this—are you Roy Sully’s mother?”

“Yes?” Eyeing her up and down now, eyebrows raised.

Lucía clawed one hand into her hair, giving her distraught. Which wasn’t an act at all.

“I’m sorry, you probably don’t know me—my daughter, Isabella, has gone missing, and your son knows her, I think they might have been dating for a little while? I was wondering if maybe Roy has an idea where she might be.”

The other woman’s demeanor changed instantly. She opened the door wider.

“Yes, Izzie, of course! My god, I’m so sorry.” Her head swiveled as if to look for something inside. She appeared genuinely upset. “Uh, Roy isn’t home right now.”

“Oh, okay. I guess you probably haven’t heard anything from him that might help. Your husband, maybe?”

“No, I’m sorry.” Roy’s mother raised a hand to her cheek. Comforting herself. “And I’m afraid Joe isn’t home, either.”

Lucía looked around as if lost, letting her desperation show. “Of course, that’s okay.” She tried to make her throat sound parched. “Thank you.” She began to turn as if to leave, then stopped. “I really don’t want to bother you any further, but…may I trouble you for a glass of water? I totally forgot to pack something, and somehow the heat…it’s just getting to me today.”

Roy’s mother thought about that for a moment.

Then she smiled and stepped back to let Lucía in. “Of course! Please.”

Lucía followed her into an antiquated but clean kitchen that smelled of garlic. Something was simmering in a pot on the stove. When she spotted the knife block on the kitchen counter, she again didn’t hesitate for one second as her gut shock-signaled her next move into her brain: She rushed straight for the knives, tore the biggest one out and brought it up to the other woman’s throat.

A glass shattered on the tiled floor.

“I know,” Lucía said, “we both already said sorry quite a lot. But I am sorry. I truly am. From one mother to another. But there’s something you need to do for me. You need to get on your phone, call your piece-of-shit son, and tell him you don’t feel so good, you need him right here, right now. Do you understand?”

Lucía was impressed when the other woman nodded right away.

“Good. Now, once you’ve done that, we’re going to sit on these two chairs over there and wait and relax. And trust me, lady—right now, you want me relaxed. So, if you want to help yourself and make our hopefully short time together as uneventful as possible, you’ll better rustle up some duct tape.”

***

Lucía squints into the low afternoon sun and brings the visor down to shield her eyes. As she does, she sees in the rearview mirror that the asshole in the grey SUV behind her is riding her tailpipe again.

“Asshole,” she mutters.

“Mom, language.” Izzie is sitting on the passenger seat next to her, knees raised to her chest, bare feet planted on the dashboard, not even looking up from her phone. She loves doing that, turning the table on her mother, using her own weapons against her; has been doing it since she was three years old.

“Sorrrrry,” Lucía says, seasoning the word with her best attempt at teenage insolence. Because, two can play that game.

Nick, who’s sitting in the back behind Lucía—where little brothers belong, as Izzie kept insisting—starts drumming his fingers on Lucía’s headrest to the beat droning from his headphones. Lucía is about to tell him to stop when Izzie emits a heavy sigh.

“Everything all right?” Lucía asks.

“Yeah…I guess,” Izzie says. “Celia is just freaking out. They’ve been hearing sirens for the last hour or so.”

“Well, we’re almost home, and I don’t hear anything.”

Izzie shrugs.

The drumming behind Lucía’s head intensifies.

“Nick, stop it, please!”

“Oh my god!” Izzie puts her feet down, sits up straight, eyes glued to her phone.

“What?”

“It’s actually happening, they’re doing a raid, only a couple of streets from ours. Jimmie writes that he can see them going into Maria’s house!”

Lucía slows the car as they’re coming up on a red light. “That can’t be—”

Tires squeal, and Lucía’s heart jumps when the grey SUV that was just behind her shoots past them on their left and races about two car lengths ahead of them, before its driver breaks hard with another squeal and cuts into her lane and stops just in front of the red light. Lucía has no choice but to jam on the brakes herself, adding to the symphony of squealing tires, barely bringing their car to a halt before it crashes into the SUV blocking their way.

Four men clad in unmatching military fatigues and bulletproof vests, with sunglasses and bandanas on their faces and machine guns in their hands, jump out of the SUV, rushing to surround Lucía’s car. One of them opens the front passenger door.

“Ma’am, please exit the vehicle,” the man says to Izzie.

Izzie stares at the man with wide eyes, face suddenly ashen. “Mom?”

“Don’t move!” Lucía says.

“Please do as I say, ma’am.” As he speaks, the man’s bandana starts slipping off his nose.

A strange expression dawns on Izzie’s face as she keeps looking at the man. “Roy?” she says, her voice incredulous. “Is that you? What are you doing?”

Lucía’s stomach drops when the man draws a small knife and cuts through Izzie’s seatbelt and grabs her by the arm and drags her out of the car. Lucía screams something like “No!” and lungs for her daughter—but she’s too late, touching only air, so she releases her own seatbelt and opens the door on her side.

One of the other armed men is standing by and pushes her door closed again.

“Please remain in the vehicle, ma’am,” he says.

“Fuck off,” is her response and she opens the door again, this time crashing it with all her might into the man’s body, taking him off-guard and sending him stumbling backward. Lucía jumps out of the car, dugs under flailing arms trying to grab her and dashes around the car’s front. Just as the man Izzie called Roy tries to push her into the back of the SUV, Lucía gets hold of one of Izzie’s arms.

“Mom!”

Lucía pulls hard as she can. “Leave—my—daugh—”

Someone punches her in the stomach. Izzie’s arm slips through her hands. Lucía doubles over, dropping to her knees, gasping for air. Paralyzed, she has to listen to Izzie’s screams becoming muffled as she is wrestled into the SUV and the rear door closed on her. More doors close in quick succession. The motor—kept running the whole time—howls, tires squeal once more.

Then she’s gone.

Lucía’s breath is coming back to her. Nick is there, his hands on her back, her arm. She looks up at him—and he practically recoils from what he sees on her face. Somewhere, deep down, it pains her to see him scared like that. But she can’t think of that now.

She clamps both her hands onto his upper arms. “Listen, she called that man Roy. Did you hear that name before? Do you know who he is?”

“Uh, yeah, I think so. I think it’s a guy Izzie went out with one time, back when he was still in school. But just the once; she said he and his friends were kind of creeps. But the guy kept lying about it, told bullshit stories about her in school. I heard some of them and asked her about it, that’s when she told me. I’m sorry, I should’ve—”

Lucía pulled Nick closer to her. “That’s all right, Nicky, you’re doing good.” She brushes a tear from his cheek. “Now, I need you to think very hard—and tell me everything you know.”

---

Bio: Michael is a chemist and medical writer. His short crime and horror fiction has appeared in Mickey Finn Vol. 3: 21st Century Noir (edited by Michael Bracken), Unnerving Magazine, the Starlite Pulp Review and the SNAFU: Contagion anthology. He lives in Brunswick, Germany.

Cover Photo by: pexels/cottonbro studios

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