Pretty Little Things

Zach was blond.

… And though you fight to stay alive, your body starts to shiver …

He turned into an empty lot where a bunch of power station lines were. Across the street was a park. Molly’s mom had taken her and Molly there once before. It had a nature reserve running through it. The mall was in the other direction.

For no mere mortal can resist the evil of the thriller …

She reached for the door handle, but it wouldn’t budge. The king of horror broke out into maniacal laughter. The song was over.

The cloth came across her face with lightning speed even as the car was still moving. The wicked taste burned her eyes and closed her throat. It was hard to breathe. Then he punched her hard in the head. She felt her face smash against the glass. She felt the warm blood trickle from her forehead, running past her eye and down her cheek. She felt her hands fall to the floor, her legs twitch and just stop working, as everything went to black.

The horror king just kept on laughing.

9 (#ulink_115b1283-62fc-5bd4-a380-3b2714a08b17)

The hall clock started to chime. Debbie LaManna could hear it, even over the blare of the television. Even two rooms away. It chimed every quarter-hour, then dang in the number of hours at the top of every hour. It took five fucking minutes just to get through midnight. She cracked off a smoke ring. The ornate grandfather clock and a bank account with $3,714.22 in it was what her mother had left her nine years ago when she’d died of lung cancer, an oxygen tube strapped to her nose and a pack of Newports in hand. Of course the money was long gone, but damn it if that hideous Mack the Knife moon-face clock was still here – dragged along behind her from husband to husband, apartment to apartment, rental to rental. Toasting each lost hour of her life with a loud, distracting clang. One of these days she was gonna call the Salvation Army to come haul it away.

Debbie counted as the dings hit eleven. Just to be sure, she looked at her watch. She was gonna kill Elaine. Really kill her. Who the hell did she think she was, staying out till eleven at night? She crushed out her cigarette. This was how it all started with Liza. Breaking curfew, coming home stoned. Smelling like a fucking bottle of Bud. If that kid thought for one second that she was gonna get away with half the shit her older sister had pulled, she had a cold, hard reality check coming. What was that saying her own mother used to love to say? Fool me once, shame on you, Debra. Fool me twice, shame on me. And Debbie was no fool. Not any more. Elaine Louise was so gonna have her ass handed to her when she walked through that door. That was for certain. She swallowed a big chug of her Mich Ultra and tried to concentrate on the news.

‘Is she home yet?’ Bradley called out from his bedroom down the hall. His voice had the twisted smirk of a kid who was happy that his sibling was gonna be in a shitload of trouble.

‘Brad, if you don’t close that damn door and go to sleep in the next five minutes, there is no Laser Tag tomorrow with Lyle. I can promise you that!’

The door closed with a thud and Debbie tried to focus once again on the news. Listening to everyone else’s tragedies seemed to help for a little bit. A local fire. A bank robbery. Nine dead in an Iraq suicide bomb. Then her thoughts came around again. This time they landed on Todd, who was also not home yet. He was the real reason Debbie was so pissed off. Where the hell was he?

An after-work beer with the boys, honey. Just unwinding from a long, hard day of making money to feed your kids.

My ass, Debbie thought, bitterly. She knew he was probably drunk and fucking that new girl from the office in some sleazy Lauderhill motel or on a beach towel in the backseat of his car. The receptionist named Michelle that he swore up and down didn’t work at his office, even though that’s who’d answered the phone yesterday when Debbie had called to check.

Debbie rubbed her throbbing temples and lit another cigarette. She looked around the family room, littered with crap the kids hadn’t cleaned up, including petrified cereal bowls leftover from breakfast, video games, clothes and stacks of crumpled school papers pulled out of book bags and thrown wherever. When Liza did feel like coming home, she loved to dump whatever she didn’t want to wear or carry anywhere she felt like it. And then there was the other prince in the house, Bradley. Thanks to his dad’s testosterone-fueled edict that housework was a woman’s job, he didn’t lift a finger to pick up his shit, either. After working another nine-hour shift, this is what Debbie got to come home to – a messy house, a rat-bastard husband, kids who drained every last bit of energy from her body. And of course, no respect. Now, after she’d just gotten through what she hoped was the worst with the oldest, Elaine was gonna try and give her patience a run for the money. She shook her head and slapped the newspaper off the couch. This was not how life was supposed to have turned out. On cue, her mother chimed in down the hall.

Rosey, the kids’ Golden Retriever, walked in with a big bear stuffed in her mouth, and nuzzled her head on Debbie’s lap. Rosey stole every loose sock and stuffed animal in the house. This time it was Elaine’s ratty, old, teddy bear, Claude. She must have pulled it off Elaine’s bed. Lainey never went to sleep without him. She was thirteen going on thirty, maybe, but she still needed her teddy to go to sleep. Debbie pushed back the bad thoughts that kept trying to force their way into her head. She fingered the numbers on the cordless beside her, wondering if maybe she should call the police. But then she remembered from her escapades with Liza what life was like once you got the cops involved. Once they were in your fucking business, they never got out. Never. Instead, she tried Todd’s cell again. ‘Where the fuck are you?’ she barked when her husband told her to leave a message at the tone and he would get back to her as soon as he was able.

As soon as I’ve dismounted my invisible receptionist with the great boob job whose name is not Michelle, I’ll be sure to call you back. Beeeeeep.

She probably slept over that new friend’s house, Debbie told herself. What was her name? The one Lainey went to the movies with? Carly? Karen? That was probably it. Maybe she’d even told her she was gonna be sleeping over. It was so crazy this morning, trying to get them all out of the house and herself off to work, she probably just didn’t remember Elaine telling her, is all. And the reason she’s not answering her cell? That one’s easy. Because she never fucking charges it, that’s why. No surprise there.

Debbie pulled Claude from Rosey’s mouth and wiped the dog spit off on the cuff of her robe. She finished off the last of her beer with a single swallow and cracked open another from the portable cooler next to the couch. Then she turned up the volume on the TV, absently rocking the mangy teddy in her arms just as Conan O’Brien started his monologue and the clock began to count down yet another half-hour of her life.

This is the way nightmares begin. Or perhaps, end.

Rod Sterling, The Twilight Zone

10 (#ulink_fd8aa572-304b-5e83-8d85-c2d45348027f)

The rumble of a lawn mower going right past his bedroom window was what woke Florida Department of Law Enforcement (FDLE) Special Agent Supervisor Bobby Dees from the weird dream he’d finally slipped into. For a few seconds his exhausted brain scrambled to reconcile the sound with the strange golf game he’d been playing with his dead dad. A groundskeeper mowing distant swales on the eighteenth, perhaps? A low-flying jet? The rumble slowly faded off, a hush grew over the excited crowd, his dad lined up the putt …

Then his neighbor turned the John Deere back around.

It was no use. Bobby lifted a lid. The sun streaks that squeezed through the drawn blinds were tinged a soft pink. He looked over at the nightstand clock: 9:03 a.m. That was when he remembered it was Sunday.

He rolled over with a grunt and the new John Grisham he’d fallen asleep reading slipped off his chest, hitting the floor with a thump. His wife’s side of the bed was warm, but empty. He heard the door to the bathroom shut softly with a click. The shower turned on a few seconds later. LuAnn’s shift at the hospital didn’t start till ten, but especially on weekends she liked to get in a little early, have a cup of coffee and read the paper in the cafeteria before taking on an ER still chock-full of Saturday-night drunks and car-crash victims.

Bobby pulled a pillow over his head and lay there with his eyes closed for a few minutes, reluctant to accept the fact that he was now awake. The last time he remembered looking over at the clock it had read 5:49 a.m. The rumble of the mower slowly faded away like the ending of a song on the radio, the crowd on the green quieted once again and he started to drift back off …

Then his Nextel rang.

Ugh. He grabbed the cell off the nightstand and pulled it under the pillow with him. ‘Dees,’ he grumbled.

‘Man, you sound like shit,’ replied the familiar voice on the other end with a chuckle. ‘What’s up there, brother? Somebody piss in your cornflakes?’

‘What’s up? Why don’t you tell me what’s up at, ah, nine-fucking-o’clock on a Sunday morning, Zo?’

Lorenzo ‘Zo’ Dias was the recently promoted Assistant Special Agent in Charge of the FDLE Regional Operations Center in Miami – aka: Bobby’s boss. ‘Hate to tell you this, but last night was Daylight Savings. Fall-back,’ Zo returned. ‘It’s eight-fucking-o’clock.’

‘Where’s my gun?’

‘Don’t tell me you ain’t up yet …’

‘I sure as hell am now.’ Bobby sat up and rubbed his head. ‘There goes your overtime budget, Boss. I’m officially back on the clock.’

‘What if I wanted to see if you were up to hitting a few on the Blue Monster this morning?’

Bobby yawned. ‘Now I know I’m coming in. Your balls couldn’t find a hole with a map, a flashlight and a personal guide. When was the last time you played golf?’

Bobby and Zo had been good friends long before Zo had begun his lonely ascent up the FDLE chain of command. They’d met in the FDLE agent academy almost a decade ago – Zo had retired early from the Miami Beach Police Department to become a special agent; Bobby had decided he’d had enough of New York and the bullshit politics of the NYPD and had headed south for better weather and a slower change of pace, which was rather ironic, considering hurricanes had become almost as commonplace as thunderstorms in South Florida and his caseload in the Crimes Against Children squad was double what it was as a Robbery detective in Queens. But he and Zo had stayed close throughout the years and the titles, and even through all the crazy administrative bullshit of the past few months. Zo was one of very few guys Bobby had met in his career who had successfully managed becoming a good boss while remaining a good friend. Most people, he’d found, turned into assholes before the ink dried on their promotion paperwork, throwing colleagues under the bus just to show some stuffed shirt in Tallahassee that they could. Of course, Zo had only been an ASAC for six months …

Zo sighed. ‘You got me. I’d rather have my teeth cleaned than chase balls smaller than my own around a big green lawn. G’head and call me un-American. I’ll see you in thirty.’

‘What’s up?’

‘We got a kid gone missing after school Friday,’ Zo replied, growing serious. ‘Thirteen-year-old Elaine Louise Emerson out in Coral Springs. Looks like a runaway, but we’re dotting I’s and crossing T’s. Springs PD asked for assistance. You know the drill.’

Unfortunately, that was true. Bobby did know the drill. Missing kid. Parents call in the locals. Locals call in FDLE. FDLE calls in him. First twenty-four hours is critical, which meant they were already way behind schedule. He rubbed his eyes. Bobby had gotten the same phone call too many times before. Nobody knew better than he that with missing kids nothing was routine and rarely did things ever turn out ‘looking like’ everyone had said they would. ‘Has anyone called the Clearinghouse?’ he asked, referring to the Missing Child Information Clearinghouse.

‘Party’s waiting on you. Mom just called it in late last night. Waited almost two days for the kid to get home from some sleep-over. Says she figured her daughter was maybe staying over a friend’s house.’ Zo sighed with annoyance. ‘Don’t ask me why she waited till almost midnight to call the kid’s friends and find out whose house she was fucking sleeping at. Unfortunately, brother, ya don’t need a license to be a parent.’

There was a brief, uncomfortable, silence.

‘You know what I’m saying,’ Zo tried when Bobby didn’t say anything.

‘Where am I going?’

‘Let’s meet at the house. You can talk to the parents, get a feel. If you don’t like what you hear, call it in. It’s 11495 NW 41st Street. FYI, that’s Section 45.’

‘Section 45’ was code for ‘Shitsville’. Coral Springs was a sprawling suburb stuck out in the middle of what was not so long ago considered nowhere. Kissing the Everglades twenty miles to the west of Fort Lauderdale and forty-five miles northwest of Miami, Coral Springs’ dirt roads had all been paved over into four-lane highways and its bean farms replaced with gated communities, office parks and, of course, a Starbucks on every corner. Voted one of the top places in the US to live by Money magazine, like any growing city, Coral Springs also had its share of problem pockets and rough neighborhoods that town commissioners would rather see annexed to some other city’s limits. ‘Section 45’ was one of them.

‘All right,’ Bobby said, reaching for the People magazine on LuAnn’s nightstand and jotting down the address across John Travolta’s forehead. ‘I’ll be there in a half. What? You don’t have anything better to do on a Sunday than hang with me? Does misery love company that much?’