A Time of Predators

There was no response.

“Debbie, honey, is it on Cuesta Avenue?”

No answer.

He made a decision. He set the receiver down beside the phone, so the connection still was open, tossed aside the phone book, and ran for the car. Check the map. Cuesta. North. He raced the VW up to Entrada, over to El Camino, north again. Only one Gander in the book, had to be the right one. Had to... But if it wasn’t, the phone connection still was open — unless Debbie would come out of it and hang up. God. They just had repeated — he even could understand their thinking. The last time, the woman had killed herself. It sure as hell would work to make Debbie keep her mouth shut.

And have a little fun in the bargain. A little innocent fun.

God. Curt had triggered this; now he couldn’t let things drop. Was it just last night he had been so naive as to think he could just walk away from it, and no one hurt? And no Debbie...

He was nearly to the Fifth Avenue turn-off that would take him to Cuesta before he even thought of stopping to call an ambulance, or the police. Hadn’t he done enough already? It was time for the professionals now, he had the predators where he wanted them: a chargeable offense, with an assault victim who could and probably would identify.

Curt didn’t even slow down. What had Worden said? The D.A.’d be damned lucky to get ’em on probation and remanded to the custody of their parents for a year. Harold Rockwell. Blind. Paula. Dead. Barbara. Terrorized. Debbie. Raped. Whoever they were, whatever they were, Curt wanted vengeance. Personal vengeance. On their bodies.

It was an indifferently kept-up bungalow on a weed-choked half-acre. Curt left the VW in the driveway with the door hanging open, ran across the untended yard to the front door. Locked.

He ran down beside the house, poked an arm through the kitchen screen door, flipped up the hook. Inside he saw a broom; he picked it up and with a wrench of powerful forearms broke the handle in half. A compelling weapon, a jagged-tipped broom handle, when jabbed at eyes or throat. He crossed a kitchen where green-bellied flies buzzed around a sinkful of unwashed dishes. Wife either dead or divorced, man and his son batching it. Charles Gander and his son Heavy. The father off for the weekend, maybe...

But the house was empty. Plenty of disorder, except that it was the continuing disorder of careless living, not of violence.

He went back outside. The wrong Gander? But...

Garage. Double doors closed. He was running again, carrying his broomstick. The doors were barred, so he went around to the side. Would they have a phone extension in the garage? Well... He laid an ear to the side door and called her name.

No answer. And the windows were painted black inside, so he could not see in. He rammed the broomstick through a pane. Still too dark to see anything; so he stepped back and smashed out the whole window. He could see a stripped-down Ford in the middle of the garage, and beside it, flopped carelessly beside the puddle of oil under the car, a greasy old mattress. There was a mattress... they took turns...

Debbie was crouched in the angle of the farthest corner of the garage, half hidden by a workbench. She still held the receiver of Heavy’s bootlegged phone in her hand, but her eyes were merely dark, empty pools in the shadowy garage.

“Debbie?” She didn’t even turn her head to Curt’s call.

He unlocked the window, pushed up the glassless frame, wriggled through. Debbie’s naked breasts were rising and falling shallowly and rapidly, her only sign of life; her ankles were tied. At some time, perhaps before she had called him, she had pulled her stained and bloodied miniskirt up into her lap in a terribly forlorn attempt at modesty. She seemed beyond any of that now. There were a few smears of blood on the mattress, not very many, and dark stains on the cement floor where she had dragged herself to the telephone on the edge of the workbench. There were also heavy dark stains on her forearms and wrists.

Curt uttered a short exclamation, starting forward with the terrible fear constricting his chest that she was bleeding to death, as Paula had. Then he checked himself.

The dark stains were oil. Oil to make her wrists slippery, let her slip off the ropes tying her arms, pull free from her mouth the filthy rag that probably had been used to gag her. A lot of guts, a lot of determination for a girl on the edge of hysteria. How long had it taken her to figure a way to get loose? How long to get to the phone and dial Curt’s number?

Curt was damned glad he hadn’t stopped to call the police. If she had wanted the cops, she would have called them, not Curt.

“Debbie,” he said gently, “I’m going to take the phone. I’ll just touch that, I won’t touch you. Okay?”