The Unwilling(28)

“I won’t take a step.”

“Mister, I will scream.”

Showing small teeth, the man gestured with his right hand. “If you will look behind you.”

Tyra turned, and saw a second man, a giant with a wide face and shaggy hair. Behind him, the street was empty, and he knew it, too. The grin. The bright eyes. She thought, Mistake, misunderstanding.

The smaller man nodded as if sympathetic. “It’s best if you don’t fight.”

Tyra glanced at Sara’s window, so close. She wanted to run, but her feet were heavy. Like a dream, she thought; but the night was no dream. The big man said, “Hey, lady,” then hit her so fast and hard she went down on the concrete, a pain in her head as if something inside had broken. She tried to crawl, but hands caught her, and lifted her, and pushed her into the back seat of Sara’s car, down onto the floorboards. Even then, she could see the same window. It was Sara’s bedroom, the pretty one with pink walls and views into the park across the street. She stretched out a hand as someone outside said, “Follow me. Keep it slow. And here, you’ll need this.”

The car rocked as the big man climbed in, turned in his seat, and pointed a Polaroid camera. “Hold still.” There was a flash, a whirring sound. Still stretching for that far, high window, Tyra said her roommate’s name. “No talking. I don’t like talking.”

The little engine started, and he turned on the headlights. Tyra said Sara’s name again. She tried to scream it, but the big man twisted again, and found her throat with his hand. Tyra tried to fight, but he was strong and her fingers weak. They scraped an arm. Darkness flickered.

She opened her mouth, but had no air.

The darkness came again.

The darkness stayed.





10


The boy was not a bad boy. Anyone who knew him would agree. He was inquisitive but scattered, the kind of child who might forget he was in a baseball game, and wander out of right field to look for crawdads in the creek. That had happened once. Seventh grade. Last year. Granted, he did catch the largest crayfish anyone at school had ever seen—even the biology teacher agreed—but they still lost the game on a two-run pop fly straight down the right baseline. The coach had spoken to him about it afterward, explaining in his quiet, patient way that the team was a machine, that every boy had a job. The other boys were not wrong, he’d said, to be upset. Winning mattered. So did teamwork. Nods had followed; so had sincere apologies and promises it would never happen again. The coach had smiled in that same, soft way, then sent the boy out to his mother, thinking as so many did.

The boy was a good boy.

Just not very bright.

On this particular morning, the boy was not at his usual stop when the big yellow bus rolled up and opened its doors. He’d left the house at 7:15 but turned left instead of right. That wasn’t a mistake—he did know left from right—but older boys had told him about an abandoned construction site where they’d been finding arrowheads in a patch of churned dirt. The boy liked arrowheads—most every boy did—but for him, it went deeper. His grandfather had been full Cherokee, descended in a straight line from the Eastern Band of the Cherokee Nation, those not forced to walk the Trail of Tears all the way back in 1838. He was dead now, but the boy remembered his lessons.

Pride of people.

Pride of place.

Arrowheads and spearpoints were to be preserved and treasured, not traded like comic books and baseball cards. And he was good at finding them. When they’d built the baseball field, for instance. Or that time the river dropped. They rarely lay flat—that was the key. Inexperienced hunters looked for the telltale shape, as if they’d been placed on purpose the day before. The boy knew better than that. He looked for the edges, the points, the small bits raised above the dirt. After heavy rainfall was a good time to look, especially in plowed fields and new subdivisions. He didn’t know how old the construction site was or why it had been abandoned, and didn’t care, either.

Turning off the roadside, the boy cut the corner where his neighborhood ended and a four-lane stretched off as far as he could see. The construction site was on the other side and two miles down, a building seven stories tall and incomplete, just the frame, the elevator shafts, the cinder block stairwells. The spot, they’d said, was behind it where a hilltop had been cut down and spread out to fill a gully. When the boy arrived, he stopped where a chain-link fence paralleled the road. Cars sped past, but no one noticed or cared or slowed. Squeezing through a half-open gate, he followed the construction road, his eyes on the red-dirt verge. The boy liked corner-notched arrowpoints the best, but loved the basal-notched and the stemmed almost as much. Even a leaf-cut or a simple triangle made his heart skip a beat. He’d found a flint knife once, and a Clovis point as long as his hand.

Ax-heads. Grinding stones. Scrapers.

Anything was possible.

Because of that, the boy kept his eyes down, and sensed the building more than saw it: a dark mass, rising ahead. He paid no attention until its shadow touched his feet, and he saw caulk guns and soda cans and dropped rivets. Stepping onto cool concrete, he peered up through a spiderweb of beams and cable. Moving deeper, his shoes scraped in the grit, his hands on the concrete, the rusted steel. He circled a stairwell, and saw the blood first.

After that, he saw the girl.



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