Does this girl have a fucking death wish or what?
She can’t have gone far, though. She’s on foot, and I have a car. A quick search at the motel and the restaurant confirms she’s really gone. I slide into the driver’s seat, turn the key in the ignition, and before long I’m riding down the road, the wind from the open window whipping at my hair.
It clears my head, and I’m wondering where the hell she could have gone.
There’s only two directions she could have taken. Up the road, and down the road.
Mounting dread fills me as I speed down the road, where a number of trucks and cars are driving, even though it can’t be after two a.m. I think I slept for two hours. Two hours duringwhich she had time to get away.
But two hours can’t get you all that far. Less than ten miles. I’d have seen her by now.
That means someone gave her a ride. What my girl has in brain cells, she clearly lacks in common sense, because what the hell is she doing hitchhiking? Unless someone took her. Unless someone has been following us, and they took her.
I feel more dead than alive as I stop at the only place on the state road within a ten-mile range. It’s a diner, but I definitely am not hungry as I walk into it. I’m convinced she either hitchhiked or was taken, so there’s no point in driving anymore. The only thing I can hope is that someone saw her.
That hope pretty much disappears the second I walk into the diner and discover a group of losers who are all nursing flat beers, while a dumpy woman is half-asleep behind the counter, slumped on a chair, her eyes glued to her cell phone.
“A coffee,” I grunt, sliding into a chair, even though a coffee is the last thing I need right now, with my nerves so jittery.
Still, I inhale the beverage, welcoming the burn down my esophagus. I’m aware it might not be the smartest thing to blurt out, “Have you seen a girl with thick round glasses?” But it’s not like this bunch of idiots has any nefarious intentions. The only thing I risk is getting disappointed.
Sure enough, the woman just shrugs. “Haven’t seen any girl.”
“She’s not exactly a girl,” I rectify. “She’s in her early twenties, has one blue eye and one green eye, red hair, thick round glasses and…” I gulp down the last of my coffee, and realize I might just as well reveal everything, because at this point, there’s no way things can get any worse. “I think she might be in trouble.”
The woman shrugs yet again, and I want to punch her, but I have to save my violence for the fucker who took my girl. Though right now, it feels like there’s no bottom to my seething rage.
I could fucking kill the world without breaking a sweat.
But when it becomes clear that the woman isn’t going to give me an answer beyond that limp shrug, I toss a bill on the counter and turn away, gritting my teeth.Useless fucking piece of shit.
I head out, past a guy who looks like he’s definitely seen better days. He’s slumped on a chair at the dirty table out in the gravelly space out front, and I thought he was asleep, or I might have questioned him. But now, he’s apparently woken up, and he says, “You looking for a girl?”
“Huh?”
Guess he heard me through the open door.
“I said, you looking for a girl?”
I nod.
“I saw a girl.”
I turn to him, my heart beating fast. “And? What?” I snap impatiently.
“She was walking down the road,” he says, so slowly I want to wring his neck, “and then a car stopped in front of her, and two guys got out. They took her.”
I take a deep breath to try to calm down the wild racing of my heart. “What kind of car?”
“No clue. A minivan, maybe. Blue or something.”
“Orsomething?”
“Yeah, like a weird turquoise blue. Or maybe mint green.”
Ignoring the fact that this turd who appears to be lacking a brain just spoke the wordsmint green, I question impatiently, “Did it seem like… she wanted to go?”
The asshole snorts into his beer. “Hell naw. Well, at first they just talked. But then, she put up quite a fight. One of the guys punched her and she passed out, and the other guy picked her up over his shoulder and shoved her into the backseat.”
