A Little Bit Ninja

7: Meet the Kidnappers (Revised)

I had to admit, it was much easier to breathe. And with him hovering in my rear seat space, my super, sensitive sniffer had no problem picking up his scent: Aqua Di Gio. Oh, swoon. It was my absolute, all-time favorite. I once bought a bottle and used to spray it on my pillow before going to sleep at night. Okay, I still did, but I swear I have had sweet dreams every night since I started the habit.       

But the person wearing it wasn’t worthy of it. That thought brought me back to reason, a little anyway. Anton wiped away my tears with his thumbs before speaking.

“I didn’t want to tie you up,” he explained again looking into my eyes, and his lips lifted into a wry smile as he continued. “I just had to make sure I got a chance to explain everything before you beat me up and got away.”

“Oh, that’s what you were apologizing for,” I said with a stony face, my giggles now well under control.

“Well, that’s part of it. I’m sorry for the whole thing really.” He was sitting next to me now looking at his hands as he spoke. He peeked at me from the corner of his eye then continued. “I didn’t want to do any of it, but if I didn’t do it, Ivan’s brother would have, and he wouldn’t have been as nice about it as me.”

I kept my face in check as I replied, “Hmmm. I bet you say that to all the girls you hijack off the street.” I turned to him and batted my eyelashes, and he sensed my sarcasm. I guess I’m not very subtle.

“So do you do this often? Save girls from worse kidnappers by accosting them yourself?”

He chuckled and turned his face toward me, “No, you’re special.”

“How so? Should I feel honored?” I laughed.

“I’ve been a fan for a while, so I wanted to meet you.” Okay, that was a little weird.

“How long have you been stalking me?” I asked a little disgusted. I’d only just noticed the car today, but “a while” is definitely longer than a day.

“No!” He exclaimed, like it was important to him that we distinguish the line between stalker and kidnapper, and where he stood in relation to that line. “I-I haven’t been stalking you.”

 It was the first time I’d seen him the least bit flustered, and the satisfaction of seeing that he was human bloomed inside me. Unless he was acting right then too, and he just wanted me to think he was flustered to lower my defenses, make me think he was friendly, and trick me into spilling whatever information he wanted.

There was a snort in the front seat, which if I was not mistaken, was Ivan The Rock holding back a laugh. Ant glared at the back of his head.

“I mean, I did stalk you, but just today. I have known about you for a while, although I didn’t know your name. I used to just call you Thriller girl.” He looked at me with a tragically sweet grin; sweet because it really did bring a glow to his face, but tragic because of what he was smiling about.

I actually felt bad for this sad, sad boy who didn’t know how disturbing that admonition was. I only stalked you today? And, it was even sadder that he had convinced himself that what he was doing was a kindness; everything from the lies, to the blow dart gun, to the cords cutting off the circulation of my wrists and ankles— and all to a girl he was a fan of. I would hate to see what he would do for girls he loved.

Whoa, whoa, whoa, did he just call me Thriller girl? Was there no escape from the infamy? This was exactly the problem with putting videos up on the internet. Nut jobs, like Ant and Ivan for example, could watch those videos, and look at the damage they were capable of.

But, since I was tied up and mostly incapable of punching my way out of this, I decided it was best to tread carefully.

 “So um,” I didn’t know how to proceed. “How did you find me? Did someone put my address online?”

 “No. Uh, in addition to the main video, there were a bunch of phone videos that got posted too. It’s actually quite simple. The phone video information is embedded with the geographical location. We just followed the electronic, yellow, brick road—so to speak—to the scene of the filming on Saturday night. We assumed it was your house, and we were right.”

“Wait, you saw that video too? And why would you go to the trouble to find me?”

“Yeah, you probably think I’m a psycho killer or something.” Yes, or something. He let out a slow breath from pursed lips. “It started on Sunday. Marv sent me a link to a new Thriller Girl video. So I was watching it, when my…parent…walks in.” His tongue tripped on the word “parent”, but then he went on.  

“I was laughing because one minute Thriller girl is getting punked, and the next minute the guy who punked her is getting his butt handed to him.” He looked up at me and winked. “Nice moves by the way. Anyway, uh, my guardian couldn’t take his eyes off the screen. He told me to play it over, and over, and over.  He was getting really weird, saying that the girl looked exactly like his wife—the one that died before he met my mom.”

Okay, this was getting creepy. I hadn’t even met the dad, but by the conversation I had witnessed earlier, he was definitely someone to be feared. And although I hadn’t made his acquaintance, I think I preferred his son—or whatever Anton was to him—with debatable mental stability or not. It sounded like both were a little bit mad to me.

“Anyway, my step-dad, well, surrogate father anyway, he doesn’t stop until he gets things his way. When he saw you, he decided you were his daughter, the one that died alongside his wife, in child birth. That’s why he sent us to collect you.”

“Okay, not to be rude or anything, but your dad sounds like a total head case.” I heard another snort from the front seat.

 Seriously, his wife and child died like seventeen years ago, and he sees me and suddenly thinks that I’m his daughter? Can we say wishful thinking?

I knew better than most people, the pain of being left behind when someone close to you dies. Everywhere you turn, you think you see that person, and for a moment you are whole. That is, until you realize it isn’t them, and it leaves the hole gaping wide open again. But this? This was a whole new level of delusional.

“He’s not my dad, but yeah, he can be a little eccentric,” Anton said, as if answering my thoughts, “I’ve heard he was different after he lost his wife.”

 Hello, who wouldn’t be? You can’t go through the loss of your wife and child and come out the other side as the same person you were before. That person cannot survive. One must change to continue existing without them

“Now he thinks that his daughter was somehow alive all these years, hidden from him,” Anton finished.  

Okay, I could understand the source of his craziness, but that just makes this situation even creepier. And what was slightly more worrisome than this deluded man was that there were people under this deluded man’s command, who acted on his insane ideas. With people there to answer his every whim, what kind of madness could this man create in the world?

Example: Me—tied up in the back of a stake out vehicle, with a head wound, and drugs pumping through my system.

Anton slipped something out of his pocket. When he held it in front of me I gasped. It was a picture of my mother lying in a hospital bed; eyes closed, with her arm wrapped around a teeny, tiny baby—a baby with little white curls. No, that wasn’t a hospital bed. It was a metal slab, like in a morgue.   

I had to swallow my revulsion when I realized it was a picture of the two of them, dead. They used to do that back in the day when people were croaking left and right from tuberculosis. They would line up the dead in their nicest clothes then take a picture of them as if they were sleeping.

I was looking at one of those, but it was taken less than seventeen years ago. But I couldn’t understand it. My neurons were dangerously close to shorting out, complete with sparks and smoke, because my mom didn’t die when I was born. Case in point: neither did I.  And the next two photos were just as disturbing, a picture of the dead infant, and another of a heart shaped birthmark just near her hip bone, on the left side.

Exactly where I had that scar…