CHAPTER 44 The Kidnapper
The Kidnapper
I’m almost sure she’s in Terlingua.
Someone like me shouldn’t be out in the daylight, but I am here, at the very beginning of my search for her, my new obsession. I walk along the bleached road, past the theatre, past the motel. It will be manual work, but it will be worth it if I find her. Or, rather, if I find her again.
It is easiest when the emotion is taken out of these things, so here is a list of things that I know:
She is likely to be in Terlingua.
What she looks like (obviously).
I have no other information, so I have been forced into good old-fashioned trial and error: watching houses and seeing who comes out of them.
These people, with their varied lives and clothes and cars and jobs and habits, they have no idea they’re being watched by me, across the street, usually in plain sight.
I earmark four houses today. They are set way back from the road and from each other. These ones stand opposite a run-down cafe and a church, and I take a slow stroll down the street and begin to watch.
One is occupied, a car outside it, and I stand, ostensibly casual. I can pass for a lost tourist, looking this way and that. There’s movement within, but it doesn’t take long to work out that it’s a man. I flick my eyes down again, and walk on by, moving on to the next houses.
The other three look unoccupied, which makes sense in the middle of the day.
I walk around the side of one, nevertheless, and to the back, peering in, my hands cupped around my face, thinking that somebody could be in there, that I’d never usually behave this recklessly, but I suppose it’s a kind of desperation.
I have to find her. And she’s got to pay the price.
There are a couple of clues in two of the houses – a pair of men’s trousers slung on the door of a washing machine out the back, and a man’s watch on the arm of a sofa – so I discount them, but earmark the fourth to revisit on the plan I have made of every house in Terlingua.
It won’t be long before she is mine.