Saturday Snippet: A teenage girl, her rescue, and its consequences

 

I recently discovered a novel titled "Needles and Delaney", and found it intriguing.

The blurb reads:

Needles, a retired Special Forces medic and owner of Dawes’s Salvage has a problem. Her name is Delaney. She’s a thirteen years old. She’s foul-mouthed, disrespectful, and hates authority. As far as Needles is concerned, those are her good points, because she’s also his manipulative ex-wife’s daughter, and he’s been extorted to go find her. An awful lot of people really want Delaney dead. They just didn’t figure on Needles getting in the way.

The preface to the book is interesting.  Todd Dorsey writes:

It all started on a dare. Really. The Missus was going on a trip to help her family for an extended period and I was stuck working. We really don’t like to be apart. After twenty years in the Army, with all that time apart, all those goodbyes at airports, our main goal since has been to be together as much as possible. We are that couple.

The Missus dared me to try writing some fiction while she was gone; something I’d never considered doing. So I did, then posted my efforts to see if I could get some feedback. There are writer’s groups, where knowledgeable views are exchanged, well thought out critiques given and experienced writers mentor newcomers. That certainly sounded nice, but a bit out of my league, to say the least. I just wanted some reader feedback.

I looked for places where there was real feedback from real readers. I ended up posting my decidedly non-erotic short story onto an erotic story website, fully expecting to be blasted. It didn’t happen; instead I got a flood of encouragement to write more. I wrote more and the encouragement continued from readers and other writers. I can’t begin to explain how important the readers were and are to getting us to write more.

The Missus eventually joined in, helping at first, but then becoming a full partner in it, coming up with plotlines, characters and ideas. She’s brilliant. She was even named by the readers who decided “my wife” was just too plain for someone who could frame a plot and build characters the way she did, so they named her “The Missus.”

We really don’t write the stories at the computer. That is where the words are put down, but the stories are written on long drives, evenings on the couch, and back and forth over the kitchen counter. We tell each other crazy stories, try out ideas for scenes. The Missus even does voices. It’s fun, it’s something we do together and it is apparently something a lot of people like. Some of the stories have been read nearly 300,000 times. That’s stunning, given that 11,000 sales can get someone on the NYT Best Seller list.

The Needles & Delaney stories, springing from an idea The Missus had, are easily the most popular we’ve written, and after a lot of requests we decided to expand them a bit and get the first three into a book and out there.

These are amazingly fun characters to write; They’re vulgar, violent, and angry to the core. But they are absolutely unrefined, unafraid and unapologetic about what they are. I think there is a bit of them hidden away in all of us.

Since my wife, too, is an author (her latest book was published earlier this month), and we spend quite a lot of time discussing plot points, action sequences and so on, that preface caught my attention, and persuaded me to try the book.  I'm glad I did.  It's entertaining, and rather better than most novice authors' first efforts - the constructive criticism offered by readers, and the effect of constant improvement, are clearly visible.

WARNING:  There's a lot of foul language in this book, particularly F-bombs.  However, it fits the characters and scenario.  If such language is unacceptable to you, I suggest you pass on this one.  I've edited it out of the snippet below, because this is a family-friendly blog.

The book opens when Needles is asked by his ex-wife to find and rescue Delaney from wherever she's disappeared to.  Reluctantly, he agrees, and accepts a tracking device that shows the current location of her cellphone.  Here's what happens when he finds her.

I went up to the trailer, pulled out the keys to Sally and, after a bit of thought, pulled my .45, a Springfield 1911, out of the bedside table, then pulled a couple extra magazines for it.

I probably wouldn’t need it, maybe the girl was probably hiding out with some summer camp friend or some boy she’d met, but I’d learned the hard way not to be caught unarmed and unprepared.

Some of that I learned from guerrillas in places nobody likes to talk about anymore. Some of it I’d learned from Charlotte.

Besides, the marker on Charlotte’s tracking app was sitting in what I knew to be a pretty ugly neighborhood, the kind of place where cops don’t go alone if they can avoid it, and that might not be a good sign for a rich little runaway. Or anyone sent to pick her up.

I walked out into the yard then pulled the roller door up on Sally’s garage and stared at her. Mostly primer with a brilliant yellow hood, and passenger door, she was certainly no beauty, looking more like a rent-a-wreck beater than anything else. That boxy-looking “Fox” body style didn’t exactly scream Fast and Furious. Still, she had it where it counted. A 1979 Mustang Cobra four-speed with all the internal trimmings and some extra upgrades beyond anything Ford offered. It’d been a total pain in the ass, but I’d put in a Gen2 5.0L Coyote engine, the best sway bars money could buy and racing seats with five-point harnesses. If this got stupid, I wanted something that could run with anything out there, and for all her cosmetic problems, Sally was that girl.

When I rolled out of the yard, I passed the square and caught a glimpse of the sheriff leaning against the grill of his Tahoe as he watched me leave.

After some deliberation, I took the back roads to the outskirts of Durham; I’d been that way hundreds of times to pick up loads; wrecked cars mostly. The dusty rock roads kept me off the highway and out of traffic, away from idiot drivers in a hurry to get someplace. I occasionally checked the tablet to see if my quarry had moved, maybe to a mall or something. No such luck.

It took almost two and a half hours to get to the rundown neighborhood. I figured by that time, according to the tracker, she’d been there for nearly five hours. I parked a few houses away. A shiny black Lincoln Navigator and a dark blue Pontiac G8 GT sat outside what was obviously a condemned house. Or at least it should have been condemned. Not good. Not good at all. I tucked my .45 into my belt and glanced up and down the street. There wasn’t any movement and damned few cars.

I straightened my hat, looked at myself in the reflection in the window and hoped that the idiots in the two-story house were desperately stupid.

When the door opened, I held the tracker up as if it meant something. “I’m looking for a Delaney Morris. I’m the Uber driver.”

The guy who opened the door had a half a head of height on me, and a dizzying array of tattoos. A huge “NCWB” tattoo ran up his neck. He opened the door just far enough that I could see nobody was in the room behind him. “Nobody called an Uber here.”

“Look, can you check? I’m pretty sure she’s here, the instructions are pretty specific.” I looked at the tablet as if I were reading it. “She’s a minor, so I have to do the pickup or I get in trouble.” I had no idea if Uber worked that way, but the guy didn’t exactly look overly sharp. I pulled her picture up and held the tablet up in my left hand. “You know her?”

“She ain’t leavin’. She’s our girl now.” His eyes flicked to a closed door.

I pretended to look at my tablet. “Dude, she’s like thirteen years old.”

Chuckling, he glanced back at the same door. “You know what they say, man. Old enough to bleed, old enough to—”

He never quite finished the sentence; medics learn a great deal about anatomy. Such as the fact that the point where the jaw attaches to the skull is particularly vulnerable to a sudden hard strike, say a really hard right cross delivered with no warning.

He staggered back and fell to his knees, so I hammered another one in on the same point and rammed my knee into his face as he sagged loosely to the ground. God, that felt good.

A trickle of blood dripped out of his mouth. I guess he was old enough.

I walked over to the door he’d looked at. There was a hasp with a screwdriver through it, locking the door shut. I pulled the screwdriver out and yanked the door open.

She was sitting, pale and obviously terrified, on the edge of a ratty mattress that had been dragged into the room. She blinked as the extra light poured in. The windows to the room had been mostly painted over on the outside. At least she was still wearing clothes; that was a damn good sign.

“Let’s go. I’m here to take you home.”

She didn’t say anything, just jumped to her feet and scrambled for the door. She stopped, looked at the guy on the ground and paused long enough to kick him in the face as hard as she could.

I heard something moving upstairs. Lots of somethings. “Keep moving.” I grabbed her arm, dragging her out the door and toward Sally.

“That? Seriously?” Even as scared as she was, she was clearly appalled by the car.

“Keep moving, Pumpkin. The limo is in the shop.” I shoved her into the passenger seat.

“What are these things?” She fumbled with the five-point.

“Jesus. It’s a safety harness. Like a seat belt.” I leaned over and began pulling the straps into place. She froze when I yanked the crotch strap into place.

“Easy there. Just getting you strapped in.” I snapped the belts shut and pulled the release rotator off, dropping it into my pocket as I rushed around the car, keeping one eye on the door to the house while I slid into my seat.

She fumbled with the center of the harness. “It’s broken. I can’t get out.”

“I’ll fix it later.” I fired the engine up.

“But I can’t get out.”

“Yeah, well that’s sort of the point, Powder Puff. Why the hell are you trying to get out of the seat in the first place...” I stopped, figures were pouring out of the front door of the house. I reflexively counted eight of them. S***. “Time to go. Your boyfriend’s asshat friends are on the way.” I tried to pull away slowly and quietly, but a few of them looked in my direction.

“He isn’t my boyfriend. These guys are just friends of Brandon’s. Brandon couldn’t make it, so they picked me up.” 

“Let me guess, you met Brandon on the internet? Un-****ing-believable. Hard to believe anybody still falls for that s***. You actually still believe he’s real?”

“**** you.” She did look a little sheepish.

“My, my, my. Would you look at her, using bad words like she’s all growed-up. You shouldn’t ****ing curse, it’s not ladylike.”

“**** you!” She glared hatefully this time.

“You already said that, Tinkerbell. Not very creative, are you?” In the rearview mirror, I could see them piling into the SUV and G8. I held my breath hoping they’d run for it, afraid, maybe that somebody’d called the cops.

“**** you!” She yanked at the webbing of the harness furiously.

“You really are going to have to work on that vocabulary.” S***. They were turning in our direction. I was sure Sally could outrun that SUV, but the G8 was going to be a problem, no matter what. Besides, even if we could outrun the damn thing, it might not be the best idea in the world. I might just be trading one problem for another.

Clueless, the girl apparently thought one unconscious thug had ended the danger. She sneered at me. “What are you some kind of pervert, kidnapping little girls?”

“Nah. Doesn’t sound very challenging. Apparently, all you have to do is pretend to be a guy named Brandon on the internet and they come running.” I needed to do this without involving the police; the last thing I wanted was for Charlotte to get pissed off and drop my grandfather’s gun into the ocean. I headed back for the route I’d come in on. Familiar ground.

“Asshole.”

“That’s better, at least now you’re showing a little creativity.” The SUV had pulled out in front of the G8; not a great plan, the G8 could have maybe outpaced me and boxed me in, but I could outmaneuver and outrun the SUV if I needed to. I didn’t need them to know that, though. Not yet. I accelerated away as smoothly as possible.

“I didn’t need your ****ing help.”

“I could see that. You had them right where you wanted them. Very clever.”

“**** you. Why’d you even get involved?”

“Your mother railroaded me into it.”

“She’s a ****ing bitch.”

“Well, we agree on that. Charlotte is one grade-A, ****ing cold-blooded, heartless, soulless bitch.”

“Oh God, you do know her.”

“No s***. Score one for Nancy Drew, Girl Detective.” I kept Sally a quarter mile ahead of the SUV, pacing as if I wasn’t aware of them. Push them too early and they’d act on it before I was ready.

I was pretty sure they were looking for the same thing I was: a quiet place with no witnesses. I had just the place for all of us, if only they were patient enough to wait fifteen minutes or so.

“We need to go back. That guy took my backpack with my clothes. He also took my phone. He said it needed to be charged.”

I looked over at her and rolled my eyes but didn’t say a word.

She slumped back in her seat a bit, clenching her eyes shut for a second. “You must think I’m an idiot.”

“Not really. You’ll need to try harder to work your way up to idiot. Do you still not have a ****ing clue what was happening?”

She stared down at her feet silently.

I rolled on. “You were about to become a goddamned party favor. There were at least eight guys there, and probably more on the way. You have to know what they would have done to you. Use your ****ing head.”

She shrunk in on herself, breathing in spasms. I could tell she was crying but she didn’t want me to know. She didn’t want me to think she was weak. She caught her breath and gritted her teeth. “Asshole.”

I laughed. “Good girl. If you can’t be smart, you’d better learn to be tough. Because you’re gonna ****ing need it if you don’t wise up.” We were getting close. I turned down a broad gravel road. I’d been through here dozens of times and I knew the roads here; I just hoped I had enough luck to pull this off.

She turned her head to wipe the tears from her eyes so I wouldn’t see them. “You don’t have to be a dick all the time. I’ve had a really awful day.”

“You want sympathy, it’s in the dictionary between s*** and syphilis. You did this to yourself. You put yourself here. Learn from it, and don’t do stupid s***.” The SUV moved aside and the G8 started to move up fast; I stepped on the gas and the engine snarled in exhilaration, the sudden acceleration punching a wide-eyed Delaney back into her seat.

“Holy s***!”

“Hang on. Your friends have decided that they don’t want witnesses.”

She looked back around the edge of her seat and saw the blue car gaining. “Oh God! Do something!”

Needless to say, Needles does, indeed, do something.  It's a well-written action sequence, and the whole book develops from and builds on this incident.

Recommended reading.

Peter