Chapter 9.
Okay, this is one will be LONG, but I could find no good place to end it and start a new chapter, so bare with me. As well, you may find this chapter off topic, but trust me, it's not. It's very essential; please don't give up on me because it's not exactly as…poignant as the rest of this story so far. I promise you that there is a healthy amount of drama, and a very good amount of action. And of course, HUMOR! (Well, in a very congealed form haha) =]
We reached our Edmonton connection at about nine, so Nessie wasn't asleep for long. We got right on our flight, however, hardly any delay between them. Next we'd be in Toronto and then we could finally get to Rio.
Nessie paid just as much attention to the airplane's flight this time as well, but she couldn't keep her eyes open long. Not long after take-off, she was back in my lap, falling quickly to sleep again. I continuously asked the stewardess for pop and caffeine so that I could stay awake. While I was still riding high-style, I ordered some food instead of touching on any of the snacks I had packed. The stewardess was reluctant to cook me anything, apparently no meals were supposed to be served after eight. It didn't take much of our still-large amount of money to convince her to change her rules for me. I realized when I got the food in my hands how long it had been since I'd actually eaten. Even the second-rate airplane food tasted good at this point.
After two full plates of food, and fifty dollars less, we were landing in Toronto at one o' clock. I didn't wake Nessie while we exited; I just carried her in my arms while we retrieved our suitcase from the piles of luggage. Back in the terminal, I sat in one of the many chairs and put held Nessie in my lap. We weren't the only ones crashing in the airport that night, so I figured there was no crime in spending the night. I left Nessie in a chair while I went and bought our next tickets for Rio. We were lucky enough to snag a pair of non-stop for Rio. We were riding in steerage this time, though; there was no room left in first class. I figured we'd spoiled ourselves enough anyway; we needed money for Rio.
I didn't sleep that night; I just sat in the waiting chairs in our terminal, waiting out the time left until our 9:00am flight. I stared at the tickets, realizing with a sudden rush of hope that we were almost where we should be, we were going to be where Bella had sent us, somewhere safe, somewhere hopeful. And then I realized something else. I realized why Bella has sent us to Rio in the first place. Of course! It should have been obvious, what other reason would she have for sending us there?
Alice and Jasper were still there, just like Bella had known. We'd find them, and search the south for any information about Nessie's origins. And then we'd be safe for a while. I smiled at the tickets…our tickets to safety. This nightmare would soon be over, and we'd be with Alice and Jasper, and they could help us for anything coming or going. I'd never been so happy to see vampires in my life. I wondered if Alice knew anything, if when we found her, she'd be able to see anything good or bad in our coming future. I knew she couldn't see us. But she could see Jasper, and we'd be with them soon, so things might be looking up by then. But did she know the rest of her family's fate? She must have seen how that fight would end.
Suddenly my hope died as I realized…Alice couldn't see Nessie and me. I groaned and tossed the tickets into the seat beside me. She wouldn't see us coming at all…she'd see nothing we had planned. We'd probably be on some wild goose chase through Brazil, on the hunt for two vampires. Well maybe, if were any kind of lucky, she'd at least seen Bella's plan to send us here. I sighed and picked up the tickets again and put them in my pocket.
Our plane arrived in the platform, and I had planned to get on right away just like the time before. I woke Nessie at around 8:30, just a few minutes before the arrival of our flight. We were just boarding the plane when I heard a disturbance from down the hallway. It sounded like several footsteps heading this way. They were getting louder and faster, too, and soon the source of sound was visible.
Just over ten police officers were making their way down the hall to us. I watched with curiosity, wondering what the reason was. But as I was watching I realized that they were not only coming in our direction, they were clearly after us. Nessie was staring at the coming crowd with the same kind of interest as me, still oblivious.
I just had enough time to gently urge Nessie forward, trying to get her onto the plane so she wouldn't be witness to the scene I knew was coming. She resisted against me, and stared at me worriedly.
"That's him! That's the one!" I heard the policemen yelling.
"Stand behind me, Nessie," I ordered her. She obeyed but I felt her peaking around my leg, still unsure of what was happening.
About twenty feet from us, a few of the officers stopped and drew guns. The few left herded us, running forward without stopping. I groaned internally. God really must not want me to get to Rio.
I didn't fight the officers that ran toward us and shoved me out of the way. But then one of them tried lifting Nessie and taking her away. Uh oh, she was probably going to fight back and that would be very, very bad. I was sure that if she wanted to, Nessie could seriously hurt, if not kill, any of these men who were trying to separate us. To spare her having to fight for herself, I jumped up from the ground, where officers were converging on me. I pushed then out of my way.
"Don't touch her!" I yelled as the man tried tugging on Nessie's arm to pull her away.
"You stay back, and don't say another word!" one of the by-standing officers responded, pulling his gun from his pocket and pointing it at my face. I put my hands in the air, like I was supposed to.
"Look, you've got it wrong," I said calmly.
He cocked the gun. "What did I say? Don't you say a word!"
Nessie screamed at the sound of the gun. But I listened to the officer; I figured that if I followed their rules, maybe we'd get out of here safely.
A female officer took the place of the man holding Nessie, and started to gently pull her away. I fought with everything inside me not to destroy them all and demand that they give her back. She stumbled along behind the woman and stared back at me desperately. I held a finger to my lips, then pointed it subtly at her and shifted my eyes to the right: get away. She nodded determinately, understanding as always. I smiled and nodded back.
"Get on the ground!" an officer ordered.
"On your stomach!" another said.
I shrugged and obeyed, dropping to the ground where I lay face first on the tiles. I was waiting for them just to pick me up off the floor and take me away, but was shocked when I felt a kick hit my side. I gasped in surprise, not so much pain. From a much further distance, I heard Nessie scream again. I prayed that it would be the only blow I received, for Nessie's sake, and thankfully it was. I felt strong hands grab my upper-arms roughly, and felt pain in my left arm as one of the hands grabbed the spot where the bullet was implanted into my skin. I made a small sound of discomfort in the back of my throat.
The officers who had me by the arms slammed me hard into wall, straining my hands behind my back to cuff them.
"Did you think you could get away with it for much longer?" asked the man who was putting the handcuffs on me roughly. I wanted to groan in exasperation, it was going to take some explaining to get these guys off my back. Running wasn't an option at this point, we didn't need the vampire police and the Canadian…what were they called? Mounties? Yeah, we didn't need any freakin' Mounties on our tail.
"You'll be going a way for a long time for this one, kid," he promised me.
They told me the usual garbage. Right to remain silent, court of law, blah, blah, blah. I didn't say a word the whole time, just trying to keep a good short term record with these guys, maybe it would be able to help me a little later on. They dragged me out of the airport, into their cruiser and then we were off. I was shoved in the back seat with nothing but my thoughts for what in the hell we were going to do to get ourselves out of this. And I wanted to cry because now I'd lost Nessie, too.
They took me straight to the station downtown, the kind with the one room cell, and the place where all the questioning would go down. As far as they knew, I was guilty of abduction, and- since I was sure that they'd gotten their information from Frank- most likely they were charging me for assaulting him, and destroying his property. But if they thought I was going to stand going anywhere where Nessie wasn't, they were sorely wrong.
They tried telling me to get out of the car, and when I'd refused, they'd resorted to force. They started trying to pry me roughly from the seat.
"Get off me!" I yelled in their faces, shoving their pushing hands away with enough force that I hoped they would feel the pain through their bullet proof vests. "Where's Nessie?" I demanded of them every time they told me to get out of the car. Finally, they seemed to lose patience with me, and one of the officers clubbed me hard over the head, and I was gone.
When my eyes opened again, I was in a cell. No, no, no. This isn't real. This cannot be real. I jumped up from the floor where I lay, running to the bars and shaking them angrily.
"Where is she!?" I demanded of no one. "Where is she!?"
I shook the bars uselessly and felt tears fill my eyes. "Take me back! Take me out! Tell me where she is!" I shouted, my voice shaking.
I shook the bars until the action seemed to become more and more pointless, even to me. Eventually, my anger faded and my shaking slowed as I fell to the floor, feeling like sobbing. I'd lost her. I didn't know where she was, and I didn't know if I'd ever find her again. But she was smart, I told myself. She knew her stuff, and she'd get away somehow. Maybe she'd find me, and we could sort everything out together. But I wouldn't believe that we were going to be permanently separated, because the idea sounded so awful to me that I barely let the thought cross my mind. Of course I'd find her, and we'd be together, we'd be together.
But it was the first time I'd been apart from her, the first time I'd ever been without my safe-house, without my only form of gravity. I felt the crushing loss, even though it had only been a few hours that I'd not seen her face. It was etched into my memory with the kind of serenity that I was hopeless without. I needed to see her; I needed to be with her.
I stumbled back to the corner of the little cell and sat in the corner, on the old bench, sulking, if I was being honest. It was then that I heard the door open from across the room. I looked up, some small part of me hoping to see Nessie, bursting through the door and into my arms where she belonged. But it wasn't her, and I felt the crushing pain again.
It was a man who walked through the door. He looked young, handsome, I guess and clearly at the top of his game. He was carrying my backpack. Two more men flanked him, one old and professional looking, the other middle-aged with a hard face that looked like it would snap if it got any surlier looking. Everything around me seemed to be gray, I randomly noticed, the walls, the few tables in the room, the paint on the doors. The young man's suit was gray and it only seemed to add to dismalness of it all. Too lost in my pain, I all but ignored their entrance besides the glance I'd thrown them. I turned back to my feet, twining my hands around and around in my lap.
I didn't look up, but I heard sounds coming from the other side of the bars. I heard the zipper on my back pack slide, and then a clutter of sound as all our supplies and money, and books and snacks and everything from Bella, fell onto one of the tables. There was a shuffling as the men started sifting through it all. I heard their voices then.
"Looks like a couple of passports…" the voice sounded like it belonged to the young man with the gray suit. "A driver's license…Jacob Wolfe. Is it him?" he asked. I imagined his head turning towards me.
"Look up!" the cruel voice of the hard faced man instructed.
I obeyed and lifted my head silently. They stared at me for minute, and then turned back to each other. I kept my head up.
"Huh. Looks kinda like him," the young man said. "We'll figure the details out in questioning. What have you got there, Jim?" he asked the older man.
"Er…just some piece of paper with 'Rio de Janeiro' on it. I think that was where the plane at Pierson was taking him and the girl."
I paid a bit more attention after they mentioned Nessie.
"Hm. So I guess that was their next stop," the young man said. He went back to digging through the pile. "An awful lot of money for just a couple of kids…some medicine…chips, juice boxes…" he continued on through our belongings, muttering the names off of everything he found.
Then old hard face took over.
"Urgh, look at the books… thinks he's some sort of Einstein or what? I tell you, these sickos got no idea who they are. Filthy no good…" his vile voice trailed off and I did my best to ignore him from then on.
So it was going to be one of the classic good cop, bad cop situations. Great.
"Huh," the man named Jim said suddenly, holding up an envelope to the ceiling. "Did you see this, Harvey? Looks like a letter or something. It's addressed to him."
"Is it open?" asked Harvey.
"Looks that way," he told him.
"Well, what's it say?" Hard- face urged.
I put my hands childishly over my ears while they read the letter out loud. When they started calling my name, louder and louder, I opened my tight eyes and unplugged my ears, to look up at them cautiously.
"Who's this Bella?" asked Harvey.
I cleared my throat. "Her mom," I told them simply.
Hard-face turned purple. Jim put a hand on his shoulder.
"This Vanessa's mother, Jacob?" asked Harvey.
I nodded.
Harvey seemed to deliberate something for a minute and then took a deep breath in through his nose.
"Why don't come with me, Jacob. We're gonna go right here, through those doors, we just want to have a word," Harvey said, pointing to the gray doors to the right of me.
I stretched up out of my seat, as Jim unlocked my cell door for me.
"You look a little shaken, Jacob," Jim told me, grinning, like it was all some big joke.
I shook my head. "I just want my Nessie back," I told him, not at all responding to his humor.
While I followed them into the room I assumed they used for questioning, I quickly planned out a decent lie. They'd read the letter, and I guess that if you translated it, it could sound like something a terminal patient mother might write to a good friend when she knew she was a goner. But if they asked why she hadn't gone with a father…what could I say? He wasn't responsible enough? I was her stepfather as far as anyone knew, so maybe I could make it sound like there had been some sort of custody battle, and that Nessie would have been mine if anything had happened. Of course, then they'd start with records and we'd be here forever. This couldn't be real, it couldn't.
They sat me down in the chair then, I hadn't even noticed us enter the room. Of course, this room was gray too, darker and simple. There was one table and two chairs, one on either side of the table. It was like a set from a movie.
"Have a seat, Jacob," Harvey said to me.
I pulled the chair back roughly, with my hands still handcuffed and dropped in, hanging my head.
"So, are you gonna tell me that this was all a misunderstanding, Jacob?" Harvey asked with a sigh.
I swallowed and shook my head.
"Well, what's the story then, lowlife?" demanded hard-face.
"Easy, Ben. We're gonna figure this out even if it takes days. I don't' care if we need a trial, I'm getting to the bottom of this one," he promised.
I suddenly lifted my head, shaking my head in disagreement.
"No, no, please." God, what had happened to my bravado? What had happened to me? I was sure that it was just because I was so desperate for Nessie, but I didn't sound like me, I didn't sound like the guy who wasn't afraid of anything. But I was afraid, afraid of making things worse for Nessie. "We don't need a trial, if I could explain. I swear that anything you've heard is a lie. Please just let me explain." It bugged a little to realize I was begging a bit.
"Alright, Jacob," Harvey said, taking the seat across from me. "Explain."
"Harvey!" Ben chided. "For Christ's sake, don't give him the satisfaction! I want some questions answered first."
"Alright, fine, Ben," Harvey said, aggravated it looked like. "Go ahead."
Ben leaned forward on the table, close to my face.
"Tell me more about 'her mom'," he made little quotations in the air.
I spoke without hesitation, in small chopped sentences. "Bella was my best friend. She died not very long ago, and Nessie was her daughter. I was taking Nessie away, because Bella had said I should, and, I'm sure you can imagine, Ben, that both Nessie and I were upset. We were going to Rio so that we could relax and have a good time for while. And that's the absolute truth." Well all but the last part anyway.
"Why did you take her?" he asked scornfully.
"You read my letter, didn't you? Bella asked me to."
His face twitched angrily and he looked like he was going to explode. Harvey put a hand on his shoulder and pulled him away from me.
"Well, with the evidence we've been provided with, Jacob, I can almost believe that what you've said is true," Harvey said. "However, I've seen many cases like this, Jacob, and I know how easy it is to fake letters and documents such as this." He held up the letter that he'd brought with us.
I was shaking my head before he'd finished. "No, it's true. That letter is from Bella, it's from Bella, I swear. There's three more letters in the bag for her parents and Nessie."
I saw the men share a glance.
"How did this Bella die?" Jim asked me.
"Disease. Cancer. Terminal case," I said as truthfully as I could.
Harvey pursed his lips, and looked down at his papers. He wrote a few things down.
I shook my head. "Please, if you could just listen and understand. Everything I'm telling you is true, and there's nothing to be making a huge deal out of. Nessie is like my daughter, and her love and safety, I swear, it was all I wanted, and it's all I'll ever want! You're blowing this way out of proportion and you don't even realize!" I was shouting by the end of my little monologue.
Harvey looked reluctant to answer. Jim looked like he wanted to laugh at me.
"I'm sorry, Jacob, but it's a little late for that," Ben said sadly.
"No! No it's not! Has anyone talked to Nessie? Has anyone asked her what's what?"
Jim laughed at me. "Sorry, kid, but we don't tend to trust the judgment of a five year-old girl around here."
"She's not like any other five year-old," I muttered. Yeah, I thought. She's a lot different.
"Well, we've talked to her. Not us technically, but she has been questioned," Harvey told me.
I laughed out loud. Oh god, Nessie in questioning. I wondered what she'd said. I bet she was brilliant. I bet the questioners got a glimpse of how different she was. The three men stared at me. Aw well, I thought. What's telling the truth going to lose me at this point?
"Sorry," I said through the laughter. "I'm just picturing it. I guess you can't tell me what she said, right?" I guessed.
Ben looked disgusted, but Harvey's lips twitched.
"No, sorry Jacob. That information is controversial," he said.
"Oh well, she'll tell me when I see her again," I said confidently.
The men exchanged another look. It looked a little disbelieving. I grinned.
Then Harvey looked back to me.
"Alright, Jacob, here's the thing. I can believe that maybe this was a misunderstanding, we'll need to talk with Vanessa a little more, but so far, from what we've heard from you, I have reason to believe that maybe the mistake was ours," Ben stared at Harvey angrily, clearly disagreeing with everything Harvey was saying. "However," he continued. "we've also got you down for assault and destruction of private property, as well as-,"
"Wait, wait," I interrupted. "I can explain all that, too." They all looked at me expectantly, waiting for me to go on. "We were just looking for a place to stay, and this guy wakes me up with a gun in my face. I hit him purely out of self-defense. As for destruction, we were just trying to get away from the flying bullets, you know. It wasn't our fault the stairs fell apart."
"Huh," was all that Ben had to say about that. I smiled triumphantly.
"Fair enough, Jacob," Harvey admitted. "We'll have to talk to our source about that."
He sighed and scrutinized my face for along minute. So long, in fact, that Jim and Ben started to look a little worried. Harvey held a hand up to calm them. They stepped back obediently.
"Alright, Jacob," he finally sighed. "I'm gonna do something I don't normally do. I'm going to trust you."
I frowned in confusion.
He stood from his and started pacing back and forth. I was starting to feel a little hopeful. Wouldn't it be luck- probably the best luck we'd received yet- if this Harvey was in a good mood? A good enough mood to possibly let us go without a hitch? I was so desperate for an answer by that point that I clung to the hope like a life-preserver, holding on for dear life.
Harvey continued to pace, clearly lost in thought. I had a feeling that by now the other two men's opinions were pointless. It was clear from the start that Harvey was the unspoken leader, per se. It was his choices that decided my fate now.
"You look young, Jacob," he suddenly said to me, turning to look at me with an expression like curiosity. I shrugged.
He nodded. "Young… Why would a young, probably aspiring kid kidnap his best friend's child? Reading these letters, I can't believe that they're forged, and everything you've told me, Jacob, I can't help but believe it. I guess it just makes sense. Maybe we have shot this out of proportion, maybe we were wrong. The source from the north didn't seem entirely reliable when we spoke with him, anyway. Wouldn't you agree, gentleman?" he asked the two men. Ben and I were gaping. I had a feeling that the same thing I was thinking was what he was thinking. Was this guy for real?
Jim actually nodded in agreement with Harvey.
"Sorry, Ben. Overruled," Harvey decided. "Okay, Jacob, you're free to go."
I was shocked. I couldn't conceal it, it was probably so obvious on my face because Harvey seemed to notice and he smiled and nodded.
"Just like that?" I blurted out. Harvey nodded again. Ben grunted and kicked the door open, trudging away angrily.
I stood uncertainly from my chair. Harvey continued to nod in encouragement, he beckoned me to come to him, I followed and he unlocked my handcuffs. He pulled them off and I rubbed at my free wrists.
They led me back into the main room where they put the contents of our back pack back together. Ben was no where to be seen. I guess he'd just left out of anger. Cool.
As we were packing my things, something else occurred to me.
"Allwe ask, Jacob, is that you please leave the country," he added after a while. "It will make things easier for you, and us."
I nodded, that was easy enough. "So I can see Nessie again?" I asked eagerly, hopefully.
Harvey nodded. "We'll take you to where she is."
I smiled. "Thanks," I told him honestly.
