The twins say I’m perfect and rare. “We had to look very hard to find someone like you." I am admired.
On the steps of her quiet brownstone, Nettie Harnell smells the sickly sweet scent of chloroform moments before she is abducted. When she awakens she’s in a dark basement chained to a post with nothing but memories of her mother and Paris to keep her company while she awaits her fate.
There is a shortage of medical donors in Philly, not that Carl and Vern Wachoski consider it a problem—it’s another business opportunity. Taking without permission has turned out to be incredibly lucrative, especially with Carl’s motto being “waste not, want not.” But Carl’s arrogance could cost them everything if they don’t watch out.
Dutch Harnell is no stranger to depression since the tragic and violent death of his wife and son thirteen years before. Now it’s time for Dutch to pull himself together to save his one remaining family member, Nettie. With the help of Kapil Talpur, a young graduate student who witnessed the abduction, he finds himself drawn deeper into a world of greed and intrigue, where they can trust no one but themselves.
Please enjoy this sample chapter from the book . . .
March 2016
Center City,
Philadelphia
Nettie first met her friend Kapil Talpur three years
ago, just after her return from Paris. He’d collapsed in an alleyway next to
her home in Center City, Philly. The young man looked emaciated. She had taken
him to a restaurant and bought him a meal; the gesture turned into an enduring
friendship. Nettie was walking toward her Locust Street brownstone now and
thinking about this sweet, thoughtful guy, his gratitude for that long ago
dinner . . .
“Thank you a
thousand times,” he’d told her. So Kapil.
“Once is plenty,”
she had said.
Kapil Talpur was
from Mumbai and had just lost his fellowship then, while in the third year of a
doctorate program at the University of Pennsylvania, something to do with
particle physics. Financial assistance had been promised in the “not too
distant” future, and he’d started a new job at a nearby convenience store to
make ends meet until he could go back to school. Three years later and Kapil
was still working in the same store.
Sometimes Nettie
would see her friend on her way home, though not tonight, apparently. She hoped
he was doing well.
The young man
always asked how her father was getting along. Kapil didn’t understand why the
reverend was living in a retirement community at such an early age.
“Paris didn’t
help him,” she’d said. It sounded flippant, uncaring. Nettie had wanted to say,
“I feel completely helpless and I don’t know how to dig him out of his terrible
sadness.” But she thought that would be too much for any friend to hear.
Nettie turned and
crossed Locust, climbing the four concrete steps to the front door of the
brownstone. That was when someone behind her cupped her nose and mouth with a
wet cloth.
The cloth smelled
sweet. It had the sort of smell that left her feeling nauseous. Like any moment
she could get a serious case of the hurls. God she hated throwing up. Chloroform, that was her thought. How long do I have? When does this shit
knock me out? What’re they gonna do, rape me? Her mom’s story: the two boys
down by the Schuylkill River.
Like mom, like
daughter.
Nettie kept
trying to break free, kicking her legs into the cold night air. The man holding
her was amazingly strong for his size. She’d gotten a glimpse of him, the guy
and his weird friend. They were frail looking men—tall but very frail.
And no, not his friend.
How could Nettie
have thought friend? Brothers—yes, of course. More than that, the two of
them are twins. Or I’m seeing double? They’re like Tweedle Dee and Tweedle
Dum. But they weren’t fat like the Tweedles. These guys were skinny, very skinny.
Her legs had
started going weak, and her brain felt as if it was floating inside her skull.
She felt a sharp quick sting in the crook of her arm. A needle, that was her thought. The needle stayed in her arm for
five or ten seconds. He’s stealing my
blood? Who in the hell takes somebody on the steps of her own home and steals
her blood? Nettie was twenty-six and lived alone. She knew a person needed
to be careful in Philly, especially Center City. A subcompact Beretta Px4 was
in her leather handbag. Now the handbag lay on the step. How priceless, so much for being prepared. Her bag had dropped when
the man grabbed her.
“Don’t bruise
anything,” one twin said.
“Does she look
bruised?”
“It doesn’t show
immediately.”
“Shut up, Carl.”
“Hey, no names. Jesus.”
“Relax. She won’t
be taking out an ad.”
Before one of the
twins had pressed the cloth over Nettie’s nose and mouth, she’d been thinking
about making a cup of dark chocolate coco and watching The Maltese Falcon on TCM with her beloved Mr. Muggles, the most
spoiled cat in the Delaware Valley. She thought a movie about a bird would keep
him interested.
The two men
shoved her into the back of a Chrysler Town & Country station wagon. She
noticed a rusted left front fender. The wagon had a pea green top and hood. The
sides were a phony mahogany wood. She saw the thing during her last moments of
consciousness. The wagon smelled like week old laundry and stale fries.
Who drives this, anymore? she thought. Late 80s’ crap, ’88, ’89.
Nettie knew her
cars. It was genetic or what-have-you; she got it from her dad who could’ve
told you the date and make of any car on God’s highway. Crazy what a person
thinks. Oh shit, gypsies, that was
what she thought. I’ve been captured by
gypsies.
Nettie blacked
out.
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Ron Savage was a senior staff psychologist at a state mental health facility in Virginia and also had a private practice. Ron is the author of seven novels and two volumes of short stories, and has published more than 125 stories worldwide. He is the recipient of the Editor’s Circle Award in Best New Writing and was nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Ron is a member of PEN America and has also been a guest fiction editor for Crazyhorse. Some of his publications can be found in Film Comment, the North American Review, Shenandoah, the Baltimore Review, and the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.
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