SHADOWS OF KAYLA

REPORTING A CASE

Festus.

“What's your complain?” The fat man behind the big basic office desk grumbled huskily, scribbling down long sentences in the half-filled page of a long journal. He wrote so quickly that I wondered if that was the reason his handwriting was so ugly and illegible.

He stopped the pen midway through a line before looking looking up at me, holding total incuriousity in his glance.

“I want to report a k********g,” I responded, looking over my shoulder at Kayla who was standing by the wall behind us, nudging me with a nod to go on.

The policeman raised his elbows to the desk, resting his chin over his hands as I watched the hard look on his face gradually dissolve. The more he stretched himself in his tight uniform, the more I feared the shirt was going to rip open from its seams.

“A k********g?” He repeated, his almost perfectly round face now serious.

I gave a nod in the affirmative whilst he showed his hand towards the chair opposite him, which I pulled out quickly and sat and rested my palms anxiously on the desk. Once I was sure he was ready to take down what I was about the say, I started,

“A woman and her child were kidn*pped this afternoon some some men.”

“Eye witness?” The officer asked me, with brows raises from the form in his hands while he briefly scratched his beards.

“Ah—yes,” I lied, missing the stutters that were at the tip of my tongue by the hairs.

“Explain what you saw, son.”

Without thinking, just let the lies flow as they came. Kayla had not told me the details yet, so I just prayed whatever reports I was making would end on the note that they were in fact kidn*pped.

“Uh…” I tried arranging the scenes in my head to make sure my story made sense to him.

“Around three pm this afternoon, Thomas Jenkins was kidn*pped from his house while being attended to by his nurse—who was also attacked,” Kayla started on my behalf, startling me in my chair.

“Are you going to talk or what?”

“Around three pm this afternoon, the boy was kidn*pped from his house while being attended to by his nurse. The nurse was also attacked.”

I watched the man write out the points from what I had just relayed to him down, waiting for more words from Kayla. When she continued, I repeated,

“The nurse was found unconscious later in their house and she relayed her part of the story before losing consciousness…”

“Where's this nurse now?”

“Like I said, she was unconscious, probably in the hospital right now,” I answered, not waiting for Kayla to give a response.

“And the mother? You said she was kidnapped.”

“On her way home from work, I'm sure the men took her too.”

The man dropped his pen and leaned back in his chair, staring suspiciously at me while he played his tongue around in his mouth.

“And you, where were you when all of this was happening?”

“Uh…I'm…I'm a neighbour. I live around, so I saw things. I've noticed something was wrong in their house but I wasn't sure. Today, I saw them taking the boy and people said his mother was missing too,” I informed, proudly letting the lies flow naturally. If we were being more logical, I wasn't exactly lying. All I did was be a mouthpiece.

“You live around and you saw things. You were stalking them?”

“What? No!” I retorted sharply, pulling out a small piece of paper from my pocket and shoving it in his direction, figuring I might put myself in trouble if I didn't leave quickly and let the police handle the rest.

“What's this?” The officer asked, unfolding the paper.

“Their address.”

“The two addresses?” He inquired cannily.

“The second address is where they're being held hostage.”

“How did you…?”

“Sorry to interrupt,” interupted a younger officer who smiled curtly and placed a file on the sitted man's table.

“I happened to hear what this young man was saying—wasn't eavesdropping. But these two cases seem related. A man came in a while ago saying his wife and son were kidn*pped, their stories correlate,” the man informed, urging the officer to check the file he had just dropped in his care.

I locked eyes with Kayla for a second, understanding that it was her dad who made the report.

The big officer looked up at me from beneath his bushy brows whilst he opened the file, reading through it before bringing his brows to a knit.

“The addresses are similar,” he noted, confirming from the scribbles he had made and the piece of paper I had passed to him.

“Yes, sir. He says he knows where they're being kept,” the younger man told.

“So does he,” he cooed, burning me with his stares. I rested my eyes idly on the paper in his hands.

“How are you related to them? The victims I mean,” he asked me, the latter.

“I said I'm a neighbour.”

“And how do you know they're being kept in this address?”

“A hunch? They seem to have scores to settle with the man who stays at that address, so I figure he'd be the first suspect.”

“Hmm.”

“The men that took the boy too, they were familiar, they'd been stalking the family for some time. So it was easy to put two and two together.”

“You can go on now, Brad,” he ordered the younger man who gave a short bow and returned to his seat.

“Now, you, what's your name?”

“Festus.”

“Okay, Festus. Son, let's be honest here, you were stalking them too, right?”