Amber

Chapter 2

New Text Received: 7:32 p.m.

AMBER Alert: Oak Creek, IN

VEH: Blue 4 door Oldsmobile Delta

CHILD : Hailey Austin 16 yo WF 125 lb Hr : Blonde

SUSP : 40-50 yo WM 5'10 220 lb Hr : Blk

CALL: 1-888-58AMBER or 911

Mark

November 3, 2015

Oak Creek smells like cat piss, motor oil, and mildew. The terrible trio. The deathly hallows of scents, Lauren and I decided. Lake Michigan, heavy rainfall, and auto-body repair shops contribute heavily to the aroma. Mrs. Webster's stray-cat collection handles the rest.

"It's too small of a town for the stink to escape," Lauren said once, scrunching her nose, narrowing her eyes, and cupping her hands around the air in front of her, pretending to squeeze the smell into a ball while guiding it toward my face. "It knows you're afraid."

It smells exponentially worse at this hour of the night once all of the shops in our little quarter mile of downtown have hauled their trash out to the curb. The wind picks at the cracked leaves in the street and carries along an unholy stench of fresh garbage blowing hard into my face as I walk past the now-empty windows on each building that I had wallpapered with fliers less than two months ago. Every once in a while I'll come across one of those damn things, crinkled and forgotten in an alley or pinned under a sidewalk bench. It always sets me off. The bright, sun-yellow paper. The bold black letters jumping off of the page. The wandering look in Lauren's eyes. Her forever stare.

I couldn't find a single sad picture of her. Not one. Not in our sparse family photos. Not in her school pictures. Not even in her baby pictures. All smiles. I don't know why, but for some reason I thought it needed to be one where she didn't look happy. Maybe I didn't want people to get the wrong impression when they looked at her. I didn't want them to see her smiling.

I didn't want anyone to smile ever again.

Everything is covered in a thin, filmy sheet of haze. The empty bottle in my pocket begins to feel heavy. I stumble across the street away from the Lauren-less windows and my eyes settle on the cream-colored brick of the police station, offset from the other buildings and garnished with short, frail-looking trees poking out of the parking lot lined with silent squad cars. Light pours out of the front windows, forming a cube of yellow on the pavement.

My fingers curl around the empty bottle. I wind up and throw, stumbling in my follow-through as it shatters in the small space between the 'L' and 'I' of POLICE spelled in dark painted letters below the slanted roof.

I should leave.

I definitely should not go inside.

I should go home.

But I don't.

I walk up to the double doors and rest my forehead against the glass, dizzy and slightly winded by the throw. I don't expect the doors to open, so when they do, I let out a grunt and close them again.

I should not be here right now.

I reach for the door again, whiffing, somehow, and begin falling in slow motion until a bush catches me before letting me drop the rest of the way to the ground. I cuss myself out and then try again, pulling the door open and slipping inside. I hug the wall for a few moments before remembering that I'm not breaking and entering. I'm just entering. The door was already open. Then the rage kicks in, and I wish I had another empty bottle to throw or another full bottle to drink or another stack of fucking fliers that I could staple to every single cubicle to remind everyone here what a bunch of failures they are and how they suck at their jobs and shouldn't get paid or be allowed to eat or sleep until they do what they're supposed to.