Saving Savannah

"Rick, we've got to roll. You remember Gregory Gates don't you?" asked the deputy who'd stayed with us. The deputy nodded and waved. "His arm wound is really bad. We need to get him to a hospital. You drive his car. I'll bring him and this lady to the hospital with me. We can get statements there."

Rick's look told us that he had no problem driving Greg's Mustang. "It was two of the Druckers," he said. "It wasn't Sam, but his son Joe and one of Joe's kids."

They helped Greg into the back of the SUV and told me to keep the tourniquet tight. The deputy put the siren on and we made good time. "Ma'am can you start telling me what was going on and how Mr. Gates got cut?" he said.

"He was the only one who stopped for me," I said.

"What are you talking about ma'am," he asked. "I know this is traumatic, oh hell...Let's just wait until we get there."

I turned to look at Greg. I could tell he was in a lot of pain. What bothered me more was that those huge soft brown eyes seemed to be having a problem staying open.

Before I could tell the deputy, the door behind Greg was roughly yanked open. A man tried to pull him away from me and I held on. "Ma'am you have to let the doctor take him," said the deputy. "He'll be fine now."

"I'm going with him," I snapped.

"Fine," said the doctor. "But we need to move now."

As I watched they stuck an IV in him and started giving him blood. I followed the gurney all the way down the hall until they went into the emergency room where a big nurse blocked me from going in.

"The waiting room is over there," she spat. "We'll let you know which room he's in and whether or not he has to stay."

I went into the waiting room and sat down. They had coffee and doughnuts there for people awaiting news of patients. I was starving but I continued to watch the door. The deputy came in sat me down. He got me a cup of coffee and a doughnut. "This is a good time for you to tell me what happened," he said. "I spoke to the Sheriff and he's pissed. Greg Gates is a good guy. He's probably one of the nicest people in the community. He's a personal friend of the Sheriff and the judge. This is not going to be nice."

He was looking to me as if I had been the one who cut him.

"Look," I said. "Maybe I had something to do with this but it really wasn't my fault." I told him the whole story from the beginning. I started back when I'd first gotten to Louisiana and my car broke down. I told him how nobody stopped for me that time either. I told him how those men had kept me locked up in their house and raped me for over a year and about how I finally escaped. I told him about my run through the woods and how again no one would stop to help me except Greg. Finally, I told him about the fight. When I finished he looked at me totally differently. He looked pissed. He pulled out a phone and started talking to people. He relayed most of the information I'd given him.

While he was on the phone a very strange looking woman came into the room. She was very tall and dressed completely in black. She had several piercings on her face and one of her arms was completely covered from shoulder to wrist in an array of tattoos so complete that not a square inch of skin showed. Her obviously dyed black hair was quartered into four very long braids two that hung in front of her shoulders and two behind them.

"Paul, where's Greg?" she asked. "What happened to him?" I'm not sure it was the southern accent coming from the mouth of an obvious Goth, the venom in her voice, or the way the deputy cowered in front of her. Of course it could also have been, the stress of the day's events, my pregnancy and lack of food, but it was all really strange and I just passed out too.

When I woke up, I was in a hospital bed with people all around me. As I regained consciousness they gave me a few moments to gather my wits and then started peppering me with questions. The one that puzzled me the most was when they asked me whether or not I intended to press charges against Beulah Carson.

They made it seem as if she was the ring leader. And I heard several people say that she was in jail. My temper flared then and I told them that I wanted to know how the man who'd helped me was.

After a few moments of a very tense stand-off, the tall Goth woman came over and told me that he was doing okay. He's lost a lot of blood and the knife hadn't been very clean so they were worried about an infection. He was on a course of antibiotics. He'd probably be released the next day to go home. The doctors had repaired the damage to his severed radial artery and the blood flow to his hand was fine. They'd put in dissolving stitches to help the muscles in the area knit faster. His arm was immobilized and would be for a few weeks. And after that he'd need physical therapy but in five or six months except for the marks from about fifty stitches, no one would be able to tell anything had happened to him.

When she said all that he would have to go through I just lost it. I started crying and I couldn't help myself.

"Honey, he'll be fine," she said. "We're all just glad that you will be too. Besides maybe this will cure him of his lost puppy syndrome."

I looked at her and wondered what she was talking about.

"Honey, everyone knows you just don't pick up strangers or stop for them in this day and age. One of the methods that carjackers love is to find a cute young girl and put her by the side of the road in a car with her hazard lights on. Some guy stops to help her and they jump out and steal his car and all of his money of he's lucky. If he's not, they can also kill him. The smart thing to do in those situations is to drive right by and just call the police. If she's really in trouble the police will get there and help her. It's their job. Just seeing what happened to Greg just serves to underscore how wrong what he did was. He was stupid." There were a lot of heads nodding.

"Sweetie, I love Greg, but he does things like this all the time. Any time there's anybody with a sad face and a story to tell, Greg is opening up his house or his wallet. He even built what amounts to a flophouse on his property. He lets people stay there sometimes while Social Services, tries to place them. And he's always giving people a job until they get on their feet. Don't get me wrong, that's where I got my job, but you just can't be too careful."

I don't understand why I did it, but when she said that she loved him, I got pissed at her.

I spent the rest of the day answering questions and giving nearly the same statement to four or five people from different agencies. There was the FBI, for what amounted to kidnapping and being turned into a sex slave. There was a woman from social services because they had to decide what to do with me. ATF wanted to know whether or not I saw guns, drug making equipment, or anything illegal like that. And finally the man from the Sheriff's department came. He was the one who told me why they were only looking to charge Beulah.

It turned out that after the deputy had seen Joe and Melvin and identified them, they knew exactly where to go. All of the men in the family had at one time or another been arrested so they'd been to the house several times before.

This time though, when two cars full of deputies went to the house, Joe and the boys, who'd been in the process of moving everything they could and getting out of there, had opened fire on the deputies.

The deputies had returned fire and shot Joe and Zeke. Randy had tried to slip out the back and had been shot too. Melvin had seen one too many movies because he tried to pull a Butch and Sundance and leap off the edge of a steep drop a few yards from the back porch into the swamps where he thought he could escape. He broke his neck in the drop. Beulah and Jennifer had surrendered after being asked over a bullhorn to drop all of their weapons. Jennifer had been sure that Melvin had escaped. When she saw his body she lost it and charged the deputies, believing that they had killed him.

She went down in a hail of bullets screaming at the deputies with what they thought was a gun but turned out to be a cigarette lighter. Beulah was the only one charged because she was the only one alive except for the baby.

After the deputy left, the woman from the social services department came back. I'm sure she was only being professional, but her manner and disposition were terrible.

"Okay Miss Hill," she began. "Who should I call?"

"I'm sorry," I said. "I don't understand what you mean."

"Do you have any family or friends that I should call to come and pick you up?" she asked.

I gave her Jaime and Earl's address in Texas. "There's no one closer?" she asked.

"There's no one else period," I said. She left the room and the tall Goth girl came back over and sat down on the edge of my bed.

"I guess we may have gotten off on the wrong foot," she said. "I'm Kerrie, Savannah. According to the doctors, medically you're fine. You're suffering from dehydration and a touch of malnutrition, but they figure a few days of eating well and you'll be as fit as a fiddle."

Somehow it was really hard to reconcile her almost vampire-like appearance with that southern accent. I almost wanted to close my eyes when she talked to me. I also wondered why she didn't sound Cajun like so many of the other people around here. That piercing sticking out from just under her lip made me want to throw up.

"So would you like to take a little walk with me?" she asked. I was so busy wondering what the hell it was that made her want to get all of those tattoos and piercings when she was clearly an attractive woman under all of it that I'd missed most of what she was talking about.

"Uhm sure," I said, not understanding where we were going or why. I didn't want her to think that I hadn't been listening to her. She could have been asking me to take a stroll through hell and I'd just volunteered.

I got down from the bed and put on a pair or thick suede slippers that she'd brought in for me. The fur linings were so soft that I never wanted to take my feet out of them. She handed me a robe that also appeared to be new, like the slippers.

"I'm sure you don't want to walk around in just that hospital gown with your ass showing," she smiled.

I nodded and noticed that I was still a little shaky on my feet. "It's not far," she said. She gently took my arm and led me down the hall and around a corner. She smiled and waved or spoke to nearly everyone we passed. She exchanged pleasantries with many of them. And no one was shocked or even seemed to notice her appearance. That told me that they were used to her, so she'd probably either grown up here or had lived here for a considerable period of time.

She led me into another hospital room. There on the bed was my would-be savior. He was asleep. I did notice that there were several tubes running into him and he was hooked up to a machine that had all kinds of squiggly lines flashing across it. I'd seen one on TV once at Jaime's house. I think it had something to do with his heart but I had no idea exactly what it did.

"Shit," said Kerrie beside me. "He was awake just a few minutes ago when I came to get you. He was worried about you and..." she looked at me and sat me down in the chair next to the bed.

"It's over, Hon," she said. "What are you crying about now?"

"Both times," I said. "Both times, he was the only one."

"I still don't get it," she said. She pulled another chair over beside me and sat down. She was stroking my hand gently. "Savannah, what's wrong. You can tell me about it."

"Both times that I was stuck on that highway, lots of cars passed by me. Most of those people saw me, but he was the only one who bothered to stop and see if I was in trouble. And look what happened to him because of it."

I looked again at him lying in the bed. His left arm was encapsulated from the elbow down in a large cast. The cast even covered his entire hand.

"Honey, it looks worse than it is. Jane, uhm, Doctor Foster, she knows how hard headed Greg is. That's the reason for the cast. They don't want him moving his hand until the muscles in his forearm have a chance to heal. The worst thing about it is that in a week to ten days they're going to have to cut that cast off so they can take the stitches out of his arm. Then they're going to put it back on for another three weeks to a month."

"This is all my fault," I said.

"Savannah, remember what I told you before. This is just the way he is. If it hadn't been you it would be some bum he met on his way to or from the movies. Early this spring, Greg brought a guy home that had been at a gas station on the interstate begging for food. It was still a little chilly out, but shit it really doesn't get that cold around here. Anyway Greg decided to put him up for a while. The guy told him this story about being an out of work auto worker, yada, yada, yada. The next morning, Greg told me about the guy and I was all set to get him started with a tryout to see if he could work for us. I went to the room that he was sleeping in and he wasn't there."

"As I looked around the house, I started coming across all kinds of small but valuable items that were simply gone. He'd stolen a couple of cell phones, an iPad and even the Pizza money," she said.

I looked at her strangely.

"There are times when we do all-nighters or at least late-nighters and we need food or snacks. Most of us are addicted to pizza, so we just order it. We have an account at the pizza hut so the orders go onto our credit card, but we like to tip the drivers for coming out. So we have a drawer full of cash right by the door. Everyone around the house knows where it is. There's usually a couple of hundred bucks there in case someone wants to go out to the store or needs gas money or whatever. The guy must've seen someone go into the drawer and he stole that money in addition to the rest of the stuff he took."

"It wasn't a major thing," she said. "Greg had to replace his iPhone and his iPad which was a hassle because there aren't any major electronics stores around here. We had to drive all the way to Baton Rouge to get replacements. The thing I kept trying to get across to the dummy there is that we got lucky. The guy was just a petty thief. What if he'd been a serial killer? Greg has to learn that he can't just go around bringing everyone he runs across home."

"You know what he told me?" she asked. I shook my head.

"He said, nobody got hurt and he needed to upgrade his iPad and iPhone anyway. He'll be fine, but maybe this will make him think twice about that stray puppy habit of his."

"Is that what you think I am?" I said loudly. "You know, people like you are what's wrong with this world right now. Nobody gives a good God damn about anybody else. Remember what you told me before? Remember your version of what people should do? Remember how you told me that people in that situation should go to a safe place and call the police? If he HAD done that...if he HAD driven past me and called the police, I'd be either back in that house chained to the fucking wall, where they would continue to rape me every fucking day or I'd be DEAD."

"Is that what you think should have happened? There are cops all around this place, let's go and ask them how many people called in to report seeing me running down the freeway being chased by two men screaming my fucking head off. I'd been skirting that freeway the whole day even before they caught up to me. Even when I was just walking by myself, nobody stopped. So if it wasn't for what you consider some fault in his character, I probably wouldn't fucking be alive." I just glared at her.

"Uhm...they say that I'm supposed to be getting some rest," he said.

Kerri was on her feet immediately. "Shut up," she told him. "You're fine. If you'd let them give you something for the pain, you wouldn't need to sleep so much. Does it still hurt really bad?"

He nodded his head and tried to smile. She started stroking his other arm, her concern for him was obvious and for some reason it only served to piss me off even further.

The door suddenly opened and that tight assed woman from Social Services came into the room.

"We have a problem," she spat. "I spoke to the owner of the apartment complex that your friends live at. They moved out of there over six months ago. He has no idea of where they are now. He did say that he thought that they were students at the university near there so I checked the university. I got the same story from them. They were students there but they withdrew from the university a little bit after they moved out. They may have gotten a job working on a cruise ship. So that leaves us with a problem."

"The county can only afford to put you up for a few days. I did find out that the state would be willing to put you into one of our homes for unwed and single mothers, but we'll have to fill out some forms and get you registered for state aid. We're going to need at least three forms of ID and to be able to prove that you've been a state resident for at least a year. So if we could get Beulah Drucker or whatever her last name is to admit that they held you captive for all of that time we'd be on our way to getting..."

"She's staying with us and I'm paying for her hospitalization. That way the county isn't out of any money and she doesn't have to go and play nice with someone who kidnapped her for a year," said Greg.

"Mr. Gates, that isn't necessary," said the woman from social services. "It would be greatly appreciated but it really isn't necessary."

"It's settled then," he said. "Kerrie take care of it." Kerri nodded and walked out of the room with the woman from Social Services.

That left me alone with Greg. "So are you okay?" he asked. I turned and looked at him. It was probably a combination of the blood loss and the pain he was in, but he looked so much smaller and weaker than he did when we were outside.

"I don't really know how to answer that," I said honestly. "On one hand I'm so glad to be out of that house and away from those people that every breath I take feels like it's the sweetest air I've ever breathed. No matter how much food I eat, it just doesn't seem to be enough. On the other hand, they tell me that right now I'm in shock and the true horror of what was done to me, will probably result in all kinds of psychological trauma down the road."

"Is that you quoting what they say?" he asked. "...Or the way that you feel about it?"

I smiled and he smiled in return. I was starting to get a warm fuzzy feeling. I wanted to go over to him and stroke his arm, the way Kerrie had. I wanted to tell him how sorry I was for what had happened to him while he was trying to help me. Oh shit, I may as well admit it; I just wanted to get closer to him. I was just about to get out of the chair when that tattooed bitch came back into the room.

"It's all arranged," she said. "Greg you can't come home until tomorrow. Savannah is checking out today. I have to uhm go out and buy her some clothes and things, she had nothing except what she was wearing when you found her. I've also arranged for the Sheriff's department and the DA to conduct their interviews with her at the house. I'm going to leave now to go out and buy her some clothes and stuff. Then I'll get the bunkhouse ready for her and stop back by and pick her up."

"Kerrie, she's staying in the house," he said. "After what she's been through, she needs to be taken care of. And she needs to be around people she knows and hopefully trusts. Right now that's you and me." Kerrie's eyes narrowed and I could tell she was pissed. She didn't want me any closer to them than she could help. She was probably worried that I'd hear them fucking or something. Just thinking about it sent a flash of lust through me.