Chapter 1: Abduction

It was a day like any other in Longview, Kansas. Located in the geographic center of Kansas, you could see both trees in the state. It was also close enough to the geographic center of the United States that it challenged any other town to try to claim the title. That was its only official tourist attraction and might have been the least visited attraction in the country.

If you climbed to the top of the water tower in Longview—as had many high school students, attested by their class numbers painted on the landmark—with a good pair of binoculars, you could see the Rocky Mountains in the West and the Mississippi River in the East. There was really no reason to look either north toward Nebraska or south toward Oklahoma.

There were many notable sites, much interesting history, and a few eccentric people in this lazy Midwestern town of 3,758 souls. Most of that will be revealed as the story progresses. In its Wild West days as a cowtown, it was known as the best armed city in America. It was pretty much all farmland in the twenty-first century, mostly wheat, corn, and sorghum. But there wasn’t a farmer on the prairie who couldn’t shoot straight.

Longview happened to also be a town devoted to the celebration of Halloween. That was its unofficial tourist attraction. It was not merely a children’s holiday, but a day when the normally reserved citizens all dressed in outrageous costumes and attracted celebrants from miles around. On that day, the population of Longview doubled.

The legend has it that back in October of 1869 a prairie fire raged so hot and swift that the town was covered in smoke. People feared for their survival and all wore bandanas over their faces so they could breathe. As it happened, two rival gangs of Texans—it’s always the Texans—decided to rob the newly opened Butterfield Bank, founded by Isaiah Butterfield, which was said to have more than $300 in its old Cary safe. They rode into town with their faces covered with bandanas only to find everyone in the bank similarly attired. There were a couple of fistfights that broke out, and when the Texans realized they couldn’t tell who was who, they retired to the houses of prostitution where it is said they left more money than they would have gained had they cracked the safe.

And all the time, they were in the company of women without a stitch of clothing on except the masks across their faces. Some of the ‘respectable’ women of town were thought to have earned a few extra dollars that night.

The masks and the lewd behavior had stuck as a part of the last night of October for over 150 years.

None of that would qualify Longview to become the next capital city of the United States of America. It took a far-thinking genius to come up with that idea, and a strange logic to make it so.

It all began on Tuesday, October 28 at the airport in New York, where Darrell Gwinner was impatiently waiting for his flight home to Longview. Of course, there were no flights to Longview. Its airport was a grass strip through what used to be Ronnie Plunkett’s bean field. He and Patience still lived out there and Ronnie spent his time intently listening to the radio chatter, hoping something would land there.

No, Darrell would have to fly to Kansas City and catch a bus from there to Salina before he could call Stacy to drive out forty-five minutes to pick him up. Of course, it would take her an hour and a half, because everything took longer when you had a three-month-old. Stacy was a fine woman and there were those in Longview who believed he’d married above his station. Including him.

His nineteen-year-old wife was a real looker and proved to be real fertile when she caught the baby batter just a few weeks after they were married. Darrell had breathed a sigh of relief at that. Not that she’d gotten pregnant so easily, but that with the amount of messing around they’d done for a year before they got married, she hadn’t gotten pregnant before. She’d at least managed to finish high school first.

Darrell was a pretty good catch for the girl, too. He’d gone to college and got a job with the Midwest Tillage Exchange. He brokered grain sales from the heartland all over the world. That’s why he was in New York City, a trip that had taken him all day Sunday to be there for a four-hour meeting with the honchos Monday, before being able to fly back to the Midwest. Of course, there was no flight that late on Monday, so he was at the airport way too early Tuesday morning to be free of the hangover from dinner with his boss the night before.

Darrell was a big promoter of his little town of Longview, so when he got the job and they suggested he would want to live in Chicago, he sold the Midwest Tillage Exchange executives on the idea that Longview was smackdab in the middle of the richest farmland in the country and he should be close to where the crops were. To his surprise, they agreed and he went back to his hometown to set up a branch office of the Exchange.

He needed some help in the little office on Wyatt Avenue downtown. He’d hired Stacy part-time while she was still in high school and they’d started screwing long before she graduated. She’d been justifiably upset when she had to quit the job in order to have and care for the baby and Darrell hired another slut from the same high school. Kristin was just a year younger than Stacy.

Darrell hadn’t fooled around with Kristin, though. Too much. And realizing how easily Stacy caught, he was always careful to use protection.

Just as he’d done in New York when his boss pointed out a hooker outside Darrell’s hotel and handed him $500 to go have a good time. He could have taken the $500 home as a badly needed bonus, but he was pretty drunk by that time and that hooker looked pretty fine. Before she left, she’d managed to pull another $200 from his wallet, so Darrell had to hit a cash machine in the morning in order to get home. But what he remembered was a hell of a good time before she left.