Missouri Loves Company (Rip Lane Book 1) (6 page)

CHAPTER 19

T
HE
P
OTTSLAND JAIL
was like the town itself—old and dilapidated.

A guard led me into a cell and locked me in. It was eight feet by eight feet, with a filthy toilet and sink, and a steel bed bolted to the floor. There were no cockroaches. The place was too dirty for them.

The guard left and I was alone.

Nobody had read me my rights. Or booked me. Or charged me. Or even allowed me to make a phone call.

I was hungry.

I wondered when breakfast would be served. I wondered
if
it would be served.

My stomach growled. I growled back at it.

I lay down on the thin mattress and laced my fingers behind my head and crossed my ankles and closed my eyes and thought about things.

Why did the cops stop me? How did they know what I had been doing at the Nobody Inn? Had the bartender contacted them? If so, why?

Maybe it wasn’t the bartender who had contacted the police. Maybe it was one of the customers. Maybe somebody had recognized Anna and the two goons in the pictures.

Maybe, maybe, maybe.

I had no idea what was going on. Which wasn’t unusual. Because things are not always what they seem to be. What at first appears to be a bad thing often turns out to be a good thing. And what at first appears to be a good thing often turns out to be a bad thing—my marriage, for instance.

Being locked up in jail did not seem like a good thing. Nothing about my experience in Pottsland seemed like a good thing.

I was supposed to be retired, no longer dealing with law enforcement, no longer dealing with trouble. And yet I was now once again dealing with both.

I savored the irony.

Anna had screwed up my retirement plans. Pretty faces have often led me astray. I was tired of it. I was hoping to spend less and less of my time thinking about women, and more and more of my time thinking about writing novels.

Lying on the bed, staring at the ceiling of my jail cell, I began to think about writing novels.

Then my thoughts turned to Anna.

CHAPTER 20

T
HEY CAME FOR
me in the early morning. Four of them. I was not surprised to see the two cops who had arrested me, but I had not expected to see the two goons from the bus station. Both goons were wearing Armani suits. Both cops were wearing uniforms. I was the only one without a matching partner.

The four men stepped into my cell and closed the door. The lock clicked into place behind them.

I got up from the bed and stood with my feet planted apart and my hands at my sides. I didn’t want to be sitting down if they decided to start getting rough.

Officer Miller held a phone book in his hand. I knew what it was for. It was to beat me with. The thick phone book would leave no bruises on my body, no evidence that I had been beaten. Officer Miller was going to book me.

Both cops moved to a corner behind me. Officer Brown stood leaning against the wall. Officer Miller stood beside him, arms folded, face scowling.

The other two guys remained near the door.

One of them moved a toothpick from one corner of his mouth to the other and then thrust his hands into his pockets. He had a white scar maybe three inches long running along his jawline.

The other guy reminded me of a reptile. His beady eyes blinked slowly, like a lizard watching a fly. His tongue was lizardlike too. From time to time it would dart out, swish back and forth, and then slide into his mouth again. I could picture him sitting on a warm rock.

The four men had me surrounded.

Nobody said anything for a while.

Finally I decided to break the ice.

“When’s breakfast?”

Behind me Officer Miller grunted.

“The caterer arrives at seven,” he said.

“Oh good,” I said. “Can I put in my order now?”

Lizard chuckled. He pointed a thumb at me and turned to face Scarface.

“Guy’s a character.”

“Ain’t he though,” Scarface said.

I wondered what these two guys were doing with the two cops. It seemed like all four of them were working together on something, and I was somehow caught in the middle of the something.

I had been searching for Lizard and Scarface the night before, showing their pictures to customers at the Nobody Inn, trying to find somebody who could identify them. And now here they were. It just goes to show that it pays to shake the bushes.

“We heard you was looking for us,” Lizard told me.

“You heard right.”

“The fuck you doing that for?”

“Because I don’t like it when my motor home gets burglarized.”

Lizard blinked once. His tongue showed briefly between his lips.

Scarface began to clean his teeth with the toothpick.

Both men had guilty looks on their faces.

“Where’s the locker key?” Lizard said.

“What locker key?” I said.

“The one you got from Anna.”

“Who?”

Lizard frowned.

“Listen,” he said. “We ain’t interested in you. We ain’t interested in Anna. All we want’s the duffel bag. Tell me where you hid the locker key and we let you go.”

“I didn’t hide it. I returned it to its locker.”

“Then you have the duffel bag.”

“Jesus Christ. What the hell’s wrong with you people. No, I don’t have the damn duffel bag. I never had it, I don’t know where it is, and I don’t care.”

“Your response don’t work for me.”

“Well it works for me.”

“You’re fucking with the wrong people.”

“Then tell me who the right people are,” I said. “I’ll go fuck with them instead.”

“You’re not going anywhere,” Officer Miller said, stepping forward.

“Then can I at least get some breakfast?”

“This look like Denny’s to you?”

“I don’t want a Grand Slam breakfast. All I want’s some oats and coffee. Some cream in my coffee. No sugar. Give me that, and I’ll tell you what I know. Fair enough?”

There was no point in holding out on them. I had nothing to hide, nothing to gain, and nothing to lose. So I figured I might as well them the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. At least it would get me some breakfast.

“Fair enough,” Lizard said to me.

“Good,” I said. “I like my oats with blueberries and cinnamon. A few raisins too. Chopped walnuts, if you’ve got them.”

The four men went away and came back with my breakfast.

I sipped the coffee. Not bad for jail coffee.

I began to eat the oats. I didn’t sit down. I stood eating.

“You better start talking,” Officer Miller told me. “You don’t, I’m gonna kick your ass. What do you think about that, eh?”

My oats were pretty good, though they needed more cinnamon.

Officer Miller’s voice got louder.

“You think I won’t come over there and kick your ass?”

“I think you’ll try,” I said, and spooned some oats into my mouth.

“Listen here, asshole . . .”

I held up my hand.

“Okay,” I said. “Don’t get your panties in a wad. A deal’s a deal. I’m going to tell you what I know.”

And I did.

I told them Anna was hitchhiking when I stopped to pick her up in my motor home. My engine started to act up, so I checked into S’mores and Snores Campground for the night, and then I made an appointment to see a mechanic the next day. But Anna didn’t want to stick around. She was in a hurry to get out of town. She needed a ride to the Pottsland bus station. I took her there on my motorcycle. When we got there she put her duffel bag in a locker and kept the key. She made a show of giving me a locker key, but it was to a different locker, an empty locker—which I didn’t discover until after she had disappeared from the bus station. I returned that key to its locker. I did not keep it. The following day I went back to the bus station and watched the security video from the day before. It showed Anna returning to the bus station hours after I had left. She got the duffel bag from the locker and then exited the station.

“Which locker she get the bag from?” Lizard said.

I told him the locker number.

“And which locker was your key for?”

I told him the locker number.

He began to nod his head as he thought about it.

“You got any proof what you’re saying’s true?”

“Proof’s on the security video at the bus station,” I said. “Why don’t you guys go there and watch it for yourselves.”

Lizard nodded.

“Yeah,” he said. “We’re gonna go check it out now. Turns out you’re telling the truth, we’ll let you go free.”

Officer Miller stood toe to toe with me.

“You better be telling the truth,” he said. “Otherwise I’m gonna stomp your ass when we get back here.”

“In the meantime,” I said, “you might want to practice falling down.”

CHAPTER 21

T
HEY RETURNED TO
my cell a few hours later.

“The security video was erased,” Lizard told me.

I shrugged, palms up.

“Ain’t you got nothing to say about it?”

“Somebody erased it,” I said. “What can I do about it?”

“You can tell us where you hid the fucking key.”

I didn’t say anything.

Beside me I sensed a sudden movement.

Darkness took me.

I don’t know how long I was unconscious. It could have been five minutes or three weeks. It felt as if I had slept for a month.

My head pounded, everything else throbbed, and the trunk of the car smelled like mothballs.

They had ganged up on me, given me a beating. I’ve taken some beatings before. But this time it felt like they had used heavy sledgehammers. I was a broken marble statue.

Entombed in the hot trunk, I could hear my own breathing. It seemed loud in the confined space. I knew that trunks were not built airtight, so there was little chance of suffocation. That knowledge made me breathe a little easier, so to speak.

The tires ticked with a steady rhythm over seams in the pavement. I figured we were going maybe sixty miles an hour.

My hands were tied behind my back, my feet bound, my mouth taped. If my nose started to itch, things would get ugly.

The darkness was not complete. Pale daylight seeped in at the edges of the trunk lid. Not enough to read by, but enough to get my bearings.

The shock absorbers were shot. Every little pebble in the road felt like a speed bump. Just my luck to be abducted by cheapskates.

They had locked me inside a car trunk.

It didn’t mean I had to like it.

There are several ways to escape from a trunk. One is to escape through the back seat. If you are trapped in a car that has back seats that fold down to allow access to the trunk, you can search the trunk for a release to these seats. There may not be one. No problem. You can still try to push the seats down. Or kick them down.

Escaping through the back seat was not going to be an option for me, because two of my four abductors were likely sitting back there.

My best option was to find an emergency trunk release.

Trunks are made to keep criminals out, not to keep car owners in. Engineers have better things to do than design trunk lids that could keep Houdini locked in forever. Well, most engineers.

Nowadays cars manufactured in America are required to come equipped with an emergency trunk release. It may be a knob or a lever, a button or a handle, a cord or a toggle switch. It’s usually located near the trunk latch.

Emergency trunk releases are supposed to be easy enough for a three-year-old to find and operate. But it is of course more difficult to do if your hands are tied behind your back.

At least I wasn’t blindfolded. Finding an emergency release is much easier by sight than by touch. Usually they glow in the dark.

Problem was, I needed to turn around. I was facing the wrong way. So I started to twist my body around to face the rear of the car.

I wriggled and shifted, crumpling into a pretzel. The tight space in the cramped trunk made it difficult to maneuver with any graceful athleticism. I was glad nobody was watching me.

It took me less than a minute to twist my body around.

My eyes scanned the half darkness of the trunk. Nothing glowed in the dark. I could see nothing that resembled an emergency release.

I twisted my body around to face the front of the car again, scooted back as far as I could, and ran my bound hands over the smooth steel of the trunk’s interior. I could feel nothing at all that resembled an emergency release.

Maybe the car didn’t have one. A lot of older cars do not. Wise abductors would use such a car.