by B A Trimmer
“Put her back in the chair,” he said with a laugh. “I don’t think you’ll have to worry about tying her down.”
As they dropped me onto the chair, I began to slide off it. One of the men walked behind me and again grabbed both sides of my head, holding me upright.
Bright lights seemed to pop in front of my eyes, and tears slid down my face as my body was racked with spasms. I tried to take in a deep breath, but it hurt too much to do so, and I was reduced to panting.
“Now then,” the man with the stun-gun said. “Where were we?” Even in my confused state, I could tell he was thoroughly enjoying himself.
He moved the stun-gun to within an inch of my mouth. “I’m going to ask you again,” he said, trying to sound like he was making a very reasonable request. “If you don’t tell me what I want to know, the next one is going into your face. I’ve been told it’s excruciating.”
He activated the weapon and the spark again jumped and sizzled between the electrodes.
“What do you know about Scottsdale General Hospital?” he asked.
“I don’t know anything,” I said, my voice barely above a whisper.
“Such a pity,” my questioner said. “Unfortunately for you, I can keep this up all day long.”
I closed my eyes and waited for the pain to start. Instead, the man turned off the stun-gun.
I heard the sound of heels on the concrete floor. I slowly opened my eyes and watched as a woman came into my field of view.
She was in her late fifties, stocky, and dressed like a businesswoman. She had on a white button-down blouse and black slacks. Her hair was chopped short and she wore almost no makeup. She looked vaguely familiar, but I couldn’t place her.
“Well?” the woman asked, sounding impatient. “She’s the one who broke into the house and planted the cameras? Right? What does she know?”
“She doesn’t know anything,” the man with the stun-gun said. “She would have talked by now.”
“I see,” the woman said, sounding annoyed. “And how many more times do you plan on stunning her?”
“Oh, I don’t know, five, maybe six. After that, the batteries will be drained.”
The woman shook her head. “Benny, I know how much you enjoy doing that, but if she knows nothing, there’s no use in simply torturing her. What did you do with her car?”
“Two of my men are ditching it in the desert, a little north of Wickenburg. When the police find it, they’ll assume she was headed up to Vegas and got kidnapped or maybe murdered.”
“Good, we need to have attention drawn away from us.”
“What should I do with her?”
The woman looked down at me and pondered the question for a moment. “Once it gets dark, get rid of her.”
“Alright,” he said. “Do you care how it’s done?”
“I could care less. Go ahead and have your fun. But dump the body a long way from here. Use that place we found out in the desert. I don’t want her connected with us.”
The man leered at me and snorted out a sick little laugh. “It’ll be my pleasure.”
I immediately knew what he was thinking. This wasn’t going to be quick or pleasant.
At a gesture from Benny, the two goons behind me hoisted me to my feet. My legs were still wobbly from the shocks I’d taken earlier and they didn’t bother to untie my hands. I couldn’t do more than weakly struggle as they dragged me down a dirty cinderblock hallway.
About halfway down the corridor, we passed a large room, and I caught a glimpse inside. Several tables were set up where half a dozen middle-aged women were busily working. I only was able to look for a few seconds before being pulled away.
I couldn’t see what they were doing, but cardboard boxes and white plastic bottles were scattered everywhere. From the activity in the room, the operation seemed to be substantial.
One of the men opened a metal door at the end of the hallway, and they dragged me inside this new room. It seemed to be some sort of general storage for the business.
As they carried me inside the new room, I saw a dirty mattress lying on the floor in the corner against the back wall. They hauled me over and dropped my limp body onto it.
“Don’t go anywhere,” one of the goons said with a laugh. “It sounds like you’ll have some company real soon.”
“Go to hell, you jerks,” I weakly said.
“If you want something fun to think about,” the goon said with another laugh. “Benny always likes to use the stun-gun on his women a couple of times before he gets started.”
“Yeah,” the other guard said with a smirk. “That way, they don’t struggle so much.”
He closed the heavy steel door with a clang. Then I heard the sound of the bolt being slid into place.
Damn.
~~~~
I sat on the filthy mattress with my back against the wall for almost twenty minutes while feeling gradually returned to my legs. I knew I had to hurry if I had any chance of getting out of this.
Benny and his pink stun-gun would be back any minute to act out his sick urges, then kill me. But no matter how I contorted my body around or tried to will my legs to work, it was a painfully slow process.
~~~~
When I could finally more or less stand without falling over, I searched my prison cell. It was a typical storage room like you’d find in any business. There were two sturdy metal shelves filled with boxes of copier paper, files, old adding machines, and all manner of office supplies.
One of the shelves held a guillotine-style paper cutter. It was sitting a little higher than was comfortable to reach. Still, I turned and was eventually able to lift the handle.
Slipping the rope holding my hands together underneath the blade, I rubbed the bindings back and forth across the cutting edge. I had no idea how sharp the trimmer on an old paper cutter would still be, but it was all I had.
I couldn’t see if I was doing anything to cut through the rope, but I kept going. When it didn’t feel like I was accomplishing anything after the first two or three minutes, I began to rub faster and harder.
So, okay. Maybe I’m starting to panic.
I kept waiting for the metallic grinding sound of the sliding bolt. I knew the door would then fly open. I could only imagine how my escape attempt would enrage the man and how it would only make my bad situation worse.
With a fresh burst of panic, I continued to feverishly scrape the binding back and forth against the metal. Suddenly, my hands flew apart as the blade severed the cord. I brought them out in front of me and shook my arms to force some circulation to return.
I quickly rearranged some of the boxes on the shelf against one of the walls. I climbed up the sturdy metal structure until I was sitting on the top shelf and could reach the ceiling’s drop-down acoustic tiles.
As I was about to reach up, my head started to spin. I had to steady myself to keep from falling back to the floor. It seems the drug they’d injected me with hadn’t entirely left my system, and the climb up the shelving unit had left me dizzy. I knew I had to hurry, but I waited another two or three minutes for my equilibrium to return.
Carefully, I lifted one of the tiles and stuck my head up to look around. Light fixtures and electrical cables stretched out as far as I could see. Some birds had made nests in the ceiling space and everything was covered in a layer of feathers, straw, and pieces of pink insulation.
The cinderblock walls separating the rooms did not extend all the way up to the roof of the building. Instead, they ended about a foot above the level of the drop-down ceiling.
I stood on the top of the metal shelf and hoisted myself up. By doing this, I was able to sit on the top of the cinderblock wall that separated the storage room from the room next to it.
I carefully lifted an acoustic tile from the new room and looked down. This room appeared to be an office area. There were four desks, computers, tables, and file cabinets.
It must have been past closing time since the lights were of
f and the room was empty. Fortunately, when I looked down, a row of file cabinets was pushed against the wall, directly below me.
I swung my half-numb legs around and replaced the ceiling tile from the storage room I had just left. Hopefully, this would present them with a mystery as to how I’d escaped from the room. I then carefully let myself down to the file cabinets.
A round metal-bladed fan sat on the top of one of the cabinets and I knocked it over as I dropped down. The sound was loud and I hoped it didn’t carry outside of the room.
I reached up and slid the ceiling tile above the file cabinets back into place. My hope was to further hide how I’d escaped from the storage room.
I climbed down off the file cabinets. There was a window with a metal grill over it in the room and a door leading out to the parking lot.
The door didn’t seem to be alarmed and had a latch to open it from the inside. Looking around to make sure no one had seen me come into the room, I opened the door and slipped through.
~~~~
I found myself outside in a manufacturing and industrial part of town. Wrecked cars and heaps of rusted scrap metal were piled all around the massive dirt lot.
Keeping an eye out for anyone trying to follow me, I crept between two of the dirty buildings. I didn’t have a clear idea where I was, so it didn’t matter which direction I went.
The sun was going down, so I knew that way was west. It seemed as good a direction to go as any. My only goal at this point was to put as much distance between me and the creeps as possible.
I crossed a street, which seemed to be more dirt than pavement, then went down a narrow alleyway formed between a low cinderblock building and a high-bay garage. I glanced around again, but fortunately, no one was trailing me.
I was limping and couldn’t go faster than a slow trot. My legs were still weak and my stomach ached, but at least my muscles had stopped twitching; I took this as a good sign.
Crossing over to a new street, I saw a familiar warehouse, about a block down. There were three large faded pictures of vegetables on the side of it. One was a dancing tomato, one was a smiling stalk of celery, and the third was a singing ear of corn.
The warehouse told me I was on Mary Street, a little north of the Salt River. I turned right and walked up to Curry Road.
Knowing I had to get off the street as quickly as possible, I anxiously thought about where I could go. I had no money, no identification, and no phone.
After being stunned twice and having crawled through a dirty ceiling, I probably looked like crackhead death warmed over. Because of this, I was thinking the helpless-woman ploy probably wouldn’t work.
I suddenly had an inspiration. I remembered what I did the last time I’d found myself in this exact situation.
I made it over to Scottsdale Road. Keeping off of the sidewalks as much as possible, I walked north until I saw Jeannie’s Cabaret.
Scottsdale has several strip clubs and they all seem to do a brisk business. Out of all of them, Jeannie’s is the one that starts to approach what I’d call classy.
While walking through the parking lot, I tried to detangle my hair and straighten myself up the best I could. I didn’t want to be prevented from going in.
I walked up to the front entrance, where a red velvet rope was strung between two poles. On either side was a huge bouncer. Both were dressed in black tuxes with tails.
The men gave me the once over. There was a long silence, and I was sure they weren’t going to let me in.
Crap.
“Um, I heard after six at night, there isn’t a cover charge for ladies,” I said, giving them my best smile.
“Yeah, that’s right,” one of the bouncers said in a rough, gravelly voice. “From now until Sunday night, there’s no cover at all for the ladies.”
This seemed to have the decision come down in my favor. After talking with me, it would have been awkward for them to stop me from going in.
The other bouncer unlatched the velvet rope and held it to the side. “Welcome to Jeannie’s,” he said.
Beyond the rope was a hallway lined with mirrors and thousands of tiny lights on the walls and ceiling. A thick red carpet led the way to the interior, where I could hear the pounding beat of classic rock music.
It took a few seconds for my eyes to adjust to the dim light of the club. There were four small stages and one larger one connected to the back by a catwalk. A woman was dancing on each of the five platforms.
The club was about half full. Most of the crowd appeared to be guys who had stopped by after work, but there were also a surprising number of women. It was still too early for the drunken multitude that would descend on a Friday night.
I looked around and was relieved to see my friend Danica Taylor-Sternwood standing at the bar, waiting for a drink order to come out. I’d become friends with Danica about a year earlier while on an assignment.
There was an empty barstool next to the waitress station and I collapsed on it. “Hi, Danica,” I said.
Danica glanced my way and it was apparent that she didn’t recognize me. She paused a moment before I saw the recognition in her eyes.
“Laura?” she asked. “Is that you? What happened? You look terrible.”
I nodded my head. “Long story, but it’s been a rough day. I just escaped from some jerks who’ve been holding me at a business south of Curry in that industrial area.”
“Oh my God,” Danica gasped. “Are you alright?”
I had to think about it for a moment. I did a quick mental check of all my body parts. Finally, I nodded my head. “Yeah, I’m a little sore, but I think I’ll be okay.”
About a year earlier, Danica had also been kidnapped and held in a business in the same industrial park. Fortunately, she’d been rescued by Gina before the men who had taken her could do more than bruise her in a couple of sensitive areas. When I searched her face, I could see she was reliving the horrible memories.
“You always seem to be in danger,” she said as she shook her head. “Have you ever thought about finding a different job?”
“All the time. Can I borrow your phone?”
“Sure, um, it’s in my locker. I’ll be right back.” She then made some hand signals to the woman tending the bar to give me a drink and charge it to her.
Danica took off for her locker while the bartender poured out a scotch from the bar gun. When I took a sip, it had a nasty plastic aftertaste, but I gratefully finished it in a long gulp.
I then remembered I probably still had some of the sleeping drug in my system and probably shouldn’t toss alcohol on top of it, but it was too late. I also knew that sometime soon, I’d want to have another drink or two with Max to help me forget about this.
Danica came back, holding out her phone. She then picked up a tray of drinks and took off.
I punched in Sophie’s number and hoped she wasn’t in the middle of a date. If she was, she might not answer, and I’d have to go with some sort of plan B.
“Hey, Danica,” Sophie said when she answered. “It’s been a while. How are you doing? How’s married life?”
“Sophie,” I said. “It’s me. You wouldn’t believe the shitty day I’ve had today.”
“Laura? Oh, I have no problem believing you’re having a bad day. But why do you have Danica’s phone?”
“I’m at Jeannie’s and I borrowed it. Could you come get me? I need to swing by my place and grab a spare set of keys, then I need to go up to the desert somewhere past Wickenburg to look for my car.”
“Wickenburg? Seriously? That’s more like a road trip than a simple pick-up. You do know that, right?”
“I know. But if you could do it, I’ll make it up to you.”
“Well, you’re in luck,” she said with a laugh. “Now that I’m down to only dating one guy, I seem to have a lot of free evenings.”
“Thanks, Sophie. You’re a lifesaver.”
“I know I am. Now, don’t forget, you owe me big time.”
~~~~
Sophie walked into the club about twenty minutes later. As she did the last time she’d been here, she spent a few minutes checking out the guys, who were looking at the dancing women.
“Damn,” she said as she came over to where I was sitting. “There’s something about walking into a room full of horny guys that gets my blood going. You can actually smell the desperation in here.”
“Well, before you get going too far, keep in mind we’re leaving in a few minutes.”
“Fine, but don’t forget, you owe me. Where’s Danica?”
“She’s over there,” I said, pointing to the catwalk.
Sophie went to the stage and waved. Danica walked to the edge of the platform and bent over so they could talk. After a few moments, Sophie came back, a massive smile on her face.
“Danica says she’s worried about you,” Sophie said. “But I told her that a shitty day for you is pretty much par for the course.”
I was about to protest, but Sophie was right. “Let’s get out of here.”
~~~~
As she drove over to my place, I told Sophie about what had happened since I’d gone into the townhouse earlier in the afternoon. She only shook her head.
“You really did have a crappy day,” she said as she reached over and pulled a feather out of my hair. “Are you going to call the police this time?”
“I actually thought about it, but I don’t think it would do any good. I’d fill out a lot of paperwork and answer a lot of questions. The police would go out to the business where I’d been taken to be tortured. They’d interview some of the people who work there. All of them would deny I was ever at the business and say they had no idea what I was talking about.”
“You’re probably right about that.”
“I have no way of proving anything and it’ll be my word versus theirs. If you were the police detective looking into my story, what would you do?”
“Well, are you at least going to tell Max? You know he’ll want to know all about it, especially if this has something to do with a rival gang.”