“—little burg up here soon,” String was saying. “We’ll get some breakfast.”
“What about—” Mole’s voice. A brush of fabric on fabric. “Somebody might see that we got a girl with a blindfold.”
“Yeah. We’ll take it off, we see anyone around.”
I shifted, hoping that it looked like I was just stirring in my sleep.
“Not like she could call somebody and tell ’em where we are.” Mole chuckled a little at the suggestion.
“Never know,” came String’s comment. “Here’s the place. Not much. Little convenience store. Pull around kinda to the side. Kid, you run in and get us some donuts.” He turned in the seat as Mole parked. “And coffee.”
Coffee. And even a packaged donut would taste like a sliver of heaven. I nearly drooled inside my blindfold.
Apparently there were no people milling around. No one made a move to take the scarf off my face. It occurred to me that the main reason String wouldn’t let me see the little town or crossroads or whatever it was, was because I would see something that could identify the place. The knowledge made me itch to snatch off the blindfold and have a good look around, but about the time I worked up the nerve to try it Ollie came back.
He tapped at the glass and Mole slid his window down.
“Hey, it’s hard to fit five cups into one of these little carrier things. It’s only made for four.”
Bless him, he’d included me.
String muttered something. I smiled, having no clue whether Ollie could see me or not.
Ollie’s side door opened and closed again. The car started. The interior became filled with the sounds and motions of a paper bag being passed around. We began moving, with a few choice words flying as the car hit ruts getting back onto the road.
Tempers settled once we were on smooth pavement again but the smell of coffee and donuts was driving me crazy. I reached up with my clumsy double hands and pushed the blindfold upward. The horizon was visible to our left, with a pale gray sky beginning to reveal itself.
String seemed busy stuffing his face. I turned toward Billy and gave him a look that said, Hey! He pulled the last cup of coffee from the cardboard carrier and handed it to me. Although I normally do a little routine with cream and sugar, today it didn’t matter. The pure black liquid tasted great, just the way it was. No wonder I’d felt so lethargic—two whole days without this. I let the caffeine rush straight to my brain.
I needed that.
It was time, I decided, to stop being quite such the quiet little thing, the go-along-with-the-group sweetheart. They thought I was some Hollywood celeb, well, let them start treating me like one.
“Got any chocolate ones left?” I said, nodding toward the paper bag that sat on the console between Mole and String.
Ollie reached for it and offered the open sack toward me. I could just see myself holding a donut with both hands and scarfing at it like a starving ragamuffin.
I raised my taped wrists. “This is ridiculous. I can’t reach for everything two-handed. You’ve kept me this way for two days and the tape is gross and disgusting.” It was true. The adhesive was beginning to blacken and my skin felt like it wanted to separate from my bones.
String caught the little outburst and turned in his seat to stare at me. Billy looked at the boss with utter trepidation.
“Okay, yeah. Give her a little break,” String said. “But you two watch her. I don’t want no trouble from the little bitch.”
Billy pulled out his little pocket knife and sliced the tape. It peeled off with a rrrippp that left raw patches. I gasped and grabbed at the tender skin.
After a minute or so I took a donut and then a second one.
The combination of sugar, fat and caffeine worked magic as a quick energy boost, but I had to wonder if these guys ate this way all the time. Hey, I’m no junk food prude; I love all this stuff. But where was the protein? And even I crave a salad and some veggies from time to time.
The moment would come when I needed to make a move to get myself out of here and I couldn’t see doing it on donut power alone. Unfortunately, it didn’t seem that I had much choice in the matter.
“Hey, if there’s a kitchen wherever we stop tonight, I’ll cook for you guys.” Now where had that come from? I don’t love to cook, even under the best of conditions.
String turned slowly to face me. “You what?”
“Uh . . . well . . . I mean, I can make stuff. You know, maybe some pasta or um . . . something. I can cook chicken, stuff like that.”
String looked at me like I’d come from another planet. Billy and Ollie both had wistful stares, like maybe their dream mom had just showed up.
I drew myself up a bit and tried to think like a movie star would. “Well, not that I really allow myself much of that food anymore. My personal trainer has me on salads, low fat, high fiber main dishes . . . you know.”
Since I didn’t have a clue about what a personal trainer would actually recommend I figured I better shut up.
“You make your own food at home?” String clearly couldn’t grasp the concept. “You don’t eat out in fancy restaurants all the time?”
Geez, how would I know? I needed to get more adept at this role they’d put me into. It hit me that I knew nothing about Cristina Cross and if any of these guys did, I would quickly blow my chances. Was she married? Did she have children? Did she actually live in Hollywood? She might be one of those Hollywood-to-Santa Fe transplants, for all I knew.
“Just offering,” I said, sinking back down into my small wedge of seat space.
No one spoke for another twenty miles, until String gave Mole instructions to turn west. By my calculation (and by the condition of the road) I was pretty sure that we’d crossed back into New Mexico around daybreak. If we were now heading west we might be approaching the Four Corners area. Names of small towns showed up occasionally on signs but I wasn’t familiar with them, especially the unpronounceable Navajo ones. I picked some adhesive residue off the back of my left hand, mainly for something to do.
I occupied my mind with calculations. I know, it’s a weird accountant thing.
Starting with the big stuff, it was now almost exactly two days since my badly timed visit to the bank. That was Friday, so this must be Sunday. I suppose any first-grader could have figured that one out.
My one ill-advised attempt to scramble out the door had only backfired, giving the men all the more reason to keep me taped, doped and blindfolded, and it seemed that every one of my plans for other ways to get out of this mess had been thwarted. An image of Snidely Whiplash saying “curses, foiled again!” came into my head and I knew I’d definitely taken a mental turn for the worse.
Chapter 19
Kingston pointed toward the farm and Drake gave it some right pedal. Less than two minutes later he spotted a wide, clear spot between the house and a large silo out back. The sun cleared the distant peaks and hit the roof of the decaying house just as he landed the ship there.
From the trees and nearby fields, men in black swarmed the place. Kingston climbed out, gun drawn. “Stay here,” he ordered.
Drake left the rotors in motion, tightened the friction on the collective and on the cyclic, then reached for the pistol he’d brought along. He wanted to leap out and rush into that house, frustrated at Kingston’s warning not to get in the way. His chest constricted, hoping against hope that Charlie would be there, that maybe the robbers had left her behind and fled to save their own skins.
Shouts of “Clear! Clear!” echoed from the wooden structure within minutes of the onslaught.
A man came out the back door, shaking his head. “Nobody here,” he called out to Kingston. Drake took his hand off the grip of his pistol and left it in his jacket.
The FBI man waved Drake over. The black-clad agent walked toward them.
“They were here,” he said. “There’s food in the kitchen, beds look slept in, but they’ve gone.”
“Let’s take a look. See i
f we can get an idea how long ago,” Kingston said. He turned to Drake. “You might be of help, spot something. But do not touch or disturb anything inside that house. Until we have a chance to go over it, anything at all might be evidence.”
Drake nodded. Knowing he was this close to Charlie, he would agree to anything. He shut down the ship and followed Kingston across the dirt yard, past a junker white Pontiac and onto the home’s small wooden back porch.
At its best, the plain farmhouse had been utilitarian. An old chrome and linoleum table and chairs filled most of the kitchen floor space. A faint odor of gas indicated that the stove had been used recently. The counter tops were littered with packages—bread, crackers, half a jar of peanut butter, an empty whiskey bottle, a package of lunchmeat that was beginning to reek without refrigeration in the summer heat. Burned-down candles had dripped wax on table and counters.
“No power,” Kingston commented, flipping a light switch. “Probably cut off, way back when the old woman died.”
“Two bedrooms upstairs,” reported one of the agents. “Lots of old furniture but it looks like the rooms were mainly used for storage.”
“Bathroom on the ground level was used and it’s really rank. I closed the door. One bedroom down here,” said another man. “Looks recently used. It seems the best furnished of them all.”
Kingston and Drake headed through a door into a living room, then into the bedroom. A full-size bed held rumpled heaps of bedding, mostly homemade quilts in multi-colored patterns. A candle had burned down to nearly nothing, leaving a heap of wax on the nightstand. A dresser across the room held a couple of framed family photos, things that dated back to the 1940s by the look of them.
Back in the living room, a heavy cabinet lay on its side, obviously tipped over when the agents had kicked through the front door. A sagging brown sofa and smashed throw pillows indicated that someone must have slept there. A thin pink bathrobe lay in a heap beside the nearby coffee table. The room’s other furnishings consisted of a classic woodstove that some antique dealer would probably love to get his hands on, plus an overstuffed green armchair and a smaller, upright one with a flowered slipcover. A little shelf unit, the kind that used to be given as bonuses by encyclopedia salesmen, contained a stack of gardening magazines, an old postcard of the Eiffel Tower on a tiny metal easel and a pair of chipped ceramic kittens.
Drake glanced over it all but only one item caught his attention. A little bunched-up piece of fabric, the same color as the shirt Charlie had been wearing Friday morning. He pointed it out to Kingston and the agent picked it up.
“She wears those things around her hair, you know, a ponytail thing. I don’t know what they’re called.” Drake’s voice caught. He cleared his throat. “This is the one she wore on Friday. It matches her shirt.”
Kingston handed it to him. “See anything else of hers?”
Drake shook his head. “Not yet.”
“You can go with Sims and look at the other bedrooms.”
Drake nodded and followed the other agent. The two upstairs rooms were just as the other guy had described. They’d been bedrooms at one time, with basic furnishings, no more. But in recent years they’d become the collect-all areas of the house. A sewing machine was probably the only item the old lady had used in the last ten years of her life. He glanced around but saw little evidence that anyone had spent time here, much less traces of Charlie.
Excited voices and the clomp of heavy boots downstairs attracted his attention. The agent who’d accompanied him was already on his way down and Drake followed.
“. . . beauty of dye packs,” one agent said.
“But just two?” Kingston questioned.
On the coffee table in the living room sat two canvas bags soaked in red. At a glance Drake might have thought blood. Four men stood staring at them. Kingston gingerly lifted an edge of one, peered inside, dropped it. Checked his fingers for stain but the dye had dried.
“At least one of the men is going to have this red all over his hands, probably some on his clothing too. Stuff doesn’t wash out.”
“That’s good news then,” Drake said.
“Yeah. Pretty hard for a guy to not get noticed. Harder still to lie his way out of his role in the robbery.”
Kingston turned to one of the men. “Find a way to bag these as evidence. Careful, parts of them could still be wet.”
The agent left and came back with some black garbage bags. Drake watched as they got the messy red bank bags inside without getting the dye on themselves.
“The bad news, of course,” said Kingston, “is that it looks like they got away with one bag of good money. It’s not here. And that gives them cash enough to go a good long way from here.”
“It can’t be traced?” Drake asked. “Serial numbers or something?”
Kingston’s expression wasn’t encouraging. “Not really. It’s one thing if the branch got a shipment directly from the Federal Reserve, packets sequentially numbered. But the money in a teller’s drawer usually contains a lot of used bills from customer deposits and such. Tracing the money as they spend it will be nearly impossible.”
The agent turned and walked through the kitchen and went out back.
Drake followed. There didn’t seem to be anything else in the house that mattered to him.
Outside, the teams were scanning the ground for other trace evidence but it didn’t look like they were coming up with much.
“Checked the VIN on the Pontiac,” Kingston said. “It’s the one we knew was registered to Lonnie Stringer. No news there. We’ve bagged every removable thing from it and will have the car towed back to the crime lab in Santa Fe. Melinda Davies’s debit card was in the glove box, which probably ties the men with her death. Otherwise, it looks like the car will only serve to prove a connection between Stringer and this location. We’ve already got the red truck, the only vehicle actually on scene at the bank so we’re really just covering bases with this one.”
“So now what?” Drake asked. “Any idea where they went?”
“Not a one.”
Chapter 20
We’d been on the road about eight hours now, with only one stop besides the coffee and donut place this morning—some no-name place for gas, during which the men in the backseat were given guns to keep me from doing some stupid thing like shouting out that I’d been kidnapped.
String continued to give step-by-step directions to Mole. Each time, Mole became more resentful and they came close to fighting it out. I almost hoped they would. Mole might pull over to the side and the two of them duking it out would give me a chance to run. I looked out at the surrounding landscape.
Nothing but red earth and sagebrush, wavering in the blistering desert heat. The terrain varied a bit, but unless I got lucky enough that they stopped the car near one of the infrequent dry washes, there simply weren’t a lot of ready hiding places. A bullet would catch up with me before I could get very far, and ducking into a culvert would only make me an easy target. Nope, this was not a good place to escape.
Not to mention that I’m not exactly up on my outdoor survival skills. My tomboy childhood has given over to the easy days of cell phones and GPS, and I realized that I’d never been faced with survival in desert heat in the summer without my cell phone and a toll-free number to call for roadside assistance. What would I do even if I did get away from my captors? I felt myself getting a little panicky at the thought.
For now, I decided, I better make the best of things. Even without air-conditioning, this crowded car and its sweaty occupants were, for the moment, my only way out of the vast open spaces all around me. I started to play around with a scenario in which Mole and String would get so worked up that they would stop the car, get out and start whaling on each other. Then Ollie and Billy would step out to either break up the fight, join in, or just be animated spectators. During all this I, in my quick-thinking way, would leap into the driver’s seat and roar off, leaving all of them in the dust. Take that, cree
ps!
The more I thought about it, the better a plan it seemed. If only I could get all four of them out of the car at once . . . of course the little matter of leaving the keys behind and relaxing their guard on me at the same time didn’t seem too likely. I slumped in my seat again, discouraged.
As if to underscore the unlikelihood of my plan, String began to relax and quit baiting Mole quite so much. He reclined in his seat and turned the radio up, catching a station that blared rap. We must be near a town. Radio stations that came in clearly would be few and far between out here. I stared out at the horizon and caught sight of a cluster of trees at our two o’clock position. Any sign of green out here could only exist if there were a river that flowed on a regular basis—rare—or if humans had planted and tended them. I scanned the road ahead but saw no signs. The blazing sun was almost directly overhead and the dashboard clock said it was 10:43.
String tapped Mole on the shoulder and pointed to the left. A half-mile later a narrow road appeared and Mole took it, carrying us away from the trees. Within minutes the radio signal faded, the rap music—for better or worse—becoming so static-filled that String switched it off.
I caught him staring into the back seat. On either side of me, the two younger men dozed. Being awakened a couple of hours into a night’s sleep, it didn’t take much effort to nap away the trip. I realized that although I felt wired and nowhere near sleepy, it might be in my best interests to let String think I was. I yawned and let my eyelids droop.
A few minutes later, String and Mole started talking in low voices.
“. . . better to travel at night? Find a quiet place to hide in the daytime?” This from Mole.
“I thought about that. We might.”
The whooshing tires on the road were the only sound for awhile.
“Not a big place though. Not on the Interstate.” String talking.
“Sometimes those little places? The ones without much traffic . . . well, people remember things . . . strangers. You know? I’m just saying.”
Stardom Can Be Murder: Charlie Parker Mystery #12 Page 12