by A P Bateman
The conversation had troubled him. He was concerned for her safety. He needed to speak with her again, but tonight was not the right time. The Sheriff cruiser once again rumbled through the streets and Stone smiled to himself. The town of Abandon had a big law enforcement presence. But so far it looked lawless. That was soon to change.
The hotel was in darkness. Stone had left the light on in his room, something he did for security measures, unless it was a room where the key card operated the lights and air-condition or heating in a separate slot. These were becoming increasingly common, although he often asked for a second card to negate this practice. But the lights were out all over, including the lights on the porch.
He saw his bag on the doorstep. It didn’t look like it had been thrown out, merely packed tidily and placed square on the mat.
He stepped forwards to ring the bell, but noticed the door was ajar. He could hear sobbing coming from inside. He nudged the door inwards.
“Hello? Maggie?” he called. That awkward kind of call that is not quite a shout, but has to be loud enough to carry. “Maggie?”
The sobbing ceased and Stone could hear her blowing her nose on a tissue and wiping something. Her eyes no doubt. Stone walked through the hall and into the lounge. Maggie sat across the room in complete darkness.
“I’m sorry Mister Stone,” she said. “I can’t let you stay. Maintenance issues. Please go.”
“I’ll go when I see you’re okay.”
“Please Mister Stone.”
“How about a drink?” he said. “I’m buying.”
“Mister…”
“I’m not going,” Stone said. “Not yet. If you can’t have me stay, fine. But you’re here alone in the dark and you’ve been crying.” Stone stepped into the open doorway. It was more than a double opening, over six feet wide. The doors fastened back to the walls by clips and two matching bronze ornaments. Stone thought they were dogs, greyhounds maybe, but didn’t pay them much attention. He found the light switch and flicked it on.
“No wait!” Maggie protested but it was too late.
Stone saw the bruise. It took up most of her left cheek. There was swelling on her left eye and her lips looked like she’d had bad collagen implants. Bad ones.
“Ice,” he said calmly. “Where do you keep your ice?”
She started to sob and raised a tissue to her swollen eye. “In the bar. There’s an ice machine under the sink.”
Stone flicked another switch on his way to the bar and walked around the counter. He found the ice, filled a bowl and draped a clean bar cloth over his arm. He found a bottle of bourbon and two glasses and walked back into the lounge. Maggie had sat up in her chair, propped a cushion under her arm.
“Are your ribs okay?” he said, putting some ice in the cloth and twisting it tightly. He’d made enough of these before for sports injuries, army training wear and tear and after many a fight through his work. He held the bundle out for Maggie.
“My ribs are sore, just where I fell.”
“Who did it?”
“You wouldn’t know him.”
“You’d be surprised. I’ve met the Conrad brothers.”
She hesitated. “Well you know then.”
“Which one?”
“Does it matter?” she winced as she dabbed the ice on her face. “They’re all as bad as each other.”
Stone dropped a little ice in both glasses and poured the bourbon over. A good glass, more than half full. He passed her one and she drank a good measure of it in one go. Stone sipped and sat down opposite her.
“I’m having a hard time working this out, Maggie,” he said. “I was doing a bit of climbing near the town today and got into a bit of trouble. My own stupid fault. So I headed down into town this morning for some coffee. Settle my nerves down, wonder why I started climbing and didn’t buy that motorbike I’ve been looking at instead. Mid-thirties man stuff, I guess. So I get a coffee and Danish and sit in the diner and watch as a fat, old man tears a strip off a guy sitting in his truck. I’m not talking a cross word or two, I’m talking about a drill sergeant who would probably be told by fellow sergeants that he might have gone a step too far. The man in his truck was broken. The fat, old man goes into the hardware store and I go check on the guy in the truck. Next, I meet the three Conrad brothers. One of them is the fat, old guy and the others are new on the scene and none of them like me talking to the poor guy in the truck. Words were exchanged, egos inflated, but it all ends well. Nobody gets hurt. I see the store sells rope so go in and buy some gear with it in my mind not to give up on the climbing, leave that bike in the Ducati showroom a while longer and go fetch my climbing gear which is stuck up on the cliff face.” Stone took another drink, Maggie matched him. She moved the ice compress to her swollen lips. “I have a chat with the hardware store guy, who tells me all about the Conrad brothers. Maybe a little too much. I’m a stranger, after all. It’s like he wanted me to know more than any stranger needed to. I go back to the cliff, the one you can see from the middle of town, and abseil down. Some joker cuts my rope, but I’m thankfully attached to another line. That’s not a warning. That’s attempted murder. Then when I get to my car, I find that somebody has slashed all four tyres. That’s a warning, or a message. And then when I first got here you weren’t too eager for me to stay.”
She nodded. “Claude called. Said not to let you stay here,” she paused. “That’s okay, but the hotel is empty, I need to sell any room I can. I need the money.”
“What did he say?” Stone poured two fingers worth in her glass, a little over one into his own.
“He said there was a trouble maker in town and that trouble makers were not welcome in our community. He said you wouldn’t stay if there was nowhere to eat or sleep.”
“Figures. I had a similar experience at the bar,” Stone paused. “We worked through that eventually. But Claude and his boys were real keen on teaching me a lesson. Seems I hit one of their men, and that’s not allowed.”
“Which one?”
“Carl. Big guy with a lot of beard.”
“Well you’re a brave man hitting him, Mister Stone. Brave or particularly stupid. He’s an ox of a man.”
“Not so sure about brave, lucky maybe.” “Well let’s hope your luck holds.”
Stone smiled. “So I leave the bar having narrowly avoided a fight, largely thanks to your Sheriff driving past, and go to the diner, where I have already been blacklisted.”
Maggie smiled. “But I bet she let you in.”
Stone nodded. “She had a story too. Have you heard it?”
Maggie nodded. “She’s in trouble and she doesn’t know how much. She’s stopped putting up a front, going along with the Conrad brothers. It’s just little things, but you can bet they’ve noticed.”
“How come she’s still here?”
“You’d better ask her.”
“Do you know?”
“No.”
“Hazard a guess?”
“Her son,” Maggie drank another mouthful of liquor. It seemed to have sufficiently numbed the pain. “If she leaves, where does she go?”
“It’s more than that,” Stone said. “I put it to her that with her outgoings she must have saved some money by now.”
“I think you’d better ask her, Mister Stone. Things aren’t always what they seem.”
Stone nodded. “This situation needs sorting out.”
“Why don’t you call the police?” Maggie asked.
“Why don’t you?”
“No. I’ve seen how that pans out.”
“Really?”
“I’ve been here a while. I’ve heard all sorts.”
“Do people leave? Start again someplace new?”
“Oh, people leave all the time, Mister Stone. The place is deserted.”
“It’s a wonder the shops make a living.”
“Well, they all belong to the Conrad brothers, one way or another.”
“They own them?”
“They own the people, Mister Stone. That’s all it takes.”
“Do you have a phone?”
“No.”
“No landline at all?”
“There was a storm a while back. It took most of the lines down.”
“So, what, they’re just leaving a town with no repairs? That’s ridiculous, the phone companies trace faults, get them repaired. A few days’ tops.”
“We know bullshit when we smell it, Mister Stone. But what do we do? It’s obvious to everyone that the Conrad brothers did something. You can’t get a cell service within thirty miles one way and over one-hundred miles in the other. To west and east are nothing but mountains. Nobody is going up there with a cell phone. Besides, the Conrad brothers own those mountains. Nobody is ever going up there.”
“What about the diner, bar and yourself? The barber, the hardware store? Where do you all get your supplies?”
“The Conrad brothers. They take our orders, add their commission and get it delivered. Transferred from some staging post by Dave Conrad’s trucks.”
“We need to contact the police. I’ll do it,” Stone said. “Surely if we get everyone on board we can get this done?”
“There’s a sheriff’s office in town. For what good it will do you.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Oh, just… It doesn’t matter. Claude Conrad owns this town. Every aspect of it.”
“Does he own the Sheriff?”
“In a way.”
“What do you mean?”
“Elected official. But Mayor Conrad owns the vote.”
“Anyone been to the state police?”
Maggie finished the bourbon, moved the compress to her eye. “People have done what they’ve done. Some people aren’t here anymore. My husband for one.”
“What happened?”
“He fell out with Big Dave. It was a small thing. Peter, my husband, bought timber for re-roofing the hotel from a yard the next county over. It was a good price, even with the hundred mile or so haulage rate on top. Dave Conrad seemed okay with it. It was stupid really. It’s a small town, Peter should have bought the timber from Big Dave, but he’d said something that irked him once. He had made out that I’d come on to him in the bar one night. I didn’t. Never would have. Dave didn’t back down and the insinuation hung in the air for a long time. Peter simply put it down to the guy being an idiot, trusted in me and when it came to buying the timber, he looked elsewhere. I can’t pretend he didn’t get satisfaction out of cutting him out, but Big Dave seemed okay with it. But soon afterwards there came a few snide comments, the odd joke where my husband bore the brunt. Then came the whispers around town. He’d put it around that we’d been sleeping together. That I was a demon in the sack, rode him like a thousand-dollar whore – the talk got cheaper the longer it went on. Peter ended up punching Big Dave. Put him on his backside in the bar down the street. Dave Conrad always was a loudmouth and pretty tough. He got back up and beat the life out of Peter. He wasn’t right for a long time, if ever. He moved slower, took longer to answer questions or think out a problem. It wasn’t something the local doctor could get to the bottom of, but that beating had an effect.” She sighed, wiped a tear from her glossy eyes. “Peter went down to the lake fishing one afternoon, a few months later. That was the last I saw him. His Jeep was there, but his body never turned up. His bank cards were never used. The Sheriff got state police involved, and Claude Conrad went crazy. He said that a disappearance in the parish didn’t need state police involvement, threatened to sack the Sheriff over it. The Sheriff and he had a real falling out over it, but it soon simmered down. The Sheriff was new in the job, probably thought better of it to fall out with the mayor so soon.”
“And when was this?”
“Three years ago.”
“Sound’s familiar.”
“What?”
“Nothing,” Stone said. He got up. “Here, let me get you some more ice. How’s it feeling?”
“Better,” she said, taking the compress off her eye. Her face was wet. She dried it with the corner of the cloth.
“I’ll get another cloth while I’m out there.”
Stone walked back across the entrance hall and into the bar. He got another cloth and looked for another bowl, then bent down and dug the bowl into the ice. When he stood up, the sight of the man at the bar made him flinch. He regained his composure just in time to save face. It was one of the big guys from outside the bar. One of the front row hard-men. The man smiled. Stone frowned, but realised a moment too late as he felt something hard hit his head, compressing his neck and driving him downwards. His legs gave at the knees and as he fell forwards into the bar, his hands didn’t move in time to break his fall. He cracked his forehead against the wood, sagged and then fell to the side, spinning and landing on his back, his head cracking against the wooden floor. The ceiling light shone directly in his eyes, but as the featureless figure of the other man stepped forwards, his foot raised above Stone’s face, he was already losing consciousness. Thankfully, before the foot drove downwards into his face, he had slipped away into an empty sleep.
9
Stone couldn’t see, his eyes were sore and swollen, but that wasn’t the only reason. He was somewhere dark, somewhere confined. He could barely breathe. His nose was blocked by clots of blood. He could taste the metallic tang of his own blood in his throat. But it was the confinement and vehicle fumes which made it hard for him to breathe, not just the injuries to his nose and mouth. His face and head hurt. A dull continuous thud at the back of his head from the initial blow. He knew that he had been bleeding from the wound, his hair felt matted and stiff as it rubbed on the coarse fibres of the carpeted trunk. His mouth was swollen. Maybe this was why they had not gagged him. Worried that he’d choke on his own blood. If it was, then that seemed be a good sign. They did not intend him dead. Yet.
He lurched from side to side, the road noise below him loud and monotonous. The trunk was dark, but strangely, not pitch black. The orange glow of the rear light clusters of the vehicle emitted a dull hue where the trim was poorly finished and once his eyes became accustomed to the darkness he could see the faint outline of his feet against the bulkhead. He moved his legs, they seemed to be free. Not bound by the same tape that held his hands together.
He raised his arms and tried to look at the bonds on his wrists. He couldn’t see, but as he twisted his wrists to and fro, he realised that it was some kind of duct tape. He looked at his watch, but couldn’t see the illuminous dials. Then he realised that they had taken his watch. He was enraged for a moment, affronted. The watch was a Rolex and it had belonged to his father. Or rather, went to his older brother after his father had died. Tragically, his brother had died soon after and the watch went to Stone. Stone’s father had always wanted one, but had always been frugal. Stone’s mother had bought it, second hand but refurbished and serviced and looking brand new. She had taken out a loan for it and paid it back monthly. She had given it to her husband the day he retired, but he had died two weeks later. Stone used the watch, like his classic Mustang, as a metaphor for living in the moment. Stone had no great saving plan, just a few thousand dollars in his checking account, but he bought what he wanted and did what he wanted. And when he wasn’t working, in the job he loved, he sought to experience new and exciting locations and activities.
Stone felt his pockets and was relieved when he felt the small lock knife. These were tough guys, but they were amateurs. He was able to reach his pocket and after a few attempts, had the knife in his hand. He opened the blade with the thumb-stud and positioned the blade as best he could against the tape. A sudden jolt threw him into the air and he bumped his head on the lid of the trunk. He had dropped the knife and it skidded somewhere when the car dropped back down. He felt around the trunk with both hands and tried to use his feet to search it out. The vehicle slowed and swung off the road. Stone realised that the road surface had changed dramatically and that indicated that they were ne
aring their destination. He shifted his weight and felt the knife against his calf. He eased his leg back towards his buttocks, bringing the knife closer. He twisted his torso the other way and managed to get hold of the handle of the knife. Again, he got the knife into position and started to cut at the tape. The blade was sharp and he did not have to try too hard. The bonds broke and he wriggled his wrists apart as the vehicle bumped over soft ground and turned around in a wide arc. The car drew to a halt and the engine died. There was a brief period of time where complete silence filled the void. It was only ten seconds or so, but for Stone, alone and in the darkness and the confines of the trunk, it felt like an age.
Both front doors opened and the vehicle moved on its springs as the two men exited. Then both rear doors opened. Were there four of them? Stone hadn’t thought of that. Just imagined the two men at the hotel, the front runners at the stand-off outside the sports bar. No more weight had transferred. Nobody had got out of the rear doors. Stone heard a metallic clang. And then a series of heavy thuds. He heard a scraping and the sound of debris scattering on loose leaves. As the minutes passed and the sound continued, Stone realised that the two men outside the car were digging a hole.
A grave.
He took several deep breaths to steady himself, to quell the nerves. They were digging close to the car. He was convinced that there were indeed just two men. The digging sounded autonomous, but like a pair carrying out the task. One would jab and hack five or six times at the soil and the other would dig out the loose earth, three or four shovelfuls and then the process was repeated.
Stone was damned if he was going to wait to be pulled out of the trunk and he turned his attention to the rear seats. He rolled over and pushed at the seats. He still had the knife in his hand, so he folded it and slipped it back into his pocket. The seats gave a little, but he used both hands and started to feel delicately for some kind of release system. Many seats fold down for loading items and Stone started to try and recall where these had been on cars he’d used in his work or in hire cars he had used. He found a small catch on one and pulled, at the same time he shouldered the seat back and it started to move forwards. Normally the actual seat part would have to be tipped forward, allowing the seat back to fold down flat, but that wasn’t possible. However, with brute force and determination Stone got the seat back tilted enough to start crawling out. He heard the digging, the scraping and the scattering and pushed, bracing his feet against the trunk pushing with all his might. He wriggled and finally, after a few minutes, he was through and sliding across the rear seat towards the open rear door.