by Lisa Black
She pulled on the thin carpeting beneath her, stiff but not tacked down. A piece of plywood covered only the spare tire, not the entire expanse of trunk floor, so she could move it aside with a minimum of scrapes and splinters to get at the grimy lower crevice. Unfortunately, the lower crevice was peppered with exposed bolts and contained a jack that removed her kneecap from the rest of her leg. At least, it felt like that.
As she rubbed her knee he turned another corner. Her head would have slid into the fender frame if the exposed bolt holding the spare and jack down hadn’t caught her handcuffs, arresting her movement.
Suddenly, she had an idea.
A large wing nut held those items down, and in the pitch darkness her fingers found it. At first it seemed frozen by who knew how many years of inactivity, but she twisted it with a desperation more of anger than fear. At last it started to turn.
James stomped on the brakes for some reason, and the resultant bouncing thrust the back of her neck into the trunk lid. If she got out of this without permanent paralysis, she’d have done well.
The nut took an annoyingly long time to rotate off – guaranteed to further frustrate any unlucky motorist who needed to change a flat tire – and she pulled the jack off the top of the spare. It didn’t seem very big, but then it would have to be able to lift a car, right?
Her hands ran over the basic diamond shape of the item. It had to have a handle, which would double as a tire iron with a crowbar end for removing hubcaps.
But she couldn’t find it. In a car this old it might have been missing for years, and the jack would be useless without any way to crank it open.
In the pitch dark, and trying not to let her face bounce down on to the protruding center bolt, she felt all over the crevice. Nothing, save for decades old grease spots and insect carcasses.
The car came to a stop and didn’t start again. In fact, James killed the engine. Theresa stopped moving for a moment to listen. She heard (and felt) the car door slam as he got out. No other car engines, no traffic noises. No voices. Maybe they were in some isolated area where he intended to leave her to die. But on gravel, to judge from the faint crunching as James stepped away from the car, so it couldn’t be that remote.
She didn’t shout or pound. Her dignity had limits, and it wasn’t as if he could have forgotten her presence. He either intended to let her out, or he didn’t, and pounding wouldn’t make a difference. Besides, if she stayed quiet he might get curious or concerned enough to check on her welfare.
But she continued her search for the tire iron, her hands roaming without sound.
Then she heard another car engine approach, and stop. A door slammed. James – at least she thought it was James, she couldn’t be sure – said something.
Suddenly, a loud bang split the air, and a bullet tore through the trunk.
It happened so fast that she didn’t have time to scream. She wouldn’t even have been sure what had occurred, but the resulting hole in the frame let in a tiny point of light that alerted her to reality. Her body reacted with animal instinct, forming the tightest ball it could even as she felt a shower of metal shavings sprinkle across the hands over her face.
She didn’t move.
After a second she heard another shot.
Theresa held her breath. If whoever had the gun out there knew she was in the trunk he could pepper it with bullets until she bled out. But if he didn’t know, she wasn’t about to alert him.
Unless it was James doing the shooting, but she couldn’t quite see the logic in that. He might have met up with a friend who sold him a gun, but then why would James shoot his seller? Hell of a way to get out of a bill.
If James had encountered a patrol car and resisted arrest, she would be hearing police radios and a flurry of activity. As it was she heard nothing except a faint crunching. This must have been the person walking away, because then she heard the thud as the car door slammed and, a second later, the engine started up. The other car drove away, churning up the stones underneath its tires.
Still she waited. She made herself count to sixty to give the shooter a full minute to leave, as if that might create some magic buffer zone that would keep her safe, a grace period which guaranteed he would never return.
‘James?’ she called.
No answer.
She rolled over and tried to peer out the small hole left by the bullet. It had actually passed through two walls of metal, and so she could only see through by moving her head to the exact trajectory. This required shoving her scalp into the tight corner of the trunk where the layers and spaces of the metal frame grabbed her hair and ripped some of it out, but finally she could glimpse a sliver of the outside world.
Gravel, trees, and a clothed leg. It lay flat against the ground and wore the same pants James had been wearing.
She shouted again. No movement. No sounds at all, which did not bode well for the idea of rescue. She really needed some passer-by to notice the body and call the cops, but from the dead silence outside the vehicle she knew she couldn’t count on it.
Back to the project at hand. James could be lying outside the vehicle bleeding to death, but she could do nothing about that right now. If either of them were to have a chance of survival she needed to get out of that car.
The bullet had actually helped the situation; between even that minuscule amount of light and no light at all there gaped a large and substantial difference. And now that the car wasn’t moving she could wriggle around without constant knocks to her head and neck. Almost.
She lifted the spare tire off its post, feeling around at the very bottom of the recess, trying not to think about the greasy, unknown things her fingers encountered. She found a booklet that seemed thick enough to be the owner’s manual, a leaky quart of extra oil, and, at last, the tire iron. Or jack handle, or whatever its proper name might be.
At first she tried dispensing with the jack entirely and wedged the flat end of the handle into the weatherstripping between the trunk and the lid, trying to prize them apart. Give me a lever and I can move the world. Perhaps he had thought so, but Archimedes had never tried to open a car trunk from the inside because Theresa got exactly nowhere. She only created some rectangular divots in the edge of the car frame. She would have to use the jack, but she had no idea if it would even work. She feared it might just pop through the metal of the lid without releasing the latch.
Again, the tiny bit of light came in handy. She positioned the jack in the center of the trunk rear, right next to the latch, and held it in place with one foot, since the cuffs kept her hands too restricted to both hold the jack and pump the handle. Insert iron, begin to crank. This would have been so much easier outside in the open where her knuckles wouldn’t scrape against the trunk lid with every pump.
The thing rose with agonizing slowness, no matter how frantically she worked the handle up and down. After what seemed like a half-hour the saddle finally touched the inside of the lid. Theresa continued to pump.
The top of the jack began to press against the lid interior. Then it created a dent in the lid interior, or at least it looked that way in the limited ambient light.
She kept pumping.
The car began to make a sort of groaning noise, which started as a small thrum but grew to a throaty purr. The jack handle showed a touch of resistance.
She kept pumping. A new sound presented itself, and after a moment she realized that it came from her, her lips forming the words please work please work please work over and over.
The latch fought until the bitter end, but still the car’s groan increased until, with a short screech of metallic agony, it slipped off its rod and the lid popped open. It didn’t fly back with a ta-da air, but it seemed dramatic enough to Theresa. She pushed it up and leapt out, leaving her friend the jack without so much as a thank-you. Only then did she take a deep breath, look around, and recall that they had landed in a gravel lot and that she wore nothing on her feet.
She and the car sat behind
a large, plain building, possibly a warehouse from its lack of windows, doors or other accessories. A lightly wooded and deeply littered area ran to the other side. No other cars presented themselves. She had no idea where she might be.
James stretched, face up, about ten feet from the car. The gravel bit into her feet as she ran to him.
A hole in his T-shirt blossomed blood, spreading through the fabric and leaking on to the dirty white rocks below. But she would guess it had been the one in his forehead that ended his life before he could even cry out. Much more than a pinprick.
It seemed strange to crouch there next to the dead body of a man with whom she had spent the morning in close quarters. He had kidnapped her, cut her and locked her in a trunk, so she couldn’t quite grieve his loss. He had killed three men, men she knew, brutally. But Theresa thought he had loved his wife, even if he hadn’t known how to be a good husband to her. And now it seemed that perhaps he hadn’t killed her, either – otherwise why would someone lure him to an isolated spot only to drill him through the brain?
So she spared a moment to express her regret to James for the way things had turned out.
Then she looked through his pockets for his cellphone.
TWENTY-SIX
‘You’re where?’ Shephard asked.
‘At a place called Brynwood Manufacturing, off Woodland and East 79th. The guy here says we’re right by the tracks.’ She sat on an old steel desk talking on a phone so dilapidated that she didn’t want to put it to her face and so instead held it a quarter of an inch from her skin. She was surrounded by at least five men, who eyed her as if she were a hamburger accidentally dropped into the lion cage. That she had shown up in, essentially, pajamas as well as handcuffed with a pair of hot-pink bracelets had no doubt prompted all sorts of theories as to her history, each one more salacious than the last. Yes, they were having a mental ball filling in the gaps.
The interior of the factory, by contrast, had been painted a brilliant white, and there were at least one or two windows, forming an odd backdrop for the workers in stained, rumpled clothing. ‘Get here. Quickly. James’ body is sitting out there by itself. Whoever killed him also took his cellphone, so I had to walk until I found an open door.’
‘Units are on their way, and I’m getting in my car now.’
‘Bring Don.’
‘Of course,’ he said, without inflection. ‘What do they manufacture?’
‘Toys, believe it or not. Tricycles, and something that looks like a Big Wheel.’
Two of the men had already lost interest and wandered out for a smoke, since no work seemed likely to occur in the next half hour or so, or maybe for the rest of the day. The other three stood and listened to her every word, including the foreman who had directed her to the phone after she’d shown up at the door with feet hurting and eyes still blinking at the overcast but bright sky.
‘We call it a Big Spinner,’ one of the guys told her, his focus on her chest. Which wasn’t even particularly big, and what, had these guys been in isolation for the past ten years, chained to their work station attaching plastic pedals to large plastic wheels?
‘Why “believe it or not”?’ Shephard asked.
Because, she thought, you would not look at these men and think that they and innocent children could possibly exist in the same world. But she didn’t say so. They were her rescuers of a sort, and she would appreciate them accordingly. ‘Just get here. I’ll be with the body.’
She hung up.
‘We might be able to find you a pair of shoes,’ the foreman said.
‘Thanks – I appreciate it, but my feet are pretty tough.’
‘Want some more water?’
‘No, I’m good.’
‘Do you want us to do something about those cuffs?’
She looked at them as if she’d forgotten their presence, because she very nearly had. They restricted her movement and therefore made her less able to fend off any unwanted advances. On the other hand, waiting for these gentlemen to rustle up a bolt cutter meant she would have to remain in their custody for the duration. ‘No, thanks. The cops will be here any minute, and they’ll have a key. I need to get back to the body.’
‘You might as well wait in here.’ The third guy had eyes like a rodent, round and dark. ‘We sometimes have a pretty good time.’
‘Sure,’ said another, his gaze roaming over her in frenetic cycles, as if he couldn’t take it in quickly enough. ‘We don’t often get visitors.’
She wanted to ask if they had been bussed in from the local penal colony, but they might answer in the affirmative. Instead she fixed the Big Spinner spokesman with a look that summed up how she felt, and spoke slowly and clearly. ‘I have had a really bad day.’
The rodent-like eyes stopped roaming, and the other guy straightened up.
‘Really bad.’
It took only another minute or two for the gallery to break rank and wander away, and she hopped off the desk and pushed past them to the door. The foreman insisted on coming with her; if there had been a murder on his boss’ property he needed to stay abreast of the developments. Happily for her he wasn’t chatty; other than sneaking glances at her bottom, he kept all thoughts to himself.
The large building had, at least, a small sidewalk in front of it, so that she hit gravel for only two sides of the horseshoe shape she had to make to get back to where James’ body lay next to the car. No one else appeared in the long, wide alley behind the plant.
‘Any cameras back here?’ she asked the foreman.
‘Used to be. They broke.’
‘Great.’
‘We don’t have much of a problem with crime,’ he added as a defense, and she supposed that would be true; Big Spinners most likely did not form a major segment of the black market.
She crouched next to the body. From that angle she could see the faint indentations where the other vehicle had stopped. James had stood in the middle, meeting him halfway. He’d brought only a knife to a gun fight, yes, but still it seemed to her that the shooter had been someone James trusted … or at the very least, not someone he expected to shoot him on sight. Though she had been occupied with the jack at the time, she recalled little, if any, conversation. The killer had driven up, gotten out, shot James, and left.
If he had known Theresa was in the trunk he didn’t care – neither about her safety after a round went through it, nor about leaving an eyewitness, since obviously she couldn’t see him. But if it had been him – or her – who called James just before they stopped, then how could they be sure that James hadn’t told Theresa who he planned to meet? James might have told the guy that he had put her in the trunk. Still, unless the shooter had a lot of experience riding around in trunks, he couldn’t be sure she hadn’t overheard the conversation.
Unless James never mentioned a name because he didn’t know who he’d spoken to, only that the person claimed to have information about his wife.
Unless he had been killed over some other element of his past, and the shooter – and the murder – had nothing to do with the ME’s office.
She checked his pockets again, in case she had missed anything, but James had traveled light – no surprise; he had had to cut out of the ME’s office in a hurry, and he probably knew better than to go back to his apartment. The knife had been tucked into a back pocket, ready if he needed it, but never ready enough for a bullet.
She gazed at him for a moment, with no sound around her except the slight crunch of the gravel as the foreman shifted his weight behind her, and tried to observe: did she notice anything she hadn’t while spending the previous seven hours with him?
Well, no. The same close-cropped hair, slim nose, a large mole on his neck. The same T-shirt under the navy hoodie, both dirty and bearing a few stains that were most likely three different types – hers, Reese’s, and his own. The bullet had not exited, she guessed from the lack of any blood flowing out from beneath the body. A large scrape along one temple – probably from Darry
l, she couldn’t picture Dr Reese putting up much of a fight. And a gold band on the fourth finger of his left hand.
‘Did you know him?’ the foreman asked.
She thought. ‘I’m not really sure.’
Theresa stood up and made a gentle path toward the car, studying the area for a casing. They were notoriously hard to find, though gravel should be better than grass, but she did not see it – them, there should be two. The killer had either picked them up, or used a revolver. Finally, she gave up and went to the car.
The keys were still in the ignition, and the window she had lowered was still down. She opened the door and studied the interior, now without the twin distractions of driving and being threatened with a knife.
The door pocket held a map of Greater Cleveland, a small bottle of Bath and Body Works Japanese Cherry Blossom hand lotion – she helped herself to a dollop since she seriously needed to smell better than she currently did – and several loose CDs labeled with a girlish hand. The small armrest console had a few quarters and pennies and a cigarette lighter. The glove box let her know that the vehicle belonged to a Laurel Hightower of Garfield Heights and was overdue for its E-check. The owner had had a tire repaired at Conrad’s and bought something, identified by a gaggle of letters, at PetSmart. The passenger door pocket—
The foreman’s face appeared in the window. ‘You really did a number on that trunk.’
He had just done a number on her heart, but she didn’t say so. ‘Yep.’