3 Sin City Hunter

by Maddie Cochere

  Scarface stepped up and yelled at the tattooed man, “Stop it! The boss said no more crushed skulls.” He pulled out a gun, aimed it at us, and said again, “Get in.”

  We had no other choice but to do as we were told. It was dark outside, but with a nearly full moon, we had been able to see each other in the moonlight. Now, in the trunk, we were in total darkness. One of the men started the car, and we were moving. I couldn’t even begin to imagine where we they were taking us.

  It was incredibly uncomfortable in the trunk. Mick had his back to me, but began shifting little by little until he was facing me. I started crying. Once again, I had not only put myself in danger, but now I had Mick’s life on the line, too. It was unbearable.

  “Come here,” he said softly. His hands were around my waist and through to my back as he attempted to pull me close to him. I kicked off my shoes and shifted my legs so my feet were behind me. I felt his warm breath on my face, and more tears came as I smelled the scent which was specifically Mick. He wore a cologne I loved, and it only smelled like this on him. It had always been a powerful turn on for me, but now it was making me cry harder. I regretted that his arrival last night had been so unpleasant, and we had slept together without so much as a goodnight kiss.

  He tried to calm me. “I don’t know what’s going to happen, Susan, and I won’t say I’m not scared, but I’ll do everything I can to find a way out of this for us. They could have shot us, and they didn’t, so this could work out yet. I love you, sweetheart. I promised you I would protect you, and I’ll do my best.”

  “I love you, too, Mick,” I told him between sobs. “I’m sorry about last night, about Dell, about Darby, about everything.” Saying the words only made me cry harder.

  “Shhh. Shhh.” He was holding me close and trying to calm me. He kissed my face again. “Susan, your parents and Darby held an intervention for me this morning. They explained everything. Before they were finished, Dell Grady showed up. The hockey team is still in town, and your dad called him to come over to the hotel. By the time they were finished, I had a pretty good picture of the predicaments you had gotten yourself into. I’m still a little unsure as to why Darby was kissing you at the arena, but I’m only jealous of Darby because of the amount of time he gets to spend with you. I wish it were me.”

  I answered his question by saying, “Darby was kissing me because he spotted these two guys right behind me. He pretended to be my boyfriend, so he kissed me and whisked me away out of reach of them. Believe me, I was as surprised by his kiss as much as you were.”

  I heard a chuckle in the darkness. “I’ll have to thank him later for rescuing you,” he said.

  The car came to a halt. We could hear voices, but no one opened the trunk. Mick tried again to pull me as close to him as he could and said, “Susan, you’re the love of my life. I’ll try to get us out of this.” He kissed me tenderly.

  This brought a fresh wave of tears from me, but I was crying quietly now. We stopped talking and held each other close. I started to feel calmer. Mick’s scent and his arms around me were comforting as he occasionally kissed my cheeks, my eyes, my lips. I felt safe in his arms, and I suddenly knew everything would be all right.

  According to my lighted watch dial, we were in the trunk for nearly an hour before hearing the sound of an approaching vehicle. It stopped, a door slammed, and we heard muffled voices. The trunk lid flew open, and we were blinded by the headlights of the vehicle which had just arrived.

  “Get them out of there,” a voice barked.

  It was Carl!

  We were yanked from the car. Scarface was holding Mick, and the tattooed man, with the crowbar still in his hands, had wrenched my arms behind my back.

  Carl was a lunatic. His eyes were dark and opened wide, his breathing was ragged, and his anger was visible, yet he was preening like a proud peacock. It was frightening in its lunacy.

  “Weren’t the two of you so cozy in that trunk,” he said sarcastically as he started to pace back and forth in front of us. “The fiance, I presume. The man who will give you NOTHING,” he screamed. “You could have had everything with ME, Susan.”

  “Leave him alone, Carl,” I said defiantly. “I’ll come with you, but leave him alone. He doesn’t know anything about any of this.” Mick’s protests to leave me alone were falling on deaf ears – both mine and Carl’s.

  “It doesn’t matter what he knows,” he sneered. “You humiliated me last night, and no one treats me like that and gets away with it. You want him, don’t you? Well, I wanted YOU, and I can’t have what I want, so I’m going to make sure you don’t get what you want.”

  I lunged for Carl. Mick wrested free of scarface, but before he could get a hand on Carl, the tattooed man cracked him on the head with the crowbar. Mick fell to the ground in a heap. I screamed.

  Scarface grabbed me, slapped his hand over my mouth, and wrenched my arms behind my back again. The tattooed man quickly put duct tape over my mouth. My wrists were tied behind my back with rope which they also used to bind my ankles together. I was essentially hog-tied. I couldn’t move, but for the moment, I could still stand.

  I was looking wildly at Carl, and trying to plead with him, but the tape only produced muffled sounds. Carl was laughed uproariously. He pointed at Mick and told the men, “Put him back in the trunk.”

  They picked up Mick’s body, and I heard him groan. Thankfully, he was still alive. They tossed him like a ragdoll into the trunk and slammed the lid. Carl walked to the truck he had been driving, reached into the back, and pulled out a gas can. He set it down on the ground beside the rental car. With a look of pure evil, he barked at the two men, “The girl gets it first.” He laughed a manic laugh before opening the back seat of the car, grabbing the garbage bag, and returning to the truck. He swung in, turned the truck around, and headed back toward the city. I tried to move to get away from the men, but I instantly fell over. I was screaming, but the tape refused to allow the sounds to be heard.

  The men dragged me across the desert, one on each side of me, with a hand under each arm. My feet hurt. I had kicked my shoes off in the trunk and had no protection for the soft tops of my feet as they dragged along the rough landscape.

  I didn’t know where they were taking me or what they were going to do to me. There was no way Mick could help me, and if I couldn’t get away from these two guys, I knew what Mick’s fate was going to be.

  I thought they would never stop dragging me, and I was sure the skin was entirely off of my feet by now. I looked up to see if I could see anything ahead of us, and my heart sank. I started to scream again and began to wriggle and fight. It was useless, and they only jerked me harder. They were dragging me toward the railroad tracks.

  Chapter Thirteen

  I could barely breathe. Crying with my mouth taped had only served to partially stuff up my nose, and I needed to blow it. I felt like I was struggling for air. The two men dragged me onto the railroad tracks. I tried to kick with my feet, but they easily overpowered me and used more rope to secure my feet to one side of the tracks. My bound hands were secured to the other side by even more rope. They had positioned me on a slight angle so I could see down one end of the tracks as well as from where we had just come. I assumed they wanted me to watch back toward the car, and also to be able to see when the train approached. My head was literally resting on one rail.

  Tying me down had only taken a few minutes, and the two men were off and running toward the car which held Mick in the trunk. Several minutes later, I heard the explosion and saw the fireball go up into the night sky. I could just barely see the lights to their car come on and then drive out of my line of sight. I screamed again as loudly as I could. I was crying uncontrollably and kept screaming and screaming until I simply couldn’t scream anymore.

  This was the worst thing I had ever gotten myself into. If Mick hadn’t seen that stupid USA Today article, he might not have come out early, and this would have never happened. All of this was my fault. M
y heart was utterly destroyed as I watched the car burn. The pain turned to numbness, and calmness was coming over me again. I knew I could lie there and let the next train take me away from this life.

  I was quiet and held my breath for a second. I thought I felt an ever-so-slight vibration on the rail under my head. I looked down the track, and far off in the distance was a speck of light. A train. A train! Survival is a strong desire, and although I knew I deserved to die, the panic came quickly, and I started fighting against the ropes. I was screaming again even though there was no one to hear. The ropes! If I could only get one hand free, I might be able to get loose. I started twisting my hands back and forth creating painful rope burns. I just needed to get one hand out!

  Something caught my eye in the moonlight. It was coming to me almost from the direction of the burning car. Mick! Mick had gotten out somehow. He hadn’t died in the fire! I tried hard to bring attention to the fact a train was coming, but nothing I was doing was making any sense. As the figure approached, I could see it wasn’t Mick. It wasn’t Mick at all. It was Dudley! My screams started all over again. I was frantic to get my hands out of the ropes and fought harder against the pain and the knots. Dudley was going to force me to stay on these tracks so the train could run over me.

  It was too late. He was right beside me now. I quit squirming and could only lie there crying. Dudley reached down and ripped the tape from my mouth. As I took a deep breath to let out a scream, he clamped his hand down hard over my mouth. “I’m not going to hurt you, lady,” he growled at me. “I’m here to help. Jeez, Chuck said you were a piece of work, and he wasn’t kidding. I’m going to take my hand away, and you have to be quiet. Then I’m going to cut these ropes and get you off of these tracks, you hear me?”

  I nodded my head. I didn’t say anything. The train was audible now and the light was much closer. Dudley worked hard with a knife to saw through the thick ropes. When he finally had me free, I could barely stand, and he had to support me as I stepped off the tracks. We weren’t thirty yards away when the freight train came rumbling through. I sank to my knees in complete weakness at the sound of it. My muscles had nothing left in them to hold me up. Dudley picked me up like a sack of potatoes and threw me over his shoulder. I didn’t care that it hurt.

  He made his way to a spot only a short distance from the burning car. It was a rock formation about 50 feet high. Behind the rocks was a four-wheel vehicle – and Mick!

  Dudley tried to set me down, but I fell to the ground. My legs still had nothing. Mick rushed to my side and gathered me into his arms. His voice was thick with emotion. “Susan, sweetheart, you’re alive! I don’t know who this man is, but I can’t believe he made it to you in time. I’m so sorry. I’m so truly sorry. I couldn’t help him. I was seeing double, and I couldn’t stand up.”

  “That’s Dudley,” I told him as I collapsed against his solid chest. It was all a blur for a few minutes, and I was aware I was being pushed around, but somehow Dudley managed to get all three of us situated on the four-wheeler, and we started off at a slow clip, not down the road, but off-road on the rough landscape. The vehicle was surprisingly quiet, Dudley used no headlight, and he seemed to know exactly where he was going. The ride was bumpy, and even painful, but it was bearable with Mick’s arms around me.

  I assumed we were running parallel to the roadway, and I had confirmation when we saw three police cars speeding toward the burning car. A couple of miles later, I could see in the distance, a cluster of police cars with lights flashing. Dudley turned to approach the vehicles. As we neared the scene, I could see the car the two men had been driving, and my heart did a little jump at the sight of the truck which surely must have belonged to Carl. Dudley stopped along the roadside, hopped off the vehicle, and helped me and Mick to extricate ourselves. We had been a bit of a pretzel behind Dudley.

  As we stood there, I tried to understand what was happening. How did the police know to come here? And why were there so many police cars? Why did Dudley bring us here instead of helping Carl to kill us? I was confused and couldn’t put the pieces together.

  “Susan Hunter, you never disappoint,” said a familiar voice to my left. I turned to see who was speaking, and my mouth fell open.

  “Detective Bentley?” I asked in bewilderment. “What are you doing here?”

  “I got a call yesterday from Darryl,” he said. “He said things had escalated here, and you and Darby had succumbed to breaking and entering. I thought it might be a good idea for me to get out here and give the local authorities a hand with you.”

  Who was Darryl? And how did Detective Bentley know Darby and I were breaking and entering?

  He held his hand out to shake Mick’s and said, “Mick, good to see you alive. I’d say it’s nice to see you again, but I’m not so sure, and you might want to reconsider marrying this one. Stay put. I’ll be back.”

  I glanced at Mick and was more confused than before. A minute later, Darby came running through the small crowd. He was by himself, and he was a wreck. He threw his arms around me and held me close in a bear hug. I bear-hugged him back. He pulled away and peered into my eyes. Tears were streaming down both of our faces. He couldn’t speak. He finally looked at Mick, and Mick reached out a hand to him. They gave each other one of those man hugs, and I heard Mick say, “It’s ok bud, we got her back.”

  The night air was cold, and I was shivering in my bare feet. Darby went in search of a blanket. Mick and I sat down on some nearby rocks. A couple of the police cars pulled away with lights flashing and sirens blaring.

  Mick had his arms around me, trying to warm me up. I had my head on his chest and was counting my blessings we were together and both of us were alive. I looked up into his face and asked, “Mick, how did you get out of the trunk?”

  “When those two guys left with you, the trunk opened a few minutes later,” he said. “I was groggy, but I was prepared for whoever opened the lid. I found a small fire extinguisher, and I planned to cold-cock someone with it. It was that Dudley guy who opened the trunk, and I swung at him, but my blurred vision caused me to swing at nothing. He was finally able to make me understand he was there to help me, not kill me. He helped me out of the trunk and made me sit out of sight by the four-wheeler while he went to get you.” His voice caught with emotion again as he said, “Susan, it killed me to hear the train come through and not know if he got you off of those tracks. I’ve never felt so helpless in my life.”

  I looked at him with a heavy sadness and said, “I was waiting for the train to come through and kill me after I thought you had died in the explosion.” He squeezed me harder and tried to pull me even closer to him. There were truly no words to describe the emotions. I looked up again and said, “Dudley is the man who’s been following me every day since I got here. I have no idea who he is or why he’s been following me.”

  “I can tell you,” said Darby. He had two blankets and half of one cup of hot coffee which one of the officers had in his patrol car. Mick and I wrapped up in the blankets and shared the coffee. Darby sat down to face us. He seemed to have his emotions under control now. “He’s not a Dudley, he’s a Darryl. And he’s not the enemy, he’s Detective Bentley’s cousin.”

  My mouth fell open. I couldn’t believe it, but I had seen the resemblance when I first saw Dudley at Wolfgang Puck. “Well, who’s Chuck?” I asked. “Dudley said, that Chuck said, that I was a piece of work. Who’s Chuck?”

  “That’s Detective Bentley,” Darby said. “I guess we’ve never heard his first name before. Anyway, when Bentley found out you were coming to Vegas, he called his cousin Darryl. Darryl’s a private investigator out here. Bentley told him that everywhere you go, you seem to get mixed up in something whether you mean to or not. He told him if he wasn’t working on anything, he should keep an eye on you, and it would pay off. Obviously, it did.” He smiled a little smile.

  I didn’t know whether to be insulted or grateful. I’d have to think about it later. I asked, “How di
d Dudley know to come out here to help us?”

  Darby shook his head. “It gets a little confusing for me here. I guess several things were happening all at once. When you didn’t come back from work shortly after 5:00, I called your phone but it went straight to voice mail.”

  My phone was in my purse. Oh my gosh! I bolted upright out of Mick’s arms and interrupted Darby. “My purse! My purse was in the rental car that blew up!”

  Mick stared at me like I was certainly overreacting to a purse. He shook his head and said, “So? We can replace anything you had in your purse.”

  He was right. I could replace everything in my purse. I let out a little laugh and said, “You’re right, but for a second, I thought I still had over $20,000 in cash in it.”

  Mick’s mouth dropped open, and he asked, “How in the world did you get $20,000? And why was it in your purse?” I could see his wheels spinning, and I knew he was wondering if I had actually taken it from the motel room.

  Before I could say anything, Darby butted in and said, “She won it playing craps and poker, but it’s safe back at the hotel.”

  Mick could only shake his head at both of us. His brain was surely on overload from too many surprises and too much information today - in addition to the murder attempt.

  Darby laughed a little and continued with his story, “Anyway, when you didn’t come back right away, and I couldn’t get you on the phone, I called the office. I insisted on talking to someone, and finally got Gregory. He’s the eavesdropper, right?” I nodded my head. “Well, he was eavesdropping again, because he heard you tell Mick you wanted to go to Anna’s. I knew right then you were going to make Mick take you, so you could get the motel key. I tried to get there in time to talk you out of it.”