Resolved To (Re)Marry

by Carole Buck

  “Chris—”

  “Do you have any idea what we stumbled into?”

  “No,” she frankly admitted. She’d been grabbed from behind a few moments after she stepped inside Gulliver’s Travels and flicked on a light. She hadn’t had a chance to register much. “Not really.” Then she grimaced. “But I do know why the guard wasn’t at the security desk.”

  “They’ve got him, too?”

  “Uh...no.” She grimaced a second time, guilt roiling up within her. She’d known that there was something off about Tom! She should have acted on that knowledge. She should have called the police. Or the security company. Something . “Not the way you mean.”

  “Are you saying—?”

  “Yes. Unfortunately.”

  “The security guard is in on this?”

  “Whatever ‘this’ is.” The one thing she had noticed during the seconds before she was seized was that one of the office’s walls had been stripped of its usual display of travel posters and defaced with spray paint. She’d seen a series of intersecting lines, a bunch of lopsided circles and several arrows. Also, an X. A large black X. What the significance of the spot it marked was, she had no idea.

  “Was Tom the guy who tried to crack my skull open?”

  “Actually...that was one of the repairmen.”

  “The alleged toilet-fixers?”

  “Uh-huh. Tom’s the one in brown. The repairmen have on the dark blue jumpsuits.”

  Chris expelled a breath. “I should have known,” he muttered. “Repairmen who work after hours on a holiday? It had to be a scam.”

  “You should have known?” Lucy stiffened indignantly, jerking against the fetters on her wrists. She was not about to let him annex any responsibility for this debacle. “I’m the one who—”

  She broke off when she heard the storage room door open.

  “Ohmygod,” Chris breathed.

  Lucy’s heart cartwheeled.

  “What is it?” she demanded, frantically trying to shift her position. Her uncoordinated movements would have sent them both toppling over, if Chris hadn’t counterbalanced by leaning in the opposite direction. By the time they were stabilized, Lucy no longer had her back to the door. But she still had to turn her head to find out what had prompted her ex-husband’s reaction.

  Ohmygod, indeed.

  Their captors were lined up just inside the door. They were clad in the same clothing they’d had on earlier. They were also wearing masks.

  And not just any masks, either. No, these were the Mardi Gras masks that Tiffany Tarrington Toulouse had purchased for the agency’s promotional salute to New Orleans.

  “Don’t be s-scared,” Tom the guard said from behind an elaborately spangled concoction of plume-bedecked plastic. He could hide his mustachioed face, but he couldn’t hide his scrawny build or his baby-poop-brown uniform. “These masks are for your protection.”

  The utter absurdity of this assertion prompted Lucy to engage her mouth without consulting her brain. “Those masks are the property of Gulliver’s Travels, Tom!”

  “Lucy—” Chris warned in an undertone.

  “Hey, why did you call him Tom?” This query came from the bearded repairman. He was sporting the alligator headpiece that Jimmy Bums had spoken about coveting.

  “Because that’s what he told me his name was.”

  Gator Head turned toward Glitter Mask. “You told her your name was Tom?”

  “I needed an alias!”

  “Oh, great! Just great! And who gave you permission to pick my name to be your alias? Huh? Huh? Huh?”

  “I didn’t p-pick it! It kind of...of...came out of my mouth before I knew it. She asked me what my name was, and I had to say something. ”

  “That something didn’t have to be my name! Jeez Louise, Dick—”

  “His name is Dick?” Lucy interrupted, experiencing a peculiar feeling of déjà vu. This squabble reminded her of arguments she’d heard involving vinnie, Joey, Mikey and the various Falco cousins. While she liked to think that her kinsmen’s level of, er, discussion was a few IQ points above that of these two bozos, she couldn’t deny that the juvenile sniping sounded very familiar.

  The gator head swung in her direction, bobbing an emphatic affirmative. “That’s right. I’m Tom. He’s Dick. Tom and Dick Spivey.”

  Brothers. It figured.

  “Oh, man!” This disgusted-sounding exclamation came from the third member of the trio, the balding repairman who’d knocked Chris out. He was sporting a smiley-face mask. “Why don’t you go ahead and tell ’em who I am, too?”

  In an act that surprised Lucy not a bit, Tom—the real one, not the plume-wearing usurper—accepted this obviously sarcastic suggestion at face value.

  “His name’s Percival Johnson,” he announced.

  Chris snorted, obviously trying to suppress a laugh. Lucy sympathized. There was a semihysterical giggle tickling at the back of her throat, too.

  “Tom...Dick...and P-Percival?” her ex-husband asked.

  Mr. Smiley-Face—a.k.a. Percival Johnson—took a step forward. Lucy’s impulse toward merriment died as she remembered that this was the fellow who’d coshed Chris across the back of the skull.

  She murmured her ex’s name in an undertone, trying to nudge him with her elbow.

  “You got a problem with Percival?”

  Lucy felt Chris tense. He’d apparently realized that he’d crossed over some kind of line.

  “Not at all,” he responded politely. “It’s a very... classic... name.”

  “That’s because his mom was an English teacher,” Tom put in helpfully.

  Percival whirled on him. “You shut up about my mama!”

  “Yeah, T-Tom,” Dick seconded snidely. “Shut up. You know Butch don’t like people talking about his mother!”

  “Butch?”

  Lucy and Chris blurted this out simultaneously. Then, in one of those weirdly spontaneous moments of absolute synchronicity, he twisted his head left and looked over his shoulder at her while she twisted her head right and looked over her shoulder at him. For a few neck-straining seconds, they literally saw eye-to-eye.

  Lucy’s heart was thudding like a tom-tom by the time those seconds ended. She was tingling clear down to her neatly pedicured toes.

  “That’s right,” the maternally protective Percival growled. “I got nicknamed Butch in the slammer.”

  The tingling gave way to a sudden frisson of fear.

  “You were in... prison?” Lucy tried not to think about the behavior patterns that might earn a convict the sobriquet Butch.

  “That’s where him and me met,” Tom volunteered.

  Oh, wonderful! Two of their captors had done time behind bars!

  “I’ve never been in prison,” Dick remarked, sounding a little sad.

  “Yeah, well, that’s because you’re a wuss,” Percival “Butch” Johnson snapped.

  “I am not!”

  “You are so!” This was from Tom.

  “I am not!”

  “Whaddya call not lockin’ the front door to the building?” Butch demanded.

  “That wasn’t wussy! That was forgetful!”

  “No, that was goddamned stupid! If you’d locked that front door, we wouldn’t be stuck baby-sitting these two—”

  “Hey, guys!” Chris’s well-modulated voice cracked like a whip. The masked trio jumped. Even Lucy started. She’d never heard her ex-husband sound so aggressively commanding. “Can we cut the bickering and jump to the bottom line? What are you doing here?”

  There was a long silence.

  “I... I d-don’t think we should tell you that,” Dick finally said.

  “Yeah,” Tom concurred, his alligator headpiece bobbing. “It’s none of your business.”

  “Excuse me?” Lucy said, her temper flaring. “I think people invading my travel agency is very much my business!”

  “This place is yours?” Tom asked. “Wow!”

  “Well—”

  “No, it’s
not hers, ” Dick put in crankily. “I told you before. Don’t you ever pay attention? It belongs to some guy named Gulliver who never comes around. She works here. Her name’s Lucy Something.”

  “Lucy?” Butch repeated. “Is that short for Lucille? I had a hound named Lucille once. God, I loved that dawg.”

  “Uh... no.” Her brief flash of anger had subsided. “It’s short for Lucia.”

  “Lucia?” It was Tom again. “You Eye-talian or something?”

  “Or something,” Chris replied flatly. “Lucy’s family’s been in America for several generations.”

  “Who the hell are you?” The question came from Butch.

  “Yeah,” Tom echoed. “Who the hell are you?”

  “Yeah,” Dick agreed. “We’ve all introduced ourselves. It’s no fair if you don’t, too.”

  For a moment, Lucy thought her ex-husband might balk. Then he said, “I’m Chris Banks.”

  Tom snickered. “Banks, like in money?”

  “Not exactly.”

  A few seconds ticked by. Eventually Lucy said, “If you won’t tell us what you’re doing here, will you at least give us a hint about how long we’re going to be stuck in this storage room?”

  A few more seconds ticked by. The masked trio exchanged looks, plainly reluctant to respond.

  “Tom? Dick? Uh... Butch?”

  The first two dipped their heads. The third rose to the challenge. “Till sometime Thursday.”

  “Thursday?” Lucy assured herself that Butch must have misspoken. While he seemed to be the closest to a criminal mastermind this crew had, he also appeared to have more than a few fried brain circuits. “Are you talking the day after tomorrow?”

  “It’s not that long,” Tom argued. “It’s gettin’ pretty close to midnight. Thursday’ll be the day after today when it’s Wednesday.”

  For an unnerving moment, Lucy thought this last statement sounded almost...lucid.

  “What kind of heist takes nearly forty-eight hours?” Chris asked quietly.

  “The kind where you have to drill through a concrete wall to get to a—” Dick broke off with an inarticulate cry of dismay, then lifted his right arm and pointed a shaking finger at Chris. “You tracked m-me!” He glanced at his criminal colleagues. “He tricked me into telling him that!”

  “He sure as hell did,” Butch said with a gravelly laugh, then flashed a thumbs-up signal. “Pretty slick move, Chris.”

  “Thanks, Butch.”

  Lucy couldn’t believe her ears. What was this? she asked herself with a flash of very feminine irritation. A moment of buddy-buddy bonding, with Chris amiably accepting a compliment from the ex-convict who’d tried to crack his skull open?

  Men!

  Which wasn’t to say that she disagreed with Butch’s assessment of what Chris had done. Her ex-husband had pulled a shrewd one. Thanks to him, they now knew their captors were intent on drilling through a wall to—

  Comprehension dawned. A fragment of her conversation with Wayne Dweck clicked with something Tom—uh, no, Dick—had let drop when they chatted at the security desk.

  “The vault!” Lucy exclaimed. “You’re breaking into that vault next door! The one that’s full of...of...of...”

  “The Red Treasure,” Dick finished reverently.

  “Yeah.” Tom sighed. “The Red Treasure.”

  The Red Treasure? What the heck was the Red Treasure?

  “Okay,” Chris said after several suspenseful seconds. “I’ll bite. What’s the Red Treasure?”

  “Cash money. Lots of it.”

  “Gold and jewels.”

  “A fortune in untraceable bearer bonds.”

  “Uh-huh.” Lucy heard her ex-husband take a deep breath and release it in a long, slow God-give-me-patience sigh. “In other words, you’re not sure.”

  “Well...no,” Butch conceded, looking down at his feet. “Not exactly. But we’ve been hearing rumors about it. Whatever it is, it’s priceless.”

  There was an awkward silence. During the course of it, Lucy actually found herself starting to feel a little sorry for Tom, Dick and Butch.

  Yes, she realized that they were criminals. Yes, she was acutely aware that one of them had hit Chris over the head. She was likewise cognizant of the fact that that same individual had informed her she was going to be spending the rest of New Year’s Eve and all of New Year’s Day tied up in a storage room with her ex-husband.

  Hmm... Maybe “feeling sorry” was a bit of an overstatement.

  “What was that ‘for our protection’ thing you mentioned when you came in—” she took a beat to make certain she had the name straight “—Dick?”

  “What?”

  “When you and Tom and Butch first walked into the storage room, you said something about wearing masks for Chris’s and my protection.”

  “Oh, yeah,” Tom jumped in eagerly. “It’s so’s you can’t see our faces and identify us later.”

  Lucy mulled this statement for several moments. No, she thought. No. There is no way these three could be that stupid.

  Well...

  Okay. Okay. Maybe Tom and Dick Spivey could be. But not Percival “Butch” Johnson.

  “Guys,” she said slowly. “I don’t want to sound—I mean, I realize two of you have been to prison and are probably a lot more clued in on this kind of thing than me—but, uh, well...we’ve already seen your faces. ”

  Although this statement provoked no immediate response from the three men to whom it was addressed, it did earn her a sharp jab from Chris’s left elbow.

  “I mean, I’ve seen your faces,” she quickly corrected, realizing that she’d done her ex-husband a potentially dangerous disservice by speaking in the plural. “Before. When I was leaving. Remember? You saw me. I saw you. In the lobby. But Chris couldn’t have caught more than a glimpse of any of you before Butch knocked him out. And everyone knows a blow to the head can cause short-term memory—”

  “Everyone also knows that eyewitnesses are notoriously unreliable when it comes to describing or identifying people,” Chris cut in with ruthless precision. “And empirical studies have shown that being subjected to extreme stress—like being manhandled and tied up in a storage room—can have a deleterious impact on an individual’s short-term memory, too.”

  “Huh?” Tom and Dick said simultaneously.

  Butch gave another deep-in-the-chest chuckle. “Tell me, Chris,” he drawled, “you wouldn’t happen to be a lawyer, would you?”

  “Harvard Law. Class of—”

  “I knew it! The way you slipped that question in on Dick, I was ninety percent sure you were a mouthpiece. But hearin’ you spout off just now—” Butch chuckled again. “You do any criminal stuff?”

  “Corporate, mostly. And some pro bono work.”

  “Who’s Pro Bono?” Tom asked, sotto voce.

  “Some Eye-talian, I think,” Dick replied with a shrug.

  What does Chris think he’s doing? Lucy wondered a bit wildly.

  “But even with only minimal experience on the criminal side,” her ex-husband went on without missing a beat, “I can tell you that whatever other laws you gentlemen may have broken this evening, those infractions are minor compared with taking Lucy and me hostage.”

  “Hostage?” Tom yelped.

  “Oh, no, no,” Dick rushed in. “You’re not hostages! We don’t want to trade you for anything! And we’re not going to hurt you, either. Even if you have seen our faces. Because by the time you have the chance to tell anyone what we look like, we’ll be long gone with the Red Treasure.”

  “He’s right. You’re not hostages. You’re like our... guests!”

  Lucy choked. “Guests?”

  “Yeah, sure,” Dick said, picking up Tom’s assertion. “Maybe not totally, uh, willing ones—”

  “And damned sure not expected ones, either, since you forgot to lock the door.”

  “I said I was sorry! Why do you keep picking on me about that, Butch?”

  “Because you were
stupid, stupid,” Tom said cheerfully.

  Dick whirled on him, quivering with indignation. “I was stupid? You want to talk stupid? Let’s talk about who forgot to bring the groceries I went out and bought so we could have something to eat tonight and all day tomorrow. I spent nearly sixty bucks, Tom. All you had to do was remember to put the stuff in the car—”

  “Shut up!” Butch yelled.

  Dick did. Tom stayed quiet, too.

  Lucy closed her eyes. She contemplated the possibility that none of this was real. Maybe she was dreaming. She’d had New Year’s Eve dreams involving Chris before. Maybe this was just another one.

  “You don’t have any food?” she heard her ex-husband ask.

  “We’ll manage,” Butch responded.

  “Whatever you ‘manage’ might be easier with one less mouth to feed. Let me offer a suggestion. Let Lucy go.”

  It took the former Mrs. Christopher Dodson Banks a moment or two to process the last three words.

  Let Lucy go.

  Let Lucy—

  Her eyelids flew open. She sat as bolt upright as her bonds would allow her. “Let Lucy go?” she repeated incredulously.

  “No way!”

  “She’d run to the police!”

  “Not if you still had me.”

  There was a stark, stunned silence. Lucy jabbed her elbow into Chris, much as he’d jabbed his into her. He didn’t seem to feel it.

  “You two got somethin’ goin’, huh?” Butch finally asked.

  “No!” Lucy denied.

  “Yes,” Chris confirmed.

  Tom snickered through his alligator mask. “Sounds like true love to me.”

  “Is it yes or no?” Butch pressed. “I don’t see any wedding rings”

  “We used to be...married.” Lucy forced the admission out through clenched teeth. She had no idea what her ex-husband thought he was playing at, but she had no intention of participating. When all was said and done, this was her mess, not his. “And as for his idea of your letting me go—forget about it. I won’t leave.”

  “Lucy—” Chris began.

  She twisted around as far as she could. “I won’t, Chris!”

  “Wait a minute,” Dick said, sounding puzzled. “Lucy, you said ‘used to’ be married. Does that mean...not anymore?”