Long Shadows: A Mystery Thriller (Winton Chevalier Book 1)

by John Oakes

  As Winton stepped out onto the curb, about to look up from his phone, his surroundings went suddenly dark. Something slipped over his head and tightened about his neck.

  Strong arms hauled him by the seat of his pants and by whatever was covering his head, choking him, and threw him onto a padded surface. His arm and shoulder scraping across belt buckles informed him it was the backseat of a civilian car. The assailant jumped in behind him, sitting on Winton’s foot, and closed the door.

  The car took off.

  “Don’t you fucking move.” The person on the back seat had a low masculine voice. He wrenched the phone out of Winton’s hand, keeping the other hand clamped on the hood at the base of Winton’s head.

  The man next to him said, “Nothing helpful on his phone.”

  “Get rid of it, I reckon,” the driver said. The Cajun accent jolted Winton. These were the two policemen who’d searched Lucas’ cruiser.

  “Don’t fucking move, and don’t touch the bag.” The barrel-chested sergeant with the big nose and dark features was the man in the back. He must have needed both hands, because he let go of the hood and pushed Winton so he was kneeling on the floor, as if genuflecting in church.

  Winton heard the case of his phone crack as the brute cop pawed it open. A window rolled down and air rushed in. More cracking sounds. One by one, the constituent parts of Winton’s phone hit the street.

  Winton made an attempt to control his breathing. These were cops. Why would they do this? The part of Winton’s brain that wanted him to put all the puzzle pieces together sure as hell was screaming at him now, but he was too frightened to think straight.

  The man tugged at Winton’s corduroys, and Winton felt his wallet slip out of his back pocket.

  “Winton Chevalier, is it?” the sergeant asked. “Four feet tall. Eighty-five pounds. Eyes, brown. And he’s an organ donor.”

  “Ain’t that special,” the Cajun said up front. “Hope nobody needs a certain organ replaced.” He cackled to himself.

  “Sorry Earl,” the cop in the back said in mock concern. “The fire burned you up real bad down there. But don’t worry, we got you a new dick.”

  “Only one problem, though Earl,” the Cajun said. The men shared a hearty laugh without delivering the punchline.

  Winton rested his head on the seat, sickness turning over in his stomach.

  Within his mounting dread, Winton remember the gold thing—the trinket he’d pulled from Lucas’ cruiser.

  The cop in the back was going through his pockets again. What if he found the odd little item?

  A stunning wave of fear passed over Winton, chilling his insides. What if that was what they were looking for?

  Winton reached down with his right hand, careful not to appear to be moving, and stuck thumb and forefinger into his pocket, pinching the end of the trinket and sliding it out. He didn’t know where to hide it, so he slipped it down his sleeve with a deft motion aided by thousands of hours of sleight of hand. Whatever it was came to rest near his elbow, and he bent his arm to keep it wedged in place.

  “Got a fair bit of cash on him, too,” the sergeant said.

  “Must be cashing all them disability checks from the government,” the Cajun said.

  “Well, now, if these are government funds, I suppose we should all get a slice.”

  Winton gritted his teeth. What did these bastards want?

  “What’s the address?” the Cajun asked.

  “It’s in San Antonio. Got us a Texas license, here.”

  Missy.

  What if they went after her? But no. His license still listed his San Antonio address, not his new one close to the resort. He breathed a little easier at that.

  “But how’s a little midget fella gonna drive a car?”

  “Huh.” The sergeant shoved him. “Go on. Answer the man.”

  Winton was silent a moment. “Google it,” he said between breaths.

  “Have it your way, then,” the sergeant said. “Just another mystery of the universe.”

  “San Antonio oughta be west of New Orleans, you suppose?” the Cajun asked.

  “I do suppose,” the sergeant said in a tired manner.

  Winton felt the car accelerate, and soon they were on some uninterrupted stretch of highway, traveling at high speed.

  “Suppose we can stop?” the Cajun asked. “I’m hungry.”

  “Not really the best time for that.”

  “Jade Palace is just off the road.”

  “It’s two miles off the road. Forget it.”

  “But Sarge, I got my blood sugar to think about.”

  The sergeant let out a grumbling sigh. “Fine, then. There’s a Harden’s right up here.”

  “Harden’s gives me diarrhea.”

  “It was one time.”

  “I got a hankering for Chinese, to be honest.”

  “I thought you were tryina lose weight. God dammit. Fine there’s a Peking Garden up here in ten minutes.”

  A moment of silence. “Sarge, I won’t eat at Peking Garden. They got smokers.”

  “You what?”

  “Their cooks smoke out the back.”

  “So? Most cooks smoke.”

  “Nah, but they trail it in. It gets on the food. I can taste it in the food.”

  There was a moment’s pause, then the sergeant grumbled. “You mean to tell me you can taste cigarette smoke in your Chinese food?”

  “Uh huh. Swear to God.” A long silence stretched out. “So, where can I—” the Cajun began.

  “Shut the fuck up,” the sergeant said in a slow but authoritative manner.

  That ended their dialogue, and a few miles of road ran beneath Winton before anyone spoke again.

  “Well, you are awful quiet,” the sergeant said. “No begging. No questions. Is this not your first time being abducted? Don’t you know how you ought to behave?”

  Winton could smell a bully from a mile away. This was how it started. Winton wasn’t tickling this cop’s demons by crying, whining or acting out at all. Now the bully was baiting him. Needing some reaction to feast on.

  “Yes,” Winton said, sounding muffled even to himself. “This is my first time being kidnapped.”

  “He speaks,” the Cajun said. “Don’t you wanna know who we are? Where we’re taking you?”

  “I know who you are,” Winton said, hoping to throw them off kilter. “But sure, I’ll bite. Where we going?”

  The Cajun gave a nervous laugh. “Oh, you know who we are, huh? Who we is, then?”

  Winton thought before speaking. “You’re two men who ought to be busy with looking for my brother Lucas, rather than whatever this bullshit is.”

  When things got eerily silent, Winton figured he’d hit a chord. He braced for a blow, but none came.

  “See, actually,” the sergeant said, “we was hoping you could shed some light on that. Where’s Lucas?”

  Winton’s head twitched to the side, as he looked up in the dark. “Wait. What?”

  The cop pulled Winton closer and patted his pockets down, taking out his keys, then replacing them, but finding nothing else. Then he sat Winton up on the seat and yanked off the hood.

  “What did you do that for?” the Cajun asked.

  “He’s seen us, Rab. In the motor pool. On the video tape, you saw him running out there just before us, and coming back just after. And besides.” The cop looked down at Winton. “I like to look a man in the eye when I ask him a question.”

  Winton looked about, gathering that they were heading west by the angle of the sunlight through the windows.

  “Who found the cruiser?” Winton asked. “You two?”

  “We retrieved it. Now, where is Lucas?”

  “I don’t know. That’s why I searched his cruiser.”

  “What did you find? I know you found something.”

  “I found nothing. Just some old wrappers.”

  The cop bore in closer to read Winton’s eyes. His name tag came into view. Elgin was his name.<
br />
  “Listen, I get the feeling we’re on the same side here,” Winton said, unsure if that was true. “I mean, we both wanna find Lucas.”

  The cop looked up at the Cajun. “He says we’re on the same side.” Sergeant Elgin’s tone was menacing.

  The Cajun looked back at them in the rearview, glancing to the traffic, then back at them. He burst out laughing. The cop in the back cracked a self-satisfied grin.

  The hood went back over his head, and the cop shoved him back down to the floor. “Stay outta sight.”

  For thirty minutes they drove on like that. Winton’s imagination trying to find a way to escape. Lunging for the cop’s gun might get him shot. He could throw himself out of the car at lower speed. But what if he jumped into traffic blind?

  During these long minutes, Winton kept thinking about what his father had told him, that he would be unprepared for this world. Winton folded his arms over his knees and rested his forehead on them. He hadn’t decided to get involved in the world of shadows. He hadn’t even figured out if Lucas was in trouble or not. Yet, here he was being driven into the middle of nowhere, inhaling his own hot and stale breath in pure blackness, powerless to help himself.

  At long last they left the highway and took a series of turns. When they came to a full stop, the driver’s door opened and closed. Someone tugged his hood off, but that revealed little in the way of daylight. Just as Winton realized they were in some sort of outbuilding, he was hauled roughly around to the trunk of another car.

  “What are you doing?” Abject fear rose from his toes to his hairline. Winton had no time to calibrate, to think up a response.

  “We need to proceed on our business without interruption or distraction,” Elgin said.

  “This’ll teach you for interfering in police matters.” The Cajun shoved Winton into the trunk. Winton tried to wriggle away, but the man was too big to squeeze past. Into the trunk he fell.

  “No!”

  The trunk slammed shut, imprisoning him in darkness.

  “Now,” Elgin said. “Hollering will do you no good. No one’s around to hear you. So just lie still, and maybe we’ll let you out in a day or two.”

  “A day?” Winton screeched. He banged uselessly at the metal ceiling above him. “You can’t do this. This is fucking illegal!”

  “Oh, well if it’s illegal…”

  The two cops laughed as they walked off.

  After their car started and pulled way, the only sound Winton could hear was the rasp of his own breathing.

  He screamed and banged at the top of the trunk.

  “The phone,” he mumbled in realization. “The phone. The phone.”

  He whipped out Lucas’ phone and illuminated the dark space. He looked around for tools or any sort of weak points. But the trunk was empty.

  “Shit. Shit. Shit.”

  The battery had only two percent juice left. It’d barely gotten a charge at all. His first instinct told him it might be enough to call 911, before he remembered the cops were not on his side.

  He turned Lucas’ location settings on and did a maps search. He was in Gray, Louisiana, just off Highway 90. He took a screenshot of the map with a route from New Orleans, then a closer street view with the beacon showing his location. Then he searched through Lucas’ contacts. Who could he trust to find him?

  It couldn’t be family. And most of the station didn’t trust Lucas. He needed a sure thing.

  Winton reached in his pocket and felt around. There. His fingers clamped on a card. He pulled it out and feverishly texted the number.

  One percent battery left.

  “Winton small guy from last night. Men who took bro, took me. In trunk of car at this location. Save me. Will pay. Plz hurry.”

  He sent the text.

  Winton pleaded inwardly, until it showed the message had been delivered. His relief was short-lived. The reality of his predicament grew more surreal at the thought of losing contact with the outside world, at losing a source of light. How many seconds until he’d be plunged in darkness?

  Winton went to Lucas’ Facebook and searched for Missy’s profile. He found the picture of her he’d always liked best, back when they first got married. Not one of Missy’s glam selfies, just a moment he’d snapped when she wasn’t looking. He studied everything he loved about her face, which was everything.

  “I’m so sorry, Miss.”

  The screen went black.

  Winton’s breath caught in his throat. The darkness was so acute, he had to close his eyes.

  He lay in breathless silence for long moment, mind searching for a sliver of hope, eyes squinting in the dark for a pinprick of light, but only seeing the dizzying memory of light burned onto his retinas.

  He let out a guttural yell and thrashed at the trunk top, kicking and slapping. He got on hands and knees and attempted to press upward using his legs and back.

  Winton exhausted himself, having turned the cramped space into a sweat box. He was afraid he’d have a coronary, the way his heart was racing. He fell on his face and belly and tried to control his breathing. He wasn’t going anywhere. Was there a use in fighting it? He tried to make peace with the situation, tried to cling to hope.

  As his pulse slowed and his breaths grew slightly further apart, the pain in his hands and legs mounted. Tears welled at the corners of his eyes and ran down his nose.

  “Is this how it ends? This?” He wasn’t sure who he was talking to. Himself, God, the dead cell phone?

  He curled up on his side and whimpered softly, trying to tell himself how to get through this. A day in a trunk? Two? Maybe more? How could he stay sane?

  Perhaps the best way through, he decided, would be to treat it like one long night of fitful sleep.

  Winton dried his eyes and did what he often did at night to help himself go to sleep. He thought about baseball. Long, boring baseball. Something Winton couldn’t keep a focus on if he tried, forcing his mind to wander off into the dark.

  EIGHT

  Winton drifted in and out of fitful sleep curled up in the fetal position. In the space between dreaming and consciousness, he barely registered a rattling, creaking sound echoing outside the trunk, ending with a loud bang. A voice called out, “Winton. You in there?” Thud, thud, thud. Someone pounded on the trunk.

  Winton woke with a start. “Huh?”

  “Anyone in there?”

  “Yeah,” Winton croaked, his throat dry. As his wits returned to him, he yelled it louder. “Yeah! Get me out!”

  Winton heard something metal clatter on a cement floor, then a moment later, scrabbling at the base of the trunk.

  Thunk! The lid popped open.

  Daylight flooded in with fresh air, and Winton rose like Lazarus from the grave. He clambered out over the bumper and clung to Julius’ leg. “Jesus Christ, thank you. Oh holy fucking wow, thank you so much.”

  Winton tripped over himself and fell to the concrete floor of the rusty old garage. He lay there, prostrate in thanks, like a sailor who’d survived a storm and washed up on dry land.

  “I’m saved,” he said to himself. “I’m saved.”

  “Man, you all right? Get up off that dirty ass floor.”

  Julius helped him to his feet.

  Winton proceeded to thank him a dozen more times.

  “I just can’t believe it was true.” Julius scratched behind an ear. “Shit. You were really in the trunk of a car.”

  Winton remembered to gather up Lucas’ phone, then shut the trunk.

  “Who did this?” Julius’ face was aghast. “Do we need to get you to a hospital or something?”

  Winton let out a long groan and stepped out of the garage into the daylight, head tilted back toward the heavens. “No hospitals,” Winton said, soaking in his freedom. “They don’t serve whiskey in hospitals.”

  After taking a long piss at the closest dive bar, Winton settled into a booth across from Julius. Winton checked his wallet and saw that all his cash was gone, but the dirtbags had lef
t his cards and ID at least.

  The mustachioed old man who ran the place asked for their order from behind the bar. Winton held up his bank card and said. “I’ll take two glasses of the finest bourbon you have here. Make ‘em doubles.”

  “Sure ‘nough.” The old man twirled the bar towel he held.

  Julius looked the place over, not appearing totally comfortable. The only two other patrons sat at the bar, white guys with thick arms, each wearing some form of camo.

  “It ain’t my kinda joint either,” Winton said. “The old fella seems to like us spending money here, though.”

  “Yeah, yeah.” Julius rubbed his thin nose. “It’s cool.”

  When the bartender brought their drinks over, Winton handed him his card. “Keep it open.”

  “You two celebrating?” he asked.

  “Something like that, sir.”

  Winton winced at the first gulp, but the second went down smooth. The third went down like a greased baby on a waterslide.

  “Seriously, Julius. I fucking owe you so huge right now.” Winton suppressed a shout.

  “It’s cool, man. I just can’t believe it.”

  Now that Winton could get a good look at Julius in the daylight, the first thing he noticed was that he’d shaved clean. Second were his wide, intelligent eyes. They were alert and engaging. Instead of the stylish turtleneck sweater, Julius wore a grey track suit with red trim, a red t-shirt underneath and red kicks on his feet. A gold crucifix hung around his neck with another, thicker gold chain. On his shaved head sat a grey visor with red under the bill.

  “Dude,” Winton said. “I just don’t know how many people out of a thousand would’ve come looking for me with a weird text like that.”

  Julius splayed his fingers. “Well, you got me here. Maybe you just know people. And it’s all good now.” Julius raised his drink. His eyes narrowed, and he coughed as he took his first sip. “Whew. You offended if I get a little ice or something to chase it with?”

  Winton tilted his head toward him. “Julius, I’ll pay for a hooker to ride you silly while you drink it, if you want.”