Reduced Ransom!

by Mike Faricy

  Chapter 50

  “Answer the damn phone, you little ingrate,” Torsten half muttered, then angrily hit the disconnect button on the speaker phone. It was almost nine in the evening and Torsten knew, at this stage, the most he could wring out of his schedule was another thirty-six hours before he was due to return to Glacial Springs and joyless, ice locked, Arliss.

  Friends were based on favors in politics and he wondered if perhaps the entertaining Miss Devereaux had found another market for her engaging favors? He couldn’t risk the potential political fallout of storming over and pounding on her door, those wise-guy city reporters would love to get hold of a story like that, not to mention what he would have to deal with up in Glacial Springs.

  He dialed Nikki’s number again, then quickly hung up when her message came on. Nothing riled him more than a citizen not respecting the proper authority of the State. Exactly what was she up to?

  * * *

  If it were up to Nikki she would never eat this crap, I mean the carbs alone were killers. And the grease, it was going to attack her complexion by morning. Clearly, she thought looking around, not even the remotest hope for any facial products, things just kept going from bad to worse.

  “I mean, like hello, anyone even home?” she wondered out loud, sitting cross legged on the bed. She stared at the disgusting grease seeping through the pizza delivery box. “Gross, just absolutely gross,” she said, then grabbed another piece from the box and ate it.

  She could only guess what sort of perverse ideas that creep had in mind for her, and not even the basic cable package in the room. And her nails, three of them broken. Just thinking how long it was going to take them to get back to perfection was enough to bring on a whole negative aura. She would literally have to book a month at a spa, first thing, after getting out of this pathetic little room. Not to mention the major skin work required after a diet of this garbage, she thought, then licked her finger tips and reached for the last slice. A month of non-stop work in a gym to completely detox her system, another two hundred and fifty dollars just to repair the damage to her nails, she was getting more and more depressed.

  Chapter 51

  Torsten couldn’t sleep and just to be spiteful he thought he’d yank a little female chain and call Nikki late in the middle of the night. He’d called at ten, eleven, midnight, then twelve-thirty, one, one-fifteen, and one-twenty. He was beginning to see a pattern, she was out for the night.

  Not like her at all, he thought. He tossed and turned for the remainder of the night. He jumped from wanting to spank her out of pure enraged fury to wanting to spank her because he was glad to have her back safe and sound. Then, he was back to the enraged fury point of the argument and so it went, fitfully throughout the night.

  He had ceased phoning her somewhere around three in the morning. He couldn’t stand to hear the static clip of her voice message one more time and decided to finally get some sleep. Easier said than done, and at six he finally just rolled out of his disheveled bed, made a cup of instant coffee in a travel mug and drove to his office.

  He’d been there for a few hours, moving stacks of files back and forth, accomplishing little if anything in the way of the people’s business. Willing himself not to pick up the phone, place another call and listen to that damn message of hers, one more time.

  Sometime after midmorning, with the skeleton staff out on yet another coffee break, a sleep deprived, crabbier than usual, Torsten Theisen was forced to answer his own phone.

  “Hello?” he half shouted, then immediately dared to hope it just might be missing Nikki Devereaux, phoning her apologies with a logical explanation followed by some suggestions of exactly how she planned to make it all up to him.

  “Representative Theisen, please.”

  There was something odd about the voice, a nasal quality, as though the caller had a horrible head cold. The pronunciation seemed off. He suspected the caller might be intoxicated and hung up the phone without a second thought.

  “I got cut off?” Mickey asked himself, sitting in his steamy car, sweating. The sun glared through the windshield, as he stared at the payphone receiver in his hand.

  He studied his bandaged reflection in the rearview mirror. Eyes purple, and swollen, a huge lump alongside his left eye, the discoloration seeping down the side of his face in the direction of his ear, the white gauze covering his nose and, of course, those raised abrasions running up his neck and along the backs of his ears.

  It was difficult, under the best of circumstances, to keep a low profile with white gauze taped over a major portion of his face. People tended to remember facial bandaging. It was the last thing he needed just now, people making a mental note of seeing him, let alone where.

  He had driven north, to the far edge of Washington County, where a seldom used payphone sat in the corner of a rural parking lot. He was the only car in the lot and he wanted to keep it that way. Just make this call quickly, hope he could be understood between the swelling and the bandaging and get this whole affair off his plate before something else went horribly wrong.

  He waited a half hour and dialed again, this time an officious female voice answered.

  “Representative Theisen, please,” Mickey said, suddenly coming awake.

  “Who may I say is calling?”

  He was momentarily stumped and he replied, “George Gates.” An alias he had used in the past during a period of failed online dating attempts.

  “Let me connect you to Representative Theisen, Mr. Gates.”

  Suddenly, there he was, smarmy in all his political glory. “Hello George, what is it I can do for you?” Torsten oozed across the phone, the upbeat lilt disguising his sour mood.

  Mickey was having none of it. He had a throbbing pain running up the back of his head, exploding just behind his closed eyes. As he spoke, he gingerly massaged his forehead with his free hand, cautiously staying away from the bridge of his nose and the left side of his face.

  “I’ll tell you what you can do for me, Torsten,” he visualized the crotchety old drunk attempting to snap his fingers in the car. “We’ve got something of yours, a little package named Nikki Devereaux. Ring any bells? One hundred grand, cash, tomorrow, call you later.” Click, and he was off the line.

  Torsten sat in stunned silence. What in the hell was that? Who in the hell was that? Had he really mentioned Nikki’s name? He dialed Nikki’s number again, waiting just long enough to hear the static before her voice message kicked in. Nikki? Had the voice said a hundred grand, or had he said he was hungry? Just what in the hell was going on here?

  Chapter 52

  What in the hell was going on here? Janice asked herself again. Not so much as a peep out of Mickey in the past two days. Then, when she did answer the phone it was her stepfather, Huey. Haranguing her for money, like he had a snowball’s chance of collecting any.

  She was just hanging up after letting Mickey’s phone ring for what seemed like hours. She’d even cruised past the War Bonnet Lounge, just to see if his car was there, it wasn’t. She’d reached the point where she was alternating between never wanting to see him again, ever, and then wanting to see him, just so she could strangle him slowly. The least he could do was face her like a man. Tell her he didn’t want to see her. Tell her there was someone else, instead of acting like the worm he really was.

  She could call Dell she supposed, ask him if he’d seen Mickey? Explain to Dell that she was worried about idiot Mickey, maybe get a reading by the way he reacted. But where those two were concerned, it was anyone’s guess what the truth would be.

  * * *

  It had taken about thirty minutes, but the pain killers were finally kicking in, reducing the throbbing in his head to a manageable level. Mickey was writing a script for Nikki to read into a tape recorder. He wasn’t going to chance another live phone conversation like the one between Janice and her father, Huey. That had been playing with fire.

  Now, the way this whole thing had come down, the last thin
g he needed was Nikki with a phone in her hands. No, she could just record a message, he’d get that to Torsten, not have to say anything himself, just get the taped message delivered, somehow, get the ransom money and get her out of his life, the sooner the better.

  He finished his script, laid down on the couch to rest and was just drifting off dreaming he was in a boxing ring. His hands were tied, and Nikki was there, too. He couldn’t tell for sure what she was wearing, something small, and revealing, but she had a sledge hammer in each hand, and seemed to have no trouble whirling them around effortlessly. He tried to flee, running around the ring as she chased him. The bell sounded, and kept ringing, interrupting his dream. He opened his eyes, heard the phone, and ignored it. Finally, peace and quiet returned.

  * * *

  Apparently, no one was home at Dell’s, Janice thought slamming down the phone, not exactly sure what she was going to do next. She was determined to do at least one thing. She was going to make Mickey look her in the eye, be a man about it, and tell her there was another woman. Where things went from there, depended on whether she thought she could get away with murder.

  Chapter 53

  “Look at this grocery list,” Dell exclaimed. “Mickey, you gotta back off here, you’re eating me out of house and home, come on.” He stared at Mickey on the couch, resplendent in a screaming yellow shirt, the image of two-dancing jukeboxes with red music notes emanating out the top on either side of the front. Had Mickey bothered to roll over Dell would see the back of the shirt sported the image of a large 45 record under the banner, ‘Rock and roll never dies!’

  Mickey didn’t bother to roll over, but he slowly opened his eyes, and gave a loud sigh. “It’s not me, it’s her,” he pointed a thumb in the general direction of the basement stairs.

  “You telling me that little thing down there is responsible for all the food? Who are you trying to kid?”

  “Dell, I’m not kidding,” Mickey said, sitting upright. He popped two more pain pills and washed them down with a glass of water from the coffee table. He paused to ensure the pills had made the journey.

  “Here,” he half tossed a sort of bird mask from a shopping bag on the floor, along with a pocket tape recorder and the script he had carefully written out.

  “What the hell is this?” Dell said, thinking the mask looked familiar, but not quite able to get a handle on it.

  “Tweety Bird,” Mickey said.

  “I hated Tweety Bird. The cartoons just sucked. I always liked the cat, Sylvester. But, I’m not going in that room with her, so it doesn’t matter. Does it? I mean look what she did to you.”

  “She blindsided me. Just a couple of lucky shots, stunned me for a moment, that’s all.”

  “Yeah, well, I don’t plan on getting blindsided. She probably hates Tweety Bird as much as I do,” he said and tossed the mask onto the coffee table.

  “Then I guess we’re just stuck with her, aren’t we? Because if I go in there, I can guarantee you there are going to be problems. Besides, if we just let her know we’re not going to hurt her, let her know that this is the way to get her ass out of here, you’ll have her eating out of your hand in no time. Besides, you whined and told me you didn’t like the Spider Man mask, so . . . there you go.”

  Chapter 54

  Nikki Devereaux polished off the last of her grilled cheese sandwich. It was cold, but that wasn’t really the issue, she still felt absolutely ravenous. When she was nervous, she got stressed, and when she was stressed she ate, and eating tended to make her more stressed which in turn caused her to eat more, in very short order it became a vicious cycle. Eating to relieve stress, stressing because she ate so much. Right now she could really go for a slice of last night’s greasy pizza.

  She had always been this way, as far back as when she was plain old Alice Bronkowski from Northfield, Minnesota. It was the same when she dyed her hair red and danced under the stage name Ember. From Ember she had reinvented herself as Monique Ménage. She bid a quick adieu to Monique after the solicitation charge, which had caused her to stress and balloon. Ultimately, after a boatload of jazzercise and Lean Cuisines, she had reinvented herself as Nikki Devereaux, and it was as Nikki that she had felt most at home.

  She had found her true calling as a personal lobbyist for just one key client, namely herself. Handling one key account, Torsten Theisen. At least, until the night when that disgustingly dreadful moron rear ended them. Now, here she was in this gross little room, pigging out on gross food, putting on about ten pounds a day and if she didn’t get out of here soon, she was going to explode.

  The sound of the door opening startled her. She stared wide eyed as a man wearing a mask approached her cautiously, half-a-step at a time. He held sheets of yellow legal paper and some sort of device out in front of him.

  Her first thought was the device might be a taser or some sort of shock control thingy, but relaxed when she saw it was just a small tape recorder. He stopped short of the foot of the bed and it suddenly dawned on her what the mask was supposed to be.

  “I have to tell you, I hated Tweety Bird as a kid.”

  The mask nodded, not saying a thing.

  “Here,” she replied to the nod, handing him the empty plate. “I’m finished. When’s dinner?”

  He extended the paper to her which she grabbed and began to read, quietly. It took her a few moments to go through the directions, nodding her head, seeming to agree.

  “Hey, Tweety, you had better be kidding here. A hundred grand. That’s all you think I’m worth? A lousy hundred grand. This is insulting. I’ll be a laughing stock,” she shouted and shook the sheets of legal paper in Dell’s face.

  She was suddenly off the edge of the bed. She backed Dell up in the direction of the door, thrusted a pointed finger toward him like a dagger with a broken Ferrari-red tip, accentuating every other word.

  “A hundred grand! What kind of a bad joke is this? Do you have any idea who you’re dealing with? I’m worth at least ten times this! I’ve got shoes that are more expensive than this. Arghh!” she screamed, tossed the papers up in the air, then stomped back toward the bed as the sheets of yellow paper drifted back and forth before settling quietly on the floor.

  Dell stood stone still, not wanting to further excite her with any movement. It was a little like finding yourself in the cage of a lion, hoping if maybe you just remained still the thing might not notice you.

  Nikki seemed to smell his fear, and slowly, like a cat appraising a mouse, she turned her head in Dell’s direction. “So, you’re going to ransom me? That’s what this is all about?” A smile came across her lips, eyes glaring, examining Dell. “You’re not that moron who ran into me the other night, are you?”

  Dell shifted his weight, cautiously moving an inch or two toward the door as he shook his head no.

  “Well, if you see that idiot, you can tell him from me, I’m not finished yet. Not by a long shot. Now, give me that,” she indicated the papers scattered on the floor.

  Dell was about to reach for them when an image of Mickey, beaten, swollen and bloody on the couch, more dead than alive flooded his brain. He silently pointed to the bed, moving his hand to indicate he wanted her to sit on the bed before he picked up the papers.

  “Oh, for God’s sake. I don’t believe this,” she said scooping up the papers. “You’re almost as stupid as that other idiot. Get out of here before I change my mind.”

  Dell nodded and hurried to the door. Mickey, who had been listening and watching through the peep hole opened the door to let him out.

  “Hey, Tweety, honey, get me something else to wear, okay. I’ve been in this outfit too long, and I’m way past dewy. Besides, that other fool ruined my shoes and belt,” she said and pointed at her shoes lying on the floor.

  Dell nodded again, stood staring at her for a second or two as she sat cross legged on the bed reading the script.

  “Come on!” Mickey whispered, finally pulling him out the door.

  “Oh, and some
ice cream might be nice, too,” she called.

  “See what I mean? Do you see what I mean? She’s an absolute nut case,” Mickey said, as he pulled Dell out the door.

  “Oh, I don’t know, Mick. I mean she hates your guts, she can’t be all bad.”

  Mickey put his eye up to the peep hole again and watched her reading the script. Her lips moved as she worked her way thru the lines he’d written. She put the script down, picked up the small recorder, pushed a couple of buttons, and said, “Test, test.”

  “Hey, where do you think you’re going?” Mickey called to Dell heading out the door.

  “I’m going to get her some clothes, like she told me, and maybe some ice cream, too.”

  “Are you kidding me, she doesn’t—”

  Dell closed the door behind him cutting Mickey off in mid-sentence.

  Great, thought Mickey, looking back through the peep hole. Now Dell was leaving the world of the sane. He watched Nikki rehearse her lines, practice her inflections. She shook her head in disgust, rolled her eyes in exasperation, and started over again.

  Chapter 55

  “You got her a black bustier with red lace and a grey sweatsuit? I don’t see the logic. How does this help the situation we’re in right now? Besides, this bustier is probably too small,” Mickey shook the garment at Dell.

  “Yeah, I know, but the sweat suit is one size fits all so hopefully she can be comfortable and feel pretty at the same time. You know how important they say that is to women.”

  “I don’t know anything of the sort. Well, go ahead, you might as well toss them in there. I’m certainly not going to risk it. She seems to have the wrong sort of reaction to me. And what the hell is that?” he asked referring to a box under Dell’s arm.