Prologue

 

When Manny hit her with the stun, the girl collapsed. Her damp hands slapped down hard on the hood of the truck, squeaking across the hot metal as she slithered down and back into Manny's waiting arms.

He cradled her easily. Manny was big, and she was a small woman. A playful wind lifted the road map off of the hood and kited it high over the road. I couldn't help imagining that a state trooper might see it and think it was some kind a distress signal.

Sitting shotgun, I checked the mirror. It was convex, and I had it aimed so that I could see both lanes beyond the shoulder. There was a car topping the rise behind us, but that was two miles back, with a deep valley between here and there. We had at least a minute or two before anyone would be close enough to see us.

Sloan pulled the truck forward a few feet and hit the brakes hard enough to rock the truck a little.

"Get the door, Darren." He sounded bored, and maybe a bit irritated that I needed to be told.

I squeezed between the bucket seats and wrenched the rear door open from the inside Manny poured the girl in. I grabbed her under the armpits and helped. She was wearing a jogging bra; I could feel it under the tee shirt. She had been running for awhile, and was slippery with sweat.

I took her left wrist and lifted it toward one of the cuffs. Yesterday, Manny had cut the links between two pair of standard cop bracelets and attached lengths of chain to the separated cuffs. The chains were padlocked to four rings, widely spaced, and bolted to the truck floor.

She didn't resist. She couldn't yet. The stun gun had temporarily robbed her of voluntary muscle control, but in the back of her throat she began a wordless keening. I ignored the frantic pleading in her eyes and turned away before she got a good look at my face.

We were all wearing disguises. I made them myself. I didn't go all Hollywood about it. I just used a few appliances to change the shape of our noses and cheeks. I added sunglasses, and matching ball caps with some company name on the front. Manny was wearing a fake mustache.

When Manny called her over to the truck, he had kept his head low. He was pretending to study the map. She had been looking at it too when he stunned her.

I carefully closed the ratchets down the way Manny had taught me, not too tight, but tight enough. Then I leaned over to get her other hand. Manny kicked her legs apart and crawled in between them, twisting around to slam the door shut behind him.

There was a gold watch on her wrist. It was in my way. My mind was kicked into overdrive. I was thinking about taking the watch off, and wondering what I should do with something that might become evidence later. I decided to just slide the watch higher on her arm. Even with all that debating I had the cuff on and closed in a couple of seconds.

"How's it going?" asked Sloan. He was looking in the outside mirror, studying the road behind us.

"Just a second more," said Manny. He started snapping cuffs on her ankles and looked up to make sure I had both hands locked down. Her tore off a length of tape for her mouth, and I followed it with a canvas bag over her head. I tied the drawstring loose around her neck to let in enough air for her to breathe.

"Good to go," said Manny.

Then we heard the car buzzing down the pavement from behind us, slowing as it drew closer. Up front, Sloan picked up the hero sandwich he had started eating earlier and held it left handed. When the car drew alongside us, he waved the sandwich at the gawkers inside to let them know everything was just fine here, and managed to screen his face with it at the same time. I thought it was a passable portrayal of a workman who had pulled over to have lunch. The ladder bungee tied on the roof of the truck was supposed to help sell that script.

I crouched low and tried to be invisible, even though there weren't any windows in the back of the truck. Manny just put his hands on his knees, bent over, and waited.

The car sped up and pulled away. It was an old couple, just rubbernecking, no sweat.

"Don't fall into any speed traps," said Manny.

Sloan chuckled as he put the truck in gear. "Don't worry; I won't bruise the tomatoes getting them home."

And as simple as that, I became a kidnapper.

Chapter One

 

"Mr. Blake wants to talk to you."

He was just a guy sitting in a car parked in front of my apartment house when I got home. I hadn't even been paying any attention to him until he spoke.

I did a double take, thinking hard. There was no question in my mind that he was talking to me, and I couldn't pretend that I didn't know who Mr. Blake was. I owed the man a lot of money.

This encounter didn't have the feel of something that could turn into a one way trip though. There was no muscle sitting beside this guy. If he was packing a gun, he wasn't showing it to me. He was rehearsing that dead eyed, tough guy role. They all cultivate it, but he hadn't perfected it yet. He was only about my age and size, which was hardly intimidating. He was just an errand boy, the kind of guy who would earn his keep by delivering packages, people, or messages. He would be well paid to see very little and remember nothing that he shouldn't remember.

I didn't know what the penalty for delinquent payment was, but it probably didn't include a trip to small claims court. On the other hand, I wasn't that late. We should be at the friendly reminder stage of collection, far short of having Mr. Blake blow cigar smoke into my bleeding face.

"Uh, sure." I held up my camera and forced myself to grin. "Just let me stash this in my apartment and I'll be right down."

I was already mentally rehearsing a getaway. I could dash past the mailboxes and down the hall to the laundry room, out the back and over the fence. It would be an insanely stupid thing to do, but blind instinct argued otherwise.

Abandoning the apartment wouldn't have cost me much. I was about to be evicted anyway. It was a fourth floor efficiency that I jokingly called "the penthouse". A real penthouse would have had an elevator though, and more of a view. I had moved out of Mom's house after she died, because I couldn't keep up with the mortgage any more.

Dad hadn't offered to take me in. He and Mom had been divorced for years. I had spent my weekends with him, back in the days when visitation rights mattered to us. He had listened to all of those enthusiastic ramblings about my film making ambitions with a sort of weary patience, hoping that I would grow up some day and get a real job, like plumbing, which was his line of work. He thought that movie making stardom was for folks who had been born into the life, like the Barrymore's or Sheens. It wouldn't have done any good for me to explain to him that I wasn't doing it in the expectation of commercial success. I was doing it for the love of the art.

Anyway, it has always been traditional for starving artists to live in attics.

The kid in the car wasn't buying any of my hustle though, at least, not enough to let me get out of his sight.

"Take your camera along," he said casually. "Mr. Blake might be interested in seeing it."

I glanced down at the camera. Collateral, I thought. Maybe he would take it and let me buy a little more time. Still, this one was my favorite. If it came down to getting a broken leg or losing this camera, I would have to think it over for awhile.

He leaned over the seat and popped the passenger door open for me. "You ain't in any trouble, dude." His voice was reassuring. "You might even want to hear what he has to say."

 

When the gate rolled open, the errand boy drove up the long private drive to the main house. Sloan was waiting out front to pat me down and escort me around to the back of the house.

"I'll need the camera," he said.

When I hesitated he said, "I'll just hold it for you until you leave. Mr. Blake is a bit camera shy." He grinned at the protective way I was holding it.

"I won't smudge the lens."

He didn't brace me with a hand on my arm or anything like that. He just walked beside me. He didn't say anything else to me either.

I had seen him around town a few times, and knew him by his reputation. He was one of those lean, weathered guys you see a lot of out in flyover country. It would be easy to dismiss him as nothing more than dumb muscle, unless you noticed his reptile gaze. Everyone else that I knew had to cop an attitude to keep the predators at bay. In his case, the predators generally recognized him as one of their own, and they gave him a wide berth. He never raised his voice, or said much, but when he did say something, people always listened to him.

Blake was sitting in a chaise lounge beside the pool with a blonde standing behind him and massaging his shoulders. She was a buff bit of tawny flesh that had been stuffed into a string bikini. It was yellow with white polka dots, like the one in the old song.

When he saw us coming, Blake waved her away. "It's business, Bunny," he said.

She pouted prettily and went to sit at the far end of the pool. She passed me without so much as a glance. Maybe Blake was the jealous type, and she was being careful not to rile him, but it was more likely the usual reason. Girls like her never bother to look at guys like me.

It's not that I'm gross or anything. I was a gangly kid who grew up into a skinny man. I started wearing glasses in middle school, and could only afford contact lenses later. I was never a jock or a party guy. If you threw in hobbies like reading and videography, you can see how I got typecast as a nerd early on.

Women generally go for the bad boys, or the guys with money or power, or the cool guys. I didn't have any of those advantages. Blake had three out of four.

Bunny slumped in a chair and picked up a book of crossword puzzles to work on while she waited. She seemed unhappy about being sent off, as though pampering Blake was her most important mission and passion in life. I wondered what the compensation package was for such devotion.

Blake watched me watching her, but he seemed pleased by my appreciation. Maybe he was proud of himself for having a woman that other men wanted, or maybe he had been wondering if a known artistic type like me was gay, and he was relieved to find out that I wasn't.

Not that he should have cared. A man like Blake would ignore anyone who wasn't useful or threatening to him. I didn't see how I could be either one of those things.

Blake leaned back in his chair and blew smoke. He liked thin little cigars. They went with his whole ensemble. There was a wide brimmed Stetson on his head. It was covering the bald spot, and no one had ever seen him without it. The jacket that was draped over the back of his chaise lounge had a suede yoke with piping around the seams and pearl buttons on the pockets and cuffs. His shirt was Western styled as well, but it was short sleeved. His string tie had been loosened so that he could open a couple of buttons to let the heat out, exposing too much black chest hair and a glint of gold chain. His boots were handmade ostrich. The hat and heels gave him height and swagger that he wouldn't have had otherwise, but the lean and rugged persona would always elude him. He looked ridiculous, but nobody laughed at him, ever.

"So," he said wearily, "this is the AV guy."

The dialect spoiled the whole John Wayne image that he was trying for. It was classic New Jersey, with a hint of some Old World backwater. I don't think that he had ever been west of Chicago. Blake wasn't his real name. That would be something hard to pronounce, something that was familiar to officers of the law.

"Good morning, Mr. Blake," I said.

Sloan sat down behind him. He was doing nothing, like a robot recharging his solar batteries. It was the wrong position to take if he wanted to prevent me from making a quick exit. I took that for a good sign.

"They tell me that you owe me some money," Blake said.

"Yes, Sir." I said. "I know I haven't been able to pay down the principal yet, but I'm keeping up with the interest." In fact, I was a few days late with that, but it was a forgivable sin I hoped.

"How much is it?"

Was that a rhetorical question, or was he that vague about the terms? If he really didn't know what I owed him, maybe he didn't know that I was falling behind in my payments either.

"The original loan was for ten thousand, Sir."

He nodded, unimpressed by the number. I suddenly realized that ten grand was small change to Blake. He wouldn't waste his own time collecting it. This had to be about something else.

"I need a guy who can make a movie for me. I want a good movie, with sound and color, not all fuzzy and crap. Something with real quality. If you make this movie for me, we can forget the whole loan and I'll give you a few grand besides."

A movie - the scene had become surreal. This thug with cowpuncher delusions wanted to be a film producer.

"You're a smart kid," his eyes narrowed as he studied me. "You know that nothin' we talk about here don't go out there."

"I know that," I swallowed.

He glanced to the left and right and leaned in toward me. I tried not to smile. There was just about zero chance that anyone could be close enough to hear us, but I suppose that old habits die hard.

"Okay, here's the deal. There's this guy. He used to be a loyal employee of mine, a real mover. Now he's got, whatayacallit, deloosians a grandyure. He needs takin' down a peg or two. He's married, but he's got some gash on the side. He keeps her in a crib out in the suburbs. He thinks nobody knows about her. What we do is - we snatch this pussy and chain her up someplace. A coupla guys turn her every way but loose, after that they get to the dirty stuff."

Behind him, Sloan coughed.

Blake studied my face. "We let this guy know that he better play ball, or things could get worse for her."

Now we were in bad dream territory.