by Ann Charles
I saluted him. “Will do, Sheriff.”
“Parker, you don’t salute a sheriff.”
“Coop’s right,” Natalie said. “This is more true to course for you and me when it comes to addressing the law.” She scratched her nose with her middle finger.
I chuckled. “I like it when you pretend to reel your middle finger up.”
“You mean like this?” she demonstrated, aiming the bird at Cooper.
His hand snaked out to grab her.
Natalie dodged, laughing. She pulled on my arm. “Let’s go before Coop sobers up enough to chase us down and handcuff us.”
“Ha!” I said, letting her tow me away from the desk. “As if you would run from him.” I’d heard enough about their love life tonight to know better.
“Well, I might run a little,” she said with a wink in Cooper’s direction. “Thrill of the chase and all that.”
We left the slightly intoxicated cop and the newly self-appointed sheriff, taking a short hall into the jail’s reception area. According to the docent, the inmates were first processed here back in the day. It was a mid-sized room with an L-shaped counter close to a door that led out to a parking lot. That door had two strips of crime-scene tape barring it tonight, though. According to the instruction sheet, we couldn’t use it for our escape game. Against one of the walls, four aluminum chairs with army green vinyl cushions that looked to be refugees from the 1960s were lined up like prisoners. On the wall above them hung a corkboard with wanted posters plastered all over it. Some of the posters were a few layers thick.
“Did you check out the posters on this corkboard when you and Cornelius were in here before?” I asked Natalie, who had stepped behind the L-shaped counter. From the sounds of things, she was checking for clues in drawers below it.
“A little. Mostly I searched underneath the chairs to see if anything was taped to them. That’s where I found the screwdriver.” Another drawer opened and closed.
“Who found the skeleton keys?” I kneeled on a chair and scanned the various wanted posters. Most looked like something I’d see on the set of an Old West movie. I wondered if any of them were real leftovers from the past.
“Cornelius found them in the storage room next to the bathroom. They were hanging in plain sight on the wall, though, so we weren’t sure if they were a part of the game.”
They were old school, unlike the lock on the door in the sheriff’s office. “What do you think they go to?”
I heard the sound of another drawer sliding open.
“I’d guess the jail cells,” she said. “But when I zipped upstairs at the start of the game, all of the cell doors were blocked open with bricks, including the outer door at the top of the stairs. That’s what made Cornelius and me think they might not be used in the game.”
I lifted one of the wanted posters to see what was behind it, finding another poster starring two criminals: Rosie “Rails” Turner and Ted “Blue-belly” Jones. Both were wanted for armed train robbery. A whopping $2,000 reward awaited anyone who brought them in, dead or alive.
“So getting accidentally locked in a jail cell like Deputy Barney Fife on the old Andy Griffith and Mayberry reruns probably isn’t supposed to be part of the fun.”
“Exactly.” She chuckled. “You and I have had enough so-called ‘fun’ behind bars in our time.”
“You can take that to the bank.” I flipped past another wanted flier. Just watch out for the bank robbers … and killers, I thought as I read about a three-time murderer with a $5,000 reward named Fat-fingers Frankie. “Hey, Nat. I think this is one of your old boyfriends. Remember that guy you dated who had bratwursts for fingers?”
“God, don’t remind me.” She leaned on the counter. “He was a thumb sucker.”
“Did he have a blankie, too?”
“No, I mean he got off on sucking women’s thumbs.” She joined me at the corkboard. “At first I tried to keep an open mind about it. I mean the guy had muscles upon muscles and he was sexy.”
“Sexy? We’re talking about the same guy, right?”
“Yeah. Sexy like a circus strongman in a leopard onesie sort of way. He even had one of those fun mustaches.”
I glanced her way. “You mean a handlebar mustache?”
“No, it wasn’t that big. It was thinner with more of a hook on the ends. I think he waxed it sometimes.”
My laugh was more of a snort. “You date weird men.”
“Said the woman currently sleeping with a mental medium who comes from an ancient line of Oracles.”
“Touché. But Doc has better fingers.”
“Longer, maybe,” she conceded with a shrug.
I flipped up Frankie’s flier to look at the wanted poster below him. This one was a group shot, but clearly a clue.
“Are those rubber duckies?” Natalie asked, pointing at the sepia-colored picture of four ducks lined up on a shelf. Each duck had a word written below it, along with a reward amount, obviously added by a graphic artist.
“Yep.”
“I don’t get it.” She leaned closer. “Ol’ Yeller, Big Red, Greenback Bill, and Black Bart. Is that supposed to be their names?”
“Apparently for the game, it is. I think we need to remember something about this wanted poster. I found these four duckies in the basement sitting on different shelves, but Cooper told me not to touch them.”
Natalie stared at the poster for a few more seconds before saying, “Okay, I got it memorized.”
I glanced at her. “Since when have you had a photographic memory?”
She shrugged. “I’m a visual learner. That’s why I always preferred looking at the pictures of naked guys in those magazines Claire would sneak from her mom’s closet. You, odd duck that you are, preferred reading the sexy stories rather than checking out the men.”
And I still liked reading sexy stories while Natalie preferred looking at men—some things never changed.
I stepped back, grimacing at her. “Those dirty magazines were Claire’s mom’s? I always thought your cousin snuck them from the head shop around the corner.”
“Nope. Aunt Deborah acts all uppity and sophisticated, but there’s a lot of fire beneath that icy surface. I think she and my uncle were having some problems with their marriage even back then, and she was using the magazines to spice up their lives with wild monkey sex.”
Images of Claire’s mom and dad, my childhood neighbors who’d joined us for many backyard barbecues, doing some kinky, hokey-pokey moves flashed through my thoughts. If my grimace sank any deeper, I had a feeling my face might cave in.
“Kate also found—”
“No!” I held my hands up in surrender. “I don’t want to hear any more about your cousins or your aunt right now. Especially when it comes to sex.”
“Fine, but you’re going to miss out on some of Aunt Deborah’s juicy sex-capades down in Arizona with her new hubby.”
“And I’m one hundred percent fine with that.”
“You’re such a wuss.” Natalie pointed her flashlight toward the exit leading farther into the jail. “Let’s finish going through this level and then go see how Doc and Corny are doing upstairs.”
“Lead the way, Deputy-up-to-No-Gooder.”
According to the old leprechaun docent, after the criminals were done being processed in the reception room, they were escorted down the hallway Natalie and I were currently walking through. I tried to imagine what it would have felt like to be led along this hall, most likely handcuffed—if not in leg chains—facing days, weeks, even months of cell life ahead of me. I shuddered. No, thanks.
My time behind bars had been measured in hours so far, and each visit to the clink had left me rattled for days after I was sprung. That was all the more reason for me to avoid Detective Hawke, who seemed to have made putting me behind bars the top spot on his to-do list.
The hall dumped us out into a larger room with light blue walls and a staircase on the far side leading up to the cells. Together, Natal
ie and I checked out each of the rooms lining the edges that were tucked away behind unlocked closed doors.
One door led to the bathroom where Cooper had left his flashlight, which Natalie found when she zipped inside to use the facilities.
Another door opened to a storage closet full of mops, cleaning supplies, and other maintenance necessities. This was the room where Cornelius had found the skeleton keys, according to Natalie.
A third door led to the basement. We opted to skip going down there since Cooper and I had already scoured it. Although Natalie did take a quick run down the stairs to check out the rubber duckies while I waited up top.
The fourth door was marked as an emergency exit. It was solid steel and secured with an alarm and the proper signage to meet modern fire codes. In the old days, before fire safety measures were a requirement, it had probably been locked up tight to keep any prisoners from making a quick escape.
We felt around the thick door frame but came up empty. Natalie won the coin toss for who would play “stepstool,” so I got down on all fours and let her climb up on my back. She took her sweet damned time feeling along the top of the lit exit sign. The new bruises I’d undoubtedly gained from our efforts were all in vain.
“Well, shit.” She helped me to my feet. “I guess that’s all the clues we have down here. Seems like there should be more. Do you think they plant different numbers of clues depending on how many people are playing the game?”
“Maybe.” I brushed off my hands and knees, following her out into the center of the room. “Could be there are a bunch of clues to where that key is up in the jail cells.”
She walked over to the base of the metal staircase and looked up the stairs. “That’s weird.”
“You’re weird.” I joined her, looking up the stairs.
“I know you are, but that’s what makes you special in my heart.” She pointed at the door on the landing at the top of the stairs. “The door is closed.”
“Good observation, Sherlock.” The heavy-duty steel door with a small square window was indeed shut. “That must be why we haven’t heard any sounds from Doc and Cornelius.”
“But didn’t the docent say that door was to be left open?”
“I remember him saying not to close the cage doors in the jail, but not anything in particular about that door.”
“The door was blocked open earlier, though. Why would they close it?” She turned to me. “Something isn’t right here.”
My heart picked up speed, starting to jog along. I craned my neck, listening. It was quiet up there, really quiet. How thick was that door? Thick enough to be soundproof?
“I don’t like how quiet it is,” I told her. “Let’s go see how they’re doing.” I hurried up the twenty or so metal steps, the thud of my boot heels echoing throughout the big first-floor room as I climbed.
Natalie kept up behind me. “Maybe I should go get Coop.”
“Let’s do a drive-by of the crime scene before we call for backup.”
“You’ve been spending too much time with Coop. Now you’re starting to sound like him.”
“It’s your fault. You partnered me with him.”
When we reached the upstairs landing, Natalie tried the door. “It’s locked.”
I pounded on the slab of steel. “Doc? Cornelius?”
Nothing happened.
We both went up on our toes to peek through the small square window. The room on the other side was too dark for me to make out details, of course, being that the game was meant to leave us in the dark.
“Can you see anything?” I asked, going up on my tippy-toes for another look.
“No, it’s too da—wait! I think I see a light at the other end of the room.” She held up her flashlight, shining it through the glass. “Damn it, I’m too short.” She aimed her light at my chest. “Get down on your hands and knees again.”
“You get down this time. Your heels hurt my kidneys.”
“Fine, but take off your boots before you step on me. The tread on those babies is too meaty.” She dropped onto all fours.
I sat down on the metal grate flooring and started to slide my boots off, but then paused. “This steel grate is going to kill your knees, Nat. Maybe we should go look for a stepladder.”
“There’s no time for that. Quit dicking around. Get up on my back and check on the guys.”
Fine! I stripped down to my socks and then carefully stepped up onto her, leaning into the door for support.
“Move your boney heel off my spine, bigfoot,” she growled.
I readjusted. “Better?”
“A little.” She grunted, shifting slightly under me.
I wobbled, clutching the small window’s frame with my fingertips to keep my balance. “Hold still.”
“I am.”
“You need to stop wiggling or you’re going to dump me off.”
“Yeah, well you need to stop shoving two helpings of cake down your piehole in the future,” she said in between grunts.
“Shut it, mouth,” I growled back at her.
Slowly and carefully, I lifted my flashlight.
“What do you see, Vi?”
“Not much. You were right about the flashlight on the floor at the far end of the room.” I aimed my light in that direction, leaning closer. There was something dark on the floor. Big and dark, with an arm sticking out from one side. Was that a …
“Oh, shit,” I whispered.
Natalie grunted, shifting under me again. “What?”
“We’ve got a man down.” I pressed my nose against the glass. “I think it’s Cornelius.”
“Where’s Doc?”
I shined my light around, catching a glimpse of a light beam coming from my far, far right.
Natalie grunted again, louder this time. “Vi, you need to get down. My old knee injury is throbbing like a son of a bitch. I don’t know how much longer I can hold you.”
“Just a second.”
“Hurry!”
I leaned farther to the side, shifting my light as far to the right as I could.
“I found Doc!”
He was sitting on one of the inmate beds in the group cell. His flashlight lay at his feet, the beam aimed toward the far wall. I dipped my light down over his stiff profile. Something definitely wasn’t right here.
“Is he okay?” Natalie asked.
“I don’t think so.”
“What do you mean?”
“It looks like he’s covering his ears.”
“Hear no evil,” she said, shifting again and then cursing in pain.
“Doc!” I pounded on the door, but Doc remained frozen in place with his head down and ears covered. My heartbeat sped up, going from a jog to a long stride.
“Vi! Down! Now!” Natalie said through gritted teeth.
“Shit!” I stepped down onto the metal grate floor. “We have to break in there, and we need to do it now.”
She held out her hand for some help up. “Why would Doc just be sitting there if Cornelius is hurt?”
I hauled her to her feet. “Remember how the docent joked about this place being haunted?”
“Yes.” Natalie leaned against the wall and rubbed her knee, her face tight with pain.
“I don’t think it was a joke.” Nor was the haunted label a marketing ploy, as I’d previously thought. “I’d bet my mom’s Janis Joplin record collection that there’s a ghost in there with Doc and Cornelius.” I tugged on the door handle again to no avail. “And I’m guessing that ghost isn’t some sweet young mail clerk who delivered letters from loved ones to the prisoners.”
I tried pounding on the door again.
“You think it’s a deranged King Kong–sized inmate wearing a clown mask with a manic grin wielding a bloody cast-iron pipe?”
I turned to her, my jaw dipped low. “Jumpin’ Jehoshaphat, Nat! Why did you have to go and make him so scary?”
“I don’t know. That image just popped into my mind.”
“Well, think
of a less creepy ghost next time. One with a geeky bowtie and highwater plaid pants.”
“Why would an inmate be wearing a bowtie?”
“Just do it!” I went back to banging on the door.
Behind us, footfalls thundered up the stairs, matching me pound for pound on the door.
Chapter Thirteen
“What’s all of the pounding and yelling about?” Cooper asked, joining us on the landing. His focus shifted. “Who closed the door?”
“We don’t know, but now it’s locked.” Natalie reached out to him when he swayed slightly, but he kept her at bay with a shake of his head. “Doc and Corny are trapped on the other side.”
“I think there’s someone in there with them,” I said in a somber voice as I put my boots back on. “Someone who shut the door and locked it. Someone no longer breathing.”
Natalie smirked. “Nice job, Vincent Price. Queue the ghostly ‘oooohhh’ groans.”
Cooper frowned from me to Natalie. “What the hell are you two talking about? What makes you think there is anything going on here other than the obvious—the door closed and accidentally locked?”
Rather than waste my breath, I pointed at the window. “Look in there and tell us what you see.”
He took my flashlight and bumped me aside, staring through the window. Unlike Natalie and me, Cooper was tall enough to not need to go up on his toes.
“What’s Curion doing on the floor?” he asked.
“Please tell me he’s breathing,” I said.
“Definitely breathing. Is he taking a nap or rebooting his third-eye chakra again?”
I blew out a breath in relief at Cooper’s still-breathing assessment. “Your guess is as good as mine, but I don’t think he’s taking a nap and it’s too early for his bedtime.” I tapped the right side of the window. “Doc’s over in the group cell sitting on one of the beds.”
Cooper aimed his light in that direction. “Yeah, I see …” He jerked, the flashlight clattering against the glass. “What the fuck?”
I knew there had to be someone in there that Natalie and I couldn’t see. An ectoplasmic visitor was the only explanation I could think of for the scene on the other side of the glass—and for Cooper’s reaction.
