by Joseph Badal
The woman’s eyelids snapped open – round with fear.
“That man hurt ya?” he said.
She slowly nodded her head.
“What for?”
No answer.
Danny untied the gag.
“Water,” the woman rasped.
Danny went to the bathroom and filled a cup. He put it to the woman’s lips and let her sip. Water sloshed down her chin. He took the cup away when she started to cough.
“Please help me,” the woman croaked.
Danny laughed. “You talk funny,” he said.
“He is going to kill me,” she said. “You must help me.”
“I better be goin’,” he said. “Don’t want no trouble.”
The woman yelled, “No, please,” she begged. “Untie me.”
He shook his head. “Oh no. My mama, she tell me not to go messin’ in other people’s bizness. I always listen to my mama.”
“Your mama must be good woman. She must tell you, always do right thing.”
“That’s Mama!”
“Vould your mama want you to help person in trouble?”
Danny appeared to think about the question for a moment. He removed the baseball cap and tousled his hair. “I guess. Maybe.”
“What if she knew you had chance to help someone in trouble and did not help?”
“Oh, she be mad at me.”
“If you do not help me now, your mama will find out. You get in big trouble.”
Danny scrunched up his eyes and wrinkled his nose. He put his cap back on and stared down at his shoes. Then he suddenly looked up. “If I help you, will you go home with me?”
“Absolutely,” the woman said on a gush of air. “I tell your mama vhat big hero you are. How you save Miriana’s life.”
“That yo’ name?” he asked. “Miriana.”
“Yes,” she said. “Miriana.”
Danny smiled. “What do I gotta do?”
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
“Mr. Cole’s office, may I help you?”
“This is Joe Callahan in Signal Intelligence at NSA. I have information for Jack Cole. Priority Red.”
“Hold please.”
Jack’s secretary transferred the call to her boss.
“Hey, Joe,” Jack said. “What d’ya got?”
“Jack, we’ve been listening to telephone traffic into and out of the Yugoslav Embassy. One of my people just heard a conversation between Paulus Tomavic, an Embassy employee, and someone named Artyan. The call came in from some backwater town – Pineview – in South Carolina.”
“Yeah . . ..”
“The guy named Artyan said he had the Gypsy girl.”
“Damn! Joe, were you able to pinpoint his location? How close can you put us to the caller?”
“He called from a pay phone about a mile east of Route 1, two-and-a-half miles into South Carolina. We’re pulling up maps now. That close enough for you?”
“You bet! Anything else?”
“Yeah. This Artyan said he will have avenged the Karadjic kidnapping by Saturday. He also said something about punishing the son for the sins of the father. We haven’t figured that one out yet. Make any sense to you?”
CHAPTER THIRTY
Danny sliced through the cloth strips tied around Miriana’s ankles. His face lit up as though a happy thought had suddenly struck him. He knelt on the floor and stared at her. “I’m real good with locks. I opens locks on cabin doors when I want to. Then I locks the doors. Nobody knows I been there.”
“Good for you, Danny,” Miriana said. “Now, please cut my arms loose, Danny.”
“You wanna hear how I sneak into these cabins and watch people sleepin’?”
Miriana inhaled a great rush of air into her lungs and held it. “I would love to hear all about it, Danny. But not right now.”
Danny frowned.
“Come on, Danny. We have to get out of here. We can go tell your mama you are big hero.”
The smile returned to Danny’s face. “Yeah!”
He cut through the strips of material that bound her wrists to the bedposts, then stepped back and wiped the knife blade on his dungarees.
Miriana threw off the bedspread and rolled naked onto the floor. She had lost circulation in her feet while they were tied. She used the side of the bed to pull herself up from the floor and sat on the bed, rubbing her feet until they no longer felt prickly.
Danny gaped at her nakedness. She realized he’d probably never seen a naked woman. She scrambled over to her suitcase and grabbed underwear, a pair of jeans, a lightweight sweatshirt, and a pair of athletic shoes. After dressing quickly, she’d started for the door when the sound of an arriving car sent a burning spike of fear through her. She froze where she stood.
She didn’t know what to do, unable to take any action. Fear engulfed her and her body shook. It took all her self-control to keep from screaming.
Danny calmly took her hand and led her to the trapdoor.
Vitas figured he’d spend a couple of hours with the girl before killing her. He looked at his watch. It was now 7 p.m. He could be gone by midnight. “Miriana, honey,” he sang out after unlocking the cabin’s door, “your lover is home.” He laughed while he walked toward the bedroom. He felt his blood rushing, his body hot with excitement.
Vitas roared when he saw the empty bed. He hadn’t been gone more than twenty minutes. One goddamed phone call to that asshole, Paulus Tomavic. How could she have gotten away? Then he saw the cleanly sliced strips of cloth on the bed. In a rage, he pulled the mattress off the bed and threw it against the wall.
He took a flashlight from his bag, ran outside, and searched around the cabin. Two sets of footprints in the dirt led away from the back of the cabin.
Then he noticed the loose boards. He kicked at the boards, sending them flying into the crawlspace. He peered into the darkness but saw only empty space. He moved the flashlight’s beam and saw the dirt had been disturbed under the cabin. After crawling through the opening, he shone the beam up at the cabin floor. A trapdoor! With a quick jerk, he pulled back the bolt on the latch and opened the door. Vitas stood up in the opening and looked around the inside of the cabin. How could she have gotten to the latch? Someone else must have opened it from below. Someone else now knows I’m here.
“Dupa!” he shouted. “How could I be so stupid?”
Vitas started to climb into the cabin when something snarled under him. He felt a sudden pain in his right calf. He leaped up and onto the cabin floor with a yell. A huge raccoon clung to his leg, its teeth imbedded in the meaty part of his calf, its claws hooked around his leg.
Vitas pulled a 9mm Smith & Wesson from his shoulder holster, shot the beast, splattering gore around it. He kicked it back into the crawlspace.
He rolled up his ripped pantleg to examine the wound. Then he cleaned it with soap and water and tore a strip of bedsheet to wrap around his leg as a bandage. He went outside and tried to follow the footprints at the back of the cabin, but they disappeared at the edge of the woods.
I’ve got to get out of here, he thought. The girl could be anywhere. If she gets to a phone, I’m dead. He hopped into the car and sped out of the Pineview Lodge. While driving north, the image of her naked body in the shower returned to him. He slammed his fist against the car seat over and over, all the while screaming her name.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
When the CIA plane landed at the Pineview Airfield late that night, Bob took his attention from the file on his lap.
The Pineview Sheriff, Don Mechem, met Bob when he climbed down the steps from the plane, followed by two CIA agents and three FBI men, including Agent Fricke. Bob was pleased that Supervisory Agent Turner had elected to skip the trip. He was apparently still pissed off with Bob over the incident at the Fayetteville Sheriff ’s office.
Short, wiry, and intelligent-looking, Mechem showed no sign of being impressed by the big-city Feds.
“I got two four-wheel drive Tahoes waiting,” Meche
m said. “Ready to hit the road?”
Mechem drove one of the Tahoes, Bob sat in the front seat beside him, and FBI Special Agent Fricke sat in the backseat. Bob took a map from his inside jacket pocket and spread it out on the center console. He pointed out a circle drawn in with the words PAY PHONE next to the circle.
“This is the location where the man named Artyan used a pay phone to call the Yugoslav Embassy. Sheriff, what’s located at the intersection of Dogwood and State Highway 176?” Bob asked.
“Gas station on one corner, convenience store, pizza joint on another,” Mechem said. “The other two corners are undeveloped.”
“Okay,” Bob said. “Let’s assume he used a phone relatively close to where he’s holding the girl – say no more than five miles. How many motels would be within that distance?”
“Two . . . no, three,” Mechem said.
“We’ll check out the closest one first.”
Mechem pulled over to the side of the road and studied the map.
Bob watched the Sheriff “X” motel locations on the map.
“The closest one to the pay phone is Lori’s Bungalows. Then the Sunshine Inn. Lastly, the Pineview Lodge. These three are all on this side of the highway. If your theory’s correct, the guy is probably staying at one of them. There are two other motels in the area, but they’re clear on the other side of town. A lot farther away than five miles.”
“Okay!” Bob said. “Let’s do it. We’ll check out the motels. If we come up with nothing, we can go over to the pizza joint. Maybe someone there saw our man.”
Mechem gunned the engine, sending stones flying off the spinning rear tires. The rubber gripped the road surface and the truck shot forward with a lurch. After only a few minutes, the Sheriff called out, “Lori’s is right around the bend.”
The motel looked like any of a thousand others spread across rural America. A neon sign flashed “VACA_ CY.” The overall ambience of the place, Bob thought, recommended against stopping there – faded and cracked yellow-painted exterior walls, a shingle-covered portico with numerous shingles missing supported by white posts between the rooms, and a gravel parking lot. Only one car was parked in the lot.
“This place barely makes it,” Mechem said. “It gets the occasional tourist or the bored housewife shacking up with her equally bored neighbor.”
When the other Tahoe pulled in, Bob told the CIA agents to take two of the FBI guys and watch the building’s rear. He, Mechem, and Fricke went into the motel office.
A fifty-something, fat woman in an enormous flowered muumuu sat behind the counter. Her garish red hair, done up in pink curlers, looked as though it had been fried by way too many permanent waves. A lipstick-stained cigarette dangled from her tobacco-yellowed fingers. When she offered a grimace of a smile, Bob saw that lipstick also marked her teeth. The place smelled like cheap perfume and body odor.
“Well, well, well. If it ain’t ma old Cher Donny Mechem,” she said in a Cajun accent. “I ain’t seen you out here in a coon’s age, boy. You must be behavin’ yoself fo a change.”
“Now, now, Ms. Lori, you be nice,” Mechem said, a genuinely friendly smile showing on his face for the first time since he’d met Bob at the airfield. “I got important visitors here from outta town. We wouldn’t want to give them the wrong impression, you hear?”
Lori batted her eyelashes at Bob, then at Fricke. “What you bring me here, Donny Boy. Dese men look like some kinda federales. Dat right?”
“Something like that,” Mechem said.
“What can I do for you gentlemen?” Lori said, giving Fricke a gap-toothed leer full of lascivious intent. “Never let it be said Lori Pontchartrain don’t treat visitors like impotant people.”
“Lori, we’re looking for a man; he had a young woman with him. Seen anyone like that?”
“You jes described ‘bout half my clientele,” Lori said with a chuckle. “This guy you lookin’ fo, he local?”
“No way,” Mechem said.
“No one here for over a week what wasn’t local.”
“That’s all we need to know. Thanks, Lori.” Mechem half-turned toward the door, then stopped. “Whose car is that out there?”
Lori smiled. “I give you my word, Sheriff, it ain’t whoever you lookin’ fo.”
The Sunshine Inn looked like a carbon copy of Lori’s place – even down to its yellow paint. But the Sunshine Inn appeared to be doing a better business. There were eight cars – all with Virginia plates.
Bob followed Mechem into the motel’s office and was introduced to the owner, Johnny Roy Pulsever, a pencil-thin, crane-necked guy with pallid, acne-scarred skin. Cross-stitched, framed religious messages hung on two of the walls. A brass sign with black lettering sat in a small tripod on the counter. The words read BORN AGAIN.
“Looks like business is picking up, Johnny Roy,” Mechem said.
“Just some people down for the prayer meeting tomorrow night.”
“Can’t never get enough prayer, huh, Johnny Roy?” Mechem asked.
The motel owner gave Mechem a sour look and said, “Something I can do for you?”
“Looking for a guy with a foreign accent. Had a young woman with him. Seen anybody like that in the last twenty-four hours?”
“Sheriff, you know I won’t allow no adulterous fornicating here.”
Mechem stepped closer to the counter. “I didn’t say these two were messing around. Just answer my question, Johnny Roy.”
“Nope. Haven’t had anyone like that stay here.”
Mechem tipped his hat at the man and walked out.
When Bob caught up with Mechem, he asked, “He’s strung a little tight, isn’t he?”
Mechem sighed and shook his head. “More than you know. For all that asshole’s religious bullshit, he’s the worst racist in the area. I’ve been trying to pin a murder on him for two years. No luck.”
Bob noticed Fricke react to Mechem’s words. The man hadn’t said a word so far, but it was obvious he was listening, taking everything in.
The Pineview Lodge spread out over several acres, with individual cabins scattered among dense stands of brush and enormous pine trees that stood like rigid sentinels behind the office. It was too dark to see how far back the motel’s land went, or how many cabins there were. Like the previous two motels, the Pineview Lodge was rustic, but, unlike the other properties, it was better maintained.
“I wanta warn you, the owner of this place is one of the meanest sumbitches in these parts,” Mechem told Bob and Fricke. “He’s an old bootlegger. Doesn’t like cops. Hates Feds with a passion. Claims he can smell a Fed a mile away. He ain’t gonna go out of his way to make us feel welcome.”
Bob and Fricke nodded their understanding and followed Mechem into the motel office, which smelled like booze and tobacco.
“What kinda company you keepin’ now, Sheriff?” Buford Nolan asked, looking over glasses perched on the end of his nose. He spat brown, viscous liquid into a paper cup he held in his left hand. Then he smiled, showing tobacco-stained teeth.
“Buford, I don’t take kindly to visitors to our city being treated with disrespect. Do I make myself clear?”
Buford didn’t say a thing. He just scowled at Mechem, then at Bob and Fricke with a wrinkled nose and turned down lips. Then he displayed a sneering smile, again spitting brown juice into the cup.
“This gentleman here,” Mechem said, “has a couple of questions to ask you, Buford.”
Bob took his cue. “We’re looking for a man who might have checked into your motel last night with a young woman. He probably had a Slavic accent. Do you remember anyone like that?”
“Only a couple guests here since last weekend,” Nolan said. “But there weren’t no woman with any of them that I could see.”
“Can you describe these men?” Fricke asked. “Are any of them still here?”
Nolan shrugged. “Just men,” he said. He rubbed one eye and spit once more into the cup. “The last guy was kinda strange, thoug
h,” he said. “I think he was a foreigner. Like you said, he had an accent of some kind. Sounded like a Rooskie to me.”
Bells went off in Bob’s head. His heart raced. “Can you describe him?”
“Tall – ‘round six foot two. ‘Bout two hundred pounds. He looked kinda Rooskie, too. You know, sorta like one of them guys you see in the news. One scary lookin’ sumbitch, too. And, oh yeah, he was blind in one eye. Goddam eye was white. Gave me chills just lookin’ at it. He drove outta here a couple times, but came right back. ‘Bout an hour ago he hauled ass down the road again like he had a bear chasin’ him. If I had to guess, I’d say he ain’t comin’ back this time.”
“Which way did he go?”
“North.”
“Can you give us a description of the car? Did you get his license plate number?” Fricke asked, his voice now tinged with a bit of excitement.
Buford looked at Fricke, then at Bob. He smiled. “You bet your ass,” he said, and just stood there staring at them.
Time passed, but Buford said nothing more until Mechem said, “You still hosting that high-stakes poker game here every other weekend, Buford?”
Nolan visibly swallowed. “Well, now, I think I can help you with that license number.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
The motel owner got in the back of the Sheriff’s vehicle with Fricke and rode with them to the cabin at the back of the property. Mechem radioed an APB on the car Nolan told them he’d seen drive away from the property. When they arrived at the cabin, Buford cursed, “Sumbitch left the gol-darn door open! Probably got critters running all over the place by now. Bastard left all the lights on, too.”
Fricke and the men in the second vehicle encircled the cabin, while Bob and Mechem, guns drawn, carefully entered it.
Bob spotted the open trapdoor and the still-damp blood next to it on the floor.
“Who’s the guy you’re looking for?” Buford Nolan asked one of the FBI agents while they examined the back of the cabin.
