Willing Hostage

by Marlys Millhiser

  She pushed Goodyear off her lap. “You know, kitty, it would be heaven to not have to worry about finances for a while but—” She opened the door almost to collide with Welker.

  “Listen, something’s come up. I have to run.” He handed her a set of car keys. “Think it over tonight and I’ll talk to you first thing in the morning. You can go out to eat. I’ve put a tail on you. But don’t wander all over town.”

  “Hey, wait! I’ve decided not to take the job. Hey.…”

  But Joseph Welker was gone and Leah was left staring at a blue Vega.

  Chapter Eight

  “Give me one good reason, kitty, why I should want to save that big brute’s life.” Leah slid into a dress and zipped it up the back. “No way am I going to Oak Creek. Not for all the money.…” The bills still lay on the dresser. She looked away and yanked a comb through her hair.

  “I’m going out to dinner. Why don’t you just go? I keep telling you I can’t afford a pet.”

  Goodyear jumped to the dresser and sat sniffing the strange pile of money.

  “Oh, no, that’s not mine. I’m not taking the job. I’m going to find something more relaxing.”

  The cat moaned a warning and struck at the money.

  “What’s the matter? Is it counterfeit? Or does it just smell like the law to you?” Leah went into the bathroom to wash her hands and returned to find the money on the floor, Goodyear still crouching smugly on the dresser.

  Next to her shoe lay a twenty-dollar bill. “Cat, you were right. This has got to be counterfeit.” She picked up more twenties, some with wet, frayed corners. “Of, for … Government jobs must be cushy in a depression. No, this has got to be fake.”

  Leah counted. “Goodyear, if he’d pay me this much to make an uncertain contact with Glade what’s-his-face, what must he be willing to offer Glade for the property, whatever it is?”

  Goodyear answered in Siamese fashion, the irises of his eyes vertical slits in the devil’s fashion.

  “Well, I’m not going to do it, you devil. He’s probably with the Mafia. They’ve always got lots of money. He probably conned the local sheriff’s office with phony papers or something.” But she tied a scarf over honey-blond hair. Too much of it showed underneath, so she wound the long strands into a knot and pinned it tight to the back of her head.

  “I can’t just leave all this money lying here, though.” She stuffed the bills into her purse. “I am going to get dinner and you are going.”

  Leah grabbed the cat and carried him to the door, where he squirmed out of her hands and disappeared into the room. She searched under the bed and the chair, in the bathroom. No Goodyear. Her ulcer rumbled. “When I get back, I just may make kitty stew out of you,” she yelled at the infuriating critter she couldn’t see and locked the door behind her. She turned to face the Vega.

  It was hate at first sight.

  She walked around it, kicked a tire, looked in the windows. The car smelled new, strange.

  Leah walked to the drugstore to replenish her supply of Maalox, glancing over her shoulder often to see if she could spot the “tail” Welker referred to. She saw no one. She paid for the Maalox with a twenty from the FBI-Mafia-whatever and watched closely as the clerk examined it. But the woman just put it in the till, returning the change to Leah. “Thank you and have a nice evening.”

  Leah stood outside, listened to the click as the clerk locked up behind her, watched an enormous round weed tumble by, saw a man with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth, lounging in a doorway across the street. The tail? A goon? Other than Welker’s this was the only business suit she’d seen in Walden.

  She hurried toward the café, peering down side streets for the yellow Volkswagen, feeling lonely without it. All the shops were closing now, only a few people ambling on the sidewalks. Rush hour in Walden was a slow affair. The little town seemed harsh, dusty, almost as alien as the mountains. If the man in the suit was following her, she didn’t see him when she entered the café.

  For dinner, she dared her ulcer with a steak and sat by the window to watch for the Volkswagen, or Welker, or Sheila, or the tail or even a sign from heaven to give her direction.

  “Are you the gal with the stray cat?” A strange waitress stopped at her table.

  “How did you know?”

  “Well, Betty described you from this morning and you’re kind of hard to miss. She told me to send some scraps home with you if you came back. Just a minute, I’ll get them.”

  When she returned with the brown bag, she said, “Funny, her thinking of your stray after getting the boot this morning. But she’s crazy about ’em.”

  “Boot?”

  “‘Yeah, she got let go today. Not many tourists going through this summer and lots of local people are leaving to see if they can get work in the shale towns. Not enough business. Feel sorry for Betty, though. Her husband’s out of work, too.”

  Later, Leah found herself standing on the sidewalk, wondering what an ex-model, ex-secretary, ex-clerk, occupational failure, guilt-ridden ex-daughter with three years of college and an ulcer could do in an area where even the waitresses were being laid off.

  The sun was setting in eerie pink and lavender cloud drifts behind the cemetery when she reached Shangri-La. Goodyear appeared for scraps of steak, liver, chicken, and hamburger. When she let him out, his stomach barely cleared the floor. But this time she didn’t say good-bye.

  Leah felt very full herself and a trifle nauseated. Feast and famine and worry were no way to live with an ulcer. She brought out her array of creams, astringents, and hair rollers for something to do and because it was a comfortable routine, and worried about her problems anyway.

  She searched for wrinkles, crow’s feet, gray hairs, and found none. She didn’t look any different at thirty. But she felt different. That birthday was just one more step in a downhill decline. Finally she turned on the black and white television and stared at it, but her thoughts kept getting in the way.

  Leah did her fingernails, did her exercises, put on her nightgown … found herself listening for a cat at the door. Perhaps she would keep Goodyear for company. But she couldn’t afford his appetite. Of course, there was a great deal of money in her purse. But it wasn’t hers. She opened the door to semi-dark. “Kitty, kitty, kitty?” No Goodyear. Just the strange Vega.

  The evening stretched on interminably. After sleeping all day, she resigned herself to a long, slow night.

  Leah missed her scrapbook and for the very reason she had burned it. Going back didn’t look quite so bad after the last twenty-four hours.

  “Economy worsens, congressional committee probes tax write-offs of major oil companies,” said the flickering black and white face. “Chicago woman kidnapped near Cameron Pass”—Leah jerked alert from her TV trance—“and more rain for the high country. These and other items in the news, but first this word from Enveco.”

  Chicago woman kidnapped? No, it couldn’t be.… She watched impatiently as a well-dressed middle-aged man dug a hole in a sandy beach with a shovel. He dumped money into the hole and explained that oil companies poured millions of such dollars down dry holes to find a few producing oil wells to provide America with the power to run its cars, industry, and homes.

  They weren’t talking about her, surely. But how many Chicago women could have been kidnapped near Cameron Pass recently? She sat through a depressing report of Dow-Jones, the Detroit auto industry, unemployment, and an ad for denture wearers who ate blueberry pie.

  Then a host of congressmen expressed shock in bureaucrateese over the “laundry list” of major oil companies. They all strangely resembled the man dumping money down a hole in the beach.

  Words and phrases flew about the room from the flickering tube. “Special favors … loopholes … tax breaks … privileges … percentage depletion … dry holes … foreign royalties … intangible drilling and development costs …” But over it all Leah continued to hear “Chicago woman kidnapped.”

  If Welker was
with the FBI and had worried enough about her safety to exchange cars, surely he wouldn’t have allowed her story to reach the news wires.

  Two clear plastic stomachs digested aspirin at uneven rates and then: “A Chicago woman, thirty-year-old Leah Harper.…”

  Good God! Her name and everything.

  “… was held captive at gunpoint last night at Pair-O-Dice Cabins, a fishing resort fifteen miles west of Cameron Pass. According to Miss Harper, her alleged assailant …”

  Alleged! Leah threw a plastic hair roller at the screen.

  “… beat her and tied her to a bed, but didn’t rape her, the woman said.”

  Although there was no emotion in his voice, he made it sound as if there was something wrong with the “Chicago woman” because she wasn’t raped.

  “Jackson County authorities are searching for a black-haired, muscular man.…”

  Leah began pacing the room.

  “… probably in his mid-thirties and on foot, wearing dark blue shirt and trousers. The man forced Miss Harper to drive him to a spot a few miles east of Walden, Colorado, on State Highway Fourteen where he released her unharmed. A look at weather and sports after this message.”

  “Welker, you bumbling idiot!” Leah hissed at the elderly lady in a porch swing who tried to discuss laxatives. “Now everybody will know my name, where I am.…”

  Leah unlocked the door to peer cautiously out into the dark. “Kitty, kitty?” she called softly. She needed somebody to talk to. The shadow-Vega hunched between her and the road. She was suddenly relieved that it wasn’t a yellow Volkswagen.

  “The Denver area will be warm and dry again tomorrow,” said a voice behind her. “But there is more rain in the two-week forecast for the high country, where rivers and streams are dangerously swollen already, officials say.…”

  “Kitty?” But the world was dark and empty. Leah spent her night in Shangri-La alone with her fear.

  Chapter Nine

  Leah looked suspiciously at everyone who entered the little café the next morning. Her hair was again knotted up under a scarf and her head ached from worry and lack of sleep. She finished her poached-egg-on-milk-toast quickly and hurried back to the Shangri-La, hoping she’d find Goodyear waiting to get in the door, hoping she would not find some menacing type waiting in the room.

  But the front step and the room were empty. Welker had said first thing in the morning. Where was he?

  Finally, Leah packed her bags and loaded them in the Vega.

  She called softly for the cat, and when there was no answer, she locked herself in the room. Were there goons out there looking for Leah Harper? How much of all this could she believe? How much did she dare not believe?

  The minute Welker came she’d hand him the money and leave Walden in the dust. She’d keep the Vega because she had no choice. Where could she go with so little money? With jobs so scarce?

  Leah would find something. She had to. Something far away from a place called Oak Creek.

  She placed the wad of bills on the dresser and took the car keys out of her purse, fiddled with them nervously.

  A faint rustle at the door.…

  “Goodyear, thank God!” But she opened the door to a man with his knuckles poised to knock. “Oh—”

  “Brian Kruger.” He flipped open a wallet with the now-familiar badge and stepped inside. “Joe Welker sent me.” He checked the street and closed the door. “Listen, don’t waste time. You have to get out of here.”

  “You’re telling me! I saw the news on TV last night. What—”

  “We’re really sorry about that.” He had soft brown eyes that reminded her of Jason’s Mutt and hair so thin that his scalp showed between every third strand. But he couldn’t have been over twenty-five. “Joe and I worked all evening to get that story off the wires but we were too late. Now, Joe wants you to—”

  “You can tell Joe to take a flying.… Here.” She pushed the money at him and opened the door. “I’m taking the Vega because you took my car, but I’m not taking the job. I’m not going to Oak Creek. You can tell that to your Joe.”

  “But.…” He followed her out to the Vega.

  Leah slid in, threw her purse on the seat beside her, and put the key in the ignition.

  But Brian Kruger held the car door open. “Wait, listen, you mustn’t come back to Walden. We’re leaving right away and we don’t have enough people to keep a watch on you here.”

  “Don’t worry. If I never see Walden again, it’ll be—” A dark tail, unmistakably feline moved rhythmically along the motel wall above a line of low shrubs.

  “Goodyear!” Leah struggled out of the low car and pushed Brian aside. “Kitty, kitty.” The tail turned the corner by the office and Leah followed. “I’ll even go to the café and beg you some breakfast if—”

  A large black torn with yellow eyes emerged from the shrubbery and sauntered off toward the filling station next door.

  Leah turned back to the Vega. How could she miss a cat she didn’t want? When she didn’t even like cats?

  Brian still stood by the car. “Listen, I wish you’d change your mind about—”

  “Good-bye, Mr. Kruger.” Leah got in, slammed the door in his face, and backed out into the street.

  A sign at the edge of the desolate cemetery read STEAMBOAT SPRINGS 62, and a lonely road stretched west. Why not?

  Brian Kruger watched her from the parking lot of the Shangri-La Motel. Leah headed the Vega across the valley for Steamboat Springs. It had the same four-on-the-floor shift as the Volks and even a working radio. But she heard a repeat of the newscast she’d watched on television the night before, complete with more rain for the high country and a Chicago woman kidnapped near Cameron Pass. She turned it off.

  She missed the cat. Had the big Siamese found a new home already? Cats were independent. Leah was independent. Her mother had depended on cats when she was in trouble. Leah might well be in trouble now. But Leah would depend on Leah. She checked the scarf over her hair. If a blonde in a yellow Volkswagen was in danger, who would notice a girl in a scarf and a blue Vega?

  She would look for a job in Steamboat Springs. Maybe it was bigger than Walden. Anything was bigger than Walden.

  Leah’d had a vague impression, perhaps from school maps, of the Rocky Mountains as one jagged barrier running north and south along the western end of the United States, the impression that one drove through them as she had in getting to Walden and then came soon to California and the sea. But more mountains rose across the treeless rolling plain ahead of her, and from what she could remember of the map, still in the Volkswagen, there was a lot more Colorado after Walden.

  The expanse of sagebrush and fence posts, the infinite view of distances, the empty road added to her loneliness. She could be attacked by an airplane here and no one would ever know.

  Why hadn’t the newscast mentioned the plane? It had given away everything else.

  As she left the valley floor and rose again onto a tortuous mountain road, Leah finally admitted to herself that she’d made a mistake. She was running from guilt and failure and she had run to the wrong place. Just as her sisters and brothers-in-law had warned her.

  The harsh and stunning beauty all around her was the kind that should be viewed on television from the safety of an easy chair—like the surface of the moon. This was no place for Leah Harper, born and bred to the city.

  Even if she hadn’t met an attacker on her first night in the Rocky Mountains, the strangeness of this country would have added one more element to her burden—fear.

  And the more time she put between herself and Walden, the more she thought of the silly cat. How was he faring? She missed having him to talk to.

  Keeping her eyes on the devil road, Leah reached into the purse beside her for a Kleenex. Her hand met a pile of jumbled paper. She knew what it was even before she dared to glance away from the road. Brian Kruger had stuffed the money into her purse, probably when she went off chasing the wrong cat. But why? She to
ld him she wasn’t taking the job. She couldn’t go back to Walden. Welker and Kruger would have left by now, anyway. What was she to do? If she kept the money it would be like stealing because she wasn’t going to Oak Creek.

  “Politicians and corporations steal from the government all the time.”

  RABBIT EARS PASS, ELEVATION 9,880, and soon Leah started down again.

  Of course, they had practically forced the money on her. She had refused it and returned it. What more could she do now? And she certainly could use that money.

  She rounded a curve and found herself facing another valley, the jagged peaks that loomed on the other side of it. The valley itself was far below, jade green and lush, with a river snaking through it. The road catapulted down a ledge on the mountainside.

  She’d heard of breathtaking views. This one left her limp. So did the appalling grade of the road. As she started down, she noticed a settlement on the valley floor and hoped it was Steamboat Springs.

  Had Brian Kruger stuffed the money back into her purse so that when she found it she’d feel she had to carry out Welker’s orders, after all? Were they playing on her honesty, vulnerability?

  STEAMBOAT SPRINGS 4, the sign read at the bottom of the grade, with an arrow pointing ahead. But the words below almost sent her off the road, OAK CREEK 16, with an arrow pointing to a side road.

  Thinking she’d been running from it, she’d actually been heading for Oak Creek all morning.

  Leah stopped at a drive-in for lunch. While she ate, she could see the side road that led to Oak Creek. Her layer of guilt had doubled once she passed it. She wasn’t a politician or a corporation. She had no right to take the Vega and the money and not go to Oak Creek. She didn’t want a job in Steamboat Springs.

  Leah wanted to admit defeat and get the hell back east. Not to Chicago and the family, but to New York where she knew she could get a job, lose herself comfortably in the canyons of the city.

  When she drove out of the drive-in she headed back the way she’d come. She couldn’t help being dumb and honest—the blue Vega pulled onto the road to Oak Creek—even though she knew that people like Welker and the man pouring money down a hole in the beach used and abused the honesty of people like her. She couldn’t use that money unless she did as Welker asked.