Tangled Thing Called Love: Life and Love on the Lam (A Loveswept Contemporary Romance)

by Juliet Rosetti

  “Quite the little spitfire, aren’t you?” Oscar Woods said, grinning. “I watched you beating the crap out of Channy, and she’s twice your size.”

  “I am not twice her size!” Channing squawked. “I weigh one hundred nineteen.”

  “Yeah, right, Channy, and I’m Hillary Clinton.” Oscar snorted.

  “You knew? About Fawn?” Mazie felt giddy. Neurons were pinging around inside her brain, theories were rapidly shuffling and reshuffling; coincidences were being outed as not-coincidences.

  Oscar wrenched her arm higher, making her cry out in pain. “Channy—get me a rag from that pile there. We’re going to have to muzzle Miss Pain in the Ass here.”

  “Who’s Miss Pain in the Ass? Oh, you mean Mazie? Guess what, Oscar—I’m going to be Miss Congeniality! And probably Miss Quail Hollow.” Channing broke into a smile that exposed her blood-smeared teeth.

  Oscar dragged Mazie across the floor, her skirt bouncing up and down, Channing trailing after, chattering. “This time I’ll get a crowning ceremony. When Fawn had her accident, I was the runner-up. They should have had a ceremony—you know, where they put the tiara on my head and I did my queen walk down the runway. But it never happened. Instead she was on the news all the time. Fawn, Fawn, Fawn, where is Fawn Fanchon, from morning to night—I got so tired of it!”

  “The cheese has slid off that one’s cracker,” Oscar muttered. He shoved Mazie behind an SUV that would shield them from anyone who peered into the garage.

  “I was going to cut the ribbon at a minimart opening,” Channing prattled on. “I got all dressed up in my pageant gown. I put on my sash and the tiara—the one Fawn stole. But when Mama saw the tiara she freaked out. She made me tell her where I’d gotten it and I had to tell her about Fawn.”

  Channing handed a grease-stained rag to Oscar. “Mama tried to burn the sash and the tiara in our backyard grill, but I knocked Mama down and grabbed the crown out of the fire and hid it in Buzzy’s garage. Only I don’t like having the tiara so close to her”—Channing pointed to the floor—“in case Fawn’s not really dead and tries to get it back.”

  “You were a goddamn nuisance from the first day you walked in my bar,” Oscar growled in Mazie’s ear. “Snooping, asking questions.” Clamping her jaw in his hand, he forced open Mazie’s mouth and stuffed the rag so far back in her throat she gagged. “Fetch me that roll of tape off that shelf,” he snapped at Channing.

  Channing brought him the tape. “Mama bought me a new tiara. I wore it to the minimart opening, but it wasn’t as nice as my real one.” She checked her reflection in the side mirror of a truck. “I was supposed to give a speech on good grooming to the Girl Scouts in September, but then 9/11 happened and my speech got canceled. All anyone talked about was the stupid World Trade Center. Like it was more important.”

  Oscar spoke to Channing in a loud voice, trying to cut through her mental fog. “Take hold of Mazie while I tape her up.”

  Muscles tensed, nerves quivering, Mazie was primed for the changing of the guard. When Channing moved to pinion her from behind, Oscar stepped back and she jerked her leg up, trying to kick him in the crotch. Once again the imbecile dress foiled her, the skirt springing up in her face, the kick missing by a mile. Oscar grabbed her shoulders and shook her so violently her head snapped back and forth and her teeth rattled. “You try that again I’ll hurt you bad,” he hissed.

  He jerked a phone out of his jeans pocket and jabbed in numbers. Someone answered and he barked, “Get over to the garage. Right away.” Disconnecting, he turned back to Mazie and proceeded to mummy-wrap her body from shoulders to waist, strapping her arms tightly against her body with automotive tape. She struggled, her heart violently slamming against her ribs, wild plans for escape whirling through her head.

  Headlights suddenly flashed through the windows of the bay door, bright beams that scythed across the building’s high ceiling. A vehicle was approaching at a high rate of speed, its brakes screeching as it suddenly slowed and turned into the narrow alley that ran along the side of the garage. Was this the person Oscar had phoned?

  Oscar used his big teeth to rip off a last length of tape. “Channing. Hey! Wake up!” He snapped his fingers to get her attention. “You keep hold of her now—don’t let go of her for one second.” He hurried toward the back of the garage. Mazie heard the garage’s rear door opening. There was the murmur of voices, then the slap of footsteps across the cement floor.

  Bodelle Blumquist strode around the side of the van. She wore white knit pants, a red raincoat, and flower-patterned rubber boots. Without the troweled-on makeup, she looked like a suburban grandmother. She halted, taking in the scene with disbelief. “What in freaking hell is going on?”

  Mazie felt her whole body slump with relief. Saved! Bodelle would put a stop to whatever idiocy Oscar had in mind.

  “Channing’s been telling tales.” Oscar jerked his thumb at Mazie. “To her.”

  Bodelle stared at her daughter. “What did you tell Mazie?”

  Channing sniffled. “I’m hurt, Mama. Mazie stabbed me. And she stuck an umbrella up my nose. She made me tell. About the accident with Fawn.”

  “You told her about Fawn?” Bodelle repeated, eyes narrowing dangerously.

  “I had to. But it’s okay. Mazie didn’t care. She told me the other girls voted me Miss Congeniality, Mama. And she said I was going to win the title, too.”

  “Oh, my God,” Bodelle whispered. “After everything, after we worked so hard—”

  “I told you she’d crack up if you let her be in that pageant,” Oscar growled. “Didn’t I tell you to keep her on the heavy-duty tranks—”

  Bodelle wheeled on Oscar, eyes flashing. “How did you happen to be here in the garage tonight?”

  Oscar shrugged, trying for nonchalance, but his skittering eyes betrayed him. “Just came over to check on stuff,” he mumbled.

  Channing giggled. “He came in the trailer with me, Mama. He’s too big for that built-in bunk, so we had to do the nasty on the floor.”

  Bodelle gasped. She stared at Oscar in disbelief. “You—and my daughter?”

  So Oscar was having a fling with Channing? Was Bodelle furious because a middle-aged barkeeper lacked the social status to be a match for her precious child? Mazie wondered. Or was Oscar supposed to be Bodelle’s own personal stud muffin? Having it off with both mother and daughter—Miss Manners would not approve.

  “My side hurts where she stabbed me, Mama,” Channing whined. “You need to take me home and fix me up. Then I want to go to bed. I need my beauty sleep for the pageant tomorrow—”

  “There’s not going to be a pageant now, you stupid little twit!” Bodelle exploded.

  Channing gave a wail of anguish and stuffed her fists in her mouth.

  Bodelle turned to Oscar. “We have to move and we have to do it fast. There’ll be a hue and cry for Mazie Maguire all over town. Everyone is convinced there’s a murderer running around loose, thanks to you. What in God’s name were you thinking—shooting Ralston like that?”

  Oscar gave a petulant kick to the mallet lying on the floor. “Listen, lady—you oughta be thanking me. If I hadn’t gotten rid of that little freak, all of us would be sitting in a cell tonight—he would have squealed like a pig.”

  “You could have buried him somewhere instead of leaving him in that van for the police to find. How stupid can you get?”

  “I had to do it fast.” Oscar’s face flushed deep red. “Anyways, you want to talk stupid, go look at that video Little Miss Sunshine here made of herself.”

  “I’ll take care of that later. First things first.” Bodelle took a deep breath, then slowly let it out. “Oscar, go turn off the garage lights—all but the few in the back. I don’t want some idiot wandering by thinking the place is still open.”

  “We gonna have to wipe Maguire’s prints off everything in here?” Oscar asked.

  Bodelle thought for a moment, rubbing her forehead, then said, “No. She came back to the ga
rage to get her truck. Of course her prints would be here. Then she left and … well, she drove out to the swamp. It’ll be another mysterious disappearance, like Fawn’s. Yes, I think that’ll work. The little fool went wandering off in the coulee where she and her boyfriend were filming. Nobody will ever know what happened to her. She could have fallen in quicksand or—”

  “The Coulee Devil got her,” Oscar suggested, grinning.

  “Whatever. You’ll need to drive that old pickup of hers and leave it in the woods. I’ll follow along behind and pick you up. My own car is too recognizable, though—I’ll borrow one of Buzzy’s beaters.”

  Oscar hurried back to the switch box. The lights went out one by one until only a few flickering bulbs created a murky gray light. Time was running out, Mazie realized, struggling frenziedly against the sticky tape and working at the gag, pushing at it with her tongue, moving her jaw back and forth. There! The rag was out. She began flexing her muscles, sensing that the tape binding her arms wasn’t very secure either; it was sticking to her skin, but not to the slick fabric of the dress.

  “Raise the grating over the grease pit,” Bodelle ordered Oscar when he came back. “Channing, bring Mazie over to it.”

  “No, Mama—don’t open the pit,” Channing whispered. “She’s down there.”

  “Don’t be a ninny,” Bodelle snapped. “Fawn is dead. You know that.”

  “I know she’s dead. But she’s still alive.”

  “No, Fawn isn’t alive, baby,” Bodelle crooned, using the tones of a parent trying to coax a toddler into eating its creamed peas. “You want to win the pageant, don’t you?”

  “You said there wasn’t going to be a pageant.”

  “We can still have a pageant, but we have to take care of Mazie first. You have to follow directions if you want to win the pageant.”

  “Where’s the damn latch?” called Oscar, who was groping around next to an iron grating embedded in the floor.

  “On the left,” Bodelle said. “Hurry up.”

  “How deep is this thing?” Oscar asked.

  “Buzzy told me once that it’s nine or ten feet, the size of a small swimming pool.”

  There was a rasping metallic noise as Oscar began raising the grating, a steel slab about five feet wide and six feet long, slotted like a sewer drain. Ordinarily the grating must have taken at least two men to raise, but Oscar was in terrific shape from years of wrangling beer kegs, and with a grunt of effort he heaved up the grating, then eased it down to lie across the floor. The pit was open.

  “Awright—bring her over,” he panted, wiping his hands on his pants.

  Mazie writhed and bucked and dug her heels into the floor, but her soles slipped on the greasy surface and Channing manhandled her relentlessly toward the pit. In seconds Mazie was close enough to see what lay below. It was a pool of black, sludgy glop, gleaming dully in the dim light, the repository of every lube job, oil change, industrial solvent, and spit wad for the past eighty years, probably going back to the time when the garage was still a hangar and airplane carburetors had been drained into it. Amelia Earhart might have been down there for all anyone knew. The oily, chemical stench rose in great, gagging waves. As she began to understand what they intended to do to her, Mazie’s stomach clenched and her entire body went rigid with fear.

  Think, Maguire! Exploit your enemies’ weaknesses.

  “Channing,” she whispered, “I saw something move down there.”

  “What?” Channing halted in her tracks. “What was it? What did you see, Mazie?”

  “I—I’m not sure. Maybe it was just a rat.”

  Hah! Not even a rat could have survived in that ooze. The Environmental Protection Agency would have had a collective seizure if they could see this pocket of pus seeping down into the groundwater. How had the Zuffs gotten away with it all these years?

  “For God’s sake, Channing—stop dawdling!” Bodelle rapped out. “Bring her up to the edge.”

  “Ohmigod—” Mazie hissed. “Is that a hand? Over there on the left.”

  “Where?” Pressed close against her, she could feel Channing trembling.

  Oscar pulled a gun from his jacket pocket. “We going to shoot her first?”

  Bodelle considered. “No,” she said after a moment. “We won’t need to.”

  “She worked her gag out. She’ll yell her head off.”

  Bodelle stared at Mazie with her slightly bulging olive green eyes. “The rain will cover any noise she makes. They say people who drown pass out after thirty seconds, but no one has ever studied how long it takes to drown in industrial sludge.” She shot Mazie a mocking look. “This could be your final pageant talent, Mazie—holding your breath to see how long you can stay alive.”

  “That’s not a good talent,” Channing said seriously. “My cheerleading routine was better. I should’ve gotten a higher score.”

  Mazie stared down at the waiting pit. A bubble rose to the surface and exploded with a dull blurp. She was going to spend the final moments of her life struggling to keep her mouth and nose out of that stuff, but it would slowly drag her down, fill her nostrils, mouth, lungs—

  “Bombs away!” Without warning, Oscar shoved Mazie into the pit.

  Channing hadn’t stepped back quickly enough; as Mazie went over, she stuck out a foot, hooking it around Channing’s ankle. Both of them tumbled into the pit, hitting at the same instant, their impact making a glurpglurpglurp sound like a giant bullfrog swallowing a giant fly.

  Mazie sank up to her waist, but now the skirt that had been the bane of her existence rescued her from a horrible death. The hoops floated to the surface, the fabric mushrooming out, suspending her above the slime. If she stayed still, she discovered, she could maintain her above-the-waist equilibrium like a Weeble toy. Channing hadn’t been so lucky. She immediately sank, then resurfaced, her entire body as black and glistening as a seal, her eyes squeezed shut. Sputtering and gasping, she flailed around wildly, creating tidal waves of ooze that threatened to capsize Mazie.

  Meanwhile Bodelle was screaming, crouching down on the rim of the pit, holding her hand out, her voice echoing eerily. “Channing! Oscar, help me—get her out!”

  From inside, Mazie could see that the pit extended horizontally quite a ways beneath the grating. It was too dark to tell, but she thought it actually was about the size of a swimming pool. It was deep enough, at any rate, that her dangling feet couldn’t touch the bottom. She thought she might pass out from the smell before she drowned. Blind and blubbering, Channing thrashed about, until one of her flailing arms found Mazie and clamped on to her like a life preserver.

  “Channing, let go,” Mazie yelled, “or we’ll both—”

  Channing spat black gunk. “She’s under me!” she gurgled. “It’s Fawn—she’s pulling me down. Don’t let her get me!” Panic-stricken, Channing tried to climb Mazie like a ladder, hauling Mazie’s entire right side down into the muck, making her skirt pop up on the left side like a sail. With her arms bound, Mazie had no way to right herself.

  “I’ll save you from Fawn,” Mazie said, trying to hold her own panic at bay, “but you have to untape me.”

  “She’s pulling me downnn!” Channing shrieked, her mouth right up against Mazie’s ear, nearly blowing out her eardrums.

  “Unwrap the tape,” Mazie told Channing.

  “I feel her hand—she’s reaching for me!”

  “No, that was your hand, Channing. Peel off the tape. Then you’ll be safe.”

  Gasping and sobbing, Channing pawed at Mazie, groping until she found a draggling end of tape. She pulled. A few yanks was all it took; maybe there was a spritz of WD-40 in this devil’s batter, lubricating everything it came in touch with. As Mazie flexed and squirmed, the tape edged upward in a solid mass and she emerged from it like a butterfly from a cocoon, the tape sliding up into a big, sodden collar around her neck.

  “Channing!” Bodelle shouted, thrusting an old truck muffler down into the pit.

  “Grab thi
s!”

  Channing and Mazie floundered through the muck, trying to paddle with their legs but held up mainly by the buoyancy of the big skirt. The sludge sucked at them, trying to drag them under, and Mazie felt as though she was in one of her nightmares, the one where she tried to move in quicksand. They reached the truck muffler, a five-foot length of steel poking down into the pit. Mazie snatched at it.

  Oscar stood at the lip of the pit, arm extended, gun pointed directly at Mazie’s head. He was smiling, anticipating the moment of release, his finger slowly pulling back on the trigger.

  “Don’t shoot!” Mazie screeched. “There’s gasoline in here. One shot and this whole place blows sky-high!”

  She had no idea whether that was true or not, but it gave Oscar something to think about. Bodelle screamed at him to put the gun away. Reluctantly Oscar took his finger off the trigger, clicked the safety on, and stuck the gun back in his pocket. Grabbing hold of the muffler, Mazie tried to haul herself up, but Bodelle, operating on the don’t-help-the-wrong-victim principle, let go. The muffler plopped into the glop, striking Channing on the hip, and setting off a whole new round of shrieking.

  “Fawn’s got me!” Channing shrilled, tried to climb up on Mazie again.

  Mazie pushed her off. “Fawn won’t hurt you if you do what I say. First, rub the gunk out of your eyes.”

  Channing obeyed, opening her eyes a crack. They were wild and unfocused, and her breath came out in short, panicked pants.

  “Heave me up,” Mazie told her. “Then I can help you get out.”

  Strong hands—strangler hands—took hold of Mazie’s waist and hoisted her upward. She grabbed onto the edge of the floor, but it was slippery and she slid back into the pit.

  “No, Channing,” Bodelle shouted. “Stop lifting her! Come over to Mama! Look, I’ve got a rope for you.”

  Channing, in a terror-filled world of her own, didn’t see or hear Bodelle. She seized Mazie around the waist, and using the strength built up through years of exercise, boosted her aloft until the upper part of Mazie’s body flopped onto the floor. Half in and half out, her legs frantically kicking, Mazie scrabbled for purchase.