A Wicked Plan

by Rod Kackley

  While her tongue explored his mouth, Bree’s hand was making him feel like a teenager again.

  Tim put his arms around Bree and she pulled back to drop down to her knees.

  All questions answered, or at least forgotten. Bree convinced Tim she wanted him. They would go to Canada together.

  “And if she fucks up along the way,” Tim told himself, “well, I will know what to do. There’s lots of trees up there, too. And they are just the right height to swing a bitch from.”

  Rope, gasoline, gloves and a ski mask. Tim checked the Walmart receipt, kind of wishing he hadn’t used his credit card.

  But he was out of cash. What choice did he have?

  “No worries,” Bree said. “Before they check your name, we will be in Canada or Mexico.” “They’ve got so many crimes to work on now, what’s one more?”

  “Besides, once they find Paul’s body, this little police department will be busy for weeks,” Tim said.

  “Exactly, baby,” Bree said.

  They went into the St. Isidore Walmart together. Tim didn’t want to let her out of his sight, and besides, she needed him, right? He’d given her such a tumble in bed that she was hurting.

  “Rub my neck, baby,” Bree said as they walked through the glass doors that parted automatically in front of them.

  She was a few steps in front of Tim, rolling her head and grimacing as he massaged her neck with his right hand.

  They got in and out quick.

  Kind of like Tim on a good night, Bree smiled to herself. Okay, that was a little bit snarky. I am starting to care for this guy. He is just like me. Ready to kill if that is what it takes to get what he wants.

  And, he wants me.

  I can understand that.

  And I want him too, just not the way he wants me.

  Too bad for Tim.

  Back at the ranch, as he liked to say, Tim relaxed on the bed and settled back for one of the best parts of the day. Bree was undressing.

  Watching Bree get ready for bed reminded Tim of why he was doing this. She was so beautiful. Her skin was soft, smooth and unblemished.

  “Look up the word ‘perky’ in the dictionary, there’s a picture of her nipples,” Tim told Paul back when he was still romancing for one, getting addicted to Bree’s Facebook page and YouTube videos.

  Everything was so fresh and so new. Maybe not virginal, but damn close.

  Tim knew he might not have been the first, but he was certainly in the top three or four. Tim couldn’t figure out what Bree’s problem was with her mother, but if it made it easier for them to be together, he was locked and loaded. He’d killed before. What’s one more? And then one more after that?

  Tim could hardly wait to put a couple of bullets in Steven.

  Bree hadn’t told him everything about what Steven had done to her, but he had heard enough and he had seen enough.

  Tim could hardly wait to cause Steven some serious pain. He had left Paul’s Smith & Wesson in the glove box of his truck.

  If he had it in his pocket, Tim would have put it against Steven’s kneecaps and blown one away, then the other, right then and there. The only reason he had hesitated was that he didn’t have the rope and the gasoline.

  Gotta to stick to the plan, Tim had thought to himself in the hedges.

  Even though Bree’s bare body was enough to drive any second thoughts out of his head about killing her mother, he could not put away the thought of Steven punching Debbie in the face.

  He broke her nose and knocked out a tooth. That’s just wrong, Tim thought as he broke down the Smith & Wesson he’d gotten from Paul and started cleaning it while Bree finished making herself more perfect.

  Or maybe it was just that Steven had been fucking his Bree.

  Maybe it was that Steven might have been better. It didn't matter.

  Soon, Steven would be no more.

  Two hours after Tim put the gun back together, shot his load and Bree got herself together, Tim was snuggled up beside her in bed. Bree was so happy. Tim was asleep. His only intrusion into her space was a gentle snore that Bree was able to ignore while she was watching herself on television.

  The reporters had picked out her best Facebook and Pinterest photos to use with the story of her kidnapping.

  I look so hot in those shorts, Bree thought. The photos of her naked had been blurred just enough to be TV legal but not so much they wouldn’t be noticed and shared.

  The police had no clues, only a vague description of a man who had thrown her into the trunk of a car and driven off. Some of the kids who had watched it described Tim as a white man, others thought he was black, why didn’t anyone say, “Asian,” Bree laughed to herself.

  None of the kids seemed the least bit interested in helping the police find Bree. That bothered her a little bit, but not too much. She had never cared about them. Why should they care about her?

  Bree was happiest with the confusion in the St. Isidore Police Department.

  They really don’t have any idea where I am. Bree smiled to herself and at Tim’s little bald spot.

  But at least they know I was kidnapped.

  CHAPTER TWENTY TWO

  The alarm bells started going off on Facebook, Pinterest and YouTube before the first cup of oil-slick coffee was done automatically dripping at the St. Isidore Police Department.

  Bree and Tim had been seen at Walmart.

  Of course, somebody in the store’s security department posted the surveillance video of them coming into the store without bothering to call the police.

  “Bree was in front of Sheldon. He was holding her, pushing her, by the back of the neck. You could see it hurt by the way she was twisting her neck,” one of Bree’s so-called friends said to another.

  “Trying to get away, too scared,” another one of Bree’s friends tapped out on her iPhone.

  “SOB was holding tight,” thumbed another.

  “She still looked good,” tapped a third.

  “I’ve always hated her,” tapped a fourth.

  “Bitch,” added a fifth.

  “But she did look good.”

  “We can see them coming into the store,” said Chief Barry “Lumpy” Doolan when he met with his team.

  “After that we lose them until they are coming out of the store with a gas can, some rope, and what looks like boxes of ammo.”

  “Moron paid for it with his credit card,” said a voice in the back.

  It was almost all hands on deck, eight of them, belonging to the four of the five officers who made up the Swingin’ Izzy PD as the locals called it.

  One was missing, Paul Desmond. Doolan would have to check on that. The little guy had been acting weird lately, even for him.

  Still Desmond was good on the radio, and they were going to need to centralize communications for this investigation.

  Chief Doolan, who was nicknamed Lumpy because he looked so much like the fat kid on the old Leave It To Beaver TV show, was in charge.

  “We know the suspect’s name. Tim Sheldon, a former high school teacher. Bounced off the payroll for playing with his students and nearly raping one of the girls. What are we waiting for?” said one of the officers.

  “We know where he lives. Let’s just go get him,” said another.

  “He has a hostage. She’s a victim. We don’t need her getting shot,” said Lumpy. He didn’t want to say it out loud, but he didn’t think the St. Izzy P. D. could handle it.

  The only time any of his men had ever fired a handgun was at the starting line of St. Isidore Founder’s Day sack race. True, they had all fired rifles and shotguns in the woods, but this wouldn’t be the same thing as going after a deer.

  If the deer had guns, I’m not sure how many of these guys would come back alive, Lumpy thought.

  The Swingin’ Izzy PD felt the same way about Lumpy. They had lost count of the deer he almost shot every year when hunting season rolled around and the schools closed so every father with a firearm could spend one day blasting a
way with the misplaced seed of his loins.

  Still, Lumpy decided he didn’t need any of his officers shooting each other or this girl.

  Lumpy knew he needed to set up a perimeter around Sheldon’s house. Traffic cones could have been used to block off the neighborhood, but Lumpy had let the elementary school principal borrow them for the annual bicycle rodeo. He’d have to get those back.

  Still, it was doable. There just couldn’t be any gunfire.

  We need to get this done and arrest the son of a bitch, Lumpy said to himself.

  Chief Lumpy had to admit though, they were way behind. The Walmart video had been on YouTube, Facebook, Pinterest, and even on television hours before his people had found out about it.

  I told those dumb asses on the city council we needed cable TV and the internet, Lumpy thought to himself. That video’s been out for eight hours at least, and we are justing finding out about it.

  The chief, who put the name “Lumpy” on his campaign signs only because he couldn’t get people to stop calling him by the nickname he hated at St. Izzy Elementary, also knew he needed help.

  He could not rely on these four officers, most of whom got their uniforms because they couldn’t do anything else without hurting themselves.

  Lumpy picked up the phone to call the state police.

  CHAPTER TWENTY THREE

  “We’re on television, again,” Tim yelled in the bedroom, as Bree came out of the bathroom unwrapping the yellow towel that barely covered her wet bottom.

  In a few hours teenagers would be taking selfies on Tim and Bree’s “Twisted Bed of Love,” as the cable TV networks would brand it. But neither Tim nor Bree were thinking about that now.

  “No way!” she said, flopping nude on the bed beside Tim. This was as good as being a Kardashian! Bree’s dream was starting to come true. She was almost a star.

  Bree could get a man’s attention away from the screen without even trying. All she had to do was walk in wrapped in a towel. When Bree got naked, Tim didn’t even care that she grabbed the remote out of his hand and backed up the DVR to watch herself.

  “Oh fuck, they think I am pushing you into the store and hurting you,” he said.

  “They think you kidnapped me. Relax.That’s just what we want them to think,” Bree said, pulling Tim down on top of her for a kiss complete with as much tongue as she could muster.

  “Baby, this is just what we wanted. This is the plan. Now we just need to kill the prick, waste the bitch and go up north.”

  Another long kiss, a few minutes of lovemaking — the best that Tim could do under this kind of pressure — and they were on their way.

  Tim’s truck with Bree, the rope, gasoline, gun, and ammo in the back, was turning left to a new life for the two of them, just as the first carload of kids pulled up in front of his house.

  It would have been nice if Bree was sitting beside Tim. That would have made for a much more romantic picture.

  Instead they decided — Bree insisted — that they stick with the kidnapping scenario. Tim wrapped her into a 8 X 8-foot throw rug, carried her over his shoulder to the truck and dumped her behind the front seat.

  Neighbors being what neighbors are, a couple of them did notice Tim carrying a rolled-up carpet of some kind over his shoulder, and one of them thought he might have noticed a pair of bare feet sticking out of the end of the roll.

  But neighbors being what neighbors are, they decided minding their own damn business was the better part of valor.

  And, besides, minding their own business was a twenty-four hour a day job.

  CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR

  Tim saw the kids from St. Izzy High driving up behind him, and the rest of his life leaving in the rear view mirror.

  Horns honking, kids yelling, it was kind of a celebration, a crowd of people wishing Tim “good luck” as he was turning on to a new path for his life.

  St. Isidore’s only radio and TV stations sent reporters over to Tim’s house figuring the police would have cordoned off the neighborhood.

  “This should be easy duty. Pick up the police department press release hand out, talk to a couple of neighbors, do some stand-up reports looking and sounding concerned and sincere, and be back at the office in time for a late lunch,” their news directors said.

  The TV and radio coverage did not work out as planned. Nobody in blue was there. However, forty or fifty kids were camped out on the front lawn. More were milling about on the street out front, smoking cigarettes and who knows what else. A couple of kids even had signs that read, “Free Bree.”

  The reporters found out more than even they wanted to know about Bree by talking to the kids. Or at least they discovered the fertility of a teenager’s imagination along with the ingrained motivation of a kid to lie so the story would trend higher on Yahoo.

  It was amazing how many of the boys had slept with Bree and how many more had been planning on it.

  Fantasy? Truth?

  The reporters didn’t care. As long as they had some sound and/or video to take back with them, they could fake the sincerity, maybe knock off a piece with one of these teenage girls, split this pop stand, grab an early lunch — burrito from Taco Bell — and be back in the editing room in time to get the minimum done.

  “If doing the minimum wasn’t good enough, they wouldn’t call it the minimum,” Drew Simon, an eight-month veteran of the St. Isidore TV news scene told a high school girl with real potential.

  There was no chance of a police standoff with the suspect who had been seen holding Bree by the neck.

  Nobody was home.

  The kids knew it first. They had knocked at the door, chanting, “Mr. Sheldon, can Bree come out to play?” “Mr. Sheldon, please don’t kill her, yet.” “Hey, Mr. Sheldon, was she worth it?”

  There was no answer.

  The kids broke in and helped themselves.

  Neighbors who would be more than willing to tell the TV and radio people everything they didn’t know about Tim would be coming out of their houses soon, swapping stories that were probably much better than the real thing.

  Whatever.

  Tim and Bree had made it out of the house. They were on their way, with only one problem. No extra clothes. No camping gear. Not even any winter coats. It was going to be cold at the cabin, damn cold.

  Bree said they could deal with that. There was always a Walmart. And she had her mom’s Walmart credit card.

  In about an hour, maybe two, Bree wouldn’t have a mother anymore and no stepfather. But she would still have that card. And Bree knew where Steven and Debbie kept the money.

  She was even more ready than Tim to start a new life.

  Bree had so many years left, a lifetime that Tim had already lived.

  St. Isidore’s finest did make it to Tim’s house just in time to break up three or four fights between teenagers and the people who wanted them off their lawns.

  “It is always the ugly girls who are the worst,” said one officer to another. “It is like they’ve got nothing to lose. They don’t stop swinging until you pull out your Taser.”

  The cops would break up one fight and then another would start. Some windows in Tim’s house got broken by the kids throwing rocks for target practice.

  A couple of the officers crashed down the front door to get inside and search for their suspect and victim after nobody responded to Lumpy’s bullhorn.

  The kids could have told them no one was inside. They could have told them the front door was unlocked when they got there. And the kids could have told them what happened to Tim’s computer and video equipment.

  The police could have used the laptop and video gear as part of their investigation. Emails and video tape are a great way to track a suspect’s history. Or so the St. Isidore Police Department had heard.

  It was in all the papers.

  Unfortunately, as they were fuming about their lack of evidence, that evidence; a MacBook Air and associated Seagate hard drives were all being sold on Craig’s
List.

  The state police had WiFi, smart phones and tablets in every car. They saw Tim’s MacBook being sold for pennies on the dollar and put a trace on the buyer.

  “Probably too late,” said one trooper. “But at least it’s worth a try Even if we don’t find it, we can help St. Izzy solve a couple hundred bike thefts when we explain Craig’s List to them.”

  “Good luck with that.”

  “We can try. In the meantime, put out a ‘shoot on sight’ order for this Tim Sheldon.”

  “He has a cabin up north. Could be headed there.”

  “Does St.Izzy know that?”

  “Seriously?”

  State police smartphones starting flashing a second after the “shoot on sight” order went out and squad cars started going to Tim’s cabin up north.

  They had a new crime to investigate.

  A state trooper had read about it on Twitter. He saw the photo on Pinterest and then on Facebook. He called the cop shop.

  Plans can change quickly and this one did. Necessity is always the mother of Plan B.

  State police and St. Izzy squad cars that were going after Tim got called off the chase.

  They were needed to investigate a dead body that had been found in the woods.

  It was a naked body that was hanging from a tree.

  CHAPTER TWENTY FIVE

  “This is it baby. This is what we have been waiting for,” Bree said as she rested her hand on Tim’s thigh, squeezing it ever so slightly.

  “Once you get this done, we will be out of here forever and together for the rest of our lives.”

  Tim’s mouth was as dry as the scalp on Old Man Winston’s head, the principal at St. Isidore High, the jag wad who gave him his walking papers. Tim was having trouble swallowing and Bree’s hand on his leg was doing more harm than good when it came to getting him out of the truck and into what would become known as St. Izzy’s “Flaming House of Death” on Channel 22, and WSIR-AM, the Voice of Swingin’ Izzy.

  The plan was simple. Still, Tim felt it bore repeating.