Dying for Dinner

by Miranda Bliss

  I could see everything and anything-but Claude.

  “Claude?” Over my shoulder, I gave Eve an “I don’t know what’s going on” sort of look and, leading the way, I sidled toward the bedroom, my back pressed to the wall of boxes. “Claude, are you all right? Did you find the mandoline? We don’t have a lot of time and-” My gasp drowned out the rest of my words.

  That’s because I found Claude lying facedown on the bedroom floor. There was a quickly growing pool of blood around the gash at the back of his head.

  “Oh, my gosh!” Behind me, I felt, rather than saw, Eve pull back. She never did do well with blood and gore.

  I can’t say I did, either, but I knew an emergency when I saw one. I dropped down on the floor beside Claude and felt for a pulse and when I didn’t find one, I grabbed my cell phone out of my pocket. I guess I was so busy pressing the buttons on it and hoping for a cell signal that never materialized, I didn’t hear the door of the RV slam shut.

  I didn’t realize Eve was gasping to find words to warn me, either. Not until I finally looked up, frustrated by my phone, and found her with one arm yanked behind her back and a knife to her throat.

  I was on my feet in a flash, but I knew better than to make another move. Not when that blade was right up against Eve’s windpipe.

  “Who… what?” I looked past Eve to the man who stood behind her. He was a little older than middle-aged, and bald. He looked vaguely familiar, though I couldn’t sort through my panic and fear to figure out why. I didn’t have to ask, either, but I was so taken aback and so terrified, I couldn’t keep my words to myself. “What on earth are you doing? What do you want?”

  The man laughed. It wasn’t a pleasant sound.

  “I want what I’ve always wanted,” he said. “I want what’s mine. I thought I had to go to Norman to get it, but you ladies, you’re the answer to my prayers.”

  “We don’t know anything.” That was Eve talking, and I had to give her credit, what with her being able to do that while there was a gleaming knife blade pressing into the delicate flesh of her throat. “We don’t know anything about Norman, or the money, or the bank robbery or-”

  My grimace came too late for her to take back her words.

  “Look…” I tried to sound calm. Big points for me since by this time, I was so afraid of what might happen to Eve, so worried about Claude, and so claustrophobic, I would have leaped out the window near the bunk beds-if there weren’t boxes piled high in front of it. “Look…” I tried again. “I think you’ve got us mixed up with someone else. Eve’s right. We really don’t know anything.”

  “I don’t care if you do.” The man had a handkerchief in his pocket and when he pulled it out, a strong chemical odor filled the room. He pressed the cloth to Eve’s nose and mouth, and a second later her eyes closed and she sank to the floor. “Your turn.” He stepped over her and toward me, and because of the clutter, I had nowhere to go. Because of the knife, I couldn’t fight back.

  He yanked the cell phone out of my hand and tossed it over his shoulder. I saw it land in an open packing box. Then I saw the handkerchief heading for my face.

  “Finally, I’ve got what I need,” I heard the man say just as the handkerchief smothered my face. My head buzzed. My vision blurred. His voice came from a million miles away. “ Norman will listen now. He has to. You’re his friends. And now, you’re my hostages.”

  I DREAMED I WAS WORKING AT TRÈS BONNE CUISINE, helping a man in a black and white golf shirt who was walking down the aisles, browsing. We stopped near the soup mixes and he adjusted his thick glasses on the bridge of his nose and smiled when he found what he was looking for on a nearby shelf.

  “Finally,” he said, “I’ve got what I need,” and he handed me a bottle of chloroform.

  Like an icy wave, the memory washed over me and I jerked awake and gasped for breath. My eyes flew open and in that one moment, I realized why the man who’d kidnapped us looked so familiar: He was a Très Bonne Cuisine customer I’d waited on just after Greg’s murder.

  Which meant all those days ago, he was hot on Norman ’s trail. He’d been following me all along-and I’d led him straight to Norman in Atlantic City and, from there, straight here to the food show.

  The enormity of the realization flashed through my bloodstream and for I don’t know how long, I lay on the built-in bench in what passed for the dining area of the RV, trying to make sense of it all. It might have been easier if my mouth wasn’t fuzzy and my head didn’t pound. It might have been a whole lot more comfortable if my wrists and my ankles weren’t duct-taped.

  Carefully, I shifted my weight. Since my hands were behind my back, I wobbled a bit, but I managed to sit up so I could see to my right, into the driver’s area of the RV (it was empty) and to my left and back to the bedroom (from this angle, all I could see were boxes in the hallway and what looked to be the entire contents of the display we’d seen outside the RV; there were kitchen gadgets everywhere, as if our abductor had simply opened the door and shoveled them in). Eve was similarly bound and slumped on the bench across from me. I didn’t like the pallor of her skin.

  “Eve!” I realized the moment I called out to her that I was alerting our kidnapper to the fact that I was awake and that it might have been smarter not to, but I was beyond caring. How could I when Eve looked so fragile and pale? “Eve, wake up. Answer me. Are you all right?”

  When she shifted and groaned, her head rolled forward. I let go a sigh of relief.

  “You’re OK?”

  Her eyes fluttered open. “Annie? What… what happened?”

  I didn’t bother to tell her that at this point, that wasn’t the question. The only question that mattered was, what were we going to do now?

  From where I was sitting, I could see the big-as-a-picture-window windshield at the front of the RV. Beyond it, there were few lights left on in the exposition center and, as far as I could see, no people around, either.

  “It must be late,” I said and by this time I’d pulled myself together enough to keep my voice down. “The show must be over. There’s nobody out in the hall.”

  Eve had to look over her shoulder to see what I could see. When she did, tears filled her eyes. “What’s going to happen?” she asked. “What does he want? Is he going to hurt us?”

  I thought about Claude and wondered if his body was still back in the bedroom where we’d last seen it. “If he wanted to hurt us, he would have done it by now,” I told her. She looked relieved to hear it so I guess in the great scheme of things, I could justify the little white lie. “I think he wants to use us to get at Norman, to get his money back.”

  A single tear slipped down Eve’s cheek. Only she could make crying look attractive. If I let myself go (and believe me, I was close enough to panic that it just might happen), my nose would get red, my eyes would puff, and my skin would get blotchy. Eve cried like the heroine in a romantic blockbuster. She sniffed decorously, too. “What are we going to do, Annie?”

  I didn’t have the heart to tell her that I didn’t have a clue.

  Maybe it was just as well. Before I could open my mouth, we heard the sounds of a key turning in the door. The next thing we knew, the man who must have been Matt O’Hara hoisted himself up into the RV.

  “Well, lookee who’s awake.” He beamed a smile at us. It made my blood run cold. “Just in time, too. I was just about to make a call to your friend Norman.”

  “We can’t help you.” My words scraped out of my parched mouth. “We don’t know where Norman is.”

  He barely gave me a look. “Shut up. And don’t lie to me. It won’t do you any good. I know he was here doing a cooking demonstration today. I sat right there in the auditorium and watched it. Sorry you had to miss it, ladies. You would have loved the drama. Especially when a little kid in the audience popped a paper bag. I swear, Norman just about fainted, right there onstage. That’s how much of a scared little girl he is.”

  I took offense at him making fun of Norman
. I took more offense at him assuming that little girls are always scared. He might have noticed my scowl if he’d bothered to look.

  Instead, O’Hara shifted his gaze to Eve, who wilted beneath it. “You said you knew about the bank robbery. What else do you two know?”

  There didn’t seem to be any point in trying to fake our way through this so I simply told the truth. “We know that you and Howard Fish robbed a bank back in Nevada. He was holding the money for you, right? What, were you set to meet somewhere so you could split it? Is that when the cops caught up to you?”

  “The cops caught up to that idiot, Howard.” O’Hara spat the words. “The rat bastard squealed on me, so eventually, yeah, they caught up to me, too.”

  “But Howard was convicted, and you were cut loose. After that, he wouldn’t tell you where he stashed the money, would he?”

  O’Hara slammed a fist against the nearest cardboard box. “Said he was doing the time, so he should take all the profits. I never could get him to tell me. Then Howard died, and I couldn’t find out anything about anything. Until a friend on the inside told me about some dope named Norman Applebaum. Said he’d been Howard’s cellmate for a while, that he’d been Howard’s friend.”

  “And you put two and two together.” This made sense and I know it sounds crazy, but at a time like that, logic was exactly what I needed. My emotions were too brittle. They couldn’t be trusted. Logic was the only thing that was going to save us. “Why did it take you so long to find Norman?”

  “Why do you care?” O’Hara reached into his pocket, and for a second I was afraid he’d pull out the chloroform-soaked hankie again. Lucky for us, he was looking for a piece of paper. He unfolded it, and, peering through the gathering gloom, I recognized the phone number of Très Bonne Cuisine.

  “Been in prison,” he said. I guess that was the answer to my question. “Took me a while to find your friend Norman. He likes to change his name. But now that I have found him…” O’Hara waved the piece of paper in front of my eyes. “As soon as we get out of here and I can get a cell signal, you’re going to make a phone call for me.”

  “You won’t get that far.”

  I signaled Eve to keep quiet, but it was too late. She was upset and when Eve is upset…

  There was nothing I could do but sit back and pray that she’d come to her senses.

  “There are cops all over this place,” Eve said. “They’ll stop us before you can drive this thing out of here. They’ll find us.”

  “They must be looking.” I said this to myself more than to anyone else. Again, I was sticking with rational thought, and this was as rational as thoughts came. Jim and Norman knew I’d been on my way to find Eve and go to Claude Brooking’s booth for a mandoline. When we didn’t return in time for the cooking demonstration, they must have been worried. They must have come looking for us.

  “Of course they did.” O’Hara saw the wheels were turning inside my head. “Why do you think I had to make sure you two wouldn’t make a sound? They came looking, all right. But that Scottish guy, and that other one, the guy in the suit-he must be a cop, I can tell them a mile away-neither one of them knew that Brooking guy. I told them I was him and they bought right into it. Didn’t recognize me from any of my mug shots. Good thing I shaved my head since my last prison picture was taken, lost some weight, too. That cop, he never suspected a thing. I told them I sent you away with whatever it was you’d come for. And they headed off again, looking for you.” He glanced at his watch. “That was hours ago. Think they’re nice and worried by now?”

  I pictured Jim and Tyler searching the building. I imagined how frantic Jim would be when he couldn’t find me.

  I told myself not to go there or my panic would swallow me whole.

  “So what’s your plan?”

  I don’t think O’Hara expected me to be so objective about the whole thing. Which didn’t oblige him to answer. He kicked his way through the gadgets that littered the floor, climbed into the driver’s seat, and turned the key in the ignition.

  “We’re going to head outside,” he said, carefully pulling the RV toward the garage-sized doors I saw across the now-empty exhibition floor. “And when we stop to check out, if one of you makes even so much as one little bit of a noise…” He took his knife out of his pocket and left it on the front seat next to him. “One of you makes a noise and I cut the other one. That’s a promise.”

  We were quiet when he pulled out of the hall, and we were quiet while he drove along the D.C. streets looking for a place to pull over and make his phone call. He finally found it across Woodrow Wilson Plaza in the Federal Triangle Metro parking lot.

  O’Hara turned off the RV, punched the numbers on his cell phone, and held it up to my ear. I wasn’t surprised when Jim answered the Très Bonne Cuisine phone.

  “Jim?” My voice was tinged with tears and I knew that would get me nowhere. And it would worry Jim. I swallowed my emotions. “Jim, it’s Annie.”

  “Annie, darlin’. Are you-”

  “I’m fine, Jim. Eve is fine. We’re with Matt O’Hara.”

  I heard Jim repeat this news to whoever was in the room with him, and I wasn’t surprised to hear Tyler asking for details.

  I didn’t have a chance to provide any before O’Hara took the phone away.

  “Now you see I’m not playing games,” he said, and I don’t know if Jim was on the phone, or if he was talking to Tyler. “You tell your friend Norman I want my money, and I want it now.”

  Whoever he was talking to repeated the message, and replied, and O’Hara scowled. “Tomorrow morning’s too late.” He listened for a moment. “Yeah, yeah. I know. It’s not easy to get your hands on that much cash. OK. Tomorrow. Six a.m. and not a moment later. Put the money in a brown paper sack and put the sack in the trash can nearest to the entrance of the Washington Monument. Oh, and if you’re not there…” I didn’t like the smile that pulled at the corners of O’Hara’s mouth. “If the money’s not there and if the cops are, your two lady friends here are going to be dead.”

  Eighteen

  MATT O’HARA WAS SMART ENOUGH TO KNOW THAT if he parked at the Metro station all night, either the Metro Transit Police or an officer from the D.C. Metropolitan force would come a-knockin’ to see what the RV was doing there.

  Too bad.

  I would have welcomed a hero, no matter what the uniform. The way it was, by the time the sun was down and the city was quiet, my wrists ached from being taped and I was pretty sure my feet and ankles weren’t getting nearly enough blood flow. I was thirsty. I was hungry. I was exhausted. Oh, yeah, I was scared to death, too.

  We left the Metro station and drove through the city, and though the boxes piled in front of the windows on the sides of the RV made it impossible to see in that direction, if I twisted just enough, I could see out the front windshield. My neck muscles ached and my insides were flopping around as if they were filled with nervous butterflies. Still, I couldn’t pull my gaze away. I watched familiar scenery shoot past: the White House, the Lincoln Memorial, the Washington Monument. At night with its monuments bathed in light, Washington, D.C., is especially beautiful, and seeing the sights I’d seen so many times before and always taken for granted, realizing I might not ever seen them again, tears stung my eyes. After a couple hours of driving around in what seemed an aimless pattern, O’Hara pulled into a no-tell motel somewhere near Sterling, jumped out, and left us on our own.

  “Now’s our chance,” I hissed at Eve, checking out the window to see what O’Hara was up to. I watched him go inside a door marked Registration and for the first time since our ordeal began, some of the tension drained from my body. Even a couple moments out of O’Hara’s sight-and away from that menacing knife he was always flashing-was a welcome relief. “We’ve got to make a move, Eve. We’ve got to try and escape.”

  “And we’re going to do this how?” Eve is not usually this sarcastic, but I suppose I couldn’t blame her. We were under some major stress here. Good thin
g she didn’t realize that she’d bitten off all her lipstick. If she had any idea how pale she looked without it (or how her hair stuck up at a funny angle over her left ear) she would have been even more upset. She squirmed. “I can’t move my hands. I can’t even feel my feet. Annie, what are we going to do? You don’t suppose he’s-”

  She didn’t have a chance to finish. The door snapped open and Matt O’Hara clomped back onto the RV, kicking his way through discarded kitchen gadgets from the door over to where we sat.

  “Can’t expect me to stay in his hellhole all night,” he said, though one glance out the window at the motel with its peeling paint and a parking lot that was largely empty and pocked with potholes made me wonder if he was talking about the RV or the motel. “But I’m not stupid, neither.” He yanked at my hands, just to make sure they were bound good and tight, and when he was sure, he checked my legs, then Eve’s legs and hands. “My room is right over there.” He poked his chin toward the window of the nearest room. “And I’m a light sleeper. One peep out of either of you two and…” In what had become a cliché that would have been laughable if it wasn’t so darned terrifying, he pulled out his knife and held it up and into a pool of neon orange light thrown by the motel’s sign. Thanks to the piled boxes and the way he’d parked under a broken light, the rest of the RV was a mishmash of shadows. “You’re going to stay here locked up good and tight.”

  “We’re hungry.” I tried to appeal to his humanity. “We’re thirsty and-”

  “Shut up.” So much for humanity. “When I have my money, then you’ll eat. And if I don’t get my money…” I didn’t like the way he smiled. He’d already opened the door of the RV and had started down the steps when he turned to us one last time. “By the way, I told the desk clerk inside that I was on my way to a dog show. That I was transportin’ a couple pit bulls that were as ornery as a son of a bitch. You’d like the guy.” There was that smile again, the one that made my skin crawl. “Keeps a pistol behind the counter. You know, just in case. I told him if he hears any noise from this here RV or sees the door open… well, I explained how these dogs of mine can sometimes get a little testy. I told him if he sees anything-anything at all-he should just start shootin’. Paid him fifty bucks to make sure he stays awake all night and watches, too.” O’Hara tipped his head. “Good night, ladies. Enjoy every minute of it, because if your friend Norman don’t have that money for me tomorrow bright and early… well, I wasn’t bullshittin’ when I told that fella on the phone that it just might be your last night on earth.”