A Way With Murder (Bryson Wilde Thriller)
Page 7
Ten miles?
Even then, it would be closed.
All he could hope for is that it had an outside phone booth.
Ten miles.
That would take him two and a half hours.
A mile down the road he wandered into the terrain for fifty steps and threw the shovel away, far enough that it wouldn’t be associated with the buried bikers.
The night was black but the road was detectible.
Every so often he turned the flashlight on and shined it around.
The topography was always the same—dirt, rabbit brush, prairie grass and rocks.
Half an hour farther down the road when he flicked the light on, something unexpected happened. A red reflection came from something off the road.
As he got closer, the reflection took the shape of a taillight, two taillights actually.
He headed that way, shining the light on the ground and keeping a lookout for snakes.
A car came into view.
His car?
It looked like it.
He picked up the pace.
Damn it, it was his car.
What the hell was it doing out here?
He trotted to it and got in.
January wasn’t there.
The keys weren’t in the ignition.
They weren’t on the floor or up in the visor or in the glove box or anywhere else.
He slammed his fist on the dash.
Goddamn it!
Then he heard a muffled sound from somewhere outside. It turned out to be a weak voice coming from inside the trunk.
“Help me …”
“January is that you?”
It was.
“River, help me …”
The lid was latched solid.
He shined the flashlight on the ground and found no keys, not there or all the way around. The passenger side door and front fender were smashed in.
He grabbed a rock the size of a gorilla’s fist and beat on the latch.
Wham.
Wham.
Wham.
It dented in but didn’t unlatch.
He beat on it more but still couldn’t bust it.
Then suddenly on the last smash something broke and the lid popped.
Inside was January. Her dress was filthy and ripped to shreds. Her panties were gone. Dried blood was on her face and her eyes were raw and wet. As soon as River bent down, the woman wrapped her arms around him and held on with the strength of someone being pulled from the grave.
28
Day One
July 21, 1952
Monday Afternoon
Wilde’s worst fear materialized when he got back to the office. The door was wide open, no one was inside and the map was gone. He’d screwed up before but never this badly. This was a new personal best. Suddenly the toilet flushed in the adjoining room and Alabama walked in. She looked at his hat, still in hand, not yet thrown at the rack and said, “What’s wrong?”
“There was a map on my desk.”
She scouted around.
“Is that it?”
She pointed to a piece of paper on the floor.
Wilde picked it up and smiled.
Then he tossed his hat at the rack, forgetting to aim to the left. It flew out the window, not a corner of the window, either, smack dab center—nothing but air.
“Ringer,” Alabama said.
“Can you run down and get it for me?”
“Me?”
“Please.”
“I don’t type, I don’t fetch hats,” she said. “We settled that on day one.”
Wilde could argue but he’d lose.
He ran down, got it and brushed the dust off on the way up, stopping at the door and taking aim for the rack. This time he threw to the right. It curved left, grabbed the rack by the edge and stuck.
Alabama was sitting on the desk wiping spilled coffee off the map.
“That’s better,” she said.
Wilde lit a Camel, put the map in his top desk drawer and said, “So how’d it go with the clothes?”
“You got me a sexy red dress,” she said. “You spent more than I wanted you to, but there was nothing I could do to stop you.”
Wilde frowned.
“I’m talking about Secret. Was she in when you got there?”
Alabama nodded.
“She was.”
“And?”
“And, wow. I didn’t know they built them like that on this planet.”
Wilde pictured it.
“What’d she say about the clothes?”
“On that front, I have some good news and some bad news,” she said.
Wilde’s chest tightened.
Bad news.
Damn it.
Bad news was never good.
“Tell me the good news first,” he said.
“Well, the good news is that she absolutely loved the clothes. She changed into them right in front of me. That woman has a body like you can’t even believe. The clothes fit perfectly, thanks to my incredible shopping abilities. I told her you wanted to pick her up at 7:30 and she told me to tell you she was looking forward to it.”
She stopped to sip coffee.
Wilde wrinkled his forehead.
“So what’s the bad news?”
“The bad news is that you’re a good looking guy, Wilde, but you’re not good looking the way Secret is,” she said. “You’ll never land her.”
“That’s the bad news, that I won’t be able to land her?”
She nodded.
“We’ll see about that.”
“I can already tell you, it won’t happen.”
“We’ll see.”
“If you had a better personality, that might get you up to a one in ten chance. But you’re you and you always will be. Therein lies your problem.”
He smiled and blew smoke, then told Alabama about his conversation with Michelle Day, the bartender at the El Ray Club. “She’d never seen this guy before, the one who looks like Robert Mitchum and even has the same first name. I’ve never seen him around either.”
“It’s a big town.”
Wilde shook his head.
“It’s not that big,” he said. “The guy’s a player. If he was from here I would have bumped into him by now.”
“What are you saying, that he’s from out of town?”
Wilde nodded.
Exactly.
“Here’s your next assignment,” he said. “Go to every hotel in town and see if he stayed there this past weekend. Get a name and find out where he’s from. I doubt that he’s still in town. It sounds like he came in specifically to do what he did. Just the same, be careful. If he’s still checked in, get a room number but don’t do anything stupid. Repeat—don’t do anything stupid. Come straight back here.”
“Yes master. Do you want me to model the dress you bought for me? It’s in the other room.”
Wilde pulled up an image.
Alabama scrubbed up pretty nice when she had a mind to.
Under different circumstances he might take a run at her.
Right now the circumstances were what they were.
They worked together.
“No.”
She ran a finger down his chest.
“It’s going to happen sooner or later,” she said.
“No it’s not.”
“Yes it is.” She paused and added, “I want to show you something.”
She got a rubber band from the drawer and stretched it out to show it was straight. Then she popped it in her mouth. Ten seconds later she pulled it out.
It was in a knot.
She tossed it to him and left without looking back.
Wilde set a book of matches on fire and watched Alabama through the flames as she swaggered down Larimer. Suddenly she turned to see if he was looking.
He tried to duck back but it was too late.
She saw him.
29
Day One
July 21, 1952
Monday Night
Su-Moon came up with an idea back at the scooter, just as the fog turned to a cold drizzle—“Let’s hang around and see if the woman leaves. We can get her license plate number.” They headed back to the parking lot and took cover in the shadows on the dry side of a van. Waverly couldn’t get the spanking out of her head.
“Have you ever been spanked like that?” she said.
“Once. You?”
“No, never. Did you like it?”
“Someone else has control of you,” she said. “That makes it dangerous. Danger can be an aphrodisiac. It can also be scary and inhibiting. It depends on the people involved. For me, the night I got it, it got me hornier than hell.”
Waverly exhaled.
“I’m not sure if I’d like it or not.”
“I’ll tell you what. When we get home, I’ll give you a few.”
“Spanks?”
“Right.”
“We’ll see.”
Ten minutes passed.
The drizzle turned to rain.
Five minutes passed.
The rain turned to a hard rain.
It crept around the van and into their clothes.
Suddenly the sounds of splashing feet and out-of- breath chatter entered the parking lot from the marina side. Waverly peeked around the edge of the van. It was Bristol and a woman, under an umbrella, walking fast.
“Bingo.”
They made their way to a black Mercury where Bristol got the woman into the passenger seat then ran around to the driver’s side, collapsing the umbrella and darting in.
The engine fired.
The headlights turned on.
The vehicle took off.
The women couldn’t make out the license plate number.
“He’s taking her home,” Su-Moon said. “This is our chance.”
“Our chance for what?”
“What do you think?”
Su-Moon grabbed Waverly’s hand and led her at a trot back to C-Dock and down to Bristol’s slip. The front door was locked.
The bedroom window was shut but not locked.
It lifted up when Su-Moon tried it.
They looked around and saw no one.
“Boost me up,” Su-Moon said.
Waverly shivered.
“This is a bad idea.”
“It will be if you keep wasting time,” Su-Moon said. “Come on, boost me up—hurry.”
Waverly looked around one last time and saw only black rain and lifeless houseboats. Then she cupped her hands for Su-Moon’s foot and tried not to buckle under the woman’s weight.
Inside, Su-Moon said, “Go around to the front and I’ll let you in,” then closed the window.
The front door was open by the time Waverly got there.
She entered and shut it behind her.
“What are we looking for?”
“I don’t know but it will be in the bedroom,” Su-Moon said. “Maybe he keeps a journal.”
“This is crazy.”
“You keep a lookout, I’ll search.”
“I’m dripping water all over the floor.”
“Don’t worry, if it’s still there by the time he gets back he’ll think it’s from him. Just keep a lookout.”
Waverly got the front door ajar and kept an eye on the dock. If someone approached, they wouldn’t be visible until the last second.
The dock was a dead end.
It was a perfect place to be trapped.
Her heart pounded.
Something bad was going to happen.
They’d pressed their luck one step too far.
30
Day One
July 21, 1952
Monday Night
January had been through a lot in her life, but what happened tonight shook her to the core. It took a hundred questions before River got the story out of her as to exactly what happened. Two drunk cowboys in a pickup truck spotted her on the side of the road and stopped.
She told them she had car trouble and her boyfriend had gone for help.
She tried to get rid of them but the one with the big gut—the one the other one called Jackson—ended up popping the hood. He fumbled around for a long time and eventually spotted the problem, one of the battery cables had come off.
He said, “Try it again.”
She turned the key.
The engine started.
She said “thanks” and shifted into first but before she could pull away the other drunk—the stringy muscular one called Condor—grabbed the steering and turned the key off.
“You’re going to give us a reward, right?”
She nodded.
“Sure.”
She reached in her purse.
That’s when Condor grabbed her tit and said, “I’m not talking about money, baby. Why don’t you get your sweet ass out here and show us how grateful you are.”
Her heart raced.
“Sure.” She opened the door as far as it would before Condor’s body blocked it. “Step back baby.”
When he did, January fired the engine, did a one-eighty and took off. They gave chase and ran her off the road.
Then they raped her, both of them.
They didn’t do it nice.
They were mean about it.
Thunder rolled through River’s blood as he listened.
“What’d they do with the keys?”
“They threw them that way,” she said.
River shined the flashlight to where January pointed and said, “Over there?”
She nodded.
“Somewhere in that direction.”
It took five minutes and he almost gave up twice, but then he found them, smack dab in the middle of yucca spines.
Yeah, baby.
The tires weren’t buried and he was able to get the vehicle back to the road.
“Do you know which way they went?”
She did.
She was in the trunk but the assholes were shouting and honking the horn like some kind of sick victory celebration when they headed up the road.
“That way.”
River put it in gear and took off, deeper into the country.
“Tell me about their truck,” he said. “What’d it look like?”
“It was old,” she said. “It was mostly white but the tailgate was a dark color, red or blue or black, something like that.”
“It must have been replaced,” River said. “Too bad for them.”
31
Day One
July 21, 1952
Monday Night
In the black dress, Secret St. Rain was a sight that brought every single fiber of Wilde’s universe to a screeching halt.
“Damn,” he said.
“Is that a good damn or a bad damn?”
“I don’t know. Did I say it out loud?”
She smiled.
Yes, he did.
“Then it’s a good one.” He spun her around to get a better look and said, “Bring your license for that body. I don’t want to get arrested.”
She grabbed her purse.
“Where are you taking me?”
“You’ll see.”
Twenty minutes later he escorted her through the front door of a smoky club called the Bokaray. Sex, sin and perfume were already thicker than the law allowed. The bodies were sardine tight and the bellies were full of alcohol. Speakers dropped whiskey-soaked jazz. That would change in half an hour when Mercedes Rain took the stage.
Everyone knew Wilde.
The men slapped him on the back.
The women planted kisses on his lips and cast sideways daggers at Secret.
“Mister Popular,” she said when they got to the bar.
Wilde went to answer but a redhead waitress behind the counter grabbed his tie and pulled him halfway across. “Bryson Wilde, you dog, you’re in love.”
He put a shocked look on his face.
“Me?”
She shook her head in wonderment. “I thought I�
��d never see the day.” Then to Secret, “He’s never brought a woman here before. You’re the first. I’m not saying he never left with one. I’m just saying he never brought one.”
Secret tilted her head.
“So how many has he left with?”
“In round numbers?”
“Sure.”
“Counting me or without me?”
“Either way.”
“Tons.”
Wilde put his arm around Secret’s waist and swept her into the crowd saying, “She’s just messing around.” At the stage he introduced her to a sultry blond who set a glass of white wine down long enough to hug Wilde, then Secret.
She was Mercedes Rain.
“Secret’s a blues singer,” Wilde said. “I was thinking maybe you’d let her sit in on a song.”
The woman looked at Secret.
“Sure, but if she sings anything like she looks, I’m going to need a new job.” To Secret, “How about, Lady Sings the Blues? Do you know the words to that one?”
“I do but …”
“Okay, we’ll open up the second set with you,” Mercedes said. To Wilde, “You want to take the drums on that number?”
“Sure.”
“Done then,” Mercedes said.
“No, not done,” Secret said. “I’m not a singer. I’ve never been on a stage in my life.”
“Then this will be your first time,” Mercedes said. “Good luck.”
Wilde grabbed her hand, pulled her through the crowd to the bar and ordered a white wine for her and a double Jack for himself.
Secret was confused.
“Why do you think I’m a singer?”
“Because I heard you.”
“When?”
“When I went to the bathroom this morning.”
She reflected back.
“You were singing to the radio,” he said.
Her face focused.
“You heard that?”
He downed the Jack, slammed the jigger on the bar upside down and said, “Apparently I did. Why’d you think I brought you here tonight, to get you drunk and take advantage of you?”
“Well, the thought crossed my mind.”
He ordered another Jack and said, “In that case, it looks like you were 10 percent wrong.”
She brought her mouth close to his.