by Mike Faricy
Morton’s tail wagged back and forth, beating like a drum against the heavy red velvet curtain.
Natasha sat in her upholstered chair with her feet stretched out across a royal blue suitcase, using the thing as a foot stool. She was wearing her red silk robe, and the black garter belt. A bucket of ice sat on her makeup table and held an open bottle of wine. An empty bottle stood on the floor next to her chair and another empty lay on its side, rolled up against a black suitcase a few feet away. Her sleeping cot had been replaced by a larger affair with what looked like a double sized, yellow air-mattress sitting on top.
“Here’s to an interesting night,” Natasha slurred then raised her glass in a toast and proceeded to slosh wine over the rim and across her silk robe. She either didn’t notice or didn’t care.
“Have you had anything to eat?”
“I fed Anastasia at exactly six, right on schedule,” she said and took a large sip.
“What about you? Have you had anything to eat?” I asked although at this point I didn’t think it was going to make much difference.
“Guess I’m just on the liquid diet tonight. Is that Melvin?” she said looking at Morton.
“Close, this is Morton. Morton, you remember Natasha and Princess Anastasia,” I said hoping he wouldn’t do something stupid.
The Princess casually looked over at Morton. She was sitting very still, but I noticed her tail seemed to race at about ninety miles an hour.
Morton strained at his leash, it took some doing, like about ten minutes worth, but I finally got him to sit and stay relatively calm.
“I better have another and you should pour yourself a glass, maybe see if that will get you in the mood, Morton,” Natasha said looking at me.
I figured she was way past the point of correcting. I refilled her glass, poured one for me, but left my glass resting on the silver tray. I’d been here countless times before, on both sides of the table. She took a couple of sips, fought to keep her eyes open, took one or two more sips then let the glass slowly lean to the side. I took the glass from her hand and set it back on the tray, then opened the kennel door and got Princess Anastasia inside.
The lights had been dimmed substantially although not completely off, but things had definitely quieted down. Natasha remained curled in the chair and began to snore. I covered her with the light blanket resting on the double sized air mattress. I laid down on the air mattress then wrapped Morton’s leash around my wrist and we gradually went to sleep. Morton slowly edged his way toward the kennel until he could look at the princess and the two of them seemed to fall asleep staring at one another.
Chapter Fifty-Eight
I had no idea what time it was, late, that was for sure. The overhead lights had been turned down even further until there was just the dimmest ring of light along the outer edge of the auditorium. I had been sound asleep until a slight “click” noise woke me. At first I thought it might be Natasha pouring herself another glass of wine, but I could hear her snoring in the chair somewhere off to the side.
I opened my eyes and saw a crouched figure slowly opening the kennel door and reaching inside. The princess gave a frightened little whine just before I heard a growl and the figure screamed and jumped to his feet. Morton rose up with him, hanging firmly onto the guy’s rear end by his teeth and giving off a vicious growl.
Another silhouette quickly disappeared out through the velvet curtains, he looked large and I think he had a crewcut, but he had vanished too quickly for anything to register.
Meanwhile, screaming and anguished cursing came from behind me as the figure spun round twirling a growling Morton hanging on by his jaws. I swung as I jumped up and caught the guy on the chin, then knocked him down with a left to his temple and a right to the bridge of his nose. As he went down his head bounced off the edge of a foot locker and then he remained very still on the floor.
I pulled Morton off just as the velvet curtain was pulled back and a large shadow stepped in and said, “Security, what the hell is going on.”
Morton growled and barked and the guy quickly reached out with some sort of aerosol can.
“No, please don’t, don’t. We woke up and this guy was in here trying to take the princess,” I said, hanging onto Morton’s collar and at the same time looking into the kennel to check on Princess Anastasia. She seemed to be untouched, although she was cowering in the far back corner of the kennel.
“You know him?” the guy asked as he shined a flashlight onto the bloodied face lying on the floor. Another security guard stepped in behind him.
I shook my head and said, “I’ve never seen him before,” Although I thought he could have been one of the five guys from the other day at Hidden Falls and quite possibly one of the guys sitting in my living room drinking up all my beer yesterday morning.
Natasha suddenly snorted a few times then half rolled over onto her side. Her silk robe more or less covered her hip, but her garter belt and the stockings with the seam up the back were clearly on display.
“Just relieving some stress tonight, maybe a little glass or two, too many,” I said by way of explanation.
The two security guards gave a knowing glance to one another.
“Whatever,” the guy with the flashlight said, then shined his light back on the figure lying on the floor. He was slowly moving his bloodied head back and forth and then raised one of his knees halfway up.
“Looks like you broke his nose.”
“Yeah, and my partner here took a chunk out of his ass. He’s probably gonna need some stitches.”
“We’ll let the cops determine that. Come on, let’s get him out of here. We’ll need you to make a statement, sir. You can follow us to the office.” Then the two of them roughly helped the guy to his feet and sort of half walked and half dragged him out into the aisle.
Morton got a good rub behind the ears and a hug from me. I double checked the latch on Princess Anastasia’s kennel before we made our way to the security office.
Chapter Fifty-Nine
The police were in the office before we even got settled. They radioed in that they’d be taking the guy to Regions Hospital for stitches. “He got bit in the ass,” one of the cops chuckled over the radio just before they led the guy away in handcuffs.
Morton had ripped the right half of the guy’s jeans open and they now hung as a blood covered flap exposing the guys chewed up butt cheek and what was left of his shredded boxer shorts.
One of the security guys had tossed Morton a dog biscuit, taken his picture and was now busy rubbing his ears and telling him he was “Very good and very brave.”
“Stop it, that’ll just go to his head and he’ll be impossible in the morning.”
“That jerk was either going to take that competing dog or worse, if your Morton here hadn’t been there, there’s no telling what could have happened, I’m not kidding.”
I filled out an incident report, gave them my personal information. They gave me a copy of the report, made a copy of my VIP ID along with Morton’s and stapled them to the report before we were finally allowed to go back to Natasha and Princess Anastasia.
“Come on, I’ll give you guys a light on the way back,” the guard named Gary said. He flicked on his flashlight and we followed him back to number eighteen. He held the curtain for us as we entered and said, “Good luck later today,” and then left.
Morton strained at the leash in an effort to get next to Princess Anastasia in the kennel. I glanced over at snoring Natasha praying she would stay asleep.
Morton whined then barked.
“Morton, knock it off, damn it, quiet down,” I hissed.
He barked again and Natasha snorted a couple of times as I peered into the empty kennel where Princess Anastasia was supposed to be and suddenly realized we had a very big problem.
I pulled Morton back through the curtains then called, “Gary, hey Gary.”
He popped his head back around the corner of the aisle and began walking toward us, he s
eemed to pick up his pace the closer he came, obviously sensing something wasn’t right.
“Gary, she’s gone. Princess Anastasia, she’s not there.”
“You sure?”
“Yeah, Morton was the first to notice, I looked, she’s not in her kennel.”
“Ms Kominski?”
“She’s in there, still asleep. I doubt she even moved while we were gone.”
“Could she have gotten out, Princess Anastasia?” he asked already reaching for the radio on his belt.
“No, I double checked the kennel myself before we left for your office. Someone must have come in and grabbed her. I’ll bet it was that guy with the crewcut, damn it, I shouldn’t have left.”
“Crewcut? All units, possible kidnapping. Princess Anastasia, a white, full size French Poodle. Missing for no more than forty minutes.” He put the radio down for a moment. “Any idea what the guy looked like?”
I quickly told him the little bit of information I had.
“Suspect believed to be male, Caucasian, large with a crewcut, blonde hair, tribal tattoos on his arms.” He gave me a look suggesting “Does that sound right?”
I nodded then looked around in all directions trying to figure out where that guy could possibly have gone to.
“We’ve got people stationed at every exit. Believe me, they aren’t going to just let somebody walk out of here in the middle of the night, especially with a dog. We’ll get her back, come on lets check the monitors. That will be the most efficient thing we can be doing right now.”
Morton and I followed Gary as he hurried back into the office. We stepped behind the counter and over to the bank of monitors to check the images. The other guy who had helped Gary turn our intruder over to the police was already reversing through images of aisle “J’ on one of the monitors.
“Nothing so far,” he said without looking up.
With the lights turned down in the auditorium the images were even more dim and hazy than normal. A digital clock on the screen reversed slowly as the guy scanned through the images, one at a time. About ten minutes into the effort he paused, the digital readout on the screen read ‘3:11AM’. The image was of a fairly large guy, with close cropped hair, maybe a crewcut. He looked like he was carrying a very large bundle of cotton. He was just stepping off of aisle “J” at the far end of the auditorium away from the security office.
“There he is, there’s your man,” he said.
Gary was on his radio, giving the time and the sighting position to everyone. The guy working the monitor was picking up the phone and calling 911. All Morton and I could do was sit there and wait.
Chapter Sixty
“I’m Allen by the way,” the guy at the monitor turned and said. “I think it might be beneficial to check the exterior camera’s, Gary. Let’s make sure he hasn’t left the building yet. There’s not that many places he can hide if he’s still here.”
“Unless he’s teamed up with someone in the competition,” Gary said.
“Just get on one of those monitors and start scanning we don’t have to go back more than an hour. You could get on one too, Mr. Haskell, it’ll save time,” Allen said.
Gary set me in front of a monitor and I started scanning a series of images from the past hour. I went through them one by one. One image shot every four seconds factored out to be fifteen images per minute, or nine hundred images over the course of an hour. Until you’ve done it you’ve no idea how easy it is to become numb just looking at nine hundred images of the same empty sidewalk in the middle of the night.
“Okay I’m finished, I didn’t see a thing,” I said about fifteen minutes later.
“Good, let me get another camera on your monitor and you can check those images out,” Gary said just as the same two cops who’d taken the guy to Regions Hospital stepped back into the office.
“Did your dog bite someone else?” one of them joked then immediately shut it down once he saw the look on our faces.
“We got a problem,” Allen said then showed them the grainy, dim black and white of the guy carrying Princess Anastasia around the corner.
“Any idea where he might have gone?”
“We’re checking that now,” Allen said as I started clicking through another nine hundred images and fought to keep my eyes from crossing.
One of the cops took a couple of steps away from us and got on the radio attached to his shoulder. I could hear him talking, but couldn’t make out what he was saying. I refocused on the monitor screen bringing up a different length of dim, unchanging, empty sidewalk outside.
“We’re going to get some other folks down here,” the cop said once he got off the radio. “Have you caught any other images of this guy? Seen him anywhere else?”
“We’ve been focused on the exterior, making sure he hasn’t left the building. I don’t think he’s been outside, so far,” Allen looked over at Gary.
“I haven’t seen anything,” Gary said.
“Not a thing,” I added.
“At least he doesn’t appear to be armed, still,” he said staring at the screen with the image on it. “I told the team coming over to check in here. In the meantime, why don’t you stay on those monitors. If you can direct us to where he was last caught on camera we’ll hopefully find this idiot.”
Allen walked them out of the office, pointed to the far end of the auditorium and then appeared to give them a brief idea of the layout by pointing in a couple of different directions.
I stared at the monitor with the grainy image of the guy with both massive arms wrapped around Princess Anastasia. He looked like the guy with the crewcut from the other day, kind of, sort of, I think, maybe.
I worked my way through another nine hundred different images of the same sidewalk only from a different angle and didn’t see anyone. Gary loaded another nine hundred up on the monitor for me and I started back at square one, again. I was looking at the east side of the building, Allen told me there were five cameras on that side and I wondered, “Could it get any worse?” Then I did some quick calculation in my head and figured that once we were done with this exercise we’d probably have to start back at the first tape we’d looked at to cover the past thirty minutes. It reminded me of one of those math equations from ninth grade, the kind that helped steer me away from any more math courses than absolutely necessary.
Four more police officers arrived and Allen brought them outside of the office and seemed to give them the same directions he’d given the first two cops then came back in to run through more outside images.
“Hey, check this out,” Gary said a few minutes later. He indicated the screen on one of the live monitors. A channel eleven news crew had pulled up out on the sidewalk. It was just about five in the morning, and the doors to the Xcel Center weren’t due to open until eleven.
“Maybe they just want to make sure they have a good position,” I said.
Both Gary and Allen gave me a quick glance.
“I wish,” Allen said sounding more than a little worried. The office phone rang a moment later. “Shit,” Allen said and reached for the phone.
Chapter Sixty-One
“Security,” he answered and then a dark cloud seemed to pass over his face. “No, I have no comment. Thank you, we appreciate your concern, but we have no comment. Thank you, good bye,” he said and hung up.
“Not good?” Gary asked.
“Somehow the words out.”
“How the hell could that have happened? Who even knows except us, well and the police?” Gary asked.
“This is going to really complicate things. You guys keep scrolling through those images I’m going to have to make some phone calls,” Allen said then got up and headed toward a desk in the far corner of the office.
I returned to the images on the screen in front of me. It was kind of like looking for life on a portion of the moon. Nothing changed.
A few minutes later Gary groaned. “Oh, oh, check it out, not good,” he said and indicated the live scr
een with the channel eleven news crew. Another van had pulled up behind it, the camera angle was such that I couldn’t read the station it represented, but the antenna’s and satellite dishes mounted on top left no question as to what it was for.
“You think they know? Maybe it’s been a slow news day and they just want to interview folks waiting in line or something.”
“First of all,” Gary said. “No one is waiting in line. Second of all, Allen’s still on the phone. Not good, not good at all, look for things to heat up in the next sixty minutes.”
About twenty minutes later a couple more security folks drifted in, including another computer monitor guy whose name I forgot as soon as he told me. Four more cops showed up shortly after that. Allen pulled himself away from the phone and seemed to give them the same directions as the others just outside the office. Two more guys showed up a few minutes after that and spoke with Allen. I heard the word “hostage” mentioned and then Allen directed them to a couple of desks in the back of the office.
Allen looked like he’d been dragged through a knot hole and I noticed Gary was suddenly clicking through the images on his screen a lot faster than I was. I picked up my pace until it was like staring at a live film of an empty sidewalk. All I needed was some sort of dull, downer poetry recited in the background to make the experience completely depressing.
There was movement and sound emanating from outside the office. People were beginning to move around, some heading toward the restrooms, but quite a few others standing in the aisles, huddled in small groups. Occasionally someone would look or point to the office, someone else would shake their head.
Two women walked into the office a few minutes later. The older of the two, she could have been the mother they looked that similar, said, “We demand to know what is happening.” Things quickly went downhill from there.
