by Sarah Atwell
I had to stop the flood. “Breathe, Maddy. So Ian came over to Peter’s house then?”
“Yes, and he told me to leave and he’d take care of everything.”
“You mean the art, right? Because he left Peter lying right there, bleeding to death.”
“What do you mean? Peter was dead.”
Aha—I recognized one small fact I hadn’t known I knew. “I don’t think so. Not right away, anyway. There was too much blood on the floor around him. If his heart had stopped when you stabbed him, there wouldn’t have been that much blood.”
I should have kept my mouth shut. Clearly Maddy was having trouble grasping all this. Her renewed sobs threatened to grow into full-blown hysterics. I decided I would welcome the opportunity to slug the idiot woman, if that would shut her up. No, Em, that wouldn’t be constructive. Right now I needed whatever feeble help she could provide to save both our lives, retrieve the art, and save the day. Yeah, right. Em Dowell, superwoman.
I could hear Ian and Chas heading our way, and they were arguing. “Put a cork in it, Maddy,” I hissed, trying to listen. Mostly it was Ian talking, with Chas protesting.
“No, Chas, we don’t have a choice. We have to eliminate them, and we have to make it look accidental.”
“Damn it, I didn’t sign on for this! You said I just had to make a shipment and I could go. You never said anything about killing people.”
“Well, it’s a bit late to worry about that now, because you’re right in the middle of it. All I’m asking is that you keep an eye on things here for a bit longer. I have to go meet with my people, and I’ll take a look at Madelyn’s shop. I don’t think it should be too difficult to stage an unfortunate incident there, and it’s already established that Madelyn and Em have been working together. It would be perfectly reasonable to assume Em had gone to see Madelyn and something tragic occurred. Madelyn was always flighty, probably left a soldering iron on and forgot about it, that kind of thing, and they were both overcome. But we have to move quickly—Em has already been absent from her own shop for an hour or more, and someone will be bound to send up the alarm.”
“I don’t have to hurt anyone? Just keep an eye on things here?” Chas was clutching at straws.
“Yes, Chas,” Ian replied with remarkable patience. “You stay with the truck, and I’ll be back as quickly as I can. Under an hour.” Footsteps, a slamming door, and Ian was gone—for now.
My mind began to race. So Ian was planning to stage an accident at Maddy’s shop, and Maddy and I would be found dead. Not if I could help it. Now I also knew that we weren’t very far from downtown, if Ian could make the round-trip in less than an hour. The downside was, that didn’t give us much time to overpower Chas and call the Mounties: Matt.
Maddy was sniveling again. I let her go ahead, since it was in character. In fact, I decided that she should ramp up the noise. That would annoy Chas—and would give me cover to get ready . . . to do what? I scanned the interior of the truck. There was my cullet, as Chas had said, but I couldn’t see any way to use that as a weapon. Throwing handfuls of glass chunks at him would annoy him but wouldn’t slow him down. But there were some other boxes alongside my supplies. I stood up as quietly as I could and tiptoed over to investigate. And when I saw what was in them, I began to see the glimmerings of a plan.
I went back to where Maddy was sitting and whinging, leaned toward her, and said, “Okay, Maddy, here’s what we’re going to do.”
Chapter 25
“What?” Maddy sniffled.
At least I had her attention. “Look, we don’t have much time before Ian comes back, probably with reinforcements. You heard what he said—whatever is going to happen has to happen quickly, or someone will notice that I’m missing.” At least, I hoped someone would. “So our best bet right now is to overpower Chas and make a run for it.”
Maddy snorted. It was an unbecoming sound. “And how do you intend to do that? He’s a lot stronger than we are.”
“Maybe than you are, lady, but I sling hot glass, remember? Anyway, if we surprise him, I’m betting that we can get him under control quickly. And there are two of us. What’ve we got to lose? If we don’t do anything, Ian’s going to kill us.”
“Maybe you’re right. So what do we do?”
I explained.
Maddy turned out to be a better actress than I expected. She gave a very convincing performance, cranking up her wails until Chas pounded on the side of the truck and yelled, “You in there, shut up!”
At my prompting, Maddy wailed louder. The noise gave me plenty of cover to rip the cartons open and arm myself. Then I went back to Maddy. “Okay,” I whispered, “quiet down a bit, and then ask to use the bathroom.”
“This is so undignified.” She sniffed.
“Hey, you want to come out of this alive?”
Maddy nodded, pouting. She subsided into whimpers punctuated with occasional sobs. I retreated to the back of the truck and nodded to Maddy. “You’re on!” I hissed.
She nodded back, then got up and went to the doors and pounded on them. “Chas? Chas, where are you?”
Nothing. For a brief moment I panicked—if he was out of range, we were screwed.
“Chas?” Maddy said again, more loudly, with a convincing note of hysteria in her voice. Of course it was convincing—it was real.
Finally I heard footsteps approaching. “What?”
In a small voice Maddy replied, “I have to use the bathroom.”
Silence. Obviously Chas hadn’t considered this possibility. “You can’t.”
“Chas, I have to go! Really badly! Do you want me to pee in your truck?”
More silence as Chas worked through the implications of that. Presumably he hoped to return to a normal life after he got out of this mess, and a truck that stank of urine was not good advertising for his business. At least, I hoped his mind would work that way.
“She still out?”
“You mean Em? Yes, she hasn’t moved. Oh, God, Chas, maybe she’s dead! Maybe I’m locked in here with a dead person! You’ve got to get me out!” I was beginning to think that Maddy had a future in the theater.
I held my breath as I heard Chas unlocking the truck doors. We would have a brief window of opportunity before Chas’s eyes adjusted to the dark interior. As instructed, Maddy moved front and center, blocking his view of me, as I rose up from my crouch and started lobbing . . . salsa.
Those other boxes had been loaded with a shipment of Tucson’s finest, and I knew just what to do with it. As Maddy stepped clear, I dashed the contents of an open jar of extra spicy straight into Chas’s face, and the chiles did their work. He clawed at his eyes and spat. But I didn’t stop with one jar. I’d opened several, just to be prepared, and I let loose with all of them. Then I followed up with unopened jars, which must have weighed two pounds each. After all my glass work, I had a strong arm, and what I lacked in accuracy (I never was much into baseball) I made up for in power and enthusiasm. Even Maddy got into the act and tossed a few jars, although several of them fell short of the target, smashing on the floor and adding to the mess.
Chas fell down, blinded, and curled up into a ball, protecting his head. “Maddy, the bungee cords!” I yelled.
She tossed me the cords, and I wrapped them around any moving parts of Chas that I could grab. I had neglected to take into account the fact that the salsa would make him slippery, but I managed. “Duct tape—now!” I ordered, and Maddy scrounged around the truck until she found a roll and tossed it to me. I reinforced the bungee cord bonds, then stepped back to admire my handiwork. “That should hold him.”
Maddy stepped delicately down from the truck and joined me in contemplation of our captive. “Good job, Em. I don’t think he’s going anywhere soon.” She poked him, not gently, with her foot. “Now what?”
I hadn’t thought much beyond this first stage of my plan, but I knew that we had little time before Ian returned. “You—find a phone and call the police. I’m going to see i
f the glass pieces are here.”
Chas moaned. “My eyes! I’m going to go blind! Do something!”
I looked down at him, lying in a colorful pool of condiment. I couldn’t muster up a lot of sympathy for him. “Why should I help you? You kidnapped me, and if I’m not mistaken, you were going to let Ian kill me.”
“It hurts!” he protested.
“I think being dead might hurt too. Okay, hotshot, where did Gemberling go, and what’s he bringing back?”
“He was going to go set up an accident at Maddy’s shop, and then he was going to meet the guys with the truck.”
I knew the first part, but I was more curious about the second. “What guys? He wasn’t going to use you to ship the goods?”
“No. He didn’t think my truck was good enough for his precious artworks. He called some guys he’s used before. They’ve got a fancier truck. The only reason I got into this at all was because he needed somebody in a hurry.”
“Not to mention somebody who would be willing to bend the law. More than once.”
“Hey,” he said, “I didn’t know the stuff was stolen. All he said was he needed some stuff moved fast, and he offered good money.”
“Pal, first you conveniently ignored the dead body on the floor when you picked up your shipment. Then you grabbed me right out of my own shop. You’re just an innocent bystander, right?”
“I was never in the house! He hired these guys who carried the stuff out, and I just stowed the crates in the back of the truck. I didn’t know anything about a murder until I came back to collect what he owed me. And then I put two and two together and I figured out it was Ferguson’s house.” And Gemberling said he couldn’t pay me until I helped him get you out of the way.”
My kidnapping could wait; I wanted to hear more about the theft. I was surprised that Ian had trusted outside labor to do his dirty work, but he clearly wasn’t strong enough to wrestle with the heavy crates by himself. And Maddy’s impetuous act had forced his hand, and he had had to improvise. It must have been one of those “guys” that Matt had picked up, the one who said he wanted to make a deal. “Didn’t you wonder why he had you drive the glass here? And by the way, where are we?”
“He lied to me, said he had to hide the crates—something about a nasty divorce, and he didn’t want his wife to know where to find them. And we’re somewhere just outside of town—he’d checked out this place ahead of time. Look, what about my eyes? They hurt!”
“I’ll see if I can find some water.” I stalked off, looking for running water. I didn’t have much luck. From what I could see, this warehouse hadn’t been used for a while, at least, not for any legitimate purpose. When I tried a light switch, nothing happened, so the electricity was off. Then Maddy emerged from what looked like an office. “The phone’s dead,” she said.
“I’m not surprised. This place must be off the radar, which is what Ian wanted. Did you find a bathroom?”
She looked blankly at me. “But that was just a story!”
I sighed. “I was going to try to find some water to wash the salsa out of Chas’s eyes. I guess he’s out of luck, huh?”
Maddy started whimpering again. “Oh, Em, what do we do now? Ian’s going to be back any minute. Should we make a run for it? Take the truck? What?”
“You have your cell phone?”
Maddy looked surprised, then baffled, then disappointed. “No, it’s back at the shop.”
“Chas? What about you? Cell phone?”
“In the truck,” he said in a sulky voice.
Ah, yes, we did have Chas’s truck, and that could get us out of here. I crossed the echoing expanse of floor and checked the big metal door at the warehouse entrance—which wouldn’t budge. Damn! Ian must have locked it. He was definitely not a trusting soul. I rattled the thing, and it seemed pretty sturdy. Maybe I could ram the truck through it—or maybe not.
But what about the art? Where was it? Ian and his helpers would be back soon, but I needed to be sure it was here. I reversed course and loped toward the dim recesses of the back of the warehouse.
“Em, what are you doing? We have to get out of here!” Maddy tottered along after me, her heels clacking.
“Not until I find Peter’s collection,” I said grimly.
“But Ian is going to kill us!” She was having trouble keeping up with me. There was a good reason why I didn’t wear heels to work in—not that I’d ever expected to have to flee murderous art thieves. But it paid to be prepared.
“Then go and find Chas’s phone and call the cops. I’m going to find the glass.”
Maddy turned and headed back toward the truck, while I continued toward the back of the warehouse. There was a lot of leftover crap, long abandoned, but luckily I knew what I was looking for. When I reached the back end, I was relieved to find a stack of tall crates. I recognized them from Peter’s house. I managed to shift one slightly: Yes, the glass had to be inside, because the crate was seriously heavy. No way we could move the crates to Chas’s truck, even if we did have time. Which we didn’t.
Time to vamoose. Maybe we could ram the truck through the door, and I was getting desperate enough to give it a try. But what should we do about Chas, still writhing on the floor outside the truck? At the very least we’d have to move him out of the way, to turn the truck around. It might be a good idea to take him along and hand him over to the authorities, but I doubted that Maddy and I could lift him into the truck, with or without the coating of salsa that made him slippery as a fish. He’d have to stay where he was for now and take his lumps from Ian and his thugs. I jogged back toward the truck, gauging angles, looking for alternatives. The side door? We could walk out, no problem, but I still had no idea where we were, and I didn’t want to risk running into Ian in a deserted industrial park. He’d just grab us all over again. I didn’t think Maddy with her silly shoes would be very good at running and hiding. I’d rather take the truck and take my chances on the road.
I’d reached the side door while working this out in my head. It wasn’t locked, to my relief. I opened it a crack, slowly—and closed it much more quickly. We were out of time: There was a truck approaching. It had stopped at the exterior gate, and I recognized Ian as he rolled the gate back for the truck to pass. Ian was certainly a cautious type, taking no chances. Well, with a multimillion-dollar art collection sitting here, I probably would have been careful too. I turned to Maddy, who had slid down from the front seat of the truck, Chas’s phone in her hand. “Too late—Ian’s back, and it looks like he’s brought some friends along. Did you get through to the police?”
Maddy whimpered. For a brief moment I was tempted to throw her to the wolves and make a run for it—that was the kind of feeling she inspired in me. Luckily for her that wasn’t possible. The nearly empty warehouse offered few places to hide: The largest contents at the moment were the crated glassworks, and that was the first place these guys would look, once they saw salsa-covered Chas tied up on the floor. “Yes, they’re coming,” she said in a dramatic whisper.
Great: Help was on the way. Unfortunately Ian was closer. Maybe we could reenact our assault on Chas? But somehow I doubted that we had enough salsa left to take on Ian and friends, and we were outnumbered. And we certainly didn’t have time to wrestle Chas out of sight.
“Maddy!” I said urgently. “Slap some tape over Chas’s mouth to shut him up. I’m going to get into the truck cab and make sure the keys are there.” I hoped. If they weren’t . . . well, I didn’t have any other ideas lined up. “Then get in with me. When Ian and his pals open the doors to bring in their truck, I’m going to make a break for it. If we’re lucky they won’t notice anything’s wrong until we clear the building.” I figured the truck could handle an old chain link fence outside, as long as we were through the warehouse door. I just prayed the other truck didn’t block our exit route completely.
For once Maddy acted quickly. I dashed to the truck door and climbed in. Damn! No keys—which meant . . .
&nbs
p; Maddy climbed in on the other side. “Looking for these?” She held up a ring of keys. “They were in Chas’s pocket.”
“Terrific! Now duck down so they don’t see us.”
I could hear the other truck idling outside the warehouse as Ian worked the padlock for the outer door. I stuck the likeliest-looking key into the ignition and prayed the truck would start quickly. We would have a few seconds at most before Ian and crew figured out what had happened, and I didn’t want to waste time—not that we had any time to waste. Either this worked, or we might well be dead in minutes. I looked at Maddy, crouched opposite me in the cramped cab, phone at her ear. “Ready?”
She nodded silently. The outer door rolled up, and the other truck rolled into the warehouse.
Chapter 26
“Hang on,” I said grimly to Maddy, who shrank into her seat. I sat up, jammed my feet on the clutch and the gas, and sent up a prayer to any gods who might be listening. The engine turned over on the first try—thank you, Chas, or whoever had kept this truck running smoothly—and I fumbled for a moment with the unfamiliar gear shift. Ian and his buddies had turned toward our truck when the engine roared to life, immobilized for a moment, but now they were moving toward us. I shifted into what I hoped was first gear and gunned the engine, heading straight for the door. If the men got in the way, too bad. Yet a small part of me was relieved when they jumped clear as I wove around their truck and raced toward daylight.
I was not surprised to hear a faint pop of gunfire. I couldn’t tell if they hit anything important, but I wasn’t going to stay around to check. Once outside the building I made a beeline for the outer fence, where punctilious Ian had indeed closed the gate again. I will admit to closing my eyes as the front end of the truck rammed into the chain link—and kept right on going.
