by E. R. FALLON
I wondered how many bullets Albert and Joyce had left in their gun. If they’d killed a couple of people at the auction like the doctor had said they had done, and Albert didn’t seem savvy enough with hand-to-hand fighting to have had military training, the same with Joyce, so I doubted either of them could shoot straight in a row, they might not have had many bullets left.
Albert dragged Dr. Tompkins’s stiffened body into the living room and put it behind the couch so that it would be out of view when someone first entered the house. I wanted to ask Joyce where the doctor had recognized her from but she looked a lot meaner than Albert did when she held the gun. So I kept my mouth closed.
They ordered me to sit on the couch and then went into the kitchen together. I glanced at my front door, which Albert had locked. The kitchen was too close to the door for me to make a genuine escape. Even if they didn’t have more than a few bullets left and even if most of the bullets missed me, there was still a good chance that one of them would reach me and they’d shoot me before I even got outside.
I heard them arguing, the second time I’d heard them do so. Even I, their hostage, knew that when criminal partners argued it wasn’t good.
Joyce was saying something about “leaving no traces” and Albert was agreeing with her, which didn’t look good for me.
But if they felt that my seeing them murder Dr. Tompkins in front of me had broken me, they were wrong.
From what I could hear they had wanted to wait until that evening to leave but feared someone might come looking for Dr. Tompkins. His death had changed their plans, and they would be leaving my house soon. And taking me with him. Once they took me with them it decreased my chances of living.
I glanced at the bolted front door and once again thought about making a run for it. How fast could I get to my car in the garage outside? But my car keys were in the kitchen. And on foot I was over a mile away from help.
I tried not to look at Dr. Tompkins’s body behind the couch. I contemplated whether I should try to write a note for help in case the police found the body so they’d know I was missing, and hide it under the doctor, but didn’t have anything nearby me to write with.
Joyce and Albert hadn’t bothered covering the body with a sheet, another sign they might be inexperienced outside of the auction crime. For the first time I thought that I might be able to beat them at their game. But even if they didn’t have much experience, that didn’t mean they were fools.
I didn’t much believe in fate. But every time I flew a mission in the war I made it a point to never be over-confident in the air because I felt arrogance would bring me bad luck. I would approach each mission with the mindset that I would do the best I could do, and that approach always helped me succeed. Joyce and Albert weren’t a plane but this was sort of a war, although I might be considered one of the bad guys, too. I started to view my situation as this: I could try to beat them, and because I felt I could try, I would succeed. Just thinking I could try would help me win.
But first I really needed an equalizer. I didn’t believe they’d actually gotten rid of my gun. I reckoned they hid my gun box and the robbery money somewhere outside on my large property. And I had to figure out where and how to get the box’s key, which was upstairs in a dresser draw, buried under some of my shirts. I also had to figure out how to get away from them for long enough to find the gun outside. With them present, I couldn’t go upstairs long enough to search for the key.
I noticed something gleaming on the fireplace rug at my side and carefully bent down to pick a paperclip off the floor. It had come with the notice that they were cutting my military retirement benefits in half, and I’d been so angry I’d thrown the paper-clipped pages of the letter at the coffee table. I’d been living off those military benefits and the small flight school pension ever since leaving my job. I’d picked up the papers after throwing them but the paperclip must have come off somewhere in the process. I slipped it into my pocket before Joyce or Albert, or both of them, could return. I’d be able to pick the lockbox with the paperclip to get my gun.
And where could Albert have put the lockbox and gun outside? I felt he’d kept the gun in the box because it wouldn’t have been easy to bust open and I hadn’t heard any noise like that.
The most likely place he’d hidden the box and the money would have been in the cavern. That’s probably where they’d been hiding too before they came to my house. Then another idea disturbed me. I hadn’t checked there for the body of the intruder. What If I’d put him down there and had forgotten?
Joyce and Albert could have seen right across to my front porch from the cavern. Peter had loved climbing around the little cave and exploring, and he had taken me with him a few times. Other than that, I hadn’t been down there in quite a while. It dropped a little farther down in the back so you couldn’t traverse it without the proper equipment.
I didn’t get outside much after I left my job, and some days I found just the idea of showering unbearable.
Without the military and without my flight instructor job, it was like I’d lost my identity twice. And then it was like I was hiding out from something. From what, exactly? The outside world? And from myself? After the war, my body was intact, with few physical scars, and I considered myself lucky when some of the friends I’d made while we served alongside each other weren’t. They’d been injured over there or worse. But my mind wasn’t okay when I returned. In a way it had been injured.
Joyce came into the room alone and sat down next to me. “Now that your doctor is gone, we could imprison you forever here and no one would notice. You seem so lonely.” She held my limp hand and her skin felt smooth and cold. “But we’re not going to do that. Honey, you’re going to pack what you need, your medicine and whatever. I’ll come with you.” She gestured for me to stand up with her hand in mine, mine still limp on purpose.
“Where am I going?” I asked, although I guessed they were headed to an airport of some sort.
“We’re going. I can’t tell you yet.” She smiled in a way that made me believe she was trying to get me to like her.
Wouldn’t happen. Ever, I thought with the sarcasm she despised.
Albert returned to his place watching by the window and Joyce went from room to room with me collecting what I might want for, as she put it, our “little road trip”.
I assumed they had ditched their getaway vehicle long ago and that they would need to take my car from the garage outside to get wherever they were going. So I would have to think of a way to get from the garage to the cavern to get my gun when I ran for it. If I was going to be on foot, then I figured I better be armed.
“When you first came here, why did you threaten me with going to the cops about that guy, if you’re on the run yourselves?” I asked Joyce as she led me upstairs to my bedroom. “You’re fugitives, you’d never go to the police.”
“Guy?” She must have known how uncomfortable her pushing me made me feel. “He’s just a guy to you? He was a person. Heck, he probably had a family, and now they’ll never see him again because of you.”
“You know, the one you say was a salesman,” I said quietly. It was difficult for me to utter out loud what they said I’d done.
“We didn’t guess he was a salesman. He was one. We saw him and heard what he said to you. Okay? Anyway, we said that because we figured it would keep you here with us. Because you would think twice about trying to escape or trying to get the police involved. Sure, we could’ve just straight up kidnapped you but this way is more fun. And I like fun. And remember, if you turn us in, then we’ll turn you in. This way, we both hold something over the other and are unlikely to betray the other. See?”
Joyce sat on my bed and watched me pack some clothes into a bag. In her denim outfit she looked more like a cowgirl than a murderer. All she needed was a hat.
“What about Albert, does he find it ‘fun’?” I asked.
Joyce chortled. “I don’t know what he likes these days.”
Joyce gave me a look like she would never give me an answer to that question.
“Do you have something nice I could change into?” She touched her light-pink-lacquered fingernails, an oddly sweet choice of color for a twisted murderer.
“I don’t really own nice clothes. Just simple things.”
“That makes sense. You seem like a very practical person. I do like that about you.”
I couldn’t figure Joyce out. One moment she was telling me what she liked about me and then a few minutes later she was threatening to shoot me.
“Your room is slob heaven,” she said. “Why’s your downstairs so neat and your upstairs the opposite?”
I shrugged because I didn’t feel like elaborating to her. The real reason my bedroom was a mess was because with Sally’s passing, and in both the throes of mania and then depression straight after that, I hadn’t cleaned it in a long time. I spent most of my time downstairs anyway, and more often than not I slept on the couch.
She suddenly grabbed the baggy jeans I held in my hand. “I’ll take these.” She pointed at some shirts too large for her that I’d placed on the bed. “And one of those.” She wanted to disguise herself from the police in my plain clothes.
It occurred to me that they were having me pack an awful lot if they were just going to kill me after I’d flown them to wherever they wanted to go, which until then I’d been convinced they would do. Why, then, if they planned on killing me, were they having me pack as if I’d be staying with them for a while? As if maybe I’d even be living with them? Then again, maybe they were just trying to boost my morale so I’d be more willing to help them. So I went along with her orders and packed even though I still wondered if they would kill me once they’d reached their destination.
“You never told me where you and Albert want to go,” I said. “Which country? A pilot has to know. I’m assuming you want me to fly you out of this country to another. Maybe South America? There are strange wind directions in some places right now. If I’m going to help you then I need to know.”
“All I can tell you is that it isn’t any of the usual places you’d expect us to go. You’re an expert pilot, it said so in the article. You got medals for your bravery. You’ll do fine wherever we go.”
Why did I get the feeling that she knew me from more than the newspaper article?
“Whose plane are you going to use?” I asked. “Yours?”
Joyce laughed. “We don’t own a plane, Emily.”
“I don’t either.”
Joyce gave me a side-eye look. “You’ll figure it out.”
She picked up my aviator sunglasses from the dresser top and twirled them in her fingers. “Ooh, I like these.”
If only she’d turn away for long enough then I could dig around the dresser drawer and get the key. Opening the box with the key would be a lot faster than using a paperclip to pick the lock.
“I no longer have clearance there. And I’ll never be able to take one from the flight school without them seeing me on the security cameras, which are monitored remotely,” I said.
“I’m sorry to hear you don’t work there anymore. But the reason we chose you is because of who you are not where you worked. Don’t you worry so much about the plane.” She reached to touch my face but I flinched, and she frowned. “We’re going to a place where rich people keep their planes in the winter when they’re not playing with them. We’ll find a plane there.”
There were quite a few places like that in the area, all of them private, and some of them many miles away.
“I can’t shower because I need to watch you,” Joyce said. “But you might as well shower before we leave the house. Once we’re out on the road you might not get another chance. Isn’t that nice of me?”
I knew she expected some kind of response so I nodded reluctantly.
“Do you have windows in your bathroom?” she asked.
“No.”
“Okay, I think I believe you but I’m going to look anyway.”
She made me come with her while she checked my bathroom to see if it had a window. It really didn’t.
“You told the truth,” she said.
“Yep.”
“Good girl. Okay …”
Woof, woof. Where’s my biscuit?
“Okay …” she said again but didn’t finish talking.
The gun moved in her fist as her hand trembled and she seemed to lose her train of thought. What was going on with her?
“Joyce?” I said. “Are you okay?”
That snapped her out of it, and back to her old self, she stared me down.
“Of course I’m fine. It’s you who should be worried.”
Back to the same old Joyce, and to think that for a second there I’d been concerned.
“Be quick,” she said. “And dry yourself off out here, not in there. Don’t worry, I’m not a weirdo who wants to watch you or anything. But I can’t have you out of my sight for too long and risk you trying something.”
I stepped into the bathroom and started to close the door.
“Leave it open,” she shouted.
I kept it ajar and then undressed and started the water, running it until it was to my liking. I didn’t check to see if she could see me naked from where she stood in my bedroom. I wasn’t going to hide my body from her. At that point, I didn’t care if she saw me without clothes. I’d already seen them kill someone so I figured we were about even.
I tried to enjoy the warm spray despite the unenjoyable situation but failed. I shut off the water and re-entered the bedroom and discreetly dried myself off. I could feel Joyce watching me, but not rudely, and I avoided making eye contact with her. She stared at the trail of wet footprints I’d left behind on the wood floor as I went into the bedroom and she appeared to smile to herself.
“I like your tattoo,” she said.
Still not looking at her, I murmured, “Thanks.”
Joyce waited a second, then she asked, “The tattoo, is it from when you were in the Air Force?”
“Yeah. A bunch of us sneaked out of the base one night and got them at the same time.”
“They were your friends?”
I nodded.
“Did any of them die?”
I gasped at the lack of consideration and respect her question displayed. Joyce avoided looking at me as I stared coldly at her.
“Sorry I asked,” she said. “I don’t mean to pry.”
I couldn’t tell if she enjoyed making me feel uncomfortable, which seemed like something somebody like her, someone capable of murder, would do. I didn’t want to give her any kind of satisfaction by answering her in detail so I replied quietly and in such a way that conveyed I wasn’t going to say anything else about it.
“Some of them died.”
“That’s too bad. I’m sorry to hear that.”
I couldn’t tell whether her words were genuine. Both she and Albert were hard to read, which had to have aided the robbery.
“I always wanted to get a tattoo but never got around to it,” Joyce said. “I waited too long. I can’t get one now because I’m too old. You’re younger so you can get away with it.”
“People can get tattoos at any age.”
“Maybe, but I think my age is too old.”
She turned away to give me some privacy and I dressed. I finished putting a shirt on. As I was pulling my pants over my legs I considered whether, away from Albert, I could convince her to release me. We were both women, and at the very least we had that in common.
“If you go on the run now, you’ll only be in more trouble than if you turn yourself in.” I tiptoed around my words, not wanting to anger her. “I’m sure they’ll cut you a break if you testify against Albert. He did the shootings, am I right? You were just his accomplice. Maybe you didn’t know he’d take it that far?”
Joyce whipped around to face me and her eyes
looked red and enraged. “You were an only child so you don’t get it, but I’d never betray my brother like that. I don’t want anything bad to happen to him. You hear me? Don’t let him know I told you we’re related.”
So, that was their relationship. From Joyce’s protectiveness of Albert, I assumed she was the older sibling.
“Besides, I already told you, you damn fool, I helped kill them. I killed the woman,” Joyce said. “It wasn’t just Albert. He killed the guy but I killed the woman. You underestimate me, Emily. I am not your friend. You are my hostage.”
I put my shoes on, and after a minute or two she seemed to calm down.
“Come on, let’s go downstairs,” she said. “You’re done here.”
How had she known I was an only child? That wasn’t mentioned in the newspaper article.
I had thrown away the few clothes Peter had left at the house so I didn’t have any men’s things to give Albert to wear, but he grabbed an old baseball cap, a favorite of mine, I had left on my fireplace mantel and put it on his head.
Albert covered the doctor’s body with my blanket that Joyce had used last night.
“They’re going to think I killed him,” I said about Dr. Tompkins.
“That’s right,” Albert said. “No one will know you were ever taken hostage. They’ll believe you killed your doc, and I’m sure they’ll find the salesman’s body on your property soon enough. They’ll never know about us. They’ll just think you’re a drunk, double-murdering psycho.”
His remark about my heavy drinking dawned on me as odd. How did he know something I’d only told Dr. Tompkins? Again, that aspect of my life certainly wasn’t in the newspaper article. Had Joyce told him, and if so, how had she known? Dr. Tompkins had clearly recognized her but I couldn’t place her. But if she knew him, then she might have known something about me. But how? Who was she to the doctor? Who was she to me?
Joyce asked me for my car keys and we went outside with Albert now pointing the gun at my back.
