by Anne Hagan
She grinned at me. “I’m not hopeless in the kitchen, you know? I was trying to do something nice for you after...after...”
“Shhh; I know.” I wrapped her in a quick hug from behind. “Babe, your love is more than enough and, for the record, let me just state that I know that you’re even better with the grill but, that said, how about you let me take over at the stove for now and you get the syrup and such out? I’ve had a little more practice standing in front of this thing lately than you have.”
As we sat to eat a few minutes later, I quizzed Mel about her collar at the restaurant.
“I was on my way there to meet with you, I swear, and that knucklehead tried to rob a bank a few blocks south of the place. I just...I just...”
“Okay, you don’t have to tell me anymore. I know what happened. Your instincts kicked in and you were doing your job.”
“I feel so bad about ruining our date.” Her eyes glistened just a little at the corners.
I pretended not to notice and I tried to wave her off but she captured my hand and held it.
“I want to make it up to you Dana. I will make it up to you, I promise; this weekend.” She smiled at me. “I wish it could be today but when we finish here, I have to go do a senior center dedication and then I have to get to work. That loser will be arraigned today for the robbery attempt and, hoping to save his own ass, he gave us a lead on the murder that happened the other day.
“It’s okay. I understand. I do.”
“You’re sure?”
I leaned across the table and showed her with a kiss.
Chapter 14 – Boar’s Head
Mel
Late Morning, Thursday, February 12th
Morelville, Ohio
“Mel, dispatch just got a call from a security company. The silent alarm is going off at The Boar’s Head.”
Barb’s Bar...
“Rolling,” I told Holly.
“The arraignment?” she asked me as I strode toward the door.
“It’s not until 3:30. I’ll be back in plenty of time.”
On my way out the door, Mason was just coming in for duty. “You’re with me,” I told her. “Let’s go.” I filled her in on the little I knew as we made our way to my vehicle.
Barb’s cell number rang through on my personal cell as I was climbing in.
“I just got the call,” I told her without preamble. “I’m en-route. Where are you?”
“On my way there too. Almost there in fact; the alarm company called me.”
“Turn around and go home. It’s probably nothing,” I told her.
“No way, Mel.”
“I promise; I’ll call you as soon as I assess the situation.”
She hung up on me.
“Shit!”
We arrived at the scene 15 minutes later to find more than a dozen motorcycles tearing around in the parking lot in the cold and driving across the now broken up remnants of what had been the front entry porch. The door was standing wide open and the dark tinted glass front window was shattered. Inside we could see that there were more bikes and bikers.
Outside, one biker fired a shotgun into the air and hollered something but I couldn’t make out what he was saying above the roar of all of his marauding fellow gangbangers on Harleys.
Three of my cruisers were already on the scene, amassed across the road. Barb’s own SUV was over there too, several yards behind the three cruisers, but I couldn’t see her inside.
I pulled in alongside the car of my Patrol Sergeant, Joe Treadway and parked then I got on my two way and ordered traffic diversions to be set up immediately in both directions and coming North out of Morelville. I didn’t want any cars going by on the road and innocent people being fired upon.
Mason and I both dismounted. Using my door as shield, I worked my way around the back of my truck and up behind his cruiser. He was back behind it, keeping it between him and the bikers across the way. He had his shotgun at the ready and a look of pure determination in his eyes.
“What the hell, now?” I questioned him.
“Other than they’re all Z Renegades over there, no idea Sheriff. Been here about 10 minutes. Gates and McDonald both got here just before me. They said it was already like this when they got here.”
I tossed my head behind me. “That’s the owner’s SUV back there. Where’s she?”
“I told her to get back in it and get out of here. She’s in there; won’t leave.”
I moved back over to my SUV, popped the rear lift gate and got out my own shotgun and handed it to Mason. Then I took out a portable bullhorn and my binoculars. Moving back alongside Treadway where I could see more, I raised the optics to my eyes and peered across at the bar.
Focusing on the man with the shotgun, I waited for him to turn so I could get a look at his face. I didn’t have to wait long.
I didn’t recognize him but the man with the street name ‘Juice’ stitched across the back of his vest, mounted a bike, fired it up and, holding the shotgun aloft, drove to the edge of the lot where he faced us. He idled the bike and hollered something across the road. I couldn’t hear what he said.
Treadway raised his shotgun but I put out a hand to stay him as ‘Juice’ turned and, still holding the gun, waved his arms at the other men on bikes. In ones and twos, they pulled up alongside him and idled their bikes too.
When it was quieter, I got on the bullhorn. “You must cease and desist now!”
Laughter peeled from the other side of the road. ‘Juice’ waved a hand for quiet. When his posse quieted down, he screamed across the divide, “You’re outmanned and outgunned pigs; fall back! We’re taking back our old hang out. I rule this turf now!”
He fired his bike back up and the others followed suit then. Driving out onto the road, he circled back to the bar. The other men all pulled or backed their rides away too and resumed the craziness of just a couple of minutes before.
“He’s right,” I said to my men that were in earshot. “We are outmanned and outgunned, for now. We’re sitting ducks over here if they decide to rush us.
The driver’s side door to the SUV behind us swung open. I turned as Barb stepped down.
“Get back in your truck!” I yelled.
She didn’t listen to me. Marching right up to me, she screamed too, “My bar! Do something!” She grabbed me by the shoulders. Treadway and Mason both moved from opposite sides to pry her hands away from me.
“Don’t hurt her,” I cautioned them.
“Mel, you have to save my bar. My life...everything I have left...that’s all of it. Besides my house, there isn’t any more after fighting for Lisa’s life and battling that damn hospital!”
I flashed back to a conversation I’d had with Barb when she first returned to the county:
“I had a partner; a partner in life and in business. We actually bought little bars and pubs and whatnot that were failing and we rehabbed them and sold most of them for a profit. We flipped several over the last dozen years. A few, here and there, along the way, we kept. We put good management in and we let them run them and we just kept going with the profits from it all. At least, we did until she got sick.”
Barb swallowed hard and her shoulders shook. A few moments slid by but then she seemed to steel herself and then she continued, “She got sick and fought and fought and then, when we thought she was almost on the road to a full recovery, I lost her after a botched surgery.”
Her eyes rimmed with tears. “It was all so bad...such an incredible nightmare. I didn’t have her and, and...on top of that I had to sell everything we had to pay her medical bills and fight the hospital in court at the same time. It was devastating.”
I was in shock but I managed to squeak out a response, “Barb, I apologize.” I blew out a heavy breath. “I’m so sorry for your loss.”
She sighed and leaned back in her chair. “Thank you. It means a lot.” She braced her hands on the edge of the desk and leaned forward again. “Look, Melissa, I know we didn’t en
d things...I didn’t end things with you well. It...it was actually...I was actually pretty horrible to you back then.”
“Water under the bridge.” I said it and I meant it.
She dabbed at her eyes. “Where was I?”
I didn’t even know how to respond to her but she picked back up on her own after a few beats of silence.
“Eventually, the hospital settled with me. Small consolation in the grand scheme of it all...” She sniffled but she drove on, “Lisa died in Colorado. I couldn’t stay there once it was all over. I packed up what little personal possessions I had left and came back here to be with my folks for a while, while I still have them, you know?”
I nodded and thought about my own obviously ailing father.
“I can’t just do nothing though and this,” she waved her hand in the air, “this is what I know. It’s what we’d done for nearly a decade. When the settlement money showed up, I took some of it and I bought this place when I heard it was available. Lord knows it needed my help...and...it helps me too...”
I looked across the street at the building we’d had that conversation in. Turning to Janet, who still had one hand on Barb, I plucked the shotgun from her other hand and told her, “Take her truck and get her home.”
Janet nodded.
“I’m not leaving!” Barb cried out.
“We’ve got this,” I hissed back at her, “but it’s not safe for you to be here right now. I can’t do what I need to do if I’m worried about you.” I stared into the eyes of my former enemy turned friend and waited for her response.
Finally, she relented. She shook herself loose of the grip Treadway still had on one arm and turned toward her truck.
Stopping Mason, I cautioned her, “Stay with her and, whatever you do tread softly.”
I watched as Janet took Barb’s keys and they left the scene.
Chapter 15 – Tailed
Dana
Thursday afternoon, February 12th
Morelville, Ohio
Erin Voll hadn’t been hard to find. The address her grandfather had given me had been confirmed by my background check. As I watched, the Brietland heiress finally left her house in south Zanesville around 10:00 AM and headed north into Zanesville proper.
I watched from a half a block or so away each time as she made a few stops at private residences. She pulled right into the driveway and took her purse to the door each time. At every stop, she was invited in only to emerge a minute or two later.
“She’s not delivering Avon.” I muttered to myself.
I followed her right into the bustle of downtown. She turned off the road into a McDonalds and got out. I parked and followed her inside.
Standing at the counter, waiting to order, I watched as she joined a man seated in a two-person booth under the windows on one side of the busy place. He had his back to me. I got my food and took a seat in the empty two-seater behind her, facing him.
The man I was looking at had gangbanger written all over him. I’d seen his type before. The sallow skin tone of a user coupled with the tear drop tattoo below the eye that signified he’d had a gang kill at some point in his criminal career. It was guys like him that had led me to the area in the first place, following the threads of a case that had led to me meeting Mel.
I shook myself and tried to listen in. He was eating. Erin was talking but, since she had her back to me and she was speaking in low tones, I couldn’t make out what she was saying to him.
As I quietly chewed my own sandwich and kept my head down, Erin got a little louder. “Conal, are you listening?” she griped at him.
“Shush your mouth!” he told her back. “I told you, don’t ever use my name!”
I waited, but in the next few minutes, I didn’t pick up anything else from the couple. I raised my eyes just a bit at the sound of paper crumpling and caught sight of the man as he rose from his seat.
“Let’s go,” he told her.
Erin got up and followed him out the same side where she’d come in. I deposited my trash and left too, trying to appear uninterested in them as I walked out not far behind them.
I was torn about what to do and who to follow as she got into her car and he got into one a couple of cars down from it. But, as Erin followed the man she’d called Conal out of the lot and up the road, I realized wherever he was going, she seemed to be going too. I fell in a little way behind her.
Voll wasn’t a careful sort. She never seemed to check her mirrors. I got closer and closer until, at one traffic light, as Conal got into the left turning lane just ahead of her, I had enough time to get a good look at his plate number before she switched lanes too and blocked my view.
I repeated the number into my cell quickly and then, asked it to ring up Young. Once the switchboard put me through to my handler there, I asked a favor.
“I’m following my target who’s with an unknown. Can I get you to run an Ohio plate for me?”
“Sure. Shoot.”
I flipped the screen and read the plate number to him.
“Give me about 2 minutes.”
“Thanks.”
We were headed west out of downtown on I-70. I let a couple of cars get between me and them. She might be an idiot but I was well aware he wasn’t nearly so naïve.
My cell line opened back up. “The car is registered to a ‘Conal Hoyt’. Do you want the address?” my hander asked.
“Yes please.”
I committed what he told me to memory, thanked him and hung up.
We were half way to Columbus when Hoyt abruptly changed from the left lane to the right lane and took the Gratiot freeway exit.
At the top of the ramp, instead of turning right toward the little town, he turned left and she followed. The two lane county highway we were on had me swallowing hard. We were entering open farm country in the middle of nowhere. It would be easy for Hoyt to pick up my tail now.
I put as much distance between us as I dared but I breathed a sigh of relief when, less than a mile later, he pulled off the road into the lot of a ‘No Tell Motel’ and Erin Voll followed him. I sped on by and didn’t look back at them.
Letting several miles pass first, I finally turned around. No one was behind me the entire distance but I feared Hoyt had caught on to my presence and that’s why he’d stopped. I was sure the two were now long gone.
There wasn’t any reason to be worried. As I approached the motel and slowed, I could see Hoyt backing his car away from the office at one end of the low brick building. Erin Voll was on foot, coming around from behind the structure at the other end.
I went by again, but this time I went just past the freeway ramps to the edge of Gratiot, turned around the first chance I got, and headed south again, back to the motel.
By the time I got there, Hoyt’s car was parked in front of a unit about 2/3rds of the way down from the office. Neither he nor Erin were visible. They were presumably inside.
I drove around to the back of the building. Erin’s silver Ford was parked just around the corner far enough to be out of view of the road. I took a couple of quick pics of it for my report back to her grandfather and then, reversing, I went back around to the front and parked several doors down from the two apparent lovers. Only two other cars were in the lot. They were both in front of the office.
A cleaning cart was outside the door of the room next to Hoyt’s. The door was closed but, as I watched, it swung open. A maid stepped out and put a ball of towels into the laundry bag hanging from one end and then went back inside.
“No sheets though...” I shivered involuntarily.
An idea popped into my head. I checked my wallet. I had three twenties on me. I jumped out of the car and went to the room being cleaned.
Stepping in, I startled the maid, a woman easily in her fifties, who was now vacuuming her way out of the room, her back to the door.
I held my empty hands up to show her I meant no harm. She switched off the machine and eyed me warily.
Holding on
e hand out, palm facing her, I took my wallet out again. “I’ll give you 20 bucks if you let me hang in here for a little bit and don’t ask any questions,” I told her, holding my voice low.
“Fifty,” came the swift reply.
I looked in the wallet and took out two bills. “I can give you forty,” I said.
She held out her hand and I placed two twenties in it. With that, she wound up the vacuum cleaner cord and wheeled it out of the room, shutting the door behind her.
Luck was on my side. The walls were not only thin but there was even a connecting door between the two rooms. I moved toward it and put my ear directly against the sliver of opening between the door and the frame.
Hoyt and Voll were making no pretense of being quiet now. I listened as the late twenties gangbanger ordered her to give him head and then in revulsion as he grunted and groaned and she gagged on him.
“Get those pants off and get up here on your fucking knees,” he commanded her after several minutes of her taking him in her mouth.
I heard a heavy thud and then, seconds later, Erin let out a little yelp and bed in the adjoining room began to creak rhythmically.
“Beg for it!” Hoyt ordered.
“Give it to me Preacher, give it to me,” Voll panted out, barely audibly to me. The bed bounced into the wall then several times and then stopped. Hoyt released a loud groan and then, judging by the sound, he collapsed onto the bed.
“Get up and unlace my boots and get them off,” I heard him say.
There were two soft thuds 30 seconds apart and then it was quiet for a couple of minutes.
As quietly and as slowly as I could, I shifted my position and switched my weight from leg to leg. I pulled my cell out of my front pocket. Less than ten minutes had passed since I’d bribed the maid.
A toilet flushed next door. Erin’s voice sounded distant and then got closer as she asked Conal Hoyt if he was awake.
His response was muted but Voll’s next questions to him had my ears burning.
