Out Cold

by William G. Tapply

  I remembered how Misty had described the man driving the van, and her description fit Cranston, right down to the round wire-rimmed glasses.

  I dropped my binoculars and fished my little digital camera from my pocket. I snapped a couple of quick shots of Cranston as he was shutting the heavy door and then getting back into the truck.

  He put it in gear and started down the driveway, and when the truck turned sideways to me, I saw the Ursula Laboratories logo painted on its side.

  Twenty-Three

  My first instinct was to slip out of the woods, sneak back to Don’s Auto Body, rescue my car, get the hell out of Churchill, New Hampshire, and find a pay phone. Call Horowitz and tell him that I’d found Kayla and had tracked down the van with the bear logo. Try to convince him that McKibben was linked to the murders of Sunshine and Misty, and that Kayla was in danger.

  My second, smarter thought was that trying to sneak out of the woods and get back to my car in the daylight was too risky. I’d been lucky to get this far without being seen. Whatever danger Kayla and those other young women might be in, it didn’t seem immediate. After it got dark I could get away from there without being spotted. Meanwhile, I could continue hunkering there under the big hemlock, safe and unobserved, and see what else might happen.

  So I waited. I ate my last Hershey’s bar, sipped some water, adjusted my position on my Space blanket. Light snow was still sifting down, but I was snug and comfortable and warm, leaning my back against the trunk of the hemlock tree.

  I couple of times my eyelids grew heavy, and I allowed them to fall down for a minute. Nothing was happening. Nobody came out of the house. Nobody went in.

  I daydreamed about a donut and a big mug of hot black coffee.

  I was resting my eyes, drifting on the muffled silence of the snowy woods, mindsurfing about a steamy shower, silky sheets, Evie’s warm skin, her lips and tongue light on my chest, murmurs in her throat, her musky earth-scent filling my head, a mingling of images all mixed up with each other—

  “Put your hands on top of your head, Mr. Coyne.”

  Oh, shit.

  I opened my eyes, looked behind me.

  Albert Cranston was standing about ten yards away. He’d snuck up the hill through the woods behind me. Now he was holding a pump-action shotgun at his hip. I was looking right down the barrel. Twelve-gauge, I guessed. The bore looked as big as a howitzer.

  I put my hands on my head.

  “Okay,” he said. “Come out from under there. Slowly. I wouldn’t mind an excuse to shoot you right where you are. It would save me a lot of aggravation.”

  A man who’d use the word “aggravation” when pondering whether to shoot a trespasser would also use the word “seek” when talking to some young streetwalkers in Boston.

  I crawled out of my hiding place and stood up. I noticed that Cranston was standing on snowshoes.

  “Take off your parka,” he said.

  “You want me to freeze?”

  He smiled. “Actually, I think that would be an excellent solution. Take it off and put it down.”

  I did.

  “Now,” he said, “move over there.” He gestured with his shotgun.

  I took a few steps away from where my coat lay.

  He jerked his gun barrel, and I stepped back another few feet.

  Cranston knew that standing knee-deep in the snow, I couldn’t make any sneaky moves at him from where I was standing, nor could I run away. A load of buckshot from an open-choked 12-gauge would blow a hole the size of a basketball through a man at ten yards, and you didn’t have to be any kind of sharpshooter to hit your target with that armament.

  He went to where I’d laid my parka on the snow and squatted beside it on his snowshoes. He held the shotgun in one hand like a pistol, with his finger on the trigger and the barrel resting on his shoulder. With his other hand he rummaged through the pockets.

  He dropped my flashlight and Swiss Army knife and Leatherman and water bottle into the snow. He slid my digital camera and my tape recorder into his pocket.

  When he found my Chiefs Special, he glanced up at me, and I thought I detected surprise—maybe it was admiration—in his expression.

  He shoved the revolver into his pocket, then straightened up. “Take off those binoculars,” he said.

  I lifted the strap from around my neck and held them out to him.

  “Drop ’em.”

  “These are top-of-the-line,” I said. “I paid a lot of money for these glasses. I don’t want them to get wet.”

  “You’re not going to need them anymore,” he said. “Drop ’em.”

  I let them fall to the snow.

  “Empty your pants pockets. Slowly. Show me what you’ve got.”

  I took my car keys from my right front pocket and held them out to him.

  “Toss them there, onto your coat.”

  I did.

  “The other pocket.”

  I showed him the change from my left front pocket.

  “Throw it over your shoulder.”

  I obeyed.

  “Now your back pockets.”

  I had a handkerchief in my right hip pocket. My wallet was in my left. He told me to drop the handkerchief and toss the wallet onto my parka, which I did.

  Without taking his eyes off me, Cranston bent down, scooped up my keys and my wallet, and put them into one of his pockets.

  Then he picked up my parka and tossed it to me. “Put it on.”

  I did.

  “Okay. Let’s go.” He jerked his head in the direction of McKibben’s buildings. He kept the shotgun pointing at me.

  I considered running. The woods were dense, and the terrain was rough and rocky, and even though Cranston had a shotgun, if I ran fast and dodged and darted evasively, I had a reasonably good chance of not getting hit.

  But, of course, I couldn’t run fast or dart and dodge evasively in snow up to my crotch. The best I could manage would be a slow-motion lumber, and he’d have no problem blowing a hole in me.

  This, I decided, wasn’t the time to try something. It wouldn’t be daring or heroic. It would be stupid.

  So I started plowing down the hill through the snow.

  Cranston, clomping along easily on his snowshoes, stayed about ten yards behind me. It took about five minutes to slog down the slope through the snow to the cleared area in front of the stables where the girls had shoveled and later the panel truck had backed out. By then my woolen underwear was soaked with sweat and I was sucking deep breaths.

  A door opened, and Judson McKibben stepped outside. “Ah, Mr. Coyne,” he said. “How disappointing to see you again.”

  “Likewise,” I said.

  Cranston poked my back with the muzzle of his shotgun. “Inside,” he said.

  McKibben held the door open. I went in. It was a long, low, dimly-lit building, obviously a stable, although it didn’t appear that any horses were living there. It had thick, time-stained wood-plank walls, a few bare light bulbs hanging from the rafters, a dirt floor. The big Lincoln SUV was parked there facing a garage-sized door. A wide corridor ran down one side of the long narrow building. The other side was lined with heavy swinging double doors, so that you could open the top half and leave the bottom half closed. Or the other way around, for that matter.

  “This way, Mr. Coyne,” said McKibben. He went down the corridor, stopped outside one of the stalls, and opened both the top and bottom doors.

  Cranston came along behind me. When I glanced back, I saw that he’d put down his shotgun. Now he was pointing my own Chiefs Special at me.

  “Go ahead in, please, Mr. Coyne,” said McKibben.

  I entered the stall. It was a square room, with wood-plank walls, dirt floor, wooden trough along one wall. It smelled of moldy hay and old manure and sour urine. There was one small window high up on the outside wall. It was covered with wire mesh. On the sides, the spaces above the head-high walls were covered with chicken wire.

  I stood there looking around
. Cranston had come up behind me. I started to turn to speak to him when something hard and heavy slammed down on the top of my head. An arrow of red pain shot down through my head to my stomach and radiated into my arms and legs, and I felt myself tumbling, numb and weightless, through black, empty space.

  My legs were icy cold. My stomach churned acid. I tentatively slit open my eyes. Shafts of thin yellow light sent darts of pain zipping through my eyeballs into the center of my brain.

  I closed my eyes and the pain became fuzzy.

  Sometime later I tried again. The light still hurt, but I forced myself to keep my eyes open. I was sprawled on the hard-packed dirt floor of the stall with my shoulders leaning against the rough wood-plank wall. They’d removed my parka and taken away my boots. A cold draft was blowing over me, and the dirt floor felt damp, and I was shivering.

  I tried to move and failed. My ankles were wrapped with duct tape up to my knees. My arms were pulled behind my back and my wrists were bound together at the small of my back. Several turns of tape had been taken around my torso, pinning my upper arms at my sides.

  All four of my limbs were numb. My throat felt like I’d swallowed a Brillo pad. A lump the size of a volleyball was throbbing and zapping darts of pain from the top of my head into my face and eyes.

  I turned my head gingerly and looked up at the window. It was dark outside. I had no idea how long I’d been lying there.

  After a while I heard the rumble of male voices from somewhere outside my stall. Then the door opened, and Judson McKibben came in. Albert Cranston was right behind him.

  McKibben was holding a bottle of spring water. “Thirsty, Mr. Coyne?”

  “Yes,” I croaked.

  He came over, knelt beside me, and held the bottle to my mouth.

  I took a swig, sloshed it around in my mouth, turned my head, and spit it out onto the floor. Then I took another drink and let it slide down my throat. When it hit my stomach, I had to swallow back a wave of nausea.

  “Enough?” said McKibben.

  I nodded.

  He stood up, looked down at me, and shook his head. “You are a problem,” he said. “We don’t quite know what to do about you.” He turned to Cranston.

  “Sure we do,” Cranston said.

  “Albert’s a little angry with you,” said McKibben. “I myself am simply disappointed. I opened my home to you, extended my hospitality to you. We had a pleasant and productive conversation, and I thought we’d come to an understanding.” He shook his head. “And then we find you lurking on our property, spying on us, with binoculars and cameras and guns, for heaven’s sake. Very disappointing.”

  “I’d appreciate it if you’d take this damn tape off me,” I said. “I’ve got no circulation in my arms or legs.”

  McKibben nodded. “I understand. Albert will take care of you. I do want you to be comfortable. But first, if you wouldn’t mind answering a few questions?”

  “I don’t see how,” I said. “My head hurts too much. My brain’s all fuzzy. I can’t think very well.”

  McKibben shrugged. “Albert?”

  Cranston came over and squatted down beside me. He was slapping his palm with a blackjack. That, I guessed, was what he’d used to whack the top of my head.

  Suddenly he flicked his wrist and the sap crashed against the side of my knee.

  It felt like he’d hammered a spike into the bone. I was sure he’d cracked it. I howled against the pain.

  McKibben reached out and touched my arm. “Let’s try again, Mr. Coyne,” he said. “First, please tell me who knows you’re here in Churchill.”

  I was drenched with sweat, shivering from the pain, chilled to the marrow. I gasped for breath.

  Cranston showed me his blackjack.

  “Horowitz,” I said between clenched teeth. “Massachusetts State Police Lieutenant Roger Horowitz. Him and Saundra Mendoza. She’s a Boston homicide detective. They know I’m here. They’ll come looking for me.”

  “So who’s your client?”

  “Huh?”

  “Your client, Mr. Coyne. You’re a lawyer. Who’s paying you to come snooping around my house, my town.”

  “Nobody pays me to snoop,” I said. “They pay me to probate their estates and negotiate their divorce agreements. You said it. I’m just a lawyer.”

  “You go snooping on your own time, then,” said McKibben. He grinned as if he’d cracked a great joke.

  “Sure,” I said. “That’s it.”

  “Who did you call from the pay phone at the motel last night?”

  “Horowitz,” I said. “I told him all about you. He’s talking to the New Hampshire cops.”

  “And what exactly did you tell this Horowitz about me?”

  “That you’re keeping girls here.”

  McKibben peered into my eyes and shook his head. “You called your girlfriend in Boston,” he said. “It’s not a good idea to lie to me.” He turned to Cranston and nodded.

  Cranston whacked the point of my left shoulder with his sap. There was a moment of numbness, a moment when I felt nothing. Then lightning bolts of pain zinged through my body. My stomach flipped. I gagged and swallowed back the acid that rose in my throat.

  “Want another drink?” said McKibben.

  I nodded.

  He held the water bottle to my lips.

  I took a mouthful, sloshed it around, swallowed a little, spit the rest out.

  “Let’s try again, Mr. Coyne,” said McKibben, “I understand you’re upset about poor little Dana Wetherbee, but really, what in the world compelled you to come slinking around on my property?”

  “She was here, wasn’t she?” I said. “Like those other girls you’ve got here. They’re prisoners, right? Are you fucking all of them? Is that how Dana got pregnant?”

  McKibben smiled. “What a vivid imagination you have. But you have not answered my question. I bet Albert would like to see how you’d react to getting tapped on your elbow.” He looked at Cranston. “Am I right?”

  Cranston smacked his blackjack into his palm.

  “You guys murdered Sunshine and Misty,” I said. “You’ve got a big secret to protect.”

  “A secret, eh?” said McKibben. “What exactly is this alleged secret?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Why in the world would you think we’d murder anybody?”

  I shrugged. “They learned your secret.”

  “He doesn’t know anything,” said Cranston.

  “I know you’ve got something to hide,” I said. “Something you think is worth murdering for.”

  “Albert’s right,” said McKibben. “You don’t know anything.” He turned to Cranston. “What do you think, Albert? Should we let Mr. Coyne go home?”

  Cranston shook his head. “I don’t see how we can do that.”

  McKibben sighed. “I suppose you’re right,” he said. “We can’t risk anything interfering with our work.”

  “Your work?” I said.

  He smiled.

  “What’s your work?”

  “Don’t worry about it, Mr. Coyne,” he said. “Albert will take care of you.”

  “Horowitz knows I’m up here,” I said. “Detective Mendoza, too. She and Horowitz. Both of them. They’ll have the police come looking for me, I guarantee.”

  “Maybe so,” said Cranston. “But not for a few days. Not until they decide that something happened to you. And where do you suppose they’ll look? Let’s see. They’ll begin here in Churchill. That’s the last place they knew you were. They’ll ask around, trying to track you down. They’ll probably start at the motel where you spent the night. Joanne Sweeney will tell them you paid your bill and said you were heading home. No doubt she saw you drive out of her lot and turn south on the highway. Nick will tell them you stopped there for breakfast. You told her you were heading home, too. After you ate, sure enough, you continued south. You stopped at the Exxon station to fill your tank, and you told Francis that you were heading back to Boston. Then you pulle
d onto the highway, still heading south. So the place to start looking for you would be somewhere alongside the road south of here.” Cranston was smiling. “It’s another snowy night out there. The roads are slippery. Terrible visibility. There are dozens of places in the mountains south of here where someone unfamiliar with the area might take a wrong turn, and if he was driving a city car like a BMW, he could go skidding off the road and tumbling down into a rocky ravine, and if nobody saw it happen—if it happened late on a Sunday night, say, and if the snow kept falling—the car might not be found until springtime.”

  As Albert Cranston spun out his scenario for my death, I tried to spot the holes in his logic.

  I didn’t notice any. It would be easy enough to crack my skull with that damned blackjack, strap me in my seat belt behind the wheel of my car—which I assumed they’d spotted at Don’s Auto Body—and push it off the road on some mountainside. If the fractured skull didn’t kill me first, I’d freeze to death, and unless they made a blatant mistake, it would be impossible to tell that it wasn’t some late-night winter automobile accident. A deer or a moose in the road would make you stomp on the brakes and go into a spin. You could hit an icy patch. It would be the obvious explanation, and easy to believe.

  “You guys’ve got it all figured out,” I said. “Except for the fact that the police know the reason I came up here was to get the goods on you. They’ll be all over you.”

  McKibben was nodding. “I expect you’re right about that, Mr. Coyne. Thank you. Forewarned is forearmed, as they say. But one thing at a time.” He pushed himself to his feet. “We’ll be back in a little while. Try to make yourself comfortable. You won’t have to wait too long.”

  Cranston suddenly snapped his blackjack down on my shin.

  I screamed.

  Then both of them walked out of my stall. The door closed and I heard the bolt slide into place.

  Their footsteps scuffled away on the dirt floor and faded into the distance.

  A minute later, the lights went out, and I was left there in the cold stable in absolute darkness, wrapped in duct tape, with my knee and shin and shoulder and head shooting off darts of dull throbbing pain with every beat of my pulse.