Val Fremden Mystery Box Set 3

by Margaret Lashley

  The last thing I saw before the paper sack went over my head was the glint of Steve’s gold tooth below his smarmy moustache, and the sound of his voice saying,

  “Do exactly what I say and you just might make it out of this alive.”

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  I couldn’t see a thing. Had I been saved by Steve...or kidnapped by a serial killer?

  The fact that I was now lying on a bed in a moving vehicle didn’t seem to favor the former. What kind of police agent had a bed in his van...or truck...or whatever this was?

  Blinded by the paper sack over my head, my other senses heightened. My nostrils detected an odor like a pile of dead rats. I could hear music coming from somewhere...most likely the front of the vehicle.

  Roger Miller crooning King of the Road.

  Steve began singing along. The torture had begun.

  I tried to get up, but my captor had tied my ankles together after shoving me on the bed. I squirmed around on the mattress like a grub for a while, then gave up.

  But my struggling hadn’t been totally in vain. Something new appeared in my range of vision. A dim, grey light emanated from around my chin. The bag had moved upward.

  Steve hadn’t fastened the bag around my neck!

  I wriggled down the bed until the paper bag no longer covered my eyes.

  In the thick, grey light, I could see I was in an RV. Lumpy, rank-smelling garbage bags hung on the walls. I made out a woman’s floppy hat on a shelf. I squinted into the dark and immediately wished I hadn’t. Sticking out of the bag closest to me was a ghostly human hand. The amputated stump’s fingers reached outward, frozen by rigor mortis.

  Holy mother of Elvis!

  The bags swaying on the walls around me were stuffed with the body parts of Steve’s other victims!

  Something touched my leg. I jerked away as if I’d been hacked with a machete.

  I tried to scream bloody murder, but the duct tape over my mouth thwarted my efforts to a desperate mewing. I forced my left eye open and craned my neck to get a look at my leg. To my relief, it was still intact. So was my purse. It was on the bed next to my shin, toppled over on its side.

  I almost kicked it off the bed for scaring the crap out of me. But then a thought pierced through my scrambled wits.

  That purse might be my only hope.

  If I could get to it, maybe there was something inside my handbag that could save me. I folded myself like a pocketknife and reached my cuffed hands toward the handle. Suddenly, the vehicle swerved and lurched to a stop.

  The music stopped...

  ...the engine cut off...

  ...and footsteps headed my way.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  “I see you’ve been a naughty girl,” Steve’s voice hissed playfully as he stepped into the tiny room where I lay trussed up on the bed like an injured deer.

  “Mmm mmm,” I muffled through the duct tape, and shook my head softly in a plea for mercy.

  “You really shouldn’t have taken that bag off. I wanted to surprise you.”

  Steve leaned over me, his face just inches from mine. I could smell the sour beer on his hot breath.

  “Don’t scream,” he whispered, then ripped the duct tape from my mouth in one quick, merciless yank.

  I hadn’t felt pain like that since that one time I’d tried to wax my legs.

  “Yowww!” I bellowed.

  Steve put his hand over my mouth. “Take it easy.”

  “Who are you?” I mumbled through his fingers and my glue-sticky lips. “Where are we? What do you want with me?”

  “Hold on,” Steve laughed cruelly. “Give me a minute.”

  I struggled to sitting. “And let you murder me out here in the woods?”

  Steve laughed again. He reached for something in his shirt pocket. As he leaned over me, with my cuffed hands I grabbed the handle on my purse and walloped him across the face with my hillbilly hacky sack.

  He fell on top of me like a bag of doorknobs, knocked out cold.

  Adrenalin throbbed in my eardrums. I heaved Steve’s limp body aside and plucked feverishly at the fabric binding my ankles. Finally, I felt it give way.

  As I inched off the bed, Steve moaned.

  Panic shot through me.

  Before I knew what was happening, my hands snatched up my purse, raised it in the air, and clobbered Steve once more hard on the noggin. I scooted off the bed and scrambled toward the front of the RV, my toe aching like a sore tooth.

  I flung the door wide open, hoping I could find a lone motorist or a homesteader in the woods who I could flag down for help.

  I didn’t have to look far.

  The sickly yellow light of a lamppost revealed that the RV was sitting in the back forty of a Walmart parking lot.

  I stood there in the doorway, open mouthed. I was barefoot. In handcuffs. And wearing a paper bag on my head like a makeshift chef’s hat.

  You know you’re in trouble when the people of Walmart look at you funny.

  I SNATCHED THE PAPER bag from my head. I needed to get out of these cuffs.

  Calling the police for help seemed like a non-starter. Besides, my phone was dead. I’d only had a couple of minutes to charge it before I got spooked by the lovely parting gift Elmira had left inside my freezer.

  Then a thought hit me like a fist in the gut.

  As horrifying as it was, my only option at the moment was to go back inside the RV...and retrieve the cuff key from Steve.

  I sucked in a Valliant Stranger breath and turned around. As I crept back inside, I left the RV’s door open. That way, any Walmart shoppers loitering nearby could hear me scream....

  I SEARCHED THE CAB first. A jumble of keys were hanging in the ignition. I yanked them out and sorted through them. Thanks to Tom, I knew what a handcuff key looked like. Unfortunately, the bundle rattling through my shaking fingers didn’t contain one.

  I dropped the keys into my purse for safekeeping. I wasn’t going to let this murderer get away with...you know...murder.

  A knot twisted in my gut.

  If the keys weren’t here, that meant....

  Crap on a cracked-up cracker.

  My gut did a backflip. I shuffled around and stared toward the dark hallway leading to the bedroom. I straightened my shoulders, grit my teeth, and hobbled toward the psycho slaughterer’s hideous black lair.

  Every hair on my body stood at attention. My mind screamed one continuous, wailing, Nooooooo!

  IN THE DIM LIGHT, STEVE looked like a gray mannequin. He appeared to still be unconscious, sprawled out on his back in the bed. I leaned over him and patted down his shirt pocket.

  Nothing.

  I grimaced and reached my cuffed hands into his right pants pocket. I felt something...but it wasn’t a key.

  Ugh!

  I jerked my hands away. Steve groaned.

  Lord help me! I need to get those keys before he comes to!

  I couldn’t see crap. So, I fumbled on the wall for a light switch and flipped it on.

  In the blinding light, Steve snorted and rolled onto his side. As he did so, his ball cap and wig remained where they were, like hacked off body parts.

  Steve had been wearing a disguise!

  It figures! The dirtbag was bald! And his head was....

  I stared at Steve’s face. My mind’s eye filled in his smarmy, pencil-thin moustache until it was as thick as a wooly, brown caterpillar.

  Oh my word!

  Steve wasn’t Steve. Steve was Goober.

  I was so shocked I could have beaten Goober senseless.

  But I’d already done that.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  I laid a cool washrag on Goober’s bumpy forehead and looked around the room. Everything was so familiar now.

  I could feel my face redden at my own wild imaginings. The garbage bags hanging on the walls...they didn’t hold dead bodies, but Cold Cuts’ disguises.

  I was inside Glad’s old RV, not a murder mobile.

  The
source of the dead-rat smell was as yet to be determined. Perhaps Goober had returned to his old pet-cremation job. Given the other options for the foul odor, I actually hoped that was the case.

  Goober groaned. I wiped his brow.

  “Are you all right?” I asked, and shook his shoulder gently.

  He cracked open a dizzy eye. It focused on me. Goober recoiled like a Mossberg shotgun.

  “Stop,” he grunted. He kicked his legs feebly like an overturned tortoise and scooted a foot away from me on the bed. “It’s me...Goober,” he muttered. “Don’t –”

  I grimaced with guilt.

  “I know, Goober! I didn’t know! I mean, I know now,” I fumbled. “What the heck are you doing here? Were you trying to murderize me?”

  “What?” Goober grunted. “No. Whatever gave you that idea?”

  I glanced at the mannequin hand sticking out of a garbage bag, then at my cuffed hands, then at the twin knots growing out of Goober’s forehead like devil’s horns.

  “Gee, Goober, I dunno.”

  “WERE THE HANDCUFFS and duct tape really necessary?” I asked, and rubbed my freed wrists.

  “I didn’t have time to explain,” Goober said.

  He was sitting across from me in the RV’s dinette booth nursing his lumps and a beer.

  “I knew you’d have to hear every gory detail before you’d go with me.”

  “That’s not true,” I sulked, knowing it darn well was.

  “Come on, Val. There was no time for Q and A. The natives were getting mighty restless, in case you hadn’t noticed.”

  I conceded with a sneer. “So, where’d you get the badge?”

  Goober reached in his back pocket. “You mean this thing?”

  He flashed a Donut VIP badge just like the one Winky had given me.

  I shook my head and snorted out a laugh.

  Goober shot me a crooked grin. His smarmy moustache, combined with the light reflecting off the twin knots on his forehead, made him the spitting image of what I thought a psycho killer should look like.

  “I had to rescue you Val, before you succumbed to the dark side.”

  “Before I...? What in blue blazes are you talking about?”

  “See? You’re already starting to sound like a hillbilly. That twang in your voice? Then that comment you made to Stumpy...that the trailer park felt like home? Really, Val. You were one step away from playing a tune on a moonshine jug.”

  “I was not! And anyway, what were you doing there? Did Tom send you to spy on me?”

  “Naw.”

  Goober inspected one of his horn-lumps with his fingertips as he spoke.

  “Tom called me and said you needed your spare keys. He’d tried to get back with you, but you never answered. He got worried when he couldn’t reach you, and called me. I’ve recently become a free agent, in case you haven’t heard. I volunteered to drop the keys by and make sure you were all right.”

  “So you were spying on me.”

  “If that’s the way you want to look at it. But honestly, I’ve got better things to do with my life.”

  I sneered. “Like what?”

  “Like rescue you from a pack of wild hillbillies. You’re welcome, by the way.”

  I scrunched my face together until I could spit out an apology.

  “Thanks. Sorry I beaned you over the head, but I thought you were about to dismember me.”

  “You should know me by now. I’m not that ambitious.”

  I smirked. “What’s that thing hanging on your window, there?”

  I pointed to a wire clothes hanger hooked over the curtain rod. It had been bent into a lopsided circle. Stretched across it like a Mercedes logo was a pair of women’s pink, thong underwear. Below them, tied to the bottom of the hanger with fishing line, hung two empty beer cans and a tin of Skoal chewing tobacco.

  “Don’t tell me you’ve never seen one of those before.”

  “No. Is it some kind of voodoo thing? You know, like the shrunken heads?”

  Goober laughed. “Nope. That, my dear, is what they call a ‘redneck dreamcatcher.’”

  I laughed despite my disgust. “And why do you have one?”

  “Eh. It’s part of my disguise. You’d be surprised how much street cred it gives me with the locals.”

  I sneered at the crude contraption. “I can only imagine.”

  I put my elbows on the table and rested my head in my hands. “I guess you know, they all think I murdered Woggles.”

  “Yeah.”

  “What do you think happened to him?”

  “I couldn’t say at the moment, Val. But as you know, I always think better with a belly full of tacos.”

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  A crispy corn tortilla met its fate beneath a moustache that looked as if it had crawled out from under a damp rock. As Goober crunched down on the taco, a spray of salsa shot out and splatted onto the left boob area of my shirt, beating me to the punch.

  I dabbed at it with a paper napkin. “So what are you doing in Glad’s...I mean Cold Cuts’ RV?”

  “As they say, life is an ever-evolving process,” Goober waxed philosophically.

  “Jorge threw you out?”

  Goober shrugged. “More like Sherryl. Though I really can’t blame either of them. Love birds tend to prefer an empty nest.”

  “One without a Cuckoo in it,” I said, and laughed at my own joke. “So, you flew the coop, eh?”

  Goober stared at me. “You done with the bad bird puns?”

  I sighed defeat. “Yeah.”

  “With my options recently opening up, I decided to give the RV lifestyle a try. Cold Cuts offered me hers on a trial basis. She doesn’t get much use out of it now that she’s with Bill down at the resort. Mind if I order another taco?”

  I shrugged. “Why should I care?”

  “Well, the tab’s on you. I’m kind ‘a short on cash at the moment.”

  “Wait a minute. What about that check you just got for ten grand?”

  Goober choked on his taco. “What check?”

  I fished in my purse and pulled out the greasy check stub. “This one.”

  “What the...how did...that’s not mine.”

  “Right.” I pulled out the other paystub. “It sure wasn’t from working at Griffith & Maas.”

  Goober’s lips followed the shift of his eyes to the left. “You got that right.”

  “So where’d you get that kind of money, Goober? Are you like...a hitman or something?”

  “Really, Val?”

  I crinkled my nose. “Witness protection program?”

  Goober sighed and shook his head. “No.”

  “What, then?”

  “Listen, if I tell you, then I’ll have to –”

  “Kill me, right?”

  “No,” Goober said.

  His eyes turned serious and bore into mine.

  “I’ll have to disappear.”

  GOOBER AND I AGREED to put a pin in his check stub for the moment and concentrate on the looming problem at hand. Who’d killed Woggles?

  We strolled back across the lamp-lit parking lot to the RV, after a quick stop in Walmart for a six-pack and a plastic bag of popcorn the size and shape of the cashier’s thigh who rang us up.

  “I have a confession to make,” I said.

  “Don’t tell me. You actually did kill that poor, cross-eyed old redneck,” Goober joked.

  “Ha ha. No. But Goober...” I looked around and lowered my voice. “...maybe Laverne did. Think about it. I know Woggles ate at least one bite from a cookie she baked.”

  “Oh crap.”

  “Exactly. What’s the going rate for unintentional homicide?”

  Goober looked taken aback.

  “How should I know? Geeze. But one bite...that’s not enough to...well...no. We are talking about Laverne’s cooking here.”

  I nodded solemnly. “The police are still waiting on the toxicology report.”

  “Did you tell Chief Collins about Laverne?”<
br />
  “No. That’s when I pled the Fifth and called J.D. He knows.”

  “You talked to J.D.? What did he say about this whole...situation?”

  “That I was lucky not to be hanging from a rope already.”

  Goober whistled. “That bad, huh? Okay. Let’s pin Laverne up there with me for now. Who else could have done-in Woggles?”

  “I couldn’t say. In the South, a mean streak can run deep and silent. And then, one day – bam!”

  Goober sidestepped away from me. “Thanks for the warning.”

  “Really?”

  “Didn’t you notice the puddle?” he joked. “As you were saying.”

  “My gut tells me Elmira had something to do with it. She’s creepy...and craftier than you might think. She’s the one who made that shrunken head and wrote those threatening notes. First, ‘Stay Away,’ which she claims was ‘Stay Awhile,’ but then the second one said ‘Get out now.’ She couldn’t so easily explain that one away.”

  I handed Goober back his keys. He fiddled with the lock until he opened the RV door. As he climbed the steps, he turned and said, “Elmira couldn’t explain that second note because she didn’t write it.”

  “Who did?” I asked as I followed him inside the Minnie Winnie.

  “I did.”

  “What? You?”

  “Yeah. I was the one who broke into your lovely tin-can cottage by the sea.”

  “Why?”

  I plopped onto the dinette bench. My toe was aching. I cracked open a beer. Goober twisted a can from the plastic ring and put the rest in the tiny fridge.

  “Well, originally I was just going to leave the keys to Maggie for you to find, as if you’d lost them. I used the spare keys to retrieve the set you locked in the trunk. Smooth move, by the way.”

  Goober winked and shot me with a finger gun. I shot him back with a nasty sneer as he slid into the bench across the table from me.

  “Anyway, I was committing the B&E when I heard someone coming, so I hid in the bushes. I overheard Charlene talking to Slim about how you were writing a story about killing someone with poison snickerdoodles. I mean really, Val. That’s crazy. Even for you.”