by Laurel Dewey
IT’S TIME FOR A CHANGE, DOROTHY.
Jane searched on the page for the product or service being advertised and came up empty. She figured “time” related to the woman’s wristwatch and Dorothy correlated to The Wizard of Oz but the rest of the ad was nonsensical. There were no website links or phone numbers that related to whatever they were selling. Avant-garde garbage. That’s what Jane deduced as she inexplicably tucked the magazine under her arm and walked to the cashier. Suddenly, the presence that had hung so closely to her disappeared.
“That all?” the chunky woman asked.
“That’ll do it.”
The woman tapped her greasy finger on a greeting card stand to the left of the checkout. “We got Easter cards on closeout.”
Jane regarded the woman with an incredulous stare. Did she actually believe Jane looked like a woman who would send someone an Easter card? Jane glanced at the nearly empty card stand and saw a glittery greeting with the Archangel Gabriel blowing his trumpet. Who in the hell sends Easter cards? Jane peered around the card stand and saw liters of spring water. She grabbed four bottles and added them to her pile. “Okay. That’ll do it.”
“Thirty-three even.” Jane handed the woman a fifty. The woman opened the register and handed Jane’s change back to her. “Seventeen’s your change.”
“What in the fuck is going on?“ Jane muttered.
“Excuse me?” the woman asked, offended.
“Not you.” Jane’s mind was elsewhere.
The woman dumped the purchases into a plastic bag. “Uh-huh,” she replied, still affronted. “Hey…” Jane was still lost in thought as she tucked the seventeen dollars into her wallet. “Hey,” the woman stressed, leaning forward.
Jane awoke from her slumber. “What?”
The woman pointed out the front window. “Isn’t that your car driving away?”
Jane turned around just in time to see the back wheels of her ice blue Mustang squeal out of the parking lot. She raced outside, instinctively grabbing for her Glock and coming up empty. The only detail she could make out was the back of a man’s head and his thick neck.
CHAPTER 2
“Un-fucking-believable!” Jane screamed as she stood on the edge of the gas station, watching the rear tires of her Mustang blow mud into the air.
She didn’t lock the car door. She always locked the goddamned car door. Always.
Her mind raced, first taking into account all the items in her vehicle. There was the Glock and her badge, locked in the glove compartment. She figured the perp chose her older ride because it was easy to hotwire. Whether he could also jimmy the lock on the glove compartment and gain access to her shield and service weapon was another thing entirely. In the trunk was her luggage and laptop, which held hundreds of sensitive case files from past and open homicides. The more Jane quickly itemized everything in her Mustang, the more the weight of the world pressed down. The potential fallout from this was enormous. It was one helluva start to an already anxious road trip.
She tried her cell phone but there was no coverage. “Shit!” Jane exclaimed as she felt the walls cave in. There was no sure way to determine which direction the perp drove after he exited the frontage road, but Jane figured he was most likely headed southbound since that was the easiest entrance to speed onto from the gas station. She never considered heading back to Denver and aborting her trip. Jane had a small window of opportunity over the next seven days to lay eyes on the one person she never knew existed until eleven days ago. To turn back now because some asshole boosted her ’66 ride was not an option. The only person she could have phoned for help was her younger brother, Mike. But he and his new wife were incommunicado, knee deep in the Amazon jungle for two weeks on a shamanic tour hosted by a guy named Bruno. The only other possible person she could call was Sergeant Weyler but Jane wasn’t used to asking for personal favors, even though she knew Weyler would drop everything and come to her aid.
A thought briefly crossed her mind as she headed back to the Quik Mart. Hank Ross. That consideration actually made Jane stop in her tracks. They’d met less than one month before when she worked the Van Gorden abduction case in Midas, Colorado. But the connection they made—both sexually and emotionally—was still new and uncertain for Jane. But there had to be something there because Hank was the only one who knew where she was headed and why she had to go there. For the first time in forever, she actually trusted someone and allowed that unseen grain of vulnerability to exist and be laid bare. Yes, even though he was more than ninety minutes north of where she stood at that moment, she knew if she called him, he would show up.
But, no. She couldn’t bring herself to do it. Like every other circumstance in Jane’s thirty-seven years, she would figure it out alone. It wasn’t so much pride with Jane Perry; it was a conviction that one is responsible for his or her own destiny and to depend too strongly on others often complicated one’s fate. She got into this problem and dammit, she’d get herself out of it.
“I need to see the outside security video,” Jane announced to the cashier as she blew back into the Quik Mart. Off-the-beaten-path joints like this one copy over their security video every twenty-four hours or fewer and Jane needed to examine the tape right away before human error took away that opportunity. The woman regarded Jane with a lazy drop of her mouth and said nothing. Jane leaned forward, irritation building. “I’m a cop,” she stressed.
“Yeah?” the woman replied, in a stupor from inhaling too many pork rinds. “Where’s your badge?”
“In the glove compartment of my car that’s heading south right now.”
She sat back, not seeming to understand the necessity for speedy action. “How did he steal your car?”
Oh, fuck me, Jane thought. “I didn’t lock it.”
“You didn’t lock your car?” Disdain covered the woman’s fat face. “If you’re really a cop, wouldn’t you know better than that?” The woman actually thought she was clever.
Jane reached her boiling point. She leaned forward, prepared to grab the woman’s flabby arm. “I’m a homicide cop with Denver PD. I’m the one who shows up at ‘Shop ‘n’ Robs’ like this one when your cold, dead ass is lying in rigor on the concrete and your grieving family is standing just outside the yellow tape bawling like babies. So let’s recap. Some son-of-a-bitch jacked my car in your fucking parking lot!—”
“You don’t have to get huffy!”
“Yes. Actually, I do! I have important business to take care of. So, if you don’t show me the goddamn security video and let me use your phone to call this in, I’ll hold you personally responsible for grand theft auto. And believe me, lady, you do not want to get on my bad side.”
Jane knew there was absolutely no way she could make the broad responsible for her bad luck, but Jane had always been able to toss out a threat with such authority that even domestic animals and house plants acquiesced. Fortunately, this dimwitted woman submitted. In a cramped backroom, Jane reviewed the security video, which was blurry with badly positioned cameras and jumped from one pump to another, leaving ten second gaps in the real time action on each fueling island.
“Jesus!” Jane exclaimed, frustration filling every pore.
“They told us they were gonna update the security system last year,” the woman offered in a slow cadence.
“Is that right? I’ll make a point to tell every perp to ‘Google’ this location.” The video finally came to rest on Jane’s Mustang. Unfortunately, the thief was already seated in the car and his face was obscured by the poor angle of the camera and the driver’s front visor. Jane paused the video in an attempt to decipher any useable, identifying qualities about the male subject but it was useless. The only other video of her car showed it screeching away from the fueling station and out of the shot.
“Shit!” Jane muttered, standing up. “I gotta use your phone.”
Jane valiantly tried to talk one-on-one with
a local cop to try and gain some leverage but because the Quik Mart was located between jurisdictions, it started to get complicated and the clock was ticking. She then attempted to reach a couple cops she knew in Colorado Springs, located fifty miles south, but they weren’t at their desks and Jane didn’t feel it made sense to leave a scattered message on their voicemail. It became patently obvious to her that it was pointless to waste her time at the scene of the crime waiting for the cops to show up. Jotting down her name and the make and year of her ice blue Mustang along with the license plate, she handed it to the cashier with instructions to report the carjacking and deal with the cops when they got off their donut break and showed up.
Checking her wallet, Jane counted one thousand and seventeen dollars. Jane had allotted herself one hundred and fifty bucks a day for her seven-day trip. It was looking like that day’s stipend would be spent on a bus ticket to Colorado Springs. The plan was to reach out to the two cops she knew there, file the grand theft charges and get them to put their eyes on the highway as quickly as possible.
After another labored conversation with the uncooperative cashier about where the closest bus station was located, Jane began a three-mile trek northbound on the frontage road. The day wasn’t getting any warmer as the spring winds stung her face. She flashed on the warm, down coat sitting on the front seat of her Mustang and felt another wave of anger wash over her. By the time she reached the unmarked bus depot, she was told she could only travel twenty-five miles south before having to transfer to another bus that would take her to Colorado Springs. Jane paid the fare and boarded the bus. By the time they crossed the Castle Rock city line, Jane had devoured one bag of pine nuts followed by a half liter of water to cut the excessively salty taste in her mouth. She tried her cell phone several times, but coverage was spotty. A half hour later, the bus finally came to a stop on a flat, lonely frontage road. Awaiting her was the next bus, a small depot and a convenience store. She quickly exited, hoping her next ride wouldn’t smell like bare feet and diesel fumes.
As Jane walked to the new coach—a polished, black luxury ride that featured a large luggage compartment—she noted the name on the side: Anubus with the number 121 below it. She recognized the name as a slight misspelling of the Egyptian God Anubis. Rising above the “n” was an illustration of what looked like the head of an Egyptian dog or jackal. Lovely, Jane mused. Jackals are known to scavenge dead bodies. She once looked up the symbology of Anubis after an intellectual killer she helped convict screamed the name out at his murder trial. The Egyptians believed Anubis guided souls to the underworld. Once there, assisted by the god Thot, Anubis supervised the weighing of the heart of the deceased. Jane wondered what the marketing mastermind was snorting when he chose such a loaded, ancient, death-driven moniker for the bus line. For anyone who studied Egyptian symbology, it didn’t exactly suggest “safe travels.”
Jane boarded the crowded bus and surveyed available seating. If a warm body didn’t take up a seat, it was being used to hold additional luggage that wouldn’t fit in the lower compartment. Jane meandered down the narrow center aisle, dragging the bag full of water, pine nuts and that strange Q magazine. A series of small televisions were located in the center of each row of seats, all tuned to a local Denver news program. Underneath each television was the bus number “121.” Jane stopped, smelling something familiar but not connecting with the odor. Whatever it was, it had a rotting tang that made her gut queasy. The further Jane walked down the aisle, the more noxious the aroma became. Looking at the faces on the bus, she noted a strange pallor that inhabited each of them. Were they all being affected, she wondered, by this cadaverous scent?
Three rows ahead, she spotted an empty aisle seat. A Caucasian girl who looked about twenty years old occupied the window seat. She was wiry, dressed in a pair of black pants, a blue turtleneck and a gray hoodie. Her eyes nervously skirted the area outside her window. The kid was a textbook druggie and probably a hooker, although she didn’t own the toughness required for the latter. Jane glanced up at the seat number. “Shit. That figures,” she mumbled.
The girl quickly looked at Jane, her black eyes lined with thick kohl that emphasized the whites underneath the pupils. “What?” the girl anxiously said.
“Row seventeen,” Jane replied, pointing to the aisle seat. “This seat taken?”
She stared at Jane for a little too long before responding. “No…” Fear edged the word.
Jane slid into the seat, securing her plastic bag between her feet. She could feel the girl’s eyes study her and did her best to ignore it until it became irritating. “Look, I’d sit in another seat if there was one available.”
The girl apprehensively looked down at Jane’s bag. “What…what’s in the bag?”
“Water,” Jane said, scanning the rows in front of her in case she missed another empty seat.
“Is that all?” There was an obvious catch in her throat.
Jane turned to the girl. Sweat beads formed across her upper lip, which quivered slightly. “No. I got pine nuts and a magazine. You want any of that?”
The girl looked deep into Jane’s eyes, searching…desperately searching. “No…No, I don’t. My stomach is already too queasy.”
Jane nodded. “It’s that smell,” she concluded. “Why do buses always smell like warmed over shit?”
“What smell?” the girl asked.
“You can’t smell that? It’s like rotting…something.”
The girl sniffed in the air. “I don’t smell anything.”
Oh, great. Jane had experienced this odd phenomenon before and it always had a surreal conclusion. First the strangeness she felt in the Quik Mart and now this. And it wasn’t even close to noon.
The girl turned back to Jane, hesitated briefly and then spoke. “Did…did they send you?”
Fuck, Jane thought. Why do the wingnuts of the world always choose bus transportation? “They?”
A small fountainhead of courage briefly emerged from the girl. “I just need to know. Okay?” Desperation clouded every whispered word. “Like you’d even tell me, right? It’s just that you kinda resemble my mom and I thought maybe they’d send someone who looked like her just to fuck with my head.”
Jane had been told she resembled a dyke, a slut and an angry young woman but she’d never been told that she looked like somebody’s mother. Since there was nowhere to escape, she figured she’d come as clean as possible. “My name’s Jane. My car got ripped off back at the ‘Shop ‘n’ Rob.’ I’m heading to Colorado Springs to file a report. That’s my story. I don’t know who ‘they’ are and I don’t give a shit. So, let’s just let it rest. Deal?”
The girl stared into Jane’s eyes. “I can trust you.”
“Look, if you’re in trouble, maybe you should—”
“Shit!” the girl whispered, craning her neck and looking outside the window on the opposite side of the bus.
“What?” Jane asked with growing irritation.
The girl slunk down and peered outside the window next to her seat. “Shit, shit, shit!”
“What is it?”
“Shh! I swear I saw the red-haired dude out there wearing a black suit.”
As much as Jane did not want to engage the girl or feed her paranoid delusions, she stood partly up in her seat and looked around the exterior of the bus. “I don’t see any red-haired guy wearing a black suit.” She sat back down. “Are you playing me? Because I’m telling you, I’ve had a fucked up morning—”
“Lilith.”
“Huh?”
“My name’s Lilith. And I doubt you’ll believe a word of what I know. That’s what they always count on. Make it so absurd so if you tell your story, you’ll sound insane.”
Jane regarded Lilith. “Are you high?”
Lilith turned away, her eyes silently canvassing the outside of the bus from her window. “Fuck off,” she murmured.
Jane stared straight ahead. The television above her head flashed on the weather map of Colorado, showing a spring cold front entering the state. The bus driver boarded and faced the passengers. Jane noted that even though he’d been outside the entire time, he had the same sickly, gray pallor just like every other passenger on this black coach.
“Hey, folks!” the driver announced, “it’s gonna be a couple more minutes. We gotta problem with one of the luggage compartments.” He turned and left.
Lilith became increasingly agitated. “Fuck!” she said under her breath, nervously looking outside.
Jane couldn’t take it anymore. She eyed the girl, speaking quietly. “Okay, if I tell you I’m a cop, will that change things?”
Her eyes widened. “For real?”
Jane nodded.
“But I thought you had your car stolen. How’s that possible?”
Jane rolled her eyes. Lilith was the second person that day to question how a cop could be so stupid. “The two are not mutually exclusive. Look, in my job, I’ve heard some really off-the-wall stories. So, if you want to share whatever’s freaking you out, I’ll listen with an open mind.”
Lilith turned her body toward Jane. It was as if she had found her savior. “I was headed to Denver this morning on another bus,” she whispered. “I was goin’ there to make a statement to a cop or whoever would listen to me.” She swallowed hard, furtively peering around the bus suspiciously. “I was involved in a murder.” Jane focused intently on her. “I didn’t commit the murder,” Lilith quickly added, “but I was used to make it happen.”
