by Chris Bostic
Lee wrapped his free arm around me and squeezed tightly. I hugged him back harder and sighed.
“That’s what I needed,” I whispered.
Lee rested his cheek on top of my head. “I love you, Hope.”
“I love you too, but don’t make this like some kind of goodbye bullshit.” I stared into his eyes. “If we’re gonna be fine, then just say something like how you’re gonna show me how much you love me tonight.”
“Dang, I should have said that.” He pretend slapped his forehead. “Dummy. Now it’s too late.”
I stood on my tiptoes and kissed him.
“Next time at least try something like that.”
He grabbed me by the waist and pulled me tightly to him. He pressed his lips to mine. He kissed me long and deep, practically sweeping me off my feet.
He couldn’t quite lift me up with his left hand, so he ended up pressing me against the wall.
“Careful.” When he looked at me tentatively, I said, “I might drop the gun again.”
He pulled back laughing. “I thought you might go for one of those is that a gun in your pocket or are you happy to see me jokes.”
“My jokes are so much better.”
When he harrumphed, I kissed him back.
It was like a match to gasoline. Lee grabbed me around the waist at first. Then reaching lower. He grabbed my ass and pulled me against him.
We stumbled back until my shoulders brushed the wall again. Then he pushed me up against it, grinding into me.
Our lips stayed locked together until I felt like I might pass out from lack of oxygen.
“Yeah,” I said breathlessly as we finally pulled apart. “That’s more like it.”
He looked all proud of himself, especially when he cupped my butt cheek and squeezed again.
“Just killing time until the cops show up?” I asked with a grin. “That’s a solid plan.”
“Time to go now,” he said, instantly slipping back into serious mode. “We can’t wait any longer.”
“Fine,” I pouted.
“I’ll make it up to you tonight.” He patted me on the butt one last time. “Now it’s really time for me to take charge.”
Lee walked over to the door we’d opened earlier to call the police, and slowly cracked it open. Then he slipped outside, while holding the door just wide enough for me to get out too.
We stood on a concrete driveway, built to handle the big loads of trucks hauling grain for grinding and fermenting.
A tall concrete wall stood immediately off to our right, with a heavy metal tube-style railing atop that, keeping barrel trucks from falling over the side to the lower level—but also partly blocking our view of above.
Lee pointed up to the general location of the loading dock, though I already knew where we were headed. The real question was how. If we just walked up the driveway until we got past the retaining wall, then we’d be pretty far away from the actual loading dock.
We sure weren’t going to scale a tall, smooth wall like that, so it meant we’d have to circle all the way around the building to get to the dock from the other side. That would be seriously out of the way, but I wasn’t opposed to that.
Might as well leave more time for the cops to arrive.
Lee had other ideas. He motioned for me to stay put while he took several steps up the driveway to get a better look at the dock.
“Truck’s still parked outside. The dock door’s still closed,” he reported back. “We can sneak up there if we go quick.”
It wasn’t what I wanted to hear, but it was everything I expected.
Lee gestured over toward the retaining wall. “We hug the wall and stay low. Follow it all the way up. At the top, we use their truck for cover until we can rush the door and surprise ‘em.”
That’s where he lost me.
“Why bother to rush the door? Won’t that make them go out the back?”
“We’ve gotta be quick…and willing to fire a warning shot if they try to run out the back.”
“Are you willing to do that?”
“Yeah,” he murmured.
“That didn’t sound confident.”
He shook his head. “It’s not that. I just….”
“What?” I stepped closer to him, practically snuggling against his arm.
“It’s obviously better if someone watches the back when I bust through the front. That’s police work 101.”
“Obviously.”
“But I’m not willing to split up. We need to stick together.”
Maybe he wanted me to volunteer to go guard the back door, but I wasn’t doing it. I had enough hesitation about his plan.
“Maybe we could go block the door,” he offered. “Trap them in the room so there’s only one way out.”
“That makes sense in principal but maybe not in practice,” I suggested. Lee seemed willing to hear me out. “I don’t know what we’d block the door with. And if we found something, how would we get it in place without making a racket?”
“Probably all true. I’ll give you that.”
“And the cops will probably show up by the time we get there.”
“So?” Lee said.
“Let’s bail on the assault. We’ll just find a spot to stake ‘em out, and think about how we respond if they do come looking for their buddy.”
“Ah, a good ole fashioned stakeout,” Lee declared. “I can get down with that.”
I grinned and said, “I should have suggested that a while ago.”
Lee looked around the area and turned up his nose. “Except there’s no cover right out here in the wide ass open. Plus we’ve got no vehicle of our own to sit in…unless we go back and get the side-by-side, and that’s not gonna happen.”
“That’s not our only problem,” I said with purposeful vagueness.
“And that is?”
“No donuts. We can’t have a stakeout without donuts.”
“Very funny, Hope.”
CHAPTER 25
“So we need to find somewhere we can see the door, but they can’t see us until they come outside?” I suggested though I phrased it more like a question.
“Exactly.” Lee gazed across a wide area, perhaps finally realizing we had a lot more room to work with if the plan turned into simple surveillance work.
He went the opposite way with it.
After a long pause, he pointed behind us. “I guess we could go back to the corner so we can see both sides of the building.”
“I’m fine with that.” Not quite as far away as I would have liked, but it made sense.
Unfortunately, if we’d been staked out farther away, things maybe would have worked out differently.
We were barely to the corner of the building and starting to sit when we heard the rattle of the dock door. We spun around in time to see it roll open.
A short, stocky man in a dark barrel crew t-shirt appeared in the doorway.
“Down,” Lee whispered to me harshly, but I was already there. I crouched behind him, putting the bulk of the building between me and the driveway.
After a quick glance, I pulled my head back leaving only Lee to watch from his belly.
“What’s goin’ on?” I whispered.
“Not sure.” Lee cleared his throat softly. “Looks like Bowling Ball’s going to the truck for something.”
Lee remained intently watching, with his head barely past the corner of the building. He pressed his cheek against the ground to show the lowest possible profile.
Since it didn’t do me much good watching Lee’s back, I kept looking the opposite direction on the off chance Little Willie decided to come out the other way.
Of course, there would be no reason to expect him to do that, but my nerves tingled anyway. Not like spider-sense. More like ready to go to bed and sleep all night, but too tired to actually get to sleep. Like the way my brain decided to ponder on the great and small mysteries of life when I knew I had to wake up at five a.m.
Lee had kept watch
ing the whole time, motionless as a rock, until the point I figured he’d have grass marks pressed into his face.
Finally, he turned back to me and uttered, “Dammit. I knew we should have taken the keys.”
“What keys?”
“To the truck. We could have trapped ‘em right here if we’d taken the time to check.”
It seemed valid enough, though risky, so I wouldn’t readily admit the point.
“But they could have seen us taking the keys, and we wouldn’t have been any better off.”
“Like now?” Lee’s agitation grew. “That was stupid on my part.”
“Don’t worry. He’s not leaving yet, right?” I leaned over to take a quick peek to verify the statement. The robber appeared to be rummaging through the front seats. No telling what he was looking for, but at least he clearly wasn’t about to leave. “No way they’re done bottling yet.”
A rattle of glass from inside the bottling hall confirmed that. Then rose a garbled yell from Little Willie that I interpreted as, “Hurry the fuck up!”
“I’m tryin’,” Bowling Ball replied.
I didn’t take another look at that point, since the guy was probably about done in the truck. With my luck, he’d catch me snooping.
I tried to put a positive spin on things.
“They’re still busy in there. If you really want, we can probably crawl over there and get the keys…if they put the door back down,” I said, though hoping Lee wouldn’t really want to do that. “But, you know, they might not even be in the truck. They might be in one of their pockets.”
“Or might not.” Lee exhaled exaggeratedly. “There’s no way to know without checking.”
I shrugged. “I don’t know that it’s worth it.”
Then again, with no sign of the police coming, I knew he was agitated.
Lee massaged his wrist while keeping hold of his pistol, and mumbled, “Yeah. I hear you.”
No way he wanted those guys to get off the property. Anyone could tell. He was set on stopping them right there, with or without the cops.
Before he decided to jump up and confront them, I tried to concoct another plan. Nothing that involved sitting in place seemed like it would be enough to stop him from going back over there.
“If they have the keys, maybe we could flatten a tire,” I suggested and thought back to a recent movie we’d watched. “Does it really not pop like all loud and stuff if you stab it with a knife?”
“I honestly don’t know.” Lee looked back at me and cracked a thin smile. “But you know we don’t have a knife, right?”
“I know I don’t.” I patted the tiny pocket on my dress and raised an eyebrow at him.
“Me either.”
“Huh. Why not?”
“I guess ‘cause I’m not a hillbilly, or a gangsta. I don’t carry a big ole knife everywhere I go.”
“Fair enough. It was just a thought.”
More glass slammed on metal and clinked loudly. Lee leaned around the corner again for a second to check it out.
I’d seen enough from my time watching bottling to know that meant they were probably dumping empties out of the boxes onto the table to get them ready to be filled.
The only thing I couldn’t know was whether they were just getting started or almost done.
It seemed like a lot of time and effort. Back at Bison Fork, those thieves had tried to steal expensive bottles already made, and whole barrels of pricey juice without trying to bottle any themselves.
“This is quite the elaborate heist,” I told Lee. “They’re going through a lot of trouble when they could have just grabbed some full cases.”
“We don’t keep a lot of inventory in storage, seeing how we don’t bottle a lot. Plus the distributors come by often.” He scratched at his chin as he gave more thought to their motives.
“You have a point….”
Lee thought a moment longer before saying, “Everything’s all inventoried and sold once it’s bottled so it would turn up as missing immediately…not like pulling some random barrels off a rick. That could take a couple years for someone to figure out.”
“I s’pose,” I replied. “Still it seems like a lot of work. Why not take the barrel and get outta here?”
“It’d be quicker for sure, but probably not all that much. Plus they’ll get a shit ton more money selling real bottles with real labels than trying to peddle a whole barrel.” Lee smirked. “I mean you might as well use the equipment if you have access to it.”
“I see what you mean. But…I dunno.”
“They’re probably dumb enough to think they can get away with it just ‘cause they turned off my cameras.” He scoffed. “Like we weren’t going to miss a bunch of cases of empty bottles.”
“Maybe they had someone like Bethany order extras, and had them hidden away?”
“She wouldn’t know any better, would she?”
“Probably not.”
“Then that’s a great theory. It’s definitely something to think about.” He turned to look at me. “You’re gettin’ pretty good at this detective stuff.”
“Thanks.”
Before I could bask in the compliment, he took another quick peek around the building. “But you know that’s a lot of cases to hide, waiting for today?”
“More like pallets of cases. It’s gonna be….” I paused to do some quick math. At six bottles per case, and maybe a thousand bottles, that means…a lot of cases. “More than their truck can haul.”
“It might fit. Or they take a couple trips to go load their personal trucks.”
I was about to suggest we leave the guys alone and let them do their thing. We could wait over by their personal trucks and have the cops arrest them there when they showed up with a truckload of stolen liquor.
But something unexpected happened first, and that would change everything.
CHAPTER 26
A thumping came from the lower level of the building. Soft at first, but rapidly growing in volume.
“Oh, shit.” Lee realized what was happening a second before I figured it out.
“Twangy,” I said. “He’s conscious.”
Lee raised an eyebrow at the nickname. “Yep, and he’s kicking the hell outta that door.”
“You tied his feet,” I said, trying to imagine how he’d found enough room to rear back and kick so hard and often.
“Should’ve hobbled him too.” Lee gritted his teeth. “He keeps it up and they’re gonna hear him.”
“And they’ll come get him loose.”
“Exactly. We gotta move.” Lee stood and offered a hand to pull me up.
“To go shut him up?”
“To go shut this down.” Lee pointed with his pistol in the direction of the dock. “We’re making a move now.”
I fished my phone out of my pocket. I thought it had to have been past the twenty minute point by then, but it had only been eight.
“Great,” I muttered. “Guess you get your way.”
“What?” Lee said as he looked around the corner of the building.
“Nothing. Just wondering why the cops are taking so damn long.”
“Midday into evening…so maybe shift change.” He shrugged. “It’s a big county to cover too. It’d be way quicker if we were in the city limits.”
Lee reached back to pat me on the knee. He waved the pistol to signal we were moving out.
“Just stay close. The door’s still open. We go to the truck, then into the building the way I planned.”
“Yeah,” I said, resigned to the fact. All I could do was pray it worked out okay, and that they were unarmed.
Lee barely made it halfway around the corner before he stopped abruptly. He backed up in a rush, knocking into me.
“Hold up.”
“What?”
Lee raised a hand to keep me back, not that I was going anywhere. Otherwise he didn’t reply right away.
Renewed thumps started up, but more metallic than the door kicking. A screechy slid
ing sound joined in.
Lee got onto his stomach and went back to turtle-mode, slowly inching his way out.
“They’ve started loading the truck,” he reported back seconds later. “Good thing they’re not being quiet about it.”
After what sounded like a couple dozen cases went in the back, the noise mostly abated—at least from the dock. Twangy still pounded away downstairs until the point I thought he might be too exhausted to carry on.
Glass clanked on metal again as someone dumped another box of bottles for filling.
“Now we go,” Lee said. “Quickly.”
“They’re both back inside?” I asked, wondering if someone was going to keep loading.
All Lee gave me was a simple, “Yeah.”
He rose to a crouch and looked back at me with steely determination. “Let’s do this.”
With a nod from me, he rushed back along the building, body pressed up against the metal to the point that his clothes swished against the siding.
My dress was too tight to swish, but that didn’t stop me from pressing up against the building too, not the slightest bit worried anymore about whether my dress would survive the day.
The beating on the door grew louder as we advanced, but not alarmingly so.
Lee stopped at the door we’d come out earlier and quickly looked inside, pistol leading the way. At that point, Twangy’s pounding sounded plain as day, but amazingly no one had come to check yet.
“All clear,” he whispered, and then pointed up toward the dock. “Move, move, move.”
I stayed on his heels, bent over like an elderly woman, as we hurried up to, then alongside the retaining wall. It towered over us initially, but quickly ran out. As we approached the top where we’d soon be visible to the robbers, Lee stopped for a few seconds.
“Get a big breath.” He pointed through the concrete in the direction of the truck. “You stay along the railing. I’ll go to the far side. Got it?”
I nodded.
Lee held up three fingers and paused. Then dropped one, followed by the other two in even intervals.
