Twisted Twenty-Six

by Janet Evanovich

  “Who?” Jeanine asked.

  “I don’t want to say until I’m sure. I’m waiting for Morelli to get off work. I want to run it by him before I officially go to the police with it.”

  I watched Barbara when I laid the trap. She didn’t look panicked. Mostly she looked like she’d had a skosh too much wine and was having a hard time focusing.

  “Well, I should be going,” I said. “Thanks for the wine. This was nice. We should do this more often.”

  I got in my Macan, drove around the block, and parked a couple houses down from Barbara’s house. I cut my lights and settled back to wait. In the Sherlock Holmes movies it took no time at all for the guilty person to leave their home and go to the scene of the crime to make sure everything was still okay.

  After I’d waited for almost an hour, a car cruised down the street and turned into Jeanine’s driveway. Bernie was home from work. Barbara’s lights went off in her house, and I had high hopes that she’d get into her car and lead me to Grandma. After twenty minutes I decided that Barbara had gone to bed. So much for Sherlock Holmes.

  I rode past my parents’ house. It was dark except for a single light in an upstairs bedroom window. I rode past Morelli’s house next. Dark. No green SUV parked in front. He was still at work.

  I went home and studied the Miracle list one more time. I turned the television on to Turner Classics. A Charlie Chan movie was playing. Black and white. 1936. Maybe it wasn’t Sherlock Holmes who used the bluff to smoke out the villain. Maybe it was Charlie Chan. Maybe it was every movie detective between the years 1933 and 1945. When you watch movies late at night with a glass of wine, they tend to blur together.

  Halfway through Charlie Chan I went to the kitchen for a snack and heard what sounded like a kitten mewing on the other side of my door. I looked out my security peephole. Nothing. Nobody there. The mewing continued. I opened my door and looked down at a small gray kitten.

  Something went ZINNNG in my head, and when I came around I was confused and in a state of utter panic. I couldn’t move, and I couldn’t open my mouth. I couldn’t see. My heart was pounding in my chest, and I was struggling to breathe. I think I was crying, but it was impossible to know for sure in the confusion and darkness. I could have been sweating. I could have been having a nightmare and nothing was real. For a moment I thought I was buried alive.

  The confusion started to clear, and I inched into survival mode. One step at a time, I told myself. Breathe. Think. Hard to tell if I was blind or simply in total darkness. I saw a thin seam of light above me. I wasn’t blind. I was in a container. I could feel the sides. It had a lid, but the lid wasn’t completely sealed. I couldn’t remember being placed in a container. What did I remember? A kitten. And then a big blank space. I wasn’t in pain, so I hadn’t been hit on the head and knocked out. I’d probably been stunned. And it had been a big charge. That would mean I’d been completely out for just a few minutes. It could have been longer if I’d gotten stunned a second time. The confusion would have lasted five or ten minutes. I’d stun-gunned a lot of people, and I knew the progression of symptoms. I was okay with this. Better to be stunned than to have a concussion.

  I couldn’t open my mouth. Duct tape, I thought. My hands were bound behind my back. Not with cuffs or plasti-cuffs. More duct tape. There was vibration under me. I was being taken somewhere in a truck or a van. I could sense when we stopped and when we took a corner.

  Charlie Chan came through for me. My bluff had worked. I’d been abducted by the amateur. Barbara. She’d found a couple new goons to work for her, and here I was getting trucked away and hopefully they’d take me to Grandma. The troublesome part of all this was that she’d already killed a guy who’d become a liability. I didn’t have my cellphone on me. Nothing that Ranger could track. We slowed and bumped over a stretch of uneven surface. I hoped we weren’t at the landfill. That thought gave me another moment of panic.

  We came to a stop, and I heard a vehicle door slam shut and another get wrenched open. My container was tipped back slightly, and I was rolled a couple feet and then dropped a couple feet, hitting hard on what I assumed was the ground. I sniffed the air. It didn’t smell like the landfill. I was tipped back again and rolled along. I couldn’t tell how many people were walking with me. There was no talking. The person dragging me was breathing heavily. Out of shape or maybe nervous and scared. There were scraping sounds, and I was jerked up a step. Just one. Door threshold, I thought. Door slammed shut.

  I heard muffled speech from someone a short distance away. A latch was released, the lid to the container was opened, and the container was dumped on its side. I blinked in the sudden light and saw that I’d been stuffed into a blue recycling container with wheels. Someone grabbed the back of my shirt and pulled me out. It was Bernard Stupe.

  I was in a windowless room about the size of a two-car garage. Grandma was at the far end, standing beside a cot. She looked disheveled but alert. There were some water bottles and fast food bags on the floor by the cot. She was handcuffed to a chain that stretched through an open door behind her. I could see part of a toilet through the door.

  “Asshole,” Grandma yelled at him.

  “Shut up,” Bernie yelled back. “One more word and no more cookies.”

  Grandma gave him the finger. “Cookie this, you dirtbag.”

  He ripped the tape off my mouth and rolled the recycling bin over to the door.

  “I didn’t see this coming,” I said. “I’m surprised you would throw in with Barbara.”

  “Barbara has no part in this,” Bernie said.

  “Jeanine?”

  “Are you kidding me? Ms. Turn the Other Cheek and Be a Good Person? Miss Sweetness and I’m So Sorry? I don’t think so.” He went out the door and returned with a length of chain and a padlock. “I wasn’t counting on this, so I’m going to have to improvise. I thought it was all finally moving along to a happy ending, and then Jeanine came home and told me you had it figured out. She said you talked to Benny and you’d figured out who was masterminding everything. Okay, so she didn’t say ‘mastermind,’ but that’s what she meant.”

  He dragged me up to my feet and over to Grandma. He wrapped the chain around my ankle and secured it with the padlock. He walked the other end of the chain into the bathroom, and I could hear him fidgeting with it.

  He came out, took a pocketknife from his jeans pocket, and sliced the duct tape off my wrists. I reached out to grab him, but he jumped away.

  “I don’t get it,” I said to Bernie. “Why did you hire those two guys to kidnap Grandma?”

  “Zeus and what’s his name? It was a reasonable idea in the beginning. It was supposed to be that this big strong guy waits for the right moment, snatches the old lady, and brings her here to stay for a couple days. It’s calm. It’s simple. It’s relatively nonviolent. Turns out Zeus is a moron. He picks up some loser idiot at a bar and they decide to go in like a SWAT team on a suicide mission. What the heck was he thinking? He broke down a kitchen door and disrupted your mother’s ironing. They weren’t supposed to be armed. Guns weren’t part of the plan.”

  “You hired the god of Thunder,” Grandma said. “What did you expect?”

  “I know,” Bernie said. “It was a bad choice.”

  “You should have hired a less macho god.”

  “He was the only one who needed money,” Bernie said. “Zeus was a big spender.”

  “And then you killed him?” I asked.

  “I had to. He was in a panic. He was going to turn himself in. He would have ruined everything.”

  “Bernie,” I said. “How could you do that? You aren’t a killer.”

  “I am now,” Bernie said. “And it was surprisingly easy. BANG. Ironic, right? All those years when Jimmy would have nothing to do with me. I wasn’t fit to be in the mob. I wasn’t good enough for them. I know what everyone said about me. Bernard isn
’t too bright. Bernard isn’t Italian. His relatives are from one of those inferior eastern European countries. Tea drinkers.” Bernie closed the blade on his knife and put it back in his pocket. “And it turns out I can kill without remorse. Go figure.”

  “So, what is this about?” I asked. “Getting even?”

  “It’s about getting even and about the chance to start my life over. Someplace far, far away.”

  “Why do you want to start it over? You have a good life. A good job. A loving wife.”

  “I have a shit job. I hate my job. My father left the company to my brother. He’s two years younger than I am. The company should have been mine. Not that I wanted it. The Concrete Plant. Do you know what we do? We pour concrete into molds and sell the blocks.”

  “What would you rather do?” I asked him.

  “As it turns out, I’d rather kill people.”

  “That’s not a step up from concrete,” Grandma said.

  “Anyway, as it happens, I’m brilliant,” Bernie said. “While the La-Z-Boys are going nuts because they can’t find the keys, I found a way to benefit from their stupidity. I don’t know what the keys look like. Don’t care. I don’t know what they open. Don’t care. For that matter, I don’t know if Grandma here is going to be any help to them. Don’t care. What I do know is that they think Grandma has the sacred keys. And they’re willing to pay big bucks for Grandma. Grandma is my ticket out of the Concrete Plant. Even Julius Roman thought I was a genius. He approached me at the Bonino viewing. Said he met a business associate in the alley and was on his way home when he saw me dump Lucca. Said he figured I was going to extort money from the La-Z-Boys, and he wanted in on it.”

  “So you killed him?”

  “I didn’t need his help, and I wasn’t in a mood to share.”

  “What about Jeanine?” I asked.

  “Jeanine will be fine. She can cross the driveway and drink wine with her dim-witted mother every night. She can go to Mass and talk to God or Jesus or Mary. Jeanine has lots of friends. The house is paid for. All she has to do is keep up with the taxes and cut the grass once in a while.”

  “What happens if they won’t pay your price for Grandma?”

  “We’ve already agreed on a price. We just have to work out the swap. Granny for a big bag of money.”

  “And me?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” Bernie said. “If they don’t want you, I guess I’ll kill you. That might be better for you anyway since I’m told Lou Salgusta is ready to fire up his tools of persuasion.”

  “You’re a little nutty,” Grandma said.

  “Yeah,” Bernie said. “And I’m tired. It’s been a long day. I’ll see you girls in the morning.”

  We watched him leave, dragging the recycling container behind him. The door clicked closed and locked.

  “This is a real bummer,” Grandma said.

  I looked at the chain around my ankle. “There has to be a way out of here.”

  I walked into the bathroom. Toilet and sink. The chains were padlocked around the sink plumbing. I went back to Grandma.

  “I don’t suppose you have a nail file.”

  “No. I don’t have a stick of dynamite, either.”

  “How did he get you to go with him?”

  “He had a kitten. He said he wanted to take it to the shelter, and he asked me if I could hold it for him. And then when I got in the car with the little cutie, he zapped me. How about you? Did you fall for the kitten thing?”

  “Yep.”

  “It was a really cute kitten,” Grandma said. “I keep wondering what happened to it.”

  “It never occurred to me that it might be Bernie,” I said. “I thought it was Barbara.”

  I looked around. Sacks of sand were stacked against one wall. A jumble of equipment was against another wall. A band saw. A leaf blower. Coils of hoses. Machinery parts that were alien to me. A long folding table and a single folding chair. A shop vac.

  “Where are we?” I asked Grandma.

  “I don’t know for sure. He had a sack over my head, and my hands were handcuffed when he brought me here. You can’t hear any sounds from outside. From the way he would come in and out I thought this must be part of the Concrete Plant. Like he would work some and then come check on me, even though it was a Saturday. This room looks industrial.”

  I agreed with Grandma. The room looked industrial. It seemed to be some sort of storeroom.

  “Are you scared?” I asked Grandma.

  “Sure, I’m scared. Aren’t you scared?”

  “Yes, and I’d be even more scared if I wasn’t so tired.”

  “I don’t like being scared,” Grandma said. “It makes my stomach feel squishy. I always thought your job sounded so great. Putting your life on the line for justice. And going into all kinds of dangerous situations. But now that I’m in a dangerous situation I’m thinking it isn’t anything I want to do again. I can see why you don’t always like your job.”

  It isn’t the danger that I hate, I thought. It’s the ick.

  It was late, and the cot was big enough for only one person. I persuaded Grandma to lie down on the cot, and I stretched out on the floor. It wasn’t comfortable, but I was exhausted, and for the next several hours I slipped in and out of sleep.

  Bernie showed up again at eight o’clock. He had a couple bags of breakfast sandwiches and two containers of coffee. He slid the sandwiches over to us and placed the coffee within reach, making sure he didn’t get too close to me.

  “We’re making the swap this morning,” he said. “It’s going to take place here.”

  “Where is here?” I asked him.

  “We’re at the plant. This is a storage facility that’s never used. It’s behind the truck garages. Sometimes I come here when I want to get away from everyone and take a nap or watch a ball game. I get good reception on my iPad in here. I’m the only one with a key, and no one would come here anyway.”

  I ate half a sandwich and sipped my coffee.

  “The police will track you down, and you’ll spend the rest of your life in jail,” I said to Bernie.

  “They’ll never find me. The instant I get my money I’m gone.”

  A half hour later, Charlie Shine and Lou Salgusta arrived. They were each carrying two suitcases.

  “This is stupid,” Shine said to Bernie. “Nobody demands cash in a suitcase anymore. We wire money now. Do you know how hard it was to get this much cash? We had guys working all night.”

  “Leave the suitcases by the door,” Bernie said. “I’ll take them from here.”

  Shine looked down the room at Grandma and me. “What’s with this? We were supposed to get Jimmy’s old lady. I’m not paying for a second hostage.”

  “She’s a freebie,” Bernie said. “If you don’t want her, I’ll take her with me and get rid of her.”

  “I like it,” Salgusta said. “Two is always better. We’ll keep her.”

  Bernie took a suitcase in each hand and staggered a little under the weight. He walked out of the building, Shine followed him, and there were two gunshots.

  Grandma and I gave a start at the sound of rounds being fired. Grandma pressed her lips together, and I put my arm around her.

  Shine backed through the doorway, dragging Bernie to the side of the room, leaving a fresh blood smear on the concrete floor.

  “Fucking amateur,” Shine said, and he walked away from Bernie and over to Salgusta. “Now that we got two of them, do you want to change the plan?”

  “No,” Salgusta said. “It’s still a good plan. I can work here. It’s isolated. Nobody’s going to come bother us. And it’s got good acoustics. You torture someone in a room with rugs and curtains, and it mutes the sound of their moaning and screaming. Takes some of the fun out of it.”

  “Jesus, Lou,” Shine said, “you’re a sick
bastard.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  “THE COT IS TOO LOW for me to work on,” Salgusta said, “but the table over by the sandbags will be good. Help me move it so it’s under the light. My eyes aren’t what they used to be.”

  “Maybe you’ve got cataracts,” Grandma said. “I’ve got a good doctor for that.”

  “Yeah, I’ll have to look into it,” Salgusta said.

  They moved the table and brought two of the suitcases over. Salgusta opened the cases and stepped back.

  “These are all my knives and pliers and restraints,” he said. “We can put the women on the table face up and tie them down with the buckle straps and ankle and wrist cuffs. It’ll work good. We attach one bracelet to a table leg and the other bracelet to a wrist or ankle. I got some big ones for ankles.” He checked Grandma out. “The old one is kind of scrawny. Maybe we use a wrist bracelet on her ankle.”

  “I got good ankles,” Grandma said. “They’re one of my best features. They haven’t started to sag yet.”

  “My torches must be in one of the other two suitcases,” Salgusta said. “I always like to start with the torches.” He looked over at me. “In the meantime, you should get undressed. I’m going to start with you, and I need you to be naked.” He looked to Grandma. “You too, Granny. You might as well get undressed now too. It’ll save time.”

  Grandma gave him the finger.

  “Nice,” Salgusta said. “How is that for an old lady to act?”

  Shine brought a third suitcase over to the table and opened it. “This looks like the right one,” he said.

  Salgusta took a slim silver tool out of the case. “This is the one I always start with. This is a beauty. I do real pretty work with this. It’s my precision butane soldering torch. This is the one that I use for my trademark signature. After I’m done with that one, I go to my Bernzomatic.”

  He exchanged the small soldering torch for the Bernzomatic. He attached a yellow cylinder to the torch and held it up for us to see.