Unfinished Business

by J. A. Jance

  To make that happen, Harvey needed to act soon. If he waited too long, he might miss the opportunity to take her by surprise. Still, waiting for the cover of darkness, he planned his attack. The other houses on Tuff Cody weren’t that close to hers, but he would need to capture her in a way that kept whatever noises might escape her lips from attracting attention. That meant putting her out of commission instantly. The brass knuckles he’d used on Ida Mae had belonged to someone else, but Harvey owned his own pair now and kept them in his glove box, just in case. The thing was, he didn’t want to kill Princess right off the bat. He wanted to have some fun with her first, so that initial blow had to be enough to knock her senseless without being deadly.

  As the sun set, he retrieved his bedroll from his truck and unzipped it so it would be fully open when he used it to engulf her. Among the miscellaneous bits of junk in the back of his truck, Harvey located a roll of duct tape. He pulled off several long strips and hung them from the ceiling of the cab-high canopy. When it came time to secure his captive, he’d need to act fast. He wouldn’t have the luxury of struggling to pry pieces of sticky tape loose from the roll.

  It was full dark when Harvey’s preparations were complete. Then, without turning on his headlights, he moved the truck across Cornville Road and into position, parking on the shoulder of Tuff Cody Trail, just short of Princess’s driveway.

  He had turned off the engine when, much to his dismay, the Prius suddenly backed out into the street. Harvey’s heart sank. If she was leaving now, he’d missed his chance and she’d most likely spot his truck. Much to his relief, she didn’t leave. Instead she backed a few yards into the street and then returned to the driveway. Stopping a few yards in, she left the Prius idling and got out of the vehicle. Approaching the nearest yard lamp, she messed with it for a time. After repeating the process twice more, she must have achieved what she regarded as a satisfactory result.

  Pulling back into the driveway, she cut both the engine and the lights. By then Harvey was already on the move, sprinting toward her, bedroll in hand. If she had exited the vehicle immediately, things might have been different. Instead she stayed in the driver’s seat for a few moments with her head bent over what he supposed was the iPad she’d been using all afternoon. Whatever the cause, that small delay gave Harvey a chance to cover the distance between them without her becoming aware of her danger.

  By the time she opened her door, Harvey was already in position. As she emerged and began to straighten up, he threw the opened bedroll over her body, completely enveloping her. Lifting her off her feet with one arm, he punched her hard with his brass-knuckled fist before she could let out a cry of alarm. With her head covered and invisible, he missed his target. The blow intended for the side of her skull landed instead on the cushioning flesh of her ear. Still, it was enough to do the job, and she immediately fell limp in his arms.

  As a heavily burdened Harvey struggled, he was dismayed to hear an invisible dog barking like crazy from a nearby house. That was the last thing he needed—a damned dog alerting the whole neighborhood that something was amiss. Not only that, Princess was heavier than he’d expected her to be, certainly heavier than she’d looked from a distance. By the time they reached the truck, he was panting and out of breath. With the dog still making a racket, Harvey needed to be gone in a hurry.

  Afraid of being caught, he hefted Princess over the tailgate and rolled her onto the still-inflated mattress. Spooked by the dog’s continued barking, Harvey rushed through the process of securing his captive. Even so, she was beginning to stir as he finished the job. To be on the safe side, once he removed the bed roll, he slapped a layer of duct tape across her mouth, then slammed the door on the canopy shut, locking it for good measure.

  Harvey had planned to go into the house in search of any ready cash or valuable jewelry, but the stupid dog put an end to that idea. Instead he started the engine and drove past Princess’s driveway in a reasonably sedate fashion before making a slow U-turn in front of the house on the far side of hers. Only when he turned right off Tuff Cody Trail and onto Cornville Road did he hit the gas pedal and speed away.

  Harvey didn’t turn back toward Cottonwood. Instead he drove east, aiming for I-17. He knew he was headed first for the All-American Canal, with the border crossing in Calexico his eventual destination. Those were both several hundred miles to the south and west, but before going there, Harvey and Princess had a date somewhere to the north of that—maybe in some empty corner of Arizona desert on the far side of Seligman or Kingman.

  Somewhere out there, Harvey told himself, I’ll find a place that will fit the bill just fine.

  At about the same time, however, he happened to glance at his gas gauge and realized with a start that he’d made a terrible tactical error. He had been so caught up in stalking his prey and taking her captive that he’d neglected to fill up before launching his attack. With the gauge sitting at only half-full, he couldn’t travel nearly as far as originally intended, and stopping for gas with her in the back of the truck was out of the question. If she somehow came around and started yelling or pounding for help, Harvey would be in deep trouble.

  No, he decided, he’d need to find a suitable spot much closer to hand. During the time he’d lived in Prescott, he’d palled around with a guy who liked to go prospecting in the wilderness area south of Mayer. Harvey had accompanied him on some of those expeditions where they’d used a tangle of primitive forest roads for both coming and going. No doubt somewhere off one of those dirt tracks he would find a location isolated enough to serve his purpose. With that in mind, when Harvey reached the southbound merge onto I-17—that’s the direction he headed all right, but only as far as Cordes Junction. There he turned off the freeway and drove west.

  |CHAPTER 29|

  PRESCOTT NATIONAL FOREST, ARIZONA

  When Cami’s eyes blinked open and she found herself imprisoned in the back of a moving pickup truck, she had no idea that her next-door neighbor’s dog, an obnoxious corgi named Lizzy who was usually the bane of Cami’s existence, would make all the difference in whether she lived or died.

  Helen Wilson, an eighty-something longtime widow and Cami’s next-door neighbor, was an Anglophile of the first order. Every flat surface in her home served as a shrine to the primary heroine of Helen’s existence, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II. Helen’s walls contained visual displays of all things queen-related. The collection of slightly faded posters and yellow-tinged photos chronicled Queen Elizabeth’s public life. She was pictured wearing her World War II uniforms, her wedding dress, and her coronation robe. There were pictures of her standing straight-backed and grim during Princess Diana’s funeral and happier, newer ones that featured her with great-grandchildren. Helen Wilson’s home contained a motherlode of Queen Elizabeth memorabilia—from commemorative teacups to ceramic dolls to salt and pepper shakers. Helen’s holiday visitors were often surprised to find that her Christmas tree was decorated with an amazing assortment of Queen Elizabeth–themed ornaments.

  That Sunday evening Lizzy—Helen’s corgi named after the queen herself—barked steadily for the better part of half an hour. Harvey need not have worried or rushed. It turns out Helen was a believer in that old adage about “early to bed, early to rise.” She had taken to bed at her usual time—seven thirty—and once she removed her hearing aids, Helen Wilson didn’t hear a thing, Lizzy’s perpetual barking included.

  When Cami awakened, however, a noisy corgi was the last thing on her mind. As she slowly regained consciousness and struggled to find her way through a debilitating mental fog, she tried in vain to sort out where she was and how she’d gotten there. Her head throbbed. The whole right side of her face felt as though it were about to explode, and the intensity of the pain made thinking challenging. She seemed to remember that she’d been out in the yard or maybe in her car, but she wasn’t clear on exactly why she’d been there or what she’d been doing. All of that was a complete blur. Someone must have attacked her whil
e she was outside, but she had no idea who it was or how it had happened. Besides, who would have done that? Who did she know who bore her this kind of animosity? Why was she in the back of a strange moving vehicle with no idea of how she’d gotten there or where she was heading?

  Gradually Cami’s senses cleared, and the first thing that registered was the smell—a sweet, slightly musky odor that she knew she’d encountered before, but where? When?

  Closing her eyes in concentration, the answer came to her at last: Harvey McCluskey’s cologne! She was lying on a bed of some kind in the back of his pickup, and the bedding reeked of the same cologne that had wafted from his office when Cami and Ali had gone to roust him out of bed. So was that what this was—revenge for being evicted?

  With her head still pounding, it hurt too much to move, so Cami lay motionless for a time in total darkness broken only by the passing of occasional headlights. Rather than struggle with the unknowable, Cami tried to focus on what was real. There was a gag of some kind over her mouth. Her hands and legs were tightly bound, although she couldn’t be sure how those restraints had been constructed. Were her mind clearer, Cami might have realized sooner that in his frantic hurry her captor had made another strategic error. Rather than fastening her hands behind her back, he’d bound them in front of her.

  Once that reality dawned on her, Cami took immediate action, using her bound hands to rip what turned out to be several layers of duct tape off her mouth. With the gag gone, she opted for maintaining her silence. No one was around, so screaming for help would do nothing but alert her captor to the fact that she was awake and coming to her senses. Cami might not have made any noise with her mouth uncovered, but she put that new reality to good use. Using her teeth, she peeled away the layers of duct tape that had been wrapped around her wrists. Every motion of her head made her want to scream with pain, but she kept on, because she knew that freeing her hands was the only way to save her life.

  Cami had no idea how long that cumbersome process took. With her hands finally free, she used her fingers to explore the damage to the side of her head. The bloodied flesh of her ear was swollen to twice its usual size, and it was still seeping in spots, but there didn’t seem to be any gaping wounds on her ear or her scalp. Next she turned to the task of removing the tape from her legs. Working mostly in the dark, that wasn’t easy either. She was still involved in that task when the truck veered to the right and came to a stop. Once it lurched forward again, everything in the truck bed shifted to one side, including Cami. Caught off guard, she tumbled off the mattress and blundered into what felt like a collection of loose boxes, slamming into one of them with her damaged ear. It took every bit of grit she could muster to keep from howling in agony. As the truck got under way again, Cami noticed that now there was far more traffic than before. She suspected that they had just merged onto a freeway now, most likely I-17. Considering the right-hand turn, she thought they were heading south toward Phoenix.

  While working on the tape, she’d tried to come up with some kind of game plan. Her two choices were simple—fight or flight. McCluskey had most likely overcome her earlier because he’d taken her by surprise from behind. In the gym Cami had managed to deck more than one surprised opponent Harvey’s size or even larger, but that was with all her faculties intact. There was a possibility that her head wound might have compromised her balance and reaction times. In other words, flight was it, and to make that happen, she needed to get the hell out of the truck, something that had to be accomplished before he came looking for her. The only way for that to work would be to throw herself out of the truck while it was still moving.

  Once Cami’s legs were free, she crawled to the truck’s tailgate. On the way, she encountered the roll of duct tape. Thinking it might prove useful, she stuck it on her wrist like an oversize bracelet so as not to lose track of it. At the tailgate, she quickly found the latch. Unfortunately, when she tried turning the handle, it was locked, most likely from the outside. In other words, her only means of escape would be to break the window—but how?

  Turning back to the interior of the truck bed, she searched for a suitable implement. With no toolbox to be found, Cami decided McCluskey evidently wasn’t a DIY kind of guy. First she dug through the loose junk littering the truck bed. Then she searched through the contents of the various banker’s boxes. Most of those were filled with articles of clothing, but finally, when one of the boxes rattled, she opened it and hit pay dirt.

  The first thing her searching fingers encountered was a small pocketknife. The blade wasn’t big enough to serve as a real weapon, but she snatched it up anyway. When she shook the box a second time, she was rewarded with another rattle. This time her fingers closed around something metal—a wooden-based trophy of some kind. Cami had no idea how sturdy it would be, but it was the best thing she’d found so far.

  Thinking that the middle of the slightly curved back window would be the weakest part, she grabbed the top of the trophy and threw it with all her might. To her ears the noise as the tempered glass shattered into hundreds of pieces sounded as loud as the crack of a firearm. She held her breath for several moments. If Harvey had heard the sound or felt the blow, he’d pull over and come to check on her, but the truck kept right on moving.

  Feeling through the layer of broken glass on the floor, Cami finally located what was left of the trophy. It had broken into two parts, with the wooden base separated from the metal. She left the wooden piece where it was and stuffed what remained of the metal part into another pocket. It wasn’t much of a weapon, but it was better than nothing.

  Cami’s next problem was figuring out the best way to exit a moving vehicle without ending up dead in the process. She would need as much cushioning as possible, so she crawled back to the boxes and went straight for the clothing. She dug through several boxes until she found a pair of sweats. They were huge. She had to use duct tape to fasten the pants around her waist, and it took two more strips of duct tape around each ankle to turn the sweats into pantaloons that wouldn’t trip her up when she tried to move. She was performing the same operation on the shirtsleeves when the truck did in fact slow down.

  Lights from buildings as well as streetlamps told her they’d entered a town of some kind, but she had no idea which one. The problem was, her preparations weren’t quite complete when Harvey executed a quick left turn followed almost immediately by a second one before Cami could make it as far as the tailgate. She was on her way there, crawling across the mattress, when the truck veered again, this time to the right. With clouds of dust pouring in through the broken window, Cami realized they were now on a dirt road, hurtling through the night at a speed far too rapid for her to risk jumping. Determined to be ready the next time the truck slowed, Cami worked her way back toward the tailgate once more. As she crawled across the mattress, the thick bedroll clumped up under her, and that gave her an idea. Here was a whole other layer of cushioning.

  Dragging the bedroll with her to the back of the truck, she wiggled inside and zipped it up around her. Minutes later, when she felt the truck begin to slow once more, she pulled the bedroll as tightly as possible around her body before easing her way up and over the open window frame. At the next curve, rather than leaping, she oozed her way out of the truck.

  Tuck and roll, she reminded herself as she fell. Tuck and roll.

  And that’s exactly what she did. She hit the ground hard, temporarily knocking the wind out of herself and sending herself rolling over and over, away from the departing truck. She came to an abrupt halt moments later when her lower right leg slammed hard into something solid on the shoulder of the road—the post of a guardrail as it turned out. The sharp pain that shot through her body took away what little breath she’d regained, and her first agonizing attempt to move the newly injured limb told her it was broken.

  Lying still in the darkness, she listened, hearing the rumbling sound of the pickup fade into the distance. That was a relief. It meant he hadn’t figured out she
was gone—at least not yet. As soon as he did, however, Cami knew he’d come back looking for her. And if he found her—if she was still here…

  Some way or other, broken leg or not, Cami knew she had to put as much distance as she could between herself and the road.

  Escaping the confines of the bedroll with her injured leg was absolute agony. Standing up and walking was impossible. Her only remaining option was to crawl on her hands and one good knee, dragging the useless leg behind her. She was tempted to abandon the bedroll, but at the last minute she didn’t. Instead, with every agonizing movement, she pulled it along behind her. If McCluskey came back looking for her, the bedroll’s khaki-colored outer layer might provide some measure of camouflage.

  The rising moon gradually lightened the desert landscape around her. The ground at hand was mostly filled with winter-dead grass that provided almost no cover. As Cami inched past a scrawny mesquite tree, she heard the sound of an approaching vehicle. Barely fifty feet from the road and still out in the open, she threw the bedroll over the top of her body and then lay deathly still beneath it, holding her breath, with the sound of her thumping heart in the foreground and the noise of the approaching truck in the background. After what seemed forever, the vehicle sped by without slowing. Once it went past, Cami let out her breath and gasped for air. Since it hadn’t slowed, maybe that meant it had been someone else’s vehicle, but Cami doubted that to be the case. It seemed far more likely that McCluskey had discovered she was gone but with no idea of where or when, he’d doubled back looking for her. He might have missed seeing her this time past, but that didn’t mean she was safe.