He had to go back to sleep.
Smedley awoke again, maybe five minutes or five hours later, and this time he seemed to remember a car wreck. Had he been involved in a collision? He tensed for a moment. Had Maria been with him when it happened? He couldn’t remember…. probably not. Where would they have been going? No, most likely he had been alone. He recalled lying in Maria’s bed, then leaving for some reason. What was it? Something to do with Vinnie-having to follow Vinnie.
With a massive effort, he managed to lift his eyelids. He was staring at a pair of fluorescent lights on the ceiling. Everything was foggy, but the lights were bright enough to make him squint. He tried to lift a hand to rub his eyes clear, but his arms were immobile.
He drifted again…
He had hit that red truck, that’s what it was. He remembered that now. The wiseguys had tricked him, parking right in the middle of Highway 281. Shit, they had almost killed him. His head was pounding and he figured he must have slammed it against the steering wheel. What the hell had happened with the airbag?
He groaned and opened his eyes. Still a little muddy, but much clearer than before. He tilted his head to the left and saw two desks against a wall, with several filing cabinets between them. To the right he saw a leather sofa. Above the sofa, on the wall, were several plaques and certificates, one of which read, BETTER BUSINESS BUREAU.
Two figures stepped up and loomed over him. The hit men. One was a big guy, maybe six and a half feet tall, built like a nose tackle. Smedley could relate. The other guy was of average height-slim. Both with four or five days’ worth of facial hair, wearing ballcaps with logos on them, work shirts, and blue jeans. Smedley instinctively noted all of this in about two seconds, and he felt reassured that his skills of observation were intact. His vision was blurry, but his thinking was fairly clear.
He tried to lift a hand to probe the injury on his forehead, but his wrists were bound together. He raised both arms and saw that they were lashed with duct tape. He attempted to reach a sitting position, which was futile, because he hadn’t done a sit-up since the elder Bush was president.
“Easy there, pardner,” the slender man said. “You ain’t goin’ nowheres anyhow.”
Smedley eased his head back onto the floor. “Water?” he croaked. His mouth felt like someone had swabbed it dry with cotton.
The smaller man nodded at the big man, who left the room and returned with a small Styrofoam cup. He bent down and helped Smedley take a few small sips at a time. Eventually, the cup was empty.
“Want some more?” the big man asked.
Smedley shook his head slightly, wary of worsening the pain in his skull.
“Okay,” the smaller man said, obviously the leader of the two. “Now that we got that out of the way, let’s get down to business.”
Smedley was surprised by the two men’s accents. He had expected them to sound like typical East Coast thugs, but their drawls were as Southern as his own. Maybe they were Texans. Could be freelancers.
The leader put his hands on his knees and leaned over Smedley. “Now, ladies and gentlemen, here comes the sixty-four-hundred-dollar question: Where is it?”
“Where is
The man shook his head and flashed a smile. “I just knew you were gonna say that. But see, we’re all prepared for that. My friend here….” He jerked a thumb in the direction of the nose tackle. “… he’s an expert in subtracting information from people.”
This was news to the big guy, judging from the fact that he looked around for whomever the smaller guy was referring to, then gave a
“So,” the leader said. “We can do this the easy way or the hard way. But either way, we’re gonna find out what you did with the corpse.”
Now Smedley was really confused. Had something happened that he was forgetting about? Maybe he had taken a worse blow to the head than he thought. Was he suffering from amnesia?
He didn’t know what else to say, so he said, “What corpse?”
The leader slowly shook his head back and forth. “So that’s how you want to play it, huh?”
But Smedley couldn’t reply. He felt himself losing consciousness once again.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Inga gasped as she turned-and found herself staring into Tommy’s smiling face. She threw her arms around him in relief, then chastised him for giving her a scare: “Why didn’t you answer me when I called out your name?”
He gave her a peculiar look. “What are you talking about? I just got here.”
Inga smiled. “Very funny, but I’m not falling for it.”
“I swear, Inga.”
She shook her head. “Whatever. You’ve already freaked me out enough tonight. Now we’d better get inside before someone spots you.”
Tommy shrugged and followed her into the motel room. She closed the door, and neither of them was prepared for what happened next.
A dark figure wearing a ski mask and gloves emerged from the bathroom carrying a baseball bat. “We having a little party here?”
Tommy looked at Inga, who had grasped his arm in alarm.
With amazing quickness, the man stepped forward and slammed Tommy over the head with the bat. Without so much as a whimper, Tommy collapsed to the floor.
Inga screamed, but the sound was choked off as the man sprang on her and wrestled her to the bed. He placed a hand over her mouth, and she could see his dark-brown eyes gleaming inside the mask.
“You got a lot of balls, you know that?” the man grunted on top of her. “You and your friend there. How come you gotta cause so much trouble?”
Inga struggled to break free, but the man held both her wrists with one viselike hand. He squirmed until he had her legs apart. “I’m real good at taking care of bad little girls like you,” the man said.
Horror gripped Inga’s gut as he pressed his crotch against hers and she felt his hardness.
“What we gonna do now, Red?”
They were in the kitchen of the small mobile home on Emmett Slaton’s property, the official headquarters of Slaton Brush Removal, Incorporated. Red had a clear view of their chunky prisoner lying on the floor in the adjoining room. The guy was still sleeping like a coonhound after an all-night hunt.
Red took a sip of coffee. Setting up here had been a good idea. Almost as cozy as home. Except he had forgotten to bring a bottle of booze, maybe some Wild Turkey or something. Other than that, Red had prepared himself for a long night. Tough guys-like hit men and bodyguards-they don’t just talk when you tell ’em to. You gotta put the squeeze on ’em a little. At least, that’s the way they did it on
Billy Don removed his cap and ran a hand through his matted hair. “I don’t know, he seems pretty out of it.”
“Aw, hell, he just got himself a small percussion when he whacked his head. He’ll come ’round. What choice does he got? We’ll just hold on to him till he spills the beans. Then we’ll turn him over to the cops. Be heroes, that’s what we’ll be. Get a big write-up in the newspaper and all. They might just give us a goddamn parade before it’s all over.”
Billy Don’s eyes lit up. Red knew Billy Don was a sucker for parades, because parades were the adult version
