Reduced Ransom! Page 4

  Huey emptied a case of bourbon and placed twenty bundles of five thousand dollars each into the box. It worried him that whoever was behind this had as much information as they did. That meant it was someone close, very close. And, after the little warning they sent last night with the fire and the destruction of his ’56 Chevy, he didn’t want them any closer.

  Mickey was making his third call to the payphone at County Road B and Dale before Huey answered.

  “Yeah.”

  Mickey had to pause and quickly inhale more helium before he could talk.

  “Anyone there?” Huey asked, and looked around to see if he could spot a guy watching.

  “I want you to drive to the Roseville Mall, ground floor, north end of the mall there’s a row of payphone’s. Leave your car unlocked, keys under the mat, come alone, we’ll be watching.”

  Huey arrived at the mall payphone’s and waited. Thinking this would be where they were going to grab the cash. Fine, he just wanted to get these animals out of his life.

  “Yeah,” was how he answered the phone.

  “I want you to drive to the airport, the Lindbergh terminal, park in level E of long term parking. Go to the phones at door five, on the baggage claim level and wait for our call. Leave the door of your car unlocked and the keys under the floor mat.”

  “Wait, now just wait a damn minute,” Huey protested, but the line went dead. Jesus, he thought, now the damn airport.

  Mickey watched from the floor below as Huey drove his white Cadillac up the spiraling ramp to the E level. It may have been years since he last saw him, but all the old pain and some of the fear rushed back. He watched as the elevator lights indicated an ascent and then eventually a decent from the E level. He watched Huey, now below him, as he walked through the glassed corridor down to the baggage claim area and door five.

  Mickey slowly made his way to Huey’s car parked on the E level. He walked past the car, glanced to see the liquor box in the back seat and kept walking. He made a loop around the parking level. It wasn’t deserted, but there was very little traffic up here and all of it looked to be normal.

  He slipped on latex gloves, made a bee line for the Cadillac, opened the rear door, dumped the cash into his backpack, zipped the pack shut and took the staircase down to the transit level. He took the light rail train from the terminal to the first stop. Once off the train he placed his call to Huey.

  “Yeah,” said Huey, answering on the first ring, nearly tearing the receiver from the cable, veins bulging in his neck.

  “Go to the Delta counter, buy a one-way ticket for the eight o’clock flight to Seattle, get on the flight. We’re watching.”

  “Seattle, are you . . . hello, hello?” Huey screamed, red faced, and knowing he was about to head west.

  Mickey let out a sigh, then opened his rear door and released the remainder of the helium balloons. On the drive back to Dell’s, he tossed the cell phone out the window as he crossed the bridge over the Mississippi river. Now, just one more detail, return Janice.

  Chapter 15

  “What do you mean, she doesn’t want to go?” Mickey said. Dell was wearing the blaze orange stocking cap with the off-center eye holes. He’d just left Janice in the room, where she’d told him she really wasn’t interested in going home.

  “That’s not an option, Dell. It’s not how it’s supposed to work. We took her, that jerk Huey paid us, now she’s got to go back, that’s all there is to it. It’s, it’s the rules,” Mickey said.

  Everything had gone so smoothly, the room, the woman, the instructions, the hand off, even sending Huey to Seattle. It had all gone so well, until now. Why were they even talking about it?

  “Tell her, no, she’s got to leave. Get back in there,” Mickey said and pushed Dell back into the room.

  “I already heard what you said,” she yelled, as the door opened and Dell began to walk in. “And, I’m not going back, bills, my daughter constantly complaining, that dump I live in. I’ve probably lost one if not both of my jobs and I’ve been operating on about four hours of sleep a day for years, let me know when we get to the good part. Plus, if you got any money out of my stepfather you are either very sharp or you scared the hell out of him. And let’s be honest, you guys ain’t that sharp. Now he’ll make my miserable life even more miserable, so I’m not going back. That’s all there is to it, and I don’t care what you do to me.”

  “You have to go,” Mickey yelled from behind the door. “It’s the way things work. We return you safe and sound, and you don’t get to say you don’t want to go.”

  “Well, it doesn’t work for me, and I’m the one who’s staying put. So, let me know when you come up with something that works for little old Janice.”

  “Jesus, this isn’t, you can’t just . . . Get back out here,” Mickey finally yelled at Dell.

  “See, I told you, she said she’s staying put, she’s not leaving,” Dell said.

  “We gotta get her out of here. I wouldn’t want to go back either, but she has to. It gets very dangerous for us if she stays. We’re suddenly supposed to feed her and keep her until she’s ready? We’re not running a spa here.”

  He took out a pen and wrote a note on a piece of cardboard. “Go back in there and give this to her, see what she says.”

  Dell reentered the small bedroom, holding the cardboard note out in front of him.

  “I don’t care what you plan to do to me, I’m not going.”

  “Here,” Dell said, and handed her the note.

  She read the note, shook her head and yelled to Mickey behind the door. “Nice stationary, it’ll take more than that.”

  “How much more?” Mickey yelled back.

  “A round number like eight,” yelled Janice not evening pausing to think.

  “Eight! No way.”

  “Now it’s going to be nine,” she yelled in response.

  “Lady, you are off your f-ing rocker if you think that we’re—”

  “Now, it’s ten, are you beginning to see a pattern here?”

  Dell looked like he was watching a tennis match, looking first at Janice, then the door with Mickey screaming, then back to Janice yelling, back and forth, back and forth.

  “Okay, okay, ten,” shouted Mickey. “But you go now. And I mean, right now.”

  “Hey, baby, I’m all packed,” Janice said. She jumped off the bed and held her wrists together. “Here, tape me up.”

  Mickey opened the door just far enough to roll the duct tape in Dell’s direction. As soon as Dell taped her wrists she spun halfway around.

  “Just be careful when you go over the eyes, watch my eyebrows, Okay? And let me take these out,” she said, deftly removing her dangling ear rings and sliding them into her pocket.

  “Okay, lead me out,” she said. She raised her voice a notch, “I hope you cleaned that car since the last time I was in it. I can still smell the mold or whatever it was, phew.”

  Dell looked at the door, not sure what to do until Mickey opened it and silently waved them forward, gently taking Janice by the arm and helping her out of the room.

  “So long, kidnap hotel, it’s been real,” she said.

  Chapter 16

  They had been driving for almost an hour, Mickey taking the beltway all around the metro area, going almost full circle.

  “You know,” Janice said from the floor of the back seat, “it would probably be best if you dropped off me in the alley, behind my place. It’s pretty secluded, no traffic to speak of and by the time I get this tape off my eyes you’ll be around the corner and gone. Not that I’d tell anyone about you, after our deal, I mean. Oh, and you ever do this again, you better get your car cleaned. I could ID you from the smell in this thing. It’s like a gym locker at the end of the year.”

  Mickey drove twice around her block, then followed her earlier directions and cruised slowly down the alley. She’d been right, it was dark and if he left her alongside the back of her garage he could be around the corner and away in seconds.r />
  He helped her up and out of the back seat, then slipped a thick envelope into her hands as she stood almost against the garage.

  “Here’s our side of the bargain, now you keep yours, count slow, to sixty so you don’t risk seeing me and we’ll never, ever bother you again. I promise.”

  Janice counted to sixty, twice, before carefully pulling off the tape from her eyes. She used her teeth to unwrap the tape from around her wrists.

  “Hi, Jan,” a neighbor called, biking past her, oblivious to her taped wrists.

  “Hi, Stevie,” she called back, clutching the envelope with ten thousand dollars as she strolled into her back yard.

  Chapter 17

  “Okay, so I got you a little something,” Mickey said to Dell a couple of weeks later. They were in the War Bonnet Lounge. Cookie had just delivered another round of drinks. Once Cookie left Mickey opened the bag at his feet and pulled out a rubber mask.

  “A dog mask?” Dell said.

  “Not just any dog mask, it’s a German Shepard mask,” Mickey said.

  “So, what’s up with that?”

  “Because, we’re on again. I’ve got this one really scoped out. It’s a sure thing like before, only even less hassle.”

  “I didn’t even know you were looking,” Dell said.

  “I didn’t want you to know because I wanted to protect you. Anyway, you got the room ready, right?”

  “Yeah, we went over all this last week, it looks completely different, new floor, fresh paint, no window.”

  “Just double checking. I got a very likely suspect,” he said, then lowered his voice and moved in closer to Dell. “I’m figuring the next couple of weeks. I’ve got a plan figured out, just a few of the finer points left to finesse.”

  “What’s the plan?”

  “Un-uh,” Mickey shook his head and waved his finger. “I’ll let you in on it when the time comes. Right now, I’m just giving you a heads up.”

  Early the next morning, Mickey had everything cleaned, dusted and scrubbed as well as it was going to be and he wanted to be out of the office no later than three a.m., just forty-five minutes away. It had been a fluke when he came across Coach Buddy Belsner’s name on a note taped to manager Carol’s desk.

  At first he had just been nosey, after all, how many guys with the first name of Thurlow could there be in town? But it wasn’t a big leap from nosey to downright curious. Seemed the high school old coach turned out to be worth quite a bit, what with a home that had been paid off for years, his teacher’s pension, and a huge stock portfolio.

  “Coach Buddy is worth a couple of million? Who would have guessed?”

  He recounted the zeros in the bottom line figure, leaned back in Carol’s office chair, put his hands behind his head and thought some more. This could be a blow struck for generations of kids the coach had terrorized. Besides, how tough could it be to grab his old wife?

  Mickey spent the next week following Candice Belsmer, which turned out to be another surprise. Apparently, the coach had remarried somewhere along the way, because this woman was not the old battle axe Mickey remembered chaperoning high school homecomings and proms, admonishing young girls not to trust young boys. This woman was younger than Mickey, which made her a hell of a lot younger than Coach Buddy.

  He spent a good deal of time watching her, and learned she was nothing if not dull. The wildest she seemed to get was attending daily morning mass and hanging around the cathedral praying for a few minutes after services. From there, she made the rounds at a variety of health food stores, where she did most of her grocery shopping. She volunteered at the elementary school Tuesday and Thursday, did Red Cross work every Wednesday and served lunch at a homeless shelter on Friday. Monday seemed to be spent on house work. Mickey found her to be a moral, decent, no nonsense, good Christian woman, four things he couldn’t abide in a woman.

  Over the course of his surveillance he contrived a plan to grab her after morning mass at the cathedral. The following morning he parked next to her car in the nearly empty lot and waited until she came out of the church. He had dressed as a priest for the occasion and stood in the parking lot with the hood raised on the El Dorado, feigning car trouble. He glanced down and reminded himself not to wear brown, python skin cowboy boots the next time he dressed to look like a priest.

  He was working out the details of how he would get her into his car without creating a scene. He had already torn appropriate lengths of duct tape and stuck them to the rear of his driver’s seat and placed an olive drab canister of pepper spray on the floor. He had to get her in the car somehow, and hoped she wouldn’t fight, scream, throw up, or try to run away.

  He was deep in thought, wondering exactly how he was going to accomplish everything, wishing he had maybe planned these final details a little better before arriving when he heard the bells chiming and looked up to see she was suddenly no more than twenty feet away, walking directly toward him.

  “Have a problem, Father? Can I help?" There was a soft southern accent to her sexy sounding voice.

  “Yes, my child, it seems to be just a momentary difficulty. I wonder?” he asked, folding his hands as if in prayer. “Could I ask you to try and turn the engine over, see if it starts while I make an adjustment here?”

  “Sure, happy to help.”

  He opened the driver’s door for her, catching just the slightest hint of perfume as she slid past and into the driver’s seat.

  “Let me just get a tool from the back seat. Let’s see, ahh yes, here we go,” he said, as he suddenly tore two strips of tape from the seat and grabbed the canister of spray. In the next few seconds, he sprayed her in the face and quickly wrapped a length of tape around her wrist and arm.

  “Father, what the hell . . .” was all she got out before the spray hit her. She was immediately blinded, not to mention more than a little stunned, unaware at least for the moment that her wrists had been constrained.

  It was all the time Mickey needed. As she assaulted her eyes with the sleeve of her blouse, he grabbed her by the lapels, hoisted her over his shoulder, and unceremoniously dumped her into the back seat.

  She coughed and sputtered as she landed on the floor of his car.

  “Just stay there and don’t move,” he said.

  He quickly slammed the hood closed, slid behind the steering wheel, and drove off across the empty parking lot. He knew he couldn’t drive all the way out to Dell’s like this. He had to get control of this before she sat up, looked at him, jumped out the door, or signaled a cop. He took a side street off the freeway and drove west on a road that led to a park and a lake.

  “If you’ll just sit tight and be quiet, I’ll getting some water to wash those eyes. You took a pretty heavy dose back there. You’ll be all right, it will wear off. Probably be best if you stopped rubbing those eyes. Listen, I don’t want to hurt you, or harm you in any way. You won’t be touched, okay? Do you understand, you—”

  Out of the corner of his eye he saw her hands for just a brief moment on the back of the seat as she attempted to sit up.

  “If you do that again, I’m going to really spray you with that stuff, lady. I just can’t have you sitting up, lay back down, now,” he shouted.

  “Much better,” he said as she settled back on the floor. “Just a few minutes and we’ll have some water for those eyes.”

  The lake area in the park was completely deserted at this early hour and Mickey pulled in next to the cinder block public rest room.

  “I’m going to get some water out of the trunk for those eyes, it will stop the stinging, please, lay still for just a moment.” He waited half a beat, made some noise in the rear of his car, watched her for a second, then ran into the rest room and quickly filled up two empty beer bottles.

  “All right, now hold still, careful. I’m going to pour this water over your face. Keep those eyes closed, just relax, you’ll be okay. Just keep those eyes closed.”

  As he poured, the water began to ease the burning and
stinging in Candice’s eyes. She’d dealt with more than her share of creeps while dancing out in Vegas and she half wondered if this jerk was someone who possibly recognized her from the old days. Just now, she needed her eyes working and the water, gently washing over them, seemed to be doing the trick.

  “There, that seems to be a little better,” Mickey said. “Please, keep those eyes closed, ma’am. Just let the water wash that spray away.”

  He slowly set the empty beer bottle down, picked up the roll of tape, and grabbed her wrists. He wrapped the tape around them and began to feel a little better.

  She opened her eyes ever so slightly, saw his blurry figure and took her chance, kicking both feet up as hard as she could, catching him solidly, directly in the crotch.

  Mickey went blank for a moment or two. He gasped, forced himself to keep his stomach down, and fought to regain control. “Oh God, that really hurt. What’d I do to you?” he shouted at the bound figure on the floor of his car. He stumbled to the trunk of the El Dorado, opened it, yanked out the spare tire and tossed it into the back seat on top of her. “There,” he gasped, slamming the rear door. “You can just lay there and if I hear so much as the beginning of a noise, I’m going to empty that spray can on you.”

  He was only half paying attention to the route he took to Dell’s. He kept his head slightly turned to the right, his ear cocked for the slightest hint of noise from the floor of his back seat. The canister of spray remained next to him and at the ready should he hear the slightest hint of movement.

  It seemed to take forever to get to Dell’s. Due in no small part to the stress of driving while expecting her to crawl out from under the spare tire and either strangle him or jump from the speeding car.

  He roared up the long driveway to Dell’s house, pressed the button to open the garage door then sped into the garage before jerking to a stop and knocking over a stack of paint cans onto the hood of his car.