Missouri Loves Company (Rip Lane Book 1) by W.J. Costello Read Free Book Online Page A

pretty good, though they needed more cinnamon.
    Officer Miller’s voice got louder.
    “You think I won’t come over there and kick your ass?”
    “I think you’ll try,” I said, and spooned some oats into my mouth.
    “Listen here, asshole . . .”
    I held up my hand.
    “Okay,” I said. “Don’t get your panties in a wad. A deal’s a deal. I’m going to tell you what I know.”
    And I did.
    I told them Anna was hitchhiking when I stopped to pick her up in my motor home. My engine started to act up, so I checked into S’mores and Snores Campground for the night, and then I made an appointment to see a mechanic the next day. But Anna didn’t want to stick around. She was in a hurry to get out of town. She needed a ride to the Pottsland bus station. I took her there on my motorcycle. When we got there she put her duffel bag in a locker and kept the key. She made a show of giving me a locker key, but it was to a different locker, an empty locker—which I didn’t discover until after she had disappeared from the bus station. I returned that key to its locker. I did not keep it. The following day I went back to the bus station and watched the security video from the day before. It showed Anna returning to the bus station hours after I had left. She got the duffel bag from the locker and then exited the station.
    “Which locker she get the bag from?” Lizard said.
    I told him the locker number.
    “And which locker was your key for?”
    I told him the locker number.
    He began to nod his head as he thought about it.
    “You got any proof what you’re saying’s true?”
    “Proof’s on the security video at the bus station,” I said. “Why don’t you guys go there and watch it for yourselves.”
    Lizard nodded.
    “Yeah,” he said. “We’re gonna go check it out now. Turns out you’re telling the truth, we’ll let you go free.”
    Officer Miller stood toe to toe with me.
    “You better be telling the truth,” he said. “Otherwise I’m gonna stomp your ass when we get back here.”
    “In the meantime,” I said, “you might want to practice falling down.”

CHAPTER 21
     
     
    T HEY RETURNED TO my cell a few hours later.
    “The security video was erased,” Lizard told me.
    I shrugged, palms up.
    “Ain’t you got nothing to say about it?”
    “Somebody erased it,” I said. “What can I do about it?”
    “You can tell us where you hid the fucking key.”
    I didn’t say anything.
    Beside me I sensed a sudden movement.
    Darkness took me.
    I don’t know how long I was unconscious. It could have been five minutes or three weeks. It felt as if I had slept for a month.
    My head pounded, everything else throbbed, and the trunk of the car smelled like mothballs.
    They had ganged up on me, given me a beating. I’ve taken some beatings before. But this time it felt like they had used heavy sledgehammers. I was a broken marble statue.
    Entombed in the hot trunk, I could hear my own breathing. It seemed loud in the confined space. I knew that trunks were not built airtight, so there was little chance of suffocation. That knowledge made me breathe a little easier, so to speak.
    The tires ticked with a steady rhythm over seams in the pavement. I figured we were going maybe sixty miles an hour.
    My hands were tied behind my back, my feet bound, my mouth taped. If my nose started to itch, things would get ugly.
    The darkness was not complete. Pale daylight seeped in at the edges of the trunk lid. Not enough to read by, but enough to get my bearings.
    The shock absorbers were shot. Every little pebble in the road felt like a speed bump. Just my luck to be abducted by cheapskates.
    They had locked me inside a car trunk.
    It didn’t mean I had to like it.
    There are several ways to escape from a trunk. One is to escape through the back seat. If you are trapped in a car that has back seats that fold down to allow access to the trunk, you can search the trunk for a release to these seats. There may not be one.