Escape Route (Murder Off-Screen Book 1) (8 page)

King slept fitfully since the New Man drove away, listening hard for more Car sounds. It was lonely out here. He chewed the rope, off and on, but wasn’t making much progress.

Another dog, like he’d never seen, trotted the perimeter of his area. King was wary of the outlander, and knew to show no fear. He planted his front feet on either side of the water dish, lowered his head and curled his lips. He growled low, from his chest.

The strange dog didn’t carry much weight, but he was quick, with a tail that bushed out thicker than a full-grown rabbit. It snarled and darted in and out, judging the end of the big dog’s reach. It smelled the ghost of hamburgers and looped wide circles to investigate, but this dog had more grit than the usual house dogs it came across. For fun, it had carried off one or two, but this one ...

In the end, the coyote made the wise decision to move on.

King stood watch until the bushy tail disappeared completely among the spindled trunks of a young forest fighting to survive on a point of land on the far side of his cove. He drank only half of the remaining water. The rest might come in handy if another long day stretched in front of him.

The New Man showed up before he needed another drink.

“Can we keep him?” Jimmy poked the dog’s hind leg with his finger.

The water dish was still half full. “I think he’s good. His tail works fine.” Dad untied the rope and scratched the dog’s neck. “Don’t go whacking on him. Likely sell him back home.”

“Aw—”

“No back talk. Get him in the truck.”

King didn’t need to be told twice. He cleared the tailgate in one leap.

The Man followed and tore open a bag wedged in the corner. He scooped a heap of kibble onto the bed floor. “Eat up. Want you lookin’ healthy.” He filled a plastic storage dish with bottled water. When he readjusted the bag, a jar rolled out of the corner and bumped across the floor grids while the dog ate.

“What do you call this?”

His three sons scrambled in the back with the dog. “My lizard, Pop,” Jimmy said. “I wanted to try it for bait.”

“You mean that gecko you just had to have? I swear, Jimmy, you’re just like your mother. Has to have it. Can’t live without it. Now, it’s fish bait.” He wedged the jar next to the dog food bag. “Don’t ever be asking me for anything else. Hear? That means none of youns.”

Three sets of shoulders shrugged. “Geesh, Dad, Billy and I didn’t do anything,” Ryan said.

“End of story. Now, Billy, grab that blanket off the backseat and throw it here for ... hey, what are we callin’ him? Has to be sort of classy to fetch five hundred.”

“Rex!” They said it together. When their Dad had run into the store to get the dog food, the boys agreed and shook on it.

“Kinda classy.” He ran his hand along the dog’s flank. “Rex it is.”

They’d been so busy with food and blankets and lizards, no one noticed the green sedan pull up behind them.

Two men got out grinning in a way that didn’t say hail and well met.

“That’d be our dog you got there in the back of your truck.”

The man and his sons jumped down and lined up tall to short. “Can’t be your dog,” the man said. “He’s eating my food in the back of my truck.”

The car’s passenger said, “That’s our rope you untied from around his neck to get our dog in your truck.” He put his hands on his wide hips. The move pulled his sweater back so they got a good look at the handgun wedged tight in his belt.

“Rope is rope.”

Dad walked to the back door of the cab. “Let me show you fellas something. Clear this right up.” He leaned in and stepped back with a rifle. He cradled it the way hunters do when they scout in the woods—barrel pointed to the ground. “We’re hunters. Rex here is our huntin’ dog. If you catch my meaning.”

“We don’t want any trouble,” the driver said. “Just need our dog.” He stepped around the man. “You’ll see. Here, King. King.” He clapped his hands. The dog’s ears twitched but he was focused on dinner, not on the Men who’d tied him to a tree.

“Sorry, fellas. Rex is eating. Good luck finding your dog.”

“Our dog has a black mark on his ear,” said the beefy passenger. “Under that nail polish you see there,” as though a rational conversation would settle the matter, and this confrontation would not end like the OK Corral.

“A black mark? I saw that dog—on a billboard up on the main drag. Neither one of you comes close to looking like that politician fellow—Cuthbart. Or are you thinking I stole this dog from Cuthbart because of that patch of nail polish you claim is covering up a mark? Or am I thinking
you
did, and maybe we should call the cops to straighten this out?”

It was a bold move, but one that answered a whole lot of questions without a word spoken. The two men climbed into their car, and backed onto the blacktop road.

“In the truck, boys.” He slammed the tailgate shut, sauntered to the driver’s door and stood, stroking the gun’s wooden stock. “Good eye, Jimmy, spotting that billboard.”

~~^~~

King leaned against his bag of food and inhaled the passing scenery. Spring buds, sparkling snatches of green water just the other side of open fields, and high up, geese breaking formation, spiraling down to land in a cove he could not see.

The bizarre creature beside him, inside the odd contraption, stared at him the whole time. King—now Rex—sniffed at the holes in the lid, but found nothing familiar about the critter’s scent. It certainly wasn’t edible.

They rode together like that in the back of the truck.

All in all, it was shaping up to be a pretty good day.

Finding Willie on a Wednesday was a cinch. He’d be perched on the swing at Aunt B’s where Gertie and I had last seen him on our way to Bo Peep’s. Thursday’s, Bub’s. Friday’s, Stevenson’s. Routine is what the doctors recommended, so everyone pitched in—especially since his brother became sheriff and wasn’t usually home.

Aunt B banged through the screen door to the front porch when we pulled up at the house. “Thought sure it was Frank come home so he wouldn’t strangle that ex-husb—hi, Ed. This is a surprise.”

“Hi, Aunt B.” To me, he said, “I’m staying right here. Make it quick.” He faced front and stopped breathing.

I grabbed my cell and hopped out of the truck. “Hold that thought.”

“What’s the hullabaloo?” Aunt B threw the ever-present dish towel over her shoulder and glared at Ed.

“Not a thing. No hulla. No baloo. Have one quick question for Willie.”

“Busy with dots,” Willie said without looking up. “No time.” He sat with books of games strewn across the bench, piled on his lap, a mountain of them on the floor underneath the swing.

“That’s fine, Willie.” I pulled up the picture of the paper from Avery’s car and enlarged the image on my phone’s screen. Now that I was here, I realized how ridiculous my idea really was, but Willie was Doofus’s last hope. “I have a brand new dot game to show you.”

“Show it.” He clapped and looked up at me with a child’s eyes.

Willie also had a child’s temperament. Ninety-nine percent of the time, Willie Nilly was a doll. But that one percent could accidentally kill you. Six-foot-two, two hundred pounds with a lit fuse sizzling in the back portion of his damaged brain. I approached with caution. If Willie didn’t like a dot game, or it was too difficult, he’d go berserk. In the fullest sense of the word. We’d have to call the sheriff home from his retreat, and that was the last thing I wanted to happen.

I held the phone out like a piece of raw meat to a tiger. “So, Willie, whatcha—”

He flubbered his lips, and his face fell. “Thought you said game.”

“More like a treasure map. It starts here, but I can’t even guess where it ends. Can you?” I made no mention of Bo Peep’s as the starting point—that was still a guess on my part. Willie’s mind worked in mysterious ways, and I didn’t want to interfere with the process.

Willie jerked his head over his left shoulder. “Start dot Beep’s.”

“Bo Peep’s? Willie, are you sure? The Start dot is Bo Peep’s?”

“Sure.”

I slapped my forehead. I’d been right. Avery would be
starting
back to Doofus
from
the bed-and-breakfast. They’d begun the map from the place they had left him, and worked it backward as they made their way to Bo Peep’s. That explained the U-turn at Beep’s. They
had
to go back to the Start dot to be able follow the map to Doofus.

“End dot ...” He lost focus and went back to the book on his lap, mumbling, drawing straight lines with a red crayon—the paper label torn half off.

Aunt B stepped between us, took my phone and parked it right under his nose. “Listen here, young man. Start dot is Bo Peep’s. Jaqie, who is your good friend, wants to know about ... ?” She turned to me and said, “You want to know exactly what?”

“This is a map. Peep’s is marked Start. What is the location of the last dot?” Beads of sweat popped up on my forehead.

In Willie’s world, dots ruled. If he didn’t want to tell me, he just wouldn’t. Aunt B? That was another matter, altogether.

“Willie. I’ve made fudge with tiny marshmallows.”

“They look like dots,” he said, bopping on the swing and grinning. “I want that.”

“Not until you tell Jaqie—”

“Drue’s Cove. X marks the spot. Fudge, now?”

~~^~~

Ed was already in the driver’s seat when I got to the truck.

“Buckle up.” He stomped the gas to the floor, and Uncle Frank’s 1970-something truck spit a ball of black smoke out of the exhaust, and sat there. The second time around, we laid rubber and expended three gallons of gas squealing down the street toward Mercer’s Landing Road.

“Can you get to Drue’s Cove this way?”

Ed leaned forward, gripping the steering wheel while we raced past the speed limit signs. “Me and the guys used to drag race out there every Saturday night, then we’d have a bonfire. This is the short cut. Don’t you remember any of this stuff?”

We’d dated since pre-K. Too much to remember. “How long?”

“Ten. Fifteen, tops.”

I slid down in the seat and covered my eyes.
Be there. Be there
.

~~^~~

He wasn’t.

“Jaqie? Are you all right?” Ed sounded scared. He’d never seen me this way.

I’d never been this way.

I snatched up a piece of partially gnawed rope lying under a scrawny tree and shook it at him. “Do I look all right to you?” I tripped over my feet scrambling to a blue tarp. A shredded burger wrapper fell out and blew away into the marsh grass.

Tire ruts ran in circles then burrowed through the muck toward Mercer’s Landing.

“They gave him water in this filthy thing!” I sailed a grimy hub cap into the tidal shallows. Let the environmentalists come. Bring them on.

Ed took a cautious step in my direction, holding out the palms of his hands. “You’ve got to calm down. Geesh, you’re gonna have a heart attack or something.”

I stormed along the water’s edge. The mire sucked at my shoes, then filled my footprints with water as I scoured the shoreline. “He was here. All last night, Doofus was right here. By himself.” I whirled around. “Do you know coyotes live in these woods? Uncle Frank shot two of them sneaking into that rickety work shed of his.”

“I don’t see any sign of digging.” He swept his arm out as he turned a circle. “No piles of dirt. Do you see anything? Maybe they didn’t kill him.” He turned back to me. “Maybe, Jaqs, they put him here because Miss Gertie doesn’t allow pets at her place, and they came back to pick him up and head home. It’s a possibility.”

I flung the rope into the water, and the tarp. “Another possibility—he could be out there!”

Ed snatched the tarp out of the shallows, rolled it up and tied the bundle with the rope. “We should call Sheriff Nilly—”

I covered my face with my hands. “Oh, Ed, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. This has all been so awful.”

I buried my face against Ed’s chest and bawled.

I blubbered about Doofus. I blubbered about Jeep—the whole story—a year’s worth of anger and worry, despair, even. I was a raging waterfall of estrogen and emotions and self-pity. I soaked his shirt while Ed stood still like a tree and let me go on until the sobbing dwindled to sniffing and hiccups. He tugged my ponytail now and then, saying, ‘There. There.’

When I finally stepped back, he pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and held it out to me.

It was clean.

“Dianne said in case I had to stop the bleeding.”

I laughed into the handkerchief. “Uncle Frank isn’t that bad.”

“It was an
anchor
, Jaqs.” Then he said, “I’m real sorry about your dog—about Doofus—and that Jeep guy. I know you’re sad, but I think you might be overreacting—like a female PMS thing. Don’t you think a lot of this probably has to do with our divorce? You and me being together all day might be bringing up some of your old feelings. I just want to say that you don’t have to be jealous just because I’m with Dianne now. Maybe if you got a boyfriend—”

I punched Ed square in the nose.