Hell, Yeah (19 page)

That prickly feeling he only got when something was very, very wrong inched its way up his neck. He threw on a pair of jeans, socks and boots, and a T-shirt and darted across the wet grass separating the trailer and the back door of the Tonk. He beat on the door for two minutes but no one answered. He peeked in the window at the garage and all three of her vehicles were there. He went back to the door to thump on it and yell for another five minutes.

When she didn’t answer he jogged back to his truck and found his cell phone on the floor. He dialed her number and it went straight to voice mail, then he dialed the Honky Tonk and it went to the answering machine.

“Maybe she went shopping with Jezzy or Angel or even Larissa and lost track of time,” he rationalized.

When he noticed that he had messages he pushed the right button and put the phone to his ear. The first one was from his mother saying that she missed him. The second from his sister, Emma, saying that he should call more often. The third one made the hair on his neck stand straight up. It was Cathy and her voice was frantic. The bad connection created a crackling background and he had to listen to it four times before he finally got the whole message pieced together.

He hit the door of the trailer at a dead run. The Honky Tonk? What to do about it. He had no idea where in the devil Tinker lived or how to get hold of him and he’d tear up the whole state of Texas and start on Louisiana if Cathy wasn’t there.

“Jezzy!” he said aloud as he threw clothing, shaving gear, and socks into a duffle bag. He drove like a bat from the bowels of hell’s back forty acres all the way to Jezzy’s place and slung gravel everywhere when he braked hard in front of her house.

Jezzy opened the door before he knocked. “Come on in and have some coffee with me and Leroy. We’re arguing about whether to buy more cattle or put in more wells if this one is a good one.”

“Where in the hell is Jefferson, Texas, and how do I get there, and will you and Leroy take care of the Honky Tonk tonight?” he said all in one big breath.

“What is going on?” Leroy asked.

Travis explained in as few words as possible. Jezzy pulled an atlas out of the book rack beside her recliner while he talked. She had the town circled with an ink pen when he finished and handed the book to him.

“Catch I-20 east to Marshall and then go north on Highway 59 right into Jefferson. You sure you got that message right?” Jezzy said.

“I’m very sure. I’m going after her. I just need y’all to run the Tonk and tell Tinker to stay put until I call or get back. He’s got keys to the place so if you’re there when he arrives he can let you inside. I don’t know if it’s been cleaned up or not,” Travis said.

“Between the three of us we can make it decent in a few minutes,” Leroy said. “You don’t worry about that end. Just go get her.”

“You should be there before it’s time for us to open up tonight. If you call and say she’s safe we’ll just tell Tinker that she’s at Daisy’s place for a couple of days.”

“I’ll call soon as I’ve got her safe. You got a hacksaw?”

“I’ll get one out of the garage,” Leroy said. “She’s a strong woman. Who in the hell kidnapped her and why? Or better yet, how in the hell did they kidnap her? I wouldn’t tangle with that woman.”

“I don’t know but I’m about to find out. Jezzy, how far is it?”

“Probably four hours. You can be there before dark, and be careful. I’m writin’ my cell phone down for you. I want to hear from you as soon as you get there.”

“Call Amos for me.” He and Leroy headed for the garage.

“How about the Jefferson police? They might know where she is and have her rescued before you get there.”

He shook his head. “Let me try first. She didn’t want me to call the police.”

Small pieces of broken wire were piled up to one side of Cathy on the bed. She tried to spring the lock in the shackle around her leg all night. At daylight when the seventh one broke tears streamed down her face. She gave up and threw herself back on the bed, resolved to the fact that she was stuck until Brad, damn his sorry soul to hell for eternity, came to rescue her. She fell asleep and awoke to the rustling sound of Rat and two of his friends helping themselves to the box of food she’d put on the toilet seat. That proved that rats could indeed scale a glass wall on a rainy day because there they were climbing up and down the slick porcelain like it was a grassy knoll.

“Get away from my food, you ugly bastards,” she screamed hoarsely. Her mouth was so dry the words barely came out. She needed water and there was plenty in the form of rain, but her chain wouldn’t let her get far enough to open her mouth and get a drink straight from the clouds.

She stomped across the wooden floor. “I will tear your damn tails off and use them to unlock these shackles.”

They scattered but didn’t leave the room. She carried the food to the bed and hovered over it. “Might as well give it to them. Three days without water and they’ll get it all anyway.”

She had no concept of time: how much had passed, how long she’d been asleep, or even if it was Monday or Tuesday. She had called Travis. Maybe he’d called the police. No, she’d told him not to call the police. Why had she done that? Because at the time she really thought she could sweet-talk Oscar and Duroc into taking her money and letting her go and she’d told them she wouldn’t tattle. If the police knew about the kidnapping they’d go after Duroc, Oscar, and Brad. She didn’t give a rat’s ass about Duroc and Oscar but she wanted a chance at Brad Alton before the law got to him.

She shivered beneath her blanket poncho. “I can whine or I can try again. I’m not a quitter.” Saying the words gave her the willpower to work another piece of wire from the bed springs and try again.

She pictured Brad in his posh office on the second floor of Green Oil in Mena. He’d best enjoy the smug confidence up on the top of his self-made pedestal because when the lock gave way she intended to bring it crashing down. If he broke a leg or arm or messed up his pretty face in the explosion, that was his problem.

Deep in her soul she knew that Travis would find her. Maybe not today but he wouldn’t let her die in a cabin full of rats. Not Travis. He wasn’t like Brad Alton and she’d been a fool to judge him by that yardstick.

“Just like the damn rain,” she muttered. “Water all around me and I’m dying of dehydration. Travis was there all around me and I couldn’t get past Brad to see him. Damn, this is no time to get philosophical. Open, damn it.”

It didn’t.

She remembered an episode of
NCIS
she’d seen on late-night television a few weeks before. One of the agents had used two pieces of wire to pick a lock. Of course, that was make-believe and the shackle was very real, but anything was worth trying. She inserted a second wire into the lock.

“If I hold this down and move that to one side then abra cadrabra bippity boo.” The wire broke and the lock did not open.

“Every time I lose the battle, you are giving up a tooth, a ball, or an eye, Brad. I might even let you decide which one.” She worked another wire from the springs and started all over.

The lock popped and she sat in the middle of the bed staring at the shackle until another rat darted across the floor. She jerked her foot free and picked up the metal and heaved it at the toilet, hitting the box of food and sending the contents all over the floor.

“You can have it all. Chew your way through the cans.” She opened the door and inhaled a lungful of freedom. She ran through the wet grass to the water’s edge where she slipped and fell headlong into the muddy embankment. She pulled herself up to a sitting position and leaned her head back, catching beautiful raindrops on her tongue. If the bayou hadn’t looked like chocolate milk she would have buried her face in it and drunk until she was full.

“Start walking, Cathy.” Her mother’s voice was so clear that Cathy jerked her head up and did a quick scan of the area.

“I’m tired,” she said.

“You’ll be dead if you don’t get out of here.”

Cathy stood up. One foot at a time she picked her way through the fallen limbs and rocks as she followed the bayou back towards the bridge. She had to stay alive to make Brad pay.

* * *

“Cross the bridge, down the bayou or river or whatever water is there, about a mile, in an old fisherman’s shack,” Travis said aloud as he drove through Jefferson, Texas. In the dreary cold mist not even a dog walker was out on the sidewalks. One lonesome looking police car slowly made rounds. He made a right turn at a big corner building and passed two old white frame hotels, one on either side of the road, but he didn’t cross a bridge. He turned the truck around in a church parking lot and drove back to the library. He made a right-hand turn and drove across the Big Cypress Bayou Bridge. He slowed down on the other side, not sure what to do at that point and noticed a muddy lot that must be used to park or put fishing boats into the water.

He stopped the truck and got out. She’d said down the river or bayou. Which way was down? He hunched his shoulders inside his lined denim coat and noticed the wooden boat tied up to a rotten tree stump. It had a speck or two of green paint shining in the dull winter evening. The benches were rotted but the oars looked fairly new.

Cathy walked a few hundred feet and sat down on the wet ground to rest. She told herself that she couldn’t stop. She saw Duroc and Oscar behind every tree. A fish sloshed out in the bayou and she thought it was them rowing the boat back to the fishing shack to kill her. She hid behind a tree until she was sure they were gone.

It was late evening when she saw the bridge up ahead. It was time to swim across the bayou to the other side and that water looked damn cold. It wasn’t far and it didn’t look deep, but still to put her bare feet out into it was more than she could do. A voice drifted across the water and she squinted. Surely that wasn’t Travis. She had to be seeing things.

“I hope this damn thing holds my weight,” Travis said. “Blasted piece of junk. If I fall in this cold water I’m going to tear this thing apart with my bare hands.”

It was a hallucination just like her mother had been. Nothing more than a trick of a dehydrated, hungry mind in a state of severe shock.

“You are not real,” she shouted.

Travis looked at the apparition across the bayou. “Cathy?”

“Are you really there?” she asked.

“Be still. I’ll bring this thing across and get you.”

“Okay,” she said slowly and cocked her head to one side expecting him to disappear.

He crossed the narrow bayou and she stood there staring at him blankly. “Cathy, come over here and get into the boat. I’ll take you home, honey.”

“If I do I’ll drown. You aren’t real,” she said.

He grounded the small boat, kept the rope in his hand so it wouldn’t float away, and stepped out onto marshy, wet ground. He held out his hand and she put hers in it.

“You aren’t a ghost,” she whispered.

“I’m Travis and I’m real.” He put her into the boat and quickly rowed to the other side. Her hair was plastered to her head. The blankets around her smelled like urine. The soles of her feet were red and bare beneath ratty bits of cloth tied to her ankles.

“Are you alright?” he asked.

“I will be. I’m so thirsty and so dirty, Travis. Just take me somewhere where there’s water to drink and hot water to get this stench off me, please.”

He tied the rope to the dilapidated wooden dock and led her to the passenger side of the truck. His arms were freezing in the raw drizzling rain. He couldn’t imagine how cold she had to be.

“I saw a motel on my way into town. We’ll go there first and get you cleaned up,” he said.

Warm air poured in the minute that he started the truck. Her nose twitched and her stomach knotted up. She swallowed several times but it didn’t keeping the nausea at bay.

“I’m going to be sick from the smell of these blankets,” she said.

He pushed the gas pedal and the pickup lurched ahead. He hoped the cop would catch him speeding and lead them to the station where she could make a formal complaint.

She gagged and clamped a hand over her mouth. “Pull over in that parking lot. There is a Dollar Store still open. They’ll have a bathroom. I can buy clean things,” she said.

“We’re going straight to the motel and I’ll come back to the store while you take a bath.”

“Thank you,” she whispered from behind her hand.

He braked to a screeching halt under the awning in front of the motel, bailed out, and ran inside the lobby. She gagged again and tasted Vienna sausage. She wouldn’t ruin the inside of Travis’s truck. She unlocked the door and got out. The clean rain and the aroma of dryer vent drifting from behind the hotel filled her nostrils. She took several deep breaths and the nausea subsided.

“Cathy?” he said at her elbow.

She took two steps backwards and her eyes widened.

“Don’t be afraid. It’s me. Travis. Our room is two doors down with an outside entrance. I’ll carry you.”

“Don’t touch me. I’m filthy.”

“Then follow me,” he said.

She started yanking the poncho up as he opened the door.

“I hate rats,” she said.

He put a hand on her shoulder. “Not yet. We need pictures.”

“No!”

“We need them for proof. Let me take them.”

She let the blanket drop back down around her shoulders and looked blankly at him as he snapped several pictures.

“Send those to my computer.” She rattled off her email address and jerked the poncho off.

Travis sent the pictures as she tossed the rags and her pajama bottoms out the bathroom door. He longed to hold her, brush back those nasty strands of hair plastered to her face, but the empty look in her eyes said he’d better give her some space.

“Will you be all right here alone while I go back to the store?” he asked through the door.

She giggled nervously. “There’s no rats and there’s a lock on the door and water in the faucet. I’m so thirsty and I’m afraid to drink because it’ll make me sick.”

“They didn’t leave you water?”

“Oscar and Duroc didn’t have enough brains between them to think of that.”

A pair of wet underpants and a pajama top flew out the door. He picked them up and shoved them into the plastic laundry bag provided by the hotel along with the rest of the smelly rags. He carried them outside and shoved them down into the locked toolbox in the bed of his truck.

The Dollar Store was located a couple of miles from the hotel and offered gray sweats long enough for Cathy’s legs. The sweatshirts all looked too short in the arms so he bought three Christmas T-shirts from a sale rack. She liked flannel pajama bottoms so he looked for those but the only size left on the shelf was small and they wouldn’t come to her knees. Finally he found a rack of nightshirts that said one size fit all so he bought two of those. He had no idea what size underpants or what style she wore. He checked the back, tried to figure out how many inches it would be around her bottom, and finally settled on size six. He tossed a package of six pair of assorted colors in the cart.

He noticed socks next to the underwear and picked up three pair along with a pair of fluffy pink house shoes. He thought about a bra but shook his head. He wouldn’t even know where to begin. He made a run through the toiletries, throwing in a toothbrush, toothpaste, hairbrush, shampoo and conditioner, and shower gel.

* * *

Cathy closed the lid on the toilet and sat down, naked and wretchedly dirty. Her hands shook as she started water running in the deep Jacuzzi tub. Her eyes locked on the clean, clear water and she couldn’t force herself to blink. Finally, she put her head in her hands and wept silently. It was five minutes before she got control and opened the door, filled a small hotel cup with cold water, and drank slowly.

She stared at the woman in the mirror.

How do lips get so parched when it’s raining? Look at me. God, I’m a mess.

“Fifteen minutes.” She touched her dirt-smeared face and her filthy hair.

That’s all her mother gave her to pout, whine, or cry. If life gave her pissy friends or a bad day, then she could bitch and moan for fifteen minutes. After that she had to forget about it and get on with living. Well, she’d had her time and she would get on with it—right after Brad Alton had his fifteen minutes. A picture of what she intended to do to him was the single thing that kept her sane enough to go back into the bathroom and crawl into the tub.

She laid back and ducked her head into the water. She felt as if she’d been baptized a second time when she came up with water sluicing off her face, turning the water brown as it cleansed away the dirt and mud. She poured all the entire bottle of hotel shampoo onto her head and built a mountain of bubbles.

Even with the smell of shampoo and clean water the stench of the rats stayed in her nose. She poured shampoo into the palm of her hand and sniffed so hard that she sucked some into her nostrils and coughed up bubbles. She washed her body with the small bar of soap so many times that it was nothing but a thin sliver and still she felt dirty.

She flipped the lever to drain the tub, stood up, and turned on the shower. Long after the shampoo was gone from her hair she stood under the hot water. She was alive. Nothing had frozen. There was a purple circle on her ankle and a few cuts and bruises on her feet but they would all heal. Her fifteen minutes were up so why didn’t she feel right?

* * *

Travis looked down at the clock on his pickup dash as he pulled into the Dairy Queen parking lot.

“Well shit!” He flipped open his cell phone and hit the right buttons.

Jezzy answered before the first ring had finished. “Is she all right?”

“She’s in a motel room taking a bath. I had to go into town and buy clothes. They grabbed her in nothing but pajamas and she didn’t even have shoes. She’d tied an old blanket around her feet to keep them warm and it stunk like rat piss. They gave her a box of food but no water. I’m so mad I could rip someone’s head off with my bare hands. I’m thinking we’ll be home in the morning after she has a good night’s sleep. Tell Amos and Tinker she is alive. And Jezzy, thanks for working the Honky Tonk for her tonight.”